Report: ‘Race Science’ Network Secretly Funded by U.S. Tech Guru

LONDON (Guardian) -- An international network of “race science” activists seeking to influence public debate with discredited ideas on race and eugenics has been operating with secret funding from a multimillionaire U.S. tech entrepreneur.

Undercover filming has revealed the existence of the organization, formed two years ago as the Human Diversity Foundation. Its members have used podcasts, videos, an online magazine and research papers to seed “dangerous ideology” about the supposed genetic superiority of certain ethnic groups.
The anti-racism charity Hope Not Hate began investigating after encountering the group’s English organizer, a former religious studies teacher, at a far-right conference. Undercover footage was shared with the Guardian, which conducted further research alongside Hope Not Hate and reporting partners in Germany.
HDF received more than $1 million from Andrew Conru, a Seattle businessman who made his fortune from dating websites, the recordings reveal. After being approached by the Guardian, Conru pulled his support, saying the group appeared to have deviated from its original mission of “non-partisan academic research”.
While it remains a fringe outfit, HDF is part of a movement to rehabilitate so-called race science as a topic of open debate. Labeled scientific racism by mainstream academics, it seeks to prove biological differences between races such as higher average IQ or a tendency to commit crime. Its supporters claim inequality between groups is largely explained by genetics rather than external factors like discrimination.
Dr Rebecca Sear, the director of the Centre for Culture and Evolution at Brunel University, described it as a “dangerous ideology” with political aims and real-world consequences.
“Scientific racism has been used to argue against any policies that attempt to reduce inequalities between racial groups,” she said. It was also deployed 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 own policies in a post on X that has been viewed 56 million times.
In Germany, protesters took to the streets in February after it emerged politicians had attended a conference on “remigration” in Potsdam. Among the delegates was an activist called Erik Ahrens.
Already notorious in Germany, he has been designated a “rightwing extremist” by authorities, who have concluded he poses an “extremely high” danger, particularly in regard to the radicalization of young people.
This investigation reveals Ahrens spent months working with members of HDF.
At a sold-out event in London last year, Ahrens was recorded urging his audience to join a secret club dedicated to restoring the power of “white society”. Later, he boasted of spending the next year “travelling around from major city to major city, just setting up these cells”.
One evening last October, 90 paying ticket holders arrived at the Little Ship, a sailing clubhouse on the Thames, for a YouTuber’s lecture on the supposed genetic decline of western civilization.
First to address the room was a young man with a short crop of light brown hair. “Hello, ladies and gentlemen,” said Ahrens. “I work for the Alternative for Germany party as a consultant.”
Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is Germany’s leading far-right party, and support for its hardline policies on migration is surging. After reciting recent polling victories, 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 said.
“The organization which I am working with is taking more concrete steps towards the establishment of such an elite,” he went on to claim. “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.”
Unknown to Ahrens, his speech at the Little Ship was being recorded. A researcher for Hope Not Hate spent more than a year undercover posing as a would-be donor, covertly filming a wide circle of activists and academics with an interest in race science and eugenics.
Also present at the event was Matthew Frost. A former teacher at a £30,000-a-year private school in London, Frost was until recently editor of the online magazine and podcast Aporia. He publishes under the name Matthew Archer.
Between October and November last year, Frost and Ahrens were filmed pitching plans for what they called a “gentlemen’s club”, with members paying for networking and training courses. While the plan now appears to have been abandoned, Ahrens seemed to suggest that recruits could be transformed into an elite group modeled on the SS, the Nazi party’s paramilitary wing. On his phone screen, he pulled up a video of muscular men punching each other in a field, overseen by a drill instructor. “This is what we want to build as well,” he said.
“Do you know the history of the SS?” he asked. “They didn’t have IQ tests and stuff like that … they had, like, certain outward characteristics. But the principle is the same. You take the elite.”
Ahrens said he held ambitions to seek political office himself. “My vision is actually to one day run in Germany, in a Trump-like fashion. It hasn’t been done for 100 years. To run a populist movement centered around a person.”
Towards the end of the dinner, Ahrens boasted of his commitment to his cause. “It’s all in. We live for the race now.”
In response to written questions, Ahrens said the men in the training video were engaged in “peaceful and legal activities” and that he had been suggesting “week-long retreats for character development and network formation among highly selected participants”. Instead of the SS, he said he could “just as well have referenced any other ‘select inner circle’ with high entry requirements as a historical example”.
Frost began publishing on Substack in April 2022. Since his first post – titled “The Smartest Nazi”, about IQ tests administered at the Nuremberg trials – his newsletter, Aporia, has become one of the platform’s most popular science publications, with more than 14,000 subscribers and hundreds of posts and podcasts.