Month: March 2019

Up is Down: Dinesh D’Souza Says the Civil Rights Act Was Part of Progressive Bigotry

Image: The Osceola (AR) Times, Nov. 19, 1920

On Twitter, Dinesh D’Souza is on the defensive. He desperately wants the Democratic party to be a party of bigotry and racism, not just during the 1800s but continuously through to the present. Given that Democratic president Lyndon Johnson supported and signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, it is hard to make the case that Democratic party remained the party of racism. However, D’Souza is persistent. He invokes the well-known racism of Johnson as a Senator which to him is proof that the CRA and VRA were not what they seemed.

In a tweet, political scientist Phil Klinker informed D’Souza that no one disputes Johnson’s racism. He then asked D’Souza:

Are you arguing that LBJ’s legislative achievements–the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts–were part of some racist design on his part?

In a mindbinding response, D’Souza said:

Surely, there are other reasons why a president might support legislation, especially legislation as far reaching as the CRA and the VRA. The real mind twister is his contention that Klinker can’t see the reason due to “progressive bigotry.” The CRA and VRA accomplished the aims of civil rights campaigners and many Republicans. Did they also have bigoted reasons for supporting those laws? I can’t figure out what he is getting at. What would LBJ have supported if he wasn’t a racist?

As I demonstrated in recent posts, numerous Republicans were also quite bigoted throughout the period when other Republicans were supporting Civil Rights legislation. Lily white Republicans in the early 1900s wanted to purge the GOP of African-Americans and were successful in some parts of the country.

If D’Souza diminishes the CRA/VRA due to Johnson’s racism, then what will he do with Warren Harding’s similar sentiment? In Harding’s 1921 Birmingham’s speech on race, he told the crowd that blacks should have equal rights to vote but he added this:

Men of both races may well stand uncompromisingly against every suggestion of social equality. . . Racial amalgamation there cannot be.

In his speech, Harding also favorably cited Lothrop Stoddard’s racist book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy to establish the problem of race in America.

Whoever will take the time to read and ponder Mr. Lothrop Stoddard’s book on The Rising Tide of Color, or. say. the thoughtful review of some recent literature of this question which Mr. F. D. Lugard presented in a recent Edinburg Review, must realize that our race problem here in the United Slates is only a phase of a race issue that the whole world confronts. Surely we shall gain nothing by blinking the facts, by refusing to give thought to them. That is not the American way of approaching such issues.

Stoddard’s book was a call to white supremacy and helped stimulate the 1924 Immigration Act which limited immigration from non-Nordic nations. When D’Souza wants to find fault with Democrats, he associates Stoddard with progressives. In his book, The Big Lie, he says this about Stoddard and his book:

Stoddard was the bestselling author of a notorious tract, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, that portrayed the pristine Nordic race being swamped through immigration and interracial marriage by degenerate hordes from other lesser races. Both Lothrop and Gamble became avid Nazi sympathizers who sought to import Nazi sterilization programs in their full magnitude to America

What D’Souza doesn’t tell his readers is that Stoddard was popular among those in the Harding administration and that Republican Harding himself cited this tribute to white supremacy in a presidential speech on race.

The facts don’t fit D’Souza’s predetermined narrative which leads to strange and ahistorical assertions about the bigotry and the CRA/VRA.

 

 

Accreditation Commission: The Master’s University Still on Probation, President Transition Required by End of 2019

Today, the WASC Senior College and University Commission posted a letter dated March 4 which describes their decision to keep The Master’s University and Seminary on probation. The letter also informs the school that the search for a new president to replace John MacArthur should be completed by the end of 2019 (see also this post). According to the letter, TMUS’s board of directors had decided to extend that date until later. The WASC team determined that was not in keeping with the plan previously established.

The Commission saw the lack of movement of finding MacArthur’s replacement as a sign of concern regarding organizational integrity. The Commission stated:

In addition, the institution made a commitment to transition its chief executive officer from the position of president to Chancellor of the Seminary within 18 months of the date of the visit. Yet, at the panel interview, the president mentioned that the Board has extended that date and had still not taken steps to define the requirements and job description for the institution’s next president. The Commission is concerned that TMUS still struggles in the area of operational integrity and transparency.

For this and other reasons, the Commission decided TMUS was out of compliance with the accreditation standards.

The Commission found that The Master’s University and Seminary is not in compliance with WSCUC Standards 1 and 3 and acted to continue the sanction of Probation.

Being on probation can lead to dire consequences for an institution of higher learning.

Under U.S. Department of Education regulations, when the Commission finds that an institution fails to meet one or more of the Standards of Accreditation, it is required to notify the institution of these findings and give the institution no longer than two years from the date of this action to correct the deficiencies. If an institution has not remedied the deficiencies at the conclusion of this sanction period, the Commission is required, under U.S. Department of Education regulations, to take an “adverse action,” which in this case would take the form of withdrawal of accreditation.

TMUS is required to respond to the following concerns:

1. The Board should ensure the successful succession and transition of the Presidential role including conducting a national search by 12/31/2019. (CFRs 3.8, 3.9)
2. The Board and Administration should continue to communicate with their constituents in the TMUS community regarding personnel actions and leadership succession. (CFRs 1.7, 3.2, 3.6)
3. TMUS should establish systematic two-way communication practices to promote consistent and sustainable flow of information among administrators, faculty, staff and students. (CFRs 1.6, 3.7, 3.10)
4. TMUS should establish and implement a formal procedure that allows for a safe environment for staff and faculty to express grievances and ethical concerns. (CFRs 1.7, 3.2)

The Commission’s Standards 1 and 3 are as follows (read all of them here):

Standard 1: Defining Institutional Purposes and Ensuring Educational Objectives

The institution defines its purposes and establishes educational objectives aligned with those purposes. The institution has a clear and explicit sense of its essential values and character, its distinctive elements, its place in both the higher education community and society, and its contribution to the public good. It functions with integrity, transparency, and autonomy.

Standard 3: Developing and Applying Resources and Organizational Structures to Ensure Quality and Sustainability

The institution sustains its operations and supports the achievement of its educational objectives through investments in human, physical, fiscal, technological, and information resources and through an appropriate and effective set of organizational and decision-making structures. These key resources and organizational structures promote the achievement of institutional purposes and educational objectives and create a high-quality environment for learning.

Each of these standards has criteria for review (CFR) which are identified in the letter. When CFR is referred to above in the letter, those are the criteria which are of concern to the Commission.

Dinesh D’Souza: Where Were the Democrats in the Human Betterment Foundation?

In his book The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, Dinesh D’Souza attempts to draw a link between the Democratic party and the eugenics movement in the United States and Nazi Germany. In the 2017 book D’Souza wrote, “Progressives in America founded a plethora of eugenic organizations.”(p. 135) He then listed leading eugenicists including, “Eugene Gosney (sic), director of the Human Betterment Foundation.” (p. 136). (Note: Gosney’s first name was Ezra).

As I pointed out in a post earlier today, Gosney was a registered Republican. He also supported the Boy Scouts and Paul Popenoe’s American Institute for Family Relations, the organization which gave James Dobson his start. While those are good things, that’s not the point. The point is that these guys were not progressives in the manner D’Souza depicts. They were Republicans and in many ways, they were socially conservative.

The Human Betterment Foundation Charter Members Were Republicans

Now to follow up on today’s post, I want to report that when the Human Betterment Foundation opened for business, none of the founding members described themselves as members of the Democratic party. I checked all of the voter registrations and other sources and found no Democrats.* There was only one person I couldn’t find any information about (A.D. Shamel), but all others were or became Republicans during their service to the organization. One member (George Dock) was a Democrat in 1924 but by 1928, he had joined his wife as a registered Republican and remained that way according to available records. Another HBF founding member (William Munro) did not state his affiliation until 1936 but when he did, it was Republican to match his wife.

So in short, in 1928, Republican philanthropist E.S. Gosney brought together 24 people, none of whom were Democrats, to form an organization that Dinesh D’Souza claims was influenced by the Democratic party.

Dinesh D’Souza is probably correct to say that the Human Betterment Foundation had an influence on the Nazis. At least HBF board member Charles Goethe said so when he wrote Gosney in 1934 after a trip to Germany:

You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought and particularly by the work of the Human Betterment Foundation. I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people.

D’Souza claims that eugenics groups like the Human Betterment Foundation are part of the “disgraceful legacy of the Democratic left.” In the light of history, the HBF is disgraceful but how can it be the legacy of the Democratic left when no Democrats were involved in it?

 

*Voter registrations were checked via Ancestry.com.

Eugenics and Republicans: What Dinesh D’Souza Should Learn from History

Last week in a Twitter response to Princeton historian Kevin Kruse, Dinesh D’Souza linked to a 2017 article published on Breitbart.com in which he claimed the following:

Hitler learned a great deal from the Democrats and from American progressives.  He got some of his core policy strategies from them.

Dinesh DSouza speaking at CPAC 2012 CC 2.0

Specifically, D’Souza claimed Hitler copied three policies from American Democrats – the treatment of native Americans, the segregation of African-Americans, and sterilization laws and the eugenics movement from the first half of the last century. While all of these claims are problematic, my intention in this post is to fact check him regarding immigration laws and eugenics.

1924 Immigration Act

D’Souza wrote:

Hitler also appealed to the racially exclusionary provisions of U.S. immigration laws, specifically the 1924 Immigration Act that had been pushed by American progressives as a model of enlightened eugenic legislation.

As Kruse pointed out on Twitter, the 1924 Immigration Act was sponsored by two conservative Republicans, Albert Johnson (R-WA) and David Reed (R-PA) and signed into law by Republican president Calvin Coolidge. When Republicans controlled the House, Johnson was the chair of the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee. While chair of that committee, Johnson appointed eugenicist Harry Laughlin to be the committee’s “Expert Eugenics Agent” and routed funds for eugenic research to Charles Davenport’s lab at Cold Spring Harbor where Laughlin also worked.

While it is true that the supporters of eugenics and race-based immigration had common cause, it is not true that the Democratic Party was the sole or even leading influence. Members of both parties voted for the bill but it was sponsored and promoted heavily by Republicans.

On a related note, Republicans today are typically the ones who want to slow immigration into the U.S. It was a recent Republican president who wondered why we couldn’t take more people from Norway than from “sh*thole” countries.

Sterilization Laws 

D’Souza wrote:

Third, Hitler learned from progressive sterilization laws that had been enacted in America through the influence of activists like Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood.

Progressive eugenicist Paul Popenoe, himself an advocate of euthanasia by poison gas, praised Hitler for being on the front lines of modern eugenics.  Harry Laughlin and Charles Davenport’s Eugenic News termed the Nazi sterilization program “a milestone which marks the control by the most advanced nations of the world of a major aspect of controlling human reproduction.”

It is true that Hitler praised America’s laws allowing the sterilization of people deemed to be deficient in various ways. It is also true that many of the leaders in the eugenics movement supported Germany’s movement to enact similar laws. However, Sanger had little to do with sterilization laws because the eugenics supporters cited by D’Souza didn’t want her help.

While it is safe to say that Margaret Sanger was progressive in her views, she wasn’t viewed as a colleague by those in the mainstream of the eugenics and sterilization movement. She hoped to attach herself to it to further her own cause but leaders in the eugenics movement didn’t seem to want her. Read what eugenics leader Paul Popenoe said in a letter to fellow eugenicist Madison Grant about Sanger’s American Birth Control League:

Dear Mr. Grant,

I have been considerably disquieted by the letter you showed me yesterday, suggesting a working alliance between the American Eugenics Society and the American Birth Control League. In my judgement we have everything to lose nothing to gain to such an arrangement.

[The American Birth Control League] is controlled by a group that has be brought up on agitation and emotional appeal instead of on research and education… With this group, we would take on a large quantity of ready-made enemies which it has accumulated, and we would gain allies who, while believing that they are eugenics, really have no conception of what eugenics is and are actually opposed to it.

[At a recent international birth control conference] two members of our advisory council … put through a resolution at the final meeting, urging that people whose children gave promise of being of exceptional value to the race should have as many children, properly spaced, as they felt that they feasibly could. This is eugenics. It is not the policy of the American Birth Control League leaders, who in the next issue of their monthly magazine came out with an editorial denouncing this resolution as contrary to all the principles and sentiments of their organization.

If it is desirable for us to make a campaign in favor of contraception, we are abundantly able to do so on our own account, without enrolling a lot of sob sisters, grand stand players, and anarchists to help us. We had a lunatic fringe in the eugenics movement in the early days; we have been trying for 20 years to get rid of it and have finally done so. Let’s not take on another fringe of any kind as an ornament.

Sincerely,

Paul Popenoe

Acknowledged eugenics leader Popenoe called Sanger’s group “sob sisters” and a “fringe.” The principle leaders in the movement to enact sterilization laws were people like Popenoe, Davenport, and Laughlin. Continue reading “Eugenics and Republicans: What Dinesh D’Souza Should Learn from History”

Questions for Superstar Francis Chan About Gospel for Asia

Francis Chan is a superstar pastor who has a franchise called Crazy Love™.  There is a Crazy Love book, study guide, website, ministries (plural) and store where you can “shop now” for all of Chan’s books. Like all superstars, he also has a church planting network. We used to call them denominations. His is called We Are Church. He is pretty cool.

Anyway, he is also a board member of Gospel for Asia. That has always confused me because GFA hasn’t had such a cool recent history. But Francis Chan thinks everything is fine. In fact, he is out saying that GFA hasn’t done anything wrong, telling Christian Post that he researched the matter with a trusted friend and found nothing wrong with GFA’s finances.

I have written Francis Chan in the past and he first had his Crazy Love assistant Chaz answer me. When Chaz didn’t actually answer the question I asked, I wrote back but Crazy Love stopped responding.

In response to Francis Chan’s statement about GFA, I still have some questions. Maybe someone at We Are Church or Crazy Love will tell someone who will tell someone who can ask Francis Chan about it.

Dear Francis Chan:

One, if there were no financial problems at GFA, then why did Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability take the rare step of evicting the organization from membership? In case you didn’t read the report, you can read all about it here. Chaz can print out a copy for you.

Two, why did a federal judge appoint a special master to oversee GFA during Murphy v. GFA? I think you know the answer. GFA couldn’t verify their expenses and the judge had given the leaders months to do so. Being sanctioned by a federal judge isn’t a sign of an honest broker.

Three, why does His Eminence The Most Reverence Metropolitan Dr. K.P. Yohannan need to have a personal fortune when he is the supreme Metropolitan of Believers’ Church in Asia? You looked at his tax returns in the U.S. but did you consider the vast wealth of Believers’ Church in Asia? How does being the patron of a state of the art medical center and medical college in India figure into one’s empire? Why does the church need a soccer team? What needs or wants are not met when the church supplies everything due to your position as supreme temporal and spiritual authority?

Four, why did GFA cover up the transfer of $20-million from Canada to India to the U.S. for the completion of the Texas headquarters? I assume you’ve been to the compound. I hear it is pretty nice. You probably wouldn’t need a big income if you have everything you need provided for you by donors who think their money is going to evangelism and poor children in Asia.

Five, why hasn’t GFA told donors that Believers’ Church and GFA lost registration as a charity in India? When Compassion International lost their registration, it made the New York Times. When it happened to GFA, GFA told several different false stories. It still isn’t clear how funds are getting into India, if they are getting in at all.

I have more questions but that should do for now. As a board member, you will be busy meeting your two new colleagues, Garland Murphy and whoever he helps chose to take Gisela’s place. Also, you all are going to have to raise the $37-million for the settlement. Since a lien will be on the Texas headquarters, you will be really busy raising money to pay the $11-million you can’t get from “the field.” Probably, raising $11-million to pay a court settlement is really going to keep the board busy. Donors might be a little skeptical of an organization raising money to pay former donors who settled a RICO suit.

Crazy.

Love, The Blogger

P.S. In case you haven’t read the Murphy v. GFA settlement, it is here.