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Brad interviews Dr. Nafeez Ahmed, author of "Alt Reich," about the historical and contemporary roots of fascism and white supremacy in Western politics. They discuss the evolution of far-right ideologies from the 1930s to the present, the influence of eugenics and organizations like the Pioneer Fund and Heritage Foundation, and the mainstreaming of racist ideas in both the US and UK.
The conversation highlights the cyclical nature of political disillusionment, the dangers of extremist groups gaining power, and the role of key figures like Steven Miller and Curtis Yarvin in shaping current policy and rhetoric.
Alt Reich book: https://www.nafeezahmed.net/
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
Today I speak with Nafiz Ahmed, the author of Alt Reich, a book that could not be more timely.
We are, of course, living through the escalating authoritarianism of the Trump regime.
The federal government and Trump's cronies have taken over Washington, D.C. This comes on the heels of the takeover and military occupation of Los Angeles.
In my conversation today with Nafiz, we talk about the long history of fascism in the West and the ways that the legacies of fascism in the 30s and 40s have led us all the way up to this point.
This includes discussions of RFK and Stephen Miller and of course Donald Trump.
It winds through the Heritage Foundation and eugenics movements.
It's a wide ranging conversation, but one that could not be more important at this moment.
Alt Reich is the book.
I'm Brad Onishi.
This is Straight White American Jesus.
This is Straight White American Jesus.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
Great to be with you on this Monday.
I'm Brad Onishi, and as I just said, I'm joined today by a first time guest who has written just a really insightful, startling and disruptive book, and that is Dr. Nafi's Ahmed.
So thank you for joining me, doctor Achmed.
Thanks for being here.
Thank you, Brad.
So, honestly, it's a pleasure to be here.
The book is The Network War to Destroy the West from Intern, and we're going to have a wide ranging discussion, I think, of many things that will just resonate throughout the contemporary moment, including the Trump administration.
We'll probably get to RFK Jr., we'll probably get to the Heritage Foundation, and the ways all of those things have deep roots.
I want to ask you two questions to start though.
If I said, what is the Alt Reich?
If you could give us your handy definition, what would you say it is?
Handy definition?
Well, of course, the term alt-right will...
People might think about the term alt-right, which is the slightly more well-known term, which is a shorthand for the alternative right.
That was a term that was used by people like Richard Spencer, who was a neo-Nazi.
It was also taken up by Steve Bannon, obviously, who was very instrumental in the Trump administration, this is the new brand that we should use we should use this idea of being of alt-right so the alt-right is a play on that obviously it comes from the the term Third Reich which is the term that was used to describe the Nazi rule back in 1930s onwards.
And so this is kind of a play on that.
And essentially, definitionally, essentially it's saying that this group that identifies itself as the alternative right or the alt-right is actually very much interfacing with some traditional fascist, if not Nazi ideas and values in ways that are quite surprising.
So we've reached a point, and if I think about American politics in specific, we had the Obama years where the Tea Party was emergent and people talked about that as a kind of rightward strain of the Republican Party.
As you say, when we get into the 2016s and 2017s, we have the alt right.
We have the Nazis with the slick, clean cut haircuts hanging out in Washington, DC, Richard Spencer being the most notable.
And we've reached a point now where you've really coined a term that I think makes incredible sense, the alt Reich.
And what this leads us to are the fascist dimensions of global politics, whether that is in the UK, whether that is in the United States, whether that is in Central Europe or elsewhere.
You've been talking about.
about massive disruption and even collapse of the neoliberal order since the 2010s.
So I'm sure you're not happy that you were correct about a lot of that, but would you tell us what you predicted in 2010 and then we can discuss how you have been pretty spot on.
So yeah, back in 2010, I wrote about how I was essentially tracking major kind of political and economic and energy trends, looking at the impact of the global financial crisis, the entrenchment of global inequalities, and the underlying systemic drivers of that, which I believe are rooted in energy and our relationship with the planet fundamentally.
And we can get into all of that stuff in a bit more detail, but this was a systems analysis, and I'm a systems theorist.
So I was looking at this and I was thinking, you know, if we continue like this, if we don't do anything about these massive systemic drivers, we're going to face the situation where They're going to essentially feel that the system doesn't work for them.
And this is going to undermine the sense of the prevailing norms and values being ballot.
The prediction was really rooted in my other work in genocide studies and mass violence, looking at what is it that drives societies into extreme polarization and ultimately makes it kind of leads ordinary folks to pick up ideas on the fringe and say that I believe that the only solution to this is is the elimination of a particular group or getting rid of a particular group of people who are defined in this way.
And it's always kind of a major systemic crisis that drives that kind of breakdown.
But that's what led me to this conclusion that if we continue in this way, this trend that we'd already seen in the preceding decade of the rising mainstreaming of far-right groups, I warned that there was a real risk that what was once the far-right would actually get into the center and essentially take over the heartlands of Western liberal democracies.
And that this could take place.
you know, not just in one country, but it would be like a Western problem.
And when I made that prediction, you know, like you said, when you make predictions like that, you make them in the hope that it's actually not going to happen.
You don't think this is definitely going to happen.
You think, you know, things are going to change.
People will take note.
And not just of me, but, you know, many other people are out there talking about this stuff.
And, you know, it won't be as bad as I'm predicting.
So I have been quite surprised at the extent to which, you know, things that I wrote, a couple of things I wrote in 2010 are actually playing out.
in that way, in a way that has been surprisingly, you know, kind of quite accurate.
So it is quite alarming.
One of the things you emphasized in those years was the fact that mainstream political parties would not be able to hold the center in essence because people would become so disillusioned.
If income inequality and inequalities across the board are so acute, you arrive at a place where people are looking for different answers.
And if what you've been offering, whether in a center-left or center-right party, feels inauthentic and as if it's serving a system that is no longer operable for a large majority of people, you're going to lose them.
And I'm wondering if that is how you see what's playing out in terms of what's happened to the Republican Party in the United States, the rise of AFD in Germany, Brexit, and everything that's happened in UK politics since then.
Is that how we should understand those phenomena?
I think you've really articulated that really well, because I think, you know, I've talked about this idea, and I mentioned it in the book of kind of, we've entered this era of kind of swing politics, where, you know, if you look back at the situation in the United States just in recent years, you know, the Trump administration got in after 2016.
ran the campaign we're all very familiar with and subsequently kind of lost support because people were fed up after those.
After those years in power, people were looking at the way Trump handled the pandemic.
They were looking at the economic situation.
They were looking at their own lives.
And they were saying, actually, this is not good enough.
This hasn't worked.
So it's kind of interesting to see that Trump lost because people were fed up and then Biden came in.
But then Biden essentially lost in a similar way.
People were looking at Biden's actions.
They were looking at what's happening in the economy.
even though, so there's an interesting thing with the Democrats talking about, you know, you had some big senior Democrats laughing about a vibe session.
There wasn't really a recession.
You look at all the growth rates.
Growth was brilliant.
Everything was fine.
And there's a certain validity to it in the sense that, of course, there were metrics which did show that there were really important improvements and certain good things that were happening.
But the reality is that when you drill down into that data and you actually look at, wait a minute, how is this impacting ordinary Americans and people who are living from paycheck to paycheck?
Actually, you're finding that it's not trickling down.
There is a persistent kind of of reality of not just plateauing poverty, but increasing poverty.
Rates of child poverty growing up, going up, you know, people kind of feeling like they're just not, they don't have economic security, they've got no savings, they're not seeing an improvement in their quality of life.
And so when you're experiencing that ultimately in my actual life, it does, you know, the economists in the Washington Post, New York Times are raving about how wonderful everything is.
And actually that heightened the disconnect because then you're thinking Biden is actually the party of the status quo.
That's what he represents.
So, well, I think then that's how Trump was able to get back in, was he's obviously kind of really weaponized that sense of discontent, channeled it.
against the idea that there's very simplistic problems with migrants and they're coming in and there's criminals and all of this kind of stuff.
But ultimately, people who are looking for an explanation, that explanation resonated and it worked.
And we're seeing this dynamic play out all over the world.
I mean, it's certainly here in the UK, you know, where, you know, Keir Starmer has come in, you know, the Tory, the Conservatives were.
time going down in the polls.
You know, we're finding that Nigel Farage and the Reform Party, who are the kind of alternative right faction, very close to Elon Musk, much more sympathetic to Trump, they're coming in that, you know, that they did really well in local elections recently.
And so it makes you wonder again, this is not ideological.
People are not really sitting here thinking, I'm subscribing to a specific ideology.
They're actually saying that we don't believe in your ability to represent us anymore.
And they're just saying, just, we don't want any, we just, just get out.
Whoever is in, if you're the one who is keeping us in this situation.
We don't want you.
So I think we're kind of swinging between these inauthenticities, whether it's the right or the left.
But the danger, of course, is the pendulum in that process is swinging further and further to the extremes as we're going, and that's empowering these really dangerous groups you know as you're talking i'm thinking of a situation where i'm hungry i'm in my house i haven't gone to the grocery store so i go look in the refrigerator and I try what's in there,
not working, not what I'm looking for, get kind of frustrated, go over to the pantry, look in there, not working, frustrated, go sit down.
on the couch, think, all right, what am I going to do?
Go back to the refrigerator, and then I go back to the pantry, right?
And it feels as if people keep looking for an answer.
Hey, Biden, Trump, Biden, Trump, right?
Is it Labor?
Is it the Tories?
And every time they get somebody in place, it's clearly not what they need and not what they're looking for.
And as you say, at some point, people start to take extreme measures.
People are going to get off the ride or they're going to push the, you know, we can use two metaphors.
Either they're going to get off the ride completely and no longer take part in the pendulum or they're going to push the pendulum so far to one way that it's going to break.
It's going to come off the axis and no longer swing and simply lead to the destruction of that whole apparatus.
And I want to relate that to both the current moment and to history.
You say in the book, and I'm going to quote you, a mapping out of the key players right at the inception of the first Trump administration reveals that the Alt Reich's capture of the U.S. government did not represent an anti-establishment insurgency, but was more like a sudden takeover by a network of white supremacist sympathizers within the establishment.
I think the argument there is that there were always folks within the establishment who had certain proclivities and tendencies and views.
and they were able to activate those and bring them into the system in the Trump administration.
That's there.
We're going to come back there in a minute.
But your argument is largely that this can be traced to the 1930s and the kind of global authoritarian moment we're seeing in the UK in the rise of AFD in what's happening in Central Europe.
We can talk about Bolsonaro.
We can talk about Trump.
We should really look to.
to the 1930s, which is the Nazi regime and its defeat.
Can you give us a just a primer on that history and how looking there is actually illuminating?
So that's the thing with me.
This is a this really is.
a hundred year story to really understand how we got here.
Going back to the 1930s, I think not only do we see some of the patterns that we're now finding amplified in different ways, but we're beginning also to see the playbook to some extent.
And the 1930s was, you know, obviously the heyday of this kind of thinking.
It was much more mainstream to think in what you might call eugenics terms, where you essentially believe that there is a racial hierarchy.
And that was, you know, not everybody believed that, but a lot of people did.
It was quite, quite normal to think that kind of thing.
This was a biological racial hierarchies.
And therefore that in order to deal with social progress, you have to do, you have to essentially control populations.
So for these.
these folks following on the logic of the racial hierarchy you know your your progress plans are really all about containing inferior populations um getting rid of them if necessary and outbreeding them with with with with with superior populations it was very biological thinking um and that's what led to essentially these eugenics programs that had simply attempted to implement that in society.
And of course, the Nazis were the exemplary kind of manifestation of that thinking on an industrial scale.
You know, they applied this not only to Roma and disabled people, but of course to the Jewish population, but many other different minorities.
And they had their hierarchy and their classifications.
But what was really, I think, eye-opening for me was the realization, first of all, of this kind of this standing circle of influence between the United States and Nazi Germany.
And the fact that So many Nazis, scientists, thinkers, ideologues were actually inspired by Nazi eugenicists, scientists and thinkers, and policymakers.
And they were looking at things that were being passed in the US Congress.
Things which were targeted against black people as well as Jewish people.
But I think there was a bigger concern about black people.
And of course, it was a highly segregated society.
So we already had a lot of that stuff there.
But in Nazi Germany, they were openly talking about that, looking at what America was doing and saying, we should do that.
That's great precedent.
Why don't we implement that here targeted that against the Jewish population, let's pass new laws here.
And then once they began implementing that on an industrial scale in Nazi Germany, in America, they were watching what the Germans were doing and they were saying, wow, they're doing that on an industrial scale.
I mean, that's amazing.
That's fantastic.
We should do what they're doing here in the United States.
And it was this very kind of vicious circle.
And one of the entities that I think really is the fulcrum of that, continues to kind of be a major kind of player in the story that I tell in the book, is this foundation that was set up in, I think, 1937 by a guy called Wycliffe Draper, who was an American textiles magnate, made loads of money in that industry, but was basically a Nazi.
You know, he loved Hitler, loved Nazis, loved everything they stood for, Nazi sympathizers in America, set up this foundation called the Pioneer Fund, basically to, to import Nazi propaganda into the United States and distribute it and kind of educate people as far as he was concerned into Nazi thinking.
Now that foundation has continued to exist.
It's, you know, it's rebranded.
branded, it's relaunched, it's kind of continued to kind of shape shift.
But the people around that entity have been active for this century.
And one of the critical things that happened after the end of the Second World War, when the Nazis were defeated, was that this group had to rethink how it operates in a post-Nazi world.
And by post-Nazi, we don't mean, okay, the Nazis just suddenly just, you know, evaporated into thin air.
They precisely didn't.
You know, we had the military defeat of the Nazis.
The world had changed.
Everyone was now on the other side, ostensibly, to say we've defeated the nazis nazis were bad so all of that work that the pioneer fund was doing quite openly before suddenly couldn't be done anymore you couldn't go around being armicade carrying nazi so these guys went underground and they needed to find new ways of operating new ways of justifying their activities and one of the big things that they did in the united states was to go back to the traditional anti-black
racism that was still very much alive and still very much normalized in the United States.
And so they doubled down their efforts on that, began to kind of distance themselves from the openly anti-Semitic kind of rhetoric that they were using before and focused on defending segregation, supporting efforts to kind of limit civil rights activities and all that kind of stuff.
And that became, I think, really the defining moment where we see how Nazis realized that they need to kind of call themselves not Nazis and in fact masquerade as anti-racist and anti-Nazi.
So, and that dynamic has defined the way in which fascism has evolved since then.
Fascism has now become an ideology which distinctly defines itself in the mainstream by saying, we are not fascist, actually.
It's precisely what we're not, which is very different to the fascism that we saw in the 1930s, where it was like, we are fascists.
And of course, we do see episodes of You know, you get pundits come out and say, I'm happy to say I'm fascist and what's wrong with fascism and Steve Bannon running out saying, you can call us racist and we're proud.
And so that does happen.
But overall, when you see the the way that these political parties and groups are operating, the defining way is to say we're against fascism, we're against narcism, but that is actually a tactic and a strategy and it's become a lot more sophisticated.
So first of all, people are going to have to read the book to trace all of the various ways that the development of fascist thinking happens from the 30s to the 40s, 50s and 60s, 70s, 80s.
in the United States, in Europe, and in other places.
So there's no way for us in this conversation to encapsulate just the overwhelming amount of information you trace in the book.
I would like to highlight a few things, though, and that is, you know, I think.
if folks sometimes hear the word Nazi or fascist today, and there's still, certainly in the United States, a resistance to say, okay, you just said a word that means we're in fantasy land or we're in the theoretical, not in the reality.
And I would just say, okay, let's think of a couple of examples from the recent months.
One is Tom Holman, the border zars he's called in the United States, claimed on television that DHS has the right to approach people and question their citizenship or residential status based on their looks, meaning if they are a brown person, if they are a black person, an Asian person, it's okay to walk up and say, are you a citizen?
Where's your papers?
Do you have?
Okay.
So that seems to fit everything you just talked about.
And he said it on TV.
And if we just put them together, I don't know how you resist what he said as being part and parcel with what you just outlined.
The second is something that I'm not sure people notice when it happens all the time, but if you made a montage of every time Donald Trump has called somebody a low IQ individual, there is a 99% chance that that person is a woman of color.
It's Kamala Harris.
It's Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.
It's Jasmine Crockett, a black congresswoman from Texas, there is always the label of low IQ human being on the black or brown woman, most likely.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg, of course, of Donald Trump's track record when it comes to race and racism.
But I'd like to stick, and I think something that you highlight in the book that to me is unique and is a incisive contribution is the through line of eugenics.
You've mentioned the Pioneer Fund.
I'd like to highlight another group you mentioned, and that is the Heritage Foundation.
People listening will, of course, know they are the, those who gave us the very great quote-unquote gift of Project 2025.
The Heritage Foundation has a long history going back to the 1970s and right-wing politics in the United States.
What people listening will not know is their involvement, the Heritage Foundation's involvement in UK politics and specifically along the lines of eugenics and its mainstreaming into neoliberal thought.
Would you just mind reflecting on that for a minute and how those global connections were made?
Absolutely.
I mean, it's an astonishing story.
I mean, And I think what it reveals here is really the complexity of what we're dealing with.
And I think it's really important for me just to make really clear, I'm not saying, and the book doesn''t say that everyone on the right is a fascist or a Nazi or even everyone in the UNDP party is a fascist or a Nazi or everyone who supports Trump is a fascist or a Nazi or even everyone in the Trump administration or Trump himself is necessarily a fascist or a Nazi in a traditional sense.
What it really is, and I don't know, I can't speak to say I know what Trump actually believes inside his heart.
I don't know.
No one really knows.
All we can do is look at how these movements have evolved and the connections.
And I think what we can do is point out the facts that if we've seen that Trump is saying certain things consistently.
He's talking about low IQ.
Why is he talking about low IQ?
Why is this a thing?
Is it a pattern?
Is it connected to other people?
And if it was just Trump all by himself saying it, then you might say, Trump's obviously got an issue.
I don't like it.
Maybe he's a little bit racist.
You know, there's something going on.
But when it's not just Trump, but you've got other people in the administration, you've got Silicon Valley billionaires who are funding the Trump administration, you've got people Is this just an accident or is this some sort of, is there a network effect?
I'm not even saying it's a conspiracy.
I'm just saying that when lots and lots of people start to believe something and they're all talking together and they're all having that kind of position of influence that has an impact.
And that process actually started in the 50s, 60s when we see the pioneer funding of this activities beginning to take a new level.
And they did a number of things.
There were two kind of interesting things that they did.
The first thing they did was they started funding dodgy science at American University.
They wanted to launder Nazi eugenics into the mainstream.
So they started giving grants.
from hundred thousand dollars to millions of dollars to academics at universities and they started funding studies which really did look like very Nazi style studies, like blood group studies, eugenic style studies, looking at IQ and genetics and things like that, things that the Nazis believed.
They then took out the anti-Semitic structure of it and then said, let's do the same kind of research.
And so that was going on.
The other thing that was happening was that the Pioneer Fund, as I said, was very active in supporting political agitation against the civil rights movement.
So in order to do that, they began working with the Republicans very closely.
A number of major Republican figures like Senator Jesse Helms was interfacing with Pioneer Fund networks for years.
And there were lots of these quite senior figures doing that.
And as part and parcel of that, one of the things that they did is they got very much into the kind of the Cold War mindset.
And one of the things they wanted to do to justify their activities was to say, there's this massive national security threat from the Soviet Union, from communists.
And they began to equate civil rights, the civil rights movement with communism.
And they were saying that these things are part of the same thing and blah, blah, blah.
And so one of the interesting things that happened is that the Heritage Foundation, one of the founders was a guy called Edward Fjornner, as you mentioned.
Edward Fjornner is a live character in this story.
So he's all the way back then.
And he's active now.
So, you know, we talked about Project 2025.
So let's just bear in mind, Edward Fjornner.
is on the advisory board of organizations that have fed into Project 2025.
He sits on the board of an organization that was funding insurrectionists January 16th and supporting their legal cases and all this kind of stuff.
So very, very much embroiled in Trump's plans today.
But all the way back then, yeah, sorry.
conservative Catholic like Paul Weyrich and like Kevin Roberts, a reactionary Catholic, right?
And really somebody who masterminded the Heritage Foundation as the We're going to write the policies.
And as you're saying, we're going to take junk science, we're going to take junk data, and we're going to feed it to Congress people so they push policy.
Well, that's absolutely right.
And so one of the things that he did is that he hired people from the Pioneer Fund right into the heart of the Heritage F Foundation.
And one of these guys was an open neo-Nazi called Roger Pearson.
Roger Pearson was the editor of a Pioneer Fund-backed journal called Mankind Quarterly, which was like their flagship eugenics journal.
On the board, and just to give you a sense of how deep this rabbit hole went, like on the board of Mankind Quarterly at that time, you had actual Nazis.
Like one of the people on the board.
was the mentor of the angel of death, you know, the guy who basically ran the outswitch death camps, was conducting experiments on children in the nazi camps really really atrocious stuff so that was how direct that line of influence was so roger pearson editor of this journal he's recruited into the heritage foundation he sets up and launches one of their flagship journals policy review he sits on various committees you know he he goes and
mingles with you know former cia and active cia and national security officials in the united states he sets up an entity called the world anti-communist league um where he actually recruits tons and tons of nazis uh in or you know into that organization and And it caused a huge scandal.
Eventually, you know, the whole thing had to shut down because it was so embarrassing.
But that was the kind of stuff that Ed Fiona was bringing in to the organization.
At the same time, the Heritage Foundation began projecting itself abroad.
So right at inception, this was conceived as an Anglo-American project.
This was about reshaping world order.
On the back of the victory after the Second World War, you know, in the context of what was happening during the Cold War, there was an agenda of let's reshape politics on the global stage.
So the Heritage Foundation, you know, I found that they had actually gone to the United States, sorry, gone to the United Kingdom and began giving money to a number of different think tanks that were very, very close to the conservatives.
And these think tanks were taking several hundred thousand, very, very heavily embedded in the foreign policy establishment, and they began creating kind of a shared vision and a shared ideology.
And out of that mix of different individuals and different think tanks, one of the kind of most kind of enduring alliances was that, you know, and there were several different organizations that were funded and seed fundeded and seed funded again.
And out of the end of it, I think one of the biggest ones was this group called the Institute for Economic Affairs.
And that was kind of like a major Tatarite think tank that took shape in the 1970s and one of the leading kind of voices in terms of neoliberal market economics.
And what became clear at this time was that the eugenics underpinnings of kind of biological kind of racist thinking this idea that essentially all problems all fundamental problems that we can see in society are not to do with social structures, political policy, economic policy.
They're actually just to do with these racial hierarchies.
And the reason that there are these issues with poverty or problems with health and education are to do with the fact that there are these inferior populations that are biologically problematic and they're perpetuating themselves.
And this essentially began to be increasingly articulated by pioneer fund intellectuals.
And that basically underpinned.
It was a kind of like a pseudoscientific rationale for what then became standard free market economics.
Now, of course, there were a bunch of neoclassical economists, Hayek and all the rest of them, who came up with their ideas and they were putting them together.
But what happened is that the eugenicists last...
you're never going to fix it because the problem is genetic.
You actually have to deal with those populations.
So the solution is we don't want a welfare state.
Eliminate welfare, stop public spending, essentially survival of the fittest.
So the very extreme social Darwinist philosophy.
And you found that these two groups essentially vibed with each other and reinforced each other mutually.
As you're speaking, one of the things that I just want to highlight is...
And my argument would be, it lines up with what you just said.
The ideas in the 80s were, oh, if this has to do with biology, then a libertarian laissez-faire economics will end up with whites on top because biologically rights are superior.
So if you just let everyone quote unquote compete on a playing field that is not fair in any way, but still let them compete, you will end up with white people on top, whether that's economics, politics, culture.
40, 50 years later, that's not happening.
And there's the sense of that's not happeninging, then libertarian laissez-faire policies aren't going to work for us anymore.
So I'm JD Vance.
I'm Kevin Roberts.
I'm the Heritage Foundation.
We now need to turn to actually big government involvement because it turns out just a level playing field, quote unquote, which was never level, didn't give us the results we wanted, probably because a lot of our ideology was based on junk science related to eugenics.
I want to hit on one more thing before we leave this topic though.
And then if you have time, I want to just ask you a bonus question about Stephen Miller and David Horowitz, if that's okay.
But if we fast forward, I'm sure there are candidates that eugenicists from the 70s, 80s, 90s and forward would have wanted to be in high ranking places in the U.S. government, one of them would be health and human services.
And we have Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and friends, let me quote you from the book and then I want to talk about RFK and people can decide if this lines up.
You talk about how fascism includes the idea of natural living, bodily strength, fitness, purity, divinity, that if you somehow have a big strong body that is Aryan and tan and so on, you are showing the signs of your racial superiority or biological superiority.
If you are showing signs of bodily weakness, slothfulness, contamination, damnation, dare I say, being mixed race like someone like me and impure, therefore, you are showing signs of your biological impurity, inferiority, and you're a danger to the rest of the people who just want to make America healthy again.
I just could not get RFK out of my head as I read your book.
So I think you've really kind of articulated that, you know, what we've seen is essentially a coalescence of these ideas that have begun to infect the way that people in the Republican Party increasingly are thinking about these issues.
And that's, you know, I would say most people in the Republican Party don't even realize that this is where we're at, you know.
there are people like RFK, I would say, like others, who subscribe to these ideas and are there because they want to essentially push these ideas forward and push an agenda forward.
And I think looking at the inflection point, I think, came with this character, Charles Murray, who in the 1990s wrote his kind of flagship book, The Bell Curve.
You know, he was quoting many, many scientists, pseudoscientists, really, who were funded by the Pioneer Fund.
And he carefully excised the origins of that from the book, took that out of the equation.
And then went around promoting this stuff.
And ironically, he was one of the guys that was flown over in the 90s after he wrote his book, flown over to the UK, you know, met people at the Institute for Economic Affairs, met people in the Thatcher government, met Margaret Thatcher herself.
And that really kind of cements and gives an indication of what was happening here.
You know, you had here, here you had someone who was basically a biological racist who believes in racial hierarchies and basically black people are stupider than white people.
There's nothing you can do about it.
We have to organize society on that basis.
Going and making great friends with the conservatives, writing pamphlets about the underclass.
writing in the Sunday Times and so on and so forth.
And that, you know, but, you know, quite not referring to his scientific racist work when he's doing that, but taking the end part of it and saying oh there's this underclass in the uk which is you know you can't do anything about it you just can't throw any money at that you just have to deal with it in these other ways and i think that set the scene but i think where i would say in terms of how this has developed and evolved i think the issue here really what makes this quite dangerous is that that certain sections of power that have now taken control
in the trump era you know jd vartz and others and so peter thiel Elon Musk, other people who are kind of involved in this nexus.
And the book really traces in detail these different interest groups and how they've kind of converged in some of these ideas.
I think what's happened is that they were looking at the increasing, on the one hand, they were grappling with a sense of widening systemic crisis.
Like we've not come out of an economic kind of crisis situation since 2008.
We're always on the cusp of a recovery, but it's never really there.
Growth has never returned.
So there's something systemically broken in the economy.
We're still seeing all these problems, rising inequalities, rising challenges, climate change is going through the roof.
We're now seeing the energy system is is is about to hit a major inflection point.
And over the last few years, we're living in a system where energy prices are just chronically high.
all the time and it's feeding this inflationary crisis.
The conventional toolbox isn't working anymore.
And what's happened is there's kind of been a split.
And then the book talks about that, this split in elite thinking.
And you've got one group of people, maybe the Bill Gates faction, who are kind of saying, we realize that the system is not quite working and we should make concessions and we should do reform.
and we should change the system and that means maybe we should improve democracy a little bit and maybe we should consider certain types of policies and blah blah blah we should do something about the climate and we should do this and then there's the other group which said, that's insane because that doesn't deal with what's really at the root of this problem, which is these inferior populations.
And so what suddenly happened is that they began to come up with this idea that the fundamental problem here is democracy.
It's democracy.
It's giving people a say.
That is the problem.
We need to do something about this.
And I think the guy that really articulated this, and he's kind of the linchpin of this in a way.
He's not the only person, but he's the figure that kind of acts as this transmission belt between, you know, 19th century Victorian racism and tech bro white supremacism.
This guy called Curtis Yavin, who I'm sure some people might have heard of.
Curtis Yavin, this kind of tech bro that came under Peter Thiel's wing, you know, Peter Thiel of Palantir that's taken over, you know, surveillance in the Pentagon and God knows what else he's taken over.
He's coming into the NHS in the UK and going everywhere.
So, you know, he got some money from Peter Thiel.
He had Peter Thiel's ear.
And since 2008, I think actually he was blogging anonymously and since then disrobed and said, no, actually, this is who I am and kind of became a bit of a almost like a minor celebrity you know kind of posing for the camera and getting nice interviews with the new yorkers since then but i looked at his early writings and i was astonished to see that even in the stuff that is coming out about curtis yarvin but journalists have not reported on how
how, you know, in 2008, 2009, he was writing openly about scientific racism and eugenics.
And he was basically saying, and he actually talked quite openly, and I'm going to use this language the way he used it, and I apologize to the audience.
He talked about the American Negro problem, very bluntly.
He said there is an American Negro, and he even referred to the Negro, this is his language the negro as it you know and he and and he essentially said that the civil rights movement put the so-called american negro in a worse position and they were actually better off under slavery by certain measures and standards,
articulated this theory, which he then expanded on a global scale, and essentially divided the world up into a number of different population groups based on their skin color.
And in order to conceal what he was doing, he essentially came up with a coded system.
He referred to it, and when you read it carefully, you can see that it's a very thin veneer.
But he came up with a coded system to refer to these different populations.
But at the end of it, basically said that the main problem we have is that there is a growing global majority of darker-skinned populations who are inferior, low IQ, and they are an existential threat to the white population.
And we need to do something about that.
And the only way we can solve this is essentially by going back to and resurrecting monarchist-style forms of government in the context of high technology and leveraging the best that we have of extreme capitalism and referring to companies like Apple as if they're super efficient and then saying that that's the kind of...
We need to create essentially a patchwork of new corporate-run entities essentially eliminate national governments and national democracies and it's an astonishing dark eugenics vision of the future that these guys are thinking about.
All right y'all, I want to thank you for listening to our conversation today.
I've been speaking with Nafiz Ahmed, the author of Alt Reich.
For subscribers, I'm going to stay on here for about 10 more minutes and ask him about Stephen Miller and the racist mentor who really taught him the ways of eugenics and gave him the worldview that is now being implemented from the White House.
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Before we go, Nefiz, what is the best way for people to link up with you?
What are things you're doing and ways folks might follow along?
with this book and other projects.
So you can check out my website at nefizarmed.net and AFEZAHM.ED.net.
You can check out the book.
Website is altreich.
It's alt-reich-reich.com.
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Other than that, you can follow me on the usual channels, Facebook, Twitter, or X, or whatever it's called, LinkedIn.
And I also run a systems thinking newsletter called ageoftransformation.org, where you can subscribe for free.
and I kind of do deep dives into the big trends and systems which are underlying all of these crazy things we're seeing in the world.
It's just wonderful to talk to you.
Thank you for sharing your insight and all the research you've done here and highlighting so many of the themes we talk about often in this show.
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