FAIR Chairman Sings Praises of Racist Founder John Tanton
Heidi looks at the racist roots of the Tanton nativist crowd; this same paranoid style of anti-immigrant and racist fervor is fueled by the same evil philosophies and defensive rationalizations that led to Breivik’s terrorism in Europe. When we see it in the US it’s really important to point it out and decry it whenever it appears. Please punch out and read the whole thing.
It gets worse. No mention is made of how Tanton introduced key FAIR leaders to the president of the Pioneer Fund, a white supremacist group set up to encourage “race betterment,” at a 1997 meeting at a private club. Tanton also wrote a major far-right funder to encourage her to read the work of a radical anti-Semitic professor — to “give you a new understanding of the Jewish outlook on life” — and suggested that the entire FAIR board discuss the professor’s theories on the Jews. He revered a principal architect of the Immigration Act of 1924, instituting a national origin quota system and barring Asian immigration — a rabid anti-Semite whose pro-Nazi American Coalition of Patriotic Societies was indicted for sedition in 1942. Tanton even arranged for his hero’s private papers to be stored in the same library as his at the University of Michigan.
And what of Tanton’s racist connections? Tanton employs and shares an office in Petoskey, Mich., with Wayne Lutton, who has been a member of white supremacist groups and written for a Holocaust denial journal. Tanton supported the white nationalist journal American Renaissance financially for some years and undertook correspondence with its leader Jared Taylor. (An example of Taylor’s writings: “When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.”) At one point, longtime white nationalist Sam Dickson, who often speaks at American Renaissance conferences, offered to take Tanton on a “politically incorrect” tour of Atlanta. For more on Tanton’s connections, read here. You certainly won’t find them in Porter’s piece.