It Could Happen Here - Anti-Vax America: Soft Eugenics

Episode Date: June 19, 2025

Anti-vaccination rhetoric is often framed by proponents as a sort of medical freedom, the ability to decide what one wants to do with their own body. It’s an argument that can appeal to crunchy granola types and religious zealots alike. But there is also a darker side to this rhetoric that reveals an embrace of eugenic ideas among anti-vax advocates, whose preferred “herd immunity” approach to outbreaks subordinates the interests of older people, those with disabilities, and members of minority groups to others. This episode explores the history of eugenics as it relates to vaccines and unpacks how modern anti-vax politics tends towards eugenic responses to viral pandemics. Sources: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19602363/  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11700278/ https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/educational-resources/timelines/eugenics https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/29/politics/abbott-migrant-transport-order-covid https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/racist-covid-infection-theories-arent-just-wrong-they-are-deadly/ https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/measles-maha-and-soft-eugenics/ https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/maha-and-soft-eugenics-revisited-the-autism-tsunami-dr-oz-and-your-patriotic-duty-to-stay-healthy/ https://www.nsdoku.de/en/groups/educational-program/the-nazi-society-of-exclusion http://www.worldofinclusion.com/res/qca/Lest_We_Forget.pdf  https://web.archive.org/web/20250213085155/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2021/11/19/anti-vaxxers-try-rewrite-history-truth-nazis-vaccination-not/  https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/07/health/hhs-cdc-vaccines-autism  https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/05/01/nx-s1-5383172/rfk-jr-placebo-vaccine-testing-studiesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. I'm Robert Evans and on my show Behind the Bastards this week, we have one of our worst subjects ever, David Byrd, founder of the Children of God cult, who we'll be talking about with special guest Ed Helms. He's not just like a weird religious cult leader. He was like fusing a bunch of hippie ideology in with this kind of like evangelical Christianity, Pentecostal preaching in the mid-century is a very weird guy. But yeah, I'll just get into it. Like nothing you just said makes sense. That doesn't say. But that's the beauty of cults.

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journalist in Dallas and an occasional contributor to Cool Zone Media. And welcome to episode four of Anti-Vax America, a special five-part mini-series for It Could Happen Here, exploring the measles outbreak as a microcosm for where we are now, how we got here, and where we could be going. Today's episode will focus on the twisted history of eugenics as it relates to vaccinations, and how the current MAHA agenda, as pushed by R.F.K. Jr., is a sort of echo of eugenic beliefs of the past. Vaccination hesitancy historically has been framed by opponents to vaccines as a matter of medical freedom, about the ability to decide what one wants to do with their

own body. It's an argument that we've discussed can appeal to crunchy granola types and religious zealots alike. But there's also a darker side to this rhetoric that reveals an embrace of eugenic ideas among anti-vax advocates who prefer quote-unquote herd immunity approaches to outbreaks Which subordinate the interests of older people those with disabilities and members of minority communities to those who choose not to be vaccinated On this episode of anti-vax America We will dive into the overlapping histories of eugenic thinking and anti-vaccination beliefs to untangle this mess as we previously discussed in episode 2,

vaccinations took off in the 1800s shortly after the creation of the first smallpox vaccine in 1796 and so did anti-vaccination rhetoric and movements. In parallel, there were a lot of scientific developments going on. The 1800s were a heady time in Western science. There was Charles Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection, which was presented in Darwin's 1859 book on the Origin of Species. Five years later, sociologist Herbert Spencer mixed concepts from Thomas Malthus, the economist who proposed that population growth would outpace food production, with Darwin's theory to coin the term survival of the fittest and apply it to industrial capitalism with the end conclusion that basically those who were on top were

deserving of all the privileges that they have and that those at the bottom were also deserving of their position in society in 1883 Darwin's cousin Francis Galton coined the term eugenics in his book, Ingris into human fertility and its developments. The book proposed to give to quote, more suitable races, a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable. To understand a bit more about Galton's thinking, I spoke with Dr. Michael Phillips, who we heard from in a previous episode. Galton was in despair that all those improvements

in delivery of healthcare, medical care itself, nutrition, all the humanitarian efforts to improve the workplace, eliminate child labor, improve factories so people don't get blown up, et cetera. What that was doing was it was allowing the unfit, you know, the people he saw as inferior, to survive past childhood, to survive into adulthood, to have longer, healthier lives.

And if they live a longer lifespan and they're healthier during that span, they're going to have more children. And he believed that because they are less gifted with intelligence, you know, cause he said history is driven by genius. And he actually did the first major study on intelligence where he traced the family histories

of what he said were the gifted men and he claimed all of this was biological inheritance, you know, everything was biology. And not only that, but all traits, all traits were biological. Work ethic, honesty, fidelity to your partner, alcoholism, every single trait a human might have, he tied to biology. And he said that the people with the worst traits, it was called dysgenic, people who were dysgenic, people who had the worst traits, were now producing large families and because they were less intelligent, they gave in to their sexual urges more often. They didn't plan families based on their economic circumstances.

They were impulsive. Oh, well, we have eight children. Let's have sex. And, yeah, if we have a ninth child, well, we have a ninth child. And that meant that those families were growing exponentially. But the fit to plan their families more carefully. And yeah, the partners are busier, job creators is innovators in science and education. The women want to have a life outside of the home that they were less fertile.

They were having fewer children. And of course, what the result would be is you have the unfit outnumbering the fit, and that leads to catastrophe. Society falls apart. These sorts of ideas are represented in the satirical 2006 film Idiocracy, which plays out a future in which stupid people outbreed smart people and society consequently devolves.

As the 21st century began, in which stupid people outbreed smart people and society consequently devolves. once favored the noblest traits of man, now began to favor different traits. Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent. But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction, a dumbing down. How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators within the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most and left the intelligent to become an endangered species. Having kids is such an important decision.

We're just waiting for the right time. It's not something you want to rush into, obviously. No way. Oh shit, I'm pregnant again! Shit! I got too many damn kids! Thought you was on the pill or some shit! Hell no! Shit! Must have been thinking of Britney. Britney?! No, thank you! While certainly meant in jest, the fundamental principle of ideocracy demonstrates the staying

power of Galton's eugenic ideas, which became highly influential in the 20th century. Within two decades of the release of his book coining the term eugenics, eugenic thinking was widespread among white Anglo-Saxon leaders of the West. But before we hear more about that from Dr. Michael Phillips, a quick ad break. I'm Robert Evans and on my podcast Behind the Bastards, we talk about the worst people in all of history. We've discussed a lot of horrible monsters in our time, but this week we have one of the very worst we'll ever talk about, David Berg, founder of a cult

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The summer of 1993 was one of the best of my life. I'm journalist Jeff Perlman, and this is Rick Jervis. Rick Jervis We were interns at the Nashville Tennessean, but the most unforgettable part? Our roommate, Reggie Payne, from Oakley, sports editor and aspiring rapper. Jeff Perlman And his stage name? Sexy Sweat. In 2020, I had a simple idea. Let's find Reggie. Rick Jervis We searched everywhere, but Reggie was gone. In February, 2020, Reggie was having a diabetic episode.

His mom called 911. Police cuffed him face down. He slipped into a coma and died. I'm like thanking you. But then I see my son's not moving. No headlines, no outrage, just silence. So we started digging and uncovered city officials bent on protecting their own. Listen to Finding Sexy Sweat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts. The two biggest eugenicists in the early 20th century, they were bestselling authors, Madison Grant, who is a friend of Theodore Roosevelt's, and Lotharp Stoddard. Stoddard in particular warned that this was fueling radical politics, that the unfit essentially were demanding the riches created by the geniuses in the world. And they were expropriating the wealth they created and they were just milking the fit for every advance. And that as that became more difficult, that would breed revolution and Sotter in particular thought there was a link to communist revolution.

As advancements in sanitation and modern medicine continued in parallel with the spread of leftist thought, eugenicists were consumed with nightmares of a Malthusian crisis and were increasingly worried about their position in society. Something in their minds had to be done to stem the growing tide of unfit masses. Because natural selection in the minds of the eugenicists had basically been suspended, the forced sterilizations were the substitute for that. Eugenicists were in despair about vaccines, but there wasn't an organized campaign

to ban them on eugenics reasons, because I think they knew politically that would be unpopular, because there were enough people who realized they could see the benefits as vaccinations became more common. In other words, some early eugenicists were both supportive of things like forced sterilization, but were

also opposed to vaccinations because they believed that vaccinations would allow the weak and unfit to survive, prosper, and multiply. But not all eugenicists were inherently opposed to vaccinations. The Nazi regime, which exterminated millions of Jews and other people deemed undesirable, also embraced widespread vaccination against diseases like typhus, even if they actually rolled back mandatory vaccination laws that had been put in place prior to the rise of the Nazis. Nevertheless, the relationship between eugenic thinking and anti-vax beliefs goes deep, and it reveals a helpful heuristic

for thinking about eugenics. So on the one hand, there's a sort of active or hard eugenics in which medical authorities or the state forcefully sterilize and exterminate people who are deemed unfit. And then on the other hand, there's a sort of passive or soft eugenics in which potentially preventable deaths are written off as a product of a process in which the fittest survive and go on to improve the overall gene pool. Now before we go any further, it is important to note that eugenics has been morally and scientifically discredited so thoroughly that it shouldn't even be necessary to mention

it. But unfortunately, eugenicist thinking is in resurgence. President Donald Trump himself has said there are a lot of bad genes in our country right now, and that immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country. That's been an ongoing thing with immigration debates ever since the late 19th century. This idea that certain groups of immigrants are disease carriers, and that was particularly been aimed at Mexican immigrants. That's been an ongoing thing. And during COVID, Greg Abbott, who's the governor of Texas,

was saying it was Mexican immigrants, undocumented immigrants who were bringing COVID to Texas at one point. He made that accusation. And it's exactly like what they were saying. We had in Texas during this period, this panic about immigration late 19th, early 20th century, Galveston, a medical doctor who was inspecting people coming into the port of Galveston who were Jewish immigrants. And he was rejecting them people coming into the port of Galveston who were Jewish immigrants and he was rejecting them because he was saying they were carrying

infectious eye diseases tuberculosis all of that and Jewish civil rights groups had to intervene to stop that racism anti-semitism and eugenics historically have gone hand-in-hand But it hasn't been since the early 1900s that people who hold such beliefs also hold so much power in the state. R.F.K. Jr., a longtime anti-vaccination activist and now head of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, said in 2023 that COVID was, quote, ethnically targeted to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. Now his Make America Healthy Again agenda is absolutely dripping with soft eugenic thinking.

And to unravel all that, I spoke with Dr. David Gorski, a doctor who regularly writes in a blog called Science Based Medicine. My name is David Gorski. I'm a professor of surgery and oncology at Wayne State University in Detroit. So Dr. Gorski, you're also a bit of a writer and you keep a pretty regular blog in which you opine on a number of things. And recently you've written a couple blog posts about the measles outbreak, the anti vaccination movement, RFK juniors make America healthy again, agenda. And you know what folks over at the Conspirituality podcast called

soft eugenics, or perhaps what we could also think of as a sort of social Darwinist logic or sort of passive eugenics. You know, a couple months ago, when I first came across the episode of spirituality which is called Maha's soft eugenics, like kind of like a light bulb went off in my brain and that it sort of helped me crystallize things that I had been thinking of about the anti-vaccine movement but not so much the rest of Maha, which, you know, let's face it,

a mishmash of, you know, anti-vaccine beliefs, you know, appeals to nature, anti-pharma, a lot of quackery mixed in with some, you know, semi-reasonable stuff, like, you know, yeah, sure, diet, exercise, it's good for you. I think measles really epitomizes what they called the quote unquote soft eugenics, which was basically instead of, you know, like actively trying to kill children or people that you, you know, whose genes you don't want passed on, you're basically letting nature do it.

And you hear this a lot when they talk about, for example, one of the most common arguments you'll hear from anti-vaxxers about measles is that, you know, if someone gets really sick from measles or dies of measles, they must have had something wrong with them. They must not have been healthy. Like that measles is harmless if you are healthy. And of course, you know, there's a whole lot of appeal to virtue as far as health goes. In other words, there's this belief system that's kind of embedded in maha and it's been around for ages and ages in the alternative medicine crowd that, you know, you have basically total control over your health. In other words, if you do

the right things, eat the right diet, take the right supplements, do the exercise appropriately, you can keep yourself healthy, and it's even as good as vaccines or better to prevent vaccine preventable diseases, infectious diseases. Right, so I think that's a great way to understand the differences

here. You know, we're not talking about the hard active eugenics of the past, which was epitomized by the Nazi regime and their quote-unquote final solution. And also, you know, you're in the good old US of A, a hundred years ago. Right, you know, or even, you know, in the lingering sterilization regimes that continued up until the later 20th century, which were sort of originally rooted in this idea that we should be calling people out of the reproductive pool who have these undesirable traits

or are considered to be unfit in some way. So that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about this more let nature take its course, survival of the fittest type mindset. I don't know if it's a resurgence or it's just continuing to gain in popularity. There's a recent conference. It's been one of two conferences that have happened in Austin, Texas, where a lot of these quote unquote, liberal eugenicists also met up with people who are in the pro-natalist movement. And

then there's this overlap with people who are kind of dabbling in race science or trying to resuscitate old ideas that are basically, you know, eugenic in nature with regard to some people, you know, being smarter by genetic basis. Dave I mean, there's a lot of that around too. And that's not soft eugenics. That's like straight up eugenic. Jared Right. And so there's a continuum, you could say. There's this spectrum and, you know, these things are not disconnected, but they also can be understood as somewhat discrete phenomenon or ideologies or belief systems. And so you

did write a little bit about one specific document that, you know, I hadn't been particularly familiar with called the Great Barrington Declaration. Can you talk about that? Okay. So I can't believe it's like four and a half years ago now, but way back in early October of 2020, three scientists were brought together by a far right-wing activist named Jeffrey Tucker, who was associated with a right-wing think tank at the time called the American Institute for Economic Research. The idea behind the document was, all of these measures to control COVID are like, you know, destroying the economy. So what we should really do, supposedly based on science, but not really as I'll get into, is to let the virus spread among, quote unquote, young and

healthy, you know, those who are not at high risk, so not the elderly, not those with preexisting conditions that make them high risk for severe disease complications and death from COVID, just let it spread to reach what they call, you know, quote unquote, natural herd immunity. Herd immunity, for those not familiar with it, is when a pathogen is so prevalent in the population that so many people have developed what they call natural immunity, but the more appropriate term is post-infection immunity, immunity after having been infected, to the point where a sufficient proportion of the population is immune and the virus doesn't spread much like if you have a sufficient proportion of the population vaccinated the virus, you know,

you might get sporadic cases and small outbreaks, but it just can't spread further. If you don't know much about infectious diseases, including COVID, it sounds like not unreasonable given that there wasn't a vaccine back then. The other part of it is what they call quote unquote focus protection. So the idea was supposedly that you could protect those at high risk while letting the virus circulate, which are pretty incompatible because how are you going to, you know, how are you going to keep these high risk people from coming into contact with people who could have the virus unless you like quarantine them all or something like that. Which again would be impractical because you know 20% of the population at least. The other problem with the this idea is for there to be natural

herd immunity. I hate that term but I'll use it just because it's what they use. A couple of conditions are necessary. First, post-infection immunity has to be lifelong or at least very long-lasting. The second is, in other words, that the virus can't be mutating to avoid immunity, which we all know now and even knew then that coronaviruses are very good at doing, so that it was expected that new variants would come up and that they could evade even post-infection immunity. In terms of influenza, that's why the flu vaccine has to be updated every year because the strains mutate. And the rise of the Delta wave, the Omicron wave, et cetera, kind of showed that people getting infected again and again, that post-infection immunity for COVID was not long-lasting.

So basically, the Great Barrington Declaration was giving up more than anything else in order to let people make money again. And it never would have worked because even back then we had every reason to expect that post infection immunity after a COVID infection would not be long lasting and that the virus would mutate and you know come up with new strains that could bypass pre-existing immunity from previous infections. However, this idea

was very influential. And in fact, the Great Barrington Declaration was kind of late in the game because the idea of just letting the virus spread to achieve natural herd immunity was being pushed as early as March and April in 2020. And one of the writers or the scientists who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration is now our director of the NIH, Dr. J. Patacharya. The other was Dr. Srinath Raghupta in England. And then there was, of course, Martin Kaldorf, who I now hear is involved in the autism, you know, vaccine study that RFK Jr. is supposedly organizing. So basically, the idea behind the Great Barrington Declaration, far from being

censored and canceled, etc., actually found purchase at the highest levels of government in the US and the UK. The Boris Johnson government and Donald Trump administration both, you know, listened to these scientists and, I mean, Great Barrington Declaration writers, you know, actually got to meet with Trump at one point, I believe in July, and it was unfortunately very influential and and discouraged stronger public health measures. I did call this idea eugenicist at the time, although maybe you can argue if it's soft eugenics or social Darwinist. I mean, maybe more social Darwinist given that, oh, well, it's kind of like screw the old people who will die of this, you know, seem to be part of the attitude behind it.

We throw up this focus protection as an afterthought, where the main idea is just to let the virus spread and most people will be okay. This is the same idea that I heard again and again, years and years before with the measles. In fact, if you go back to 2015, which was after the Disneyland measles outbreak and during the holidays of 2014 that took part in the early part of 2015, you would see a lot of anti-vaccine activists going on and on about how,

if you just keep yourself healthy, measles is not a danger, that natural immunity to measles is far greater than vaccine-induced immunity. What they always fail to mention is that a price of getting post-infection immunity can be, besides just being sick, could involve the risk of complications, neurologic damage, or even death? Right. In a way, there's a moralization around health in that. It's something that individuals have to be personally responsible for. As you said, if they succumb to an illness like measles,

it is an indication that maybe they were unfit in some way or unhealthy. And this dovetails with something you also wrote about, RFK Jr.'s recent speech in which he talked about autism and described it as a tsunami and likened it to an epidemic. He claimed that the increasing statistical prevalence of autism is due to environmental risk factors and is something that is sort of induced by human behavior as opposed to that statistical prevalence being a result of improvements in diagnostic tools that more accurately measure a phenomenon. And he also portrayed autistic people as a sort of burden on society, you know, or people who will never be able to do things like fall in love or get a job, despite the fact that there are countless examples of people with

autism or under the umbrella of what we call autism, doing exactly those things. And there's this undercurrent of rhetoric that you sort of describe it as an echo of something. I hadn't heard this term before, but I'm familiar with the idea of it, or rather the way in which it was deployed, the idea of quote unquote, useless eaters. And so can you just walk us through sort of what your reaction to RFK Jr's speech was

and you know, how you made that connection? Well, look at what the very first thing he said about people with severe autism. Okay. What did he say? He said, they'll never pay taxes. They'll never have a job. And then, oh, they'll never go on a date. They'll never pay taxes. They'll never have a job and then oh, they'll never go on a date. They'll never play baseball You know, it's what are the first two things he mentions paying taxes and having a job This is straight up useless eaters rhetoric and useless eaters was basically a term that the Nazis used

You know for people with you know, severe, you know neurologic for people with severe neurologic conditions or diseases that made it such that they would require lifetime care and would never contribute to society. So that was the echo. I think that echo was pretty clear describing them that way. Now the other interesting thing about the eugenics angle, there's a very strong denial of what we know thus far about autism, which is that it's like roughly 80% genetic. You know, you can argue over the exact figures, but it's predominantly genetic. I think there's little doubt about that. So parents who have an autistic child, they often blame

themselves or they think, wait, if it's genetic, that means it must be me and or my partner. Yeah, which if you're thinking in terms of the whole health is virtue thing, if there is something about you that is not changeable, mainly your genetics, and that no amount of, no amount of exercise or, you know, living right is going to change, it's easy to fall into denial of that and seek to blame something else.

So there's that. And you know, one of the things I'm kind of afraid of is that if it becomes undeniable, you know, if they keep doing all this stuff and failing to find, you know, any real evidence that an external exposure is causing autism and they're forced to reckon with autism being primarily but not exclusively, but primarily genetic. Where does that lead you in terms of what do you do about autism? And my mind has gone in some fairly dark directions thinking about that. Right.

Right. And there's little discussion of what autistic people think or want. No, it doesn't matter to them at all, really. In fact, they're almost entirely dismissive of what autistic people themselves think. Exactly. And there's also a total disregard for the value of difference and the contributions that people who are autistic have made to society that perhaps they might even correlate with the fact that they're autistic. So there's this total erasure of not only what an entire group of people actually want for themselves as advocates for themselves, but also their value, you know, not just as a group of people, but as individuals as well.

To add to that, let's go back to around 2007, 2008, when Jenny McCarthy was the face of the anti-vaccine movement. So like one of the things she said after, you know, supposedly after her son Evan got vaccinated was that quote-unquote, the light went out of his eyes. And then you hear this a lot when parents realize their children are showing the signs of, you know, the early signs of autism. Is it like they there's language about how their child was stolen from them. In other words, as if this autistic child is not their child, rather their idealized version of what their child should be is their real child or their quote-unquote

normal child. This is some really ancient stuff in that, you know, I don't know if you there's the whole idea of the changeling myth in which, you know, the idea being, you know, children with mental illness, you know, have been taken over or they're changelings. They are no longer what they were before. It's almost as if they are no longer human. I mean, the dehumanization that you hear from the anti-vaccine movement about autism has long been horrific. And it's just that up until now, most people have not heard that rhetoric. And now they're hearing it from a high government official and it is becoming federal health policy.

Yeah, that is certainly a new development. There's something we've discussed on previous episodes is the deeper history of anti vaccination belief or hesitancy that goes deep in American history, you know, for almost as long as vaccines have ever existed. It has rarely ever been enshrined in law and policy in the way that it is now being done. And so we've talked about one of these people, high level government officials, RFK Jr. whose statements have drawn your attention and elicited your concern, but he's not the

only one. So you also wrote about Oprah, adjacent television personality, Dr. Mehmet Oz. Yes. Well, Dr. Oz actually sort of surprised me a little bit, but then in retrospect, not really. So I'm surprised there wasn't more commentary about this, but when he gave his brief little acceptance speech after having been confirmed as the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is the part of HHS that administers Medicare, Medicaid, Affordable Care Act, it's really important, huge programs. When he said basically it is your patriotic duty to take care of yourself, you know, be healthy. And then he goes, oh, and it feels better as well. But he said it's your patriotic duty to take care of yourself and be

healthy because then you, you know, draw less. I'm paraphrasing because I don't remember exactly what he said. But because you pull less from the pool, which interestingly echoes exactly, almost exactly, other than the patriotic duty part, what R.F.K. Jr. said when Bernie Sanders asked if health care was a human right. As you recall, R.F.K. Jr. did his best not to answer. Like, you know, he dodged and weaved around the question. And then he brought up the example of a someone who smokes cigarettes for decades and then develops lung cancer and is now drawing from the pool. He was like very, you know, emphasized drawing from the pool as if that person does not deserve healthcare basically because an addiction gave you cancer,

because what he neglects to mention is just how addictive tobacco and nicotine are. And as a former addict himself, I found that striking. But coming back to the whole patriotic beauty thing, the whole idea is, again, health is virtue. You control your health, and if you don't do the right things and become ill, that you're somehow less worthy of healthcare.

Right. And there's an interesting thread there in that some eugenicists thinkers, at least American ones, were somewhat concerned about, you know, the idea that vaccinations could prevent prevent the weaker the unfit from being cold naturally. Oh yes definitely yeah so there is some linkage here even if these are somewhat discrete. Ideas and you know you also quoted something from a doctor speech back in twenty thirteen You pulled a video that had been resurfaced in recent years. And Oz said, people don't have a right to health if they're uninsured. And so it's not like what he's saying is kind of new for him. He's been saying things like this for a while.

And the idea that, you know, there's this national body that we all have a duty to sort of be healthy cells of is something that there's a long history of that sort of thinking and policy. Yeah, yes, the whole. I mean, I couldn't help but think of Nazis in the vault. Quick aside for those who don't know the Nazi idea of the Volk has a few elements to it. Not only does it relate to racial and cultural homogeneity, but it also conceives of the nation as a sort of body composed of cells, one that must be cleansed of unfit or unhealthy cells in order to become perfect. In other words, a dutiful member of the folk would prioritize their health as a sort

of patriotic or nationalistic duty and would participate in eugenic programs to eliminate the unfit. You know, I'm not saying this is straight up Nazi or anything like that. It's just that these sorts of themes have echoed through, you know, not just eugenicist movements, but nationalist and authoritarian movements. And there's this concerning development RFK Jr. has proposed, basically creating like a national database or registry of people with autism. And if it's not just autism, maybe other disorders like ADHD. And if you read reports that interview people with autism or similar disorders, they are very concerned by this for the reasons that you

just described. So the creation of this database could be framed as a way to improve our ability to understand this hypothetical linkage that they are so doggedly stuck on between autism and vaccines. But I think those who know their history could easily imagine such a tool being used for other more nefarious purposes because similar policies were passed in Germany in the 1930s to identify these people and categorize them and then eventually do what they did with them. So for all those sorts of reasons and also the fact that we're living at a time in which American citizens and illegal residents are being sent to a foreign prison colony, that is certainly something that I think people are picking up on and maybe making

connections with. As you mentioned, a lot of autistic people don't want to be on this database. And as a result, I've read reports in the news of parents are asking that their child not be given a diagnosis of autism so that they don't end up in the database, which could artificially cause, you know, the prevalence of autism to level off

and start to decline, at which point RFK declares victory. We'll hear a bit more from Dr. Gorski after a quick ad break. I'm Robert Evans and on my podcast behind the bastards, we talk about the worst people in all of history. We've discussed a lot of horrible monsters in our time, but this week we have one of the very worst we'll ever talk about. David Berg, founder of a cult called the Children of God.

We'll talk about all of his horrible crimes with special guest Ed Helms. He's not just like a weird religious cult leader. He was like fusing a bunch of hippie ideology in with this kind of like evangelical Christianity, Pentecostal preaching in the mid century. He's a very weird guy. But yeah, I'll just get into it here. Like nothing you just said makes sense. That doesn't say it.

Right. But that's the beauty of cults. Listen to Behind the Bastards on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes, but there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country cops cops called this Taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple.

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Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes one, two, and three on May 21st and episodes four, five, and six on June 4th. Ad free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple podcasts. The summer of 1993 was one of the best of my life. I'm journalist Jeff Perlman and this is Rick Jervis. We were interns at the Nashville Tennessean, but the most unforgettable part?

Our roommate, Reggie Payne, from Oakley, sports editor and aspiring rapper. And his stage name? Sexy Sweat. In 2020, I had a simple idea. Let's find Reggie. We searched everywhere, but Reggie was gone. In February 2020, Reggie was having a diabetic episode. His mom called 911.

Police cuffed him face down. He slipped into a coma and died. I'm like thanking you, but then I see my son's not moving. No headlines, no outrage, just silence. So we started digging and uncovered city officials bent on protecting their own. Listen to Finding Sexy Sweat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast hell and gone, I've learned

one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Catherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. I have never found her and it haunts me to this day.

The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we'veK's HHS that intends to provide placebo vaccines during testing for all quote unquote new vaccines. So the idea is the vaccines in the childhood schedule have quote unquote never been tested against placebo control.

Although ironically, it's funny, I read an article the other day where they did admit that the COVID vaccine for children was indeed tested against a placebo control. I'm kind of surprised they conceded that, but I guess sometimes they have to concede reality. But here's the idea. So it's true that some of the vaccines have not been tested against the strict saline placebo control that they want.

But there are a number of reasons for that. The primary reason is ethics. So let's go back. So if you have a new vaccine that is for a disease that has never had an approved vaccine before, yes, it's tested against a placebo control. This has been the case for a very long time. However, if you have a new vaccine for a disease that already has a vaccine that's been approved as safe and effective and is the standard of care, it is completely unethical to do

a randomized study where, you know, one third to half of the participants will be randomized to a group that does not get the standard of care treatment, as in, you know, the vaccine or the standard of care preventative. In that case, the only ethical way to test the new vaccine against, you know, the disease for which there's already a vaccine

is to test it against an existing vaccine and then make sure that it is at least not inferior or preferably better. So if you trace back the lineage of all the vaccines on the on the childhood vaccine schedule, if you go back to the first vaccine against the disease that was approved, it was tested against you know placebo when it was a new vaccine against a disease that didn't have a vaccine. I'm wondering if you agree with this, but it does sound like this proposal, if it were

to be implemented in a way that involves vaccines for existing diseases that have already been treated with vaccines, if there were placebos introduced into this testing, and you know, like you said, there was a random percentage of people that were given a placebo. I mean, to me, it recalls like a soft version of a Tuskegee experiment. Yeah, I've been meaning to make that analogy,

but you beat me to it. As we discussed in a prior episode in this series, the Tuskegee syphilis study was a horrifically unethical, racist, and eugenic experiment that helped seed a long-standing distrust of vaccines and medical authorities, particularly among minority communities in the United States. And it straddled the intersection of hard and soft eugenics. While it was not a forced sterilization program, the intent of the experiment was to test the eugenic hypothesis that racial groups were differently susceptible to infectious diseases.

And that's because they basically believe that black people had different nervous systems than white people and that they were not the same. And they also allowed black men who could have otherwise been treated for syphilis, which there were treatments for at the the time to instead suffer and die after being given placebo treatments without their knowledge. Children's Health Defense, while under the leadership of RFK Jr. invoked the Tuskegee syphilis experiment in a recent anti-vaccine film that they specifically promoted to black Americans to encourage vaccine skepticism.

And now the former leader of that organization is proposing an approach to vaccines that is eerily reminiscent of the sordid Tuskegee experiment. In the post-COVID world, vaccination rates are on the decline and anti-vaccination beliefs are spreading in tandem with eugenicist thinking. The rhetoric of the leaders of our top health bureaucracies recall chilling episodes in recent history, ones that we would rather not repeat. But because we have history as a guide, it is not impossible for us to imagine what could happen if things continue to trend in the direction we are already headed. So on the next episode of Anti-Vax America,

I'll explore some of the worst case scenarios that could unfold if the proponents of the Maha Agenda get their way. I'm Stephen Monacelli. Until next time. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, CoolZoneMedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. I'm Robert Evans, and on my show Behind the Bastards this week, we have one of our worst

subjects ever, David Byrd, founder of the Children of God cult, who we'll be talking about with special guest Ed Helms. He's not just like a weird religious cult leader. He was like fusing a bunch of hippie ideology in with this kind of like evangelical Christianity, Pentecostal preaching in the mid-century. He's a very weird guy. But yeah, I'll just get into it here.

Like nothing you just said makes sense. That doesn't say it. Right. But that's the beauty of cults. Listen to Behind the Bastards on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Open AI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be an aberration, a symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon

Valley. And I'm going to tell you why on my show better offline the rudest show in the tech industry, where we're breaking down why Open AI along with other AI companies are dead set on lying to your boss that they can take your job. I'm also I know a lot of cops. They get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. This is Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad.

Listen to Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The OGs of uncensored motherhood are back and badder than ever. I'm Erica. And I'm Mila. And we're the hosts of the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast,

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every Wednesday. On the Black Effect Podcast Network, the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you go to find your podcast. This is an iHeart Podcast.