Two years ago on this platform I called out Richard Dawkins for using his large social media presence to promote a book written by a white supremacist, which I supported with receipts so lengthy you’d think I’d bought a can of Coke at Walgreens. Because Dawkins is Atheist Pope, a lot of viewers rushed to defend him and accused me of seeing Nazis everywhere, even in scientific research. So today I want to talk a little bit about a new undercover investigation that found there are Nazis everywhere, especially in scientific research. And here’s the kicker: the Nazis are now paying YouTubers to convince you that there’s a scientific basis to their bigotry.
Hope not Hate is an anti-fascist organization in the UK that has been pushing back on various forms of extremism since 2004. Last year, they teamed up with the Guardian and Der Spiegel to send an activist undercover as a potential investor for an organization called the Human Diversity Foundation, a far-right organization formed with the goal of spreading race pseudoscience. Though it was officially established just two years ago, HDF is simply the rebranding of the Pioneer Fund, which, as I explained in that previous video, was established in 1937 as a tool to distribute Nazi propaganda films in the United States, and to fund and publish bogus scientific studies conducted by Nazis and Nazi sympathizers.
In case you think things have improved for the Pioneer Fund since they rebranded, the undercover recordings make it clear that they’re just as Nazi as ever. One of the three leaders of HDF, German white nationalist “influencer” Erik Ahrens, is caught on tape admitting that he was trying to form a network of “elites” that he positively likened to the Schutzstaffel.
When reporters reached out to Ahrens to let him know they heard his remarks, he defended himself by saying he could have chosen any “select inner circle” as an example, like a Lion’s Club. Sure, we’ve all been there, giving prepared remarks at a secret dinner where we’re describing our vision of an elite group of men and we struggle to think of an example and the first thing that comes to mind is Hitler’s paramilitary wing that oversaw the genocide of the Jewish people. Let he who is without sin, etc. It’s like trying to come up with an example of a breakfast food and saying “I don’t know, whatever Hitler liked to eat.” Very understandable.
Though as the German press reported, at the event where he was secretly recorded telling the undercover activist that his elite group would be like the SS, “his business partner tried to follow up: “It’s actually like an identitarian Antifa?” Ahrens corrected him: “It’s not Antifa, it’s fa”, i.e. not anti-fascist, but fascist.” So hm I guess that’s about as clear as it gets.
The undercover investigation also uncovered one of the major funders of this Nazi organization: American tech bro rich dude Andrew Conru, who made his millions by creating the dating site Adult Friend Finder and then selling it to the Penthouse porn empire. He gave HDF more than a million dollars, but when journalists reached out to ask him about it he claimed that the organization had “deviated from its original mission of “non-partisan academic research”.” Again, HDF is just a rebrand of the Pioneer Fund, which has spread Nazi ideology for the past 90 years. Sure, we’ve all been there, burdened by millions, maybe billions of dollars, that we give away willy nilly, and sure a million or so might accidentally fund Nazi propaganda! And another $50,000 might fund far-right dipshit Christopher Rufo. And yeah, lots of money might go to Charlie Kirk and other anti-immigration organizations but that just HAPPENS! I swear.
So who else is part of this “new but not new” Nazi project, Human Diversity Project? Well, Hope not Hate has published a long and very informative piece that looks at the scientists publishing the racist pseudoscience, and friends, this is the point in my research that my brain exploded. Because it turns out that I know one of the Nazis. I used to think of him as…well not a friend per se but a friendly acquaintance. And he’s a god damn Nazi now.
Waaaay back in the early 2000s, I got my start in this industry of being skeptical about things on an online forum known as the JREF forums. That’s the James Randi Educational Foundation, with Randi being the guy who offered a million dollar prize to anyone who could prove they have paranormal powers. His forum was a welcome space for skeptics and atheists to hang out and chat, and that’s where I met Bryan Pesta, a psychologist working at a university in Ohio who loved really crass dick jokes. Like, here’s one example from the sister forum of the JREF in which he describes his ideal method of bleaching his anus. That was par for the course for Bryan but whatever, it was the early cringe shock days of the internet. I became friends with his wife, who appeared in the first Skepchick calendar back when we did those. It looks like they’re now divorced so I won’t mention her name or show her photo and just wish her the very best.
But Pesta got up to quite a bit in the years since we used to banter. For years now he has been accepting money from the Pioneer Fund to publish racist papers in places like Mankind Quarterly, exploring such topics as “Does IQ Cause Race Differences in Well-being?” and “Does Cognitive Ability Mediate Black-White Income Disparities in the USA?” Spoiler alert he thinks the answer to both of those is “yes.”
He co-authors often with Emil Kirkegaard, the Danish white supremacist who “founded” HDP by being gifted the Pioneer Fund’s holdings and who, in addition for calling for a white ethnostate, also thinks child pornography should be legal and that the age of consent should be lowered to 13 or earlier if puberty starts. Fun fact: Kirkegaard is apparently deeply in debt because he tried to sue someone for calling him a pedophile and had to drop the case and pay all the legal fees because yeah man that’s the kind of shit pedophiles say. He legally changed his name, which might be to get out of paying those fees or maybe to hide that he’s a big old Nazi just like how the Pioneer Fund became the Human Diversity Foundation. Who knows?
Anyway, back to Pesta. He actually was a psychologist at a university in Ohio back when I knew him, which always seemed funny to me because he obviously and a pile of festering mouse testicles for a brain. But he’s not anymore: in 2022, Pesta was fired from Cleveland State University and stripped of his tenure for “serious violations of our policies governing academic research,” and further he was “also found by the National Institutes of Health to have misused its data and was banned from its use for three years in what CSU alleged was the “most serious and longest such ban in NIH history.” Pesta used that data in a controversial research report that suggested Black people are genetically predisposed to be less intelligent than white people, part of a larger body of scholarship Pesta had authored on the topic of genetics, race and inheritance that, as the Chronicle of Higher Education reports, flew under the radar until recently.”
Hilariously, Pesta filed a lawsuit against the university claiming they violated his freedom of speech, and asked they give him a bunch of money and also admit that his racist ideas have merit. The judge ruled against him, writing “Pesta’s theory is not supported by the facts. The evidence submitted to the Court overwhelmingly supports Defendants’ version of the events.” Shout out to Rational Wiki for finding that, and for having an entire page on Pesta.
Man, those bigots just have the worst time in courts of law. Shame.
Since his sacking and his embarrassing loss in court, Pesta has moved over to be a full-time racist for HDP, appearing here in the organization’s Monday morning planning sessions, which is how I confirmed it was the same Bryan Pesta I used to know. In one team meeting, Kierkegaard suggests that they won’t be able to get one racist paper published unless Pesta softens up the language. Once it was published, they discussed how they’d promote it through their various channels, which include the YouTube channel “The Jolly Heretic,” which posts vaguely atheist and skeptic-type content. The “heretic” in question is a white supremacist named Edward Dutton who is also on HDP’s payroll, and in only a few years he’s managed to get more than 100,000 subscribers to uncritically accept his promotion of scientific racism, plus a Substack that brought in $62,400 last year.
In a hilarious aside, HDP higher-up Matthew Frost told Hope not Hate’s undercover operative that Dutton is annoying and requires micromanagement to get anything done, but at least he’ll do whatever they tell him to do. God, I almost feel bad for Dutton. Imagine that it’s revealed that you’ve been accepting money from Nazis to spread their misinformation and then also finding out that they think you’re an annoying idiot. Wait, I don’t feel bad for him. What a stupid piece of racist shit.
So yeah, I started reading about this investigation expecting to learn uncomfortable facts about how far into scientific circles Nazis have infiltrated, but I had no idea that it was going to end where I started: confronting the Skeptic/New Atheist-to-Nazi-apologist pipeline. Pesta, Dawkins, Michael Shermer, Sam Harris, so many people, so many white men who I used to rub elbows with now seem to be in the business of spreading white supremacist talking points, “whitewashing” them, so to speak, in scientific lingo in the hope that the masses will take them seriously. Just as many people were doing 100 years ago.
So the next time you hear a science communicator sharing the completely debunked idea that, say, certain ethnic groups are less intelligent than white people, take a moment to wonder who’s paying their bills
And on a positive note, this is all a huge win for investigative journalism: this sting convinced that billionaire to stop funding these Nazis, at least for now. The reveal that the Russian government was funding rightwing Americans has apparently now led to Tim Pool shutting down his white supremacist propaganda show. If we go after the money, we win.
As for me, you don’t have to worry. I remain funded entirely by my patrons and viewers like you who watch, like, share and subscribe! In fact, let’s go ahead and cut to a video of my dog Indy, so named for my favorite Nazi-puncher(‘s dog), and check out the names of some of my top patrons!
I’m going to start doing a special once-a-month end-of-video voiceover where I shout out my producer-tier patrons as a little thank you! October’s patron pals are Alex Forkosh, Cordwainer Jones, Eric Sawinda, Goldi, Johnny Wallflower, Keith Bostic, Kristina Foss,
Luke Swanson, Michael Cassidy, Michael Seydel, Mike, Mike Quinton, Ric Klein, Samuel Howard, Sean Alt, and Vizzini! Thanks!
