The Pioneer Fund

Abstract

Many citations used in The Bell Curve to provide a pseudoscientific veneer for Herrnstein and Murray's academic version of The Turner Diaries for the “cognitive elite” came from advocates of eugenics, whose “research” has been supported by the Pioneer Fund. A Nazi endowment specializing in production of justifications for eugenics since 1937, the Pioneer Fund is embedded in a network of right-wing foundations, think tanks, religious fundamentalists, and global anti-Communist coalitions. This article combines Domhoff's model (1978) of how the ruling class makes public policy, Knapp and Spector's (1991) model of how and why capitalists build racism, and Oliver Cox's (1948) analysis of how and why capitalists build fascism to show that the U.S. ruling class is laying the political, ideological, economic, and paramilitary groundwork for fascism. Liberal reaction to The Bell Curve and the threat of fascism has mainly taken the form of appeasement. History suggests it is time for a different response.