A beardless JD Vance seemed nervous as he stepped to the microphone at the chichi Ritz-Carlton Hotel a few blocks from the White House in Washington, D.C. It was the last day of the inaugural “National Conservatism” conference on July 16, 2019, a few months before Donald Trump would lose the presidency to Joe Biden. Tieless in a beige-brown jacket over a blue pinstripe shirt, Vance stood at Nat Con 1, as it’s called, in front of a screen dotted with the National Conservative logo mixed with that of the sponsor, the Edmund Burke Foundation.
Vance’s topic was “Beyond Libertarianism”—which proved to be accurate as he reconstituted old “positive” eugenicists’ ideas that the government should help fill and fund the births for more children, while the author of “Hillbilly Elegy” repeatedly called people—OK, women mostly—who chose not to have them “psychopaths.”
“We want more babies because children are good, and we believe children are good because we’re not sociopaths,” he said.
The sponsoring organization is based in The Hague and tied from its launch to far-right movements in The Netherlands that supported the rise of Geert Wilders, the leader of the Dutch “Party of Freedom,” who is closely allied with far-right, anti-immigration European leaders such as Marine Le Pen of France’s National Rally.
At the Ritz for Nat Con 1, only seven of 46 conservative speakers were women; the vast majority were white men. Among them was conference chairman Christopher DeMuth, a man considered conservative royalty due to key roles at the Federalist Society, the American Enterprise Institute and currently as a Distinguished Fellow in American Thought at the Heritage Foundation. Heritage is the progenitor of Project 2025, which has big, hairy ideas about what to do about unwanted immigrants, including building a “deportation machine.” Vance, as you will recall, wrote the forward to the Project 25 book that they delayed until after Election Day. In it, Vance said, “It’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”
The Appalachia expat’s argument wasn’t as much about how wonderful children are as it was about the need for non-“psychopathic” members of a strong society to “replace” themselves with offspring. Basically, women are in two distinct boxes for Vance: childless psychopaths who prefer caring for their cats, or those who live up to the ideal, eager to raise a bunch of children. Nuance is clearly not his thing.
Vance is certainly no libertarian as he has continually called for the U.S. government to intervene to ensure that Americans, or at least certain of us, get married and procreate. He has called Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán a role model and praised him for giving financial incentives to married couples with children and tax exemptions to women giving birth to at least four children, the Associated Press reported. Also, Vance has suggested that childless people and couples should pay higher taxes than parents—and he suggested that parents should get more votes than childless ones.
“There are a lot of ways to measure a healthy society, but the most important way to measure a healthy society is by whether a nation is having enough children to replace itself. …Our people aren’t having enough children to replace themselves. That should bother us, ” Vance posited at Nat Con 1.
Of course, the words “our people” are doing a lot of work there considering just how anti-immigrant and anti-other Vance’s audiences tend to be. Add to that Nat Con’s principle (No. 8) that “today’s penchant for uncontrolled and unassimilated immigration has become a source of weakness and instability” in our pluralistic nation, where the Burke bunch believes (No. 4) that the state and private institutions both should ensure that “public life … be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision” anywhere that “a Christian majority exists.” And rooting out immigrants will help ensure that majority; it would be a government math exercise with Vance in charge.
But the most telling word Vance uses is “replace.” It’s a blaring clue, in fact. A talisman. A marker. A sweet gem of wink-wink propaganda for those in the know whether in Washington, The Hague or various points in between. And it represents a very ugly, and false, tenet of white supremacy.
It’s About Replacement, Stupid!
It so happened that Tucker Carlson was one of four keynote speakers at Nat Con 1, along with JD Vance mentor, investor and campaign backer Peter Thiel, John Bolton (Trump’s national security adviser whom he fired two months after Nat Con 1) and Sen. Josh Hawley, who openly embraced what he named “Christian Nationalism.” In his Nat Con 1 talk, Carlson yucked it up about “How Big Business Hates Your Family.”
Carlson is one of the best-known, although far from the only, proponents of modernized “Great Replacement Theory” in the U.S., which PBS explained this way in 2022: “Simply put, the conspiracy theory says there’s a plot to diminish the influence of white people.” As I detailed recently in my Democracy essay on America’s anti-immigration history, the current theory is closely related to an earlier, and even more openly racist brand known as the “White Genocide Replacement/Conspiracy Theory,” which spurred horrific violence led by neo-Nazi David Lane in the mid-1990s and a white-supremacist sniper attack on Black shoppers here in Jackson in 1999.
The current replacement rhetoric that Carlson bandies about is relatively more sanitized on the surface, as he claims Democrats are intentionally bringing in Black and Brown immigrants to beef up their voting power in order to “replace” conservative voting strength.
“The Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World,” Carlson proclaimed on Fox News Primetime in April 2021 back when he still had a show there. “If you change the population, you dilute the political power of the people who live there. So every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter.”
I know it’s absurd, but don’t laugh; many people have bought the replacement muckery, including JD Vance. In his 2022 campaign for Senate in Ohio, he claimed that Democrats had a plot to “transform the electorate” evidenced by them not climbing fully on board the anti-immigration and mass-deportation train. He then warned on FOX News of a migrant “invasion,” saying that Democrats were planning to bring in “a large number of new voters to replace the voters that are already here.”
Of course, throughout Trump’s and Vance’s presidential run, the immigrants targeted and called “animals” and “vermin” and subhuman) are Black and Brown. Both men spread lies about hard-working, legal Haitians eating cats and dogs in Vance’s adopted state of Ohio. Hitler’s favorite term for his targets, “untermenschen” was a word he acquired from U.S. racial hygienist T. Lothrop Stoddard; in English, it’s “undermen”. It meant subhuman animals, and that meant he and his German followers could do anything to them.
To hear Trump and Vance tell it, people in certain immigrant groups are born to be violent animals who rape and kill. They are inevitably from south of the U.S. border, Haiti, the Congo and so forth. Ironically, Trump is married to a white woman who acquired an Einstein visa to get into the U.S. from Slovenia—a conquered country that lost 1,300 Jews in the Holocaust and where Hitler believed Slavs to be racially inferior. And Vance’s wife is the child of parents who immigrated from India in the 1980s, and thus both men’s children hail from first-generation immigrants on their mums’ side.
But Melania and Usha are exempt from the ugly ire because, you know, wives. And, overall, Americans like Vance now consider those cultures acceptable, unlike back in the 19th and 20th centuries when both Slovenia and India were considered outposts of subhumanity and blocked from U.S. entry.
Look, I have no doubt that both Trump and Vance believe the racist “replacement” shtick—they are first among the white types fixated on how they belong to a supposedly superior group identity while accusing others of being “a low IQ individual” (that’s a racist tell, especially when it expresses an assumption that a Black woman has a low IQ) or too “woke” if we point out these connections to sordid parts of our history. That is, they’re white, and all of us white folk are set to be a minority in the U.S. by 2045. This is unacceptable to way too many people obsessed with race, and misogyny, in our country.
Vance’s answer is to re-educate (or mis-educate) us as his strongmen idols do elsewhere. “What do you do at the Department of Education? Well, you do what Viktor Orbán has done in Hungary, which is basically say, ‘You’re not allowed to teach critical race theory anymore, you’re not allowed to teach critical gender theory anymore … You’re not allowed to do those things and get a dollar of federal money or a dollar of state money,’” Vance said on a right-wing podcast.
Race and gender, continually intertwined. That brings us full circle to Vance’s fixation with birth rates. This is not a new thing. This morass of forcing women to give birth to stop the loss of power is a long-time American obsession.
‘The Multiplication of Our Better Stocks’
Major Leonard Darwin, the eighth son of Charles Darwin, stayed in the opulent Upper East Side home of Henry Fairfield Osborn on Fifth Avenue and 81st Street when he crossed the Atlantic from London in September 1921 to headline the Second International Eugenics Congress. Star-power racists including Lothrop Stoddard (coiner of “undermen”) met in New York City’s American Museum of Natural History, then a hotbed of scientific-racism activism, where Osborn was the administrator and chief eugenicist.
Darwin, like so many big names in the U.S. and England, was there to help save the superior white race from mixing with the supposedly inferior bloodlines of a variety of immigrant nationalities arriving on western shores. In Osborn’s home, just before the gathering obsessed with getting white women to have more babies opened, Darwin told sympathetic journalist Marguerite Dean that “the average family should have at least four children; otherwise, the stock of that family will die out.” But, he emphasized, by “average,” he meant (white) families “in each fit model social group.” His belief in eugenics, invented by his several-times-removed-cousin Francis Galton, was the “practical application to man” of his father Charles’ game-changing work, he said.
To the doting white reporter, Charles Darwin’s progeny waved away disapproval that his methods would be “a cold-blooded affair,” and said that even women pushing for contraception were coming around to the idea that superior stock must be purposefully multiplied (positive eugenics), while “inferior” reproduction drastically reduced (negative eugenics). “Eugenics is to increase the multiplication of our better stocks and to decrease those less fit—that is, we should encourage the breeding of those who are likely to be a benefit to society,” Darwin told his media admirer whose lengthy polemic interview appeared in newspapers across the U.S., including the Evansville Courier and Press in Indiana.
Darwin would then open the conference by calling on the group of American leaders and bureaucrats—even a surgeon from Ellis Island was there to dump on dark-skinned immigrants—to embrace his preferred method of “racial progress” to preserve white Protestant stock and power: “I hold that our aim as eugenicists should be to increase the rate of multiplication of stocks above the average in hereditary qualities and to decrease it amongst the less fit.”
It was full-on replacement obsession. They wanted to keep control, to remain the majority. The idea that dominated upper-crust Protestant America’s fixation on saving their race (and population share) was all about using women’s bodies as a tool, a weapon and a pawn in a larger game. In speech after speech, the mostly white male conferees called for various policies to reverse slowdowns in (white) birth rates: direct payments, tax breaks, PR and propaganda campaigns, state-fair exhibits and more.
They also called for negative eugenics—ways to stop race-mixing and discourage births by “inferior stock.” Those included forced sterilization for “the feeble-minded, the insane, criminals, epileptics, alcoholics, blind persons, deaf persons, deformed persons, and indigent persons” in “insane asylums” across the U.S., separation of the races and other horrific methods that Nazi Germany (and the Jim Crow South) would embrace with some of these geniuses’ help. Poor white women were sterilized in large numbers precisely because they were believed the ones most likely to “mix” with inferior races, as a woman speaker at the 1921 Eugenics Congress made clear in no uncertain terms.
Slap in the middle of the 1910-1930 “one drop rule” heyday across the U.S. (not just the South), Sir Leonard used the word “segregation” to make his aims clear about his staunchly inequitable methods to improve and increase certain stock that had, to his mind, proved itself superior and while ensuring that the inferior ones stop multiplying. The “grossly unfit,” Darwin claimed, should be kept separate from the “normal population” because “they are often a serious nuisance to society.”
This eugenics meetup’s speakers from across the U.S. and beyond were pushing for government interference to ensure more “desirable” babies for the same reason JD Vance has—a way to preserve power. Coincidentally, perhaps, the 1920s were becoming an acme decade for the federal government, and especially Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover and the Federal Housing Administration, to institute a host of discriminatory housing laws and practices to keep white neighborhoods free of integration (and thus miscegenation).
That included redlining to deny mortgage loans of the “unfit” and allowing white property owners to enforce restrictive covenants based on race, which the U.S. Supreme Court would uphold in its 1926 Corrigan v. Buckley decision. Many traditionally redlined neighborhoods are still de facto segregated now, often with lower home values, because the nation’s racist past is systemic prologue.
The 1921 eugenics confab and its participants also were key to the passage of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, a sweeping anti-immigration law. In that same year Virginia passed the first U.S. Racial Integrity Act, including the “one-drop rule” that someone was Black if they had one drop of non-white blood. (I’ll let y’all deduce the reason.) Eugenicists and anti-immigration activists then were basically one and the same: an incestuous bunch fixed on keeping white people’s numbers up and their power strong. At the Natural History Museum, there was no need to keep it a secret: more white births plus fewer inferior births plus less integration would equal the maintenance of white supremacy.
Guess who Adolf Hitler got his “racial hygiene” and sterilization impetus from? These guys. But the national amnesia that fell on the U.S. after the horrors of the Holocaust meant that this history is largely shielded from most Americans today. Unfortunately, that makes it easier for those with similar motives to cherry-pick the methods and rhetoric in 2024.
It was certainly “far beyond libertarianism” back then, just as Vance calls now for massive government interference in people’s everyday choices and lives. And most women had no voice or choice in the halcyon early days of eugenics, and men like Vance don’t want them to now.
Paved With Women’s Pain, Loss and Tears
The big difference today in Vance’s and Carlson’s birth-rate obsession is that do not blatantly engage the “negative eugenics” of trying to stop people they consider inferior from having children. The most cynical reason is that it is just too obvious in a post-World War 2 world to say such a thing at the same time that you’re pushing white women to have babies (while insulting the “psychopaths” who don’t, or can’t, have kids).
Maybe they’ve let the racism go altogether, one could try to argue, since they don’t fixate on negative eugenics like the racists of old. The answer to that is four words: Madison Square Garden Rally. Or the vicious racist attack on hard-working Haitians in Ohio. Or the illogic of blaming every Venezuelan for the bad people in their midst as if America hasn’t created and shielded hordes of proud white-boy terrorists over the years.
The other answer is slightly more subtle; instead of overt racism, instead many just do the least they can to support low-income families once a child is born. They refuse to clean up the intentional effects of all that redlining starting back in the 1920s to ensure that equity was never achieved. In Mississippi, state leaders are adamantly “pro-life”—but it’s an uphill battle for Mississippians to get them to support poor children’s needs, education and health care once they’re actually born regardless on the intentional barriers behind the problems.
A real amnesia about all that supporting of life sets in fast once a woman’s water breaks.
I think of this as the newfangled version of negative eugenics. Yes, even unwanted pregnancies must be carried to term, they tell us now. But the same politicians then do everything possible after that to hinder the ability for marginalized American families to achieve parity and equal power, voter and otherwise. They start with ensuring that children are stuck in place. It’s hard to believe that is accidental, but what do I know.
So, yes, racism and misogyny have always been a tight rubber-band ball in this country. And women of all races have always been abused, and disparaged, and ordered around, and beaten, and belittled when we try to refuse to be pawns in an ugly game. I can’t help but think of a rainbow of women coming together across party lines to lead Mississippi’s defeat of Personhood as even the Black, male Democratic nominee for governor that year had supported it.
The nation was shocked and awed that its rejection could happen in Mississippi. Then everybody seemed promptly to forget how women stood up and voted in favor of making their own choices—not just about abortion, but about IVF, contraception or to save their own lives and protect their daughters. That choice was ignored and soon forgotten—even by Democrats—on the road to Mississippi becoming the state that would overturn Roe v. Wade.
Make no mistake: This negative-positive eugenic birthrate obsession dominated white leadership, newspaper editorials and policymaking—especially anti-immigration laws— for most of the first half of the 20th century. It ended only because Adolf Hitler and goons took the American “racial hygiene” obsession to the ultimate negative eugenic end with the Final Solution’s mass murder in order to replace the “undermen” in life, business, power and voting bases with their supposedly superior Aryan selves. But its seeds, arguments and illogic remain if slightly repackaged.
This replacement obsession is a road this country, and the world, needs to avoid at all cost. And it is certainly paved with women’s pain, loss and tears.
Read Donna Ladd’s unfolding series of Democracy essays here.
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