How Nazi Race Science Conquered the White House, and is Coming for Your Democracy

It’s hard to believe, but it’s happening. On 27 March 2025, President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order, ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History’. Among its main concerns was the Smithsonian American Art Museum which, the order complained, featured an exhibit that claimed that “sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism”.

The White House was especially upset that the exhibit “promoted the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating ‘Race is a human invention.’”

On 15 February, a memo from the US General Services Administration removed an explicit ‘Prohibition of Segregated Facilities’ (like waiting rooms, restaurants and drinking fountains) for federal contractors. Though the memo cannot overturn the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination based on race, colour or other traits in public facilities, legal experts describe it as a powerful symbolic act exemplifying Trump’s embrace of a segregationist agenda.

The White House’s open support for racist and eugenicist ideas does not come out of the blue. It is the culmination of decades of subversion by scientific racists seeking to move their fringe beliefs into the mainstream.

But two individuals in particular became the connecting points between the traditional fascism of the 1930s, and the new digital era. What began as fringe internet musings about eugenics, racial IQ differences, and supposedly natural social hierarchies has seeped into elite tech circles and, remarkably, into the heart of American politics.

In 2007, an obscure American software engineer-turned-blogger began posting lengthy screeds under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, denouncing democracy as “ineffective and destructive” and praising authoritarian rule. Around the same time, a British philosopher began penning essays lauding scientific racism and absolutist micro-states.

These two figures – Curtis Yarvin (Moldbug’s real name) and Nick Land – helped spawn an intellectual movement that became known as the Dark Enlightenment, a neo-reactionary revolt against modern democracy.

Despite some major media outlets scurrying to look into the influence of Yarvin and Land on the American right, they have largely overlooked and obfuscated the roots of their ideas in Nazi-inspired scientific racism and eugenics.

Delving into some of their most racially-charged ideas – Nick Land’s support for “hyperracism” and Curtis Yarvin’s existential fear of the global extinction of a cognitively inferior white race – throws unnerving light on what the Trump administration is preparing for, and why it is working to protect anti-Black racism and the eugenics belief that sees race as a biological reality.

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Eugenics Rebranded: The ‘Human Biodiversity” Doctrine

For most journalists writing about the Dark Enlightenment, the most significant thing about Yarvin and Land is their opposition to democracy and support for techno-authoritarian rule. But this barely scratches the surface of what is really driving their belief systems.

Yarvin and Land built their worldviews on a foundational belief: human inequality is biologically hard-wired. They drew on a network of bloggers and authors in the early 2000s who promoted race-based genetic theories – the HBD (human biodiversity) community, which put a pseudo-academic gloss on old-fashioned scientific racism which  was supercharged under Nazi rule in the early 20th century.

As I reveal in my new book Alt Reich: The Network War to Destroy the West From Within, the HBD movement attempted to repackage ideas cemented under Nazi ideology.

Those ideas were originally promoted across America by the Pioneer Fund, a New York foundation established in the 1930s which harboured active ties to Nazi eugenicists. At this time, the Pioneer Fund distributed Nazi propaganda in the US. After the Second World War, the Fund bankrolled research at American universities in an effort to launder Nazi-inspired views about race and eugenics into the mainstream.

Its fundamental belief was that all social hierarchies are naturally determined by hereditary traits passed on largely through genetics. In particular, it believed that black people and other people of colour, as well as women, inherently have lower IQ than white men. The only solution was to engineer societies in such a way as to outbreed inferior populations through eugenics programmes, that often required violence to regulate.

The Nazis applied this ideology to many groups, but of course focused primarily on demonising Jews. To mainstream this ideology in a post-Nazi world, the Pioneer Fund and its supporters, and those inspired by its research, increasingly sought to rebrand their ideas by excising their Nazi origins and antisemitic trappings from view.

This led to a new dynamic. The Nazi sympathisers around the Pioneer Fund needed to masquerade as anti-Nazi, pro-democracy, and draw on nationalist sentiments. While being driven by existential concerns about inferior races, they needed to find a way to popularise their beliefs as anti-racist, scientific and as essential to free inquiry and liberty. To ditch the Nazi label, they shifted focus away from Jews and reverted back to obsessing about black people, civil rights, and more recently, migrants and Muslims. This attracted new types of bigots, and drove the creation of a heterogenous network of antisemitic, anti-black and anti-Muslim groups which, despite disagreements, have converged on shared goals of authoritarian resurgence to protect white identity.

Perhaps the most powerful example of this process was The Bell Curve (1994), co-authored by Charles Murray, which drew heavily on research funded by the Pioneer Fund, but carefully avoided acknowledging the Nazi inspiration behind its claims. The book remains the veritable ‘bible’ of modern scientific racism. Its classic claims that black people are statistically stupider than white people largely due to genetic reasons, and that this means inequalities between different groups cannot be solved through social policy, carefully skirted around its antisemitic roots.

The Bell Curve, for instance, praised Henry Laughlin, the pro-Nazi antisemite and founding first president of the Pioneer Fund for his immigration policies, ignoring that they were motivated to prevent Jews seeking safe refuge in the US during the Nazi Holocaust.

The HBD movement picked up the ideas popularised by Murray and sought to mainstream them further.

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Race Science and Monarchism

Curtis Yarvin’s early writings under his pseudonym frequently invoke race science to challenge liberal ideas.

In one essay titled ‘Why I am not a White Nationalist’, Yarvin’s writing illustrates the strategy at hand: to disavow white nationalism while, in reality, reconstructing its most foundational racist diagnoses in a new, post-democracy authoritarian context. He introduces “the leopard” of forbidden truth as “human cognitive biodiversity” – essentially human biodiversity applied to cognition. He writes: “The leopard’s name is human cognitive biodiversity. While the evidence for human cognitive biodiversity is indeed debatable, what’s not debatable is that it is debatable.” [my italics]

Yarvin argues that racial-cognitive differences must be openly considered, noting that for “the last 50 years” mainstream society has refused to do so.  

He offers a ‘critique’ of white nationalism which, however, describes it as “a very ineffective political device for solving the very real problems about which it complains.” Linking to the notorious white nationalist magazine American Renaissance, Yarvin claimed that “Every year, thousands of people of class B are attacked, raped and killed by people of class A”, using “class B” as an euphemism for white people, and “class A” for black people.

Referring to an old blog about Detroit, he claimed that whole areas of the country “X” (code for the United States) “have been ethnically cleansed by the departure of class-B people fleeing class-A violence.”

He even insisted that “class-Bs are systematically disfavoured in competition for educational and professional positions”, linking back to an obscure anti-diversity blog, Discriminations.US, run by a race science sympathisers. One post on the blog refers to “the growing concern that recent progress in DNA research on racial differences might re-enforce popular prejudices about … racial differences” and goes on to argue that “principles of equal treatment that have relied on the presumption that we are all fundamentally equal” should be “set aside” in favour of the view “that races and ethnicities are fundamentally different, and that skin colour is a valid proxy for those differences”.

For Yarvin, if nothing is done then the entire “class-B” white race is at risk due to the inherent violence of non-white “class-A” populations: “While class-Bs are a numerical majority in some regions, they are a substantial minority on the entire planet. Many respectable and influential people advocate the abolition of all migration controls worldwide, leaving the class-As in a perfect position to extend their theory of violence to a policy of global conquest and destruction. While this is not about to happen tomorrow, over the next century it is quite plausible.”

In the same essay, Yarvin explains his ‘model’ of reality, which classifies people into two fundamental types, “White and Swarthy” – he draws inspiration for this classification from ‘Fjordman’, a far-right blogger whose writings would later be quoted 111 times in the manifesto of neo-Nazi terrorist Anders Behring Breivik (who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011).

Yarvin argues that white people can be divided into three groups – “Brahims” who are the elites, and Vaisya and Optimate, who represent the white middle and working classes. The other two groups, Dalit and Helot, represent ethnic minorities: “One of the white parties (Brahmin) is ganging up with the two swarthy parties (Dalit, Helot)” – Yarvin sees these as the Democrats – “to apply a good old-fashioned whupping to the other two white parties (Vaisya, Optimate)” represented by the Republicans.

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Rejecting ‘Racial Uniformity’

In a separate essay setting out this model, Yarvin refers to the work of white supremacist Steve Sailer, who invented the term “human biodiversity” as a way to communicate scientific racist ideas to right-wing audiences. Yarvin links back to an article by Sailer published by The Unz Review, a platform promoting antisemitism, Holocaust denial, and pro-Russian conspiracy theories.

In the early 2000s, Sailer was one of the loudest defenders of the Pioneer Fund-inspired claims of The Bell Curve, and wrote about them at the American Conservative. It would later emerge that Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration policies during his first term and his current deputy chief of staff, was a fan of Sailer’s writings on VDARE, the notorious white supremacist website which publishes Holocaust deniers and white ethnic separatists.

Yet Yarvin explains that his opposition to “nationalism” is actually because he sees it as “really another word for democracy”, a concept which “makes no sense” due to its focus on the popular will. He wants to go back to the era of aristocratic rule that preceded modern nationalism, praising “the world of the ancien régime, in which French aristocrats had far more in common with Russian aristocrats than with French peasants. The world before nationalism and democracy was a world of mild wars, small and effective governments, personal freedom, and civilised high culture.”

The task ahead, he urges, is the eradication of democracy to return to a semblance of this glorious past: “The task of restoring the old world is immense. It may not be solvable. It certainly demands the eradication of all present governing institutions, a fate they seem not at all inclined to acquiesce in. But they are, after all, democratic, and for democracy to abolish itself is no paradox but a triumph – the only really satisfying way to terminate the whole great cult.”

He has claimed, for instance, that whites have higher IQs than blacks for genetic reasons, and even mused that some races are naturally more suited to slavery than others.

In one of his most explicitly racist essays in 2009, Yarvin rejects the idea of innate equality across races, which he calls “HNU” (Human Neurological Uniformity). He derides believers in “racial uniformity” – people who believe “genetic differences between races (if the term is even acknowledged) are of no behavioural significance” as dogmatists, and singles out evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, a prominent critic of gene-race-IQ theories, as a “spinmeister” of “HNU credulism”.

He also proceeds to use an anti-black racial slur with glee, insisting in his discussion of what he calls “the Negro problem” that “we will continue to use the word Negro, which has – or had – been the most standard and precise signifier for its signified since (according to my OED) 1555.”

Calling himself an “HNU denialist” who is “prepared to consider patterns of genotype–phenotype correlation in behavioural traits of modern human subpopulations”, Yarvin goes on to endorse the idea that “Negroes” are “naturally inferior to the Whites”. Referring to “the obvious statistical differences in the average talents of human races”, Yarvin’s prescription is to deal with this by eliminating representative government, paying “minimal attention to race” and then allowing structural racial inequalities to unfold:

“Obviously, once you stop believing in democracy, it is easy to stop seeing the failure of this political design in societies with a high percentage of non-Eurasian genetic ancestry as a moral reflection on persons of non-Eurasian ancestry, and start seeing it as a mere engineering failure, ie: if Negroes are unsuited for representative government, the fault lies entirely with the latter. Europeans are unsuited for representative government, too—just slightly less unsuited.”

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Obsessing Over America’s “Negro Problem”

Yarvin goes on to expound on what he calls “the Negro problem”, and argues that the alleged decline of “American Negros” after the 1960s has occurred despite diversity programmes and government spending. Because, he argues, this cannot be explained by the history of slavery or racism, it demonstrates the urgent need to cease democratic government support for them. He calls, for instance, for stopping US welfare programmes applied to “populations with recent hunter-gatherer ancestry and no great reputation for sturdy moral fiber”, which has turned those communities into “absolute human garbage”:

“Strangely (or not), most Americans are not familiar with the actual history of the modern American Negro. It shows a precipitous cultural decline in the second half of the 20th century… Before 1960, most Negroes had jobs, most Negro children were born to married parents, and most cities in America had thriving Negro business districts (such as Bronzeville in Chicago). All this is gone. But for a white-assimilated minority, often more mulatto than Negro, the community has simply been shattered.”

In other words, life for “Negroes” under racist segregation, he claims, was better than it is today – a spurious claim that is blatantly false.

The NHU credulist, Yarvin continues, “ascribes the depressing sociological statistics of American Negroes to mistreatment, past and present, by whites. ie: racism. In the era of slavery or the era of the lynch mob, this did not seem like much of a stretch.” NHU credulists, therefore, said that “the Negro problem could be solved by (a) giving Negroes money and power, and (b) educating Europeans to like and respect their Negro brothers, who (respectable scientists assured them) were exactly the same as them, under the skin.”

He then concludes: “Fifty years ago, this prescription was not absurd. America took it. It didn’t seem to be working, so we doubled the dose. And so began the usual pattern of iatrogenic escalation. Far from curing the relatively mild social pathologies of the Negro community in the early 20th century, the Myrdal therapy aggravated them, converting small precancerous lesions into vast metastatic melanomas. Of course, this called for even more medicine. And so on.”

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The Dark Enlightenment is Born

Many of Yarvin’s ideas were further developed by Nick Land, who coined the term “Dark Enlightenment” with a series of essays in 2012 and 2013. Once a left-field academic known for dense critical theory, Land later embraced what he termed “hyperracism” – effectively a techno-futurist spin on eugenics. He advocates for racially based absolutist micro-states, where unregulated capitalism combines with genetic separation between global elites and the “refuse” of the rest.

In Land’s vision, society should stratify into biologically superior elites who mate with each other and spawn a new species with an expanding IQ, while the lower classes degenerate – a scenario he chillingly frames as the rise of a quasi-speciation event under unfettered capitalism.

What’s crucial is how these racist ideas directly inform Yarvin’s and Land’s politics. If one truly believes that human groups differ vastly in innate intelligence or “aptitude,” the egalitarian premise of democracy looks fatally flawed.

Where the original Enlightenment championed reason, equality, and democracy, the Dark Enlightenment preaches in-equality, elitism, and autocracy. It scorns “voix” (voice) in politics, celebrating instead exit: the idea that the talented few should simply escape the democratic mass and form their own governed enclaves. Land envisions a future where ‘great men’ steer the ship of state, guided by algorithms or AI rather than by any popular mandate.

Curtis Yarvin’s political vision aligns closely, though he prefers analogies to corporate governance and monarchy. He has written thousands of words detailing how a “formalist” neocameralist state would work. Stripped of jargon, Yarvin’s proposal is that we “reboot” the US government as a corporation – literally converting countries into networked territories controlled by private companies (which he calls “Patchwork” realms), owned by shareholders and run by CEOs with absolute authority.

“The state is simply a real estate business on a very large scale,” Yarvin wrote in 2007, suggesting citizens should be treated as tenants or, more appropriately, given the context of capitalist acceleration, as customers – not participants in governance. In a Patchwork realm, the sovereign CEO is constrained only by the need to keep customers from leaving to a competitor state; within his domain, he wields unchecked power. “A Patchwork realm…is no more bound by the laws it imposes on its residents than Linden Lab is bound by the terms-of-use policy it enforces in Second Life,” Yarvin explained, explicitly likening government to an online game server where the owners can change rules at will.

Both Yarvin and Land share a central thesis: Democracy is a dangerous delusion. Yarvin calls liberal democracy a “decadent” system, doomed to collapse under the weight of its own egalitarian pretences. “If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia,” Yarvin declared in a 2012 talk.

In Yarvin’s ideal world, a “benevolent dictator” would take charge of America, assume absolute power long enough to dismantle the “old regime” of Congress, courts, and bureaucrats, and then govern like a sovereign CEO.

Land’s writings likewise argue that giving every person a vote just empowers mediocrity and corruption – what he calls “the politically awakened masses as a howling irrational mob.” In one grim line, Land writes, “Nothing human makes it out of the near-future”, hinting at a belief that humanity must evolve (or be engineered) beyond its current state to survive – a rationale for his hyper-elite, AI-steered governance.

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From Silicon Valley to “Caesarism”

By the late 2010s, these ideas had spread beyond obscure blogs, finding an audience among a clique of wealthy technologists and right-wing intellectuals disillusioned with mainstream conservatism. Yarvin, in particular, became an unlikely guru in Silicon Valley. A key figure here is billionaire investor Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, who along with Elon Musk, played a major role in helping Trump win back the White House.

Thiel met Yarvin about a decade ago and was impressed – so much so that Thiel’s venture capital fund quietly bankrolled Yarvin’s startup (the decentralised computing project Urbit). Thiel, who declared in 2009 that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” was already on a parallel intellectual track. Reading Yarvin’s work seemed to validate Thiel’s own doubts about democracy. Yarvin has hinted that he “coached Thiel” over the years and that Thiel is “fully enlightened” – meaning fully on board with Yarvin’s neoreactionary worldview. Indeed, Thiel’s writings echo Moldbuggian themes: he lamented that women’s suffrage harmed capitalist democracy and spoke of launching seasteading colonies to experiment with new governments.

Other tech moguls followed. Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape and a major venture capitalist, became friendly with Yarvin and started publicly quoting him. In a 2023 interview at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, Andreessen praised Yarvin and even called him a “friend”, while parroting Yarvin’s line that “the 1960s were a horrible mistake”.

On the East Coast, pro-Trump right-wing intellectuals at outfits like the Claremont Institute also took notice. In 2016, Michael Anton – a former speechwriter turned theorist – penned the infamous “Flight 93 Election” essay comparing the prospect of Hillary Clinton’s victory to a hijacked plane about to crash. Anton later revealed he had read Yarvin’s work. By 2021, Anton (then a Claremont senior fellow) hosted Yarvin on his podcast for a long conversation about ending democracy.

The two discussed how an American “Caesar” might come to power. This was significant: Claremont was a think-tank with huge influence in Trump’s orbit, and Anton had served on Trump’s National Security Council in 2017. Their engagement with Yarvin signalled that neoreactionism was permeating establishment conservative circles.

By the early 2020s, Curtis Yarvin’s name began cropping up at the highest levels of Republican politics. JD Vance, a venture capitalist-turned-populist politician (and Thiel protégé), admitted he was “plugged into a lot of weird right-wing subcultures”. It soon emerged that Vance had not only read Yarvin, but also corresponded with him. In fact, back in 2013, Blake Masters – another Thiel mentee – emailed friends a link to Yarvin’s blog, enthusing over its argument for abolishing the US government in favour of a monarchy.

Masters later ran for Senate, and on the campaign trail, he echoed Yarvin-esque ideas: when asked how to drain the swamp, Masters replied with a proposal to “Retire All Government Employees (RAGE),” an acronym he attributed to “one of my friends” (widely understood to be Yarvin). Masters lost his 2022 race, but JD Vance – backed by Thiel – won his, becoming Senator from Ohio. Vance then became a chief surrogate for Trump’s 2024 campaign – and by October 2024, rumours swirled that Trump might even tap Vance as his running mate. Sure enough, he did. Vance himself, now Vice President Elect, acknowledged in a podcast interview that Yarvin’s writings influenced him deeply.

Tucker Carlson, the most-watched right-wing TV host, developed a fascination with these ideas. He invited Yarvin onto his streaming show for an hour-long interview, giving Yarvin by far his largest public platform. Carlson treated Yarvin as an intriguing visionary rather than a crank, legitimising him for a mainstream conservative audience.

Even Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, reportedly read Yarvin’s blog. In early 2017, Politico reported that Yarvin was communicating with Bannon and his White House aides through an intermediary – a claim Yarvin denied.

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Into the White House

All of this set the stage for what happened after the 2024 election. Donald Trump, having won back the presidency, began assembling his new administration – and fingerprints of the Dark Enlightenment are evident.

Key figures in Trump’s inner circle were Yarvin-friendly. Vance was the obvious example, but not the only one. Another was Michael Anton, now director of policy planning at the State Department. Peter Thiel has acted as a sort of shadow adviser and talent scout for the new regime. The Washington Post revealed that Marc Andreessen had also been “quietly recruiting candidates for positions across Trump’s Washington” effectively helping to stack the administration with people sympathetic to the tech-authoritarian worldview.

Most striking are the parallels between Yarvin’s public strategies for seizing autocratic power and the actions of Trump’s team in real time. For years, Yarvin had blogged about an incoming leader using “the power of the mob” as a blunt instrument against rival power centres. Sure enough, after Trump’s victory, his camp began using the threat of primary challenges and the fury of the MAGA base to cow Republican lawmakers who opposed Trump’s more extreme nominees.

Yarvin had also advocated gutting the civil service via mass firings (recall “RAGE”) and stripping agencies to the bone. In 2023–24, Trump’s policy advisors – coordinated by Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 – rolled out plans to invoke Schedule F (a legal mechanism to reclassify and fire tens of thousands of federal employees) and slash budgets. Elon Musk, as Trump’s Special Advisor in charge of the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) which is not even a formal part of the US Government, mirrored Yarvin’s ideas: Musk mused that “government is simply the largest corporation”.

Other Yarvinite policies found their way into the platform: talk of using the military to “restore order” in high-crime cities (Yarvin had often suggested that extreme measures would be needed to pacify urban unrest once liberal governance was removed), or schemes to have the President assume direct control over independent agencies. Trump himself started musing about the need for “one-day trials and quick executions” for certain crimes – a level of summary power that sounds monarchical.

By the inauguration in January 2025, Curtis Yarvin attended a black-tie inaugural gala dubbed the “Coronation Ball”. The name underscored what was afoot: the flirtation of Trumpism with outright monarchy. It was a moment that signalled the convergence of the Dark Enlightenment and MAGA populism.

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Techno-Feudalism?

The celebrated dissident economist Yanis Varoufakis was one of the few who saw what was coming. In his book Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism? he argued that the new technology oligarchy was reverting to a form of authoritarian control that mimicked pre-capitalist relations of feudalism. Instead of profit-seeking through competition, this was rent-seeking through monopolies, amidst anti-democratic structures which treat citizens as serfs.

Varoufakis’ analysis provided a compelling critique of the authoritarian direction and centralisation of power under the technology oligarchy. But he ultimately misconstrued what capitalism is in its most fundamental sense – a social-property relation concerning the systems of production. Under feudalism, peasants still lived off the land. Direct force was used to extract rents in the form of a portion of the produce. Under capitalism, people were entirely expelled from the land through enclosure, as the emerging capitalist class took control of the systems of production for themselves. The newly dispossessed working class were forced to sell their labour power to the capitalist owners of production.

Every new era of capitalism has reinforced this divide through deepening forms of ‘enclosure’ that cement the dispossession of people from the earth, and from the mechanisms by which we produce the things we need. Under the new technology oligarchy, this dispossession has not reversed, but intensified. We are in an accelerationist age of the commodification of everything, to the point that now even ourselves, our desires, our beliefs, our attention, have become commodified – as the means to produce information itself are monopolised by Big Data platforms which hoover up and maximise profits on the basis of mass surveillance of all our behaviours.

While violence, monopoly and rent-seeking are increasingly incorporated into the mechanisms of control as the system spirals into intensifying crisis, the fundamental relation of capitalism – dispossession from the systems of production which are owned and controlled by an increasingly centralised oligarchy – is not being weakened, but is consolidating under the weight of authoritarian power. In this new stage of accelerationist capitalism, the dispossession of the masses is to be completed through the fascist project of ending democracy itself, completely eliminating the need to depend on humans for production, and the absolutist technological takeover of the public sphere by AI-augmented private power.

This new hybrid authoritarianism is fusing corporate power, state force and neo-reactionary ideology, which has painstakingly reconstructed Nazi-inspired eugenics for the post-Nazi digital era. I call it technofascist hypercapitalism.

This new, deranged form of fascism – a fascism for the age of the polycrisis that is so delusional it denies its own nature – cloaks its aims in the language of “efficiency” or “draining the swamp” rather than overtly renouncing democracy. It reject descriptors like ‘racist’ and ‘Nazi’ only because it intellectually positions itself as engaged in a creative dialogue with history that draws carefully on Nazi-funded eugenics but reconstructs it for a post-Nazi world. This ambiguity is by design: Yarvin himself advocates a strategy of “clear-pill” incrementalism, where a would-be autocrat methodically undercuts democratic norms without necessarily making grand proclamations.

This is not just an American project. As Yarvin made clear, the existential fear of non-white “class A” populations is that they will rise up and violently endanger the white race – a prospect enabled by the very existence of representative democracy and welfare states. Not only must the American Republic be destroyed, but so too must the democracies of its major allies.

The Dark Enlightenment may have started in the shadows, but it has stepped into the light of day. Recognising its genesis in Nazi-era scientific racism and its metamorphosis for the age of Big Data is crucial, because it reminds us that at its core this movement seeks to legitimise domination – by one race, one class, or one genius – over the rest of us.

Dr Nafeez Ahmed is a systems theorist, investigative journalist and change strategist. He is the author of Alt Reich: The Network War to Destroy the West From Within.