“What is meant by improvement?” Sir Francis Galton asked the Sociology Society of the University of London in 1904. At the time of his speech, Galton was already 35 years deep into a career promoting what he termed “eugenics,” the idea that the human race could improve itself through selective breeding—through propagating good traits and quarantining the bad ones. “All creatures would agree that it was better to be healthy than sick, vigorous than weak, well-fitted than ill-fitted for their part in life,” he explained. “So with men.”

Eugenics enjoys the dubious distinction of being one of the most thoroughly discredited theories in scientific history. It is most closely associated with the Nazis and their obsession with racial superiority, but the Nazis did not invent it any more than they invented racism: It began in Great Britain, and swiftly spread to the United States. Beginning with Indiana in 1907, 32 states adopted laws “authorizing the sterilization of people judged to have hereditary defects,” Adam Cohen writes in his book Imbeciles. “They called for sterilizing anyone with ‘defective’ traits, such as epilepsy, criminality, alcoholism or ‘dependency,’ another word for poverty.” Americans adopted eugenics so enthusiastically that 70,000 people were sterilized under laws that eventually influenced the policies of the Third Reich.

But eugenics, though discredited, has never been abandoned. In fact, the most powerful people in America appear to enthusiastically embrace the idea that humans can be divided into inherently superior and inferior specimens and treated accordingly. “You have to be born lucky,” President Donald Trump told Oprah Winfrey in 1988, “in the sense that you have to have the right genes.” His biographer Michael D’Antonio explained to Frontline that Trump and his family subscribe “to a racehorse theory of human development. 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.”

So does Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon, if the reports are to be believed. Sources told The New York Times this November that despite his devout Catholicism, Bannon “occasionally talked about the genetic superiority of some people and once mused about the desirability of limiting the vote to property owners.” Adam Serwer of The Atlantic reported in January that Attorney General Jeff Sessions praised the Immigration Act of 1924 in a 2015 interview with Bannon, which could be an insight into the views of both these immigration hardliners: The act required would-be immigrants to specify whether they’d ever spent time in prison or the “almshouse,” and if their parents had ever been confined to a psychiatric hospital.

The work of Trump adviser Michael Anton also reveals a grim obsession with genetic purity. “‘Diversity’ is not ‘our strength;’ it’s a source of weakness, tension, and disunion,” he wrote in the Unz Review last year. As the Huffington Post noted at the time, the same essay claimed that the aviator Charles Lindbergh’s fascist America First Committee had been unfairly maligned. Lindbergh was a eugenicist who admired the Nazis: He once wrote that flying “is one of those priceless possessions which permit the White Race to live at all in a sea of Yellow, Black, and Brown.”