“I have written it as an attempt at justice.”
Hilaire Belloc, Introduction to The Jews (1922)

Several weeks ago I participated in a discussion of my work with Kevin MacDonald for TOQLive, and in the days prior to that I had a look at my past articles in the TOO author’s archive. It came as something of a surprise to see that there are now almost two hundred essays, blog posts, and translations (in five languages) under my name, submitted over a seven year period. I really hadn’t realised I’d written that many essays, though I suppose it goes some way towards explaining Rabbi Bruce Warshal’s description of me as a “prolific anti-Semitic academic.” In some ways these years seem to have flown by. A lot has happened. The roster of writers at The Occidental Observer, with the exception of a couple of returning stalwarts like Brenton Sanderson and Edmund Connolly, has changed somewhat. This is due in part to the fact this website stands at the frontline of the culture war and bears several scars. To say nothing of the early years of The Occidental Observer, during my time writing for the site two TOO writers were doxxed by the SPLC and have not returned, the site underwent a period of DDOS attacks in 2015 (with some of the offending IPs originating in Israel), and we were then deplatformed from PayPal as part of a concerted post-Charlottesville censorship strategy by our opponents. Outside TOO, between 2012 and 2019 I made a brief foray into politics, delivered speeches in three countries, edited a few books, became a father two more times, started work on a volume of my own work, was arrested twice on spurious allegations relating to my political opinions, was (temporarily) prohibited from entering the United States, and managed to get banned from Twitter more times than I can now remember. I have no regrets, and in fact found much of it enjoyable. During this busy and important period in my life, and that of the movement, I believe my reasons for writing developed, matured, and evolved, and I thought I’d share my thoughts on this.

My path to The Occidental Observer probably began in 2004/5, a few years before the website was created. It was during that year that I began reading large amounts of academic material on the historical relationship between Jews and Europeans, a process that began with Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996) and steadily developed to encompass most of the field’s mainstream authors including Robert Wistrich, Jacob Katz, Gavin Langmuir, Schmuel Almog, Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Kenneth Stow, Yehuda Bauer, David Sorkin, Marvin Perry, and Frederick Schweitzer. Although most of the books produced by these authors were well-written, had a polished academic veneer, and were published by some of the most-respected publishing houses in academia, I felt they all suffered, to borrow Albert Lindemann’s description of Robert Wistrich’s work, from repeating the same “colourful and indignant narrative, accompanied by weak, sometimes tendentious analysis.” It occurred to me very early on that it wasn’t altogether healthy for Jews to dominate the academic discussion of the historical relationship between their people and other peoples, and that resulting histories were bound to come with their own subtle or not-so-subtle biases. By the time I made it to Anthony Julius’s Trials of the Diaspora (Oxford, 2010), I had grown quite suspicious of Jewish-authored histories of anti-Semitism, and Julius’s extremely arrogant and manipulative work was in some sense a final straw. In the opening of Part 1 of Trials of the Diaspora, Julius opined that anti-Semites were mere charlatans in search of something to appear “expert” in, but I came away from his book wondering if it wasn’t Jews who were claiming the monopoly on expertise in anti-Semitism, entirely ignoring the other half of a very long and painful story.

Julius also wrote that no anti-Semite has ever “carried his anti-Semitic convictions tentatively.” Ironically, by the time I had finished reading his book I was beginning to do just that. Doubts and suspicions had slowly given way to the realisation that readers like me were being manipulated, and even insulted along with our ancestors, by the production of works like Trials of the Diaspora. And, in a twist of fate, the next book I happened to read after Trials of the Diaspora was Kevin MacDonald’s A People That Shall Dwell Alone. I really can’t remember if I’d read any negative material about Kevin prior to reading PTSDA. My feeling is that I read the book “blind,” and that the book had come up during a library catalog trawl for relevant books rather than a text I deliberately sought out. The edition I later received from my library also happened to be the original, very traditional-looking hardback, so I completed the book, I assume, without any sense of the controversy that by then attended it. I was, however, sufficiently intrigued and encouraged by PTSDA to try to find out if Kevin had authored any other books on Jews and anti-Semitism, and it was at that point that I think I encountered the ADL and SPLC hit pieces, and the broader mainstream response to his trilogy. I wasn’t much affected by the propaganda, and was delighted to discover Kevin’s own academic website, where he offered responses to the criticisms of the trilogy levelled by other academics, many of whom clearly hadn’t read the works in question. After reading most of the online exchanges, I ordered the entire trilogy in paperback.

It was several weeks after finishing Culture of Critique that I discovered The Occidental Observer while searching for further work by Kevin. I remember clearly that the very first piece I read was Brenton Sanderson’s April 2011 essay ‘Why Mahler? Norman Lebrecht and the Construction of Jewish Genius.’ Like all productions by Sanderson before and since, the essay was exceptional, and, after Kevin, Sanderson remains my favourite contemporary writer on the subject of Jewish influence and anti-Semitism. It was an extremely pleasant surprise to find Jewish matters, and the issue of anti-Semitism, being discussed at a very high (and honest!) level, and I became a dedicated TOO reader many months before I became a TOO writer. I continued to carry out research into the mainstream productions of Jewish historiography, while letting TOO broaden my mind to some of the more contemporary political and cultural manifestations of age-old problems. Contrary to the assertions of Julius, much of this remained tentative, and I remained open to counter-arguments or any evidence against the ideas I was beginning to form or agree with. To some extent I still am, even if the counter-arguments are shallow and the evidence against “anti-Semitism” thus far non-existent.

Some months after becoming a TOO reader, I began an email exchange with Kevin MacDonald, explaining something of my own academic background, some interesting encounters I’d had with Jews, and relating some tales from my own research. I recall being delighted with the mere fact I got a reply to my first email which, if I remember correctly, was simply a brief message of support in reference to the SPLC’s activism against Kevin’s place of employment and the broader campaign of vilification that had been relentlessly carried out by Heidi Beirich. As our exchange developed, the idea then arose that I might contribute a piece of writing to The Occidental Observer. My intensive reading in Jewish historiography was by then very extensive and the options for subject matter were almost unlimited but, since it was fast approaching St. Patrick’s Day, I decided to write a short piece on the little-known boycott of Jews in Limerick, Ireland in 1904. My first essay, posted on St. Patrick’s Day 2012, was positively received by Kevin and the TOO readership, and I resolved that, time permitting, I would make the effort to offer further contributions.

These early contributions reflected my background in academia, and my growing fascination (and horror) with the ways in which Jews wrote about themselves and their history. I came to see Jewish influence in academia and the writing of Jewish history (and that concerning anti-Semitism) as especially pernicious, and almost all of my early TOO essays therefore concerned myth-making in historiography. A couple of months after the Limerick piece I submitted a much longer and more serious examination of the idea and reality of “pogroms” in Russian history, based primarily on my reading of the works of John Doyle Klier between 2009 and 2011. Klier (1944-2007) was a well-respected academic at University College London who had been head of the British Association for Jewish Studies. Klier’s work, which was almost as influential on me as MacDonald’s, was built around the most detailed and rigorous examination of the history of Jews in the Russian empire that had then been undertaken. It was his posthumously published Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-82 (Cambridge, 2011) that contained some of the biggest bombshells. Klier demonstrated how Jewish-owned Western newspapers like England’s Daily Telegraph had pre-existing animosities towards Russia, and were only too eager to disseminate en masse the sensational and entirely fictional accounts of Russian atrocities against Jews. After years of reading about “deniers” and “denial” in relation to Jewish historical narratives, here was quite literally one of the top academics in Jewish Studies (and one of its very few non-Jews) announcing that the pogrom narratives were inventions of reporters from the Jewish World that are “flatly contradicted by the historical record,” that they were first embellished and spread by Rabbis in Prussia, and that all such reports of Russian brutality should be treated with “extreme caution.” Anthony Julius had argued that people turn to anti-Semitic ideas when they want to appear as experts, but here was a widely-acknowledged bona fide expert essentially describing one of the foundational narratives of modern Jewishness as a manipulative lie. And because Julius was by now a disdainful background note to much of ongoing research, I decided to exorcise him by offering a dissection of Trials of the Diaspora in my next long essay.

My thinking in Jewish matters retained an exclusively academic focus until halfway through 2013. In early 2013 I produced an extended essay on the Jewish promotion of Spinoza almost by accident, after Kevin MacDonald sent me a review of Jonathan Israel’s book on Spinoza as an example of mutual promotion among Jewish academics. In another twist of fate, I happened to be in a college library when I received the email, and when I looked up from my laptop screen I was right beside the section of philosophy texts covering Spinoza. For the next few weeks I devoured almost everything they had on Spinoza, assessing each monograph for authorship, approach, and its evaluation of Spinoza’s place in history. The resulting essay now seems to me a prose bibliography with a focus on ethnicity, illustrating the extraordinary bias of Jewish academics and intellectuals over historical time. And of all the essays I’ve written for TOO, it’s one of which I remain particularly proud. After the Spinoza piece, I began investing more time investigating contemporary Jewish activism. In May 2013 I submitted a review of government texts discussing the notorious Marc Rich case, which involved almost every aspect of contemporary Jewish behaviours that can best be described simply under the umbrella term ‘Semitism’ – White collar crime, questionable Jewish loyalty, international ethnic networking, Israel as a refuge for Jewish criminality, the use of charges of anti-Semitism to evade criticism or punishment, and the exertion of influence on (and cultivation of links with) non-Jewish elites. The examination of the Rich case was again very influential on my own thinking, and my author archive shows I took a six month hiatus from writing after the article was posted. I remember coming to the strong realisation in mid-2013 that the Jewish Question was not simply a matter of history, or for that matter simply a matter of Jewish historians “batting for their team,” but rather something much more profound and infinitely more harmful to the contemporary interests of Whites/Europeans. This took me some time to digest and come to terms with.

When I returned to TOO in January 2014, my motivations for writing had fundamentally changed and I think this was reflected in the tone, subject matter, and pace of my writing from that date forward, with the result that I moved from an average of five pieces per year in 2013 to making 24 or more entries per year in 2017/8. Foremost in my motivation for writing was (and remains) a desire to protect the interests and future of my children, which I felt was being threatened by Jewish activism throughout the West. My first essay after my hiatus was absolutely in line with my new mindset: ‘Making “America as user-friendly to Jews as possible.” The Anti-Defamation League and the Indoctrination of our Youth.’ Re-reading the essay, it’s clear to me that writing for TOO had become, on some level, personal. “I have two young sons in elementary school,” I wrote. “What a morally, spiritually, culturally, and racially bankrupt world they will inherit. Abraham Foxman of the ADL claims he has been “losing sleep” over weakening American support for Israel. I endure sleepless nights because when I put my boys to bed at night, and watch them drift off to sleep as their blond hair falls softly across their pillows, I am filled with a dread inspired by the activities of that same Mr. Foxman. I know the future that he and others want for my sons, and I am moved to act in any way I can.” It’s now more than five years since I wrote those words, and I’ve become a father twice more in that time. They appear to me more real and urgent than ever.

Since that date, I’ve tried to offer as wide and as comprehensive analysis of Jewish activism as possible. The examinations of historiography have of course been retained. In addition to dissecting Julius, over time I’ve assessed the work of Wistrich, Langmuir, Cesarani, Ginsburg, Penslar, and (most recently) Hanebrink in detail, as well as discussing the work of many others in the course of broader analyses. I continue to believe that attacking the “colourful and indignant narratives” with their “weak, sometimes tendentious analyses” is an essential part of the culture war against Jewish influence in academia and society as a whole. Adding to this, I’ve tried to bring wider attention to credible mainstream academic texts that contain useful information or arguments, including The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews(Brill, 2010) by Robert Aleksander Maryks, and also bring new audiences to old texts like Hilaire Belloc’s The Jews(1922) or a three part survey of three centuries of useful anti-Semitic literature. It’s very gratifying to me that many of these essays, which are potentially alienating in the specificity of their subject matter and necessary employment of academic jargon, nevertheless attract a healthy readership and lively commentary – a testament to the quality of reader the site continues to attract.

Closely related to my work on Jewish historiography has been those examples of my work that attempt to drawn out comparisons between historical trends and contemporary events. A further motivation for my writing has therefore been to make clear and specific warnings based in historical fact. Where appropriate, I’ve offered historical examples as guides to current events or as predictors of future opposition strategies. In 2012, when I started writing for TOO, the heady days of the 2016 Alt-Right surge were almost unthinkable. Speculation instead revolved around the British National Party (now almost defunct) and other European pro-White political parties as avenues for potential ideological breakthrough into the mainstream. Dissidents of the Right, though marginalised, were also fairly secure on the internet. But a look through my archive suggests that I became seriously concerned about Jewish intentions in this sphere in January and (more urgently in) May of 2015 – fatefully late to raise the alarm in order to put counter-strategies in place, but eerily accurate in its prediction of the censorship measures taken against the Alt-Right in late 2016 (and which are still ongoing). As early as 2014 I clearly became very interested in historical patterns involving Jewish efforts to suppress mass freedoms in order to acquire privileges and security, with two essays (here and here) that year on Jewish attacks on free speech, and a further two (here and here) in January 2015. Other essays where I’ve drawn direct comparisons between historical and contemporary events include ‘Failed Crypsis and Its Discontents’ and ‘Jews Versus the Alt-Right: Lessons from History.’

A further motivation for my writing has been to offer an evidence-based argument in defense of the idea of anti-Semitism as a rational response to intensive resource competition between my people (and indeed other peoples) and the Jews. This idea is explained masterfully in the second volume of Kevin MacDonald’s trilogy, and I’ve tried to compliment it with new material and examples from history and also contemporary events. This has necessarily involved direct and honest confrontation with the alleged “canards” of anti-Semitism. As such, I’ve tackled issues like present-day Jewish moneylending and white collar crime, demonstrating that Jews have been, and remain, utterly prolific in the trade in debt and in financial criminality. Using hard evidence and public or mainstream sources I’ve also confronted Jewish representation in refugee and migration organizations, Jewish activism in sexual matters, and Jewish dominance in mass communications, as well as offering the first ‘anti-Semitic’ rebuttal to Jean-Paul Sartre’s much-lauded apologetic Anti-Semite and Jew. It’s my sincere hope that they constitute even the most modest contribution to our ideological armoury.

Another reason why I write is that I feel I must speak out against injustice. I was one of the few people to speak out about the questionable logic, motivations, and legality of the National Action arrests in Britain in 2017. A couple of months ago I was contacted by one of those men arrested, Andrew Clarke, who informed me upon his release by the authorities (after 18 months in prison and not a single criminal conviction) that he had appreciated my article on Britain’s lamentable terrorism priorities and the heavily embellished government and media portrayal of the National Action saga. In fact, he said, prior to his own arrest he had shared the article on his Facebook profile and was later questioned by prosecution lawyers about this act of sharing my article during his trial. When he explained that the content of the piece actually proved his innocence, and revealed the arrests themselves as an act of farce, The Occidental Observer’s brief (and hopefully only) appearance in a terrorism trial came swiftly to an end.

I can’t finish this rumination without mentioning one of my greatest motivations for writing— the people it has enabled me to meet, and the readers it has been my great pleasure and honour to engage. It goes without saying that to, in some sense, work alongside Kevin MacDonald over the past seven years has been one of my life’s great “moments” and one I wish to continue for as long as possible. Kevin is an inspiration and a role model, and has made a contribution to the trajectory of our people that is already great but can only grow stronger in the coming decades. I have no doubt that he is a man of history, and it has been a great privilege to play a small role in his story. In addition to this, I have greatly enjoyed seeing reader responses to my work – both the positive and the critical. I am lucky to have met with, and spoken to, many readers in person. On long arduous journeys, such as we currently find ourselves on, the companionship of fellow pilgrims is much appreciated. And I salute my fellow pilgrims.

Notes

Lindemann, Esau’s Tears, p.x.

Julius, Trials of the Diaspora, pp.22-3.

Ibid, p.21.

Klier, Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-82, pp.399-401.