Dr. Virginia Abernethy’s Response to USA Today article

Editor’s note: Dr. Virginia Abernethy is running for Vice-President for the American Third Position. (Merlin Miller is A3P’s presidential candidate.) The following is her response to an article on her, also reprinted below, that appeared in USA Today and The Tennessean (Nashville). Dr. Abernethy has also given two video interviews on these issues, link below

Dr. Virginia Abernethy

The Tennessean and USAToday ran the same article about me. I write in hopes that one or both papers will print my comment.

The article is accurate in several respects, but inaccurate in others, and thus disturbing. The SPLC’s negative and hateful characterizations of people like me who oppose mass immigration are factually untrue.

The SPLC has upped the ante by adding the false charge of neo-Nazi to the tired old [and incorrect in my case and in most cases] label of racist.

Organizations like the ADL are complicitous in these hateful smears and, at the least, do themselves a disservice by repeating charges designed to tar people who disagree with them.

Apparently, their ideal for the United States is to be part of a borderless world, while Israel, they think, is entitled to secure borders.

The SPLC clearly hates patriots like me. This demonstrates that their “anti-hate” stance is merely a cover for their globalist Marxist agenda. They want Europeans-Americans to “tolerate” their own dispossession. This suicide of a whole people is the goal of their ‘Teaching Tolerance’.

Other factual errors in an article that treats the SPLC as authoritative include:

It is factually untrue that I am a supremacist. I am an ethnic separatist, which means respecting preferences to be with whomever one wishes. I have no objection to campus African-American groups, B’nai B’rith, La Raza or countless others. What I see, however, is that Christian and European-American groups—and only these groups—are targeted for discrimination. They are in the SPLC bull’s-eye of hate—hate for anyone who does not agree with the the SPLC’s anti-Christian, anti-patriotic, globalist agenda.

It is factually untrue that I am a neo-Nazi, or that people with whom I associate are neo-Nazis. They are American patriots. Moreover, anyone who has political affiliations associates with people whose language and positions are not identical with their own.

I am neither racist nor anti-Semitic, although I support the recent letter from leaders of mainstream American churches to the effect that Congress should re-examine the no-strings-attached policy of giving large aid packages to Israel.

Further, Kathy McKee is the Arizonan who started and saw though to a successful ballot conclusion Proposition 200. Well into the initiative process in 2004, she asked me to speak with the overseas media, which I was pleased to do. I hope I helped. In any event, 47% of Hispanic voters supported Prop. 200. The harm of mass immigration to less educated working people, including established immigrants, is abundantly clear.

My most important academic work focuses on the “fertility opportunity hypothesis” [see Population Politics and an earlier book, Population Pressure and Cultural Adjustment]. This hypothesis suggests that couples and/or men and women who see expanding economic opportunity will allow larger family size. Couples who perceive diminishing economic opportunity try in all possible ways to avoid additional dependents.

The evidence in support of my fertility opportunity hypothesis is huge and growing. Read the books and post-1993 papers. The hypothesis correctly predicted that fertility rates in the “nine Asian tigers” would decline significantly faster than trend line after those countries’ economic collapse of 1998-99.

American3rd Position is a new Party and one that may draw support from Americans who feel unrepresented by the major Parties. These Americans see Democrats and Republicans as “one bird with two wings”. A3P is pro-American, which means representing the values of the majority of Americans and defending European-Americans from being cast as the destroyers of society. European-Americans are historically, and are still, builders.

European-Americans are on track to becoming a numerical minority in the United States. This trend can be reversed by stopping mass immigration and a conscious coming together of like-minded men and women.

Moreover, European-Americans should begin to identify themselves as an ethnic group that participates on equal footing with other ethnic and racial groups that define the new multicultural reality. I would prefer a country in which “American” came first and religious and ethnic or racial identities receded to insignificance. But that is no longer the reality, or even the ideal among groups such as the SPLC and ADL.

The SPLC is the real hate group, and its fellow travellers like the ADL are enablers, because they incite divisions and hatred. Unfortunately, the SPLC has power, has defined the new reality, and forces all of us to identify by ethnic group whether or not that is our first inclination.

Interviews: See here and click on the interview boxes for the two interviews (one is 3:15 long and the second, 23:11)

Original Article from The Tennessean website:

Virginia Abernethy is running for vice president on an ‘ethnic separatist’ party ticket. / John Partipilo / The Tennessean

Retired Vanderbilt professor is ‘ethnic separatist’ candidate

By Anita Wadhwani, The Tennessean

The self-described ‘ethnic separatist’ is running for vice president on an obscure third-party ticket.

Just shy of her 80th birthday, elegantly dressed in silver jewelry and a pencil skirt, retired Vanderbilt professor Virginia Abernethy doesn’t appear a likely contender for emerging leader of the nation’s white supremacist movement.

But the Anti-Defamation League described her as an “unabashed white supremacist.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center calls her a “full-fledged professor of hate” and added Abernethy to its list of 30 new leaders to watch on the radical right.

This year, Abernethy is on the ticket as a vice presidential candidate of the obscure American Third Position Party, or A3P. The whites-only polit­i­cal party was formed “to rep­re­sent the inter­ests of White Amer­i­cans,” according to its website. It has run a handful of candidates for offices as varied as the Mesa, Ariz., City Council and the New Hampshire governor’s office. Republicans in New Hampshire called A3P the party of “despicable racists.”

Abernethy calls all the attention misguided but amusing.

“I think it’s hilarious,” said Abernethy, speaking from the corner office on the Vanderbilt campus that is hers for life as a professor emerita of anthropology and psychiatry. “I’m 104 pounds exactly. I’m punching above my weight, to hear the SPLC tell it.”

She politely would like to set the record straight.

She is not a white supremacist, Abernethy said.

She’s an environmentalist and a scientist. She opposes most immigration. She’s a feminist who helped put an end to Vanderbilt professors calling female medical students “girls.” She’s a Christian and a European-American.

She is also, she said, an “ethnic separatist.”

“Separatism says, ‘Birds of a feather flock together,’” Abernethy said. “I say, ‘Let them.’ What I see is rampant racial discrimination against European-Americans. And I am not in favor of discrimination.

“I see African-American groups and Asian-American groups and I feel that we should respect our identity as European-Americans as well.

“I do not see anything whatever wrong with that.”

Abernethy appears on the Tennessee ballot as running mate to Gatlinburg-area filmmaker Merlin Miller, who is running for president of the United States. The party was founded by neo-Nazi skinheads in California in 2010 in response to the recession and Barack Obama’s election. The A3P, according to the SPLC, is the “most important hate group in America at the moment.”

Views ‘repugnant’

Abernethy is unusual among American white separatists, said Heidi Beirich, director of the SPLC’s “intelligence project,” which has tracked Abernethy’s affiliations, speeches and writings for more than a decade.

Abernethy’s academic credentials, which include a Harvard Ph.D., a Vanderbilt M.B.A. and 20 years as a Vanderbilt Medical School professor, have long lent credibility to her position on immigration, which Abernethy strongly opposes with the exception of Europeans, Beirich said.

But Beirich has traced a marked shift in Abernethy’s focus and affiliations in recent years. Where Abernethy once worked with more mainstream immigration-reform groups, now her affiliations are with neo-Nazis and white supremacists, groups that have benefited from Abernethy’s credentials, Beirich said.

“Because of her background, she elevates these horrible views and these racist organizations,” Beirich said. “She provides cover to them and lends them an academic veneer to views that are repugnantly anti-Semitic and racist.”

The A3P party is a prime example, according to Beirich. The group was founded by California corporate lawyer William Johnson, who once sought a constitutional amendment to deport any American with an “ascertainable trace of Negro blood.”

Fellow board members include James Edwards, host of the “pro-white” radio show “The Political Cesspool”; Don Wassal, publisher of The Nationalist Times, which SPLC calls a “racist newspaper”; and James Kelso, a former aide to Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

“How does a professor emeritus end up hanging around with people who want to throw out people with a drop of ‘Negro’ blood?” Beirich said. “There’s a difference between being concerned about our immigration policies and overcrowding in schools and being involved in organizations that say non-whites should not be in this country.”

Abernethy, however, said she “doesn’t subscribe” to the idea of deporting African-Americans.

Where she and Johnson do agree is on the platform of the American Third Position Party, she said.

“The American Third Position Party believes that government policy in the United States discriminates against white Americans, the majority population, and that white Americans need their own political party to fight this discrimination,” the party’s platform says.

“We are constantly seeing reports about African-Americans being discriminated against,” Abernethy said. “Why are we not reading about white Americans who are also being discriminated against?”

Born in Cuba to American parents, raised in Argentina, Abernethy said her life outside the United States has made her more strongly patriotic.

‘Ethnic separatist’

In her two decades as a Vanderbilt professor — she retired in 1996 — Abernethy was perhaps best known within academia as the author of the “fertility-opportunity hypothesis.”

Abernethy’s theory says that as women have access to more economic opportunities, they have more children, rather than fewer.

The theory runs counter to a prevailing hypothesis that says when women become better educated and more affluent, they have more access to contraception and tend to opt for fewer children.

Abernethy said her theory is behind her opposition to sending food aid to developing countries to avoid contributing to overpopulation.

Outside academic journals, Abernethy’s theory drives her anti-immigration activism. In 2004, Abernethy was asked to lead Arizona’s Proposition 200 campaign. The measure, which passed, required proof of legal residence for voting and to access public benefits.

When Abernethy described herself as an “ethnic separatist” during the campaign, she got national attention — most of it negative. A non-public figure before that election, Abernethy said she was called out by international news outlets for not having politically correct views.

“There is a level of hostility some people have toward scientists who describe the world as they think it is instead of how it ought to be,” Abernethy says now.

Abernethy concluded from the Arizona experience that “some people favor mass immigration. The divide is between people who want European-Americans to become a minority and those who do not.”

Kathy McKee, an Arizona anti-immigration activist who worked with Abernethy, said Abernethy, like herself, drew charges of racism for simply advocating for reasonable immigration limits.

But McKee said she grew concerned when she learned Abernethy served as an editorial adviser to the Council of Conservative Citizens, a group that has referred in its written materials to African-Americans as a “retrograde species of humanity.”

“When I found out she was affiliated with this group, I called her and said, ‘It sounds terrible — have you looked at their website? Because they’re a bunch of nasty racists,’” McKee said. “She resigned immediately. You don’t meet many people her age or my age who have said, ‘Maybe I have made a mistake and will change.’ I respected her for that.

“I think her views that people of European ancestry — that there’s a concerted effort to discriminate against us — that’s not my issue, but what she says certainly seems factual to me,” McKee said.

Intellectuals lend legitimacy

Abernethy joined the board of the American Third Position in 2011. Shortly afterward, she agreed to join the ticket of the A3P party, which sprang from the organization.

“Parts of our beautiful country now resemble Third World communities in Latin America, Africa and Asia,” the party platform says. “White people are already a minority in many cities and counties, along with several states, both large and small. Without constructive political action, within a few decades we will become a minority across the entire country. Enough is enough! The American Third Position Party believes that we should put America first!”

Abernethy doesn’t actively campaign, except to send out a steady stream of emailed commentary daily to several hundred people on her mailing list about world events.

Running mate Miller, 60, is a filmmaker who left Hollywood to found Americana Pictures in his hometown, Gatlinburg. The company’s goal is “to develop, produce and market quality motion pictures, which promote fresh talent and the best of traditional European-American ideals.”

Miller said criticism of Abernethy — and himself — is driven by “Zionist power background, including the mainstream media, which is controlled by Zionist influences in my opinion.”

Those same interests helped spur his candidacy, which Miller said he uses as a platform to spread the message that European-Americans have lost representation politically.

“For the most part, Virginia and I are in agreement on various platforms,” he said. “She is forthright and doesn’t pull any punches. She has incredible credentials. We both believe European-derived Americans have not had representation politically. I believe diversity can be a very good thing, but look at Ireland, Germany. They’re unique in their national character. But America is different, and global elites want a borderless world and they don’t want American sovereignty.”

A white supremacist movement led by professionals in law, film, academia or other areas represents a new vehicle for extremism that hate watch groups such as the Anti-Defamation League are keeping a close eye on.

“They’re not this old image of rednecks in the backwoods,” said Marilyn Mayo, co-director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, which monitors right-wing extremism in the United States. “What makes this party different is it’s made up of a number of people who are intellectuals and well established in their fields. It gives this party a form of legitimacy. They’re of concern because they’re a party that’s organizing to get some kind of power in this country.”

Retired for more than 20 years and now a great-grandmother, Abernethy makes the trip from her home in Hendersonville to her office on the Vanderbilt campus three days a week.

“All emeritus in good standing are permitted use of space within the Medical Center’s Emeritus Professors’ Office,” Vanderbilt University spokeswoman Amy Wolf said. “As an emeritus professor, faculty are permitted access to shared office space that is to be used for academic and scholarly pursuits.”

Reach Anita Wadhwani at awadhwani@tennessean.com or 615-259-8092.

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