The Groups
In the world of 'academic racism,' four groups play leading roles.
Ideology and strategic arguments from the radical right are produced by hundreds of groups and individuals around the country. However, only a small number actually function as real think tanks, and an even smaller number are influential, even on the extreme right. The four groups profiled below, including one that was just formed last fall, may be the most important. They are also each associated with individuals who became involved in the recent dispute over anti-Semitism on the radical right. Each has said it opposes anti-Semitism, or at least anti-Semitism in its crudest forms (each of them also pushes the work of Kevin MacDonald, an academic who criticizes Jews in somewhat softer terms than most anti-Semites). One of them, the Pioneer Fund, has financially backed the racist research of many individuals associated with the other groups. All four organizations are listed as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Charles Martel Society/The Occidental Quarterly
Founded in 2001 by Chicago millionaire publishing scion William H. Regnery, the Charles Martel Society puts out The Occidental Quarterly, a journal devoted to the idea that "race informs culture" that is edited by a Who's Who of the radical right. Its chief editor is Kevin Lamb; its managing editor is Louis R. Andrews and its associate editor is Wayne Lutton, who also works at The Social Contract Press, another hate group. The board of the society includes Andrews, Lamb, American Renaissance Editor Jared Taylor and Sam Dickson, a white supremacist lawyer and luminary of the Council of Conservative Citizens. The Occidental Quarterly publishes an array of extremists including Robert S. Griffin, a University of Vermont professor who has been a member of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, and Marian Kester Coombs, wife of the managing editor of The Washington Times and a well-known racist writer. In 2004, the society went beyond publishing for the first time, holding a black-tie dinner in a fancy Washington, D.C., hotel, where it awarded Kevin MacDonald $10,000 and its Jack London Literary Prize for books describing the alleged "group evolutionary strategies" of the Jews. The Charles Martel Society and its journal have been very well received among so-called "academic racists" in America -- so much so that when Florida race scientist Glayde Whitney died in 2002, his family asked that in lieu of flowers, mourners send donations to the society.
National Policy Institute
After a year of soliciting funds for a "new think tank" in Washington, D.C., the National Policy Institute was established with a staff of four in September 2005 by far-right publisher William Regnery. The institute's mission statement says it aims "to elevate the consciousness of whites, ensure our biological and cultural continuity, and protect our civil rights. The institute ... will study the consequences of the ongoing influx that non-Western populations pose to our national identity." In an August 2005 speech to the Chicagoland Friends of American Renaissance (see group profile below), Regnery warned that "within the first or secondhand memories of people in this room, the white race may go from master of the universe to an anthropological curiosity." The institute has published two studies: a critique of affirmative action, which the institute opposes; and "Mass Deportation is a Viable Solution to America's Illegal Immigration Crisis," written by Edwin Rubenstein. (Rubenstein, a frequent contributor to the V-Dare hate site, is president of ESR Research Economic Consultants of Indianapolis and has served as research director for the conservative Hudson Institute, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, an economics editor at the National Review, and a contributing editor at Forbes magazine.) The institute's senior fellow is Wayne Lutton, an extreme-right writer, and its spokesman is Kevin Lamb. Its board includes Louis R. Andrews, American Renaissance Editor Jared Taylor, and James B. Taylor, who is also on the board of directors of the Reagan Ranch Program. Its advisory committee includes Kevin MacDonald.
New Century Foundation/American Renaissance
Jared Taylor, the man who heads the New Century Foundation and edits its American Renaissance magazine, presents himself as a cosmopolitan, open-minded thinker not afraid to take on the taboos of his time without stooping to racial epithets and the like. But, in fact, he is a man who promotes the "clear conception of the United States as a nation ruled by and for whites," regardless of the calm tone of his journal, which has an academic look and feel. In 2002, for instance, Taylor published an article by race scientist Richard Lynn (see Pioneer Fund, below) under the title "Race and the Psychopathic Personality" that argued that blacks "are more psychopathic than whites" and suffer from a "personality disorder" characterized by a poverty of feeling, lack of shame, pathological lying and so on. After Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, the magazine ratcheted up its customary attacks on blacks, particularly in an error-ridden essay by Taylor that said the hurricane "was an excuse [for blacks] to loot, rob, rape and kill." American Renaissance, based in Taylor's home in Oakton, Va., also publishes frequent articles on the discredited field of eugenics -- selective breeding to improve human genetic stock. The foundation has hosted biannual conferences since 1994, and its website, featuring stories on black crime and the like, recently rose to one of the top 20,000 in the world after a makeover. In recent years, Taylor has added several budding racist intellectuals to his staff, including Ian Jobling, the website editor and E-list moderator, and Stephen Webster, assistant editor of American Renaissance. Even before he started the New Century Foundation, Taylor wrote on race, penning a 1992 book, Paved With Good Intentions, that argued because sterilizing welfare mothers would not be publicly accepted, authorities should instead provide such women with "five-year implantable contraceptives."
Pioneer Fund
The Pioneer Fund was started in 1937 by textile magnate Wycliffe Draper with an original mandate to pursue "race betterment" by promoting the genetic stock of those "deemed to be descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original thirteen states prior to the adoption of the Constitution." Many of those involved with the fund early on, including its first president Harry H. Laughlin, had "contacts with many of the Nazi scientists whose work provided the conceptual template for Hitler's aspiration toward 'racial hygiene' in Germany," according to an article in the Albany Law Review. In the 1960s, according to William Tucker's recent scholarly book, The Funding of Scientific Racism, many board members and recipients of Pioneer grants sought to block the civil rights movement. In recent decades, the fund has concentrated on making grants to academics interested in the alleged connection between race and intelligence, along with related matters. It also paid to distribute the racist French novel, The Camp of the Saints, and to publish an autobiography of Thomas Dixon, whose novels helped to romanticize the Klan and also to bring it back to life in 1915. Since 2002, the Pioneer Fund has been headed by J. Philippe Rushton, a Canadian professor who has produced work suggesting that blacks have "smaller brains, lower intelligence, lower cultural achievements, higher aggressiveness, lower law-abidingness, lower marital stability and less sexual restraint than whites," according to an article by psychologist Andrew S. Winston. Several organizations have recently refused grants from the fund in the wake of bad publicity. One recipient, Hiroko Arikawa of the Forest Institute of Professional Psychology in Springfield, Mo., said she was returning her grant after being contacted for comment by the Intelligence Report.
Intelligence Report Summer 2006