In an interview with right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt on Monday morning, Trump’s suggestion that non-White immigrants are genetically inferior was made explicit.
The comment came as Trump was disparaging his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
“How about allowing people to come through an open border,” he said, “13,000 of which were murderers, many of them murdered far more than one person and they’re now happily living in the United States?”
This is a false claim — “outrageously false,” in the wording of The Washington Post Fact Checker — based on a misrepresentation of numbers released by the government. That data indicated that there were about 13,000 immigrants who had committed murder but were not in custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Many, though, are in custody elsewhere, including at the state level. Nor were they all immigrants who arrived during the Biden administration; many were here under Trump, too.
Unchallenged by Hewitt, Trump continued on the subject.
“You know, now, a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes,” he said. “And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” Reinforcing that he was talking about the “bad genes” of immigrants, Trump offered up more false claims based on the ICE data.Hewitt, rather than contesting Trump’s genetic argument, shifted the conversation with no apparent irony to the federal criminal charges Trump himself faces. These, of course, are not a function of criminal genes, in Trump’s estimation, but instead of the political whims of Biden. (In reality, they are a function of Trump’s actions.)
"Criminal genes" is a core belief of Biosocial Criminology, a loose collection of racist, hereditarian beliefs that relies heavily on the racist garbage of Jean-Phillipe Rushton. How did I miss this article in Undark on the subject of Biosocial Criminology?
Later that year, the lead author of the paper, Brian Boutwell, took to the right-wing magazine Quillette to complain that biosocial criminologists were being shunned by their colleagues. Around that time, Boutwell and one of his co-authors on the paper, Florida State University criminologist Kevin Beaver, appeared separately on the show of alt-right podcaster Stefan Molyneux to talk about the links between crime, biology, and race. (Wright, one of the Cincinnati professors, appeared on the show too.)Shunned or not, the authors of the paper maintained active careers. Boutwell is now an associate professor at the University of Mississippi. One of his co-authors, J.C. Barnes, was until recently the chair of the Biopsychosocial Criminology division of the American Society of Criminology. Another co-author, Beaver, now directs the Biosocial Criminology Research & Policy Institute at Florida State University, and he maintains an affiliation with King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia. (Beaver did not respond to requests for an interview.)
Steven Pinker is a booster of biosocial criminology, which the Undark article does not mention, but which I've been tracking.
It should come as no surprise that Trump embraces race pseudoscience, considering he is funded by racists like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen.
In a surprise twist, Andreessen's partner Horowitz has switched to supporting Harris.
But any reporter doing the least amount of research on Thiel would understand exactly how racist he has always been. This is from "Contrarian" the book about Thiel by Max Chafkin:
Clarium employees read, played chess, and debated (sample topic: If you were going to design a country from scratch, what would it look like?) Everyone spent a lot of time talking politics, though out was important that those politics always be of the right-wing variety. An employee told me that it was common to hear talk about climate change denial and to see web browsers open to VDARE, the far-right website with a long record of publishing white nationalist writing. There were liberals at Clarium, but they understood that it was best to keep those views quiet.
How ironic that Steven Pinker (born in Canada), who apparently despises Trump (see him doing his awkward dance when Trump lost in 2020) has contributed to Trump's dangerous racist beliefs, by promoting racists and race pseudoscience (albeit usually stealthily) for the past couple of decades.
