This writer’s expression, “bluegrass genocide,” is a marvel of imagery, simplicity, and power. Nowhere to be found on the internet (till now), the term lashes an arcadian adjective to a dystopian noun. Just two words and five syllables describe a sweeping saga, imparting both sense of place and sense of horror. It starkly captures the inhumanity that, for the better part of the last century, exerted a vice grip over science, medicine, culture, politics, journalism, and public policy—the notion that experts are entitled to play God with lives in pursuit of their favored social goals. The writer’s addition of “quiet”—”a quiet Bluegrass Genocide”—makes the events described all the more vile.

Sometimes, the word “genocide” is used in a hyperbolic and, in my view, inappropriate ways, but here, the term is more than apt. For linguistic sticklers (like me), the word “genocide” was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish legal scholar, to describe the systematic murder and exile of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire and Jews under Nazi Germany. But the word also applied to smaller, more subtle, events. Lemkin was a moving force behind the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention. That document defined genocide as any of five acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” with one of those acts being, “Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” …

I’m from Virginia, and I know how my state’s government, dominated by ostentatiously inbred elites, sent swarms of public health practitioners and social workers into the Blue Ridge and Allegheny Mountains to round up and sterilize those they considered unworthy.