Pioneer Fund

By 1965, Dr. Ernest Vanden Haag had testified on behalf of segregation in American public schools at least three times.

And as an expert witness on the Pioneer Fund's payroll, he'd been part of a legal strategy to undermine integration that abused the very idea of science.

I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.

I think I've only ever met one Pioneer Fund grant recipient in person.

I don't think Richard Spencer counts.

We just sat in the same courtroom for a while.

And not just because it's partly his fault I can't ever visit Boise, Idaho.

He's an interesting character.

in 2023 he was thanked by a magazine called aporia for organizing and inviting them to the national conservatism summit of which james orr is a key organizer and he sits as a european director of the edmund burke foundation which runs the national conservative conferences now aporia is a really significant entity here because another undercover investigation broadcast on Channel 4, it was also published in The Guardian, and it was led by a brilliant journalist at the anti-racist charity Hope Not Hate.

they had caught out that aporia was basically just a reconstituted rebranded front for the very same nazi eugenics foundation that you mentioned called the pioneer fund that had been set up in the 1930s and had been doing all this work to promote its ideas But they had in around the 1990s to late 90s to 2000s, they had begun rethinking how they can launder their ideas into the mainstream.

So they ended up doing various things.

And Aporia as a kind of a public facing magazine was what they had come up with.

Ernest Van Den Haag's life story isn't what I set out to tell you about.

I was just doing my due diligence, collecting a bit of information about each of the pro-segregation expert witnesses that were collected by the Pioneer Fund for their legal battle to overturn Brown v.

Board of Education in the 1960s.

We'll get there.

But I could tell right away that some things were missing from that obituary.

I mean, just from the research I've done for this story so far, I already know that Ernest Van Den Haag was a founding member of the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics, the IAEE.

Which was that Pioneer Fund front group that collected fringe scientists who were more interested in being racist than doing science.

But that wasn't in there.