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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.
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’.
Revealed: Reform UK Matt Goodwin’s Academic Ties to Rebranded Nazi Eugenics Front
Reform’s Gorton and Denton candidate, who has said that genetics will expose the “inherent differences between groups” has links to multiple organisations tied to discredited racist pseudoscience
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.”