
Race Science Inc.
Undercover in The Human Diversity Foundation, the million-dollar race science company
A HOPE not hate investigator goes undercover inside the race science movement and finds that the notorious Pioneer Fund has relaunched under a new name thanks to backing from a super-rich American tech entrepreneur.
The Scandza Forum is one of the most important events in the far-right calendar. Hosted by Fróði Midjord, a Scandinavian neo-Nazi, it is a conference of extremist intellectuals who gather for lectures on white nationalism, race science, and World War II revisionism. In May 2023, the Scandza Forum was held for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic at the Von Stackelberg Hotel in Tallinn, Estonia, attracting more than 100 far-right activists from across the western world.
Among the guests was an undercover reporter for HOPE not hate.
At the conference, our infiltrator met a man who introduced himself as Matthew Archer, although we now know his real name is Matthew Frost.Matthew FrostFounder of Aporia, former religious studies teacher Frost said he was the founder of Aporia, a website running stories on “HBD”, or human biodiversity. This is the belief that there are meaningful and measurable differences between different “races”, especially in terms of intelligence. It is, in essence, the misuse of science to promote racist ideology.

Frost claimed Aporia was being read by important people in Westminster, Washington D.C., and Silicon Valley. An anonymous American tech tycoon, our undercover reporter was told, had even invested a large chunk of money in the project.
Advocates of eugenics are often stereotyped as old, conspiratorial cranks whose papers are confined to obscure publications with dwindling audiences. Aporia, however, is younger, slicker, and much more popular, boasting 14,000 subscribers on Substack and almost 10,000 followers on X/Twitter.
After the Tallinn conference, HOPE not hate set out to understand the wider ecosystem in which Aporia operates. Over six months, our reporter posed as a wealthy investor looking to give Aporia a six-figure cash injection. Excited by the prospect, Matthew Frost and his colleagues revealed their inner secrets in business meetings, dinners, video calls, WhatsApp conversations, voice notes, and internal company documents.
We discovered
- The Pioneer Fund, a Nazi-affiliated eugenics organisation —thought to be essentially defunct — has rebranded as the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF)
- Aporia is part of the HDF’s organisation, as is a scientific racism research team
- Andrew Conru, the multimillionaire entrepreneur who created Adult Friend Finder, has given $1.3 million to HDF. After being contacted prior to this report’s publication, he said he would cut ties with the company
- HDF has connections to Alternative für Deutschland, the far-right German party, and hopes to create a white-only ethnostate
- HDF is working to create a cult of weapons-trained activists inspired by Scientology and the Nazi SS

The Pioneer Fund
The Pioneer Fund was perhaps the most notorious financial backer of the intellectual far right. Founded in the US in 1937, its board members distributed Nazi propaganda and developed close ties to the Third Reich. Its first act was to screen Erbkrank, or The Hereditary Defective, a Nazi movie that paved the way for its euthanasia programme.


In the post-war years, Pioneer paid for researchers to publish papers seeking proof that Black people were less intelligent than white people. Some of them were academics, such as Richard Lynn, a psychology professor at the University of Ulster, who aspired to “have a go at the rehabilitation of eugenics”. Others were far-right activists like Jared Taylor,Jared TaylorLeader of American Renaissance a white nationalist who has said: “When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.”
Pioneer boasted assets of around $2.5 million in the early 2000s but its activities and endowment have since declined. In the last decade, the fund awarded smaller sums to fewer people, and in some years failed to grant anything. The drop in activity has prompted speculation that Pioneer was inexorably sliding into irrelevance.
Our undercover investigation reveals that Pioneer has instead relaunched itself as the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF). As a charity, Pioneer had to disclose the sources of its funding. HDF, as a private company, has no such obligation. However, we can disclose that Andrew Conru, an American tech entrepreneur, gave $1.3 million to HDF.
Inside the Human Diversity Foundation
Having met Matthew Frost at the conference in Tallinn — and hearing rumours there that the Pioneer Fund was back in action — our undercover journalist approached him with an offer to invest in Aporia. Thus began a months-long series of conversations in which our infiltrator slowly gained the trust of Frost, who then introduced him to colleagues and unwittingly exposed the structure and personnel of his secret company. What we discovered in our conversations with Matthew Frost is that Aporia is merely one part of the HDF’s much larger operation.
HDF is led by three men. The CEO and founder of Human Diversity Foundation LLC is Emil Kirkegaard.Emil KirkegaardDanish scientific racist Kirkegaard is a well-known Danish scientific racist and far-right activist, having spoken at the Traditional Britain Group conference in 2022.

Kierkegaard’s disturbing views extend beyond race. In 2012, he published a blog on his website about paedophilia, suggesting that abusers should be allowed to rape children drugged with sleeping medicine. “If they dont notice it is difficult to see how they cud be harmed, even if it is rape [sic],” he wrote. Kirkegaard later claimed he was merely discussing a hypothetical scenario. He now leads HDF’s research team.
Matthew Frost is another key figure in HDF. He is a former religious studies teacher at Kensington Park School, a private institution, in west London. Frost, who goes by the name Matt Archer, is the founder of Aporia. He has also attended the clandestine London Conference on Intelligence, a gathering of scientific racists and eugenicists that was formerly held at UCL, and in 2023 and 2024 was organised in Budapest.
In a comment to HOPE not hate, Frost claims to have left Aporia and to no longer have any affiliation with HDF. In a leaving article on Aporia he does, however, state that he will “still write the occasional piece and host meet-ups”. Frost remains the administrator of Aporia’s official Telegram chat as of October 2024.
The third senior figure of HDF is Erik Ahrens, a social media advisor in Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the far-right German party. He is an advocate of white nationalism, and appeared at the AfD’s Potsdam conference in November 2023, at which party leaders discussed deporting German citizens of foreign descent.
Unlike Pioneer, HDF is a limited liability company registered in Wyoming. “The reason it’s an LLC,” Matthew Frost told our undercover reporter, “is because if you’re a non-profit, then that means you have to file all your internal paperwork for the nonprofit websites. And that just means a journalist will go there.” Pioneer, as a charity, had to publish its accounts and endure the ensuing negative press coverage; HDF’s leadership want to avoid making the same mistake.
The company was incorporated in November 2022 by Emil Kirkegaard under his legal name William Engman. Kirkegaard was close to Richard Lynn, the late president of the Pioneer Fund. Both were integral to the publication of Mankind Quarterly, Pioneer’s pseudo-academic journal. Lynn used to be the publication’s editor-in-chief and until last year Kirkegaard was listed as the public registrant of the domain name for its website.
Although the Pioneer Fund’s resources have diminished in recent years, it still has assets of $277,873, according to its most recent filings. Matthew Frost explained to our reporter that HDF has “appropriated” the remaining funds. “It was left to Emil and now that becomes part of our organisation,” he said. “It’s good. It’ll pay a few wages for a couple of years.” Pioneer’s latest accounts have yet to reflect this change. Their most recent filings were submitted in May 2024 for the previous tax year. The only recipient of funds for 2023 was Edward Dutton, a British scientific racism YouTuber, who we can also reveal is on HDF’s payroll. Strangely, the charity still lists Richard Lynn as the president despite his death 10 months prior.

HDF has incorporated the Pioneer Fund’s old operations. In private conversations with our infiltrator, HDF leaders said “we have” Mankind Quarterly. On an internal slide deck prepared by the company, Mankind Quarterly was similarly listed as part of HDF’s operations.
Furthermore, Bryan Pesta, a former academic at Cleveland State University and a longtime recipient of Pioneer funding, has moved over to HDF. He appears in their Monday planning meetings alongside the other underground researchers.
Pioneer was known for disbursing grants to academics who sought evidence of meaningful biological differences between groups, and HDF continues this legacy. A recent research paper, published in the respected scientific journal PLOS ONE and co-authored by Mankind Quarterly contributor Russell T. Warne, acknowledged that it had been funded by a grant from HDF. His paper looked to undermine the idea that African Americans suffer from “stereotype threat”, a psychological theory that negative stereotypes internalised by minority groups can damage their cognitive performance.
Underground research
In an online presentation to our undercover reporter in October 2023, Matthew Frost claimed that HDF has two arms. Emil Kirkegaard runs the “underground research arm”, a continuation of Pioneer’s main activity. It is a group of academics and independent researchers that convene weekly for a video call to coordinate ideas and share access to genetic data sets.
The team aims to slip papers into academic journals with higher impact and circulation than their own publications. If unable to do so, HDF will publish the group’s papers in their print journal Mankind Quarterly or the OpenPsych website, which has been described as “a pseudoscience factory-farm”. Kirkegaard is associated with the management of both titles. During a research team meeting in November 2023, Kirkegaard told his researchers that an article on “international dysgenics” was unlikely to get accepted by a proper academic imprint unless their colleague Bryan Pesta, a former scholar at Cleveland State University, could “make the words soft and sweet”. HDF leaders discussed a “pipeline” whereby the underground research team would publish scientific racism articles that would then be promoted by HDF’s public operations like Aporia or Edward Dutton’s YouTube channel, “The Jolly Heretic”.

A diagram shown to our undercover reporter shows that the research team has approximately 10 members. The meeting our infiltrator attended had 11 writers from the UK, the US, and Europe, including Kirkegaard. At least one contributor (Meng Hu at the University of Hong Kong) was not present. Several of the team are known in the world of scientific racism, and had contributed to Aporia or had in the past been funded by Pioneer. Chief among them is Bryan Pesta, who between 2019 and 2022 received Pioneer money and was dismissed from his academic position at Cleveland State University in February 2022 for misusing genetic data in his research.
Davide Piffer is also part of the team. His 2013 paper on intelligence and race was cited by Payton Gendron, the terrorist who shot dead 10 Black people in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York in 2022. The gunman wrote in his manifesto that Black people have a “lesser IQ”, concluding: “We must remove blacks from our western civilizations.” In past research papers, Piffer was credited as a member of the psychology department at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, however a representative said he never completed his PhD and left after a year in undisclosed circumstances.
Members of the research team are sometimes successful in smuggling their articles into peer reviewed journals. Piffer co-wrote an article with Kirkegaard focused on IQ for the journal Twin Research and Human Genetics, published by Cambridge University Press, in March 2024.
From Pioneer to policy
HDF’s other arm is its public facing operation, led by Matthew Frost and Erik Ahrens. This is where HDF differs most notably from its predecessor, the Pioneer Fund, which did not have an outlet targeting the general public. Frost told our undercover reporter in November 2023 that he planned to step back from the day-to-day editorial duties of running Aporia in order to focus on other HDF projects. In August 2024, he officially announced his resignation from Aporia’s masthead but said he would remain as an occasional writer and event host. He is still the administrator of Aporia’s Telegram chat.
While Frost did not found HDF, he joined the company early on. He told our reporter that he sold Aporia (which he founded as Ideas Sleep Furiously in 2021) to Emil Kirkegaard. At that point, the website already featured articles on race and IQ differences and was at one point highlighted as a featured publication by Substack.Substack platforms racism. Read more about how Substack lets far-right activists use their website.
For a period it ranked the top social science newsletter on the platform.
Ideas Sleep Furiously relaunched as Aporia in March 2023, pledging that it would “not cower beneath the god of political correctness”. Central to the website is the concept that fixed racial groups exist, and that there is a discernible hierarchy between them based on genetic factors. It also said it would promote conversations around “The Darwinian Revolution”, the idea that humanity is not a single race but has meaningful biological differences that should inform social policy. “The point,” explained Frost to our reporter, “would be to take what they’re doing and try to tie it a bit more, where possible, to policy.”
In further conversations, he described his excitement about a policy of so-called “remigration”— mass-deportations of European citizens of foreign descent to their country of origin, an extreme but increasingly popular far-right idea. “Imagine that this happened in the next 10, 15 years, what that would do for the West, for Europe,” Frost said. He told his colleague Erik Ahrens, who is active in the AfD, a party in which this policy is under consideration: “It’s your fucking duty to do this.”
At the time our undercover reporter first met Matthew Frost, Aporia shied away from antisemitism, conspiracism and vulgar expressions of racism. Instead, the publication adopted a strategy perfected by the scientific racism movement. It hid its racist ideas under layers of statistics and jargon to give the semblance of academic rigour — but were in fact misinterpretations, misrepresentations, and manipulations of science.
Frost explained to our undercover reporter in September 2023 that he would play “publication tricks”, such as his plan to host Jared Taylor to “give the fluent, well-thought-out version of his ideology”, but doing so in a debate-style format “so it doesn’t look too one-sided”. In recent months, however, Aporia has dropped its pretence of balance, as evidenced by the interview that eventually took place with Taylor in May 2024. Taylor’s interlocutor was Bo Winegard, Aporia’s new executive editor, who, on the website, has called upon his readers to “embrace” white identity politics and believes racial stereotypes are “reasonably accurate”.
Moving the Overton Window
Aporia aims to reach a wider audience than Mankind Quarterly, a scientific racism publication backed by Pioneer. Its website describes its goal to “move the Overton Window”, referring to the range of ideas deemed publicly acceptable. Aporia wants the Overton Window to include scientific racism.
The website’s masthead includes Bo Winegard, who in August 2024 officially assumed day-to-day duties from Matthew Frost. Winegard had been dismissed from his role as assistant professor of psychology at Marietta College in Georgia, US, amid a scientific racism scandal. His last paper, published in 2020, drew on Richard Lynn’s flawed IQ data and had to be retracted. The editor of the academic journal that published Winegard’s article concluded he had used unreliable data, adding that his failure to acknowledge critiques of Lynn’s work was “unfortunate”. Noah Carl, Aporia’s editor, was sacked from the University of Cambridge. Diana Fleischman, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, has a part-time role hosting Aporia’s podcast, and is the author of an article on the website headlined: “You’re probably a eugenicist.”
Aporia focuses on topics popular with far-right activists, such as migration, family and reproduction, LGBT+ rights, crime and societal decline but also wider social issues and current events. Its writers deride “wokeism” (essentially progressive ideals) and egalitarianism in many forms. However, Aporia’s arguments are almost exclusively made through a lens of biological determinism and genetics.




The publication is not merely an intellectual exercise; it also espouses brutal policy goals. In one article titled “How to solve demographic collapse”, the pseudonymous writer Arctotherium argues for ending “Affirmative Action for women” and banning “the thousands of organizations, scholarships, and programs that exist to promote women’s career success”, in addition to reversing the sexual revolution by ending no-fault divorce and “once again stigmatizing extramarital sex”.
Winegard himself enthusiastically promotes Donald Trump because of his opposition to “pernicious progressive ideology”. In an Aporia piece, Winegard writes: “Ban [critical race theory] in K-12. Stop funding state universities that teach divisive racial flapdoodle.” He concludes that “only the populist conservative movement is willing to do this”.
In another article advocating for white people to form their own racial consciousness, Winegard wrote:
“Without white identity, European culture, the unique manifestation of the European temperament, will decay and its fragments will either be absorbed into a vast, insipid cultural porridge or they will disappear.”
Holding progressive ideals such as support for LGBT+ rights and feminism is, by regular contributor Joseph Bronski, explained through “dysgenics”, or the accumulation of “genetic defects” in a population. He claims that decreases in western IQ is due to race-mixing and accounts for perceived social ills. According to Bronksi, dysgenics has made men pliable and submissive which, in turn, explains the rise in feminism.
Jared Taylor, the white nationalist agitator, appeared on the Aporia podcast in May 2024 to rail against interracial societies. “There is no possibility of blacks and whites living peacefully together,” he said. “And all the places in which you find blacks and whites living together, whether it’s in Great Britain, Canada, France, it’s a failure.” He added that Black people are less intelligent, are violently hostile towards white people, and cannot plan for the future, claiming: “Africans and Black Americans are less able to defer gratification.”
Supposed genetic differences are used to justify inequality in terms of class and gender as well. An article by the pseudonymous contributor Cremieux Recueil is titled “Elites are genetically different”. Another article headlined “Feminism Run Amok” by the Norwegian writer Eirik Garnås claims: “Women are still predisposed toward choosiness, pairbonding and monogamy, which are most suited to their biological needs.”
Aporia typically hides its most extreme views behind the paywall of podcasts or at the end of articles and long social media posts. In conversation with our undercover reporter, Matthew Frost said that he posted a long thread on X/Twitter highlighting the differences between the Israeli and Palestinian populations, at the end of which he wrote that the average Palestinian IQ is approximately 85, close to the borderline of mental disability. “I did that deliberately,” confessed Frost. He wanted his audience to understand that the reason accounting for Israeli-Palestinian differences was based in intelligence and genetics. “Palestinians are different,” he said. “They can’t be reasoned with, you can’t educate them.”
The Jolly Heretic
Aporia is not the only operation covertly run by HDF. The company has also secretly employed Edward Dutton, the scientific racism YouTuber who produces content as “The Jolly Heretic”. Dutton is one of the most successful British social media influencers to focus on eugenics, having amassed 110,000 subscribers on YouTube as of October 2024. Compared to Aporia — whose founder Matthew Frost is conscious about adopting too many controversial positions — Dutton is considerably more open with his racism. A former editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, he has also published a book, The Naked Classroom, which claims Black people “don’t do very well academically and don’t behave very well either”.
He writes:
“Adapted to the unstable ecology of Sub-Saharan Africa, where it is often necessary to suddenly act with lethal force and in which there is less pressure to form tightly-bonded groups as it is easier for schismatics to survive, blacks are lower than whites in Agreeableness and Conscientiousness and they are higher in Neuroticism; in negative feelings. This modal personality profile, together with lower average intelligence, explains the behaviour of certain black children that you might have witnessed at school.”
Dutton was fired from a position at the University of Oulu in Finland after plagiarising a student’s dissertation. He is now professor of evolutionary psychology at Asbiro University, a business school in Poland. Despite his failure as a mainstream academic, Dutton exploits what credentials he does have to gain legitimacy within the far right. Some of his papers list what appears to be a Durham University email address. On inspection, it appears to be an account given to undergraduate alumni.
While Dutton’s online profile suggests that he is independent, Matthew Frost told our undercover reporter that he is under HDF’s “control”. Dutton appears on organisational diagrams of HDF, and joined meetings with our undercover reporter in which fundraising was discussed.


Frost sent us subscriber data from the admin dashboard of The Jolly Heretic’s YouTube and Substack accounts. Dutton’s Substack had an annual revenue of $62,400 as of November 2023, all of which is funnelled into HDF. In exchange, HDF keeps Dutton on their payroll at approximately $40,000 per year and assists in boosting his production value. His video output now includes documentaries in which he travels to the US and Spain and records podcasts in a professional studio. Although he is no longer in full control of his own channel, Dutton told our undercover reporter in a video call in September 2023 that he was not particularly interested in its operations. “I personally find that it’s best for me to focus on what I’m apparently good at and not think about these things,” he said.
While Dutton has been brought into the fold as HDF’s star talent, behind his back, his managers seem to treat him with contempt. In October 2023, during a dinner with our undercover reporter, Matthew Frost said, referring to Dutton: “I don’t get excitement or gratitude or any sense of understanding about where he is and where we’re going to go.” He furthermore said Dutton required “micromanagement”, and was annoying to deal with because of his lack of interest in professionalising his channel. Frost explained: “It’s more frustrating because it’s passive. He’ll basically do what he’s told.”
The CEO of Adult Friend Finder
The identity of HDF’s mysterious funder is a tightly-guarded secret. In conversations with our undercover reporter, HDF’s leaders refused to be drawn into revealing the name, merely disclosing that he was an American tech tycoon with a history of funding similar far-right projects.
HOPE not hate faced an obstacle in November 2023 when Matthew Frost and Erik Ahrens revealed that they would be departing for Athens for the rest of the year in search of winter sun and cheap office space. In order to secure the name — the last, most important detail of HDF’s network — we travelled to Greece to meet with Frost and Ahrens. We hoped they would divulge their backer’s identity in the more casual setting of an in-person meeting than the structured, professional environment of a phone call. There, over dinner in an upmarket seafood restaurant in central Athens, our undercover reporter convinced Frost and Ahrens to reveal the source of their money: Andrew Conru.
Emil Kirkegaard, we were told, has been in contact with Conru for several years. Over multiple transactions, Conru gave HDF $1.3 million. The funding is in the form of an investment into Human Diversity Foundation LLC and has, according to Frost, given Conru a stake in the company of “between 10 and 15 percent”. It is a private investment and not a donation given through Conru’s personal foundation and therefore does not show up in public filings.
ConruAndrew ConruPhilanthropist and founder of Adult Friend Finder, a dating websiteMore about Conru has also funded Bryan Pesta, a former recipient of Pioneer money who is now part of HDF’s underground research team. In legal depositions that Pesta made as part of an investigation into his misuse of genetic data, he said: “There’s a guy who created the website Adult Friend Finders [sic], and he’s given us $50,000.” Conru founded the sex and dating website, Adult Friend Finder. The transcripts were made public through a legal challenge mounted by Pesta against Cleveland State University for unfair dismissal.

Conru has similarly given an undisclosed sum to Simon Webb to publish a 2021 book The Equalitarian Dogma: Why Ideology and not Science Dominates Debate on Ethnicity and Race in the Modern World, which references race scientists like Philippe Rushton.
According to Frost, it was the white nationalist Jared Taylor who brokered the introduction between Emil Kirkegaard and Andrew Conru. Taylor, we were told, has secretly received money from Conru for a number of years. Pioneer Fund filings indicate that Taylor’s organisation has received at least $212,000 between 1994 and 2008 (not adjusted for inflation). Frost explained that Conru developed a relationship with Kirkegaard which has made him “very comfortable” and has funded individuals involved in the organisation on an informal basis:
“Over the course of a few years, they [Kirkegaard and Conru] developed this relationship where he would fund things. When Emil and I first met, he wired ten grand to me - a camera, to do the Lynn documentary. When Bo Winegard lost his money, he wired ten grand to him.”
Frost also indicated that it was Conru who had a role in formalising the relationship with Kirkegaard, which ultimately turned into HDF: “Andrew realised at the tail end of last year [2022], this needed to be scaled up, systematised, and this was how the HDF was formed.” The funding has allowed HDF to grow and innovate beyond Pioneer’s original aspirations. The resources at HDF’s disposal are enormous. According to Kirkegaard, the company’s running costs, as of November 2023, are roughly $50,000 per month. HDF has at least four full-time staff members, six part-timers and multiple researchers, contributors and developers paid on an ad-hoc basis, plus production costs and extensive travelling. In 2023, Frost, often accompanied by Erik Ahrens, made at least 13 international visits, with five cities in the US, including Seattle, San Francisco, Austin, and New York on two different occasions.

In response to HOPE not hate’s findings, Conru, through his lawyer, told us that he cut ties with the Human Diversity Foundation and ordered a review of his philanthropic activities. “Mr Conru helped to fund the HDF project at the beginning,” said a statement. “It unfortunately now appears that it has deviated from its initial objective, and the motivation for his funding, which was to promote free and non-partisan academic research.” We had asked Conru whether he also privately funded Jared Taylor. The statement sent on his behalf did not deny it, merely that Conru was now investigating governance processes in his philanthropic activities.
Revenue streams
Scientific racism journals have always been fringe publications. Aporia, however, is different. Although its audience is relatively small (14,000 subscribers in October 2024), it has hundreds of supporters who pay £5 a month to read its stories and listen to its podcasts. An internal slide shared with our undercover reporter in November 2023 claimed Aporia’s annual revenue was $29,000. Considering the number of subscribers that Aporia currently has and assuming that the fee per subscriber remains the same, we estimate its annual revenue to now be $53,000.
The Jolly Heretic, which is controlled by Aporia, earned $62,400 in annual revenue in November 2023. Given its subsequent rate of growth, we now estimate this figure to $133,000. There are very few British far-right media companies approaching this level of profitability, if any.
Neo Byzantium: The far-right cult set up to drain its members' bank accountsHDF hopes to further grow its sources of income. It is creating a private club called Neo Byzantium,Neo Byzantium: The far-right cult set up to drain its members' bank accounts
which, if an internal company document is to be believed, will bring in $140,000 in revenue this year. Membership to the club will begin at £650 and rises to £5,000, according to an HDF presentation.
Elite aspirations
Matthew Frost wants Aporia to be read “by the elite, people aspiring to the elite, people who accidentally end up becoming the elite because they’re so crazy or entrepreneurial they make it big”.
He added:
“In three or four years’ time, this will be the destination for controversial social science. We would rather be read by a few billionaires than 10,000 normies. Judging by our email list, this is already happening: I can look down and see academics, entrepreneurs, journalists at the New York Times.”
Frost was not entirely blustering. In October 2023, the Conservative MP Neil O’Brien shared an Aporia article on his own Substack. Headlined “The West’s Fertility Crisis”, it was written by Russell T. Warne, an American author whose work has appeared in the pages of Mankind Quarterly. After O’Brien recommended that his online followers read the article, Matthew Frost texted our undercover reporter an image of a dark hand manipulating a marionette. O’Brien did not respond to a request for comment.
Before HDF was registered as a company, Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and early Facebook investor, met with some of its key figures. In 2019, he flew Emil Kirkegaard out for a one-hour meeting to discuss his work. He has also met with Noal Carl, Aporia’s editor.
Describing his meeting with Thiel, Kirkegaard said:
“I went over there. And after that, he was so happy with the meeting, he asked me to suggest a bunch of other people. So I suggested also Noah Carl, Nathan Cofnas. All these people have already gotten the Thiel treatment. And never got any money from Thiel, but certainly we know that he knows about some of the stuff now.”
Thiel did not answer a request for comment.
Among The Jolly Heretic’s paid subscribers are the billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and the GB News presenter Nick Dixon. According to Frost, Andreessen had a paid subscription to Dutton’s Substack of $500 per year.
Aporia has tried to appeal to what it considers “high-value” readers by hosting well-known commentators and authors on its podcast. Peter Hitchens, the Mail on Sunday columnist, Louise Perry, the reactionary feminist author, and Noam Chomsky, the linguistics professor, have all appeared on Aporia or its predecessor, Ideas Sleep Furiously. “We’re using these people to get legitimacy by association,” Frost said.
Frost added that he was using these high-profile guests as a “shield” to avoid scrutiny, giving the semblance of a respectable publication. In March 2023, he approached Adam Rutherford, the UCL geneticist, and offered him $1,000 for a regular column on Aporia. Rutherford, who has published extensively against scientific racism, criticising the likes of Kirkegaard and Dutton, rejected the offer.
Frost suggested that not all of his podcast guests were aware of Aporia’s true agenda. However, he has also hosted well-known eugenicists on its show. Jared Taylor was interviewed on the programme, as was Helmuth Nyborg, a scientific racist who lectured at the Scandza Forum in Tallinn.
Toby Young, The Spectator columnist and advocate of “progressive eugenics”, came on the Aporia podcast to complain that his views on genetics were unfairly considered contentious. “If you invoke genetic differences to explain any outcome discrepancy between groups, you’re in trouble,” he said. “Between racial groups, then you’re in suicide territory.”
In that same podcast, Young was asked for his most controversial opinion. “Expressing my belief that variations in outcomes between different humans are more than a little due to genetic variation,” he replied. “That core belief is certainly my most controversial belief, and variations of it attract controversy.” Young has enlisted Noah Carl, Aporia’s editor, to write for his website, the Daily Sceptic.
Matthew Goodwin, the radical right commentator, appeared on Aporia’s podcast in December 2023. Aporia’s website also recommends Goodwin’s Substack. In his Aporia interview, Goodwin discussed immigration and progressivism which is an issue where his views overlap with that of Aporia. During the interview he said “radical progressivism represents as much of a threat to our civilization as radical Islamism”.
A whites-only homeland
Erik Ahrens is a key figure within HDF, as well as one of the most extreme. In his early 30s, he is already a veteran of far-right activism in Europe, and is close to Martin Sellner, the identitarian activist. He advises politicians in the far-right German party, Alternative für Deutschland, on how to use social media, including the MEP Maximilian Krah, who, in a May 2024 newspaper interview, defended the Waffen-SS. Ahrens attended the now-infamous meeting of AfD officials at a castle in Potsdam in November 2023, where party officials discussed how to deport German citizens of foreign descent. He is personally connected to Emil Kirkegaard, and is in business with his girlfriend. Kirkegaard lives on a compound outside of Potsdam owned by an AfD supporter. Ahrens has also stayed there periodically.
In conversations with our undercover reporter, Ahrens described his plan for the future. He wants to create a homeland for “white, Christian people”. Ahrens believes they are under threat from immigration. “All of these people, all across the world, ideally across the white world, need to be connected,” he said. “This is for them. What we’re building is for them. Ideally you have a homeland like Germany, or probably eastern Germany, a state power, which looks out for them, like Israel looks out for the Jews. It’s not ideal, but it’s the only way to survive.”
Ahrens sees a big role for himself in this. “My vision is to one day run in Germany, in a Trump-like fashion,” he said. “It hasn’t been done for 100 years, to run a populist movement centred around a person. I was looking for who can be this, and I probably have to go into that role.”
He added:
“In order to do this, I need to build myself obviously, and need to be both financially and politically independent from a party… I want to be in a position where, when the German government inevitably goes after me — because they don’t want this to happen — I need to have an international network generating revenue in different countries, so when you take one leg you have five others to stand on, like a spider or octopus.”
Ahrens — who did not dispute any specific details of our reporting — takes inspiration from the Nazi SS, and wants to create a cadre of Neo Byzantium members who are trained in armed and unarmed combat. He is associated with the Active Clubs of Germany and Switzerland, and plans to leverage his connections to organise a training camp where recruits can be taught boxing and shooting. Ahrens, who said he was close to the Swiss far-right group Jünge Tat, described wanting to “brainwash” members by bringing them to combat training. “I am so dedicated I would die for this,” he added. “I will die for this, or I will live to be successful. It’s one of the two for me.”
Neo Byzantium, according to Ahrens, will be run using the cult management techniques of Scientology, which demands members isolate themselves from their friends and family. He told an undercover reporter that he wanted his members to feel “a little bit of paranoia”.
Ahrens is so committed to this plan that he broke up with his girlfriend of six years in order to devote more time to HDF. “I put a lot on the line, and I’m all in,” he told our undercover reporter. “It matters that we are all in to the degree that we say we want to spend the next year travelling from major city to major city, setting up these cells, while we are building the network.”
He told Frost to break up with his girlfriend too. “She’s being slowly phased out,” Frost said.
“All in,” Ahrens replied. “We live for the race now.”
The past, present, and future of scientific racism
If Wickliffe Draper, the original source of Pioneer’s endowment, were alive today he would recognise and perhaps admire a great deal about the Human Diversity Foundation. The single-minded obsession with genetics that pervades the HDF network is the same as it ever was. Richard Lynn, the Pioneer Fund director, once wrote that he wanted to “have a go at the rehabilitation of eugenics”, complaining that it lost popularity after WWII. Joseph Bronski, a member of HDF’s underground research team and Aporia contributor, has similarly written: “I think everyone has a moral obligation to improve the genome of the next generation.”
The difference between HDF and the Pioneer Fund lies principally in the modern organisation’s ambition, which has grown in both scope and cruelty. Having retreated into the shadows as a private company, its operations are hidden from scrutiny, and thriving in the dark. There, it is building a cult inspired by the Nazi SS, consolidating a clandestine influence network of far-right activists, and collaborating with an extremist political party whose leaders dream of enforcing “remigration”.
HDF’s operations are not confined to conspiratorial articles in crank publications. They have practical implications, and thanks to the deep pockets of Silicon Valley capital are reaching the ears of policymakers. We cannot allow the brutal science of eugenics to return, for people to be separated and ranked by malevolent agitators operating in bad faith.