Free Republic (hold your nose) links to a number of obits for Reed Irvine, co-founder of Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia. According to Wilson “Nukem” Lucom in Newsmax:
Over 30 years ago, Reed and I were two letter writers to the New York Times and other major newspapers. Each week Reed and I, along with several sincere Washington conservatives, would meet for lunch. We would discuss the issues of the day and how biased the media were.
Remember, this was during the height of the Cold War. War was still raging in Vietnam, and our brave soldiers were dying in the rice paddies as the New York Times helped the communists…One day I suggested to Reed we start a non-profit organization that criticized the major media when it made mistakes…I told Reed that if he would devote the time to make it work, I would donate the seed money.
Thus was born AIM, which, according to the NY Times:
paved the way for the tide of conservative talk shows, Web sites and news programming that would follow decades later.
The Times adds:
And while AIM occasionally lived up to its name, it also spent much of its time pursuing conspiracy theories.
In recent years, for example, Mr. Irvine turned his attention to such speculative topics as whether the death in 1993 of Vincent W. Foster Jr., the deputy White House counsel in the Clinton administration, was really a suicide. He also challenged the government’s explanation of the crash in 1996 of T.W.A. Flight 800, alleging that it had been caused by a rocket.
The Times also says that
In 1985, Mr. Irvine started Accuracy in Academia, which was presented as an effort to challenge the teachings of college and university professors in the same way as AIM had done with the media. In this case, an indignant response was widespread, with a number of prominent conservatives joining liberals in the defense of academic freedom. A.I.A., as it was called, was never able to achieve the sort of influence that AIM had demonstrated.
AIA produces a newsletter, Campus Report, which for some years was edited by Lucom. More recently, AIA was headed by Dan Flynn, an anti-war conservative and friend of Mike Adams, and the current AIA website includes a prominent endorsement from anti-Kinsey crank Judith Reisman.
Irvine’s financier (also known as Chuck Lucom) has been an occasional subject for Pete M at The Dark Window. Lucom is a great humbug: while anyone who has any misgivings about US policy in the Middle East must be a terrorist sympathiser, Lucom himself is a cheerleader for General Pinochet, whose regime was responsible for a car bomb in Washington DC in 1976 that killed two. There is also a weird discrepancy on his Newsmax bio. On his bio page we read:
For over 25 years he was Chairman of Concerned Voters, a Washington, D.C.-based conservative organization. During the same period he also served as President of the United States Anti-Communist Congress in Washington, D.C.
But at the foot of most of his articles it says:
Wilson C. Lucom is a former president of the World Anti-Communist League
WACL is, of course, better-known and, like Lucom, has serious links with South American dictators, but despite numerous studies of WACL online there is little mention of Lucom. It seems likely, therefore, that the latter profile is an error. Also, files at the Library of Congress link the rather more obscure United States Anti-Communist Congress with Herbert A Philbrick (covert anti-communist member of the CPUSA), and Philbrick with Lucom.
One aspect of AIM that the reviewers all miss is a rather dodgy connection brought to my attention by blogs Ethically (Abhorrent) and Take Back Our Campus. Using Wayback to look at the AIM website for the end of 2001 we find:
AIM Events
..In Defense of Western Man
American Renaissance Conference
February 22 – 24, 2002, Herndon, Virginia
Speakers include Jared Taylor, Sam Francis, Glenn Spencer, Dr. Phillipe Ruston of the U. of Western Ontario, Prof. Michael Levin of CUNY, Nick Griffin of the British National Party, and many others. Click here for more info…
American Renaissance is a racialist organisation, and clicking on the link takes us to an archived American Renaissance site which reveals the following, among much else:
In all parts of the world, whites are afraid to speak out in their own interests. The costs of “diversity,” racial differences in IQ, the threat of non-white immigration—politicians and the media are afraid to discuss what these things mean for whites and their civilization.
We are different…Speakers will include:
J. Philippe Rushton — “In Search of the African IQ.” Prof. Rushton is the world’s leading theorist on the nature and significance of racial differences
…Nick Griffin — “Racial Friction in Britain and Europe.” Mr. Griffin is chairman of the British National Party. He is a graduate of Cambridge, and has been editor of several British nationalist magazines, including The Rune and Spearhead.
The profile for Griffin is too modest by half. A friend of David Duke, Griffin has the political savvy to appear anti-immigration rather than racist when appearing on the BBC, but he has a long history of anti-Semitism, including Holocaust denial (he has attacked David Irving for not going far enough) and authorship of a booklet Who are the Mindbenders? on supposed Jewish control of the media. The BNP leadership is full of other charming characters, many of who have been convicted for violent racially-related crimes. StoptheBNP has many more details. AIM appears to have dropped its endorsement for this event by Jan 2002 (the next archived page), although there is no explanation as to why.
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