The Ghosts of John Tanton
November 07, 2024 at 11:30PMIf you think everyone on the right flank of US politics believes climate change is a hoax, think again. Abrahm Lustgarten digs into the intersection of environmentalism and racism, specifically the decades-long effort to curtail the arrival of non-white immigrants on US soil. He illuminates this nexus largely through John Tanton, an ophthalmologist, a prominent member of the Sierra Club, and a white supremacist :
Even as he built an environmental legacy, Tanton was privately thinking more and more not just about the size of the population but about how to preserve what he described as the distinctiveness of European people. In 1975, he wrote a paper titled “The Case for Passive Eugenics” and would later, in a letter to eugenicist Robert Graham, a millionaire businessman known for starting a sperm bank for geniuses, clarify his goals. “Do we leave it to individuals to decide that they are the intelligent ones who should have more kids?” he asked. “More troublesome, what about the less intelligent, who logically should have less?”
Around this time, a fundamental demographic shift occurred: New births no longer exceeded deaths in the United States. The population should have begun to stabilize, except there was a new form of growth: immigration. The population, then at around 211 million, continued to expand, and many who at first worried for the carrying capacity of the planet became preoccupied with walling off the country and keeping the global population at bay. For Tanton, “population” became a euphemism for “immigration.” With time, “immigrant” would become a euphemism for “nonwhite.” Long before the great replacement theory became a dominant strain among mainstream conservatives—nearly 7 out of 10 Republicans have said the theory had merit—Tanton, while not using those words, began to define the term. We’ve been thinking so much about “how many” come to this country, he would write, it’s time to think about “who.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/11/07/the-ghosts-of-john-tanton/
via IFTTT
Watch