Trump’s War on ‘Woke’ and DEI: Incubated by a Nazi Eugenics Foundation

‘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.

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’.

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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 secretly rehabilitating the Pioneer Fund under the new Human Diversity Foundation brand identity.

The aim has been to normalise the Pioneer Fund’s Nazi-aligned scientific racism in the mainstream through the notion of open debate and ‘free’ inquiry. Scientific racism has been rebranded as the story of ‘human biodiversity’.

The key funder supporting this initiative was revealed to be American technology entrepreneur Andrew Conru, who donated $1.3 million to the HDF. Around the same time, Conru was also funding the most influential conservative voices attacking DEI and ‘critical race theory’ – Christopher Rufo, Peter Boghossian, and Richard Hanania.

HDF’s magazine, Aporia, was founded by British far-right activist Matthew Frost. Conru’s donation provided him with a 15% stake in the group. It has defended Richard Lynn’s pseudoscientific racism, published an interview with Nazi sympathiser Jared Taylor, and in 2024 claimed that racial stereotypes are “reasonably accurate”.

Hope Not Hate’s undercover reporting recorded far-right activists associated with the HDF calling for “remigration” – the ‘mass removal of ethnic minorities’.

Kirkegaard is the long-time editor of the Pioneer Fund-backed eugenics journal Mankind Quarterly, a founding board member of which was Nazi eugenicist Otmar von Verscheur – who taught and mentored Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi SS officer known as the ‘Angel of Death’ for performing medical experiments at Auschwitz.

In 2023, both Kirkegaard and Frost attended a notorious neo-Nazi gathering known as the “Scandza Forum” in Estonia, hosted by Scandinavian neo-Nazi Fróði Midjord. The conference was that year renamed ‘Guide to Kulchur’ after a book by Nazi sympathiser and Holocaust supporter Ezra Pound.

Kirkegaard inherited the assets of the Pioneer Fund from its former long-time president Richard Lynn before he died in July 2023.

Following the Hope Not Hate investigation, Andrew Conru stated that he had cut ties with the HDF and was conducting a review of his philanthropic activities. 

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Funding Connected Causes

The Pioneer Fund’s revival is not the only white supremacist outfit Conru has financed. 

US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) filings of the Conru Foundation reveal that, from 2020 to 2021, Conru donated $50,000 to the Centre for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration lobbying group which spent a decade distributing antisemitic and Holocaust denial literature. 

It was originally founded by American eugenicist John Tanton and seeded by his Federation for American Immigration Reform, which received $1.2 million from the Pioneer Fund in the 1980s and 1990s. 

In 2020, Conru donated $5,000 to the white nationalist blog, the Unz Review, published and edited by Holocaust denier Ronald Unz.

That year, Conru also provided $100,000 to Turning Point USA (a step up from the $25,000 he had provided the group in 2019). It is a far-right student organisation which enrols white supremacists and pro-Nazi activists and has campaigned against critical race theory being taught in universities.

According to HDF’s then director Matthew Frost, Conru was also privately funding Jared Taylor, founder of the American Renaissance website and conference which regularly hosts neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members.

American Renaissance was previously funded by the Pioneer Fund, and its late president Richard Lynn was a participant. Taylor had also attended the neo-Nazi Scandza Forum in 2023 with Kirkegaard and Frost.

Conru told the Seattle Times that he condemns “racism and extremist views” and is no longer funding any of these groups.

Public filings of the Conru Foundation show that Conru has also provided financial support to some of the most influential culture war voices in the conservative movement.

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Rufo

Christopher Rufo was recently profiled in The Times as America’s “most effective conservative” for paving the ideological ground for the second Trump term.

During his first administration, in late September 2020, Donald Trump issued an executive order banning the US Government and federal contracts from diversity training, including anything to do with critical race theory or racial sensitivity, to stop “efforts to indoctrinate government employees with divisive and harmful sex- and race-based ideologies”. 

Critical race theory is a body of legal and sociological analysis on the idea that ‘race’ is not a feature of biology related to physically distinct subgroups but a culturally invented category, largely used to oppress and exploit people of colour. 

Trump’s policies were significantly influenced by Rufo’s campaigning.

Early in September 2020, Rufo appeared on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight show and called for Trump to “immediately issue” an executive order “abolishing critical race theory trainings from the federal government”. 

Trump promptly followed suit. Within weeks, Rufo flew out to Washington DC to help fine-tune the wording of Trump’s order.

The following year, public filings show that Rufo’s film studio, the Documentary Foundation, received $25,000 in funding from Andrew Conru – who bankrolled the relaunch of the Pioneer Fund as the HDF.

In 2023, Rufo appeared in the HDF’s Aporia podcast in which he was interviewed about his views on critical race theory. He later promoted Aporia in an article and lists it as a recommended newsletters on his Substack, which reaches more than 100,000 subscribers.

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Boghossian

Peter Boghossian is best known as the former academic behind the ‘grievance studies’ affair, which aimed to expose how extreme left-wing ‘woke’ ideology is destroying academic standards in universities and classrooms. 

In 2018, with authors Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Boghossian secured the publication of a number of hoax papers advocating absurd ideas in academic journals in the humanities and social sciences.

Out of the 20 papers they drafted, only seven were accepted for publication. Critics pointed out that many of the journals secured were obscure outlets rather than credible high-impact journals defining the field. There was also no ‘control group’ comparing acceptance rates for equivalent hoax papers in other disciplines such as economics or STEM – and therefore no way of telling whether the hoax was about the field or reflected broader vulnerabilities in academic peer-review if researchers use deceptive data.

In a detailed analysis of the grievance studies affair, Dr Geoff Cole – a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Essex’s Centre for Brain Science – found that it was largely manufactured by clever PR: Boghossian and his co-authors had systematically exaggerated what their hoax papers actually said. Journalists covering the story had mostly not read the papers themselves but simply carried Boghossian and his co-authors’ misleading claims about what was published.

“All the exaggerations were due to the promise of huge publicity together with a pressure to publish their own account of the project”, Dr Cole concluded. “In sum, the standard account of the ‘grievance studies affair’ is incorrect and should be revised.”

Despite this, the affair became a lightning rod justifying the idea that universities have an institutionalised, political left-wing bias due to ‘woke’ ideologies such as critical race theory. 

Boghossian went on to set up the “National Progress Alliance” in 2021, which campaigns for ‘free speech’ on American campuses, claiming that colleges are becoming cults due to woke ideologies around race and gender. 

From 2022 to 2023, Boghossian received two grants totalling $600,000 from the Conru Foundation.

Boghossian is also a long-time collaborator of Stefan Molyneux, described by the American civil rights law firm, the Southern Poverty Law Centre, as a “white supremacist”. 

Best known for his ardent belief that “blacks are collectively less intelligent” than white people, Molyneux is a supporter of scientific racism and frequently refers to and platforms purveyors of discredited eugenics research originally backed by the Pioneer Fund.

He once described the context of the Holocaust in reference to Germans who were “in danger of being taken over by what they perceived as Jewish-led communism. And Jewish-led communism had wiped out tens of millions of white Christians in Russia, and they were afraid of the same thing. And there was this wild overreaction and all this kind of stuff”.

Boghossian has also written the foreword to one of Molyneux’s books.

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Hanania

Richard Hanania is a self-styled former repentant white supremacist who has had huge influence on Silicon Valley billionaires backing Donald Trump. He was also a contributor to the Heritage Foundation-backed “Project 2025”, which is currently being executed by the second Trump administration.

Before becoming a mainstream voice published in major newspapers and magazines, Hanania wrote under a pseudonym for white supremacist publications.

He supported eugenics, including the forced sterilisation of mostly black “low IQ” people, and opposed “race mixing”. He even cited William Luther Pierce, the neo-Nazi author of The Turner Diaries, to justify the idea that black people cannot govern themselves.

Only after being outed by a Huffington Post investigation in 2023 did he publicly renounce these writings.

Yet, as many observers have noted, he continues to make racist statements, which align with his pro-Nazi writings. Even in his essay renouncing these views, he defended the significance of “statistical differences between races”, commenting that his only “mistake” was to have assigned “collective guilt based on certain undeniable facts”.

“These people are animals, whether they’re harassing people in subways or walking around in suits”, Hanania wrote in 2023 after a homeless black man was killed on the New York City subway. To meaningfully solve crime, he also posted, “we need more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people”.

In 2021, Hanania’s organisation, the Centre for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, received $200,000 from the Conru Foundation.

This was the same year in which Conru had also funded Christopher Rufo, the Centre for Immigration Studies, and Turning Point USA. He had also provided $110,000 to the Claremont Institute, which has increasingly become a nerve centre for pro-Trump insurrectionist and election denialist conspiracy theories.

In 2023, Hanania published his popular book, The Origins of Woke, which was endorsed by PayPal co-founders and Trump megadonors David Sacks and Peter Thiel. 

“D.E.I. will never d-i-e from words alone”, reads Thiel’s endorsement of the book. “Hanania shows we need the sticks and stones of government violence to exorcise the diversity demon.”

Vivek Ramaswamy, another billionaire Trump donor who was previously co-director of DOGE alongside Elon Musk, also endorsed the book. Major Trump donor and tech investor Marc Andreessen is also an avid Hanania supporter, having appeared on his podcast at least three times.

Although he has written a number of articles distancing himself from “white nationalism”, Hanania has never disavowed scientific racism. 

Last January, for instance, he wrote an essay extolling the research of the Pioneer Fund’s last president, Richard Lynn, but overlooking the numerous scientific studies exposing Lynn’s cherry-picking of data for his ‘National IQ database’ showing white people as smarter than everyone else.

Hanania’s essay pointed out that many scientific racists believe that men and women share similar levels of intelligence, which Lynn opposed – a position Hanania agrees with: “So they in effect say sorry, but IQ is real and genetic, there are big racial differences, poor people are poor because they’re not as smart as rich people, and there are more male geniuses. But we can give you gender equality!… But if Lynn is correct on the four-point gap, it would indicate that the average man is smarter than over 60% of women, which is pretty important.”

He closed the piece by claiming that, due to the genetic drivers of these disparities, “society should be completely indifferent to disparate outcomes between groups”.

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Normalising Nazism

The ‘war on woke’ did not suddenly appear. It is an idea deeply rooted in a form of scientific racism that has been laundered into the mainstream over decades by the Pioneer Fund and right-wing activists connected with this group. 

This nexus of ties to Pioneer Fund entities and ideology throws new light on how the Trump administration’s attacks on DEI are the fruit of a broader white supremacist endeavour inspired by Nazi-aligned ideology.

It also suggests that the increasing normalisation of the Nazi salute by Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, and others is not an accident either – but a signal; one we would do well not to ignore.

Andrew Conru, Christopher Rufo, Peter Boghossian and Richard Hanania did not respond to requests for comment.

Dr Nafeez Ahmed is the author of ‘Alt Reich: The Network War to Destroy the West From Within’ published by Byline Books