FvD refuses to remove racist podcast episode amid outcry

An English language podcast broadcast aired by the far-right FvD party’s international arm, Forum & Friends, has sparked an outcry after guests described African people as “pack animals”, discussed racial IQ theories and described Black people as genetically inferior.

The podcast is a weekly show which, like other party operations, is funded through the interior ministry’s subsidy for political parties.

The August 26 episode was hosted by John Laughland, a British party staffer who has run FvD International since 2022 and is a mentor to party founder Thierry Baudet.

Laughland’s guest was British author Simon Elmer, who had posted a series of messages on X about Jason Arday, a Black Cambridge professor who took his own life earlier this year following plagiarism accusations.

Elmer went on to describe the “genetically determined culture and mentality of African people” and said their only use was “to destroy us and breed us out of existence”. He called people from 10 African countries “feeble-minded”. Laughland nodded along and said at the end that it was “hard to disagree” with the analysis.

“Outlandish”
FvD parliamentary leader Ralf Dekker told Volkskrant he had not heard the episode. The podcast gives a platform to voices that “provoke thought”, he said, “and then it can sometimes be outlandish. But if this was said literally, I do not agree with it.” He said there was no reason to remove it: “You should never take anything offline.”

Laughland and the FvD press office have not responded to questions from Volkskrant since Friday.

Léonie de Jonge, a political scientist who researches the far right, told the paper the English-language format was no accident: the podcast is aimed at international far-right networks, not Dutch voters. Anthropologist Amade M’charek said “feeble-minded” is a eugenics term used to justify mass sterilisation in the 20th century.

Earlier episodes have featured guests defending the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, and Laughland himself has spoken of a “horrible cabal” transferring wealth to a small elite, a phrase closely tied to antisemitic conspiracy theories, Volkskrant said.

Laughland, who taught Baudet at Oxford, worked from 2008 to 2015 for a Russian-funded think tank in Paris. Investigative platform Follow the Money reported last year that he spoke at four Russian government-linked conferences between June 2024 and May 2025, with his travel and accommodation paid by his Russian hosts, which the FvD confirmed. He has described Ukraine as “a fiction”.