Around 1900 the ‘science’ of Eugenics was invented by Francis Galton. It was taken seriously in Germany and the southern States of America in the 1930s – as well as in Sweden, as it happens. Not so much in Britain, however; where gross poverty among the working classes raised fears about the quality of the British-imperial racial ‘stock’, leading some to advocate ‘eugenic’ solutions – that is, euthanising the weak, or merely allowing them to die off, and encouraging geniuses to breed; but which were broadly discarded; in favour of the alternative approach, of strengthening the ‘unfit’ by means of social reform. Eugenics then became a no-no, too closely associated with Nazism and slavery to be a respectable academic or political line of thought.

With that historical precedent in mind, I’ve been disturbed by recent suggestions in America, mainly on the political Right, that eugenics might be adopted once again, this time as a national policy of racial recovery. You’ll know about Elon Musk’s sperm-spreading with carefully selected partners, on the assumption that he is particularly gifted in the ‘IQ’ department (which I’ve never accepted, by the way). But it goes further than this. Here’s the recent press report that filled me with particular horror this morning: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/may/04/maga-soft-eugenics.

So, here comes Robert Kennedy – that repository of all kinds of weird conspiracy theories, and currently Trump’s Health Minister – to bio-engineer the future American ‘master-race’. That’s MAGA with a vengeance. Don’t tell me that History never repeats itself.