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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So the situation on the Strait currently is:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The role of the Church

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

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

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

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

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

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

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All My Links

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

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

Europe: A People

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The European Cultural Academy

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

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

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

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

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The Great Repeal

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freeing Europe’s Economy

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

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

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

Sovereignty and Subsidiarity

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

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

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

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

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Fortress Europe

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

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

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

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

Remigration

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

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

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

• Denaturalising and deporting foreigners with criminal convictions

• Denaturalising and deporting foreigners on welfare

• Deporting migrants residing on fraudulent or expiring statuses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A competing vision

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The authors conclude with the prediction that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Neoliberalism brought greater economic stability.

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

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

Neoliberal Asset Bubbles and Financial Crises

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

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

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

(4) Dot-Com Bubble (1999–2000)

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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7 months ago · 46 likes · 12 comments

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Seeing this mini-revival of the English flag, I was reminded of an old essay from the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton: England: an identity in question. Though it was years since I first read it, it always stuck in my mind because Scruton surprised me with his advocacy of English nationalism against the more civic, British identity.

Scruton explained how he too had noticed an English identity beginning to resurface beneath the British one among the majority population of the Union:

The desire for an English, as opposed to a British, identity is growing rapidly. When I was a teenager, crowds who supported England in football or cricket matches waved the Union Jack; now they wave the flag of St George. This flag is beginning to appear on suburban lawns and in rural farmyards, and the word "England" is increasingly heard in contexts where until a few years ago "Britain" would have been the norm.

In the essay, Scruton wrote sympathetically of pleas for Scottish independence, noting that the British government made a great mistake in resisting Irish demands for national independence in a way that led to unnecessary conflict and long-term enmity between the nations.

But it was what an island of independent nations could mean for his England that was his focus. Writing this in 2007, Britain’s 2005 General Election was still fresh in Scruton’s memory.

That election returned Tony Blair’s Labour to power in Britain, yet Scruton notes that the Conservative Party actually received more votes than Labour in England. However, Labour still secured a massive majority in parliament, largely due to the voting power of the Scottish and Welsh. This reflected a long-standing dynamic in British politics that continues to this day:

The Labour Party has always relied on those votes in order to secure its periods of office, knowing that the separatist feelings of the Celts readily lend themselves to the fight against the somewhat mythical, but still resonant, threat of the English Tory establishment. However, the strategy of using the Celtic vote to govern the English has depended upon keeping the Celts within the kingdom, which is why the Labour Party granted them some measure of independence, lest their grievances cause them to break entirely away.

If there was a political division between the English nation and its Celtic neighbours in 2005, that division is far more stark now with the rise of Reform and the Scottish National Party. Just look at the seat projection for the British parliament if an election were to be held in 2025:

What jumps off the map is the extreme ethnic fragmentation. Putting aside how much Labour support relies on the large, multiracial metropolitan areas, it is clear that an England shorn of its union with Scotland and Wales would deliver an overwhelming majority to Reform. This will be the likely outcome of the next election anyway, but the fragmentation Scruton wrote about in 2007 is even stronger now.

So what are we to make of this mini-resurgence in English identification? Firstly, I believe the breakup of the United Kingdom in our lifetime is inevitable: a shared British identity is waning, the individual nations of the Union are more politically divided than ever, and voting trends point to a second Scottish independence referendum likely to succeed — after which Welsh demands for independence will reach a fever pitch.

This political fragmentation coincides with the decline of any meaningful shared British identity. As Britain has grown more multicultural and universal in its self-definition, “Britishness” has shifted from a rooted national loyalty to a vague civic label.

Scruton aniticipated this shift. In his book “England And The Need For Nations”, he reflects on the trajectory of British identity. Drawing on a popular historian who described it as a politically constructed, imperial project, Scruton observed that:

The idea of a British national identity makes sense only because of the other and more deeply rooted identities that it subsumes. The Scots continue to describe themselves as Scots; the Irish as Irish—or, if they reject the Republic, as ‘Unionists’, meaning adherents to the strange legal entity described in their passports. The Welsh, who provided us with our most determinedly English kings, the Tudors, are still, in their own eyes, Welsh. The English remain English, and in their hearts it is England that secures their loyalty; not Scotland, Ireland or Wales. Only one group of Her Majesty’s subjects sees itself as British, but not English, Scottish, Irish or Welsh—namely, those immigrants from the former Empire who have adopted British nationality while retaining ethnic and religious loyalties forged far away and years before. Many of our fellow citizens are ‘British Pakistanis’, while ‘English Pakistani’ suggests someone of English descent resident in Pakistan, rather than a Pakistani immigrant to England.

…

The British experience therefore illustrates the way in which a composite national identity can be forged into a single jurisdiction, while also providing shelter to minorities who may as yet have no national loyalty at all but whose children, it is hoped, will be brought up to acquire one.1

And the latter point, I think, explains the recent revival in English symbolism. Although “Britishness” isn’t definitionally a civic, open identity, it increasingly became one in the 20th Century — even before the end of Empire and recent waves of mass-immigration — in a way an ethnic identity like Englishness never could. A Google Ngram investigation tells an interesting story about the historical uses of “England”, "Britain”, and “UK” — firstly, that there was a shift toward British identification and away from English at the outbreak of World War 1, as the Union called on all its constituents to provide bodies for the war effort.

There is another, more dramatic shift in the post-War period. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, use of the term “UK” appears. This sharp rise in the 1970s coincides with the beginning of The Troubles, when the political legitimacy of the union of Britain and Northern Ireland came into focus, and declined again after the Good Friday Agreement of 1997 put a bookmark in that question in most Briton’s minds. Yet now, the “Yookay” is seemingly undergoing a resurgence in post-Boriswave Britain, the catch-all civic identifier for anyone living in the Union.

Though historically understood as an extension of English identity, Britishness was primarily expressed as a loyalty to institutions and political arrangements rather than to a people. This made it fragile as a source of loyalty and left it vulnerable to denationalisation, allowing it to be reframed in the late twentieth century as a multiracial, elective identity. Britishness has always functioned less as a nation than as a civic umbrella. Its symbols and oaths point to a sovereign rather than a nation. Rule Britannia exalts empire and liberty, and the national anthem pledges loyalty not to a people or culture but to the monarch who presides over the Union. Britain’s monarchy has implicitly welcomed every step of the country’s multiracial transformation. It now exists only as a relic of tradition, which conservatives feel obligated to rally around even as the royal family shows time and again to be decidedly on the side of anti-national forces.

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In this context, Scruton’s observations take on renewed urgency. England, he argued, needs a political recognition of its own identity, not just as part of a wider Union but as a distinct nation with historical, cultural, and political coherence. Even if not articulated, many nationalists in England are returning to their national flag away from an increasingly abstract Britishness. A former advisor to Tony Blair complained on BBC Newsnight that the emergence of the St. George’s flag is “being used to racialise political discourse.”

Though not every member of the establishment will be that explicit about it, It is evident that the establishment is on shakier ground deconstructing the ethnic basis for Englishness than it is in redefining the UK. A perfect illustration of this dynamic was the now-famous clash between Thomas Skinner, happily waving a St. George’s Flag, and a seething, frothing-at-the-mouth skintellectual Narinder Kaur, who inisted men like Skinner drop their national identification for her civic conception of Britishness. The exchange captured the fault line Scruton foresaw two decades ago, now crystallised: between a rooted national identity and a hollow civic label.

A final reason to favour the end of the Union would be what it could mean for nationalism in each newly independent country. It is a constant source of frustration to nationalists to see that popular national independence movements like that of the Catalans tends to be so left-wing, and even supportive of multiracialism in a way that is clearly opposed to nationalism. The same phenomenon can be observed with the dominant independence movements of Scotland and Wales, which has also pushed British politics leftward.

But a breakup of the Union could seriously undermine this phenomenon of left-wing nationalism. The leftward character of Scottish and Welsh nationalism has chiefly arisen from their status as peripheral nations, framing themselves as smaller, historically marginalised peoples resisting domination by the English-dominated centre. Once Scotland or Wales achieves full independence, that foundational narrative disappears. No longer defined by subordination to a wealthier centre, these nations would be forced to define their national identity on new terms, and the ideological coherence of their left-wing nationalism could be weakened. As their ruling parties continue to champion multiracialism and align with globalist governance structures, they could face a challenge from a newly empowered national-populist right, currently constrained by the electoral system and the binary choice between independence movements and Unionist British parties.

In conclusion, the breakup of the Union could redefine nationalism across the former Union’s nations, allowing the emergence of a more confident English ethnic nationalism and potentially dismantling left-wing dominance on the Union’s Celtic fringe, fostering a new era of authentic national expression. In this light, the establishment's discomfort with the St. George's Cross reveals their intuitive understanding that what they are witnessing is not just a passing social media fad, but the first signs of their own obsolescence.

All My Links

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Ironically, many of Schmitt’s contemporary rightist fans have an understanding of his philosophy that aligns with Marxist theorist Franze Neumann's early portrayal of him as an advocate for "brute force" against the principles of democracy and the rule of law. Neumann’s Schmitt was an illogical thinker, much like Georges Sorel, whose political philosophy was a justification for the exercise of raw power over political adversaries to the point that "every opponent can become a foe subject to physical extermination.”1

Schmitt's political theory begins with a deceptively simple premise: politics possesses its own autonomous logic that cannot be reduced to morality, aesthetics, or economics. While each of these domains operates according to its own criteria, the political is to be defined by a criterion of intensity: the division of human beings into friends and enemies.

This makes politics a meta-category that parasitically draws energy from other domains of human experience. Religious, national, economic, or moral differences all become politicised when antagonism reaches a decisive intensity. The political possesses no essence of its own — its truth emerges only in the decisive moment when conflict becomes existential. As Schmitt writes:

The political can derive its energy from the most varied human endeavors, from the religious, economic, moral and other antitheses. It does not describe its own substance, but only the intensity of association or dissociation of human beings whose motives can be religious, national (in the ethnic or cultural sense), economic, or of another kind and can effect at different times different coalitions and separations.2

The stark clarity of Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction attracts both casual readers and critics who condemn it as nihilistic. By defining politics through conflict's intensity rather than moral or economic criteria, Schmitt appears to divorce politics from questions of good, justice, or truth, seemingly elevating enmity and decision as ends in themselves. Critics from the liberal left and traditional right have been able to seize on this apparent groundlessness of Schmitt’s theory. The most powerful expression of this critique came from Karl Löwith, an influential philosopher of history, who argued that Schmitt had created a "nihilistic vision" where politics would be reduced to mere struggle, devoid of teleological purpose.

Löwith’s Critique

Karl Löwith accuses Schmitt of being an “occasionalist.” Schmitt himself criticised 19th-century liberal “occasional romanticism,” where the individual replaced God as the ultimate authority, treating every passing event as a potential source of meaning without any fixed centre. Löwith argues that Schmitt merely reproduced this structure: instead of the isolated individual, he elevated the state (or sovereign decision-maker) to divine status as final authority, committing the same error in different form.

Because Schmitt’s decisionism has no substantive grounding in a teleological philosophy, it becomes entirely determined by immediate historical circumstances. This theological emptiness has profound implications for Schmitt's thought. While thinkers like Kierkegaard and Marx confronted chaos with decisions anchored in something substantial — God for Kierkegaard, humanity for Marx — Schmitt's sovereign stands on nothing but the contingency of the moment. There is no "highest court of appeal" beyond present circumstances; no moral or spiritual measure to guide decisions. The sovereign decides simply because the situation demands decision, not because any pre-existing law, principle, or truth commands obedience. As Löwith put it:

Hence it will remain to be asked: by faith in what is Schmitt's ‘demanding moral decision’ sustained, if he clearly has faith in neither the theology of the sixteenth century nor the metaphysics of the seventeenth century and least of all in the humanitarian morality of the eighteenth century, but instead has faith only in the power of decision?3

Schmitt draws on historical examples of religiously informed sovereigns, like Cromwell's puritanical absolutism, but these interest Schmitt only insofar as they are good demonstrations of the pure exercise of power. Their substantive ethical or theological commitments are irrelevant to his analysis.

This analysis reveals how fundamentally Schmitt's thought diverges from its apparent Christian or conservative affiliations. His theological references serve purely instrumental purposes, legitimizing authority in formal terms while imposing no substantive constraints. Schmitt's decisionism constitutes what Löwith calls "active nihilism": rather than merely lamenting the absence of moral and spiritual anchors, it actively thrives in the void their removal creates.

Theology Without Transcendence

Viewed through Löwith's lens, the theological elements in Schmitt's work become clearer. His sovereignty resembles nominalist theology's divine omnipotence: law and order emerge not through reason or natural discovery but through pure acts of will creating from nothing. Authority achieves legitimacy not by corresponding to higher norms but through sheer deciding power. What masquerades as "political theology" reveals itself as theology of power emptied of transcendence. For Schmitt, politics is not where ethical or spiritual values find application but where they face suspension, replaced by decision's and enmity's raw intensity.

Schmitt's nihilism is not simply an empty void. It is an active force that elevates decision and enmity into the highest political realities. Politics, for Schmitt, cannot be reduced to administration, law, or moral striving. It is an arena where the fundamental antagonisms of human existence are confronted without mediation. The sovereign does not restore order to chaos by appealing to truth or justice. The sovereign actually reveals that no such anchor exists, and in its absence, decision itself becomes the only measure.

This places Schmitt in a curious proximity to Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes too rejected transcendent or natural sources of political normativity and sought instead to ground order in a self-sustaining mechanism: the fear of death and the rational laws of preservation that flowed from it. For Hobbes, sovereignty emerges not from divine command but from life-preservation necessities under conditions of perpetual conflict.

Schmitt’s work could be seen as a similar attempt at a mechanistic substitution for a teleologically grounded political philosophy, though his is arguably much more radical. Hobbes still sought some minimal universality — the universal fear of violent death, which could serve as the foundation of a stable order. Schmitt refuses even this. For him, there is no shared human passion or universal drive toward peace that could underwrite political authority. There is only the intractable division between friend and enemy, which no mechanism of preservation can ultimately overcome. So while both thinkers replace transcendence with an immanent “law of motion,” in Schmitt’s worldview the rational pursuit of peace takes a backseat to the reality of the permanent possibility of conflict.

Napoleon's Final Reflections

Carl Schmitt, Democrat

Löwith’s critique of Schmitt's decisionism as a justification for the amoral exercise of power or rootless "occasionalism" was popular among liberal critics of Schmitt post-War, especially after his support for Germany’s National Socialist regime seemed to confirm his thought ended in support for the worst excesses of tyranny. Richard Wolin articulates what became a standard critique of Schmitt when he writes:

The emphasis on the exception to the exclusion of all normativism, proceduralism, and institutional checks allows him to degenerate into an advocate of charismatic despotism.4

But there is an important point many of these criticisms of Schmitt miss, which is that his theory of the political is always anchored in a society's collective values, what he terms the "people's sense of right." Sovereign decisions prove effective only by crystallising a community's pre-political orientations into political form, enforcing boundaries of collective identity that already possess moral and spiritual coherence:

If order in the modern world, for Schmitt, is based on the continuing existence of a state, this is not so much because the state embodies power rather than truth, but because the state establishes a specific perspective on morality and metaphysics, which is then formalized and institutionalized in a set of norms once the sovereign has made the decision for a particular understanding of order.5

This insight transforms our understanding of the state of exception. When sovereigns suspend law, they act not from self-interest or mere power politics but to preserve the specific values and moral ideals their state embodies. This symbolic dimension proves crucial for understanding why simplistic right-wing appropriations of Schmitt fail: without it, conflicts never transcend biological survival to become genuinely political oppositions. Ideological and ethical distinctions serve as preconditions for political conflict's emergence.

Schmitt insists that politics cannot be reduced to morality or economics, yet he equally denies that politics can be wholly detached from them. The friend-enemy distinction does not arise in a vacuum but emerges from concrete collective differences, typically differences in national character, that have already been experienced as meaningful divisions by a people. The state of exception thus becomes a space where rival visions of the good clash, each seeking to define public order. Sovereign decision resolves this competition by determining which conception prevails, creating a "point of ascription" from which all subsequent norms flow.

Schmitt’s sovereignty emerges from conflicts over competing visions of the public good, which he sees as the root of political antagonism. In Political Theology, he writes:

Whenever antagonisms appear within a state, every party wants the general good—therein resides after all the bellum omnium contra omnes.6

The sovereign’s decision in a state of exception is not a grab for personal rule or a vendetta against enemies but a resolution crystallising one vision as the community's identity. Far from advocating tyranny, Schmitt is a profoundly democratic thinker, defining democracy as the “identity of ruler and ruled” — a definition he adapted from Rousseau. In The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, he critiques liberalism’s vulnerability to minority capture, arguing that authentic democracy requires a sovereign aligned with the people's unified will, capable of transcending positive law to ensure collective self-determination. Such decisions, effective only with popular support, embody popular sovereignty as communal self-government's ultimate expression.

While the sovereign’s decision in the state of exception is decisive, there must be a certain minimum of popular support for the sovereign’s decision, and there must be an identity between his people along the identity expressed in the friend-enemy distinction set by him. Schmitt seems to suggest that a successful sovereign decision on the exception would be the ultimate case of collective self-government.

The sovereign decision…is the only form in which popular sovereignty can be actualized, and popular sovereignty, Schmitt argues, is the only modern basis for the legitimacy of law.7

This defence of genuine popular sovereignty overriding the proceduralism of liberal order and its negotiated pluralism, makes Schmitt’s theory a defence of homogeneity as a prerequisite to genuine democracy. He emphasises shared identity as essential for legal determinacy and non-arbitrary governance. In homogeneous societies, laws remain uncontroversial because the general will appears obvious. Exceptional decisions ensure this system's smooth operation by excluding minoritarian dissenters.

This for Schmitt is true democracy: for a people to maintain self-determination, they need the power to continually expunge corrupted law designed to undermine unity of will. Liberal pluralism, which today identifies itself with “the rule of law” and “democratic values”, is fundamentally anti-democratic because it is designed to perpetually thwart the majority will. Legal safeguards, minority lobbying, parliamentary coalitions, and universal human rights — the entire liberal pluralist apparatus — systematically frustrates the free exercise of the general will to protect minority interests. Far from coming up with post-hoc justifications for tyranny, Schmitt takes himself to be defending democracy by highlighting conditions for a political community's preservation.

Schmitt’s reliance on a people’s “sense of right” shifts legitimacy from universal principles to historically contingent collective identities, yet this does not fully escape the charge of nihilism brought against him by critics. Without natural law or moral universals to adjudicate competing values, each community’s horizon remains irreducibly particular, making inter-communal conflict the politicals defining essence. Though Schmitt was a Catholic, his thought is “realist” in that it pursues an autonomous interpretative framework that eschews transcendence in favour of the autonomy of the political. Löwith was fundamentally correct that this move is a radical departure from the tradition of Christian political thought, which always sought to subordinate earthly authority to divine command and universal moral law.

Yet Schmitt’s thought cannot escape the reality that politics feeds on deep-seated commitments. His theory thus hovers in an unstable space: insisting on the radical autonomy of the political while tacitly acknowledging its dependence on pre-political values that make the friend-enemy distinction intelligible. This fundamental tension explains both Schmitt's enduring intellectual appeal and the ease with which ideologues misappropriate his work for their own purposes.

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Throughout World War 1, Germany wanted peace and had nothing to gain from the conflict (1:15:55)

Although assigning blame to any individual countries for the outbreak of WW1 is very difficult, there is no doubt Germany deserves a good portion of blame for its decision to give Austria-Hungary a “blank cheque” to respond to Serbia in July 1914. A big part of this calculation was the belief among German leadership that there was a closing window where it could challenge the French-Russian alliance before Russia’s industrialisation made them unchallengeable.

General Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of the German General Staff from 1906 to 1914, was convinced from well before the war that only a defeat of Russia could secure Germany’s future.1 This was a fear that was exacerbated by Russia launching a big program of rearmament after the disastrous Russo-Japanese War in 1913, that was due for completion in 1916-17.2

One of Germany’s generals in the war, Friedrich von Bernhardi, wrote a bestselling book titled Deutschland und der Nächste Krieg (Germany and the Next War) in 1912. Although von Bernardi was fairly distant from German high command, his arguments about Germany’s inevitable choice between ‘World Power or Decline’, “epitomised the intentions of officials in Germany’s military leadership with great precision.”3

Bernardi’s argument was that Germany could only compete as a world power if it eliminated France as a threat, acquired new colonies, and took leadership over other Central European countries into a federation — 'Mitteleuropa'. Only this would allow Germany to compete with both Russia and the established world powers of the United States and the British Empire, who held far greater territory than Germany which had been late to colonialism.

In line with this thinking, during the war many in German leadership favoured policies of annexation and colonisation of the east. In 1914, the Chancellor of Germany tasked Friedrich von Schwerin with working out a plan for governing Germany’s captured territory in the East. His chief proposals were:

The annexation of the Polish 'Frontier Strip' and of the provinces of Lithuania and Courland, in which he proposed to carry through an extensive settlement scheme with colonists from the interior of Germany and from Russia.4

In March 1915, von Schwerin issued a 30 page memoranda to the government advising on occupied North-Eastern territories, wrote that:

The German people, the greatest colonising people of the world, must be mobilised again for a great operation of colonisation, it must be given wider frontiers within which it can live a full life. The overseas territories suitable for colonisation by Germans have already been distributed, and cannot be acquired as prizes of victory in this war, so that an attempt must be made to acquire new land for settlement contiguous with the present Germany.5

A further report on the occupied territories submitted to the government by Geheimrat Sering after the foreign ministry sent him to modern day Lithuania and Latvia with the task of writing a detailed report on how to settle Germans in the Baltic region. Sering argued that the great world powers — the British Empire, the United States, Russia — attained their power because of their great expanse of living space for their core population (with Britain’s smaller size overcome by its White colonies). Sering informed the government that Germany was destined to be confined to a secondary status on the world stage if it did not expand its heartland, and this could only be done by annexing land to its East.

Sering thus proclaimed it the ‘holy duty’ of the Fatherland to settle this new ‘Ostland’ in the Baltic region with two million ethnic Germans uprooted by the war.6 In Sering’s words:

The present war, unleashed by the Europe-based giant empires against the Central Powers, will decide whether the latter, and the countries of Central Europe as a whole, can continue to exist at the side of the giants as their equals, or not. They can do so only if the map is altered very radically in their favour.7

Both of these reports and their recommendations were very influential on German policy, and the views of their authors reflected the consensus of Germany’s military leadership.

Without even getting into the debate of where blame lies for the First World War, there is no doubt that once it exploded, German military leadership sought to make the best of it, decapitate its main continental rivals, expand German borders, and finally establish Germany as a world power.

Even though Germany was winning in December 1916, Kaiser Wilhelm made a generous peace offer anyway (1:16:01)

Europa says that “Kaiser Wilhelm was willing to just call off the war and return to how things were before”. Not so. The peace proposal approached the Entente powers from the position of assumed victor. At the time, Germany occupied Belgium, Poland and areas of France, with no mention in their proposal of leaving these countries to “return to how things were before”.

In fact, the Central Powers never expected the peace offer to be accepted. Instead, it was a propaganda tool and a means of quelling anti-war sentiment in Germany. The German chancellor at the time, Bethmann Hollweg, admitted in a letter that the intention was for the Entente to reject the proposal, thus shifting blame to them for the hardships caused by the war:

Should our enemies refuse to enter peace negotiations – and we have to assume that this will be the case – the odium of continuing the war will fall on them. War-weariness … will then grow and generate new support for the elements that are pushing for peace. In Germany and among its Allies, too, the desire for peace has become keen. The rejection of our peace offer, the knowledge that the continuation of the struggle is inevitable thanks alone to our enemies, would be an effective means of spurring our people to utmost exertion and sacrifice for a victorious end to the war.8

Hollweg had also written to Hindenburg before the proposal, accepting Hindenburg’s demands that any German terms for peace include the right to militarily occupy Belgium, the annexation of the Briey-Longwy region and other areas of France, an indemnity paid to Germany in exchange for evacuating France, the annexation of Luxemburg and the acquisition of the Congo.9 In the final proposal:

The two most outstanding characteristics of the note are its vagueness and its defiant tone. Such overbearing language did anything but convey a willingness to make concessions in return for an early peace.10

As well as simply hoping for positive psychological effects among the German public:

The hope of achieving a separate peace with one partner or another was the real motive behind the whole move, for hardly anyone seriously expected the peace offer to be accepted.11

So Germany’s peace proposal wasn’t really aimed at peace, and still expected any party to it to accept large territorial gains and monetary compensation to Germany as a prerequisite to entering discussions.

The other part of Europa’s narrative here is that by December 1916 Germany was clearly winning the war. It mentions Britain suffering from the U-Boat campaign, France suffering heavy losses, Russia’s internal strife, and the fact that none of Germany had been militarily occupied. Thus, we are set up to believe that only the Balfour Declaration and subsequent US entry into the war staved off inevitable German victory.

By this point in the war, the Royal Navy had control of the North Seas and was blockading Germany, causing bad food shortages — the “turnip winter” of 1916-1917 was actually the low point in German food supply during the war.12 The Entente’s naval blockade of Germany was far more crushing than Germany’s U-Boat blockade, and low morale in Germany and growing calls for peace led to efforts like the peace note. At this point in the war, after the Somme and Verdun offensives, the war was at a stalemate. Europa mentions the heavy losses France had suffered, but there were more dead German soldiers than French at this point in the war, and the Allies retained greater manpower than the Central Powers.

The Allies were also outproducing the Central Powers militarily and economically, and growing their advantage. This was a trend that continued throughout the war.13 Already by the start of the war, the Triple Entente accounted for 28 per cent of the world’s manufacturing output compared to the Central Powers 19. The Allies also had a 4.5:1 population advantage which translated to a military manpower advantage. Even Germany’s knocking Russia out of the war was more than compensated by the combined growth of the Allies’ output and decline of the Central Powers during the interim period.14 Given these disadvantages, few historians now believe Germany ever had a realistic chance of winning World War 1.15

Jews offered to secure US entry into WW1 in exchange for a Zionist state (1:16:38)

Securing Jewish Zionist influence on the side of the Allied Powers was undoubtedly a calculation for the British in making the Balfour Declaration. Lloyd George told his cabinet that:

The Zionist leaders gave us a definite promise that, if the Allies committed themselves to giving facilities for the establishment of a National Home for the Jews in Palestine, they would do their best to rally to the Allied cause.16

However, the dates here are important. Europa suggests that after the Balfour Declaration Jews went about planning to get the United States to enter the war, but the Balfour Declaration was made on November 2, 1917, seven months after the US had entered the war on the side of the Allies.

Even if we extend this back to when negotiations for the declaration began with the first meetings between Zionist and British officials, this was February 1917. By this point, America’s entry into WW1 was seen as a virtual inevitability, not least by the Germans, who switched to unrestricted submarine warfare on February 1st — just a couple of weeks after sending the Zimmermann telegram promising Mexico support if it invaded the US. Of course, Europa does not mention this telegram, the submarine warfare on American ships, or events like the sinking of the Lusitania in turning American public opinion. By the time the discussions that would lead to the Balfour Declaration were beginning, American public and elite opinion was already resigned to war. In “The Path To War”, the historian Michael Neiberg summarised this national mood:

By March 1917 they had reached a remarkable degree of consensus on a few fundamental points. First, they recognized that although the war in Europe was horrific, they felt that they had no choice but to enter it to secure Europe’s future, and their own as well. Europe may have been over there, but it was also close to home. During the course of three years, the two had become more connected as the safety once provided by the Atlantic Ocean vanished. Second, they collectively believed that they themselves had had little role in starting the war, hence they were acting in self-defense and in the wider interests of mankind against a German imperial government that had, in Wilson’s words, gone “mad dog.” Third, they agreed that their disparate ethnic identities meant less than their common identity as Americans. The war galvanized assimilation as nothing had done before.17

Even setting aside the awkwardness of making these dates work, there just isn’t evidence to show that Zionist lobbying played much of a role in US decision making at this time. While it’s true Zionist Jews supported American entry on the side of the Allied powers, Zionist power in America was not what it is today, and Jews in America were actually more divided on this than elite WASPs.

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Internationalist Jews, many of whom were descendants of exiles from Russia, held such great enmity to the Russian Empire that they mostly opposed the US joining their side. And in the early 20th Century, it was these internationalist Jews who had disproportionate power in the United States. Ron Unz has a detailed breakdown of claims about the Balfour Declaration dragging the United States into the war which I recommend. He concludes that:

American Jews were overwhelmingly opposed to such military involvement and only a small fraction of them supported Zionism, being far outnumbered by anti-Zionist Jews, an imbalance that was especially pronounced among the wealthier, more influential Jews who played an important role in politics.18

It makes intuitive sense that the Balfour Declaration might have led to Zionist lobbying within the US to drag America into the war, but the evidence is just too thin to support such a conclusion. The majority WASP elite was very sympathetic to the Allied Powers from the beginning of the war and this was expressed in media and the behaviour of American financial institutions. Wall Street firms loaned huge sums of money to the Allies. This was dominated by WASP-led firms, and none lent more than J. P. Morgan.

In fact, Jacob Schiff’s Kuhn, Loeb & Company stood out among Wall Street firms for its commitment to neutrality and refusal to lend to the Allies. This was due to Schiff’s characteristically Jewish hatred of Tsarist Russia. Schiff argued that:

Though deplorable, German atrocities in Belgium, which attracted so much condemnation in Western Europe and the United States, were far less appalling than the brutal Russian persecution of the Jewish population of western Russia and Poland.19

Adam Tooze, in his monumental book on WW1 Deluge, describes how the Allies had become so indebted to American financial institutions that an Allied defeat and default would have meant economic devastation for the US.20 American industry also received a much needed boom from producing munitions for the Allies, and large sections of the American elites were pushing for war by the time of US entry. World War one actually represented a transition which “marked the end of the Rothschilds’ supremacy in government loans”, a decline that: “above all, was due to their weak presence in the United States where the sinews of war would henceforth be located.”21

Zionists like Bernard Baruch, Paul Warburg and Jacob Schiff pressured America to join WW1 (1:17:17)

While Baruch was made chair of the War Industries Board and represented the US at the Paris Peace Conference,22 none of these three were great lobbyists for American entry into the war, and two were actually notable for their lack of support for American intervention.

As mentioned above, Schiff stood out on Wall Street for his refusal to aid the Allies, and downplaying German crimes relative to the horrors of Tsarist Russia. Schiff and Warburg were two of the greatest lobbyists for neutrality among America’s financial elite:

Even more fervent than the support which Jacob Schiff and the Warburg brothers gave to a compromise peace was their hope that the United States would not be forced to intervene against Germany … Paul Warburg’s only complaint was that American treatment of Germany was insufficiently conciliatory.23

Warburg actually lobbied for some concessions to avoid war with Germany, such as banning travel by Americans on ships of belligerent nations, justifying German U-boat policy as just retaliation for the British blockade. And, in a detail that is very inconvenient for the Europa narrative, Warburg while serving as one of the original members of the Federal Reserve Board “led the board in its refusal after August 1914 to allow banks to rediscount bills of exchange from munitions purchases” because “Warburg claimed that this contravened US neutrality.”24

British airplanes dropped leaflets over Germany promising Jews a homeland in Palestine after the war (1:17:33)

This is true. The British Department of Information dropped leaflets to Jews in German, Austrian, and Russia territory which announced “The Allies are giving the Land of Israel to the people of Israel.”25

After the Balfour Declaration, the Jewish media began to display dehumanising anti-German propaganda to win American support for intervention (1:18:50)

Once again, the dates are just wrong. The United States entered WW1 officially on April 4, 1917. The Balfour Declaration came on November 2.

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Crypto

I personally decided on this work after reading through Napoleon in Exile, the two-volume work by Napoleon’s physician on St. Helena, Barry O’Meara. I found the reflections of Napoleon contained in the work to be gripping and surprisingly candid, and was surprised at how little this work is ever mentioned today. After much work updating the original — condensing it to the most interesting passages, translating French and Italian passages, adding over 200 footnotes to give the reader context to the events and figures of the time discussed, and updating some of the antiquared language for an easier reader experience — the final work is lucid and engaging, with a gorgeous cover focused on sketches of Napoleon.

The easiest way to buy it right now is via Amazon in your own region:

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Europeans were the only people to develop history as an independent discipline with its own methodology, with things like textual criticism and handling of diverse sources, distinct from myth or propaganda.

Other civilizations like China kept detailed historical records, but these were mostly genealogical records compiled by bureaucrats and designed to legimitise dynasties or instruct rulers.

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Greeks built the Library of Alexandria as a centre for preserving and studying texts from across the known world. Scholars compared manuscripts of classical authors to correct errors and produce standardised texts, something practically unheard of in the ancient world.

Europeans have treated ancient historical sources with unique care. The norm in most times and places has been to take this careless attitude to ancient sources. But in contrast, everywhere Europeans went they began to collect detailed historical records, protect ancient sites, and compile real histories of the regions independent of local myth.

The pyramids at Giza and other Egyptian historical sites fell into centuries of neglect under Islamic rule.

The pyramids were quarried for building material. The original white limestone that covered the pyramids is gone because it was stripped for building in Cairo.

There was no organised attempt at preservation or historical understanding of these sites for centuries. Instead, they were simply seen as a curios relic of paganism and understood using folklore involving djinn or giants and other superstition.

The nose of the Sphinx was destroyed in the 15th Century, in response to Egyptian peasants giving it offerings, because of a belief that you could "kill" a statue by cutting off its nose and stopping it breathing.

It was only when Egypt came under European rule that the pyramids began to be studied scientifically and "Egyptology" became its own field. European explorers and scholars surveyed, excavated, translated and protected ancient Egyptian sites, eventually teaching locals to treat these sites with some reverance.

In response to this, many users presented the example of detailed Chinese histories, especially the example of the Shiji.

This is not a good counter-example to my argument.

The Shiji was a massive historical chronicle from 1st Century China that mixed historical records, biographies and moral lessons for the purpose of legitimising and guiding Chinese rulers.

While Chinese civilization produced detailed historical records like this, it was done for bureaucratic purposes within a Confucian tradition, meaning it blended myths and legends with real history and written with the purpose of teaching moral lessons to its readers.

European historiography uniquely developed systematic methods such as textual criticism, evident as early as the 5th century BC in the works of Thucydides. In contrast, the Shiji relies on oral traditions and official records without a critical methodology for verifying sources.

Because of this, Europeans were unique in their effort to preserve and study original texts in their own right, even when these texts challenged mythic narratives or political agendas.

Did Islamic Civilization Match the West in Critical History?

Almost all the responses to my thread are just people pointing out large historical works written outside the West, which misses the point.

In this case, the works highlighted are Islamic exegesis, which combine creation myth, religious teaching, and historical chronicles.

Islamic civilization did have historiography, but it never became a systematic science of a subject of formal study. The Qur'anic understanding of history was cyclical rather than linear, events were presented as timeless and not part of a historical chain.

Ricardo Duchesne writes "we do not find, among Muslims or Chinese, actual historical narratives, as contrasted to mere chronicles -- that is, there are no controlled, sustained monographs, with a coherent and continuous narrative, as we see in Thucydides, Polybius, Livy, Tactitus..."

Now look at the quote this person uses to support their point.

This quote does not say Islamic civilization produced any innovation which influenced Euopeans, only that Western historians used Muslim historical literature to gain a broader comparative lens. But this is not something that was done in the other direction.

This only reflects the truth that Europeans were the only civilization to systematically study other cultures as coherent systems of belief and history worthy of critical engagement on their own terms.

The steelman counter-example would be Ibn-Khaldun, who is a genuinely remarkable thinker for his time who created a cyclical theory of the rise and decline of civilizations and his own method of sociological analysis.

But his work was an isolated intellectual achievement which did not produce a school of thought or repblicable theoretical framework.

His work was largely ignored, and Muslim historians after him continued to write in a traditional chronicle formats. The critical attitude he took to sources was not replicated.

Moreover, while impressive, his work was focused on on Islamic and Arab history. He did not compare texts from different civilizations or study Greek or Roman histories critically. His approach was not universalist in a way the thinking of European historicists was.

Ironically, his modern recognition and understanding as a "sociologist" and historicist is largely due to him being rediscovered through a European lens.

In response to my challenging the idea that Islamic historiography was equal to its Western counterpart, Islamic scholar Daniel Haqiqatjou disagreed.

Daniel Haqiqatjou:

All this is a cope after you got proven wrong.

The hadith sciences ARE a historiographical field dedicated to authenticating reports of the statements of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ and his earliest followers. Literally tens of thousands of books were written by Muslims from the late 7th century onwards engaging in critical historical investigation of the Prophet's ﷺ life and his teachings.

Don't let white chauvinism drive you to make factually incorrect claims.

Ricardo Duchesne himself responds to Haqiqatjou:

The very fact that you view Allah as a prophet, and that the Muslims historians you reference did as well, demonstrates my point. As I explain in Greatness and Ruin, "in his book Islamic Historiography, Robinson claims that many Muslim historians 'were alert to contradictory evidence, to fabrication, exaggeration and bias.' It was important for them to be true to the history of their religion. But as Humphreys (2002, pp. 90-92) recognizes, Muslim historians 'never show any real awareness of change and development' in their chronologies. 'Events were in a real sense timeless. . . conceived and presented as moral exempla, not as links in a continuous narrative or as part of a historical process…The Qur’anic understanding of history is cyclical rather than linear' (Humphreys, 2002, pp. 90-92)."

"Moreover, Muslims did not offer explanations for the cycles of history (as we saw in Polybius, Sallust, Livy). The point of their moral teaching was to illustrate, not to explain, whereas for the ancients the point was to instruct about the nature of human beings, and why this nature underlies the cycles of history. And, as Humphreys admits, Muslims had no conception of change and development — unlike Christians, who initiated a history of development and started to identify the main stages of history."

My own response to Daniel:

Yes, they are narrowly aimed at authenticating reports of statements by a religious figure, not discovering historical truth for its own sake.

They operated within a doctrinal framework as given and their method never extended to critique Islamic tradition itself, nor to develop a universal method of historical inquiry applicable beyond Islam.

Thus, they are not comparable to the universalised, self-critical Western method of historiography.

Haqiqatjou’s response:

Again, you are simply wrong here. Muslims were engaged in investigating history (Tarikh) using sophisticated methods they developed for this purpose. And the sub-field of Jarh wa Tadil was self-critical and skeptical history.

What you are struggling to articulate is that the West invented materialist histories. That's true. The Western historians, starting from Edward Gibbon, simply took for granted Enlightenment materialism in their understanding of time, history, and the rise and fall of civilizations. Other civilizations outside the West took for granted their metaphysical assumption as well, but that doesn't mean they weren't engaged in history, even critical history.

My response::

Hadith criticism could be rigorous and self-critical, but only within its confines. It was aimed at doctrinal integrity, not reconstructing history across time and cultures.

My argument predates the Enlightenment and goes back to historians like Thucydides and Polybius who were already part of a tradition that treated historical causality as intelligible and open to critical inquiry.

The uniqueness of the Western tradition is not that it took materialist metaphysics for granted, it's that it developed tools to transcend its own cultural beliefs and develop a self-correcting and universalisable historiographical tradition.

Haqiqatjou:

I am not talking only about hadith. I am also talking about the wider field of Tarikh, which did investigate the history of the world outside of the immediate context of 7th century Arabia.

As for the value of "transcending cultural beliefs," yes, this is unique to Enlightenment thinking, and it is precisely what has created the postmodern deracination of European identity you're always bemoaning.

Don't you realize the sheer irony of what you're being triumphalist about?

Maybe if Europeans were more like Muslims, and they stopped trying to transcend their culture, geography, and heritage in seeking this cold, objective standpoint of "universalisable" cosmology you're so proud of, they wouldn't be facing an existential crisis today.

Please connect the dots.

My final response:

It's not just a product of the Enlightenment. You can see it already in Thucydides, Polybius, Tacitus and Renaissance humanists.

I do agree with you it cuts both ways, the same European capacity for universalism and stepping outside their tradition is largely responsible for the situation our people find themselves in today, but if we want to deal with that we should understand it for what it is, and we should celebrate what's good about it.

All My Links

Hitler’s Table Talk is a collection of informal monologues given by Adolf Hitler during meals at his wartime headquarters between 1941 and 1944. These conversations, recorded by members of his inner circle, ranged from religion and race to history, architecture, and war strategy. The tone was often speculative and rambling, which fits with Hitler’s style of monologue as many of his contemporaries described.

These comments were not recorded using shorthand or audio equipment. Instead, they were written down after the fact by members of Hitler’s inner circle, most notably a lawyer named Heinrich Heim, legal assistant Henry Picker, and later Martin Bormann, Hitler’s powerful private secretary and head of the Nazi Party Chancellery. The note-takers worked under Bormann’s direction, who aimed to preserve Hitler’s musings as an ideological guide for the future. In the postwar years, these notes were edited, translated, and published in various forms, including French and English editions, and became an important source to historians reconstructing Hitler’s ideology and his thinking during this pivotal period.

Sources of Skepticism

Table Talk's legitimacy is often contested by revisionists who seek to downplay or deny aspects of Hitler’s ideology that it reveals. I encountered this after writing my article Nationalism Doesn't Need National Socialism, which cited Table Talk to explain Hitler’s intention to ethnically cleanse Eastern Europe. Most revisionists who reject Table Talk are motivated by one of two recurring concerns:

1. They reject Hitler’s hostility toward Christianity which is spelled out most clearly in Table Talk. Some of these are Christian National Socialists, and some like Richard Carrier are atheists who wish to argue evils of National Socialism came from Christianity.

2. They deny Hitler’s view on the inferiority of the Slavic races and his intention to subjugate and ethnically cleanse Slavic peoples.

Why does Table Talk pose a problem for them? Consider the following statements attributed to Hitler regarding Christianity:

The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew.

Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure.

The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity. Christianity is a prototype of Bolshevism: the mobilisation by the Jew of the masses of slaves with the object of undermining society. Thus one understands that the healthy elements of the Roman world were proof against this doctrine.

On Hitler’s view of the Slavs, Table Talk makes it clear that he viewed them as an inferior race worthy of and destined for subjugation under Germans:

The Slavs are a mass of born slaves, who feel the need of a master.

The Russian will never make up his mind to work except under compulsion from outside, for he is incapable of organising himself. And if, despite everything, he is apt to have organisation thrust upon him, that is thanks to the drop of Aryan blood in his veins. It's only because of this drop that the Russian people has created something and possesses an organised State.

We'll take the southern part of the Ukraine, especially the Crimea, and make it an exclusively German colony. There'll be no harm in pushing out the population that's there now.

It should be possible for us to control this region to the East with two hundred and fifty thousand men plus a cadre Of good administrators. Let's learn from the English, who, with two hundred and fifty thousand men in all, including fifty thousand soldiers, govern four hundred million Indians. This space in Russia must always be dominated by Germans. Nothing would be a worse mistake on our part than to seek to educate the masses there. It is to our interest that the people should know just enough to recognise the signs on the roads. At present they can't read, and they ought to stay like that.

Carrier and Nilsson

The two scholars most credited for their challenge to Table Talk authenticity in recent years each seem to have been motivated by a desire to preserve the idea that Hitler was a believing Christian. Richard Carrier is a Jesus mythicist who wished to counter the arguments of Christians that Hitler shared his atheism. Carrier wrote a series of articles investigating problems with the sources used in Table Talk. However, he concluded that there were three German versions that "have a common ancestor, which must be the actual bunker notes themselves”. His investigation concluded with a note of caution about the documents and a recommendation that scholars work with the German editions to avoid later editorial additions.

Table Talk was dissected much more rigorously by the historian Mikael Nilsson, who has also argued for Hitler being a believing Christian on the basis of his public statements. Nilsson’s 2020 work Hitler Redux is a very thorough investigation of the editorial history of Table Talk. The history of the Table Talk itself turns out to be quite an interesting chapter of history as Nilsson traces the many editorial distortions introduced over time and how these were often treated uncritically in historical literature. Nilsson argues that although Table Talk document real conversations with Hiter, the published versions we have are layered with editorial decisions that compromise their reliability as direct sources, but historians have often treated them as verbatim recordings on the assumption they were from stenograph recordings.

A Brief History of Table Talk

The initial note-taker for Table Talk was Heinrich Heim, a lawyer who worked under Bormann. He recorded Hitler’s comments from mid-1941 through early 1942. Heim typically jotted notes or reconstructed full summaries after the conversation had ended.

Heim was succeeded by Henry Picker, who continued the project into 1943. Picker later published his version in German in 1951. Unlike Heim, Picker inserted clarifying remarks, removed repetitions, and polished Hitler’s language. While both Heim and Picker were present for Hitler’s conversations, their transcripts reflect differing levels of editorial intervention and personal interpretation, something Nilsson zeroes in on to emphasise the unreliability of Table Talk for providing verbatim quotes.

Later, parts of these notes were assembled and edited again by Martin Bormann himself, who had initially commissioned the project. In the postwar period, the most widely circulated editions were produced by François Genoud and Hugh Trevor-Roper.

Editorial Layers and Their Problems

Mikael Nilsson's Hitler Redux does valuable work documenting the serious editorial issues with the many published versions of Table Talk. These problems are present in each of the three main editions:

Henry Picker's 1951 German edition removed repetitions, polished language, merged material from different dates, and contained what even Bormann identified as numerous errors and misdatings. Despite these flaws, it became the standard German reference for decades.

François Genoud's 1952 French edition presents more serious concerns. Genoud was a postwar Nazi sympathiser who acquired the rights to the Table Talk documents after the war. Genoud had a track record of manipulating other Hitler documents, which raises red flags about his input on Table Talk. Genoud closely safeguarded the original German manuscripts, refusing to grant access to scholars and making independent verification of his production of Table Talk impossible. Nilsson documents how Genoud arranged secret contracts to ensure everyone involved in producing the later English edition — a team led by the renowned Hitler historian Hugh Trevor-Roper — could only use his French version as their base text.

Hugh Trevor-Roper's 1953 English edition compounded these problems by translating not from the original German manuscripts but from Genoud's own questionable French version. This created multiple layers of potential distortion: a post-facto recollection, editorial smoothing, the ideological motives of Genoud, translation and retranslation to French and then to English.

The Best Available Source Solves Most Problems

But most of these issues which Nilsson's book investigates at length can be avoided simply by using the most reliable edition available: the 1980 version edited by Werner Jochmann, which has been carefully reconstructed from Bormann's archives using Heinrich Heim's original notes as the primary source.

This edition eliminates the editorial problems that plague other versions. It sidesteps Picker's stylistic interventions and date-merging. It avoids Genoud's potential ideological manipulations entirely. It eliminates the translation-retranslation chain that distorts the Trevor-Roper edition. Most importantly, it preserves Heim's systematic approach to note-taking, including his careful acknowledgment that entries were reconstructed rather than transcribed.

Heim remains the most credible of the original note-takers. He worked closely with Bormann from 1941-1942, was trusted within Hitler's circle, and maintained a consistent methodology. His notes, as preserved in the archives and presented in the Wirth edition, represent the earliest and least adulterated layer of documentation available.

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However, because they were reconstructed from memory and not taken down in real time, they inevitably reflect at least some editorial interpretation in how to reconstruct the conversations. We can reasonably conclude that while not verbatim, they offer a reliable reconstruction of Hitler’s private statements. And that is all any mainstream historian who uses the Table Talk expects — it has not been treated as a verbatim recording of Hitler’s words by reputable historians for some time.

In fact, Nilsson himself, despite documenting the editorial problems extensively, still emphasises the fundamental authenticity of the source in the conclusion to Hitler Redux:

However, and this is very important, the results presented in this book should absolutely not be interpreted as meaning that the table talks are not authentic. They really are, at least for the most part, memoranda of statements that Hitler made at some point or another in his wartime HQs. They were made by either Heim, Picker, Müller, or Bormann, although there are also some notes that have no name attached to them.1

Nilsson does NOT claim that Table Talk is fabricated or worthless. His concern is that it has often been used without sufficient attention to its origins. As his exhaustive account of the history of the Table Talk show, many postwar writers have unquestioningly treated Table Talk as if it were a stenographic transcript, which it is not.

Now compare this statement of supposed arch-skeptic Nilsson to what a very mainstream historian of the Third Reich, Richard J. Evans, says in defence of the source's reliability:

These were, then, not based on shorthand transcripts taken by Hitler's secretaries, as has sometimes been assumed, but written up after the event. How reliable are they? Obviously, they are not an exact record, and indeed Heim prefaced each of them with a phrase such as 'The boss expressed himself among other things, in effect, as follows.'

Moreover, while Bormann was satisfied with Heim's reports, he was far more critical of Picker's, which contained numerous minor slips and even misdatings and mistranscriptions. However, there is no evidence that anyone, including Bormann, interpolated new material or inserted tendentious amendments in order to give readers a false impression of Hitler's views. After all, by 1941 Hitler was regarded, not least by his staff and by Nazi fanatics like Martin Bormann, as a kind of God, and the actual reason for recording the 'table-talk' was to put down his thoughts as a kind of sacred text, a guide to the imagined Nazi future. Altering the record in any significant way would have been tantamount to sacrilege.

Of course, Hitler can hardly have expected his listeners not to repeat what he said to others, so his remarks were far from being private or confidential. But nothing in the 'table-talk' went in any way counter to Hitler's known views as expounded in his speeches and directives, and the frequent repetitions and revisits to previously discussed topics reveal complete consistency in what Hitler said during the period of time covered. They add details to what is already known but contain no startling revelations. It does not follow from the fact that they were written up from memory that they did not more or less faithfully reproduce anything Hitler said, or distorted or misrepresented his thoughts.2

Even the most skeptical critiques of Table Talk, such as those by Nilsson and Carrier, ultimately arrive at a broadly similar conclusion.

Bormann and Hitler’s Christianity

The real question is how likely it is that Bormann manipulated the texts to lie about Hitler’s true beliefs. As Evans points out, Bormann would have seen this as a sacred text necessary to preserve Hitler’s original thoughts in as original way as possible. Carrier challenges Bormann’s reliability by suggesting he was part of a small, ideologically anti-Christian minority within the Nazi leadership, and thus, as Carrier sees it, had reason to hide Hitler’s Christianity:

There really were notes taken down in Hitler’s bunker of things he was remembered to have said, by people who were there, and those notes were really collated and heavily rewritten by Hitler’s secretary Martin Bormann (notably, infamously, a Christian-hating atheist; there were some of those in the Nazi party, though they were fairly rare, and Hitler wasn’t one of them). And all the varying published German versions do derive from that Bormann manuscript in one way or another.

Similarly, Nilssen quotes Picker, who said of Bormann that he took his notes and “edited them in a shameless manner”, this is followed by Nilssen noting that “if there ever was a National Socialist who hated Christianity it was Bormann.” So should we be skeptical of the anti-Christian passages in Table Talk as the manipulation of Bormann?

Recall one of the harshest anti-Christian quotes from Table Talk cited earlier, where Hitler is reported to have said “The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity.” “The pox” here refers to syphilis, and we have testimony from the diaries of both Alfred Rosenberg and Joseph Goebbels recording the very same statement from Hitler in April of 1941:

If we have primary sources from Hitler’s closest inner circle attesting to an anti-Christian statement recorded in the Table Talk, then the claim of people like Carrier that Hitler’s anti-Christian statements point to manipulation by Bormann falls apart. Perhaps Bormann could have made some of Hitler’s anti-Christian statements stronger, but the idea he was fabricating things is just not supported by the evidence, and the single strongest anti-Christian statement we have from the document is confirmed genuine by the other diaries. But another that point people throwing doubt on Bormann seem to miss is he would only have edited the Table Talks on the assumption that Hitler would be dead when they were published and thus unable to call him out on falsifications. They are looking back on how the war turned out as if Bormann knew Hitler faced an inevitable demise in 1945. But had Hitler survived, he could easily have called out misrepresentations of his worldview in the talks, something Bormann was aware of.

Finally, the evidence that Carrier and Nilsson draw on to argue for the likelihood of Hitler’s religiosity against Table Talk is drawn mostly from public speeches by Hitler, where he was appealing to a heavily Christian German public. We would have to expect a politician like Hitler to temper his anti-Christian attitudes when speaking to a mass audience.

In sum, while Table Talk is not a verbatim record of Hitler’s conversations, it remains a credible and valuable source for understanding his private beliefs. Since it aligns with other primary accounts and private testimony, and no compelling evidence suggests Bormann distorted Hitler’s views, the major objections against its authenticity collapse under scrutiny. The editorial issues documented by Nilsson are real but do not undermine the fundamental authenticity of the material.

The note-takers for the Table Talks were present at the events they recorded. While their reconstructions weren't perfect transcripts, they were eyewitness accounts by people with direct access to Hitler's private conversations. Used critically and with proper sourcing, Table Talk remains among the most illuminating records of Hitler’s worldview.

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Crypto Addresses

All My Links

Gnosticism was the original woke culture, says OnePeterFive, a Catholic journal; Bishop Robert Barron writes on gnosticism as the philosophical roots of wokeism for the Acton Institute; Wokeism is the new face of an old heresy, explains Thomist philosopher Edward Feser; according to anti-woke crusader James Lindsay, “a thread of Gnostic cult belief that has shaped every facet of the West for at least the last three hundred years”; Wokeism is the Gnostic religion of the intellectuals, writes a contributor to Chronicles Magazine; and Wokeness is grounded in a Gnostic understanding of the world, writes a contributor to National Affairs.

This kind of thing isn’t actually anything new to conservatives, either. In a 1957 edition of The National Review, a Catholic scholar named Frederick Wilhelmsen complained that Gnosticism had “worked its poison into the blood of our body politic.” Wilhelmsen’s examples? For one, President Eisenhower’s refusal to support the Hungarian uprising in 1956. This could only be understood by recognising Ike’s “Gnostic mist”, a decision informed by “Gnostic illusions about the future.”

In 1962, another National Review alumni named Brent Bozell told a crowd of 18,000 conservatives at Madison Square Garden that communism and liberalism had the same root — “the ancient heresy of gnosticism with its belief that the salvation of man and society can be accomplished on this earth.” Bozell warned the packed crowd that in their gnostic quest liberals were now becoming sympathetic to the Soviet ideal of remaking man, and so “if gnosticism is ever to triumph, it will triumph in the communist form.”

Conservative thinkers invoking gnosticism to explain their enemies’ motives owe a lot to Eric Voegelin, who blamed Gnosticism for the rise of every modern ideological movement from communism and fascism, to psychoanalysis and liberal progressivism. Voegelin saw the Gnostic impulse as a rejection of the world in favor of a purified order — what he famously called “immanentizing the eschaton,” or attempting to usher in heaven on earth. These movements were called “gnostic” simply for being utopian and intellectual — as if those traits were unique to gnosticism, and despite the fact that actual gnostic texts are strikingly apolitical and anti-utopian.

Yet there is obviously something still very appealing about this kind of argument to conservatives, and it has seen a recent revival as their intellectuals grapple with the rise of the newest iteration of progressive utopian thinking in the form of wokeism. In The Gnostic heresy’s political successors, Edward Feser argues that the first feature of the gnostic mentality is that:

It sees evil as all-pervasive and nearly omnipotent, absolutely permeating the established order of things.

This differs from Orthodox Christianity, which teaches that creation is fundamentally good, and from this follows the concept of natural law. By contrast, wokeism, according to Feser, sees the world as pervaded by evil — not in metaphysical terms, but in the form of systemic racism:

For CRT, the all-pervasive and near omnipotent source of evil in the world is the “racist power” of “white supremacy,” “white privilege,” and indeed “whiteness” itself. This racism is “systemic” in a Foucaldian sense – it percolates down, in capillary fashion, into every nook and cranny of society and the unconscious assumptions of every citizen. It is especially manifest in all “inequities,” which result from the “implicit biases” lurking even in people who think of themselves as free of racism.

This is the basic argument of all the “wokeness is gnostic” people: gnostics looked at the world and saw nothing but evil, woke people look at the world and see nothing but inequality and injustice.

Gnosticism isn’t easy to define, because it wasn’t one movement but a collection of early religious movements that shared a belief that the material world was illusory and fallen, a kind of cosmic mistake. Gnostics typically believed the physical world was the product of a flawed or evil lesser god — the Demiurge — and that it separated us from our natural end — the union of our own divine nature with the real hidden God who transcended nature. Gnostics believed the overcoming of the physical and the awakening of our divine spark could not come through faith or action but only through a transformation of the self through secret knowledge — gnosis. In this sense, it was more similar to the ascetic, acosmist spiritual movements of the East than what we associate with Western philosophy.

All this is to say that if anything defined the gnostic outlook, it was a complete repudiation of the material world and its temptations, turning instead to asceticism and the spiritual life (of course, this has at times manifested in some decidedly “left-hand” libertine approaches that were anything but ascetic). What they emphatically were not, however, was political utopians. Temporal injustices like a dearth of Black CEO’s actually becomes less of a concern when your concern is escaping this fleshy prison altogether. This kind of political utopianism originates from a much more materialist disposition. After all, the furore of Marxist utopianism came from a thinker who presented a wholly materialist interpretation of history and vision of utopia.

In fact, if the apostles of woke have a metaphysical disposition at all, it’s much more optimistic than Feser et. al portray. Far from rejecting the material world, the woke think we can create a worldly paradise if only we can extirpate inequality and discrimination. Conservatives will say something like “the woke think white people are born inherently evil or racist”, but this isn’t really the case.

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One thing the woke absolutely take for granted — the whole basis for their political outlook — is that we enter the world as blank slates, and systems of power reproduce inequalities and discriminatory attitudes. They are only so motivated to undo these power systems because they believe the world of true egalitarianism where these structures have been done away with would be so beautiful. There is no ascetic or spiritualist impulse here. Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart goes as far as to say — and I agree with him — that:

If I were pressed to give an account of the causes that allowed secular modernity to evolve out of early modern Christendom, one formulation I would be tempted to venture—in order to be provocative, admittedly, but also quite in earnest—is that modernity at its most truly nihilistic is in very great part the effect of the final expulsion of any genuinely gnostic spiritual disquiet from the consciousness of the Christian West.

And if the woke disposition was another case of the gnostic rejection of materiality, wouldn’t we expect to find among their leaders a few gnostics? But far from being esotericists or world-denying Valentinians, any survey shows most are either atheists with an unquestioned belief in the good of a post-Christian ideal of equality and the universal dignity of man, or themselves Christians in quite the opposite mold of the gnostic. When they are religious they tend to come disproportionately from Evangelical Christianity, which is about as far away as you can get in a Christian context from gnostic esotericism. Cornel West is Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice at the Christian Union Theological Seminary. Jemar Tisby, author of woke bestsellers The Color of Compromise and How To Fight Racism is also an evangelical Christian who received his academic credentials from the Reformed Theological Seminary. On the atheist side, Ibram X Kendi, the author of How to be an Antiracist, thinks Jesus was a political revolutionary and that “trying to “save” souls is “racist theology” which only “breeds bigotry.” Not a very gnostic outlook.

Transhumanism

Maybe the feminists and social justice warriors aren’t driven by a gnostic impulse, but what about the transhumanists who share the gnostic desire to transcend the material constraints of their body altogether? Modern liberalism is animated by the desire to free the self from all constraints and collective identity. Some, like early transgender activist Martine Rothblatt, have spelled out the transhumanist turn implied by this impulse in books like “From Transgender to Transhuman: A Manifesto On the Freedom Of Form.” Respected liberal thinkers like Yuval Noah Harari talk about their liberal philosophy of individualist hedonism reaching its fulfillment in a transhumanist future where human minds can be uploaded to the cloud and exist in a state of perpetual pleasure and novelty.

Richard Storey, in a response to me on this topic, identified this as rooted in gnostic metaphysical assumptions:

The gnostic liberals do have a teleology, an end for human existence — it is the mastery of nature. Again, this belief is transcendent and makes metaphysical assumptions about the mind, destiny etc. whether the liberal realises they are engaging in metaphysics or not. Transhumanists believe that we can and will escape the shackles of this material body, and thus escape death, preserving our souls and transcending to create our own meta-worlds; not just augmenting this reality but subordinating the resources and tools of the material world to our own virtual worlds; not storming heaven but inventing our own as gods.

…

Now, I am of course not saying I believe this is good or even possible, but they believe it, and such a belief is unmistakeably a sect of gnosticism.

I might be provocative and say that thinking the experience of the boundless ego experiencing novelty in perpetuity is anything like the kind of liberation from corporeality the gnostic sects had in mind only reflects the poverty of our own modern view of the spiritual. It is quite common for moderns to view concepts like eternity as an infinite succession of events, and heaven as an infinitely pleasurable series of these events. From that perspective, the transhumanist dream of infinite jest in the cloud might seem similar, after all, didn’t the gnostics too talk about liberating the “pure intellect”?

As Hart observes, the transhumanist’s dream would have struck ancient Gnostics as a nightmare — the very image of hell. These spiritual sects did not want to “escape the material world” for a more complete hedonism or mastery of nature, as Storey suggests. Rather, they sought a radical severance from the very conditions of becoming altogether — time, matter, individuality, and desire. A less materially constrained, more physically liberated ego, as something which masks the inevitability of decay and suffering in this world, would be seen as a hindrance to the gnostic end goal. The soul’s end in the gnostic worldview is to awaken from the game entirely, not play it with better equipment. In the transhumanist vision, we are not simply caught up in the play of the shadows on the cave wall, but transform our own selves into one of the shadows and mistake this for liberation.

If a rejection of the material as a place of ultimate fulfillment and a desire for an infinite, incorporeal existence through spiritual “gnosis” is actually the spirit of our age, then it shares this with the innumerable spiritual traditions, and Harari and Rothblatt are the expression in our age of what the Buddha or Meister Eckhart expressed in theirs. Gnostic immortality was no endless extension of life — it was escape from life itself. A yearning not for more sensation, but for the Real: communion with God, a return to the silent divine source from which all being had tragically fallen.

In the end, the conservative habit of labelling wokeism as a revival of Gnosticism tells us less about the nature of woke ideologues than it does about the intellectual reflexes of their critics. It reflects a desire to give metaphysical weight to political opposition and lead us inevitably to finding the answer in their own religious and political priors. Unwilling to confront or defend the possibility of real and profound biological differences between groups — differences that might naturally produce the disparities woke activists interpret as signs of hidden injustice — these critics instead reach for metaphysical analogies. This allows them to redirect the debate toward familiar conservative anxieties like the decline of religiosity and and the excesses of intellectual radicalism.

In doing so, they avoid the unpopular task of challenging the real taboos at the heart of the debate, replacing it with a theological drama that flatters their worldview but explains very little.

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I want to argue that the main reason this debate is so muddled is that the ideological poles of the 20th century — liberalism on the right and social democracy on the left — have largely merged since the 1990s. What dominates Western politics today is a hybrid: a broad social liberal consensus that doesn’t neatly fit either tradition, but could equally be argued to be their natural end point. Almost all major political currents in the West operate within this merged framework, which makes it harder to name or oppose the system as something coherent and distinct.

One problem on the right is that we often look in the wrong places to understand the origin of the modern system. Though radicals like the Frankfurt School, and French “postmodern neo-Marxists” had great influence on the New Left, they did not foresee the kind of dynamic, market-based economic system leftist politicians would end up embracing today. One thinker who has had a great, direct influence on some of the most powerful politicians of today is the British sociologist Anthony Giddens. Giddens is a prolific author and highly influential academic, who served as Director of the London School of Economics from 1996 until 2003. His introduction to Sociology has sold over a million copies, and he is notable for being the rare academic to reach a large audience outside academia.

Bill Clinton’s reform of the Democrat Party was influenced by Giddens, but he is better known for being the chief intellectual influence on Tony Blair and the creation of New Labour. In two books, ‘Beyond Left and Right’ and ‘The Third Way’, Giddens charted a path to renewal for social democracy, a new model of left-liberal governance that would be dynamic, make use of markets, and be less attached to the bloated welfare state that social democrats had previously prided themselves on. It was just what politicians like Blair and Clinton needed to rehabilitate parties that had gained negative reputations for socialist mismanagement, real or perceived.

Reading these works now is interesting, because Giddens was highly prescient in seeing how the welfare state in the West would develop, not least because the suggestions he produced directly influenced so many of the people who have been in charge of it since. Blair and Clinton did not just rejuvenate the social-democratic parties in their own countries, but produced a pragmatic model that other establishment left parties would imitate for electoral success. But they did not just change the left. By embracing many of the changes brought about by neoliberalism, they created a new social liberal centre which establishment parties, left and right, have gradually adopted to the point of near absolute consensus across the West.

In order to demonstrate this great progressive synthesis, it’s helpful to look back at how Giddens defined the old left and the neoliberal right in his book The Third Way, published in 1998. Here are the structural features Giddens attributes to these worldviews:

Classical social democracy (the old left)

• Pervasive state involvement in social and economic life: The state actively directs economic planning and social programs to ensure stability and equity, advocates nationalising important industries and utilities.

• State dominates civil society: Government authority overshadows independent organisations, state-led solutions trusted over private initiatives.

• Collectivism: Emphasises group welfare and solidarity, leans into class-based politics and promotes shared economic goals over individual interests.

• Keynesian demand management, plus corporatism: Uses government stimulus to boost demand and collaborates with unions and businesses to stabilise wages and production.

• Confined role for markets: Social economy; markets directed by the state, private enterprise and state ownership blended to pursue social goals.

• Full employment: Aims for universal job availability through state intervention, viewing unemployment as a policy failure.

• Strong egalitarianism: Sees inequality as a problem to be addressed. Seeks to minimise income and wealth disparities through progressive taxation and redistribution policies.

• Comprehensive welfare state: ‘cradle to grave’ benefits; state directly provides universal services like healthcare, education, and pensions. Welfare benefits are universal.

• Linear modernisation: Pursues steady industrial growth and economic progress, assuming continuous growth and technological advancement.

• Low ecological consciousness: Prioritises economic and social goals over environmental concerns, with minimal focus on sustainability.

• Internationalism: Promotes a sense of global solidarity, often through socialist or labour movements, to foster cooperation across nations; may oppose immigration for social reasons but hostile to xenophobia and nativism.

• Belongs to bipolar world: Operated in a Cold War context, aligning either with Western social democracy states or more hard-left socialist blocs in global politics.

Examples: Clement Attlee, Willy Brandt, George Galloway

Theory: The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money by John Maynard Keynes

Neoliberalism (Thatcherism, the new right)

• Minimal government: Reduces state interference in economic and social life, favouring deregulation and privatisation to enhance efficiency.

• Autonomous civil society: Encourages private organisations and entrepreneurship; seeks to limit state control over community and individuals.

• Market fundamentalism: Views unregulated markets as the primary driver of prosperity, prioritising competition and free enterprise. Supply-side economics — allowing for an abundance of supply/entrepreneurialism will create its own demand.

• Individualism: Combines traditional social values with a focus on personal responsibility and entrepreneurial freedom.

• Free labour market: Treats labour as a commodity, with wages and employment determined by supply and demand; opposes union influence as coercive and driver of inefficiency.

• Acceptance of inequality: Views economic disparities as natural outcomes of market competition, with minimal state intervention to redistribute wealth.

• Civic nationalism: Leans into patriotism, skeptical of supranational institutions (Euroscetpicism of Farage/Thatcher)

• Welfare state as safety net: Limits welfare to minimal support for the neediest, emphasises “safety net” over universal entitlements.

• Linear modernisation: Assumes continuous economic growth through market-driven innovation, with little regard for social or environmental limits.

• Low ecological consciousness: Prioritises economic growth over environmental protection; distrustful of green policies as statist and bureaucratic power-grab.

• Realist theory of international order: Pragmatic approach to global relations; focuses on national interests and power dynamics over ideological alliances.

• Belongs to bipolar world: Operates in a Cold War framework, aligning with Western capitalist interests against socialist blocs.

Examples: Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley, Javier Milei

Theory: The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek, Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman

In this work, Giddens also outlines the features of his proposed Third Way. While Giddens’ description of the previous two models is helpful, his description of the Third Way is polemical and unhelpful, sounding more like election sloganeering than a serious analysis, like describing one feature as “no rights without responsibilities”. Now that we have experienced almost three decades of the new social democratic model Giddens proposed. I will outline a description of the new social liberal consensus that has emerged using similar categories to Giddens:

Social Liberalism (Modern Social Democracy, contemporary Centre-Left/Right consensus)

• New mixed economy: synergy between public and private sectors; state used to boost “competitiveness” and stabilise market excesses with targeted interventions rather than state-planning; dynamism and efficiency of market economy directed for mass-affluence

• Partnership with civil society; lack of sharp dividing lines between state, private sector and civil society, blending into one “regime”; NGOs fulfill social care roles and engage in social engineering; public-private collaborations on service provision

• Pragmatic collectivism: encourages individual aspiration and entrepreneurship; social cohesion via “solidarity” and humanitarianism, rather than class-based politics or national consciousness

• Social market economy: embraces globalisation and neoliberal market expansion, mostly focuses on supply-side policies (education, innovation etc.) to drive growth with little demand management or tariffs. Fundamental logic of market efficiency is embraced, but regulated for common good. “Stakeholder capitalism”

• Flexible labour market: prioritises job creation and employability through training and education; little reliance on state to create jobs directly; rather supports "flexicurity" — facilitating flexible private labour markets while maintaining strong safety nets.

• Moderate egalitarianism: prioritises equality of opportunity, maintains wealth redistribution via progressive taxation social programs for poor, but allows for growth of super-rich and accepts wealth inequality as unproblematic in itself

• Cosmopolitan pluralism: cultural pluralism and multiracialism, mass-immigration to ensure labour flexibility and market competitiveness; civic patriotism but harsh suppression of ethnic/racial nativism

• Targeted welfare state: abandonment of universal benefits-based welfare state; means-tested benefits and subsidies; focuses on returning welfare recipients to private sector

• Non-linear modernisation: embraces technological progress and digital transformation; embraces complexity and disruption in economic and social change. Uses a pragmatic state to easily reshuffle human capital.

• Ecological consciousness: “sustainable growth” and climate action; shift to renewable energy; carbon reduction; role of private sector in innovating solutions.

• Globalised internationalism: multilateralism; peace through interconnectedness via global trade; cooperation on global issues via institutions like the UN, WTO, WHO; lifting up of the rest of the world via human rights universalism, developmental aid and trade.

• Belongs to multipolar world: operates in an already globalised, interconnected world with multiple power centers; powerful actors from private and public sector collaborate to navigate tensions between global integration and national sovereignty.

Examples: Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, David Cameron, Emmanuel Macron, most establishment political parties today

Theory: A Theory of Justice by John Rawls, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy by Anthony Giddens

Given that this consensus has veered to an embrace of market economics and globalisation more than its early advocates may have foreseen, and this consensus now represents a much larger progressive centre than merely the political left, I think a more apt term for this new consensus is social liberalism, merging social democracy of the left with the economic individualism and market-orientation of the right. Thus, it brings together the more individualist, market friendly trend of the left in the late 20th Century with the libertine, economistic trend of the right as it abandoned social conservatism and nationalism.

Justice as Fairness: The Intellectual Defence of Social Liberalism

Social liberalism has always been a trend in the liberal tradition, a variant that focuses on the active expansion of civil and political rights, as well as more material questions of social justice based on liberal humanitarian principles. It found its greatest advocate in John Rawls, one of the most influential social theorists of the 20th Century. Rawls’s theory of “justice as fairness” argues that a properly just liberalism would demand a limitation of inequality and a collective provision of goods for the least advantaged.

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Arguing that the proper way to engineer society was behind an imagined “veil of ignorance”, liberals should create the kind of society an individual would want if they did not know where — into what class, race, gender, etc. — they would be born. Extreme poverty, lack of education or access to healthcare could prevent those with the misfortune of being born into impoverishment from exercising their freedom. This lays the foundation for a liberal defence of social democracy: maximal freedom for all necessitates an interventionist state to ensure liberty is not obstructed by material inequalities:

Significant political and economic inequalities are often associated with inequalities of social status that encourage those of lower status to be viewed both by themselves and by others as inferior. This may arouse widespread attitudes of deference and servility, on one side, and a will to dominate and arrogance on the other. These effects of social and economic inequalities can be serious evils and the attitudes they engender great vices... Fixed status ascribed by birth, or by gender or race, is particularly odious.1

Like Giddens, Rawls rejects both laissez-faire capitalism — for generating inequalities incompatible with maximising liberty — and the traditional welfare state, for placing too much control of the economy in the hands of a few planners.2 Rawls favours a “property-owning democracy” or “liberal socialism”. The difference between this and the welfare state capitalism of social democracy is that while the latter creates near-monopolies of the means of production and makes the individual reliant on welfare handouts from the state,

Property-owning democracy avoids this, not by the redistribution of income to those with less at the end of each period, so to speak, but rather by ensuring the widespread ownership of productive assets and human capital (that is, education and trained skills) at the beginning of each period, all this against a background of fair equality of opportunity. The intent is not simply to assist those who lose out through accident or misfortune (although that must be done), but rather to put all citizens in a position to manage their own affairs on a footing of a suitable degree of social and economic equality.3

This helps clear up some of the confusion about whether the modern system is properly socialist or liberal. While the technocratic, redistributionary state may seem at odds with classical liberal principles, theorists like Rawls have long since reconstituted liberalism to account for liberty as something that requires a material basis, which is best preserved by a state capable of remedying inequalities and illiberal outcomes produced by markets. And, while men like Giddens and Blair favour the social democracy model, their moral justifications are the same as Rawls, viewing liberal pluralism as the only just foundation for legitimate governance.

The Triumph of Social Liberalism

Every Western government today has converged on the social liberal model of democracy outlined by Giddens. In Europe, this is the politics of most establishment centre-left and centre-right parties, usually with a minority of an old social democratic left, and in some countries a populist right which may combine elements of any of the three. A couple of examples here are illustrative.

In Ireland, political parties have traditionally been hard to categorise ideologically. Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, the two largest parties traditionally, were divided by a Civil War rather than any clear split on ideology. By the early 2000s, Fine Gael were seen as aligning more with the Christian Conservatism of the continent, while Fianna Fail was seen as a true liberal, centrist party. The Labour party was seen as representing the traditional left, with Sinn Féin seen as a more ideologically flexible, populist force.

Now though, all parties have converged on support for the modern social liberal model. Fianna Fail and Fine Gael represent a large progressive centre, which align fully with modern social liberalism, and have together ushered in a great deal of radical social change to Ireland, as well as opening the country to a massive demographic change through mass-immigration. Both the Labour Party and Sinn Féin, as well as other smaller leftist parties, support a classical social democratic model, with each touting the Nordic model of socialism with universal benefits and more progressive taxation as a superior alternative to Ireland’s system.

As these parties come closer to government though, the tendency is for them to adapt to the social liberal consensus. When Labour have entered coalition governments, they have had to prioritise policies like protecting the minimum wage and minimising cuts to social spending, rather than any radical reform of the welfare state. Sinn Féin too, while remaining locked out of government, has yet moderated its old left positions to be seen as feasible managers of a modern, globalised economy, including abandoning a promise to raise Ireland’s notably low corporation tax. As I have written about before, politics in Ireland is not so much divided on a left/right axis, as it is split between a large progressive centre committed to a modern social liberal model, and a sizeable minority to their left that favour a classic social democratic model, but have gradually embraced more and more of its modern update.

In the UK, Tony Blair dragged Labour away from its old left baggage to an embrace of social liberalism. David Cameron, in turn, shifted the Tory party away from neoliberalism and toward Blairite politics. Cameron passed gay marriage, abandoned any commitment to social conservatism, and brought a new commitment to environmentalism. Cameron’s Tories also supported a “Big Society” initiative, which sought to use markets for paternalistic ends and combine civic organisations and charities to provide public services at a local level, in line with the modern social liberal model of government using civil society partnerships for welfare. When the Labour Party experimented with a return to the old left under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, they suffered a crushing electoral defeat, before Keir Starmer returned them to a modern social liberal ethos.

Why Social Liberalism Won

In opposition, leftist parties still advocate a classic social democratic model that often looks back nostalgically on the golden age of social democracy in post-war Europe. But in government, all parties converge on the social liberal model of modern social democracy. Ideological leftists may blame this on capture of leftist politics by big business interests, pressure from neoliberal media, or corruption inherent in parliamentary politics, but these parties are generally true believers in the ideals of the old left. The pressure to adapt to the social liberal model needs to be understood as a reflection of structural realities created by changes in the economic system brought about by the acceleration of globalisation since the 1970s.

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Firstly, trade liberalisation, the mobility of global capital, and the growth of multinational industries has eroded the classical model of social democracy’s reliance on national industry and more confined markets, which could be micromanaged by state planners. Maintaining national industry, full employment, and high wages creates inefficient industries incapable of competing on a global stage, which led to cases like the decline of traditional British industries like steel during the rise of globalisation.

Second, the shift to service economies, gig work, and the rise of the “precariat” in place of the traditional working class and trade unions, has weakened the traditional collectivist base of the left and made goals like full employment and wage guarantees unrealistic and unwanted. Focus on these goals over “competitiveness” and supply side innovations would mean stagnation in a modern liberalised service economy, forcing leftist parties to pursue growth by increasing market efficiency. Rapid technological growth and fluid capital shifts make social democracies’ demand of job guarantees and the protection of living standards for workers in entire industries impossible, with the only way to secure affluence for workers now seen as making them capable of adaptation through education and training, thereby encouraging economic individualism.

Third, with the unprecedented growth of the post-war period now gone, with aging populations, skyrocketing national debt, and global tax competition and capital flight eroding the traditional corporate tax base, the comprehensive and universal welfare systems, made for the young, working population of the post-war period, is increasingly unsustainable. With little long-term industrial planning or investment after the neoliberal experiment, Western governments can do little to provide the growth necessary to fund existing social programs than by attracting market confidence and global investment, which requires moderating government spending and maintaining a pro-business environment.

Fourth, the move to green economics is in direct conflict with the old left’s reliance on traditional heavy industries like coal and steel to deliver jobs and economic growth. The international consensus on environmental sustainability encourages public-private partnerships, market innovations and a shift to a tech-driven service economy to reach carbon reduction targets, policies which have evolved with the new social liberal model.

Finally, the traditional White working-class base of the social democratic left has been undermined by demographic, as well as economic change. The post-war socialism of Europe owed a lot to the spirit of national unity and collective sacrifice that emerged during the war. The British electorate threw out the old Tory Winston Churchill in favour of the socialist Labour Party, which led to the establishment of the NHS, among other great socialist institutions. The concept of ‘folkhemmet’ or ‘people’s home’ was the foundation of the Swedish welfare state constructed by the Swedish Social Democratic Party. Sociological research has established that declining ethnic homogeneity leads to a decline in social trust as well as decline in support for welfare state policies. A study by Harvard economists which looked at the reasons for why the United States did not follow its Western counterparts in establishing a comprehensive social democratic model attributed about half the difference to America’s racial and ethnic heterogeneity. They note that:

Support for welfare is lower among people who live near welfare recipients of a different race. The difference between within-race and across-race effects seems to mean that people have a negative, hostile reaction when they see welfare recipients of a different race, and a sympathetic reaction when they see welfare recipients of their own race.4

As Europeans moved further in time from the spirit of 1945, towards greater individualism, and witnessed their societies become more diverse through mass-immigration policies, support for the socialism of old has declined.

One can demonstrate some of these structural pressures by imagining a scenario where Jeremy Corbyn had become Prime Minister and attempted a return to classical British social democracy, including his planned abandonment of austerity and increase in the corporate tax rate. Britain would likely have faced a flight of foreign investment, and a potential stock market crash which would have forced the social democratic government to enact even harsher austerity. A lack of market confidence in old left policies would have created bond market turmoil, resulting in higher government bond yields and increased borrowing costs, a major obstacle to the kind of Keynesian deficit-spending the old left used to stimulate economic growth.

Regardless of their adherence to the ideals of the old left and and the success of the post-war welfare state, leftists are forced by the realities of an already globalised capitalist system to adopt the less statist, more market-friendly adaptations of social liberalism. Labour’s director of communication Peter Mandelson once declared “we are all Thatcherites now”, while Thatcher’s Tory successor David Cameron titled himself the “heir to Blair”. Both these statements reflect a reality where the old left and new right have both had to to the dominant social liberal centre to maintain electability and economic stability, with either pure neoliberalism or an old social democratic model proving unfit for modern economic and political realities.

For neoliberals, those political realities came from the deep unpopularity of neoliberal policies, especially after the austerity that followed the 2008 financial crash, as well as the consensus that “light touch” regulation and neoliberal reforms that encouraged financialisation of the economy was responsible for that crash.

Though Thatcher and Reagan each delivered economic growth and undid stagnation brought about by leftist governance, their reforms led to little long-term benefit except for the rich. Decades of stagnant wages for the middle class, combined with the open immigration policies neoliberals tended to favour, has fuelled populism to their right directed against free trade, mass-immigration and the hollowing out of the White working class. Trump’s easy victory over a Republican field clinging to the Reaganite consensus that then gripped the party forced conservatives to adapt to his rhetoric of economic nationalism and populism, with National Conservatism emerging as the new trend among rightist intellectuals and leaders who successfully navigated this period, like Viktor Orbán.

Conclusion: Is There No Alternative?

There are a number of geopolitical reasons why global liberalism is declining. Still, in the West, this social liberal consensus remains strong. When it does come apart, it won’t be the result of a better idea winning the debate. The great source of instability is the millions of non-Western immigrants who have been brought to the West in recent decades. Multiculturalism has destroyed social capital in Western countries, to the point that conflict experts like David Betz now believe there is a strong likelihood of violent internal conflict coming to a European country in the next five years.

Both the emergence of this kind of planetary politics, and the source of its eventual undoing, was identified by Panagiotis Kondylis, a Greek-German sociologist I have previously written about. At the turn of the milennium, Kondylis had identified mass-immigration, facilitated by the naive human rights universalism and economism of Westerners, would contribute to massive conflict in the future:

Kondylis knew that mass migration into Europe, combined with having a demographic imbalance in native populations, would cut too deep into established normality with the possible consequence of the re-occurrence of things of the past: life-threatening scarcity and, as a consequence of it, a biologization of the political, meaning a re-shaping of the political along the lines of ethnic and tribal identities.5

Recently, there has been a recognition from social liberals like Keir Starmer that the “open borders experiment” was a failure — one which will lead to an “island of strangers” and a collapse in the social democratic institutions of Britain if not corrected. But men like Starmer will not remedy the problem. In their commitment to human rights universalism, Starmer’s Labour government will not even leave the European Convention on Human Rights, a self-imposed restriction which forbids them from even deporting the hundreds of illegal migrants arriving to their shores on boats every day.

As Western societies become increasingly racially diverse and politically fragmented, human rights universalism and pluralism, the underlying ethic of the social liberal consensus, will fade away as groups turn to an honest assertion of their racial and ethnic interest. Whites may be the last group to think in this way on a large scale, but the transition is already happening. After that, the future system that will rule the West, or whether there will be any such system for the whole West again, will be an open question. The future is unclear. What is clear is that the current order, for all its triumphs, rests on a precarious foundation — one that will not withstand the tensions it has itself created.

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Since this was spread across a few days, and went between replies and quotes, it’s a little difficult to follow even for people on X, so I’ve decided to publish the full exchange here for posterity.

I think the reason Yarvin is so defensive of this position — despite his apparent ignorance of the history surrounding the topic — is that he wants to demonstrate some lesson in elite theory about how supposedly organic movements like ethnonationalism always being downstream of some broader geopolitical machinations, making us nationalists destined to be mere pawns of the real power brokers. It’s also worth pointing out that at one point during this debate Yarvin did repost someone calling the Irish “spiritually brown”, which might suggest there is some deeper ethnic resentment at play.

What is interesting is how much you see people in reactionary circles like Yarvin’s repeat the modernist orthodoxies about nationalism which I’ve spent some time picking apart. Both the Marxists who promote this theory in the academy and rightists like Yarvin take it for granted that nationalism must be some kind of synthetic, elite creation to direct the masses for their own material interests. Yarvin demonstrates here that he takes this on faith. As you’ll see, when the historical record doesn’t support it in a case like Ireland, he just insists it must be the case because that’s how it goes.

Yarvin’s initial post came as a reply to this:

Yarvin opines:

Because Irish nationalism has been a cat’s paw of the London left at least since Gladstone got on his high horse about abolishing the Church of Ireland.

“Nationalism” is the easiest way to camouflage international soft power. Look at the Ukraine today. Same thing

Yes, there is much in it that is truly Irish, and real deviations (de Valera) toward genuine independence.

But Irish nationalism is ultimately just the original anticolonialism—and nothing is more colonial than anticolonialism.

Sorry if this comes as a shock to you.

My response:

This is so dumb. With few exceptions, Irish nationalism had no truck with the international left prior to the 1960s. The IRA was collaborating with NS Germany in the 1940s, hardly an expression of the desires of the "London left".

Even Yarvin's example of Gladstone felt forced to make concessions to Ireland because the country was already united behind Charles Stewart Parnell's Home Rule movement – Gladstone believed some concessions were necessary to preserve the Union and quell Irish nationalism.

In other words, it's the complete reverse of what Yarvin is suggesting. But I suppose I shouldn't expect historical accuracy from a guy who concluded last week that he had uncovered a hidden mass genocide in Western Europe based off the vibes he got from a photo.

Yarvin responds with ChatGPT screenshots:

Sorry to ChatGPT you old chap

Yes I’m still hoping Claude will take me back. But reality rapidly setting in:

I’m well aware that there was all kinds of insane based-Irish stuff around WWII. De Valera sending condolences to the Austrian painter etc.

There is always a bunch of real nationalism around. In all periods. But you see how it ends up lol

I respond:

The best Yarvin could come up with in response is asking ChatGPT to agree with him? Curtis, here's what's not included in your screenshot:

• It's clear that Liberal leader Gladstone wanted to make concessions to Ireland because he feared a more militant Irish nationalism emerging otherwise.

• He only supported Home Rule after 1885, when he failed to secure a majority and needed the votes of Parnell's Irish Parliamentary Party.

• He was so strongly opposed within his party that it led to a split and the formation of the Liberal Unionists who chose to enter coalition with the Conservatives rather than allow any concessions to Irish self-rule.

• Parnell's Home Rule movement had become a formidable force politically independent of the British left.

You haven't done anything to prove your point about Irish nationalism being a cat's paw of the London left. Your argument is the equivalent of saying Ukraine giving more self-rule to its eastern provinces after 2014 proves its government supports Russian nationalism.

Yarvin dismisses the split of the Liberal Party over Home Rule as typical “infighting”:

Lol. Was there ever a movement without infighting? You can prove socialism and communism were Mortal Enemies this way.

If you are a leftist in London in the 19th or 20th centuries, you support Irish nationalism. Without this tailwind, the “Irish” cause is unrecognizably weaker.

I respond:

It's not just "infighting" — they actually abandoned Gladstone and changed sides for a coalition with the Conservatives over the Home Rule issue. And the point is those in Westminster making concessions to the Irish cause were doing so tactically, not as an expression of leftism.

You have yet to demonstrate this supposed sympathy in London did anything to stoke the rise in Irish nationalism. Demonstrate your point instead of just repeating it. If you can't do it over text, let's debate this.

Yarvin:

Do you acknowledge that the natural alliance I describe applies to other 19th and 20th century nationalisms? Is the Irish cause unique, or not unique?

Me:

Did leftists often sympathise with nationalisms within their own empires? Sure. Was this significant to the growth or shape of Irish nationalism? Not at all.

Yarvin offers up a way to refute him:

Keith or anyone else has a simple way to refute this: show us 19th-century English libs on the other side of the Irish conflict—supporting the Ascendancy.

Such people perhaps exist. But they’re about as common as Franco supporters in Greenwich Village in 1937.

I refute him:

"show us 19th-century English libs on the other side of the Irish conflict—supporting the Ascendancy".

There was a bunch of prominent ones that were passionate enough about it to create the Liberal Unionist Party.

Per Robert Ensor's History of England: "virtually the whole whig peerage left Gladstone over Home Rule".

London Liberals actually went the hardest against Home Rule -- Gladstone became more reliant on the "Cetlic fringe".

Sounds like the complete opposite of your narrative.

Despite referencing the Liberal Party throughout the debate, Yarvin now says he wasn’t talking about anyone in the Liberal party, but other, unnamed radicals:

Sorry, by “libs” I meant actual shitlibs, not Liberal Unionists, Liberal Imperialists, etc. Radical would be a better word at this time.

There are no living descendants of anything like Chamberlain’s movement. Compare to McKinley in the US

I respond:

Let's rewind, shall we? Your claim was "Irish nationalism has been a cat’s paw of the London left at least since Gladstone got on his high horse about abolishing the Church of Ireland."

Now you say Gladstone Liberals aren't relevant to your argument, just the real radicals who weren't even represented in government?

Sounds like you've already thrown the argument. In any case, what impact on British foreign policy were these anti-Union, anti-Empire English radicals having on British policy in the late 18th century?

Remember that you're supposed to be demonstrating that they were the guiding hand over Irish nationalism. How did this relationship function if they weren't in government?

Yarvin hasn’t responded to this. I don’t know what he could say at this point. He began by arguing liberals stoked Irish nationalism, using examples specifically from the Liberal Party like their leader Gladstone’s policy on the Church of Ireland and their attempts to negotiate Home Rule. Then in his final post, he decided Liberals and the Liberal Party weren’t relevant to his argument, which was actually all about radical leftists. Obviously, it would be very difficult for him to argue these people were somehow stoking Irish nationalism through the British state if they weren’t even represented in government.

I saw a page here named also wrote a response to Yarvin. It includes some important details not included in my posts which I’m sure a lot of my non-Irish audience will be curious about, so I’ll finish with it and encourage you to give him a follow.

Twilight of the Gael:

Curtis Yarvin’s take on Irish nationalism is retarded.

Claiming it was a tool of the “London left” from the time of Gladstone is the kind of contrarian overreach that sounds clever until you check the facts (typical for him).

Gladstone’s disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869 wasn’t a nod to Irish self-determination. It was a calculated imperial reform to shore up the Union by softening Protestant dominance. Irish nationalists — whether militant Fenians or constitutional Home Rulers — weren’t fooled. They didn’t see Gladstone as a fellow traveler. They saw him as the same old problem wearing a liberal mask.

Yarvin also sidesteps the core of Irish nationalism: it was never about aligning with progressive internationalism. It was Catholic, rural, spiritual, and rooted in cultural memory. From the Gaelic Revival to the Easter Rising, the movement was built on the idea of a people with a sacred past and a sovereign destiny. Patrick Pearse, the symbolic heart of 1916, didn’t speak like a liberal reformer — he spoke like a mystic. His writings are steeped in sacrifice, resurrection, and divine national purpose. If anything, he represents a strain of nationalism closer to integralism or proto-fascism than anything resembling the modern left.

De Valera carried that spirit into the state he helped build: Catholic, protectionist, neutral, inward-looking, and fiercely independent of both British and American influence. Say what you like about his Ireland — but globalist it was not.

If Yarvin’s framing were accurate, figures like Seán South wouldn’t exist — and certainly wouldn’t have been celebrated. Killed during the IRA’s Border Campaign in 1957, South was a devout Catholic, a member of the Legion of Mary, and openly anti-Communist. He didn’t die for social reform or class struggle — he died for the Irish nation, its sovereignty, and its faith. Today, South is practically erased from official memory and openly derided by modern progressives as a fascist. In a sense, that’s the point: he’s exactly what Irish nationalism used to look like — militant, moral, unyielding — and exactly what the current order has no place for. His erasure says far more about the present than the past.

Yarvin’s narrative also collapses when you look at the post-1960s republican movement. If Irish nationalism were simply a puppet of international leftism, why were there repeated ideological splits over Marxist infiltration?

The Official IRA drifted into Marxism in the late ’60s and were rejected by a large faction that went on to form the Provisional IRA. That split wasn’t just tactical — it was a rejection of doctrinaire socialism in favour of the traditional nationalist cause. Later breaks, like Republican Sinn Féin’s split from the Adams camp, followed the same logic: a refusal to surrender national principle in exchange for American respectability and globalist alignment.

These weren’t fringe squabbles. They were battles for the soul of the movement — and they make one thing clear: Irish nationalism, at its core, was never aligned with the global left. It resisted both imperialism and ideological subversion.

If today’s Sinn Féin embraces neoliberalism, identity politics, and progressive orthodoxy, that reflects a rupture, not a continuity. The original movement would find them unrecognisable — and unforgivable.

Yarvin’s worldview insists every rebellion is theatre, every resistance co-opted. But Ireland doesn’t fit the script. Its nationalism wasn’t managed, mimicked, or manufactured — it was real, and it was dangerous.

If this is the man whispering in the ears of Silicon Valley’s would-be monarchs — if this smug, historically illiterate nonsense is what passes for intellectual leadership on the so-called “right“— then we’re already fucked.

Thanks for reading. If you want to learn more about the Home Rule movement and Irish nationalism, be sure to pick up a copy of Irish Nationalism: Essential Writings!

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Human settlement in Ireland began around 8000 BC, during the Mesolithic period, after the retreat of Ice Age glaciers. Archaeological evidence indicates that small groups of hunter-gatherers arrived by sea from Britain or western Europe. These early inhabitants relied on fishing, hunting, and gathering, establishing temporary camps that left little impact on the archaeological record. Their population remained small, limited by the resources available on the small island, until the Neolithic period introduced significant change.

By 4000 BC, farming communities from Britain and Europe arrived, replacing or blending with earlier hunter-gatherers. Coming to Ireland from Britain and continental Europe, these settlers brought domesticated animals, cereal crops, and pottery. They constructed megalithic structures, including Ireland’s iconic passage tombs like Newgrange and Knowth in the Boyne Valley, proof of complex ritual practices and organised societies. This migration established Ireland’s first substantial population base, laying the groundwork for later demographic shifts.

The Bronze Age, beginning around 2500 BC, saw another major population movement associated with the Bell Beaker culture, which most likely took the form of a violent invasion. Named for their distinctive bell-shaped pottery vessels, Bell Beaker folk likely originated in the modern day Low Countries. As well as their distinctive pottery, they brought with them advanced metalworking and mining techniques, leaving traces like the copper mines at Mount Gabriel in County Cork. Their impact is perhaps most striking in their burial practices, seen at Tara, where single inhumations replaced earlier traditions. At this sacred site, archaeologists have uncovered individual graves containing bodies carefully interred with grave goods like pots and jewellery, signalling a new reverence for personal status and the afterlife. This kind of burial practice is a marker of Indo-European peoples, and the Bell Beaker culture was one successor to the so-called “Yamnaya culture” of the early Proto-Indo-Europeans. Genetic studies show a significant influx of new Steppe-related DNA entering Ireland during this period, reflective of a transformative migration of Indo-European people.

This new population wave, peaking around 2400 BC, coincides with a near-complete replacement of the earlier Neolithic gene pool in Ireland, suggesting that this ancient invasion almost completely displaced the prior Neolithic populations, who were likely no match for the expansive Bronze Age warriors. The Bell Beaker arrival totally reshaped Ireland’s population and material culture, and provided the genetic stock of the island that has changed little since, isolated from other major population movements on the continent. This population transformation also brought an expansion of trade networks, connecting Ireland to a wider Bronze Age culture in Britain and the continent.

It is with the Iron Age, starting around 600 BC, that we see the introduction of Celtic culture to Ireland, evident in the spread of La Tène-style artifacts such as iron tools and hillforts.

It was once believed this cultural shift was brought by a Celtic invasion of Ireland, but we now know there was in fact a very stable continuity with earlier Bronze Age populations, showing little sign of a major new influx. Instead, it seems Ireland’s native inhabitants adopted Celtic language and practices through cultural diffusion, likely coming via elites who encountered Celtic culture through trade and contact with Celtic-speaking regions in Britain. It was in this period that the Irish Gaelic language emerged as dominant, giving the island’s inhabitants a more distinct cultural identity. Ireland had always been divided politically, with sovereignty fragmented among many local chieftains governing small kingdoms or túatha. Yet by the Iron Age there was a distinct people and language in Ireland that would change little up to the modern period.

The adoption of Celtic culture was one major part of the creation of what is distinctively Irish culture, another was the arrival of Christianity in the fifth century AD. St. Patrick, a British-born missionary, is responsible for this conversion from paganism. Patrick, captured as a slave in Ireland before returning as a missionary, established churches and converted local leaders, achieving a full scale religious conversion of the island. The shift integrated Ireland into the wider Christian world, yet also reinforced its cultural distinctiveness, for unlike in Roman Britain, Christianity in Ireland blended much more with existing customs to create a distinctive Celtic Christianity. Monasteries adopted a decentralised structure that mirrored the túatha system. St. Patrick was revered in Irish tradition not just as a propagator of the Gospel, but also as a legitimiser of native traditions he deemed compatible with Christianity, blessing the pre-Christian Brehon Law of Ireland. In the centuries that followed, monastic hubs like Clonmacnoise became beacons of Gaelic learning, blending local traditions with Latin scholarship and helping cement a cultural cohesion around Irish identity.

During the early Middle Ages, these monasteries became renowned centers of scholarship not just in Ireland, but across the Christian world, attracting students and scholars from all over Europe and establishing Ireland as a pivotal center of education in the Latin world. Their emphasis on manuscript illumination and the preservation of classical texts helped sustain and spread knowledge during a time when most of the rest of the continent faced cultural decline. But for Ireland it was a golden age culturally, in which it earned the affectionate title of ‘the land of saints and scholars’, and in which Irish monks produced some of the finest artefacts of medieval Christian art in the form of high crosses and illustrative manuscripts like the renowned Book of Kells.

Politically, Ireland remained fragmented, but the concept of the High King (Ard Rí) reflects an early sense of an Irish political unity. Dating back to at least the fifth century, the High King was a ceremonial overlord, claiming authority over regional kings from the sacred site of Tara. Medieval Irish literature portrayed an unbroken line of High Kings ruling Ireland from the Hill of Tara that stretched back thousands of years. In practice, this title was contested, with rival dynasties like the Uí Néill in the north and the Eóganachta in the south vying for dominance. The Annals of Ulster and other texts record these struggles, showing that while the High King lacked centralised power, the existence of the position symbolised a shared aspiration for unity. Although this is something quite distinct from modern idea of nationalism, it does indicate a recognition of Ireland as a single entity, even if this was always tenuous politically.

Beginning in the late eighth century, Ireland became a center of the Viking Age. Norse raids began targeting Ireland’s rich monasteries and other settllements, before Vikings established permanent settlements like Dublin, Wexford, and Waterford by the ninth century. These coastal enclaves introduced trade and urbanism, linking Ireland to existing Scandinavian networks. The Vikings came as hostile invaders, but over time they often assimilated, adopting the native language and intermarrying with the native population. The Norse presence also intensified regional conflicts, as local kings often chose to ally with them over their regional enemies.

The tenth and eleventh centuries saw efforts to assert greater political control over all of Ireland, exemplified in the rise of Brian Boru. A member of the Dál Cais dynasty from Munster, Brian challenged Uí Néill dominance, consolidating power through military campaigns and alliances. In 1002 AD, Brian claimed the High Kingship of Ireland. Inspired by Julius Caesar, he styled himself Imperator Scottorum: Emperor of the Irish. His victory at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014 AD against a combined Viking and Leinster force cemented his legacy, though he was killed in the battle. Brian’s death fragmented his coalition, and no successor ever matched his scope. But his reign did mark a symbolic peak in the idea of Irish unity, drawing on Gaelic traditions and Christian legitimacy to project a proto-national vision, even if it remained yet unrealised.

Norman rule in Ireland began in 1169, initiated by the invitation of Diarmait Mac Murchada, King of Leinster. Led by Richard de Clare (Strongbow), the Normans brought their distinctive feudalism, today most visible in the many Norman castles dotted around Ireland. Initially allies of local rulers, they soon established lordships, particularly in Leinster. As with the Norse invasions, over time many Anglo-Normans assimilated, adopting Gaelic customs and language and marrying into the native population. "More Irish than the Irish themselves" (Níos Gaelaí ná na Gaeil féin) was a phrase that became common in Irish historiography to describe this common trend of assimilation. The English Crown, alarmed by the trend, imposed the Statutes of Kilkenny in 1366 which banned settlers from speaking Irish or marrying natives. However, the statutes had little impact, and the Hiberno-Normans continued to assimilate to the dominant Irish cultural identity. Outside of The English Pale, an area encompassing modern Dublin and surrounding areas, Gaelic and Norman-Irish lords retained a great deal of autonomy from the British crown. This period solidified a dual identity: a native Irish core, now Christian and Irish-speaking, alongside a partially integrated foreign elite.

The sixteenth century marked a turning point with the Tudor conquest, as England sought to impose centralised authority over all of Ireland. Henry VIII declared himself King of Ireland in 1541, introducing the “surrender and regrant” policy, which required Gaelic lords to submit to English rule in exchange for retaining their lands under feudal titles. Many complied formally but preserved traditional practices, limiting the policy’s effectiveness and still frustrating the British Crown’s desire to fully entrench British rule over Ireland. The Reformation, initiated by Henry and enforced under Elizabeth I, only deepened divisions. Most Irish rejected Protestantism, in large part because of its association with English dominance, meaning that Catholicism emerged as a marker of resistance and became more central to Irish identity.

The persecution of Catholicism also forced closer alliances between many of the “Old English” who had maintained their Catholic faith, and now felt greater affinity with their Irish neighbours. Better educated than the native Irish, many became great opponents of the reconquests of Ireland from the Tudor era on. One example is the historian Geoffrey Keating, born to a Gaelicised Old English family in Tipperary in 1580. Keating was termed ‘the Herodotus of Ireland’ for gathering old Irish manuscripts and oral traditions and ordering and archiving them to safeguard their existence from the collapse of the old Gaelic tradition. The culmination of this project was his major work, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (The History of Ireland), which became widely popular among the educated in Ireland and led to a stronger sense of a shared national identity.

Elizabeth I’s reign saw military efforts to suppress opposition, including the Desmond Rebellions (1569–1583) and the Nine Years’ War (1594–1603). The latter, led by Irish lords Hugh O’Neill and Hugh Roe O’Donnell, was a serious blow at English power in Ireland. The Irish confederacy drew in thousands of fighters, captured most of the island, secured a string of military victories, and secured military aid from Catholic Spain. However, the English secured a vital victory at the battle of Kinsale in 1601, turning the course of the war. The Flight of the Earls in 1607, when O’Neill and other leaders fled to Europe (after news of another planned rebellion reached British authorities) signalled the final collapse of the political order of Gaelic Ireland. The Plantation of Ulster followed, beginning in 1609, with land confiscated from Catholic owners and granted to Protestant settlers from England and Scotland.

The seventeenth century further solidified English control. In response to ongoing land dispossession by an increasingly aggressive Protestant regime, the 1641 Rebellion saw Gaelic Irish and Old English Catholics unite against the encroaching Protestant settlers. The Catholic rebels managed to seize two thirds of the country, with Royalist forces only holding Dublin, Cork and surrounding areas, with some Protestant militias holding parts of Ulster. Out of the captured territory, the rebels formed the Irish Catholic Confederation, with its government based out of Kilkenny. Irish self-government over so much of the territory of Ireland, and reports of atrocities committed against Protestant settlers, prompted a severe response in the form of Oliver Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland, beginning in 1649.

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The result of Cromwell’s brutal campaigns was a demographic shock — as much as 20% of the Irish population died in this period to war, famine and plague — and a drastic reduction in Catholic land ownership to the benefit of Protestant settlers. The Penal Laws, introduced after the Williamite War (1689–1691), restricted Catholics and non-Anglican Protestants from political participation, landownership, and education. These measures established the Protestant Ascendancy, a minority ruling class aligned with Britain, which generated widespread and longstanding discontent among the excluded population. By this stage, Irish identity began to reflect more a shared experience of subordination and resistance, as the many failed attempts of the native Irish to break the English yoke creating, through generations, a romantic canon of Irish nationalist struggle.

In the eighteenth century, Ireland functioned as a subordinate kingdom within the British system, governed by a Dublin Parliament that served the Ascendancy’s interests. Economic policies restricted trade, and the Penal Laws continued to marginalise Catholics and Presbyterian Dissenters. The native Irish, reduced to tenant farmers, faced growing hardship, while the Old English Catholic gentry had also lost influence. In Ulster, Presbyterians, though Protestant, encountered discrimination from the Anglican establishment, fostering resentment. The Enlightenment brought ideas of popular sovereignty and individual liberty to the educated in Ireland, as well as a spirit of revolutionary zeal, influencing young idealists in urban centers like Dublin and Belfast. The American Revolution’s success in removing British rule further inspired Irish nationalists. The Irish Volunteers, formed in 1778 as a militia, became a political force, securing the Constitution of 1782, which increased parliamentary autonomy. However, this body remained under British control and excluded non-Anglicans, failing to address broader grievances.

The Society of United Irishmen, founded in 1791 in Belfast by figures like Theobald Wolfe Tone, emerged in this environment. The group drew on French Revolutionary ideals, but initially sought peaceful parliamentary reform, including an expansion of the vote and Catholic emancipation. It aimed to unite Ireland’s religious communities under a shared national struggle against British rule. It was here that the Irish national struggle became wedded to the ideals of Republicanism, a political ideal under which the country would eventually unite for its national independence struggle in the 20th century. But this was just the political form — by this time, there was a clearly distinct Irish people, culture and identity with roots stretching back to the ancient world.

From the hunter-gatherers who first tread its shores to the Gaelic-speaking Christians who resisted centuries of conquest, Ireland’s story is one of resilience. Across millennia, waves of migration, cultural diffusion and differentiation, foreign incursion and resistance forged a unique people with a rich culture. The Tudor conquest and subsequent English domination hardened this identity, binding it to Catholicism and a romantic yearning for the ideal of an Ireland both Gaelic and free. The eighteenth and nineteenth century’s revolutionary fervour crystallised these threads into a more distinctly modern nationalist vision which, carried by the bravery and sacrifice of one of Ireland’s most heroic generations, would achieve the victories that began the end of British rule in Ireland.

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