Revealed: Reform UK Matt Goodwin’s Academic Ties to Rebranded Nazi Eugenics Front

Matthew Goodwin, Reform UK’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election in Greater Manchester, holds a visiting professorship at a university centre whose network includes the front publication for a reconstituted Nazi eugenics foundation. Byline Times can reveal that Goodwin has actively defended, promoted and cited key figures within the network, which encompasses at least five organisations tied to discredited racist pseudoscience.

The University of Buckingham’s Centre for Heterodox Social Science (CHSS), where Goodwin took up a visiting professorship in early 2025, lists the organisations on its website under the heading “Our Network.” All are described as “mission-aligned.”

Among them is Aporia Magazine, exposed by a joint investigation by Hope Not Hate and The Guardian in 2024 – broadcast on Channel 4 News – as the publishing arm of the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF).

The HDF is a reconstituted version of the Pioneer Fund, a Nazi endowment established in 1937 in New York which distributed Nazi propaganda and cultivated ties to the Third Reich. For decades the Fund bankrolled research claiming to establish biological hierarchies between racial groups. Those claims have been comprehensively debunked by mainstream genetic science. Neither the Pioneer Fund nor its successor HDF have ever renounced these Nazi origins.

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Goodwin’s Own Words

In the run-up to becoming Reform’s first major parliamentary candidate, Goodwin has argued that people from Black, Asian and other immigrant backgrounds are not necessarily British. “It takes more than a piece of paper to make somebody ‘British’,” he said in November 2025.

In an interview in June 2025, he described “Englishness” as “an ethnicity that is deeply rooted in a people that can trace their roots back over generations.” The formulation excludes millions of British citizens.

He has claimed that women in Britain are having children “much too late” and called for a “negative child benefit tax” for those without children, alongside removing income tax for women with two or more. Universities are dominated by “childless women,” he argued, which contributes to “politically correct authoritarianism.”

Over the past decade Goodwin has shifted from liberal critic of the far-right to ‘anti-woke’ nationalist populist. Much commentary has speculated on what drove that transformation. Largely overlooked are his encounters with ‘race science.’

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Defending ‘Race Science’

In 2019, Noah Carl was dismissed from his research fellowship at the University of Cambridge. More than 500 academics had signed a letter warning that his work amounted to “ethically suspect and methodologically flawed” racist pseudoscience. The university’s own investigation concluded it was “poor scholarship” that “did not comply with established criteria for research ethics and integrity,” and found that Carl had collaborated with far-right extremists.

Carl had published in Mankind Quarterly, a white supremacist journal financed by the Nazi-aligned Pioneer Fund. One of its founding board members, Otmar von Verschuer, mentored Josef Mengele – the Nazi SS officer known as the ‘Angel of Death’ for his experiments at Auschwitz. 

Carl also attended the London Conference on Intelligence, a secretive eugenics gathering at UCL frequented by far-right extremists.

Goodwin disagreed, characterising Cambridge University’s decision as “mob rule… crushing free speech on campus” – rather than engaging with the substance of the concerns.

His long-time collaborator and co-author Eric Kaufmann went further, explicitly defending gene-oriented race-IQ research: “We won’t know whether race really is connected to intelligence until the gene-level relationships that define the two are mapped at some point in the future.” He, too, cast the dismissal as an assault on academic freedom.

Kaufmann’s depiction of this issue as an unresolved scientific question was wrong. A paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explaining the consensus among geneticists noted that genetic data “refute the notion of racial substructure for human populations.” The discrete biological races that race science depends on do not exist. The paper also showed that cultural transmission alone can mimic high heritability, collapsing the statistical foundations of the race-IQ thesis.

Noah Carl did not return to academia, but instead joined Pioneer Fund front publication Aporia as a regular contributor in 2022. The following year he graduated to become an Aporia senior editor. That year, Matt Goodwin appeared as a guest on the Aporia podcast to discuss immigration attitudes in Britain, without challenging the programme’s premises. Months earlier, he had told the Triggernometry podcast:

We’re on the cusp of developments with genetic coding and science that are going to be complete gamechangers in how we understand health, medicine, life-expectancy, all of that stuff. So the idea that there are not inherent differences between groups is just going to be completely unsustainable. I mean it already is if you look at the evidence. Over the next 5-10 years it’s just going to look utterly ridiculous as a lot of this research and evidence comes through.

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Citing the Godfather of Modern ‘Race Science‘

Goodwin has promoted the leading populariser of ‘race science,’ Charles Murray, at least three times in his public writing. He recommended Murray’s book Coming Apart in two Substack posts and in an UnHerd essay on national populism as early as 2019.

Murray is the co-author of the 1994 book The Bell Curve, which famously claims – citing research funded by the Nazi-aligned Pioneer Fund – that black people are less intelligent than white people, largely for genetic reasons, this explains social inequalities, and nothing can be done about it. The Southern Poverty Law Centre has designated Murray a “white nationalist” who uses “racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor.”

In Coming Apart, Murray applies the framework of The Bell Curve to white America, masking biological arguments through social proxies. Instead of IQ, Murray uses educational attainment as the sorting mechanism for modern class structure: intelligent people cluster together, marry each other and pass their advantages to their children, while everyone else falls behind. 

This means the “cognitive elite” are effectively concentrating high-IQ genes within a closed caste. Inequality is therefore not a result of structural forces or bad policies but of what in The Bell Curve Murray describes as “dysgenic pressures”. The decline of the lower class, he concludes, is due to a lack of ‘industriousness’ rooted in fixed, heritable traits.

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Matt Goodwin’s University of Buckingham Network

In February 2025, Matt Goodwin became Visiting Professor at the Centre for Heterdox Social Sciences (CHSS), directed by his co-author Professor Eric Kaufmann. Kaufmann appointed him, and also runs the university’s courses on “Cultural Politics” and “Woke: the Origins, Dynamics and Implications of an Elite Ideology,” in which Goodwin teaches.

The CHSS was founded to conduct “social science and humanities research which has been difficult, if not impossible to pursue within an academia which is increasingly setting narrow boundaries to the acceptable range of approaches and findings.”

The Centre’s website names a network of “mission-aligned” organisations under a section titled ‘Our Network’, explaining:

Our goal is to help connect those who wish to explore difficult topics, forming links and establishing relationships… the Centre seeks to also emerge as an institutional hub for a new trans-Atlantic or global network of scholars and institutions in the countercultural social sciences… Mission-aligned academics and research have been compiled into a one-stop resource to build this network.

Analysis by Byline Times has identified at least five with documented connections to the ‘race science’ movement. A spokesperson from the University of Buckingham said: “The University of Buckingham strongly supports free speech and academic freedom. Views expressed by our academics, honorary fellows and other individuals or organisations affiliated with the University, our research centres or our staff are their own, and do not represent the views of the University.”

The most alarming network member of the university’s CHSS is Aporia Magazine – the publishing arm of the Human Diversity Foundation, the rebranded Nazi-aligned Pioneer Fund. Aporia publishes on “intelligence, human biodiversity, evolutionary psychology” and related subjects, arguing that IQ gaps between ethnic groups are largely heritable, Western success is linked to evolutionary traits of European populations, and demographic decline among white populations threatens civilisation.

A second is the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI), which received $200,000 from the same US tech tycoon who gave more than a million to rebrand the Pioneer Fund as the HDF. CSPI’s founder Richard Hanania wrote an essay in 2024 promoting the statistically flawed research of the Pioneer Fund’s last president, Richard Lynn. Hanania agreed with Lynn “that the average man is smarter than over 60% of women” and concluded that “society should be completely indifferent to disparate outcomes between groups.”

A third is Quillette, an online magazine described as dedicated to “repackaging discredited race science.” Its articles have been regularly republished by the white supremacist American Renaissance. Contributors have argued that race is a straightforward biological concept and that “the White Death” – rising mortality among white Westerners – “sits on a throne of ethnic diversity.”

A fourth is the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, where Charles Murray spent nearly a decade as a senior fellow and where CHSS director Kaufmann currently holds the same title. For more than 20 years, the Manhattan Institute has championed the genes-race-IQ thesis of The Bell Curve, framing biological accounts of racial difference as unjustly suppressed.

A fifth is the Free Speech Union (FSU), chaired by self-styled ‘progressive eugenicist’ Lord Toby Young. Matt Goodwin has sat on the FSU’s advisory council since 2020. Another FSU advisory council member alongside Goodwin is the geneticist Robert Plomin, a key signatory to a Pioneer Fund-drafted statement defending the science behind The Bell Curve without repudiating its racist conclusions.

Professor Eric Kaufmann told Byline Times: “The network part of the site refer to those who may be sources of heterodox social science. I am not interested in race and intelligence, as you can see from our research. I list Aporia because they regularly summarise heterodox social science articles of interest, not because of their race and intelligence research. I defended Noah Carl from cancellation, as he was expressing his academic freedom in mounting a philosophical defence of those who did race and intelligence research, but did not do such research himself.”

Matt Goodwin’s history of promoting, defending and aligning with key individuals in this ‘race science’ network raises questions about Reform UK’s agenda for Britain given his role as the party’s first parliamentary candidate in 2026. Goodwin did not respond to request for comment.

“These accusations are desperate bordering on conspiratorial by a discredited outlet attempting to derail a democratic election”, a spokesperson for Reform UK said. “It is standard for academics to hold fellowship positions at other institutions around the world. As a respected academic known for his award winning research, Matt has given hundreds, if not thousands, of paid talks to organisations around the world including in the USA, Canada, Switzerland, Sweden, Japan and more. It should be noted Matt was also a Senior Fellow at the Royal Institute for International Affairs at Chatham House for a decade, where he undertook paid work, and he is currently a Senior Fellow at the University of Buckingham.”