Human Livestock

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And I promise we won't spam you. And after the episode, we hope you'll stick around because we've got more to the story. A little bonus content, a little conversation, some bloodthirsty stuff, right after the episode. One more thing that I'd like to talk about, and that is that you select these Ks for the most muscling and the best bone structure and the like, and ultimately, it's what happens on their grade and yield.

Would you explain a little bit about that? Well, sir, it's a bit of an extrapolation to look at the calves and try to guess what they're going to do in terms of what their carcass is going to look like from a grade and yield standpoint. But we've got things we can look at. We can look at muscle shape in the calves in the rear end and the quarter and down their top line.

And we can handle those calves and feel and look at visual indicators of fat thickness and fat deposition. And that can give us a good idea of how those calves are going to do on the rail in terms of grade and yield. And then, you know, from my perspective, when I put an emphasis on structural correctness, that's just going back and saying, even though we realize that the most important thing here probably is carcass quality and cutability, we still need to put some emphasis on having these cattle be functional and sound and not only for their own welfare, but for their ability to perform correctly.

Ferris wheels and funnel cakes and fun, but it just wouldn't be the fair without the livestock. Hogs and sheep and chickens and cattle competing for that coveted blue ribbon. Now, it's a serious business for farmers. A prize winning animal can bring recognition and revenue to an operation. In October 2024, at the 76th annual Big Tex Youth Livestock Auction, the Grand Champion Market steer was sold for one hundred and eighty thousand dollars, setting a record for the state fair of Texas.

Big bucks rolled in for the Grand Champion Market goat that year to thirty five thousand dollars. Now, how crazy would it be if people also competed like livestock at the state fair and were judged in pretty much the same way? I think we could tone this guy quite a little bit back and probably make him just a bit more practical, a bit more sensible and certainly one who would sell with a bit more rib cage.

We'd like to make him just a little bit sounder from that hawk down from behind. You can see he gets a bit upright in that pasture and way stiff in terms of that hawk. Yeah, that'd be all kinds of crazy, except that craziness actually happened. Ladies and gentlemen, see an array of the finest human specimens the heartland can produce.

Astonishing good health, robust vitality. You are raising better hogs, better cattle and better horses. Now, why don't you raise better babies? These days, prize winning animals seldom just happen. They're created. In the old times, a farmer with a prize bull or stallion might turn that bad boy loose in a pasture with as many cows or mares as he might be able to take on.

The resulting calves or foals would be scrutinized for what genetic traits came through. The best would be kept, the weakest would be culled. Nature, manipulate it and accelerate it in the simplest of ways. Animal breeding today is far more sophisticated. Our agrarian ancestors would call it witchcraft or science fiction.

Instead of turning a bull out to have the most thrilling day of his life with a pack of cows, big ranchers are far more likely to order up a delivery of champion semen. Artificial insemination has replaced Randy Romp's in the barnyard. Companies like LGC BioSearch Technologies have turned farming into genetic science.

We offer next generation sequencing, a vital tool for plant and animal breeding programs. Our core technologies enable high throughput, cost effective DNA analysis in plant, livestock and aquaculture genetics. This in turn enables development of more productive and resilient plants and animals, as well as food safety and animal health applications through the identification and screening of pathogens.

That's a million miles from there was a farmer, had a dog and bingo was his name-o, isn't it? Selective breeding is a given in the world of animal husbandry. And long before DNA was discovered, humans have figured out how to breed animals to not just amplify desirable traits and reduce negative traits, but to create whole new kinds of creatures.

Look at dogs. In the Victorian era, people were obsessed with Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. They applied the idea of natural selection to their dogs. You can see many of the results of that right now at your neighborhood dog park. Take dachshunds. They used to have much longer legs. German shepherds weren't nearly as muscled and stocky as they are now.

And the number of terrier breeds jumped from two to ten by the end of that period. The whole idea of dog breeds was actually a Victorian invention. Did you know that? Instead of being valued for what they did, suddenly dogs in the Victorian era were valued for how they looked. It's not at all surprising to learn that the Victorians also invented the concept of the dog show.

Live from Philadelphia, it's the 125th annual Mayflower Kennel Club Dog Show. 3,000 dogs competing for best in show. The idea of selectively breeding people, choosing who's fit to reproduce, what physical and behavioral traits are to be cultivated, and what traits are to be bred out of the population, there's a name for that.

Eugenics. Eugenics is nothing new. The ancients are said to have practiced their own methods, which were mostly violent and awful. If the writings of the Roman historian Plutarch are accurate, citizens of Sparta were required to present their newborn children to the council of elders for inspection. If the child was deemed unfit to live by the council, then the baby was hurled into a chasm.

But honestly, some of the more rabid corners of the internet would love this practice and are probably trying to figure out how to bring it back right now. The link between Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and eugenics was no accident or coincidence. Darwin had a half-cousin named Francis Galton. 24 years after the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, Galton was inspired to release his own book called Human Faculty and Its Development.

Galton described it as the study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations. It was Francis Galton who suggested that many of the most desirable traits in a human being were hereditary. The fact that Charles Darwin was unhappy with this interpretation and strongly disagreed with it didn't slow Galton down a bit.

He coined the phrase nature versus nurture and he came up with the word eugenics. We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have.

The word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea. Suitable races, less suitable races. And since Francis Galton was a Victorian, he was mad for dogs and used dogs to help explain his theories. If a man breeds from strong, well-shaped dogs, but of mixed pedigree, the puppies will be sometimes, but rarely, the equals of their parents.

They will commonly be of a mongrel, nondescript type, because ancestral peculiarities are apt to crop out in the offspring. Galton wasn't just some embarrassing cousin sprouting on the Darwin family tree. He was renowned as a genius, one whose busy brain never stopped spinning. For example, he wrote a letter to the editor of the journal Nature regarding the problem of how to efficiently cut slices from a round cake.

And that was published in December 1906. In what way should it be cut so as to leave a minimum of exposed surfaces to become dry? The man included drawings that look like something from the geometry section of the SAT and advised holding the cut cake together with a rubber band afterward. He was also instrumental in developing the science of fingerprints for use in criminal forensics.

And though the original ideas weren't his, he never owned up to that. But before you think, aw, he sounds like a smart guy who contributed a lot to science, you should know that he was also an absolutely vile racist. The Chinese, as a race, are capable of high civilization and only temporarily stunted by the recent failures of Chinese dynasties.

should be encouraged to immigrate to Africa and displace the inferior aboriginal blacks. The ugly truth is, Galton's eugenics bordered on genocidal. There exists a sentiment, for the most part quite unreasonable, against the gradual extinction of an inferior race. Galton's idea of a glorious future where controlled reproduction meant all members of society were intelligent and productive, where the disabled, the defective and the undesirable were blocked from crossing borders and ultimately weeded out, wasn't at all controversial for the time.

In fact, King George III made him a knight of the realm in June 1909. University College London endowed the Galton chair of eugenics. The position still exists, just with a new name. The college swapped out the word eugenics for genetics. So, as you can see, back then, eugenics wasn't some kooky fringe theory beloved by the Nazis.

It was embraced by academics, politicians and clergy. Then, in 1922, the American Eugenics Society was founded to... Further the discussion, advancement and dissemination of knowledge about biological and sociocultural forces which affect the structure and composition of human populations. There's some language drier than a piece of old toast.

The American Eugenics Society, or AES, knew full well that they had to be strategic about how they shared their message with the public. There was the positive spin. Loud and cheerful slogans about the need for the genetically blessed to get busy having babies. And then there was the negative spin. The cost to society of permitting the defective to breed.

Both messages had their time and place and target audience. And because this was America, the American Eugenics Society took their cause out of the university lecture halls and to the midway, carnivals and fairs, where they hosted what amounted to human livestock competitions. The choice to stage these events at county and state fairs wasn't just for the entertainment value.

In the US, many of the most significant eugenics organizations actually got their start in agricultural breeding associations. And why not? Comparing animal breeding to human breeding seemed like a fairly short leap to make. After all, hadn't the American slave owners of the past already co-opted the language of animal husbandry?

And the practice as well. Some enslavers used forced breeding to grow their supply of forced labor. Labeling certain enslaved people as bucks and others as breeders. Eugenics aimed to emphasize the value of superior blood and the menace to society of inferior blood. The Genesis had all sorts of dark and frankly sinister plans for how to handle the problem of inferior blood.

And most of those plans were what's called negative eugenics. Now grab your cotton candy and your nickels, because the human livestock shows that the fairs were considered positive eugenics and good fun for the whole community. Vital and social statistics show to startling effect that human scrubs are multiplying far more rapidly than human thoroughbreds.

And here we all thought that a scrub was a guy that thinks he's fly who's also known as a buster. You know, guy hanging out the passenger side of his best friend's ride trying to holler at us. Who knew that the eugenicists beat TLC to that idea by 77 years. The fitter family contests were spawned by the better baby contests, which were created by two women, Florence Brown Sherbon, a member of the American Eugenics Society, and Mary T. Watts.

They were the leaders of a movement called Baby Health Examination. And their first better baby contest was held in 1911 at the Iowa State Fair. Just as this nation has made the rest of the world respect its buyer crops of corn and wheat, its cattle and its hogs, its well-made shoes and its cotton goods. So now the entire world will acknowledge the supremacy of its babies.

This 20th century miracle is to be wrought by the same methods employed in producing high-grade grain, livestock and manufactured goods by standardization. Yep, the standardization and mass production of 100% grade A American babies. Plump and pink as piglets, sturdy and sound as calves. The whole idea was one that the public absolutely ate up.

Even as the fitter families competitions grew in popularity, the better babies events had people lined up out the door. The Indiana State Fair in September 1929 had 13,120 babies competing for the honor of being named the best baby in the state. The infants were examined in specially decorated buildings, livestock halls, which had been refitted with enormous glass panels so that spectators could watch the fun.

Beatings, examinations, weigh-ins. This was an extremely popular attraction at the fair. I mean, more than 13,000 babies, that's crazy. Five main factors are considered in determining the baby's rating. Height with respect to age, weight with respect to age, height with respect to weight, mental defects and physical defects.

Failure to measure to certain standards deducts points. The youngster with the score closest to 1,000 points wins the contest. Of course, there can only be one winner, right? Well, two in this case, a boy and a girl. 25-month-old Ralph Walter Lieber was declared the best baby boy in Indiana. 20-month-old Jeanette Sinkner grabbed the crown for best baby girl.

Little Jeanette Sinkner has been a healthy baby all her life, Mrs. Sinkner said. She has been kept outdoors for a good part of the time. This summer, she's practically lived in her pen and sand pile. Occasionally, she eats a little boiled meat. And there you go, new parents. The recipe for making the very best baby. The very best white baby, that is.

Black children didn't have a chance of winning. They were blocked from even competing. There was nothing subtle about that. Dr. Ada E. Schweitzer, director of the Indiana State Division of Infant and Child Hygiene, called the Better Baby Contest, quote, a school of education in eugenics, end quote. Under her leadership, the children were not only measured and scored like livestock, the standards used were quietly, implicitly, politely white.

Rural and middle class white families got to win prizes for reproducing while taking center stage as Exhibit A for who should be permitted to reproduce at all. Dr. Schweitzer traveled the state of Indiana hosting baby inspections, visiting schools, and giving speeches. In her lecture, The Home, Its Safeguards and Perils, Dr. Ada Schweitzer gave a comprehensive view of how mothers should rear their children.

She pointed out that the rearing of defective children not only burdened humanity, but lowered the deficiency of the race, which, by the character of its people, must stand or fall. Schweitzer's lectures were accompanied by a little slideshow, lantern slides. Those are very cool, transparent photographs printed on glass plates and viewed with what was called a magic lantern.

Very, very cool old technology and very steampunk and very much replaced by the modern slide projector. To help her illustrator points, Schweitzer was known to use images of farm animals. Hogs, for example, enjoying clean pens, not the muddy filth typically associated with pigs. They were an example of how good housekeeping led to good health.

Images of cows being milked in unsanitary versus sanitary conditions helped make her point about a mother's obligation to know where her children's milk came from. Images of horses each drinking from their own bucket to make the argument that public drinking fountains were nasty things where any old tramp could put his mouth.

People lined up to have their children examined by Schweitzer and other public health officials. Fairs holding better baby or fitter family competitions were overwhelmed with entries. Indianapolis in 1923. Dr. James C. Carter will have charge of the general examinations. Dr. Bernard C. Larkin will examine the baby's eyes.

Dr. John W. Carmack will examine the baby's ears, noses, and throats. After the baby has passed through the hands of these three physicians, assistants who have been trained for that purpose will compute the baby's average. The card bearing those figures will be taken to the office of the State Board of Agriculture. The State Board of Agriculture will then notify the parents of the winning babies.

No one was more pleased by the turnout than Dr. Ada Schweitzer. This is going to be a wonderful baby year. If anyone had told me that 828 babies in the state of Indiana would attend the state fair for the purpose of having their bodies examined, I should have thought it a joke. Not a joke at all. Better babies mean better Hoosiers.

But not everyone thought that grading babies was a solid plan. Not because the idea was gross, no, but because babies could be tricksters, their genetic flaws hiding and waiting to be revealed with time. That was the opinion of Charles B. Davenport, the director of the Biological Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor, the Eugenics Record Office, and the Carnegie Institute of Washington Station for Experimental Evolution.

In other words, Charles Davenport was the most powerful and famous eugenicist in the country. Upon learning of the first Better Baby contest, Davenport dropped a postcard in the mail to founder Mary Watts. You should give 50% to heredity before you begin to score a baby. Davenport must have thought he'd failed to make his point, because a year later, another postcard arrived.

A prize winner at two may be an epileptic when he is ten. Watts' partner, Dr. Florence Sherban, agreed with Davenport. How many prize-winning babies had they seen who very likely had diseased, drunk, or even insane relatives? Those were Sherban's exact words. No baby with that sort of genetic background could truly be described as better, right?

The best way to evaluate a baby was to look at the entire family, spot the troublesome hereditary factors that might otherwise be missed. So they set to work. And though it took six years, they finally developed an approach they thought could work to really test for eugenic ideals. The fitter families contest. Now there were some concerns that parents would resist being examined at the fair and would balk at the Wassermann test for syphilis for fear of what the results might be.

Yet the very first fitter family contest, held in Kansas in 1920, was a success. Twenty families competed for the win. Kansas excels in all kinds of thoroughbreds, both in livestock and crops. Kansas babies and families can also excel all others. The Kansas Free Fair even boasted a brand new eugenics building. Organizers acknowledged that while a department of eugenics was definitely something new for the fair, there was no better way to apply the principles of livestock breeding to the improvement of the human race.

Fairs, and consequently the world, are beginning to take as much interest in purebred human stock as in pigs and cattle. Other states soon followed Kansas, like the very first ever fitter families competition that was held at the Michigan State Fair in September 1925. Better breeding is the aim of the fitter families contest, backed by the Eugenics Society.

While livestock judges are testing Holsteins, Jerseys, and Guernsey cows in the stock pavilion this week, a full staff of physicians and specialists will score the Joneses, the Smiths, and the host of Detroit families, which present themselves in the fitter families department. This is regarded by eugenics workers as one of the most pertinent of national movements.

How exactly were they planning to identify this perfection at the Michigan State Fair? By making each family member in competition submit to a thorough private examination. Thorough. Members of the American Eugenics Society bragged that every fitter family event was bound to turn up at least one case of unsuspected diabetes and incipient tuberculosis.

Real tears will be shed over the discovery of swollen tonsils or bad teeth. As each family member was examined, they were given a score, and the family with the highest combined score would be declared the fittest. But all families whose combined scores added up to at least a B-plus were given bronze medallions to wear.

The medallions were inscribed with the words, Yay, I have goodly heritage. Goodly heritage, as defined by the eugenicists, meant white, and ideally with Western or Northern European heritage. Farmers and stock raisers do not bring the lame, the halt, or blind animals to exhibit. So the fitter families department is looking for the PICC, the perfect family groups in Detroit and the state.

So the standards reached and maintained by them may help to stimulate raising health standards everywhere. Turns out that no one needed to worry about recruiting folks to participate in the fitter families contest, because families lined up to be evaluated and scored. This idea of testing humanity by families is already proving its popular appeal.

More advanced entries have already been received for the contest of the Eastern States Exposition than any similar contest in the United States. The judging was intended to be every bit as stringent as anything going down in the livestock pavilion. These examinations will include psychology, psychiatry, structural measurements and weight, general medical examination, laboratory tests of urine and blood, examination of eyes, ears, nose, throat, and dentistry.

Each member of a family will be examined separately. No one need fear disagreeable publicity in connection with the fitter families contest. Only winning scores will be given to the public. There was plenty of other entertainment planned for spectators too. Dogs and guinea pigs will be shown to demonstrate truths concerning heredity.

Eugenics was basically not just all the rage in the U.S. from the early 1900s till its peak in the 1930s. It had mainstream acceptance, which might help explain why Americans of that era were largely untroubled by news coming out of Europe about a firebrand populist in Germany, a failed artist who had a fixation on racial superiority.

Hell, with notions of racial superiority dressed up as public health initiatives proving to be big attractions at the local fair, Nazi rhetoric drifting across the Atlantic didn't seem troubling. It sounded familiar. And as you'll soon discover, familiar because it all actually began right here in the United States of America.

It's cringy for sure. The spectacle of human children being lined up and examined like calves or hogs, bone structure, muscle tone, eyes, teeth, skin, all carefully measured and scrutinized and scored. But in Indiana, at least, for all of the blatant eugenics and racism, the effort to build better babies was, by 1931, focused on a bigger picture.

How many mothers in Indiana were dying? How many children were at risk of poor nutrition, inadequate medical care, and poverty? Hoosier babies had Dr. Ada Schweitzer on their side, and she was a champion of the Children's Charter, an initiative driven by President Herbert Hoover's administration. That was a 19-page document meant to serve as a roadmap for improving the lives of America's children.

It's frustrating and tragic, though, when you compare it to what's actually happening in the state of Indiana, because the reality makes Hoover's vision back then sound like a utopian fairy tale today. Children in Indiana must have protection against labor that stunts growth. Effective January 1st, 2025, the legal workday for children ages 14 to 16 has been extended two hours to 9 p.m., regardless of whether or not school's in session.

Also, all prior restrictions on time and hours worked have been repealed. Children may now work the same hours and days as any adult. Also repealed, any restrictions on handling hazardous material for children between the ages of 16 and 18 and agricultural work. Now, before you kick Indiana's ass, know that the state simply mirrored the federal provisions on child labor.

This is America's new take on, but the children, as in, but let the children pull third shift in a meat plant. Care and treatment must be provided to those who are physically and mentally handicapped so that they may become an asset to society, to be dealt with intelligently as society's charge and not society's outcast.

Effective July 1, 2025, the state of Indiana has launched a new assessment tool for disabled children to determine Medicaid eligibility. And Medicaid is already endangered, along with new and strict limitations on the attendant care program, which provides money to parents and caretakers. Throw in an onerous new rule calling for more frequent redetermination for the blind and disabled, meaning if the child's guardian fails to respond in a timely fashion, their benefits will be terminated.

I know some of you all are like, let's get that blind toddler working in a poultry plant. The lazy little brat, which is, let's be real, an absolutely horrible take and an abomination for every child. Health protection from birth through adolescence, including periodic health examinations and where needed, care of specialists and hospital treatment, regular dental examinations, preventative measures against communicable diseases, the ensuring of pure food, pure milk and pure water.

In 2025, Indiana ranked 30th in the United States for child health, which, OK, is not exactly last place. Though the news isn't great, deaths for children and teenagers in the state higher than the national average and the percentage of low birth weight babies has jumped. So has the preterm birth rate and the infant mortality rate and the maternal mortality rate.

And well, you get the picture. Oh, my goodness. What happened to all my better babies? My better Hoosiers? Hush, Dr. Schweitzer, you're long dead. What do you care? How are there so many people on board with not just human livestock competitions, but with the whole concept of eugenics in the first place? Well, see if this sounds maybe the tiniest bit familiar.

There was a growing and deep paranoia and fear around the idea of the decline of the white race. Fear and paranoia about America's changing demographics. As far back as the beginning of the 1900s, fear and paranoia that infected both government and science. A high profile eugenicist named Madison Grant published a book in 1916 called The Passing of a Great Race.

In it, he furiously banged the drum of the so-called racial suicide and collapse of the white race. And here's a fun fact that's not so fun. One of Madison Grant's biggest admirers wrote a gushing fan letter to the author calling The Passing of a Great Race his Bible. This admirer was profoundly influenced by Grant's work and even went on to write his own book, which he called Mein Kampf.

Maybe you've heard of him? Adolf Hitler? Hitler proudly admitted to drawing inspiration from Madison Grant and the American eugenicists. In fact, I think this will surprise you. The state of California had such a robust eugenics program that the Nazis used it as their model. Ugh, I hate it too. I don't want it to be true either.

But closing our eyes to the facts doesn't make them disappear. It just leaves us stumbling around in the dark, complaining about how we can't see. What's wild is that this was 109 years ago. Because, hello? Right now? These very same ideas are festering like open sores in both the nastier corners of the internet and on your angry uncle's Facebook.

But talk is cheap, right? It's just talk. Unless that talk gets a whole lot of financial backing. Like maybe from one of the most wealthy and prominent families in the country. The Carnegie family, for example, who funded a research document that was released in 1912. It was called, Well now that's a mouthful, isn't it?

The American Breeders Association was organized in 1903 for the purpose of bringing together practical breeders, experimenters, investigators, and teachers interested in the subject of breeding for the advancement of the science of genetics. Yes, the American Breeders Association. As in, breeding people. In recent years, society has become aroused to the fact that the number of individuals within its defective classes has rapidly increased, both absolutely and in proportion to the entire population.

That some normal strains are becoming contaminated with antisocial and defective traits. And that the shame, the moral retardation, and the economic burden of the presence of such individuals are more keenly felt than ever before. The American Breeders Association didn't hesitate to spell it out. Members of the following classes must be considered as socially unfit and their supply should, if possible, be eliminated from the human stock.

One, the feebleminded. Two, the pauper class. Three, the criminal class. Four, the epileptics. Five, the insane. Six, the constitutionally weak. Seven, those predisposed to specific diseases. Eight, the deformed. Nine, those having defective sense organs, as the blind and the deaf. It's horrifying. But even more horrifying?

Their proposed solutions, or to use their words, quote, a remedy looking toward the cutting off of the supply of defectives. End quote. One, life segregation or segregation during the reproductive period. Two, sterilization. Three, restrictive marriage laws and customs. Four, eugenic education of the public and of prospective marriage mates.

Five, systems of matings purporting to remove defective traits. Six, general environmental betterment. Seven, polygamy. Eight, euthanasia. And there you have it. You might have been surprised to hear that segregation topped the American Breeder Association list, but racism is an ugly old thing, and the eugenicists were terrified of what they called racial mixing, which counts for why 28 states in 1915 refused to legally recognize interracial marriages, and six more states banned it outright.

It took the Supreme Court until 1967 and the Loving v. Virginia case to invalidate laws against interracial marriage. In 1907, Indiana became the first state to pass a forced sterilization law. By the 1920s, 33 more states followed, and 60,000 Americans were sterilized involuntarily, which is a polite way of saying against their will.

This was the heyday of forced sterilization, a real craze that had begun to slow down by the early 1940s. By that point, only 13 states still had laws on the book that allowed for the sterilization of the incarcerated and patients housed in mental institutions, and that's something that continued right through the 1970s.

At first, these forced sterilization campaigns focused on the disabled. Soon enough, though, poverty came to be seen as reason enough to prevent a person from reproducing. Let's get to general environmental betterment. Well, if only right. General environmental betterment inevitably calls for investment in people and communities, and that's always been controversial around these parts.

We can thank our Puritan forebears for our weird, baked-in conviction that helping the poor and the needy only encourages laziness and sloth. As for euthanasia, the final and most extreme remedy on the Breeder Association list? Well, even that crowd was forced to face the fact that the American people weren't quite ready to march their neighbors into some sort of lethal killing chamber.

So, no euthanasia on a mass scale. Just quiet, low-key euthanasia in more private settings, like the mental institution in Lincoln, Illinois, that, hold on to something, because this is hard to believe, they served milk contaminated with tuberculosis to their patients. This horror was worth a 30 to 40 percent annual death rate, saving the hospital and the state of Illinois a fair amount of money while ridding the population of human beings they considered defective.

And, of course, there was what they called passive eugenicide, and that found its way into labor and delivery rooms. No sense is suffering a child to live if the poor creature was afflicted in such a way as to impose a terrible burden on the family and community alike. Wasn't it a mercy to let that poor little one swiftly return to the arms of God?

Of course, affliction, like beauty, is in the eyes of the beholder, and you're kidding yourself if you think that race, poverty, and parentage weren't factors in the decision of which newborns would live and which would be helped out of this world. A Chicago physician by the name of Harry Haiselden made a name for himself in just this way.

Emma Stanky, two months old and weighing two and a half pounds, died Sunday night after Dr. Harry J. Haiselden refused to make an extraordinary effort to save her life, saying, we gave her ordinary humane care. Had she lived, she would have been unable to use her arms and legs. Haiselden found himself in court in 1915, facing prosecution for denying a simple surgery to an infant, which resulted in the baby's death.

This is known now as the infamous Bollinger case. It is our duty to defend ourselves and future generations against the mentally defective we allow to grow and suffer among us and add to our burdens and problems. Farmers select the best stock for reproduction, the best seed without disease for sowing. Poor humans rely upon death, and defectives are as welcome as any to enlarge families, and only the mother will look after the idiot child.

If the mother is taken, the father and brothers and sisters will not care for it. I've talked to too many mothers of defectives to be swayed in my judgment. Many of the tales are pitiable. Ouch, dads. Not the most flattering observation. Plus, Haiselden's definition of defective was broad. Let us be sensible. Let us approve the sterilization of the insane and the defective and the children of habitual drunkards where both mother and father are so.

By the weaning out of our undesirable, we decrease their burden and ours and lay the foundation for a normal race, which would result in four generations. Dr. Haiselden is a whole story all by himself. We should maybe pay him a big old visit in a future episode. Step right this way, ladies and gentlemen. See the human thoroughbreds, the finest, the fittest, the products of better breeding.

You probably didn't learn any of this in school. American eugenics history isn't something we're proud of, but here's the thing. American eugenics never went away. We didn't learn. We didn't evolve. We didn't come to see the light. So what happened to the eugenics movement in this country? Why did it all sort of just melt into the shadows seemingly overnight?

World War II happened. Even the biggest proponents of eugenics, including doctors and scientists and even U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, they didn't want to be publicly aligned in any way with the atrocities committed by the Nazis. Eugenics had been a loud and well-funded movement in this country, and then suddenly it wasn't.

American eugenics went quiet, but it never went away. It just wears a new modern face. At one extreme are those who see eugenics as a way to restrict both immigration and reproduction in certain racial groups. At the other extreme are those who see eugenics as a way of engineering better babies. There's a whole category of people who want to control the gene pool by encouraging the beautiful and elite to breed as many offspring as possible, while also blocking the less desirable from reproducing.

It's weird and troubling and it's exhausting. In just the same way that people are weird and troubling and exhausting. Maybe there's just no breeding that out of us. Look at those teeth! Feel those muscles! This is a blue-ribbon human specimen! Congratulations to you! You are a better baby! Next time on True Weird Stuff.

People go missing all the time. But most of them are found pretty quickly. Only about 1% of the missing stay missing. Those are the cases that haunt you. The ones where a person just seemingly vanishes. No evidence, no leads, no body. How can someone just disappear as though they had never ever existed in this world at all?

And that's on the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode. Sam Moore, Kary "Doc" Bowser, Heather Elizabeth, Erin Cox, Tony Garcia, and Don Morgan. Sherry, shocking doesn't begin to explain how I feel about this. And not just what was being done, but once again, this is something that wasn't happening really all that long ago.

Because when I look at some of this stuff that seems most shocking about this, this happened during my parents' lifetime. Oh yeah, yeah. And it abruptly went quiet when the American GIs began liberating the death camps. Because that was eugenics taken to the furthest extremes so far in human history. I mean, I have to leave room for growth because that's how humans are.

But a lot of people are shocked that the Nazis were actually inspired by the American Eugenics Society. Does that not give you the willies? It does. Do you know what's funny about the word eugenics? It's something that, I mean, I knew the word. I thought it was just something that described this. I didn't know there were people that had societies where they were rallying behind it.

Do you know what I mean? That was the thing that I had no idea. So much of the current events have circled back to this. So much of what's happening right now. And not just in the U.S., but the whole world. Humanity appears to be going through one of its periodic, we never learn scenarios. The language of eugenics is everywhere.

If you know it, once you see it, you can't unsee it, right? So every time I hit my news feed, I feel like I'm time traveling. Like I cannot believe how blatant the language of early 20th century eugenics is back in the news. But because they don't teach it in school, because you don't know this about your own history, you don't understand that this is the foundation.

A foundation that the Puritans were very helpful in laying the basement for. This idea that circumstances in your life are connected to your morality or your character. Like poverty as a moral failing, disability as a moral or character failing, as a judgment upon you from God. The Puritans laid all that foundation work.

And then the American eugenicists just took it to the next place. And then it went quiet, but not away, and now it's back. And we did an episode about a year or so ago, where we touched on how in the 1970s, while the Eagles were touring Hotel California, male inmates in Wisconsin were being forcibly castrated against their will.

Remember? People are like, that can't be right. The 70s? That cannot be right. Yeah, no, it's right. It's true. And these better baby, fitter family things? I mean, they literally were dying to participate in this. Americans, we love to compete. We love to win a prize. I love how the newspaper said, basically, they were saying, listen, we're only going to have the highest scores made public.

We're not going to embarrass those of you that didn't measure up. Oh, how kind of them. Are you kidding me? Well, and the magnitude, like the depth of these examinations, I liked how they were concerned initially that they wouldn't get adults to participate because they didn't want to take the Wassermann syphilis test.

Now, you understand what was really being said there, that you would have, the implication was that you would have married men that had been unfaithful and had syphilis. And they wouldn't want to compete at the fair because they wouldn't want to find out that they had syphilis. It seemed like we talked about Andrew Carnegie not long ago.

Of course, Andrew Carnegie was this industrialist. He made a lot of money, and one of the really good things that he did is he got a lot of money out for libraries to start in the community, the library that's near us. The first one was Andrew Carnegie's money. But Andrew Carnegie was kind of a strange fellow in that he believed that only he knew the best use of money, that you couldn't lead that to anybody else because nobody was as evolved as Andrew Carnegie was.

He really was, he was a guy who would say, okay, fine, he did the good things. But in a lot of ways, he wasn't really a good guy. He was another one who was a eugenicist. I mean, he financed a big part of what would have become kind of a terrifying chapter in American history if World War II had not disrupted it. This is why, like I giggled, there's a lot of discourse online about how the billionaires of the olden times were better people because they built libraries and museums and railroads.

And that's true. They were philanthropic in a way that we don't see now. Like Jeff Bezos sent himself and his fiance to low earth orbit. They didn't build a library. So it's definitely true that the billionaires of the past were more philanthropic, but they were not necessarily in any way better people. Sherry, the story about the mental institution in Lincoln, Illinois, giving people tuberculosis.

I'm sorry. That's the stuff of horror movies. In fact, if you put it in a horror movie, people would say, that's really kind of too cruel. I would. It is. And yet it happened. And look at the death rate that they were very pleased with themselves. Because again, and you're seeing this, it's back in the public conversation right now, this idea of culling the population because people who are sick, people who need treatment, people who are poor, people who are disabled, they are, how many times did you hear the word burden in this episode?

They are considered a burden on society. If you look at some of what is underlying the modern resurgence of genetics, you see the same sort of population culling strategies coming into play. And there are people that will be like, oh, you're so melodramatic and you're so blah, blah. Okay. But whatever. Like you're the first person in my life that's called me dramatic.

But honestly, like you cannot hurt my feelings with that. They're not the first. I mean, seriously, like if you think that, did someone just call me dramatic? I've been hearing that since I was old enough to understand what was being said to me. You just have to look at history. You just have to look at the facts. And you can see the language has only shifted ever so slightly, as it always does to fit the moment, the time that it's in.

Like the Spartans were hurling their defective babies into chasms. You know, we don't do that. We have other ways of trimming the population, culling the population now. But here's the thing. Here's the thing. This is awful. And you hate it. And you wish you didn't know it. Yeah, me too. But you know what I wish even more that I didn't know it?

I wish it wasn't true. Like I wish it didn't happen. I wish it wasn't happening again. When I think about the number of people who do all this in the name of religion, and when I think about the parable of the Good Samaritan, which is anti-this, absolutely anti-this, that the idea is to not put them down as they're, you know, it's the idea of helping.

It's about the idea of being of service to help all people. I'm just astonished by this and how anybody could do any of this in the name of religion. Well, there was a story in my news feed maybe five, six days ago, that henceforth when we build federal buildings or remodel or renovate federal buildings, we won't be worried about, like, accessibility.

So that if you're a person who uses a wheelchair, for example, and you can't get into a federal building, too bad, so sad. Now, I know you hear that and you go, that can't be true. Well, it is. That's a thing that's actually happening right now. And I can't make it make sense. And you'll go, that's crazy. That doesn't make any sense.

I can't help you with that either. What's shocking about that is I can pull a number. I did a paper when I was in college. Yes, I really did go to college. It's hard to believe. But I did about making buildings handicap accessible. And so the complaint was, well, it's going to drive up the costs. It is less than 1% added to the cost to make buildings handicap accessible.

And the way I proved it was I spent a day going around the school where I went in a wheelchair. And it was really difficult. First of all, I had to learn how to use it. That was difficult enough. But being able to get through doors, make it over curbs, all kinds of things that made it difficult just in order to prove the point.

And, you know, it troubles me, the idea that we seem to go backwards with that because the world is a better place because we've made these places accessible. Not acceptable, accessible. And the idea of all – when I think of how many people who have contributed mightily to society who would not have fit the parameters that they're setting up for what's acceptable, I think about all of the people who have done amazing, wonderful things who, you know, had any number of infirmities and were able to overcome them.

I think, can people not see that, that we're all better for these people having excelled and us helping those people? I definitely don't think that it's the majority, but it's a very loud minority of people that disagree with what you just said. And I just have to say, like, one of the things that we've become really guilty of is this sort of, like, moral wishy-washiness where we go, well, I disagree with you, but you're entitled to your opinion.

Brother, your opinion is dehumanizing and wrong. And so I'm afraid that while you're entitled to hold that dehumanizing and wrong opinion, I'm not obliged to make you feel good about it. Do you see the difference, Max? Yeah. Like, I'm going to say to you, you're a miscreant and a bigot and kind of an asshole, and that's going to hurt your feelings a little bit, but maybe not as much as a person who needs accommodations who now can't access a government building because you don't want to spend an additional 1%.

Less than 1%. Less than 1%. On top of all of that, you may be able-bodied right now, but you have no guarantees that that's going to continue. So my children went to preschool with-he was in Karamiya's class, charming little boy. I'm not going to use their name because they don't deserve to have their privacy invaded like this.

Great family, sweet little boy, cute as a button. He and Karamiya were good friends. And then, you know, you get out of preschool, and they went their separate ways to completely different schools. But because of social media, I kept up with-these were, you know, families that I knew, so I would see them in my Facebook feed.

His dad suffered a catastrophic accident and is paralyzed from the neck down, and he was like 38 when it happened. And everything that he thought he was and every plan he made for his life and everything he and his wife daydreamed about their future changed dramatically and forever in an instant. That can happen to any one of us.

Like any one of us can lose our hearing, our sight, our ability to walk, our ability to use our hands. That can happen to any one of us. So you have to ask yourself, and you may be a greedy prick. You may be someone who is very selfish and very self-centered, and you only care about yourself and you only care about your own.

And, okay. But you have to ask yourself, do you want to wake up in a world where the decision has been made for you that you no longer have any value as a human being? And that really, wouldn't it be just better for you and everybody around you if you died and stopped being such a burden and such a drain? Because that's what eugenics is.

Eugenics is saying that so many of us are just wasting space and oxygen, and it would honestly be better for everyone if we weren't here. Is that the world that you want to occupy? Is that the world you want to bring your kids up in? I mean, it's astonishing. It's just astonishing. That's the only way that I can term that.

Because this seems counter to the idea of being of service to other people. This seems counter to, you know, the spiritual rules that just about every religion has where the idea is I'm going to try to help those who need the help. I have the ability to do this, and now I will help you. Whatever form that takes. I'm with you, brother.

I'm gobsmacked. I would love nothing better than if we were having this conversation and it was a quaint relic of a more ignorant time. Wouldn't you love that? Sherry, I would, but that's not where we are. That's not where we are. I'm with you, and I'm just, like, literally aghast at the reality that I wake up in every day.

You know, one of the joys of my lifetime is that I have watched people who most people would have thrown on the waste heap, turned their lives around, and watched them become these incredible forces for good in their lives, people that nobody would, people that people gave up on. And one of the joys is to be able to see how those people were able to contribute so much to society.

But, you know, so you know that's possible. But if you are one of these eugenists, and, you know, as you say, there's nobody belongs to the eugenic society today, or if they do, you know, I'm not familiar with it. But it's the idea that there are people that kind of give it tacit support. You know what I mean? Maybe they don't outwardly do it on their Facebook, but they certainly are giving it tacit support.

They don't think it all the way through, right? Because, you know, it's just human nature, like, to think from your own perspective. Because we're locked in our meat suits, and this is, you know, the only view that I have of the world, right? So, like, I can think of people, I've watched what they say online, and I think, I don't, your words don't match up with the version of, with who you think you are as a person.

You think of yourself as a good person, as a loving, helpful person, who has faith and is trying to be good. That's how you think of yourself. But the words that you just posted suggest that whole sections of the population could be eliminated, and you wouldn't be troubled a bit by it. That's eugenics. And who gets to decide?

Who gets to decide? Like, there was a period in the 90s where I couldn't think of any good reason for Nickelback. Like, why is this here? Why is this being inflicted on all of us? And yet, at no time did I feel like Nickelback and their fans should be eradicated. Like, just because something... Sure, I did. Can I just say...

Well, but he's made amends, y'all. He's not a monster. He hasn't. Go ahead. I'm sorry. I just, I don't know. You know? I don't know. And I will say that the very loud minority of people that are banging the drum for this, because eugenics has always been about not just controlling who reproduces, but controlling who crosses which invisible line and lives where.

So, ideas around immigration have always been a part of eugenics. And in this country, you know, we've had, as different waves of people have come in, different waves of immigrants, you know, eugenics had a lot to say about the Italians, a lot to say about the Irish, a lot to say about the Polish, the Jewish. Like, as people have come into this country back in the early Ellis Island days, you know, there were some concerns about the quality of human being that was going to be allowed to breed on American soil.

So, this has always been with us. And it's just back. And the Native Americans are going, oh, we've got something to say about that. Yeah. Not that any of you people listen. And so, it's really troubling. It's really troubling. And we will pay every time a society gets a great big hard-on for eugenics and mobilizes as a nation state against certain categories of people, it ends badly and people pay a terrible price.

And we won't be an exception to that. We're already seeing the terrible price coming. Some of the terrible price is literally the terrible price, like at the grocery store. But we're already seeing now what happens when eugenics get behind the wheel. And it's utterly tragic and utterly and completely avoidable. But we don't learn, do we?

You would think that the slaughter of millions of Jews by the Nazis or any one of a number of societies that's trying to do cleansing of some kind, you would think that the horror of that would be enough to make people think, you know, this really is a bad idea. And it's all because of fear, you know, that's where it all is.

But if you have seen the pictures of what was found in the death camps after the liberation of Europe post-World War II, there's no part of you that could ever get behind this. There's just no part of you because you realize the horror of that. These are people that weren't bad people. They were just people going about their jobs and trying to raise families and trying to make a living and trying to keep their heads above water.

And they were taken and thrown into these camps, and they were killed just because of who they were. Look at the images coming of starving children and their parents in Gaza right now. People are not moved by black and white pictures from Dachau or Auschwitz, and they're also not moved by color video on their phone. And can I just say, before you come to say, but that picture was this or that kid was this, I don't want to hear it.

I don't either. And I don't want to get into the controversy of why this is happening either because I think that that takes away from the fact, well, okay, that's happening. But guess what's going on? You have lots of children, and you have lots of people that are absolutely starving to death because they can't get the food.

And for whatever excuse you come up with, oh, it's their fault, it's still happening, and we need to rise up and say we shouldn't let this happen. If you find yourself arguing in any way in defense of atrocities being committed against children and innocent civilians, you are on the wrong side of history. You may win this argument because you're loud and scary, but you will always lose with history because you're just on the wrong side.

And also, if some of y'all think you're going to trick the almighty Lord God Jehovah into swinging back by a little ahead of schedule by doing some crazy shit, what kind of God could be fooled by you? It's like, dude, you can't fool Penn and Teller. You ain't fooling the Lord God Almighty Jehovah. Like, what are we doing?

Why are we such terrible misbehaved little bald monkeys? Why are we so awful and so vile? And why do we not learn? Now, I think that we haven't learned because we have not taught. We just have not taught our history. We haven't taught it in our schools. We don't know. We don't know about any of this. I mean, the fact that you didn't.

And you are a collector of weird, creepy, roadside, anecdotal American culture. Yeah, oddball stuff, yeah. Aren't you the guy that would have known about this? I feel like I would have been. When you were doing it, I went, there was a society called that? I didn't know that. Yeah. I did know. The one thing, the fact that you had that loving versus state of Virginia.

Virginia, yeah. I did know about that. And really, people, that's really not all that long ago. That's 1967. It was outlawed. You were not allowed to marry another race. Are you kidding me? According to who? It's super recent, and it's up for grabs. It's one of the things that's in Project 2025 to undo. Because the eugenicists are deeply, and all eugenics are deeply and profoundly racist.

Full stop. And ableist. Because the whole point of eugenics is the best as determined by us. And in this case, the determination is Caucasian. And quote, unquote, able-bodied. And without any mental defects. Now, how the hell you can scream for all of this? But you heard what Charles Davenport said in the episode. Oh, a beautiful baby at two is an epileptic at 10.

And for Charles Davenport, an epileptic at 10 is a burden on society that should be eliminated. And if you agree with that, you need to just be cool with acknowledging what you are. Which is a person that thinks other human beings should be exterminated. Based on your say-so. And if you're good with that, well, I can't imagine that you're listening to this.

I can't imagine that you are either. No, I can't imagine. I don't know. And like Ada Schweitzer. Who, you know, was running these fitter family things. And, you know, just being all about the American Eugenic Society. Ada Schweitzer is one of these figures that's a little bit of, she's complicated. Because on the one hand, oh my God.

But on the other hand, she was so right about so many things. And she advocated ferociously for the children of Indiana. And a lot of the things she was advocating for are things that we all agree a child should have. You know, a safe home. Outdoor play. Clean, healthy, adequate amounts of food. Like, all of these things that we all are like, abse-damn-lutely.

And at the same time, she was deeply embedded in the eugenics movement. She was definitely a woman of her time. They were so into outdoor at that time. That they would open the windows of the school in places like Indiana in the middle of the winter. And have the children sit there all bundled up. Because the outdoor air was so much better for them.

Oh, well, look at the airing babies movement. Like in New York City in the tenements, they had cages on the windows. Oh, yeah. Because you didn't have a backyard. And you would stick your baby in a high rise dangling out of a window cage. Yeah, I mean it was, again, you know, like Ada Schweitzer was a woman of her time.

She was a complicated person. But she was operating at a time when eugenics was mainstream. Like President Roosevelt was into it. Like people were, you know, talking about human breeding in the same way that we talk about animal breeding. And so I didn't want to be too harsh with her. Because she believed what everybody believed.

And she did a lot of good. The same way like most, like not all your terrible people. Some of your terrible people are just awful. They contribute nothing but darkness. But she was one of those complicated figures where, girl, yikes. But also, like you did contribute some good things. The woman who voiced her, Erin Cox, who's done some stuff for us before, Sherry said, let's give her this part.

And I said, okay, fine. So I sent it off to her. And she said, oh, thank you very much. I've got a speaking part. She's not too awful, is she? She's not, Erin, she's not too awful. Too awful, no. Just kind of awful. And I want to say about Ada Schweitzer, I don't think the woman took a night off. Like, it was a rare day that she wasn't at the Lions Club in Indianapolis.

And now she's speaking to the Teachers Union in Bloomington. And she just was tireless about the Hoosiers of Indiana. She loved Indiana. She loved her people. She loved children. And she wanted Indiana to thrive. And as it happened, she lived and worked at a time when eugenics was mainstream. So she was definitely wrong about a lot of it, but not about everything.

Not about everything. She did leave a legacy of some good. And the whole Better Baby, Fitter Family thing, for the families that competed, you know, and won, you know, you've got some local bragging rights. Your baby was in the newspaper. The little boy that won Better Baby, Best Baby Indiana, this kid is enormous. He's a toddler, but he's, like, a toddler that got in front of, like, some cartoon ray gun in front of the Giants.

Like, do you know what I mean? Sure. I was 30 pounds at a year. So I can, I know. Max's bronzed baby shoes. Like, didn't we, didn't we, didn't you bring them into work so we could see if anybody in the station could fit them? Heather has, who works on our show, does our IT and all sorts of stuff, she has tiny feet, and we put it next to, and they're really toddler shoes.

She put her feet next to my toddler shoes, and they're about the same size. It's hysterical. Max's little bronzed baby shoe, like, you could serve dinner out of it. It's massive. He was a big baby. Well, this baby, you would have been a better baby. You might have won a blue ribbon at the fair. Go ahead. This baby was, he was just robust and plump and chunky.

And in his newspaper picture, he doesn't look very impressed to be Indiana's best baby. And then the baby girl that won, the Sankner girl, I loved her mom. She's like, she spends most of her time outside in the pen, which makes her sound like a goat, but they meant play pen. We just put some food and water in the trough, and she gobbles it up.

She's fine. Doesn't that put the expectation, if you're one of the better babies, and you're supposed to be this perfect specimen, doesn't that put a lot of pressure on you as a child when you're growing up? You better not grow up homely. I could just hear my mother going, well, you started off all right. You were a better baby, but now look at you.

Can you imagine? Max, can you imagine winning the best baby in Indiana contest, and then you're kind of clumsy and not that bright? So all of these expectations that you were a superior specimen, you're dogged for the rest of your life by how disappointing you are. And you don't really figure all that stuff out until you're sitting with a therapist and you're 50 years old.

If this was all we did and time was, you know, like there was plenty of it, I would try to hunt down as many of these living, fitter family, better baby contestants as I could find to be like, how did it turn out for you, you superior human being? You pee-coozer. But you can't blame them. They were just babies. They were just kind of thrown into this.

It must be trippy. There are probably people that are cleaning out a family member's home and coming across these weird artifacts or maybe newspaper clippings and going, mom, uncle Tommy was in a livestock competition at the fair. Because think about, remember the day we were working on one of the Pine Barrens episodes and we found the baseball team, the minor league baseball team, your dad played for before you went off to fight.

The football team, I'm sorry. The Imps. There are these threads in each and every one of our lives, our attics and basements and family stories that sound kind of kooky. And nobody's ever, well, what do you mean? What do you mean uncle Tommy was in a fair competition? And we lose the memory. We don't know. But you know that that's true, especially in Indiana and Kansas where the better baby fitter families competitions were huge.

Texas too. Yeah. You know that there are boxes in somebody's attic with those metals that say, yay, I am of goodly stock. All this crazy stuff. What the heck is this? Yeah. So Dr. Haiselden, who makes a very brief cameo appearance in this episode. Are you familiar with the Bollinger baby case? Yes. I mean, I have heard of that.

Yes. Yeah. It's a, it's a real dark Mark on American medical history in so many ways. So the Bollinger baby was born with a number of issues and rather than perform surgery on this baby, Haiselden felt that it was most merciful and in the best interest of everyone involved to just let the baby die because the baby would have no quality of life and be a burden and, and all of those things.

So it became a real, um, flashpoint case and it's famous and infamous and like medical and legal history. And he was absolutely unrepentant. Like you, you couldn't budge him. And so I thought after we finished this one, I was like maybe because he's a, he's a real piece of work and he deserves his own true word stuff episode.

He does. But I need a break. I need a break from these people. Um, do you know that in 1917, he starred as himself in a silent movie about the event events of that case called the black Stork. And I pulled it up on YouTube and watched it. Did you? Oh, well, I'm going to now. And it's, I mean, it's a silent movie. So, you know, with our modern brains, you're like, Oh my God, can I please play a game on my phone?

But if you look away from the screen, You don't understand what's happening. Cause there's no dialogue. Um, because of the film's controversial content, theaters offered special male only and female only viewings in 1918. It played under the name. Are you fit to marry? I mean, right. So Dr. Haiselden, um, he was in Chicago.

And, um, the, the baby in question was only one day old. And he refused to perform this operation that would have saved this child's life because he said that the baby would be an imbecile. And he said that the attending, and there were some pretty significant issues with the child. The baby was born without it's up the cap, the upper part of the skull cap.

And there were, there were other things. This was a, this was a tragic situation for this family. Um, Haiselden said that the attending physician, physician called and they consulted together along with 40 other doctors and surgeons. And, um, they all agreed that the kindest thing they could do was let this baby die. And Dr. Haiselden said at the time I will be criticized, but I will have my supporters too.

And someday people will wonder how I was ever criticized. Oh my God. So, and there were other, um, there were other cases with, um, Haiselden. So, you know, at the time that this was happening, this was in the early part of the 20th century and there was no such thing as like an ultrasound or, um, amniocentesis, right?

Like you would get pregnant and nobody knew anything. We didn't know what the sex of the baby was. We weren't a hundred percent on your due date. Um, we only knew that you had like complications when they manifest it, you know, preeclampsia or gestational diabetes or whatever. Right. So it wasn't until the baby was born that you would know that this baby had catastrophic issues like missing the top part of its skullcap.

That said, um, people back then, and I think now we're up in arms that a doctor would make the decision to let a, to let a baby die and it was controversial then it's controversial now. So after, after all of that, I was just like, Oh, I need a break from these damn eugenicists and their crazy notions about who's fit to breed and who's defective.

And sometimes like the modern eugenicists that are banging that drum today, I look at them and I'm like, wait a minute, you seem to be three quarters forehead and you look like a tragic old thumb and you're telling me that you're a superior genetic specimen. Like please take a seat. It's just, it's shocking how the people who, who often do least embody these ideal characteristics are the loudest.

Like it was noted at the time and in his sense historically that the very man screaming for the blonde blue eyed Husky Aryan ideal was a short, smelly, um, flatulent little toad. Like Hitler himself was, could not have been further from the Aryan ideal. Was he? I mean, come on Max. Yeah, I mean he was no Chris. I mean you look at him and you go, so you're, you're trying for blonde haired blue eyed and you are, you're smelly and greasy and gross and weird and completely ruined the box mustache for men to be able to grow in later generations.

I mean you just can't now. It'll never be okay. No, it's a shame because you know, so I guess in conclusion, um, if we go all the way back to the ancient Spartans and come all the way forward to today, eugenics is very popular and it rears its ugly head once every century and it never wins. And I think the only reason that it continues is because the people who are it's history. I think it just sounds good to them. You know, just yeah, yeah, absolutely. Blonde, blue eyed, white people looking at you, Sidney Sweeney and your ghastly American Eagle GZ. Um, I think if you knew what the eugenics movement really was, you would be horrified to align with it.

But I could be mistaken about that. Max people might know exactly what it is and feel real good about it. Very. Yeah. I mean the eugenics to the extreme is the Holocaust. I mean let's, that's what happens out of that ideology. And that's what's happening again. And if you're lucky, it'll get disrupted before it goes much further because most of us are not the ideal human.

Most of us are walking around with all sorts of defects. Those defects are what make us human. Otherwise we'd be gods and this would be a different world. Sherry, some of those seem to be more human than others though. I just wanted to point that out. So, well I was having kind of a wacky middle of the night thought there are so many people on earth and one of the, Oh my God, I cannot take us down this tangent of like how are there so many extra souls?

Cause then we get into self splitting. We can't go, we can't let that happen. Max, we have to be strong. We have to fight it, fight, fight the urge. But I was thinking in the middle of the night the other night, there are so many more people on earth and I think statistically that means there's so many more that didn't get a soul on the assembly line.

Cause there are people walking around, they're just empty skin suits. And if you look at just the law of averages, if you have a hundred people, you might have one skin suit. If you have a hundred million people, you have a million skin suits. Do you see the, there are a lot more of them and they tend to do very well in life because they're not burdened by a conscience or empathy.

They tend to be pretty successful and they love power. So it's no mistake. It's actually a design feature that the very worst, most terrible among us tend to be those who rule us because they're the ones who wanted the job. You like puppies and ice cream. And thinking your thoughts and chilling out in your house after a long day.

These are people that wake up every day and it's like pinky in the brain. They just want to take over the world. And for many people who do those things, they've, they have, they have tons of skeletons in their closets, but they are totally unconcerned about them being found out. Totally unconcerned about that. That's that absence of a conscience or empathy. I think one, if you're wondering like, Hey, is this person I'm talking to an empty skin suit?

One way to test it is provoke them into a conversation where they are adamant that you believe something that you know to be a lie because for a narcissist and that's your skin suits are all narcissists. Not all narcissists are empty skin suits, but all empty skin suits. So your narcissist walks around in a reality where the world is as they say it is. And you will submit. It may take a minute.

They may have to keep saying the lie over and over again before you swallow it as the truth. But eventually you'll get there because they're loud and they're going to have power over you. Because while you were thinking about puppies and eating a cupcake and day dreaming about how pretty the world is, all they cared about was dominion.

All they cared about was power. And so it's no freaking mystery why some of the worst people in the history of people are in charge because if you wanted that gig, you would have gone for it. Have you ever had the slightest desire max ever? No. If I think about the, so I think, I think I can be, um, if I think about the worst thing that I've ever done and everybody's got probably some worst thing that you would not want anybody to know about.

So I think about the worst thing that I've ever done. The thought of anybody finding that out, even though probably nobody would, that alone is reason enough for me not to want to do it. Do you see what I mean? Oh yeah. That's because you have a conscience. That's your conscience that's talking to you. That feeling of remorse and empathy, that moral compass that tells you this is right and this is wrong.

That keeps your behavior in check. The thing about a skin suit narcissist and I had one for a father, so I've had a lot of experience. Um, the thing about a skin suit narcissist is they think you're a sucker and a fool. They, they have contempt for you. They think you're stupid that you'd be willing to just eat shit when you could be a king or a queen.

They don't understand you and they don't care to try because they don't even, um, you're not even a person the way they are. They're the star and you're the background scenery. And every single person listening to this has, has come across this. Maybe at home, maybe at work, but you've, there's no way you've dodged this bullet.

And so anytime somebody says to me, yes, the world is terrible, but, but they must, they're going to realize that they're doing terrible things and they're going to change. Don't count on it. No, they're not. These terrible things they're doing are the things they want to be doing. It's like that meme that you see all the time when you're talking about like dating and relationships. Girl, if he wanted to, he would, if he wanted to, he'd be there. If he wanted to, he'd be with you.

If he wanted to, he would. If they want it to be decent, they would. They don't want to be. And so they're not. And that is, um, it's no mistake that that's who rules the world. That's who wanted the job. Good people aren't good. People don't have any, um, taste for dominion and oppression, but your empty skin suits, that's why they're here. That's the gig.

Okay. So that's this episode of True Weird Stuff. Now next, oh my gosh. And poor Don Morgan. We're going to find, we're going to find some like wonderful person for Don to play on True Weird Stuff. Um, coming soon on True Weird Stuff, he was a carpenter from Galilee. Anyway, so next week, so fun, fun, fun. Listen, listen, listen.

Aren't you fascinated by missing people that literally walk off the face of the earth and that, and there's nothing they're never seen again. They're never heard from people looking at surveillance video and they never left the bar. There's an, a famous case out of Ohio, Brian Schaefer. There's no sign that he ever left the bar. This person, Hey mom, I'm on my way home. I'll see you soon. Click.

No car, no cell phone, nothing. Now most missing people are found. They really, I was shocked by how, by what the statistics are on missing people. Most are found. A very small percentage just disappear off the face of the earth. And that got me to thinking, where do they go? And especially the case we're going to look at next week.

There were witnesses. There was an exhaustive search. The man had had a stroke and couldn't walk, so he didn't get anywhere on his own steam, right? He was here and then he was gone. And this has been a mystery that has endured for more than a hundred years. So here's my question to you. What if some of these people who vanish like that, what if they fall between worlds and they're missing in our world, but they've posted up in another and they're doing their best to get by.

Do you ever think about that? So they're in the world where Bigfoot actually is. Or we are even Bigfoot. Even Bigfoot is like, which is I am not coming out in this environment. No. So next week we're going to take a look at a mystery of a person who went missing. Who knows? Maybe he just fell in a crack between the worlds and the multiverse.

And that's on the next true weird stuff. And if you listen to us on Apple podcast, hit the plus button in the top right corner. And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it. If you subscribe rate and review true weird stuff, hit our website. True weird stuff.com for show notes and photos and videos.

When we have it and bonus content, everything true weird is waiting for you at true weird stuff.com and follow true weird stuff on Instagram. True weird stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser.

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