Hey, the clip was "erroneously" posted at Donald Trump's Truth Social website, right? You know, the one I mean, the 62-second video clip (to the tune of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight") that featured Barack and Michelle Obama with ape heads, the one that the president felt there was simply no need to explain or in any way say he was sorry for. You know, the very one where, despite later deleting it from his account, he insisted, "No, I didn't make a mistake." Meanwhile, as NPR reported, "White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the clip, saying, 'Please stop the fake outrage.'"
Oh, right, it's certainly fake outrage -- but only, of course, if you happen to live in a distinctly White supremacist world. In that case, you'd certainly shrug off Michelle Obama's response that "it's his same old con, doubling down on ugly, misogynistic, racist lies as a substitute for real ideas and solutions that will actually make people's lives better."
How could the outrage not be fake when you're talking about the president who wants to toss every immigrant he can find, who is not from Denmark, Norway, or Sweden, out of the country -- oh, sorry, with the exception of White immigrants from South Africa? ("Why can't we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few? Let's have a few from Denmark" Send us some nice people.")
Of course, Donald Trump is not exactly alone in the history of American presidents. After all, 111 years ago, Woodrow Wilson screened a movie, The Birth of a Nation, that glorified the Ku Klux Klan in the East Room of the White House. And with all of that (and so much more) in mind, let TomDispatch regular Clarence Lusane take you into a world in which Donald Trump learned all too much about race from" yes, of course, Jeffrey Epstein. Tom
Donald Trump's Racism Mirrors Jeffrey Epstein's
The President with the "Right Genes"
Jeffrey Epstein was not only a rapist and a child predator, but also -- wait for it -- a White supremacist. While some speculate that the Epstein issue is just a distraction from President Trump's virulent and endless racism, others feel that the video the president posted at the beginning of Black History Month of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes was meant to divert attention from the growing Epstein fallout. Well, as it turns out, the two crises are not as far apart as you might imagine.
Bombshell articles in The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and at MS Now pulled the covers off Jeffrey Epstein's noxious racism. Reporters culling the most recently released Epstein files discovered numerous pieces of evidence in emails and other documents suggesting that he advocated the faux "science" of racial eugenics and held racist views not distinct from those promoted for decades by Donald Trump. Epstein built (or at least tried to build) ties and develop friendships with some of the most notorious eugenicists and White nationalists around the globe, including Nobel Prize laureate and geneticist James Watson, political scientist Charles Murray, and artificial intelligence researcher Joscha Bach, among many others. He also circulated posts from White supremacist websites that promoted bogus, supposedly genetically-based intellectual differences between the races.
Eugenics is the "race science" that was developed in the latter part of the nineteenth century to justify European slavery and colonialism. Proponents contended that humans were biologically and genetically separated into distinctly unequal "races." Everything from intelligence, criminality, and attractiveness to morality was, so the claim went, genetically determined. It should surprise no one that, in such an imagined hierarchy, Whites were at the top and, in most configurations, people of African descent at the very bottom with Asians and indigenous people somewhere in-between. Those four (or five or six) categories were considered immutable. And it mattered remarkably little that, for a long time, social and natural scientists had overwhelmingly argued with irrefutable evidence that racial categories were social constructs invented by humans and distinctly malleable over time as political and social life changed.
The real-world impact of racial eugenics theory long shaped public policy, political status, and life opportunities. In the United States, a belief in the genetic inferiority of Blacks helped foster slavery and then Jim Crow segregation, and led to tens of thousands of African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and individuals with physical and mental disabilities, as well as prisoners being sterilized. By 1913, 24 states and Washington, D.C., had passed laws allowing enforced sterilization. President Theodore Roosevelt was a firm believer in such eugenics and supported sterilization in order to prevent what he termed "racial suicide," a perspective that echoes today's "Great Replacement Theory."
In Nazi Germany, eugenics led not only to the sterilization of Jews, Blacks, and the disabled, but to the state-organized mass murder of literally millions of people. It was a core tenet of Nazism that all non-Aryans were genetically inferior and a threat to the White race. The Nazis railed against Jews "poisoning the blood" of White Germans, a term Trump used in describing non-White immigrants from the global South.
Despite this history, Epstein came to deeply believe in eugenics and genetic determination, as has Donald Trump. To that end, Epstein sought to connect with the notable race theorists of his day.
Epstein on Race
Perhaps the most notorious book in the modern era advocating a racial basis for intelligence and a social hierarchy that places Whites on top and Blacks at the bottom was The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and the late Richard J. Herrnstein, published in 1994. Since then, in multiple books and articles, the research behind that book has been thoroughly debunked and overwhelmingly rejected by scholars in the social and natural sciences. Yet, at the time, many Republicans and some Democrats embraced its racist argument in order to contend that government welfare programs should be cut back. Murray aligned with Republicans in giving testimony to Congress in the 1990s that blamed the morality of poor people for their poverty (as a debate unfolded around the future of welfare programs).
According to the Epstein files, Epstein himself repeatedly tried to correspond with Murray. However, Murray claims he never received (or remembers receiving) any emails from Epstein and did not correspond with him. Regardless, it's pretty clear that Epstein was writing because of Murray's notoriety for his work on race and genetics. This was in 2018, more than a decade after The Bell Curve had been published and Murray had become famous for it.
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