Reform’s Matt Goodwin Advises Conservative Peer Linked to Relaunched Nazi Race Science Platform

Reform UK’s candidate in the Gorton & Denton by-election has sat on the advisory panel of the Free Speech Union, which is chaired by Lord Toby Young, a Conservative peer who Byline Times can reveal is in a formal business partnership with the senior editor of Aporia Magazine – the front publication for a reconstituted Nazi eugenics foundation. 

Young, who has previously advocated what he described as “progressive eugenics”, has a history of sympathies with discredited race science. Since 2022, Young’s co-director at his publishing company Skeptics Ltd has been a contributor and senior editor at Aporia, whose owners are accused of trying to revive ‘scientific racism’. 

The magazine was founded by two far-right activists who received funding to rehabilitate and rebrand the Pioneer Fund, an American Nazi endowment established in 1937 with direct ties to German eugenicists working for Hitler’s regime.

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Toby Young and Race Science

Before founding the FSU, Young attended the London Conference on Intelligence, a gathering of white supremacists and eugenicists. Among its attendees was the late Richard Lynn – a self-described “scientific racist” and director of the Pioneer Fund.

“I am deeply pessimistic about the future of the European peoples because mass immigration of third world peoples will lead to these becoming majorities in the United States and westernmost Europe,” Lynn once said. He also called for “the killing off of the population of incompetent cultures,” arguing that “evolutionary progress means the extinction of the less competent.”

Young has distanced himself from the London Conference on Intelligence, saying: “Just because I sat at the back in a lecture room at UCL one afternoon, scribbling away in my reporter’s notepad, while some right-wing fruitcakes held forth about ‘dysgenics’ does not make me a Nazi.”

However, as Byline Times previously exposed, Young used a speech the same year at the International Society for Intelligence Research to defend the claim that women are underrepresented in STEM not due to structural barriers, but simply due to “greater variability in the cognitive abilities of men than women.” He complained that “social justice warriors” treat anyone “who believes that human differences are rooted in biology rather than socially constructed” as “the enemy.” 

In the same speech, Young defended the research of Pioneer Fund-backed white nationalist Linda Gottfredson, who has claimed that “blacks” are the most “aggressive, impulsive, dominant and sociable” group.

He went on to defend the work of American white nationalist Charles Murray in The Bell Curve as a “measured discussion of the evidence”, endorsing its central hypothesis that “a meritocratic society will eventually degenerate into a biological caste system”.

The central thesis of Murray’s The Bell Curve that black people are insolvably less intelligent than white people – widely regarded as the ‘Bible’ of scientific racism – drew heavily on Nazi-aligned Pioneer Fund-backed research. In the book, Murray praises Nazi collaborator Henry Laughlin – who campaigned to block Jewish refugees entering the US during the Holocaust –  as “a biologist who was especially concerned about keeping up the American level of intelligence by suitable immigration policies.”

In 2020 – the same year Toby Young founded the FSU – he interviewed Charles Murray in his capacity as London associate editor of Quillette, a magazine renowned for its focus on pushing ‘race science’ under the guise of studying ‘human biodiversity’. 

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The Young-Carl Business Partnership

Noah Carl, a senior editor at Aporia, was previously dismissed from a postdoctoral fellowship at Cambridge in 2019 after an internal investigation found his work was “poor scholarship” produced in collaboration with far-right extremists.

He did not return to mainstream academia. Instead, in 2021 he and Toby Young became co-directors of Skeptics Ltd, which publishes the Daily Sceptic blog. The blog started off publishing misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines, but has since extended into ‘science’ more broadly including climate science denial. 

By then, the Nazi-aligned Pioneer Fund had lost legitimacy, support and finances. In 2022, far-right activists Emil Kirkegaard and Matthew Frost founded the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF) to rebrand and relaunch it, spawning Aporia Magazine. A secret benefactor – later exposed as US technology investor Andrew Conru – provided HDF with £1.3 million.

Carl joined Aporia as a regular contributor that year. By 2023, HDF founders Kirkegaard and Frost had attended a notorious neo-Nazi gathering in Estonia known as the “Scandza Forum,” hosted by Scandinavian neo-Nazi Fróði Midjord and renamed “Guide to Kulchur” after a book by Nazi sympathiser and Holocaust supporter Ezra Pound. The following year, Noah Carl became senior editor at Aporia alongside Bo Winegard.

The result: a direct business link between the chair of the Free Speech Union and the senior editor of a Pioneer Fund front publication. Goodwin has sat on the FSU’s advisory council since 2020 – a year before Young formalised that business partnership with Carl.

Lord Young and the Free Speech Union did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did Matt Goodwin. But when Byline Times previously asked Goodwin about his FSU role given Young’s documented sympathies with discredited race science, he had replied simply: “I am delighted to be associated with the Free Speech Union.” 

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Platforming White Supremacists

Matt Goodwin has publicly endorsed the idea that genetic science will soon prove “inherent differences between groups” in a 2023 podcast with Konstantin Kisin, declaring that the claim there are no such differences “is just going to be completely unsustainable” and will “look utterly ridiculous” within a decade.

Later that year, he appeared as a guest on the Aporia podcast with Noah Carl, Toby Young’s business partner, in 2023. A few months on, Carl and his co-host Bo Winegard interviewed American white supremacist Jared Taylor – whose Pioneer Fund-backed American Renaissance platform has welcomed neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan – to argue there is “no possibility of blacks and whites living peacefully together.” The podcast was titled, ‘Race Realism and White Identity’.

By January 2025, Toby Young was nominated by Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch to join the House of Lords as Baron Young of Acton. Later that year, Aporia guest Jared Taylor came to the UK to deliver a keynote address at a conference hosted by the neo-Nazi Patriotic Alternative (PA), a staunchly antisemitic party officially labelled as a “cause for concern” under the UK’s updated definition of extremism. Taylor stood alongside PA leader Mark Collett – who has historically praised Hitler – to advocate for a “white homeland” while denouncing Western governments as “traitors” to their race. 

So by the time Young became a Conservative peer, he was in a formal business partnership with the senior editor of a publication founded to revive Nazi-era eugenics – one whose founders had attended a neo-Nazi gathering and whose podcast had hosted a white supremacist (who that same year would share a platform with a Hitler-admiring extremist leader officially labelled a cause for concern by the UK Government).

The Conservative Party did not reply to a request for comment.

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The Buckingham Network

The result is a chain of connections running from the leaders of both major right-wing parties to the frontline of the ‘race science’ movement. Badenoch elevated Toby Young to the Lords. Matt Goodwin has advised Young’s Free Speech Union since its founding. Young is in business with Noah Carl. And Carl is a senior editor at a publication created to rehabilitate Nazi-era eugenics.

Byline Times has previously exposed the “mission-aligned” network of the University of Buckinghma’s Centre for Heterodox Social Sciences, where Matt Goodwin is Visiting Professor, for including at least five organisations with documented ties to the race science movement – among them Aporia Magazine itself. The Free Speech Union is also part of that network.

“These accusations are desperate bordering on conspiratorial by a discredited outlet attempting to derail a democratic election”, said a spokesperson for Reform UK said. “It is standard for academics to hold fellowship positions at other institutions around the world.”

Goodwin’s candidacy has also been endorsed by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, known as ‘Tommy Robinson’, the far-right racist provocateur and convicted fraudster who helped incite the violent racist riots in Southport last summer.