The Pioneer Fund started in the 1930s to advance eugenics — the idea that the nation’s strength depended on protecting its “stock.”

By the 1980s, that same money was flowing into FAIR, seeding John Tanton’s network of anti-immigration think tanks. FAIR’s affiliates would later help draft key U.S. immigration laws, from IIRIRA (1996) to SB 1070 (2010).

The connective tissue was Thomas F. Ellis, a political strategist for Sen. Jesse Helms and board member of both the Pioneer Fund and the Council for National Policy (CNP). Through Ellis, the language of “racial preservation” migrated into the Christian Right’s moral vocabulary.

Within the CNP’s closed circles, leaders such as Falwell, Robertson, and Dobson reframed demographic anxiety as a defense of “traditional family values.” Policy think tanks drew on FAIR’s data. Political messaging merged with theology. The result was a potent hybrid: a politics of cultural purity cloaked in religious righteousness.

Over decades, that rhetoric normalized exclusion as civic virtue. It shifted the Overton window — turning segregationist logic into “heritage” and policy into piety.

This is the quiet success of the Pioneer-to-CNP pipeline: • It moved race science from lab to law, • from white papers to pulpits, • from ideology to national identity.

The American experiment depends on distinguishing moral conviction from manufactured fear. When the two merge, liberty gives way to hierarchy, and the line between democracy and dominion blurs.