The

The Hello and welcome to behind the news. My name is Doug Henwood.

The ordained order is maintained, two guests, two segments.

Quinn Slobodian will talk about eugenics and neoliberalism,

and Molly White will talk about stable coins in the Trump-UA.E. Deal.

Last week we heard from the philosopher Emil Torres on the post-humanist crew in Silicon Valley.

Their obsessions with intelligence, human and artificial,

genetics, race, immigration, and population quality. I thought it'd be interesting to talk

about the roots of that sort of thinking in the neoliberal thought collective, with his

historian of that movement, Quinn Slobodian. Of course, neither the post-humanists nor the

neoliberals have the monopoly on this mode of thought.

Upper-class late-19th and early 20th century philosophers of white supremacy, like the outlandishly named Lothrop Stoddard, Harvard O'5, author of the Rising Tide of Color against White

World Supremacy, and Madison Grant, Yale 87, 1887, that is, author of the passing of the Great Race, which Hitler referred

to as his personal Bible, had a worked-out worldview and a large following. Explicit white supremacy

of that sort went out of fashion, but it came creeping back with the backlash that began in the

1970s. A landmark was the 1994 publication of the bell curve by Richard

Hearnstein and Charles Murray, which argued that a measurable general intelligence was the

key to success in life, that it was to a significant degree heritable, and that

maybe, you know, some groups had more of it than others. The book had a very noisy

reception, widely condemned, but also applauded by some,

with a finally someone who's saying it reaction.

The bell curve was a long time ago, but that sort of thinking has pervated the

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