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This has led to an upswell of organic unrest from people in the North over immigration. There was widespread rioting and clashes with police, mostly in Protestant estates in Belfast, though there were smaller protests reported elsewhere across the province.

Although the attack happened in a Catholic area of Belfast, the victim was saved by a hurl-wielding Irishman named Maitiu, and these riots are being celebrated as an Irish uprising by foreign audiences, they are a largely loyalist affair.

CathalMór:

Although much talk was made of a “uniting of the clans”, there was little if any evidence to suggest that Catholics or nationalists participated in the rioting in any large scale neither did the two communities engage in their usual sectarian clashes. The rioting was exclusively a Protestant, loyalist affair executed with the probable blessing of the main loyalist paramilitaries in the city, the Ulster Defence Association and the Ulster Volunteer Force.

It was the third race riot in as many years in the North, and this particular riot was exactly one year to the day following the beginning of race riots in the town of Ballymena, County Antrim when two Roma teenagers were arrested and initially charged with attempted rape of a young teenage girl. The charges were later dropped but of the substantial Roma population in the town pre-riots, two-thirds fled. Emboldened by that success, loyalist paramilitaries used the opportunity to expel migrants they fear to be potentially troublesome from their strongholds.

What explains the disparity? If you use X you may well encounter a group of Anglo-American influencers who never miss an opportunity to attack the leftist Irish and argue their national struggle is inextricably connected to a path of erasure through open borders.

In reality, opposition to immigration is one of the few issues that straddles old sectarian divides in Northern Ireland — Catholics and Protestants support and oppose immigration in almost equal numbers.

Europa Media has interviewed Irish nationalists on the ground in Belfast in recent days, and they sound nothing like their political leadership on immigration:

What is striking about Belfast was not that loyalists rioted, but that nationalists mostly did not — despite many ordinary Catholics privately sharing the same anxieties about immigration. That asymmetry reveals something important about the post-Good-Friday-Agreement order: loyalism retained a street-level political ecology, while republicanism was successfully absorbed into Sinn Féin’s electoral machine.

Reporting first-hand on the riots, Aris Roussinos described working-class Catholics watching their Protestant neighbours riot “with an anthropological detachment newly devoid of contempt.” While the orange and green may not be joining hands on this issue, this is clearly an issue where Sinn Féin’s leadership is totally at odds with its traditional base. Put simply, loyalists rioted and Irish nationalists didn’t because the latter are neutered by their political leadership.

Put less provocatively, unionist and loyalist working-class communities still possess a semi-autonomous political ecology beneath and around their formal parties. The DUP and UUP — the official parties of the unionist community — may condemn unrest, but they do not fully control the streets. Loyalist areas retain a network of paramilitary influence, community groups and informal authority structures that can mobilise collective action outside the grammar of respectable politics.

“Whatever happened to Sinn Féin?”

Nationalist areas once had something similar. Long before Sinn Féin became a serious electoral force, the republican movement had built a dense parallel society in nationalist areas, with its own networks of informal authority. The difference is that this world was gradually absorbed into Sinn Féin’s peace-process strategy. Whatever one thinks of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, I’ve long considered them among the most formidable politicians Ireland has ever produced. If you understand the history of the island, it’s hard to overstate the political achievement of subordinating Republicanism’s militant, decentralised social movement entirely into a professionalised electoral machine, with only a handful of marginal dissenting groups breaking off in the process.

But there was an obvious cost to the subordination of republican street politics. The same party that was elected as the voice of nationalists in the North after the Good Friday Agreement now mostly constrains the political expression of its traditional base. Local grievance is filtered through the needs of a party that first sought international recognition in the language of liberal human rights universalism, and now seeks power on both sides of the border by courting middle-class progressivism.

Which takes me to a question I’ve probably been asked 100 times by non-Irish people since I became a public figure: “how did Sinn Féin become globalists?”

There are quite a few reasons for this.

The first was the peace process itself. In hindsight, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and other traditional republicans who split from the Adams/McGuinness leadership were vindicated on their main argument: once Sinn Féin entered the electoral process, the process would change Sinn Féin more than Sinn Féin changed the process. Ó Brádaigh had led the traditionalist split in 1986, after Sinn Féin voted to abandon abstentionism toward Leinster House, arguing that participation in constitutional politics would inevitably moderate the movement. They were wrong about the viability of dissident republicanism, but not about the direction Sinn Féin would travel under Adams. The party could not pursue negotiations, office and international legitimacy while preserving the language and posture of revolutionary republicanism.

Sinn Féin’s central problem on turning to politics from the late 1980s onward was not simply how to win votes, but how to bring the representatives of what was considered a terrorist movement into serious peace negotiations and government.

But this leftward shift did not begin with the peace process. It had roots in the political atmosphere out of which the Adams generation emerged. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the language of civil rights was transforming political conflicts across the West, and in Belfast it offered younger republicans a way to present their grievance on the international stage not only as an Irish national question, but as a broader struggle against discrimination, sectarian policing and minority exclusion.

The great irony here is that much of the radicalism that helped transform Irish republicanism came not from the old republican tradition itself, but from a British university in Belfast, where the politics of the global New Left had taken hold among students.

Queen’s University Belfast was the home of People’s Democracy, a small socialist student movement that emerged in the late 1960s. From there it overlapped into republican circles by becoming a major voice for the civil rights struggle and street activism on behalf of Catholics in the North.

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A useful account of this shift appears in Sinn Féin and the Politics of Left Republicanism, a study of how republican politics moved leftward in the decades before and during the peace process. Its author, Eoin Ó Broin, quotes Jim Gibney — a former IRA volunteer and later Sinn Féin figure — describing People’s Democracy as having “dominated the scene politically” in Belfast in the early 1970s. Ó Broin draws out the significance of that admission:

When former IRA volunteer and senior Sinn Féin member Jim Gibney retrospectively described the left-wing political grouping, People’s Democracy, as ‘dominating the scene politically from 1970 to about 1975’ and as ‘the political leadership of what we loosely called the anti-imperialist movement’ in Belfast, he was admitting not the absence of a distinct Sinn Féin message or programme of activity, but rather at best the absence and at worst the irrelevance of that message from the centres of conflict in the North. Gibney’s comments also highlight a political gap, between the 1960s’ generation of Ó Brádaigh, Ó Conaill and MacStiofáin and the younger generation of republicans emerging from within the civil rights movement, of which Gibney was one. Christian socialism, federalism and the building of alternative state institutions had less purchase for those seeking to play an active part in the activity of the IRA, or for those more attuned to the radical political message of People’s Democracy.1

This point is important. Both old supporters and opponents of Sinn Féin have often assumed that its egalitarian language was merely a façade for a harder nationalist agenda.

But for the mostly working-class young men who comprised the Adams generation, civil-rights radicalism had already changed the way the struggle was understood. Republicanism did not cease to be nationalist, but nationalism increasingly passed through the moral vocabulary of the late-1960s left: oppressed minorities against oppressive states, colonised peoples against empire, communities against systems of exclusion. While many volunteers surely understood this as little more than a useful framing to legitimise their armed struggle, over time it became the party’s moral universe.

Secondly, Sinn Féin’s electoral strategy required becoming a governing party both in the North and the South. In the 26 counties, old-style northern republicanism had a hard ceiling. In the 1990s, Sinn Féin was largely despised by “middle Ireland” for its association with sectarianism and violence, especially for IRA actions which killed Irish army members and Gardaí. Its path to growth lay among younger, more radical voters disillusioned with the old centre of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. This mattered because the available opposition vote in the South was generally to the left of the parties in government. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael occupied the broad centre, leaving Sinn Féin to expand among voters who saw the old order as economically conservative, socially stale and morally exhausted.

This pulled Sinn Féin toward the moral vocabulary of the southern progressive class, where housing, welfare, feminism, LGBT politics and anti-racism all formed part of a wider language of liberal respectability. The more successful Sinn Féin became in the South, the more it had to satisfy voters whose instincts were very different from those of its traditional northern base.

This shift also had a class dimension. The more Sinn Féin became a serious electoral party, the more it attracted and promoted the kind of people who could operate in the world of media, NGOs, policy forums and government departments. That did not mean abandoning the old base symbolically; if anything, the memory of working-class republicanism remained central to the party’s moral identity. But the party’s practical incentives increasingly pointed toward a different constituency that was culturally progressive and spoke the language of modern leftism.

As this shift has happened, so has Sinn Féin’s drift into a third-worldist framing of the Irish struggle. Part of this was strategic: once Britain was integrated into NATO and the old European anti-British alignments had disappeared, the IRA increasingly looked to the revolutionary Third World for allies, receiving arms from Libya and cultivating solidarity with movements like the PLO and ETA. But in the modern left-wing imagination, where White guilt is the dominant moral category, this has taken on a new symbolic importance. By recasting Ireland as one oppressed people among many in a global anti-colonial coalition, Irish leftists can celebrate their own rebel tradition while translating it into the fashionable idiom of Palestine, Black civil rights and “decolonisation" in the abstract.

Republicanism and the ethnic question

But the deepest reason for Sinn Féin’s post-Good-Friday-Agreement trajectory is ideological.

Human rights universalism offered Sinn Féin a way to avoid the most difficult question in Irish republicanism: the ethnic basis of the conflict itself. Republicanism under Adams/McGuinness has tried to present the struggle as an anti-colonial and civil rights conflict, denying any framing of the conflict as fundamentally a contest between two historic peoples on the same territory. The problem, in this telling, was not that two distinct peoples were contesting the same country, one descended largely from historical settlers and the other from the native Irish. It was that a minority — “Catholics,” a proxy for the ethnic Irish as distinct from unionists — had been denied equality by a colonial administration imposed from outside. This framing allowed Adams and co. to sidestep the most difficult moral challenge to the republican struggle: that in pursuing Irish unity through force, they were to some degree denying the self-determination demands of the nationally distinct Ulster-Scots population living on the island.

Republicanism as framed by Adams rests on a moral claim that Ireland was one nation artificially partitioned by Britain, and that unionism was ultimately a political distortion sustained by colonial power, a kind of false consciousness certain Irish Protestants have adopted. To recognise unionists as a people in their own right would complicate the republican case. It would mean admitting that Irish unity was not simply the completion of national democracy, but the absorption of one historic community into a state defined by another.

This tension is clear in Gerry Adams’ own writing. In his book Free Ireland, Adams writes that “The Loyalists have a desperate identity crisis. They agonise over whether they are Ulster-Scotch, Picts, English or British.” Elsewhere he claims: “There are no cultural or national links between the Loyalists and the British, no matter how much the Loyalists scream about their ‘British way of life’.”2

These lines are revealing. Adams is not merely attacking unionist politics. He is denying them the status of a coherent people. He says there are no evident national links to Britain, but of course there is in one very important sense — their heritage. This means that Adams was not denying unionist identity specifically so much as he was effectively denying the political relevance of ethnic and ancestral categories altogether.

It does not take a great imagination to see how this framing of the conflict would superimpose on the politics of immigration and national identity elsewhere. If Irishness is open, plural, anti-essentialist and detached from ancestry, then immigration becomes difficult to oppose in nationalist terms. If the conflict in the North was never really about competing peoples, but only about rights and equality, then the party’s natural destination is a politics in which all group particularity is dissolved into liberal inclusion.

Coming back to the present day, though the sentiment is there, the prospects for a new Irish nationalist movement in the North organising outside Sinn Féin are extremely bleak. The old republican ecosystem has been so successfully monopolised by the party that any attempt to organise independently would be treated as a threat to the movement’s internal sovereignty. It would not just face the usual denunciations as “far-right” that nationalists meet in the South, but would be branded anti-republican, sectarian, loyalist-adjacent or useful to the British state before it ever had the chance to build roots. It would also come up against older networks of control and intimidation that are largely invisible to outsiders precisely because Sinn Féin’s dominance extends far beyond ordinary electoral politics.

The events of the past week in Belfast show the consequences of that asymmetry. Immigration may now be one of the few issues on which ordinary Protestants and Catholics sound more alike than their political leaders, but sentiment alone does not create politics. Recent events demonstrate that loyalism still retains the networks and muscle memory of collective action. Irish republicanism has had them too. But those capacities continue to atrophy amid Sinn Féin’s long march into liberal respectability and governance.

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If you’d like to have your question answered in the next installment, leave a comment below.

What is to be done is we are to continue to make metapolitical and cultural change, shift the bounds of acceptable discourse, build our own institutions and parties, and acquire as much power as possible.

I see posts like these all the time, and they feel a lot like grandstanding and self-pity. Yes, our political enemies have many institutions and great power. Yes, it will be very difficult to unseat them from power. But repeatedly emphasising how lopsided the power dynamics are, as if that suggests the only answer is violence, is dishonest. If anything, people engaging in violence when institutional power is so monopolised by their political enemies only makes it more futile and counter-productive, since the existing power-brokers can respond and manage in a way that strengthens their grip on power.

But we should not mistake institutional size for health. The present order looks powerful because it occupies every commanding height of society. But ideologically, it is exhausted. Liberalism no longer offers a believable account of the common good, national loyalty, or even basic public order. It survives increasingly through overt censorship, managerial inertia, and the fear people have of saying obvious things aloud. This means that, for all the powerful institutions you listed, their greatest weakness is still in the realm of ideas — their increasing inability to manufacture consensus.

It is a silly false dichotomy then, to say things like “Another post on X? another Substack? Another podcast?” Yes, actually. Politics is shaped by people, and those people’s ideas are shaped by media. Almost all of the nationalist right’s gains in recent years have come by changing people’s minds through digital media.

At every point in the last ten years, I’ve seen the same people say we have reached our limit online and now is the time to DO SOMETHING. They said it after the censorship of 2017, when the black pillers wanted us to accept defeat over the online space, let our enemies control discourse, and switch to marching around in costumes. They said it during COVID, even though the years after saw a huge growth in nationalist ideas. When I told people to take advantage of the freer environment brought about by Elon Musk’s acquisition of X, I was attacked by the same people for taking people away from DOING SOMETHING. But shortly after my return to the platform, the attention a post of mine received made Irish hate speech laws a topic of debate in this country, and a campaign mostly coordinated online made the laws so unpopular that the government quietly dropped them. Then, I was told that we would be allowed some controlled pushback on the excesses of the left, but we were playing into the enemy’s hands, who would ensure discussion of the bigger issues of Jewish and Zionist influence could never be normalised. Then our #BanTheADL campaign became the top trend on Twitter, and the aftermath of October 7 red pilled millions of people on these topics. Meanwhile, there has been a normalisation of ideas like “remigration” to the point that official U.S. government accounts regularly promote the idea. More recently, the murder of Henry Nowak only became a national scandal in Britain because of the online backlash.

None of this is a substitute for organising, and everyone acknowledges that these kinds of changes will mean nothing if they do not have a lasting impact on the world outside the internet. But that is where people’s minds are shaped, and the biggest part of our task is undoing decades of leftist brainwashing against our ideas. Posting is not a substitute for organising, but the way to convince people of that isn’t to tell them that it’s a hindrance, either. The normies you want to reach are online. The capable people you want to organise with are online.

We do need organisation, but we need to be very clear about what organisation means. It does not mean a handful of alienated young men convincing themselves that politics is only real when it involves danger or theatrical confrontation. Serious organisation means building durable structures that survive censorship, personality drama and the normal exhaustion that comes with political life.

It means local groups. Reading circles, activist networks, social clubs, churches, schools, media outlets, legal funds, donor networks, professional associations. It also means networking professionals and people with skills, as well as finding people willing to do unglamorous work consistently.

It will also necessarily mean some level of entryism in existing institutions. Some people should build explicitly nationalist organisations, but others can have greater influence joining existing institutions and shifting their culture from within. Politics is not confined to elections or parties. It is shaped by the people who sit on committees, manage budgets, train younger members, hire staff, and set the informal moral atmosphere of an institution. The left understood this very well. It did not merely win public arguments; it embedded itself in the machinery of social life.

What will not help is encouraging potentially influential young men to throw their lives away in some fatalistic act of rage, or politically neutralising people by telling them “there is no political solution.” This rhetoric usually comes from people who are so black pilled that they contribute nothing to nationalist movements, and are convinced only some spontaneous deluge of violence, carried out by someone other than themselves, will remedy things. I believe this is immoral, but I also believe it’s wholly counter-productive to what the people promoting it want.

I have written before about why this fantasy of a right-wing revolt is so divorced from reality:

My basic argument is that we know a lot about how revolutions and civil war happen, and they require elite defection, state weakness, mass immiseration, organisation, and favourable geopolitical conditions, none of which exist for the nationalist right in the West. One thing our regimes are very good at is crushing armed movements, and the whole machinery of Western surveillance states has been directed towards managing the massively exaggerated threat of far-right violence now for decades. Violence would not only fail; it would give the regime exactly the pretext it wants for repression, censorship, financial deplatforming, surveillance expansion, and the destruction of any serious nationalist infrastructure.

Of course, the questioner says “how could we expect nothing less, imprisonment and death are the price for the continuation of our people,” but were he serious, he wouldn’t be posting such sentiments online where the security services could easily monitor him. The people who post these sentiments are almost never serious. They have an online profile telling other people online that their being online is a waste of time and they should DO SOMETHING, while they themselves wait for others to DO SOMETHING for them.

So yes, another post. Another podcast. Another article. Another campaign. Another local meeting. Another institution. Another candidate. Another business. Another school. Another family. Another donor. Another organiser. Another person persuaded who yesterday thought our ideas were unthinkable. That is how power is built. We need to gather more people who are serious about the business of building power and stop taking seriously people who demoralise in order to promote their own unrealistic solutions.

In the rest of this week’s mailbag: is ethnopluralism the way forward for Europe? Should Russia be part of a united Europe? How do we deal with fake populists? What’s the proper amount of immigration and is “integration” actually possible?

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I’m starting a reader mailbag, where I’ll take questions from subscribers and answer them in a longer post.

Politics, history, books, writing, current events, any of our recent shows, or anything you’d like me to expand on.

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If you’d prefer to ask something privately or anonymously, you can send it by email/DM and mark it anonymous.

The first mailbag will go out later this week.

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Why does the modern West treat minority rights as more sacred than the collective interest of its own people? Keith and Ryan discuss Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies, written in the mid-twentieth century in response to the totalitarianism of its age, and ask how Popper’s vision became the ruling ideal of the postwar West.

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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

Purchase Ethnopolitics in your preferred format and region on Amazon:

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

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“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.”
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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

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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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