CASE FILE: Edward Dutton

Edward Dutton (AKA The Jolly Heretic) is a British YouTuber and proponent of pseudo-scientific “race science”, which purports that intelligence and other characteristics are almost entirely biologically determined, and varies significantly between “races” of people. Dutton taught at University of Oulu in Finland but was removed after an investigation by the university found him guilty of plagiarising a student’s dissertation.

Dutton has since taken to vlogging and independent eugenicist research and commentary. He has written for a number of fringe far-right journals, including the Quarterly Review and race science outlet OpenPsych. He sits on the advisory board of Mankind Quarterly and is a prominent individual in international race science circles. He spoke at the Traditional Britain Group conference in 2022.

His often childish tone does not seem to have impeded his success on YouTube. The channel has 118,000 subscribers and 13 million views as of January 2025. On it, he publishes monologues that espouse racist views with a scientific veneer. He also interviews far-right figures such as Jared Taylor, Nick Fuentes, and Laura Towler and more mainstream figures such as Lionel Shriver, Douglas Carswell, and Amy Wax. Unlike many of his contemporaries and despite his extreme views, Dutton has so far avoided a YouTube ban by steering his audience towards his Substack for unexpurgated uploads.

In 2024, HOPE not hate revealed that Dutton is an employee of the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF), a US-based company advancing race science led by Emil Kirkegaard. Dutton has ceded editorial control to HDF in exchange for a salary. As a content creator in HDF’s stable, he benefits from a more professionalised channel with better recording equipment and the use of a podcast studio. He has also produced documentary-style videos filmed in the US and Spain. His audience on Substack, launched in 2023, has grown to 14,000 subscribers, and is the platform’s 10th most popular “science” newsletter.