Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
Neo Nazi Organizations
Tanton Memo of the Month – The Promotion of Eugenics
01 year ago
This month’s Tanton Memo of the Month focuses on John Tanton’s eugenics project, Society for the Advancement of Genetics Education (SAGE).
In the mid 1990s, John Tanton, the founder of a host of anti-immigrant organizations, including NumbersUSA and the Center for Immigration Studies, decided to develop a platform to educate the public on eugenics without using the term “eugenics.”
Eugenics was used to justify slavery in the U.S. and Nazi Germany’s crimes against Jews, and Tanton recognized that the American public had come to reject pseudo-scientific arguments that certain racial or ethnic groups were inferior to others.
To hide his promotion of eugenics, Tanton decided to use the word “genetics” instead of “eugenics,” and to focus on plant life as a gateway topic to promote his belief in inherent biological IQ differences. These racialized arguments are still popular in many of today’s white nationalist and neo-Nazi organizations.
In a letter to Dr. Robert K. Graham of the Foundation for the Advancement of Man, Tanton said the project would emphasize:
“mankind’s use of eugenic principles on plants and the lower animals as a way to condition the public to the idea of genetic manipulation, and raise the question of its application to the human race. In fact, we report on ways it is currently being done, but under the term genetics rather than eugenics.”
Graham is the founder of the controversial project, “Repository for Germinal Choice,” a sperm bank which gained infamy by trying to only recruit Nobel Prize winners as donors. Only one Noble Prize winner ever admitted to donating his sperm and that was William Shockley, who was outspoken about his belief that American Blacks were of low intelligence. All of Graham’s donors were white.
Tanton’s activism with regard to racial eugenics is based on the disturbing belief that those identified as the most productive “gene pool of the human stock” should be the ones with access to and control over scarce resources.
The same American eugenics movement of the early 20th century that informed Nazi Germany’s practices also advocated against immigration in the 1920s. It is believed that eugenicists helped pass laws that ranked immigrants based on ethnicity – at the time Nordic and Anglo Europeans being the most desirable and Asian immigrants the least. Eugenics movements have found genetic fault with nearly every physical trait and ethnic group outside of the “Nordic race”. These have been considered the “undesirable” immigrant masses over the past 100 years.
Today’s anti-immigrant movement focuses on criminalizing, detaining and deporting primarily non-white immigrants.
While it’s hard to find anything left of SAGE’s website, www.genetics-ed.org, the goals and objectives were clear. The project would start “formally as a membership organization, doubtless with a self-perpetuating board to help guarantee that it stays on course” and would attempt “to reach the young, the well-educated, and the affluent.”
Tanton’s obsession with eugenics shines a light on his motivations for associating with white nationalists and controversial anti-immigrant views.
*The John Tanton letters and memos are a public collection at the Bentley Historical Library.
Anti-Immigrant ‘Progressives’ Embrace Hate
02 years ago
by Eric Ward
in American Renaissance, Council Of Conservative Citizens, Dr Martin Luther King Jr, Federation For American Immigration Reform, Immigration, John Tanton, Leah Durant, Neo Nazi Organizations, Politics, Progressives for Immigration Reform, Social Contract Press, Summit Ministries, Wayne Lutton, White Nationalist Movement
Back in 1963, The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream where . . . “little black boys and black girls” would “be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” I’m fairly sure Dr. King wasn’t envisioning Leah Durant, executive director of Progressives for Immigration Reform (PFIR) joining group shots with prominent leaders tied to the American white nationalist movement.
For nearly a year Leah Durant has been working overtime in an attempt to convince the public that PFIR is a legitimate progressive organization concerned about the issue of immigration. Recently in a discussion on AlterNet Durant argued that the fact that she was African American should be proof enough of PFIR’s progressive bona fides. Ironically Durant makes this statement after arguing that her organization was not “concerned with race.”
PFIR is the latest front group of the anti-immigrant John Tanton Network. Before assuming her present assignment Durant was a staff attorney for the Tanton Network’s Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). In 2007 FAIR was listed alongside klan and neo-Nazi organizations as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
A recent photo of Leah Durant is yet another example highlighting that PFIR politics are progressive in name only. The photo is a group shot of Leah Durant (right) with PeterGemma (center) and Wayne Lutton (left). Durant, Gemma, and Lutton were attending the 33rd Writers Workshop put on by The Social Contract Press (TSCP) an organization founded by John Tanton. TSCP is well known for its peddling of racist publications and writers.
Wayne Lutton is the editor of Social Contract Press. Lutton got his start at the homophobic Summit Ministries based in Colorado. Lutton was also active with the anti-Black magazine American Renaissance and the flagship publication of the Council of Conservative Citizens. The Council of Conservative Citizens is the lineal descendant of the white citizens’ council organization that opposed Dr. King in the South during the 1960s. Lutton now writes for the anti-Semitic journal The Occidental Quarterly.
Peter Gemma, like Lutton, also writes for the anti-Semitic Occidental Quarterly. Gemma who interviewed Durant in the pages of TSCP in the summer of 2009 writes for Middle American News (MAN). MAN’s earliest leadership included white nationalist Samuel Francis (now deceased). Gemma participated with the extremist Council for National Policy and spoke at a white nationalist event alongside the famous neo-Nazi David Duke. In 2003 Gemma spoke at a Council of Conservative Citizens event addressing “The Attack on White Culture.” Other presentations at the event included defending Mississippi symbol of the Southern Confederacy. Gemma regularly posts at the website VDARE named after the first alleged white child born in North America.
Lutton, Gemma, and The Social Contract Press have nothing in common with progressive politics. If one is known by the company they keep the same probably goes for Leah Durant and Progressives for Immigration Reform. PFIR is nothing more than a cheap attempt at dressing up anti-immigrant bigotry in the garb of progressive politics. Durant’s activities don’t resemble The Dream of Dr. King rather the nightmare of racist bigotry that he stood against.
I guess at the end of the day one could still consider Progressives for Immigration Reform “progressive.” If you’re a Nazi that is.