So Is This A Good Time to Talk About A Shadowy Right-Wing Population Control Conspiracy Group?

Just kidding. It's always a good time.

Well kids, it’s been a real week for the books, huh? Just kidding, I don’t remember it either. 2024 is turning out to be just another year in the old information mines!

So I heard we had some kind of bullshit kerfuffle with Joe Biden and a debate where he was kind of quiet and now he’s old and senile and needs to drop out, ha ha, never mind the other guy running for president, we’re sure he’s just joking about banning Muslims and separating families at the border and destroying pandemic response and … hang on a second, I’m getting something in my earpiece …

Right! Well, I guess today I’m going to talk to you about Project 2025, since that shitshow has finally percolated into the public consciousness.

Just kidding, I don’t want to talk about that either. I want to talk about John Tanton’s network and why it matters. 

So there’s this network of dark money groups and nonprofits and well-placed individuals all over the United States, and they’re all eugenicists, like full-on mass sterilization, population control, white-people-need-to-have-a-demographic-majority eugenicists, and that’s just the stuff they say publicly!

They’re the brainchild of this ophthalmologist who finally croaked in 2019, John Tanton. Once upon a time, John and his wife Mary Lou were your usual do-gooder whites, but then they got really into Malthus, as do-gooder whites in the 1960s often did, and decided that the planet was overpopulated. But not just overpopulated! Overpopulated with the wrong kinds of people. You know. 

So ol’ John, who turned out to have the soul of a poster before there was an internet to post on, got on his typewriter and started writing letters and exhorting entities to join him in his new project. He made lots of friends with Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club (really) before finding and really leaning into his true calling, which was racism. Once he landed there, he had no problem getting funding. Sound familiar? Anyway, he quickly became besties with a woman named Cordelia Scaife May, a billionaire heiress who loved “nature” and despised immigrants who weren’t white. She funded the creation of the Federation for American Immigration Reform back in the 1970s, and the rest is history.

Well, kind of history. See, what happened after John and Mary Lou went from population control to racist population control to billionaire heiresses, they hit on a new plan to keep the American population both limited and majority-white: Get people really good and worked up using threatening-sounding narratives about diluting “European-American culture,” and “swarms” or “hordes” of people “invading” the border. Sound familiar? It should. Guess who crafted that image?

It’s all bullshit.

The problem with this network is that they’re so goddamn cartoonishly evil, so absolutely vile in every way, that trying to raise alarms about them is more likely to get me laughed out of the room. When I started researching these shitlords, back when I was still a border reporter, I found reams of primary sources. (But not all of them — there’s still box after box of paperwork that John Tanton donated to the University of Michigan that they refuse to release to the public. But that’s a story for another day.)

I worked that information into my stories for a while, but then when the Trump administration came into hideous being, one of the first things they did was staff the federal government, specifically the Department of Homeland Security and its border agencies, with hires either directly from or recommended by the Federation for American Immigration Reform. Remember the Muslim ban? Family separations? The strange fourteen-word DHS press releases? You should, because guess who crafted all those? That same network, my singular obsession, and the entity that’s singlehandedly responsible for Americans thinking about immigration at all, much less in a negative light. That’s the Tanton network. You see?

But as pesky and inhumane as they were before the Trump administration threw them all directly into the halls of state power for the first time, now they’re malignant and metastasized. They’ve expanded into all sorts of things domestically, not just border issues, but all those issues consistent with their vision of a white-ruled America with hardened borders and hoarded resources, just in time for the climate to take a massive shit on the heads of countries that the good old US-of-A has spent decades pillaging, not coincidentally. Some of their newer interests include:

• Abortion;

• CRT and DEI;

• State borders and state lines;

• Trans rights;

• No-fault divorce;

• Many other issues that have to do with racism or reproductive rights, specifically the removal and control of. The through-line is, in their own words, “population control.” I say we don’t let them do this!

You guys, we are so fucked if these people get their way.

Anyway, there’s a lot more, but I’ll have to save that for another time. I just want to bring it all together with one more thing. This network coalesced around the border starting in the 1970s, because border control, like environmentalism, was thought by Tanton and his fellow mayo demons to be easily leveraged into arguments for population control and from there into soft eugenics. It was always intended as a Trojan horse.

But the really important thing to remember is that over the years, this network has folded in a number of other movements with similar goals, like Christian nationalism, and Trumpism, and all those weirdo creeps like the boogaloo boys and so on. But there’s one group that this network was intimately involved with from the very beginning. They share family members, family interests, and billionaire funders, and the vice president of philanthropy from a major funder they share even wrote a glowing book about John and Mary Lou Tanton and their activities.

That group is ... wait for it … the Heritage Foundation.

Cordelia Scaife May funded FAIR, and Heritage was her brother Richard Mellon Scaife’s baby.

Why is that relevant to my rambling about the border? Well, you may have heard of Heritage as the ones behind Project 2025.

Ta-da! They were always the same all along!

And that, kids, is why Project 2025 is Bad, Actually. It’s also why I’ve turned into the Joker, but that’s also another story, ha ha.

I saw it at the border for years, and we all were forced to witness it together during the Trump administration. They’ve done plenty of damage already, for decades.

Don’t let them win, because they mean what they say.

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