“The pictures of the world’s wealthiest man killing the poorest children in the world aren’t pretty kids,” Microsoft founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates said of Elon Musk in an interview with the Financial Times earlier this month. Gates indirectly referenced the role of masks in blocking federal agency aid (USAID) to International Development Assistance (USAID), which has been directed to global poverty reduction and decades of eradicating disease. That is until President Donald Trump’s unofficial Office of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led accusations in February of dismantling USAID. “And unless we turn it around very quickly, it’s going to kill over a million children around the world,” Gates said in a late show interview with Stephen Colbert, expanding his Financial Times comments.
Despite Gates and others may think, the disdain for the human life of the mask is not limited to his role in leading the Doge. This is not just a musk way of thinking. Trump has deployed a group of old Eugeneists and new eugenists in his administration’s relationship with billionaires. Some of these major men believe in a philosophy known as long-termism. For humanity to survive and spread itself throughout the galaxy in the trillions of the future, men like them must pilot the roads. Because they must make the tough decision to allow a considerable number of people in the present to die in order to protect this distant future. And with Trump, men like Musk are leading us in eugenicists and long-term ways, leaving us in millions of real or potential dangers.
Perhaps a major example of old-style eugenicist thinking on Trump’s orbit is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., currently the US secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). There are two positions he holds publicly, and it really shows that Kennedy is a 20th century eugenicist. One is his long-standing attitude towards vaccines, particularly MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella). In the 1990s, a small number of scientists once claimed that MMR was the cause of an increase in the frequency of doctors diagnosed with autism. Despite many studies refuting these claims, anti-vaxin advocates like Kennedy continue to undermine public confidence in vaccine programs. “They took a shot, and that night they had a fever of 100 and 3, they went to sleep, and after three months their brains were gone. This is the Holocaust, and what is this doing to our country,” Kennedy said of MMR’s 2015 belief that it could cause autism. He later apologized for the aggressive use of autism compared to the Holocaust.
The other is his meritocracy, wrapped around like racism. In April, Kennedy denounced the prevalence of increased autism in the United States as “destroying families” and said, “We’ve regressed to autism… we’ll never pay taxes, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write poetry, they’ll never write dates.
Kennedy refuses to believe data that autism is not spreading like an illness, but instead society has the tools to more easily identify people who exist socially and neurologically. Similarly, in 2023, Kennedy spread rumors of a capable, racist and conspiratorial anti-vaccine in nature. “Covid-19 is intended to attack whites and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese,” Kennedy said in a video in July 2023 during a fundraiser for the 2024 presidential election. It’s not just that there’s no evidence of a conspiracy to infect certain white and black people with Covid. There is no evidence to suggest that certain groups are not affected by the disease. Kennedy’s racism is clearly anti-Semitic in nature.
Earlier this month, Kennedy announced that Medicaid and Medicare had allowed personal data to be shared with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by September to “reveal the root cause of autism” (reveal preventable diseases). Beyond his other statements, the decision would interfere with the work of eugenicists of the last century. However, state governments in the US and fascist governments like the Nazis use such lists to institutionalize people with autism and other disabilities in society. In the US, sterilization is a method used to protect population gene pools from contamination, and Nazi Germany famously used euthanasia. Obviously, Kennedy is an old-style anti-vaccine, competent and racist eugenicist.
However, the new eugenics of the 21st century are long-term. Long-termism is actually a 21st century version of the “survival of the fittest” of social Darwinism and the eugenics movements it created. Long-termism is not about maintaining the Master White Race. However, long-termism also works well within eugenics sandboxes. Longtermism’s supporters work to save humanity from extinction by making humans better and making better humans. However, this “better” comes with two precautions. One is an effective altruist who says, for example, white men such as Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos, are suitable to act on behalf of future humanity. The second requires that the use of planetary resources be decided about the entire class of people whose use of human resources could lead to an end-of-manise. Billions of present humans may ultimately be sacrificed to save humanity’s distant future.
Musk expressed his fundamental belief in who deserves to live and die in a three-hour interview with the Joe Rogan Podcast in February. “So we are making civilized suicide empathy… The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. Exploitation of empathy. They are exploiting the bugs of Western civilization. According to Musk, if “they” “do not sympathize with the whole civilization, “they” have committed themselves “to civilization suicide.” Their musk and logans include undocumented immigrants, white liberals and progressives, Democrats, and LGBTQIA Folx.
There are other like-minded long-termists in the Trump world, including tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who believes Social Security is an “intergenerational Ponzi plan.” Tiels nods to the masked dog work opposed to providing social welfare to older people, a signal that the Trump administration is developing age-rich, competent policies in the name of reducing wasteful spending. Policies that could kill many elderly people and Americans with disabilities.
Along with Trump, Kennedy and Musk made the most of their levels to remake the federal government with their own eugenicist image. Since assuming his post in mid-February, Kennedy has acted in connection with mask Doge in blocking funding for HHS, NIH and other programs on vaccination, illness, epidemic prevention, and cancer research. Essentially, there is an order of gags that prevents disease control officials from discussing the spreading of avian flu strains among animals and humans working in the poultry industry. When the May 14th Congressional hearing was reported about his job as a secretary of HHS, Kennedy admitted in 2025 that he would “probably be vaccinated for ‘measles’. However, at the same hearing, Kennedy once again threw hints on his competent attitude towards people with autism. This is among the worst measles outbreaks in the United States, particularly Texas, in the past 50 years. So far, there have been more than 1,000 cases, mainly with unvaccinated children, of which two have died.
This new commitment to limiting federal resources dedicated to the health and safety of all Americans has eugenics and long-termism that is written all of it. Musk and Kennedy’s work in particular undermines the federal government’s role in public opinion. Their belief that people with physical and intellectual disabilities (especially those with older adults or autism) are the drainage of economic resources is all part of the view that many Americans are exhausted to the point of death.
The views expressed in this article are the authors themselves and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.