Greg discussed his time on the front line of America’s deportation efforts, the forces that undermined him, and why the movement for remigration is making him so excited for the future.

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Ryan and Keith discuss the sociology of screen addiction. The smartphone revolution of the 2010s has upended social life and remade our world. What does the new world of ever-present social media and algorithmic manipulation mean for happiness, dating, and the future of civilisation?

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Keith and Ryan discuss the age of slop and the rise of slopulism. How have algorithms and the growth of the attention economy changed politics on the right, and who are the winners and losers? Plus, an examination of the ways the establishment is now trying to co-opt the new right to serve old ends.

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House prices rose naturally

Price-to-income ratios have roughly doubled since the Boomer buying era. In 1985, during the peak Boomer buying years, the median home sold for $82,800 while median household income was $23,620 — a ratio of 3.5×. By 2025, the median home had reached $416,900 against $83,150 in median income — a 5× ratio, with homes up 403% and income up 252%.

The surge came from deliberate supply restrictions (NIMBY zoning enforced by older homeowners), loose monetary policy that inflated assets, mass immigration driving up demand that couldn’t be met, and Boomers refusing to downsize en masse. Boomers now sit on trillions in home equity precisely because the system they created made housing a speculative store of value, and because each successive generation has faced a higher barrier to entry.

As a result, empty-nest Boomers in the U.S. now own nearly twice the share of large homes as Millennial families. In the UK, over-60s own 55% of all property in the UK, with those under 40 owning just 10%.

Boomers faced 15% mortgage rates

Boomers will sometimes cite historically high interest rates in the early 1980s, but it’s meaningless given that they still translated to mortgage payments that are a fraction of what this generation pays. Boomers bought at price-to-income ratios of roughly 3–3.5×. They then enjoyed multiple tailwinds the next generations never received:

• Rates fell sharply through the 1980s and 1990s and gave them easy refinancing.

• High inflation wiped out the real value of their fixed-rate debt.

• Decades of strong house-price appreciation turned modest purchases into massive equity.

What does the nominal interest rate matter when the relative burden was far lighter and the equity gains were locked in for decades?

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Young people are irresponsible with their money

Gen Z are actually saving for retirement more than Gen X and Boomers did. Gen Z start saving for retirement at a median age of 22, about 13 years earlier than Baby Boomers or Gen X.

This is despite the aforementioned 2–3× higher housing costs relative to wages, higher student debt, and decades of stagnant real wage growth.

Boomers entered adulthood with cheap homes, near-free college, affordable living, a low number of dependent pensioners relative to the working-age population, strong unions, and they were on the cusp of a historic, multi-decade explosion in wealth from which they could benefit through even modest asset ownership.

Pensioners paid into a pot — it’s their money

This is the biggest lie told by defenders of gerontocracy. Across the West, state pensions are overwhelmingly pay-as-you-go. All your “contributions” were spent on the previous generation’s pensions, and there is no ring-fenced personal pot earning returns for you. Current workers fund current retirees.

People are so brazen with this lie that someone commented under my previous post on Britain’s triple lock policy that I “seem to forget that they paid into the system all their working lives and many retired people don’t get the full State Pension. It’s not free money.”

Remember, this is in defence of a policy where state pensions are automatically upgraded every year by whichever is highest: inflation, average earnings growth, or 2.5%. The system is actually designed to ensure pension gains outpace average earnings growth, and its defenders still frame it as honouring some kind of fixed obligation.

Baby Boomers did not pay into a future pension pot. When they funded the state during their peak working years, the worker-to-beneficiary ratio was far higher — around 3–5 workers per retiree through the 1970s–1990s. There are 2.7 workers for every pensioner in America today, a ratio similar to the UK. In Germany the old-age dependency ratio set to increase to 51% by 2050; Italy will be over 66% by that point.

This is a massive intergenerational transfer from a shrinking pool of younger workers to a much larger, longer-living cohort of retirees, and a complete inversion of the favourable demographics Boomers enjoyed when they were paying in.

The result is visible across Europe. In several major economies, pensioners now have net incomes approaching those of working-age adults; in some countries like Spain, they are slightly higher:

The young will get it all through inheritance anyway

The same commenter who said Boomers had funded their own pensions commented that I should remember that “this wealth will trickle down to the next generation and that will give them a head start.”

There will be a great wealth transfer eventually but most will never see this. Boomers hold ~half of national wealth, and many are ready to spend it on long retirements, healthcare, and comfortably leisurely lifestyles. Inheritances arrive late (typical recipient in their 50s–60s), well after the point where they could have aided family formation and other milestones for the next generation.

The transfer is also extremely unequal. It’s ridiculous to point to a minority receiving large inheritances, usually late in life, and act like this corrects a structural imbalance that affects every subsequent generation.

Not only that, but Boomers believe less in passing on their wealth to their children than any generation to ever exist! They explicitly say they plan to enjoy their money or leave less than expected. Just look at how many famous Boomer celebrities have bragged about the promise of leaving nothing to their children.

A survey reported last year found that only 22% of Baby Boomers expect to leave an inheritance, and only half that number rated it a top priority.

Another survey found that only 21% of Boomers with at least $1 million in investable assets said they want the next generation to enjoy their wealth, compared to 53% of Millennials. Three times more Boomers than Millennials say they want to enjoy the money for themselves while alive. If someone thinks stereotypes about Boomer entitlement are unfair, show them this:

We must protect house prices for the good of the economy

This is the economics of gerontocracy. High house prices enrich current owners, who are disproportionately older, at the expense of labour mobility, entrepreneurship, family formation and new home ownership.

Turning housing from shelter into a speculative rentier asset creates (sometimes disastrous) bubbles, enables parasitic rent extraction, and locks national wealth into an unproductive asset which misallocates capital and stifles genuine economic growth.

This is not a neutral policy because all the policies that inflated Boomer assets were choices made at the cost of alternatives. In this context, “the good of the economy” just means protecting Boomer balance sheets at everyone else’s expense.

Pensioners are ‘asset rich, cash poor’ so we can’t tax their asset wealth or cut their benefits

Today’s retirees — especially Baby Boomers — are the wealthiest cohort in history. Boomers in the United States hold over half the country’s wealth.

Much of this wealth sits in housing. Most older homeowners are mortgage-free and sitting on massive unrealised gains created by decades of asset inflation downstream of policies that favoured them.

If they are genuinely “cash poor,” they have multiple straightforward options to unlock equity. The reason they don’t is that many simply choose not to. They prefer to preserve their full asset base while receiving universal benefits, public services subsidised by working-age taxpayers, and special tax protections.

The fact that pensioners have trillions tied up in unrealised gains is supposed to elicit great sympathy, but not the “cash poor” situation of younger workers who are paying rent, taxes and pension contributions with no realistic path to ownership. And of course, the same people invoking the “cash poor” excuse would oppose almost any policy designed to encourage retirees to make their wealth more liquid and free up the housing market.

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My latest book, Ethnopolitics, is now available. The book collects 15 of my best essays on how collective identity shapes the world. Its two lengthiest essays are exclusive to the book, a study of the psychology of the left and the mental pathologies that drive extreme leftism, and an ethnohistory of the Norman people and the extraordinary mark they left on European history.

“Keith Woods is one of the most accomplished of a rising generation of ethnic nationalists. His new book Ethnopolitics demonstrates its relevance to a wide range of political issues, showing why ethnopolitics is the wave of the future. I highly recommend Ethnopolitics to all my readers.”
— Greg Johnson

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Votes are being counted across Britain today for local elections that signal another defeat for the country’s traditional party duopoly and another step in the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

These results seem to match what most were expecting, and I don’t know if there is much nationalists can take from this. Morgoth’s Review just published a good article discussing the election as a further sign of Britain’s move to sectarian politics and the end of traditional political alliances.

One group that definitely wins from this election is old people. Keir Starmer’s Labour government is historically unpopular for many reasons, but one of the most relevant to the greying British electorate is a debacle over winter fuel payments.

Winter fuel payments are one of the many universal benefits enjoyed by British pensioners — one in four of whom are millionaires. Despite its struggling finances, the British state gives all ten million of its pensioners a flat payment to spend on fuel.

When the British Treasury attempted to means test the payment and exclude the wealthiest retirees, the backlash was so severe that the government issued a humiliating U-turn. Doorstep canvassers, and a Labour minister, have reported this as the single most commonly cited grievance in 2025’s local elections and by-elections, and Reform — the favoured party of British Boomers — weaponised the issue with devastating effect.

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Polling for the local elections in Britain consistently shows pensioners turning out at nearly twice the rate of under-35s. They also vote in far greater numbers for parties that protect their benefits. I’ve written before about how much the elderly vote also dominates Irish elections and props up the establishment parties. Ireland is bad, but Britain is one of the worst cases in the world of gerontocracy run amok. This was evident again recently when Tony Blair’s think tank suggested the state should scrap the so-called “triple lock,” which ensures pensions increase annually by whichever is highest: inflation, average earnings growth, or a flat rate of 2.5%.

The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates that state pension spending in Britain could rise by roughly £80 billion in today’s terms by the 2070s, with more than half of that increase driven by the triple lock. It’s hard to believe how irresponsible this policy is — the government is structurally committed to making sure pensioners gain more than the average worker, every year, even as the ratio of pensioners to workers reaches historically unprecedented levels and the birthrate craters.

Liverpool Echo:

Since 2010, the state pension for a Brit has climbed from £423 monthly to £1,048 – an increase of nearly 150%. During the same timeframe, average earnings have grown by just 66%, while 55% inflation has eroded most real-terms gains for working people.

Is there any other way working people would tolerate being screwed this badly? Of course, when Blair’s institute suggested reexamining this, there was a backlash from all the major parties, affirming their commitment to the triple lock.

Nigel Farage previously questioned the sustainability of the policy, but basic political incentives have forced an about-face. Recently, Farage promised to keep the funnel running by offering “the most radical proposals to cutting welfare ever seen in this country.”

Where might those savings come from? The state pension is already more than half the British state’s welfare bill. Perhaps reconsidering universal cash payments for retired millionaires, the generation that benefited immensely from property market timing and locked their children out of housing? No, Farage is also committed to fully reinstating the terms of the old universal fuel payment scheme that the loony lefty Labour government deemed fiscally unsustainable.

Of course, the problem of entrenched gerontocracy is everywhere in the developed world. French MPs approved France’s 2026 social-security budget only after the government agreed to suspend Macron’s pension reform, delaying the rise in the retirement age from 62 to 64 until after the next presidential election. In a country where over-65s now make up 22.2% of the population, this alone will blow a hole of up to €30 billion in France’s social-security finances.

It’s hard to fight gerontocracy, partly because of its ability to present itself as the unmarked condition of politics. Taking welfare from grandparents seems mean-spirited. The reality of how much policies like these are actually a direct transfer from poorer working-age people to often very wealthy retirees just doesn’t register with the average voter. Existing pension formulas, property privileges and healthcare priorities are treated as the natural order of things, while any attempt to change them is framed as an attack on the vulnerable.

But this is a trick of perspective. A policy that protects incumbent homeowners is no less “interventionist” than a policy that helps first-time buyers. A pension formula like Britain’s triple lock, which automatically ratchets upward, is no less a political choice than tax incentives for parents or public housing programmes. Gerontocracy wins by making its own privileges seem like the neutral order of things, and every challenge to them look like confiscation.

The conservative commentariat play a role in enforcing this. In The Telegraph, Andrew Orlowski shames moderns for considering something as anti-traditional as scrapping the triple lock:

In Confucian and Catholic cultures, where family ties are stronger and the elderly are revered, it would be unthinkable to hear such violent rhetoric against the aged.

Japanese legend preserved the story of ubasute, the carrying of an elderly parent to a mountain to die when the household could no longer sustain them. It does not appear to have been a common historical custom, but its existence as folklore is revealing. Traditional cultures did not imagine old age only through the sentimental modern category of entitlement.

The Confucian intergenerational compact was reciprocal: the young owed honour and support to the old, but the old were custodians of inheritance. They passed on trades, homes, land, tradition and a social order in which the young could prosper as adults. Defenders of the gerontocracy have scorn for the idea of this kind of obligation. They demand filial piety from a generation that has been priced out of becoming householders.

Given this settlement, is it any wonder young people’s self-reported well-being is now collapsing in the Anglophone world? Annual World Happiness Reports have shown a noticeable divergence emerging: while regions such as Eastern Europe and Latin America have seen reported happiness rise, English-speaking countries have moved sharply in the opposite direction.

The Economist reports that this is being driven by the young:

The divergence is starkest among the young. In most other parts of the world young people are at least as satisfied with their lives as they were a decade ago, if not more so. But among under-25s in America, Australia, Britain, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand, scores have fallen—placing all six among the biggest declines for this age group.

Unsurprisingly, people have blamed social media, but it seems like South Americans and East Asians are just as hooked on their smartphones. But few places have a life cycle as broken as these countries. The young are expected to fund a system built around the security of the old while the basic milestones of adulthood recede further into the distance. Britain has one of the highest rates of millionaire emigration in the world, second only to China.

There is no sense of excitement about the future among the young in these countries. Lower paid jobs now have an added indignity as they have become dominated by cheap labour imported from the third world. Aspirational young people who aren’t emigrating are generally attempting some kind of hustle, scam or gamble to try and break out of their station. Social life has been privatised, with shared social spaces dominated by Boomers and young people priced out of everything. The consensus of the young in these countries, regardless of political orientation, is that things are destined to just keep getting more shit, and that is perfectly rational since it is the only trend they have observed as adults.

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My latest book, Ethnopolitics, is now available. The book collects 15 of my best essays on how collective identity shapes the world. Its two lengthiest essays are exclusive to the book, a study of the psychology of the left and the mental pathologies that drive extreme leftism, and an ethnohistory of the Norman people and the extraordinary mark they left on European history.

“Keith Woods is one of the most accomplished of a rising generation of ethnic nationalists. His new book Ethnopolitics demonstrates its relevance to a wide range of political issues, showing why ethnopolitics is the wave of the future. I highly recommend Ethnopolitics to all my readers.”
— Greg Johnson

Purchase Ethnopolitics in your preferred format and region on Amazon:

“Keith Woods is one of the most accomplished of a rising generation of ethnic nationalists. His new book Ethnopolitics demonstrates its relevance to a wide range of political issues, showing why ethnopolitics is the wave of the future. I highly recommend Ethnopolitics to all my readers.”
— Greg Johnson

Purchase Ethnopolitics in your preferred format and region on Amazon:

There is a noticeable trend lately of influencers on the right being frustrated with the decline in quality of other influencers, and their own audiences. Things have become so bad that Alex Jones is regularly despairing at the lack of epistemological rigour among online conspiracy theorists now. With the election of Trump, the relaxation of censorship, the paranoia caused by the covid period, the growth of bro science and lifestyle twitter, and the rise of figures like Candace Owens, this is the age of the rightoid. To understand the direction of the right and the general downgrading of rightist discourse then, we must understand the rightoid and his motivations.

What is the rightoid? I don’t use it as a general insult for people on the right, but to describe a particular kind of low-resolution rightist: someone dispositionally destined to be anti-left, but not capable of serious right-wing thought. Rightoids are not low-IQ conservatives, though their thinking does overlap with low-IQ reasoning patterns. The rightoid is better understood through the core assumptions he uses to make sense of the world. I break these down into three similar but distinct filters through which the world is viewed:

Cabal theory
The fundamental tendency of the rightoid is to reduce all complex, impersonal systems to the intentional actions of a coherent, hostile elite. To be a rightoid is to anthropomorphise all social phenomena. This might sound a lot like defining “conspiracy theorist,” but conspiracy theorists may maintain a critical stance to the subjects they investigate or only conclude a conspiracy after investigating.

The rightoid does not treat cabal theory as something that must be argued for and defended, but takes it as a baseline assumption. Apparent anomalies or contradictions are not investigated in their own right, instead, they are treated as cues that something is being done behind the scenes — this is usually expressed in rhetorical they statements. In milder forms this resembles conspiracy thinking; in stronger forms it becomes an elastic and unfalsifiable theory of everything, capable of incorporating any contradictory evidence as further proof of concealed intent. QAnon is the extreme example. The funniest example of this kind of thinking is when rightoids treat the news cycle changing as itself proof of a nefarious conspiracy theory:

“First they told us to focus on covid, then they told us to focus on BLM, now they are talking about Ukraine. Get excited for next new thing!”

Aside from believing all social change comes through the agency of a cabal, the rightoid also believes the elites are motivated by evil. For Christians, this may take the form of believing the elites are satanists. For others, there is a belief that they are pedophiles or under the influence of some kind of occultic beliefs. It is from this theory that rightoids can make predictions about politics, and why their politics are so often wrong. For example, during covid it was common to see rightoids predict that the WEF would begin manufacturing food shortages, or implement climate lockdowns. Rightoids were unanimous that covid restrictions would never end because evil cabals do not willingly surrender power they have gained.

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Epistemic populism
Rightoids reject mediated or expert knowledge in favour of intuition and in-group common sense. Institutional claims are not treated with skepticism because they are potentially contaminated by leftist bias, they are simply discounted on the basis of their source.

Rightoids have a frustrating character of being intensely skeptical yet showing little curiosity to investigate the things they are skeptical of. They may produce 100 reasons why humans could not exit the earth’s atmosphere that they have picked up online, but they will never have investigated any one of these with real scrutiny. Their skepticism is purely defensive: dissonant information is met with intense doubt, but the doubt never translates into real inquiry that could undermine their existing assumptions.

Romantic primitivism
For most people, their nominal beliefs are downstream of aesthetics and vibes. This is especially true for rightoids, given their anti-intellectual outlook. That vibe is romantic primitivism, an aesthetic and moral preference for what appears natural, traditional, or unprocessed. Modern, technical, or abstract systems are treated with suspicion, while the “natural” is granted an assumed authenticity. This brings the overlap with bro science and crunchy lifestyleism, with rightoids passionately opposed to things like pasteurised milk, sunscreen and the polio vaccine.

This is really what makes the rightoid dispositionally rightist rather than the type of left-leaning, hippie conspiracy theorists that used to smoke pot and watch Zeitgeist.

Although none of these alone explain the outlook of the rightoid, they are all manifestations of the same underlying orientation: a low-trust, intuition-dominant epistemic style that prefers agentic, morally legible, and experientially grounded explanations over abstract, system-level ones.

Why rightoids lose

Why does this mindset exist as a distinct type? I think it is basically a tribal mindset designed for close-knit societies. There is nothing really wrong with that. In fact, it is probably quite an adaptive mindset in a more natural setting. In the small-scale societies that were the norm for most of human history, the most important political facts were immediate and personal. Who is loyal? Who betrayed the group? Who is secretly coordinating against us? In that setting, this kind of threat detection and reliance on in-group knowledge was very adaptive. If more of our people had these instincts in a scenario where nationalists were in power, we would be better off for it.

The problem is that the right is not in power. For a political vanguard attempting to overturn the existing regime, this mindset becomes a problem. Modern mass society is a vast, technical system directed by complex bureaucracies, markets, legal regimes, media incentives, professional networks, ideological trends and demographic pressures. Trying to make sense of this in total is where this mindset becomes disabling. And if you cannot distinguish genuine conspiracy from these systemic forces, you become incapable of understanding or tackling any of them.

This puts the right at a serious disadvantage. Leftists are generally better at thinking in systems. The left understands pipelines, funding networks, legal pressure, bureaucratic capture, activist institutions, cultural production, personnel placement, and long-term cultural change. In other words, it thinks in terms of metapolitics. It has many political manifestations, but it is fundamentally the metapolitical project of White erasure and emancipation toward normative egalitarianism and liberal pluralist societies. It may be wrong about human nature, but this is not a political weakness while it understands institutional reproduction.

It also makes serious analysis difficult. This has two deleterious effects on the right. First, it makes it harder to attract intelligent, elite human capital who seek systemic explanations and want to deepen their understanding of social phenomena. Second, it makes it harder to organise against leftism, leading to a kind of paralysis where rightoids either wait for a saviour figure to dismantle the existing elite structure or place their faith in an eventual collapse or civil war scenario.

Social phenomena that require layered explanation are flattened into moral accusations. Think of how many conservative commentators explain things like modern art and architecture as consciously designed to make you hate yourself. Of course, this kind of thing can be useful for propaganda purposes, but as maxims like this have come to dominate the online ecosystem, most now operate on nothing but their own propaganda. There is real hostile intent from our elites, but because hostile intent is a default master explanation, the right cannot properly rank causes. Everything becomes equally intentional, equally malicious, and equally urgent, and this destroys strategic discrimination.

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Why is there no leftoid problem?

The left has leftoids just like the right has rightoids. If we take a rightoid to be the middling IQ pseudo-normie who has a tribalistic bent to right wing politics, then the leftist equivalent is the status-anxious moral conformist. Leftism among intellectuals is built out of elaborate abstractions, but it is enforced by masses of progressives who barely understand these ideas. The apparent system-thinking of the average leftist is just fluency with institutional language. A leftoid will look at any political issue and point to some kind of systemic injustice like “capitalism,” “patriarchy,” or “White supremacy” as its cause. This is the left-wing equivalent of the rightoid’s “they.” For the rightoid, the cognitive plug is “they planned it,” for the leftoid, the cognitive plug is systemic oppression. Both are monocausal reductions of social phenomena that bypass real analysis, but one is rooted in distrust and disagreeableness and one is rooted in conformity and status anxiety.

But the left is not constrained by its leftoids in the way the right is with its rightoids because the leftoid’s instincts are compatible with the institutional form of left-wing politics. Regardless of how hysterical, shallow or stupid the leftoid is, they likely remain plugged into a leftist institutional machine led by capable organisers. Any issues they may have with their own party or activists is secondary to tackling the larger problem of the right wing. A leftoid can be told: donate to this organisation, attend this protest, report this enemy, vote for this candidate, share this campaign, defer to this approved expert. He may do all of this for stupid reasons, but he will still do it. He is socially programmable in a way that benefits his side.

In contrast, the rightoid will find reasons to avoid this rooted in suspicion. Either they will have given up on politics or they will treat any right wing politics presented to them as a likely op or grift. Imagine how much easier the task of the right would be if there were a large portion of progressives who:

• Encouraged their own side to give up on activism and take up farming instead

• Encouraged stochastic violence

• Constantly badjacketed their own leaders

• Accused all fundraising efforts and organisations of being a grift

• Rejected their intellectuals for endlessly talking and not “doing something”

This contrast in attitudes is why you get a map of political attitudes that looks like this:

When this was published, a lot of conservatives were sharing it as a source of pride, but this kind of unity is obviously a huge source of strength for the left.

The conclusions to be drawn from this are quite bleak. Nationalists that want to build a competing political movement not beholden to rightoids will have to do things to attract people who are not natural cranks, but with influencers competing for audiences there is always a strong incentive to play to the larger rightoid demographic.

Without principled thought leaders who can support themselves independently of the crowd, there’s always a strong incentive to go along with these trends. But being a public influencer on the right with any pull is itself something that selects for amoral showman types willing to chase algorithmic trends for money and clout.

There is no easy solution to this. But it is clear that a serious nationalist movement will have to present a really differentiated alternative and build institutions, political organisations and thinkers not entirely dependent on the same social media incentives. We can hope there are enough like-minded people who have quietly watched these trends and come to similar conclusions are waiting for that serious movement to get behind.

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Keith explains the true origins of wokeism, looking at the emergence of "the equality thesis" in the 20th century and its effect on politics. How much are today's social justice movements the outgrowth of the West's Christian inheritance, how much is the fault of "Cultural Marxism," and why do conservative commentators so often misdiagnose the real origins of woke?

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Keith explains the remarkable dominance of left wing politics in Ireland. Contrary to many of the explanations that Ireland's leftism is rooted in "third worldism" or Irish nationalism, the answer lies in Ireland's remarkable elite cohesion and their dominance over public life.

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My latest book ETHNOPOLITICS is now available.

This book brings together 15 of my strongest essays on identity featured across a number of publications, and also includes some published here for the first time.

“Keith Woods is emerging as one of the West’s most original younger thinkers. His essays are astonishingly wide-ranging, sometimes disconcerting, always compelling.”
— Peter Brimelow, Former Editor of VDARE and National Review

“Keith Woods is one of the most accomplished of a rising generation of ethnic nationalists. His new book Ethnopolitics demonstrates its relevance to a wide range of political issues, showing why ethnopolitics is the wave of the future. I highly recommend Ethnopolitics to all my readers.”
— Greg Johnson, Editor/Founder of Counter-Currents

“I’m very glad to see that Keith Woods is now releasing a new collection of many of his meatiest articles from the last couple of years, covering subjects ranging from politics to economics to history to anthropology. I’m sure that readers will find them as interesting and well-researched as I did when I originally read them.”
— Ron Unz, Editor/Founder of The Unz Review

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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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