Nordics, Not “Shithole Countries”
How American eugenics shaped U.S. immigration policy for decades, inspired Hitler, and paved the way for Trump, Musk and Miller.
Over the last 24 hours, three of the most prominent members of the extended Trump regime have alluded to the idea of allowing more people to immigrate to America from Northern European countries—otherwise known as Nordics. By contrast, they want to reverse migration for people from what Trump called “shithole countries.”
This rhetoric is based on a century-old racist myth called Nordicism promoted by American eugenicists—and embraced by Adolf Hitler. But Nordicism was not a fringe movement—it represented the underlying pseudoscience that shaped U.S. immigration policy from 1924 until 1965.
The Trump regime wants to bring it back.
Musk: What About the “Nordic-Germans”?
On Tuesday morning, Elon Musk—the most prolific promoter of white supremacy in the world—bemoaned the fact that Somalis have allegedly replaced a “primarily Nordic-German” area in Minnesota—and have the temerity to vote.
Later in the day, signaling the official reunion of Elon Musk and the Trump regime after a rough patch, Stephen Miller’s wife Katie interviewed Musk, who noted without a trace of self-awareness that Minnesota “is really far from Somalia”—despite Musk being an African immigrant himself.
“I’m like, actually, well, let’s look at Ilhan Omar, who was literally voted into power, voted into Congress, by a large group of people from Somalia, who are in Minnesota, which is really far from Somalia, or Mamdani, who was voted as to be mayor. But by a majority of people who are not born in America, That’s my understanding at least. So, and then California is a big time situation. So I don’t know if we’re just going to turn it to a communist hell hole, basically.”
Somalis constitute less than 2% of Minnesota’s population.
“Shithole Countries”
In 2018, Donald Trump denied he said Haiti and African nations are “shithole countries”—and that he asked why we can’t have more immigrants from Norway.
In 2025, however, Trump has no problem saying the quiet parts. At a speech that was ostensibly about the affordability crisis on Tuesday night, Trump rambled for 90 minutes about everything except the real economy—and included a racist diatribe about encouraging immigrants from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark instead of “shithole countries.”
“I say, Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few? Let’s have a few from Denmark, you mind sending us to be a people, send us some nice people, you mind. But we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.”
Were it just Trump and Musk reviving Nordicism on the same day, you could argue this was merely a coincidence among fellow racists.
“Part of Europe”
But Tuesday night on Fox News, Stephen Miller made clear where this new Nordic meme was coming from. In a clearly planted question, Will Cain asked Miller whether the United States should return to the racist policies of the Immigration Act of 1924. Miller readily agreed and explained why.
“So the 1924 Act is such a good example because so we had large immigration from Europe, from 1880 to 1920… we went from a country that had immigration from part of Europe to immigration from many other parts of Europe. But even other European countries pose enormous stresses on the US system both economically and in terms of security. There’s a lot of crime, a lot of threats to public safety and order, and those who are addressed with very strict immigration quotas.”
When Miller says we had immigration from “one part of Europe,” he means Anglo-Saxons, and Scandinavians—aka Nordics. When he says “many other parts of Europe,” he means Italians, Slavs, Jews and other Eastern and Southern Europeans—people who were often brutally discriminated against with the same dehumanizing rhetoric now being deployed against Haitians, Somalis, and other so-called “garbage.”
Tellingly, as a Jew, Miller doesn’t push back on the myth that Eastern and Southern European immigrants—who might have included his own family—were the cause of “a lot of crime, threats to public safety and order.” Instead he embraces the idea as his own.
It’s worth understanding where this myth came from—and where it finally led.
Madison Grant and Hitler’s “Bible”
In 1916, prominent New York conservationist, zoologist, and anthropologist Madison Grant wrote The Passing of the Great Race (PDF) a pseudoscientific, profoundly racist book promoting his theory of Nordicism. Grant believed that Western and Northern Europeans are the “great” or, as he coined it, the “master race” from which all other parts of humanity are derived—and have, to varying degrees, degenerated.
Grant’s book became one of the most influential racist tracts of his generation and was a cornerstone of the burgeoning early 20th-century American eugenics movement. Grant was personal friends with several presidents, including Theodore Roosevelt with whom he shared a love of nature, and Calvin Coolidge who went on to ratify Grant’s ideas into U.S. immigration law.
“The danger is from within and not from without. Neither the black, nor the brown, nor the yellow, nor the red will conquer the white in battle. But if the valuable elements in the Nordic race mix with inferior strains or die out through race suicide, then the citadel of civilization will fall for mere lack of defenders.“
—The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant (1916)
American Eugenics
One of the most significant collective amnesias of American history is the size, scope and influence of the eugenics movement. The fraud of “scientific racism” governed much of U.S. policy for decades. It was Grant himself who helped author the signature achievement of the eugenics movement—the Immigration Act of 1924 (PDF).
The law, as Stephen Miller noted, essentially froze immigration from non-Nordic countries by putting quotas on immigrants based on the 1890 Census, 34 years prior—when the population was more homogeneous. Asians were banned from immigration entirely.
But it was not just the American government who was inspired by Madison Grant and his cohorts in the eugenics movement. There was a meeting of the minds between the Nazis—including Hitler himself—and the American eugenicists. After WWI, the collaboration between the rising National Socialist movement in Germany and American eugenicists was deep and wide—and continued in earnest all the way up until the start of WWII.
Notably, the Supreme Court found nothing wrong with eugenics policies.
“The principle that sustained compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover the cutting of Fallopian tubes.”
Madison Grant died in 1937, before being forced to witness what his racist pseudoscience had metastasized into—but not before receiving a letter from Hitler calling The Passing of the Great Race “my Bible.”
Importantly, these ideas did not stop after WWII. To the contrary, these racist beliefs persisted both in America, and in the Nazi diaspora, many of whom helped shape the Republican Party after the 1965 Civil Rights Act effectively reversed the Immigration Act of 1924.
For those interested—recommended reading:
THE NAZI CONNECTION: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (2002) by Stefan Kuhl (PDF)
Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party by Russ Bellant (1990) (PDF)
New Nazis, Old Ideas
The coordinated revival of racist mythology and pseudoscience to promote American policy is not a sign of either a healthy or a confident government. Whether it’s trying to revive Grant’s Nordicism or the pseudoscience of The Bell Curve, pulling these ideas out of the historical gutter is the sign of a struggling fascist regime resorting to more and more drastic propaganda to keep its base happy.
There is a well-known phenomenon in political science called the Dictator’s Dilemma in which a regime becomes so totalitarian that its drive to validate its own propaganda—whether it believes it or not—leads to harmful decisions, which in turn lead to a need for more drastic propaganda, and so on.
Regimes like Idi Amin, Muammar Qaddafi, and Saddam Hussein’s suffered from this problem, and ultimately fell as a result of their disconnection from reality. America is not Uganda, Libya, or Iraq—although the government certainly is trying. But while the bottom is nowhere in sight, the will of the American people to fight back seems nowhere near exhausted.
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Want proof of Republican stupidity? If they abolish abortion, they lose an opportunity to reduce the dilution of their Nordic super race. Or are they as stupid as Hitler was? He enslaved many non-Aryans but quickly worked them to death, and he exterminated the rest after destroying their jobs. All that good slave labor lost! Elon Musk is definitely too stupid to correct those errors. He'll opt for the death camps too, or put them on little boats and let Pete take care of them.
Hahahaha, as if Danes, Swedes and Norwegians would actually emigrate Hippo Don's America. They don't. I know for a fact that they despise Hippo Don. And Nazi soluter Musk.
As do my fellow country men and women.
Also, Hippo Don suddenly, conveniently forgets that Denmark, Sweden and Norway are very much multicultural societies these days.
Wouldn't it be hilarious if scores of Swedes, Danes and Norwegians of Arab descent lined up to apply for US citizenship, holding up their Nordic passports?