One of the things that's catching up with today's Progressives is that their Progressive American forebears were horrible racists.  Just in the past two days, Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club have felt compelled to disavow their founders, Margaret Sanger and John Muir, having finally accepted what conservatives have always known: both were racists, and Sanger was a eugenicist.

A little history is in order here.  The early Progressive movement in England and America, the one dating back to the turn of the last century, was built around the idea that mankind could be perfected if the members of the intelligentsia just put their collective minds to the task. Some of their ideas were genuinely humanist, such as fighting pollution, limiting corporate monopolies, and helping alleviate the squalor of American slums.

Other ideas, though, were appalling derivations of Darwin's ideas, with "Survival of the Fittest" mutating into "white people are superior to all other races."  After all, late 19th- and early 20th-century white, college-educated leftists, looking at England's and America's dominance around the world, felt compelled to conclude that people of Anglo-Saxon stock were the world's fittest people.  Therefore, perfectibility meant more Anglo-Saxons and fewer everybody else — especially blacks, Jews, and members of other "darker-skinned" races.

And so modern racism and its genocidal stepchild, eugenics, were born.  Eugenics took racism one step farther by arguing that selective breeding among Anglo-Saxon whites (preferably Protestants), and sterilization and abortion among all the other races, would result in a racial purity that would usher in a perfect world.  Likewise, eugenicists encouraged killing any imperfect specimens from the white race.

America's and England's Progressives didn't get their ideas from Hitler; they gave their ideas to Hitler.  He was both impressed and inspired by the racial laws that American Progressives (all of whom had a home in the Democrat party) had succeeded in enacting across large parts of America.

For eugenicists, Hitler, before he got really out of control, was a good thing.  Here's famed playwright George Bernard Shaw praising Hitler's eugenic policies:

Two of the pre-eminent Progressives in early 20th-century America were Margaret Sanger, famed for founding what would become Planned Parenthood, and John Muir, an early environmentalist who helped preserve Yosemite Valley and Sequoia National Park, and who helped found the Sierra Club.  The Sierra Club is one of America's most respected national conservation (and hard left) organizations.  Both Sanger and Muir were open in their belief that the white race was the best; the others were subnormal; and, in Sanger's case, that the other races needed scientific pruning.

Pro-life people have been pointing out for decades that Margaret Sanger promoted birth control and abortion in significant part to decrease non-white populations.  To this day, Planned Parenthood outlets are most common in poor (especially poor minority) communities.

Faced with its founder's ugly views, a Planned Parenthood in New York has reached a decision.  It isn't about to stop encouraging black and Hispanic women to abort their babies.  Instead, it's just going to make Sanger go away:

Planned Parenthood of Greater New York will remove the name of Margaret Sanger, a founder of the national organization, from its Manhattan health clinic because of her "harmful connections to the eugenics movement," the group said on Tuesday.

[snip]

"The removal of Margaret Sanger's name from our building is both a necessary and overdue step to reckon with our legacy and acknowledge Planned Parenthood's contributions to historical reproductive harm within communities of color," Karen Seltzer, the chair of the New York affiliate's board, said in a statement.

The Sierra Club is having a similar reckoning, although it's just trying to clean up Muir's reputation rather than jettisoning him entirely:

[O]n Wednesday, the organization's president, Michael Brune, said it was time for some "truth telling" about Muir, a founder of the environmental organization, and his racist views and the white supremacist beliefs of its original members.

Muir "made derogatory comments about Black people and Indigenous peoples that drew on deeply harmful racist stereotypes, though his views evolved later in his life," Brune wrote in a post on the club's website. "As the most iconic figure in Sierra Club history, Muir's words and actions carry an especially heavy weight. They continue to hurt and alienate Indigenous people and people of color who come into contact with the Sierra Club."

It would be amusing watching leftists scrub their racist history but for two things: one, they're still indescribably racist, only this time they hate whites, not blacks (and they still, as always, hate the Jews).  Two, once they're done purifying themselves, they're coming for the rest of us.