Editing Virginia Abernethy

It’s not often that open white supremacists are joined and applauded by a retired professor from a major university, a former fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science no less. But Virginia Deane Abernethy is a now a full-fledged professor of hate. Abernethy, a professor emerita of psychiatry and anthropology at Vanderbilt University, showed her leanings early on, cooking up a “fertility opportunity hypothesis” that predicts that Mexican Americans will have more children than native-born whites in this country and then suggesting that “European-Americans should rapidly increase family size in order to avoid minority status.” After that, Abernethy’s slide into full-throated extremism rapidly accelerated. Born in Cuba, raised in Argentina and New York, and educated at Vanderbilt and Harvard, Abernethy in the late 1990s became the editorial advisor of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), a hate group that has referred to black people as a “retrograde species of humanity.” At the same time, Abernethy, who edited the academic journal Population and Environment for a decade, worked tirelessly to suggest that non-white immigration needed to be stopped for environmental reasons. At various points, she was on the boards of the Carrying Capacity Network and Population-Environment Balance, both nativist organizations. In 2004, Abernethy became the head of the national advisory committee to Protect Arizona Now, a group that was pushing a punishing anti-immigrant referendum. Even though Abernethy frankly identified herself to one newspaper reporter as a white “separatist” and she was denounced editorially across the state for her ties to the CCC, the referendum passed handily. The same year, she gave a speech honoring Kevin MacDonald (see profile below), an infamous anti-Semitic professor at California State University, Long Beach.

Abernethy went on to join the board of The Occidental Quarterly, a racist and anti-Semitic journal, and to post regularly to VDARE.com, a racist nativist website named after Virginia Dare, the first English child born in America. In 2010, Abernethy heartily endorsed as a “well-researched page-turner” a white supremacist potboiler of a novel, Kyle Bristow’s White Apocalypse, that among other things enthusiastically depicted the assassination of the editor of this magazine, albeit under a fictional name. But it was in June 2011 when Abernethy truly crossed the Rubicon of hate, joining the board of the American Third Position, a group originally started by neo-Nazi skinheads whose leader, California corporate lawyer William D. Johnson, has sought a constitutional amendment to deport any American with an “ascertainable trace of Negro blood.” The group, which may be the most important hate group in America at the moment, also includes as principals MacDonald; James Edwards, host of the white supremacist “Political Cesspool” radio show; Don Wassal, publisher of the racist Nationalist Times; and Jamie Kelso, who was for many years the chief aide of former Klan leader David Duke.