- Secret funding from a US millionaire backed a race science group
- Hope Not Hate exposed the group’s push for eugenics ideology
- Trump, AfD linked to “remigration” rhetoric, fueling far-right agendas
A multinational network of “race science” activists working to influence public debate with discredited theories about race and eugenics has received secret funding from a multimillionaire US computer entrepreneur.
Undercover filming has revealed the organization’s existence, founded two years ago as the Human Diversity Foundation. Its members have used podcasts, videos, an online magazine, and research papers to spread a “dangerous ideology” regarding the claimed genetic superiority of specific ethnicities.
The anti-racism charity Hope Not Hate launched an investigation after meeting the group’s English organizer, a former religious studies teacher, at a far-right conference.
According to the recordings, Andrew Conru, a Seattle businessman who earned money from dating services, paid HDF more than $1 million. Conru withdrew his support, claiming that the group had departed from its original purpose of “non-partisan academic research.
While it remains a fringe organization, HDF is part of a push to reintroduce so-called race science as an open issue of discussion. Mainstream academics refer to it as scientific racism, and it aims to demonstrate biological differences between races, such as more excellent average IQ or a propensity to commit crime. Its adherents argue that inequality between groups is mainly explained by genetics rather than extrinsic factors such as discrimination.
Dr Rebecca Sear, head of Brunel University’s Centre for Culture and Evolution, called it a “dangerous ideology” with political goals and real-world implications.
“Scientific racism has been used to argue against any policies that attempt to reduce inequalities between racial groups,” she told me. It was additionally put to use to “argue for more restrictive immigration policies, such as reducing immigration from supposedly ‘low IQ’ populations.”
In one conversation, HDF’s organizer was recorded discussing “remigration” – a euphemism for the mass removal of ethnic minorities – saying: “You’ve just got to pay people to go home.” The term has become a buzzword on the hard right, with Donald Trump using it in September to describe his policies in an X post that has been viewed 56 million times.
In Germany, demonstrators flocked to the streets in February after it was revealed that politicians had attended a seminar on “remigration” in Potsdam. Among the delegates was an activist named Erik Ahrens.
Already well-known in Germany, he has been labeled a “rightwing extremist” by authorities, who have assessed that he poses an “extremely high” risk, particularly to the radicalization of young people.
The research revealed that Ahrens spent months working with HDF members.
Ahrens was heard asking his audience to join a secret club dedicated to restoring the authority of “white society” at a sold-out concert in London last year. Later, he boasted of spending the next year “traveling around from major city to a major city, just setting up these cells.”
‘Do you understand the history of the SS?’
One evening in October, 90 paid ticket holders assembled at the Little Ship, a sailing clubhouse on the Thames, for a YouTuber’s lecture on the alleged genetic demise of Western civilization.
The first person to address the audience was a young man with short, light brown hair. “Hello, ladies and gentlemen,” Ahrens announced. I work as a consultant for the Alternative for Germany party.”
Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is Germany’s biggest far-right party, and support for its hardline migration policies is growing. After recounting recent polling successes, Ahrens turned to European higher education. “The universities used to be where society – where western European, where white society – used to produce elites capable of exerting power,” he told me.
“The organisation which I am working with is taking more concrete steps towards the establishment of such an elite,” he continued to argue. “We’re doing this partly through media outreach, partly through talking to people on the ground, and partly through networking, which is taking place more behind the scenes.”
Ahrens, who formerly advised the AfD’s top candidate in this year’s European Parliament elections, now works outside the party’s ranks. Following several controversies, the party distanced itself from him.
The Brandenburg state office for preserving the constitution, part of the region’s interior ministry, has placed Ahrens on its watch list. In a statement to the Guardian’s reporting partners Der Spiegel and Paper Trail Media, the office’s director, Jörg Müller, described him as making “anti-constitutional” remarks. “Due to his high reach in social networks and his considerable self-radicalisation, we estimate the danger he poses – especially with regard to young people – to be extremely high.”
Unbeknownst to Ahrens, his address on the Little Ship was being videotaped. A researcher for Hope Not Hate went undercover for more than a year, posing as a potential donor and secretly photographing a diverse group of activists and academics interested in race science and eugenics.
Matthew Frost attended the event as well. Frost, a former teacher at a London private school that costs £30,000 a year, was most recently the editor of Aporia, an online magazine and podcast. He publishes under the name Matthew Archer.
Frost and Ahrens were caught on camera proposing ideas for a “gentlemen’s club” in October and November last year, with members paying for networking and training sessions. While the concept appears to have been abandoned, Ahrens seemed to hint that recruits may be turned into an elite force similar to the Nazi party’s paramilitary wing, the SS. On his phone screen, he played a video of muscular men pounding one other in a field, supervised by a drill instructor. “This is what we want to build as well,” he indicated.
“Do you understand the history of the SS?” he asked. “They didn’t have IQ tests, but they did have certain outward features. But the premise remains the same: “You take the elite.”
Ahrens stated that he intended to run for political office himself. “My goal is to one day run in Germany in a Trump-like approach. It hasn’t been done in 100 years. To lead a populist movement centered on an individual.”
Toward the end of the event, Ahrens boasted about his dedication to his cause. “We’re all in. We live for the race now.
In answer to written questions, Ahrens stated that the men in the training video were engaged in “peaceful and legal activities” and that he had suggested “week-long retreats for character development and network formation among highly selected participants.” He stated that he could “just as well have referenced any other ‘ select inner circle’ with high entry requirements as a historical example” instead of the SS.
Legitimacy by affiliation
Frost started publishing on Substack in April 2022. Since his initial post, “The Smartest Nazi,” on IQ testing administered during the Nuremberg trials, his newsletter, Aporia, has become one of the platform’s most popular science publications, with over 14,000 subscribers and hundreds of posts and podcasts.
We’d rather be read by a few billionaires than 10,000 new normies,” Frost informed us. “Based on our email lists, this is already happening. “When I look down, I see academics, entrepreneurs, journalists, and important people, and that’s what we want to grow into.”
Frost stated that the blog was sold to HDF early in its development and was a crucial component of its media arm.
Aporia offers its work as an objective examination of challenging topics. However, some of its content appears to have increasingly become more overtly political, with titles like “What is white identity?” and “America needs race realism.”
Frost’s ambition was to influence a larger society. He wanted to “become something bigger, become that policy, front-facing thinktank, and bleed into the traditional institutions.” Aporia had commissioned mainstream writers for “legitimacy via association.”
Aporia has a limited reach, yet some of the concepts it promotes are gaining traction.
Trump, who has promised mass deportations if he wins a second term as US president, told an interviewer last month: “We have a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” In June, former Fox News journalist Tucker Carlson gave Steve Sailer, credited with rebranding scientific racism as “human biodiversity,” a platform on his podcast.
The rhetoric of racial science is infiltrating UK politics. A candidate for Nigel Farage’s Reform party was disavowed this summer after it was uncovered that he claimed: “By importing loads of sub-Saharan Africans plus Muslims that interbreed, the IQ is in severe decline.”
In addition to Aporia, Frost stated that the gang controlled the output of a YouTuber named Edward Dutton, who was the main speaker at October’s Little Ship event and had over 100,000 subscribers.
Dutton, known for his diatribes on “dysgenics,” a term for the supposed deterioration of genetic stock, has recently released a video titled “You’re more related to a random white person than your half-African child.” He toured Clacton-on-Sea wearing a cravat in another, describing it as “one of the most dysgenic towns in the UK.
Dutton stated that he did not advocate eugenics and had never signed a contract with HDF. He implied that he was exploiting his name to impress people.
Frost informed the Guardian that he did not have far-right ideas. He announced his departure from Aporia in August. The newsletter is still being issued under a new editor.
‘Remigration’
The US National Institutes of Health defines scientific racism as “an organized system of misusing science to promote false scientific beliefs in which dominant racial and ethnic groups are perceived as superior.
The philosophy is based on the mistaken belief that “races” are separate and distinct. “Racial purity is a fantasy concept,” stated Dr Adam Rutherford, a genetics lecturer at University College London. “It does not and has not and never will exist, but it is inherent to the scientific racism programme.”
Professor Alexander Gusev, a quantitative geneticist at Harvard University, stated that “broadly speaking, there is essentially no scientific evidence” for the core ideas of scientific racism.
Angela Saini, the author of a book on the revival of race science, has highlighted how it originated as arguments used to defend colonialism and, subsequently, Nazi eugenics and how it is now frequently employed to “shore up” political ideas.
In several talks, HDF organizers indicated that their interests were also political. Frost appeared to endorse what he dubbed “remigration,” which Ahrens had assured him would be the AfD’s main agenda if the party won power.
“Imagine: a new German state,” he suggested. “Imagine if they got this done. It would not be nice. It’s like you’re a bouncer at a nightclub. It’s your responsibility. You did not welcome these individuals in. You just need to pay people to go home, whatever. Take two battleships to the coast of Morocco and announce your intention to accomplish this. We are wiser than you, greater than you, and you will do this.”
AfD officials have rejected any plans for mass expulsions, which have been outlawed since the 1960s by Protocol 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The law mandates that courts analyze each case individually.
In the same conversation, which occurred shortly after the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza conflict, Frost stated that the Israeli political establishment “understands instinctively that the Palestinians are different.” They cannot be reasoned with, and you cannot educate them. They need to be contained. They realize this. Similarly, the Hamas leadership understands certain things about Ashkenazi Jews whatever. “Like we all do.”
Frost rejected any indication of extremist ideas. “Unfortunately, in reality, it is sometimes necessary to engage with undesirable people to secure funding for essential scientific research intended to benefit humanity,” he told me. However, I am neither politically aligned with any ‘far-right’ ideology nor hold views that could reasonably be characterized as such.”
He stated that he was no longer involved with HDF and had severed company with Ahrens in December 2023 after becoming aware of “our divergent political views.
Underground Research Wing
Emil Kirkegaard, the owner of HDF, has commented similarly about “remigration,” saying of families who have been there for two or three generations, “I generally support policies that pay them to leave.”
Kirkegaard, who also goes by the name William Engman, is the author of over 40 papers published by Mankind Quarterly, a British racial science journal founded in the 1960s.
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Originally from Denmark and currently based in Germany, he leads what Frost calls HDF’s “underground research wing,” consisting of roughly ten hobby researchers and academics.
Ongoing HDF initiatives, highlighted in a video call held by Kirkegaard last year, include research into “international dysgenics,” whether dating apps affect human breeding, whether progressives are mentally ill, and whether Wikipedia editors are too left-wing.
Kirkegaard said, “The HDF is not involved in politics.” It is not linked with any political party or organization. If specific company values must be assigned to the HDF, they are those of the Enlightenment: reason, science, open-mindedness, and free speech.”
The major beneficiary
Andrew Conru launched his first internet firm while studying mechanical engineering at Stanford. In 2007, he grabbed the jackpot by selling his dating website Adult FriendFinder to the pornography company Penthouse for $500 million.
In recent years, the entrepreneur has shifted his focus to giving away money, stating on his website: “My ultimate goal is not to accumulate wealth or accolades, but to leave a lasting, positive impact on the world.
His foundation has given millions to a diverse and sometimes opposing range of causes, including a Seattle dramatic society, a climate thinktank, and a pet rehoming facility, as well as less progressive recipients such as the Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigrant organization, and Turning Point USA, which maintains a watchlist of university professors it claims advance leftist propaganda.
Thanks to the recordings, Conru’s participation in HDF has only recently become known. He is identified as HDF’s primary beneficiary, having invested $1.3 million in exchange for a 15% interest. “Andrew realised at the end of last year [2022] that this needed to be scaled up and systematised, and that’s how the HDF was born,” Frost said in one filmed interaction.
When contacted for comment, a spokeswoman for Conru said in a statement that he had “helped to fund the HDF project at the beginning” but that it “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.”
They claimed Conru denounced racism and bigotry and was unaware of Ahrens’ involvement. In response to the information you’ve provided, he has cut ties with the Human Diversity Foundation, ceased his funding, and ordered an immediate review of governance processes across all of his philanthropic activities to ensure such a situation does not arise again.
