Reply #112: see among many others this about the Pioneer Fund + The Bell Curve

[bobbieinok]

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1271

Racism Resurgent:
How Media Let The Bell Curve's Pseudo-Science Define the Agenda on Race

By Jim Naureckas

....

...Nearly all the research that Murray and Herrnstein relied on for their central claims about race and IQ was funded by the Pioneer Fund, described by the London Sunday Telegraph (3/12/89) as a "neo-Nazi organization closely integrated with the far right in American politics." The fund's mission is to promote eugenics, a philosophy that maintains that "genetically unfit" individuals or races are a threat to society.

The Pioneer Fund was set up in 1937 by Wickliffe Draper, a millionaire who advocated sending blacks back to Africa. The foundation's charter set forth the group's missions as "racial betterment" and aid for people "deemed to be descended primarily from white persons who settled in the original 13 states prior to the adoption of the Constitution of the United States." (In 1985, after Pioneer Fund grant recipients began receiving political heat, the charter was slightly amended to play down the race angle--GQ, 11/94.)

The fund's first president, Harry Laughlin, was an influential advocate of sterilization for those he considered genetically unfit. In successfully advocating laws that would restrict immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, Laughlin testified before Congress that 83 percent of Jewish immigrants were innately feeble-minded (Rolling Stone, 10/20/94). Another founder, Frederick Osborn, described Nazi Germany's sterilization law as "a most exciting experiment" (Discovery Journal, 7/9/94).

The fund's current president, Harry Weyher, denounces the Supreme Court decision that desegregated schools, saying, "All Brown did was wreck the school system" (GQ, 11/94). The fund's treasurer, John Trevor, formerly served as treasurer for the crypto-fascist Coalition of Patriotic Societies, when it called in 1962 for the release of Nazi war criminals and praised South Africa's "well-reasoned racial policies" (Rolling Stone, 10/20/94).

One of the Pioneer Fund's largest current grantees is Roger Pearson, an activist and publisher who has been associated with international fascist currents. Pearson has written: "If a nation with a more advanced, more specialized or in any way superior set of genes mingles with, instead of exterminating, an inferior tribe, then it commits racial suicide" (Russ Bellant, Old Nazis, the New Right and the Republican Party).


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(Long discussion about Pioneer-funded Rushton, the author of the study in the OP---'British-born researcher John Philippe Rushton, who previously created a furore by suggesting intelligence is influenced by race, says the finding could explain why so few women make it to the top in the workplace.'

....

Anyone who flipped through the footnotes and bibliography of Murray and Herrnstein's book could see that there was something screwy about their sources. And there is hardly a proposition in their book that had not been thoroughly debunked more than a decade ago by Steven Jay Gould's classic work on the pseudo-science behind eugenics, The Mismeasure of Man.

....

The connection between the book and the anti-immigrant movement is, once again, the Pioneer Fund; the fund has always feared immigrants, although its concerns have shifted from Poles and Italians to blacks and Latinos. The leading anti-immigration group in the U.S. is the Federation for American Immigration Reform (unfortunately sharing an acronym with the media watch group FAIR); the federation has received more than $1 million in Pioneer money, which was critical in getting the organization off the ground. (See Extra!, 7-8/93.) Pioneer also funds the American Immigration Control Foundation, a more overtly racist group whose work is cited by Murray and Herrnstein.

....

It was left to John McLaughlin, of all people, to say the obvious about The Bell Curve: "It is largely pseudo-scientific and it is singularly unhelpful."

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And note especially

'Anyone who flipped through the footnotes and bibliography of Murray and Herrnstein's book could see that there was something screwy about their sources. And there is hardly a proposition in their book that had not been thoroughly debunked more than a decade ago by Steven Jay Gould's classic work on the pseudo-science behind eugenics, The Mismeasure of Man.'