This led to me taking a greater interest in some of Mann’s less acclaimed works, finally viewing his 2006 Miami Vice. As it happened, I watched this film almost to the day of the 20th anniversary of its release, which gave me extra pause for reflection on a movie that now seems like one of the greatest time capsules of the early 2000s.

I should make it clear: Miami Vice is nowhere near Mann’s best film. The film never really develops emotional stakes and we’re not given much to explore beneath the brooding central characters; much of the early dialogue and plot borders on unintelligible. Once the story does become clear, it turns out to be fairly conventional Hollywood territory: two undercover police officers infiltrate a drug cartel, become entangled with criminals, and watch their operation go wrong.

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The reception was especially frosty because Mann basically disappointed everyone expecting a summer blockbuster action flick by delivering a two-hour experimental mood piece. On top of that, it was a reboot of a beloved television franchise that presented a much glitzier, more romantic picture of Miami. And yet, the film has undergone a reappraisal in recent years and now enjoys a small cult following, and a fortnight after viewing it I am still thinking of the mood Mann captured. So what is it that’s captivating?

Firstly, Miami Vice is saturated with 2006. Mann intentionally broke with audience expectations of a nostalgic reboot of the 1980s television show and tried to make something blisteringly modern. In 2006, that looked like speedboats, BlackBerrys and flip phones, glass towers, nightclubs, and surveillance technology.

The technology serves another function: it makes you feel like you’re dropped in a world of globalised movement. Characters move between cities seamlessly by air and sea, and Miami itself feels like a node connecting America, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Then there is Mann’s use of digital cinematography. Miami Vice is shot overwhelmingly with HD digital cameras. In 2006, this was still unusual. Most major Hollywood films were shot on 35mm, while digital was often used only in parts or made to look like film.

Where conventional cinematography often isolates a subject by throwing the background out of focus, Mann deliberately exploited the enormous depth of field offered by his HD cameras. He pushed his digital cameras to their technical limits in low-light conditions, which has the effect of producing a kind of digital noise in the background of scenes. The characters are never really separated cleanly from the world around them, meaning the colours and texture of environment communicates far more of the mood than it does in other films.

The environment itself is in constant movement, giving the film a persistent sense of instability: a world of speed, unstable identities and technological mediation. Beneath the digital haze is a theme that recurs throughout Mann’s work — the contrast between the extraordinary order of technological modernity and the isolation of the individual within it. Heat is built around the same tension.

Mann’s films show highly organised infrastructure networks and technical efficiency. Los Angeles and Miami both present the cutting edge of modernity. The characters in Heat and Miami Vice are highly specialised in their fields, but also lonely and alienated. In Heat, Neil McCauley’s rule that he must be willing to walk away from anything in thirty seconds reflects his own professional mastery and a philosophy of absolute rootlessness.

What’s interesting about Mann, though, is that he does not present this world as cruel or ugly to make this point. He finds immense beauty in this contrast.

The right tends to look for beauty in conventional sources and styles. Yet depictions of modern or futuristic urban settings like Blade Runner and Drive have been a great source of aesthetic inspiration for the new right. At first glance this seems counter-intuitive. Technology and urban development are typically ugly impositions on natural beauty. Modern cities, especially, are overwhelmingly composed of instrumental structures: roads, office towers, car parks, airports, power lines, warehouses and anonymous apartment blocks. All of these exist as a means to other ends, and none are primarily designed to be beautiful.

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But there is nothing contradictory about this also being beautiful. A Platonic conception of beauty sees it as a recognition of order and proportion; beauty reminds us of the underlying intelligibility of reality. Iris Murdoch, working in a Platonic tradition, described the experience of beauty as a form of ‘unselfing’, an experience that draws us out of our own ego and directs attention toward something real and independent of us. Mann makes urban environments beautiful by taking in their full scale and giving a rhythm and order to technological functioning that makes the individual feel insignificant. That insignificance is alienating, but it is also beautiful in its unselfing. An airport runway at night, a bridge, or a city skyline can confront us with a world that far exceeds our private concerns. The experience is alienating, but there is something strangely liberating in having our own concerns reduced to their proper scale.

Mann’s films often give the very impersonality of instrumental order an aesthetic grandeur. Something as simple as a lit runway, the setting of Heat’s climactic scene, can become beautiful using exactly what makes it impersonal and alienating. At a glance, we see immense scale and technical coordination, the rhythmic order of airline traffic carrying innumerable other personal stories, and the drama of McCauley and Hanna illuminated by the purely functional artificial lights of the runway.

At their best, Mann’s films approach a kind of technological sublime.

Roger Scruton described the sublime as a “vista which invites another kind of judgment, in which we measure ourselves against the awesome infinity of the world, and become conscious of our finitude and frailty.”

The traditional sublime emerges from confronting something so vast or powerful that the individual feels diminished before it. Edmund Burke described this as something like an overwhelming sense of impersonal power, using examples like dark forests, dangerous animals, and most clearly of all, the ocean: “the ocean is an object of no small terror. Indeed terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime.”

Interestingly, many of the most iconic shots from Mann’s films feature characters brooding over the ocean.

But what makes Mann interesting is that he finds a similar sensation in the systems we have built ourselves. The modern city is beautiful because it dwarfs the people who inhabit it. It is therefore the perfect setting for drama involving alienation and belonging.

Mann’s technological sublime is most powerful when placed beside the natural sublime. Miami Vice repeatedly combines modern infrastructure with elemental nature: speedboats against open ocean, artificial light reflected on black water, lightning against the skyline. Human drama is made to appear smaller by being suspended between two immense and indifferent systems: the natural world and the technological one. Perhaps this is part of why technological modernity appears so beautiful in Mann’s films. For all its scale and sophistication, it too is diminished when set against the indifference of nature.

These themes are present in Heat, but there is another reason Miami Vice feels evocative twenty years later. Mann presented a forward-looking vision of technological modernity that very quickly came to seem dated. It is a vision of an incoming digital age that is still overwhelmingly physical. Technology creates a globalised world, but it still exists mainly to assist people moving through the world. The characters are constantly driving, flying, crossing water, entering nightclubs. Phones and surveillance technology are used to bolster their work and arrange for in person meetings.

This now feels like a very specific historical moment. All the foundational technology of our era is there, but it’s a time before the smartphone and social media age totally overturned social dynamics and made permanent online presences a feature of life. Miami Vice is a time capsule of 2006, but also of a more optimistic vision of the future that was to come. Technology still seemed to promise a larger world rather than a retreat from it.

That gives the film an innocence it could not have possessed at the time. In embracing everything contemporary, Mann unknowingly captured a brief transitional phase of the digital age that was about to disappear. Facebook opened to the general public just two months after the film’s release; the first iPhone arrived in June 2007; and a year after that came a major financial crisis that punctured much of the confidence and glamour associated with that pre-crash moment.

It’s also worth mentioning that the music choices here are essential. In Heat, Moby’s “God Moving Over the Face of the Waters” gives the final runway scene an almost spiritual quality, turning a cold and purely functional space into something mournful and transcendent.

Miami Vice’s signature music does something very different stylistically. The film opens in the midst of a nightclub scene with “Numb/Encore” playing.

This feels like a quintessentially early-2000s song: a Jay-Z and Linkin Park rap-rock crossover, from a period when collaborations like that were all the rage. Even the specific pairing now feels oddly historically specific. After all, what’s a more early-2000s band than Linkin Park? What’s a more early-2000s rapper than Jay-Z?

But the song also perfectly captures the emotional contradiction at the heart of Mann’s modernity. It was cool, sleek and aggressively contemporary, yet the vocals express a mood of exhaustion and longing. It is, after all, literally called “Numb”: beneath the swagger and wealth is a song about emotional deadness and the desire to escape an imposed identity. That tension fits Mann, and Miami Vice, perfectly. The characters have wealth and access to almost anything, yet seem chronically longing. The music captures that contradiction: all the glamour and momentum of modern life, with a persistent sense of numbness underneath.

Perhaps this is ultimately why Miami Vice has stayed with me, and why it is now undergoing a positive re-evaluation from a new audience, despite its obvious weaknesses. Mann did not try to make a timeless film. Instead, he made the bolder choice of surrendering completely to his own moment and to its assumptions about what the future would look like. Twenty years later, that commitment to the contemporary has made the film more evocative than less, and what once looked aggressively modern now feels strangely quaint. This adds a temporal layer to the experience of unselfing: looking back at Mann’s Miami, we feel not only small against the city and the sea, but small against time.

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I must start this review with a disclaimer. I remain under an official Thargelia from the Apolloist movement by decree of Mark Brahmin, and the following words are the product of a pharmakos mind. Apolloists reading may wish to end the review here.

Losing My Religion

Richard Spencer and Mark Brahmin’s Myth to Power is the long-awaited systematic presentation of their theory of Racial Esoteric Moralization, or REM. This would be the first book Richard Spencer authored or co-authored, though it appears the bulk of the material is essays Brahmin has published on his Apollonian Transmission blog over the past decade.

The theory begins with a simple proposition: people imitate what they admire. From there it rapidly expands into something much more ambitious. Stories are said to establish ideals of conduct and attraction, those ideals influence mating, and mating shapes the population. “Myth and ethos direct breeding.” The artist therefore becomes, in effect, a racial engineer.

The book aims to use the power of REM to uncover a hidden system through which Jewish and “proto-Jewish” priests, artists and storytellers have consciously shaped populations for thousands of years, ultimately even directing their biological development. The reader learns that what we ordinarily separate into religion, myth, propaganda and entertainment is actually one continuous technology of racially conscious social engineering.

The foundational example is Genesis 30. Jacob places striped branches before Laban’s sheep while they mate, after which they produce streaked and speckled offspring. Spencer and Brahmin take this story to be an allegory of cultural control over reproduction. Since Laban’s name means “white,” they identify his flock with a white population, the speckled animals with racial mixture, and the branches placed before the sheep with the cultural environment shaping human mating. “Whatever holds the attention and forms the cultural milieu,” they conclude, “governs human behavior and breeding.”

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These meanings are produced by the authors moving from the meaning of Laban’s name, to the familiar metaphor of humans as sheep, to the assumption that variation in coat colour represents human racial difference, and finally to the claim that what the sheep see represents the cultural environment. By the end of the chain, an ancient story about Jacob manipulating livestock has become evidence that its authors possessed a theory of mass media, sexual selection and racial engineering. Even the most basic step is already extremely questionable: that an ancient Hebrew author would associate the colour white with a European racial classification.

This interpretation supplies the template for the entire book (it was also the subject of a debate between Mark Brahmin and Jay Dyer, which I encourage readers to listen to, because it’s one of the funniest ever pieces of internet history). REM is divided into JEM, Jewish Esoteric Moralization, and AIM, Aryan Inner Moralization. JEM supposedly consists of myths and symbols designed to advance Jewish or “Proto-Jewish” interests; AIM is the rival system the authors want to construct for Aryans. The practical purpose of the project is to lay a foundation so that works that “have an AIM” may be developed and eventually treated as sacred. Myth to Power is therefore both an attempt to decode an alleged propaganda system and a manifesto for building another one. Volume 1 focuses on the first part of the project.

Trying to start their own religion online requires Spencer and Brahmin to take a very strong position on the origins of religion itself. They dismiss as “absurd” the idea that the Greeks and Romans were genuinely superstitious and argue that their educated elites understood the gods essentially as myths and concepts rather than real beings. “The first man to speak the name of these gods,” they claim, must have understood the deity as his own invention. This is doing enormous work for REM. If important gods and myths were consciously invented from the beginning, then ancient religion can plausibly be treated as deliberate social technology. But no evidence is presented for even one instance of this. The authors are simply projecting their own modern rationalist incredulity backwards when they insist that intelligent ancient peoples could not sincerely have been “superstitious.” The conscious engineering of ancient religion is crucial to the entire thesis of the book, yet it is simply assumed at the outset and then used as the basis for interpreting particular myths.

But there is little in the historical record to support this imagined divide between educated, rationalist elites and superstitious commoners. Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, one of the great encyclopaedic works of Roman learning, records remedies such as stopping hiccups by touching a mule’s nostrils with one’s lips; Plutarch reports that the great toe of Pyrrhus possessed healing powers and miraculously survived his cremation. Spencer and Brahmin contrast the supposedly sober educated elite with the superstition of the masses, yet beliefs of this kind permeate the works of antiquity’s most learned authors. Livy records the Senate ordering sacrifices and public prayers after reports of prodigies including a speaking ox, a two-headed pig and a sweating altar. Perhaps I will be accused of missing the AIM in these stories, but it seems to me that the ancients were perfectly capable of extraordinary intelligence and extraordinary superstition at the same time.

Another major difficulty is that “Proto-Jewish” is defined so loosely that it can absorb vast stretches of ancient civilisation. Spencer and Brahmin use the term for an alleged myth-bearing priestly class, present since Sumer, whose cults and symbols eventually developed into Judaism through a “continuity of initiates.” These Proto-Jews need not even have been ethnically Semitic;. The category can encompass the cultural elites of any society the authors place within the relevant symbolic tradition. This allows them to find Proto-Jews among groups like the Etruscans, Spartans and Zoroastrian Magi, and in cults stretching from Sumer and Egypt to the Greco-Roman world. Vulcan, Bacchus, Mercury, Saturn and Pluto are all folded into the same genealogy, which supposedly survives through Judaism and Christianity before reappearing in modern popular culture.

As good Nietzscheans, the authors have a particular bone to pick with Plato and Socrates. Plato’s doctrine of the immortal soul, they argue, was “in no way Aryan,” but was instead drawn from “chthonic, Proto-Jewish Mystery and personal-salvation cults.” Elsewhere they simply refer to him as “the proto-Jewish Plato.” The Orphic and Pythagorean traditions that influenced him are thereby incorporated into the same esoteric lineage that eventually produces Judaism and Christianity. Here, as with much else in the book, the reasoning is largely circular. Bacchus is classified as Proto-Jewish, so Orphism becomes Proto-Jewish because it centres on Bacchus. Pythagoreanism is Proto-Jewish because it inherits Orphic ideas, and so Plato is Proto-Jewish because he inherits Pythagorean ones.

This demonstrates a broader problem with Myth to Power: the book repeatedly moves from evidence of influence or resemblance to much stronger claims about the identity and intentions of those responsible for it. That stories influence people, symbols recur and artists borrow from earlier traditions is obvious enough. But these observations are repeatedly made to support claims of extraordinary historical specificity: similarities become evidence of a particular line of transmission, and transmission is then taken to imply participation in a single esoteric programme serving a racial strategy. At every stage, the claim becomes more extraordinary while the standard of evidence gets weaker.

So how can REM distinguish a real esoteric pattern from one generated by the interpreter? The book’s answer is that you will know it in your heart if your interpretation is correct, because successfully decoding REM gives one the feeling of solving a riddle:

REM carries with it plausible deniability. Indeed, the living Jewish artists whose work we explore in this study would likely vigorously deny almost all of our interpretations, if ever they were presented to them. Yet the reader will find our interpretations accurate and corroborated. Indeed, the sensation of solving REM messaging is often like the sensation of solving a riddle. One knows immediately that one is correct and not 'reaching.'

At this point, we’ve reached Candace Owens epistemology: the authors don’t know know, but they know.

The End of Critical History as We Know It

The book’s treatment of the Irish Túatha Dé Danann provides the best example of the flaws of REM once it is applied to an actual body of mythology. The argument begins with a genuine feature of the surviving Irish material: much of it was recorded by Christian monks, and biblical genealogies were sometimes grafted onto native traditions. From this uncontroversial observation, Spencer and Brahmin proceed towards the possibility that some of Ireland’s most famous pagan gods are actually representations of Jews.

The first clue is the name. Túatha Dé Danann is normally rendered as the people or tribe of the goddess Danu. The authors argue it is more likely “Danann” is connected with the biblical Tribe of Dan. The evidence for this is the similarity of “Danann” and “Dan.” This becomes more suggestive because Dan is described in Genesis as “a serpent in the way, a viper by the path,” and the book has already claimed the serpent as an established Proto-Jewish symbol. Thus, Dan becomes a “Crypto-Jewish archetype” associated with concealment and striking from behind. At this point even characters called Dan, Danny or Dani in The Shining, The Karate Kid and Midsommar are identified as Jewish-coded.

The authors regard an older Irish term as even more decisive. Túath Dé, which could mean “tribe of the gods” or “tribe of God,” was used in medieval Irish writing both for the pagan divine race and for the Israelites. From this linguistic overlap they ask whether Túatha Dé Danann might actually be a literary reference to the Israelite Tribe of Dan. Eventually the authors are prepared to ask whether modern Celtic neopagans might unknowingly be “worshiping Jews—albeit through an esoteric text.”

We then get a list of other apparent connections. The Túatha Dé Danann arrive in Ireland amid mist and are repeatedly associated with fog and magical clouds. Yahweh also appears in clouds in the Hebrew Bible, so the mist is likely another indication of their Jewish identity. Their four legendary cities and four magical treasures can be related to the four elements, Platonic-Pythagorean symbolism and ultimately the four camps into which the tribes of Israel are arranged in Numbers. Within REM, even having four of something can become evidence of a biblical Jewish genealogy.

None of these individual examples is particularly convincing and there is no argument provided to connect them other than resemblance. Danann resembles Dan; Dan is a serpent; serpents are already Proto-Jewish; Túath Dé can mean “tribe of God”; the same expression was used for Israelites; the supernatural race lives amid clouds; Yahweh appears in clouds. Each association supposedly reinforces the others, even though none establishes that the medieval authors intended the identification in the first place.

Spencer and Brahmin then ask how this alleged Jewish material reached Ireland. One possibility is transmission by Phoenician traders in the Bronze Age. Another is Pythagorean influence upon the Druids, with Pythagoreanism itself having already been classified as Proto-Jewish. A third, which they call the most compelling, is that Celtic mythology was substantially created by crypto-Jewish pagan bards and Christian monks practising JEM. The Druids themselves may even have contained crypto-Jews or have constituted a “consciously Jewish-formed sect.” Crucially, we are told that these possibilities do not exclude one another.

The same move is then applied to Norse mythology: because much of the surviving material was recorded by Christian writers, Christian influence is expanded into a theory of crypto-Jewish authorship. The authors accordingly classify Odinism among the same suspect religious traditions and suggest that the “pith” of Norse mythology may itself be Christian or crypto-Jewish.

Here the argument runs into a more basic historical problem. Spencer and Brahmin repeatedly lean on the fact that the surviving Eddas were written down by Christian authors in the thirteenth century. But the date of a surviving manuscript is not the date at which the traditions it records were invented, which the authors immediately concede when they write that the poetic Edda drew "upon older works from the tenth."

There is of course evidence for Germanic religion centuries before it was documented by Christian writers, including Tacitus’ much earlier descriptions of Germanic cults. Again, as with the Túatha story, it is hardly controversial to conclude that Christian monks reshaped pagan material, but that does not license the massive jump Spencer and Brahmin take to claiming they created its underlying mythology as a crypto-Jewish system of racial manipulation.

The bizarre logic of the method should now be apparent. Ordinarily, rival historical hypotheses are supposed to compete: evidence that strengthens one route of transmission may weaken another. Here, every possible route expands the theory. If the symbols entered Celtic mythology in antiquity, Proto-Jewish Pythagoreans may have transmitted them. If they entered much later, crypto-Jewish monks may have inserted them. If neither can be demonstrated, Phoenician transmission remains available. The authors never have to establish who transmitted a myth or what their intention was, because transmission can be inferred from the symbols themselves. By the end of the exercise, an uncertain etymology and the mundane fact that Norse texts were preserved by Christians have become grounds for hypothesising millennia-long Jewish esoteric influence on Irish and Norse mythology. Phoenicians, Pythagoreans, crypto-Jewish Druids and Christian monks can all perform the same explanatory function. The same method becomes considerably more entertaining when applied to modern popular culture.

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Shiny Happy Gentiles

Once the method has been established, the examples hardly need much commentary. The authors machine-gun the reader with cases of JEM in modern cinema.

We are told that Spider-Man’s enemies the Osborns “plainly” refer to the 19th-century eugenicist Henry Fairfield Osborn, whose birth year they get wrong by 18 years. The entirety of the evidence for this is the shared surname.

Spider-Man’s Aunt May “appears to be a reference” to Maia, the mother of Mercury.

Ant-Man is Hank Pym. A pym, the authors inform us, is an ancient unit of wealth worth two-thirds of a shekel. Here they are more modest in only speculating that an esoteric allusion to a Jewish currency denomination is the basis for the character’s name.

More confidently asserted is that Ant-Man’s Jewish partner transforms into the Wasp to fit into WASP (GET IT??) society:

Stan Lee’s 'Ant-man,' too, must don a helmet to shrink to an undetectable size and doubtlessly this parable deals with themes of crypsis as well. His consort, 'the Wasp,' who appears coded a Jewess with a Gentile father and surname, literally becomes a WASP to fit in.

Spider-Man villain Kraven the Hunter is “almost certainly” Nimrod, because Nimrod was also a “mighty hunter.” His Russianness may additionally be an ethnic attack on Russians as “not quite” European.

Daredevil’s law partner Foggy Nelson is Yahweh. “Foggy” evokes fog, fog evokes clouds, and Yahweh repeatedly appears in clouds in the Hebrew Bible. Nelson is then rendered as “Son of Cloud.” Foggy/Yahweh controls the Christian Daredevil, whose blindness is a representation of Gentile obliviousness.

Stan Lee seems to present 'Daredevil’s' senior law partner, 'Foggy' Nelson ('Son of Cloud'), as a Yahweh figure, implicitly directing and controlling the blind, Christian, Gentile-coded Daredevil. Here, his blindness doubtlessly refers to a 'spiritual blindness' or Gentile obliviousness.

John Connor’s initials are JC, making him Jesus Christ. Sarah Connor is Mary. Kyle Reese is Yahweh or Gabriel. Schwarzenegger‘s Austrian heritage completes the puzzle: he is literally Hitler. The film is therefore “the battle between Jesus and Hitler for the future of the world!”

Interestingly, the robot of the first film, the T-800 Model, is played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Why would a ruthless AI create an 'infiltration unit' with such a conspicuously Austrian accent? Whether intentional or not, the casting decision sets up the central conflict of the film—the battle between Jesus and Hitler for the future of the world!

Why is the artificial intelligence called Skynet? Because “sky” evokes the Proto-Indo-European Sky Father. The Schwarzenegger Terminators then resemble muscular Olympian gods. Their glowing red eyes may refer to HAL 9000, whose eye may itself represent the sun.

Once again, there is an awkward problem with this interpretation that can be discovered by a Google search. James Cameron originally conceived the Terminator as a physically nondescript infiltration unit who could disappear into a crowd, a conception that was later revived with Robert Patrick’s T-1000 in Terminator 2. The not-so-Aryan O.J. Simpson was originally the first choice for the role of the Terminator, with Cameron and the studio actually earmarking Schwarzenegger for the role of Kyle Reese.

During their meeting, however, Schwarzenegger gave Cameron such a meticulous account of how a machine assassin should move that Cameron became convinced he should play the Terminator instead. The supposedly meaningful Austrian superman at the centre of the REM interpretation was therefore not part of the character’s original conception at all, but the contingent result of a casting decision. I wonder if Schwarzenegger’s turn to protagonist in the sequels reflects James Cameron’s later embrace of AIM.

We continue. In The Empire Strikes Back, Luke Skywalker loses his hand. This is “not simply a metaphor of castration,” but may also signify his sexual defeat by the “possibly Semitic” Han Solo in their competition for Leia. Leia can then become Luke’s “racial sister,” while Han is compared with Orion competing for Diana.

Daenerys Targaryen has dragons. Dragons have already been placed within the Semitic symbolic system alongside serpents, Satan and Bacchus. She is therefore Jewish-coded, despite looking rather inconveniently Aryan. But wait! Though she may look Aryan, her hair is not merely silver, but “lunar silver.”

The modern Aryan scarcely bats an eye when she emerges as the heroine. 'Neat,' he thinks. 'And look how blonde an Aryan she is!' Yet her symbols, as well as her fugitive backstory, are those of the antagonistic 'anti-Westeros.' In other words, despite her hair, she is coded Jewish. And notably, her hair is a lunar silver in the books.

I bet even veteran racial esoteric moralists would have missed that detail.

The black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey is a black stone. Black stones evoke Saturn; Saturn is connected to Jewish symbolism; Yahweh is repeatedly described as a rock. The monolith is therefore, “most prominently,” Yahweh. It is also Saturn, Mercury and Prometheus.

While most of the analysis is confined to Western culture, Spencer and Brahmin take a detour to compare Hollywood’s decline to Hindu India, informing us that Shiva is “the Indian Bacchus,” and his cult was “doubtlessly” Jewish in origin:

The decline we see in Hollywood is far from unique in the history of religio-cultural development but seems instead the standard. Very likely a similar process took place in Hindu India, at least after the ascent of Shiva, the Indian Bacchus, during the first to fourth century AD. Doubtlessly his cult, among others, including much earlier ones, was either an offshoot of Judiasm, common Proto-Jewish cults or was, simply, crypto-Jewish.

These are just some of the book’s more dubious applications of REM to popular culture. The examples continue at exhausting length, before the authors themselves then provide the perfect summary:

The world revolves around REM.

And of course, for the authors it does: a theory this expansive, and this indifferent to empirical constraints, can pull anything into its orbit.

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A Thargelia Against the Copy Editor

Even on its own terms, the book does not apply its categories consistently. Michelangelo’s David is introduced as “a new incursion of de-facto AIM” and then, almost immediately, “correctly classed as shoal-culture,” without explaining how the two classifications relate. The categories are elastic enough not only to absorb contradictory evidence, but to assign opposite classifications to the same work, within the same paragraph.

The problem is compounded by the sheer number of ordinary factual, chronological and editorial errors throughout the book. Films are given the wrong release year; the Roman theologian Cornelius Labeo is placed in the wrong century; biblical verses are mis-cited (“Revelation 5:28–29” is cited, despite Revelation 5 having only fourteen verses) and relatively elementary historical and linguistic claims are stated incorrectly. The manuscript is also riddled with ordinary typographical errors and malformed sentences. There are dozens of spelling errors, and sentences such as “Thus neither was their a knower who could create” and “Christopher Nolan... the Stanley Kubrick remains the master.” The endnote numbering also inexplicably restarts between some chapters but not others.

I know from first-hand experience that self-publishing is difficult and that minor typographical errors can easily slip through the editing process, and I would normally give a lot of leeway to issues like this. But this is a book that two authors and their intellectual circle have been working on for almost a decade. And it would still matter less for any other book, but Myth to Power depends on tiny details around dates, names and spellings carrying enormous interpretive weight. When a book asks you to believe that a single misplaced vowel conceals five millennia of racial engineering, it had better not mistake the third century AD for the third century BC.

Everything is REM

The problem is not ultimately that the book makes a lot of dubious interpretations or gets some facts wrong. It is that this interpretive flexibility is built into REM itself. Spencer and Brahmin have built in a means of absorbing almost every possible state of affairs into JEM: conscious deployment of the symbols counts, but so does unconscious transmission; a Jewish creator fits the theory, but non-Jewish creators and Jews who don’t know about JEM can yet produce “de facto JEM” by participating in a cultural milieu already shaped by JEM. When I challenged Brahmin’s theories in the past, I was accused of being a “crypto-Christian,” whatever that means.

The book also warns of “Post-Jews,” apparent gentiles whose identity cannot be established by ordinary means and who will therefore have to be identified through the symbolic patterns REM purports to decode. The interpretation can thus establish the hidden identity of an author, while that hidden identity can subsequently corroborate the interpretation. We also learn of the “Sussman,” a Jew who reproduces JEM without understanding its true esoteric purpose. The absence of evidence that a particular artist consciously understands JEM therefore presents no great difficulty: he may simply be transmitting it without knowing what he is doing.

But Spencer and Brahmin need to identify at least some people who consciously propagate JEM for their theory to make sense. They explicitly identify some of the most prominent filmmakers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as every major Jewish comic-book writer of the period they survey, as “masters” of JEM:

Some of the most prominent writer-directors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are masters of JEM: Woody Allen, Ari Aster, Darren Aronofsky, Joel and Ethan Coen, Mark Kamen, Stanley Kubrick, David Mamet, Sam Mendes, Roman Polanski, Steven Spielberg, Robert Towne, Billy Wilder, and Lana and Lilly Wachowski. Writers Ira Levin (Rosemary’s Baby (1967)) and Bernard Malamud (The Natural (1952)) deployed JEM in their novels in striking ways. More recently, J.J Abrams (Star Wars (2015-19)); Michael Green (Blade Runner 2049 (2017)); John Hamburg and Jim Herzfeld (Meet the Parents (2000)); Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)); writer and director Gil Kenan and Jason Reitman (Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024)); and Boaz Yakin and Ed Solomon (Now You See Me (2013)) are also practitioners of JEM. A close review of Marvel and DC comics from 1938 through 1966 and beyond reveals that every single major Jewish comic-book writer, from Stan Lee to Jerry Siegel to Bill Finger, practiced JEM. This includes lesser known figures like John Broome, Chris Claremont, Robert Kanigher, David Michelinie, Julius Schwartz, and Marv Wolfman. JEM’s prevalence in pop culture—and thus the public’s imagination—cannot be underestimated.

It is here that we really see how gigantic the gap in evidence is for this theory. Surely once the theory moves from unconscious cultural transmission to claims about conscious practitioners of an esoteric tradition, we should expect some evidence that the alleged practitioners actually understood the symbolic system in anything like the terms Spencer and Brahmin reconstruct. Yet the book offers nothing. We know the practitioners have mastered JEM because Spencer and Brahmin think they see esoteric codes in their productions, and their supposed participation in JEM is then used to corroborate the decoding. No Country For Old Men must be full of JEM because it’s made by the Coen brothers, and we know the Coen brothers are master manipulators of JEM because Mark Brahmin noticed esoteric JEM symbols (like clouds, the number 4, and the name Daniel) in their films.

Early in the book, the authors cite Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique approvingly, and clearly see REM as engaged in a similar exercise: uncovering a hidden “group evolutionary strategy” among prominent Jewish cultural producers, much as MacDonald attempted to do among twentieth-century Jewish intellectuals. But bringing up MacDonald only highlights the profound methodological difference between a serious scholar and a conspiracist blogger.

MacDonald understood that attributing conscious group interests to particular individuals created a great documentary burden on him. He therefore went looking through biographies, correspondence and records of private conversations for evidence that the intellectuals he studied understood their activities in terms of Jewish identity and Jewish interests. I recall long sections of his book stacking biographical detail on figures like Franz Boas to establish that Jewish identity and concern about antisemitism were important in his personal life, and then arguing, again through extensive biographical detail, that these commitments helped shape his political outlook and academic work. Now imagine if MacDonald had identified a few dozen Jewish intellectuals as conscious masters of an esoteric Jewish group strategy, then posited as his sole evidence that he saw signs of esoteric Jewish subversion in their work. The authors of Myth to Power intimate in the introduction that they have each been frustrated by academia and decided to undertake this research free of the confines of the modern academy. It seems what they are really demanding freedom from is even the most basic evidentiary standards of historical inquiry.

This evasion of evidentiary standards appears throughout the book. As demonstrated by the jump from Christian handling of pagan sources to a claim of Christian authorship, the authors’ greatest claims constantly fall back on a kind of motte-and-bailey argument, in which a relatively uncontroversial proposition is affirmed and then treated as evidence for a much stronger one.

The same manoeuvre appears in the book’s brief declaration of victory for Christ mythicism. Spencer and Brahmin say that Christ mythicism is “evidently correct,” tell us it is “no longer particularly controversial in educated circles,” and later announce that “Mythicism, to some degree or another, has prevailed.”

Yet in the very same discussion they concede that “most mainstream historians still insist on the historical existence of Jesus,” but point out that the same scholars accept the much weaker claim that the Gospel narratives were shaped by Jewish scripture and the broader religious environment of antiquity. But that fact is perfectly compatible with a historical Jesus and is not Christ mythicism. In fact, the scholar they cite in support of this point is Bart Ehrman, one of the most outspoken critics of Christ mythicism. Nevertheless, acceptance of the weaker proposition is presented as evidence that the stronger Mythicism thesis has somehow prevailed.

More fundamental than any dispute over whether a particular character or symbol has been correctly decoded, however, is whether REM’s supposed mechanism has ever been demonstrated at all. Remember that the theory does not merely propose that art influences attitudes or that stories provide moral and aesthetic ideals. Those propositions are banal. REM claims that cultural production can alter sexual preferences and mating behaviour sufficiently to redirect the biological development of entire races. Yet the book offers practically no empirical evidence that this mechanism operates on anything like the scale required, let alone that its effects can be detected in historical population dynamics. Instead, we are returned to their idiosyncratic reading of Jacob’s sheep and to symbolic interpretations of works of art.

A serious historical theory has to expose itself to the possibility of failure. There must be some imaginable discovery capable of forcing its proponents to abandon or substantially revise a claim. With REM it is difficult to say what such evidence could even look like. Stripped of its elaborate terminology, REM finally amounts to little more than Richard Spencer and Mark Brahmin’s pet conspiracy theory. As with any other conspiracy theory, if no possible evidence can count against REM, then no amount of evidence can meaningfully count for it. Some readers will find these interpretations compelling, but Myth to Power is unlikely to convince anyone not already dazzled by Spencer and Brahmin’s vision.

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One consequence of the massive turn against Israel since October 7 has been a renewed interest in radical politics. For many people, the war and its aftermath produced their first sustained encounter with the Jewish Question: Jewish political organisation, Zionist influence and the extent to which Western governments privilege Israel’s interests. Because serious discussion of these subjects remains largely taboo within establishment centrism, those seeking more fundamental explanations have often ended up in either far-left or dissident-right political spaces.

This has brought people from very different ideological backgrounds into the same online conversations. Leftists and nationalists now appear on the same programmes, condemn the same lobby and oppose the same wars. Figures associated with the right increasingly use the language of oligarchy, class solidarity and universal liberation, while sections of the left praise right-wing populists for challenging Israel and the foreign-policy establishment. This convergence has encouraged the belief that the old left-right division is becoming obsolete and that a new alliance can be constructed around opposition to Zionism, war and elite corruption.

The Enemy Of My Enemy

There has always been room on the right for humanitarian sympathy towards the Palestinians. Pat Buchanan combined an America First criticism of Washington’s pro-Israel policy with concern for Palestinian civilians. This followed from non-interventionism and national interest, not from a left-wing conception of Zionism. Ironically, I have for years been accused of “third worldism” and attempting to ally with the left for simply expressing similar opposition, and for defending nationalist principles of international order.

But much of the discourse since October 7 is different. The radical left opposes Zionism because Israel privileges one people, maintains an ethnic conception of national membership and uses political power to preserve a Jewish majority. It interprets the conflict through racist settler colonialism and the opposition between oppressor and oppressed. Something like Palestinian identity may be legitimate because it belongs to a dispossessed group engaged in resistance, but European assertions of national continuity remain forms of racism. Many attracted to the dissident right through anti-Zionism now affirm some of these talking points.

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A nationalist criticism of Zionism begins from a completely different premise. It does not deny that Jews constitute a people, possess collective interests or naturally organise to advance them. The objection is that Western governments privilege Israel’s interests over those of their own nations, while Jewish ethnocentrism is treated as legitimate and equivalent organisation by Europeans is condemned.

The real question is not whether someone opposes Zionism, but why. Do they oppose Jewish national preference because they reject national preference universally, or because another people has exercised it through their political system at the expense of their own people? Do they want Israel subjected to the same post-national order imposed upon the West, or do they want Western nations permitted to exercise the same unapologetic preference for their own continuity?

Many people radicalised since October 7 have never confronted this distinction. They arrived through outrage at a particular injustice rather than through a developed understanding of political order. After entering dissident-right spaces, they often retain the left’s moral grammar around nationalism, colonialism and racism. Anti-Zionism by itself is politically indeterminate, and the differences between Islamists, humanitarian liberals and nationalists are too great to sustain any durable political alliance. These differences cannot be overcome by saying that other political questions can be deferred until the common enemy has been defeated. A serious political alternative takes years or decades to build, and throughout that process it cannot avoid taking positions on the same cultural questions that divide left and right.

I have previously argued that ideology is more important for the success of a political movement that merely rationalising power after it has been won. A movement must share some positive vision of the order it intends to create before it can organise seriously for power. No coalition can organise for power around a single grievance and leave its programme for government to be decided after victory. There is no plausible future in which Nick Fuentes, Hasan Piker and Tucker Carlson win power through a party of “anything other than Zionism” and then amicably separate into rival political movements.

Left and Right

At bottom, the left-right split concerns attitudes to inequality. I favour Alain de Benoist’s formulation that the right is an attitude that consists of seeing the world’s diversity and the relative inequalities that arise from it as good, and the progressive homogenisation advanced by egalitarian ideology as an evil. The left begins from the opposite presumption: inequalities rooted in inherited distinctions require justification and should, where possible, be overcome. Its characteristic conception of freedom is Promethean and emancipatory, seeking progressively to convert unchosen conditions into matters of individual choice.

This fundamental division has taken different and messy political forms. In the post-war West, it was expressed primarily through the conflict between interventionist social democracy and market-oriented liberalism. Here, the split was over the good of equality vs. inequality in the economic sphere, with social issues still subject to a broad consensus and states still generally understood as the political expression of a particular nation and national group.

If the left is defined simply by state intervention and the right by free markets, as someone like Ben Shapiro insists, then contemporary Western politics becomes unintelligible. Since at least the 1990s, centre-left parties have accepted privatisation, flexible labour markets, global trade and the discipline of international capital. Centre-right parties have accepted large welfare states, extensive regulation, anti-discrimination law and the use of government to shape social outcomes for decades. Neither side proposes a return to the economic order with which it was historically associated.

As I have argued elsewhere, the old social-democratic left and neoliberal right have largely converged upon a social-liberal centre. This settlement combines a market economy with an interventionist state, a large NGO sector, moderate redistribution, cultural pluralism and universal human rights.

The social-liberal convergence has not abolished the distinction between left and right. The left’s objects of emancipation have simply changed. The old left concentrated on the exploitative relationship between the wealthy and the lower classes. Since the twentieth century, it has increasingly treated all inherited identities like race and sex not as natural destinies carrying legitimate social obligations, but as categories whose meanings are socially constructed illusions to be transcended.

This does not mean that the contemporary left regards race and sex as politically unreal. On the contrary, it often makes these identities intensely salient as structures of oppression while denying that they possess any fixed natural meaning or normative authority. Race may be treated as a social construction while racial disparities remain central to political analysis. Biological sex may be acknowledged as a collection of physical characteristics while being denied the authority to determine social identity, behaviour or obligation. The categories remain politically powerful precisely because their inherited consequences are understood as things from which individuals must be liberated.

The economic form taken by this project can vary. The “abundance movement”, for example, supports deregulation and technological expansion as means of overcoming scarcity and enlarging individual autonomy. Ben Shapiro would presumably consider these policies right wing, yet nobody regards Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias or Gavin Newsom as members of the new right. Obviously, economic instruments only acquire their political character from the conception of society and freedom they are intended to serve.

Culturally, however, the left is far more coherent. Its different factions broadly agree on multiculturalism, anti-racism, feminism, expansive LGBT rights and the moral equality of different forms of identity and belonging. They also share a suspicion of any political claim based upon ancestry or ethnocultural continuity, especially from White people.

Insofar as studies show much greater diversity of attitudes to various topics among those on the political right, this is because leftists possess a common moral grammar of equality and emancipation that can be applied across issues, whereas the right contains traditions beginning from very different moral premises, whether Christian, racialist or pagan. That the left’s cultural consensus survives otherwise bitter disputes over economics and foreign policy shows how fundamental it is. Equality and “social justice” are not positions leftists happen to hold alongside their other views, but the deepest moral premises through which they understand politics itself. Yet these are precisely the commitments that advocates of a left-right alliance need the left to abandon.

The National Question

The left-right split is so fundamental because it concerns the identity of the political subject itself. For nationalists, the nation is not simply the collection of individuals residing within a particular territory at a particular moment. It is an intergenerational, ethnocultural community possessing kinship, a historic homeland and a legitimate interest in its own continuity. Political institutions belong to this people in a meaningful sense and should give priority to its survival and flourishing.

In earlier decades, this question could remain partly obscured. Although there were prominent communist parties that promised a utopian future without nations, Western societies were sufficiently homogeneous that mainstream politics could address an apparently undifferentiated citizenry while taking the existence of the historic nation for granted. Even the post-war welfare state’s language of universal citizenship operated within national boundaries and depended upon an inherited degree of solidarity. Sweden’s post-war society was built on the Social Democratic ideal of the folkhemmet, or the “people’s home”, which imagined society as a national household in which everyone contributed and everyone was cared for. Its egalitarianism was universal within the Swedish people, rather than an abstract obligation owed equally to the whole world. The model did not need to emphasise its national boundaries because the existence and relative homogeneity of the national community were still largely taken for granted.

Decades of mass immigration have made it impossible simply to recover this kind of politics while leaving the national question unspoken, especially now that minority groups are already engaged in organised identity politics. The post-war legal order was built on institutional pluralism and safeguards against nationalism. Once minorities establish institutions through which to pursue their collective interests, there is no longer the illusion of neutrality against an undifferentiated citizenry. Western regimes have increasingly tied their legitimacy to safeguarding liberal pluralism, while minority institutions have become established participants in the competition for political influence and collective recognition.

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Under these conditions, appeals to colour-blind individualism do nothing to remove identity from politics. They merely ask the historic majority to abstain from collective organisation while other groups continue to organise, lobby and vote with some consciousness of their shared interests. The choice is no longer between a society governed by identity and one in which identity is politically irrelevant. Identity politics is already a permanent feature of diverse Western societies. The question is whether the historic majority alone will be denied the right to recognise itself as a group possessing collective interests.

The contemporary left increasingly conceives “the people” not as the historic nation but as a coalition of groups united by their subordinate position within existing relations of power. Racial minorities, migrants, women, sexual minorities and other officially protected groups become political agents through their experience of exclusion, while the historic majority appears primarily as the bearer of inherited privilege. Minority groups may organise around ancestry, preserve exclusive institutions and demand collective recognition because their identity is understood as a defence against domination. Equivalent organisation by the majority is condemned because majority identity is itself understood as a form of domination. The left does not necessarily oppose every nationalism. It supports national or ethnic consciousness when it can be interpreted as resistance by the oppressed, while opposing it when it serves the continuity of a historic majority.

This explains why Palestinian national consciousness can be celebrated as emancipatory while European concern about demographic continuity is dismissed as racist. From within the left’s moral framework, the positions are consistent: one challenges an established hierarchy and the other preserves it. From a nationalist perspective, however, peoples do not acquire or lose their right to collective existence according to their position within a progressive hierarchy of victimhood.

All this is to say that the demographic transformation of the West has made a formerly implicit question impossible to avoid. Who constitutes the people? Is the state the political expression of a historic nation, or a neutral mechanism for balancing the claims of every group residing within its territory? Does the majority possess a legitimate interest in remaining a majority, or must it accept its eventual reduction to one constituency among others? These questions are now so fundamental that they cannot be parked by a political coalition on opposite sides to focus on secondary points of agreement like tax policy or lobbying. Before a movement can decide how wealth should be distributed or how sovereignty should be exercised, it must decide who the sovereign people are. A coalition cannot govern coherently when one side regards the historic nation as the rightful political subject and the other regards its collective self-assertion as the principal obstacle to equality.

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Where Is the Old Left?

The imagined left-right alliance, especially as envisioned by people like Tucker Carlson, usually depends upon a particular picture of the left: the patriotic factory worker, trade unionist or miner who supports public ownership, dislikes mass immigration and retains socially conservative instincts. This type certainly existed and individual examples still do. What no longer exists at any meaningful scale is an organised political left representing that combination of values.

The post-war left operated within nationally bounded and relatively homogeneous societies. Its welfare states redistributed wealth among people who generally understood themselves as members of the same nation. Its parties could invoke class solidarity without having to decide whether the historic majority itself was an oppressive category. Even when its intellectual leadership was internationalist, its electoral base took some kind of nationalism for granted and remained rooted in national industries and local communities.

Leftist theorists recognised the disappearance of this social foundation decades ago. In Farewell to the Working Class, published in 1980, André Gorz argued that automation, consumer affluence and fragmented employment had deprived the industrial proletariat of its revolutionary role. Herbert Marcuse likewise believed that capitalism had integrated organised labour and that radical politics would increasingly draw upon racial minorities, social outsiders and intellectuals. Both anticipated a left whose principal agents would no longer be the nationally rooted industrial working class.

Deindustrialisation weakened the trade unions and communities that had sustained the old labour movement. As the industrial worker declined in importance, graduate professionals, public-sector employees, academics, NGO activists and members of officially protected minorities became more central to the left’s coalition. Its institutions are now staffed largely by a highly status-conscious, college-educated managerial class, while its programme explicitly combines economic redistribution with feminism, anti-racism, migrant rights and expansive theories of identity. These are not distractions imposed upon an otherwise traditional labour politics; they are central elements of the contemporary left. The Party of the European Left’s manifesto, for example, presents socialism, migrant inclusion, feminism and anti-racism as parts of the same emancipatory project.

And it’s not like this was because the organisers of the old left were usurped or subverted. Many prominent old-left stalwarts like Jeremy Corbyn and George Galloway have wholly embraced the contemporary consensus on multiculturalism and diversity with as much zeal as any purple-haired millennial activist.

There remain economically left-wing voters who are patriotic, socially conservative or hostile to immigration. But voters are not an alliance partner: they possess no common leadership, institutions or programme through which nationalists could negotiate with them. Once they organise politically around sovereignty and national continuity, they generally cease to belong to the left and enter some form of national populism.

In rejecting a left-right alliance I am not rejecting the support of people like this. If anything, I have developed something of a reputation for arguing that the right should become more economically populist precisely so that it can appeal to such people. But winning former left-wing voters is not the same thing as forming an alliance with the existing left, and no such alliance is necessary to bring them into a nationalist movement.

Fascism and the Left

Those looking for historical precedents for a left-right alliance sometimes point to Fascist Italy or National Socialist Germany. Both movements drew a significant minority of their recruits from socialist, communist or syndicalist backgrounds. Mussolini had been a prominent socialist, and the early Italian Fascist programme was heavily influenced by revolutionary syndicalist and socialist ideas. The German National Socialists likewise appealed to sections of the working class, attacked finance capital and attracted some former Communists and Social Democrats.

Yet neither movement proposed a durable partnership in which left-wing organisations would retain their independence and exercise power alongside nationalists. Italian Fascism attacked socialist organisations and absorbed labour into institutions subordinated to the national state. The Nazis likewise treated the Communist and Social Democratic parties as enemies and abolished the independent trade unions. Leftists were invited to abandon the primacy of class, accept the nation as the political subject and enter a new movement on those terms. This was political conversion, not alliance.

The conditions under which this recruitment occurred were also very different. Interwar Germany and Italy were far more ethnically homogeneous and socially conservative than Western societies are today. The identity of the historic people could still be taken largely for granted, including by much of the left’s working-class base. Many ordinary left-wing voters were attached to socialist parties principally through questions of wages, ownership and working conditions. A worker could therefore move into a nationalist movement without reversing his position on the demographic and cultural questions that now divide left and right.

The situation today is almost the reverse. The organised left’s positions on migration, race, sex and minority identity are no longer incidental additions to an economic programme. They help define both its worldview and the coalition it represents. A contemporary leftist who accepts national preference, demographic continuity and the political primacy of the historic nation is therefore not merely changing his position on the relationship between labour and capital. He is abandoning principles that have become constitutive of left-wing politics.

Tucker’s Third Way?

The difficulty can be seen in Tucker Carlson’s recent attempt to articulate a programme for whatever follows the collapse of MAGA. After breaking with the Republican Party and promising to help build a third party, Carlson presented a ten-point vision of what America should become:

This was not a conventional political manifesto, instead attempting to establish the moral purposes around which a new political movement might be organised. Carlson attacked foreign influence, financialisation and usury, ugly cities, government secrecy, and the fertility collapse. It is easy to see why such a programme might be presented as the basis of a left-right alliance. After all, who would say they do not want fairness, a healthy population or an honest government? Who supports killing civilians in war as a matter of principle? But notice that Carlson’s ten points are all adjectives. They describe desirable qualities without identifying their political content. Everyone favours fairness in the abstract. Politics begins when we ask: fairness between whom, according to what standard and secured by which institutions? As soon as those questions are answered, the old left-right divides will emerge again, as will the centrality of the “equality thesis” and the impossibility of sidestepping it.

For the contemporary left, fairness means more than applying the same rules to everyone. Persistent disparities between racial, sexual and other identity groups are treated as evidence of structural injustice requiring political correction. Carlson appears to mean something closer to formal equality, the punishment of corrupt elites and an end to the impunity enjoyed by what he calls the “Epstein class”.

Implementing fairness in this negative, classical-liberal sense would nevertheless require more than a return to an agreed political norm. It would mean dismantling important parts of the contemporary civil-rights settlement and ending affirmative-action policies, diversity mandates and institutional efforts to produce proportional representation. The representation of some protected groups would probably fall sharply within particular elite institutions. Would left-populists such as Cenk Uygur and Jimmy Dore accept this as a return to sanity? If Carlson instead accepts the results of decades of anti-racist social engineering as the neutral baseline, his programme does not reconcile left and right. This is how the political ratchet operates. The left uses power to transform institutions; the right eventually accepts the transformation as the new neutral baseline and promises only to prevent the next turn of the ratchet. The same contradiction confronts anyone who promises a return to “colour-blind meritocracy” while accepting the existing civil-rights regime as a neutral settlement. A system that treats disparities between groups as presumptive evidence of discrimination will continually generate demands for race-based remedies.

The same problem runs through the other points. Sovereignty for the left may mean taking AIPAC out of politics, but for the right it also means deporting millions of illegal immigrants. Have any of the post-October 7 populist leftists come out in support of deportation efforts? Carlson’s programme therefore resembles the outline of a post-neoliberal right more than the basis of a left-right alliance. Its terms are broad enough to create the appearance of agreement only because the questions that divide left and right have been left unanswered. Even his apparently inoffensive points like asserting the normativity of the family and heterosexual marriage would mean a divergence with leftists that appear on his show like Cenk Uygur, who argues passionately for things like keeping transgenders in girls’ sports.

There may still be room for limited cooperation when a particular objective is shared, but a campaign or a social media mob can be confined to one question in a way that a political movement cannot. Nationalists can also appeal to former left-wing voters and incorporate economic demands once associated with the old left, but the organised left will never see this as anything but a cynical way to manipulate the working class.

The convergence since October 7 has opened new channels between people who previously inhabited separate political worlds, and some of that cooperation has already been valuable. A more radical online environment spanning parts of the left and right has helped normalise nationalist voices previously excluded by establishment gatekeepers. But a serious politics cannot be organised around a single grievance or a list of desirable adjectives. It must begin by answering the question that now sits at the centre of Western political life: who actually constitutes the people? As long as that remains disputed, agreement on secondary questions can only be superficial. The proposed left-right alliance dissolves precisely at the point where serious politics begins.

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With the online right discourse still heavily dominated by reactions to Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, Richard Hanania has chimed in by defending Nolan’s Christianising and liberalising of Homer’s epic with the argument that presenting these epics as Homer intended would be too unpalatable to a modern audience.

In support of this argument, Hanania has been recirculating an essay he wrote on the Iliad, which he argues was mere propaganda for an aristocratic order demanding unconditional obedience from commoners. Unlike conventional authoritarian propaganda, he argues, Homer’s poem does not legitimise a particular ruler by presenting him as exceptionally wise or virtuous. Instead, it legitimises the supremacy of the aristocratic class itself:

The Iliad has a different purpose: to justify the rule of elites as representing the natural order of the world, which in effect means that defending the virtue of past leaders is unnecessary, if not downright counterproductive.

Hanania’s case rests primarily on the treatment of Thersites, the common soldier who condemns Agamemnon’s greed only to be beaten and humiliated by Odysseus. For Hanania, the fact that Thersites is substantially correct makes his punishment especially revealing:

If Thersites were wrong on the substance, then he could be dismissed for that reason. But the fact that he is right and gets beaten for it shows that there’s never a good reason for commoners to step out of line. Only ugly, cowardly cripples dare to criticize their superiors.

He contrasts the fate of Thersites with the freedom enjoyed by Achilles and the other aristocratic warriors:

The Iliad does legitimize opposition to leaders from other elites. Those of sufficient rank can try to convince Paris to give back Helen or Agamemnon to make peace with Achilles, but they can only rely on the power of persuasion. Commoners don’t even get that; all they can do is obey.

Remarkably, toward the end of Hanania’s essay he writes:

It seems doubtful that I would come up with a brand new theory about The Iliad, but I’ve looked around a bit and haven’t found anyone making a similar argument.

For a more humble scholar, this reflection might have prompted him to consider a simpler explanation for the apparent originality of his theory, other than his own extreme intellectual brilliance: Homer’s audience required no elaborate justification for hierarchy in the first place. Scholars of the Bronze Age and archaic Greece understand that hierarchy formed the background of Homer’s world, taken for granted much as we take for granted that generals outrank privates. To call the Iliad propaganda for aristocracy because it reflects aristocratic assumptions is like calling every modern military film propaganda for its chain of command.

This does not mean that Hanania has imagined the hierarchy he identifies. The freedom depicted by Homer is unmistakably aristocratic rather than universal. Homer’s commoners possess nothing resembling modern political equality, and Thersites plainly lacks the freedom to challenge Agamemnon enjoyed by Achilles.

Hanania may therefore be right that obedience was effectively unconditional from below, but he mistakes this for an aristocratic order imposing no corresponding conditions from above. Rank granted privileges, but it also imposed demanding obligations upon its possessors. It does not follow from the political subordination of commoners that aristocratic status was itself unconditional, or that Homer treated birth as sufficient justification for whatever a prince chose to do.

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Ricardo Duchesne places this principle within what he calls the “aristocratic egalitarianism” of the Indo-Europeans. He introduces this concept in The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, which is a useful corrective to Hanania’s understanding. Indo-European societies were not egalitarian in the modern sense: freedom and public recognition belonged principally to a warrior elite. But they were not organised around the unconditional sovereignty of a god-king, the political model of the Orient. Authority was dispersed among competing chieftains, each of whom depended upon the recognition of other proud and independently powerful men:

It is in aristocratic societies that we first discover characters zealously preoccupied with their honor and future name, with the judgment of other “masters” regarding their courage, skill in war and in the hunt.1

In the Iliad, the clearest expression of this conditional aristocratic ethic appears in Sarpedon’s speech to Glaucus in Book XII. Sarpedon asks why they receive the finest seats, meat, wine and estates in Lycia. His answer is not that noble birth entitles them to unconditional deference. Their privileges oblige them to stand among the foremost fighters, where they assume the greatest risk of death:

Glaucus,
why do they hold us both in honor, first by far
with pride of place, choice meats and brimming cups,
in Lycia where all our people look on us like gods?
Why make us lords of estates along the Xanthus’ banks,
rich in vineyards and plowland rolling wheat?
So that now the duty’s ours—
we are the ones to head our Lycian front,
brace and fling ourselves in the blaze of war.2

The people of Lycia, Sarpedon continues, should be able to say that their rulers owe their position to their own demonstrated excellence:

Not without fame, the men who rule in Lycia,
these kings of ours who eat fat cuts of lamb
and drink sweet wine, the finest stock we have.
But they owe it all to their own fighting strength—
our great men of war, they lead our way in battle!3

Sarpedon then gives the ultimate reason for accepting this danger:

Ah my friend, if you and I could escape this fray
and live forever, never a trace of age, immortal,
I would never fight on the front lines again
or command you to the field where men win fame.
But now, as it is, the fates of death await us,
thousands poised to strike, and not a man alive
can flee them or escape—so in we go for attack!
Give our enemy glory or win it for ourselves!4

Sarpedon neither denies hierarchy nor treats privilege as unconditional: those who receive more must risk more. The finest estates, food and wine impose an obligation to lead with bravery from the front.

The poem also distinguishes sharply between the nobleman who fulfils this standard and one who fails it. When Paris retreats at the sight of Menelaus, Hector does not defer to him merely because he is Priam’s son:

Paris, appalling Paris! Our prince of beauty—
mad for women, you lure them all to ruin!
Would to god you’d never been born, died unwed.
That’s all I’d ask. Better that way by far
than to have you strutting here, an outrage—
a mockery in the eyes of all our enemies.5

Hector then attacks the discrepancy between Paris’s appearance and his actual worth. The Greeks mistook him for Troy’s “bravest champion” because of “the handsome lustre” of his body, but he possesses “no pith, no fighting strength inside.” His inherited standing and divine gifts cannot save him from disgrace if he lacks the courage expected of a prince.

Both are princes, but their birth does not confer equal honour upon them: Sarpedon vindicates his position through courage, while Paris disgraces his by shrinking from its obligations. Homer’s contempt for Paris is difficult to reconcile with Hanania’s portrayal of him as a mere propagandist for aristocratic privilege. Unlike the court literature of the ancient Orient, which concentrated glory in a god-king whose rank itself testified to his greatness, the Iliad exposes the gulf between Paris’s princely birth and his personal worth. Homer assumes aristocratic rule, but he does not flatter aristocrats: he subjects them to a demanding heroic standard and openly humiliates those found unworthy of their position.

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That standard is aretē, the governing principle of Homeric aristocracy in Duchesne’s account. The word denotes excellence, nobility, success and the reputation produced by them; it shares its root with aristos, “the best.” As Duchesne writes:

To strive always for the highest aretē and to excel all others in battle is the governing theme of this epic.6

Homeric society was not meritocratic in the modern sense, since noble birth largely determined who could enter the heroic competition. But neither was noble status understood as an arbitrary privilege unrelated to ability. One of the top comments on Hanania’s essay rightly points out that aristocratic birth brought superior nutrition, military training, political education, leisure and experience from childhood — advantages that produced men visibly better equipped to lead and fight.

What is genuinely strange and noteworthy is not that aristocratic rule is accepted, something taken for granted in the ancient world, but the distinctly Indo-European character of Homeric aristocracy: kings are not god-rulers possessing an unquestionable monopoly on authority and glory, but first among competing chieftains who must continually vindicate their rank before other proud and independently powerful men. The poem does not ask whether kings and commoners are equal; it asks which princes are worthy of their inherited rank. Sarpedon vindicates his position by leading from the front, while Paris disgraces his by shrinking from its obligations.

Nor were the ordinary Greeks simply modern conscripts forced to die for a ruling class from which they received nothing. The Achaean host more closely resembled a coalition of aristocratic war bands, attached to particular chiefs and united by the prospect of conquest and plunder. The common warriors occupied subordinate positions within the same heroic economy. They received smaller shares of its rewards, but they were also its beneficiaries rather than merely external victims of Menelaus’s private quarrel.

Hanania therefore assumes too sharp a separation between the interests of the chiefs and their followers. The hierarchy advantaged Agamemnon most, but victory promised spoils, captives and prestige throughout the army. Homer did not need to invent a modern national cause to explain why the Greeks fought, because loyalty to one’s chief, participation in a successful expedition and the expectation of plunder were already intelligible motives to his audience.

Hanania sees the inequality of this order clearly but reduces its internal ethic to a mechanism of class domination. He notices that Thersites must obey, but pays insufficient attention to what Sarpedon must do to deserve honour, what Paris fails to do despite his birth, and what ordinary warriors expected to gain by following their chiefs. Duchesne restores the missing half of the picture: obedience below was paired with competition, judgement and mortal risk above. Hanania may be right that the commoner possessed no recognised right of resistance; he is wrong to infer that aristocratic privilege was therefore unconditional or unrelated to merit.

Elsewhere, Hanania has invoked the rank injustice of Homeric morality to defend Nolan’s transformation of it into a modern Christian morality tale. But an adaptation need not endorse every feature of the Homeric world to represent its moral logic honestly. The hierarchy, cruelty and exclusion are inseparable from an aristocratic ethic that also demanded courage, excellence, self-sacrifice and contempt for rulers who failed in their obligations. Hanania and Nolan both view this through an intolerant liberal lens and reduce this strange and demanding moral universe to little more than an ancient class racket. Contra Nolan and Hanania, a great adaptation would confront modern audiences with that difference. Their shared failure is one of imagination: neither can conceive of entering a moral world radically unlike his own without first remaking it in the image of modern liberalism.

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I admit, I did hope this movie would fail. But I am a fan of Nolan’s films, and I fully expected to begrudgingly enjoy this, in which case I would have remained silent other than continuing to make fun of its woke casting and messaging. There is little to recommend about The Odyssey. I would rank only the awful Tenet below it; together, they are now the two great duds of Nolan’s career.

Much of the focus on this film prior to its release has been on casting, and for good reason. It would have been annoying but easy to overlook, if Nolan had thrown in a few African soldiers or merchants as background in this film, as he did in Dunkirk. But race-swapping Helen of Troy and the goddess Athena was an unforgivable act of cultural vandalism against European civilisation. It got to the point of ridiculousness with his casting of “Elliot” Page to play Sinon, a Greek soldier.

People have tried to downplay this since its release by saying these characters receive only a few minutes of screen time, but it is actually much worse than advertised. Lupita Nyong'o plays both Helen of Troy and her sister, Clytemnestra. Zendaya plays Athena. We are introduced to the story by a Black bard played by rapper Travis Scott, who also provides some hilariously bad music for the outro. Sinon, despite his limited screen time, is actually a pivotal character. Odysseus’ most loyal servant Eumaeus is played by a mixed-race Latino. There are Black Trojan and Greek soldiers; we see Agamemnon’s mixed-race child; one of the major suitors and antagonists is Black; and Odysseus’ crew is multiracial. One casting choice that has been little discussed is Indian actor Himesh Patel as Eurylochus, Odysseus’ right-hand man. But he ends up getting more screen time than any of the others, apparently being on screen for 30 per cent of the three hours. Also aboard Odysseus’ ship are an African and, most conspicuously of all, a man of East Asian descent.

It would be bad enough to do this to any ancient European epic, but it’s especially ironic that we get this smattering of the world’s races gathered aboard a single ship in a story whose drama depends upon the immense difficulty of travelling even between the islands and coastlines of the ancient Mediterranean.

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These casting choices mean that far from being over and done with in the opening act, there are few scenes in which the diverse casting is not noticeable. Aside from the offensiveness of this for an adaptation of one of the foundational texts of European civilisation, it also breaks immersion in the ancient world Nolan is attempting to create. A particularly jarring example is an important scene where Sinon speaks to Odysseus from Hades. This is totally ruined by the ridiculousness of him evidently speaking to Odysseus with the voice of a frail woman.

I didn’t love the cast outside of the diversity hires either. Matt Damon is not a convincing Odysseus. He delivers almost the entire performance with the same blank, pained expression, projecting weariness but little of the charisma and danger that should characterise Homer’s mercurial “man of many turns.” But this probably isn’t his fault. Damon may not have delivered a performance as Homer’s Odysseus, but this is Nolan’s Odysseus, a jaded war veteran, a middle-aged “dad” working through his trauma.

Tom Holland — an English actor forced to adopt an American accent for an adaptation of a Greek epic — seems equally out of place as Odysseus’ son Telemachus, coming across like a bright-eyed child and communicating remarkably little emotional depth throughout. Maybe Holland was joking when he said he only discovered after the film’s release he was supposed to be playing an adult rather than a 16-year-old, but it would explain a lot. Even his recognition of the father he has awaited his entire life, one of the story’s potentially overwhelming moments, lands with scarcely any force. Of course, this is not helped by the flat dialogue and decision to use modern American parlance, with Holland’s Telemachus repeatedly referring to Odysseus as “my dad.”

A bright spot is Robert Pattinson as Antinous, who brings a menace and a welcome theatricality to the role of principal suitor. His scenes have an energy that contrasts with the blandness of Holland and Damon, and offer a glimpse of a more vivid, dangerous film this might have been.

But even with a perfect cast, I would not have enjoyed this film. It is aesthetically lifeless and never feels like an epic, or anything that matches the scope its budget, director or source material promises. For a film so marketed on the strength of its visual spectacle, it is depressingly dreary and grey. Nolan has one of the most beautiful natural settings in the world as his canvas, yet this never looks or feels like it’s set in the Mediterranean. Its geography seems generic and vaguely northern: misty forests, drab fields, bleak rocky beaches and overcast coastlines that could belong almost anywhere. He even has Odysseus sailing around in a 115-foot Viking longship.

The beaches are grey, the water is dark, the sky is a washed-out pale blue, the grass is a sickly brown-green, and the sun looks uncannily dull. Even the sets of Bronze Age armour reflects the same muddy palette, looking like they are made out of tarnished scrap metal. Agamemnon’s armour, meant to especially stand out, looks like a big plastic Batman costume.

The sterile atmosphere is part of the reason the film never feels like a great epic. The Lord of the Rings trilogy gives the viewer a sense of a coherent world extending far beyond its central characters. Nolan’s Odyssey, by contrast, makes its secondary characters disposable, reduces its gods and monsters to mechanisms for advancing the narrative, and offers almost no impression of the ancient Mediterranean beyond sparse coastlines and the interior of Odysseus’ palace. The film presents an enormous journey through a world that never seems to exist beyond the places immediately required by its plot.

Another reason for the absence of epic grandeur from this film is that the trials of the characters are utterly devoid of joy. There is little mischief and scarcely any levity, while no one outside Odysseus and his immediate family receives enough development to make their eventual loss matter. Without quieter intervals of friendship, wonder or reflection, neither the world nor the stakes are given room to expand. The action consequently resembles a highlight reel of famous incidents Nolan is cycling through on the way to the climax. The film arrives at the Cyclops, Circe or the Sirens, supplies the anticipated image and moves onward before the encounter can acquire much dramatic or philosophical weight.

The treatment of these trials also reveals where Nolan’s vision diverges most sharply from Homer.

In Homer, Odysseus escapes the Cyclops Polyphemus by calling himself “Nobody,” but cannot bear to let the Cyclops believe that nobody defeated him. Once his ship is safely departing, and despite the pleas of his crew, he calls back across the water to announce that Odysseus, sacker of cities, was responsible. His hunger for kleos — the glory attached to a remembered name — allows Polyphemus to identify him and call upon Poseidon for vengeance. Odysseus is intelligent enough to become Nobody, but too proud to remain nobody.

In Nolan’s version, Odysseus turns back to fire an arrow at Polyphemus in a fit of anger to avenge the men the Cyclops has killed, despite having already secured escape for the survivors. The act is no longer an expression of heroic vanity but evidence that Odysseus remains trapped in “war mode,” instinctively answering every loss with retaliatory violence. Homer’s Odysseus is endangered by an excess of pride; Nolan’s by the psychological damage inflicted upon him at Troy. This Odysseus is not a masterfully cunning, dangerously self-assertive hero, but a familiar war veteran archetype like Chris Kyle in American Sniper.

Circe is subjected to a similarly modern reinterpretation. Nolan recasts the witch-goddess, who transforms Odysseus’ crew into pigs, as another victim of violent men. Her apparent vulnerability becomes a trap, and she later explains that she has not really transformed Odysseus’ companions so much as revealed their true nature. The metaphor could hardly be more obvious: beneath the armour, men are already swine, and Circe’s cruelty is merely the defensive response of a woman who has encountered too many of them.

We learned before release that Nolan was basing his adaptation on the feminist translation of Emily Wilson, so it’s not surprising to see this kind of reimagining of female characters. Perhaps Nolan was also inspired by Madeline Miller’s bestselling Circe, which similarly transforms Homer’s capricious sorceress into a victim of male violence who turns predatory sailors into pigs in self-defence.

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Homer’s Circe, by contrast, is a dangerous, autonomous divine being who transforms men because she possesses the power and inclination to do so. Odysseus defeats her enchantment with Hermes’ assistance, confronts her with his sword, extracts an oath and then becomes her lover and guest. The encounter is obviously strange and morally ambiguous for a modern audience, but Nolan presents another predictable and safe parable about male violence and female trauma.

These revisions get to the heart of Nolan’s problem with Homer. He seems unwilling to let the ancient world remain genuinely alien to us. Whenever Homer presents something morally strange or metaphysically unsettling, Nolan translates it into a familiar modern category: heroic pride becomes combat trauma and divine caprice a defensive response to male violence.

One of Nolan’s calling cards is the insertion of extremely simple moral lessons beneath elaborate narrative structures. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing — Interstellar, with its simple message of the transcendent power of love, is one of my favourite films — but there could be no worse work on which to impose this approach than a foundational epic that has resisted reduction to a digestible moral axiom for almost three millennia.

Nolan applies the same reductive treatment to the Trojan War. Its violence is explained through the familiar language of trauma, while its political cause is translated into modern economism. Odysseus even tells Penelope that the war was not really fought to retrieve Helen, but to satisfy Agamemnon’s more banal desire to secure trade routes. Finally, it is revealed that the Athena with whom Odysseus has been communicating bears the face of a girl he witnessed being slaughtered at Troy, suggesting that the goddess is nothing more than a projection of his guilt. Nolan will allow us a glimpse of the gods only if they can be explained away as psychological symptoms.

The result is a pre-Christian epic awkwardly interpreted through a secularised post-Christian morality. The pagan ethos preserved in myth is genuinely alien to us: its heroes can be cruel, vainglorious and deeply unsettling. But that strangeness is precisely what should make presenting Homer to a modern audience so compelling. Odysseus should not be a responsible “dad” who just wants to return to civilian life. Nolan makes the ancient world accessible by removing almost everything that might disturb or challenge us.

Why, then, did the Greeks admire a character as morally ambiguous as Odysseus? The Greeks admired him because he embodies aretē: the excellence proper to a warrior, ruler and man struggling against impossible circumstances. He is courageous, resourceful and almost superhumanly enduring. He also possesses mētis, the cunning intelligence that allows a weaker man to defeat stronger enemies through disguise, deception and strategic patience. He survives, often through adapting best to circumstances that destroy others around him.

Odysseus is not morally canonised, but even his less attractive qualities belong to this excellence. His pride is the shadow of his greatness; his intelligence makes him an accomplished liar; and his ruthlessness enables him to defend what belongs to him. Homer does not ask us to admire each deed in isolation. Odysseus’ proper end is not to neuter his martial powers, but to return them to their proper object.

That object is Ithaca. For all his adaptability, Odysseus is among literature’s great figures of rootedness. He can assume innumerable identities and survive within radically different worlds, yet he never forgets the particular place to which he belongs. Calypso offers him immortality and eternal youth, but he chooses an ageing wife and a poor, rocky island. He prefers a finite life that is his own to an endless existence severed from his household, ancestry and name. In an age of globalism and a distrust of the rooted and familiar, an age of oikophobia, this is a powerful message, and one Hollywood has predictably deemed unfit for a modern audience. In fact, it is through examining this ancient relationship between a man and his home that we can best see the gulf that exists between us and the ancients.

This is best explored in Fustel de Coulanges’ The Ancient City. Coulanges presents an ancient world in which the household was not merely a private residence or source of emotional comfort. It was simultaneously a family, religious institution and political order. Its hearth was sacred, its land contained the ancestral dead, and its descendants maintained the rites joining past and future generations. Coulanges clarifies the true stakes of Odysseus’ homecoming. For the ancient man, “Whatever man held most dear was associated with the idea of country. In it he found his property, his security, his laws, his faith, his god. Losing it he lost everything.”

Odysseus does not merely miss Ithaca as a modern expatriate might miss familiar surroundings. Without Ithaca he possesses no settled identity at all: he is separated from the land of his ancestors and gods, and thus separated from his own authority and place within the divine order. This is why the suitors’ occupation of his palace is so grave. They consume his estate, solicit his wife, plot the murder of his heir and threaten to extinguish the continuity of his sacred household. In killing them, Odysseus does not merely take revenge. He restores the network of relationships through which he exists as Odysseus, and which served as the sacred foundation of the ancient world.

Nolan continually tells us that Odysseus wants to go home, but here there is nothing very profound about this homecoming. Ithaca is just the place where his wife and son happen to live. The dialogue reiterates the family’s desire for reunion without conveying any religious, ancestral and political significance of what has been lost. We understand that Odysseus misses his family, but not that exile has deprived him of his place within the order of existence. Even the 2004 Troy, a heavily modernised Hollywood adaptation, allowed its heroes to desire things modern audiences might find alien, like Achilles knowingly exchanging the promise of a long and happy domestic life for immortal glory. The Odyssey could have been an exploration of the opposite but equally ancient choice: Odysseus sacrificing eternity to recover the particular place in which his name has meaning. Nolan is not interested.

This reinterpretation also changes the dramatic character of Odysseus’ homecoming. Following Athena’s counsel, he finally relinquishes control and allows the water to carry him back to Ithaca. The literal event has a Homeric precedent: the Phaeacians transport Odysseus home while he sleeps. But in Homer, this divinely favoured passage rewards a long demonstration of cunning, endurance and heroic excellence. Nolan instead frames it as another therapeutic lesson in surrender, with the traumatised warrior reaching home only after submitting to the guidance of his female conscience. This displacement of heroic agency by psychological acceptance helps explain why the film feels so diminished as an epic. Our hero does not finally overcome the forces opposing him, but learns to stop resisting them.

So what message does Nolan want us to take? The answer is supplied by the moral refrain Nolan invents for the film: “Zeus’s Law,” which he says was how he simplified the Greek concept of xenia for a modern audience.

Characters repeatedly invoke it before it is finally stated in the unmistakably Christian language of the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Having stripped Homer’s world of its metaphysical strangeness, Nolan replaces it with the safest and most universally acceptable moral lesson imaginable: be kind to strangers. In case there was any doubt his message was this uninspired, he has reiterated it in promotional interviews. But for the Greeks, xenia was not an abstract command to extend indiscriminate kindness to every human being. It was a reciprocal relationship between guest and host, structured by ritual, status, gift exchange and the possibility of punishment by Zeus Xenios.

Nolan tries to give this Golden Rule civilisational significance by making the sack of Troy its primal violation. As Odysseus finally confronts his repressed guilt, we see the Greeks cease to regard the Trojans as men to whom moral restraints apply, turning a war into what he calls a “hunt.” Brutalised by what they have done, the returning warriors become the mysterious People from the Sea, spreading disorder throughout the Mediterranean and contributing to the Bronze Age Collapse. Troy therefore functions as Nolan’s secular original sin: by opening its gates, Odysseus releases a violence he cannot contain. The Greeks leave morally fallen, and the destruction of Troy precipitates a collective expulsion from Eden as the high civilisation of the Bronze Age descends into centuries of darkness. Odysseus’ geographical exile becomes the personal expression of mankind’s exile from a lost order. Again with Nolan, it’s all very Christian — or more precisely, the moral architecture of Christianity after transcendence and spiritual redemption have been removed.

But just in case this point had not been made sufficiently clear over the preceding three hours, we are treated to the most ridiculous example yet of Nolan’s familiar expository dialogue. Odysseus solemnly tells Penelope that “our age of bronze is collapsing,” because of the people from the sea, in what must go down as the single most absurdly anachronistic line ever written for a character in a historical epic.

Nolan’s Odyssey concludes with one final inversion of Homer’s hero. No sooner is he back in Ithaca and reunited with his family than he decides to set sail again with Penelope: partly to honour his fallen men, and partly to fulfil a promise to her made before his departure that they could one day sail the seas aimlessly, content with each other’s love. It’s so Nolan I half-expected an after-credits scene in which an old servant spots Odysseus drinking wine with Anne Hathaway at a distant café and silently nods. Bruce Wayne and Odysseus both reached bourgeois Boomer completion and retired for a life as perpetually holidaying wife guys.

This completes Nolan’s transformation of Odysseus from a hero endangered by the excess of his virtues into a veteran damaged by the exercise of them. Homer’s problem is how cunning, pride and martial violence can be brought back into the service of household and kingdom. Nolan’s adaptation ends with a parting of them.

For all its promised spectacle, Nolan’s Odyssey never truly transports us to the ancient world. It gives us a picture of that world, sterilises it, and sends it back wearing the moral psychology of therapeutic modern society. After three dreary hours, the man of many turns has been reduced to one familiar lesson: be kind, process your guilt, listen to women, and know when to step aside.

You should not pay money to see this film on principle. If you watch it at all, I recommend watching it on a small screen, where the IMAX spectacle cannot conceal just how hollow the film beneath it really is.

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

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

CathalMór:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Whatever happened to Sinn Féin?”

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

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

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

There are quite a few reasons for this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Republicanism and the ethnic question

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For readers unaware, ethnopluralism is a term to come out of the French New Right, for a politics built on “the right to difference." The idea is that distinct peoples and cultures should not be dissolved into a universal liberal order, but encouraged to preserve their own identity, territory, and institutions. This is a kind of radical multipolarity, with the French New Right imagining Muslim enclaves in French cities having a large degree of self-rule and segregation, with White self-rule in turn respected.

My answer would be: yes, ethnopluralist democracy is a better model for Europe than liberal multiculturalism, but it is certainly not the ideal. Both ethnopluralism and nationalism start from the recognition of important truths: that ethnic differences are meaningful, that diversity in proximity creates conflict, and that the solution is not attempting to socially engineer away cultural differences between ethnic groups, but separation.

The ideal is a society with a coherent demos: a historic majority, a shared culture, and a high degree of ethnic and civilisational continuity. Even most of the advocates of ethnopluralism would recognise this, but they do not believe a return to the ethnically coherent nation-states of a generation prior is now possible. That may be true in France. It may yet turn out to be true in many European countries, but as long as there is a feasible route to reverse mass-immigration through politics I think that is where our goals should be focused. But where diversity is already a hard political fact, ethnopluralist arrangements are preferable to liberal multiculturalism, not least because “integration” would only make it more difficult to reverse disastrous immigration policies in the future.

On the identitarian revolution, the goal is bigger than persuading conservative parties to deport more asylum seekers. That is part of it, but the deeper objective is metapolitical: to make it legitimate again to say that European peoples have collective interests and rights, including the right to remain majorities in their own homelands. The moves by parties like the CDU are really only promising insofar as they reflect that deeper shift.

You use the example of Farage, and I think it’s useful here because his rhetoric has been a lot better lately over the death of Henry Nowak. Did Nigel suddenly have an awakening? No, but he feels Rupert Lowe and Restore breathing down his neck. Restore supporters have aggressively attacked Reform on not being committed to doing things their base wants, like mass-deportations.

As you say, there is not something on Restore or Lowe’s level in Ireland yet. But just a few years ago in Britain, there wasn’t even a Reform UK. The nationalist right has become more of a force in the conversation in Ireland, and this is largely due to, and still limited to, the online space. We should continue to build this up and establish a coherent set of demands. There will be energy there that can be taken advantage of by more moderate politicians, but the demand will grow for something more radical as our voices grow.

In the longer run, the task is to occupy the ground between fake populism and crank anti-politics. That means being more radical than Independent Ireland on fundamentals, but also more competent and legible to ordinary people than the crank fringe of Boomer anti-politics.

In the case of Independent Ireland specifically, it’s an extraordinarily Boomer-coded party that wants to do things like scrap property taxes for the elderly — one of the worst conceivable policies anyone could propose right now. They have also gone out of their way to distance themselves from nationalism or principled opposition to immigration, so it shouldn’t be difficult to show disillusioned voters their vision of Ireland is much more of the same.

Well first of all, I do not think Europe should be “unified” in the sense of a single centralised empire, Brussels-led or otherwise. My ideal is a Europe of nations and peoples: internally sovereign, civilisationally conscious, and capable of cooperation where interests align.

Russians are racially European, and Russia is part of the wider European world, but not necessarily part of the same institutional structure as Western or Central Europe. Russia is its own great power, with its own civilisational identity and strategic interests. It should be treated as a European power, not as an Asiatic enemy to be endlessly contained, but also not romanticised as if its interests are automatically identical with ours.

And of course, Russia’s ethnic composition also complicates this question. Unlike most European nation-states, Russia is not simply a European people with a state. It is a vast multi-ethnic federation, spanning Europe and Asia, with large Turkic, Siberian, and Muslim populations. That does not make Russia “non-European,” but it does make it a difficult candidate for any common European political structure. A unified Europe based on civilisational and ethnic continuity cannot simply absorb a Eurasian empire without importing all of its internal diversity and geopolitical contradictions. Because Russia is a federation of many peoples rather than a nation-state in the strict sense, it will always have strong incentives to reject ethnonational or identitarian politics internally, or closer ties with a confidently European political project, since applying that logic consistently would threaten the cohesion of the Russian state itself.

Glad you enjoyed the book!

In the case of Nick, he recently explained his feelings on that topic here. Essentially, he’s not hostile to Russia, but he is very skeptical of Russian interference in the American right.

As for Spencer, I don’t think he has a very rigorous worldview, and he tends to base a lot of his opinions on what he thinks seems more intellectual and counter to the conservative chuds he detests. 10 years ago, it seemed quite vogue and continental to invoke the works of Dugin and critique liberal internationalism in Eastern Europe.

Now, Putin is generally admired by low-information rightists, and the kind of European federalist, Macron enjoying, alt-progressives who Spencer vibes with very anti-Russia, so I think this turn was inevitable. At the start of the Ukraine War, Spencer was going on streams arguing that a bipolar conflict between the West and Russia/the third world would somehow awaken a European civilisational spirit, and dissidents like himself could somehow become accepted and even influential figures within that new paradigm so long as they were very committed to the West’s efforts against Russia. Obviously, that hasn’t really come to pass. But Spencer has still come to identify more with “the West,” with the multipolarity discourse coming from pro-Russia circles being the antithesis of the kind of progressive super-imperialism he idealises.

On the last point, you’re in luck — I am actually writing a book on this very subject right now. It will cover the ideal size of states, the history of small states, theories of localism and decentralisation, and a vision for a more decentralised future.

As for assimilation, the basic principle should be that immigration is permissible only when it does not challenge the identity or cohesion of the host nation. The burden of proof should be on those proposing immigration to show that it can meet that standard.

Now, I happen to think maintaining an adequate standard of living in a modern, highly complex economies like ours does require the exchange of labour through immigration. This is where recognising race is important. If we are honest about it, then we will recognise that the immigrants will be least disruptive to their host country if they are of the same race. For European countries, this means they should prioritise other European immigrants. It would even be advisable for North European countries like Ireland to give further priority to selecting among other, more genetically similar North Europeans rather than Southern Europeans.

I do not think we can place an exact universal number on how many immigrants a country can take per year. That depends on the national interest, the condition of the host society, the type of immigration, and whether the arrangement is temporary or permanent. But as a rough ceiling, a modern Western country might be able to tolerate something like 5–10% of its workforce as guest workers, provided they are genuinely temporary, politically subordinate, geographically dispersed, and drawn from culturally proximate populations. Once the figure rises much above 10%, it begins to cease being a marginal labour supplement and becomes a demographic fact in its own right. Ideally, a serious state would work to keep the number below 5% and reduce its dependency on foreign labour over time.

Ok!

Erik Satie — Gnossienne No.1.

That’s it for this week’s mailbag. Leave questions for the next one below.

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

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

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

The first mailbag will go out later this week.

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

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

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

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

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House prices rose naturally

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

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

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

Boomers faced 15% mortgage rates

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

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

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

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

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

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Young people are irresponsible with their money

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

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

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

Pensioners paid into a pot — it’s their money

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

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

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

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

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

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

The young will get it all through inheritance anyway

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

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

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

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

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

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

We must protect house prices for the good of the economy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Purchase Ethnopolitics in your preferred format and region on Amazon:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Liverpool Echo:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Purchase Ethnopolitics in your preferred format and region on Amazon: