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"'All men are created equal.' Well, it's not true."
That's President-elect Donald Trump, a clip unearthed for a PBS documentary that shone a light on, among other things, Trump's apparent belief that some people are born smart, born to be successful, born with what he has called "the winning gene."
"The [Trump] family subscribes to a racehorse theory of human development," Trump biographer Michael D'Antonio told the team behind the Frontline documentary The Choice. "They believe that there are superior people, and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring."
This belief, that certain genes make better people, is an echo of eugenics, a racist, pseudoscientific philosophy that aims to "improve" the human race by breeding out supposedly bad characteristics. When it became popular in the late 19th century, eugenics became the driving force behind a number of atrocities against many minority groups, including the Deaf community. The Nazis were the most infamous eugenicists, but there were many other believers. Alexander Graham Bell used eugenics to propose...