Majorityrights News > Category: Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity

ItaliAnthro, “Mediterranean Sea as Genetic Barrier”, 16 June 2014:

This new study confirms that the Mediterranean Sea has acted as a strong barrier to gene flow through geographic isolation following initial settlements. Samples from (Northern) Italy, Tuscany, Sicily and Sardinia are closest to other Southern Europeans from Iberia, the Balkans and Greece, who are in turn closest to the Neolithic migrants that spread farming throughout Europe, represented here by the Cappadocian sample from Anatolia. But there hasn’t been any significant admixture from the Middle East or North Africa into Southern Europe since then.

Genes Mirror Geography Across the Mediterranean Basin

We first used principal components analysis (PCA) to visualize the genotypic distances between studied populations. Populations on the southern and northern coasts of the Mediterranean appear to be separated by the geographic barrier of the Mediterranean Sea. The role of the Mediterranean Sea as a barrier for gene flow among populations was also supported by our analysis using the BARRIER software, which implements Monmonier’s maximum difference algorithm. In accordance with this finding…the PCA distribution of the populations closely resembles the geographic map of the countries circling the Mediterranean Sea. On this PCA “map” of populations, the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea is appropriately occupied by the Palestinians and the Lebanese Druze. Yemenites and Bedouins branch out from the Mediterranean populations and are closer to the populations of the Near East.

  [...]

Seljuk Turks settled in Anatolia in the 12th century AD; however, the Anatolian Cappadocians we included in this study belong to the population that have kept the religion and the language of the pre-Seljuk Cappadocians and, therefore, most likely carry the genetic makeup of the ancient Anatolians. The only important gene flows from Near East to Europe must have occurred in prehistoric times and, as genetic evidence suggests, the most prominent migrations should have occurred during the Neolithic.

  [...]

Although the Southeastern Mediterranean islands seem to have acted as a bridge from Anatolia to Southern Europe, the relatively small degree of gene flow between the African and the European coasts shows that the Mediterranean Sea also had a barrier function as also suggested with studies of mtDNA polymorphisms. Thus, the Mediterranean seems to have facilitated the migrations of Neolithic farmers along its Southern European coast but it mostly acted as an isolating factor between its European and African coasts.

Adua del Vesco is from Messina, Sicily

Diversity Macth Frei, “France’s Chief Rabbi urges Jews to work with Muslims against nationalists”, 10 May 2017:

France’s Chief Rabbi Haim Korsia has said that the country’s Jewish community must seek cooperation with French Muslims against far-right political forces in the country, Israel Radio reported on Wednesday.

“It is very important that we work also with the Muslims against National Front,” Korsia said, referring to the populist anti-immigration party led by defeated presidential candidate Marine Le Pen.

Le Pen lost the second round of elections at the beginning of the week to centrist Emmanuel Macron, who will be sworn in on Sunday. Le Pen, 48, had portrayed the ballot as a contest between the “globalists” represented by her rival — those in favor of open trade, immigration and shared sovereignty — and the “nationalists” who defend strong borders and national identities.

Korsia’s comments came against a wider trend in which European Jewish and Muslim leaders are coordinating activities against anti-religious legislation in the continent. Arab religious leaders are also involved, including some from Saudi Arabia, the radio station said.

Among other efforts, Jewish and Muslim groups have held meetings and seminars in pursuit of an agreement on joint action against parliamentary motions banning ritual slaughter or religious symbols in public places. The talks have led some Muslim leaders to back action against Muslim attacks on Jews in Europe, the report said.

In Europe, the Jewish and Muslim slaughter customs have united opponents both from liberal circles who cite animal welfare as their main concern and right-wing nationalists who view the custom as foreign to their countries’ cultures.  Source

This is, of course, unsurprising, because, as I discussed the other day, the Jews created Islam as a weapon against Christians and are still using it as such to this day. Unfortunately, knowledge of this truth is confined to, most likely, a few thousand people in the world; at worst, a few hundred; at best, tens of thousands. Yet if we could successfully establish this idea in the public mind - that the Jews created Islam -, even just to the extent of making people aware of it as a “conspiracy theory”, as everyone is now aware of the claims of 9/11 truthers or birthers,  it could genuinely alter the world. 

First of all, it could unravel Islam itself if Muslims realised they had fallen for a 1400-year-old Jewish con trick. Second, it would weaken Jewish domination of our societies if recognition spread that the Jews and Muslims were working together against us. Third, and perhaps this is fanciful, but could it even sow self-doubt among Jewry itself, since I’m sure very few Jews know the role their people played in fostering the emergence of Islam?

If the Counterjewhad movement were really interested in undermining Islam, there is no more effective means of doing it than spreading awareness of the fact that Jews created it in the first place. Muslim antisemitism would then self-detonate, potentially taking Islam down with it, or, at the very least, significantly weakening it. Of course they won’t do that, however, because their primary interest is not weakening Islam but promoting the interests of Jewry and it is not in the interests of Jewry to be known as the authors of this monster.

Please help disseminate the meme that “Jews created Islam” on forums and comment sections you participate in. Use those exact words and link to the Hagarism post with those words. Because of the way search-engine algorithms work, this makes it much more likely that when someone types those words into Google, the Hagarism post will come up.

NPR,“A ‘Forgotten History’ Of How The U.S. Government Segregated America”, 3 May 2017:

Federal housing policies created after the Depression ensured that African-Americans and other people of color were left out of new suburban communities - and pushed instead into urban housing projects, such as Detroit’s Brewster-Douglass towers. Paul Sancya/AP

In 1933, faced with a housing shortage, the federal government began a program explicitly designed to increase — and segregate — America’s housing stock. Author Richard Rothstein says the housing programs begun under the New Deal were tantamount to a “state-sponsored system of segregation.”

Race: Historian Says Don’t ‘Sanitize’ How Our Government Created Ghettos

Code Switch: Everyone Pays A Hefty Price For Segregation, Study Says

The government’s efforts were “primarily designed to provide housing to white, middle-class, lower-middle-class families,” he says. African-Americans and other people of color were left out of the new suburban communities — and pushed instead into urban housing projects.

Rothstein’s new book, The Color of Law, examines the local, state and federal housing policies that mandated segregation. He notes that the Federal Housing Administration, which was established in 1934, furthered the segregation efforts by refusing to insure mortgages in and near African-American neighborhoods — a policy known as “redlining.” At the same time, the FHA was subsidizing builders who were mass-producing entire subdivisions for whites — with the requirement that none of the homes be sold to African-Americans.

Rothstein says these decades-old housing policies have had a lasting effect on American society. “The segregation of our metropolitan areas today leads ... to stagnant inequality, because families are much less able to be upwardly mobile when they’re living in segregated neighborhoods where opportunity is absent,” he says. “If we want greater equality in this society, if we want lowering of hostility between police and young African-American men, we need to take steps to desegregate.”

Interview Highlights

On how the Federal Housing Administration justified discrimination

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America - by Richard Rothstein

The Federal Housing Administration’s justification was that if African-Americans bought homes in these suburbs, or even if they bought homes near these suburbs, the property values of the homes they were insuring, the white homes they were insuring, would decline. And therefore their loans would be at risk.

There was no basis for this claim on the part of the Federal Housing Administration. In fact, when African-Americans tried to buy homes in all-white neighborhoods or in mostly white neighborhoods, property values rose because African-Americans were more willing to pay more for properties than whites were, simply because their housing supply was so restricted and they had so many fewer choices. So the rationale that the Federal Housing Administration used was never based on any kind of study. It was never based on any reality.

On how federal agencies used redlining to segregate African-Americans

The term “redlining” comes from a development by the New Deal, by the federal government of maps of every metropolitan area in the country. And those maps were color-coded by first the Home Owners Loan Corp. and then the Federal Housing Administration and then adopted by the Veterans Administration, and these color codes were designed to indicate where it was safe to insure mortgages. And anywhere where African-Americans lived, anywhere where African-Americans lived nearby were colored red to indicate to appraisers that these neighborhoods were too risky to insure mortgages.

On the FHA manual that explicitly laid out segregationist policies

The Two-Way: Interactive Redlining Map Zooms In On America’s History Of Discrimination

READ MORE...

NewObserver, “Israeli Air Force Bombs Anti-ISIS Forces in Syria”, 23 Apr 2017:

The Israeli Air Force has carried out two bombing raids against anti-ISIS army forces in the west of Syria as part of the [Israeli imperialist state’s] long-running campaign to disrupt the Syrian government’s military campaign against the terrorist army.

According to a report by the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA), a military source announced that the “Israeli enemy’s warplanes fired two missiles at 18:45 from within occupied territory at a military position in the surroundings of Khan Arnabeh in Quneitra countryside, causing material damage.”

The “occupied territory” being referred to is the Golan Heights, which Israel seized in 1967, and annexed against all international law.

The SANA report said that the Israeli “aggression came after an attempt by terrorists to infiltrate military positions in Quneitra countryside was foiled and the terrorists suffered heavy losses.”

This, SANA said, “proves that Israel provides direct support to terrorist organizations,” adding that their source “affirmed that such desperate attempts will not dissuade the Army and Armed Forces from continuing to crush the terrorist groups that act as Israel’s proxy in the area.”

A follow-up report in Al Jazeera revealed that Sunday’s attacks targeted fighters loyal to the Syrian government in the Naba al-Fawwar area of Quneitra province, which is located in the 30 percent of the Golan Heights that is not under Israeli occupation.

Three fighters from the pro-government National Defence Forces (NDF) were killed and at least two more were wounded in the attack, an NDF official said.

The terrorist armies fighting Syria’s Bashar al-Assad government and its allies control much of the Quneitra area.

Unusually, the Israeli Army confirmed that it had targeted positions inside Syria in retaliation for mortar fire that hit the northern part of the occupied Golan Heights.

“The Israeli army targeted the source of the fire,” an army statement said without giving further details.

In reality, the terrorist groups operating in the area against the Syrian government often operate close to Israeli lines—because Israel treats their wounded in hospitals inside the Jewish state, and it is therefore inevitable that the Israeli side will be hit occasionally by stray rounds.

The Israelis however always take these stray rounds as an excuse to bomb Syrian government positions.

The Jerusalem Post even admitted as much, saying that the Israeli attack was due to “errant rocket fire” caused by “fighting between Hezbollah and regime troops against rebel groups near Ain Ayshaa, Samadiniyah Sharqiyah & Madinat al-Baath near Quneitra.”

The other excuse which the Jewish [imperialist] state uses to attack the anti-ISIS forces in Syria is that they are “carrying weapons to Lebanon” to fight Israel—as if Syria could at this stage spare such military effort.

The Lebanese Hezbollah organization—most famous for defeating the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon—is one of the Syrian government’s key military allies, providing tens of thousands of troops on the ground in the fight against ISIS.

Small boats facilitate invasion

New Observer, “Italy: 2,074 Seaborne African Invaders Land in One Day”, 15 April 2017:

The ongoing African invasion of Europe continues to speed up, with 2,074 Africans landing in Italy in just one day.

The mass invasion—by [Africans] who have absolutely no right to claim asylum anywhere, and who are motivated purely by what they can get by way of charity handouts from liberal Europeans—is aided and abetted by the “rescue” missions run by private leftist charities and naval units from various European states.

An Italian coast guard spokesman told media that on Friday last week, 19 such “rescue operations” by his nation’s coast guard, or ships operated by non-governmental organizations, had plucked the 2,074 invaders from “16 rubber dinghies and three small wooden boats.”

The fact that the Africans were in such small vessels shows once again that they do not even have to cross the Mediterranean, but only have to set sail from the coast of Libya before being picked up by the Europeans and transported in comfort and safety to Europe—instead of being dumped back on the nearby African coast as they should be.

READ MORE...

Euractiv, “Green NGOs blame Monsanto for ‘buying science’ to save glyphosate”, 24 March 2017:

The authors of the report claim that between 2012 and 2016, the companies sponsored a series of review articles published in scientific journals, all of which conclude that glyphosate and its commercial formulations are not carcinogenic. [Mike Mozart/Flickr]

A new report accuses glyphosate producers of “buying science” in order to secure the substance’s position in the EU market.

According to the Buying Science report published by GLOBAL 2000 (Friends of the Earth Austria member of Pesticide Action Network-PAN) with the support of Avaaz, BUND, Campact, CEO, GMWatch, (PAN) Europe, PAN Germany, and Umweltinstitut München, Monsanto and other glyphosate manufacturers allegedly “distorted scientific evidence” on the public health impacts of the pesticide.

The authors of the report claim that, between 2012 and 2016, the companies sponsored a series of review articles published in scientific journals, all of which conclude that glyphosate and its commercial formulations are not carcinogenic.

Scandalous

“Glyphosate producers have used every trick in the book to enable regulatory authorities around the world to play down the alarming health effects of glyphosate. The fact that the agencies accepted their ‘assistance’ is nothing less than scandalous,” insisted Helmut Burtscher, one of the study’s authors.

Earlier this month (15 March), the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) concluded that glyphosate weedkiller should not be classified as a carcinogen.

Environmentalist NGOs reacted strongly, with Greenpeace saying that the ECHA “sweeps glyphosate cancer evidence under the carpet”.

Glyphosate is not carcinogenic, EU agency says.

The European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) said today (15 March) that much-discussed glyphosate weedkiller should not be classified as a carcinogen, triggering a strong response from environmentalist NGOs.

The Health and Environment Alliance (HEAL) went further, claiming that the decision contradicted the world’s most authoritative cancer research agency, the World Health Organisation’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which classified glyphosate as a “probable carcinogen” in 2015.

Scientific flaws

The NGOs claim that these reviews proving glyphosate is safe contain “fundamental scientific flaws spanning from apparently calculated omissions and the introduction of irrelevant data to the violation of OECD guidance for the evaluation of rodent cancer studies”.

“The reviews also consistently assign greater weight to unpublished industry studies than to studies that were peer-reviewed and published in scientific journals,” the report noted.

The report stressed that regulatory authorities like Germany’s Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR), the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have all drawn on such review articles, which have concluded that glyphosate was not carcinogenic, have actually referred to these industry-sponsored review articles.

“In contrast, IARC refused to consider the unpublished industry studies summarised in industry-sponsored reviews in its assessment of glyphosate, stating that the data presented therein were insufficient and important details were lacking […] IARC generally does not accept unpublished scientific evidence,” the authors of the report concluded.

Europe poised for total ban on bee-harming pesticides.

The world’s most widely used insecticides would be banned from all fields across Europe under draft regulations from the European Commission, seen by EURACTIV’s partner The Guardian.

Positions

European Commission Spokesperson Enrico Brivio recently told EURACTIV that the EU executive “took notice” of ECHA’s opinion, which was “based on scientific evidence”.

“The submission of the final opinion to the Commission is expected before the summer break […] After submission of the final opinion, the Commission Services will re-start their discussions with the member states as regards the approval of glyphosate as an active substance in Plant Protection Products (PPPs).”

“A decision has to be taken within 6 months of receipt of the RAC Opinion from ECHA, or by the end of 2017 – at the latest,” he added.

An EFSA spokesperson said, after this article was published, that “EFSA is the first to defend the importance of reliable science as it forms the basis of all our risk assessments”, adding “from an initial glance at the “Purchased Science” report, it is clear that the majority of mentioned studies were published after EFSA had completed its assessment of glyphosate. In other words, they did not play any role in the EFSA assessment of glyphosate”.

“There are two scientific reviews mentioned in the report (Williams et al 2000, Kier and Kirkland 2013) that were among the 700 references considered in the EU assessment for glyphosate. EFSA and EU member states rely primarily on the original studies and the underlying raw data which they check themselves. The weight given to reviews of scientific studies (like the ones mentioned in the report) is limited,” they added.

“There are no grounds to suggest that reviews of scientific studies, sponsored directly or indirectly by industry, improperly influenced the EU risk assessment for glyphosate,” the spokesperson concluded.

Background

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) said in November 2015 that glyphosate was unlikely to cause cancer in humans and proposed higher limits on the amount of residue of the weedkiller deemed safe for humans to consume.

The EFSA advises EU policymakers and its conclusion were expected to pave the way for the 28-member European Union to renew approval for glyphosate, which was brought into use by Monsanto in the 1970s and is used in its top selling product Roundup as well as in many other herbicides around the world.

Environmental groups have been calling for a ban after the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), part of the World Health Organisation, said in March 2015 that glyphosate was “probably carcinogenic to humans”.

A campaign group said that 1.4 million people had signed a petition calling on the European Union to suspend glyphosate approval pending further assessment.

The EFSA said it had carried out a thorough analysis and taken account of the IARC’s findings. Greenpeace, for its part, called the EFSA’s report “a whitewash”.

        Visigrad Post, “Orbán: Brussels Must be Halted, and Hungary Must Stand Up Against International Capital”, 24 March 2017:

Hungary – Prime Minister Viktor Orbán called March 15 an “indisputable proof” of the Hungarian nation’s past, present and future, at a commemoration of the 1848-49 revolution and freedom fight on Wednesday, March 15.

Speaking in front of the National Museum, the prime minister said that European nations are in a “state of revolt”, with the “winds of 48 blowing again on the continent”. Over the past years European nations once again revolted against “the hypocritical alliance of the Brussels bureaucrats, the liberal international media and the insatiable global capital,” Orbán said.

First the British, then the Americans rebelled, to be followed by others this year, he added. Orbán stressed the need for Brussels to take off the “masks of hypocrisy”, and opt for straight speech and an open discussion of the future.

Orbán emphasised that the resettlement of illegal migrants must be prevented, the network financed from foreign funds made transparent, and the right to regulate taxes, wages and utility prices kept in national competence.

Orbán called March 15 an “indisputable proof” of the Hungarian nation’s past, present and future. “We, living in the Carpathian Basin, at the buffer zone of cultures, empires and civilisations, can be proud of the greatest triumph of all, winning all wars for the survival of our homeland, our nation,” he said.

He said 1848 had become a “moral compass” for the nation, one that shows who is “loyal, patriotic, dedicated and brave” on the one hand, and exposes “pettiness, perfidy and efforts to kill dreams and destroy the nation” on the other. The prime minister insisted that national unity should be retained and cemented day by day.

“But what should we do with those who want unrest and division rather than peace and unity . whose only pleasure lies in spoiling the holiday of others,” he asked, referring to a group whistling during his speech. “It would be easy to mock them but we should not do that,” he said adding that Hungarians should “stand their ground on the horizon of building the nation rather than in the skirmishes of petty parties.”

“From the horizon of the Hungarian nation, one can choose the road that leads us to the wide gate of greatness or the one that leads to the swamp of hatred,” he said.

Article originally published at Daily News Hungary.

Reveal News, “White nationalist gets his money from cotton fields – and the government”, By Lance Williams 17 March 2017:

Topics: Accountability

Two weeks after last year’s presidential election, white nationalist Richard Spencer held forth on a cable news show about how white people built America.

“White people ultimately don’t need other races in order to succeed,” he told the audience of the black-oriented program, “NewsOne Now.”

The exchange grew heated as host Roland Martin questioned Spencer’s rhetoric: Didn’t slaves help build America? Wasn’t the nation’s 19th-century economic boom propelled by the slave labor that produced the world’s cotton on Southern plantations?

America’s rise was “not through black people” and “has nothing to do with slavery,” Spencer retorted. “White people could have figured out another way to pick cotton,” he said. “We do it now.”

He is in a position to know. Spencer, along with his mother and sister, are absentee landlords of 5,200 acres of cotton and corn fields in an impoverished, largely African American region of Louisiana, according to records examined by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. The farms, controlled by multiple family-owned businesses, are worth millions: A 1,600-acre parcel sold for $4.3 million in 2012.

The Spencer family’s farms also are subsidized heavily by the federal government. From 2008 through 2015, the Spencers received $2 million in U.S. farm subsidy payments, according to federal data.

USDA farm subsidy payments to Spencer family companies, 2008-2015

Farm Payments

Dickenhorst Farms $1,014,558
Spencer Farms $524,655
Dickenhorst Trust $201,460
Sher-Di-Je Land $165,029
Poor Richard Partnership $98,878
A-Renee Partnership $78,016
Total $2,082,596

Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture data compiled by the Environmental Working Group

Although Spencer has attracted extensive media attention as a leader of the so-called alt-right movement – particularly after he drew Nazi salutes at an event celebrating Donald Trump’s election – he never has explained publicly how he supports himself while actively promoting his agenda via conferences and media appearances. The finances of his nonprofit think tank, the National Policy Institute, are a mystery; the organization hasn’t filed a public report since 2013. On Monday, the Los Angeles Times reported that the IRS revoked the institute’s tax-exempt status.

Spencer, 38, is a dropout from a Duke University Ph.D. history program who emerged during the Trump campaign as one of the nation’s most visible white separatist agitators. In his writing, speeches and interviews, he has given an intellectualized explanation for how he came to advocate creating a whites-only “ethno state” in North America. While in graduate school, he has said, he was compelled by critiques of multiculturalism and political correctness and by demographic data indicating that whites are en route to minority status in the United States.

But the Spencer family’s business interests and geographic history suggest a different possible lineage for Richard Spencer’s racist politics. The family’s farm holdings are a legacy of its ties to the Jim Crow South, passed down by Spencer’s grandfather, who built the business during the turbulent civil rights era.

Spencer family land holdings in Louisiana
Farming company Parish Acreage
Dickenhorst Farms Tensas 1,888
Dickenhorst Farms East Carroll 967
Sher-Di-Je Land Tensas 1,186
A-Renee Partners Madison 753
Poor Richard Partnership Franklin 400
Spencer, Sherry Madison 90
Total   5,284

Sources: Louisiana Tax Commission parish tax rolls; parish assessment records

Spencer declined in an interview this week to discuss how much money he personally receives from cotton farming and government subsidies and whether that income funds his political activities.

“I’m not involved in any direct day-to-day running of the business,” he said, later adding: “I’m going to navigate the world as it is, and I’m not going to be a pauper.”

One Spencer family farming company, which holds title to 400 acres of land, is called the Poor Richard Partnership.

In the interview, Spencer also downplayed his family’s influence on his political views, saying, “My parents are very mainstream Episcopalian Republicans in Dallas.”

Although Spencer grew up in an affluent neighborhood of Dallas and now splits his time between Montana and Washington, D.C., his family lived in the South for generations. Records show his mother attended segregated schools as a girl in the small northeast Louisiana city of Monroe. Later, Spencer’s mother inherited farms in northeast Louisiana from her late father. Today, her two children are her business partners.

Spencer’s mother did not respond to an email and voicemails seeking comment for this story. In the past, she has said she does not share her son’s views. In an open letter sent to their local newspaper in December, Spencer’s parents, Sherry and Rand, said that while they love their son, “we are not racists. We have never been racists. We do not endorse the idea of white nationalism.”

The region that is home to the Spencers’ farms has a history of slavery and racism. Through the civil rights era, the Klan targeted black residents there with lynchings, cross burnings and other violence. In Tensas Parish, where the Spencers own 3,000 acres of farmland, blacks didn’t win the right to vote until 1964, according to Elvadus Fields Jr., mayor of the town of St. Joseph.

White supremacist views typically run in the family, said writer and race relations expert Cleo Scott Brown. Feelings of racial superiority often are passed “from generation to generation, because that’s what they believe,” said Brown, whose father – a civil rights leader in East Carroll Parish, where the Spencers own 900 acres of farmland – was shot and wounded during a 1962 voter registration drive, allegedly by a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Agribusiness in the region today is heavily mechanized and provides few jobs. In 2013, CNN reported that East Carroll Parish suffers from the worst income inequality in the nation: The richest 5 percent of residents earned an average of $611,000 per year, 90 times what the poorest 20 percent earned. The parish’s population is 67 percent black.

Ownership of Spencer family farming companies

Farming company

Owners
Dickenhorst Farms Sherry Spencer, Richard Spencer and sister
Dickenhorst Trust Dickenhorst Farms (Sherry Spencer, Richard Spencer and sister)
Sher-Di-Je Land Dickenhorst Farms (Sherry Spencer, Richard Spencer and sister)
Spencer Farms Sherry Spencer
Poor Richard Partnership Sherry Spencer*
A-Renee Partners Sherry Spencer and daughter

*Records show that Richard Spencer has received subsidy income from the partnership but don’t identify him as an owner.

Sources: U.S. Department of Agriculture data compiled by the Environmental Working Group; Louisiana secretary of state filings

Race relations have improved significantly in recent decades. But after Trump’s election, some white residents celebrated by draping their pickup trucks with Confederate flags and driving through the region’s towns, according to the Rev. Roosevelt Grant, head of the NAACP branch in Winnsboro, Franklin Parish, near another of the Spencers’ farms.

The Trump presidency, he said, “has caused people to pray more.”

Spencer’s maternal grandfather, Dr. R.W. Dickenhorst, established the family farming business. He was a radiologist who started a medical practice in Monroe in 1952 and became wealthy and socially prominent, according to local newspaper obituaries.

Racial segregation was a given in Monroe then. Blacks were barred from housing, schools and public facilities used by whites. White superiority “was the way of life; that was the way it was, and anyone challenging it was challenging God’s will,” said the Rev. Roosevelt Wright Jr., a local historian in Monroe.

Dickenhorst’s daughter, Sherry, who would grow up to be Richard Spencer’s mother, enrolled in all-white Neville High School in 1962, according to district records. In 1964, at the start of her junior year, integration of the school began, with a single African American student enrolling.

As Dickenhorst’s medical practice prospered, he bought farmland in northeast Louisiana on the Mississippi River’s west bank. He died decades later, in 2002, and his wife died the following year. By then, their only daughter was the wife of a wealthy Dallas eye surgeon and the mother of two grown children: Richard Spencer and his sister, who did not respond to an email and phone calls seeking comment.

Today, through Dickenhorst Farms and several related companies, Sherry Spencer, 68, and her two children jointly own most of the family farmland, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data compiled by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group. Sherry Spencer is general partner of Dickenhorst Farms, and Richard Spencer and his sister are part owners, according to state and federal records. The family contracts out crop production to local farmers, a common practice in a region where corporations and absentee owners control much of the land.

The Spencer family’s farms are headquartered at a $3 million home in the ski town of Whitefish, Montana, where Sherry Spencer now lives. Also headquartered there: Richard Spencer’s think tank, his AltRight.com website and other white nationalist-related enterprises he controls, including a book publisher and web design outfit. Spencer also has lived in Whitefish in recent years ­– sometimes in his mother’s home, sometimes in a condominium she owns, according to documents and interviews.

The Spencers have received payments from two federal farm programs. One is the commodity subsidy program, intended to guarantee income for farmers who are helping to maintain supplies of certain crops deemed important by the government. The other is the conservation reserve program, which pays farmers for environmentally sound farming practices. Most of the $2 million paid to the Spencers has been in commodity subsidy payments for growing cotton.

Yet, Spencer has been bitterly critical of America and its government.

“This is a sick, disgusting society,” he declared in his speech at an alt-right gathering in Washington after the election, “run by the corrupt, defended by hysterics, drunk on self-hatred and degeneracy.”

Note: I have no necessary qualms with Spencer’s wealth (though ultimately, something like Bowery’s/ William Jennings Bryan’s progressive land taxation based on site value might be in order) nor do I have anything against his family’s alleged history of wanting to live separately from blacks. - DanielS