Note: Originally published as “The Funding of the Science” in Searchlight No 277 (Jul7 1998). This version is slightly revised and expanded.
This special issue of Searchlight devoted to race science contains articles on American Renaissance magazine, Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve, Right Now! magazine, and two background articles on the history and modern applications of race science. If one scratches the surface of any of these topics one finds that the Pioneer Fund has played a significant role.
The Pioneer Fund has been involved in the history of race science since its establishment in 1937. One of its founders, Harry Laughlin wrote a model sterilization law widely used in both the United States and Europe. Many of the key academic racists in both Right Now! and American Renaissance have been funded by the Pioneer and the Pioneer was directly involved in funding the parent organization of American Renaissance, the New Century Foundation. Indeed, most of the leading Anglo-American academic race-scientists of the last several decades have been funded by the Pioneer, including William Shockley, Hans J. Eysenck, Arthur Jensen, Roger Pearson, Richard Lynn, J. Philippe Rushton, R. Travis Osborne, Linda Gottfredson, Robert A. Gordon, Daniel R. Vining, Jr., Michael Levin, and Seymour Itzkoff — all cited in The Bell Curve. (1)
The Pioneer Fund’s original endowment came from Wickliffe Draper, scion of old-stock Protestant gentry. Draper grew up in Hopedale, Massachusetts — a company town built by his family. Living in what one historian has called a “a quasi-feudal manor house.” The company maintained almost total control over the lives of company workers until 1912 when the IWW organized the Draper Company at Hopedale after a four month strike.(2)
Colonel Draper, as he was often called by his friends and admirers was a man searching for a way to restore an older order. Draper believed geneticists could scientifically prove the inferiority of Negros. According to Bruce Wallace, a geneticist who tutored Draper in the later 1940s, Draper “was sure that we had all the answers and that we were just too frightened to say what they meant.”(3) Under his direction, the Pioneer Fund’s original charter outlined a commitment to “improve the character of the American people” by encouraging the procreation of descendants of the original white colonial stock.
Abandoned by the political mainstream after World War II,(4) Draper turned more and more to academic irredentists still dedicated to white supremacy and eugenics. Most prominent among these early recruits was Henry Garrett, Chair of Psychology at Columbia University from 1941–1955. A Virginia born segregationist, Garrett was a key witness in defending segregation in Davis v. County School Board (1952) one of the constituent cases in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education (1954).(5)
It is worth examining the changes in Pioneer grants over the past four decades. For those interested we are providing a spreadsheet of all Pioneer grants from 1971 to 1996. During the 1950s and 1960s, Garrett helped to distribute grants for Draper and was one of the founders of the International Association for the Advancement of Eugenics and Ethnology (IAAEE) in 1959. The IAAEE brought together academic defenders of segregation in the U.S. and apartheid in South Africa. The Pioneer Fund supported the IAAEE and other institutions working to legitimising race science, including the IAAEE’s journal, Mankind Quarterly. (6)
In the 1970s the chief beneficiaries were the Foundation for Human Understand, an organization directed by R. Travis Osborne; Arther Jensen’s Institute for the Study of Educational Differences, Shockley’s Foundation for Research and Education in Eugenics and Dysgenics; and the IAAEE.
By the decade of the eighties, the largest Pioneer grants went to the University of Minnesota, Arthur Jensen’s Institute for the Study of Educational Differences, the Federation for American Immigration Control, Roger Pearson’s Institute for the Study of Man, the University of Western Ontario, and the University of London.
During the 1990s, the major recipients of Fund grants have been the University of Minnesota, the University of Western Ontario, the Ulster Institute for Social Research, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Institute for the Study of Man, and the University of Delaware.
When Draper first founded the Fund in 1937, he was looking for “useful science.” He was convinced that scientists had the answers he was looking for, but were too timid to admit the truth of race differences, Negro inferiority and the value of eugenics. From the 1960s to the 1990s the Fund has singled out individual academics whose work proved useful in the political struggles against integration, open immigration and other right wing causes. While organizations such as FAIR have received significant funding, preference has always been given to the more general purpose (or multi-purpose) scholarship supporting biological determinism, genetically based race differences, and eugenics. In the early years, Pioneer funds were funneled through small organizations such as the IAAEE and FHU which were set up by marginalized scholars to disseminate work for which there were few mainstream outlets. By the 1990s, most of the funds were being distributed directly to universities for support of Pioneer affiliated scholars.
Leading Grant Recipients, 1994–1996
University of Western Ontario (J. Philippe Rushton) $334,405
Ulster Institute for Social Research (Richard Lynn) $289,000
University of Minnesota (Thomas Bouchard) $218,967
University of Delaware (Linda Gottfredson) $177,541
Institute for the Study of Man (Roger Pearson) $159,500
Federation for American Immigration Reform $100,500
___________________________________
Compared to the largest American foundations, the Pioneer Fund is very small. Its assets have never exceeded $6.5 million (£4 million) and its total annual grants have never exceeded $900,000. But the Pioneer Fund’s importance in the history of post-war race science far exceeds its size or the size of its grants. With almost laser-like precision, the Pioneer Fund has been at the cutting edge of almost every race conflict in the United States since its founding in 1937.
SHOCKLEY AND JENSEN
The Pioneer Fund has changed little since its inception. An article in the New York Times on December 11, 1977 characterized it as having “supported highly controversial research by a dozen scientists who believe that blacks are genetically less intelligent than whites.” In the 1960s Nobel Laureate William Shockley (1910–1989), a physicist at Stanford University best known for his “voluntary sterilization bonus plan” received an estimated $188,710 from the Pioneer Fund between 1971 and 1978. Arthur Jensen, an educational psychologist, garnered more than a million dollars in Pioneer grants over the past three decades. Three years after being recruited by Shockely, Jensen published his now famous attack on Head Start in the prestigious Harvard Education Review. Jensen claimed the problem with black children was that they had an average IQ of only 85 and that no amount of social engineering would improve their performance. Jensen urged “eugenic foresight” as the only solution. (7)
ROGER PEARSON
Roger Pearson, whose Institute for the Study of
Man has been one of the top Pioneer beneficiaries over the past twenty years ($870,000 from 1981–1996) is the clearest example of the extremist ideology of the Fund’s leadership. Pearson came to the United States in the mid-sixties to join Willis Carto and the group around Right magazine. In 1965 he became editor of Western Destiny, a magazine established by Carto and dedicated to spreading fascist ideology. Using the pseudonym of Stephan Langton, Pearson then became the editor of The New Patriot, a short-lived magazine published in 1966–67 to conduct “a responsible but penetrating inquiry into every aspect of the Jewish Question,” which included articles such as “Zionists and the Plot Against South Africa,” “Early Jews and the Rise of Jewish Money Power,” and “Swindlers of the Crematoria.” Taking account of all groups linked to Pearson, Pioneer support between 1975–1996 exceeds one million dollars — nearly ten percent of the total Pioneer grants for that period.
J. PHILIPPE RUSHTON
For the past few years, University of Western Ontario psychology professor J. Philippe Rushton has replaced Jensen as the top individual beneficiary of Pioneer largess. Since 1981 he has benefited from more than a million dollars in Pioneer grants. Rushton argues that behavioral differences among blacks, whites, and Asians are the result of evolutionary variations in their reproductive strategies. Blacks are at one extreme, Rushton claims, because they produce large numbers of offspring but offer them little care; at the other extreme are Asians, who have fewer children but indulge them; whites lie somewhere in between. Despite Rushton’s controversial race theories, he has been embraced by the scientific mainstream, having been elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American, British, and Canadian Psychological Associations.
The Pioneer Fund seved as a small part of “a multimillion dollar political empire of corporations, foundations, political action committees and ad hoc groups” active in 1980s (Washington Post, March 31, 1985, p. 1; A16) developed by Tom Ellis, Harry Weyher, Marion Parrott, R.E. Carter-Wrenn and Jesse Helms. The Fund has served as a nexus between academic theory and practical political ideology. It’s leadership, especially, Harry Weyher, Thomas F. Ellis and Marion A. Parrott are part of an interlocking set of directorates and associates linking the Pioneer Fund to Jesse Helms’ high-tech political machine. Ellis, for example, simultaneously served as Chairman of the National Congressional Club and the Coalition for Freedom, co-founder of Fairness in Media, a board member of the Educational Support Foundation and Director of the Pioneer Fund. Harry Weyher, president of the Pioneer Fund served as lead counsel for Fairness in Media.
AFTER THE PIONEER FUND?
The Pioneer Fund has defined, in important ways, a distinct era in the history of contemporary thinking about race. This era began after World War II, when anti-egalitarian race scientists were scientifically and politically marginalized and defeated, and it continued long enough to witness their subsequent victory, with the Pioneer Fund’s support, in an aggressive campaign to rehabilitate the notion of incorrigible racial differences as a cardinal scientific and civic fact. This era may now be coming to an end. Harry Weyher and the others who have guided the Fund’s activities for several generations will probably soon pass from the scene, and many of the grant recipients with whom it has been most closely identified also are approaching the end of their productive lives.
The environment within which the Fund operates has also changed. Over the past decade the Fund has responded to these circumstances, and to the window of opportunity afforded it in recent years for advancing its agenda, by accelerating its grant-making to a rate sustainable only by spending its capital. Weyher was quoted in GQ magazine after the publication of The Bell Curve as saying, “It seemed to make more sense to spend the money than to save it, so we spent it. Once it’s gone, we’ll just quit.”(8) As a result of this policy, by the end of 1996 the Fund’s assets had declined in real terms to less than 40 percent of their 1986 level. If this trend continues, the Fund will not long outlast its current officers. At the same time, the development of alternative sources of funding is making workers in the fields that the Fund traditionally has supported less dependent on it. These changes in funding arrangements will change the character of discourse on immigration and individual and group differences in ways that cannot now be foreseen.
For now, however, it is a useful measure of the Pioneer Fund’s success that anti-egalitarian race scientists are more confident and better organized in the United States than at any time since the 1920s, and public policy internationally has begun ineluctably to reflect their assumptions and preferences.
Barry Mehler, Director
Keith Hurt, Research Associate
•Institute for the Study of Academic Racism, 1998
FOOTNOTES:
1. Pioneer Grants were made to the New Century Foundation (NCF) in 1994, 1995, and 1996. 1997 and 1998 data is not yet available (see our spreadsheet). The first Pioneer grant to NCF was $12,000 approved as of Sept 21, 1994 “for publishing & disseminating writings which enable the public to understand scientific findings about the human race and which otherwise might not be published.” A $500 grant was approved as of Dec 8, 1995 “for the distribution of scientific manuscripts.” And finally, a $4,990 grant was paid to NCF during 1996. It is probable that the material distributed included work by such major Pioneer grantees as J.P. Rushton and Michael Levin. They were among the speakers at the 1994 and 1996 AR conferences, and the money might have gone to supporting distribution of the proceedings of the conferences.
2. Margaret Crawford, Building the Workinginan’s Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns. Haymarket Series. London and New York: Verso, 1995.
3. Taped interview with Bruce Wallace 24 January 1990. Between March and May 1960, Ronald W. May wrote a series of articles on Draper’s relationship to the House Un-american Activities Committee. In preparation for these articles he interviewed a number of well-known geneticists, including Bruce Wallace. Wallace was quoted by May in “Genetics and Subversion,” The Nation (May 14, 1960). Defenders of the Pioneer Fund have raised questions about the authenticity of these quotes, so in 1990, I called Dr. Wallace. Dr. Wallace did not remember the interview with May, but after hearing the quotes attributed to him said: “I can say this and that is that the tenor of quotations you have cited to me are probably correct.”
4. Frederick Osborn, for example, a founder of the Pioneer Fund along with Harry Laughlin, distanced himself from the Pioneer Fund. In a dramatic parting of ways in 1954, Draper offered Osborn full support for the financially ailing American Eugenics Society if Osborn would support “measures for establishing racial homogeniety in the United States.” Osborn turned down Draper’s offer and resigned from the Pioneer board.
5. Newby, I. (1969). Challenge to the court: Social Scientists and the defense of segregation, 1954–1996. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press; Kluger, R. Simple Justice: The history of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s struggle for equality. (New York: Knopf, 1976).
6. Winston, A. S. (1998). “Science in the service of the far right: Henry E. Garrett, the IAAEE, and the Liberty Lobby.” Journal of Social Issues, 54, no. 1, 179–209.
7. Hirsch, J. “To Unfrock the Charlatans,” Sage Race Relations Abstracts 6 #2 (May 1981) pp. 1–68 and “Jensenism: The Bankrupcy of “Science” Without Scholarship Educational Theory 25 No 1 (Winter, 1975) pp. 3–27.
8. Sedwick, John. “The Menatality Bunker,” Gentlemen’s Quarterly (November 1994).
Banking with Bin Laden
Charles Murray as a new op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about growing cultural inequality between the upper and lower classes in the US. He has solutions too! Apparently, families need to start acting in their self-interest, and the upper class need to move into poorer neighborhoods, become openly judgmental, and “preach what they practice” towards the uncultured lower classes about their poor morals(which is why they are in the lower class to being with, you see). Also, changing marginal tax rates and more college financial aide is definitely not going to help:
Here’s a Krugman piece about an argument just put forth by Tyler Cowan that maybe falling social mobility isn’t such a bad thing. Some of the arguments were reminiscent of the Charles Murray WSJ article in the previous comment. It’s a nice preview of rehashed arguments of yesteryear for a Dickensian tomorrow.
Oh my, it looks like Charles has a fan:
So after we move all the rich and poor folks into the same neighborhood, do the poor kids still get to work as the school janitor or will they have absorbed enough moral character from their neighborhood betters?
I would call this an instance of Derbyshire ‘dropping the mask’ if he was still wearing it.
Oh look, Derbyshire just found a new home...at VDARE. Now he can pontificate on the unfair negative connotations associated with the term ‘white-supremacy’ in peace.
Charles Murray has a column in the WSJ about why capitalism has been getting a bad wrap lately:
I’d also add the endless rehashing tired “all government is inherently bad and inefficient and free markets are the default best model for all circumstances” arguments we see in the above column to the list of factors contributing to capitalism’s current conundrum.
Be it noted that this is the same Charles Murray, co-author of the infamous racist tract “The Bell Curve”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Murray_%28author%29
As an apologetic for Capitalism it’s a real potboiler. And it’s telling that such a notorious charlatan is deployed to do so.
It’s primary thesis...
“From the dawn of history until the 18th century, every society in the world was impoverished...”
...is bunk.
If the blessings of Civilization™ and Capitalism are so overwhelming how come so much blood has been shed to resist it and murderous oppression required to impose it globally?
From the enclosure movements in Britain to the decimation of indigenous peoples in the Americas, Capital’s blood-drenched rise to global hegemony has been fought back by millions.
Those poor benighted souls just could not grasp it’s many blessings I guess, eh Charles?
Whoops! The Heritage Foundation just had to issue a “we’re not racists we merely hire them!” statement in response to this uncomfortable little discovery about the author a recent Heritage Foundation study that made a big splash about the massive projected costs of proposed immigration reform. It tuns out the guy is ... wait for it ... kinda racist:
Odds are Charles Murray isn’t much of a Frontline fan, but there’s a new episode that he really needs to watch...not that watching it will make a dent in his worldview...but still...
While not surprising(*snicker*), it’s worth noting that Charles Murray has picked a side in the GOP’s civil war:
Oooo...does this mean the greed-is-good mentality can finally go extinct?
Let’s hope so, because it’s at the point where it a choice between ditching Social Darwinism as our socioeconomic paradigm or ditching society.
Recall the solution to America’s socioeconomic woes as prescribed by Charles Murray in his recent book “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010”. The long-term solution is for the the rich to start “preaching what they practice” and just tell the lazy poor people that the reason they’re poor is because they’re so lazy and undisciplined. Here’s what that looks like in real life:
Feeling motivated yet, all you lazy, shiftless poor people? Good. The dawn of the new blue-collar Golden Age should be right around the corner.
London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, just managed to channel Charles Murray, Gordon Gekko, and John Calvin all in single speech. Johnson must be feeling pretty confident about his “spiritual worth” these days:
“So why, I asked innocently, are they so despicable in the eyes of all decent British people? Surely they should be hailed like the Stakhanovites of Stalin’s Russia, who half-killed themselves, in the name of the people, by mining record tonnages of coal?”
Now you know what the poor, put-upon global super-rich are all doing in London: mining coal. Record amounts of “coal”.
Look who “moderate conservative” Paul Ryan is citing in the latest round of his “I care about poor people”-makeover.
Such courage...
Josh Marshall hits on a key insight in Paul Ryan’s recent Charles Murray walkback: There’s only so much of Murray’s worldview one can deny embracing before that worldview looks nothing like what Paul Ryan appears to believe even if you take him at his world and assume he’s completely non-racist:
Yeah, un-ringing The Bell Curve and separating the eugenics arguments from the rest of the neo-Social Darwinism can’t be easy when the neo-Social Darwinism is clearly something Ryan has a lot invested in upholding. After all, it’s not just about him. The idea that helping other hurts us all is central to the GOP’s “we care about the poor that’s why we’re trying to starve them”-platform. Still, never say never, at least in terms of Ryan successfully shrugging off this latest bit of bad PR. The force is strong with this one.
If you’ve ever wondered “how can I be as compassionate as Paul Ryan”, the easy answer is “read lots of books by Charles Murray and Ayn Rand”. But don’t stop there. Compassion has had many champions throughout history. For example, just think about all the compassion that must have been flowing through Gilded Age poorhouses. Just think of it, especially if you want to be as compassionate as Paul:
Yes, Paul Ryan gets his ideas about poverty from the same place the the rest of the GOP appears to be getting its ideas about poverty: the Gilded Age.
As such, Ryan knows that the war on poverty can never be won with a government-run safety-net. That just leads to a cruel starvation of the soul for those in need of trickle-down morality.
No, what is needed is an army of morally superior ‘Friendly Visitors’ that can visit all of the millions of people in need of assistance and make on-the-ground snap-judgements about their worthiness as human beings. It’s what compassionate societies do.
Rick Santorum still hasn’t decided if he’s going to make another attempt to win the White House in 2016 but that hasn’t stopped him from winning hearts and minds. Specifically the hearts and minds of people that already had their hearts and minds won by Jesse Helms:
Just imagine everything that could have been avoided if only Obama had been more like Jesse Helms way back in January 2009. Or the stuff that wouldn’t have been avoided if we had a president Helms, especially in the realm of race relations. Just imagine.
Imagine that: Far right ‘journalist’ Charles C. Johnson decided to tweet about a theory he’s a fan of:
You can see where this is going...
“I like Charles Murray books to be honest with you, which means I’m a total nerd I guess,” Bush said:
“My views on this were shaped a lot on this by Charles Murray’s book, except I was reading the book and I was waiting for the last chapter with the really cool solutions — didn’t quite get there.”
It’ll be interesting to hear Jeb’s view on Charles Murray’s “really cool solutions” if he ever gets around to reading them. Especially since Murray is one of the chief conservative advocates of a universal basic income.
Granted, the right-wing universal basic income advocates tend to view it as an alternative approach to social welfare programs so such a system would most likely be used a as Trojan horse to slash public spending on the neediest Americans, much like the GOP’s plans to gut programs like Medicare and Medicaid by turning the programs into state-based block grants, cutting per capita spending, and waving the magic “it’s decentralized so we’ll get more for less!” wand. So it’s not like Murray’s proposal couldn’t achieve the GOP’s long-standing dream of shrinking “Big Government”...it would just replace all those maligned social programs with a big check that everyone gets. Then that check slowly shrunk over time and, voila, no more welfare state! So if Jeb hasn’t gotten around to reading about Murray’s solutions to poverty he should probably get on that.
At the same time, a generous and humane universal basic income with strong guarantees that everyone will have enough to live comfortable is probably one of the most graceful and effective methods society has in a future where advanced robotics/AI, overpopulation, and eco-collapse necessitate radical shifts in the social contracts that ensure everyone can live comfortably without being subjected to some sort of roboticized Rat Race of the Damn. So the incentives for the GOP to at least give lip service to the idea of a universal basic income is only going to increase going forward because the incentives for every political party to jump on the universal basic income is only going to grow.
And that’s all part of why it’ll be very interesting to hear Jeb’s comments on the topic should anyone ask him about the actual policy solutions advocated by one of his favorite authors. Not only is a universal basic income potentially one of those key ingredients for a fabulous future for almost everyone, but it also doubles as a possible Republicans Trojan horse for those that want to destroy the welfare state! In other words, the universal income is the future of American politics. Or at least should be.
So hopefully Jeb will get some questions about the universal basic income now that he’s opened up the Charles Murray can of worms. And maybe he could get some questions about what else he found so appealing in the can. It’s a big can with a lot of worms.
Is Jeb Bush ashamed of his history of endorsing shame as a key tool for providing birth control to unwed women? No...maybe...no...maybe:
Huh, so Jeb wrote a book back in 1995 touting the value of publicly shaming the poor into living ‘lives of purpose and meaning’ and then refused to veto a ‘Scarlet letter’ law while governor. And today? He’s evolved. Sort of:
That sure sounds like an “I’d like to shame single parents, but I’m too ashamed to fully embrace it”-kind of answer. And that’s too bad considering Jebbers wants to be the next national nightmare. Honesty is nothing to be ashamed of, Jeb!
So let’s hope Jeb finds his courage over this shaming issue. Better yet, lets encourage Jeb’s betters to shame Jeb into a more open public embrace of the the power of shaming. After all, back in 2012, one of Jeb’s favorite authors, Charles Murray, wrote an entire book about how convincing rich people to move into poorer neighborhoods so they can shame their wayward neighbors into more financially secure lifestyles is the key to national renewal. If anyone can shame Jeb into sharing his thoughts on shaming more openly, it’s probably someone that’s had a profound influence on Jeb’s thinking. Someone like Charles Murray:
Charles Murray clearly is so unashamed to promote the shaming of the poor that he wrote an entire book about it that makes the case that such shaming is the only thing that can solve the growing class divide:
Now that’s someone proud of their shaming agenda. And since that same someone is one of Jeb Bush’s favorite authors, who knows, maybe a rereading of Charles Murray’s many classics will give Jeb courage he needs to overcoming his shaming shame.
Jeb had just better keep the shaming appropriately targeted on the poor. He wouldn’t want to say something he might regret.
Here’s a reminder that, at the same time we have ‘Alt Right’ neo-Nazi figures like Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopoulos engaging in high-profile college speaking tours seemingly designed to provoke a public backlash and feed into their white supremacist victim complex, the far-right doesn’t always intend for its campus activities to be in the public eye: University College London (UCL) appears to have just discovered that there’s been a secret eugenics conference hosted in its campus since 2014. Whoops.
One prominent attendee to these conferences is Toby Young, the head of the New Schools Network — a network of “Free schools” in the UK that are non-profit independent schools funded by the state. Another notable attendee is Richard Lynn, the ‘academic’ who sits on the board of the Pioneer Fund and who provided the bulk of the work in The Bell Curve purporting to show racial difference in intelligence. Apparently the attendees the invite-only conference were told about the location at the last minute and asked not to mention it to anyone. So, while it would have been easy enough to just arrange for such a conference outside of a campus setting, this group appears to really want to discuss their eugenics theories on a campus. Without anyone knowing (until now):
“The London Conference on Intelligence was said to have been run secretly for at least three years by James Thompson, an honorary senior lecturer at the university, including contributions from a researcher who has previously advocated child rape.”
Wow, that’s quite a few secret eugenics conferences to have on your campus. But note the spin by James Thompson, the UCL professor who’s been hosting the conferenc: yeah, eugenics was a topic, but one of many. How reassuring:
And how reassuring it must be to the parents of children enrolled in any of the government-back New Schools Network, to find out that Toby Young, the head of that network, was one of the attendees. Oh, and he’s also on the Fulbright Commission, which oversees student scholarship programs between British and US universities:
And you have to love Young’s explanation for his attendance at least year’s secret conference: He was just attending as research for a speech he later gave in Canada “about the history of controversies provoked by intelligence researchers.” And that speech in Canada was at a conference described as “a similar conference”. So Young attended last year’s scientific racism conference in London so he could give a speech at a scientific racism conference in Canada. How reassuring:
And, of course, attendees to this conference included one of the most prominent ‘scientific’ racists alive; Richard Lynn. Along with Emil Kirkegaard, a ‘race realist’ who also appears to support sex with sleeping children (Milo would presumably approve):
And in case it wasn’t clear that James Thompson was fully aware of the nature of the individuals he’s inviting to his invite-only annual secret conferences, here’s a close look at his long-standing networking with this ‘race realist’ network:
“James Thompson, the honorary UCL academic who acts as the host of the conference, is a member of the UISR Academic Advisory Council. His political leanings are betrayed by his public Twitter accoun, where he follows prominent white supremacists including Richard Spencer (who follows him back), Virginia Dare, American Renaissance, Brett Stevens, the Traditional Britain Group, Charles Murray and Jared Taylor.”
Yep, James Thompson is a member of the Ulster Institute for Social Research (UISR) Advisory Council. What’s that? It’s that Pioneer Fund-financed organization run by Richard Lynn that publishes Mankind Quarterly:
In addition, Thompson is a frequent contributor to the ‘race realist’-friendly Unz Review:
And if that’s not an openly neo-Nazi-ish enough background, there’s Emil Kirkegaard, the self-taught self-declared “polymath” who Thompson describes as a “very bright young guy”. A very bright young guy who runs OpenPsych, a platform for non-peer reviewed psychology papers, the kind of place that might publish papers from people like Kevin MacDonald (the neo-Nazi acadaemic of choice):
And then there’s Kirkegaard’s advocacy of ‘compromising’ with pedophiles by allowing them to molest children knocked unconscious. And showing up on podcasts to talk about “the future of eugenics” with someone banned from YouTube for being too much of a neo-Nazi. Kirkegaard is indeed quite the ‘polymath’, at least when it comes to being a neo-Nazis:
That’s the kind of secret conference the UCL has been hosting since 2014. A conference run by and for ‘academic’ neo-Nazis (it’s hard to call them academics when they peddle pseudoscience...hence the need for non-peer reviewed journals).
And the icing on the Nazi cake is that UCL isn’t just some random institution when it comes to eugenics: The “father of eugenics”, Francis Galton, was a UCL academic:
So that might give us a hint as to why these people were so keen on hosting their conference at UCL when they had to do so in secret. There’s a lot of eugenics history there. Horrible history that these folks would clearly love to repeat.
Here’s a story that acts as a rather chilling follow up to the recent reports about Peter Thiel being awarded a prize in Germany from the Frank Schirrmacher Foundation for “disregarding prohibitions on thinking” and thus enriching “the current socio-political discussions in a wide variety of fields”:
We just learned about another secret Peter Thiel-backed extremist initiative. It’s not exactly a surprising revelation, although there are some interesting twists. First, recall the reports from back in 2018 about a secret invitation-only eugenics conference that had been held at the University College London (UCL) for at least three years. One of the prominent attendees of these conferences was Toby Young, the head of the government-backed New Schools Network. UCL claimed it had no knowledge of the conferences. Well, we just got a new report on a network of academics with a fixation on ‘race science’ operating in the UK. A network that appears to have a great deal of overlap with the figures behind the UCL eugenics conferences since we are told many of the academics involved with it ended up mobilising around Toby Young’s Free Speech Union (FSU).
And guess who is apparently operating as the network’s chief patron. Yes, Peter Thiel. Surprise! Although it sounds like it’s actually the Chief of Staff of Thiel Capitol, Charles Vaughan, who played a direct role in leading this network.
While this particular network is allegedly interested in countering left-wing ‘cancel culture’ in general and claims to not just be interested in race science, there’s also no denying that an embrace of race science — and a sense that its being unfairly dismissed due to political correctness — appears to be one of the unifying rallying cries of the group, with Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve playing a prominent role.
But Canadian psychologist Jordon Peterson who has emerged as a focal point for the group’s efforts in recent years following a March 2019 decision by Cambridge University to withdraw a visiting fellowship offer. At the time, the university explained the decision by stating that Cambridge “is an inclusive environment and we expect all our staff and visitors to uphold our principles. There is no place here for anyone who cannot”. By November of 2021, Peterson was invited back and attended a number of seminars and talks. And as we’re going to see, by the Peterson’s invitation was withdrawn in March of 2019, Peterson had been already working with Thiel and Vaughan for several years, with Peterson first reaching out to Thiel in the summer of 2017 and the two meeting up and agreeing to work on some projects. So this ‘Thiel network’ of academics formed around 2016, rallied around Peterson in 2019, and had won Peterson’s return to Cambridge using arguments about free speech and religious freedom.
Oh, and as the following Byline Times piece points out, this period of time where Thiel and Vaughan were throwing around their influence on the Cambridge University campus happens to roughly coincide the period where Palantir was working with Cambridge Analytica in developing psychographic profiling techniques for Facebook users. As we’ve seen, Palantir and Cambridge Analytica started talks about working together as early as 2013 and formal work together in 2014. And as we also saw, the whole Cambridge Analytica project included work with Cambridge University psychology professors. So this quiet far right academic lobbying network popped up at Cambrige University not long after Palantir’s work with Cambridge Analytica ensued.
So were the UCL eugenics conferences part of this same network of ‘race realist’ academics Thiel was putting together at Cambridge? It sure looks like we’re talking about the same network. Which is a grim reminder that this story about Peter Thiel’s secret far right network of Cambridge academics probably isn’t limited to Cambridge:
“Their common concern was the increasing threat from the advancement of a ‘liberal’ agenda to traditional Christian religious and theological beliefs – including an unnerving fascination with race science.”
A fascination with ‘race science’. Charles Murray’s race science, in particular. That was one of the core themes of this Cambridge-based academic network let by Charles Vaughan, chief of staff at Thiel Capital. That and a fixation on ‘cancel culture’, with Jordan Peterson playing the role of the martyr. A role Peterson got to embrace in March 2019 when Cambridge University withdrew its acceptance of a visiting fellow application. The decision became a rallying cry for the network, culminating in Peterson’s triumphant November 2021 trip to Cambridge where he participated in a number of seminars and talks at the invitation of Dr James Orr, a lecturer in the philosophy of religion at Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity. The defense of Peterson’s views was successfully wrapped up in some sort of religious freedom argument. Thiel and his ilk won again:
And in case it wasn’t clear just how openly Jordan Peterson embraces the worst kind of ‘race science’, his 2017 interview with ‘Alt Right’ personality Stefan Molyneux should put those doubts to rest. Peterson and Molyneux were on the same page:
Also note the allegations that Quillette itself is another Thiel-backed product. Quillette founder Claire Lehmann completely and unequivocally denied the claims in Max Chafkin’s Thiel biography that Thiel was secretly funding the publication around 2016. But as this whole story of the secret Cambridge lobbying efforts should make clear, if indeed Thiel was interested in funding Quillette it’s probably the kind of thing he would have preferred to do in secret:
But it’s the timing of the activities of this secret academic network that is potentially the most interesting aspect of this story: it whole happens to overlap with the period where Palantir was actively working with Cambridge Analytica to construct psychological profiles of Facebook users. And as we’ve seen, that’s a story with a significant Cambridge University element. It was a Cambridge academic in the university’s psychology department, Aleksander Kogan, who developed the psychographic profiling techniques, after all. So it’s rather fascinating to learn that Peter Thiel’s chief of staff was quietly and successfully orchestrating a lobbying network at Cambridge University not long after Palantir started working with Cambridge Analytica:
So when the Frank Schirrmacher Foundation awarded Peter Thiel the prize for “disregarding prohibitions on thinking” and providing enriching “the current socio-political discussions in a wide variety of fields,” we have to ask: was the sponsorship of this secret network of academic racists an example of the kind of disregard for prohibitions on thinking the foundation was referring to? Maybe, although Thiel’s role in this wasn’t actually well known before now with the Byline Times’s exclusive report. So odds are, no, Thiel’s sponsorship of this network probably didn’t play a role in awarding him that prize. There’s always next year.