Thread by @AdamRutherford

Thanks to everyone flagging up Lionel Shriver’s piece in the Spectator. I have read it, and it is very unsophisticated Replacement Theory, and lands straightforward far-right conspiracy theory talking points which haven’t changed in more than a century.

These ideas, robustly present by racists such as Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddart in the 1st decades of the 20th century formed the ideological basis for eugenics policies in the US, and later in Nazi Germany. Hitler cited Grant’s work as ‘his Bible’.

Shriver’s piece echoes these sentiments very specifically. She is biologically and historically illiterate on this matter. Her words are very specifically reminiscent of those of Tom Buchanan in Gatsby too:

‘The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be will be utterly submerged, It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.’

Anyway, it’s garbage. Don’t read it. Stupid, illiterate, ill-conceived fuckery. Read Gatsby instead.

Interesting fact: Fitzgerald was acquainted with many of the key founders of US eugenics, notably Mary Harriman - widow of railroad tycoon E. H. Harriman and her daughter, who was so into eugenics she was nicknamed Eugenia.

Harriman funded the Eugenics Research Office from its foundation, lead by Charles Davenport, and run by Harry Laughlin. Laughlin wrote eugenics legislation in the US that was the basis for the 1933 Nazi ‘Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases’.

This was one of the first pieces of legislation passed after Hitler took power, and allowed the involuntary sterilisation of hundreds of thousands of people.

The ERO evolved into Cold Spring Harbour labs, one of the best genetics departments in the world. Funny old history.

Ok who did this