Richard Weikart and Hank Hanegraaff Talk Darwinian Racism
On today’s ID the Future, radio host Hank Hanegraaff interviews historian and Center for Science and Culture senior fellow Richard Weikart about his book, Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism. The two look at how Darwinism fueled scientific racism and an aggressive and frequently racist eugenics movement not just in Nazi Germany but, earlier, in the United States, where many leading, even mainstream voices, including Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, top business magnates, and some liberal Protestants enamored of evolutionary theory pushed compulsory sterilization laws, which were passed in Indiana, California, and other states. Weikart shows how these laws were fueled and informed by ideas laid out in Darwin’s The Descent of Man, ideas that also came to influence Adolf Hitler, the Nazis, and contemporary white nationalists here in the United States. The conversation then turns to Karl Marx, Marx’s attack on religion, and how Marx’s environmental determinism differed from Hitler’s biological determinism. To delve deeper into these important chapters of modern history, material frequently ignored in surveys of nineteenth and twentieth-century US and European history, get your copy of Weikart’s new book, Darwinian Racism.