In 2023, Matt Goodwin chose to step onto a well-worn and deeply dangerous path. Speaking on a podcast with Konstantin Kisin, he endorsed the idea that genetic science would soon prove “inherent differences between groups”, predicting that the claim there are no such differences would look “utterly ridiculous” within a decade. That is not idle speculation. It is the core thesis of so-called “race realism”, the modern rebranding of the same pseudo-scientific racial hierarchies that underpinned the eugenics movement of the early 20th century. The language may be updated, the microphones more polished, but the intellectual architecture is unmistakable: biology as destiny, hierarchy as natural order, and inequality as science.
Matt Goodwin says developments in genetic science will make younger generations more conservative as they understand the "inherent differences" between different groups. pic.twitter.com/iRMTrLPZyc
— Adam Bienkov (@AdamBienkov) April 16, 2023
Later that year, Goodwin appeared on the Aporia podcast alongside Noah Carl, the controversial academic formerly affiliated with Cambridge and business partner of Toby Young. Aporia itself was founded explicitly to reopen debates around hereditarianism and group differences, debates that were discredited not merely because they were offensive, but because they were historically weaponised to justify sterilisation, segregation and extermination. Within months, Carl and co-host Bo Winegard platformed American white supremacist Jared Taylor on an episode titled ‘Race Realism and White Identity’. Taylor, a long-time figure in organised white nationalism, has used his platform to argue there is “no possibility of blacks and whites living peacefully together.” This is not abstract theory. It is eliminationist ideology dressed in academic language.
So, Matt Goodwin… https://t.co/g5iIODdYoi
— GET A GRIP (@docrussjackson) April 16, 2023
Taylor’s own organisation, American Renaissance, has for decades served as a meeting ground for neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan figures, sustained in part by funding streams historically linked to the Pioneer Fund, a body synonymous with racial pseudoscience. By 2025, Taylor was welcomed to Britain to keynote a conference hosted by Patriotic Alternative, where he appeared alongside its leader, Mark Collett, a man with a documented history of praising Hitler. There, Taylor called for a “white homeland” and denounced Western governments as “traitors” to their race. Patriotic Alternative has been officially designated a “cause for concern” under the UK government’s updated definition of extremism. These are not fringe blog posts lost in obscurity; they are public alignments within a live extremist ecosystem.
Meanwhile, Kemi Badenoch nominated Toby Young to the House of Lords as Baron Young of Acton. By that point, Young remained in formal business partnership with a senior editor of a publication established to revive debate around race science and eugenics, a publication whose associates had platformed an open white supremacist who would, that same year, share a stage with a Hitler-admiring extremist leader. The through-line is not accidental. It is structural. When prominent commentators legitimise the premise that genetics will soon prove immutable hierarchies between racial groups, they lend credibility to a worldview that has already demonstrated where it leads.
The Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers. It began with journals, conferences and confident men insisting that science had revealed fundamental biological truths about human difference. It began with the normalisation of the idea that some groups were inherently inferior, incompatible, or parasitic. The language of “inherent differences between groups” is not historically neutral. It is the intellectual scaffolding upon which racial hygiene laws were built in Nazi Germany. To flirt with that framework today, to predict its vindication, is to reopen a door that Europe once paid in blood to close.
No one is claiming that podcast appearances equal genocide. But ideas create atmospheres; atmospheres create movements; movements create consequences. When mainstream academics and media figures amplify hereditarian narratives, and when political leaders elevate their associates into positions of legislative power, the boundary between fringe extremism and respectable discourse erodes. The tragedy of the 20th century was not merely that monstrous people existed. It was that respectable institutions accommodated monstrous ideas until they no longer seemed monstrous at all.
From Racial Darwinism to the Nazi Death Camps: A Historical Timeline
1859 – Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species
Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species, outlining the theory of natural selection. Darwin’s work focused on biological evolution, not racial hierarchy. However, aspects of evolutionary theory were soon distorted by others to support social and political ideologies.
1860s–1890s – Social Darwinism and Racial Hierarchies
Thinkers such as Herbert Spencer popularise “Social Darwinism,” applying evolutionary language to human societies. Competition between nations and peoples is framed as a biological struggle in which the “fittest” should dominate.
At the same time, pseudo-scientific racial classification systems gain traction across Europe and the United States, ranking human populations into hierarchies of “civilisation” and worth.
1883 – Francis Galton coins the term “Eugenics”
Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, introduces the concept of eugenics, the idea that human populations can and should be improved through selective breeding.
Eugenics movements spread across Britain, Germany and the United States, gaining support among academics, reformers and policymakers.
Early 1900s – Institutionalised Eugenics
Eugenics societies are founded in Britain and the United States. Universities establish research programmes on heredity and intelligence.
In 1907, Indiana becomes the first US state to enact compulsory sterilisation laws for those deemed “unfit.” By the 1930s, more than 30 US states had similar laws, resulting in tens of thousands of forced sterilisations.
1920s – Racial Science and “Hygiene” in Germany
In post-World War I Germany, racial anthropology and “racial hygiene” become influential intellectual currents. Works such as The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant circulate internationally and influence German racial theorists.
These ideas argue that national survival depends on preserving racial “purity.”
1933 – The Nazi Seizure of Power
Adolf Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany. The Nazi regime quickly embeds racial ideology into state policy.
The “Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring” mandates compulsory sterilisation for hundreds of thousands of Germans.
1935 – The Nuremberg Laws
The Nuremberg Laws strip Jews of citizenship and prohibit marriage or sexual relations between Jews and “Aryans.” Racial classification becomes a legal instrument of the state, enforced through bureaucracy and documentation.
1939 – The T4 “Euthanasia” Programme
The regime launches Aktion T4, targeting disabled children and adults for systematic killing. This programme becomes a testing ground for techniques, including gas chambers, later used in extermination camps.
1941–1942 – From Mass Shootings to Industrialised Murder
Following the invasion of the Soviet Union, Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) conduct mass shootings of Jews, Roma and others.
In January 1942, senior Nazi officials meet at the Wannsee Conference to coordinate what they term the “Final Solution”, the systematic extermination of European Jewry.
1942–1945 – The Death Camps
Extermination camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka and Sobibor are constructed or expanded for industrial-scale killing.
Approximately six million Jews are murdered in the Holocaust, alongside millions of Roma, disabled people, Poles, Soviet POWs and others targeted under Nazi racial doctrine.
Historical Pattern
The trajectory from racial Darwinism to genocide was not inevitable. nor was it linear. But it reveals a pattern:
- Academic theories about hierarchy
- Popularisation through books and journals
- Policy implementation through sterilisation and segregation
- Escalation into state-directed persecution
- Culmination in extermination
The Holocaust did not arise from nowhere. It emerged from decades of normalised pseudoscience, institutional support, and political will. The language of “inherent differences” and biological hierarchy has repeatedly been used in modern history to legitimise exclusion and oppression.
Understanding that intellectual genealogy is essential not to silence debate, but to recognise how certain frameworks have operated historically and the consequences they have carried when translated from theory into power.
