When Nobel Prize winner James D. Watson suggested in October that Africans are innately less intelligent than others, he was met by an international firestorm of scientific criticism, ultimately resulting in his public apology and later resignation from the Long Island laboratory where he was chancellor. Many experts on intelligence challenged the scientific basis for Watson’s comment, and the director of the Human Genome Research Institute, who took up his post after Watson left it, described Watson’s remark as “a racist statement.” In fact, the weight of current scientific evidence suggests that differences in IQ between racial groups are principally caused by environmental factors.

In the aftermath of the Watson controversy, Slate.com, a normally liberal online magazine, published a three-part series by its science and technology columnist, William Saletan, that suggested strongly that IQ differences were, in fact, related to race. But within days, Saletan had published an essay entitled “Regrets,” in which he admitted that he had done a particularly poor job of summarizing the state of science on the IQ question. (Another Slate writer, Stephen Metcalf, also posted a major critical response to Saletan’s series.) In fact, as Saletan partly admitted in his apology, almost all of his conclusions came from the work of J. Philippe Rushton — a man who heads up a racist foundation, the Pioneer Fund, dedicated to race and IQ studies. The fund was created in 1937 to pursue policies of “race betterment,” specifically promoting the genetic stock of the white settlers of the original 13 colonies.

Then it was the turn of The New York Times. On Dec. 1, six weeks after Watson’s remarks, a story by Patricia Cohen summarized the controversy, the Slate episode, and the debate over race and intelligence. But Cohen made almost precisely the same mistake that the unfortunate Saletan did. Quoted prominently in her story was one Linda Gottfredson, identified simply as a sociologist at the University of Delaware, saying that Saletan had nothing to apologize for. Gottfredson hailed Saletan, in fact, for possibly being “the first journalist to so directly acknowledge the scientific evidence” and called the response to his series evidence of a “moral panic.”

Just one little trouble. Gottfredson, along with Rushton, is one of the merry band of Pioneer Fund grant recipients. Since 1988, she has accepted at least $267,000 from the racist foundation. Gottfredson also opposed the 1991 Civil Rights Act because she said it fails to recognize innate differences in intelligence. And she criticized what she called “the egalitarian fiction that all groups are equal in intelligence.”

The white nationalist world is filled with any manner of oddball schemes, but a recent advertisement in the race science publication American Renaissance for “saving” the white race through the use of “Positive Subliminal Audio Programming” has got to take the cake for kookiest.

Alexander Thiele of the Legion of Joan of Arc blog proposes that for white nationalists to “safeguard [their] ethnic genetic interests,” they must counter destructive PC propaganda, which he calls negative subliminal audio programming, that whites are subjected to every day. That programming supposedly interferes with whites’ ability to understand that their true interests are in saving the white race — not hanging out with people of color.

Thiele came to this understanding of how whites went wrong after reading a 2006 article by anti-Semitic theorist Kevin MacDonald, a psychology professor at California State Long Beach, in the white supremacist journal, The Occidental Quarterly. The article argued that although “ethnic tendencies are automatic,” the mass media and our multicultural society’s “cultural programming” is somehow interfering with these natural processes — and thus stopping white nationalism from taking off. (For more on Kevin MacDonald’s anti-Semitic body of work, see here.)

So what does Alexander propose that whites should do? Lucky for white nationalists, Thiele says he has already created a way to bring “self programmed positive subliminal audio into our people’s daily routines.” He created a “subliminal, hypnotic guided meditation called Destiny and another piece, a pure subliminal called Winning.” The audiotapes are composed of tones that supposedly stimulate the frontal cortex and “synchronize both hemispheres of the brain which unifies and protects the mind from the enemies [sic] negative subliminal assault.”

Worried that Thiele’s Aryan tones might not work? Just listen to this American Renaissance conference-goer’s testimonial: “My wife and I had not been doing very well. We were edgy, finding fault with each other and talking about a divorce. … So I did what you suggested; put the CD on the home stereo and let it repeat on track one for a month. After two weeks things smoothed out a little. … After a year we made a good deal on a better house. I have some very interesting new job offers which I have not acted on yet because I want to do it right. My level of political activity has increased considerably. My wife and I have not spoken about divorce since before listening to the CD.”

The Robert A. Taft Club, a group headed by a man with a network of racist connections, has announced that a U.S. congressman, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), will address the group this Thursday at a restaurant in Arlington, Va.

The Taft Club is led by Marcus Epstein (right), who serves as the executive director of both white nationalist Pat Buchanan’s The American Cause and the Team America PAC, which is run by Buchanan’s sister, Bay Buchanan. Epstein writes for the anti-immigrant hate site vdare.com and he advocates for white supremacist organizations. He is especially fond of American Renaissance — a white supremacist journal that has suggested that blacks have “psychopathic personalities” — and attends the journal’s biannual conferences. In 2006, Epstein invited the head of American Renaissance’s parent organization, Jared Taylor, to speak to the Taft Club on the issue of “Race and Conservatism.” ( continue to full post… )

The Social Contract Press, which has been listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center since 2001 for publishing articles by white supremacists and promoting the idea that America should be populated by white people, is co-hosting a news conference at the National Press Club today. The topic is “How Many Illegal Aliens are in the United States?” and it will dispute official government data that shows approximately 12 million undocumented immigrants residing in the US.

The Social Contract Press is one of several programs that make up U.S. Inc., a foundation run for decades by John Tanton (right), the architect of much of the modern anti-immigration movement and the co-founder of the country’s largest immigration restriction outfit, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). FAIR has its own ties to white supremacists, having accepted more than $1 million from the Pioneer Fund, a hate group that funds controversial studies on race and intelligence.

Tanton has a history of bigotry. Perhaps most famous were the remarks he penned on immigrants in internal 1986 memos to his FAIR colleagues. In them, Tanton questioned the “educability” of Latinos compared to others and wondered whether “those with their pants up [whites] are going to get caught by those with their pants down [Latinos]” in what he characterized as a race to procreate. Tanton’s Social Contract Press also has republished and given a full-throated endorsement to a racist novel called The Camp of the Saints. The book depicts a future invasion of France by starving hordes of Indian emigrants, who are characterized as sexually voracious beasts determined to wreck Western civilization. ( continue to full post… )

A new academic paper rebuts the anti-Semitic theories of Professor Kevin MacDonald, a psychology professor at Cal State Long Beach who is widely read in neo-Nazi and white supremacist circles. MacDonald, who also is a member of a white supremacist group, published a trilogy that supposedly “proves” that Jews are genetically driven to destroy Western societies. MacDonald also argues that anti-Semitism, rather than being an irrational hatred for Jews, is a logical reaction to Jewish success. So the Nazis, like many other anti-Semites, were only anti-Semitic because they were countering a genuine Jewish threat to their wellbeing.

The unpublished paper is entitled “Jews Will Be Jews: A Scientific Racialism for the 21st Century,” and is written by David Isadore Lieberman, who has published several items in ABC-Clio’s Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution. Lieberman presented a shorter version of the paper during a 2005 seminar held at the University of Southampton’s Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/Non-Jewish Relations in England and has now made it available on the web. ( continue to full post… )