Optimized for Survival – The Return of Social Darwinism and Eugenics in American Policy

This is the architecture of a belief system—one that never fully died.
A system that ranks human worth.
That justifies inequality as natural.
That frames failure not as structural, but as personal.

And this time, it’s not hidden.

“You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory.”
—Donald Trump, addressing a white crowd in Bemidji, MN, September 2020

“You know now, a murderer—I believe this—it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”
—Donald Trump, October 2024 interview with Hugh Hewitt

“If you believe in the racehorse theory, he’s got a nice, smart son.”
—Donald Trump, praising Elon Musk’s lineage, January 2025

These are not one-off musings. They are ideological signals—meant to reintroduce an old idea with a new polish:

That some bloodlines are simply better.
That some people are born to lead, and others to be discarded.
That “optimization” isn’t just policy—it’s destiny.

TL;DR:

In 2025, the U.S. government is not malfunctioning—it’s functioning exactly as designed: to sort, exclude, and abandon the vulnerable. Under the guise of “efficiency,” “fraud prevention,” and “modernization,” public institutions are being restructured to serve only the optimized—those who are tech-savvy, wealthy, healthy, and able-bodied—while quietly discarding those who aren’t.

Programs like Social Security, public health, immigration, and disability rights are being hollowed out, not with open violence, but through administrative erasure: office closures, inaccessible systems, and the quiet deletion of protections. Meanwhile, elite natalism, embryo screening, and predictive AI are promoting a modern, digitized form of eugenics—one that values optimized performance over personhood.

This isn’t new. It’s the revival of a long American tradition: Social Darwinism and eugenics, reborn in bureaucracy and algorithms. What was once done with sterilization laws and IQ tests is now done with logins, thresholds, and budget justifications.

And at its moral core, this system—built under a self-declared Christian administration—is profoundly anti-Christian. It abandons the sick, the poor, the stranger. Not because the state is broken. But because it’s being re-engineered that way.

This Isn’t Dysfunction—It’s Design

It doesn’t look like the eugenics of the past.
It looks like a login error.
A missing check.
A closed office.
A benefits portal that times out.
A hotel with no wheelchair ramp.
A guidance page that quietly disappears.

Across the United States, the systems meant to protect the vulnerable are being hollowed out—replaced with policies that reward the optimized and discard everyone else.

• Social Security offices are shuttered, especially in rural and low-income areas. Identity verification must now be completed online or in person—no more phone options. If you can’t access either, you may lose your check.
• Over half a million asylum seekers from the global South have lost protections, while white South Africans have been granted expedited entry as ‘refugees.’
• Public health infrastructure is unraveling, with funding for HIV prevention, mental health care, and disease surveillance slashed or stalled. Vaccine programs are quietly rolled back.
• Natalism for the wealthy is on the rise. Embryo screening startups pitch “optimization” to elite families, while billionaires encourage each other to reproduce in the name of civilizational survival.
• Federal protections for disabled people are being erased, not by law, but by omission. The Department of Justice recently deleted public ADA compliance guidelines meant to help businesses include disabled customers.
• Even desegregation standards have been rescinded. A decades-old guideline barring segregation in federally contracted facilities was quietly revoked.

None of these events is isolated.
None of them is accidental.

This is not dysfunction.
This is the architecture of a belief system—one that never fully died.

A system that ranks human worth.
That justifies inequality as natural.
That frames failure not as structural, but as personal.

This system has a name. It’s been called many things over the years:

• Social Darwinism, to explain poverty as evidence of inferiority.
• Eugenics, to institutionalize racial and class hierarchy and sterilize the “unfit.”
• Racial hygiene, in Nazi Germany.
• Population engineering, under apartheid South Africa.
• And now, in 2025, it returns in the language of modernization, fraud prevention, and digital efficiency.

We are watching its revival in real time—under a self-proclaimed Christian administration.

And yet, at its core, this ideology is profoundly anti-Christian.
It denies mercy. It withholds care. It abandons the very people the Gospels tell us to serve.

The names have changed.
The logic has not.

This is the system being built all around us.
And it’s time to call it what it is.

Eugenics by Infrastructure: What’s Happening Right Now

You don’t need the word “eugenics” to practice it.

In 2025, the American state is increasingly structured not to protect the vulnerable, but to sort them out. Public institutions are being retooled into filtering systems—prioritizing speed, efficiency, and “merit” over equity, access, or human need. Under the Trump (47) administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a new version of social triage is taking shape.

And while it doesn’t speak the old language of racial hygiene or family pedigrees, it carries the same logic:
The strong will adapt. The weak will be left behind.

Social Security: The System That Doesn’t Want You

Social Security isn’t being reformed—it’s being hollowed out. Under DOGE’s direction, the agency has become a hostile environment for the very people it was designed to serve.

• Dozens of field offices have been shut down, particularly in rural and low-income areas.
• Phone verification has been eliminated. Those needing to verify their identity must use an online portal or travel in person.
• Thousands of SSA workers are being laid off, slashing the capacity to process claims and correct administrative errors.
• Checks have been withheld or retroactively rescinded for recipients unable to meet new verification protocols or mistakenly flagged.
• Public comments from top officials suggest this is intentional. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick claimed that only “fraudsters” would complain if their checks didn’t arrive. Elon Musk called the program a “Ponzi scheme.”

The outcome isn’t theoretical. Seniors, disabled individuals, and low-income workers are already being cut off. Those who cannot navigate an increasingly complex, digitized, underfunded system are left to fend for themselves. The less capable you are of jumping through hoops, the more likely you are to be discarded.

Public Health: Let the Strong Survive

The assault on public health isn’t loud—but it’s lethal. Funding cuts and infrastructure rollbacks are targeting the exact areas that protect the most vulnerable.

• The CDC’s budget for infectious disease tracking has been slashed.
• Programs for HIV prevention and mental health support have lost federal funding.
• Vaccine skepticism and anti-public-health rhetoric are amplified from the top.
• Medicaid expansion has stalled or reversed in multiple states.
  

The result is a system that no longer frames good health as something that benefits all. Instead, illness is increasingly treated as a personal problem—evidence of failure, not something society should prevent or treat.

In this framing:

• If you fall ill, it’s your fault.
• If you die from something preventable or treatable, it’s unfortunate—but it couldn’t be helped.
• And if you survive, it’s proof you were “fit” enough to make it through, and your bloodline should continue.

This is not a public health strategy. It’s a survival-of-the-fittest philosophy enforced by policy.

Immigration: Gatekeeping by Genetics and Class

The administration’s approach to immigration and asylum mirrors the eugenics-era desire to curate the population.

• In early 2025, the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program was suspended.
• At the same time, a special exception was made to fast-track white South African “refugees.”
• Over 530,000 legal humanitarian entrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela lost their temporary status.

Refuge is no longer based on need or danger—it’s based on who the state wants. Preference is given to those who resemble the imagined ideal: white, Western, and “culturally compatible.” Those fleeing violence, poverty, or climate devastation—especially if they’re Black or Brown—are treated as threats to be neutralized, not lives to be saved.

The echoes of early 20th century immigration law are unmistakable. The categories have changed, but the structure remains:
Let in the “right” people. Keep out the rest.

Efficiency as a Moral Code

The new language of governance is neutral on its surface:

• Fraud prevention.
• Budget tightening.
• Technological modernization.
• “Merit-based” systems.

But these phrases are camouflage. They obscure the reality that our public infrastructure is being redesigned to serve the optimized—and abandon the rest.

Those with access to broadband, time, digital literacy, stable housing, and high cognitive function can survive this system. Those without—especially the elderly, disabled, chronically ill, underemployed, or marginalized—are quietly removed from its concern.

This is eugenics without surgery. It is Social Darwinism without lectures. It is infrastructure—funding decisions, access protocols, administrative hurdles—used as a tool of selective abandonment.

And, for a self-proclaimed Christian Nation, it is fundamentally anti-Christian.

From Spencer to Sterilization: The Gilded Age to WWII

Long before algorithms and biometric IDs, the American elite had another method for deciding who was fit to thrive: science. Or at least, what passed for it.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the United States built a moral framework atop a misreading of Darwin’s theory of evolution. The result was a social, political, and scientific movement that justified inequality as natural, encoded hierarchy into law, and laid the groundwork for some of the most devastating state-sanctioned policies in modern history.

The names have changed. The logic has not.

Social Darwinism: The Justification for Inequality

The Gilded Age was an era of industrial might and unregulated capitalism—but also of crushing poverty, brutal labor conditions, and extreme wealth concentration. American thinkers and industrialists needed a way to explain this growing divide that didn’t implicate their own systems of power.

Enter Social Darwinism.

• Coined and championed by British philosopher Herbert Spencer—not Darwin himself—Social Darwinism applied the concept of “survival of the fittest” to human societies.
• In the U.S., thinkers like William Graham Sumner argued that poverty was a sign of moral or biological failure, and charity only interrupted nature’s work.
• Figures like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller leaned on the idea that their wealth was evidence of personal superiority—not exploitation or luck.

Through this lens:

• Inequality wasn’t a problem. It was proof the system was working.
• Government aid wasn’t compassionate. It was interference.
• Human suffering wasn’t unjust. It was natural selection.

This worldview didn’t just uphold racial hierarchy—it also rationalized deep divisions within the white population. Poor whites, especially immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, were seen as genetically suspect. Urban working-class whites were blamed for “moral failings.” Disabled and mentally ill white Americans were classified as biological threats to the national future.

The “unfit” weren’t always non-white. Often, they were simply unwealthy, unhealthy, or noncompliant.

The Rise of American Eugenics

By the early 1900s, Social Darwinism had a new toolset. It was no longer enough to let the “unfit” fail. Now the goal was to prevent them from reproducing.

Eugenics—first developed in Britain by Francis Galton—found an eager home in the United States, where it was folded into mainstream science, government policy, and popular culture.

• Charles Davenport, head of the Eugenics Record Office, led efforts to collect genetic “data” on American families and identify “inferior stock.”
• IQ testing was developed and deployed to sort children, immigrants, and inmates by mental worth.
• Entire state programs were created to sterilize the “unfit”—including people labeled as feebleminded, disabled, epileptic, poor, or simply foreign-born.

By the 1930s:

• Over 30 U.S. states had active forced sterilization laws.
• Tens of thousands of Americans were sterilized, many without consent or even notification.
• Courts upheld the practice. In the infamous 1927 Buck v. Bell decision, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote:
  “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

What’s often forgotten is that this wasn’t just about race. Eugenics targeted a broad swath of “undesirables”:

• Poor white women who had children “out of wedlock.”
• Appalachian families judged to be “degenerate” by state social workers.
• Immigrants from Italy, Poland, and Russia labeled mentally deficient at Ellis Island.

This wasn’t fringe science. It was mainstream American policy, taught in schools, celebrated in medical journals, and funded by elite philanthropies.

Immigration as Racial and Cultural Engineering

The logic didn’t stop at domestic policy—it extended to the nation’s borders.

• The Immigration Act of 1924 capped arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe and banned nearly all immigration from Asia.
• National origin quotas were calculated using racialized pseudoscience to preserve the “Nordic character” of the U.S. population.
• Immigrants were screened with intelligence tests and health exams designed not to protect public safety—but to prevent the reproduction of supposedly inferior genes.

Here again, whiteness was not monolithic. Italians, Jews, Slavs, and Greeks were considered biologically suspect. It wasn’t just about race—it was about which kinds of white people belonged, and which could be filtered out.

The state wasn’t simply protecting its borders. It was curating its genome.

The Popular Face of Eugenics

This ideology wasn’t hidden in academic papers or backroom legislation. It was celebrated.

• State fairs hosted Better Baby Contests and Fitter Family Competitions, judged by scientists and doctors.
• Marriage licenses in some states required eugenic screenings.
• Biology textbooks included charts ranking races, warning against “race mixing,” and outlining the social costs of disability and poverty.
• Magazines ran profiles of doctors sterilizing the poor and “degenerate” for the greater good.

It was marketed as progressive, modern, and rational. And it was deeply bipartisan.

This wasn’t Nazism.
This was mainstream America.
And it set the ideological stage for everything that came next.

Exported Ideology: Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa

Eugenics wasn’t just an American phenomenon. But it was America’s version of eugenics—legalized, institutionalized, and widely celebrated—that offered a template for the most notorious regimes of the 20th century.

Two governments in particular adapted American racial and eugenic logic to serve their own aims: Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa. And while their brutality is rightly remembered, the structure of these regimes—how they sorted, stratified, and justified exclusion—was built on systems the U.S. had already tested.

Importantly, neither system targeted only racial outsiders.
Both also imposed hierarchies within whiteness itself—based on class, culture, political loyalty, and reproductive value.
To treat these regimes as purely racial is to flatten the complexity of how power protected some and discarded others—even among those deemed “white.”

Nazi Germany: American Blueprints, German Precision

Before launching their racial state, Nazi officials studied the United States.

In the 1930s, Germany’s race theorists admired how America had already enacted:

• Immigration quotas based on ethnicity and national origin
• State-level anti-miscegenation laws
• Sterilization of disabled and “feebleminded” people
• Legal frameworks for reproductive control and racial segregation

These policies were translated, analyzed, and praised in Nazi academic and legal circles. The U.S. was a model of how a democracy could enforce biological hierarchy through bureaucracy.

Then Germany industrialized it.

• The T4 program began the systematic murder of disabled Germans—seen as burdens on the Volk.
• The Nuremberg Laws institutionalized Jewish exclusion, built from America’s anti-miscegenation statutes.
• The Holocaust evolved from a foundation of classification, containment, sterilization, and surveillance.

And even within “Aryan” society, Nazi ideology imposed internal divisions:

• “Degenerate” art, behavior, sexuality, and nonconformity were policed and punished.
• Working-class Germans were monitored for ideological purity.
• Women were valued not as citizens, but as reproductive vessels—assessed by heredity and loyalty.

Whiteness under Nazism was not a guarantee of safety.
Only those deemed fit, useful, and ideologically aligned were protected. The rest were marginalized, sterilized, or silenced.

Apartheid South Africa: Segregation, Sorted by Science

Apartheid was not just a racial regime—it was a population management system, built on eugenic logic and social engineering.

South African lawmakers combined elements of Jim Crow, British colonial racial codes, and Nazi-style classification systems to sort people with precision:

• The Population Registration Act classified every citizen into rigid racial categories: white, Black, colored, or Indian.
• Interracial relationships were criminalized.
• Education, healthcare, and public space were assigned based on this constructed identity.

But, as in Nazi Germany, whiteness itself was also tiered.

• Afrikaners, English South Africans, and immigrant Europeans were treated unequally—some favored, others politically distrusted.
• Poor whites were targeted for social uplift through “white labor” programs—designed to prevent them from falling into the economic class of the Black working poor.
• White women were heavily surveilled for sexual purity, reproductive choices, and loyalty to state ideology.

The regime’s goal was not just to exclude non-whites.
It was to purify and control whiteness—protecting its “value” while actively suppressing those within it who threatened its image or function.

The Logic Was Global, But the Blueprint Was American

What Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa built were escalated versions of a model pioneered in the United States:
A society engineered to sort, sterilize, uplift, or discard based on genetics, productivity, and conformity.

Race was a central axis—but it was never the only one.
Class, gender, culture, and ideology were always in the mix.
Those who fell short—even within the dominant racial group—were often punished, policed, or removed.

This complexity matters.
Because today’s policies—cloaked in neutral language about fraud, efficiency, or modernization—follow a similar script.

And the deeper we understand how these hierarchies operated across lines of race and class, the better we can recognize what’s being rebuilt right now.

Post-War Recoil: Rejection and Reinvention

When Allied soldiers liberated the Nazi death camps in 1945, the world saw the brutal endpoint of a logic many societies had quietly accepted. Gas chambers, forced sterilizations, racial registries, and medicalized murder—these weren’t just acts of war. They were the outcomes of a belief system that treated human life as a hierarchy of worth.

In the aftermath, the global consensus shifted. At least on the surface.

Eugenics fell out of public favor.
Social Darwinism was no longer fashionable in elite discourse.
The language of biology was scrubbed from policy debates, replaced with the rhetoric of rights, equality, and dignity.

But the values that powered those systems didn’t disappear.
They mutated.

The Great Disavowal

Immediately after the war, the U.S. distanced itself from its role in shaping eugenic ideology—despite the fact that Nazi lawyers had cited American sterilization and miscegenation laws as templates.

• The Eugenics Record Office was shut down in 1939, just before the war.
• Forced sterilizations quietly slowed—but didn’t stop. Some states continued the practice well into the 1970s.
• The Civil Rights movement brought an end to the legal structure of segregation through Jim Crow laws.

At the same time, the U.S. pivoted into a new moral posture:

• Universal declarations of human rights
• The founding of the United Nations
• The Civil Rights Movement, GI Bill, Medicare, Medicaid

For the first time in American history, equality—not hierarchy—became the official narrative.

But that didn’t mean the infrastructure of inequality was dismantled. It just became harder to see.

Reinvented, Not Removed

The principles of eugenics were not erased. They were rebranded.

• IQ testing remained widespread, still used to track children, justify educational segregation, and determine access to opportunity.
• Housing policies like redlining and urban renewal sorted people spatially—by race, income, and perceived “fitness” for investment.
• Welfare programs created distinctions between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, often along racial and gendered lines.
• The rise of mass incarceration replaced biological determinism with criminal determinism—but kept the same populations under control.

Instead of calling people unfit, we called them:

• High-need
• Underskilled
• Low potential

The outcome was the same: exclusion, containment, and reduced access to opportunity. Only now it came wrapped in data, spreadsheets, and neutral administrative language.

The Persistent Undercurrent

While the public face of government shifted toward equality, the undercurrent of sorting never stopped. It simply adapted.

• In education: gifted programs for some, discipline pipelines for others
• In healthcare: boutique medicine for the wealthy, emergency rooms for the poor
• In employment: professional networks for the elite, algorithmic rejection for everyone else

And in politics, every few decades, the old arguments would resurface:

• Welfare reform in the 1990s framed recipients as lazy or genetically inferior.
• Immigration debates in the 2000s painted non-European migrants as incompatible with “American culture.”
• Prison expansion was justified by a thinly veiled fear of inherited criminality to certain categories of persons.

The core idea—that some people are better equipped to succeed, and others are not—never really went away.
It just stopped calling itself what it was.

And now, under the banner of efficiency, optimization, and digital governance, it’s coming back into the light.

The Modern Rebrand: Efficiency, Fraud, and Fitness

This has returned to the United States with a resurgence, led by those indoctrinated in this system from childhood in South Africa.

The language has changed.
The goals have not.

In place of old eugenic slogans and race science, the new terminology is clean, corporate, and digital. Policy is no longer framed around human worth—but around metrics, budgets, and performance. Terms like “optimization,” “fraud prevention,” and “efficiency” now carry out the work that sterilization laws and IQ quotas once did.

It’s no longer about declaring people unfit.
It’s about building systems that make them irrelevant.

Bureaucracy as Filter, Not Safety Net

Across American institutions, a quiet restructuring is underway. The tools aren’t as dramatic as forced sterilization or immigration bans. But their effects are just as profound.

• Digital-only services exclude those without internet, tech literacy, or stable housing.
• Reduced staffing and physical closures in public offices make access harder for the disabled, the elderly, and the poor.
• Fraud prevention protocols function less as safeguards than as gatekeeping mechanisms—delaying or denying assistance through complexity.
• Algorithmic decision-making uses opaque logic to determine who gets help, who gets flagged, and who disappears from the system entirely.
• Cancelling meetings and initiatives meant to drive vaccine efficacy that saves lives and long-term health.

The rollback isn’t always direct. Sometimes it’s symbolic.

In March 2025, the Trump administration rescinded a decades-old federal policy that explicitly barred segregation in facilities used by government contractors. This guidance—originally part of Executive Order 11246—had prohibited segregated bathrooms, dining areas, and workplaces for anyone doing business with the federal government.

The Civil Rights Act still stands. In theory, segregation remains illegal.

But the retraction sent a different message:
These protections are optional.
These expectations are negotiable.
You no longer need to pretend you care.

There is no immediate wave of segregated bathrooms or “separate but equal” break rooms. That’s not the point.

The point is to signal—to employers, contractors, bureaucrats—that the government is stepping back. That standards once rooted in justice are now seen as overreach. That inclusion is no longer part of the contract.

Access Denied

Then, the Department of Justice is joining in. In early 2025, the DOJ quietly rescinded 11 public guidance documents under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). These weren’t fringe policies—they were core resources.

• Pages explaining how hotels should provide accessible customer service—gone.
• Guidelines showing retail businesses what accessibility features they are legally required to provide—removed.
• Documentation that clarified the rights of disabled people and the responsibilities of public accommodations—disappeared from the public archive.

The ADA itself remains on the books.
But this isn’t about repealing the law. It’s about weakening it through information sabotage.

The stated justification? Economic efficiency.
Removing “bureaucratic red tape” so businesses don’t have to spend money on compliance.

But building a ramp, installing a curb cut, or marking an accessible parking space isn’t red tape.
And removing guidance on how to treat disabled guests with dignity? That doesn’t lower inflation.
That just erases people, demonstrating the belief—barely concealed—that people with disabilities are too expensive to accommodate.

According to the CDC, 12.2% of U.S. adults have a mobility disability—more than 41 million people who struggle to walk or climb stairs. That’s 41 million Americans who rely on accessibility not as a bonus, but as a basic right.

If this were about boosting the economy, making businesses accessible would be a mandate. It would be seen as expanding the consumer base, increasing workforce participation, and unlocking the full economic power of tens of millions of people.

But that’s not what this is about.

This is about deciding—quietly, administratively—that some people don’t matter enough to include.

“Fraud” as Ideological Cover

The push to eliminate “waste” and “fraud” is not just about money. It’s about framing vulnerability as suspicion.

• Leaders accuse benefit recipients of cheating the system, despite evidence showing fraud rates are minimal.
• Entire populations—immigrants, the disabled, the unemployed—are treated as probable abusers rather than citizens in need.
• Mistakes or delays by agencies are reframed as proof of individual failure, rather than systemic design.
• Voting is made less accessible, under the guise of election integrity, “solving” a non-material problem

In this framework:

• Bureaucratic failure becomes personal failure.
• Need becomes burden.
• Dependence on others becomes guilt.
• Lack of proficiency in technology becomes an exclusion.

It’s not just stigmatizing. It’s strategic.
By labeling certain groups as risky or inefficient, the system justifies withdrawing support—under the guise of “fiscal responsibility.”

Tech-Driven Fitness Metrics

In elite circles, a new language of bio-optimization has emerged. It doesn’t use the word “eugenics,” but the logic is unmistakable.

• Startups offer embryo screening services to optimize for traits like IQ, height, or disease resistance.
• Billionaire-funded natalism encourages “high-value” individuals to reproduce more, casting fertility as a civic duty of the elite.
  • Artificial Insemination to select the “highest-quality” embryos for implantation.
• Predictive AI is being developed to assess “risk” in everything from school admissions to policing to child welfare.

What’s being created is a new framework of fitness:

• Not racial, but cognitive.
• Not ethnic, but economic.
• Not about genes, exactly—but about data points that are perceived to signal potential.

Access to opportunity is no longer a matter of rights.
It’s a question of optimization.

The New Language of Exclusion

The modern state doesn’t say:

You are unworthy.
It says:
You didn’t qualify.
You didn’t meet the threshold.
Your account couldn’t be verified.

The result is the same:

• The old, the sick, the poor, the noncompliant, the marginalized and the digitally disconnected are sorted out.
• The optimized move forward—faster, smarter, and with access to more of the keys to success.

It’s not eugenics by name.
It’s exclusion by design.

And for those being filtered out, it doesn’t matter whether the algorithm or the bureaucrat made the final decision.

The outcome is the same:
You don’t belong.

The Architecture of Erasure

There’s no proclamation.
No official statement.
No headline declaring that the United States has begun quietly offloading its obligations to the vulnerable.

No clear headline saying “we are drawing on the legacy of Social Darwinism, Eugenics, and the learnings of South African Apartheid.”

But the structure tells the story.

It’s not always visible at first. You might only catch it in the fine print—the form that never arrives, the website that doesn’t load, the benefits portal that times out. You might feel it in the long waits, the missing checks, the closed doors. Or maybe you notice who the system still works for: the well-connected, the self-sufficient, the already optimized.

What we’re living through isn’t just administrative decay. It’s a deliberate retooling of the state—away from inclusion, away care of the vulnerable, and toward a future where survival is reserved for those who can currently create financial value, meeting the system on its terms.

And those terms are getting narrower.

This Isn’t Policy Failure. It’s Policy Design.

• A Social Security recipient loses benefits over an unverifiable online account, or an algorithm that concludes they are already dead.
• A mother in a rural county drives two hours to an office that no longer exists.
• A refugee is told to wait—indefinitely—because their crisis isn’t the “right” kind.
• A disabled veteran is caught in a paperwork loop until the appeal window quietly closes.

These aren’t accidents.
They’re outcomes.
Engineered, approved, and carried out through the everyday mechanisms of modern governance.

There’s no need for violence.
Just distance.
Delay.
Silence.

And it works. Because no one has to say the quiet part aloud.

Efficiency as a Moral Code

The new language is gentle, technocratic, and sanitized.

We no longer talk about “defectives.”
We talk about “eligibility thresholds.”

We don’t speak of “degenerate stock.”
We cite “fraud risk” and “budget constraints.”

We don’t ask whether someone is fit to live.
We ask whether their data matches our model.

This isn’t the language of genocide.
But it is the language of abandonment.

When the system makes you invisible, you stop being its responsibility.

Who Slips Through?

The same people as always.

• Those who move too slowly.
• Those who need help navigating.
• Those who can’t afford mistakes.
• Those who were never meant to inherit the full promise of citizenship in the first place.

They fall behind in a system that rewards optimization, automation, and uninterrupted productivity. And once they fall behind, the system offers no hand. No pause. No grace.

Not because it’s broken.
Because it’s built that way.

The Logic Never Died

The racial pseudoscience is out of fashion. The forced sterilizations are no longer public policy. The charts ranking families by bloodline are gone.

But the belief—that some lives are inherently more valuable than others—never left.

It has simply been reformatted.
Streamlined.
Digitized.
Turned into default settings inside institutions we’re told are neutral.

It now shows up not as open exclusion, but as silence—by omission, by design, by function.

This is not the eugenics of the past.
It’s the infrastructure of the present.
And unless we are willing to understand it for what it is, it will become the future.

Let’s conclude with Mathew 40:37-45 NIV:

37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

Sources Include

https://www.thehastingscenter.org/the-alarming-history-behind-trumps-bad-genes-comments
https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=f7927a63-d5b7-4097-a9cb-0c2d910def46
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/22/politics/donald-trump-genes-historical-context-eugenics/index.html
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-10-10/genes-donald-trump-hugh-hewitt-adolph-hitler-eugenics
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4908156
https://www.uc.edu/content/dam/refresh/cont-ed-62/olli/s21/darwin5-.pdf
https://www.history.com/topics/early-20th-century-us/social-darwinism
https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Eugenics-and-Scientific-Racism
https://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/mistaking.pdf
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/the-gilded-age/gilded-age/a/social-darwinism-in-the-gilded-age
https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/educational-resources/timelines/eugenics
https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/breeding-societys-fittest
https://www.nature.com/scitable/forums/genetics-generation/america-s-hidden-history-the-eugenics-movement-123919444
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6736015
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/17/tech-money-race-science-nonsensical
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/03/natal-conference-austin-texas-eugenics
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/10/donald-trump-migrants-race-science/680187
https://www.vox.com/politics/376797/trump-immigrants-bad-genes-nationalism
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/11/25/the-icon-and-the-idealist-stephanie-gorton-review
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Against_the_Weak
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_views_of_Donald_Trump