Keith and Ryan return to discuss The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist — a work exploring the “divided brain” and its consequences.

They examine the distinct ways the left and right hemispheres interpret the world, and how an overdominance of the left hemisphere may help explain the pathologies of modern thought.

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I’ve just finished watching Channel 4’s three-part documentary The Tony Blair Story. Blair has always seemed so unremarkable as a person that I never took much of an interest in him, but I found this series surprisingly captivating despite Blair being as guarded and unapologetic for his reign as ever.

At the start of part one of the series, Blair is asked what impact his father having a stroke when Blair was only 11 years old had on him. Blair dismissively replies that he doesn’t engage in much psychoanalysis, but it “must have had an impact on my thinking about the world.” Towards the end of the series when pushed on his fateful decision to go to war in Iraq, Blair again repeats his view that psychoanalysis and introspection are overrated, and, much to the frustration of the interviewer, tells him “there’s no point carrying on trying to get me to see a different point of view from the one I had at the time.”

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I think it’s this kind of refusal to engage with his legacy beyond repeating the spin-doctored policy justifications of the time that makes Blair such a reviled figure today outside the establishment. It’s not that Blair is defensive, it’s that he is completely averse to introspective moral scrutiny. George W. Bush’s reputation seems to have recovered better for his role in the ill-fated war on terror, because for all his belligerence and apparent idiocy, he was a man of instinct who acted on understandable impulses. Blair by contrast, is a technocrat who is always in the mode of justification, less concerned with whether the decision was right in hindsight than with preserving the coherence of the reasoning that led to it. I think most people rightly feel there is something unhuman about a refusal to introspect on a moral question of this magnitude.

But there is something even more unsettling about this persona of Blair, which is that his presentation as the archetypal late-modern amoral technocrat — concerned only with efficiency and spin — is paired with a very simplistic, totalising moral framework which motivated what turned out to be a radical political agenda.

The author Robert Harris, a former friend of Blair who now identifies him as a narcissist with a messiah complex, says in the documentary that Blair was motivated by a “Manichaean sense of good and evil” rooted in his Christian faith.

Yet Blair was the face of New Labour and “Third Way” politics, which marketed itself as a kind of post-ideological form of politics stripped of its old antagonisms and reduced to competent administration — if you want to understand this, read my essay The Triumph of Social Liberalism.

Blair dragged Labour out of exile and delivered them three successive national electoral victories by abandoning the old attachments of British leftism and embracing globalisation and markets. The party was unpopular due to its reputation for socialist mismanagement earned when last in government, so Blair simply abandoned any economic leftism that was unappealing to the British public, tore up decades of Labour conventions, and turned New Labour into a vehicle designed to win elections.

Of course, no politics is ever truly non-ideological. What Blair did was displace overt ideological conflict in domestic politics by bringing Labour into alignment with the emerging centrist, socially liberal consensus. Instead, the moral fervour of progressives was to be directed to the international stage. Blair grasped that after the Cold War, the central political divide was no longer left versus right or socialism versus free markets, but national versus post-national: between those who saw political legitimacy as rooted in the nation-state, and those who saw it as grounded in universal norms, transnational institutions, and individual rights. Blair was the first British Prime Minister to align himself decisively with the latter.

After all, all the most radical changes Blair brought are in this direction: the incorporation of the Human Rights Act 1998 bound British law more closely to the European Convention on Human Rights, something which now constrains successive governments’ ability to stop the inflow of illegal migrants on small boats; he expanded the role of courts and placed limits on parliamentary sovereignty in the name of universal rights; he massively expanded immigration in the name of competitiveness and openness, and in the words of his speech writer, to “rub the right’s nose in diversity”; he expanded speech restrictions and equality legislation to narrow the boundaries of permissible public discourse; and of course, he made Britain an active participant in a series of interventions — Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, and Iraq — that were justified not primarily in terms of national interest, but of humanitarian obligation.

Throughout all this, what motivated Blair? One factor is his Christianity, which was a much more important part of Blair’s worldview than one might imagine. Blair converted to Catholicism shortly after leaving office in 2007, but we are told by his old friends and colleagues that Christianity was important to Blair throughout his adulthood — his fellow University student and Anglican priest Peter Thomson is credited with both awakening his religious faith and his left-wing politics. At the start of episode 2, he says the film that most affected him was Schindler’s List, specifically the image of German cruelty over helpless captive Jews, and witnessing so many do nothing while this cruelty persisted.

Tony Blair is a Boomer, and like most of his generation, he has a rather simplistic moral worldview that is a fusion of a neutered, humanitarian Christianity and ‘Holocaustianity.’ The latter is a far more Manichean worldview where anything that would prevent the scenes Blair saw in the camp scenes in Schindler’s List is good, and any attitudes that could lead to it — or the kind of passivity that would allow it to happen in a distant land — are evil. This combined with Blair’s desire for adulation, to be seen as a liberator and a driver of progress, especially by destitute non-White people, is what drove his moral mission. We are told that the adulation he received on visiting Kosovo after Britain’s intervention there affected him deeply, the kind of adulation he then hoped for from the Iraqi people.

The apparent contradiction of Blair then — a technocrat on the surface and a crusading moralist underneath — is less of a contradiction when you understand it as a product of a specific historical moment in which those two tendencies could be fused. When the managerial, post-ideological mass democracies of the 1990s synthesised the socialist critique of capitalism, found a technocratic medium in economic management, and used the universal lessons of the 20th Century to direct Western elites’ moral energy to a more expansive and ideological vision of moral progress at the global level built on human rights universalism.

The problem for Blair is that the moral and political framework he operated within holds no resonance now. The assumptions that made his worldview plausible — the authority of the West, the universality of liberal norms, the moral clarity of intervention on the basis of invoking Hitler or Chamberlain — began to erode almost immediately after their high point. Iraq shattered the credibility of humanitarian intervention. The financial crisis undermined faith in technocratic governance. The catastrophic failures and unpopularity of mass immigration has shown the post-national project to be something forced on unwilling majorities by people with no moral mandate.

As an individual, Blair can seem especially reptilian compared to other politicians of his generation, but the same man was the most popular politician in his country in the 1990s because people found him relatable and “not like a politician.” Blair is really the purest expression of a moral and political order that has already collapsed. He now seems strangely out of time.

And yet, for all that, at the close of this series Blair boasts that his influence over British government is as great now as it was when he was Prime Minister. In January, another out of touch Boomer currently attempting his own ill-fated hubristic Middle-East adventure tapped the 72 year old Blair to head a Gaza ‘board of peace’ and oversee its construction.

The world that made Blair may have passed, but the system he helped build remains intact.

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Keith and Ryan return to discuss modern civilization's biggest crisis: the fertility collapse. Entire nations face erasure within generations on current trends. Why is this problem so persistent, what are the factors driving it, and what can be done to rebirth the West?

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This belief has enduring appeal among anti-Zionists because, if true, it undermines the Jewish claim to an ancient biblical connection to Israel, and many of its proponents also see it as a clever way to sidestep accusations of “anti-Semitism.” Severing the connection between biblical Israelites and modern Jews is also why the theory has been adopted by some Christian anti-Zionists — this appears to be the primary motivation of Candace Owens, now the most influential proponent of Khazar theory. Candace has argued that acceptance of Khazar theory “doesn’t even require literacy” because of how self-evident it is that ““God’s chosen people” don’t mass murder, steal, create systems of usury and rape children in occult ceremonies.”

While the theory is now kept alive by conspiratorial audiences online, its origins lie in a small body of historical scholarship on the medieval Khazar state. A key body of Hebrew source material was published by the Russian Academy in Leningrad in 1932. This was followed by Abraham Nahum Polak’s History of a Jewish Kingdom in Europe (1944), which portrayed Khazaria as a substantially Jewish polity and entertained the possibility of a demographic legacy in Eastern Europe, linking it to the collapse of the Khazar state and a subsequent mass migration following the Mongol invasions — in fact, the kingdom had collapsed several centuries before the Mongols appeared on the steppe, a fatal error for Polak’s theory.1 The theory entered wider public debate, and took on its more maximalist form as an explainer for Ashkenazi origins, several decades later with the publication of Arthur Koestler’s 1976 book The Thirteenth Tribe.

Koestler, a Hungarian Jew, moved through several ideological currents — including Zionism and communism — but ultimately became a staunch critic of ideological nationalism and ethnic politics. Koestler’s biographer documents that Koestler told a French biologist that he:

Was convinced that if he could prove that the bulk of Eastern European Jews (the ancestors of today's Ashkenazim) were descended from the Khazars, the racial basis for anti-Semitism would be removed and anti-Semitism itself could disappear.2

In the introduction to The Thirteenth Tribe, Koestler outlines what he views as the most profound consequences of his theory — a final undermining of the “cruel hoax” of anti-Semitism:

This was written before the full extent of the holocaust was known, but that does not alter the fact that the large majority of surviving Jews in the world is of Eastern European—and thus perhaps mainly of Khazar—origin. If so, this would mean that their ancestors came not from the Jordan but from the Volga, not from Canaan but from the Caucasus, once believed to be the cradle of the Aryan race; and that genetically they are more closely related to the Hun, Uigur and Magyar tribes than to the seed of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Should this turn out to be the case, then the term “anti-Semitism” would become void of meaning, based on a misapprehension shared by both the killers and their victims. The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated.3

Koestler’s argument is speculative. Without the aid of modern genetic science, he constructs his theory around a few facts from the historical record:

1. The ruling elite of the Khazar Khaganate converted to Judaism around the 8th century.

2. The Khazar state collapsed after attacks by the Kievan Rus in the 10th century.

3. Large Jewish populations appear in Eastern Europe in the late medieval period, especially in Poland, Lithuania, and Russia.

From this, Koestler suggests that there may have been a large migration of converted Khazars to Eastern Europe in this period, who now comprise the bulk of Ashkenazim.

Interest in the Khazar hypothesis resurfaced more recently with the publication of Shlomo Sand’s 2009 book The Invention of the Jewish People, a work Candace Owens often cites as something that woke her up to Khazar theory. Sand, like Koestler, is a leftist Jew and an ardent opponent of nationalism, who similarly views the Zionist project as harmful to Jews.

Sand rejects the idea of a unified, continuous Jewish ethnos descended from a biblical nation, as well as the traditional narrative of a mass exile after the destruction of the Second Temple. Instead, Sand suggests that Jewish populations outside the Levant emerged primarily through local conversions — most notably among the Khazars — rather than through diaspora communities maintaining biological continuity.

Though Sand’s theory addresses genetics, he seems unwilling to actually engage with genetic science, sometimes suggesting the whole enterprise is racist. For example, when geneticist Harry Ostrer announced the results of a DNA study revealing “a biological basis for Jewishness,” Sand responded that “Hitler would certainly have been very pleased.” Sand has also claimed that geneticists have avoided investigating the Khazar hypothesis because they know it would undermine the ancient foundation for a unified Jewish ethnic identity.

Setting aside genetics, there is little new in Sand’s historical argument, which is largely a repetition of Koestler’s in The Thirteenth Tribe. For additional historical evidence, he draws primarily on two sources — the highly dubious Cambridge document and King Joseph’s letter, which will be discussed in the next section.

Elsewhere, Sand writes that “the Khazars’ sacred tongue and written communication was Hebrew,” citing an Arab source named Ibn al-Nadim.4 In fact, al-Nadim merely recorded that Khazars used “Hebrew characters,” and this would have been limited to elites in what was otherwise a largely illiterate steppe society.

Sand also makes the claim that Hebrew characters entered the Cyrillic alphabet, through the Khazars’ early rule over the Russians. This suggestion finds no support among historical linguistics, or seemingly anywhere outside Sand’s work; the origins of the Cyrillic script are generally traced to Greek and Glagolitic forms developed by Byzantine missionaries.

Even overlooking errors like this, and setting aside the genetic record, Koestler and Sand’s broader theory is problematic from a historical perspective. The migration history of Ashkenazi Jews is relatively well documented and points to gradual migrations from Western and Southern Europe. After exile, Jewish communities existed throughout the Roman Empire and developed particularly strong roots in Italy during late antiquity. From there, they migrated northward into the Rhineland and northern France in the early medieval period, with historians documenting an established “Italy–Rhineland route of Jewish immigration.”5 One example is the Kalonymos family, a prominent rabbinic lineage documented to have moved from Lucca in Italy to Mainz, where its members became leading scholars in the emerging Ashkenazi community.6

These Ashkenazi communities later migrated eastward into Poland and Lithuania between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. We know such movements were encouraged by Polish rulers who granted Jews legal protection and economic privileges, most notably in the Statute of Kalisz of 1264.

There is also no historical evidence for a mass westward migration of Khazar Jews. While remnants of Khazar populations likely survived in regions around the Caucasus after the collapse of the Khazar Khaganate, medieval sources do not describe any large-scale movement of Khazars into Eastern Europe. Contemporary chronicles do document the rise of Jewish communities in Poland and the German lands, but they make no reference to these migrants arriving from the Eurasian Steppe. If such a migration had occurred on the scale required by the Khazar hypothesis, there would surely be traces of it in the record: descriptions of migrating peoples in chronicles, references to Khazar or Turkic origins in Jewish communal traditions, or linguistic evidence of a Turkic substrate in Ashkenazi culture. Neither Koestler, Sand, or any other contemporary proponents of Khazar theory have produced anything compelling on this front.

What we do know is that the traditional language of Ashkenazi Jews, Yiddish, developed primarily from High German dialects with Hebrew and Slavic influences, reflecting its emergence among Jewish communities in medieval German-speaking Europe without any Turkic linguistic influence. Yiddish is primarily based on medieval High German,7 taking in elements of Hebrew and Slavic languages. The religious traditions and legal scholarship of Ashkenazi Judaism likewise show clear continuity with the rabbinic culture of Mediterranean and Western European Jewish communities rather than with the cultural milieu of the Khazar steppe.

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Did the Khazars even convert?

Even the story of a large Khazar conversion rests on scant evidence. A 2013 paper titled Did the Khazars Convert to Judaism? has demonstrated serious problems with the sources commonly used to support the narrative of a large conversion among the Khazars.

The most commonly cited source is a letter from a Khazar king Joseph addressed to a Jewish scholar named Hasdai ibn Shaprut. Joseph’s letter, which describes the conversion of the Khazar ruling elite and the establishment of Jewish institutions in the kingdom, is written in “beautiful literary Hebrew,” with no reflections of a native Khazar language. The author of the letter also displays an apparent ignorance of the geography of the region. Despite the king describing his kingdom, he doesn’t mention any of the main cities, knows “remarkably little about its eastern part” or the groups populating it, or about trade routes or the commercial ties with other regions. The author seems to only be familiar with Crimea, about which he also makes apparent mistakes, leading historians who have analysed the document to suggest it was authored by someone who would have travelled from Constantinople to Crimea.

The Jewish king’s letter refers to great synagogues, study houses and other centers of learning containing renowned Jewish scholars throughout the land, yet:

None of the scholars are named, no other sources refer to grand synagogues or Jewish study halls, and no archaeological remains of Khazar synagogues have been found. In all of the rich literature produced in that time in the yeshivot of Jerusalem or Babylonia or preserved in the Cairo Geniza, there is not one reference to scholars in the Khazar lands, nor are there references to migration of scholars to Khazaria.8

The other powerful source for the Khazar conversion narrative is the so-called Cambridge Document or Schechter Letter, a medieval Hebrew text that purports to describe the conversion of the Khazar ruling elite to Judaism. The author of this document, and the date it was authored, is unknown, and none of the events in it have been corroborated by any other sources.

The events in the document read more like legend than real history, describing Khazar elites miraculously discovering preserved Hebrew books hidden in a cave. The Khazars who find these texts, despite growing up without books or any education in Hebrew education, were somehow immediately able to read and understand these complex Hebrew texts, sparking a mass-conversion. Hebrew scholars have identified many similarities between this story and the pseudepigraphic Jewish chronicle Josippon.

The document portrays Khazar society as having an established Jewish scholarly culture with institutions and traditions, yet this left no trace anywhere else in Jewish intellectual history. Stampfer notes that

In all of the rich literature produced in that time in the yeshivot of Jerusalem or Babylonia… there is not one reference to scholars in the Khazar lands.

The silence of external observers is equally significant. Byzantine, Muslim, and Rus’ writers described the Khazars extensively, often commenting on their political structures and religious diversity. These sources consistently portray the Khazar elite as religiously heterogeneous — sometimes mentioning Judaism among several faiths practiced within the khaganate — but none describe the large-scale Jewish kingdom or scholarly centers depicted in these Hebrew texts.

Also absent is archaeological evidence. If the ruling elite of a major Eurasian empire had adopted Judaism and established synagogues, academies, and a network of Jewish institutions, historians would also expect to find traces of this in the archaeological record. Yet despite excavations across the core regions of the Khazar Khaganate uncovering a wealth of settlements, fortifications, and burial sites, they have never revealed evidence of Jewish communal life on the scale described in the medieval narratives.

Archaeologists excavating in Khazar lands have found almost no artifacts or grave stones displaying distinctly Jewish symbols.9

A historical study of the burial practices of Khazarians note they retained pagan customs that would have been strictly forbidden in Judaism, such as trephination — boring into the skull’s cranial cavity — well after their alleged conversion.10

This is how an archaeologist of Khazaria summarises the archaeological picture:

There is very little archaeological evidence of the propagation of this faith among the population of the Khazar khağanate. Almost all of them are found in the large ancient cities on the shores of the sea, where the population was mixed, inhabited by people of different religious beliefs. But in the towns in the steppe and in the mountains, in the tombs, there are practically no Jewish artefacts. Their quantity does not allow us to think about the propagation of Judaism among the Khazars.11

The story of a Jewish Khazar kingdom is therefore far less certain than often assumed, resting on little more than a handful of noncontemporary and unreliable stories. But even if such a conversion did occur, it would still do nothing to support the claim that Khazar Jews migrated westward to form the basis of Ashkenazi Jewry. Modern genetic evidence provides a far clearer answer to that question.

New support for Khazar theory?

In 2013, an Israeli geneticist sensationally claimed to have proven the Khazar theory. Eran Elhaik’s The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses argues that the genetic ancestry of Ashkenazi Jews is better explained by a Caucasus-centered origin than by the traditional model of migration from the Middle East through Western Europe. Using modern populations as proxies for ancient groups, he concluded that Ashkenazi Jews show closer genetic affinity to populations from the Caucasus region than to the Middle Eastern groups used in his model. Elhaik — who told interviewers he read Koestler’s The Thirteenth Tribe as a child — concludes that “our findings support the Khazarian Hypothesis and portray the European Jewish genome as a mosaic of Caucasus, European, and Semitic ancestries.”12

Given his background as a geneticist, Elhaik obviously cannot be dismissed as a kook. However, his proposal runs into many of the same problems discussed earlier for the Khazar hypothesis: there are no linguistic traces of Turkic influence in Ashkenazi culture, no evidence of a mass westward migration from the Eurasian steppe, no historical records among Ashkenazim describing such an origin, and no archaeological evidence of widespread Jewish communities in Khazaria.

There is another problem with Elhaik’s argument though, which is that a heterodox explanation like the Khazar theory is necessary because the massive growth in the Jewish population in Eastern Europe — from about 50,000 in the 15th century to around 8 million in the twentieth — could not be explained by natural population growth. He argues this is particularly true of a Jewish population “subjected to severe economic restrictions, slavery, assimilation, the Black Death and other plagues, forced and voluntary conversions, persecutions, kidnappings, rapes, exiles, wars, massacres, and pogroms.”13 Elhaik’s citations for this claim are Koestler’s The Thirteenth Tribe and Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish people.

But there is really nothing remarkable about this kind of population growth, especially for an insulated religious group that combines high fertility rates and low rates of out-marriage. The Amish population in North America numbered only around 5,000 at the start of the twentieth century but has expanded to over 350,000 today. They are projected to reach 3–7 million by the end of the century, already matching the 20th century Jewish population in Eastern Europe from a smaller starting base. The Afrikaners in South Africa started from a group of only a few thousand Dutch settlers at the Cape in the seventeenth century, today it is roughly 3 million, largely through natural population growth.

Gershon Hundert, a historian of early-modern Jewry, has documented that Jews in Poland enjoyed both a higher birth rate and a lower mortality rate than their Polish neighbours, and also practiced earlier marriage, though he attributes most of the growth to low infant mortality.14 The Jews’ population growth was also remarked on by observers of the time, with Hundert quoting a Krakow university professor who wrote of the Jews “[n]one of them dies in war or of the plague. . . . Moreover, they marry when they are twelve . . . and so multiply rampantly.”15

Elhaik is also vastly overstating the maltreatment Jews faced in this period. There is scant evidence of mass forced conversions or massacres of Jews, and modern historians now agree that Jewish life in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was relatively secure and autonomous compared to Western Europe. A papal diplomat, surveying Jewish areas of Poland in the 16th century, wrote:

They do not live here under pitiful conditions and do not engage in lowly pursuits… But rather, they possess land, engage in commerce, and devote themselves to study, especially medicine and astrology.... They possess considerable wealth and they are not only among the respectable citizens, but occasionally even dominate them.16

Similarly, Jewish historian Israel Bartal describes an economically powerful and integrated Jewish population, with large share of Jews working as artisans, merchants, and estate leaseholders, with many others managing regional and international trade:

At the end of the eighteenth century, nearly 30 percent of the Jews were linked to the estate lease economy, and managed means of production owned by the nobility: distilleries, breweries, flour mills, lumber mills, and the like.17

Far from being lowly, persecuted minorities, Jews by this time dominated the trades and made themselves key intermediaries between peasants and markets.

All this is to say that the historical anomaly Elhaik uses to support his Khazar thesis is not anomalous at all. But what of his genetic model?

Elhaik’s argument depends heavily on modelling ancestry using modern populations as proxies for ancient ones. In particular, he treats contemporary South Caucasus populations — especially Armenians and Georgians — as stand-ins for the Khazars, a medieval Turkic confederation whose genetic composition is largely unknown.

Elhaik writes that “Caucasus Georgians and Armenians were considered proto-Khazars because they are believed to have emerged from the same genetic cohort as the Khazars.” Here, Elhaik makes three citations, Polak 1951; Dvornik 1962; Brook 2006. The first two references are more than half a century old works on Jewish Khazaria that are now widely seen as outdated, the latter reference is to an “amateur Khazar enthusiast who has no first-hand knowledge of Central Asian studies.”18

Elhaik’s assumption here has been widely criticised by other geneticists, who point out that Armenians and Georgians are indigenous populations of the Caucasus with deep regional continuity and are not appropriate genetic substitutes for a medieval Turkic confederation whose ruling elite likely originated on the Eurasian steppe.

Elhaik himself refers to a study by Balanovsky et al., but fails to mention that it concludes that of all the national groups in the Black Sea region, the Georgians and Armenians were the least likely to have absorbed significant populations from other national groups. In other words, while there was DNA from eight Ashkenazi males in Elhaik’s study, there was no Khazar DNA at all. This makes it a bit difficult to come to significant conclusions about the Khazarian ancestry of Ashkenazi Jews.19

As a result, Elhaik’s model effectively tests whether Ashkenazi Jews share ancestry with Caucasus populations — not whether they descend from Khazars. But genetic similarities between eastern Mediterranean and Caucasus populations are already expected under the conventional historical model, since both regions were historically connected through migration and trade.

A second major criticism concerns the reference populations Elhaik used to represent Middle Eastern ancestry. A response paper with 20 co-authors criticised Elhaik’s methodology, noting that he used poor modern populations as stand-ins for ancient ones. Not only was his identification of Georgians and Armenians as a stand-in for Khazars misleading, but he chose poor proxies like modern Palestinians as proxies for ancient Judean populations. When alternative Middle Eastern reference populations are used, the genetic results change substantially.20

Taken together, these methodological problems mean that Elhaik’s argument for a Khazar origin is no more convincing than earlier historical versions of the theory. In contrast, the broader body of genetic research converges on a clear and internally consistent account of Ashkenazi ancestry.

The genetic picture

Across multiple independent genome-wide studies, Ashkenazi Jews consistently cluster between Levantine and southern European populations. They do not cluster with populations of the Caucasus or Eurasian steppe, as would be expected if they primarily descended from Khazar converts. This single finding is sufficient to rule out the Khazar hypothesis in its strong form.

More broadly, modern population genetics has established that Jewish communities across the diaspora share a significant component of Near Eastern ancestry traceable to the ancient Levant. Genome-wide analyses show that Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi Jews form related genetic clusters despite centuries of geographic separation, reflecting a common origin followed by varying degrees of admixture.

This pattern is also visible in uniparental markers. Paternal lineages (Y-DNA) tend to show strong continuity with Middle Eastern populations, while maternal lineages (mtDNA) more often reflect European origins — suggesting a pattern of outbreeding where Jewish men adopted European wives.

Early Y-chromosome research — which traces paternal lineages and shared male ancestry across populations — already pointed in this direction. A landmark 2000 study found that Jewish populations from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East share a substantial set of paternal lineages derived from a common Middle Eastern ancestral population.21

The most influential genome-wide study on Jewish origins is a 2010 paper by Behar et al. Using hundreds of thousands of genetic markers, the researchers compared several Jewish populations with dozens of non-Jewish populations across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. The analysis showed that Jewish groups form closely related genetic clusters, reflecting shared ancestry despite centuries of geographic separation. Most Jewish populations clustered between Middle Eastern and southern European populations, indicating a substantial ancestral connection to the ancient Levant alongside varying degrees of admixture from surrounding host populations.22 Similar conclusions were reached in a parallel analysis of Jewish diaspora groups published the same year.23

The origins of Ashkenazi Jews have attracted particular attention because the population emerged in medieval Europe while retaining clear genetic ties to the Near East. Research on the timing and location of European admixture suggests that much of this mixture occurred in the Mediterranean world. A key 2017 genetic study concluded that the European component of Ashkenazi ancestry most likely originated in southern Europe, with Italy highlighted as a plausible location.24

Ancient DNA research has further illuminated this picture. A major 2022 study of medieval Jewish remains from a cemetery in Germany confirmed a founder event leading to modern Ashkenazim, and supported a blend of Levantine and European ancestries, with subgroups showing varying proportions but overall continuity from ancient Jewish sources.

Genetic evidence also points to a demographic bottleneck in the medieval period. The Ashkenazi population appears to have descended from a relatively small ancestral group before expanding rapidly in Central and Eastern Europe, a process that helps explain the genetic homogeneity observed among modern Ashkenazi Jews. The Ashkenazi population appears to have descended from a relatively small ancestral group before expanding rapidly in Central and Eastern Europe.

Some recent analyses suggest that the European — particularly southern European — component of Ashkenazi ancestry may be larger than earlier models indicated. Several researchers argue that earlier genetic studies relied on imperfect reference populations when modelling “Italian ancestry,” typically including northern Italian groups such as proxies, even though southern Italians and Sicilians are genetically closer to eastern Mediterranean populations. Because northern Italians are more genetically similar to northern Europeans, these models may exaggerate the apparent genetic distance between Ashkenazi Jews and southern European populations.

Using stronger southern Italian reference populations, some recent studies estimate that Ashkenazi ancestry may derive largely from southern European — especially Italian — sources. One recent model estimated placed southern European ancestry at 68%, with most of the rest coming from Levantine and Middle-Eastern sources.25

Genetic historians have therefore proposed “a one-time event in the first or second centuries… when many Jews arrived in Italy and married locals before intermarriage sharply declined.” After centuries of relative isolation following this event, Jewish populations migrated to Northern and then Eastern Europe, with their genetics changing little since.

The picture we now have of Jewish genetics is impossible to reconcile with the Khazar hypothesis. While there is still room for debate over the precise balance between Levantine and southern European ancestry in Ashkenazi Jews, genetic studies consistently place them closer to Mediterranean and Middle Eastern populations than to peoples of the Caucasus.

More importantly, genetic studies show continuity in Ashkenazi ancestry across the medieval period. The genetic structure observed in medieval Jewish remains already closely resembles that of modern Ashkenazim, with no sign of the large-scale influx of Caucasus ancestry that would be expected if the population had been substantially reshaped by Khazar converts.

Taken together, the historical, linguistic, archaeological, and genetic evidence presents a consistent picture of Ashkenazi origins. Jewish communities developed in Europe through gradual migrations from the Mediterranean world, into the Rhineland and later into Eastern Europe. While conversion and local admixture occurred, as it does in all diaspora populations, there is neither the evidence for a large-scale migration of Khazar converts, nor a widespread conversion to Judaism among the Khazars.

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Keith and Ryan return to discuss the rise of Rupert Lowe’s new party, Restore Britain. Can a nationalist party win an election in modern Britain, how are changing demographics affecting election outcomes now, and how much worse can Nigel Farage and Reform Yookay get?

The debut episode of Continuum, a long-form podcast from Europa Media, where Keith Woods and Ryan Williams explore the deeper forces shaping modern life.

In episode 1, Keith and Ryan discuss their unconventional paths to their politics, the history of the online right, downsides of populism, and why nationalism needs a new intellectual core.

We are approaching two weeks of America’s Purim war on Iran. I am increasingly astonished at what a poorly thought-out mess this is turning out to be. This is the situation America finds itself in after 12 days of war:

* This is already the least popular American war ever at the moment it began, and Americans haven’t even begun to experience economic pain yet.

* The public has still not been given a clear reason for why this war is happening. Some of the reasons given:

1. Trump “had a feeling” Iran was about to attack the U.S. that was “based on fact,” but Pentagon officials then told Congress there was no intelligence indicating Iran was about to attack United States forces.

2. Trump said in his announcement of the war that the U.S. was eliminating an “imminent nuclear threat,” and urged Iranians to overthrow their government. Trump later said Iran was two weeks away from having a nuclear bomb, despite bragging last year that their nuclear facilities were “obliterated” in strikes.

3. Marco Rubio told the press that the U.S. knew Israel was planning a unilateral strike on Iran with or without U.S. support, and so the U.S. joined the war because it feared Iranian retaliation would involve striking U.S. forces in the region. In other words, the U.S. went to war for Israel. Mike Johnson said the war happened because “Israel was determined to act with or without American support" leaving the U.S. in fear of retaliation against their forces. Since everyone made the obvious conclusion that this meant the U.S. had gone to war for Israel, the administration backtracked on these statements.

4. Pete Hegseth talked about it as retaliation for Iran supporting proxies that killed American soldiers, because of which the war apparently especially resonates with his generation of millennials.

5. Trump said the war was actually “two or three days” of strikes designed to target key military assets. He then said the war was always forecast to be 4 to 5 weeks, but could go much longer.

6. Trump Truth’d a message that the U.S. was now demanding an UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER from Iran and a regime change to “Make Iran Great Again (MIGA!)”.

* On the question of the apparent nuclear threat, we have learned that Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who led the U.S. negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, conducted the talks without nuclear technical experts and based their concerns on a research reactor, unaware that such a reactor is incapable of enriching uranium. When the Iranians made a good-faith offer to hand over their highly enriched uranium but keep the Tehran Research Reactor built for them by Eisenhower, Witkoff and Kushner, due to their ignorance of the subject, apparently interpreted this as a demand to become a nuclear power:

Elena Sokova, the executive director of the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, called the administration’s assessments of the Tehran Research Reactor “confusing and misleading” and riddled with “technical errors.”

“It mixes up different elements of the nuclear program and their potential proliferation capabilities,” Sokova said. “Research reactors are not capable of doing enrichment of uranium, whether for civil or military purposes.”

Witkoff defended the decision to bring no nuclear experts by saying he had “read quite a bit about it.”

* Aside from having no technical knowledge and bringing no advisors or nuclear experts, Witkoff was apparently ignorant of previous agreements and negotiations with Iran, did not bring a diplomat who was knowledgeable of these things, did not take notes, and did not understand Iranian proposals.

* Trump relayed to the press that Witkoff told him Iran’s message was "essentially, in a real nutshell: We want to continue to build nuclear weapons." None of the mediators present reported this. The Omani foreign minister who mediated the talks travelled to Washington and told J.D. Vance and U.S. media outlets that the negotiations had made “substantial, momentous, and unprecedented progress.”

Think about how insane this is — either the war was sparked by America’s representatives being totally ignorant of nuclear enrichment while negotiating a nuclear deal, and no one along the way picking up their error, or alternatively, they actively misled Trump to lead to war with Iran on Israel’s behalf. So that’s either gross negligence and incompetence or high treason.

* Iran is now laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz. Even if there were a sudden reversal, these would likely take weeks to clear, meaning Iran is in this for the long haul.

* Iran is wagering that the U.S. and Israel will blink first in a test of endurance where they cripple the global economy. Astonishingly, the U.S. does not appear to have a plan for the outcome that put off U.S. war planners from pursuing a war with Iran for decades.

* The U.S. apparently assumed freedom lovers in Iran would topple their regime if they helped kick the door in. There have been no signs of large social unrest in Iran since the war began. Trump has responded to Iran’s measures by promising to “hit them so hard that it will not be possible for them or anybody else helping them to ever recover that section of the world.” Whatever problems reformers have with the Islamic Republic, it seems like a reasonable conclusion that this kind of rhetoric, combined with bombing schools, is going to make it easy for the Iranian regime to convince Iranians they are now in a war for their national survival. There will be no internal revolt.

* The U.S. Navy is refusing all requests for escorts through the Strait.

* Just how badly was the U.S. prepared for dealing with a closure of the Strait of Hormuz? Consider that in January of this year, the U.S. withdrew its four Avenger-class minesweepers from the Middle East. The four vessels were built in the late 1980s and early 90s and forward-deployed for the next four decades. They are now sat decommissioned in a port in Philadelphia. They arrived there on Tuesday, the day Iran began laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz.

* During the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq laid roughly 1,200–1,300 naval mines, which coalition forces took more than 2 months to clear. Even during the operation, carried out after the war was won, two U.S. warships were still damaged by Iraqi mines. Iran has an estimated >5,000 mines it could deploy in the Strait.

* The U.S. reassured the public with footage of it bombing 16 Iranian small boats mining the Strait. But Iran has thousands of vessels that can fill this role, as well as tunnel networks and submergibles designed specifically for this role.

* The prewar traffic in the Strait was >50 oil tankers per day. During the "tanker war" in the 1980s, America escorted an average of one convoy, each containing 2 or 3 tankers, each week. This means it would take two and a half years to get all 320 or so vessels currently stranded in the Gulf out of there. On top of that, analysts have calculated the cost of a single escort would exceed the value of the cargo it is meant to protect.

* But none of this really matters, because the U.S. is never going to be able to freely clear the Strait without suffering enormous damage from Iranian counter-measures. Iran has hundreds of anti-ship cruise missiles it has yet to deploy. Many of these can be launched from small boats or mobile launchers inland, again showing how meaningless it is for people to just gesture at American air dominance. Iran also has thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of Shahed drones, which U.S. ships could be vulnerable to if launched in swarms. Imagine the backlash if the U.S. has its ships sunk by Iran. Even if the economic calculus of this made sense, which it doesn’t, the risk of this makes it a complete non-starter.

* Last year, Zelensky sent the United States a proposal to stock the Gulf with Ukraine’s low-cost interceptor drones designed as a defence against Iranian Shahed drones. The U.S. dismissed this as "Zelensky being Zelensky." The U.S. and Gulf states are now asking for Ukrainian assistance, with Zelensky now offering to exchange them for Patriot missiles.

* Pete Hegseth claims there has been an 83% degradation of Iranian drone capacity, apparently based off the number of observed launches. But that doesn’t say anything about how much their capacity has been degraded, it’s likely just a sign that they are conserving more drones for use later in the war. How much can the U.S. actually degrade their drones without a ground invasion? Shahed drones can be launched out of the back of a pickup truck. They are easily stored and concealed, and can have as many storage locations as there are drones.

* Even if U.S. air power were sufficient to secure the Strait, the Iranians have disabled THAAD batteries and air bases in the region, diminishing U.S. capacity for air strikes.

* The U.S. has NO PLAN for how to open the Strait of Hormuz.

So the situation on the Strait currently is:

1. The U.S. cannot stop the Iranians mining it

2. It would take the U.S. months to clear after it’s mined

3. The U.S. cannot safely provide escorts while there is a credible risk from missiles and drones

4. The U.S. cannot eliminate the threat of missiles and drones without a ground invasion

5. No amount of bombing will bring Iran any closer to a democratic revolution

The market is still pricing in a TACO and a quick resolution, but the Trump administration’s approach has left them with no choice but to fundamentally change this dynamic and establish real deterrence. That means seizing this opportunity and imposing real pain on the U.S. by strangling the world economy. Iranian analysts say they will be willing to wait this out months and seek financial compensation for Israel and the U.S. ravaging their country. Don’t expect Russia to intervene, they are going to benefit enormously from the rise in oil and gas prices and the diversion of U.S. military focus to the Gulf. China is still getting millions of barrels of oil delivered through the Strait.

At this point, this looks like a disaster for the United States. The only plausible endgame is Trump eventually backing down and making concessions, yet this administration, with Israel and the Zionist lobby’s encouragement, seems determined to climb the escalation ladder at every stage of the conflict. That only ensures the eventual retreat will be far more humiliating.

** As I was about to hit publish on this, Trump just declared that America has won the Iran War.

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It is now 10 days since the beginning of ‘Operation Epic Fury,’ launched during the Jewish celebration of Purim. I think we can now conclude this looks like one of the worst thought-out military operations in recent memory.

* There is still no sign of major domestic unrest in Iran. The figures like 30,000 dead protesters were always unbelievable, but whatever hopes liberal reformers had before the strikes, the actual outcome of the strikes on Iranian politics has been to put a more hardline faction in charge and galvanise the country against a state that opened the war bombing an elementary school which killed 160+ children.

* There is likely no military means by which the US can keep the Strait of Hormuz open. Even with American/Israeli air dominance, it cannot destroy Iranian drone production faster than Iran can sustain or rebuild it. According to Western estimates, Shahed drones are already produced in the thousands per month, and the best analysis of this I have seen based on recent battlefield evidence concludes it would be many months before drone production becomes degraded enough to protect the Strait.

* Many of Iran’s drones are already produced at dual-use plants and they can repurpose other civilian plants. There is probably no way America can eliminate this threat enough to secure the Strait without a ground invasion. People are waving this away by pointing to America’s air power, but Nazi Germany reached its peak production of airplanes in 1944 while the country was under relentless bombardment.

* Iran still possesses hundreds of cruise and anti-ship missiles designed specifically to target vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, many deployed on mobile launchers along the coast. Even with air superiority, suppressing a dispersed arsenal like that without a ground campaign would be extremely difficult.

* Oil markets are now pricing in the risk of prolonged disruption, and if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed this could become the largest supply shock in modern history. Every Western economy is already on the brink, with little room left to manoeuvre on debt or interest rates.

* Aside from oil, the Strait closing gives the world a major disruption in fertiliser exports; and nearly half the world’s sulfur which is used for extracting phosphate for fertilizer, as well as copper and uranium extraction. This means that a long disruption could cascade into semiconductor and data-centre supply chains.

* The US is spending about >$1.4 billion a day on this war, with Iran now in control of a civilizational choke point maintained by $20,000 drones.

* Rather than give the Iranians an easy off-ramp Trump has demanded UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER, treated all regime politicians and heads of state as legitimate targets for assassination, and made it clear any negotiations conducted by America/Israel will be done in bad faith.

It’s hard to see how America comes away with anything like a victory from this. Trump resisted an Iran war throughout his first term because of his fear about the knock-on effects on oil, but it seems the success of the Venezuela action has led to hubris.

One thing about Trump though, whether on tariffs or Greenland, he has always been willing to reverse course when markets got spooked. At this point I think the most likely outcome is the mother of all TACOs with Trump declaring total victory and rapidly de-escalating. But Israel is absolutely committed to at least a month’s long war with Iran, and all America can offer Iran is a return to the same unstable status quo that makes an eventual resumption of war inevitable. Even if Trump decides he wants an off-ramp, he has fundamentally changed the structure of the conflict. The likely result is that Iran re-establishes deterrence across the Gulf, which will be hard to read as anything but a strategic defeat for the United States.

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This episode is tragic — Spain is truly one of the most beautiful countries in Europe with an extraordinary historical inheritance. What is doubly tragic is the bizarre coalition that produced it: a convergence between radical feminist and migrant activist networks on one side — a group with contempt for historical Spain, and the institutional authority of the Catholic Church on the other — an institution woven into Spain’s national identity for centuries.

The public face of the push was Regularización Ya, a migrant-led initiative that forced the issue into parliament by collecting more than 700,000 signatures — well above the legal threshold for a citizen-driven legislative proposal. The movement first emerged in 2020, when COVID lockdowns caused anger among illegal immigrants who could no longer access work or welfare.

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Their first protest happened in June 2020, in the Summer of Floyd. With African migrants highly represented among the organisers, a White guilt narrative about “modern-day colonialism” was front and centre from the beginning, with sympathetic articles writing about how the movement aimed to

Raise awareness of how institutional discrimination and the modern-day colonialism of Africa is deliberately being used to prop up the EU’s economy.

While Regularización Ya was loosely organised and seemingly lacked formal early funding streams, it soon built alliances with established NGOs and human rights groups, who would unite behind the movement as the spearhead needed to bring their agenda to the foreground of Spanish politics. And as the movement became more organised, an unmissable pattern is its lead organisers have overwhelmingly been leftist women.

Victoria Columba, an Argentinian who migrated to Spain in 2002, is the most prominent spokesperson for the group. She tells the media “We immigrants are here to change the rules of the game.”

While Columba is usually treated by Spanish media as the main voice of the Regularisation movement, the group itself has four official spokespeople; three are feminist women, one is a male Senegalese immigrant.

The latter, Lamine Sarr, entered Spain illegally and spent years as a ‘manteros’ or street vendor. In a glowing New York Times profile of Sarr, it writes of how he and his friend were “deported and repeated the journey several times before eventually settling in the country permanently.”

But rather than being grateful to his new home, Sarr blames ‘the new colonialism’ perpetrated by Europeans for denying him prosperity in his native Africa:

The problem we have is that we live here because of capitalism and neo-colonialism that forces us to leave our country…If migration is growing every day, it is because of this. Because of this system that continues to impoverish Africa.

Sarr explicitly frames his lobbying for migrant rights as a way to give back to his fellow Africans, a small step to correcting the imbalance created by European domination.

Among the female spokespeople, Edith Espínola, a Paraguayan migrant, represented domestic and care workers, casting regularisation — the Spanish term for granting legal status to illegal migrants already in the country — as a fight against ‘structural racism,’ and ending a regime that ‘breaks and exploits women’s bodies.’ Silvana Cabrera, a Colombian hospitality worker, described the policy as an act of “an exercise in recognition, colonial reparation, and memory.” Kenia García, a Paraguayan immigrant and part of the ‘Seville Prostitutes Collective,’ represents migrant sex workers in the movement, decrying “the unjust class conditions” of her fellow prostitutes in Spain.

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Street pressure alone, however, did not make law. That role fell to female-led leftist parties inside government, especially Sumar and Podemos, whose leverage over the governing Socialists turned regularisation into a coalition priority.

Chief among these women was Yolanda Díaz, leader of the progressive alliance Sumar and Spain’s Labour Minister. A former trade-union lawyer, Díaz reframed regularisation as a labour-market and demographic necessity to make it more palatable to Spaniards, arguing that the Spanish economy is dependent on migrant labour and could no longer function on informal employment agreements. Her female colleague Verónica Martínez Barbero handled the parliamentary mechanics, steering the citizen initiative through committees and preparing it for executive action.

Podemos, the far-left party that entered government as a junior coalition partner to PSOE in 2020, exerted the most pressure in parliament on regularisation. Here again, two women — Ione Belarra and Irene Montero — played the key role. Belarra, a former social worker and the party’s secretary-general, was the formal leader of Podemos during the regularisation push. Montero, who had just left office as Minister for Equality, became one of the most high-profile amplifiers for the campaign.

Together, they made regularisation a key plank of maintaining Podemos’s parliamentary leverage. Spain’s socialist coalition depends on a narrow majority, and the radical pro-migrant voices in government tied support for unrelated legislation to movement on regularisation.

At the far end of this political chain sat Elma Saiz, the ruling socialist party’s Minister for Inclusion, Social Security and Migration. Though the most radical lobbying came from the minority partners in government, Saiz was a radical member of her party on migration, in alignment with the demands of the minority coalition partners. In 2024, she had already overseen a first, more limited regularisation through reforms the expanded pathways to work permits and residency. That would become the precursor to this more recent and much more radical legalisation push, where her ministry took the radical step of approving an extraordinary regularisation by decree to regularise as many as a million illegal migrants.

Spain’s regularisation push lands in a country that already offers one of the most liberal citizenship regimes in Europe. Migrants from Latin America, as well as countries such as the Philippines, can apply for Spanish citizenship after just two years of legal residence. In practice, this means that extraordinary regularisation is not only about temporary legal status, but will now fast track hundreds of thousands of migrants into full citizenship on a timeline far shorter than in most EU states. And this comes at a time when most of Europe is tightening laws like this — countries like Italy have recently moved to tighten rules around ancestry-based “right of return” and limit access to citizenship for South Americans of European descent.

The role of the Church

It’s not really surprising to find a push to reward illegal migrants led by intersectional feminists, labour lawyers and immigrant activists. The tragic element of this story is that the primary backer of this anti-Spanish movement in civil society — the group that most normalised these radical demands to more moderate Spaniards — was the Catholic Church.

The regularisation movement boasted of having 900 NGOs behind it, but chief among them was Caritas, an organisation designed to be the social service and advocacy arm of the Catholic Church in Spain. Caritas is the organisation that speaks for the movement on the EU Commission website, and is often listed as one of the key early backers of the movement. Beyond public statements, Caritas and allied Church bodies used their nationwide network to document how ‘irregular status’ was denying migrants rights, and produced a number of policy proposals to make regularisation more palatable to politicians.

Though the Catholic Church often takes liberal stances on migration that have little downstream effect on policy, their role shouldn’t be underestimated here. The Church supplied parishes, charities, reports, and a moral authority that extended far beyond activist circles. The church provided a language of respectability and basic human dignity to the radical, intersectional and often explicitly anti-White framing of its activist founders.

Caritas was not an outlier in actually engaging in real activism on this issue. Alongside it, the Spanish Episcopal Conference, CONFER, the Jesuit-run Servicio Jesuita a Migrantes, and the Catholic NGO network REDES issued joint statements, research papers, and parliamentary appeals that embedded the regularisation campaign inside the Church’s broader social-justice infrastructure.

The Spanish Episcopal Conference — the national body that represents and coordinates Spain’s Catholic bishops — went beyond general appeals to compassion and actually explicitly endorsed extraordinary regularisation, bypassing parliament, as a national urgency. In a joint statement with Church migration and development bodies, the bishops’ conference described the policy as “an act of social justice and a recognition”

The story behind Spain’s regularisation push shows the many faces of the civil society coalition promoting European ethnic erasure. Long-established activist networks and NGOs, leftist political blocs, and migrant coalitions combining to pressure for replacement politics against a largely passive Spanish population — with one institution that should be a holdout of Spain’s historical identity instead aligning itself with this emergent coalition.

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All My Links

Watch the video replay on Rumble.

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This vision, especially the suggestion of Switzerland as a model for EU governance, seemed to provoke a lot of interest, so I think it’s worth a more comprehensive articulation. Identitarians seem to be divided into two camps: those that favour complete abolition or a stripping back of the EU to limit it to some basic economic arrangement, and those that fantasise about an even more centralised, federal version of the EU hostile to “petty nationalism.” I find myself in neither of these camps, but I rarely see anyone articulate the confederal model I will lay out here. So let this be an attempt to describe, in concrete terms, what a restored Europe would look like once we step beyond the clichés of both imperium europa fantasies and visionless euroscepticism and sketch a genuinely alternative direction for the European project.

One obvious counter to the case I am presenting is to simply ask why any union is necessary at all, if national restoration is actually the goal. The answer is that a Europe of proud nations still requires a framework for cooperation on matters no single state can manage alone: such as border security, strategic industries, and the defence of European civilisation as a whole. Even most abolitionists agree that after scrapping the EU, it would be necessary for the now sovereign collection of European nations to come together and devise some kind of continental system to handle these necessities. A confederal EU could satisfy their desire to preserve sovereignty where it matters while still providing the scale and coordination required to confront a multipolar world. So I will provide this vision, whether it is one to be implemented through a reformed EU, or one to come under a future European confederation that comes after its failure.

Europe: A People

A restored Europe would first have to recognise itself as a civilisation with a definable people at its core. Europe is not an economic zone, but the home of the indigenous European people, that have gifted the world the bulk of its achievements in philosophy, science, art, literature, engineering and other cultural achievements. At this year’s Remigration Summit, I watched the French philosopher Jean-Yves Le Gallou give a fine statement on the historical genetic identity of the European people:

Europe is the continent of Europeans. The settlement of Europe dates back 40,000 years with the expansion of hunter-gatherer peoples. We, contemporary Europeans, carry the same genes as the parietal artists of the Lascaux caves in France, Altamira in Spain, Hohle Fels in Germany, or Fumane in Italy. This initial settlement was partially modified, particularly in southern Europe, by the arrival of Anatolian farmers 8,000 years ago. It was then complemented by the expansion of the Yamnaya, a hunter-gatherer people from the Pontic steppes, 5,000 years ago. This migration brought the Indo-European languages we still speak today through their Greek, Roman, Celtic, Germanic, or Slavic branches, as well as a cosmogony and social structure, the tripartition, which has continually shaped European civilization, even after Christianization (oratores, bellatores, laboratores).

Jean-Yves’ statement is comprehensive, but a little long for political use. As a foundation for the renewed European project, the new EU will officially state:

The European peoples are the indigenous descendants of the Paleolithic, Neolithic, and Indo-European populations who shaped the continent’s genetic, linguistic, and cultural foundations over 40,000 years. They constitute a continuous civilisation whose identity has developed organically from these ancestral layers.

This must be the starting point of any reformed European project. Recognising Europeans as the indigenous peoples of Europe establishes a moral foundation for the new Union. The purpose of European integration is no longer to dissolve identity into a liberal universalism but to preserve the long continuity of the civilisation that emerged on this continent.

From this recognition would come a concrete proposal: that the indigeneity of the European peoples should be enshrined directly within the constitutional framework of the new confederation and formally articulated as a legal category. Europe would state, in concrete terms, that its native peoples possess the inherent right to cultural continuity, demographic security, and territorial rootedness in the lands that shaped them.

Europe would then take the unprecedented step of bringing its indigeneity onto the international stage. Drawing upon the existing frameworks used for other indigenous peoples, the new EU would submit a formal request for recognition of this statement to UN bodies, presenting demographic data showing the threat of population replacement, and initiate motions within the Council of Europe asserting the legitimacy of indigenous European claims. Given the current U.S. administration’s statements on Europe and mass-immigration, it is more feasible than ever that these proposals would receive support from the United States.

This could potentially be a paradigm-altering shift of global norms: for the first time it would be recognised on the world stage that Europeans, no less than any other indigenous people, possess the right to endure as a distinct civilisation. Once recognised, this doctrine would become a shield against ideological pressure, providing Europe with the moral and legal basis to defend its demographic future before the world, even if this conflicts with previous liberal legislation around ‘human rights.’ This would mean for the first time a reversal on the international stage of the all-engulfing spread of universal human rights doctrine, superceded by the right to self-preservation of the European peoples.

The European Cultural Academy

But a civilisational consciousness cannot be created by law. It would be necessary to take steps to rediscover European identity, and here the flagship would be a new institution: the European Cultural Academy. The Academy would be composed of scholars, historians, linguists, scientists, and philosophers from across Europe’s nations. Its mission would be to articulate Europe’s cultural inheritance, devise an intellectual canon, and ensure that education and cultural policy reflect the distinctiveness of European civilisation. This can provide a new articulation of European identity and history to combat the Post-War consensus of guilt around European history which dominates intellectual life.

To support this work, the Academy would establish a patronage scheme dedicated to nurturing European cultural life. This would include grants and residencies for artists, writers, composers, and scholars who work within the European tradition; funding for the preservation an revitalisation of regional folk traditions and architectural styles; as well as support for research into Europe’s ancient past, genetic heritage, mythology, literature, and philosophy. Rather than relying on the market to support these projects, this scheme would revive the older European model in which cultural production was sustained because of institutions convinced of the civilisational importance of their mission. This patronage would provide both material support and symbolic legitimacy to those engaged in the intellectual and artistic renewal of Europe, at a time when most private support goes toward leftist and postmodernist cultural projects.

The Academy would also administer a series of continental awards recognising excellence in science, art, literature, historical research, and cultural preservation—prestigious honours designed to celebrate what is best in the European spirit. These awards would function as Europe’s counterpart to the Nobel Prizes, grounded in the recognition of Europe’s incredible civilisational achievements.. Their purpose would be not only to reward achievement but to create a public narrative of European accomplishment, reinforcing a shared consciousness of belonging to a civilisation capable of producing beauty, truth, and greatness.

Aside from relying on public funding, the Academy would also recognise private individuals who contribute to cultural production in Europe. This would revive the tradition of private patronage that underpinned so much of Europe’s artistic flourishing in periods like the Renaissance. The contributions of these patrons would not be treated as mere acts of generosity, but as expressions of civic responsibility toward the civilisation to which they belong — encouraging other status-hungry elites to put their resources into Europe’s revival. By restoring the old European model of enlightened patronage, the Academy would cultivate a new class of cultural stewards: Europeans willing to use their wealth and influence to sustain the artistic and intellectual flowering of their civilisation.

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The Great Repeal

Before any renewal could begin on the continent, we must first take a flamethrower to the mountains of legislation left behind by liberal technocrats designed to make the EU a means of neutering nationalism and sovereignty. A restored Europe would therefore initiate what might be called The Great Repeal, a deliberate and sweeping undoing of the centralising legal architecture of the modern EU. There is a view that the EU is destined to be an endlessly centralising, liberal organisation hostile to national sovereignty, but it’s important to remember that the EU is where it is now because of decades of incremental change brought about by liberals. Nationalists need to have a similar will to incrementally peel back this centralising infrastructure and implement changes that limit and redirect the EU. In theory, any piece of legislation that transformed the Union from a tool of cooperation into an instrument of social engineering could be removed.

A coalition of governments committed to Europe’s renewal could force the reopening of the Treaties that set the EU on its current course. Once that door is open, the first priority would be to roll back the Maastricht–Lisbon settlement that embedded centralising functions in the Union’s legal order. The supremacy of EU law and the empowering of supranational bodies to define the limits of national sovereignty must be removed.

One of the first things to be scrapped by the new Europe would be the European Convention on Human Rights. So emblematic of the universal human rights regime governing the EU currently, the ECHR has become a dangerous vehicle for judicial activism used by the EU to interfere with migration policy, block deportations of invaders, and elevate abstract cosmopolitan rights above the concrete interests of the European people. Its abolition will be a day of great celebration for nationalists who have seen it interfere with national border security for years.

Recent events have shown that one of the most urgent and symbolically significant part of this repeal would be focused on the Digital Services Act. This act, recently used by the EU commission to place a massive fine on X, reflects how the EU has adopted a regulatory posture that is treating the internet as a domain to be tightly regulated and sanitised according to the ideological preferences of Brussels. This threatens the political expression of all Europeans, and is being used by EU technocrats to privilege establishment narratives under the guise of “trust and safety.”

For a reformed EU, the priority in legislating around online speech would be protecting the rights of Europeans against Big Tech censorship. The ability of Europeans to speak freely and criticise authority is essential to the continent’s renewal. The Great Repeal would therefore include abolishing the censorship provisions of the Digital Services Act and refocus it on holding platforms accountable for censorship and political bias.

The new Europe would also establish a European Charter of Digital Freedom. Almost everyone involved in this project of renewal will have at some point been a victim of online censorship for their politics. Now, they will use the apparatus of the EU to ensure this kind of ideological censorship of proud Europeans is a thing of the past. The Charter will declare that political censorship of Europeans by social media platforms is prohibited, even under pressure from NGOs, corporations or other states. Every European would possess a legally enforceable right to free expression online, including protection against deplatforming, shadow banning, and algorithmic suppression, and a right to transparency from the platforms on how and why they have been censored. Platforms would be given an ultimatum to undo years of censorship and restore Europeans banned for political speech, or else face fines and other restrictions.

Freeing Europe’s Economy

Aside from demolishing the architecture of institutionalised pluralism and liberalism in the EU, the Great Repeal must also undo the suffocating regulatory regime that is holding back European innovation. Europe’s decline is not merely demographic, and if nationalists want to win the support of the people for our vision of a restored Europe, we must also deliver a new era of economic growth. But this is impossible under the EU’s existing structures. Decades of technocratic rulemaking have created a regulatory thicket that small and medium-sized businesses struggle to navigate, to the point that starting a company in Europe is harder than in almost any other advanced economy.

At the same time, a simplistic narrative has taken hold on the right that Europe fell behind the United States simply because of more regulation and less economic freedom. The reality is more complex: what really separated the American and European response to the Great Recession is that the EU adopted an aggressively conservative macroeconomic response. Following neoliberal orthodoxy, Brussels imposed fiscal compacts and prohibitions on state-aid to industries that crippled the chance for nation-states to develop national industrial policy and prevented governments from deploying the strategic investment to restore growth. In the wake of the Eurozone debt crisis, member states were locked into strict deficit limits that made it impossible to back the industries of the future — precisely the kind of long-horizon investment that allowed China and the United States to surge ahead. The result was a decade of austerity, underinvestment, depressed demand, unemployment, and lost growth and innovation.

Added to this economic straitjacket are needlessly punitive regulations like the cookie law and GDPR, which burden innovators while doing little for the common good. As part of our Great Repeal of the EU, these constraints will be dismantled entirely. Economic freedom in a confederal Europe primarily means the freedom of nations and regions to pursue their own developmental paths without vetoes from Brussels. As such, the Fiscal Compact will be scrapped, along with the broader framework of Brussels-imposed budgetary constraints, which will restore to national governments the freedom to invest strategically in domestic industries and innovation, and pursue long-term economic development without any external vetoes.

Sovereignty and Subsidiarity

The current EU has no ethos. An EU run by patriots will be built around two fundamental principles: sovereignty and subsidiarity. The new Union, after years of undoing legislation and limiting the scope of continental bodies, will become a clearly defined and limited confederation, rather than a superstate. Nations will retain final authority over issues like migration, healthcare and education. Supranational institutions exist only where the scale of an issue genuinely requires them.

This clarity is guaranteed by a new Confederal Constitution, modelled closely on Switzerland. The constitution will be a commitment to use the Union to protect the integrity of Europe’s historical nations; to empower and revive its historical regions and cultural minorities, and to ensure a doctrine of subsidiarity prevents the domination of the continent by any one power. It would set hard limits on the Union to prevent bureaucratic overreach and provide a permanent legal safeguard for the cultural and demographic integrity of European nations.

The principle of subsidiarity also guards Europe against the two great dangers that have always haunted it: the drift toward centralised rule and the domination of the continent by a single power. Subsidiarity would be enshrined in the new Constitution as a hard rule to pushes decision-making downwards. This would be nations where appropriate, but also Europe’s historic regions wherever possible, allowing places like Bavaria, Catalonia, Flanders, Tyrol, and countless others to now shape their own cultural life without being micromanaged from Brussels or overridden by national governments which have to centralise to assert themselves on the continent.

This would be a quite natural restoration of Europe as a diverse patchwork of strong local identities which is how it was constituted for most of its history. And by dispersing power across Europe’s natural communities, subsidiarity prevents any one state from dominating the direction of the EU, thus alleviating a common source of anger from countries on Europe’s periphery about German and French dominance.

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Fortress Europe

After a recognition of the indigeneity of the European people and the threat of erasure they face due to mass-immigration, the top priority of a reformed Europe must be preventing this erasure. This will necessitate reversing mass-immigration, but we must start with first securing our borders and stopping the inflow. It is time to build Fortress Europe. This is one of the areas where the benefits of European cooperation on patriotic lines can become most evident.

For decades, the continent’s frontier has been left wide open to criminal traffickers, foreign governments exporting unwanted populations, and a network of NGOs who aid in this civilisational crime. This should be treated as the criminal conspiracy it is — emergency legislation must be introduced to dismantle the NGO network responsible for undermining Europe’s security. In collaboration with national governments, comprehensive investigations into their operations and funding networks must be conducted, with their patrons punished or sanctioned by the EU.

The Mediterranean is Europe’s sea, and it must be secured at all costs as a symbolic first step. Free of the constraints of the ECHR, emergency powers will allow states to deny docking permissions, impound vessels, revoke licences, and prohibit NGO activity in territorial waters. For the price of a secure civilisation, European states will collaborate on joint naval patrols, land border fortifications, intelligence-sharing, and coordinated deportations. States in Africa and the Middle-East who facilitate human trafficking into Europe’s borders will face diplomatic pressure up to and including sanctions.

Migrants intercepted in the Mediterranean will be taken to designated safe ports outside Europe, never entering the EU itself. Fortress Europe will require a unified continental framework for removals and entry denial. A migrant rejected by one European nation cannot be allowed to simply walk into another. Illegal entry can never create a pathway to residency anywhere in the EU.

Remigration

Fortress Europe secures the frontier; remigration restores the interior. Even with secured borders, many European countries are too far down the path of the mass-immigration experiment to avoid erasure without reversing immigration. Immigration levels have been so high that they have already put indigenous Europeans on course for minority minority status in many of their own homelands. If Europe is to endure, it must not only halt new inflows but reverse the demographic damage already done.

Remigration is the lawful, organised, and necessary return of foreign populations who no long-term place within European society. This begins with the obvious cases:

• Deporting illegal migrants, many of whom have remained in Europe for years due to lax deportation protocols or protections from EU human rights law

• Denaturalising and deporting foreigners with criminal convictions

• Denaturalising and deporting foreigners on welfare

• Deporting migrants residing on fraudulent or expiring statuses

But even dealing with all of these problematic groups cannot restore the demographic integrity of many European nations. Remigration must expand to include voluntary return programmes for non-European groups, supported by bilateral agreements and financial incentives. Here again, European cooperation can be beneficial in negotiating paths of return with countries of origin using the economic and diplomatic might of the whole continent. Without the constraints of EU-enforced human rights law, new deportation orders can be swift, enforceable, and coordinated across all European states. A migrant removed from one country will not simply reappear in another.

Eventually, European nations will have to come up with greater incentives to encourage migrants — including second and even third generation ones — to relocate, and here again, a strongly aligned European Union will be important to coordinate best practice on this and defend its legitimacy on the world stage.

Remigration will have to be central to any project of European renewal. The continent cannot rebuild cultural confidence or restore national sovereignty while its demographic base is eroded by ethnic blocs who (correctly) do not feel themselves to be part of this story. Every society in history has understood this truth, now Europe must rediscover it. With Fortress Europe securing the border and remigration restoring demographic integrity, the continent can finally begin the work of renewal.

These measures are only a starting point, the minimum of what is necessary for a civilisational reawakening. But they are also all very feasible were nationalist parties with the will to implement them to become dominant on the continent. They lay a foundation for Europeans to undo decades of bureaucratic overreach, harmful centralising tendencies, anti-European leftist cultural production, subversive human rights law, speech suppression, lax border security, and demographic replacement through mass-immigration. These measures alone may not be sufficient, but without them true a European renewal will not be possible.

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In a style that has become typical of Elon’s approach to politics, he lashed out against the EU with a call to tear the whole thing down, and abolish the European Union. Prominent American politicians like J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio have been extremely critical of this ruling, coming in the same week a new U.S. Security Strategy claimed Europe is becoming a minor actor on the world stage due to its commitment to failed mass-migration policies. Some identitarians in Europe, like Martin Sellner, have jumped on this opportunity to argue the case for abolishing the European Union as the body facilitating the demographic replacement of Europeans. Should we all get behind this push? I am skeptical.

I’m sure it will be surprising to some readers to see me push back on this. First, I am a nationalist. I believe the best kind of states are ethnostates, and a good moral principle on which to base a sustainable international order is a right of self-determination for national groups. The EU’s leadership is opposed to ethnonationalism and seeks to undermine the sovereignty of its constituent members toward a globalist, social-liberal agenda. I also support the idea of subsidiarity — that is, governance should operate on the most local and immediate level possible — and I think a great many problems of the modern world would be solved by more decentralisation (I am so sure of this, I am currently working on a book on this topic.) The EU nominally supports this, but in practice its evolution has been a steady ratcheting of authority away from national and local government toward Brussels.

Clearly, a European nationalist cannot support the current EU. The fine against X is only the latest example of overreach by a bureaucracy that has long positioned itself against populism and national expression within the Union. From its inception, the Union was designed by anti-national technocrats with the aim of undermining nationalism, especially German nationalism. Its central institutions were built with the deliberate intention of placing key decisions beyond the reach of national electorates, insulating policy from the populations it purported to unite.

Yet none of this straightforwardly commits us to the conclusion that the Union should be torn down, or that even if that is desirable, that we should direct our political energies there as nationalists with the limited time we have to turn our countries around. Politics is the art of the possible, and it would be bad strategy to tie a very winnable position to a more ambitious one with little support. The most important thing for nationalists right now is creating the metapolitical change to normalise opposition to replacement migration on racial/ethnic terms, and in turn normalise and generate support for the remigration. This is an achievable goal, and we have seen great strides in that regard in recent years.

Abolishing the EU is not a popular position. According to a poll conducted this year, 74% of Europeans think their country has benefited from EU membership. Only 6% opposed the idea of the Union on principle. Even in countries where a majority feel the EU is going in the wrong direction, like Italy and France, only 27% would vote to actually leave the Union. Even a majority of right-wing voters don’t support this in most countries; for example, only 36% of supporters of Spain’s Vox party would vote to leave.

An irony of these fresh calls emanating from our friends in the United States is that the American right’s attacks on the EU often end up bolstering the very Europhiles they hope to weaken. Liberals can reframe their defence of the current Union as a proud European stand against boorish American meddling, portraying their deference to globalist technocrats as the truly self-confident European stance. There is a risk that U.S. criticism gives Brussels the continental legitimacy it can’t actually generate on its own. This only deepens the basic problem: abolition is not just unpopular, it is easily caricatured as an American import rather than a European demand.

So the first problem with this proposal is its unpopularity. The constituency that supports leaving the EU already overlaps almost perfectly with those who support sweeping reforms on immigration and national sovereignty, but almost everyone who isn’t already on board with those things associates exit with uncertainty, political chaos and potential economic ruin. The example of Brexit has not put anyone’s mind at ease in this regard, and the massive number of non-European immigrants Britain has welcomed since has made it harder to claim that departure from Brussels is a reliable tool for national self-correction.

And that brings us nicely to the next point: the EU is not the chief obstacle to sensible immigration policies. Immigration policy is still set by our national governments, and were there a will among them to do so, they change course. Countries like Poland and Hungary show ethnostates can still exist within the EU with strict immigration policies, while countries like Denmark and Sweden have begun experimenting with remigration programs. Often, directing blame for mass, non-White migration towards the EU is just misdirection for people who blame far-away, globalist bodies for what is happening in their country because of their own political consensus. For years, populism in Britain was directed toward the single cause of leaving the European Union, which delivered multiple Tory governments majorities to “get Brexit done,” in which time they oversaw record net-migration to a bemused voting base.

Given how fine the margins are for nationalist parties on the verge of power in Europe, in most of the continent it would be effective political suicide to commit to a hard stance of Eurexit while the populace is so against it, tying a potentially majoritarian project to a peripheral cause. And nothing would make nationalists more unpopular than attempting this grand project and failing.

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A third problem is that even if public opinion shifted, the practical work of dismantling the Union would be a generational undertaking. The EU is not a single treaty one can rescind but a massive interlocking architecture of legal, economic, and regulatory systems woven into every member state’s daily functioning. Undoing this cannot be done overnight, and any attempt at immediate abolition would produce a level of administrative and economic dislocation that no responsible movement should inflict on its own societies, if for nothing else than its own political survival.

A botched attempt — one that failed to overcome the many legal obstacles, or the certain market panic it would trigger for our already heavily indebted nations — would not simply fail; it would permanently discredit the parties that championed it. Nationalist movements that are now on the verge of governing in several countries would find themselves blamed for the resulting chaos, economic downturn and instability, giving a new lease of life to the reliably stable Europhile establishment.

Lastly, there is a certain irony in the claim that electing governments willing to abolish the EU is a prerequisite to saving Europe. Because if the day comes where nationalist parties do command enough public support across the continent to make abolition a realistic prospect, they would by that very fact also possess the strength to reform the Union in the direction we want anyway. In other words, if you can build a political bloc capable of dissolving Brussels, the same bloc is capable of redirecting it to a vision of Fortress Europe. The level of support required for abolition would already guarantee the possibility of meaningful reform, without the upheaval of tearing the entire system apart and committing us to mapping out an unpopular and potentially perilous course.

A competing vision

While I am skeptical of the wisdom of pushing to “abolish the EU,” the principles underlying the drive are good, and it’s not very inspiring to tell idealistic nationalists that they must simply accept the reality of an institution hostile to their interests. Instead, we need a new, inspiring vision of how the Union could be scaled back and remade in a way that actually treats the preservation and flourishing of the distinct European peoples in a multipolar world as its guiding mission. Away from the centralising bureaucratic economic union of the EU technocrats, we should look to the European example of Switzerland as a union that has endured centuries and fostered the constituent identities of its diverse people groups.

Although its system of Cantons sounds positively medieval, the Swiss model has shown remarkable resilience in the modern era. Switzerland is a world-leader in a number of economic and social metrics, often ranked at the top of rankings of global competitiveness, innovation and quality of life. Yet it has achieved this while weathering the worst effects of globalism and maintaining a great deal of local autonomy. Switzerland’s decentralised model has been successful because its cantonal governments can innovate, correct mistakes quickly, and tailor policies to the specific needs and strengths of their own regions and people. No region feels trapped under the authority of a distant centre, and no central authority mistakes its role for that of an imperial administrator. In other words, the Swiss model has escaped many of the problems that plague the modern European project while maintaining the benefits that larger cooperation can bring, especially in economics.

It’s easy to forget now that subsidiarity was supposed to be a central governing principle of the EU, because it is totally irrelevant to how the current Union functions or how its leaders conceive its purpose. A reformed Union, one led by strong and independent nations, would recover subsidiarity as the structural logic of the entire project, returning authority to national and regional governments while maintaining a pan-European architecture for strategic necessities. But even this continental scope of action — when conceived as a protective framework that shields Europe’s constituent regions and coordinates their defence on the world stage — aims at the flourishing of European culture all the way down to the most local level. A Europe that defends its civilisation collectively makes it possible for its nations (and its regions and smaller communities) to live and develop on their own terms.

A confederal Europe led by patriots could also be advantageous in doing something modern nation-states have failed at — empowering more local regions and cultures with a greater degree of independence. These more independent regions could govern closer to citizens, more attuned to local needs than national governments, and far better placed to preserve their cultural distinctiveness. Under the leadership of proudly European nationalists, this project would not have to undermine or weaken nations. Instead, it could anchor them in their natural historical foundations and produce a more vibrant Europe with many centres of vitality, well attuned to Europe’s natural diversity. Were this to be achieved, the homogenising pressures of governance by distant, cosmopolitan managerial elites would be structurally undermined, and with it one of the great pressures driving our continent leftwards.

Ultimately, the question is not whether the EU should change, obviously as it exists now it is terminally at odds with genuine European nationalism. The question is what is the viable path to undo its nefarious aspects. A movement strong enough to abolish the Union would be strong enough to reform it, and reform could offer us the tools we need to undo our erasure without gambling our people’s survival on a highly fraught, unpredictable course. Given the high stakes with which we are playing, it’s wiser to focus on building what will last than to roll the dice on rupture.

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A striking claim, and predictably it has spread like wildfire online. Headlines framed it as a scientific breakthrough that “explains” Hitler’s personality or alleged sexual pathology. The mainstream media stoked this sensationalism to a great degree, running with headlines about a study supposedly “proving” Hitler had a micropenis, despite that trait only belonging to a minority of Kallmann patients anyway.

Firstly, I am not among the chorus of deniers who say this DNA does not belong to Hitler. Researchers studied DNA from a blood spatter taken from the couch Hitler shot himself on, later cut out of the couch and stored by a U.S. Army Officer. Though we do not yet have a peer-reviewed, documented chain of custody or authentication, the DNA has been matched to the unique familial E1b haplogroup of Hitler’s male relatives. Hitler shooting himself in that room is well-attested to by the people there, so while not yet definitive I am pretty satisfied they really were studying Hitler’s DNA.

But the genetics behind Kallmann syndrome are far more complex than the coverage suggests — and once you examine the actual research on the relevant genes, the sensational interpretation falls apart almost immediately.

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The study lead, Jean King, gave away a grave error in an interview on her study, which you can watch here. At about the 9:33 point, it is noted that “there are five genes… noted to be associated with Kallmann’s, and we’ve got a deletion in one… in that PROK2 gene.”

The problem is that this statement reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how PROK2 actually functions in Kallmann syndrome. King speaks as if Kallmann is a straightforward “one gene, one mutation” disorder — implying that a single deletion in any one of the five associated genes is enough to produce the disease. But this simply isn’t true, and all the scientific literature I have found on Kallmann’s is explicit on this point.

A 2007 PNAS study examined a family in which several siblings had Kallmann syndrome and were found to carry a homozygous loss-of-function mutation (meaning both copies of the gene were broken) in the PROK2 gene. Crucially, another brother who was completely healthy had only one broken copy of the gene, and the parents also carried just one broken copy — yet neither of them showed any symptoms. This pattern showed that a single PROK2 mutation is typically not sufficient to cause the disorder. The authors concluded that the disease phenotype appeared either when both PROK2 alleles were mutated or when one mutated allele interacted with defects in other genes involved in GnRH neuronal development:

Combined with our data, it appears that two mutated PROK2 alleles are needed to cause nIHH/KS. Alternatively, additional gene defect(s) could synergize with one mutated PROK2 allele to cause nIHH/KS.1

A 2008 study in the European Journal of Human Genetics expanded on these findings by examining a large group of patients with Kallmann syndrome. The researchers found that the people who clearly had the disorder were those who carried two damaged copies of the PROK2 gene, while individuals with only one damaged copy (like Hitler) were usually completely healthy. In fact, many of these single-copy carriers inherited their PROK2 variant from their fertile parents who had no symptoms at all — strong evidence that a lone mutation does not reliably cause the condition.

The authors conclude with the prediction that:

patients carrying monoallelic mutations in PROK2 have another disease-causing mutation, presumably in still undiscovered Kallmann syndrome genes.2

Finally, a recent 2023 study looked at patients with various pituitary hormonal problems and screened them for mutations in the PROK2 genes. What they found fits perfectly with the other two studies: people with only one damaged copy of PROKR2 often showed no symptoms at all, while others showed mild or highly variable hormonal issues that did not match full Kallmann syndrome.

The argument of the researchers is that PROKR2 variants have a more complex inheritance pattern beyond Kallmann’s, many single-copy mutations simply “lower the threshold” for hormonal dysfunction (perhaps there is a link here to Hitler’s reported undescended testicle, but it certainly does not point to Kallmann’s.) Crucially though, PROKR2 mutations frequently appear in completely healthy individuals, and mouse models only show clear disease when both copies are disrupted:

For instance, heterozygous PROKR2 mutations have been reported in patients with IHH, and in many of these patients, the variants were inherited from an asymptomatic parent. An alternative possibility for this variable phenotype of PROKR2 may be the dominant negative effect of some variants on the normal allele but this mechanism is unlikely to account for the deleterious effect of all missense alterations, as many of them have also been found in healthy individuals.3

So every serious study we have on PROK2 and PROKR2 shows that one mutation isn’t enough to give someone Kallmann Syndrome. You need two defective copies, or other defective genes related to pubertal development, before Kallmann syndrome reliably appears. And many perfectly normal, fertile people walk around with the same kind of single-copy mutations reported in Hitler. Given that this finding came from professional geneticists, it seems like a stunning misinterpretation of their own findings, which have now been inflated even more by the media.

There may be many other interesting findings from the study of Hitler’s DNA, like his reported high tendency toward disorders like autism and schizophrenia, but the author studies have undermined all of this with the fundamental misinterpretation at the heart of their most sensational claim.

Hanania prides himself on attacking the populist beliefs of the left and right alike in favour of the “elite human capital” beliefs which defend liberty, markets, and colourblind meritocracy. His case for neoliberalism is simple: “Neoliberalism emerged to deal with real problems, had strong intellectual foundations, and largely accomplished its goals.”

Hanania’s argument after this depends on cherry-picked data, misleading comparisons, the ignoring of obvious counter-arguments and examples, and a simplistic set of myths about markets and fiscal prudence that would fit a Sean Hannity monologue better than a serious think-piece. Rather than demonstrating that neoliberalism “worked,” Hanania only reveals how shallow its intellectual defenders have become.

Hanania’s case is wrong in many ways, so I will break it down based on each of his major claims about economic history.

1. Neoliberalism delivered massive growth to those who embraced it.

Hanania writes that “the UK, in particular, saw growth increase in the 1980s and 1990s. Growth was about the same in the US in the 1980s and 1990s as it was in the 1970s, but with lower inflation, more stability, and lower unemployment. Refusing to follow Thatcher’s approach of taking on unions and limiting the expansion of the welfare state, the other major economies of Western Europe—France, Germany, Italy, and Spain—saw slower growth than either the US or the UK in subsequent decades.”

It’s not true that this period saw higher growth than the Keynesian post-war period. According to data from Crestmont Research, US GDP growth averaged 3.97% in the decades of the 1950s, 60s and 70s; and just 2.73 percent in the three subsequent decades. The picture is similar for the UK: ONS data shows average GDP growth of 4% from 1950 to 1979, and just 2.7% in the period Hanania celebrates from 1980 to 2009. Hanania is only calling these growth rates impressive compared to a period of economic crisis that came at the tail-end of the Keynesian period, which is hardly a fair way to judge its success. This would be like comparing the growth rates of the 1960s to the two years after the neoliberal financial crisis of 2008.

And just looking at GDP growth rates to judge the success of policies in this period is misleading. After all, exogenous factors — like a windfall of natural resources — can grow the economy in spite of bad government policy. Other bad policy, like borrowing from the future with heavy deficit spending and private credit expansion, can also lead to impressive GDP growth without actually being the best way to steward the economy. Both of these apply to Thatcher and Reagan’s economic management.

Reagan’s economic miracle, apparently built on financial prudence and the rolling back of big government, was financed by the largest peacetime deficits in American history up to that point. Federal debt as a percent of GDP almost doubled during Reagan’s time in office, as he embraced cutting tax revenue alongside a surge in military spending, and in nominal terms the national debt tripled due to his deficit spending. Pumping money into the economy through deficit spending is textbook Keynesianism, but the difference is Reagan’s policies focused on pushing consumption with borrowing while replacing manufacturing exports and real productivity gains. At the same time, financial deregulation and credit expansion encouraged an explosion of private debt.

Similarly, Thatcher’s apparent revival owed much to the North Sea oil boom and financialisation of the British economy, which in the long-run would become a drain on Britain’s productive economy. The North Sea oil find was generating 3% of national income in the Thatcher years, a figure which would “conservatively” be valued at £450bn by 2008 if invested in safe assets as more prudent socialist countries like Norway did with their resource wealth. Elsewhere, I have written in detail about the myriad of ways Britain’s turn to financialisation under Thatcher has made it worse off, to the point where the British middle-class now has a lower living standard than Slovenia and is on course to be overtaken by Poland.

Modern Britain now has fewer IPO’s than Mexico, with an economy almost entirely reliant on financial services. And if you exclude the international financial hub that is London, the remainder of Britain is poorer than every state in the US, as well as all the European countries Hanania talks about it outperforming.

Thatcher’s oil money created the illusion of a productivity revolution that was simply downstream of an explosion in energy revenue and asset inflation. Thatcher also deregulated markets in a way that ignited a wave of speculative capital inflows and property bubbles that pumped up GDP figures but added little to the real economy other than pricing out would-be home buyers. Hanania suggests neoliberal policies solved the unemployment problem it inherited, yet unemployment actually worsened under Thatcher. After inheriting an unemployment rate of 5.2% in 1979, unemployment rose to as high as 14.8% in 1986, well into Thatcher’s term, and was still at 7.7% by the time she left office.1

Hanania’s claims about growth don’t even stand up on the numbers, but in both of the examples he uses that growth was short-term and fuelled by debt, natural resource revenue, public asset fire-sales and government spending, a package that was obviously unsustainable — and that’s before even getting to the role the deregulation of this period played in the ‘08 financial crash.

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2. Neoliberalism is responsible for China and India’s development.

Hanania writes that “After market-oriented reforms, both nations experienced dramatic improvements in growth and poverty reduction.” He notes that China’s rise alone has accounted for nearly 75 percent of the global reduction in extreme poverty over the last four decades.

Now, to praise the success of neoliberalism, Hanania is citing two countries that explicitly rejected it in this period. Of course it’s true that market liberalisation helped develop both countries immensely, but neoliberalism isn’t just markets. All of the Keynesians of the post-war period would have supported China and India making market reforms and opening up to global trade. It wasn’t neoliberal economists that opened China up to the global marketplace, it was pre-neoliberal politicians like Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter and his Keynesian economic advisors. The great wave of Western capital that poured into China in the 1980s and 1990s came through diplomatic initiatives, export-credit agencies, and multinational investment guarantees, Western governments coordinated global economic integration rather than allowing markets to act spontaneously.

As for China’s domestic policy, China has embraced a very centralised form of economic corporatism (state-capitalism, if you prefer) which is closer to fascism than anything promoted by liberal ideologues. China maintains strict control on finance and runs state banks, for much of its development all land remained under state control, strategic industries were heavily subsidised rather than allowing the market to pick winners, and they were bolstered on the world stage by aggressive tariff policies and an intentionally undervalued currency.

3. Other East Asian economies had more success with more neoliberalism.

Hanania acknowledges China is a “hybrid model,” but points out that countries like Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan achieved even more economic prosperity embracing a more pure form of neoliberalism. This demonstrates a profound ignorance of the economic history of these countries. Hong Kong is obviously a special case as a sheltered city-state. Singapore, like China, is closer to corporatism than neoliberalism: this is a country where 90% of land is state-owned, where the state has near complete control of the housing market, and sovereign wealth funds own dominant shares in large industries — all policies which repudiate neoliberal prescriptions about leaving land, housing and industry to private interests.

South Korea and Taiwan also followed the course of developmental nationalism to achieve their economic miracles. South Korea under Park Chung-hee was a textbook case of corporatist economics: credit was directed by state-owned banks and the state selected “national champion” firms for export promotion like Hyundai and Samsung. Tariffs and import quotas were used to protect domestic industry until global competitiveness was achieved.2

South Korea, Taiwan, and then China all followed the model of infant-industry protection combined with export discipline, and only opened up to more competitive global markets when they had directed their industry to be in a strong enough position to win in a fair fight. Hanania writes that “It was beneficial for China to move away from communism, but its growth has likely occurred despite practices like large state-owned enterprises… rather than because of them.” What is this based on? Does he also think South Korea would have been better off without Samsung, LG and Daewoo?

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4. “Shock therapy” was a success in the long-run.

Hanania also points to the post-communist transition in Eastern Europe as evidence that neoliberal “shock therapy” ultimately worked. He writes that although the reforms were painful in the short term, “over the medium to long-run, many of these economies stabilized, integrated into the European Union, and experienced sustained growth.” Not only does Hanania breeze over the astonishing scale of the initial collapse brought about by pursuing neoliberal prescriptions, but he ignores the fact that recovery for these countries only came after the abandonment of neoliberal orthodoxy.

How bad was it? Between 1989 and 1996, Russia’s GDP collapsed by roughly 45 percent, industrial output by over half, and real incomes fell by around 40 percent. Inflation in 1992 alone exceeded 2,000 percent, wiping out household savings overnight. Male life expectancy dropped from 65 years to 57, a demographic collapse unprecedented in peacetime.

In Ukraine, GDP shrank by more than 60 percent during the 1990s under neoliberal shock therapy, and by the end of the decade, half the population lived below the poverty line. Merely some short term pain according to Hanania, who highlights Poland in particular as a post-communist success story. But Poland immediately relented on its initial shock therapy, reintroducing subsidies for key sectors, and kept large state firms under partial public control for another decade.3 These countries restored corporatist economic structures after the anarchic conditions of the early 90s, many benefited from massive EU investments, and others like Russia had a recovery led by commodity exports, not financialisation.

If Hanania was really judging neoliberal policy empirically, the post-Soviet experience should count as a massive failure. Instead, he gives a sentence to the catastrophe it engendered then credits all subsequent success after communism to the wholly unnecessary initial experiment with neoliberalism.

5. Neoliberalism brought greater economic stability.

Having done nothing to make his case for the empirical vindication of neoliberal ideas, Hanania now ponders why people reject it in spite of its obvious success. His answer is that it may be too successful. Economic instability was taken for granted in the old system because of the constant recessions, but Hanania writes that “the Great Recession of 2008 was a major exception, it stood out precisely because it interrupted what had become an era of relative economic stability compared to the turbulence of earlier decades.” Hanania then makes the astonishing claim that “The only other serious economic crisis since the mid-1980s was the COVID-19 downturn.”

While writing this, I saw the excellent X user Lord Keynes had published his own response on his economics-focused blog, which I highly recommend. I won’t do a better job compiling a list of neoliberalism’s own financial crises than he did:

Neoliberal Asset Bubbles and Financial Crises

(1) 1980s US Savings and Loan Crisis (1986–1995)
Financial deregulation and risky investments caused the failure of over 1,000 savings and loan institutions, which cost US taxpayers about $160 billion.

(2) 1990s Japanese Real Estate Bubble and Lost Decade (1990–2000s)
Financial deregulation in Japan led to a massive real estate and stock market bubble, followed by bank crises, banking failures, and recession.

(3) 1990s East Asian Financial Crisis (1997–1998)
Capital control liberalisation and financial deregulation allowed asset bubbles and capital inflows, which then catastrophically reversed, as well as speculative attacks on national currencies in Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, and other nations.

(4) Dot-Com Bubble (1999–2000)

(5) 2008 Global Financial Crisis (2007–2009)
Neoliberal financial deregulation allowed a massive real estate bubble, with toxic subprime mortgage defaults, a global financial crisis and the worst global recession since the Great Depression.

(6) The Eurozone sovereign debt crisis (2009–c. 2015)
The fundamental cause of the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis and the bad deflationary recessions and/or banking crises during this period – in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Cyprus, Spain and Italy – was ultimately the flawed Neoliberal design of the EU and Eurozone monetary policies: the Eurozone effectively robbed smaller nations of monetary sovereignty, which drove them into brutal austerity that, most notably, crippled the economies of Ireland and Greece.

What makes this record even worse is that neoliberal dogma often prevented effective responses to these crises. Governments constrained themselves with austerity, inflation-targeting, and faith in market self-correction. After 2008, governments engaged in costly bailouts of the financial system they had let run wild with the light-touch regulation encouraged by neoliberalism, forcing fiscal restraint on public finances that led to a decade of stagnation.

In Europe, the neoliberal architecture of the Eurozone turned a private banking crisis into a sovereign-debt crisis, which has been a massive drag on public finances and growth ever since. Instead of stabilising capitalism, the commitment to neoliberalism has slowed or sabotaged recovery by subordinating national prosperity to the preservation of financial orthodoxy.

Conclusion

Intellectuals often display a peculiar laziness when they turn their pen to economics. Part of this, I think, is they are too focused on ideology at the cost of taking a cold look at the historical record. Hanania loves the idea of neoliberalism, but he is clearly ignorant of the record of the system he is volunteering to defend.

Hanania’s whole case is a series of myths: that Thatcher and Reagan rescued capitalism through discipline and faith in individualism; a simple story of China’s ascent being about capitalism replacing statism; that the East Asian economic miracles were the product of laissez-faire economics rather than protectionism and state-direction; that the wreckage of post-Soviet shock therapy — the single greatest peacetime economic collapse in modern history — was a necessary reform after communism; and that the neoliberal era brought stability and prudent financial management despite hollowing out native industry, stagnating living standards for the middle-class, and leaving us with the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

If there’s a lesson from economic history, it’s that ideology is a poor guide. The most enduring systems are those that allow markets to channel ambition and creativity, but draw pragmatic boundaries when they threaten the stability of families, industries, or the nation itself. Hanania may want to live in a world that has outgrown the nation-state, but the economic history of the 20th century shows that what really “works” is nations using markets rather than surrendering to them.

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Now, he wants to warn Westerners about what he views as the profound depravity and backwardness of Indian culture.

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If you want to see the full thing and throw Ed a few bucks, it’s available on his Substack:

The Jolly Heretic

Democracy was a period of time—and now its over | Keith Woods

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