Eugene Wigner and the Moonies

I was reading Merchants of Doubt and came across this passage: “Seitz, like his mentor Eugene Wigner (a Hungarian refugee) was ardently anti-Communist. (Wigner in later years lent his support to Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, eventually feeling that any enemy of Communism was his friend.)” Wow. I’d only known Wigner as a famous theoretical physicist (not that I had any idea what he actually did in that area) and as the author of the classic article, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” According to Wikipedia, Wigner not only supported the Moonies, he also was “credited as a member of the advisory board for the Western Goals Foundation, a private domestic intelligence agency created in the US in 1979 to “fill the critical gap caused by the crippling of the FBI, the disabling of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the destruction of crucial government files.” Wow. In the grand scheme of things, this is no big deal. Lots of…