“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” – George Orwell
The term “intellectual moron” may seem like an oxymoron, but someone with a highly developed mind that cedes all reason to their political ideology is hardly unusual these days. When intellectuals believe their expertise in one area naturally extends to all other areas, intelligence becomes arrogant. And this brimming sense of superiority has bred a plethora of ~isms: feminism, environmentalism, racism, sexism, and you-name-it-ism. One leading thinker, in particular, gained prominence in the area of women’s rights and feminism despite some very troubling beliefs.
Margaret Sanger, born in 1879, was raised a socialist and was a member of the Wobblies, a socialist-fronted union movement. She was deeply involved in eugenics and committed to creating a purer race, one that looked more like her. She spoke at a KKK rally in 1926 while leading a race betterment movement. She called for sterilization, segregation, and abortion to attain her thoroughbred race. In a speech in 1932 called “A Plan for Peace”, Sanger even romantically imagined farmland where the useless would work in labor camps. These concentration camps, she mused, would house 1 out of every 7 Americans, or nearly 15 percent of the population!
Her feminist views and promotion of birth control were on full display in a newsletter called “The Woman Rebel” which she started in 1914. With the tagline, “No Gods, No Masters”, Sanger hoped to lead a new generation of feminists with her advocacy of voluntary motherhood and empowerment for women. In 1927, another magazine, “The Birth Control Review”, included the following articles by Sanger herself, “Birth Control and Race Betterment” in 1919, and “The Eugenics Value of Birth Control” in 1921. Margaret Sanger used terms like human weeds, human waste, dysgenic, and defective stock when referring to the poor and downtrodden. She thought the poor were poor because they were unfit. Sanger had a particular hatred for Catholics, whom she condemned for their excessive breeding and the dangerous view that the mentally challenged, the handicapped, and the sickly, were God’s people, too.
Publicly, Sanger used population control as a cover for her eugenics campaign. During a 1957 Mike Wallace interview, she scoffed at the idea that the world could feed the current population over the next 50 years, even if it grew by an additional thirty percent. Yet, the population more than doubled from 3 billion in 1960 to 6.675 billion by 2007. At the same time, by every imaginable standard, poverty rates dropped. And despite a mountain of evidence, population control remains the stubborn rallying cry from the intelligentsia to this very day.
Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in Manhattan in 1916, mostly to rein in the birth of undesirables. Specifically targeting blacks for both sterilization and birth control, she called for sound breeding to increase the general intelligence of the population, or to tidy the gene pool, if you will. Sanger is also credited with the opening of Planned Parenthood while recruiting prominent blacks to lend credibility to the extermination of black lives, including MLK, Jr., who was the recipient of the first annual Margaret Sanger Award in 1966. Even today, 36 percent of abortions are by black women, the highest ratio of any racial group. Nearly 80 percent of all Planned Parenthood Clinics are also located in minority neighborhoods, and in some predominately black areas, like Washington DC, there are more abortions than live births. Both eugenics and abortion have been wildly successful in curtailing the growth of minority populations.
In Daniel J. Flynn’s 2004 book, “Intellectual Morons”, Flynn answers the question of why so many embarrassing theories and beliefs come from the halls of academia, the media, and political elites. The answer is ideology. These joiners squander their giftedness to groupthink, desperate to please their party politics. Further, these dangerous ideas become institutionalized as truth and are difficult to reverse, even when facts and logic reveal their folly.
One of the best antidotes to the indoctrination of these political purveyors is knowledge, debate, and a return to a tolerance of alternative opinion. Restoring our college campuses to a place of openness and deliberation is a good start. We need to redevelop the art of critical thinking, by teaching how to think and not merely what to think, which has been absent from our education system for decades. As the United Negro College Fund’s update slogan suggests, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste…but a wonderful thing to invest in.”
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