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‘Woke’ and ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ (DEI) are both terms that have been portrayed as a threat to white people. What if the opposition to them has been manufactured to further the goals of a burgeoning white supremacist movement inspired by racist pseudoscience funded by Nazi sympathisers?
Following a plane crash in Washington DC on 29 January, Donald Trump said that the Federal Aviation Administration’s commitment to hiring people with disabilities was “one reason why our country was going to hell”. His Vice President, JD Vance, later said that the President “was being very explicit about the fact that DEI policies have led our air traffic controllers to be short-staffed”.
Meanwhile, programmes across the federal government have been shuttered, including the Department of Justice’s civil rights division – putting an end to the US Government’s enforcement of decades of anti-discrimination legislation. The Pentagon has also ordered all military services to purge all mentions that “promote diversity, equity and inclusion” from website postings, photos, news articles and videos.
A military ban on transgender people was just the start.
General CQ Brown, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff appointed by Trump himself in 2020 – and the second black general to serve in that role – was sacked in a broader shake-up of the Pentagon. The head of the US Navy, Admiral Lisa Fanchetti – the first woman to lead a military service – was also fired.
US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth questioned whether Brown was only hired due to his ‘race’, writing: “Was it because of his skin colour? Or his skill? We’ll never know, but always doubt.”
Both Brown and Fanchetti have far greater military experience than Hegseth – suggesting that his war on “that woke shit” – in his own words – is about keeping the US military as white and male as possible. He hinted as much when he criticised “all the ‘diversity’ recruiting messages” which “made certain kids – white kids – feel like they’re not wanted”.
Trump also fired three Judge Advocate Generals, the most senior lawyers across the US military, in order to replace them with loyalists – eliminating what Hegseth called legal “roadblocks” to sweeping deployment of military power.
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Trump’s replacement for Brown, John Daniel ‘Razin’ Caine, has far less military experience than him – but happens to be an advisor to Thrive Capital, a venture capital firm established by the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, Joshua, one of whose early investors was none other than Trump megadonor Peter Thiel.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by X, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, has pursued a similar approach of smashing DEI as a tool to dismantle US Government agencies and departments.
The Trump administration’s ‘war on woke’ is also reverberating well beyond the White House. Technology giants and major corporations – from Meta to Apple – have followed suit by ditching DEI programs.
Free speech and public health are both on the line. As one whistleblower observed in the British Medical Journal, the Trump administration is banning basic words from the entire US federal research system, hampering scientific research on minority communities: “The words that must not be used include ‘bias’, ‘biased’, ‘women’, or ‘female’, and it’s impossible to see how scientifically valid research can be conducted without these words.”
US Government health websites with critical resources on contraception, HIV, sexually transmitted infections, avian influenza, maternal morbidity, and mortality have disappeared – including the National Institutes of Health’s Office’s women’s health website on “supporting women in biomedical careers” and “women’s health funding opportunities”.
Other words banned from both federal documents and federally-funded research include: ‘advocacy’, ‘gender’, ‘diversity’, ‘inclusion’, ‘marginalised’, ‘underserved’, and ‘LGBTQ’.
An Influential Trio
This is not merely the culmination of years of ‘culture war’ campaigning by lobbying groups. As I explore in my book, Alt Reich: The Network War to Destroy the West From Within, the ‘war on woke’ has been shaped by an organisation harbouring direct ties to Nazi officials in Adolf Hitler’s regime.
This includes three of the American conservative movement’s most prominent critics of ‘diversity’: Peter Boghossian, Christopher Rufo, and Richard Hanania.
Their ideas have had a huge influence on the Republican Party. And all of them are part of a nexus of organisations tied to an obscure but powerful Nazi eugenics foundation established in the 1930s.
Documents dissected in Alt Reich reveal that Boghossian, Rufo, and Hanania have each been bankrolled by the top funder of this foundation.
The same donor has financed several other major right-wing culture war organisations, white supremacist groups, and Holocaust denial platforms, illustrating ideological alignment between this Nazi-inspired worldview and the new conservative ‘war on woke’.
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The Evolution of the Pioneer Fund
The foundation, originally known as the “Pioneer Fund”, was relaunched and rebranded in 2022 as the “Human Diversity Foundation” (HDF) by Danish eugenicist Emil Kirkegaard.
The identity of its new donor was revealed in an undercover investigation by the leading British anti-racism and anti-fascism advocacy group Hope Not Hate.
Established in 1937 by a pro-Nazi American textiles magnate, Wickliffe Draper, the Pioneer Fund had direct ties to Nazi eugenicists and senior officials in Hitler’s regime. It actively promoted Nazi ideology in the US by distributing Nazi propaganda films.
After the Second World War, the Pioneer Fund would go on to play a huge role in financing Nazi-inspired research at American universities by commissioning studies on scientific racism.
The scientific racism supported by the Pioneer Fund advocated the inaccurate belief that the inequalities we see in society are largely biologically-determined, rather than anything to do with politics, economics, or the rules and policies by which social institutions work. Rather than one human race, researchers backed by the Pioneer Fund claim that humanity can be divided into a genetic hierarchy of races leading to insurmountable group differences in intelligence and cognitive ability. White people are positioned at the top of this hierarchy, with black people at the bottom.
Such theories were supercharged in Nazi Germany, which sponsored large-scale research into eugenics – the pseudoscientific idea that the genetic quality of the human population can be improved through selective breeding mechanisms to weed out inferior races and privilege those with supposedly superior traits.
The Nazis pinpointed Jews as the most dangerous group. Following the Holocaust, when antisemitism was no longer socially acceptable, the Pioneer Fund’s activities focused more broadly on minority groups and black communities.
By the mid-20th Century, scientific racism was discredited within the scientific community as biologists and geneticists increasingly discovered that the majority of the traits studied in eugenics had little genetic basis. For instance, studies show that genetic differences make-up a negligible component of the black-white IQ gap, and that genes alone – without accounting for upbringing, education, nutrition, and broader socio-economic forces – are not a reliable predictor of intelligence.
But last year, Hope Not Hate revealed that a network of white supremacist activists was secre