Darwinian Racism with PHD Richard Weikart

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This week, brought to us by throughout all ages ministry. We have a professor of history at California State University, Richard Weikert I understand he's emeritus, which means that he holds this title, even though he may no longer be the professor there.

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He is the author of from Darwin to Hitler, Hitler's ethic. The Nazi pursuit of evolutionary progress

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Hitler's religion, the twisted ideas that drove the Third Reich, and the death of humanity, and a case.

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And the case for life. His most recent book is Darwinian racism, which is our topic.

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Our topic tonight. How Darwinism influenced Hitler Nazism and white nationalism.

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He completed his PhD in modern European history at the University of Iowa, receiving a biennial prize of the forum of history of human science sciences for the best dissertation in that field.

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Apparently these words are too big for me Richard so I'm going to turn it over to you. Okay, thanks.

03:17

Yeah, tonight I'm going to be talking about my book Darwinian racism, right here. That's my.

03:23

Yeah, like this backwards. That's the problem with computer, computer video it does everything backwards.

03:31

Anyway, so I got into this topic in a rather interesting way and so I'm going to sort of go back just a little bit.

03:40

When I was doing my dissertation at the University of Iowa, I was looking at the way that Darwinism was being interpreted by German socialists like Karl Marx Friedrich Engels and other prominent socialists, and while I was doing that I got interested in the way that some

03:57

Darwinian thinkers at that time, including biologists but also some social thinkers were trying to replace

04:03

Judeo Christian ethics and other ethical systems with evolutionary ethics are trying to formulate this kind of evolutionary ethics and that is what got me interested in my next research project which was about evolutionary ethics.

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But as I got along and was researching about evolutionary ethics is like in the late 1990s when I was doing this,

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I discovered that a lot of the people who are promoting evolutionary ethics, by the, especially by the 1890s and early 1900s.

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We're also promoting eugenics which was the idea of trying to breed better humans by doing things like compulsory sterilization controlling reproduction of other kinds of things like that.

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And they were also promoting some, some of them the more radical fringe of them were promoting euthanasia.

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There was also close ties to scientific racism, among a lot of these thinkers.

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And so I got interested in looking at how evolutionary ethics was being more broadly applied and I started noticing that a lot of these thinkers did sound a lot like Hitler and the

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Nazis and their ideology and so I decided to explore that and that's where my book from Darwin to Hitler came from in 2004

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I wasn't originally thinking of Hitler at all. I wasn't trying to look at the way Darwinism is impacting Nazism, I was looking at the way the

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Darwinism is impacting ethics. And so, as I went along that, of course, brought me into some controversies with people who thought it was sacrilege to write a book that was connecting

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Darwin to Hitler. And so then I had to sort of defend my position along the way several times and this book that I put out earlier this year, called

05:36

Darwinian racism is basically a sequel to from Darwin to Hitler.

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The book from Darwin to Hitler actually looked primarily at the pre 1914 period, it looked at how

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German thinkers before World War One were interpreting Darwinism and trying to formulate evolutionary ethics and eugenics and racism.

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In the on the German scene and then only the last chapter actually talked about Hitler and then in 2009

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I published a sequel. That called Hitler's ethic that looked at Hitler's ideology and focus primarily on Hitler himself, and so this new book sort of broadens that out.

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And looks at the way that Darwinism was being used by the

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Nazis to justify and buttress their ideology in the 1930s and early 1940s.

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It does look at Hitler, but then it also looks at the Nazi biology curriculum and other kinds of things too that I'll get into a little bit as we move into the material here in just a little bit.

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Now I should say too that this is a very timely topic, because my last chapter on white nationalism, we just saw a shoot up in Buffalo.

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This past weekend, and in fact I just wrote an op ed article that just came out today on townhall .com

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as well as some other websites about that Buffalo shooting, because the manifesto that that white nationalist put forward justifying his shooting of predominantly black shoppers in a supermarket.

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Was based upon Darwinian thinking, it was based upon Darwinian ideology and my last chapter of Darwinian racism looks at that more extensively.

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And in fact, this manifesto of this Buffalo shooter actually confirms a lot of the points that I made in that last chapter about the tight connections between Darwinian thinking and current white nationalism.

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Now you won't get this in the mainstream media, you won't get this in NPR or places like that, because they're focused on blaming white nationalism on religion, especially evangelical

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Christianity. In fact, this past year, there were three books published by university presses, all of which basically tried to make the connection between evangelical

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Christianity and white nationalism, evangelical Christianity as being sort of the cause of white nationalism.

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But the truth is that Darwinism plays a very key role in today's white nationalism.

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Now there were in the past, especially if you go back into the 19th and early 20th century, there were groups like the

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Ku Klux Klan that did try, unfortunately, to connect their brand of Christianity with racism.

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But in the mid 20th century, there was a key shift there and most of the white nationalists today are embracing it on the basis of scientific racism, not on the basis of any kind of religious kind of ideals.

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Now, one of the first things I do in my book, Darwinian Racism, is

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I look at Darwin himself, because the question gets posed a lot of times, was

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Darwin a racist and why? And there's some people, some people say, well, yeah, of course, he was a racist because everyone was a racist back then.

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But by the way, not everyone was a racist back then. David Livingston, the famous explorer and missionary to Africa, was not a racist and he was loved by the black

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Africans that he helped and tried to elevate in the time that he was ministering in Africa.

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But to be sure, most people were racist in Darwin's time. But what's interesting about Darwin and racism, it wasn't just a side thing to his theory.

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Darwin's views about evolution were tied very closely to racism.

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In fact, Darwin thought that racism was a evidence for his theory.

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Now, why was that? Well, Darwin, in the Origin of Species, where he, by the way, doesn't talk much about humans, he just in the last couple pages mentions humans really briefly.

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In the Origin of Species, the first two chapters of Darwin's book are on variation. The first chapter is on variation under domestication.

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The second chapter is on variation in nature. So for Darwin's theory to get off the ground, he had to show that there's lots of variation within species.

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And so when he turned his attention to the human species, as he did in his book, The Descent of Man, which was published 12 years after the

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Origin of Species in 1871, he talks quite extensively about different human races being widely different.

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Darwin thought they were different not just physically, but he thought they were different intellectually.

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He thought they were even different morally. He thought they had different moral traits biologically ingrained in them.

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And so Darwin thought that racism was evidence for his theory. Interestingly, after Darwin's time,

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Darwinists were going to sort of switch things around. Once Darwinism became the established theory, Darwinists were in fact going to say the opposite.

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They were going to say that Darwinism was proof of racism, because Darwinism had to have variation so races must be widely divergent.

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But there's also another thing about Darwinian theory that was important in relation to races. And that is that Darwin believed that the races were caught in a struggle for existence, which was a essentially competition to the death.

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And Darwin does talk about racial extinction. And he talks about races exterminating and replacing other races.

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I'll actually read you the quote here from The Descent of Man. Darwin stated, at some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world, the savage races.

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So by the way, when people talk about replacement theory, Darwin believed in replacement theory. Now he believed it in the opposite way.

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He thought the Europeans were replacing the indigenous peoples. And he saw this happening, by the way, in his own day.

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He saw British imperialism going out and he saw the native populations of the Americas, of Australia, New Zealand, and other places, being replaced by the

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Europeans and the Europeans exterminating these other peoples. Darwin thought that was a good thing because he thought it would bring about biological progress.

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And so this is a way that Darwin's racism becomes even more problematic because not only does he think that races are unequal, based on his view of biology.

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But he also thinks that these races are in competition and that some are going to end up exterminating others, and that this will bring about a biological progress.

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So racial extermination, he thinks, is just a natural process that goes on all the time in other species and goes on then in the human species as well.

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Now after Darwin's time, many Darwinists continue to argue that Darwinism provided support for racial inequality.

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They claimed, like Darwin himself, that not only were these physical characteristics, but also mental and moral characteristics.

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One of the most prominent German Darwinists, Ernst Haeckel, was going to claim that there were 10 different human species.

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Now unlike Darwin, Darwin himself said they're all part of one species, all races are part of one species, but Darwin said they're just subspecies, races are like subspecies.

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Haeckel thought they were even more divergent, and he claimed there actually were 10 different human species.

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And he claimed also that what he called the lowest human races were closer to the highest apes than the lowest human races were to the highest humans.

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So this is pretty, so Haeckel is claiming that the distance between the highest humans and lowest humans is greater than the distance between the highest humans and the lowest apes.

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So that, by the way, was designed to try to convince people of human evolution by showing that there's huge divergent within the species, only a little bit of divergence between different species, which is what

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Darwinism has had to try to approve all along. So Haeckel was going to be one focusing on these huge inequalities that he saw that he claimed were part of the human species.

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There were many others who similarly did this. There was a German historian, cultural historian named

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Friedrich Hellewald, who laid stress on racial struggle.

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He claimed that when the Spanish conquistadors came over to the Americas, that their killing off of Indians, American Indians, was simply part of the struggle for existence.

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And Hellewald said, you know, it's just a natural thing, you know, don't moralize about it. There's, you know, it's just a natural process.

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And he thought it would lead to the elevation of the human species. There also, so you have this notion of racial inequality.

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Then secondly, you have this notion of a racial struggle, struggle for existence.

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And then thirdly, Friedrich Ratzel, a German biologist who became a geographer, he actually wrote a book about Darwinian biology in his early days of his career when he was a biologist, but then he switched careers to a geographer.

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He developed the idea that became known as living space. And this was based upon his idea that the

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Darwinian struggle for existence is a struggle over space. It's a struggle over gaining space in which you can then live off of, gain, you know, gain your food supply, and such.

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And so Friedrich Ratzel developed this idea then of living space, it was going to become very prominent among a lot of Darwinian thinkers in the early part of the 20th century.

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And then a fourth key idea that was going to emerge in the late 19th and early 20th century, on the basis of Darwinian ideology, was the idea of eugenics, which

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I'd already mentioned earlier, which was the idea of trying to breed better humans. Some Germans even were proposing killing people with disabilities.

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Ernst Haeckel in particular, in 1870 already, proposed killing babies with disabilities as a way to try to improve the human species and get rid of those that he considered unfit.

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And so the euthanasia movement was going to grow out of that. Now these four key ideas, racial inequality, racial struggle, living space, the struggle for living space, and then eugenics, were all going to be adopted by Hitler in his worldview.

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They are not even prepared by others. Hitler was not innovative in his worldview.

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Hitler was drawing upon ideas that were already there and had already been developed by scientists, in fact, not just by crank or, you know, fringe publicists or something.

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Many of these ideas were considered by many scientists to be sort of settled science of the time.

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And Hitler was going to embrace these ideas and make them central to his ideology.

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It's not just that Hitler had these ideas that they were floating around there. It's that these were actually central ideas to Hitler's ideology.

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Hitler once said that the, just to give an example of this, Hitler once said that the difference between Marxism and his own

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National Socialism or Nazism was that the Marxist believed in class struggle, and he believed in racial struggle.

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So there's that racial struggle notion. The idea of living space, this is why Hitler launched his aggressive wars, is because he wanted to gain living space.

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He even used that term in German Lebensraum, that he was trying to gain Lebensraum or living space for the

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German people by going out and conquering the Slavic territories to his east. And then eugenics was also a very prominent part of Nazi ideology.

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They passed compulsory sterilization laws. The first year they were in power, they ultimately set up a euthanasia program where they killed people with disabilities, beginning in 1939 to 1940.

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And Hitler was going to express this belief in biological evolution many times during his career in all sorts of ways.

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In his book Mein Kampf, which many of you are probably familiar with, have heard of anyway, in Mein Kampf he talks about the process of biological evolution.

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In his second book, which is just called the second book because it was never published and never had a title, so it's today just known as Hitler's second book.

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In his second book, the very first chapter is entitled War and Peace in the

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Struggle for Life. And that term struggle for life, by the way, is a term that Darwin himself used. Darwin called it sometimes a struggle for existence.

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Sometimes he called it the struggle for life. And then if you look at how Hitler actually explains what the struggle for life is all about, he talks about populations increasing faster than their food supply.

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That's exactly what Darwin had based his theory on, on Malthus's population principle.

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And that they're locked in this struggle for existence. So Hitler very clearly bought into this racial struggle idea and based it upon Darwinian ideology.

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Then Hitler also in his speeches, as well as in his monologues. He gave a lot of monologues during the war in his headquarters, and these were transcribed.

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And we now have transcribed copies of what Hitler said, and he talks pretty extensively there about his belief in evolution and Darwinism and such.

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So there's lots of evidence and again in my book I spell this out about obviously in greater detail.

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I have an entire chapter on Hitler, in fact. But then aside from just Hitler himself, the

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Nazi regime promoted evolutionary theory in quite a number of ways. And one of the interesting ways to look at this is to look at the official biology curriculum of the

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Nazi regime. You know, you'd think that if you want to know what the Nazis believed about evolution, look at what they taught in their schools, and indeed this is exactly the case.

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If you look at the official biology curriculum it contains strong doses of Darwinian evolution, not just in relation to non -human organisms, but also in relation to humans and the development of races, so the evolution of races.

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So the Nazi regime is promoting these ideas in the biology curriculum in a very strong way.

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And by the way, this is one of the most solid proofs against those few, there are a few people who've, you know, tried to refute my position.

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One of them is Bob Richards at the University of Chicago, who published a book called Was Hitler a Darwinian? And my book that I just published,

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Darwinian Racism, blows his ideas out of the water. Because I not only show that Hitler himself did believe in Darwinism very clearly and give plenty of evidence for that, but the official

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Nazi biology curriculum promotes biological evolution, including the evolution of humans and including the evolution of races.

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And not only in the biology, this official curriculum, but if you look at the biology textbooks during the

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Nazi period, which I've done. I've looked at the biology, and I didn't look at just the ones, you know, published in 1933 or 34 when the

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Nazis were first coming to power because they could have still been influenced by pre -Nazi editions and such, but I looked at the textbooks that were published in the late 1930s and in the 1940s, by which time the

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Nazis would have had plenty of opportunity to revise and correct things that they disagreed with.

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And what we find is that they universally teach biological evolution, Darwinian evolution, and these were approved by the

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Ministry of Education, the Nazi Ministry of Education, so it's pretty clear that the

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Nazi Ministry of Education was promoting Darwinian evolution in a very big way.

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Not only that, but the Nazi regime was also elevating professors into positions in the biology professorships in the

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German universities who believed in evolution. In fact, there were some figures who were specialists in human evolution, who were given university positions.

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One example of this is a man whom you've never heard of, but his name is Hans Weinhardt, and Hans Weinhardt was appointed as professor of anthropology at the

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University of Kiel in northern Germany, and Weinhardt was an evolutionary anthropologist.

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He was an evolutionary anthropologist. That was his specialization, was studying the evolution of humans, and that's not the only example.

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The Nazis also promoted other evolutionary anthropologists to positions within the

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German universities. Quite a number of these evolutionary anthropologists, by the way, again, these are people are studying human evolution, were also

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SS officers, so there again explodes the idea that the Nazis were against the notions about human evolution.

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They put people studying human evolution into positions as SS officers, and they often put them in charge of training, worldview training sessions for medical personnel, for scientists, for Nazi organizations.

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And so evolution played a very prominent role in Nazi ideology and was certainly being promoted in a very big way during the

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Nazi period. We can also see this if we look at Nazi newspapers and periodicals, because in Nazi propaganda, the

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Nazis were also promoting Darwinism, and there's not a shred of evidence that they opposed

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Darwinism, which is what Bob Richards has claimed. Just as one example among many, and I give more examples in my book, the

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Völkischer Beobachter, which was the official Nazi newspaper, in 1932, so this is the year before the

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Nazis came to power, published an article that was simply called Darwin. And by the way, the

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Völkischer Beobachter did not publish a lot of pro -evolutionary propaganda. The reason for that is it was a newspaper that was covering current events, mostly, so most of it's covering political events and such.

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But they did publish this article in 1932, simply entitled Darwin, and the article honored

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Darwin and made clear that they were promoting evolutionary biology during this time.

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If you look at Nazi periodicals, Alfred Rosenberg was one of the key leaders of the

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Nazi worldview. He was considered one of the leading Nazi ideologists, ideologues, during the time of the

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Third Reich. Rosenberg, in the periodical that he edited, published quite a number of articles relating to biological evolution and human evolution, making very clear that he was positioned in the

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Darwinian camp as well. Not only that, but the

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Nazis, especially late in the Nazi period, especially as they were fighting their war with the

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Soviet Union, published in the early 1940s some manuals that were designed to train

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SS policemen, as well as their army troops, in the

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Nazi worldview. And so you have these worldview manuals, essentially. And they're actually the classroom manuals.

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They actually are divided up into classes. And so, you know, it'll say class one, class two, class three, class four, etc.

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And these worldview training manuals do contain heavy doses of Darwinian biology.

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Just to give one example of these, there was an SS manual called Rasenpolitik, which is translated as racial policy.

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And in that book, it argues that races arose through evolution by natural selection, and also claimed that further progress in evolution is our purpose in life, that our very purpose in life is to, you know, bring biological progress about.

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So we have these Nazi worldviews, and there was other Nazi worldview manuals too, similarly, that were designed to train soldiers and train

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SS police and such in the Nazi worldview. And all of them contain a very heavy dose of evolutionary biology.

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So, these Nazi ideas, if you will, were very prominent.

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They were front and center. There was no secret about them. These were not, you know, something that they were just peddling behind the scenes or anything like that.

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Now, one of the things that some people have argued in relation to some of these ideas in the

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Nazis is they said, well, this is pseudoscience. That's a term that gets bandied about a lot. This is just pseudoscience.

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It's not really science. Or they'll say this was just the view of some fringe publicists, some, you know, anti -Semitic cranks, you know, in the early 20th century that Hitler took off on.

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And so, one of the things that I do in my book, Darwinian Racism, is I lay to rest that caricature of Nazi ideology by showing that these ideas were actually fairly mainstream among serious scientists, some of the leading scientists, in fact, during the

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Nazi period. And we're not talking just here about scientists that the Nazis themselves had put into positions of authority, but these are people who were recognized in the scientific community before the

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Nazis came to power. For example, the leading anthropologist in Germany was

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Eugen Fischer. And when I say leading anthropologist, he was the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics, and Human Heredity, which was one of the most prestigious positions in the

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German academic world. I mean, it'd be like holding a Harvard or Yale professorship or something like that.

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In fact, it was even better than a Harvard or Yale professorship in some ways, because they were not even required to teach.

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That was just a research position, but extremely prestigious. So, Eugen Fischer received this position in 1927, which was six years before the

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Nazis came to power. So, it's not like the Nazis, you know, catapulted him into this position. In fact, if you look at how things actually worked themselves out,

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Fischer had more influence on Hitler and Nazi ideology than vice versa, the reality is.

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Fischer was a staunch racist who believed that races were unequal.

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He believed in the Darwinian struggle for existence between races. And he was even going to serve on committees once the

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Nazis did come to power. Fischer was going to serve on committees, drawing up racial policies for the

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Nazis and drawing up eugenics policies for the Nazis. So, he was going to be contributing to the

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Nazi worldview on the one hand before the Nazis came to power, but then he also was going to be promoting

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Nazi policies based on this worldview once the Nazis did come to power. He was also a participant in a program to sterilize those

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German children who were half black who had been born from the French African troops after World War I.

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There were several hundred half black, half German babies that had been born in the period right after World War I.

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And Fischer was very strongly involved in the program that the Nazis ran, which was, by the way, completely illegal.

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The Nazis never passed a law to legalize this, they just did it behind the scenes.

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But he helped to identify who were these people, and he served on a committee to try to draw up the ways to do it.

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So, he was fully on board with this Nazi program of sterilizing these people who were half black.

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So, this was not just being done by, you know, cranks on, you know, who were, you know, on the margins of society.

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These were serious scientists who were following his policies. And Fischer is just one example among many at the time as well.

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And again, there's, again, I refer you to my book if you want to look at more examples of that. Just one more example, though, that I think is kind of interesting is

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Conrad Lorenz. Conrad Lorenz is a Nobel Prize winning biologist who won his

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Nobel Prize after the Nazi period. He was a young scientist during the time of the Nazi period. He's from Austria.

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And he won his Nobel Prize for his study of animal behavior. But during the

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Nazi period, Lorenz in 1940 wrote an article in which he argued that Darwinian evolution was the best support for the

31:54

Nazi view of race and racism. And he even said that, in fact, his article was bashing creationists, who he thought were completely misguided.

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And so he's upholding Darwinian evolution and saying that Darwinian evolution is the best way to support racism during this time.

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And so Lorenz, as well as many other scientists at the time, were claiming

32:19

Darwinian sanction for their policies such as sterilization, once the euthanasia program came on board, and for their racial policies as well.

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Now, one mistake that some people make, too, is that they think, well, that's just the Germans. And that's who

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I've talked about primarily up to this point. Most of my research has been done on the Germans. I've been looking at the Nazis and the

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German scientists and such. But there also were Americans and British men and women who embraced similar kinds of ideas, too.

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So let me just give you a couple of examples here of early 20th century American scientists who embraced ideas that are fairly similar to Eugen Fischer and some of the other

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German scientists. Henry Fairfield Osborne was a very prominent scientist.

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He was a professor at Columbia University in New York City, beginning in 1891.

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He was a paleontologist. He was thoroughly committed to Darwinian ideology.

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He was the president of the American Museum of Natural History. But he argued that Darwinian evolution had produced the racial inequalities that he thought were around within the human species.

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And he even wrote the preface to the book by a white supremacist named

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Madison Grant. Madison Grant wrote a book in the early 20th century called The Passing of the

33:52

Great Race. And Madison, this is one of the most influential books promoting

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Nordic racism, or the idea really of white supremacy, in this period right at the beginning of the 20th century.

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And Osborne was fully on board with those ideas, so much so that he wrote the foreword to, or preface rather, to that book.

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Osborne was also the co -founder of the American Eugenics Society, so he was completely on board with the eugenics program as well.

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Another key figure in the early American eugenics movement, really the leading figure within the

34:30

American eugenics movement, was Charles Davenport. Charles Davenport was a professor of biology for a while at Harvard and for a while at the

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University of Chicago in the 1890s and early 1900s. He was an avid

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Darwinist, and he believed that eugenics was based upon Darwinism. In 1904,

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Davenport became the director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which was a key center for eugenics in the

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United States. In fact, it was really the center for eugenics research and publications in the early part of the 20th century.

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In 1929, Davenport, just to show his racist bent, published a book called

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Race Crossing in Jamaica. And in that book, he argued that racial mixing leads to biological degeneration, which, by the way, was a similar idea that the

35:29

Nazis were peddling during the 1930s as well. So Davenport believed many of these ideas too.

35:36

Also, Davenport, together with some of his close colleagues at Cold Springs Harbor, pushed very hard to get restrictive immigration legislation in the

35:48

United States based on their views of scientific racism. The idea was that they thought that Eastern and Southern Europeans were inferior to Northern Europeans.

35:58

They thought that East Asians, Chinese, and such were inferior biologically to Northern Europeans. And so they called on Congress to put immigration restrictions on, and this passed

36:09

Congress, largely based upon scientific racism of Davenport and others.

36:16

Again, this is being pushed by scientists. This is not just something being pushed by some cranks.

36:21

And again, these are American scientists too. This is not just going on in Nazi Germany. Now, of course, the Nazis were going to be the most fanatical ones about promoting some of these ideas of eugenics and scientific racism, but they were ideas that were percolating through the ideology of Americans as well.

36:39

Another key figure, and many of you may be more familiar with this one, is Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood.

36:46

She was also intensely racist and believed that birth control would help to reduce the

36:55

Black population. And so she was using her birth control as a way of eugenics, but it was also a race -based view of eugenics as well.

37:08

So, in any case, the scientific racism was fairly prominent in the early part of the 20th century.

37:16

Again, in the United States as well as in Nazi Germany. It was going to persist in Germany longer than in the United States because in the

37:22

United States in the 1920s and 30s, anthropology, especially under the influence of Franz Boas at Columbia University, he was one of the most prominent anthropologists of the early 20th century in the

37:31

U .S., began emphasizing cultural determinism rather than biological determinism.

37:38

And so he began turning away from race as an explanation for human behavior and such.

37:44

And so anthropology and sociology and such, by the 1930s and 40s in the United States, was moving away from scientific racism.

37:52

In Germany, of course, in the 1930s and early 40s, the Nazis were in power, and so they were still promoting scientific racism, which was going to diminish after World War II in Germany once the

38:03

Nazis were defeated. Now, we might think that, okay, well, the Nazis were defeated, scientific racism waned in the mid to late 20th century.

38:15

So why do we need to worry about any of this today? Well, interestingly, as I suggested toward the top of my talk when

38:22

I was talking about the Buffalo shooting that just took place this past weekend, there are quite a number of white nationalists today who are spreading very similar ideas, and that's why sometimes they're called neo -Nazis.

38:37

Sometimes they refer to themselves as alt -right, sometimes refer to themselves as white nationalists, white supremacists, you'll see all those terms used about them.

38:45

But they are also promoting their racism on the basis of Darwinian biology.

38:52

So Richard Spencer, who was one of the key leaders of the alt -right, he got a lot more attention right around 2016, 2017 than he has in the last few years.

39:02

But Spencer, who was one of these flamboyant leaders of the alt -right, said, quote, group differences exist as consequences of evolution by natural selection.

39:15

When he's talking about group differences, he's talking about racial differences. And then he also said, quote, racial differences are a natural and normal consequence of human evolution.

39:26

He also said, quote, the preference for one's own race is a product of our evolutionary history.

39:34

So he not only thought that races were unequal because of evolutionary history, he also thought that our evolutionary history made us prefer our own race to other races there and built that into our psyches somehow.

39:48

So Spencer certainly sees his white nationalism being built upon Darwinian foundations.

39:53

Likewise, there was a professor at California State University, Long Beach, a psychology professor who embraced evolutionary psychology.

40:01

His name is Kevin McDonald. He tried to explain anti -Semitism as a product of evolution, actually on both sides of it.

40:10

He tried to explain that the Jews banding together and promoting their own welfare and essentially conspiring, in his view, conspiring against the other non -Jews was part of their built into them by their evolutionary competition in the past.

40:30

But he also thought that anti -Semitism was a reaction against the Jews based on evolutionary consideration.

40:36

So he thought that there was this racial struggle for existence going on and he promoted this in a number of books that are very widely read by white nationalists and promoted on a lot of white nationalist websites today.

40:50

Another book that's promoted on a lot of white nationalist websites today, and sometimes actually get the

40:55

PDF version of this on some white nationalist websites, is a book by Ragnar Redbeard, and this is a pseudonym, we don't know who exactly wrote it.

41:05

There's some guesses as to who wrote it. But Ragnar Redbeard wrote a book called Might is Right, and the subtitle of the book is

41:12

Survival of the Fittest. And Redbeard's book was written back in the 1890s, but it didn't become very prominent until the 1960s when the leader of the

41:27

Satanic Church, Anton LaVey, began promoting this book,

41:34

Might is Right. Might is Right is one of the most vitriolic, incendiary pieces of social Darwinist literature

41:39

I have ever read, and I'm an expert on social Darwinism, so I've read a lot of it. This is really one of the worst pieces.

41:46

It's very Nietzschean, it's very social Darwinist, very anti -Christian in its orientation, and this book is being promoted on a lot of white nationalist websites.

41:55

In fact, in 2019, there was a young man who shot up the

42:02

Gilroy Garlic Festival, maybe some of you remember this just three years ago, a little less than three years ago, who shot up the

42:08

Gilroy Garlic Festival, and just before he did that mass shooting, he posted to his social media that everyone should read this book,

42:16

Might is Right, by Ragnar Redbeard. So, this gives us again another indication of the way that the

42:25

Darwinian ideology is underpinning some of this white nationalist rhetoric, and such.

42:30

And in fact, that's not the only mass shooting that's taken place, this Buffalo shooting, and the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting, these are not the only mass shootings, there are others

42:38

I could bring, and I'll only bring in one more here because it's one of the more spectacular ones that many of you have heard of, and that was the

42:45

Columbine High School Massacre of 1999. Many of you may remember that that was done on April 20, which was

42:53

Hitler's birthday, so it's tied into his veneration of Hitler, and so there's a neo -Nazi side to all of this.

43:00

And if you read Eric Harris's journals, which I have, he does honor

43:07

Hitler and the Nazis, but he also honors Darwin. And he also talks about evolution, biological evolution, and interestingly, when he was going out shooting the high school up at Columbine in 1999, he was wearing a t -shirt that said, natural selection.

43:28

So making very clear this connection between his thinking about his, that he thought he was sort of helping

43:37

Darwinism along, I suppose you could say, by his shooting that was taking place.

43:42

I'm not arguing that these mass shootings like the Buffalo one and Eric Harris and others, I'm not arguing that these were done exclusively because of Darwinism.

43:52

But it did play a role in their worldview, and it did affect what they were thinking about and how they viewed race relations and such.

44:04

So let me just sort of wrap this up and then we can go to Q &A here. So my point that I've made is that racism has been a very integral part of Darwinian ideology from the very start.

44:18

And even though many Darwinists today are not racist, I'm not arguing that Darwinism necessarily means you have to be a racist, there are plenty of anti -racists today who are

44:26

Darwinists. But nonetheless, there's a certain logic to it that is still appealing to people in white nationalist ranks and causing them to see races as being unequal and being locked in a struggle for existence because of their embrace of Darwinian thinking.

44:45

Thank you very much for your attention. And now we can turn to a time for a question and answer. Well, that was amazing.

44:52

I was very getting into that. Did you want to give us a website where we could reach you if later on we have some questions too or where we can buy your book?

45:05

Yeah, my book is available on all the major websites that you get books on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, walmart .com

45:13

has it. So it's available there. Discovery Institute Press is the one who published the book.

45:19

So you can go to the Discovery Institute Press website to find out more about the book as well.

45:24

And they have a lot more information about it, as well as other of my writings on their website as well.

45:32

My email is very easy to find at my university as well. I'm at California State University, Stanislaus. And so you can find my email pretty easily on my university website.

45:42

Okay, that's what I was wondering. So, um, I had the most questions in the chat.

45:50

And I'm going to start with, do you think that eugenics made like a viewable difference in the

46:02

German population. I mean, do you think it was a noticeable type difference

46:07

I know that seems like a real weird question but do you think that they thought eugenics was working.

46:14

Well, they didn't have long enough to do it to make any kind of appreciable difference.

46:20

The Nazis were only in power for 12 years. The first six years, they carried out compulsory sterilization and they, they were far more radical than the

46:29

Americans were in their compulsory sterilization program. The Americans also had compulsory sterilization in many states over half the

46:36

US states had compulsory sterilization was California did California pastor compulsory sterilization law in 1909.

46:43

But in the United States, the numbers of people who are compulsorily sterilized numbered in the 10s of thousands perhaps 50 or 60 ,000 people over a period of like 50 years or so they were still doing it in the 70s weren't they because my mother talked about it.

46:59

In fact, the laws, very often we're still on the books even a lot of times in the 1990s and and even thereafter, but not the 1960s is when usually was being phased out there actually was an episode here in California, where there was a prisoner who was sterilized.

47:17

It's unclear what extent it was quote forced. The, but in order to be released, they were required to get sterilized and some people were there's an outcry about that be compulsory sterilization based on eugenics as well.

47:31

It's not clear that the reasoning was the same either but yeah up until the 1960s, it was being done quite prominently.

47:37

So you got maybe roughly 10 ,000 Americans per decade. That's a rough figure being sterilized in the

47:46

United States and the United States is a much bigger population in Germany to me about four times the population of Germany at the time in Germany during that six year period from 1933 to 39 the

47:58

Nazis compulsorily sterilized somewhere around 350 to 400 ,000 people.

48:04

Wow. So that was one out of every 20 Germans was sterilized during that time.

48:11

So that's pretty massive program. Now again, we don't know if it had any significant biological impact probably not for one, one thing there's lots of lots of the things that they were targeting are more complicated genetically than a lot of the biologists recognized at the time and that's one of the reasons why eugenics had a lot of problems, even in the biological realm in the middle of the 20th century because there's lots of recessive genes.

48:38

There's lots of combinations of genes that cause things. It's not so simple as you know you just eliminate, you know, all the people with X, Y, or Z and then that's going to get rid of them so if we eliminate all the people with Down syndrome and by the way, 90 % of the people with Down syndrome are being eliminated right now in the

48:54

United States, as well as in many Western European countries by abortion. If you eliminate all the people with Down syndrome you're still gonna have

49:02

Down syndrome because it's caused by a mutation. So, yeah, it's not going to eliminate

49:08

Down syndrome. So, there were some false presuppositions behind it. Then when the

49:13

Nazis in the 1939 they began their euthanasia, so called euthanasia program T4 euthanasia program, where they actually killed people with disabilities so they did get rid of lots of people with disabilities, but how that impacted population in the long run probably not a lot.

49:27

Okay, thank you so much that was very good information. And then this is probably more history than it is eugenics but I heard you speaking about living space.

49:38

I can't. You know that Hitler thing stuff fascinates me because he was just so evil.

49:48

So you think, or you know that he was conquering that territory so he could fill it with like blonde hair blue eyed people.

49:58

Yeah, although he himself was not blonde haired but that's sort of another point to get it.

50:04

But yes, when the Nazis took over Poland and Czechoslovakia. They actually instituted a program to try to screen the populations to try to figure out which poles and which checks were

50:18

Aryan or Nordic, and ultimately they didn't have enough time to ultimately carry out this program in full, but the idea in the long run was they did want to get those people out of the territories that they were occupying and get

50:32

Germans, you know blonde hair blue eyed Aryan Nordic Germans into those areas that they had conquered so yes that was forthrightly the program, and they did try to implement it to the extent possible within the six years that they were fighting their war.

50:47

But of course, and is he less than six years because of course they're being pushed back last couple years, but they were unable to do it but yes it's very clear that that was their program.

50:58

Interesting. Rachel made a comment on Margaret Sanger and I knew you would touch on her.

51:05

And did you have anything. Now, was it. I am my understanding is that Hitler was influenced by the

51:12

US is eugenics programs. I have a personal thing with the eugenics program.

51:21

My, one of my brothers might not my brothers, my father's brothers was down syndrome.

51:30

And he mysteriously died. Nobody knows why. So, and that would have been in 1927.

51:41

So, do you think Margaret Sanger was or Hitler was influenced by the

51:46

US, or, or the US was influenced by Hitler for this eugenics type thing.

51:52

That's a great question because there have been some people who have Edwin black in particular was written a book called war against the weak has been promoting this idea that the

52:02

United States influence the not influence the eugenics program in Germany and thus brought on the

52:08

Nazis and such. That's really a misguided view though and the reason is this eugenics movement in Germany was very strong, even at the same time as, and even slightly before even the

52:21

American eugenics movement, the German eugenics movement had the first Internet, excuse me the first eugenics organization in the world.

52:29

They also had the first eugenics journal in the world. They had some of the leading eugenicists in the world in Germany.

52:37

And so there was there was influence going both directions, American eugenicists and German eugenicists, you know would read each other's books, and such.

52:45

But it seems to me from having looked at both of the sides that the German eugenics movement was at least as strong or stronger than the

52:54

American eugenics movement was. The only way they weren't as strong was politically. That is the

53:00

United States there were sterilization laws that were passed earlier than in Germany and so Germany did try to copy those sterilization laws.

53:07

And the Nazis did appeal to the, you know, appeal to the United States, but there were

53:12

German eugenicists who were already pushing for sterilization before the United States passed their sterilization law so it's not like the

53:18

Germans were just, you know, copying the Americans. The Germans were already pushing for these things.

53:24

Sometimes before the Americans had it as well so the influence went both directions but I think the influence may have been stronger from Germany to the

53:31

United States and vice versa, if anything. Interesting. Oh, very good. And now, this is just a comment.

53:38

We're talking about population and food supply, and how they wanted to eliminate these people.

53:49

I'm not saying these people disrespectfully. But I mean is there what they consider to be useless eaters, and we know that's the term they use useless eaters, which is horrible.

54:01

I see today that there, you know, there's supposed to be food shortages coming up, and I'm just wondering if you want to, if you can make any kind of correlation or, you know, history repeats itself.

54:17

What do you think about the food and the population today with our increased abortion and do you have any comment on it.

54:25

Well, you know, I think it's interesting if you look at the way that Darwinism was used to devalue human life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,

54:35

I see that same devaluing of human life going on in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

54:43

So 100 years later, as well. And it doesn't manifest itself in the same ways.

54:49

It manifests itself sometimes in other ways, because it's not focusing on the same groups that are being targeted.

54:57

So the Nazis targeted the Jews, the Slavs, the blacks, and the people with disabilities,

55:05

Germans with disabilities, and such. They were the people targeted by the Nazis. Today, the people being targeted are largely unborn babies, especially ones who have disabilities.

55:18

But also, now we have a growing euthanasia and assisted suicide movement that is devaluing the lives of people toward the end of their life cycle.

55:26

And so now we're getting more and more people whose lives are being claimed that they're being useless because they have some kind of disability.

55:36

And there are places like Canada, where they're calculating out the amount of money that they will be saved if they euthanize people rather than have to care for them.

55:50

And so this notion of economics does figure in sometimes to these calculations.

55:56

There are American insurance companies that are offering people assisted suicide.

56:04

They'll pay for it, but they won't pay for your treatment. So, you know, we're seeing these economic kind of decisions, you know, you think about useless eaters, that attitude is being put forward today, too.

56:18

Also in the euthanasia movement in Belgium and the Netherlands and in Europe, as well as other countries in Europe, too.

56:25

There's other countries of Europe that have more recently passed euthanasia, either legislation or courts have upheld it.

56:32

They are starting to euthanize people with mental illnesses. So it's not even just terminal illnesses anymore.

56:39

It's people who have mental illnesses. In fact, if you are over 70, there's a lot of people pushing in Belgium and the

56:48

Netherlands for people who are over 70 to be allowed to have euthanasia, just because they are, quote, tired of life.

56:58

And so there's this devaluing of human life that I see going on. And again, it may target different groups than the

57:05

Nazis did, but I think it's just as problematic. Wow, I know. And I can't even think about it.

57:12

It's so awful. And then the other thing I was wondering about the lefties and the secularists, why do they want to deny

57:25

Hitler was following Darwin? Well, I think it's largely among people who want to protect

57:34

Darwin, so to speak. And so it's people who just are. And it's a small number of people, too.

57:42

It's not large numbers of people. Robert Richards at University of Chicago is one who has criticized me and written that book called

57:47

Was Hitler a Darwinian? Most historians, especially those, especially in the

57:54

Nazi period, have not been critical of my work. I've got a lot of praise from other German historians who've read my work about the period and recognize that it actually makes a lot of sense.

58:06

But it's primarily from people who just get really irate at the notion that Darwin, they feel

58:13

Darwin's being drugged through the mud, so to speak. You know, so it's sort of like, I mean, they sort of react in the way that someone would react, a

58:21

Christian would react, who's told that, well, Christianity is what caused the Inquisition or caused the Crusades. And so I can understand their concern about that connection, but still there is a historical connection between these things and we have to look at what it is.

58:34

Now, they can deny, and what I've told some of my critics is that, look, if you don't agree that Darwinism leads to these particular ideas, then argue with them, argue with the

58:47

Nazis, don't argue with me. I'm not saying that Darwinism necessarily produces euthanasia.

58:54

I'm saying that this is historically a position that many people have taken and there is a kind of logic that they have, even if there may be other ways to take

59:04

Darwinian ideology. And then, June was wondering about sterilization.

59:13

Was it done chemically, do you know? No, it was done surgically. I don't know if they even knew how to do chemical at that time.

59:22

In fact, even the surgical sterilizations were only, if my understanding is correct,

59:28

I might be wrong on this. Okay, don't quote me on this one, but surgical sterilizations, I think, were only sort of perfected right at the beginning of the 20th century.

59:38

And so, what they were pushing for was surgical sterilizations. And interestingly, in a lot of countries that practiced compulsory sterilization, females were sterilized at a higher rate than males were.

59:52

I'm not sure exactly why that is either, maybe just prejudice against females, but that is simply a historical case.

01:00:02

All right, thank you. Terry, are there any questions on Facebook Live? No, there are not.

01:00:08

Okay, we're going to go ahead then and shut off live streaming and the recording. And once you hear the creepy voice.