By now you have probably seen that the Guardian and their friends at Hope not Hate ran a successful infiltration of our company, the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF). In general, their pieces are pretty lame; you can read them for yourself. The TL;DR is that:
- In 2023, the spy Harry Shukman AKA Chris Morton, went to various ‘right wing’ conferences and meet-ups. In Tallinn, Estonia, he met Matt Archer, former editor-in-chief of Aporia Magazine (owned by HDF).
- Shukman posed as an investor who wanted to help out, so Archer invited him to a meet-up with Ed Dutton (The Jolly Heretic, also previously owned by HDF) somewhere in England. At this meeting, Matt brought Erik Ahrens, who also gave a speech.
- Later Matt and Erik went to Athens, Greece, and invited Shukman to come. Since Shukman said he wanted to invest or donate, and Erik and Matt wanted to build a non-woke gentleman’s club, this meetup was a kind of investor talk. Or so they thought. Shukman responded positively when they proposed “edgy” ideas, so they kept coming up with “edgier” ideas, and told Shukman some untrue things.
- At some point, Matt and Erik mentioned the research organization (the main wing of the HDF) to Shukman. He also expressed interest in funding that. So a call was set up between the three of them and myself. I presented the company structure and explained what additional funding could be used for. Afterwards on the same day, I invited Shukman to sit in on a weekly team meeting with my researchers. Nothing out of the ordinary.
- After this, Shukman broke off contact and there was some suspicion that he was a spy, but that was all. It turns out he was a spy and had recorded all of these meetings. These recordings form the basis of their reporting.
Why was the infiltration successful? Well, HDF is a very small company, and it seemed unlikely someone would do a spy operation like this. After all, we are just doing science and writing about interesting science. So it didn’t occur to anyone involved to ask for a non-disclosure agreement, or hire a PI to look into him. Some other people had already done some of this, and his Twitter account seemed normal enough.
Then at the end of September 2024, emails started coming in to various people that Channel 4 were doing a documentary about them, and the Guardian had some questions and so on. At this point, it was of course clear what had happened. The outcome of this is that HDF now has a Wikipedia page, which kind of distills their various claims. It is the usual combination of falsehoods and distortions that we have come to know (see my prior post on Wikipedia’s political bias via sentiment analysis). I don’t really expect these to get corrected, but in case they some how do, some of the false claims are as follows:
- “The Human Diversity Foundation (HDF) is a far-right organization”
- HDF is not a far right organization. It has in fact no political goals, aside from promoting enlightenment values of science, reason, free speech and the like.
- “promote “race science”, remigration and white nationalism.”
- HDF does promote race science, since this is an important and neglected area of research. HDF does not promote remigration or white nationalism (of course, individual employees may do so on their own accord if they wish).
- “HDF publishes the Aporia Magazine and Mankind Quarterly.”
- HDF does not publish Mankind Quarterly.
- “Emil Kirkegaard, a Danish far-right activist”
- I am not a political activist, or into far right politics, I am a scientist. My politics are broadly libertarian, everybody can read my actual beliefs here.
- “The other HDF leaders are Matthew Frost, a British former teacher and founder of the Aporia Magazine, and Erik Ahrens, a German white nationalist and social media advisor for the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).”
- Matt was head of the media wing until he resigned in August this year to pursue other projects, so I guess he can be considered a leader in some sense. Erik never worked for HDF.
- “Emil Kirkegaard leads an “underground research wing” of the HDF consisting of about 10 researchers. Members of the HDF research team include Bryan Pesta, Bo Winegard and Davide Piffer.”
- Bryan Pesta does not work for HDF; he was on the weekly meeting call because he wanted to be. He is doing science in his free time. Bo Winegard is not part of the research team; he is part of the media team.
- “In October 2024, journalists from The Guardian reported that Emil Kirkegaard and HDF had accessed UK Biobank data.”
- The HDF does not have access to the UKBB.
- “HDF plans to create a white-only ethnostate by forcibly expelling non-ethnically European minorities, a tactic they describe as “remigration”.”
- The HDF does not plan to do any such thing because it is mainly a research group. This is a truly preposterous accusation.
- “Kirkegaard has suggested that families that have settled for two or three generations should be paid to leave.”
- I don’t recall exactly what I said, but many countries run these kinds of policies. Even Sweden just announced one.
- “HDF operates the online magazine Aporia as a scientific racism outlet.”
- Aporia is not a “scientific racism” outlet. It covers many things. From the current front page: the effect of the Israel-Hamas war on militant numbers, a film review of Halloween, childhood interventions to reduce antisocial behavior, depictions of sex in popular media.
Judging from the Guardian’s tweets, their story was a bit of a dud. The Guardian’s account has about 11 million followers, but their tweets about this story only got: 100k, 38k, 30k views. In contrast, I posted a figure from a book I was reading yesterday, and it got 154k views. We can put this into numbers. Guardian’s 10.8M followers generated 100k views, or 0.009 views per follower. My tweet generated 4.782 per follower (32.2k), In other words, their tweet was about 530x less popular than mine taking followers into account. In fact, a tweet talking about Shukman’s possibly illegal passport got 1 million views.
A big deal is made out of the fact that our research is privately funded. Well, how else would it be funded? Privately funded science is necessary due to the extreme political bias at universities, which have basically shut down any research that doesn’t come with a pre-written conclusion along the lines of the current ideology. James Flynn famously wrote:
If universities have their way, the necessary research will never be done. They fund the most mundane research projects, but never seem to have funds to test for genetic differences between races. I tell US academics that I can only assume that they believe that racial IQ differences have a genetic component, and fear what they might find. They never admit that the politics of race affects their research priorities. It is always just far more important to establish whether squirrels enjoy The Magic Flute.
I am hopeful this story will help encourage other funders to donate to this worthy cause.
The real story here is that legacy media conspired with an activist organization to lie their way into a tiny research group doing research that publicly funded universities refuse to do, despite strong scientific and public interest in the topics. It’s a David vs. Goliath story. We are just a small team of around 15 people who are genuinely interested in science and the implications it may have. Their behavior was grossly immoral and contrary to the spirit of science.
