The Social Contract Press

To Whom It May Concern:

This is a request under the Freedom of Information Act. I hereby request the following records:

Records relating to or mentioning The Social Contract Press, which routinely publishes race-baiting articles penned by white nationalists. The press is a program of U.S. Inc, the foundation created by John Tanton, the racist founder and principal ideologue of the modern nativist movement. TSCP puts an academic veneer of legitimacy over what are essentially racist arguments about the inferiority of today's immigrants.

The Social Contract Press (TSCP) was founded in 1990 by John Tanton, a man who has set up and funded several anti-immigration groups over the past 30 years. TSCP is the publishing wing of Tanton's network of organizations. In addition to putting out books, many of them extremely anti-immigrant, TSCP prints a quarterly journal, The Social Contract, which has featured articles by dozens of white nationalists and anti-immigrant extremists.

From 1990 to 1998, John Tanton served as editor of The Social Contract. In the 1980s, Tanton wrote often to colleagues about the movement's need for a reputable journal to synthesize ideas; the TSCP's The Social Contract became that journal. Tanton is deeply connected to white nationalist groups and leaders. He has corresponded with Holocaust deniers, a former Klan lawyer and the leading white nationalist thinkers of the modern era. Tanton is also the founder of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the nation's most influential anti-immigrant lobbying organization, which was listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2007. No longer editor of The Social Contract, Tanton serves as publisher of the entire press operation.

In 1994, TSCP republished an English translation of the an openly racist French book that is also Tanton's favorite tome, The Camp of the Saints, with Tanton writing that he was "honored" to republish the novel. What Tanton called a "prescient" book describes the takeover of France by "swarthy hordes" of Indians, "grotesque little beggars from the streets of Calcutta," who arrive in a desperate refugee flotilla. It attacks white liberals who, rather than turn the Indians away, "empty out all our hospital beds so that cholera-ridden and leprous wretches could sprawl between white sheets … and cram our nurseries full of monster children." In the novel, after the Indians take over France, white women are sent to a "whorehouse for Hindus." Dark-skinned immigrants eventually overrun the entire white Western world. Reflecting on the novel, Tanton wrote in the winter 1994-1995 issue of The Social Contract: "We are indebted to Jean Raspail [author of The Camp of the Saints] for his insights into the human condition, and for being 20 years ahead of his time. History will judge him more kindly than have some of his contemporaries."

TSCP publishes huge quantities of fear-mongering articles and books. Besides the reprint of The Camp of the Saints, perhaps its most inflammatory publication is The Immigration Invasion. Put out in 1994, the book was co-written by Tanton and white nationalist Wayne Lutton, The Social Contract's current editor. It is so incendiary that Canadian border authorities have banned it as hate literature.

Lutton, a longtime contributor to The Social Contract, became the editor of the journal in 1998. Lutton has an extensive extremist track record. He has held leadership positions in four other white nationalist hate groups: the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), the National Policy Institute, The Occidental Quarterly and American Renaissance. In the early 1980s, Lutton worked at far-right Summit Ministries in Manitou, Colo. While there, Lutton co-authored AIDS, a gay-bashing book, with Summit president David Noebel and Paul Cameron, who runs the anti-gay hate group Family Research Institute and is widely known for perpetrating academically faulty "junk-science" studies on homosexuality. Published in 1987, the nonfiction work proposed to "suppress" homosexuality by making gay sex illegal, prohibiting gays from having custody of children, including their own, "quarantining" HIV-positive gays who engage in sex and denying all AIDS patients admittance to regular hospitals.

Lutton has strongly expressed his belief that the United States is a country of white people, for white people. "We are the real Americans, not the Hmong, not Latinos, not the Siberian-Americans," Lutton declared in 1997 at a conference put on by the white supremacist CCC. "As far as the future, the handwriting is on the screen. The Camp of the Saints is coming our way."

In 2006, Tanton brought Kevin Lamb on as managing editor of The Social Contract. The prior year, Lamb was fired from two mainstream managing editor positions with Human Events and The Evans-Novak Political Report after the Southern Poverty Law Center revealed that Lamb was concurrently editing The Occidental Quarterly, a white nationalist journal. After his firing, Lamb wrote a bitter essay saying that several fellow employees had known of his work for the racist quarterly, including Al Regnery, the conservative publisher who owns Human Events. In fact, Lamb had written for racist publications as far back as the early 1990s, when he published works in Mankind Quarterly. He also edited a 2002 book on Glayde Whitney, a racist academic who once wrote a fawning introduction for former Klan leader David Duke's autobiography My Awakening.

The Social Contract has published articles by many white nationalists including Samuel Francis, who was the CCC'S chief editor until his death in 2005, and James Lubinskas, at one time a contributing editor for the racist American Renaissance magazine. Other contributors include Michael Masters, the leader of the Virginia chapter of the CCC and Brenda Walker, a frequent writer on the VDARE anti-immigrant hate site and a major propagator of the Aztlán conspiracy theory that holds that immigrants come to the United States not to work, but to colonize.

In 1998, The Social Contract released a particularly racist special issue entitled "Europhobia: The Hostility Toward European-Descended Americans." The lead article was written by John Vinson, head of the Tanton-supported hate group American Immigration Control Foundation, and argued that "multiculturalism" was replacing "successful Euro-American culture" with "dysfunctional Third World cultures." Tanton himself elaborated on Vinson's remarks, saying an "unwarranted hatred and fear" of white Americans was developing. The main culprits, in Tanton's view, were immigrants and their ideological allies, the "multiculturalists."

The winter 2006-2007 issue of The Social Contract consisted entirely of reprints of articles from the hate site VDARE.com, which features racist and anti-Semitic articles. VDARE is named after Virginia Dare, said to be the first English baby born in the United States. Its contributors include Peter Brimelow, professor Kevin MacDonald, who believes that Jews are genetically driven to destroy Western societies, and Jared Taylor, editor of the racist newsletter American Renaissance.

The Fall 2010 issue of The Social Contract, titled "The Menace of Islam," pushed the bounds of the journal's already rancorous prose. In it, one author refers to Park51, a Muslim community center with a construction site two blocks away from the World Trade Center site, as a "victory mosque." The article claims that the building of the center is the first step in a conspiracy to enact Islamic law in the United States. Another article refers to the "greed" of Muslim immigrants to the United States and describes them as an "alien force" that has "infested" the country. In the issue, K.C. McAlpin – who last year was promoted to president of U.S. Inc., replacing Tanton, who is suffering from Parkinson's – warns that Muslim immigrants should be seen as a "Trojan horse," a group of people who are stealthily attempting to infiltrate and destroy the United States. McAlpin argues that all Muslim immigration to the United States must be stopped.

Please conduct a search of the Central Records System, including but not limited to the Electronic Surveillance (ELSUR) Indices, the Microphone Surveillance (MISUR) Indices, the Physical Surveillance (FISUR) Indices, and the Technical Surveillance (TESUR) Indices, for both main-file records and cross-reference records of both HQ and all field offices for all relevant names, agencies, organizations, companies and events including but not limited to those cited in the previous paragraphs and/or links as well as a cross-reference with the Southern Poverty Law Center to include any information provided by the SPLC. My request includes but is not limited to 137, 157, 176, 177, 183, 184, 188, 214 and 266 files. If previously released records are available, then I request a rolling release consisting of those records while additional records are located and processed for release.

I am a member of the news media and request classification as such. I have previously written about the government and its activities for AND Magazine, MuckRock and Glomar Disclosure and have an open arrangement with each. My articles have been widely read, with some reaching over 100,000 readers. As such, as I have a reasonable expectation of publication and my editorial and writing skills are well established. In addition, I discuss and comment on the files online and make them available through the non-profit Internet Archive, disseminating them to a large audience. While my research is not limited to this, a great deal of it, including this, focuses on the activities and attitudes of the government itself. As such, it is not necessary for me to demonstrate the relevance of this particular subject in advance. Additionally, case law states that “proof of the ability to disseminate the released information to a broad cross-section of the public is not required.” Judicial Watch, Inc. v. Dep’t of Justice, 365 F.3d 1108, 1126 (D.C. Cir. 2004); see Carney v. U.S. Dep’t of Justice, 19 F.3d 807, 814-15 (2d Cir. 1994). Further, courts have held that "qualified because it also had “firm” plans to “publish a number of . . . ‘document sets’” concerning United States foreign and national security policy." Under this criteria, as well, I qualify as a member of the news media. Additionally, courts have held that the news media status "focuses on the nature of the requester, not its request. The provision requires that the request be “made by” a representative of the news media. Id. § 552(a)(4)(A)(ii)(II). A newspaper reporter, for example, is a representative of the news media regardless of how much interest there is in the story for which he or she is requesting information." As such, the details of the request itself are moot for the purposes of determining the appropriate fee category. As such, my primary purpose is to inform about government activities by reporting on it and making the raw data available and I therefore request that fees be waived.

The requested documents will be made available to the general public, and this request is not being made for commercial purposes.

In the event that there are fees, I would be grateful if you would inform me of the total charges in advance of fulfilling my request. I would prefer the request filled electronically, by e-mail attachment if available or CD-ROM if not.

Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation in this matter. I look forward to receiving your response to this request within 20 business days, as the statute requires.

Sincerely,

Michael Best

I am appealing the integrity of the search, as the parameters I specified were not met, including but not limited to a failure to search all the field offices I requested and a failure to search for the name I actually specified. Nor was an attempt made to locate correspondence with the SPCL. I specifically requested "a search of the Central Records System, including but not limited to the Electronic Surveillance (ELSUR) Indices, the Microphone Surveillance (MISUR) Indices, the Physical Surveillance (FISUR) Indices, and the Technical Surveillance (TESUR) Indices, for both main-file records and cross-reference records of both HQ and all field offices for all relevant names, agencies, organizations, companies and events including but not limited to those cited in the previous paragraphs and/or links as well as a cross-reference with the Southern Poverty Law Center to include any information provided by the SPLC. My request includes but is not limited to 137, 157, 176, 177, 183, 184, 188, 214 and 266 files. If previously released records are available, then I request a rolling release consisting of those records while additional records are located and processed for release."