Marko Elez, Eugenics, and the Left’s Forgotten Past

Among the more interesting and edifying moments in the rise of DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency) and the concomitant rise of the virulent and hysterical opposition to it was the discovery this past week that one of DOGE’s young tech experts has a history of making controversial posts on Twitter/X. According to The Wall Street Journal, 25-year-old Marko Elez had a now-deleted profile on which he “advocated repealing the Civil Rights Act and backed a ‘eugenic immigration policy’ in the weeks before President Trump was inaugurated.” On Thursday, in response to the exposure of his former account, Elez resigned from his position.

What’s interesting about this isn’t that a young male would hold ugly beliefs or that he would be dumb enough to state them in a public forum. Young men think, do, and say stupid things all the time. It’s one of their defining characteristics. Elez’s beliefs, assuming they are accurately reflected in his tweets/posts, are indefensible, and no sensible person should waste his time trying to justify them.

Rather, what is interesting about Marko Elez’s comments and his subsequent resignation is how integral some of the sentiments he expressed were and are to the ideology and the political agenda of the contemporary American Left. The media and President Trump’s political critics will, of course, do their darnedest to turn Elez into an anchor to drown DOGE and the broader MAGA movement, yet the truth of the matter is that the beliefs he apparently espouses helped form the Progressive movement and the program of the Democratic Party.

As with all things “Progressive” and many things politically and morally abhorrent, this story starts in the late 19th century in the hallowed halls of Johns Hopkins University. In 1885, Johns Hopkins professor Richard Ely, one of the godfathers of the Progressive movement, co-founded the American Economics Association. Among those who aided in the Association’s creation and early operation was Ely’s PhD student, Woodrow Wilson, another of the godfathers of Progressivism. In its statement of principles, the Association declared that “the conflict of labour and capital has brought to the front a vast number of social problems whose solu­tion is impossible without the united efforts of Church, State, and Science.”

When he spoke of “science,” Ely meant, among other things, the “science” of eugenics. Ely became a pioneer in the eugenics movement with the publication in 1903 of his book Studies in the Evolution of Industrial Society, in which he waxed optimistic about the positive effects that could be achieved by the ongoing efforts in the various states to limit the abil­ity of “objectionable” people to breed. As a result of Ely’s book and his efforts, 27 states adopted mandatory sterilization laws and various government entities “successfully” sterilized millions of people, the most common targets being ethnic minorities and the mentally ill.

In eugenics, as in all ideological matters, where Ely went, his precocious student Wilson followed. As I have noted before in these pages, when he was the governor of New Jersey, “Wilson signed one of the nation’s first and most draconian state eugenics laws, a law that was drafted by none other than Dr. Katzen-Ellenbogen, who would later turn against his fellow Jewish prisoners and become a notorious killer-doctor in Hitler’s Buchenwald death camp. Among other things, Wilson’s law created a special three-man ‘Board of Examiners of Feebleminded, Epileptics, and Other Defectives….’”

There are those who try to separate Ely and Wilson the “Progressives” from Ely and Wilson the “inveterate racists and eugenicists,” but that is easier said than done, mostly because it cannot be done. Their entire careers are defined by racism because racism was integral to their ideology. One cannot separate “Wilson the Progressive” from “Wilson the racist,” because the racism and the Progressivism have the same progenitor: a belief in the white protestant’s superiority to all other races and classes of men.

This is even more evident if one looks beyond Wilson. Margaret Sanger, the Progressive feminist icon and founder of Planned Parenthood, was a fervent racist and a dedicated eugenicist. Among other things, Sanger advocated abortion as a means for eliminating those “inferior races,” which she considered “human weeds” and a “menace to civilization.”  Indeed, she made the biologist and polymath Herbert Spencer, who coined the term “survival of the fittest,” look like a humanitarian in her enthusiasm for the murder of the babies of the “unfit.” Sanger herself put it this way:

As an advocate of birth control, I wish… to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the “unfit” and the “fit,” admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes. In this matter, the example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feebleminded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken classes, should not be held up for emulation.

We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.

Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of the Navy was a man named Josephus Daniels. He was not merely a racist but an avowed white supremacist—and, of course, an avowed Progressive. Daniels’ Assistant Secretary of the Navy, the man who oversaw the American invasion and blatantly racist occupation of Haiti, as well as the drafting of Haiti’s racist constitution, was the Secretary’s best friend, a man who would, several years later, hire Daniels to be his Ambassador to Mexico. His name was Franklin Roosevelt. Like his cousin and the rest of the Progressives, FDR was also obsessed with the “science” of the “purity” of the white race.

The bottom line here is that Progressivism, eugenics, birth control, and abortion are all tied up together in one enormous bundle of white purity, white supremacy, and racism. Today’s “progressives” would never admit as much, of course, as they would never admit that Sanger’s vision was largely realized, precisely as she described it, in the pre-Dobbs abortion regime. In 2019, for example, the Centers for Disease Control reported that 38% of abortions in the United States were performed on black women, who constituted a mere 13% of the female population. Progressivism remains eugenicist to its core.

Again, to be clear, none of this should be taken as a defense of the comments made on Twitter/X by Marko Elez. Indeed, his support for racism and eugenics should be condemned by all right-thinking people. But not just his.