A secret eugenics conference that was held at University College London (UCL) is being investigated by university authorities.
The event, entitled “The London Conference on Intelligence”, has taken place at least four times since its inception in 2014. The conference was organised by James Thompson, an honorary Professor of Psychology at UCL. It featured a number of white supremacist speakers promoting racist views linking intelligence to genetic and racial differences.
Richard Lynn, President of the Ulster Institute for Social Research (UISR), spoke at the conference in 2015 and 2016. He has called for the “phasing out” of the “populations of inferior cultures”.
The UISR also runs a journal entitled ‘Mankind Quarterly’, whose founders included Corrado Gini, leader of Fascist Italy’s eugenics movement; Henry E. Garett, a defender of segregation in pre-Civil Rights America; and Robert Gayre, a defender of South Africa under Apartheid. The journal’s editorial board once included Ottmar von Verschuer, a German race scientist who mentored Nazi war criminal and Holocaust perpetrator Joseph Mengele.
London Student revealed that the overwhelming majority of speakers at the 2015 and 2016 conferences are associated with the USIR or Mankind Quarterly, such as Gerhard Meisenberg. Both Lynn and Meisenberg run a group called the Pioneer Fund, which is considered a hate group in the United States. The Pioneer Fund has given money to causes linked to the far-right, such as Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance, whose conferences have promoted leading racists and anti-Semites such as alt-Right figurehead Richard Spencer, former British National Party (BNP) leader Nick Griffin and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke.
Professor James Thompson follows a number of far-right and white supremacist accounts on Twitter, including Jared Taylor, Richard Spencer, American Renaissance and Traditional Britain Group. He also regularly contributes to the Unz Review, which has published deeply anti-Semitic articles such as “America’s Jews Are Driving America’s Wars”. Thompson himself has argued that women are less intelligent than men and has accused “blacks” of contributing “relatively little”.
One speaker linked to both UISR and American Renaissance, Helmuth Nyborg, spoke at the London Conference in 2015 and 2016. He has previously warned that Demark’s gene pool would suffer from mass immigration.
Disturbingly, the conference also featured an organiser who has argued in favour of raping children. Emil Kirkegaard, a blogger who has written about the defects of miscegenation (race-mixing) and explored the idea of a Jewish conspiracy, has claimed that “having sex with a sleeping child without them knowing it” could be a potential “compromise” for paedophiles.
UCL said that they were never given prior notice of the speakers or the subject of the conference, claiming that they were booked as an “external event” without official endorsement. However, the conference itself featured UCL’s logo on its YouTube channel and official publications.
David Colquhoun, an esteemed UCL Professor, described the academic content of the conference as “pseudoscience”. At Student Rights, we believe these views to not only be intellectually redundant but morally repugnant. It is unacceptable that this conference was able to go ahead on university premises without detection for so long. The external nature of the event also reveals a troubling loophole which future extremists may exploit.
A UCL spokesperson told London Student: “We are an institution that is committed to free speech but also to combatting racism and sexism in all forms”. They added that: “We have suspended approval for any further conferences of this nature by the honorary lecturer and speakers pending our investigation into the case”.
Student Rights is glad that the institution has taken this matter extremely seriously and we hope that there will be no future events of this nature taking place on campus.