Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free
Your guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the world
The writer is author of ‘Hayek’s Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right’
Since the full scope of Nazi crimes was revealed, eugenics has fallen deeply out of fashion. Yet if the term has become taboo, some of the practices associated with it have not. Today we are witnessing the emergence of what could be called libertarian eugenics.
Eugenics has always had two sides, positive and negative — not in the moral sense, but rather in terms of the distinction between measures designed to encourage the birth and flourishing of some people and those meant to limit or prevent the reproduction of others. Prenatal genetic screening, for instance, once rare but now routine, functions as a kind of positive eugenic tool.
What was once the prerogative of states has become a kind of consumer-side eugenics, enabled by private service providers. Startups like Orchid Health and Manhattan Genomics, founded by Thiel Fellowship alumni, and others like TMRW and Nucleus funded by Donald Trump adviser and financier Peter Thiel, embody this shift. Orchid sells polygenic risk scores for embryos, promising to minimise disease and optimise desirable traits. Its clients include Elon Musk and Shivon Zilis, the mother of four of his children. Investors such as Delian Asparouhov of Founders Fund brush off the stigma of eugenics: “When you choose your married partner,” he said, “you’re using a form of eugenics.”
A researcher working with another genetics start-up which claimed to be able to screen embryos for intelligence, defiantly laid claim to the mantle of “liberal eugenics”, saying that “parents should be free and maybe even encouraged to use technology to improve their children’s prospects”.
As David Friedman — Milton Friedman’s son and a leading libertarian theorist — once observed, the dream of the “designer kid” runs deep in libertarian thought, dating back to the science fiction of Robert Heinlein. Today, advances in gene editing combine with a pronatalist and deregulatory agenda — the Trump administration’s February executive order easing access to IVF among them — to make that dream materially possible.
Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong has called for the creation of what he calls a “Gattaca stack” to “accelerate evolution”, citing the 1990s film that featured engineered future humans. Along with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Armstrong has invested in an embryo editing start-up called Preventive which is seeking locations where it can operate legally.
The Make America Healthy Again wing of the Trump coalition, represented by figures like Robert F Kennedy Jr, edges towards something that resembles libertarian eugenics by another path. By delegitimising mainstream expertise, dismantling vaccine mandates and curbing the authority of public health agencies, it transfers responsibility for health and survival to private individuals. Childhood vaccine exemptions hit a record high in 2025 alongside outbreaks of preventable diseases like measles. The predictable outcome is that those with resources and education will thrive, while those without will fall further behind.
A third way that libertarian eugenics operates is through immigration policy. One of the most important figures in the blending of a rehabilitated race science and libertarian politics is the thinker and political scientist Charles Murray. Since the publication of his co-authored blockbuster The Bell Curve in 1994, he has been working on proposals for reversing what he calls the dysgenesis, or genetic decline, of the population in ways that are consistent with his libertarian principles.
Like many on the American right, Murray sees the interventionist state of the post-Great Society era as having squandered resources and misaligned incentives in such a way that those less intelligent and less genetically fit are being subsidised to reproduce, while those more fit are being kept out of leadership positions for reasons of affirmative action and the remedying of racial inequality. Murray advocates a low-cost filter: immigration policy based on national IQ averages. In 2006, he proposed admitting fewer people from countries with “low-job-skill populations”, where, in his view, IQ tends to be lower.
The Trump administration’s recent refugee policy echoes this logic. The annual refugee cap has been slashed to 7,500, far below historical norms, while an exception has been carved out for white South Africans, justified through the false narrative of a “white genocide” promoted by Musk and embraced by Trump.
All told, the picture is one of a consistent, if unacknowledged, libertarian eugenics. The high-tech fertility market privileges those able to pay for genetic advantage. The retreat of public health abandons the social minimum needed to ensure that all children can survive and thrive. And immigration policy redraws the body politic along racial lines, achieving by exclusion what mid-century welfare states once sought through inclusion.
What emerges is not a paradox but a 21st-century return of social Darwinism, wrapped in a language of choice, freedom and national greatness.