<
https://skepchick.org/2024/10/nazis-are-funding-youtubers-to-spread-pseudoscience/>
"Two years ago on this platform I called out Richard Dawkins for using his
large social media presence to promote a book written by a white supremacist,
which I supported with receipts so lengthy you’d think I’d bought a can of Coke
at Walgreens. Because Dawkins is Atheist Pope, a lot of viewers rushed to
defend him and accused me of seeing Nazis everywhere, even in scientific
research. So today I want to talk a little bit about a new undercover
investigation that found there are Nazis everywhere, especially in scientific
research. And here’s the kicker: the Nazis are now paying YouTubers to convince
you that there’s a scientific basis to their bigotry.
Hope not Hate is an anti-fascist organization in the UK that has been pushing
back on various forms of extremism since 2004. Last year, they teamed up with
the
Guardian and
Der Spiegel to send an activist undercover as a potential
investor for an organization called the Human Diversity Foundation, a far-right
organization formed with the goal of spreading race pseudoscience. Though it
was officially established just two years ago, HDF is simply the rebranding of
the Pioneer Fund, which, as I explained in that previous video, was established
in 1937 as a tool to distribute Nazi propaganda films in the United States, and
to fund and publish bogus scientific studies conducted by Nazis and Nazi
sympathizers.
In case you think things have improved for the Pioneer Fund since they
rebranded, the undercover recordings make it clear that they’re just as Nazi as
ever. One of the three leaders of HDF, German white nationalist “influencer”
Erik Ahrens, is caught on tape admitting that he was trying to form a network
of “elites” that he positively likened to the Schutzstaffel.
When reporters reached out to Ahrens to let him know they heard his remarks, he
defended himself by saying he could have chosen any “select inner circle” as an
example, like a Lion’s Club. Sure, we’ve all been there, giving prepared
remarks at a secret dinner where we’re describing our vision of an elite group
of men and we struggle to think of an example and the first thing that comes to
mind is Hitler’s paramilitary wing that oversaw the genocide of the Jewish
people. Let he who is without sin, etc. It’s like trying to come up with an
example of a breakfast food and saying “I don’t know, whatever Hitler liked to
eat.” Very understandable."
Via Brad Koehn and Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
