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racism
Another Thing Trump and Epstein Share: White Supremacy
Epstein came to deeply believe in eugenics and genetic determination, as has Donald Trump.
Mar 18, 2026
Jeffrey Epstein was not only a rapist and a child predator, but also—wait for it—a white supremacist. While some speculate that the Epstein issue is just a distraction from President Donald Trump’s virulent and endless racism, others feel that the video the president posted at the beginning of Black History Month of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes was meant to divert attention from the growing Epstein fallout. Well, as it turns out, the two crises are not as far apart as you might imagine.
Bombshell articles in The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and at MS Now pulled the covers off Jeffrey Epstein’s noxious racism. Reporters culling the most recently released Epstein files discovered numerous pieces of evidence in emails and other documents suggesting that he advocated the faux “science” of racial eugenics and held racist views not distinct from those promoted for decades by Donald Trump. Epstein built (or at least tried to build) ties and develop friendships with some of the most notorious eugenicists and white nationalists around the globe, including Nobel Prize laureate and geneticist James Watson, political scientist Charles Murray, and artificial intelligence researcher Joscha Bach, among many others. He also circulated posts from white supremacist websites that promoted bogus, supposedly genetically-based intellectual differences between the races.
Eugenics is the “race science” that was developed in the latter part of the 19th century to justify European slavery and colonialism. Proponents contended that humans were biologically and genetically separated into distinctly unequal “races.” Everything from intelligence, criminality, and attractiveness to morality was, so the claim went, genetically determined. It should surprise no one that, in such an imagined hierarchy, whites were at the top and, in most configurations, people of African descent at the very bottom with Asians and Indigenous people somewhere in between. Those four (or five or six) categories were considered immutable. And it mattered remarkably little that, for a long time, social and natural scientists had overwhelmingly argued with irrefutable evidence that racial categories were social constructs invented by humans and distinctly malleable over time as political and social life changed.
The real-world impact of racial eugenics theory long shaped public policy, political status, and life opportunities. In the United States, a belief in the genetic inferiority of Blacks helped foster slavery and then Jim Crow segregation, and led to tens of thousands of African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and individuals with physical and mental disabilities, as well as prisoners, being sterilized. By 1913, 24 states and Washington, DC had passed laws allowing enforced sterilization. President Theodore Roosevelt was a firm believer in such eugenics and supported sterilization in order to prevent what he termed “racial suicide,” a perspective that echoes today’s “Great Replacement Theory.”
There is no bigger racist science believer than the current occupant in the White House.
In Nazi Germany, eugenics led not only to the sterilization of Jews, Blacks, and the disabled, but to the state-organized mass murder of literally millions of people. It was a core tenet of Nazism that all non-Aryans were genetically inferior and a threat to the white race. The Nazis railed against Jews “poisoning the blood” of white Germans, a term Trump used in describing non-white immigrants from the global South.
Despite this history, Epstein came to deeply believe in eugenics and genetic determination, as has Donald Trump. To that end, Epstein sought to connect with the notable race theorists of his day.
Epstein on Race
Perhaps the most notorious book in the modern era advocating a racial basis for intelligence and a social hierarchy that places whites on top and Blacks at the bottom was The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and the late Richard J. Herrnstein, published in 1994. Since then, in multiple books and articles, the research behind that book has been thoroughly debunked and overwhelmingly rejected by scholars in the social and natural sciences. Yet, at the time, many Republicans and some Democrats embraced its racist argument in order to contend that government welfare programs should be cut back. Murray aligned with Republicans in giving testimony to Congress in the 1990s that blamed the morality of poor people for their poverty (as a debate unfolded around the future of welfare programs).
According to the Epstein files, Epstein himself repeatedly tried to correspond with Murray. However, Murray claims he never received (or remembers receiving) any emails from Epstein and did not correspond with him. Regardless, it’s pretty clear that Epstein was writing because of Murray’s notoriety for his work on race and genetics. This was in 2018, more than a decade after The Bell Curve had been published and Murray had become famous for it.
Epstein, according to The Atlantic, was reportedly provided with Murray’s email address by James Watson. He and Francis Crick had, of course, discovered the structure of DNA in 1953. Nine years later, they and Maurice Wilkins won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Around 2000, Watson’s regressive views on race began to surface. That year, he told an audience that “dark-skinned people have stronger libidos,” leaning into a centuries-old racial stereotype. In 2007, according to a former assistant in the London Sunday Times, he said that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really.”
Epstein also had ties to a number of other researchers and scientists, including Joscha Bach, who received funding from the convicted felon and was hired at MIT’s Media Lab with his help. In one exchange in 2016, Bach wrote to Epstein, stating that African-American children “have slower cognitive development” and “are slower at learning high-level concepts.” With the release of those files in January, Bach tried to explain why his statements were not racist and that “scientific discussion about the heritability of traits… [is] very complicated and not my area of research.”
Epstein also spent time on hardcore white supremacist websites. For example, he sent a link to a racist article entitled “Race and IQ: Genes That Predict Racial Intelligence Differences” to left-wing scholar Noam Chomsky. The article came from the outright white supremacist website the Right Stuff, according to The Atlantic. Chomsky, over email, expressed his disagreement with Epstein about race science. According to The Guardian, Chomsky had a “close friendship” with Epstein. There is no evidence that Chomsky participated in or witnessed any of Epstein’s sex crimes, and Valeria Chomsky, his wife, admitted that the couple made “serious errors in judgment” in maintaining ties to him. While the statement vigorously denounced Epstein’s offences, there was, however, no mention of his racist behavior, which few focused on in all those years.
The “Great Gene” President
Epstein’s eugenicist views are in line with the longstanding genetic determinism of Trump. There is no bigger racist science believer than the current occupant in the White House.
For decades, he has bragged about his genetic superiority relative to the rest of humanity. The examples are endless:
- “Well, I think I was born with the drive for success because I have a certain gene. I’m a gene believer.”
- “You have to have the rights—the right genes.”
- “Do we believe the gene thing? I mean I do.”
- “I have great genes and all that stuff which I’m a believer in.”
And, of course, in opposition to Trump’s “right genes” are those with the wrong kind. From the president’s perspective that would, of course, include migrants. In an interview discussing them, he opined, “You know, now a murderer—I believe this—it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”
Over the years, Trump has also shown little empathy for individuals with disabilities. He famously mocked reporter Serge Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis that affects his joints, by twisting and contorting his body to make fun of him. He also reportedly did not want to be around physically disabled soldiers, according to his former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly.
Trump often speaks with a strategic ambiguity so that he can later deny that he was disparaging migrants, people with disabilities, or wounded soldiers. He fools no one.
It’s notable that one of Trump’s go-to insults is to call someone “low IQ,” and in nearly every case, his target turns out to be a Black person and disproportionately female ones, including his opponent in election 2024 Kamala Harris and congressional Reps. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Al Green (D-Texas), Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), radio host Charlamagne tha God, and New York Attorney General Letitia James among others.
Trump has been careful, at least publicly, to not explicitly say that Black people are genetically predisposed to criminality. However, he has endlessly attacked Black-led cities as crime zones, without ever labeling white-dominated cities or states the same way. He also posted fake data supposedly demonstrating that African Americans commit crimes at a higher rate (with the clear implication that race is the driving factor).
His eugenicist views are most manifest in his immigration policies and dreams. Theoretically, he is not able to run for president again, so he has little incentive to hide his true feelings. After spending years denying it, in December 2025, he proudly admitted that he had referred to nations in Latin America and Africa as “shithole” countries back in 2018. In a December 9, 2025 speech in Pennsylvania, he plugged for white—and implicitly white only—immigration to this country:
Remember I said that to the senators that came in, the Democrats. They wanted to be bipartisan. So they came in. And they said, "This is totally off the record, nothing mentioned here, we want to be honest," because our country was going to hell. And we had a meeting. And I say: Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden—just a few—let us have a few. From Denmark—do you mind sending us a few people?
In January 2026, Trump essentially halted almost all refugees coming from Africa. The administration stated that it would admit only 7,500 total refugees from around the world in 2026, the lowest number on record. This meant near zero for Black Africans.
At the same time, the Trump administration sought to process 4,500 white South African refugee applications per month starting in January. The president also issued Executive Order 4204 in February 2025 falsely claiming that whites in South Africa were being mistreated and deserved an expedited process to become permanent residents of the United States. The new target, contained in a previously unreported document from the State Department dated January 27 and reviewed by Reuters, signals a push to ramp up admissions from South Africa, while refugee applications from other areas have been severely curtailed.
Racial genetics is Trump’s defining worldview (full stop!). That he thinks of Barack and Michelle Obama as less than human should surprise no one who has followed his statements on race over the decades. A compilation of Trump’s views on the former president over all these years boils down to this: Barack Obama is an ape-like radical Muslim (founder of ISIS) and socialist who was not born in the United States but engineered a conspiracy involving thousands to pretend that he was (or maybe he actually was), then fraudulently assumed the presidency and now should be arrested for treason and illegally spying on the Trump White House, and no matter what your eyes and brain tell you, he is not as mentally and physically healthy as I am.
Beginning in the early 1950s, real science, as opposed to the fraudulent versions embraced by Epstein and Trump, was able to make life-changing breakthroughs as a result of access to what became known as HeLa cells. Those cells would be responsible for understanding and creating vaccines and treatment for polio, cancer, HPV, Parkinson’s, measles, HIV, mumps, Zika, and Covid-19, among other diseases. They would lead to the creation of the field of virology. It is highly unlikely (and would likely have been mortifying) that either Epstein knew, or Trump knows, that those cells came from an African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks. They were cynically named HeLa, combining the first two letters of her first and last names.
In 1951, when she was admitted to Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore, deadly ill with cervical cancer, cell tissues were taken from her body without her or her family’s permission. That unethical theft—legal at the time—would lead to countless billions in profits for pharmaceutical corporations. After the publication of Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks in 2010, her story became well-known and family-initiated lawsuits proceeded. In 2023, the family reached a settlement with Thermo Fisher Scientific, and, in February 2026, another settlement with Novartis, a Switzerland-based pharmaceutical mammoth.
Trump is easily the most intellectually incurious, ill-informed, unread, vacuous, and petulant president in US history. He will never acknowledge—or even understand—that his rise to power was not due to his having any extraordinary talents, skills, or genetically based genius. It was, without qualification, the result of a lifetime of perpetual race, gender, and class privilege.
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Trump Gives Eugenic Vibes Ranting Against 'Genetics' of 'Sick' Muslim Immigrants
"He's a white supremacist," said one critic. "He doesn't hide it."
Mar 13, 2026
US President Donald Trump was accused Friday of espousing white supremacist ideology after he blamed the "genetics" of Muslim immigrants who commit crimes like Thursday's assault on a Michigan synagogue, while calling for their exclusion from the United States.
"Well, it's been going on for a long time. It's a disgrace. They're sick, they're really demented people," Trump said during a call-in interview with Fox News Radio host Brian Kilmeade. "They come into the country, they sneak in."
Trump was responding to a question about recent attacks by people who happen to be Muslims, including Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, who was stabbed to death by a cadet at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia after fatally shooting instructor Lt. Col. Brandon Shah, and Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, who was shot dead by security guards at the Temple Israel synagogue in West Bloomfield Township, Michigan after crashing his vehicle into the building.
Neither Jalloh nor Ghazali "snuck" into the country. Both were naturalized US citizens. Jalloh, originally from Sierra Leone, was a former National Guardsman. Ghazali had recently lost two of his brothers and other relatives to an Israeli airstrike in his native Lebanon.
"They’re sick people, and a lot of them were let in here. They shouldn’t have been let in," Trump told Kilmeade. "Others are just bad. They go bad. Something wrong—there’s something wrong there. The genetics are not exactly, they’re not exactly your genetics."
Trump has made many racist statements and has occasionally invoked what critics say is the language of eugenics, a debunked pseudoscience embraced by many white supremacists. He has also boasted about his own "much better blood."
While running for reelection, Trump echoed Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler's screed against "poisoning" by an "influx of foreign blood," declaring during a December 2023 campaign rally in New Hampshire that undocumented immigrants are "poisoning the blood" of the country.
"Trump is an old-school eugenicist nativist. He actually is fine with immigrants as long as they have the right 'genes,'" said David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, in response to Friday's interview. "This argument was the basis of the creation of the restrictive US immigration system 100 years ago."
Trump has previously said that he wants more immigrants from countries like Norway and not from what he called "shithole" nations in the Global South. His second administration has effectively ended refugee admissions—with the notable exception of white South Africans, the only people in the world allowed into the United States as refugees since last October, according to US Department of State data.
Progressive journalist Alex Cole said on X: "Imagine being the grandson of immigrants—who dyes his hair, paints his face orange, and wears lifts—lecturing the country about 'genetics.' The irony writes itself."
Trump's political rise began with his promotion of the racist "birther" conspiracy theory falsely positing that then-President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. He launched his 2016 presidential campaign by calling Mexican immigrants "rapists."
Once in office, Trump enacted a series of restrictions and outright bans on immigration from nations with Muslim majorities.
"He's a white supremacist," journalist Mehdi Hasan wrote Friday on X. "He doesn't hide it."
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New Leader of College GOP Group is ‘Avowed and Overt Supporter’ of White Nationalist Nick Fuentes
A recent poll of young right-wingers also showed that 54% of Republican men under 50 deny the Holocaust, while around a third of young Republicans self-identify as racist.
Mar 11, 2026
The new political leader of the College Republicans of America is an "avowed and overt supporter" of one of the nation's most infamous white nationalists, Nick Fuentes, according to a disturbing report compiled by the group Right Wing Watch.
The College Republicans of America (CRA) was created in 2023 amid an ugly split with the more mainstream College Republican National Committee (CRNC), which it has accused of becoming overly bureaucratic and poorly managed. It describes its mission to "replace the CRNC and to aid the GOP in cultivating the next generation of Republican activists, staffers, and leaders."
While CRA is newer and less directly embedded within the national Republican Party structure, it claims to be "America’s largest national College Republican organization,” with more than 300 active chapters at schools around the country—roughly four times that of competing campus GOP groups, according to the organization.
Last week, the group announced that it had chosen a new political director, Kai Schwemmer. As Kyle Mantyla, a senior fellow at Right Wing Watch parent group People For the American Way, explained:
Schwemmer is an overt 'groyper,' which is the term used by followers of Hitler-loving racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, homophobic, Christian nationalist, fascist, white nationalist, Nick Fuentes.
Schwemmer, who goes by the nickname "Kai Clips," has his own show on Fuentes' invitation-only streaming platform Cozy.TV, and was featured as a special guest at Fuentes' 2022 "America First Political Action Conference" in Orlando, which was held as a more explicitly white nationalist counter to the Turning Point USA conference.
That same year, Schwemmer described himself as someone "affiliated with America First," Fuentes's political movement. He also appeared in a 2022 pro-Fuentes documentary titled "The Most Canceled Man in America."
In a clip of that documentary, which Right Wing Watch posted to social media, Schwemmer explained that an episode of Fuentes' nightly program, titled "Demographics or Destiny," introduced him to the conservative movement and "woke me up on immigration."
Fuentes, who once described himself as "just like Hitler," has called for the mass deportation of nonwhite immigrants and has said he favors a "whites-only immigration policy" to sustain "white demographics."
Schwemmer said Fuentes' shows are "a little bit controversial" and "hyperbolic," but "obviously humorous." He added that Fuentes is "deeply politically engaging," as "behind every joke is some commentary."
Ben Lorber, an extremism researcher for Political Research Associates, explained in a social media post on Tuesday that "Schwemmer was in Fuentes' inner circle in 2021, and since then has strategically downplayed his support to avoid controversy."
He pointed out that Schwemmer still has a long history of questionable online activity, including posts and messages glorifying the Unabomber and boasting about his meeting with the antisemitic author E. Michael Jones. He has also shared jokes insulting Jewish people and mocking the Holocaust.
During the second presidency of Donald Trump, especially, the radicalization of young right-wingers has been brought to the forefront, as leaked group chats from college Republicans in several states—including New York, Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont have revealed members trafficking in overt racism, antisemitism, misogyny, and other forms of vile bigotry that often veered into calls for violence and genocide against minority groups.
Just last week, The Floridian reported that the secretary of the Miami-Dade County Republican Party was involved in a WhatsApp group chat nicknamed after what one member described as “Nazi heaven.”
Participants in the group, which included members of the head of the Florida International University Turning Point USA chapter and the then-recruitment chair of FIU's college Republicans, "used variations of the n-word more than 400 times, regularly described women as 'whores,' used slurs to talk about Jewish and gay people, and mused about Hitler’s politics," according to later reporting by The Miami Herald.
Recent polling of young right-wingers conducted by the conservative Manhattan Institute has suggested that these sorts of views are increasingly becoming common.
About 31% of Republicans under the age of 50 said they themselves express racist views, while 25% said they express antisemitic views. Just 4% of those over 50 said they expressed each of these views in the December 2025 survey.
More than a third of all Republicans who answered the survey, 37%, said they share Fuentes' view that the Holocaust was "greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe," with a majority of men under 50, 54%, expressing this view.
Schwemmer, who appeared as a guest of Rep. Burgess Owens (R-Utah) at last month's State of the Union address has said he does not use the same sorts of extremist, often overtly genocidal, rhetoric that Fuentes does because he has "more authentic political aspirations" and does not want to create "angles of attack" for his opponents.
Schwemmer has not denounced the views espoused by Fuentes and says there is "absolutely a place and a value behind making those kinds of jokes, saying those kinds of words, trying to push the envelope socially and trying to remove the lens of political correctness from our lives."
"This seems to be Schwemmer's role in the movement," Mantyla said. "Putting a moderate face on America First's racist, antisemitic, and radically authoritarian agenda."
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