Jason Richwine is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He co-authored their study of the immigration reform bill that is currently winding its way through the Senate. Three years ago, he published two articles on a white nationalist website run by Robert Spencer. Mr. Spencer is the chairman of the the National Policy Institute, which is a “think-tank” devoted to the interests of “white Americans.”
Controversy first erupted around Jason Richwine when the Washington Post reported that he had received a doctorate from Harvard University in 2009 after submitting a dissertation that argued that immigrants have lower IQ’s than native-born Americans and that Hispanics in particular have lower IQ’s than whites. Whether or not he had data to support those allegations, he used his findings to argue that immigration policy should involve the measurement of prospective citizens’ IQ.
Michelle Malkin offered an impassioned defense of Mr. Richwine’s dissertation, which somewhat ironically relies on the credibility of the dissertation committee. Any port in a storm, I guess.
In fairness, Mr. Richwine’s posts at the white nationalist web site occurred in the first days of that blog, before they began engaging in Holocaust denial and some other deeply embarrassing things. It’s still damning that Robert Spencer had connections with Mr. Richwine at any point in time.
Mr. Richwine’s study for the Heritage Foundation, which he co-authored with Robert Rector, has been severely criticized by people on both the left and the right. But it’s Richwine’s dissertation and connection to a white nationalist that are causing the Heritage Foundation to consider bringing in a crisis management consultant group.
Former Senator Jim DeMint resigned from Congress in December to take over the Heritage Foundation. It took him about six months to destroy their reputation. Who could have predicted?
I hope Mr. DeMint has a long career at Heritage. They deserve each other.
Both the Republican Party leadership and much of the institutional Right hates Heritage now. Only the super-racist wingnuts love them now, and those misbegotten souls (like Malkkkin) now love Heritage with a white-hot passion. That passion should give Demint’s leadership enough fuel to fuck up the conserative brand some more.
I can’t accurately describe how very much this cheers me up. A lot; it cheers me up a whole lot. That will have to do for a description.
I despise DeMint as much as the next liberal but I’m not seeing the connection here. Where’s the evidence he supported Richwine or tried to cover up the guy’s prior contributions to a racist website or otherwise enabled racism or a racist?
I’m not saying DeMint’s clean here. I’m just saying nothing presented in the article points to him.
This is his first big project. It was supposed to be a big roll out with members of Congress quoting the study all through the debate on immigration reform. And DeMint let a guy with racist views and connections write it. Seems to me that that is all you need to know about his leadership abilities.
who recruited Richwine for Heritage in 2010?
Well, Feulner signed off on it. I don’t know how he got an invite.
Thanks Booman. Makes sense.
Itself being an asylum, The Heritage Foundation should have known better than to welcome one of the inmates to help run it.
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” says I!
Why be so circumspect? Jason Richwine is a white supremacist racist nazi bigot. Who the hell gets it in his head to measure immigrants’ IQs anyway? I’m trying to think of what kind of study I might be doing where that would be meaningful and useful information, and I really can’t think of anything that doesn’t make me want to go out and apologize to every Mexican person I can find.
Ha-ha, back to Charles Murray and his fine “conservative” work “The Bell Curve”—which also posited that non-whites (blacks especially) have a genetically determined lower IQ than those lucky whites, who of course deserve their cultural and economic dominance solely as a result of their God-given high(er) IQs. As I recall, the idea was torn to ribbons as not found in the data, but whatever.
The reality is that American “conservatives” like this appalling Richwine turd, can’t stop snacking at the cat’s litter box, the turds are simply too delicious. They will never stop with their “scientific” racist arguments, because those arguments support white cultural dominance, which is what today’s “conservatives” believe is the natural order of things. They really, really do. That it is about one step away from Nazi racial doctrines doesn’t bother them too much.
Now John Stuart Mill famously quipped that “although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative”. One might therefore think that today’s conservative white male (even with a dubious Harvard PhD) might be inclined not to throw stones about the IQ test intelligence of other groups. But no, the lure of the cat turd is overwhelming.
As for Duhmint, did he bring this Richwine doofus on board? And of course, having Himmler himself as a “senior fellow” at Heritage wouldn’t ever stop the corporate media and Congressional “conservatives” from using Heritage as their one stop propaganda-as-fact outlet.
But yap away, Heritage and Richwine, you are following in the Grand (racist) Tradition of know-nothing American “conservatism”. Also, too, rebranding!
Where is Harvard sending its credibility? Malkin may be pointed in the right direction for the wrong reasons when she credits the dissertation review panel. But then there’s also Ted Cruz and his wild accusations of his professors at Harvard being Nazi’s. What’s going on Harvard?
Yglesias also graduated from Harvard, remember. So it’s not just their side of the aisle.
Presumably Cruz meant Lib’rul Fascists, in the Jonah Goldberg tradition.
But didn’t this conserva-clown Richwine get his PhD from that uber-lib’rul Kennedy School of Gub’mint? Guess not every prof is lib’rul, eh?
And yes, one would think this is a huge black eye for Harvard. I guess you pays yer money and you gets yer PhD, not too many untoward questions asked, haha.
At first I thought that too, but then again the MT organization that this new guy Richwine is affiliated with has a pretty cozy relationship with the white supremists. Oh, and I love that Cruz licks his chops in glee everytime he gets to trott out his McCarthy style line of questioning.
And don’t forget the Harvard economists who handed the Right and its TParty the austerity talking points, all based on a flubbed excel spreadsheet
The fuckers had it coming.
Thanks, Jim.
The Heritage Foundation along with the word heritage was dead and buried when the KochBirchers bought it. DeMint is now running a vibrating Sheepsfoot Compacter over the grave site. It Ain’t finished, Smooth roll and Paving are yet to come.
BTW Cato Vs. Chuck KochBircher. How did that turn out? Who owns Cato now?
scare me. And he got a degree for such twaddle? A HARVARD DEGREE?
Makes me cringe for the quality of American education, from top to bottom.
If you want help in being a decent person, Harvard seems to have nothing to offer.
Which doesn’t slow down vast herds of Americans from dreaming of going to Harvard, or sending their kiks there, to fulfill their “American dream”. They think they’ll make the connections that matter. Now we see that those connections are equivalent to contracting a disease. You’d think the simple fact that Bush graduated would have been ample warning about the kind of connections Harvard has to offer.
Bush went to Yale. He’s an Eli. His degree from Harvard was from their Business School.
He’s still a Harvard graduate. Who cares what kind of degree he got? We already knew it wasn’t going to be cosmology or anything.
I think Bush would dispute the assertion that he is a Harvard graduate. He would say that he is a Yale graduate who has a Harvard degree.
Technically, you know, he’s a graduate of elementary school, middle school, high school, probably cub scouts.
But you only really pick one school to describe yourself as a graduate.
When you’re talking about rival Ivy League schools, this is particularly true. A Princeton man is a Princeton man, regardless of wherever he may go to get additional degrees. Same for Yale.
Shame on Harvard. What did Alan Alda’s character in MASH call it? The Massachusetts Institute of Snobbery?
My brother-in-law was an executive of a big midwest tea party organization and is now a regional director of Heritage. He is a libertarian type (a form or religious extremism if you ask me–cult-like delusional thinking). Greatest disappointment from him is that he thinks all the racists around him are liberal plants! Seriously. Where do I sign up to act like a racist just to make conservatives look bad?