Scientists for Segregation: Ernest van den Haag

0:07Speaker 1:When Ernest van den Haag died in 2002, the obituary that ran in the New York Times described him as a Dutch-born conservative commentator on social issues and a leading advocate of the death penalty. He'd spent most of his life in Manhattan. He was a professor, a journalist, a sociologist, a psychoanalyst, a contributor to the National Review. And in the Times' words, he was someone who was comfortable taking strong and often controversial stands on a wide range of issues.

0:41Speaker 1:The obituary notes that he'd been a critic of the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education and a vocal advocate for the abolition of laws prohibiting child labor. But there were pieces missing, some pretty big ones. The New York Times had gathered most of the biographical details about Vanden Haag's life secondhand, trusting an account related to them by the dead man's close friend, William F.

1:06Speaker 2:Buckley.

1:08Speaker 1:I'm not sure exactly what Buckley omitted intentionally and what he just didn't know. But his friend wasn't born Ernest Vanden Haag. He wasn't even Dutch. I do understand why Buckley left out some of the pieces of that story that he did know. Buckley had little incentive, for example, to include the parts about his friend Stint as a board member at a front group established to provide scientific justification for segregation. It wouldn't do the conservative movement any favors if he gave credit to Vanden Haag for his role in defending apartheid before the International Court of Justice in the 60s. And of course, Vanden Haag hadn't just been a critic. of the Brown v. Board of Education position, he was a key player in an organized effort to overturn it. I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.

2:28Speaker 1:This is Weird Little Guys. I may have strayed a bit from the original premise, and lately it's not always entirely focused in a straightforward way, on telling you about the profound weirdness of a particular guy. But it is still the name of the show. So it wouldn't be right for me to pass up an opportunity to tell you a little bit more about the backstory of one of our side characters, who I think was a very weird guy. You know I love a little mystery. Ernest Vanden Haag's life story isn't what I set out to tell you about. I was just doing my due diligence, collecting a bit of information about each of the pro-segregation expert witnesses that were collected by the Pioneer Fund for their legal battle to overturn Brown v. Board of Education in the 1960s.

3:18Speaker 2:We'll get there.

3:20Speaker 1:We're still getting there, in my own way. And when we do, I'll tell you a little bit about each of those scientists. What was their academic background? Which hate groups did they have known connections to? We'll highlight a few of their more egregiously racist and academically debunked opinions, that sort of thing. But I realized pretty quickly that the side story I have about Ernest is a little bit cumbersome, and I think it deserves its own space.

3:50Speaker 1:Because after I read his obituary, I realized he hadn't been entirely honest with the court, or his colleagues, about his background. Obituaries are a fantastic place to start if you're curious about someone's life. Even if a person wasn't famous, when someone dies, a loved one probably puts some kind of notice in the local paper. It might say where they were born, or what they did for a living, who they married, if they had children. The sparsest little obituary in a small-town newspaper almost always gives me Something.

4:29Speaker 1:Even if it's not much. The name of a parent or a child, which charities you should send money to in their honor, which church held their funeral service. Something. Some crumb. It's usually a place to start. So, that's where I started with my list of scientists. Unlucky for us, Dr. Vanden Hung was a little bit famous. Famous enough to have an obituary in the New York Times, anyway. but I could tell right away that some things were missing from that obituary. I mean, just from the research I've done for this story so far, I already know that Ernest Vandenhag was a founding member of the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics, the IAEE, which was that pioneer fund front group that collected fringe scientists who were more interested in being racist than doing science.

5:25Speaker 1:But that wasn't in there. And I know he was the director of another Pioneer Fund front group, the Foundation for Human Understanding, through at least the 1980s. He was a known grant recipient of Pioneer Fund money for his research in the 60s, and if he was on a board of a group handing that money out for decades after that, I mean, it's fair to assume that he had a lot of Wycliffe Draper's money in his pockets over the years. But none of these organizational affiliations show up in his obituary. There's Nothing about his ferocious anti-communism or anti-integration activism or how he spent the entirety of the 1960s arguing against the very concept of civil rights.

6:08Speaker 1:It's not there. There was no wife left behind. No children I can find evidence of. The New York Times obituary, clocking in at just shy of 500 words, says he left no immediate survivors. That's not that surprising. He was 87 years old. But what he did have were a handful of very old friends who all had their own magazines. He was eulogized by William F. Buckley in the National Review, Thomas Fleming in Chronicles magazine, and Peter Brimlow in VDare.

6:44Speaker 1:Buckley in the National Review you probably recognize. Peter Brimlow is the British-born anti-immigration activist who bought that big weird castle in West Virginia. We've talked about it. You might remember my interview a few months back with Mike Hayden about his book Strange People on the Hill, which was about those white supremacists and their West Virginia castle. And Thomas Fleming was a founding member of the neo-Confederate hate group League of the South. Chronicles magazine bills itself as a paleo-conservative publication, and its current editor is Paul Gottfried, the guy who was mentoring Richard Spencer when they cooked up the idea for the alt-right together. So.

7:26Speaker 1:Take that as you will. So after I read all four of these obituaries, one in the Times and three by his dear friends, I still had more questions than answers. The more explicitly bigoted publications, B. Dare and Chronicles, both made vague insinuations that van den Haag had Sephardic heritage. They both used that phrase. I wrote it off It's not unusual, actually, to see guys like this accusing other people of having secret Jewish heritage. And I do mean accusing because they don't mean it as a compliment and it's not a value-neutral thing to say. But aside from that one comment, the obituaries were full of praise. These were his friends. Why would they toss in what is in their world a pretty serious insult for seemingly no reason?

8:28Speaker 1:It was enough to send me off to the genealogical archives. And you probably won't be surprised to find they were wrong. Of course they were. Ernest Vanden Haag didn't have Sephardic heritage at all. It's Ashkenazi. The man the Pioneer Fund paid to testify about the flaws in what his colleagues called the Jewish science behind the Brown v. Board of Education decision had been born Ernest Malamerson. And despite every single article about van den Haag describing him as Dutch-born, he was in fact born in Berlin, to Flora Haag and Moishe Malamerson. I have his parents' birth certificates. I have their marriage license. I have his U.S. alien registration documentation, his draft card, his federal employment records, his naturalization records, his voter registration records from the 1950s, the records from the time his mother spent in a displaced persons camp.

9:28Speaker 1:That's who they are. And I can't find any evidence he ever set foot in the Netherlands until South Africa flew him there to testify on their behalf at the Hague in 1965. I'm not sure why no one there noticed he wasn't Dutch, but it doesn't seem to have come up. Now, he certainly isn't the first man trying to make it on the far right who's lied about having Jewish heritage. And in his defense, I can kind of understand why you'd want to be vague about that sort of thing if you spent some time in the 1930s as a stateless person drifting around Europe the same could be said for pretending you're not a German if you're trying to fly under the radar in France in 1940 and as a Jew he was stripped of his German citizenship by the Nuremberg laws in 1935 anyway so he may not have considered himself a German He was technically stateless until he became a United States citizen in 1947.

10:26Speaker 1:But I can't find a single source that even acknowledges he was born there. He's quite adamant about having been born in the Netherlands. He's very committed to this particular biographical embellishment, and I can't make sense of that. Ernest's father, Moishe Malamerson, was born in northeastern Poland, near the Lithuanian border. While he was studying law in Zurich, he changed his name to Max to avoid being so identifiably Jewish. In 1910, Max had moved to Germany and he married Flora Haag in her hometown of Hamburg. And that's where they had their first son, Ralph. In 1911, they moved to Berlin, where the couple were involved in the Berlin cabaret and thriving avant-garde art scene. Their second son, Ernest, was born in Berlin in 1914. I found a photograph of Of Flora Malamerson that shows her with her children, there are several daughters in the picture, but I don't ever see them mentioned anywhere. In 1926, the Malamerson family moved to Italy to escape rising anti-Semitism in Germany, although they remained German citizens. They settled in Vietri, a municipality in the province of Salerno, and Max took over an existing Majolica

11:41Speaker 1:factory and founded his own ceramics company called Industria Ceramica Salernitana. Majolica is apparently a particular kind of brightly colored pottery. It's pronounced several different ways. This is the one I picked. I don't want to hear about it. But I found a bunch of listings online for vintage pieces made at Max Malamerson's factory during this time period, and they go for hundreds of dollars. The ceramics factory and the Malamerson's themselves were at the heart of a small German expat artist's colony in the area. William of Buckley's obituary says van den Haag spent two years imprisoned in Italy after being arrested by the Italian fascist regime, before fleeing to France, where he was put into a concentration camp by the occupying Nazi army, only to then escape from that camp, flee to Portugal, and make his way onto a ship bound for New York. Other versions of his life story say it was three years in the Italian prison, that he was badly wounded in an assassination attempt before his arrest in Italy, and that his daring escape from the camp in France was under a hail of bullets. I

12:51Speaker 1:think there are some exaggerations here. But on my first pass here, I struggled to come up with any kind of primary or contemporaneous documentation of any of these claims. I mean, the first hour or so I put into this, I was kind of coming up empty, and I thought he might be making it up. It was simple enough to confirm that his parents did spend several years at an internment camp in Italy. I found a handful of articles in English about the history of the particular type of pottery and decorative tile made at the family's factory, and the articles mentioned Max and Flora's personal story. They were taken to the internment camp at Ferramonte d'Itagia. Official records only list Flora's name and show her arriving at the camp in 1940 and but several articles and a 2017 book about the couple have them both in the camp until it was liberated by Allied forces in 1943.

13:49Speaker 1:But Ernest was already in New York City by the end of 1940, so he wasn't in that camp with his parents. My first thought at this point was, well, he's borrowing their story for the drama, right? He's borrowing pieces of a story he knows well, and that makes sense. But it's a lot weirder than that. he wasn't making it up.

14:18Speaker 3:Well, I was put in prison because at the time I was a communist. So they were probably right of putting me in prison.

14:32Speaker 1:His parents spent three years in an internment camp because they were Jewish. But Ernest was imprisoned by the Italian government because he was a communist. In that interview shortly before his death, van den Haag repeats this claim that he spent nearly two years in prison in Italy. He doesn't make any mention of being shot. I think that version was a creative exaggeration, but here's this personal narrative about becoming an anti-communist in the 40s after having been very involved in communist organizing in Italy in the 30s.

15:10Speaker 1:Those articles I found about the history of artisanal Italian ceramics and the sad fate of the couple who designed them Those were in English, a few of them. The sources about how their factory functioned as a hub for militant communist organizing against Mussolini's fascist regime, though, those were all in Italian, which made them a little trickier to find. In a 2006 book whose title translates to Fascism and Labor in Naples, Corporate Union and Popular Anti-Fascism, 1930-1943, The Vietri group of a larger communist organization is described as being led by a man named Ugo de Feo, the manager of the Malamerson ceramics factory, and the factory owner's son, Ernesto.

15:58Speaker 1:Ugo de Feo, Ernesto Malamerson, and several other members of the group were arrested in the fall of 1938 for producing and distributing subversive pamphlets. Another source in Italian, a dissertation on emigration of Italian intellectuals under Mussolini, mentions Malamerson only in passing, noting that he never re-enrolled for his third year at the University of Florence in 1938, and that he later emigrated to the United States. So, he really did go to jail for being a communist in Italy.

16:32Speaker 1:I found sources that list charges and sentences for other members of the group, but I couldn't find any source material that confirmed exactly what Malamerson had been charged with or how long he spent in prison. His friends Ugo de Feo and Antonio D'Ambrosio were sentenced to six years for crimes of propaganda, and they both served four of those years. Their younger colleague, Aniello Raimondi, served one year for obscene acts. He and Ugo de Feo had admitted to having a sexual relationship. Malamerson clearly didn't serve more than a year and a half. These arrests were in the fall of 1938, and he's definitively in Paris by early 1940. So this does align with the versions of his biography that put him in prison for around 18 months in 1939. In that interview in 2000, Fendenhag describes bouncing around a little after leaving Italy, eventually ending up in Paris, where he studied psychiatry at the Sorbonne for a few months. This, too, seems to be true. It's corroborated in an Italian language source. In his 1940 manuscript, Memoirs of an Antifascist, Italian resistance movement member Sergio de

17:52Speaker 1:Benedetti describes his life in Paris in the late 1930s. And towards the end of chapter 11, the English translation reads, Some of my friends ended up in French internment camps. One of these was Ernesto Malamerson. Although he had lived in Italy for a long time and was officially apolitical, he was arrested as a German by the French police. So his arrest in France was not because he was a communist, not because he was a Jew, but because he was an enemy alien. He was able to convince the authorities that he wasn't really very German, so he spent a bit of time in a debarkation camp in Bordeaux.

18:38Speaker 1:awaiting a visa to leave for the United States. In June of 1940, he was one of several thousand people granted a visa by Portuguese consul Aristides de Sousa Mendes. By August, he was in Lisbon, boarding a ship bound for New York City. He stayed briefly with his brother, who'd immigrated to New York in 1939, and by 1942, Ernest Malamerson was finishing up a master's degree in economics at the University of Iowa. That fall, he was chosen as one of 15 students who would participate in an experimental program to teach graduate students the Russian language in just 13 weeks. Another participant in that program described it as a pretty awful experience. In an oral history recorded many years later, Konger Metcalf, who went on to become a painter, said he was very thankful to be able to drop out of the program after a few weeks to go to boot camp. He was happier with the idea of physically going to war than continuing to spend every waking moment being berated in Russian. But apparently, for those who finished the program.

19:51Speaker 2:It worked.

19:52Speaker 1:And jobs in government intelligence were waiting for them. By 1943, Ernest Malamerson had completed his Master's in Economics at the University of Iowa, as well as that intensive Russian immersion course. And then, Ernest Malamerson disappears forever. Ernest Vanden Haag was hired by the Office of War Information as a propaganda analyst. The name didn't come out of nowhere. Haag was his mother's maiden name. But the Vanden, but in the middle name, was clearly added to make the name sound Dutch, which it was not. He worked out of an office in New York City until his position was abolished at the end of the war in 1945. Propaganda analysts at the Office of War Information consumed and analyzed media that was being produced abroad and produced briefings on what it contained.

21:02Speaker 1:But they also made and disseminated propaganda of their own, at home and abroad. as part of the war's psychological warfare operations, and efforts to keep support for the war high at home. The CIA didn't exist yet, but some of these operations would eventually be folded into the work of the CIA. Presumably, Ernest got this job as a result of the aptitude he had displayed in his Russian immersion course, but I couldn't tell you exactly what he was doing in that office during his two years there.

21:38Speaker 1:Vanden Haag said he had a change of heart around this time. Remember, he'd been an ardent anti-fascist, deeply involved in a radical communist organization working against fascism in Italy. He had been willing to risk death. He had been a political prisoner. He was made stateless by Hitler and imprisoned by Mussolini. His parents were still in an Italian concentration camp. He was a refugee and an immigrant. But suddenly, when those U.S. government war propaganda checks started hitting, he realized he'd been a fool.

22:18Speaker 3:I stopped being a communist when I came to this country and met Sidney Hook, who became a friend, and others, A.P.

22:26Speaker 2:Lerner.

22:28Speaker 3:And Sidney converted me. I became, not only stopped being a communist and became an anti-communist, which I am, to this day.

22:43Speaker 1:More specifically, he credits his change of heart to the mentorship of Sidney Hook. Hook was just a few years older than Vanden Haag. The son of Austrian Jewish immigrants, Hook was born in Brooklyn in 1902. And in the 1920s, in his early years as a philosophy professor, he was a prominent Marxist scholar. His politics started shifting in the 30s, and by the time the CIA came into existence in the mid-40s, he was collaborating with the United States government and accepting CIA funding to run an anti-communist front group. So, in the mid-1940s, Ernest Vanden Haag is a professional propagandist for the U.S. government, and then he meets his great mentor, a CIA-funded anti-communist. I think that helps explain how quickly he was able to make this hard turn. Picking through old newspapers for any mention of Vanden Haag's name, he's described in such a wide variety of capacities. He's a sociologist with a specialty in cultural anthropology. He's a practicing psychoanalyst in Manhattan. He's a law professor. He's a philosophy professor.

23:59Speaker 1:He's teaching psychology, sociology, public policy. He's an expert on the death penalty. He's an expert on child psychology. He's a renowned social scientist and critic. What is he even a doctor of?

24:12Speaker 3:It's economics.

24:15Speaker 1:There were people seeing Dr. Vanden Haag for psychoanalysis in his Manhattan office, but his doctorate was in economics, and his only qualification for practicing psychoanalysis was a semester of psych classes in Paris in 1940, and his only qualification for teaching law school was half a law degree in Italy. He had no formal training in psychology, psychiatry, or American law. He finished his PhD in economics at New York University in 1952. His dissertation was a proposal for a previously non-existent way for colleges and universities to generate revenue. I mean, forget philanthropy or government subsidies. Universities should be making their own money by becoming creditors. I found a number of articles about this dissertation, and this isn't mentioned in any of the articles, but to put us in the proper context, he's writing this dissertation around 1950, right? Enrollment in higher education has ballooned, thanks to returning servicemen using their GI benefits to go to college. Classrooms were filling up, and they're filling up with people who never would have had a shot at being there before. There are more students

25:38Speaker 1:from low-income backgrounds, immigrants, people of all religious and ethnic backgrounds, you know, Black people. Even before the major wave of organizing we think of as the Civil Rights Movement in the late 50s into the 60s, returning Black veterans were registering to vote and registering for college classes in huge numbers. And that was really starting to make waves. Remember way back to the beginning of the series of episodes on Medgar Evers? He got his start in civil rights activism when he tried to vote immediately after returning home to Mississippi from serving in France. And he really committed to the fight when he was blocked from using his GI benefits to enroll at a public university. That's the environment Vanden Haag is writing this dissertation in. Maybe it's not entirely about the economy. Maybe this isn't just about dollars and cents and interest rates and the bond market. Maybe there's some other motivation here for a market-based solution. to who gets to go to school.

26:52Speaker 3:You know?

26:54Speaker 1:But that's what he's talking about. He's trying to invent a way for massive student loan debt to haunt you forever. In his proposed system, a university would sell student debt on the bond market at a lower interest rate than the rate charged to the student. So the university gets that tuition money right away, and then they collect interest from the student repaying that loan that covers the cost of administering the program and generates a bit of extra revenue.

27:25Speaker 1:I couldn't find a copy of the dissertation itself, but Fortune magazine went crazy for it, writing, as creditors, the colleges would have direct control over the assets in which they invested. They would be in a good position to identify bad risks. The asset being invested here is people.

27:49Speaker 3:Right?

27:49Speaker 1:The students. And Fortune magazine lauded this as a brilliant way of balancing the market. Because if any particular field became oversaturated, the people working those jobs would make less income and they would be less able to pay back the loans and the colleges would identify those careers as poor investments and stop admitting students trying to study to get whatever job that is. They would let the market decide what kinds of careers would keep existing. It actually happened kind of reminds me of the way the Trump administration is reorganizing federal student loans to redefine what sorts of educational paths are professional degrees. Like I said, I couldn't find a copy of the dissertation itself, but I did read a few chapters of his 1956 book, Education as an Industry. It's not uncommon to finish a dissertation and then take a few years to refine it into your first book, and I'm pretty sure that's what this is, although I don't know that he did much refining. In the section called Racial Discrimination, where the word racial is in quotes, it's obvious he didn't update or edit anything.

29:03Speaker 1:I mean, the dissertation was written two years before Brown v. Board of Education, and the book came out two years after. But in the paragraph defending the continued practice of segregation, he writes, quote, Surely no group should want a law compelling people to congregate. And then there's a little footnote that says, This was written before the recent Supreme Court decision providing for compulsory congregation. Since it was generally welcomed in the North, our view of people's wishes was wrong.

29:35Speaker 1:If he doesn't take that out or change... it, he just puts in a footnote.

29:42Speaker 2:The End.

29:58Speaker 1:Over the years, he wrote a number of books, none of which are mentioned in his New York Times obituary. I mean, I would have at least expected some of his pro-death penalty work to show up in there, but I'm not surprised they failed to mention the book he wrote in 1969. It was called The Jewish Mystique. I assume that's some sort of play on the title of Betty Friedan's 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique. I don't know what to make of this book. Chapter one is called Are Jews Smarter Than Other People? Okay, that more or less aligns with the race and IQ work he's doing at the Pioneer Fund. A lot of that work is focused on proving the inferiority of Black people, but it's not at all uncommon in those same works to also talk about Jewish people as a distinct race with quantifiable differences in intellect and temperament. That's pretty standard. There are other chapters with titles like, Do Jews Make Better Doctors? And, You Don't Have to Be Jewish Anymore to Charge Interest.

31:07Speaker 1:Whether or not the author is Jewish changes how you hear those words, doesn't it?

31:15Speaker 3:Should it?

31:17Speaker 1:I don't know. But I think you have to admit it does. Is he culturally, religiously, ethnically Jewish? Jewish, whatever that might even mean? I don't know. It seems unlikely that he'd been actively practicing Judaism as a religion for many years, and it's not my place to opine on the status of someone's cultural or ethnic Jewishness. Again, whatever that even means. But he's the one who wrote a whole book making the argument that it's a race. a genetic reality, a set of heritable traits. I wonder if the amateur psychoanalyst was getting any psychoanalysis of his own during this time period, because I think it's noteworthy that he's presenting this work to the reader as though it were written by a complete outsider. Reviewers of the work note that it's written by a Gentile. Anatoly Boyar, the New York Times literary critic who reviewed the book, said the author had been a friend of his for many years.

32:27Speaker 1:And his review begins, quote, For the Jew, ambivalence is almost a way of life. At least three generations of Jewish novelists and Jewish comedians have made a living out of it. But while it's perfectly kosher for the Jew to caricature himself, he doesn't take kindly to any kind of comment, even compliments from outsiders. Such comments not only invade his privacy, they also awaken well-founded suspicions. And his response to them is likely to be at least hostile and perhaps even paranoid. The Jewish mystique, therefore, will almost certainly meet with both resistance and misunderstanding. So this critic is saying he's known Vanden Haag for years. He describes him as a friend. But in his review, he's saying this book may not be well received because it is a book about Jews written by a non-Jew. No mention is made of the author's personal connection to the subject matter.

33:25Speaker 1:He's not presented as having any insider knowledge. He's just a psychoanalyst and a cultural critic who has observed these things in his work. And he chooses, albeit passively, to participate in that portrayal. I'm not telling you this so that we can all indulge in the idea of the self-hating Jew. I'm not interested in that. I want you to look beyond that particular problematic stereotype and see a broader type here. He's not just a man who's hiding his Jewish heritage. He's a Hispanic ICE agent. He's a gay Nazi. He's a xenophobic immigrant. He's a black Proud Boy.

34:09Speaker 1:He's all of these people. These people aren't just sad contradictions. They're a political reality. These people who appear to be acting against their own best interests out of stupidity or self-hatred or a misguided trust that it'll be different for them if they buy in. Or a total obliviousness that the program they're buying into includes their own destruction. In some cases, they make very useful mouthpieces. The Proud Boys can't be a white supremacist organization and Riquetario is Afro-Cuban.

34:42Speaker 1:That Border Patrol agent isn't systematically abusing the rights of any brown person who crosses his path. His name's Martinez. Andy Ngo isn't a far-right extremist. He's a gay Asian whose parents were refugees. And oddly enough, in all of those examples, even today in 2026, to some extent, the thing that binds all of these people is still anti-communism. The Cold War has been over for decades. But that anxiety still animates some of the most bizarre political beliefs in the game. I mean, the President of the United States in the year 2026 is still going on TV and fear-mongering about communism. So as curious as I am about what was going on in Vandenhag's head, as much as I would love to be able to ask him what it felt like as a German Jewish refugee, to work side by side with the men who had lobbied Congress to keep men like him stuck in Europe at the mercy of Hitler and Mussolini, I'm not sure it makes much difference. It's all anti-communism. And in that light, whatever Vanden Haag's internal experience of his identity was matters a lot less. Once your guiding principle is anti-communism, everything

36:04Speaker 1:else about you takes a backseat. The book is packed with familiar tropes. Communism is inherently Jewish. Jews are more likely than Gentiles to have radical politics. Jews are smarter and work harder than white Gentiles, and Black people are less intelligent and work less hard. The civil rights movement is reliant on Jewish radicals who simply feel guilty about the plight of the Black American, and Black people could not possibly have organized any of it on their own.

36:30Speaker 1:Integration always leads to miscegenation, which mixes the blood of the various races until distinct races disappear entirely, which is apparently a very scary thing. You know, we've been talking about this stuff for months. It's always the same. You know these arguments. But he's also got some exciting new crank theories. I mean, stuff I've never heard before. He argues that the origin of antisemitism, the animating purpose behind antisemitism, is that Christians are angry at Jews for inventing monotheism.

37:07Speaker 1:They invented the idea of a singular, all-powerful God, and then they were total killjoys about it by refusing to let go of their mean Old Testament God when Christians invented a new, gentler God to replace him. I mean, this is a baffling perspective on both history and theology. I have not encountered this one before, so credit for originality, I guess. But like I said, I can understand why they left this one out of the obituary because it's just weird. It's hard to know what to say about this.

37:44Speaker 1:I struggled with this part. By the mid-1970s, he'd largely transitioned into being all about the death penalty. Banging the drum of segregation wasn't worthwhile and it certainly wasn't going to earn him a comfortable position at the Heritage Foundation. As the nation's leading voice for executing people convicted of violent crime, Vanden Haag was a Heritage Foundation Distinguished Scholar for many years. Many of those years overlapped with the years he was collecting a check as the director of a Pioneer Fund front group. In the spirit of disingenuous arguments about academic freedom, we'll leave off here today with a pair of contradictory arguments, made 40 years apart. In 1954, Ernest Vanden Haag shared a stage with J. Edgar Hoover at Hofstra University at a conference on academic freedom, and both men's speeches were about the dangers of communism. Hoover gave lip service to the importance of free inquiry, but cautioned that there is a vast difference between inquiry, which acquaints you with both sides of a question, and academic license.

38:52Speaker 1:Hoover railed against teachers who create doubts about the American way of life.

38:58Speaker 3:And Dr.

38:58Speaker 1:Vanden Haag took the stage, and his solution was simple. Make it illegal to be a communist, fire them all from their jobs, revoke their Fifth Amendment rights. Academic freedom is so important that it can only be preserved by making sure some people don't have it. We, as the custodians and main beneficiaries of academic freedom, have failed to clean our house. We have not had the clarity and courage to expel those among us who have betrayed our trust and surrendered their freedoms. he told the crowd by being communists they've already given up their right to freedom of any kind it's not a violation of academic freedom to censor or punish people who don't deserve freedom in the first place freedom is only for people who agree with the government or perhaps more accurately, only for people who agree with him. Because 40 years later, in an article published in the Pace Law Review, Vanden Haag again argues for academic freedom. In 1954, freedom meant the freedom to agree with the prevailing current, to buy into Cold War hysteria and agree with J.

40:13Speaker 3:Edgar Hoover.

40:15Speaker 1:In 1994, under the title Academic Freedom and Tenure, freedom looks different. He moans about unfair political correctness, about censorship, about some professors feeling unable to express their unpopular views.

40:35Speaker 3:You know the ones.

40:38Speaker 1:Some of the unpopular views he brings up as examples are whether or not it's okay to accept tens of thousands of dollars from the Pioneer Fund, just as a random example. The article was written around the time that Pioneer Fund grant recipient Linda Gottfredson was in hot water with her employer, the University of Delaware, because they did not want to accept funds from a eugenicist, segregationist, white supremacist organization with known ties to both neo-Nazis and the actual original Nazis. But shouldn't she be free to conduct her academic inquiries into race and IQ using money from an organization whose goals have always been to fund bad science for bad ends? Examples of other professors who've been unfairly maligned for their politically incorrect expressions of academic freedom are, according to Vanden Haag, men like Arthur Jensen, J. Philippe Rushton, Richard Herrnstein. They'd all been attacked and smeared as racists, he says. He doesn't mention that all three of these men had benefited from Pioneer Fund money, and To be fair, I guess he couldn't have known that J. Philippe Rushton

41:49Speaker 1:would go on to be the Pioneer Fund president from 2002 until his death in 2012. It's a grave injustice that Rushton was suspended from in-person teaching for a semester, simply because he published a study comparing relative sizes of skulls and penises across different races. He was searching for a racial correlation between genital size and IQ.

42:14Speaker 2:In the 90s.

42:16Speaker 1:He wrote that in the 1990s. In the 1990s, this man was measuring dick circumference and plotting it against standardized test scores and asking you to take him seriously. I mean, academic freedom aside for a second, this one's kind of an own goal, right? This is a guy who wants you to think he's a brilliant scientist and he's telling you, that science says the bigger your penis is, the dumber you are. In the paper, Vanden Haag omits some relevant details about Rushton's plight, though. Like the fact that he was suspended from the classroom because he conducted his penis-sized surveys on his students without seeking university approval to use human subjects. And Rushton is Canadian, and Canada has actual laws against certain kinds of hate speech. But that's the rub, isn't it? The hypocrisy is irrelevant. The misapplication of laws and principles and omission of relevant details, none of that matters.

43:27Speaker 1:Because this isn't about academic freedom or meritocracy. Just like the work of the Pioneer Fund was never about scientific inquiry. Just like Nathan Kofnes' academic witch hunt was never really about plagiarism. It's all just the best argument they can muster in a given moment to reinforce a reactionary worldview. The argument doesn't have to be consistent. Because the results are. And for a hundred years, they've been using this argument to push Black people out of schools. I promise we are going to reach the conclusion of this chapter, this meandering story of race science in the courts in the 1960s.

44:10Speaker 1:There are plenty of stories left to tell about the race scientists of yesterday and today and God help us tomorrow. But I don't know. Maybe we don't have to spend the rest of the year talking about eugenics. I haven't decided yet. My husband is dying to get on mic and show off his Jared Taylor impression, though, so who knows? A few weeks ago, I said I didn't know where we were going, but wherever it was... We might be there for a while. The wide world of scientific racism is packed to the gills with some of the weirdest guys you can possibly imagine. I don't know, maybe I've poisoned my mind and this is a matter of taste and you may disagree with me, but I find it a lot easier to write about an honest bigot. Just tell me you hate whoever it is you hate and be done with it. The... sublimated, footnoted, contorted justifications and elaborate explanations for perfectly mundane hatreds are bizarre to me.

45:17Speaker 1:I actually have an easier time comprehending a guy who says he doesn't think black people are human because as the descendants of Cain they bear the curse of his sin than I do reading a hundred pages of arguments about deliberately botched skull measurement experiments. The end result is kind of the same. And both ways of thinking about the world are poisonous and harmful. But there's just something so unhinged about the amount of effort they put into pretending they're normal. I guess that's what makes it so scary.

45:50Speaker 1:Because it works sometimes. We end up having to debate the skull measurement guy because science is something we debate. And they're tricking people into thinking they've got something of possible academic value that merits a real discussion. But they don't. And it doesn't. So stop indulging them. They've worked so hard to make it sound like they've got something important to say. But they're just weird little guys. So Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.

46:39Speaker 1:It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me at weirdlittleguyspodcast at gmail.com. I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys.

47:05Speaker 2:Thank you.