America's dark underbelly: I watched the rise of white nationalism

 

America's dark underbelly: 

I watched the rise of white nationalism

Journalist Vegas Tenold spent six years among some of America’s most extreme white supremacists, and discovered a people who believe the white race is under threat and the enemy is everywhere


Sat 17 Feb 2018 10.00 GMT  

It was almost 3am, and Matthew Heimbach and I were sitting in an International House of Pancakes restaurant somewhere between Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Paoli, Indiana, when Matthew asked me why I never asked him about the Holocaust.

The question caught me by surprise, not because I was unaccustomed to Matthew talking about Jews – only a few hours earlier he had ranted about how Jews were behind tens of millions of aborted white babies – but because I didn’t know the answer to the question.

It was on the evening before the presidential election, and I had known Matthew for a few years, watching him gain steam as a nationalist leader in America and putting together the Nationalist Front, his ragtag coalition of white pride malcontents.

I had spent the past six years with members of the radical right in order to write a book that explains the resurgence of rightwing radical groups who march in the streets, whose beliefs are rooted in the flotsam of decades of American racism, antisemitism, and white supremacy.

Matthew’s vision was to bring the these groups together within a single political movement – and in the time I knew him he became one of the most significant far-right figures in the country.

His question about the Holocaust made me wonder if all the time we had spent together had dulled me in some ways or softened my journalistic instincts.

If you spend enough time with another person, however much you disagree with or abhor that person’s opinions on certain matters, you are bound to find traits you like. And there were traits about Matthew that I honestly liked. He was always upbeat and friendly and had a way of dismissing the rest of the far right in a way that was hard to disagree with.

Also, there were political issues that we agreed on. We both felt strongly for the struggle of Palestinians, and we both believed that the prevalence of money and special interests in American politics had gotten the country into trouble.

Perhaps I was getting a form of Stockholm syndrome. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that at some point along the way I had let myself get taken in by Matthew’s charm and gregariousness.

The folksy, friendly qualities that made him so much more dangerous than your garden-variety white supremacist had gotten under my skin, and it dawned on me that the reason I hadn’t asked him about the Holocaust might be that I didn’t want to hear what he had to say about it.

 Matthew Heimbach and Miles Smythe heading to President Trump’s inauguration in Washington. Photograph: Vegas Tenold

Somewhere along the line, in the churning and virulent sea of Klan members’ ramblings, neo-Nazis’ aggression, and old-school white supremacists’ hatred, Matthew had become an island of relative calm, someone with whom I discussed the craziness of the white supremacist movement rather than a subject whose views I dissected and scrutinized.

The reporting for the book always took place with the full knowledge and consent of my subjects. I never concealed who I was or presented myself as anything but a journalist. But during my reporting I had spoken to several law enforcement officers who had infiltrated Klan and militia groups during the 1970s and 1980s, and they all said it was easy to become friendly with the people they were investigating and that keeping an eye on the ball was sometimes a challenge.

Had I, too, begun to lose sight of the ball?

I chewed on a forkful of red velvet pancake with syrup when it dawned on me that Matthew’s question was a gift, bringing me back to where I needed to be. It was a wake-up call, a reminder that however friendly we had become, there was still a chasm between us that neither of us wanted to cross and certain things I could never condone.

Of course, I didn’t say this to him. “I’m not sure why I haven’t asked you about the Holocaust, Matt,” I said. “I suppose I always planned on getting around to it, but now is as good a time as any.”

I put down my fork and took a sip of iced water.

“So how can you defend national socialism when it was behind the murder of 6.6 million innocents?”

With that, everything fell back into place again.

It was jarring to listen to Matthew explain the mathematical impossibility of cremating millions of Jews, the lack of historical witnesses to the Holocaust, the impracticality of using Zyklon-B, and the benefits the international Jewry had seen in perpetuating the lie of the Holocaust. These were all boilerplate Holocaust-denying arguments and had been debunked ad nauseam, yet they still proved irresistible to those who wanted to give a veneer of pseudo-science to their antisemitism.

They were feats of faux-intellectual acrobatics, non-factual contortions designed to force a square peg into a round hole, and Matthew’s refusal to acknowledge the mountain of historical evidence of the slaughter of a people reminded me that however friendly or rational he seemed, especially compared to other white nationalists, he still believed and promoted the same racist ideas.

When Matthew was done explaining how there were bound to be deaths at PoW camps – which, according to him, is what the concentration camps were – but that these camps weren’t any worse than what the Russians were doing at the time, he stopped and asked me what I thought about it all. I told him it was pretty much what I had expected, and with that we paid our bill and got back on the road.

•••

 The Ku Klux Klan protests in Charlottesville, Virginia. Photograph: Chet Strange/Getty Images

Writing a book about something that is ongoing is a surreal affair because one needs to decide at some point when the story in the book ends, whereas in real life it continues, unaffected by narrative concerns.

There is always a next rally. Always something bigger and more consequential.

In this story, it was Charlottesville.

Charlottesville was to be a grand and much-overdue coming together of the leaders of the alt- and far right, and was given the hashtag-friendly name Unite the Right. The lineup of speakers was unquestionably impressive, living up to the name of the rally. Richard Spencer would be there, as would David Duke, Mike Enoch, and the alt-right internet luminary Anthime Gionet, aka Baked Alaska, who announced on his Twitter feed on the eve of the rally on August 11: “Tomorrow we make history at #UniteTheRight.”

Matthew had top billing. His name was on the poster along with the other prominent leaders of the far right. He had arrived.

I hadn’t planned on going. I’d been to more than my fair share of these things, and I wanted to be done with it. But throughout the summer of 2017, as the rally drew nearer, Matthew began telling me that antifa promised to bring thousands to Charlottesville. According to him, they were flying in from New York, Chicago, and Oakland as well as bussing in from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. At the same time, the number of threats against him had been increasing.

In the end a mix of curiosity, fear of missing out, and force of habit drew me to Charlottesville. I’d been going to these things for so long that it seemed strange not to.

 

Much like you don’t notice yourself aging, I had failed to see Matthew’s politics harden over time

Once I arrived at Charlottesville, it felt immediately like something had changed. The night before the rally, a few of the members of Matthew’s Traditionalist Worker party (TWP) kicked me out of a party at their house.

I’d brought another journalist who they immediately suspected was a Jewish spy, and Scott, Matthew’s gormless henchman, fetched a bacon pizza and asked her to eat it in what he believed was a clever ruse to ferret out Jewish infiltrators.

There was an edge to the crowd I hadn’t seen before. There were more guns than I was used to and much more bravado. As soon as I got there Matthew Parrot told me I had to leave. “Nazi Joe is here, and he’d be fucking pissed we invited a journalist. He’s going to come up and start something. You guys better get out.”

As menacing a name as it was, I soon found out that “Nazi Joe” was an alias the TWP used for Eric Striker, undoubtedly another alias.

Striker was a short, skinny kid with a big head and cartoonish features who liked to rant against Jews on the website the Daily Stormer. He was about as daunting as a very small dog, but his animosity spread among the usually bookish TWP crowd and, in some way I couldn’t quite put my finger on, altered the tenor of my relationship with the group. Matthew wasn’t there, but Striker said he spoke for him when he said I could stay but “the kike had to go”.

I was taken aback by the aggression. It felt more like a skinhead gathering than a TWP party. The next day provided further hints that Matthew was hardening, slipping further to the right.

 White nationalist demonstrators use shields to guard the entrance to Lee Park in Charlottesville. Photograph: Steve Helber/AP

A couple dozen TWP members in matching uniforms and construction helmets (a not-so-subtle nod to the TWP’s pro-worker bent) gathered early in the morning in a parking structure a couple of blocks from the park where the rally would take place. In their hands were riot shields, flags, and clubs. They were the tip of the spear, primed in case Antifa was there. Then came the League of the South (LoS), National Socialist Movement (NSM), and a few other groups.

All told, there must have been close to a hundred people – all marching behind Matthew. He wore his new uniform, a snug, black shirt that stretched over his paunch, a black armband emblazoned with the silver logo of the TWP, and a black tie stuffed into the buttons of his shirt. Unlike his men, he didn’t carry a shield or a club, and his helmet was a military-style combat helmet rather than a construction hat.

One of the guys from the LoS was telling the group to use the clubs against the abdomen, not the head. The head was assault, the abdomen was not. I wasn’t completely convinced he knew what he was talking about, but to be fair, he also said to not strike unless the enemy struck first, which I guess made it all the more legal.

“We’re not the alt-right and we’re not the far right,” he roared with his club in the air. “We’re the hard right!” A pickup rolled up, and as if to underscore his point, Chester Doles, Peaches, and a couple of other guys from the Confederate Hammerskins, a violent skinhead group, jumped out.

I looked at Matthew’s crowd again.

Spencer wasn’t there. He, Mike Enoch, and the members of American Vanguard, Identity Evropa, and everyone else who belonged to what had become known as “white nationalism 2.0”– simply another term for the suits of the movement – were meeting elsewhere.

This was a 1.0 crowd, and I was struck by the realization that Matthew, who had once spent a freezing March day outside the Conservative Political Action Conference happily arguing with conservatives, was now a completely different person from the one I met years ago.

The transition had been gradual, and perhaps I had been too close to see it. Much like you don’t notice yourself aging, I had failed to see Matthew’s politics harden over time.

Now, in the stark glare of the parking lot fluorescents, surrounded by what could only be described as troops, shaking hands with the Hammerskins, marching with the old guard of the movement, his transformation was obvious.

Matthew was no longer “the affable, new face of organized hate” but rather someone who believed he was at war.

•••

 Matthew Heimbach and Scotty during Richard Spencer’s speech at Auburn University. Photograph: Vegas Tenold

Matthew had come a long way since I first met him, but he’d also not moved an inch. No one could argue that he hadn’t created an alliance of disparate far-right groups. He had curated an organization, the Nationalist Front, that somehow housed neo-Nazis, KKK, alt-right, and other racists, but it raised the question: to what end?

His friends from his former life, the one that included Youth for Western Civilization, had moved on, some to influential positions within conservative circles. But Matthew, for all his eloquence and affability, was now an avowed National Socialist, a dedicated antisemite, and the de facto leader of some of the most radical white supremacists in the nation.

He still maintained that his end goal was a true party for the white working man and that he still didn’t consider other races inferior in any way, but at the same time he was rubbing elbows with the most alienating crowd conceivable. Although his plan was to work locally and convince everyday Americans that fascism was their friend, somehow he’d convinced himself that he could do it with the help of Klansmen and tattooed skinheads.

Where he once had ridiculed Jeff Schoep, the leader of the National Socialist Movement, for being delusional enough to believe that the American public might somehow get behind a party sporting the swastika, Matthew now believed that the public would somehow come to trust the friendly neighborhood Hammerskins, “kill niggers” tattoos and all.

Ultimately, however, I believe Matthew’s vision, and the incarnation of the far right in America that I spent years covering, is destined to fail. Not because America is inherently good and that the forces of justice and progress are always stronger than those of intolerance and hatred, but because white supremacy is doing just fine without the far right.

The country has spent decades perfecting an ostensibly nonracial form of white supremacy, and it is serving with remarkable efficiency. Private prisons, mandatory sentencing, seemingly unchecked police power, gerrymandering, increasingly limited access to healthcare and abortion – these are all tendrils in an ingenious web designed to keep people poor and powerless.

Yes, white people were caught in that web too, but when it comes to those experiencing poverty, African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos vastly outnumber whites.

The people Matthew was ostensibly fighting for– the broken, beaten, and forgotten whites of Appalachia and the Rust Belt – weren’t victims in a war against white people but rather collateral damage in a war against poor people and minorities. I believe Matthew was right when he said that the elites and politicians hate his people, but they don’t hate them because they’re white; they hate them because they’re poor.

In the end, Matthew both succeeded and failed at the same time. He built the large alliance on the right that he’d always dreamed of, but it was a darker, angrier, and more extreme version than what he had pitched me all those years ago. If his plan had been to use his alliance to win the hearts and minds of those who weren’t yet “red-pilled,” then his goal seemed farther away than ever.

There was a reason the National Socialist Movement had been around since the 1960s with almost nothing to show for it: because despite all the latent racism in America and the explicit and implicit white supremacy built into the fabric of our society, National Socialism would always be a fringe outlier.

By succeeding, Matthew had made the same mistakes that all the coalition builders before him had made. The Nationalist Front would never be a political force in America. If Matthew played his cards right, he might become the next George Lincoln Rockwell, William Luther Pierce, or Richard Butler.

But his steady path further and further to the right guaranteed only one thing: Matthew Heimbach would always be an extremist.

Q&A with the author: My six years covering white supremacy

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/17/americas-far-right-white-supremacists-nationalism#img-5

In the cases of two separate holocausts, Israel and Poland find it difficult to acknowledge the facts of history

In the cases of two separate holocausts, Israel and Poland find it difficult to acknowledge the facts of history

While Poland has decided to outlaw any claims that their countrymen participated in the extermination of the Jews, Israel continues to ignore the Armenian genocide

Robert Fisk @indyvoices

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• Thursday 15 February 2018 12:15 GMT

Under President Andrzej Duda, Poland has moved to make references to ‘Polish death camps’ a criminal offence Reuters

The Israelis have been mighty pissed off with the Polish government these past few days. I don’t blame them. In fact – and I’m not referring to the racist, extremist military occupation government of Benjamin Netanyahu – the Israeli people and Jews around the world are quite right to be enraged at Poland’s latest Holocaust denialism.

The Polish decision to criminalise any accusation of Polish complicity in the Holocaust, passing a law which effectively prevents any Pole from acknowledging that Poles themselves assisted in the genocide of six million European Jews, is iniquitous. Its purpose is not to elicit the truth, but to bury it. It certainly constitutes part of the denialism of the Jewish Holocaust.

But – to give a taster to what this column is also about – I will say one word: Armenia. And reveal henceforth one of the most remarkable coincidences in recent publishing history. It involves century-old telegrams – hitherto regarded as forgeries, but in fact real – ordering the mass extermination of more than one million Christians, a truly courageous Turkish historian, and a total denial of the Armenian Holocaust by the one nation which should acknowledge its existence. But first, Poland.

So let’s get the facts – “just the facts, Ma’am, just the facts,” as Sgt Joe Friday never actually said in Dragnet – out of the way. Jews accounted for 10 per cent of the Polish population in 1939. Pre-war Polish governments took anti-Semitic measures to exclude Jews from important state posts. When the Germans invaded, they regarded the Poles as Slavic “untermenschen”, but understood all too well how latent anti-Semitism stained the Christian nationalist state of Poland.

Poland lost two million non-Jewish citizens at the hands of the Nazis. Polish Jews were virtually annihilated. Many Poles hid Jews from the Nazis and fought alongside them against the Wehrmacht and the SS.

But the Germans used Polish police forces to guard Jewish ghettoes, the last transit point before the Jews were sent in their tens of thousands to the extermination camps on Polish soil. No, they were not “Polish death camps” – both the Poles and the Israelis agree on that – but Polish collaborators (the “Blue Police”) did enforce curfews against Jews and assisted in the liquidation of the ghettoes.

There is clear and unimpeachable evidence that some (perhaps more than “some”) Poles blackmailed Jews in return for keeping their hiding places secret. In eastern Polish towns, Poles in a few cases participated in the murder of their Jewish neighbours. The massacre at Jedwabne comes to mind. But Poles were the first to reveal the facts of the Jewish Holocaust to the Allies, and at least one Polish resistance group saved thousands of Jewish lives by producing forged papers and finding escape routes for Jews.

As in most German-occupied European nations, morality – or immorality – was coloured grey. Think Vichy, and the French “maquis”. Think Italian fascism, and the Italian communist resistance.

In 2015, Ukraine passed laws that forced its citizens to honour nationalists who briefly collaborated with the Nazis and participated in the mass killing of Jews. No uproar from the West, of course, since we currently support brave little Ukraine against the Russian beast that has gobbled up Crimean Sevastopol.

But now to the incredible timing of the Polish legislation. For even as this disreputable law was actually passing through the parliament in Warsaw a few days ago, that most brave of Turkish historians, Taner Akcam, was publishing a short but revelatory book (Killing Orders, published by Palgrave Macmillan) which proves, finally and conclusively, that the extermination orders of Talat Pasha, a leader of the Young Turks and one of the Three Pashas who ruled the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, to destroy the entire Armenian Christian population in 1915 were real.

Not forgeries as Turkey’s apologists and denial historians would have the world believe. Not concocted by Armenian counterfeiters, or fiction created by a non-existent Ottoman official, as these wretched people would have us think. But as copper-bottomed and terrible as the Nazi documents which prove Germany’s responsibility for the Jewish Holocaust – and the evidence that proves Poles sometimes joined in the slaughter.

The facts of the Armenian Holocaust – for “Shoah” (holocaust) is the very word that many honourable Israelis use for the Armenian genocide – are well known but need, however briefly, to be repeated. In 1915 and in the immediate years that followed, the Ottoman Turks deliberately set out to liquidate a million and a half of their Armenian Christian citizens, sending them into the desert on death marches, butchering the men, raping the women, spitting the children on bayonets or starving them to death with their mothers and other family members in what is now northern Syria.

The Kurds, sorry to say, assisted in this barbarity. Taner Akcam has written extensively and with immense authority on this appalling period of Turkish history – which the Turkish government, to this day, shamefully denies – and has as a result been abused by hundreds of right-wing Turkish extremists who have even tried to place him on an American “terrorist” list (he teaches in the US).

Akcam’s new book contains a dark and haunting – almost frightening – geography, for most of the 1915 massacres he writes about took place in or near towns which carry their own fearful message of slaughter and horror to us today: Mosul, Raqqa, Deir ez-Zour and, yes, Aleppo.

It was in the Baron Hotel in Aleppo – still standing today, the descendants of the then owner Mazlouiyan still (just) occupying its lobby – that a set of original telegrams from Talat Pasha, along with other liquidation messages memorised by an Ottoman official, Naim Bey, were handed over to an Armenian Holocaust survivor called Aram Andonian. He paid cash for the documents. We don’t know how much.

Until now, Turkish historians and their supporters in the West have regarded these vital papers as false. They claimed that Naim Bey did not exist, that Andonian was a forger, that the cypher in which Talat’s telegrams were written did not match the Ottoman cypher system of the time. They ignored the mass of evidence presented to the existing but quickly suppressed post-war trials in Istanbul, archives which subsequently went missing. And they held up telegrams – real enough but deliberately misleading – that “proved” Talat had the best interests of the Armenians at heart when he deported them.

Akcam’s unravelling of the truth is both a detective story and a volume of sudden, inconceivable horror. He proves the cypher numbers were real, that Naim Bey did indeed exist; an Ottoman document on a corruption investigation – in which Turkish officials accepted bribes from Armenians in return for their lives – identifies him as “Naim Effendi, the son of Huseyin Nuri, 26 years of age, from Silifke, former dispatch official for Meskene, currently the official in charge of Municipal Grain Storage Depots”. And more powerfully than any previous historian, Akcam proves – along with papers from the archive of a dead Armenian priest – that the Ottoman authorities were sending two sets of telegrams about the Armenians. One set expressed the government’s insistence that food and tents should be provided for Armenian deportees and that their confiscated property should be recompensed. The other set insisted upon their secret liquidation, preferably away from the cameras of prying US diplomats (America was neutral until 1917) and German officers allied to the Turkish army.

The Nazis told their Jewish victims that they were going to be “resettled” in the east rather than gassed. They also tried to cover the traces of the gas chambers of Treblinka before the Red Army arrived. But the “double” instructions sent by Talat Pasha and his 1915 genociders demonstrate that the pretence of humanitarian resettlement was conceived even before the organised genocide began. Some of the young German officers who witnessed the killings of 1915 turned up 26 years later in the Soviet Union, overseeing the slaughter of Jews.

And here is one very short account (courtesy of the Turkish historian Akcam) of an Armenian witness to his people’s destruction, which could – if the identities and locations were changed to the Ukraine or Belarus – have been written during the Second World War: “In order to eliminate the last remaining Armenian deportees...between Aleppo and Deyr-i Zor [sic] who had managed to survive...Hakki Bey...evicted all the deportees along the Euphrates, starting from Aleppo... Close to 300 young men and boys...surviving in the camp Hamam were sent to the South in a special convoy... Solid reports about them arrived that they had been killed in Rakka [sic]... Elsewhere, we learned in no uncertain terms that in the area around Samiye, 300 children were thrown into a cave opening, gas was poured in and they were burned alive.”

So here’s the real hypocrisy of this story. The Israeli government, so outraged by Poland’s Jewish Holocaust denialism, refuses to recognise the Armenian Holocaust. Shimon Peres himself said that “we reject attempts to create a similarity between the [Jewish] Holocaust and the Armenian allegations. Nothing similar to the Holocaust occurred. What the Armenians went through is a tragedy, but not genocide.”

The Americans, I should add – Trump included, of course – have been equally pathetic in their failure to acknowledge the Armenian truth. But oddly, not Poland.

For 13 years ago, the Polish parliament passed a bill which specifically referred to the “Armenian genocide”. The speaker of the Polish parliament, Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, said at the time that the Armenian genocide did indeed take place, that responsibility fell on the Turks, and that Turkish documents – though not yet those which Akcam has just revealed – “confirm” this.

So there you have it. Poland punishes anyone who speaks of Polish participation in the Jewish Holocaust, but accepts the Armenian Holocaust. Israel insists that all must acknowledge the Jewish Holocaust – and Poland’s peripheral guilt – but will not acknowledge the Armenian Holocaust.

Mercifully, Israeli scholars like Israel Charny do so. And mercifully, Turks like Taner Akcam agree. But how many times must the dead die all over again for nations to accept the facts of history?

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/holocaust-israel-poland-history-difficult-acknowledge-netanyahu-jewish-polish-government-a8212071.html

RICHARD LYNN endorsing and producing racist pseudoscience.

RICHARD LYNN

Richard Lynn is one of the most unapologetic and raw “scientific” racists operating today, arguing, among other things, that nations with high average IQs must subjugate or eliminate lower-IQ groups, which he associates with particular racial groups, in order to preserve their dominance.

About Richard Lynn

For 50 years, Richard Lynn has been at the forefront of scientific racism. An unapologetic eugenicist, Lynn uses his authority as professor (emeritus) of psychology at the University of Ulster to argue for the genetic inferiority of non-white people. Lynn believes that IQ tests can be used to determine the worth of groups of people, especially racial groups and nations. The wealth and power of nations, according to Lynn, is due to their racial intelligence and “homogeneity” (or “purity”). He argues that the nations with the highest IQs must subjugate or eliminate the lower-IQ groups within their borders in order to preserve their dominance.

In his own words:
“I am deeply pessimistic about the future of the European peoples because mass immigration of third world peoples will lead to these becoming majorities in the United States and westernmost Europe during the present century. I think this will mean the destruction of European civilization in these countries.”
—Interview with neo-Nazi Alex Kurtagic, 2011

"I think the only solution lies in the breakup of the United States. Blacks and Hispanics are concentrated in the Southwest, the Southeast and the East, but the Northwest and the far Northeast, Maine, Vermont and upstate New York have a large predominance of whites. I believe these predominantly white states should declare independence and secede from the Union. They would then enforce strict border controls and provide minimum welfare, which would be limited to citizens. If this were done, white civilisation would survive within this handful of states.”
—Undated interview with fascist magazine Right NOW!

"Only one conclusion is possible… . [T]he broad picture is clear and inescapable: at some point in the foreseeable future the white British people will become a minority in these islands, and whites will likewise become minorities throughout the economically developed nations of European peoples. As the proportion of non-Europeans grows in Europe and in the United States (and also in Canada and Australia) and eventually become majorities, the intelligence of the populations will fall. The strength of the economies will equally inevitably decline to the level of developing nations. World leadership will pass to Russia and Eastern Europe, and to China and Japan, if these manage to resist the invasion of non- European peoples. We are living in an extraordinary time. Nothing like this has ever occurred in human history. Mass immigration of non-Europeans will inevitably result in the European peoples becoming minorities and then increasingly small minorities in their own countries, as they are in most of Latin America and the Caribbean islands. Throughout the Western world the European peoples are allowing themselves to be replaced in their own homelands by non-Europeans. What is even more remarkable is that the European peoples have become quite complacent about their own elimination. Some even welcome it. Hardly a week goes by without some intellectual or politician declaring that immigration has been good for the country, that "in our diversity is our strength" and "we must celebrate our differences.” Others announce that they look forward to the day when whites become a minority. This is the first time in the whole of human history that a people has voluntarily engineered in its own destruction.”
—“Race Differences, Immigration, and the Twilight of the European Peoples,” VDARE.com, 2009

“If the evolutionary process is to bring its benefits, it has to be allowed to operate effectively. This means that incompetent societies have to be allowed to go to the wall… . What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the populations of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of "phasing out" of such peoples. If the world is to evolve more better humans, then obviously someone has to make way for them otherwise we shall all be overcrowded. After all, ninety-eight per cent of the species known to zoologists are extinct. Evolutionary progress means the extinction of the less competent. To think otherwise is mere sentimentality.”
—Review of Raymond Cattell’s A New Morality from Science: Beyondism, 1974

Background:

Since the 1970s, Richard Lynn has been working tirelessly to place race, genes, and IQ at the center of discussions surrounding inequality. Through his own writings and those published by his Ulster Institute for Social Research, in Northern Ireland, Lynn argues that members of different races and nations possess innate differences in intelligence and behavior, and that these are responsible for everything from the incarceration rate of black Americans to the poverty of developing nations. Lynn is also an ethnic nationalist who believes that countries must “remain racially homogenous” in order to flourish.

Lynn, along with other “race researchers,” divides the world’s population into three main racial groups: “Mongoloid,” “Caucasoid,” and “Negroid,” referring to east-Asians, white Europeans, and black people of African descent, respectively (Lynn considers other ethnic groups to be mixtures of these three categories). Lynn’s “studies” of race and IQ purport to show that “Mongoloids” have the highest average IQ (100-106), closely followed by “Caucasoids” (100), with “Negroid” having a much lower average intelligence (70).

Lynn uses this framework not only to explain and justify the present-day wealth and poverty of nations, but the entire course of human history, asking, “Who can doubt that the Caucasoids and the Mongoloids are the only two races that have made any significant contribution to civilization[?]” Lynn goes beyond arguing for differences between these three groups, however; he also recycles Nazi-era arguments for Nordic superiority within the “Caucasoid” group, claiming that a “north-south continuum” exists, with people from northern Europe having evolved to be more intelligent than their southern neighbors.

Lynn believes that “racial differences in intelligence are one of the most important reasons for the differences in the wealth and poverty of nations that are present throughout the world (the other main reason being the presence of a market economy or of some form of socialism or communism). Intelligence is a major determinant of competence and earning capacity, so inevitably the European and Far Eastern peoples whose populations are intelligent achieve higher standards of living than other peoples who are less intelligent.” His estimates of national IQ, for example, bode “rather poorly for the potential of black Africans for democracy and economic development.” This is because, according to Lynn, IQ correlates not only to wealth, but also to “democracy and associated political institutions of civil liberties, political freedom, property rights, the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary and the efficiency of government bureaucracy,” presumably because “people in countries with low national IQs are not as able to organize themselves, to take part in national politics, and to defend their rights against those in power as people in countries with higher national IQs.”

Not only does Lynn argue that nations without a white majority are incapable of self-governance and economic success, he believes that minorities, especially immigrants, threaten western nations’ success as well: “The single most important issue [facing western society] is the increasing immigration of low-IQ third-world peoples into the United States, Canada, and Europe. The effect of this, combined with their higher fertility, is that they are replacing Europeans. By the end of the twenty-first century Europeans will become minorities in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe.” This represents, to Lynn, a “demographic catastrophe” in which “the European peoples are… being dispossessed in their own countries by the influx of non-European peoples.”

Although Lynn claims that continued immigration is the biggest threat to “western society,” he also uses his pseudo-scientific arguments to argue against policies aimed at helping immigrants and ethnic minorities who already reside in western countries. Lynn claims that such policies are futile because “when non-European peoples migrate to Europe and North America their lower IQs make it difficult for them to cope in economically developed societies.” On education policy, Lynn bemoans the idea that “[i]t is impossible to envision the president saying that nothing can be done to advance the blacks, Native American Indians, and Hispanics because of their low IQs and personality characteristics.”

By “personality characteristics,” Lynn is referring to his belief that racial groups have genetically determined behavioral patterns, and that crime, disruptiveness, and antisocial behavior are part of minorities’ genetic makeup. In this way, Lynn has provided a veneer of scientific respectability to long-discredited racist theories like those popularized by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in The Bell Curve. Lynn insists — along with Murray and Herrnstein, who used Lynn’s work as the foundation their book — that “[h]igh rates of crime seem to be a universal characteristic of Blacks,” and most other “non-Europeans.” Lynn has since tried to extend arguments about race differences beyond intelligence and into questions of mental illness, arguing that ”[t]he issue of race differences in personality is one of the big problems that still has to be tackled. I attempted to make a start on this in 2002 with a paper in which I assembled evidence suggesting that psychopathic personality is highest among blacks and Native Americans, next highest in Hispanics, lower in whites, and lowest in Orientals.”

Lynn is one of the few remaining “race scientists” who is willing to explicitly endorse addressing these supposed problems through eugenic policies. While authors like Murray and Herrnstein emphasize the threat posed by groups with “inferior” genes for intelligence and behavior, they shy away from arguing that the government should be involved in people’s reproductive decisions. Lynn, on the other hand, unabashedly suggests just that, favoring a “parental licensing scheme” in which “couples would have to apply for and obtain a license to have children.” He also believes that there is “a good case for reviving the sterilization of the mentally retarded and criminals,” and has promoted a “commendable scheme” targeting poor mothers which “would require sterilization as a condition of receiving welfare.”

Unsurprisingly, Lynn’s arguments that minorities and immigrants lower national IQ, cause increased crime, and pose an existential threat to “European civilization” have made him a favorite among white supremacists. He has contributed to several white supremacist publications including VDARE.com, The Occidental Quarterly, and American Renaissance. He also sits on the editorial committee of Mankind Quarterly, a pseudo-scholarly journal dedicated to publishing “articles in controversial areas, including behavioral group differences and the importance of mental ability for individual outcomes and group differences” — a thinly veiled admission that they primarily print racist pseudoscience.

Lynn is the current president of the notoriously racist Pioneer Fund. Prior to becoming president in 2012, he received hundreds of thousands of dollars in Pioneer Fund grants, both directly, and through the Ulster Institute for Social Research. Lynn is the founder and president of the Ulster Institute, “a think tank for the support of research on social issues and the publication of works by selected authors in this field.” According to its website, “The Ulster Institute for Social Research specialises in the application of psychology to the analysis of social problems,” which translates to promoting racist research by Lynn and several of his colleagues and collaborators.

Like many “race scientists,” Lynn also believes in inherent differences between the sexes, arguing that “one of the main reasons why there are not more female science professors or chief executives or Cabinet ministers is that, on average, men are more intelligent than women.” As with his work on race, Lynn insists that the disagreement of the overwhelming majority of geneticists and psychologists is nothing more than “the forces of political correctness” which has “made the reporting of this sort of statistic virtually impossible.” (Ironically, this accusation of censorship appeared in an article he wrote for The Daily Mail, the second largest newspaper in the United Kingdom.)

Despite his claims of persecution, Lynn has successfully translated his status as a scientist and open racist into a high-profile and profitable career, even though other scientists have repeatedly found his work to be riddled with methodological flaws and bias. Critics have noted that “an important drawback of Lynn (and Vanhanen)'s reviews of the literature is that they… do not adhere to systematic methodology to control for potential biases in the many choices made by the reviewer,” while prominent psychologist Leon Kamin stated that "Lynn's distortions and misrepresentations of the data constitute a truly venomous racism, combined with the scandalous disregard for scientific objectivity.”

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/richard-lynn