Joseph Sobran

A racist magazine called Instauration (now defunct) described Scandinavians as the pinnacle of beauty; “the thin, fair and symmetric race originating in Northern Europe.” Joseph Sobran praised Instauration in the New York City Tribune on May 13, 1986, even though he admitted it “is openly and almost unremittingly hostile to blacks, Jews, and Mexicans and Oriental immigrants.” That’s an understatement. Instauration even favored abortion as a means of controlling the black population. Instauration returned Sobran’s compliment in September of that year in an editorial entitled “The Brave Pen of Joseph Sobran,” saying, “The man has repeatedly defended white racial pride and solidarity, despite the mounting campaign to get him.”

In a review of the movie Schindler’s List, Sobran complained about “all this Holocaust-harping,” explaining that the genocide of six million Jews was largely an overreaction to “Jewish-led communist movements.” (Arizona Republic, 3/24/94) Sobran believes that the New York Times “really ought to change its name to Holocaust Update.” (New Republic, 8/11/86) There’s much more here. Joseph Sobran is such a virulent anti-Semite that he was fired from National Review magazine. He has also been a keynote speaker for the Institute for Historical Review, one of the major organizations dedicated to holocaust denial.

What does this have to do with Howard and Doug Phillips, you ask? Joseph Sobran was the Constitution Party’s nominee for vice-president in the year 2000. At the top of the ticket was Howard Phillips. Doug Phillips promotes the Constitution Party as a worthy recipient of a Christian’s vote.

R.M. Ballantyne

Doug Phillips has added some new volumes by R.M. Ballantyne to his library of racism. One of them is called The Gorilla Hunters. Here’s an online version where you may find this passage:

While the trader was speaking I observed that the negroes were talking with the eager looks and gesticulations that are peculiar to the Africans when excited, and presently two or three of them came forward and asked several questions, while their eyes sparkled eagerly and their black faces shone with animation as they pointed into the woods in the direction whence we had come.

“They want to know where you have left the carcass of the leopard, and if you have taken away the brains,” said the trader, turning to me. “I daresay you know – if not you’ll soon come to find out – that all the nigger tribes in Africa are sunk in gross and cruel superstitions. They have more fetishes, and greegrees, and amulets, and wooden gods, and charms, than they know what to do with, and have surrounded themselves with spiritual mysteries that neither themselves nor anybody else can understand. Among other things, they attach a very high value to the brains of the leopard, because they imagine that he who possesses them will be rendered extraordinarily bold and successful in hunting. These fellows are in hopes that, being ignorant of the value of leopard brains, you have left them in the carcass, and are burning with anxiety to be off after them.”

“Poor creatures!” said I, “they are heartily welcome to the brains; and the carcass lies not more than four hours’ march from this spot, I should think, – Is it not so, Jack?”

My friend nodded assent, and the trader, turning to the expectant crowd of natives, gave them the information they desired. No sooner had he finished than with loud cries they turned and darted away, tossing their arms wildly in the air, and looking more like to a band of scared monkeys than to human beings.

“They’re queer fellows,” remarked Peterkin.

“So they are,” replied the trader, “and they’re kindly fellows too – jovial and good-humoured, except when under the influence of their abominable superstitions. Then they become incarnate fiends, and commit deeds of cruelty that make one’s blood run cold to think of.”

Why do homeschooling families consider Vision Forum books to be worthy of purchase? Must a Christian education engender hatred towards black people?

G.A. Henty

For many years, Doug Phillips and Vision Forum have sold books by G.A. Henty and hosted an essay contest in his honor. You can see how often Henty is praised there.

One of the books included in the 40-volume set for sale at Vision Forum is By Sheer Pluck. Here is Henty’s opinion of black people, which any young child may find in its pages:

They are just like children. They are always either laughing or quarrelling. They are good-natured and passionate, indolent, but will work hard for a time; clever up to a certain point, densely stupid beyond. The intelligence of an average negro is about equal to that of a European child of ten years old. A few, a very few, go beyond this, but these are exceptions, just as Shakespeare was an exception to the ordinary intellect of an Englishman. They are fluent talkers, but their ideas are borrowed. They are absolutely without originality, absolutely without inventive power. Living among white men, their imitative facilities enable them to attain a considerable amount of civilisation. Left alone to their own devices they retrograde into a state little above their native savagery.

White superiority is the theme that runs through all of Henty’s books. He once wrote of “the utter incapacity of the Negro race to evolve, or even maintain, civilisation without the example and the curb of a white population.”

Note: Doug Phillips is selling the original, unexpurgated (racist) versions of these books, not the versions edited by Mantle Ministries and Preston Speed.

It’s astounding that racist books are being sold to impressionable youths under the guise of Christianity, but Henty is just the beginning. For example, Vision Forum also sells Elsie Dinsmore, which contains the “n-word” and borderline pederasty. Elsie even tells her slaves that “they wouldn’t be Negroes in heaven.”

Friends in Low Places

Here is an alarming article on how racial segregation made Jerry Falwell famous. The article describes Doug Phillips’s connection to Rev. Falwell. You can also read about how, in 1983, Falwell made his private jet available to Howard Phillips and the widow of Congressman Lawrence McDonald, a racist who founded the Western Goals Foundation, a front for the John Birch Society. Falwell was to be the keynote speaker for a Jamestown celebration hosted by Doug Phillips this month.

Doug is a close personal friend of the father of Creation Science, Henry Morris. On page 147 of his book, The Beginning of the World, Morris writes: “The descendants of Ham were marked especially for secular service to mankind… Thus, all of the earth’s ‘colored’ races, yellow, red, brown, and black—essentially the Afro-Asian group of peoples, including the American Indians—are possibly Hamitic in origin and included within the scope of the Canaanitic prophecy, as well as the Egyptians, Sumerians, Hittites, and Phoenicians of antiquity.” The so-called curse of Canaan in the book of Genesis was used by both Henry Morris and the antebellum South to justify chattel slavery of Africans.

Doug Phillips has called Rev. Joseph Morecraft, a pastor in Cumming, GA, “One of the greatest preachers and defenders of truth in America today.” Mr. Morecraft once preached a sermon entitled “South Africa as Observed by Joe Morecraft” in which he argued against equality of blacks and whites.

Ovid Need, the father-in-law of Doug’s employee, Matthew Chancey, has called “race-mixing” “socially, practically and Scripturally unwise.” Last I checked, something that is “Scripturally unwise” is called a sin.

Otto Scott

Otto Scott was another very close friend of Rushdoony and the Phillips family.

Scott despaired of ever again having a white president and a white Congress if minorities continued to increase in numbers. “Open borders, no more whites allowed.” He defended racial profiling. He wrote an article for the neo-Confederate Southern Partisan magazine in support of apartheid in South Africa, comparing opponents of apartheid to evil Abolitionists. (Scott wrote a book called The Secret Six which denounced abolitionist John Brown for his murderous rampage.) When apartheid was finally abolished in South Africa, “immorality laws” forbidding interracial marriage were rescinded. Scott said this was a rather inconsequential matter at the time because “only bums and intellectuals crossed the line.”

Scott said: “No race has brought more blessings to humanity than the Caucasian; none is more essential to the continued progress of world humanity… Without Christians there would be no chance for long-range survival by minorities in our midst.”

Scott praised Ferdinand and Isabella for expelling Jews and Muslims from Spain in 1492. He said this was done “in obedience to the doctrine that a house divided against itself cannot stand.” He called the act a “great triumph for Christianity.”

Scott’s newsletter, Compass, gave a favorable review to Jean Raspail’s infamous novel, The Camp of the Saints, which is so shockingly racist that no respectable bookstore will touch it.

Here is a sample of the subtle racist statements that were commonplace from men such as Scott and Rushdoony. Scott wrote: “Nigeria – one of the richest and most advanced of all the black countries of Africa under the English – fell into corruption and tribal strife almost immediately… Lagos, its capital, is a city of walking nightmares. Its leaders are eloquent, learned, stately in appearance and inept. Schooling, in other words, did not achieve what the English had hoped in Nigeria. They had hoped, through schools alone, to educate future leaders… But the great schools of England (when they were great) were not great because of what they taught, so much as great because of whom they taught.”

You can hear more racist statement from Mr. Scott in his lecture People and Population.

Doug Phillips praised Scott as “an autodidact, a self-taught independent scholar who has written ten substantive books and hundreds of articles. Mr. Scott is well known for following the evidence, writing with (sometimes disturbing) candor, and caring not a whit for the prevailing historical fashions.” This is almost identical to what Phillips said about Dabney. Racists really don’t care a whit for “the prevailing historical fashions.”

A few years ago, Matthew Chancey, who is on the payroll of Doug’s brother Brad, and a few of Doug’s employees, were visited by Otto Scott and the pictures were posted on the Vision Forum website. Phillips wrote: “In 2004, a delegation of young men from Vision Forum journeyed to the Old Dominion to honor Mr. Scott. Under the leadership of Vision Forum friend Matt Chancey, these men flew Mr. Scott to Virginia for the simple purpose of spending a few days with a great man, and the privilege of asking him questions about life and the history of the 20th century. It was an unforgettable event for all of them.” They stood at Stonewall Jackson’s grave in Lexington, VA. Scott looked up and commented, “A handsome edifice—It marks the end of southern civilization.”

R.L. Dabney

Through Vision Forum, Doug Phillips sells books on Robert Lewis Dabney, who was Stonewall Jackson’s chief of staff and chaplain during the Civil War. After the war, Dabney wrote a book called A Defense of Virginia, which even over a hundred years later is considered one of the most racist books ever written. Dabney considered black people to be a “morally inferior race,” a “sordid, alien taint” marked by “lying, theft, drunkenness, laziness, waste.” He considered slavery to be “the righteous, the best, yea, the only tolerable relation” between blacks and whites. He condemned the “abhorrent amalgamation of [white] children with blacks” and actually argued that it was better for blacks to be enslaved than not since it was better for their minds and their health. Dabney called the attempt to educate all Negroes “mischievous,” “tyrannical,” “useless,” “impracticable,” and “dishonest.”

Here are some choice quotes from Dabney:

It is well known, that, as a general rule, [Negroes] are a graceless, vagabondish set, and contribute very little to the support of the State by which they are protected. They are not citizens, never can become citizens, and wherever found in large numbers they are an expense and a source of trouble…

The black race is an alien one on our soil; and nothing except his amalgamation with ours, or his subordination to ours, can prevent the rise of that instinctive antipathy of race, which, history shows, always arises between opposite races in proximity…

The offspring of an amalgamation must be a hybrid race incapable of the career of civilization and glory as an independent race. And this apparently is the destiny which our conquerors have in view. If indeed they can mix the blood of the heroes of Manassas with this vile stream from the fens of Africa, then they will never again have occasion to tremble before the righteous resistance of Virginia freemen; but will have a race supple and vile enough to fill that position of political subjugation, which they desire to fix on the South.

How does Doug Phillips regard Dabney? He calls Dabney “the greatest southern theologian of the 19th century.” He exclaims: “Hail Dabney, prophet of the South, our great apologist… And so with joy we doff our hats and shout from every mouth: Hail Dabney, wise apologist, defender of the South!”

In Doug’s lecture on Dabney, he says Dabney was “formulative” to his way of thinking. He introduces Dabney as one who would be “in the front lines at Gettysburg, charging toward the Yankees.” Doug calls Dabney “the greatest defender of Southern heritage, Christian faith, and common sense.” He praises Dabney “for being bold enough to say things that others today are afraid to say.” He laments that Dabney is “resented by those Christians who don’t want to hear his prophecies.” He said we may be uncomfortable with Dabney’s conclusions, but we are “left with no other option but to run and hide – we can’t deny it – or simply to embrace the truth…” He calls Dabney “a prophet in the fullest sense,” and after announcing that he might name his next child after Dabney, recites a poem he has written for the occasion entitled, “Hail Dabney, Prophet of the South.”

Doug Phillips also edited a book entitled Robert Louis Dabney: The Prophet Speaks.

Oh, but we’re just getting started.

R.J. Rushdoony

R.J. Rushdoony concocted an ideology called Christian Reconstructionism which seeks to resurrect Old Testament law. National Public Radio calls Christian Reconstructionism “the most extreme form of Christian fundamentalism” and the “Christian Taliban.”

As was true of Dabney, Rushdoony argued that slavery is not only biblical and permissible but “benevolent” and preferable to living in Africa. He also condemned interracial marriage. (I just realized that I am writing these words on the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Loving v. Virginia decision which legalized interracial marriage.) Rushdoony detested the civil rights movement and desegregation.

Read these quotes from his book, The Institutes of Biblical Law:

The white man has behind him centuries of Christian culture and the discipline and the selective breeding this faith requires… The Negro is a product of a radically different past, and his [genetic] heredity has been governed by radically different considerations.

Unequal yoking plainly means mixed marriages between believers and unbelievers is clearly forbidden. But Deuteronomy 22:10 not only forbids unequal yoking by inference, and as a case law, but also unequal yoking generally. This means that an unequal marriage between believers or between unbelievers is wrong… The burden of the law is thus against inter-religious, inter-racial, and inter-cultural marriages, in that they normally go against the very community which marriage is designed to establish.

Hybridization seeks to improve on God’s work by attempting to gain the best qualities of two diverse things; there is no question that some hybrids do show certain advantageous qualities, but there is also no question that it comes at a price, bringing some serious disadvantages.

Every social order institutes its own program of separation or segregation… Segregation, separation, or quarantine, whichever name is used, is inescapable in any society.

He said Americans were blameless for taking slaves from Africa because those taken were already enslaved. He said those who were shipped to America preferred the journey to staying in Africa. He even called this journey to slave markets “the jackpot.” He wrote: “The move from Africa to America was a vast increase of freedom for the Negro, materially and spiritually as well as personally.” But he said the slaves never thought in terms of freedom, and that’s why Liberia never worked out. He called slavery “an albatross that hung the South, that bled it,” because the slaves were lazy. “Only a minority of the slaves ever worked.” He said white men were hired to do the hard work.

He also mocked the educational achievements of Africans: “The University of Timbuktu never existed. The only thing that existed in Timbuktu was a small mud hut the Arabs had where they taught a few of the half-breeds to memorize the Koran. They never even learned to read. But the people who are trying to exalt the Negro past have gone into that sort of thing and they’ve spoken of the school of Timbuktu, and then somebody quotes that, and it becomes a university, and then it becomes quite a tremendous cultural center. This is ridiculous.”

Though a pastor, he was not above using vile language. In Foundations of Social Order, he railed against those who identify “‘God’ with the city, with the ‘spick, black nigger, bastard, Buddhahead, and kike,’ with ‘all men,’ and calls for communion with all men as they are… This concept runs deeply through the so-called Civil Rights Revolution.”

He condemned “sensitivity training,” which he said was designed to teach that all people have equal rights, which is a denial of God’s law. He called labor laws “Marxist,” including the law that forbids discrimination by race. He asked: “Where in the Bible does it tell us that there is a principle of equality?… A belief in good and evil requires us to discriminate. An employer therefore has a property right to prefer whom he will, and he can prefer whom he will in terms of color, creed, race, or national origin.”

He praised eugenics: “Selective breeding in Christian countries has led to a degree to the progressive elimination of many defective persons.”

Rushdoony’s own son-in-law denounced him for abandoning covenantalism for racism and accused him of elevating “race over reformation.”

He said adopting welfare babies is “insanity in the name of Christ.”

He said the first-century church was segregated, “and Paul saw nothing wrong with that, nor did any other apostle.”

But that’s not the worst of it. According to the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, holocaust denial was the worst thing about Rushdoony.

The false witness born during World War II with respect to Germany is especially notable and revealing. The charge is repeatedly made that six million innocent Jews were slain by the Nazis, and the figure – and even larger figures – is now entrenched in the history books. Poncins, in summarizing the studies of the French Socialist, Paul Rassinier, himself a prisoner in Buchenwald, states: ‘Rassinier reached the conclusion that the number of Jews who died after deportation is approximately 1,200,000 and this figure, he tells us, has finally been accepted as valid by the Centre Mondial de Documentation Juive Contemporaine. Likewise he notes that Paul Hilberg, in his study of the same problem, reached a total of 896,292 victims. Very many of these people died of epidemics; many were executed’… Did the Nazis actually execute many thousands, tens, or hundred thousands of Jews? Men to whom such murders were nothing had to blow up the figure to millions. Did the doctor perform a number of experiments on living men and women? A few sterilized women and a few castrated men and their horrified tears and grief are not enough to stir the sick and jaded tastes of modern man: make him guilty of performing 17,000 such operations. The evils were all too real: even greater is the evil of bearing false witness concerning them, because that false witness will produce an even more vicious reality in the next upheaval. Men are now ‘reconciled’ to a world where millions are murdered, or are said to be murdered. What will be required in the way of action and propaganda next time?

In other words, insisting that 6 million Jews were killed by Nazis is worse than what the Nazis actually did!

Rushdoony called Zionism “national socialism,” i.e., Nazism. He said, “The Jews of Europe are not really Jewish in blood… There are no Jews with more than a trace of Jewish genes from antiquity.”

Well, what do you think Doug Phillips has to say about Dr. Rushdoony?

Phillips has praised Rushdoony as being one of the most significant influences in his life, perhaps second only to his father. Doug’s respect for Rushdoony is such that when he was in law school, he “would literally come to class with three books—the textbook, a copy of The Institutes of Biblical Law, and my Bible.”

“Especially fond to me are the memories of old days when I could visit in person or listen on tape to Mr. [Otto] Scott and Dr. R.J. Rushdoony (now with the Lord) as they would wax eloquent on subjects as diverse as the moral inadequacies of jazz, to the glories of haggis, to an exposition on the book of Romans.” On page 61 of The Institutes of Biblical Law, Rushdoony writes: “The background of Negro culture is African and magic, and the purposes of magic are control and power… Voodoo or magic was the religion and life of American Negroes. Voodoo songs underlie jazz, and old voodoo, with its power goal, has been merely replaced with revolutionary voodoo [‘civil rights’], a modernized power drive.” The footnote on that page: “See, for the voodoo background of jazz, Robert Tallant, Voodoo in New Orleans (New York: Collier Books, 1946, 1965).”

On his blog, Doug wrote, “The influence of [Rushdoony] on twentieth century thought was vast and extended to many who drew heavily from his writings though they were unwilling to formally associate with him because of his vigorous advocacy of biblical law.” Gee, you think so? More than likely, it was due to his virulent racism and anti-Semitism, but those things are apparently no problem for Doug Phillips. That’s why Doug sells Rushdoony’s materials.

Doug Phillips considers R.J. Rushdoony to be one of the greatest men of the 20th century. Rushdoony was a very close friend of the Phillips family and was personally responsible for Howard Phillips’s conversion from Judaism.

Howard Phillips

We now turn to the influences that Doug Phillips routinely praises, and we must begin with his greatest influence, the man he calls his “hero” – his father, Howard Phillips.

Howard Phillips headed two federal agencies during the Nixon Administration and later served as chairman of the Conservative Caucus and founded the Constitution Party.

Howard has a partner on the board of the Conservative Caucus named Richard Shoff. Shoff is the former “Grand Kilgrapp” of the Indiana Ku Klux Klan. According to Indiana police, Shoff regularly hosted KKK rallies on his property with cross burnings.

The Southern Poverty Law Center calls the Constitution Party a racist organization. “Among the party’s current roster of local candidates is a Salt Lake City man, Jack Gray, who has no qualms about presenting himself as a member of David Duke’s white supremacist hate group, the European American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO)… The party’s official ‘key race’ for 2003 is a gubernatorial bid by Mississippi’s most virulent Confederate flag defender, John Thomas Cripps, a long-time member of the white-supremacist hate group, League of the South…”

When racist John Thomas Cripps, the pastor of the “Confederate Presbyterian Church,” ran for governor of Mississippi on the Constitution Party ticket, he was endorsed by Howard Phillips. Both Howard and Cripps are being watched carefully by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Howard was one of the few present at the funeral of notorious racist Samuel Francis, who was fired by the Washington Times due to his constant race-baiting.

Doug Phillips

Doug Phillips has made a name for himself among Christian homeschoolers by selling “old-fashioned” books and hosting “historical” conferences and events. In actuality, the words “old-fashioned” and “historical” mean “thoroughly white.” The Vision Forum catalog is full of books by racists. Their books and tape sets glorify men who believed and wrote that black people are inferior to white people. They sell no books by any of the people of color who contributed to American history. Doug uses code words like “cultural syncretism” to decry the “blackening” of American society.

At the recent Vision Forum World History conference, there were no non-white speakers, as is true of almost all Vision Forum events, and the only bit of world history covered in 68 lectures that was not white history was a lecture on the central American Indian tribes. Rushdoony was called one of the greatest men of the 20th century at the conference. Who is Rushdoony? We’ll get to that.

In the city of San Antonio, which is only about 30% white, Phillips has hired an all-white staff at Vision Forum, except for a black or Hispanic man here or there in the warehouse. Isn’t this illegal for companies with so many employees? And how will the convention centers, such as Henry B. Gonzalez, where Mr. Phillips hosts his events, react to the news divulged here?

Phillips often praises the military, but only for World War II and prior, before the military was racially integrated. On his blog, he posted a poem by Robert Service, which contains the verse:

Deny my God! yes, I could do it well;
Yet if I did, what of my race, my name?
How they would spit on me, these dogs of hell!
Spurn me, and put on me the brand of shame.
A white man’s honour! what of that, I say?
Shall these black curs cry “Coward” in my face?
They who would perish for their gods of clay —
Shall I defile my country and my race?

Introduction

Hello, I am a mother of five in the metro Atlanta area. You can call me Elaine, although that is not my real name. I’ll explain why I am not using my real name in a moment.

I’ve been slightly addicted to reading blogs for several years, but I never considered starting one of my own until an incident occurred in my life that opened my eyes to the injustices that minorities continue to suffer. Now, I don’t have unreasonable expectations. I know that we live in a corrupt world, and as a Christian woman, I realize that it takes time to undo the errors of the past. But the one place I absolutely refuse to countenance racism or discrimination of any kind is the Christian church. I am as mad as a hornet at what I see taking place across the country, and I’m determined to do something about it, if I can.

As I said, I feel newly passionate on the subject because my eyes were opened. In my own large church there is a tremendous effort to make blacks and Hispanics, most of whom are new to our county, welcome. There is a small church not a half mile away, however, that has consistently refused to open their doors to anyone but white people. THREE FAMILIES have now come to our elders for financial assistance and prayer after having been turned away by these FELLOW CHRISTIANS. I got involved to assist the families with their domestic affairs and have heard hour after hour of the most horrific stories you could imagine. What terrible tragedies these poor souls have experienced, only to be turned away from a church because their skin was not white enough.

And what is to be done about the “Christians” who have failed in their duty as Christians? Our churches are not connected in any way. To whom do we turn for redress and justice? It is our duty to follow Matthew 18 and confront these people about the sins they have committed. But if they ignore us, what then? We are simply unwilling to allow them to hurt another family as the minority population of our county rapidly escalates. I think this is where the Internet comes in. Perhaps we can draw enough attention to situations like this that the perpetrators will be shamed into repenting.

Our local situation is a continuing development, and I’ll keep you posted as it unfolds. In the meantime, I intend to broaden my scope and draw attention to some nationally prominent leaders of bad report.

We’ll start with Doug Phillips, who is very influential among many young families with small children in our area. Even his most loyal followers have been disillusioned of late as news has emerged about his abuse of former parishioners. There is so much more to tell, not only about Doug but about his father, Howard Phillips, who has been well-known since the Nixon administration.

As for why I am using a pseudonym, some of the pastors who will be scrutinized here have made it very clear that they like to sue their critics, even though this is forbidden in 1 Cor 6. These wolves in sheep’s clothing have used intimidation for a long time to mask their behavior, but I can keep my silence no longer.