Anglican Church of Canada blunders stoke calls for general secretary to resign

“The ACC absolutely has the capacity to respond in an appropriate way, but it has made deliberate and calculated choices not to," a survivor said.

The Anglican Church of Canada logo. Courtesy image

March 30, 2022

By 

Kathryn Post

(RNS) — Survivors of abuse and anti-abuse advocates in the Anglican Church of Canada are calling for the denomination’s general secretary to resign, saying he and other ACC leaders have continued to bungle their response to the leak of a draft of an article on sexual misconduct written for the denomination’s paper.

“The ACC absolutely has the capacity to respond in an appropriate way, but it has made deliberate and calculated choices not to out of its need for self-preservation or out of fear,” said Cydney Proctor, a self-identified survivor of sexual misconduct.

In February, an advocacy group called ACCtoo published an open letter claiming a “high-ranking official of the ACC” leaked a draft of an Anglican Journal article about the ACC’s mishandling of abuse allegations to some of the ACC authorities implicated in the story.

On March 13, the executive office of the ACC’s governing body, called the Council of General Synod, apologized and said it was conducting reviews of the ACC’s journalistic practices and sexual misconduct policies.

ACCtoo, however, noted that the council did not fully address ACCtoo’s original demands, which include a request that the person who leaked the draft resign.

Two days after the council’s statement went live, General Secretary Alan Perry, chief operating officer of the ACC’s governing body, was identified publicly as the person who shared the story draft.

Perry had been known to be the leaker by some inside the church since at least September 2021, when the church’s top official primate, Linda Nicholls, referred to him by title in a summary response to the incident that was published on the ACC website March 15. “In light of the sensitivities of such an article,” Nicholls wrote, “a draft was shared with the Director of Communications, General Secretary and Primate. Believing it was a penultimate draft, it was shared by the General Secretary with dioceses/institutions reflected in the article.”

On March 23, Perry said in a statement that the sharing of the article “happened on my watch.” He also expressed “regret” at the harm caused to survivors but did not accept personal responsibility for circulating the draft. Perry and Nicholls did not respond to requests for comment.

It’s not clear whether the ACC intended to reveal that Perry had leaked the draft when it posted its response this month, but now, the Anglican Journal’s former editor-in-chief Matthew Townsend, Proctor, ACCtoo and at least one member of the council told Religion News Service they are calling for Perry’s resignation.

ACCtoo also learned last week that a report of an investigation into the Anglican Journal leak had been shared with the Anglican Journal’s editorial board. That report — which ACCtoo has repeatedly requested be shared with survivors — contained an appendix with confidential information about Proctor’s original complaint, according to Townsend.

Cydney Proctor. Courtesy photo

“Multiple sources have confirmed that in fact, the full report received by the editorial board included an appendix that not only identified one of the perpetrators in my story, it also provided details of my complaint against them,” Proctor said in a March 24 video. “This further degrades the trust which remains between me and the General Synod’s senior leadership. It is another breach for which I demand another apology.”

The chair of the editorial board did not respond to request for comment.

In its statement, CoGS, as the council is commonly known, had recommended that the report be shared with the editorial board, and claimed the report said “absolutely nothing about the circumstances of the original complaints by the individuals.”

A member of CoGS told RNS that the council has not seen the report and had no knowledge of the appendix. The CoGS statement also said the primate offered to meet with survivors and share the full report with them, “with appropriate mutual assurances of privacy and confidentiality.”

ACCtoo believes survivors should have access to the report independent of a meeting with the primate. In a March 16 email addressed to the primate, general secretary and members of CoGS, ACCtoo co-founders Carolyn Mackie and Michael Buttrey asked for a copy of the report to share with survivors. As of Tuesday (March 29), they had not received a response.

Finn Keesmaat-Walsh, a member of CoGS from the Province of Ontario, dissented from the CoGS statement in a Facebook post on Thursday, saying it did not address ACCtoo’s three requests.

“I’m not willing to give up hope that reconciliation can happen, and that with appropriate steps, this church can heal from this,” Keesmaat-Walsh told RNS. “But I don’t think that healing will be possible without the three goals that ACCtoo put in their letter being met.”

On Monday, Townsend, who quit his job at the journal in June in protest of the handling of the controversy, called for further accountability in his own statement. He emphasized the need to share the investigator’s report with survivors and released his own resignation letter to further validate the facts in ACCtoo’s open letter.

“My sense from the very start was that the church’s leadership didn’t really understand the gravity of the breach. For me as a journalist, this kind of confidentiality breach is the worst thing that could happen in your career, and the worst thing you could do to sources,” Townsend told RNS. “I continue to be concerned that the church isn’t quite taking this seriously, and that the approach is still not trauma-informed in any kind of way.”

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RELATED: Anglican Church of Canada leaders apologize to survivors, respond to ACCToo

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ACCtoo is also concerned about the appointment of Bishop William Cliff as chair of the ACC’s Communications and Information Resources Committee, which oversees the General Synod’s communication policy, according to the church website. Cliff is the bishop of Brandon, the diocese where Proctor has said she experienced sexual misconduct by a church leader. Cliff, according to Proctor and Townsend, is also one of the original recipients of the Anglican Journal article draft. Cliff did not respond to requests for comment. 

“He needs to recuse himself,” Proctor told RNS. “No one even remotely tied to this situation should be in charge of the communications of the national church.”

For ACCtoo and its supporters, the ACC’s response so far to the leak demonstrates a focus on institutional self-preservation over the needs of survivors.

“There is so much work that needs to be done in the church to respond to survivors of sexual violence,” said Mackie. “But this particular incident is symbolic of all of that. Until they can address this properly, and take accountability for what happened, we can’t trust that any other efforts to change systemic responses in the church will bear any fruit.”

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RELATED: ACCtoo calls Anglican Church of Canada to repent for mishandling abuse allegations

 

Rocket Lab launches BlackSky satellites as it prepares for mid-air booster recovery

by Jeff Foust — April 2, 2022

A Rocket Lab Electron lifts off April 2 carrying two BlackSky imaging satellites. Credit: Rocket Lab webcast

WASHINGTON — A Rocket Lab Electron launched another pair of imaging satellites for BlackSky April 2 as the company gears up to attempt recovery of the rocket’s first stage.

The Electron lifted off from Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand at 8:41 a.m. Eastern. The rocket’s upper stage deployed a kick stage carrying two BlackSky satellites into orbit nearly 10 minutes later. The kick stage, after a burn of its Curie engine, released the satellites into a 430-kilometer orbit nearly an hour after liftoff.

The launch was the latest in a series of Electron launches of BlackSky satellites arranged by Spaceflight. That deal included launches of pairs of BlackSky satellites in November and December 2021 as well as a failed Electron launch in May 2021.

Rocket Lab said March 24 that the launch, the second Electron flight of the year, was previously scheduled for March but postponed by weather. Because of the delay of the launch, revenue from the launch would be recognized in its fiscal second quarter rather than its first. The company updated its revenue projection for the first quarter from $42–47 million to approximately $40 million.

BlackSky said in December it would launch two to four satellites this year, joining the 12 it had in orbit at the time. The company is shifting its development focus to a new Gen 3 series of satellites with improved resolution, with the first of those satellites scheduled to launch in 2023.

Rocket Lab did not attempt to recover the first stage of the Electron after this launch. The company said in November that, after three launches where it recovered Electron boosters after splashing down in the ocean, it was ready to attempt a midair recovery of a booster by catching it with a helicopter, the final step before reusing those boosters.

The company has not announced when that recovery will take place, but hinted it would take place soon. “The first one that we’ll catch in the air is coming up very soon,” said Lars Hoffman, senior vice president of global launch services at Rocket Lab, during a panel session at the Satellite 2022 conference March 22. “Then we’re going to examine that and do any refurb that is necessary, and try to relaunch that as soon as it’s ready, hopefully this year.”

He added that the company has a “full manifest” of Electron launches this year, including the first from Launch Complex 2 at Wallops Island, Virginia, with a goal of launching on average once per month. “We’re keeping pace with the market. We’re trying not to get too far ahead.”

Does Goliath deserve his bad reputation? 

A new spin on an old villain

Benjamin Ivry

FORWARD

March 31, 2022

Does Goliath, the giant notorious for his biblical confrontation with David, deserve sympathy? The latest book by Jonathan Friedmann, professor of Jewish music history at the Academy for Jewish Religion California, explains why he may be getting some. “Goliath as Gentle Giant” examines the recent phenomenon of humanizing depictions in popular culture of David’s opponent. Friedmann’s previous books include studies of the social functions of synagogue song; music in the Hebrew Bible; and the Jewish liturgical composer Jacob Sonderling. Friedmann recently spoke with Benjamin Ivry about whether belated celebrity damage control is possible for Goliath.

Benjamin Ivry: People from Philistia, where Goliath hailed from, as described in the Books of Samuel and Joshua, appear to have an image problem. Archaeologist Lawrence Stager has noted that they are “defined mostly by their enemies” as hostile to culture and the arts, but were “cosmopolitan people who traded widely across the eastern Mediterranean.” Another archaeologist, Seymour Gitin concurs that the “Philistines were not philistines in the sense we define the word today.” Should Goliath and his brethren be renamed Philistians or people from Philistia, rather than the potentially misleading Philistines?

Jonathan Friedmann: You know that’s really interesting and you’re absolutely right. I think [Israeli archaeologist] Israel Finkelstein said when you look at the Philistines, there’s nothing philistine about them. Their civilization was more prosperous and far-reaching than the Israelites.

Why does the Bible describe Israelites as constantly clashing with troops from Philistia? Researchers today declare that little archaeological evidence suggests that they posed any real threat to the Israelites; they were more concerned with regional superpowers like Egypt, Assyria and Babylonia. Was Philistia as opponent of the Israelites just a literary convention?

The ongoing war surrounding the meeting of David and Goliath is very far-fetched from a historical or archaeological perspective. It’s more about a minority culture, with the Israelites being less sophisticated, a less powerful hill people. In large part, the Israelites were worried about Greek hegemony at that point. Goliath is basically described as a Greek soldier, so it’s a polemical text. It’s a revenge fantasy, with the Israelites trying to build themselves up in their own literature to give themselves strength, power, and superiority that they didn’t have in real life.


By Getty Images

It Ain’t Necessarily So:

Around 40 years ago, the endocrinologists David and Pauline Rabin wrote a note to the New England Journal of Medicine, speculating that Goliath may have had hormonal problems. Moshe Feinsod, a neurosurgeon from Haifa, published an article following what he called the Rabins’ “humoristic twist” in diagnosing a pancreatic tumor in Goliath. How did the subject of Goliath’s possible health problems develop from doctors aware of the absurdity of such distant diagnoses to a self-help guru like Malcolm Gladwell who seriously identified with the ailing Goliath, saying that underdogs like David should never win?

There’s a bit of silly undercurrent even when we speak of the story of David in a serious medical way. But it’s helpful in that there are lots of aspects of Goliath that don’t make much sense unless he’s considered as an ailing or failing champion. He doesn’t see well, and his shield bearer is like his seeing eye guide. What ultimately happens is that Goliath starts to be seen as the underdog himself, compared to David.

The 1984 novel by Joseph Heller, “God Knows” contains a deathbed kvetch by King David about his misdeeds. Heller depicts David as a narcissistic fashionista who regrets his celebrity. To make Goliath appear more likeable, is it necessary to show David as frankly unpleasant?



The Bible tries to portray the innocent time of David, doubling down on his purity, virtuousness, and naivety, but Heller basically says David was always David, and creates a more complicated picture. In the beginning of “God Knows,” David claims to despise the Book of Chronicles because it whitewashes all the fun stuff. In the Davidic story, he’s a murderer and a scheming political animal, he’s an adulterer and a bit paranoid, a very well-rounded and tormented character. But not in Chronicles and certainly not in rabbinical literature.

Biblical scholars explain that in 1 Samuel 17, the traditional account of David vanquishing Goliath is given, but in 2 Samuel 21 the killer of Goliath is named as Elhanan. son of Jaare-Oregim the Bethlehemite. Supposedly Elhanan’s feat was later ascribed to David, because the latter became more famous, so he lent prestige to the achievement. Can David be dissociated from this victory, or is it too late for any such revision?

It’s rather remarkable. The Biblical world was much more comfortable with competing stories and retelling stories and adding details because it was much closer to an oral tradition. A lot of discrepancies can be explained by looking at Elhanan as the original story, of a heroic person who slayed a giant, a typical folklore theme. And David’s name was tacked onto this, which is the general historian’s consensus.

The Babylonian Talmud (Sotah 42b) describes Goliath as son of the sister-in-law of David’s great-grandmother. “Ruth Rabbah,” part of the Midrash Rabbot as a commentary on the Book of Ruth, says that Goliath and David were even more closely related. Was the David-Goliath fight just a family squabble? Or should we follow the Jerusalem Talmud, in which Rabbi Yohanan claimed that Goliath was the son of “one hundred fathers and one old maid” due to his mother’s promiscuity, possibly leading to more compassion for him today?

In my view, the Midrashim regarding Goliath, and the storytelling in Christianity which builds Goliath into Satan against Jesus, just doubles down on the depravity and despicableness of Goliath. There’s no sympathy for him; that’s not the purpose of those texts. When you look at the way Jacob and Esau are treated in the Talmud, typically black and white oppositions are described within the same family.

Emil Hirsch’s article on Goliath in the “Jewish Encyclopaedia” enthuses about the David-Goliath matchup: “From the point of view of literary effectiveness, few portions of Old Testament literature equal this.” Does this artistic impact, plus the fact that we know nothing else about Goliath as a character, mean that speculations, reimaginings, and rehabilitations will surely continue about him in future?

I do want to stress that looking at Goliath positively is very rare. There aren’t that many kind treatments of Goliath. But it’s a very bare-boned story. I don’t know how it would stack up against other pieces of literature, so [Hirsch’s] praise may be hyperbole. But from my perspective, this story lends itself well to the Sunday school crowd, with David being the Sunday school student against any obstacle. So many of us learn this story as children; that’s what makes it powerful. We automatically know what it means when we say David and Goliath. I don’t know if the story itself is so great, but it’s an easy one to sell. David is really a complex character. A lot of what he does is not something you’d want to expose a Sunday school student to, but the battle with Goliath is sometimes called a perfect boy’s tale, tailor made for the Boy Scouts and all that stuff.

Is the Republican Party a hate group? Is there a difference now that it has mainstreamed ‘the great replacement’?

White supremacy is the tie that binds all GOP issues.

 March 30, 2022 | 

Guns, abortion, immigration – what binds these “hot button” issues together in the Republican mind? Well, white supremacy, obviously. 

I say “obviously” because there was a long period when I thought the defense of whiteness at society’s center, which is clear when you bother looking, couldn’t be right. It was just too simple.

But then I learned, thanks to effort, study and the influence of people who knew better, that white supremacy is no simple thing at all. It can’t be, as it’s the principle organizing the whole of our society.

Guns
America’s first Black president was reelected more than a month before the Sandy Hook massacre during which 20 first-grade kids were shot to pieces down the road from where I live in New Haven.

The Republicans had a choice to make. They could turn away from a seditionary interpretation of the Second Amendment and toward good and sensible gun legislation to prevent other kids dying in cold blood.

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A proper democracy is a white democracy and you don’t get that by letting every Tomás, Chico and Harry participate, not when white women have fewer babies and nonwhite ones have more. America was founded on Anglosaxonjudeochristiancodeforwhite values. 

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Or they could lean into a seditionary interpretation of the Second Amendment on account of democracy having yielded another term for the first Black president who signaled the end of “our way of life.”

Do the right thing – let kids live? Do the wrong thing – let kids die? You know the answer. The Republicans and their white supporters would rather die, literally, than be replaced at the center of power. It was a fateful choice. The land is soaked by the blood of legions. 

Dead kids were the price for protecting whiteness.

Abortion
The Republicans are sacrificing the lives of children on the altar of whiteness while appearing oh-so-concerned about unborn children. But the pro-life movement doesn’t fear for all kids, just white ones.

Pro-life means pro-white.

Beneath rhetoric about life and personhood is a pernicious anxiety about living in a democracy in which white people are outnumbered.

Or worse, replaced. 

That anxiety occasionally rears its head, as when former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said this week that Christians have “got to be bold. You know, the [antidote] to darkness is light. And the [antidote] to a really grim future is filling the world with a lot of Christian babies who could bring that light to the world.”

To be sure, anti-abortionists are bent on putting women back in the home, making them subordinate to the authority of their husbands and otherwise reaffirming the primacy of the “nuclear family.” 

But obedient women are a consequence, not an end. The goal is preventing white women, who get the most abortions, from aborting their pregnancies, thus repopulating the country with white people. 

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A proper democracy is a white democracy and you don’t get that by letting every Tomás, Chico and Harry participate, not when white women have fewer babies and nonwhite ones have more. America was founded on Anglosaxonjudeochristiancodeforwhite values. 

They’ll be damned if it doesn’t stay that way!

Immigration
To recap:

Some white Christian men are going beyond the law, with their semi-automatic rifles and their equally armed pals in law enforcement, to terrorize nonwhite people back to society’s margins. Other white Christian men are using the law to force white women to give birth. 

One group clears the way for the product of the other’s labor. Together they constitute two legs of the three-legged stool of white supremacy.

Immigration is the obvious third leg. But as “gun rights” isn’t about guns and “pro-life” isn’t about life, immigration isn’t about immigrants. 

“We’re being attacked on our southern border,” said Stew Peters, a fascist livestreamer. “They don’t talk about this, because the great replacement is real. White, Christian Americans, America first patriots, people who believe in conservative core values – they want them out. The Democrat Party claims to be anti-discrimination yet they discriminate against certain groups all the time. Are you willing to say the modern Democrat Party embraces racism against white people?”

Peters was kicked off Spotify last year. When asked for comment, he inadvertently synthesized white fear of replacement: Spotify is “the propaganda arm of the communist, globalist genocidal machine, hellbent on the destruction of freedom, Christianity and truth.”

There you have it.

Is the GOP a hate group?
We typically look at guns, abortion and immigration as separate and distinct issues. Some might insist they are unrelated. But you can’t properly understand them in isolation. They are all of a piece. 

They have in common fear – the white fear of being replaced. This fear animates virtually everything the Republicans say and do, because it animates virtually everything their media and supporters say and do.

The white fear of replacement used to be fringe. Thanks to the Republicans, no longer. Does that make the GOP a hate group? 

I asked the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Rachel Carroll Rivas. 

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What’s the status of hate groups in America?

Every year, the Southern Poverty Law Center puts out a flagship report summarizing our research of the trends of the hard right. 

In 2021, the year after the insurrection on January 6, 2021, the hard-right movement converged around a willingness to engage in political violence, inflict harm and deny legally established rights.

We documented that a number of groups active in communities declined to 1,220 hate and anti-government extremist groups. These numbers do not demonstrate a decline in the power of the hard right.

Honestly, these harmful ideas have become so commonplace that card-carrying membership is less and less necessary.

The full embrace of technologies that easily spread messages to individuals has far-reaching implications. Particularly, live-streaming. It has become a preferred tool for organizing, fundraising and spreading false conspiracy theories and hard-right propaganda.

We consider the hard right of today inherently anti-democratic. 

The groups reject equality and pluralism. They work to build a hierarchical order that pushes some groups out. It’s authoritarian! Groups are often conspiratorial, racist and nationalistic. Targeted people know this personally. They include: people of color, women, LGBTQ people, religious minorities, immigrants and non-Christians.

We documented 733 hate groups and 488 anti-government groups in 2021. There are also 65 new groups listed in 2021.

Is koshing how hate groups go mainstream?

Conspiracies underpinning the hate movement focus on a nefarious “other” as an enemy who threatens to take away liberty and power.

These ideas mobilize resentment against [outgroups]. Leaders working against these enemies are held up, even if they are authoritarians.

Is there a conspiracy theory that looms above others?

In 2021, the “great replacement” was prevalent and problematic.

Conspiracies targeting the government include sub-conspiracies around martial law, gun confiscation, the “New World Order” and FEMA. 

These are rooted in racist, antisemitic and nativist beliefs.

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The false conspiracy about the “Big Lie” of a fraudulent election in 2020 was a constant theme throughout the last year.

Because antisemitism fuels white nationalist ideas against the Black struggle for civil rights, conspiracies around voting and policies addressing inequality are often a manifestation of old hateful ideas.

To what extent are these hate groups aware of each other?

Hate groups operate fairly independently, especially at the local level. However, the hard right as a social and political movement has many people and groups overlapping in their activities and their ideas.

Global awareness depends on the group and its specific ideology.

Cross organizing and recruiting between groups is highly concerning, particularly when hard-right groups interact with groups with more legitimate power and authority in our communities. 

Those interactions push hard-right ideas deeper into the mainstream.

Does the GOP satisfy any of the SPLC’s criteria for hate groups?

We raise concern about decisions by some GOP officials to spread conspiracies as well as interact with identified hate and anti-government groups, including open white nationalists.

Would it be more accurate to say individual Republicans, rather than the whole party, satisfy the SPLC’s criteria for hate groups?

We don’t do individuals. We do hate groups.

Some members of the Republican Party have engaged in extremist activity and have pushed ideologies we monitor, expose, counter and work to prevent. You can see the report for a few examples that include US Reps. Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar and Madison Cawthorn.

So that’s a yes?

We have criteria for groups.

The report this year delves more deeply into the hate and anti-government movements and their harmful tactics 

Shrewd answers. Two more questions. How bad a problem are private militias? What is their history of violence (in brief).

In 2021, we documented 92 militia groups. They have obsessions with field-training exercises, guns and uniforms like those in the military. 

They hold an absolutist and warped interpretation of the Second Amendment. Because these groups engage in firearms training and have a history of violence, we believe they are concerning.

Some militia groups were present at the J6 insurrection, including the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters. Dozens have been charged with crimes, including the rare and serious conspiracy charge.

On the local level, militia groups intimidate and harass local communities. This includes border militias targeting migrants and humanitarian groups. It includes intimidation of local democracy entities, like school boards. They often manipulate followers into believing they are aggrieved and use that belief to organize. They don’t allow for safe and inclusive participation on important issues.

In 2021 many militia groups became more covert. They are feeling greater scrutiny by the media, public and law enforcement after J6.

They will emerge stronger if the pressure doesn’t continue.

The numbers are down. Is that because the ideas are going mainstream or because the law is cracking down? Mix of both?

The mainstreaming of hard right ideas is definitely a factor.

As I mentioned before, the motivation to be a “card-carrying” member is diminished now that many of their harmful ideas are so openly supported by public figures, political activists and media pundits.

The full impact of the legal crackdown is yet to be determined. 

In the case of the Oath Keepers, their centralized structure, attempt to be more mainstream and recruitment among law enforcement officers have figured into how they are affected by the arrests and charges. The organization is disarray right now and their chapter activity is down. They account for a significant sum of the reduced numbers. 

However, groups like the Proud Boys, which also played a role in J6 insurrection, and are very problematic, have grown in 2021. Perhaps this is due to their organizational structure not being as centralized or the lack of concern about “appearances” by their membership.

To address the threat of the hard right, we will need the public, civil leaders, the news media and the legal sector to keep scrutinizing and holding accountable those who are tearing us apart and harming democracy. It has to be a holistic approach, starting with prevention. 

We can’t let false conspiracies and hateful ideas stand as the truth. 

We have a more positive and hopeful story to tell.

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John Stoehr

John Stoehr is the editor of the Editorial Board. He writes the daily edition. Find him @johnastoehr.

She reviewed it 35 years ago but didn’t realize it was foundational to white nationalists. Here’s how she understands the book now

Fern Schumer Chapman (and Jane Elliott) on The Birth Dearth.

 April 1, 2022 | 

You remember I interviewed Michelle B. Young. We talked about how the Democrats actually did not “strand” Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson during Senate confirmation hearings for her being the next justice.

During our chat, Michelle shared a video clip of Jane Elliott, a well-known white anti-racist teacher. Michelle said the video clip illustrated her belief that Republican “issues” are not issues at all. 

“Immigration” isn’t about immigration. “Abortion” isn’t about abortion. “Critical race theory” isn’t about CRT. Instead, they’re proxies for the fact that many white people “value whiteness more than democracy.” 

Republican issues are usually about something else – and that something else is almost certainly rooted in white anxiety and fear of a republic slipping out of the control of white people, especially men.

In the video clip, Elliott talks about a book that explains all this. Written by Ben Wattenberg in 1987, it’s called The Birth Dearth: What Happens When People in Free Countries Don’t Have Enough Babies? (The author died in 2015.) I wanted to know more about the book. 

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“At the time, I couldn’t believe anyone would make the case that the major problem confronting the United States in 1987 was that there weren’t enough white babies being born. As I remember, he claimed white people will be in the numerical minority and our country would no longer be a white man’s land.”

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I happened on a 1987 review published in Fortune. The reviewer was Fern Schumer Chapman, who later wrote the acclaimed Motherland: Beyond the Holocaust: A Daughter’s Journey to Reclaim the Past (2001).

I tracked Fern down. I asked if she’d be willing to talk about the book, though her review ran 35 years ago. She said sure. She said we could also talk about how the subject of Wattenberg’s book – basically, eugenics – affected her personally. The Nazis murdered her grandparents after they sent her mom to America at the age of 12. 

Before we get to the interview, I want you to read what Jane Elliott said about The Birth Dearth and how it explains to her the reasons why white people do what they do to nonwhite people in this country.

The transcript is lightly edited. 

The interview with Fern follows it.

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Jane Elliott on The Birth Dearth

If you don’t understand the destruction of Planned Parenthood offices, and you don’t understand the wall we’re going to build on the southern border, you haven’t read The Birth Dearth by Ben Wattenberg.

Ben Wattenberg was a brilliant Jewish man who was a member of the American Enterprise Institute. He wrote a book the first paragraph of which says: The main problem confronting the United States these days is that there aren’t enough white babies being born. He was an advisor to presidents of the United States. He wrote the book in 1987. 

He says if we don’t change this and change it rapidly, white people will lose their numerical majority in this country and this will no longer be a white man’s land. Now, I’m not misrepresenting this. 

I’m telling you almost exactly what he says. 

He says there are three things we can do. 

Number one, we could pay women to have babies, as they have been doing in western European nations for years. Then he says, and these are his words, not mine: Unfortunately, we would have to pay women of all colors to have babies. So we don’t want to do that. 

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“[The book] tells white people that they are superior because of the lack of melanin in their skin. Then they find out we’ve got a Black president. That’s traumatic. That’s where their trauma is – living a lie. Finding out the truth is traumatic.”

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He says the second thing we could do is increase the number of legal immigrants that are allowed into this country every year. Then once again, he says, unfortunately, the vast majority of those wanting to come to this country are people of color. So we don’t want to do that. 

The third thing he says – and white women had better pay attention to this – 60 percent of the fetuses that are aborted every year are white. 

If we can keep that 60 percent alive, that would solve our birth dearth. 

Does that sound like racism to you? 

[The book] tells white people that they are superior because of the lack of melanin in their skin. Then they find out we’ve got a Black president. 

That’s traumatic. 

That’s where their trauma is – living a lie. 

Finding out the truth is traumatic. 

Finding out that within 30 years, white people will be in the numerical minority in this country is going to be traumatic. White people are scared to death right now, particularly white males. 

They’re scared to death that they are going to lose their power in the future, and they are, but if you want to get ready for the future, if you want to be treated well in the future, treat others well in the present. 

What we do in the present constructs the future. 

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My interview with Fern Schumer Chapman

What was your first reaction to Wattenberg’s Birth Dearth?

The book was outrageous! 

At the time, I couldn’t believe anyone would make the case that the major problem confronting the United States in 1987 was that there weren’t enough white babies being born. 

As I remember, he claimed white people will be in the numerical minority and our country would no longer be a white man’s land. 

I didn’t take it very seriously then. 

Looking back, I believe he launched the white nationalist movement.

He had a three prong solution.

1. Pay women to have babies. But he was troubled by the fact that we would pay women of all colors to have babies.

2. Increase the number of legal immigrants allowed into this country every year. He didn’t like that idea, because the majority of those coming to this country would be people of color.

3. He said 60 percent of fetuses aborted every year are white. We should keep that 60 percent of life alive. That would solve what he called “the birth dearth.”

Let’s spell out what he thought the problem was.

He worried about falling birthrates in the US and other industrialized democracies. He predicted a Spenglerian decline of the west.

He worried that America would no longer be characterized as a nation that is predominately of white European extraction.

“The major threat to western values and the free world concerns the fact that, as the next century progresses, there won’t be many free westerners around to protect and promote those values,” he wrote.

To be clear about language, when he uses words like “civilization,” “western values,” and “free world,” he means white, right?

I wrote the review 35 years ago. However, I remember that that was his implication, though he may have been cagey. He said “demographic turbulence would be much less likely to show up if the real culprits, the non-reproducing white middle class, started reproducing itself.”

He’s clear, by inference, who’s to blame for falling birth rates.

1. abortion.

2. birth control

3. “tolerance” for homosexuality.

4. women married later in life.

5. women working outside home.

In other words, women and LGBTQ people.

Sounds familiar. 

None of this is new.

Madison Grant, author of The Passing of the Great Race (1916), was a stalwart for the preservation of the nativist/Nordicist strain of eugenics during the progressive era. He argued for the preservation of America as a “civilization  preserve” for the Nordic race, advocating for immigration from the founding stock of Anglo-Saxons and other Nordics from northeastern Europe. This was Hitler’s bible.

Madison Grant indirectly affected you personally.

Yes! American immigration quotas during the 1930s prevented my grandparents from fleeing Nazi Germany. My grandparents sent my mother to America for safety all by herself. She was 12 years old.

The Nazis murdered my grandparents in concentration camps. 

My mother’s immigration experience profoundly defined her life. She’s 96 now. She can’t watch television news. She can’t watch the Ukrainian families being ripped apart. It re-traumatizes her to see it again.

I have spent decades writing about how the policies of eugenics have played out in our family. The trauma transmits through generations. 

My mother never spoke of her past. When I was pregnant with my third child in 1991, my mother decided she wanted to return to the small town in Germany where her family lived for over 200 years. When she was born, in 1925, the town had two Jewish families and 2,000 people. Everyone knew them. My grandfather was a civic leader. 

We had intimate experiences in which residents said they had never heard of the Holocaust or begged us for forgiveness. My first book, Motherland, captured how that journey transformed my relationship with my mother and how Germans live with the history of eugenics.

My mother felt like she was betrayed by her country and her parents. She was thrown out of her homeland as if she were garbage. It took her years to understand her parents hadn’t rejected her; they had saved her life. She was stuck in a 12-year-old’s broken heart.

Wait, some residents told you they never heard of the Holocaust!?

Yes.

They claimed they did what their parents told them to do. It was against the law at that time to speak to a Jewish neighbor.

That’s a lie, right?

Yes, a lie.

But German schools didn’t teach the Holocaust until the mid-1960s. 

Nazism is institutionalized bullying. The government approves of cruel behaviors against one powerless group of people or another.

I don’t think most white Christian-ish Americans understand the depth of white fear of being replaced, of moral perversion. 

Some of this white fear feels like a backlash (or as Van Jones said, “a whitelash”) to Barack Obama’s presidency. Intolerance to shifting demographics is inevitable. Many issues are expressions of this fear.

Changing demographics can be stopped “if the real culprits, the non-reproducing white middle class, started reproducing itself.”

That’s Wattenberg again.

I’m afraid many Americans don’t understand the concept of America — built on democratic principles, immigration and diversity. I fear that the emerging restrictions on books will exacerbate this thinking.

Which brings us back to Hitler: “I’ll put an end to the idea that a woman’s body belongs to her,” he said. “Nazi ideals demand that the practice of abortion shall be exterminated with a strong hand.”

Controlling women, their bodies and birth rate, and limiting immigration of the “undesirables” are all part of eugenics. 

Madison Grant insisted “the Laws of Nature require the obliteration of the unfit” and rejected the “alloying of races” in the Melting Pot.

Someone told me the forces making women give birth are the same forces stopping women from giving birth. In other words, make white women give birth. Stop nonwhite women from giving birth.

Yes.

Late 19th-century intellectuals in England had a variety of eugenic policies. In the US, members of the progressive movement embraced eugenic ideas, especially immigration restriction and sterilization. 

Indiana enacted the first eugenic sterilization law in 1907. The Supreme Court upheld such laws. State programs sterilized institutionalized and mentally disabled women. 

By World War II, US programs had sterilized 60,000 people.  

Nazi eugenics sterilized 400,000 in under a decade. China and India still have coerced sterilization programs. Involuntary sterilization is still used against minority groups in some parts of the world.

So you wrote the review in 1987. What was it like rereading it all these years later — in context of a global far-right in ascendance and demanding pretty much what Ben Wattenberg called for?

I had forgotten about the review until you reminded me. I didn’t take his book seriously at the time. Now, in retrospect, I wish I had slammed it harder. As I remember, the editors didn’t want a slam.

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John Stoehr

John Stoehr is the editor of the Editorial Board. He writes the daily edition. Find him @johnastoehr.