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| This is a corrected version of the Eugenicist Republican meme. |
About a month ago I wrote that I had accused Dinesh D’Souza of relying heavily on half-truths, and that when Dinesh D’Souza challenged me to cite one of his half-truths, I pointed out that he hides the fact that Republicans were the main proponents of eugenic sterilization.
When I pointed that out, he had no response. There was no response that he could give that would even speciously let him off the hook. So he just moved on and ignored the problem.
Subsequently I created a meme, a map of the United States that shows that mostly Republican governors signed eugenic sterilization into law, and I have posted it many times on Twitter, along with other memes indicating other deceptions in Dinesh D’Souza’s argument.
Dinesh D’Souza generally ignores my posts attacking him, of which there have been many. He has responded to two between 9 November and today. In one instance he responded with a hairsplitting rhetorical question that bypassed the real point, and in another instance he responded to a point that was not what I had said, which of course is called strawmanning. This kind of dishonest rhetoric actually seems to work for him with the kinds of stupid people who find the rest of his rhetoric appealing, if likes and retweets are any indication.
This morning (12 December 2017) I made the same point that I made on 9 November, but this time using the meme that I had created, and it was addressed to somebody recommending D’Souza’s book The Big Lie to Bret Baier of Fox News. There was a good chance that Bret Baier would see my post.
That’s why, I think, Dinesh D’Souza finally felt obliged to respond to the point that he had ignored one month earlier. This time, amazingly, he admitted that Republicans had supported eugenic sterilization. He still tries to downplay it, but that’s not going to be very convincing when there was already a graphic display in the same thread showing that the overwhelming majority governors who signed eugenic sterilization into law were Republicans.
Since Dinesh D’Souza also claims in his response that progressives supported “eugenic murder,” I posted proof that he had lied about this, a page from Paul Popenoe’s book Applied Eugenics (1918) wherein Popenoe says that the “lethal chamber” and castration are not necessary for eugenics. Dinesh D’Souza has been claiming that Popenoe advocated the use of “lethal chambers” and thereby, D’Souza says, pointed the way for the Holocaust. This lie linking Popenoe to the Holocaust is important, given the subtitle of D’Souza’s book: Exposing the nazi roots of the American left.
The last post on that thread (as of this writing) is by a leftist (whose motives for attacking Dinesh D’Souza are probably different from mine). He supplies a video by Rachel Maddow that talks about the Republican involvement in curbing “diverse” immigration, and the eugenic argument that was used to justify this change in policy.
The information given about the history of the Republican involvement in eugenic sterilization and immigration-restriction is, I believe, mostly correct.
The assertion that eugenic sterilization has anything to do with killing people is, however, false: it’s Jewish Holocaust propaganda. You will recall that Dinesh D’Souza made the same assertion, and that I showed the page from Paul Popenoe’s book Applied Eugenics where Popenoe said that eugenics required neither killing nor castration.