Yet, far from being historical and ideological artefacts, the pernicious influence of race science and its abhorrent twin eugenics are now coursing through the veins of Alt Right and even mainstream conservative thought and have begun to influence policy making at least at its respectable margins. The inter-generational transmission belt of these ideas has been primarily the Pioneer Fund which survived the Second World War to provide intellectual ballast to the anticommunist right in the USA and UK and in the 21st century its successor in barely subterranean Silicon Valley financed race science movements which are tickling the fancy of today’s ethno-nationalist and racist fusiliers.
The most informative guides of the return of these dangerous ideologies are the work systems theorist and investigate journalist Dr Nafeez Ahmed [1]on the “Alt-Reich” and that of the journalist and Hope not Hate activist Harry Shukman[2] on his journey underground in the bowels of the British far right. Dr Ahmed describes how over the last century, a shadowy network of American, British and European extremists has strived determinedly guided by Nazi eugenics to form an insidious new fascism, masquerading under the battle-cry of ‘freedom’. He traces and explains the raison d’etre of this network, who is behind it, its modus operandi and its objective: to replace Western democracies with a global techno-authoritarian order that guards elite power in an age of multiple planetary crises.[3] In his secret journeys through the ecosystem of the British far right, Shukman meets a circle of Holocaust deniers, a race science organisation with a major Silicon Valley investor and right-wing think tanks that have the ears of Conservative policy makers.[4] Together, these authors provide not only a warning from history, but also one from the present and future.
Eugenicism: Its Breeding Grounds
The ideological and etymological origins of eugenicism lie in the musings of the 19th century polymath Francis Galton. While a student at Cambridge University in 1840, he wondered if the principles behind the breeding of cattle and horses could be applied to the breeding of humans. “Could not the race of men be similarly improved?” he wondered. “Could not the undesirables be got rid of and the desirables multiplied?”. Although it would be another forty-three years before Galton coined the term from the Greek or “good” and “born”; the sparks for the “science” of eugenics had been lit.[5]
Eugenics, according to the National Human Genome Research Institute, is ‘the scientifically inaccurate theory that humans can be improved through selective breeding of populations’. It is based on the assumption that human capabilities, including intelligence and social behaviours, are largely the outcome of genetic inheritance.[6] Discredited though it later became, it is worth acknowledging that approval of eugenics was shared by voices that are regarded as “progressive”. The Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb advocated screening out of “defective” stock as part of their programme for scientific socialism. The birth control pioneer Marie Stopes had a similar aversion to the reproduction of defective genetic stock.
The term “race suicide” to describe the differential birth rates of Anglo-Saxons and the newer migrants to the US from southern and eastern Europe, was adopted and popularised by Theodore Roosevelt who became US President in 1901 and a decade later founded the Progressive Party. Roosevelt believed that the elimination by whites of inferior races was a moral good for “the good of civilisation.”[7]
Eugenics was thus a science nurtured by, and helped nurture, the growing fears of racial degeneration and race suicide. “Man has the choice of two methods of race improvement “, the American lawyer and eugenicist Madison Grant wrote in his 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race, a foundational text of American racism. “He can breed from the best, or he can eliminate the waste”.[8]
The idea of certain human beings as “waste” had become a common refrain by the end of the 19th century. The elimination of human waste was looked upon by many as progressive an act as the creation of a sewage system, a means of replacing laissez faire policies with social planning. “The superficially sympathetic man flings a coin to the beggar”, the British social reformer Havelock Ellis wrote in 1916:
The most informative guides of the return of these dangerous ideologies are the work systems theorist and investigate journalist Dr Nafeez Ahmed [1]on the “Alt-Reich” and that of the journalist and Hope not Hate activist Harry Shukman[2] on his journey underground in the bowels of the British far right. Dr Ahmed describes how over the last century, a shadowy network of American, British and European extremists has strived determinedly guided by Nazi eugenics to form an insidious new fascism, masquerading under the battle-cry of ‘freedom’. He traces and explains the raison d’etre of this network, who is behind it, its modus operandi and its objective: to replace Western democracies with a global techno-authoritarian order that guards elite power in an age of multiple planetary crises.[3] In his secret journeys through the ecosystem of the British far right, Shukman meets a circle of Holocaust deniers, a race science organisation with a major Silicon Valley investor and right-wing think tanks that have the ears of Conservative policy makers.[4] Together, these authors provide not only a warning from history, but also one from the present and future.
Eugenicism: Its Breeding Grounds
The ideological and etymological origins of eugenicism lie in the musings of the 19th century polymath Francis Galton. While a student at Cambridge University in 1840, he wondered if the principles behind the breeding of cattle and horses could be applied to the breeding of humans. “Could not the race of men be similarly improved?” he wondered. “Could not the undesirables be got rid of and the desirables multiplied?”. Although it would be another forty-three years before Galton coined the term from the Greek or “good” and “born”; the sparks for the “science” of eugenics had been lit.[5]
Eugenics, according to the National Human Genome Research Institute, is ‘the scientifically inaccurate theory that humans can be improved through selective breeding of populations’. It is based on the assumption that human capabilities, including intelligence and social behaviours, are largely the outcome of genetic inheritance.[6] Discredited though it later became, it is worth acknowledging that approval of eugenics was shared by voices that are regarded as “progressive”. The Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb advocated screening out of “defective” stock as part of their programme for scientific socialism. The birth control pioneer Marie Stopes had a similar aversion to the reproduction of defective genetic stock.
The term “race suicide” to describe the differential birth rates of Anglo-Saxons and the newer migrants to the US from southern and eastern Europe, was adopted and popularised by Theodore Roosevelt who became US President in 1901 and a decade later founded the Progressive Party. Roosevelt believed that the elimination by whites of inferior races was a moral good for “the good of civilisation.”[7]
Eugenics was thus a science nurtured by, and helped nurture, the growing fears of racial degeneration and race suicide. “Man has the choice of two methods of race improvement “, the American lawyer and eugenicist Madison Grant wrote in his 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race, a foundational text of American racism. “He can breed from the best, or he can eliminate the waste”.[8]
The idea of certain human beings as “waste” had become a common refrain by the end of the 19th century. The elimination of human waste was looked upon by many as progressive an act as the creation of a sewage system, a means of replacing laissez faire policies with social planning. “The superficially sympathetic man flings a coin to the beggar”, the British social reformer Havelock Ellis wrote in 1916:
the more deeply sympathetic man builds an almshouse for him so that he need no longer beg; but perhaps the most radically sympathetic of all is the man arranges that the beggar shall not be born.”[9]
Another example of the hold that eugenic ideas had over the social progressives and reformers of the time.
A major player in the American eugenics scene was Harvard biologist Charles Davenport. He founded the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) in 1910 in New York. He also maintained connections with various Nazi institutions and publications, before and during the Second World War. Davenport’s underling at the ERO was Harry Hamilton Laughlin, whom he appointed as the organisation’s superintendent. In 1914, Laughlin published the Model Eugenical Sterilisation Law designed ‘to prevent the procreation of … degenerate persons … with inferior hereditary potentialities.' In 1920, the US Congress appointed Laughlin as its ‘expert eugenics agent’, in which capacity he testified on ‘dysgenesis’ – or patterns of bad heredity - afflicting immigrants in prisons. In response, Congress passed the Immigration Restriction Act in 1924 to block Jewish and Italian immigrants from entering the US. That year Laughlin also provided expert testimony leading to the US Supreme Court’s Buck v Bell decision endorsing compulsory sterilisation throughout the US of the ‘unfit’, including the ‘intellectually disabled … for the protection and health of the state’.[10]
Across the Atlantic, cross-pollination between American and German eugenics played a crucial role in the evolution of Nazi ideology as documented by American historian Edwin Black in his book War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race. In 1920, for instance, Laughlin corresponded with German eugenicist Erwin Baur, the lead author of Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene, a leading German text on the subject matter read by Adolf Hitler during his period of imprisonment in 1924. American and German eugenicists frequently collaborated in international organisations. The Germans borrowed much of their 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Defective Offspring from Laughlin’s model sterilisation law. In turn, leading American eugenicists took great inspiration from Nazi eugenics laws after 1933.[11]
The Pioneer Fund
The Holocaust and its evil precursor, the T4 euthanasia programme by which tens of thousands of learning disabled children and adults, mentally ill people and others of hereditary defective stock were gassed to death should have consigned eugenics and all its associated lethally refined quackery to the waste bin of history and for most of the post 1945 period it was not discussed in polite or respectable circles. But it never went away. It was incubated, kept under the radar and has remerged in an another period of ideological retrenchment – our current era of alt-right identitarianism with its constitutive war on woke and Enlightenment ideas.
The carrier of this fungus was another US pre-war eugenicist initiative – the Pioneer Fund. The Pioneer Fund was set up by New York textiles magnate Wickliffe Draper, an ardent eugenicist with links to Wilhelm Frick, the Reich Minister of the Interior who played a major role in the drafting of the Nuremberg Laws on race mixing designed to prevent the dilution of “the purity of German blood” from “Jewish degeneracy and also in the T4 programme. Draper established the Fund primarily to promote ‘race betterment’ through eugenics. He appointed Harry Laughlin as its President. Laughlin’s first assignment at the Pioneer Fund was to distribute two eugenicist Nazi propaganda films. That year, Draper secretly funded the publication of White America, a book by white supremacist Edward Sevier Cox. This book claimed that the ‘superior’ white race had been undermined by interbreeding with the ‘inferior’ race of the blacks. For Cox, the only solution to the problems arsing from the intermixing of races was the deportation of blacks to Africa.[12]
Despite the terminal blow which Nazi atrocities should have delivered to the twin conceptual evils of eugenicism and race science, the Pioneer Fund survived and indeed prospered after 1945 era due in no small measure to the exigencies of Cold War American anticommunism. Two initiatives, in particular, were germane to the rehabilitation of former Nazis to serve in the ideological and intelligence battles against Soviet influence. Under Operation Paperclip, more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, technicians and intelligence officers were recruited and brought to the United States. Despite their complicity in numerous Nazi war crimes, their expertise was crucial in the development of missile technology and the subsequent space race.[13]
The malign cultural impact of Operation Paperclip in the US is conveyed in the description of the segregation arrangements in the public schools in El Paso where the 144 children of Nazi scientists were educated by historian Joanna Perrillo in her book Educating the Enemy: Teaching Nazis and Mexicans in the Cold War. White children went to ‘American schools’, while Mexican Americans went to ‘Mexican’ schools. German children were sent to the American schools where they were taught about white Euro-American heroism in a way that erased Mexicans and Native Americans from history and whitewashed the acts of genocide by which the United States was settled.[14] In this way the beliefs in the superiority and inferiority of races and the accompanying pseudo-science undergirding them these children were undoubtedly exposed to in their family homes were reinforced and reproduced.
The second was the ‘Gehlen Organisation’ in which thousands of Gestapo, Wehrmacht and SS veterans were recruited by Reinhard Gehlen, one of a group of senior Wehrmacht generals who had established a secret ‘rat-line’ escape route out of Germany near the end of the war that led to South America and the Middle East with the intention of planting the seeds of a ‘Fourth Reich’ which would resume the war at some time in the future. Gehlen surrendered to the US Army in Bavaria on 22 May 1945, handing over valuable intelligence, including identifying OSS officers who were secretly members of the US Communist Party. He was then secretly flown to Washington DC where by 1946, now working for the Americans, he had recruited 350 former Nazi intelligence agents onto the US payroll. His organisation included such infamous Nazis as Alois Brummer, the ‘Butcher of Lyons’ Klaus Barbie and Adolf Eichmann’s chief deputy, SS major Emil Augsburg. Despite their knowledge of the Nazi war criminal background of their agents. US officials enabled this programme to set the stage for the US to tolerate multiple human rights abuses and regime changes and to be the recipients of misinformation about the nature of the Soviet threat until Gehlen’s retirement in 1968.[15]
A major player in the American eugenics scene was Harvard biologist Charles Davenport. He founded the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) in 1910 in New York. He also maintained connections with various Nazi institutions and publications, before and during the Second World War. Davenport’s underling at the ERO was Harry Hamilton Laughlin, whom he appointed as the organisation’s superintendent. In 1914, Laughlin published the Model Eugenical Sterilisation Law designed ‘to prevent the procreation of … degenerate persons … with inferior hereditary potentialities.' In 1920, the US Congress appointed Laughlin as its ‘expert eugenics agent’, in which capacity he testified on ‘dysgenesis’ – or patterns of bad heredity - afflicting immigrants in prisons. In response, Congress passed the Immigration Restriction Act in 1924 to block Jewish and Italian immigrants from entering the US. That year Laughlin also provided expert testimony leading to the US Supreme Court’s Buck v Bell decision endorsing compulsory sterilisation throughout the US of the ‘unfit’, including the ‘intellectually disabled … for the protection and health of the state’.[10]
Across the Atlantic, cross-pollination between American and German eugenics played a crucial role in the evolution of Nazi ideology as documented by American historian Edwin Black in his book War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race. In 1920, for instance, Laughlin corresponded with German eugenicist Erwin Baur, the lead author of Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene, a leading German text on the subject matter read by Adolf Hitler during his period of imprisonment in 1924. American and German eugenicists frequently collaborated in international organisations. The Germans borrowed much of their 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Defective Offspring from Laughlin’s model sterilisation law. In turn, leading American eugenicists took great inspiration from Nazi eugenics laws after 1933.[11]
The Pioneer Fund
The Holocaust and its evil precursor, the T4 euthanasia programme by which tens of thousands of learning disabled children and adults, mentally ill people and others of hereditary defective stock were gassed to death should have consigned eugenics and all its associated lethally refined quackery to the waste bin of history and for most of the post 1945 period it was not discussed in polite or respectable circles. But it never went away. It was incubated, kept under the radar and has remerged in an another period of ideological retrenchment – our current era of alt-right identitarianism with its constitutive war on woke and Enlightenment ideas.
The carrier of this fungus was another US pre-war eugenicist initiative – the Pioneer Fund. The Pioneer Fund was set up by New York textiles magnate Wickliffe Draper, an ardent eugenicist with links to Wilhelm Frick, the Reich Minister of the Interior who played a major role in the drafting of the Nuremberg Laws on race mixing designed to prevent the dilution of “the purity of German blood” from “Jewish degeneracy and also in the T4 programme. Draper established the Fund primarily to promote ‘race betterment’ through eugenics. He appointed Harry Laughlin as its President. Laughlin’s first assignment at the Pioneer Fund was to distribute two eugenicist Nazi propaganda films. That year, Draper secretly funded the publication of White America, a book by white supremacist Edward Sevier Cox. This book claimed that the ‘superior’ white race had been undermined by interbreeding with the ‘inferior’ race of the blacks. For Cox, the only solution to the problems arsing from the intermixing of races was the deportation of blacks to Africa.[12]
Despite the terminal blow which Nazi atrocities should have delivered to the twin conceptual evils of eugenicism and race science, the Pioneer Fund survived and indeed prospered after 1945 era due in no small measure to the exigencies of Cold War American anticommunism. Two initiatives, in particular, were germane to the rehabilitation of former Nazis to serve in the ideological and intelligence battles against Soviet influence. Under Operation Paperclip, more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, technicians and intelligence officers were recruited and brought to the United States. Despite their complicity in numerous Nazi war crimes, their expertise was crucial in the development of missile technology and the subsequent space race.[13]
The malign cultural impact of Operation Paperclip in the US is conveyed in the description of the segregation arrangements in the public schools in El Paso where the 144 children of Nazi scientists were educated by historian Joanna Perrillo in her book Educating the Enemy: Teaching Nazis and Mexicans in the Cold War. White children went to ‘American schools’, while Mexican Americans went to ‘Mexican’ schools. German children were sent to the American schools where they were taught about white Euro-American heroism in a way that erased Mexicans and Native Americans from history and whitewashed the acts of genocide by which the United States was settled.[14] In this way the beliefs in the superiority and inferiority of races and the accompanying pseudo-science undergirding them these children were undoubtedly exposed to in their family homes were reinforced and reproduced.
The second was the ‘Gehlen Organisation’ in which thousands of Gestapo, Wehrmacht and SS veterans were recruited by Reinhard Gehlen, one of a group of senior Wehrmacht generals who had established a secret ‘rat-line’ escape route out of Germany near the end of the war that led to South America and the Middle East with the intention of planting the seeds of a ‘Fourth Reich’ which would resume the war at some time in the future. Gehlen surrendered to the US Army in Bavaria on 22 May 1945, handing over valuable intelligence, including identifying OSS officers who were secretly members of the US Communist Party. He was then secretly flown to Washington DC where by 1946, now working for the Americans, he had recruited 350 former Nazi intelligence agents onto the US payroll. His organisation included such infamous Nazis as Alois Brummer, the ‘Butcher of Lyons’ Klaus Barbie and Adolf Eichmann’s chief deputy, SS major Emil Augsburg. Despite their knowledge of the Nazi war criminal background of their agents. US officials enabled this programme to set the stage for the US to tolerate multiple human rights abuses and regime changes and to be the recipients of misinformation about the nature of the Soviet threat until Gehlen’s retirement in 1968.[15]
This disgraceful, but hardly unique, episode in covert US foreign policy is just another facet of the ‘networked insurgency’ that Dr Ahmed has so diligently mapped out and which poses so much peril for liberal democracy in our era. And one facet of this insurgency has been the rehabilitation of race science and eugenics through the Pioneer Fund. In the US during the civil rights era, the Fund lobbied against desegregation of schools in the American Deep South. Pioneer leaders paid for legal cases aimed at reversing equality legislation. Their money funded committees to prevent the 1964 Civil Rights Act from passing, and created whites-only private schools in Mississippi to circumvent mixed-race state ones. Spending millions of dollars in this period, Pioneer was estimated to be the largest single backer of anti-civil rights agitation.[16]
Pioneer researchers claimed to be interested in the truth, but like anti-vaxxers and climate change deniers they were only ever interested in the simulacrum of scientific endeavour; the repetitive publication and citing of recycled data that they have generated. ‘Real scientific journals,’ writes William Tucker, a historian critical of the Pioneer Fund, ‘do not publish the same conclusions – indeed, sometimes substantially the same article – again and again.’[17]
Pioneer supported some of the most extreme far-right activists of the 20th century. In the 1970s, a British activist called Roger Pearson ran a Pioneer-backed journal, Mankind Quarterly which published articles claiming black people were ‘temperamentally unsuited for citizenship’. Pearson had earlier created an organisation called the Northern League (no connection to the Italian far right Legia Nord as far as I am aware!) and filled it with former Nazi SS officers. Pioneer personally gave him an estimated $2 million during his career to write and edit their journals. Although Pioneer largely operated at the fringes of academia, occasionally it did receive mainstream plaudits. In a letter exposed by Hope Not Hate’s predecessor organisation, the then US President Ronald Reagan in 1984 sent a herogram to Pearson praising him for ‘performing a valuable service’ citing another of Pearson’s publications, the Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, which throughout its existence had published race-science articles. Reagan expressed ‘hope that your efforts continue to receive broad interest and support and wish you every success in your future endeavours. An embarrassed White House did not deny the letter’s provenance, but merely requested Pearson not to use it to sell subscriptions to Mankind Quarterly.[18]
IQ Measurements: Racist not Intelligence Quotient
At the time of his death, Richard Lynn was President of the Pioneer Fund, late Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Ulster, a honour which was withdrawn in 2018. Lynn was a self-described scientific racist who advocated for a genetic relationship between race and intelligence. Among his legacies is the national IQ data set, first published in 2002. The average IQ in Europe, he claimed, is around 100. In sub-Saharan Africa, Lynn said it is 70. According to the British Psychological Society, this level of IQ would signal considerable retardation in intellectual functioning.[19]
Lynn’s research methodology is suspect, to say the least. Compiling IQ tests conducted by other researches, regardless of the poor quality of the data, Lynn determined average scores. For example, he declared the national IQ of Angola was 77 using a sample size of nineteen. Somalia’s score (67) was based on interviews with civil war refugees, average age thirteen, in a Kenyan refugee camp, a quarter of respondents went to school. Included in the Eritrean data set was a test of 72 severely traumatised war orphans aged four to seven. Lynn’s conclusion for Eritrea’s IQ : 69.[20]
One review of Lynn’s research found that he further ignored test results that showed high IQ scores, only citing studies that confirmed his prejudices. Academics who use his data risk retraction of their papers due to its notoriously pure quality. The conclusions Lynn arrived was:
not genocide, the killing off of the populations of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of the ‘phasing out’ of such peoples.
While he did not elaborate on what “phasing out” would actually mean, Lynn did say that ‘incompetent societies have to be allowed to go to the wall’.[21]
The Social Darwinism implicit in that last statement of his become more explicit as does the collective identity of its recipients in another part of the same article:
Similar sentiments expressed fifty years ago by right-wing Tory MP and intellectual, Keith Joseph, in the context of his “Cycle of Deprivation” speech were enough to derail his candidature to replace Edward Heath as Conservative Party leader. In today’s context of the growing appetite for nationalist pronatalism and anxieties about the proliferation of the feckless underclasses, would it be one step beyond for a rising political star on the right to borrow the vocabulary of Richard Lynn and Keith Joseph. The appearance of the ambitious and possible future Tory leader Robert Jenrick at anti-migrant rallies in the company of activists from the far right Homeland Party and his opposition to immigration from “backward cultures with medieval attitudes towards women” shows how far the shifting of the Overton Window can go on previously taboo subjects.
The New Pioneers
The Pioneer Fund, until the early 2010s, disbursed hundreds of thousands of dollars every year and as a charity its filings are open to the public. Harry Shukman in his examination of its accounts found that in 2001, a total of $314,247 was distributed, including $80,000 to a race scientist in England, $75,000 to the University of Texas at Austin, including $10,000 to Jared Taylor founder in 1994 of the white supremacist New Century Foundation and its now discontinued publication and website American Resistance. At its peak, it had assets of $6.5 million. [23]
Most researchers who have continued to pursue the Pioneer Fund’s paper trails have concluded that its activities have been steadily wound down. However it appears that reports of its demise have been greatly exaggerated. For key Pioneer Fund personnel are now ensconced in Project 2025, a programme for a radical conservative agenda for Donald Trump’s second terms with its laser focus on the “woke” threat from within. It seeks the total realignment of the US government under authoritarian control to endow Trump with unprecedented centralised power, including the capacity to deploy unchecked military power at hope against anyone who opposes him (e.g. the Democrat controlled states of California and Washington DC) and to weaponise the justice system against his critics; e.g. the recent FBI raid on the home of the former US National Security Adviser John Bolton, which has alarmed even Pro-Trump outlets such as Fox News.
The Social Darwinism implicit in that last statement of his become more explicit as does the collective identity of its recipients in another part of the same article:
We are too altruistic in our social welfare policies towards the poor. People are poor largely because they are incompetent and unintelligent. Such people should not be encouraged to breed. Conversely, we are too harsh to the rich. Progressive taxation, for example, is hard to justify. The rich are rich, broadly speaking, because they are intelligent and competent and we should encourage them to have more children.[22]
Similar sentiments expressed fifty years ago by right-wing Tory MP and intellectual, Keith Joseph, in the context of his “Cycle of Deprivation” speech were enough to derail his candidature to replace Edward Heath as Conservative Party leader. In today’s context of the growing appetite for nationalist pronatalism and anxieties about the proliferation of the feckless underclasses, would it be one step beyond for a rising political star on the right to borrow the vocabulary of Richard Lynn and Keith Joseph. The appearance of the ambitious and possible future Tory leader Robert Jenrick at anti-migrant rallies in the company of activists from the far right Homeland Party and his opposition to immigration from “backward cultures with medieval attitudes towards women” shows how far the shifting of the Overton Window can go on previously taboo subjects.
The New Pioneers
The Pioneer Fund, until the early 2010s, disbursed hundreds of thousands of dollars every year and as a charity its filings are open to the public. Harry Shukman in his examination of its accounts found that in 2001, a total of $314,247 was distributed, including $80,000 to a race scientist in England, $75,000 to the University of Texas at Austin, including $10,000 to Jared Taylor founder in 1994 of the white supremacist New Century Foundation and its now discontinued publication and website American Resistance. At its peak, it had assets of $6.5 million. [23]
Most researchers who have continued to pursue the Pioneer Fund’s paper trails have concluded that its activities have been steadily wound down. However it appears that reports of its demise have been greatly exaggerated. For key Pioneer Fund personnel are now ensconced in Project 2025, a programme for a radical conservative agenda for Donald Trump’s second terms with its laser focus on the “woke” threat from within. It seeks the total realignment of the US government under authoritarian control to endow Trump with unprecedented centralised power, including the capacity to deploy unchecked military power at hope against anyone who opposes him (e.g. the Democrat controlled states of California and Washington DC) and to weaponise the justice system against his critics; e.g. the recent FBI raid on the home of the former US National Security Adviser John Bolton, which has alarmed even Pro-Trump outlets such as Fox News.
The midwife to this threat to the very foundations of American democracy and democracy everywhere is Project 2025’s host organisation the Heritage Foundation and here is where the Pioneer Fund legacy enters. The Heritage Foundation has played an instrumental role throughout the post-war period in disseminating far right theories – core to and cultivated by Nazism - across the world. Its transatlantic ties and movement of funds and personnel means that the Heritage Foundation boasts vast soft power influence and ideological impact on conservative thought and values across the Western World. The Heritage Foundation is a key player in the Atlas Network founded by Sir Antony Fisher, whose Manhattan Institute and Institute of Economic Affairs have played pivotal roles in mainstreaming the scientific racist Charles Murray of Bell Curve fame in both the US and UK.[24]
Pioneer Fund grantee Roger Pearson was integrated into the Heritage Foundation by its co-founder and former president Ed Feulner. Through 2024, Feulner sat on the advisory council of the American Project – founded by Trump ally and 6 January insurrectionist Patrick Byrne and former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn – which funnelled millions of dollars to 2020 election deniers. Feulner has also taught on the faculty of the Atlas Network’s Think Tank MBA, a worldwide training programme for extreme free market think-tankers funded by the Bradley Foundation – which financed Charles Murray’s work on The Bell Curve (which began at the Manhattan Institute under the directorship of Feulner). The Atlas Network reaches 479 organisations in 92 countries which means that the mission and the ethical edifice has an active global reach.[25]
Operating underground as a potential financial sponsor to far right projects, Harry Shukman learns through his attendance on the conference circuit that the Pioneer Fund never went away. For it has rebranded, re-formed and gone into hiding as a private company; its projects more nimble now they have moved into the dark. He is introduced by a contact to an operation called Aporia, an online magazine that publishes stories about ‘HBD’. HBD stands for human biodiversity, the concept that races, sexes and socio-economic classes can be ranked by traits like intelligence. Advocates of HBD believe that differences between these groups are principally caused by genetic factors rather than environmental ones, the result of nature rather than nurture. Not surprisingly, HBD hits the G-spots of far-right activists as they believe it justifies their hatred of other races and desire to live apart from them.[26]
In his search for the identity of the Silicon Valley investor from whom his contact (Matt) believes he has secured thousands of dollars in funding, he notes that Matt begins to talk about ‘our organisation, rather than just Aporia. Matt then explains that another associate, the race scientist Emil Kirkegaard, is in charge of an LLC, a limited liability company, registered in the US, in a state with helpful privacy laws. Emil is not a geneticist by profession, having completed a bachelor’s degree in linguistic. Just like the purveyors of anti-vaccine, Covid denialist pseudo-science, very few of these race scientists have bona fide academic expertise or credentials in relevant subject areas like anthropology or psychology. An ethnonationalist, Emil advocates for eugenic policies and believes the biggest threat society faces is ‘demographics’. In order to disseminate his work, Emil create OpenPsych, a website that resembles an academic publication. One his interests is sexual difference between races: who has a bigger penis, who is more interested in breasts or buttocks, and whether a high sex drive is indicative of lower intelligence (white people with smaller penises and a lower sex drive being, apparently smarter).[27]
According to Emil their organisation has sixteen people and want to create a website in which users submit their DNA profiles from Ancestry.com or 23andMe and, in addition to taking an IQ test and providing information about their ethnicity, will be told what kind of diseases they might be likely to contract. Other researchers in the fold are Bryan Pesta, a former professor at Cleveland State University in Ohio and an Italian Davide Piffer who informs Shukman that he is collaborating with Emil Kirkegaard on a paper analysing genetic information from Neolithic samples to show Europeans had superior genes to Africans.[28]
References
[1] Nafeez Ahmed (2025) Alt Reich. The Network War to Destroy the West from Within. London: Byline Books.
[2] Harry Shukman (2025) Year of the Rat. Undercover in the British Far Right. London: Chatto & Windus.
[1] Nafeez Ahmed (2025) Alt Reich. The Network War to Destroy the West from Within. London: Byline Books.
[2] Harry Shukman (2025) Year of the Rat. Undercover in the British Far Right. London: Chatto & Windus.
[3] Ahmed (2025)
[4] Shukman (2025)
[5] Kenan Malik (2023) Not So Black and White. The History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics. London: Hurst & Company p.77
[6] Malik, p.16
[7] Malik, p.76
[8] Ibid, p.77
[9] Ibid, pp.77-78
[10] Ahmed, p.17
[11] Ibid, pp.17-18
[12] Ibid, p.20
[13] Ibid, p.22
[14] Ibid, p.22
[15] Ibid, pp.223-25
[16] Shukman. p.176
[17] Ibid p.177
[18] Ibid, pp.177-78
[19] Ibid, p.179
[20] Ibid, pp.179-80
[21] Ibid, p.180
[22] Ibid, pp.180-81
[23] Shukman, p.178
[24] Ahmed, p.366
[25] Ibid, pp.366-67
[26] Shukman, pp.168-69
[27] Ibid, pp.187-92
[28] Ibid, pp.194-95
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
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