William Happer

Climate was only the most recent.

Well, for example, there was the eugenics movement in America and Britain and Western Europe where the claim was that the great gene pool of the Anglo-Saxon race was being diluted by all these low-Q Italians and Eastern European Jews and Chinamen.

It was all completely nonsense, but they had –

learned journals where you could publish an article that proved that and you had the presidents of Harvard and Stanford and Princeton, Alexander Graham Bell being great eugenicist, you know, protecting the American genome and it was all nonsense.

It was just complete bullshit.

And yet – and the only thing that stopped it really was the Nazis because they took it over with a vengeance.

They were big fans of the eugenics movement in America and Britain.

And they took it to its absurd extreme.

That's getting to the heart of the problem.

Joe says this famous quote by Immanuel Kant.

You know, from the crooked timber of mankind, no straight thing was ever made.

That goes for science as well as every other aspect of human society.

Right, right.

We'd have been a much poorer country because so many leading Americans, you know, creative, productive people have immigrated, you know, fairly recently.

Dick has often made the point, which I agree with, that politicians and sort of society leaders are the worst in situations like this.

The ordinary person is often a little bit more skeptical and more reasonable.

So, for example, I like to tease Dick because he's a Harvard grad about the Salem witch trials.

Yeah.

They were orchestrated by people from Harvard.

It was not the common people.