Thread by @UR_Ninja

NEW Investigation:
Eugenics, Border Wars & Population Control: The Tanton Network
➡️ A criss-crossing mesh of politicians, lobbyists, think tanks, non-governmental organizations, pundits, and billionaire money
unicornriot.ninja/2022/eugenics-…

Nearly everything Americans hear about the U.S.-Mexico border is wrong, and it’s very likely because of one relatively small but extremely well-funded and influential group of American racists -- known to researchers for many years as the Tanton network. unicornriot.ninja/2022/eugenics-…

The increasingly blatant bigotry in immigration discourse is the culmination of decades of targeted influence by an assortment of largely unknown groups. These work towards common policy goals, often with shared funding, as the Tanton network, named after John Tanton.

John Tanton, retired Michigan ophthalmologist and birdwatcher, discovered the spectre of overpopulation, courtesy of Paul R. Ehrlich’s 1968 book “The Population Bomb“, which ushered in decades of policies of coercive sterilization and worse, worldwide.

Paul R. Ehrlich went on to sit on the advisory board of Tanton’s flagship organization, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), for many years; he was also a founder of another Tanton-linked group, Zero Population Growth.

Ehrlich didn’t stop there. “We must use our political power,” he also wrote, “to push other countries into… population control.” Tanton’s obsession was initially with overpopulation as a whole – he felt that there needed to simply be fewer people on the planet.

Tanton preached for efforts such as contraception and abortion in order to bring progressives around to what he perceived as a huge need for population control. Tanton quickly decided only some populations might need controlling — those he personally found the most questionable.

He quickly changed tactics to settle on immigration restriction after realizing that eugenics might not be palatable to most Americans in the decades following the revelations about Nazi atrocities during World War II.

Tanton ultimately decided that “population control” should be inflicted more on certain people than others, advocated for a “Euro-American majority, and a clear one at that.” And thus was the eugenics movement reborn, couched as “immigration restriction.” blogs.baylor.edu/eugenicsintheu…

John Tanton’s letters often detailed a plan that he came to call “passive eugenics,” which consists of ideas such as coerced sterilization, restricting childbearing ages, and anti-immigrant disinformation campaigns. An essay in 1975 he called “The Case for Passive Eugenics.”

Tanton apparently discovered that he shared many ideals with the richest people in the country— his first and primary funder, Cordelia Scaife May, believed that immigration should be sharply limited in the United States. pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/fiv…

May, whom Tanton affectionately called “Cordy” in letters, began life with progressive leanings, but ended up detesting most humans, particularly immigrants and people of color, and she had the inherited wealth to push toward bringing about her particular vision for the world.

Cordelia Scaife May, Tanton's key funder, wrote to a cousin in the 1980s in language that by now is likely familiar to all Americans:

May and her foundation financed Tanton’s efforts and for years. The warm, lucrative relationship b/w Tanton & “Cordy” continued until her apparent 2005 suicide. By 2013, May’s Pittsburgh-based Colcom Foundation was the single biggest bankroller of the anti-immigration movement.

Cordelia Scaife May also contributed funds to white nationalist group VDARE and paid to republish Jean Raspail’s work of deeply racist fanfiction, “The Camp of the Saints”, which former Trump adviser Steve Bannon calls his favorite book.

Cordelia Scaife May's brother, Richard Mellon Scaife, a major early funder & board trustee of The Heritage Foundation, gave his blessing to Tanton’s efforts through the Colcom Foundation.

This chart shows Tanton network orgs like FAIR and Center for Immigration Studies share interlocking funding with larger, key right-wing institutions like the Federalist Society, Heritage Foundation, Hudson Institute, Claremont Institute, Manhattan Institute, Hoover Institution

Colcom’s VP of philanthropy, John Rohe, wrote a glowing biography about the Tantons: “Mary Lou and John Tanton: A Journey into American Conservation.” (Rohe also wrote something called “A Bicentennial Malthusian Essay: Conservation, Population and the Indifference to Limits.”)

The Tanton network's efforts paid massive dividends. In 1986, American immigration law was changed for the far more draconian, even as it offered asylum to millions already within the United States, with IRCA, the Immigration Reform and Control Act.

By the 1990s, misleading “overpopulation” narratives were accepted by the American public at large, with national magazines blaring terrifying narratives about all the evils that overpopulation could bring, playing directly into national debates over immigration and overcrowding.

These media trends were the results of extensive efforts by the Tanton network, as Tanton himself makes clear in an “oral history” with Daniel Stein (who still heads FAIR) in 1994. They leveraged a relationship with Sen. Alan Simpson to reach greater visibility:

Learn more about the rise of hardline 1980s & 1990s immigration policing in our leaked #Icebreaker manual series, includes ICE & INS agent operations manuals
-- showing how immigration agents enforce the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). unicornriot.ninja/2020/icebreake…

Tanton Network Advances in the Trump Era
By 2015, when Donald Trump first announced that he planned to run for U.S. President, these groups were well known throughout the political and media ecosystem.

Around 2015, news organizations by and large had begun to understand that the Tanton network of nonprofits and lobbying groups was not representing its true aims. "Reestablishing and buttressing front groups is an example of the movement’s repeat tactics,” wrote @ADL in 2013.

@ADL But by 2016, the ‘Overton window’ of acceptable discourse was sliding rapidly to the far right, thanks to concerted efforts from the Tanton network’s disinformation purveyors and their “objective” enablers in the popular media.

@ADL Soon, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the Center for Immigration Studies, and other affiliated groups and organizations that had once been recognized as serving up nothing more than white supremacist fare, such as The Social Contract Press ...

@ADL ... were regularly quoted in news stories, tapped by pundits, invited onto televised panels, all without revealing their true affiliations and goals, such as seeding white supremacist conspiracy theories such as “the Great Replacement” into the mainstream.

This nearly immediate acquiescence to disinformation purveyors by national press paved the way for Tanton network operatives to get into the federal govt en masse via Trump. A 2016 PGH Post-Gazette story shows many links b/w Trump campaign & Scaife money. newsinteractive.post-gazette.com/scaife-to-trum…

Many of those named in the 2016 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette report are likely familiar to Americans, such as former transportation secretary Elaine Chao, former education secretary Betsy Devos, billionaires Peter Thiel and Rebekah Mercer, and more.

Learn more about the influence networks around Betsy DeVos, her brother Erik Prince, and other Christian conservatives involved with the Council for National Policy in our 2020 report [based on leaks from #DDoSecrets]: unicornriot.ninja/2020/leaks-exp…

By 2017, many of those same Tanton affiliates were either embedded in or directly influencing Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, enacting their agenda mainly against immigrant women and children.

Key figures: USCIS Ombudsman Julie Kirchner, fresh off a years-long stint at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, Ken Cuccinelli in the Department of Homeland Security, and Kris Kobach, a pet lawyer for FAIR’s legal wing, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, or IRLI.

It was under their watch that family separations and coerced or forced sterilizations took place en masse in the United States following the stated goals and aims of the Tanton network.

There's no real pushback or consequence for these acts under Trump admin clearly classified as acts of genocide under Geneva Convention. Instead, Joe Biden’s admin, constrained by Trump appointed judges, a hostile GOP, & political “norms,” has continued similar border policies.

In the absence of legal or social consequences for any of these acts or the rhetoric that inevitably accompanies and justifies such acts, the Tanton network has once again upped its game as catastrophic climate change looms.

Tanton network advocates no longer seem to feel constrained to wrap their nativism in pseudoscience and dogwhistles - instead pushing warlike language of “hordes” and “invasion”...

... in what appears to be an effort to spark stochastic violence — acts of terror whose likelihood can be statistically but not individually predicted, encouraged by signaling aggression against specific groups of people.

But while the Tanton network is skilled at nuisance lawsuits, weaponized rhetoric, and fundraising, they are also a relatively small group of people who are highly vulnerable to counter messaging and losing their positions of power.

Tanton network narratives are closed loops that can be derailed with transparency and fact-based reporting. unicornriot.ninja/2022/eugenics-…

Hassan Ahmad, a Virginia-based immigration lawyer, has spearheaded an ongoing transparency effort around John Tanton’s private papers, which he donated to the U. of Michigan with the caveat that some not be unsealed until 2035.

Ahmad and supporters argue that these papers contain a wealth of knowledge about Tanton’s plans and contacts - all squarely in the public interest. For five years the case has dragged on.

The boxes of paperwork would bring new life to journalists and researchers working to shed light on John Tanton’s destructive legacy.
Link decay, changes in editorial direction, and paywalls have increasingly interfered with efforts to track down background information...

...on the Tanton network and its allies, at the same time that transparency and equality have become crucial in the age of hybrid attacks and catastrophic climate change, particularly around the future of migration and immigration. unicornriot.ninja/2022/eugenics-…

As the Tanton network’s influence and funding continues to grow, so do the calls to uncover the truth about the history, & the future, of U.S. immigration policies.
Thanks to @brooklynmarie for this investigation & photos of the U.S.-Mexico border region
unicornriot.ninja/2022/eugenics-…

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