Pioneer Fund Assets Divided; New Leadership Appointed
In October 2012, Jean-Philippe Rushton, a Canadian psychology professor and probably the most important race scientist in North America, died of cancer. At the time of his death, Rushton was running the Pioneer Fund, a grant-making entity founded in the 1930s by Americans with Nazi sympathies. In recent decades, Pioneer has been the only major foundation devoted to subsidizing race science and eugenics research, areas of science that are now fully discredited.
Under Rushton, the Pioneer Fund gave out very few grants, concentrating its disbursements on prominent race scientists such as Jared Taylor of the white nationalist group, American Renaissance. Rushton also headed the Charles Darwin Research Institute, located in Port Huron, Mich., an online outfit that distributed his racist research. Rushton’s most infamous study concluded that brain and genital size were inversely related, suggesting that black people are less intelligent than whites and more highly sexualized. Sometime in the last year, the website for the Charles Darwin Research Institute went offline.
For most of the last year, the Pioneer Fund’s website provided no indication that Rushton had passed away nor did it register any information about who was in change of the group. Messages left by Hatewatch at the fund’s phone number over the last year have not been returned.
But some time in mid-2013, a notice was posted on the website about what was happening at Pioneer. It said that in August 2012, Rushton transferred half the assets of the Pioneer Fund to his Charles Darwin Research Institute. The website also said that Rushton had resigned before his death as president of the fund and nominated Richard Lynn as his successor.