Part of Genetic Frontiers Season 2: Genetics in American Politics & Culture, Sue Currell, PhD, discusses the disturbing echoes of eugenic thinking in American politics today. She calls eugenics "the backbone of political control and a progressive meritocracy," and argues that "grip of eugenic ideas on American politics today is a political failure to imagine a world where value is not profit."

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KEY TOPICS

Reading of excerpts from "This May Be the Most Dangerous Thing Donald Trump Believes": Eugenic Populism and the American Body Politic.
How should we understand the administration's agenda to "forge a society that is colorblind, merit-based, and only has two genders" in light of the eugenic history of the United States?
How are you making sense of this focus on the gender binary, and whether it has a relationship to eugenic ideologies?
From what you know about the history of efficiency in the United States, how are you thinking about the new Department of Government Efficiency?
What is the story we're being fed by politicians? And what is the real story?
How would you describe Trump's relationship to disability rights?
Can you talk about the complicated histories of eugenics and abortion rights and how you think this is influencing America today?
How do you think clinicians and scientists should be thinking about the role of science, in particular genetics, in America today?

Read full transcript of this episode here.