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 US tech entrepreneur.

Undercover filming has revealed the existence of the organisation, 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 campaign Hope Not Hate began investigating after encountering the group’s English organiser, 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 $1m 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. Labelled 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 organiser 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 56m 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 radicalisation 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”.

‘Do you know the history of the SS?’

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 civilisation.

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 organisation 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.”

An adviser to the AfD’s lead candidate in this year’s European parliament elections, Ahrens, now operates outside its ranks. The party distanced itself from him after a series of controversies.

The Brandenburg state office for the protection of the constitution, part of the region’s interior ministry, has put Ahrens on its watchlist. In a statement to the Guardian’s reporting partners Der Spiegel and Paper Trail Media, the office’s director, Jörg Müller, described him as having made “anti-constitutional” statements. “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.”

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 modelled 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 centred 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”.

Legitimacy via association

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.

“We’d rather be read by a few billionaires than 10,000 new normies,” Frost said. “Judging by our email lists, this is already happening. I can look down, I can see academics, entrepreneurs, journalists … I can see very important people, and that’s what we want to grow further.”

The blog was sold to HDF early in its development, and was the key part of its media arm, Frost said.

Aporia presents its output as impartial exploration of controversial ideas. However, some of its content appears to have gradually become more nakedly political, with headlines such as “What is white identity?” and “America must have race realism”.

Frost described his goal as to influence wider society, saying he wanted to “become something bigger, become that policy, front-facing thinktank, and bleed into the traditional institutions”. Mainstream writers had been commissioned by Aporia for “legitimacy via association”.

Aporia’s reach is limited, but some of the ideas it publishes are gaining ground.

Trump, who has promised mass deportations should he win a second term as US president, told an interviewer last month: “We got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” In June Steve Sailer, credited with rebranding scientific racism as “human biodiversity”, was given a platform by the former Fox News journalist Tucker Carlson on his podcast.

The language of race science is filtering into UK politics. A candidate for Nigel Farage’s Reform party was disavowed this summer after he was discovered to have claimed: “By importing loads of sub-Saharan Africans plus Muslims that interbreed the IQ is in severe decline.”

In addition to Aporia, Frost claimed the group controlled output from a YouTuber called Edward Dutton, the keynote speaker at October’s Little Ship event, who has more than 100,000 subscribers to his channel.

Known for diatribes on “dysgenics”, a term for the supposed deterioration of genetic stock, Dutton’s recent videos include one titled: “You’re more related to a random white person than your half-African child.” In another, he toured Clacton-on-Sea wearing a cravat, describing it as “one of the most dysgenic towns in the UK”.

Dutton said he did not support eugenics and had never signed any contract with HDF. He suggested it was using his name to impress others.

Frost told the Guardian he did not hold far-right views. He announced his departure from Aporia in August. The newsletter continues to be published under a new editor.

‘Remigration’

The US National Institutes of Health describes scientific racism “an organised system of misusing science to promote false scientific beliefs in which dominant racial and ethnic groups are perceived as being superior”.

The ideology rests on the false belief that “races” are separate and distinct. “Racial purity is a fantasy concept,” said Dr Adam Rutherford, a lecturer in genetics at University College London. “It does not and has not and never will exist, but it is inherent to the scientific racism programme.”

Prof Alexander Gusev, a quantitative geneticist at Harvard University, said that “broadly speaking there is essentially no scientific evidence” for scientific racism’s core tenets.

The writer Angela Saini, author of a book on the return of race science, has described how it traces its roots to arguments originally used to defend colonialism and later Nazi eugenics, and today can often be deployed to “shore up” political views.

In multiple conversations, HDF’s organisers suggested their interests were also political. Frost appeared to express support for what he called “remigration”, which Ahrens had told him would be the AfD’s key policy should the party win power.

“Imagine: a new German state,” he said. “Imagine if they got this through. It wouldn’t be nice. It’s like you’re a bouncer in a nightclub. It’s your job. You didn’t invite these people in. You’ve just got to pay people to go home, whatever. Take two battleships to the coast of Morocco, and say you’re going to do this. We’re smarter than you, we’re bigger than you, you’re going to do this.”

AfD leaders have denied any plan for mass expulsions, which have been prohibited since the 1960s under protocol 4 of the European convention on human rights. The law requires courts to separately consider each individual case.

In the same conversation, which took place shortly after the start of the Israel-Gaza conflict, Frost said the Israeli political class “understand it instinctively, that the Palestinians are different. That they can’t be reasoned with. You can’t educate them. They have to be contained. They understand that. Likewise the Hamas leadership understand certain things about Ashkenazi Jews, whatever. Like we all do.”

Frost said he rejected any suggestion of extreme beliefs. “Unfortunately, in reality, it is sometimes necessary to engage with undesirable people to secure funding for essential scientific research intended to benefit humanity,” he said. “However, I am not politically aligned with any ‘far-right’ ideology, nor do I hold views that could reasonably be characterised as such.”

He said he was no longer affiliated with HDF and had parted ways with Ahrens in December 2023 after becoming aware “of our divergent political views”.

Underground research wing

HDF’s owner, Emil Kirkegaard, has made similar comments about “remigration”, saying of families settled for two or three generations: “I generally support policies that pay them to leave.”

Kirkegaard, who also appears to use the name William Engman, is an author of more than 40 papers published by Mankind Quarterly, a British race science journal established in the 1960s.

Originally from Denmark and now living in Germany, he heads what Frost described as an “underground research wing” for HDF consisting of about 10 hobby researchers and academics.

Ongoing HDF projects, discussed in a video call between the group last year that was led by Kirkegaard, included studies into “international dysgenics”, whether dating apps alter human breeding, whether people with progressive opinions are mentally ill or whether Wikipedia editors are too leftwing.

Kirkegaard responded by saying: “The HDF is not involved in politics. It’s not affiliated with any political party or group. If one must attribute some company values to the HDF, these are those of the Enlightenment: reason, science, open mindedness, and free speech.”

The principal benefactor

Andrew Conru founded his first internet business while studying mechanical engineering at Stanford. In 2007, he hit the jackpot, selling his dating website Adult FriendFinder to the pornography company Penthouse for $500m.

In recent years, the entrepreneur has turned his attention to giving away his money, declaring on his personal 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 wide and sometimes contrasting range of causes, including a Seattle dramatic society, a climate thinktank and a pet rehoming facility, as well as less progressive recipients: an anti-immigration group called the Center for Immigration Studies, and Turning Point USA, which runs a watchlist of university professors it claims advance leftist propaganda.

Conru’s contribution to HDF has only emerged thanks to the recordings. He is described as HDF’s principal benefactor, having invested $1.3m, exchanged for a 15% stake. “Andrew realised at the tail end of last year [2022] that this needed to be scaled up, systematised, and this was how the HDF was born,” Frost claimed during one filmed encounter.

Approached for comment, a spokesperson for Conru said in a statement 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 said Conru rejected racism and discrimination, and he was unaware of Ahrens’s 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.”