Better not tell him National Socialist Germany's eugenics idea came from American progressives.

https://archive.ph/I4iHP https://lawliberty.org/eugenics-american-progressivism-and-the-german-idea-of-the-state/

 JANUARY 31, 2013

+Eugenics, American Progressivism, and the ‘German Idea of the State’

tiffany jones miller

Both the letter, and especially the enforcement, of the Nazi sterilization law went well beyond existing American precedents.  Nevertheless, as historian Jonathan Spiro notes, the Nazi statute was “quite consciously based on the model sterilization law of Harry H. Laughlin and the American Eugenics Society,” a connection readily recognized by American eugenicists.[3] The Eugenical News, a publication closely tied to Laughlin’s Eugenics Record Office, proudly proclaimed its paternity:

Doubtless the legislative and court history of the experimental sterilization laws in 27 states of the American union provided the experience which Germany used in writing her new national sterilization statute. To one versed in the history of eugenical sterilization in America, the text of the German statute reads almost like the ‘American model sterilization law.'[4]

The extensive scholarly exchange and admiration between leading American eugenicists, e.g. Madison Grant and Harry Laughlin, and the men who became the leading advocates, architects and administrators of the Nazis’ “racial hygiene” program, has been very well-documented, even if it is not particularly well known.[5]  What is even less well known is that the American eugenics movement not only flourished during the Progressive Era, but was especially influential “under reformist state administrations,” including in the state of Wisconsin, the very beacon of progressive reform.[6]  “[I]t is evident,” as historian Rudolph J. Vecoli concludes in a study of the origins of Wisconsin’s sterilization law,

that sterilization was a Progressive measure. . . .  it was taken up and agitated by reform groups and organizations, it was advocated by Progressive leaders and publications; and it was enacted by a Progressive legislature and administration.[7]