Jonah Goldberg: Self
Quotes
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Margaret Sanger : Eugenics means the release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination, and eventual extirpation of those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization. The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members, is to kill it.
Dinesh D'Souza : [narration] By Sanger's time, techniques of racial elimination like lynching had become taboo within the Democratic party, and so Sanger pioneered a different approach to bring about a similar result.
[to Jonah Goldberg]
Dinesh D'Souza : How would you describe Sanger's so called 'Negro project'?
Jonah Goldberg : The Negro project was to bring these birth control and other eugenic methods into the black community. She hired black ministers expressly to sell the idea.
Margaret Sanger : We don't want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population. A minister is the man to straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to their more rebellious members.
Dinesh D'Souza : Surely today's Democratic party leaders would repudiate Margaret Sanger.
Hillary Clinton (archive footage) : I admire Margaret Sanger enormously. I am really in awe of her, and there are a lot of lessons that we can learn from her life and from the cause she launched and fought for and sacrificed for so bravely.
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Dinesh D'Souza : What happened to Carrie Buck?
Jonah Goldberg : Carrie Buck is a tragic and really important story. Carrie Buck is this young woman who was supposed to be quote unquote 'feeble minded'. They wanted to forcibly sterilize her. Her case went all the way up to the Supreme Court.
Carrie Buck : [screaming as she's wheeled in strapped to a gurney] Help me! No!
Doctor : Miss.
[puts his hand on her]
Carrie Buck : DON'T TOUCH ME!
Doctor : Miss! MISS! You need to CALM down! I need assistance!
Jonah Goldberg : Oliver Wendel Holmes said that it's okay to forcibly sterilize this young woman, who was not feeble minded, she read, she was perfectly competent, certainly didn't deserve to be forcibly sterilized. And he says in this famous damning line in his opinion, '3 generations of imbeciles is enough!'
Carrie Buck : [pinned down on the operating table] NOOOOOO!
Jonah Goldberg : Forcibly sterilized back in those days meant something. It meant holding this woman down, doing these terrible things to her through the power of the state simply because the state had this idea of what the population should look like and who should have the right to have children. Tens of thousands of people across the United States were sterilized.
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Jonah Goldberg : The opening of the Democratic convention in 2012, "Government is the one thing we all belong to." No, government belongs to us, we don't belong to it, we are citizens, not subjects. You remember the Life of Julia ad the Obama administration put out? Every frame begins with the words 'Under President Obama', Julia gets this kind of scholarship and this kind of loan and this kind of promised job. The creepiest sentence in modern political history was when The Life of Julia ad says "Under President Obama, Julia decides to have a child." Nowhere in this do you see Julia's family, there're no parents, there's no husband, there're no friends, it's just the state as personified by Barack Obama: community, churches, synagogues, family, friends, mediating institutions as the social scientists call them, that give us a sense of order and place in the world. That's what the world of the state has planned. And it was completely contrary to the ideas of the founding of this country, the classic liberal ideas of the founding of this country: the fruits of your labor belong to you, our rights come from God, not government, we are citizens, not subjects.
Dinesh D'Souza : The progressive-ism is actually progress away from the founding.
Jonah Goldberg : Yeah, that's right.
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Dinesh D'Souza : [narrating] Jonah Goldberg is an editor at the National Review.
Dinesh D'Souza : Jonah, Democrats used to call themselves very commonly "liberals." But today, more commonly they use the term "progressive." What does "progressive" actually mean?
Jonah Goldberg : Social engineering and social control, where experts and bureaucrats and government officials guide society in a very specific forward direction, towards an end goal in mind.
Dinesh D'Souza : It kind of seems, Jonah, like the film Metropolis. It was all about class struggle and social control.
Jonah Goldberg : Right. Now it was the era of political parties and political movements that were going to guide society forward. Planning, which empowers the planners. There was this revolution in Europe and in the United States. In America, we called it Progressivism. Soviet Union, they called it Communism. In Italy, they called it Fascism. The flagship magazine of American Liberalism, The New Republic, celebrated Benito Mussolini throughout the 1920s. FDR had nice things to say about Benito Mussolini. Mussolini reviews FDR's book and says, "Hey, this guy is one of us. He's a Fascist." And it's important to remember that Fascism back then wasn't about the Holocaust. It was about planning and experimenting and ushering in this new progressive era.
Dinesh D'Souza : And one of the very important strands of modern progressivism, is the idea of eugenics. Who is the figure that comes to mind, who embodies this?
Jonah Goldberg : I mean, the obvious answer to the question is Margaret Sanger. Margaret Sanger was the founder of Planned Parenthood.
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Dinesh D'Souza : And the Nazis admired Sanger and actually patterned some of their programs along the lines of things that she suggested.
Jonah Goldberg : Yeah, the first people who get wiped out under the Nazis actually aren't the Jews. They're mentally unfit, invalids, and all that. They went through the hospitals, and cleaned those guys out.
