In a passionate blog post, alt-right darling Richard Spencer detailed his plan to implement a population congress to begin the process of improving the American gene pool.

This body to direct and control the population through Birth rates and immigration, and direct its distribution over the country according to national needs consistent with the taste, fitness and interest of the individuals. The main objects of the Population Congress would be: (a) to raise the level and increase the general intelligence of our population. (b) to increase the population slowly by keeping the birth rate at its present level of fifteen, decreasing the death rate below its present mark of 11. (c) keep the doors of Immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as feeble-minded, idiots, morons, insane, syphiletic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes, and others in this class barred from entrance by the Immigration Laws of 1924. (d) apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization, and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.

Oh, wait a second, my mistake. That was actually from a speech given by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger to the New History Society in 1932.

However, Spencer did say very similar things recently in a video he uploaded to Twitter. (For more on the video, read Jonathan Van Maren’s fantastic write-up at The Bridgehead.)

We need to recognize this potential for both good and evil or good and bad within contraception itself, that this is something that can be a great boon for our people, for our race, or it can be a great detriment. Contraception has been a great detriment because precisely the people who shouldn’t be using it are using it. We want smart people to have more children. I sometimes want smart people to be a little more reckless. Don’t plan. Don’t use a condom. What I’m saying basically is the abortion issue is just a much more complicated issue than this kind of ‘good or evil’ binary that the pro-life movement and the Christian movement want to use. We need to be more adult than they are.

Translation: More babies from the fit, less from the unfit.

Both Sanger And Spencer Have Advocated For Eugenics

The ideology of both Sanger and Spencer is called eugenics. It’s the belief that genetic cleanliness is necessary for a better world, and that reproductive technology should be used to stifle the growth of “unfit” or “dysgenic” populations. Both Sanger and Spencer use those exact terms.

In fairness to Spencer and the alt-right, Sanger is significantly more abhorrent. She believed not only that the “dysgenic” should be encouraged to use birth control, but that they should be forcibly sterilized and segregated from the rest of society, as she describes in her population congress proposal. Spencer’s white identitarianism is viciously racist and anti-American, but never has he advocated that kind of violence.

As a self-described eugenicist, it was not uncommon for Sanger to advocate for these kinds of programs. Rather, coercive population control tactics and dehumanization of lower class people were common threads through nearly everything she said and did.

In chapter 13 of her book “Women and the New Race,” Sanger writes of birth control technology thusly: “Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives.”

Sanger’s KKK Member Friend Loved Adolf Hitler

Not only is the worldview of Spencer and the alt-right deeply rooted in that of Sanger’s, Spencer often cites one of Sanger’s colleagues, Lothrop Stoddard, including in his recent video:

‘We actually have to think about an issue like abortion…in a complicated manner, something that that issue deserves,’ Spencer said. ‘Lothrop Stoddard talked about contraception, not so much abortion but contraception, as a potentially world-changing—for the good—technology, or something that could change the world for the worse. In a way he was absolutely right and I think contraception has to a large degree changed the world for the worse. Intelligent people will engage in family planning because they naturally have long time horizons, they think ahead. They aren’t just going to go run and have sex with someone without a condom and get them pregnant and so on…In a way, contraception has been terribly dysgenic in the sense that it is only the smart people that really use it. Smart people are not using abortion as birth control. Smart people are using abortion when you have a situation like Down Syndrome or you have a situation where the health of the mother is at risk. I would say that it is the unintelligent and blacks and Hispanics who use abortion as birth control, as a kind of late-term birth control.’

Stoddard was an outspoken supporter of Adolph Hitler and was the Exalted Cyclops of the Massachusetts Ku Klux Klan. He authored “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy,” among many other books and articles on the topic. In 1939, he met with Hitler and Gestapo commander Heinrich Himmler, and established himself as one of the primary influencers of Nazi racial propaganda in the German education system.

Sanger And Spencer Support Race-Based Birth Control

Sanger and Stoddard were very close. Sanger featured Stoddard’s writings in her magazine, Birth Control Review, and appointed Stoddard as a founding board member of the Birth Control League, later renamed Planned Parenthood. Spencer is well-versed in the ideas of Stoddard and discussed them in detail in a 2013 podcast with Jonathan Bowden.

‘Certainly, with somebody like Lothrop Stoddard, who we’re going to speak about a little bit later, it was a position held by someone who openly thought of himself as a progressive and a modernist,’ Spencer said in the interview. ‘And [eugenics] also had some popular appeal. Actually, in a talk I gave not too long ago at the H. L. Mencken Club, I showed some pictures that were actually taken by a very good book, a biography of Lothrop Stoddard which was written by a Left-liberal who doesn’t like Stoddard very much but recognizes his importance, but these pictures were of eugenic buildings at the state fair. I believe a famous one was from the Kansas State Fair. They would have a competition for the fittest family, and what they wanted to see was a good genotype. That was a healthy family with all boys and girls looking strong and smart and good-looking parents and things like this. So, eugenics really had a positive value in peoples’ lives. It was something that meant that they were healthy and good and normal and people of quality. Obviously, this has gone through a total reversal. I think we should talk about all of these things in detail, but maybe you could pick up on the basic history of eugenics that I’ve just outlined that something that was hegemonic has become unspeakable just over the course of 100 years. Something that was endorsed by presidents and now is associated with crazed lunatics. Maybe just talk a little about that and talk a little bit about why that happened.’

Not only does Spencer know of these people and their views, but he decries the downfall of eugenics and is attempting to repopularize the once-dormant movement. The alt-right is the resurrection of the eugenicists. This is a frightening phenomenon and it’s something the left and right can and should come together to attempt to stamp out, but we won’t be able to do that unless we attack the ideology at the roots.

It’s about eugenics. It’s about the eugenic and the dysgenic, the fit and the unfit, the humans and the “human weeds.” These aren’t new ideas. To effectively combat the Spencer and the alt-right, we all must acknowledge their ideological roots: the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century, and its most prominent advocate, Margaret Sanger.