Pioneer Fund

Um, I forget his name.

The guy who bankrolled the Pioneer Fund, which was not a neo-Nazi organization.

It was an OG Nazi organization.

Yeah, it was, uh-

He's a eugenicist who wrote a book about how black people don't have as high an IQ as white people and about how white people are basically intellectually and morally superior.

He wrote that while being funded by the Pioneer Fund, which is a eugenicist organization.

So...

Yeah, maybe it's pretty understandable why Charles Murray might want to cut back on social safety nets and just give the money straight to people's pockets in their earnings when he didn't think that certain people from certain demographic backgrounds were deserving of essentially anything.

Before I get into our article i do want to note that she is the author of two books Agora Toxica: Uncivil Society in The Internet Age which is about how anti-democratic actors use influence operations and digital platforms to mobilize and undermine democratic societies And La Terreur Masculiniste In Twenty twenty four an Investigation Into Masculinist Radical Milieus their Ideologies Networks and the Use Of Violence As A Political Strategy both are published by Editions du Détour I think unfortunately they're--I mean unless you speak French then it's very fortunate But They Are IN FRENCH obviously I'M GOING TO BE READING [laughs] Uh STEPHANIE'S ARTICLE IN ENGLISH AND HERE IT GOES THE HUNT FOR JASON ARDEY Race science is a pseudoscience that feeds far right propaganda long relegated to the margins It Is gaining traction in universities and seeks to establish its proponents as arbiters of knowledge.

The hunt that led to Jason Ardey’s death reveals how this machinery of epistemic domination operates—and who helps normalize it From day one everything pointed to the fact That jason arday the black neurodivergent Cambridge professor Who died in August of 2026 Was being subjected To racist and ableist harassment Exactly the kind of targeting he himself had described Ardey Had been marked as quarry Long before the fatal media pileon An open and immensely well funded race Science international network Enabled Its hunters to unleash the pack To give the pursuit scale reach and political unity But to break out of the margins of race science the chase had to become something else His extremist ideology needed to Be laundered into a story About scientific and journalistic integrity The media had ample evidence to challenge the frame imposed On them By the eugenicists Instead they adopted it Running with the hounds And in doing so legitimized Both the aims and Epistemic authority of race scientists Marking the Quarry The Hunt For Professor Jason Arde Began Quietly Three Years Earlier Couched At The Civilized Nodes OF A Scholarly Society A PROFESSOR WHO WAS MERELY ASKING QUESTIONS In May of 2023 Dave Harris a retired white academic and professor emeritus at Plymouth Marjon University began examining Ardey’s publications Ardey’s appointment as professor of sociology and education at Cambridge had made national news AT THIRTY SEVEN HE was the youngest Black professor in the university's history FROM THE MOMENT He arrived at CAMBRIDGE ArdEAY WAS TARGETED BY Freedom oF Information requests In tHE United States Christian nationalist organizations opposed to teaching and researching Drawing ON Critical race theory CRT WHICH EXAMINES AMONG OTHER THINGS HOW RACISM IS REPRODUCED THROUGH LAW AND INSTITUTIONS WERE already explicitly encouraging Their supporters to USE public records procedures to target academics and Then identify Or manufacture misconduct SUCH SMEAR campaigns ARE now part OF THE ACADEMIC FAR RIGHT'S repertoire AIMED PARTICULARLY AT researchers wHO examine power relations BUT ALSO AT those whose VERY presence Whose perceived identity appears to embody the gains of diversity equity and inclusion policies THe largely covert campaign against BLACK scholars also surfaced in TWENTY TWENTY THREE WHEN THE WORK O f Claudine Gay Harvard’s first Black president came under heightened scrutiny AGAINST A backdrop of misogynoir Christopher Rufo a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and former visiting Fellow at the Heritage Foundation BOTH CHRISTIAN NATIONALIST ORGANIZATIONS IS ONE OF THE principal architects of the American campaigns Against CRT and DEI He helped turn the plagiarism allegations against gay INTO A broader POLITICAL offensive AGAINSt minority representation in American institutions WHAT connects RUFO to what would later come for ARDAY is not only the method but Also the NETWORK Rufo has repeatedly promoted RACE SCIENCE FOCUSED online magazine Aporia And appeared on ITS podcast in TWENTY TWENTY THREE Research by the Anti Fascist organization Hope Not Hate identifies aporia as the Public Facing arm of the Human Diversity FOUNDATION OR HDF A Wyoming registered company created as the successor to the Pioneer Fund the American Eugenics Organization established in NINETEEN THIRTY SEVEN Bylined Times reports THAT RufO and hdf also shared a funder Tech entrepreneur Andrew Conru invested One point three MILLION DOLLARS IN HDF WHILE HIS foundation gave $TWENTY FIVE thousand DOllars to rufo's documentary foundATion in twenty twenty one Aporia Repeatedly provided a platform for Nathan Kaufman the race science researcher who Would Later propel the Allegations against RDay to a mass audience H df cofounder Emil Kierkegaard HAD met Peter Thiel in TWENTY NINETEEN According to Kirkegaard's own account thiel subsequently asked him to recommend other Researchers kirkegaArd NAMed KaufmaN AND Noah Carl APORIA'S EDITOR Both HAVE BEEN run OUT OF Cambridge foR THEIR MEDIOCRE WOrK AND OVERT racism THIS Network ALSO overlaps directly WITH Britain’s free speech union FSU founded b Y spectator Magazine associate Toby Young whO HAS HIMSELF advocated What he CALLED progressive Eugenics Aporia's NOAH CARL is the CODIRECTor oF skeptics LTD the publishing COMPANY controlled BY YOUNG while aporIA contributor Eric Kaufmann sits on the FSUs advisory councilThe funding of race science by christian Nationalist and extractive industry billionaires including surveillance capitalism serves a political functionAs historian of neoliberalism Quinn Slobodian shows in Hayek’s Bastards racialist theories and the obsession with IQ Make It possible to naturalize inequality Social hierarchies are no longer presented as the product of Power Relations but as the expression of supposedly objective biological differences that are hereditaryIn Largely secular Societies race science therefore provides chRiSTian nationalists With a substitute for the Authority religion No Longer commandsIt also Provides intelligence obsessed techno masculinitesWith a SCIentific veneerFor the Hierarchies THEY seekto uphold or even reinforceTHE DAY claudine GAy resignedas HARVARD PRESIDENT Ruffo announced AN initial ten Thousand dollar FUNDfor Plagiarism Huntingat Elite UNIVERSITIES Explicitl y tyingthe bountyHUNTTO his CampaignTo defeatwhathe calledracialistideology Plagiarism hunting reconfigures legitimacy.

Promoters of the junk science that is race science reposition themselves as arbiters of scientific integrity, from which position they can disqualify those who expose the cultural foundations of systems of power.

By June twenty twenty-four, Black academics were describing the climate in their universities as open season.

A few months after the book was published, the New York Review of Books ran an essay by Charles Lane called The Tainted Sources of the Bell Curve.

And Lane points out that if you look at the citations specifically for the book's claims about race and IQ, every single source has some kind of connection back to the Pioneer Fund, a private foundation established in 1937 to fund research on scientific racism.

This is not an accident.

When William H. Tucker, a psychology professor, was researching what would become his 2002 book about the Pioneer Fund and its founder, Wycliffe Draper, he started by listing out the names of every researcher he'd ever come across who was writing and publishing on the subject of racial differences in intelligence.

And then he took that list of names and he started searching out archives of those scientists' personal papers.

I traveled to each of these places, fully expecting that some trips would be a waste of time and research money because there wouldn't be any pioneer connection, he told Angela Saini for her 2019 book on the modern resurgence of race science.

One.

William Tucker looked into the background of every academic he could think of in his field writing on this topic.

Rufo has repeatedly promoted race-science-focused online magazine, Aporia, and appeared on its podcast in 2023.

Research by the anti-fascist organization Hope Not Hate identifies Emporia as the public-facing arm of the Human Diversity Foundation, or HDF, a Wyoming-registered company created as the successor to the Pioneer Fund, the American eugenics organization established in 1937.

Byline Times reports that Rufo and HDF also shared a funder.

Tech entrepreneur Andrew Conru invested $1.3 million in HDF, while his foundation gave $25,000 to Rufo's documentary foundation in 2021.

It was fantastic.

I'd heard about the return of the Pioneer Fund back when Hope Not Hate released their reports.

I'd never heard anything since, which I always thought was strange.

Did you watch the documentary that accompanied the reporting? It came out on BBC4.

That is a race science think tank founded as a vanity press by race scientist Richard Lynn.

The Ulster Institute for Social Research has, throughout its existence, received the majority of its funding from the Pioneer Fund, a private foundation that's been funding race science since it was founded in 1937.

And Lynn himself was the president of the Pioneer Fund from 2012 until his death.

Meaning Richard Lynn was the president of the world's leading funder of eugenics and race science research at the time he chose to publish a 600-page book by a recent college graduate.

Coincidentally, of the 22 peer-reviewed papers associated with Kofnes' name in a Google Scholar search, one 2018 paper lists Michael Woodley as a co-author.

And when they do, they cite each other's work back and forth, giving it the appearance of legitimate academic publishing.

For example, one of Kofnis' early journal articles appears in an academic journal called Personality and Individual Differences.

a publication whose editorial board included Pioneer Fund President Richard Lynn until 2019.