The Institute for the Study of Academic Racism (ISAR) pointed out in 1998 that,

“For the past few years, University of Western Ontario psychology professor J. Philippe Rushton has replaced [Arthur] Jensen as the top individual beneficiary of Pioneer largess. Since 1981 he has benefited from more than a million dollars in Pioneer grants.”[1]

That’s real money that the Pioneer Fund is dispensing. If Rushton is now getting more of it than Jensen, it must be because Rushton is doing more of what Pioneer wants, or doing it ‘better’ than Jensen. We have already seen what both Jensen and Rushton do. Could it be that Pioneer is a racist organization? It certainly was when it was founded. ISAR explains that Pioneer is “a foundation established in 1937 to ‘prove’ that whites are genetically superior to blacks.”[2] This matters because institutions survive the passage of time when those who run them recruit people ideologically like themselves as replacements. So it appears that Pioneer has not been funding Jensen and Rushton by mistake.

The date of Pioneer’s founding, 1937, is significant, because this was the heyday of the American eugenics movement. Could it be that Pioneer is a eugenicist organization? Well, IQ ‘research’ was invented by the eugenicists, so the funding of Jensen and Rushton suggests that it might be. In fact, a definitive answer can be given to this question.

As you may recall from chapter 7, Harry Laughlin was the second most important man in the American eugenics movement—Charles Davenport’s right hand man (unless he was Davenport’s eminence grise, his Richelieu). Well guess what?

“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.”[3]

As we also saw in chapter 7, Harry Laughlin’s “model sterilization law” formed the basis of the Virginia eugenics law, which in turn led to the sterilization of Carrie Buck, subsequently appealed to the Supreme Court as a rigged fight—organized by Harry Laughlin himself—so that Americans all over the country could also be sterilized and/or incarcerated against their will. Fascist forces in Europe, including those in Nazi Germany, modeled their own eugenic laws after the one drafted in the United States by Harry Laughlin. This is who founded Pioneer.

Moreover, as ISAR explains,

“The Pioneer Fund’s original endowment came from Wickliffe Draper, scion of old-stock Protestant gentry… 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.”[4]

The “older order” of the “old-stock Protestant gentry” was one in which the “old-stock Protestant gentry” got to own people of color outright, and for this a theory of their natural inferiority was needed. Draper recognized that, living in the time of science, he needed to give the old racist doctrine a pseudo-scientific veneer, and that’s what his Pioneer Fund was for.

Now, given all this, making a defense of the Pioneer Fund would seem to require a fearless racist. The following is from pages 240-41 of Jon Entine’s Taboo:

“[Stephen J.] Gould and other critics make a lot of noise about the supposed links between some contemporary scientists and eugenicists of the 1930s. The controversial Pioneer Fund has provided millions of dollars to bankroll research on intelligence at more than sixty institutions in eight countries. It was chartered in 1937 by Wickliffe Draper, a textile magnate, to improve ‘the character of the American people’ by encouraging ‘white persons who settled in the original thirteen colonies prior to the adoption of the constitution and/or from related stocks’ to increase their reproductive rates. It bankrolled numerous U.S. and German scientists, including the biologist Harry H. Laughlin, who drew up a model sterilization law that was used by many countries, including Nazi Germany, in drafting the Nazi Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Ill Progeny, National Socialism’s cover for genocide. The fund embraced ‘race betterment’ and the forced sterilization of ‘inferior stock,’ reflecting the most aggressive tenants [sic] of the American eugenics movement. Yet such beliefs were mainstream enough to receive the blessing of...President Roosevelt’s secretary of war, Harry I. Woodring. Though eugenic thinking appears extreme to today’s sensibilities, much of it was certainly considered within the boundaries of reasonable policy in the thirties and forties.”

This is so brazen that the ordinary reader probably cannot imagine that Jon Entine could possibly be doing what he in fact is doing, and I therefore suspect most people read the above in a slightly confused haze, never realizing what has happened.

Entine tells us that the Pioneer Fund “was chartered in 1937,” when Adolf Hitler was of course already in power in Germany, and in fact only two years before the outbreak of the World War. Since Pioneer, as Entine explains, had the same ideology as the German Nazi Party, and therefore was interested in the demographic growth of white people (read ‘Aryans’), including by means of “forced sterilization of ‘inferior stock,’” this naturally means that when Pioneer “bankrolled numerous U.S. and German scientists” it was preparing the German Nazi Final Solution. And the bankrolling of US ‘scientists’ such as Harry Laughlin (Pioneer’s founder) had the same purpose because, as Entine also mentions, it was Harry Laughlin who built up the legal infrastructure that became “National Socialism’s cover for genocide.” This of course should make it impossible to defend the Pioneer Fund. And yet Entine states matter-of-factly that criticizing the Pioneer Fund for this history is to “make a lot of noise” because, in fact, even the highest echelons of the Roosevelt administration were backing all this. Okay, he says, so the extermination of an entire people and culture “appears extreme to today’s sensibilities,” but “it was certainly considered within the boundaries of reasonable policy in the thirties and forties.”

I stand corrected. The words ‘fearless racist,’ strong as they are, cannot begin to describe Jon Entine.

Entine’s apology for fascism and genocide is basically this: “Look, everybody was doing it, so back then it was okay.” This is naturally false. Everybody wasn’t doing it. The American eugenics movement was organized and funded by the wealthiest people in the United States, and its violence was directed against the lower classes. So the fact that Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of War was a eugenicist does not demonstrate that ‘everybody did eugenics,’ because it was the arch-wealthy classes, then as now, that controlled the US government. The working classes targeted for extermination by the aristocratic eugenicists, as you might expect, were not that crazy about this movement.

So learning that Roosevelt’s Secretary of War was a fascist makes a very different point, and it is this: The close cooperation between US government officials and the leaders of the American eugenics movement, covered in chapter 7, was still going on in the Roosevelt administration. Charles Davenport had succeeded in making the Galtonian dream an American reality: government-applied pseudo-biological theory as a tool of aristocratic state control; and this is precisely what the Nazis, encouraged and funded as they were by the American eugenicists, also said they were doing: “Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, coined a popular adage in the Reich, ‘National Socialism is applied biology.’”[4a] In what sense, then, were the US and Nazi ruling classes and governments ideological opponents?[4b] By pretending that the pervasiveness of eugenic thinking in the US ruling class, including in the Roosevelt administration, supposedly excuses fascism as ‘normal,’ Jon Entine prevents you from asking this question.

It is a question that must be asked. After all, even Entine himself concedes above that the German Nazis were doing what the American eugenicists—backed by the US government—told them to do. This agrees with what Edwin Black documents in War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's campaign to create a master race, which is that the American eugenicists completely dominated the international eugenics movement.

“American influence rolled across the Continent. Finland, Hungary, France, Romania, Italy and other European nations developed American-style eugenic movements that echoed the agenda and methodology of the fount at Cold Spring Harbor. Soon the European movements learned to cloak their work in more medically and scientifically refined approaches, and many were eventually funded by such philanthropic sponsors as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institution. ... Some [nations], such as Lithuania and Brazil, enacted eugenic marriage laws. Some, such as Finland, went as far as forced sterilization. One nation, Germany, would go further than anyone could imagine.”[4c]

There are two problems with the above statement. First, the American sponsors of European eugenics were not “philanthropic.” Here is the meaning of that word, as rendered by Merriam Webster Online: “dispensing or receiving aid from funds set aside for humanitarian purposes.” The key word is humanitarian. So Black’s use of the word “philantropic” above completely contradicts what he himself has documented, which is that the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations sponsored the international eugenics movement with their eyes open, and with the backing of the US government, because they meant to exterminate certain classes of people (see chapter 7 of this book).

Black also says above that “One nation, Germany, would go further than anyone could imagine.” This again is perfectly false, and once again (!) the refutation is included in Edwin Black’s own book. There had been considerable talk about ‘euthanasia’—which was code for mass killing—in American eugenic circles, including much discussion of ‘lethal chambers’ using poison gas. Edwin Black gives a rather detailed account of such discussions in chapter 13 of War Against the Weak. So what the German Nazis did was certainly imagined by the aristocratic American eugenicists; they just couldn’t get away with it in the United States, as Black himself explains.

And in chapter 14 of War Against the Weak, Black documents that in everything the German Nazis were the junior partners to the American eugenicists. Of course, in the end it was the German Nazis who were able to get more done, while the American eugenicists watched with a mixture of paternal pride and competitive envy.

“Ten years after Virginia passed its 1924 sterilization act [which was followed as a model by the German Nazis], Joseph DeJarnette, superintendent of Virginia’s Western State Hospital [where lots of innocent American workers were being forcibly sterilized], complained in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, ‘The Germans are beating us at our own game.’”[4d]

But coming back to our main thread, I must point out that Entine has once again succumbed to his passion for self-refutation. Why? Because even if we were to accept his preposterous defense of American eugenics as a passing fad no longer worth worrying about, this will not work as a defense of Pioneer. You see, at the Pioneer Fund, eugenics never went out of fashion. As the Institute for Study of Academic Racism (ISAR) explains,

“Abandoned by the political mainstream after World War II, [Pioneer’s patron Wickliffe] 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).”[4]

You will remember Henry Garrett from chapter 9, where his testimony in Davis v. County School Board was examined, and he was shown to be an arch-racist who supported segregation. Since Henry Garrett was the “most prominent among these early recruits” of Pioneer’s in the post-war period, it follows that the Pioneer Fund was not embarrassed by the Holocaust and did not abandon its racist goals. At least it hadn’t by the 1950s, when Henry Garrett testified against black equality.

Jon Entine in fact will concede to this. Here is what he says:

“Columbia University anthropologist [sic] Henry Garrett, an outspoken advocate of segregation [i.e. of American apartheid], consulted with the Pioneer Fund to bolster his research on the intelligence differences between the races. Garrett and his colleagues launched two controversial magazines that are now considered the intellectual digests of extremist hereditarian theories of intelligence, The Mankind Quarterly in Britain and a more recent German off-shoot, Neue Anthropologie.”[4e]

And Entine further concedes that Mankind Quarterly “became a haven for hard-line eugenicists.” In fact, as Entine also concedes on the same page,

“Since 1978, Mankind Quarterly has been edited by Roger Pearson, a controversial British anthropologist. He founded the Northern League (also called the Pan-Nordic Cultural Society) in 1957, which recycled the pre-World War II belief in the natural superiority of northern Europeans. According to Pearson, humanity could only be preserved if we preserved ‘an aristocracy of mankind’ by selective breeding of ‘ideal’ types. That was a code word for the Nordic [i.e. the so-called ‘Aryan’] race.”

So, given that Henry Garrett was getting money from Pioneer, it follows that Pioneer was still in the business of promoting eugenics. And yet I remind you that Jon Entine's apology for the Pioneer Fund's fascist origins was that this was supposedly a thing of the past, just a symptom of the supposedly general ideology of the first half of the twentieth century. Nonsense. Once you take a look at who the Pioneer Fund has been supporting over the course of the second half of the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first, it becomes perfectly obvious that, as you might expect, this organization has never abandoned its racist and fascist goals.

“…most of the leading Anglo-American academic race-scientists of the last several decades have been funded by 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.”[4]

What is The Bell Curve? This is a book that caused considerable controversy when it came out in 1994. The title makes clear why: The Bell Curve: Intelligence and class structure in American life.[5]

“Once a relatively obscure organization, Pioneer Fund entered the spotlight roughly two years ago following the publication of The Bell Curve, a book that attempted to prove that race and class differences are largely determined by genetic factors. Some critics took issue with the book’s scholarship, focusing specifically on its reliance on research subsidized by the Pioneer Fund.”[6]

Yes. When a book argues that “race and class differences are largely determined by genetic factors” one has a right to become suspicious if the supporting research is funded by an organization whose patron recruited “academic irredentists still dedicated to white supremacy and eugenics” because “[he] believed geneticists could scientifically prove the inferiority of Negros.”

And suspicion naturally grows when one finds that Pioneer Fund recipients have only one thing in common: they attack blacks. Thus, for example, consider the following three people in the list of names above: William Shockley, Michael Levin, and Linda Gottfredson. The first of these, Shockley, was neither a psychologist nor a biologist but a physicist:

“William Shockley. 1910-89, American physicist, b. London. He graduated from the California Institute of Technology (B.S., 1932) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D., 1936). After directing antisubmarine research for the U.S. Navy during World War II, he returned to work at Bell Laboratories. There he and two colleagues, John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain, produced the first transistor in 1947; for this work they shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956. Shockley taught electrical engineering at Stanford Univ. from 1958 to 1975.”[7]

So Shockley had zero training in psychology or biology. But that didn’t stop him from making certain claims:

“During the late 1960s Shockley became a figure of some controversy… He held that standardized intelligence tests reflect a genetic factor in intellectual capacity and that tests for IQ (intelligence quotient) reveal that blacks are inferior to whites. He further concluded that the higher rate of reproduction among blacks had a retrogressive effect on evolution.”[8]

Shockley was obviously a eugenicist, and he went out of his way to become a public racist. In fact, “He came to describe this work [i.e. his ‘work’ attacking blacks] as the most important of his career, although it severely tarnished his reputation.”[8a] The Pioneer Fund saw fit to give this man money, but obviously not because he was a good physicist—this was a prize for using his Nobel prestige to attack blacks.

Then there is Michael Levin.

“…the [Pioneer Fund] awarded $124,500 from 1991-1992 to Michael Levin, a philosophy professor at the City College of New York who has argued that black population growth must be slowed by ending public assistance.”[9]

What does a philosopher need $124,500 for? The answer is that he doesn’t need it. Philosophers do not conduct expensive research. Once again, this is just prize money for being a public racist, and for making arguments in favor of restricting the population growth of blacks, which is one of the things the original eugenics movement also called for.

And finally, let’s take a look at Linda Gottfredson.

“[Linda] Gottfredson [is] a University of Delaware researcher who said that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites and have diminished capabilities in work and educational settings. The university rejected a $174,000 Pioneer grant toward her work, citing the fund’s racist history. Gottfredson sued, claiming she was a victim of political correctness, and the school eventually backed down to avoid a protracted legal battle.”[10]

Gottfredson is militant. In 1990 she got together with Phillipe Rushton and with Harry Weyher, the president of the Pioneer Fund, and wrote a letter to the British daily The Independent saying that “governments that want ‘effective’ public policies must listen to scientists who say blacks are genetically less intelligent than other races.”[10a]

The outspoken Linda Gottfredson once again is neither a psychologist nor a biologist, but a sociologist who teaches in the Department of Education at the University of Delaware. So we have a physicist, a philosopher, and a sociologist. What do they have in common with the IQ-testers? Other than that they attack blacks from their academic perches and collect their rewards from the Pioneer Fund, nothing.

It is clear what the Pioneer Fund is, then. In consequence, it is clear also what Jon Entine is, because, despite everything he conceded about this organization, he defends the Pioneer Fund and its recipients, as follows:

“Over the years, the Pioneer Fund has backed a virtual Who’s Who of race scientists, many brilliant, who have published more than two hundred books and two thousand scholarly papers, many with the view that inferior groups are ‘dumbing’ down society by disseminating inferior seeds.”[10b]

If I clip that just a little it becomes easier to see:

“...the Pioneer Fund has backed...race scientists, many brilliant, ...with the view that inferior groups are ‘dumbing’ down society by disseminating inferior seeds.”

This is pretty clear, but Jon Entine is not quite done.

“...The Pioneer Fund continues to funnel money to dozens of academics... Though almost all hold professorships at distinguished universities, it is not uncommon for them to be vilified as ‘professors of hate.’”[11]

Since according to Merriam Webster Online ‘to vilify’ means “to utter slanderous and abusive statements against,” Entine is saying this:

To attack the eugenicists who get money from Pioneer—and who, by the way, are really smart—as ‘professors of hate’ is a slander.

Next Jon Entine will defend the Pope against the supposedly slanderous accusation that he is a Catholic.

So what do we have? That Jon Entine is one cog in a rather large and well-organized anti-black movement, seeing as he goes out of his way to apologize for a well-funded effort to make racism respectable in academia, which effort traces itself all the way back to the odious eugenics movement (the same one that, as Entine himself admits, bequeathed us Adolph Hitler and German Nazism).

One might argue, however, that Entine is merely cheerleading a racist movement, that he does not directly coordinate his actions with those of Pioneer and other well-funded and well-organized racists. But I think I can show that Entine is no free agent. In Mexico, where I grew up, there is an old saying, “Tell me who you hang out with, and I’ll tell you who you really are.” Of course, we have already seen who Entine really is, but let us take a look at his buddies anyway, for this will tell us who has an interest in promoting anti-black racism.

Jon Entine’s friends
__________________

Jon Entine calls J. Phillipe Rushton “Phil Rushton” in the acknowledgments section. Sounds friendly. Guess what?

“Since 2002, Rushton has been the president of the controversial Pioneer Fund.”[11a]

Really, how can there be a debate about whether the Pioneer Fund is still a racist organization? It has made Phillipe Rushton its president. Given that Entine defends Pioneer, and that Rushton is Entine's friend, and one who helped him out with Taboo, can there be a debate about Entine?

Entine has other such friends.

As mentioned earlier, Jon Entine wrote an article for Skeptic, a magazine, where he defended his views in a full-issue extravaganza that Skeptic devoted to Taboo. This was followed by a Skeptic symposium on Taboo at one of the most prestigious science schools in the US: Cal-Tech. So it is time for us to ask: What kind of magazine is Skeptic?

Let us first see what those running the magazine have to say about that. The Skeptic website explains the publication’s ‘mission’:

“Our mission is to serve as an educational tool for those seeking clarification and viewpoints on…controversial ideas and claims.”[12]

The Skeptic website also contains the Skeptic ‘manifesto,’ which explains as follows:

“Modern skepticism is embodied in the scientific method, that involves gathering data to formulate and test naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena.”[13]

Putting them together, Skeptic says that it means “to serve as an educational tool” about “controversial ideas and claims” by honoring the “scientific method,” which is to say principles of “gathering data to formulate and test…explanations.”

Now, the editors of Skeptic have for years been attending the meetings of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, the same society whose journal published the refutation of Rushton I cited in chapter 10. I know they’ve been there because I have seen them there myself, and on more than one occasion I have ended up seated at the same table with them, and exchanged a few words. Therefore, all that the editors of Skeptic had to do was call or email some of the many human population biologists or biological anthropologists they have met there. This would have been the first rational step in “gathering data” about Entine’s claims.

By taking this step, the Skeptic editors could have quickly found out just how absurd Entine’s arguments were. Just as an example, since they have met me, it could have occurred to them to call me. Very low cost. It’s not like they don't know me, because they published a letter of mine protesting Vincent Sarich’s celebration of The Bell Curve in an earlier issue of Skeptic.[13a] But it didn’t have to be me; many others in the Human Behavior and Evolution society could have explained to the Skeptic editors that when Entine presents his views as the mainstream state-of-the-art in population biology, he is simply lying. At which point the obvious editorial decision is to print a refutation of Entine by a qualified biologist, because the Skeptic mission, they claim, is “to serve as an educational tool for those seeking clarification and viewpoints on…controversial ideas and claims.”

But the editors of Skeptic didn’t do that. Instead, they invited Entine to make a defense of his book Taboo. They also invited Vincent Sarich to write another defense of the same.[14] For good measure, they had one of the editors of Skeptic, Frank Miele, write a glowing fan piece about Entine, once again defending Taboo and giving the full list of Entine’s ‘prestigious awards.’[15]

Did anybody take a critical view of Entine’s book? Michael Shermer, one of the editors at Skeptic, wrote a piece with a weak dissenting argument (compare to Carrie Buck’s lawyer’s weak defense of her, which we saw in chapter 7), and John Hoberman, a sociologist at the University of Texas, was also invited to write a piece against.[16]

What this means is that not one population biologist was asked to comment on Entine’s claims, even though this was, of course, the only way to satisfy the explicit Skeptic mission and manifesto. When it comes to Jon Entine, then, Skeptic abandoned skepticism entirely, merely producing the aura of scientific debate when it had in fact gone out of its way to stack the deck in Entine’s favor.

What could explain this?

To answer this question let us consider again the journal Mankind Quarterly. This journal was founded by R. Gayre. To get a sense for him, consider that he was called as an ‘expert witness’ for the defense in a trial against several individuals accused of publishing racist materials.

“In his evidence to the court he [Gayre] described blacks as being ‘feckless’ and he maintained that scientific evidence showed that blacks ‘prefer their leisure to the dynamism which the white and yellow races show.’ Largely on the basis of Gayre’s ‘expert’ testimony the defendants were acquitted.”[17]

Entine himself explained, as you may recall, that another founder of Mankind Quarterly was eugenicist and pro-segregation activist Henry Garrett. Entine conceded, further 1) that this journal “became a haven for hard-line eugenicists,” and 2) that “Since 1978, Mankind Quarterly has been edited by Roger Pearson,” who, as Entine also explains, defends the traditional German Nazi ideology.

How interesting, then, that Frank Miele, who, as we saw above, is one of the editors of Skeptic, has written extensively on ‘race’ for—guess which journal? Mankind Quarterly. Two examples from his corpus are:

Miele, Frank. “Morphological Methods and Racial Classification.” Mankind Quarterly 12 (April-June 1972): 220-227.

Miele, Frank. “Twin Studies and the Inheritance of Mental Ability.” Mankind Quarterly 13 (January-March 1973): 129-140.

And Frank Miele is also associated with Arthur Jensen’s work.[18]

It is now becoming much clearer why Skeptic magazine, and Frank Miele in particular, should have showcased and praised Entine’s book Taboo. Further enlightenment is to be had by consulting the acknowledgments section of Taboo, where, in addition to thanking Vincent Sarich for doing some heavy lifting in making Taboo as good as Entine thinks it is, somebody else is thanked in the same terms:

“Berekely geneticist Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele, an editor at my favorite magazine, Skeptic, were generous enough to review the manuscript in detail, offering up dozens of critical suggestions.”[19] [my emphasis]

(Please do not fail to notice that Entine has called Sarich—who isn’t— a geneticist.)

So this is a friendly little club. Small wonder, then, that the other friend, Vincent Sarich, was invited to contribute his own defense of Entine’s ideas in the pages of Skeptic, which ideas Entine of course got from… (?)

Wait just a minute.

As you may recall, Jon Entine got his ‘theory’ from Vincent Sarich (see chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5), whom Entine falsely presented as espousing the biological mainstream. Consulting Entine’s footnote, I find that Entine is not quoting a peer-reviewed publication of Sarich’s, but, if you can believe this, an email that Sarich sent to an informal internet list. Entine is popularizing the biological mainstream? Entine is popularizing an email. An email.[20]

They are playing us for fools, aren’t they?

Now Sarich has written an article for Skeptic defending Entine’s ideas of race. But the ideas are his, Sarich’s, and they were written in an email, not published in a peer-reviewed publication. Lunacy. If we wait just a bit, somebody may write an article for a low-grade pseudo-academic journal (perhaps Frank Miele, in Mankind Quarterly), this time citing Sarich’s Skeptic article. Then University of California at Berkeley Professor Emeritus Vincent Sarich can write another article for a somewhat more prestigious journal and cite Miele’s latest ‘academic’ article, always on the same idea. It is now a ‘respectable idea.’ See how this works? It is ‘out there’ and being discussed ‘in the literature.’ This is a page stolen from the tactical manual of the antisemites who deny the Holocaust, and whom Pr. Deborah Lipstadt has exposed.[21]

You might never suspect this, however, if all you knew about Skeptic was that Michael Shermer, one of its editors, had written a book in 2000 refuting the Holocaust deniers.[21a] This is much too clever. So clever, in fact, that the publicity for this book sports a plaudit from Jared Diamond, the same Jared Diamond who is a public anti-racist and whose work is so infuriating to the man whom Jon Entine affectionately calls “Phil Rushton.” This of course is the same Entine who is a Skeptic inner-circle amigo and whose racist and pro-eugenicist views Skeptic (which Michael Shermer edits) vigorously promotes!

It’s enough to make your head spin, and perhaps you need to read the above paragraph again.

Can it be explained? The following hypothesis springs to mind: Jared Diamond, who is Jewish and a public anti-racist, has fallen innocently prey to a maneuver meant to give Skeptic a pro-Jewish flavor by associating its editor prominently with the refutation of Holocaust deniers. And what is the point of that? The point is to get any African-Americans who discover just how racist Skeptic is to conclude that anti-black racism is connected with being pro-Jewish—an excellent way of alienating the African-American and Jewish-American communities. But would Skeptic have an interest in so dividing blacks and Jews? Certainly. As we have seen, Skeptic is pushing eugenics, and it should not be forgotten that the eugenicists suffered a quite important defeat at the hands of the Civil Rights movement, the backbone of which was a strong alliance between blacks and Jews (it is not a random coincidence that one of the five founders of the NAACP should have been Jewish: Henry Moscowitz, the only non-black founder[21b]).

Another aspect of the same policy is that Jon Entine tells the world that he is supposedly Jewish! In an interview he gave to United Press International about a book he is writing (slated to be released in 2005) on Jewish history, he talks about “the trauma of my bar mitzvah.”[21c] I have already shown that Jon Entine is dishonest, so how difficult is it to imagine that he is lying about being Jewish? Given that he is an apologist for German Nazism, as we saw, I would submit that this is not too difficult. What is difficult is to imagine a real Jewish person apologizing for those who exterminated the Jewish people. It would be like finding a black person defending the Ku Klux Klan.

Given all this, it matters that the American Establishment is fully behind Jon Entine, because from this we may conclude two things:

1) eugenics never went out of fashion in the hyper-rich American aristocracy, and

2) these American aristocrats have learned their lesson, because they appear to be taking quite sophisticated steps to sabotage unity between African Americans and Jews.

In the following section I examine the widespread support Jon Entine gets from the wealthy Establishment.

Jon Entine has friends in very high places
_____________________________________

As we saw in the introduction, Entine’s book was widely praised in the mainstream press. To those with an understanding of the race concept, population biology, categorization theory, and the history of IQ tests, it is obvious that Entine’s book is one lie after another. It follows, therefore, that the mainstream press did not ask qualified people to review this book.

Is that how the press usually does things? At least at The New York Times, the usual practice is to ask people to review a book who are professionally familiar with the book’s topic. I’ll give you three examples.

1) When The New York Times needed somebody to review The Seashell on the Mountaintop: A Story of Science, Sainthood, and the Humble Genius Who Discovered a New History of the Earth, by Alan Cutler, it asked Kevin Padian to do it. Why? Because the book examines the discoveries of a medieval geologist, and Padian “teaches evolutionary biology and paleontology at the University of California, Berkeley.”[22] Is a paleontologist a good choice for reviewing a book on medieval geology? Sure. Paleontologists cannot get their degree unless they understand geology.

2) When The New York Times needed somebody to review Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science - From the Babylonians to the Maya, by Dick Teresi, it asked Stephen S. Hall. Why? Because this is a book about the history of science, and Hall writes on the history of science: “Stephen S. Hall is working on a book about the history of regenerative medicine.”[23] So this is right up his alley.

3) When The New York Times needed somebody to review The Great Challenge: The Myth of Laissez-Faire in the Early Republic, by Frank Bourgin, it asked Pauline Maier. Why? Because this is a book about American history, and “Pauline Maier’s books include The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams,” so the presumption is that she knows something about American history.[24]

You get my drift. This newspaper is careful to match a book it wants to review to a person with the credentials to review it. But this is precisely what didn’t happen when it came to reviewing Entine’s book Taboo. For this one, The New York Times asked Jim Holt to do the review. His qualifications? “Jim Holt writes about science and philosophy for Lingua Franca and The Wall Street Journal.”[25] Well, that’s very nice, but if Jim Holt is a serviceable jack-of-all-trades who writes for The Wall Street Journal, that doesn’t make him a population biologist.

And what did Jim Holt say? He wrote that Entine had made “a painstaking case that race and genetics are indeed ‘significant components’ of the ‘stunning and undeniable dominance of black athletes,’” and he defended Entine’s book, believe it or not, as an attack on racism, by suggesting that the thesis it defends “rankles white racial chauvinists, who until the last century clung to the myth that Africans were inferior to Europeans.”

This takes some nerve, because the “white racial chauvinists,” such as Henry Edward Garrett, have always said that blacks are “fine muscular animals” (see chapter 9).

Holt did mention in passing that Entine might be wrong. But that’s just the problem: it creates the impression of a debate when in fact there is none. What Holt should have said is that Entine’s book is a long string of incoherent absurdities, defended by misrepresenting a lot of nonsensical hogwash as the supposed findings of mainstream biology, and for good measure citing the findings of mainstream biology—which refute him—as if they supported him. And Holt probably should have mentioned, too, that Jon Entine apologizes for the eugenics movement that spawned the German Nazis.

Did The New York Times make an innocent mistake? This is quite impossible, because

1) the topic of the book is quite sensitive—in fact, politically explosive;

2) among educated people it is not a secret that biologists have been saying for some time that there are no human races;

3) The New York Times is run by educated people; and

4) quite a few people openly accused the book of being racist as soon as it came out.

Therefore, the obvious move here was for The New York Times to cover its back and make sure that an eminent population biologist reviewed the book—or at least somebody who had some reason to know something about population biology. What follows, then, is that The New York Times went out of its way to get this book reviewed by a layperson, even though it is precisely this book which, of all books, should have been reviewed by an expert.

There can be little question on this point because The New York Times—as if it were the marketing division for Jon Entine Inc.—did not give Taboo one review but two. Holt’s was the second, four months after the book first came out in January 2000.

The first NYT review of Taboo, in January 2000, by one Richard Bernstein, says this:

“Mr. Entine makes a careful and reasoned case for this point of view… Mr. Entine’s conclusion that racially distinctive features are an essential element of the picture is part of a sophisticated argument that, whether entirely persuasive or not, cannot be dismissed.”[26]

A ringing endorsement.

The funny thing is, about Richard Bernstein The New York Times cannot even say that he writes about science and philosophy: he is an utter layman. If you would like to know what Mr. Bernstein does, let me get out of the way so that he can tell you:

“My new book is a story of two journeys. One is that of a Chinese monk named Hsuan Tsang who in the seventh century traveled from the Tang Dynasty capital at Chang-an to the South of India and back, in search of the Buddhist truth. The second journey was my own retracing of Hsuan Tsang’s route over four or so months in 1999. I went for roughly 10,000 overland miles by bus, train, and Jeep, across deserts, Himalayan mountain passes, two former republics of the Soviet Union, Pakistan, India, and Nepal—and back.”[27]

How charming. I suppose this is why Mr. Bernstein is qualified to evaluate a book that makes claims about the supposed state-of-the-art in population biology.

So there is no doubting it: The New York Times went out of its way to get laypersons to review Entine’s book—not once, but twice.

And why? It is obvious: if an expert had reviewed Entine, he would have trashed it, as confirmed by how this book was reviewed in the biological journals. Here is how a review in the Quarterly Review of Biology wryly delivered the point that Entine (whose book it called “maddening”) had not supported himself with the work of mainstream genetics:

“The heavy reliance on anthropologists who support the race distinction [Vincent Sarich] does not strengthen the case and, indeed, serves only to highlight the pronounced and growing distance between mainstream genetics and anthropology. Much of the cited evidence derives from secondary and tertiary sources, and a fair amount of email, anecdotes, celebrity opinions, newspaper editorials, and unpublished communications masquerade as evidence.”[28]

Ouch. (Not that Entine feels the sting: he posted the review on his website!)

So if The New York Times went out of its way to get a complete layperson to review Jon Entine’s book—not once, but twice—this must be because it didn’t want a review like that in the Quarterly Review of Biology happening in its pages.

What does that suggest? That an attack on black people, backed by the big money of the American Establishment, is afoot.

More evidence for this point is hardly needed, because The New York Times is the king of print media: the ‘cream of the cream’ (in terms of prestige and circulation figures, if not quality). But if further evidence were needed, I remind you that The New York Times was hardly alone in praising Taboo. Across the board, all over the mainstream press, Entine received glowing reviews. Entine, of course, claims that there was great resistance to Taboo, but as I said in the introduction,

“If the Establishment had indeed tried to squash Entine’s book, we would expect Taboo to have been negatively reviewed, or not to have been reviewed at all, in mainstream publications. But in fact the opposite happened. The book was widely reviewed. The non-scientists who reviewed Taboo wrote that Entine had been ‘forthright enough to present hard evidence,’[29] and had ‘done a brilliant job’[30] of giving us a ‘balanced, comprehensive presentation of a mountain of relevant data,’[31] which amounts to a ‘sophisticated argument that…cannot be dismissed.’[32] They warned that, although ‘There will be those who will refuse to listen,…his work will be difficult to refute, given the overwhelming nature of…the scientific evidence.’[33] They agreed that ‘Taboo convincingly argues that race does make a difference….’”[34]

These were the opinions of Kirkus Reviews, The Montreal Gazette, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.

Still not convinced that there is a well-funded and broadly based attack on blacks going on? Then consider where Entine’s book Taboo comes from. As Entine informs the public on his own website, and proudly displaying the NBC logo,

“TABOO is based on the 1989 NBC News documentary ‘Black Athletes: Fact and Fiction,’ produced and written by Jon Entine with Tom Brokaw. The program, which included an hour-long documentary and a forty-five minute discussion and analysis that followed, was awarded an Ohio State University Award for Excellence in Broadcasting and was named Best International Sports Film at the International Sports Film Festival.”[35]

Once again we see a prestigious news source going out of its way to promote Entine’s claims. Once again we see the Establishment showering praise in the form of awards.

NBC is a very big deal: in recent years the most important TV network. In fact, NBC is a much bigger deal than The New York Times, because although that paper is quite respected, not that many people read it, and book reviews are something that the overwhelming majority of those who do read this paper skip anyway. NBC, on the other hand, is watched by millions of people. Moreover, Tom Brokaw in particular was always considered a trusted newsperson, and in fact he rose to become the highest rated news anchor:

“Tom Brokaw’s retirement [December 2004] at age 64 ended a nine-year run as the No. 1 network news anchor as measured by Nielsen.”[34a]

A lot of ordinary people watching Brokaw’s program with Entine were undoubtedly influenced by NBC’s and Brokaw’s prestige, and thought to themselves that they were looking at a report on what mainstream biology had shown—because Brokaw and NBC would not be deliberately pushing racism, now, would they?

They would.

Jon Entine relates, on pages 6 and 7 of Taboo, the following comments by the former NBC news anchor concerning the program he put together with Entine:

“‘It was probably as complicated and controversial a story as I’ve ever gotten involved in, certainly up there with Watergate,’ Brokaw remembers. ‘There were times right before and after it aired that I worried if the storm would ever die down. Those were delicate moments.’ ... ‘Friends said ‘Don’t do it,’’ recalls Brokaw. ‘But I thought that it was important enough to address.’ ... ‘I had a friend who shall go nameless, who is a distinguished black American, had been an athlete, and excelled at the highest levels in other fields. He never raised the subject with me. He just quietly withdrew our friendship for about two years.’”

This is quite a lot to digest. Tom Brokaw created such a controversy with this program that he compares it to the Watergate scandal that forced president Richard Nixon to resign in order to avoid impeachment! There is of course no question that mainstream biologists informed Brokaw that Entine was a quack (after all, the show created a storm that seemed to Brokaw like it might never die down). And yet Brokaw went ahead with this program because he thought it was very important—important enough that he would do it even if it offended his black friends.

Tom Brokaw cares deeply about promoting Entine’s obviously fraudulent ideas.

The same can be said about the rest of the mainstream media, which went out of its way to praise the NBC Brokaw-Entine extravaganza. Of this Entine leaves no doubt because he quotes all the accolades on his website:

“This is a step forward in the dialogue on race and sports.” - Newsday

“This program—reported by Tom Brokaw and written and produced by Jon Entine—is very good, very fair and stands on its own. And this program is controversial, but only because it publicly suggests what countless avid sports followers know to be true and say privately.” - Los Angeles Times

“It is the best documentary NBC has put together in a very long time.” - Philadelphia Daily News

“The program opened the door to enlightenment on a controversial subject.” - Dr. Harry Edwards, University of California-Berkeley Sociologist

“‘Black Athletes’ presented a strong case that there are, in fact, fundamental physiological differences between blacks and whites.” - Houston Post

“Producer-writer Jon Entine and host Tom Brokaw offer us a thoughtful look at widely held beliefs about black athletic superiority.” - Los Angeles Herald Examiner

“The network should be applauded for its bold venture, for the willingness to tackle a sensitive subject such as alleged athletic superiority of blacks, and for taking risks in the name of truth-seeking.” - Denver Post

“Blacks have suffered so much cruelty at the hands of whites, they are now unwilling to accept what could be a compliment because they are scared to hidden meanings and implications. That’s sad for blacks. And if you think about it, it’s sad for whites, as well.” - San Francisco Chronicle.[35]

But if you are still not convinced that there is a big-money organized effort against blacks, I will ask you simply to remember that the Civil Rights movement is only a half-century old, and that almost every psychology department in the country continues to produce and teach so-called IQ research, even though this ‘research’ has been thoroughly discredited many times over, and even though the only point of it is to disenfranchise blacks and other minorities.

This is a big deal. A lot of Establishment support goes to convincing people that

1)  human races supposedly exist;

2)  that the prejudices ordinary Americans have about so-called ‘blacks’—which are derived from the ideological needs of those who oppressed Africans with slavery—are supposedly accurate; and

3)  that IQ tests—designed so that members of the lower classes (where blacks are overrepresented) will do poorly as a result of their environmental disadvantages—are valid measures of something called ‘intelligence,’ which is held to be innate and unalterable, but which is in fact a concept that the IQ test results themselves refute!

It is high time all this was exposed, and it is high time that ordinary black people became aware of what is being done to them, systematically, across the board, with subterfuge, and with the backing of big money.

A defense must be mounted.

___________________________________________________

Footnotes
___________________________________________________

The following piece documents that the British government tried to destroy the state of Israel in the cradle. This included sending captured Nazi officers to the Arab armies that pledged themselves to exterminate the Israeli Jews in 1948.

"The British Record on Partition"; Reprinted from The Nation, May 8, 1948; Emperor's Clothes; Posted 9 March 2004; with an introductory note by Jared Israel.
http://emperors-clothes.com/history/br.htm

This British policy was supported by the United States government, but loudly protested by the American workers, as documented here:

In 1947-48 forced by external circumstances, the US government gave lukewarm support to the creation of the State of Israel. But then it reversed itself and implemented anti-Israel policies; from "Is the US an ally of Israel? A chronological look at the evidence"; Emperor's Clothes; September 2004; by Francisco Gil-White.
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/ihrally.htm#1947

[4c] Black, E. 2003. War against the weak: Eugenics and America's campaign to create a master race. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows. (p.277)

[4d]  War against the weak (p.245).

[4e] Taboo (p.241)

[5] Herrnstein, R., and C. Murray. 1994. The bell curve : intelligence and class structure in American life. New York: Free Press.

[6] GOP DRAGGING BAGGAGE TO NEW HAMPSHIRE VOTE: Forbes Waffles on Ellis; Brooks Blasts Buchanan; By JONATHAN MAHLER, FORWARD STAFF;
http://www.ferris.edu/isar/Institut/pioneer/forbes.htm

[7] Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, Copyright (c) 2004.
http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/S/Shockley.asp

[8] "Shockley, William B.." Encyclopædia Britannica from Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
http://proxy.library.upenn.edu:8300/eb/article?tocId=9067464
[Accessed February 5, 2005].

[8a] William Shockley. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Bradford_Shockley

[9] GOP DRAGGING BAGGAGE TO NEW HAMPSHIRE VOTE: Forbes Waffles on Ellis; Brooks Blasts Buchanan; By JONATHAN MAHLER, FORWARD STAFF;
http://www.ferris.edu/isar/Institut/pioneer/forbes.htm

[10] Racist Science; From CUNY Web Server; August 29, 1998; BY TREVOR W. COLEMAN
http://tomweston.net/racsic.htm

[10a] The Independent (London), March 4, 1990, Sunday, HOME NEWS PAGE; Page 4 , 1239 words, Academics 'were funded by racist American trust', By TIM KELSEY and TREVOR ROWE in New York

LONDON, Ont. (CP) - A letter written by controversial professor Philippe Rushton and four other academics says governments that want "effective" public policies must listen to scientists who say blacks are genetically less intelligent than other races.

The letter, which was to be published today in the British newspaper The Independent, argues that genetic factors are an important cause of racial differences in wealth, crime rates, illiteracy, health and unemployment.

The letter is signed by Rushton, psychologist Hans Eysenck of the University of London, education studies professor Linda Gottfredson of the University of Delaware, psychologist Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster and Roger Pearson, director of the Institute for the Study of Man, Washington, D.C.

It is also signed by New York lawyer Harry Weyher, president of the Pioneer Fund, which has provided research money to the five academics. The fund has been described as racist.

Rushton, a University of Western Ontario psychology professor, argues that blacks are less intelligent, law-abiding and sexually restrained than whites, while both rank below Orientals.

But the quality of Rushton's scientific research has been questioned. Critics point out Rushton uses results of intelligence tests that have been called culturally biased, he refers to discredited studies of brain size and he shrugs off any facts that don't fit his beliefs.

[10b] Taboo (p.241).

[11] Entine, Jon. 2000. Taboo: Why black athletes dominate sports and why we're afraid to talk about it. New York: Public Affairs. (p.241-242)

[11a] http://www.answers.com/topic/j-philippe-rushton

[12] Visit
http://www.skeptic.com/
and click on Skeptic Mission on the left-hand margin.

[13] Visit
http://www.skeptic.com/
and click on Skeptic Manifesto on the left-hand margin.

[13a] "The Flaw in Sarish's Ointment"; Skeptic; vol.3, No.4; 1995; by Francisco Gil-White.

[14] “The Final Taboo: Race Differences in Ability”; Skeptic; Summer 2000; by Vincent Sarich.
http://www.jonentine.com/skeptic/sarich.htm

[15] http://www.jonentine.com/skeptic.htm#intro

[16] http://www.jonentine.com/skeptic.htm

[17] Billig, Michael (1979) “Psychology, Racism & Fascism,” Searchlight. (ch.3)
http://www.ferris.edu/isar/archives/billig/

[18] The Institute for the Study of Academic Racism has compiled a bibliography for Frank Miele. You will find it here:
http://www.ferris.edu/isar/bibliography/miele.htm

[19] Taboo (p.344).

[20] Taboo (p.110, fn.47).

[21] Lipstadt, D. (1993). Denying the Holocaust: The growing assault on truth and memory. New York & Toronto: Free Press.

[21a] http://www.skeptic.de/b/0058.php4

[21b] http://www.naacp.org/about/about_history.html

[21c] Q&A: Tracing Jewish history through genes, United Press International, May 15, 2003 Thursday, 1474 words, By STEVE SAILER, LOS ANGELES, May 15 (UPI)
http://www.upi.com/inc/view.php?StoryID=20030515-013945-7702r

[22] The New York Times, April 27, 2003 Sunday,  Late Edition - Final , Section 7; Column 1; Book Review Desk; Pg. 21, 1079 words, Of Stones and Saliva,  By Kevin Padian; Kevin Padian, who teaches evolutionary biology and paleontology at the University of California, Berkeley, is also director of the college writing program there.

[23] The New York Times, December 1, 2002 Sunday,  Late Edition - Final , Section 7; Column 1; Book Review Desk; Pg. 13, 2204 words, Mapping the Heavens, Curing Dandruff ,  By Stephen S. Hall; Stephen S. Hall is working on a book about the history of regenerative medicine and the prospects for “practical immortality.”

[24] The New York Times, July 30, 1989, Sunday, Late Edition - Final, Section 7; Page 11, Column 1; Book Review Desk, 1413 words, THE DISSERTATION THAT WOULD NOT DIE, By PAULINE MAIER; Pauline Maier's books include ''The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams.''

[25] The New York Times, April 16, 2000, Sunday, Late Edition - Final, Section 7; Page 11; Column 1; Book Review Desk , 1570 words, Nobody Does It Better, By Jim Holt;  Jim Holt writes about science and philosophy for Lingua Franca and The Wall Street Journal.

[26] The New York Times,  January 14, 2000, Friday, Late Edition - Final Correction Appended,  Section E; Part 2; Page 55; Column 1; Leisure/Weekend Desk,  1139 words,  BOOKS OF THE TIMES; The Race to the Swift. Or Is It the Swift to the Race?,  By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

[27] http://slate.msn.com/id/103188/entry/103189/

[28] Quarterly Review of Biology, by Michael J. Dougherty, Biology, Hampden–Sydney College, Hampden–Sydney, Virginia;
http://www.jonentine.com/reviews/quart_review_biology.htm

[29] “Journalist and award-winning TV producer Entine writes lucidly about a forbidden topic. After O.J., it takes courage to discuss race science…Entine presents the evidence that makes his argument unusually ambitious and controversial…Courageous enough to ask tough questions about the uneven playing field, forthright enough to present hard evidence.” -- Kirkus Reviews,  NONFICTION,  336 words,  1-891620-39-8.

[30] “Cultural differences play a role, but the evidence Entine assembles is overwhelming: at the sports in which they excel, blacks are superior… Entine has done a brilliant job of making his case. There will be those who will refuse to listen, but his work will be difficult to refute, given the overwhelming nature of both the anecdotal and the scientific evidence.” -- The Gazette (Montreal),  February 12, 2000, Saturday, FINAL,  1051 words,  Why black men rule the game: It’s time to admit the obvious, says author who traces the history of racism in sports,  JACK TODD.

[31] “…Entine’s balanced, comprehensive presentation of a mountain of relevant data…” -- The Christian Science Monitor,  June 15, 2000, Thursday,  FEATURES; BOOKS; Pg. 16,  795 words,  Race and sports not a black-and-white issue,  Ross Atkin

[32] “Mr. Entine makes a careful and reasoned case for this point of view… Mr. Entine’s conclusion that racially distinctive features are an essential element of the picture is part of a sophisticated argument that, whether entirely persuasive or not, cannot be dismissed.” -- The New York Times,  January 14, 2000, Friday, Late Edition - Final Correction Appended,  Section E; Part 2; Page 55; Column 1; Leisure/Weekend Desk,  1139 words,  BOOKS OF THE TIMES; The Race to the Swift. Or Is It the Swift to the Race?,  By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

[33] Jack Todd in the Gazette, Montreal (see above)

[34] When Race Matters * Review by Paul Ruffins, Washington Post, February 6, 2000.

[34a] USA TODAY, December 3, 2004, Friday,, FINAL EDITION, NEWS;, Pg. 13A;, 273 words, Why Tom Brokaw was No. 1 so long, Al Neuharth; USA TODAY Founder

[35] http://www.jonentine.com/fact_fiction.htm

www.hirhome.com