IHS Knifes Phillip Magness

The important economic historian Phillip W. Magness has been fired as  Academic Program Director at the Institute for Humane Studies.

There's supposed to be a non-disclosure preventing either party involved from discussing the matter but not all the lips at IHS are sealed tight.

The cause for the cut appears to be
a comment Magness made about Claremont Institute. Apparently, you can not speak ill of Claremont at IHS.

Tom Dilorenzo filled us in on Claremont in 2015:

Calling the Claremont Institute a “Pentagon propaganda mill” is no exageration.  After the entire world understood that the invasion of Iraq was entirely based on a Big Lie, promoted by such people as those associated with the Claremont Institute, the Claremont Institute awarded its annual “statesman of the year” award to Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Rush Limbaugh and Victor Davis Hanson for their respective roles in instigating and prosecuting this senseless and catastrophic military intervention that even the Bush administration’s British political sock puppet Tony Blair has apologized for.

And DiLorenzo wrote this in 2007:

 [A] friend sent me an email link that included the announcement of the 2007 "Lincoln Fellows" at the Claremont Institute, the shrine in California devoted to the worshipping of Abe Lincoln and Winston Churchill. The Institute said it was proud to announce its latest Lincoln Fellows, who will be treated to eight days of indoctrination this summer in Newport Beach, California. There is no pretense that this "fellowship" program is a scholarly endeavor. The first line of the announcement says "Lincoln Fellowships are offered to professionals serving elected officials or appointed policy makers in the federal government, as well as staff members of national political parties, non-profit institutions that research and publish on public policy and constitutional issues, and political editorialists in the media."

  Claremont’s Lincoln Fellowships are intended for Republican Party hacks, propagandists and apologists only (or a few wayward Democrats who, like the odious Joe Lieberman, support the neoconservative foreign policy agenda of world domination, imperialism, and perpetual global warfare). "Alumni" of the program are said to include "senior staff of United States Representatives and Senators, White House staff and speech writers, and senior advisors in numerous U.S. [government] Departments and agencies. Indeed, a California newspaper editor recently mentioned to me that Claremont staffer Ken Masugi has left the shrine to work as a speech writer for Alberto "Torture Chamber" Gonzalez.

So it is no surprise that Magness who wrote,  Colonization After Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement , would be introduced to the knife at IHS once he put Claremont under the microscope.

From the blurb  to Magness'  Colonization After Emancipation:

History has long acknowledged that President Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, had considered other approaches to rectifying the problem of slavery during his administration. Prior to Emancipation, Lincoln was a proponent of colonization: the idea of sending African American slaves to another land to live as free people. Lincoln supported resettlement schemes in Panama and Haiti early in his presidency and openly advocated the idea through the fall of 1862. But the bigoted, flawed concept of colonization never became a permanent fixture of U.S. policy, and by the time Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, the word “colonization” had disappeared from his public lexicon. As such, history remembers Lincoln as having abandoned his support of colonization when he signed the proclamation. Documents exist, however, that tell another story.

Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement explores the previously unknown truth about Lincoln’s attitude toward colonization. Scholars Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page combed through extensive archival materials, finding evidence, particularly within British Colonial and Foreign Office documents, which exposes what history has neglected to reveal—that Lincoln continued to pursue colonization for close to a year after emancipation. Their research even shows that Lincoln may have been attempting to revive this policy at the time of his assassination.

Using long-forgotten records scattered across three continents—many of them untouched since the Civil War—the authors show that Lincoln continued his search for a freedmen’s colony much longer than previously thought. Colonization after Emancipation reveals Lincoln’s highly secretive negotiations with the British government to find suitable lands for colonization in the West Indies and depicts how the U.S. government worked with British agents and leaders in the free black community to recruit emigrants for the proposed colonies. The book shows that the scheme was never very popular within Lincoln’s administration and even became a subject of subversion when the president’s subordinates began battling for control over a lucrative “colonization fund” established by Congress.


Colonization after Emancipation reveals an unexplored chapter of the emancipation story. A valuable contribution to Lincoln studies and Civil War history, this book unearths the facts about an ill-fated project and illuminates just how complex, and even convoluted, Abraham Lincoln’s ideas about the end of slavery really were.

 -RW