This is the Guardian. Hobbins can bring you the most spectacular He's flying to the Sunderland Empire from the first... for your tickets! Tickets.com slash Sunderland. Hello, I'm Faye Carruthers, host of the Guardian Women's Football Weekly. Every week we bring you the very latest from the Women's Super League, the FA Cup, Champions League.
and leagues around the world. And as we get ready for the all-important Women's European Championship in the summer, our panel of experts join me and football writer Susie Rak. Check in with how Serena Viegman's lionesses are preparing. So listen to the Guardian Women's Football Weekly wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Guardian Law. showcasing the
form journalism covering culture, politics and new thinking. For the text version of this and all our long reads go to theguardian.com This article contains some swearing. A year of hate. What I learned when I went undercover with the far right. Written and read by Harry Shookman. Charlie, the leader of a white nationalist group, leaned over the sticky pub table. He pointed a big finger at me and lost. You better not turn out to be an infiltrator for hope not hate, he said. I froze.
Flanked by several of his lieutenants, Charlie watched, waiting for my response. His face softened into a smile. He started laughing and yanked down his collar, pretending to talk into a hidden microphone. Abort, abort, he shouted. I played along. lifting up my wrist like there was a wire stashed in my cuff. Get me out of here, I yelled into my sleeve. They've discovered me. Charlie was right to be suspicious of me. I was, in fact, an infiltrator for the anti-fascist organisation Hope Not Hate.
The only thing he got wrong was the location of my microphone. It wasn't in my collar, but strapped to my chest. For more than a year, I went undercover in the British far-right. Using the pseudonym Chris, I spent time with nine different groups of extremists. Among them were a political party, a circle of Holocaust deniers, and an organisation backed by an American tech tycoon that sought to prove black people are genetically less intelligent than white people.
During the pandemic, I was a journalist reporting on how far-right activists were campaigning with anti-vaccine conspiracy theories. but I found it a difficult topic to cover. People on the fringes of society are rarely open to reporters, who are typically believed to be controlled by dark establishment forces.
I had been experimenting with undercover reporting on my own, at a house of anti-satanic conspiracy theorists in Birmingham, for instance, and a sect of anti-Semitic Catholics in Southport. But I never stayed undercover for more than a day. I wanted to learn what the people in these movements are really like. Why do they join? Do they get along with one another? What do they tell their partners, parents and kids about their activities?
What makes them listen to the leaders in these movements, many of whom seem to be money-hungry grifters or aggressive oddballs? Hope Not Hate focuses on monitoring, researching, and campaigning against the far right. I contacted their research team in late 2022 to discuss working together. We couldn't meet at their office because, since they have been the targets of death threats and harassment campaigns, their location is kept secret. Instead, they invited me to a gloomy central London pub.
Over a pint of Guinness, Joe Mulhall, the head of the research team and a veteran antifascist, asked if I would like to team up for a long-term infiltration. An undercover project in which I became close to the leaders of a far-right group could, Mulhall explained, disrupt their operation. The thrill of working undercover was a draw, but I had a personal stake in it. I come from a Jewish family.
One side fled the Nazi invasion of France. The other emigrated from the Russian Pale of Settlement that restricted how Jews could live and work. I am fascinated and maddened by the persistence of anti-Semitic prejudice and the adaptation of old tropes now being used against Muslims. Mulhall told me to think carefully about whether this was what I really wanted, given the dangers
I didn't have to think long. I was already spending time undercover in extremist circles. This was a chance to do it more safely, with more guidance. Patrick Hermanson, a Hope Not Hate researcher, became my handler. He was a perfect choice. In 2016, he had pretended to be a master's student on exchange from Sweden in order to infiltrate extremist think tanks. His time undercover was so successful that he was appointed by a far-right group to assist with their vetting process.
Together we built my new identity, planning my debut in far-right society. First, we created Chris. Fake identities are easier to remember if they are anchored to the truth, so I inverted my biography. My siblings now went by their middle names, for instance. We wanted Chris to avoid too much attention, so we gave him a job that sounded so boring people would be unlikely to ask a second or third question about it. Chris was a strategy consultant working in support function optimization.
I wore the drabbest clothes in my wardrobe. A white shirt, a zip-up fleece, a pair of navy trousers, a sad anorak, and a fake lanyard around my neck. In each of the groups I joined, being undercover tended to mean the same thing. I had to show up and fit in. That could mean participating in a protest outside refugee accommodation in Kent, canvassing for votes in Essex with an extremist party, or doing the washing up at a house full of Holocaust tonight.
Hermanson and I thought that Chris should be dependable, affable, and above all, normal. As Chris, I would sit there politely, buy rounds of drinks if it was my turn, and contribute a conversation. We decided Chris should be an interested layperson concerned about demographic replacement, the fear that white people will one day become a minority due to high immigration and low birth rates.
When asked, I would mention growing up in an ethnically homogenous village and feeling alienated upon moving to diverse London. How I enjoyed the videos of far-right content creators. How I was lonely and bored and didn't have anyone to talk to about my politics. Hermansen advised me not to speak too much. A lie becomes weaker the more details you try to pack in, he explained. Next to sort was the camera. I learned the hard way to keep checking if a tape was working.
On a day out with Britain First, a far-right political party, I listened to senior members telling me Auschwitz was made up. Gas chambers weren't used except for de-lousing, they said. Here was proof that Britain First is a nasty party, with some activists who traffic in some of the vilest conspiracy theories, and I was capturing it on camera. At the first opportunity I slipped into a pub toilet to check the recording equipment. I pulled it out of my pocket and pushed a button.
The camera had been off the whole time I was devastated My biggest worry at the beginning was maintaining my cover. As Chris I had to repeat the name in my mind whenever I was walking into a meeting in order to remind myself who I was pretending to be. Before long, I would turn my head if I heard a shout of, Chris! Although I was never able to stop myself from reacting if someone called out, Harry!
On one occasion, when another Harry was part of the group I was with, I found myself automatically, helplessly, answering questions not meant for me. Thankfully, nobody noticed. There were many near misses. Once, at a Wetherspoons with a white nationalist influencer, I offered to buy a round on the pubs at... I pulled out my phone, and in full view of the table, started typing in my real email address, getting halfway through before noticing.
I quickly deleted the name, muttering that I sometimes used my girlfriend's account and got away with it. The real heartstopper came when I logged onto a video call with an American eugenicist on my personal email account. Five minutes in, I saw my real name on the screen. I hung up and waited until I could breathe normally. I rejoined using my Chris account, my face burning, ready with a lie about how I had borrowed a work laptop. My contact didn't remark on it, and she continued speaking.
Apparently, when bigamists cross the threshold of their secret family's front door, they forget about their other partner and children. Something similar happened to me. I noticed that after arriving for a meeting, once I had greeted everyone and no longer had to mentally repeat my pseudonym, I was in Chris mode. It could last for hours, but break unexpectedly. If someone looked at my chest, I became convinced they had spotted my hidden camera, and I began catastrophizing.
Once, a far-right campaigner directed his gaze at my shirt, straight into the camera lens. I was sitting in his house, with a dozen other activists, far from the door, with his eyes drilled at exactly where the device was. Had he seen it? I counted all the steps I'd have to take, all the people I would need to pass. His eyes were still on me, before I'd have to unhook the tricky latch on the back door and escape. Then he yawned and looked elsewhere. He'd just been zoning out.
Going undercover is an extreme strategy, and people may wonder if it was justified. Activists and politicians on the far right are intensely distrustful of the media. Had I walked into a meeting of a far-right group and presented myself as a journalist, there is no chance that I could have spent time with them and heard them talk openly.
The groups I infiltrated had vetting procedures and were obsessed with OPSEC, operational security, like secret handshakes and phone checks designed to keep reporters out. Leaders in the far right conceal their true nature to present a more acceptable version to potential voters, donors, and sometimes their own members. One prominent eugenicist who works in Westminster admitted this tactic after I'd befriended him. Everyone puts on the mask, he said.
Only by spending prolonged periods of time with them, winning their trust, and being deemed safe, is it possible to see those moments when that mask slips and the truth peeks out from underneath. If the far-right are using subterfuge to gain ground in politics, then it makes sense to turn their tactics back on them.
All this matters right now. The far right is edging towards the mainstream. Extreme organisations in the UK are looking to capitalise on the election of five MPs from the Reform Party. They have been energised by the re-election in the US of Donald Trump. In the Netherlands, the anti-Islam party for freedom of Geert Wilders won the most seats at the last election. Italy now has a far-right Prime Minister.
When I went undercover, the AFD was polling nationally at 23% in Germany, a record high, and leading polls in three states. The Britain First Party was developing connections with continental partners to learn electioneering and seek funding. During my year undercover, I met a lot of people in different groups. Among the rank-and-file members of far-right organisations, I was struck by their loneliness.
In discussion groups, in city pubs, at secret meetings in the countryside, many of them spoke about feeling like outcome. In one organisation, I noticed that most members seemed more interested in companionship than political debate. They described their days of working in dull, unfulfilling jobs, and evenings spent listening to hours-long fascist livestreams.
When they attended conferences, many of them tuned out of the talks. I used to count the nodding heads of sleeping audience members, frequently reaching double figures. They looked forward most to the coffee breaks and post-event pints. Wanting connection is a common reason people give for arriving at these groups, and also what makes it hard for them to leave, even if they're not enjoying themselves.
At a conference of the Traditional Britain Group, an organisation that campaigns for the deportation of immigrants and citizens of foreign descent, I met a lot of conspiracy theorists. They believed shadowy elites were encouraging white women to have children with men of other races and ultimately extinguish the white race.
Others claim to have discovered the far right during the pandemic, when lockdowns and masks and vaccines prompted bizarre fantasies about the government trying to launch a genocide on its own people. Many of the men I encountered, they were at least 90% men, shared their disappointment at the friendships and relationships they expected from life had yet to materialize. One said he believed his romantic prospects were slim. I consider myself pretty low down on the totem pole of society, he said.
Conspiracy theories can appeal to people who feel isolated, ignored and insignificant. Believing that an evil cabal controls the outcome of major world events could explain why one's own life might not be unfolding as planned. What surprised me most was that despite my revulsion for what my new associates said and did, I often felt myself becoming friendly with them. It was hard not...
To fit in, I had to endear myself to new groups by being friendly and smiley. Naively, I hadn't reckoned on them being friendly and smiley back. They thought I was one of them. On long bus journeys with Britain First, they would shout at South Asian drivers, jeer at black people, and tell jokes about the Holocaust.
Then they told me about their weight loss goals and divorce proceedings, their grandchildren's birthday parties and their garden renovations, their girlfriend troubles and their summer holidays. As they greeted me with cheers and handshakes, I told myself that what I was feeling was relief at their acceptance of me. But was there also the beginnings of warmth?
I felt a confusing mix of disgust at what they did, fear about my own exposure, and guilt. Guilt at befriending dozens of people with the intention of betraying them. As abhorrent as their views are, and as nasty as some of their actions may have been, these people invited me into their homes and shared intimate details with me about their lives and hopes and dreams. I would sell them out. Thanks for listening to The Guardian Long Read. We'll be back after this. Cameron McIntosh.
can bring you the most spectacular color fragile let's And she's flying to the Sunderland Empire. only step in time for your tickets at atgtickets.com slash sunderland Hello, I'm Faye Carruthers, host of the Guardian Women's Football Weekly. Every week we bring you the very latest from the Women's Super League, the FA Cup, Champions League. and leagues around the world. And as we get ready for the all-important Women's European Championship in the summer,
Our panel of experts join me and football writer Susie Rack to check in with how Serena Wiegman's Lionesses are preparing. So listen to the Guardian Women's Football Weekly wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to the Guardian Long Read. I learned as the year went on that a great deal of what my new associates were discussing was not confined to fringe groups. Some leading activists were reaching the powerful people.
birth rates have become one way to slip extreme views about intelligence and demography into the mainstream. There are concerning links that this particular movement has with genetic testing companies that offer screening of embryos produced during IVF to determine which will have the highest IQ. One advocate of race science told me about policy papers he was writing for the Prime Minister at the time.
Andrew Sabisky was hired to work for the government in January 2020 when Dominic Cummings, then the Prime Minister's chief advisor, requested that weirdos and misfits with odd skills apply to join him. A self-described superforecaster, Sabisky was meant to bring his enthusiasm for data analysis to the Downing Street operation. Aged 27, he found himself in Boris Johnson's senior team, attending meetings with the Prime Minister.
He did not last long. Weeks into his employment, the press found Sabisky's detailed writings on race differences and IQ. Among his comments was the claim that in America, there are, uh, quote, far greater percentage of blacks than whites in the range of IQs 75 or below, at which point we are close to the typical boundary for mild mental retardation." He accused the media of selective quotes.
In 2023, I met Sabisky at a dinner for pronatalists in London, and he told me that he was once again writing papers for Downing Street. He even tried to get me to pay for him to work on energy policy for the government with his friend, the special advisor Will Dry. We're providing this secret service for number 10 and trying to keep it as secret as possible, he said. Dunak and the rest of his team were kept in the dark about this.
In early spring, I heard my new friends talk excitedly about an upcoming conference. Organised by a pharaohese white nationalist called Frodi Midiord, the Skanza Forum is one of the biggest intellectual far-right gatherings in Europe. After a hiatus during the pandemic, it was being relaunched, this time in Estonia's capital, Tallinn, and promised three days of speeches and socialising. Midyard had invited a grim roster of lecturers. Best of all for the gas. He had booked Jared Taylor.
a well-known advocate of segregation, who has written, quote, blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, western civilization, any kind of civilization, disappears. Fans of Taylor enjoy imitating his blue-blooded American accent, especially the way he aspirates the word white.
Conferences are an ideal target for infiltration. For a brief period, it becomes normal to meet and talk to strangers Paranoia and secrecy surrounds the organisation of such an event, but once inside, attendees feel safe to speak more freely. By this point, I had been undercover for four months and knew a few of the conference guests, so felt able to fit in. The overseas location, however, added an alarming edge of unpredictability to the trip.
I tried not to think about this when I flew to Estonia in May 2023. The strangeness of it all hit me when Tallinn's grid of Soviet-era tower blocks came into view. Going to the pub is one thing, but an international conference of neo-Nazis in a country I didn't know, it seemed reckless. The conference attracted people from all over the Western world. The refrain I heard from everyone, isn't it great to have someone to talk to, filled me with sadness.
If anything, the individuals in this crowd were lonelier than any of the British people I met who at least had each other. Many of the Tallinn attendees didn't know anyone in their communities they could hang out with. Some of them had flown several thousand miles, spending several thousand pounds to get here. At the conference, I encountered a group that would change the course of the undercover project.
It began with a lecture by a racist Danish academic called Helmut Neuborg, a former professor of developmental psychology at Aarhus University. Wearing a curious pink shirt with two collars that folded into each other like the ice cream swirls on a Vianetta dessert, he told us about a looming disaster. According to Neuborg, immigrants of low intelligence are coming to Europe and having lots of babies, threatening intelligent low-fertility Europeans.
This is a biological fight for being on national territory, he rasped, staring into the audience. And we are about to lose it. we have to realise that the great immigration problem that is currently overwhelming the West can neither be solved by cultural, social, nor legal engineering. Although the content of Neuborg's speech was objectionable, after the final round of applause concluded, I wasn't too worried about his impact in the real world.
Race science, the misuse of science to promote racist ideology, may be popular among the far right, but people like Newborg tend to be ridiculed in the mainstream press. His idea to stop poor women having babies to avoid degenerates in the population was criticised by the Daily Mail as a repugnant doctrine that was discredited following Hitler's agenda of racial purification. Anyone who believes that races or nations can be categorised and ranked by intelligence is a crank, I thought.
By the end of the Tallinn conference, I realised that I was horribly mistaken. The race science movement is not composed of fringe weirdos. It is well-funded, sophisticated and influential. The penny began to drop while the conference guests were drunkenly milling around after dinner. I heard an English accent and turned to see a sharp-looking man in his early thirties wearing the tech entrepreneur's outfit of a tight blazer and a dark blue t-shirt.
I introduced myself, saying it was nice to meet a fellow countryman. He shook my hand and said his name was Matt Archer, a pseudonym, I later learned. His real name was Matthew Frost, a former private school teacher. Unlike the inebriated revelers around us, he was focused and alert. Frost described the operation he was running. It's called Aporia, he said, an online magazine that publishes stories about HBD.
HBD stands for human biodiversity, the concept that races, sexes, and socioeconomic classes can be ranked by traits like intelligence. Advocates of HBD believe that differences between these groups are principally caused by genetic factors rather than environmental. HBD, another term for race science, underpins eugenics, the idea that desirable traits can and should be bred.
Eugenics advocacy dwindled after the horrors of Nazi Germany became fully known, but the desire to protect racial or national health through selective breeding and forced sterilization has never gone away. Incredibly, Frost said that he had received a large amount of money from an American investor, someone who may He wouldn't tell me who. It would take months to find out.
I took a closer look at Aporia. There is no possibility of blacks and whites living peacefully together, said Jared Taylor on an Aporia podcast. and all the places in which you find blacks and whites living together, whether it's in Great Britain, Canada, France, it's a failure. He added that black people are violently hostile towards white people, and less able to plan for the future.
Aporia Magazine's executive editor and podcast host is Beau Weingart. He was fired from his American university job amid a race science scandal. He repeatedly writes about the need for his audience to attain a sense of white racial consciousness. Without white identity, European culture, the unique manifestation of the European temperament, will decay and its fragments will either be absorbed into a vast, insipid cultural porridge or they will disappear. End quote.
Aporia is not an obscure race science blog. It earns thousands of pounds in subscriptions and is read by thousands of people, some of them powerful. The Conservative MP Neil O'Brien reposted one of its articles on falling fertility rates. the commentator Toby Young, now Lord Young, has appeared on their podcast, as have the theologian Nigel Bigger, now Lord Bigger, and the journalist Peter Hitchens.
In Tallinn, I had heard rumours of the revival of the Pioneer Fund, a notorious organisation pushing race science and raising money for publication. Founded in the US in the 1930s, Pioneer developed close ties to the Third Reich. Its first act was to distribute a Nazi propaganda film called Herbcrank, or The Hereditary Defective, which claimed Jews produce an exceptionally high percentage of mentally ill.
Once worth millions of dollars, Pioneer had given out most of its money and was believed to be essentially dormant. If it was back in action, this was extremely worrying. Pioneer supported some of the most extreme far-right activists of the 20th century. It was especially worrying. to think that this sinister movement might be enjoying a fresh boost of energy thanks to the younger, image-conscious leadership of Matthew Frost.
Our investigation stalled, however. Chris, with his lack of race science expertise and tedious corporate job, was not an exciting person to meet. In order to get closer to Frost and his team, Hermanson and I decided that we would tweak the character of Chris. Instead of an office drone, he had now come into a fat inheritance, and was interested in donating a chunk of it to right-wing projects.
Money talks, we soon discovered. Offering to invest in Aporia instantly opened up a meeting with Frost. On a video call, he told me he was working with an underground research organisation. When I asked if this was the Pioneer Fund, he was strangely quiet. Was he hiding something? To learn more, I booked a table at a restaurant in West London's Holland Park, where Frost had rented an apartment while visiting.
It was a bougie place, in keeping with my image as a wealthy investor. The menu had potted partridge and £350 Bergen. I arrived early and spent a while choosing the right table where my camera might best film him. When Frost arrived, he refused my offer of a drink and ordered sparkling water. We were both trying hard to remain in control. Before we sat down, I had wondered if we would get along. But we bypassed pleasantries to talk business
He must have been determined to secure my investment. Our preparations for this evening must have been pretty similar, rehearsing lines to impress the other. I asked Frost about the underground research team that he had mentioned last time. He told me it's run by Emil Kierkegaard, a race science advocate I saw in Tallinn but didn't meet. Kierkegaard, who is Danish and looks to be in his late 30s, has a reputation as perhaps the most active writer in the race science world today.
I noticed that Frost talked about our organisation instead of just Aporia. I asked what the difference was, and he explained that Kierkegaard was in charge of an LLC, a limited liability company registered in the US, in a state with helpful privacy laws. Frost indicated that the LLC had received more than £1 million from a mystery investor, roughly a 10% stake. I name-dropped a couple of American billionaires known for investing in far-right projects just to see if it would elicit a response.
but Frost stayed tight-lipped, except to say that when he met him in Vienna in June to raise more money, the funder was in a down period due to negative press. Who was he? Despite Frost's indiscretion until now, I sensed that this was a detail he would not divulge, and decided not to press him further. Frost talked about how the 10-man underground research team publishes articles on race science online and in academic journals, which Aporia then promote.
He described himself simply as the pursuer of truth, as many race scientists do. You've been telling us for over half a century that it's evil, but it's true, he said. I personally think it's immoral to bury your head in the sand. Frost told The Guardian he did not hold far-right views. He announced his departure from Aporia in August last year. However, he said in his announcement that he would not entirely quit.
Nervous, but determined to pin him down, I told Frost that what he had built sounded like a version of the Pioneer Fund. To my surprise, he agreed. He even said that Pioneer's remaining money had been inherited by Kierkegaard, who is now using it to power his new company, the Human Diversity Foundation. Kierkegaard maintains that his politics are not far-right, but heterodox.
Later, Frost recounted a conversation he had with his business partner, Eric Ahrens. Ahrens is a communications expert with the AFD in Germany. Both hope that if the AFD gets into power, it will enforce remigration, a euphemistic term for mass deportation. Imagine if Germany did that, Frost said in a hushed, animated voice. He said, he told Ahrens, it's your fucking duty to do this. Frost said he had parted ways with Arendt in December 2023 after becoming aware of our divergent political views.
Frost fantasised about filling ships with people and manoeuvring them to Morocco and forcing the government there to receive human cargo. We're smarter than you. We're bigger than you. You're going to do this. His eyes were shining with enthusiasm. Imagine that this happened in the next 10, 15 years. What that would do for the West, for Europe. The bill arrived, and Frost said he had another meeting to dash off. Once he'd gone, I phoned Hermanson to relay the details.
The Pioneer Fund isn't back, I told him. It never went away. It's rebranded, reformed, and gone into hiding as a private company. It's projects more nimble. into the dark. Thanks again for listening to The Guardian Long Read. That was A Year of Hate, what I learned when I went undercover with the far right. Written and read by Harry Shuckman. And produced by Nicola Alexandru. The executive producer was Ellie Bury.
Adapted from Year of the Rat, undercover in the British far right. Published by Chateau and Windus on the 8th of May. To support The Guardian, Thank you. Go to theguardian.com. slash long read. Macintosh and can bring you the most spectacular flying to the Sunderland Empire from the