You’re a UK civil servant in charge of a new team running housing and immigration policy, and you need to house 400 people. 200 are from the Middle East and 200 are White British.

You look for somewhere suitable and find two towns. Each have 10,000 White British people living in the town centre and a surrounding suburb. Despite the low national birth rate, the towns’ populations are remarkably stable, almost as if natural decline, overcrowding and several other things have been controlled for in a statistical analysis using censuses from 1991 to 2021 and other government datasets. You see that both towns have capacity for 200 more people each. Perfect!

You accidentally sort your spreadsheet by ethnicity and then begin the allocation. In Town A, you put 200 Middle Easterners into the town centre. In Town B, you instead house 200 White British people. As is customary in the civil service, you then take a decade of time off in lieu of your hard work and check back on the towns later. What do you see?

Looking at your handiwork, you see remarkable differences between the two towns. Your diversified Town A now has a total population of 10,107 people, being 9,907 White British people plus the 200 Middle Easterners you placed in it. Town B, however, has a population of 10,200 White British people. Why is Town B now larger than Town A? They both had the same capacity.

According to Kinship Realism, biology explains much of this. Humans, like other organisms, exhibit kin preferences and all else equal prefer to live around people who are more like them. I don’t just mean in customs and habits, though that is of course true. I mean genetically closer to one another. To test whether this applies in England and Wales, I assigned the hundreds of recorded census ethnicities genetic coordinates using the Eurogenes G25 dataset, and measured their distance from White British reference populations. I then measured the relationship between growth of those populations and the local White British populations in the local middle layer super output area (MSOA) neighbourhoods in the censuses. As would be expected in a Kinship Realist model, local growth of genetically distant populations from the native White British was associated with lower White British populations at the end of the decade. To simplify the analysis, I then grouped the non-White British ethnicities and looked at urban areas outside of London.

White Flight Simulator: Feed the Churn

Urban Ex-London White Flight Simulator (+1 of ethnic group per 1,000 population)

The negative values are the expected reduction in the White British population when each group grows by +1 resident per 1,000 starting residents, after controls over a decade.

To build the White Flight Simulator, I analysed UK census data from 1991, 2001, 2011 and 2021, joined with various official ONS and other government datasets to add controls. This allows us to hold our model towns constant by housing growth, flats, household composition, overcrowding, tenure, and population age structure, deprivation, student presence, starting population, starting White British share and region, while also accounting for growth by other ethnicities grouped by their ancestral home region. The 1991-2001 decade gives us useful context, but the best evidence comes from 2001–2011 and 2011–2021 with their consistent White British categories and geographical granularity.

This created a stock-change model, which means that we can look at what tends to happen in the thousands of MSOAs across England and Wales. We expect a normal amount of churn as people move in and out of neighbourhoods for various reasons. We’re measuring the expected change to that population churn, which includes things like people choosing not to move into the area, not renewing tenancies and so on. We can also account for capacity in an MSOA expanding as new houses are built or rooms converted, so we can feed more people into the neighbourhood’s churn and see what will likely happen over a decade. As we can see in the table above, when we feed non-White British people into the population churn and even when we hold many things constant, the local White British population declines. In reality of course, those things are not held constant and the population declines more rapidly than our model shows.

But you are a civil servant, and you’re worried you’d get fired for mentioning the White Flight Simulator at work, so you keep on moving people into towns and the native populations keep shrinking. Still, you now know that you are contributing to native population displacement while you’re doing it. Anyway, is that the time? Don’t worry, you’ll be able to claim all this back as time off in lieu and go on a nice holiday! Would you like to go to Town A or Town B?

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I saw this happen on the ground in Syria during the Arab Spring, and over years analysing wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East noticed that the patterns of violence often fit cleanly onto countries’ ethnic maps. Ideologically-driven nation building efforts in various recent wars has seemed entirely at odds with human nature to use ethnicity as a stable basis for political organisation. Fighting to keep Afghanistan together under de facto Pashtun rule instead of handing the Uzbek areas to Uzbekistan and so on made little sense.

An ethnic map of Iran (CIA, 2009)

It is tempting, therefore, to pull out the map of Iran and advocate carving it up to quickly prevent a lengthy civil war. Knowing that wars tend to descend into ethnic bloodbaths, perhaps Azerbaijan should immediately stabilise the Azeri parts of Iran, Iraq take Arab Khuzestan, Iraqi Kurdistan take Iranian Kurdistan, Turkmenistan take the Turkmen areas and so on. And for the remaining areas, straight to a Bosnian Dayton Agreement-style quick peace. In Iran, broadly applying this approach is not likely to work in the way traditional ethnic maps suggest.

Genetic Proximity Mines

Analysing Iran from a Kinship Realist perspective allows us to view politics and warfare through the lens of evolutionary biology. Rather than using more qualitative traditional ethnographic approaches to military intelligence, it incorporates quantitative genetic data to model the behaviours of individuals and groups. The most important point is that, all else equal, the genetically closer the group, the more likely they are to be allies than adversaries in a conflict. This of course does not hold in all cases due to kinship entanglement, when the interests of genetically distant groups become entwined, but overall it is a good place to start from.

Traditional ethnic maps are not good enough. They give us no sense of how distant the various groups are from each other, just that they are distinct. The below heatmap on the left instead shows us how distant cosmopolitan Tehranis are from Iranian Azeris, Kurds and ethnic Persians. And on the right, the genetic distances from Turkish Kurmanji Kurds across the border.

As you can see, Turkish Kurds are considerably more related to various Iranian groups than Iranian Arabs and Balochs are. In practice, this means that the groups have more recent common ancestors and are likely to be more intermarried.

Genetic distance from Tehranis

The above table of genetic distances shows just how close to Persians the various Kurdish and other groups are. It shows that cosmopolitan Tehranis and Turkish Kurds are about as closely related as the English and Irish, and that Tehranis are about as related to Iranian Azeris as the English are to Belgians. This may surprise those using a linguistic categorisation method, but the Azeris only fully switched from their Iranic language to a Turkic one around the 17th C. Overall, Azeris, Kurds, Lurs and Persians are about as closely related as Northwest Europeans are. Of course, those familiar with military history will know that even the genetically close English and Irish are far enough apart to fight each other.

Applying this genetic analytical layer over standard military intelligence analyses helps us understand how using the Kurds against Iran could potentially backfire. Just as arming the very distantly related Balochs would endanger Pakistan, itself facing a Baloch separatist movement, arming Iranian Kurds risks the conflict spilling over into Turkey. When applying this approach to specific military leaders, we see that even the head of Iran’s IRGC as a Shirazi Persian appears to be more closely related to Turkish Kurds than to the Balochs living only a few hours’ drive from Shiraz. With this degree of proximity, one should expect the type of shared cultural practices and interfamily links through intermarriage that facilitate armed resistance.

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Everyone has genetic coordinates, whether they like it or not. These tend to be clustered into ethnic groups, and are then averaged out to give that group’s coordinates, which can be plotted with others in a pretty 3D chart. These coordinates are typically plotted in 2D or 3D due to our human brains not being able to comprehend the standard format, simplified into a mere 25 dimensions.

The genetic modern world in three dimensions (Eurogenes Global 25 in Vahaduo)

This 3D visualisation is remarkable by the way in which it reflects the geography of our world in a sort of lasso shape. Imagine a traveller starting a journey at the bottom tip of Africa. At the base of the lasso in yellow are the native African ethnicities the traveller encounters, which in this model cluster together at the bottom. In reality, Africa’s Khoisan and Mbuti ethnic groups are the furthest away from each other in genetic distance, but here they are clustered. In his journey in Africa, he meets groups with so-called “ghost DNA”, admixture of up to a grandparent’s worth of DNA from other hominids who others outside of Africa do not appear to have met.

As the traveller journeys up the lasso towards North Africa, he begins to encounter Arabised Africans, and towards the top of the straight part of the lasso are the Middle Eastern ethnic groups, merging into Europeans. Here, he meets people partially descended from the Neanderthals. He had seen very slight traces of their presence in Africa, but not to this extent.

A very rough approximation of genetic groups, colour divergence not to scale

Standing in the Middle East, our traveller faces the option of going left (West) to meet the red dots, the ancient Western Hunter Gatherers who modern Europeans are partly descended from. Or he may turn right (East) towards the blue dots and encounter those from the Indian subcontinent. As he explores the ring of the lasso, he notices a large impassable area between the blue and orange dots, the great genetic hole in the middle caused by Asia’s ethnic groups being long separated by the Himalayas.

In the bluest part of the lasso, he meets Papuans and others, and finds that they’re admixed with a previous group of travellers named the Denisovans, leaving sometimes double-digit percentage traces in local genomes. He considers whether the red dots of the European hunter-gatherers may themselves have been admixed with hominids as yet undiscovered, rather than drifting away alone.

Now, he sees that the far end of his lasso is split again into Northeast Asians and Native Americans. In Northeast Asia, he is a very long way from the tip of Africa now. Here, he sees traces of both Denisovan and Neanderthal admixture. Are these the descendants of Dragon Man? He sees the journey Native Americans must have taken, over Alaska’s Bering Strait, and across the Pacific from Polynesia to settle these vast continents. Looking back at his journeys, he sees the paths many have taken before, shaped by geography.

No Escaping Gravity

Ethnic groups’ proximities to each other in the genetic coordinate space we have just explored likely matter in real life due to organisms’ predisposition to kin preference. Genetic similarity theory explains that more similar organisms tend to cooperate more, something I’ve extrapolated in the political sphere to Kinship Realism.

As the UK’s population rapidly changes due to mass migration and differential fertility rates of the White British and postwar immigrant populations, we see changes in the genetic coordinates of the “average British person” too. Before WW2, the average Brit had coordinates effectively an average of just the English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh ethnic groups, with negligible contributions from other populations.

To look at how this is changing in modern Britain, let’s use Eurogenes G25 coordinates and simplify things by only looking at England in the census years 2001, 2011 and 2021, treating all White British people in England including the Cornish as just English.

For the avoidance of confusion, I’m going to use the term “Englander” to describe someone from or in the country England regardless of ethnicity, and “English” to refer to someone in the English ethnic group, generally being Anglo-Saxons admixed with Brittonic peoples. I also take census numbers at face value, despite them likely underestimating the immigrant population.

Over this 20-year period, our average Englander changed significantly. In 2001, soon after Blair and Brown’s Scottish Raj ramped up immigration, he was already more genetically distant from an Englishman as a Welshman is. By 2011, he was as distant as a Scandinavian, and by 2021 as far away as a Belgian.

Our average Englander is rapidly distancing himself from the ethnic English

2021: A Race Odyssey

By 2021, the composition of the United Kingdom had changed considerably from its prewar demographic situation. Following the political crisis created by the unexpected arrival of people aboard HMT Empire Windrush, the government ramped up mass immigration over the decades, often responding to political crises abroad under a general ideological framework heavily influenced by American culture and political warfare operations. This preference for mass immigration has meant the weighted average coordinates have shifted significantly.

Likewise, in the American imperial metropole, the coordinates have shifted away from European genetic clusters. The metropole appears to be dragging its European holdings away from their starting points through its cultural transformation policies. These shifts are heading in slightly different directions. Our average Englander is moving gradually closer to both the African and South Asian clusters. Our average American in contrast started more towards the African cluster, and has moved towards the more distant Native American clusters due to influx of Latin American immigrants.

This is of course a reductive average. In reality, the numbers obscure the increasing variability of real Americans and Englanders. When applying a Kinship Realist perspective to a shared security issue of the UK's unnecessary gifting of the Chagos Islands and large amounts of cash to the shadow banking hub Mauritius at the expense of the USA's security, we see that the architect of the UK civil service's policy was a Delhi-born Indian, significantly genetically closer to the ethnically Indian leaders of Mauritius and the Indians on the military base there than an Englishman is. One would expect that, all else equal, someone beyond the threshold of foreignness to the English would behave differently to an Englishman, who is genetically close to American leaders with predominant ancestry from the British Isles.

Despite genetic centres of gravity obscuring such nuance, the tool's simplicity allows for relative ease of comparison. Should the United States over time become de facto Greater Mexico due to its Latin American immigration, all else equal one would expect it to diverge in approach to the UK as its centre of gravity further diverges. As the average Englander becomes less English, one would also expect a divergence in the UK's policy preferences. Perhaps more importantly, one would not expect the UK to give as great a priority to the needs of its English population.

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I wrote in June 2025 when discussing the likely decline into low-intensity conflict about the “lack of accompanying symbols that have not been co-opted by the state. Waving the England flag either identifies you as an ethnonationalist or a supporter of England’s ethnically diverse football team.” This clearly needs an update.

Seeing the England flag, like Northern Ireland's Irish and Union flags, now marks your entry into the contested and shrinking ethnic English territory within England. This is seen most clearly in the North of England. When driving through Dewsbury, for example, you will see South Asian pedestrians in traditional (face-covering niqabs for women and long robes for men) and modern dress walking around flag-free neighbourhoods, then as your route crosses into an Anglo-Saxon neighbourhood, suddenly the flags appear and the people change.

The use of flags as ethnic territorial markers is clear in segregated Northern England

In my home city of Peterborough, like much of urban England also highly segregated, the flag has been painted on roundabouts into the Pakistani part of the city and in surrounding English villages. Flags on lamp posts mark the western entrance to the city, flown next to the government's asylum seeker hotel housing 146 military-aged men between two children’s play areas in the woods. But at ground level, the area sees flyers promoting Wagner-affiliated sub-Saharan militarists. The flags in this case mark a liminal space, between two worlds. On the one side is the withdrawing old England, and on the other, the British state’s new nation.

Why Are Flags Important?

When deploying the military into an area, it is important to collect data on “atmospherics”. How this is done varies, but the aim is to give an insight into the social environments that security forces operate in. Chairman Mao identified the local people as the water his Red Army swam through, and in New Mercia this water appears to be becoming murkier.

When operating in England, American soldiers are currently advised to keep their heads down. There are rules for social contact outside of bases due to a mixture of the ever-present threats of Islamist terrorist attacks, Chinese and Russian spies, criminals and domestic nationalists usually grouped under the term “far-right”. It’s no conflict zone, but it’s no South Korea either.

There is a nationalist threat to the American military presence in Britain, shown in a “green on blue”-style insider attack from a GCHQ worker. The attacker Joshua Bowles, described in court documents as an autistic loner, attempted to assassinate an American servicewoman with a knife by her gym, and was stopped before killing her. When detained he said, “I make a pretty shit terrorist, don’t I?”

The attack was played down publicly as incel terrorism from a disgruntled former civil servant, despite the attacker first selecting a male target. The judge did not believe that the target’s American nationality had no bearing. Just before the attack, Bowles had searched for non-traditional WW2 narratives about the Allies massacring German civilians, usually completely ignored by British WW2 documentaries, which from personal experience are more likely to show you footage of leggy blonde German women enjoying themselves at holiday camps with ominous background music to make you distrust and fear them. The non-traditional view of history is a common talking point among European nationalist groups, and the attacker wrote about waging war against those demoralising and replacing him. A cursory reading of postwar European history will show that the population displacements occurring due to mass immigration have arguably been consequences of the American influence over Western Europe.

Sentencing Remarks from R v Joshua Bowles (highlight added)

Anti-Americanism among English nationalists is currently low. There is a generalised anti-Americanism present in Europe, but intense enough for minor political demonstrations or snide remarks, not currently intense enough to provide an ideological basis for frequent attacks. With the Trump government’s pivot to promoting the interests of native groups in Europe, nationalists have aligned with right-wing Americans against “woke” and some discuss population displacement, rather than rejecting the American presence as a whole. They are operating within the American Overton Window, without questioning why the wall around the window is there in the first place. It would be unwise to expect this situation to last forever.

At some point, European nationalists may take out their pens and paper to draw a simple timeline and see that American soldiers arrived in their country before mass immigration started. They’ll scratch their heads and wonder if their countries could in fact be occupied vassal states. Could it be that having no independent foreign policy (and having the hegemon blow up your gas pipeline without consequence if you try to have one) and having the hegemon’s soldiers everywhere means that you’re living an Empire, not an independent nation-state? Why do the media give so much coverage to events in small-town America? How can a new American government switch from supporting mass immigration to declaring woke over and fundamentally change your country’s political environment?

I write this from a cafe inside what was a Roman settlement. Even without my crayons and paper I can see that there was an overlap between Roman soldiers being here (Gloucester if you’re wondering), Roman influence on local government and this being a part of the Roman Empire. It is not a great leap to recognise that this cafe is now in the American Empire. But do the people walking into this American cafe wearing American-style blue jeans (stolen from the French of Nîmes but that’s another story) recognise that they’re in an Empire? Probably not.

Nerva, Emperor of Greggs (Gloucester)

Something in the Atmosphere

The West Country is not so far in New Mercia. Flags are not widely used as ethnic markers until moving further north into the Midlands. Despite Gloucester being multicultural, the local English have not yet left in great enough numbers for its city centre to have been effectively abandoned. For now, the atmosphere is such that, outside of an industrial area on the edge of the city, the local English do not appear to feel insecure enough to assert their identities through flag displays. Yet, just up the road in Cheltenham, a native man was radicalised enough to carry out an attack.

Monitoring atmospherics in this case requires more than looking around the neighbourhood and talking to people. Social media sentiment analysis is also important. This is now less useful for analysis of individual communities due to the proliferation of chatbots, but the bots themselves give an indication of the information environment the locals inhabit. Perhaps most of the comments someone reads on X are written by AI accounts run by engagement farmers and information warfare operatives, but we can assume that those operations are at least partially effective. Monitoring X accounts allegedly paid by Israeli information warfare operatives to promote anti-Muslim content was useful for measuring European ethnocentrism by proxy when predicting the 2024 UK race riots.

Monitoring legacy media is also important. Tracking specific content is useful, but British state and other mainstream media are similar to Soviet propaganda in that you have to listen to what they don’t say. Like most legacy media within the American Empire, they are notorious for giving prominent coverage to White criminals and burying stories of non-White criminals, or hiding or playing down their ethnicities if they are forced to cover the story. A useful atmospheric indicator for local ethnocentrism in this would be the degree to which the media continue to behave in this manner. A shift in coverage could indicate fear of instability from the state.

Recognising the influence of the American metropole on the periphery also helps. It’s very rare for honeypots and broader political warfare operations to be officially acknowledged, but they do have an impact on the periphery’s social environment. From the outside looking in, America’s strategy appears to be to shore up European ethnocentrism just enough to support the forever wars in the Middle East by keeping it defined in opposition to Islamist groups. It will pay to consider the long-term consequences of promoting inclusive Christian nationalism and multiracial anti-Islamic street demonstrations while the UK rapidly fragments along genetic lines.

The demographic change that occurs during American-style “diversity is our greatest strength” social transformation is relatively predictable, thanks to decades of detailed American and British census data. We know what happens when large numbers of different people move into an area. In the base case scenario, the British state, operating within a fundamentally American ideological framework, will continue to import millions of people genetically distant from the English. This is, Detroit-style, causing the local White population to rapidly leave. Politically, this is forming a contiguous new national territory with the rough borders of the old Kingdom of Mercia.

If the British state implements its plan of stopping censuses forever, monitoring where the flags are flown would serve the dual purposes of identifying ethnocentrism and seeing whether a neighbourhood is still English, or has been taken over by the state’s new nation.

Overall, monitoring atmospherics can give us an idea of how the operational environment is changing for American and other security personnel in the UK. As the country moves into its fragmented future with an expected low-intensity civil war following native disenfranchisement, keeping track of the diverging attitudes and behaviours of its people will help keep operations running smoothly.

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Uncle Sam and Uncle Samantha need YOU!

This may come as a surprise to you, but as you look again at the world, it will start to make sense. When Uncle Sam won in 2024, he declared the old regime over. You may have noticed the media you consume change in tone. Suddenly, non-native criminal faces started appearing on state media news sites. People were able to discuss demographic change without being fired and excommunicated. Nationalist politicians were able to communicate to the electorate without Uncle Samantha’s minions shutting everything down. Uncle Sam rolled back Samantha’s policies of chemically and physically castrating impressionable autistic children in pursuit of his goals for the American DEI Empire. It’s OK to not want the state to take your son away and chop his penis off now.

But State Media Say We’re Independent!

If you are British, you may live under the delusion that your country is independent. How can we live in the American Empire when we have a sovereign King and Parliament?

The answer is incredibly straightforward: the United Kingdom has been de facto militarily occupied by the United States since 1942. It has been Air Strip One since then, and Britain’s political environment has been shaped by American hard and soft power policies. The hard power side is quite obvious, as we spent decades fighting Maoist and Soviet communism, then supporting Chinese communism as the USSR crumbled, then playing second fiddle to the post-Cold War unipolar interventionist End of History, and joining America's crusade against Islamism since 9/11. The closest we’ve been to opposition to American foreign policy was not joining the Vietnam War when Australia and New Zealand (barely non-British then) did, and instead facilitating Vietnamese refugee movements via Hong Kong. In hard power terms, the United Kingdom may as well be America's 51st state.

With military presence comes soft power instruments. In British India, soldiers came long before Macaulay worked to create “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” Since the Second World War, this degree of social change has been the effective undeclared policy of the United States in Europe. But both Uncle Sam and Uncle Samantha are allergic to the idea of Empire, and to suggest that their vast global holdings are doing anything more than bailing out the locals’ military budgets is frankly un-American!

So how have the two Uncles run their vast imperial holdings? The NGO-industrial complex has been a key lever used to transform the societies around American bases. Separate from the military, USAID and the State Department have overtly funded operations of nominally non-governmental organisations across the Empire to support the Uncles’ political campaigns. Work by Musk’s DOGE has uncovered much of this, but it is not a recent phenomenon. Ad agencies, NGOs and think tanks have historically bid for projects contracted out by government agencies to generate activities leading to particular kinds of media coverage. Many of the reports you have heard discussed on the news will have been funded by the American government to promote a particular policy objective. Those local pro-migrant marches you remember popping up with identical placards may have been funded by Uncle Samantha.

As well as overt funding, covert support for propaganda has been widespread. Many will know that the Animal Farm cartoon was funded by anticommunist US intelligence operatives at the Central Intelligence Agency. Over the generations, how much time has your family spent consuming covertly funded pro-American Empire content?

Uncle Samantha’s Advantage

Through the same bureaucratic incentives used by Haas to explain the expansion of the European Union, Uncle Samantha has always had an advantage over his rival. Government activity necessarily begets more government activity. If you want a European Coal and Steel Community, you must have another organisation to support it with procurement and HR, then another to support that by setting procurement and HR rules and so on, until eventually you’re in the European Union without realising it! Uncle Samantha has always liked giant bureaucracies, and can always build them faster than Uncle Sam can unravel them.

It follows that when Samantha brought over his preferred HR policies from the metropole to the rest of the Empire, the activity must have been accompanied by political warfare campaigns. Suddenly, new brightly coloured flags appeared on churches across the Empire, and recruitment policies were rewritten to match those in the metropole. Uncle Samantha exploited the death of an American drug addict in 2020 to run a mass campaign so wide-reaching that the author of this article was told directly by a client’s Human Resources head in a provincial British city that they were trying to fire the company’s founders from the Board of Directors because they were too “pale, stale and male” as a direct result of the campaign around George Floyd’s death. Suddenly, it became surprisingly hard to find work as an Englishman in England.

Because Uncle Sam couldn’t care less who hired whom in the far-off reaches of his Empire, he wasn’t actively intervening in the way Samantha was. Each time Samantha came into power, he transformed the Empire to resemble his pretty little face a little more, then a little more, until American and vassal state policies became almost indistinguishable. Gradually, the British Empire was subsumed into the American Empire. Before the invention of “British Values”, which seem indistinguishable from “Canadian Values” or indeed any other statist social cohesion project across the diarchic Empire, there were Uncle Samantha’s Values.

The Empire within an Empire

Incorporating the British Empire into the American Empire first required separating the United Kingdom from its external territories. The Americans and Soviets squabbled for decades over these, and scuppered the Rhodesian attempt for British settlers to hold onto power outside of Sam and Samantha’s diarchy. Domestically, the same institutions used to govern the Empire continued to function much as before. There was no French or Turkish-style revolution on the fall of the British Empire and declaration of a new republic run in the interests of its people. Instead, the same institutions used to govern the Empire have preserved their bureaucratic culture domestically.

In the same Parliament which used to debate how to encourage more settlers in the Canadian possessions, British politicians form immigration policies that treat the territory of the United Kingdom like the New World, just another dominion to be filled with people. This has fit very well into Uncle Samantha’s world order. To Samantha, every human is an interchangeable economic unit who just needs to wave a little multicoloured flag and say a few words to become an imperial citizen. Samantha spent his first decades stamping out the Anglo-Saxonism of Uncle Sam’s Invisible Empire in America, and he was certainly not going to let it take hold in England! Key to preventing this has been to encourage non-Anglos into positions of power, both through funding specific leadership training projects and by using America’s vast political warfare apparatus to set the limits of acceptable debate.

Five Eyes Are Watching You

Across Sam and Samantha’s formerly British possessions, various agents of the state work on behalf of their principal to keep tabs on nationalists. From Australia’s deserts to Canada’s vast tundras, the Empire’s men run honeypot organisations designed to entrap young Anglo-Saxons. Is that a genuine Australian civilian dressing up like a Nazi and baking a big Adolf Hitler cake to photograph you in front of, or could it possibly, just maybe, be one of Uncle Samantha’s men? Is that a real Englishman with a crusader profile picture in the group chat sending PDFs to your phone to auto-download so technically you’re in possession of far-right materials and face 15 years in prison, or could it possibly be one of Samantha’s stooges? Is there someone suspicious in your life making George Lincoln Rockwell edits that make you think of another Rockwell’s music? You may be justified in always feeling like somebody’s watching you.

Overall, Uncle Samantha's strategy of persecuting and otherwise subverting nationalist movements worked. His Empire is becoming so transformed that the Anglos’ hooded Invisible Empire no longer even potentially threatens his power at home. Anglos worldwide have lost power to such an extent that within another generation of demographic change in Australia, there will not even be one large Anglo-majority city worldwide. Nationalist movements in Europe have been permitted so long as they align with American policy objectives, now still on the anti-Islamic crusade.

When Uncle Sam inherited this system, he decided to look again across his Empire and reassess the direction it’s been heading in. So far, he’s decided that he doesn’t want the complexity of having to try to rule an Islamic Caliphate in England, but how? He’s given nominal support to remigration, but hasn’t fully supported Wilson’s principles of national self-determination that he used to deconstruct the old British Empire.

At home, Uncle Sam’s supporters were prevented from forming an Anglo-Saxon Congressional Caucus to stand up for Anglos’ rights in America. Could he take a leaf out of Uncle Samantha’s book and use activity in the Empire to change his supporters’ circumstances at home?

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To investigate this, I plotted the estimated genetic coordinates of Prime Ministers and their Home Secretaries from 1964 to 2025, then measured the distance between them and the average English person using Global25 coordinates, and compared this to UK immigration numbers, being overwhelmingly to England.

Approximate genetic distances of Prime Ministers and Home Secretaries over 1964-2025 from the English reference coordinates used in calculations, with comparably distant populations

The Threshold Effect

Given bureaucratic inertia and the fact that immigration statistics are imperfect estimates, even if genetic distance did explain immigration numbers, we would not expect a perfectly linearly correlated relationship. The pattern of immigration’s rise over the observation period suggests that explanations framed purely in terms of short-term demand are incomplete. Immigration advanced in steps, settling onto higher plateaus which then persisted. To analyse these potential regime-level shifts, I measured whether changes in genetic distance were associated with deviations from a rolling average of immigration over the previous three years.

Net immigration shown with Prime Ministers’ and Home Secretaries’ genetic distance to the English reference population over 1964-2025

Overlaying the average full year genetic distance of Prime Ministers onto this series produces a striking alignment. Periods in which Prime Ministers were genetically closer to the English reference tended to coincide with lower immigration levels. This relationship survived controls for time, and years in which immigration significantly exceeded the recent baseline were more likely to coincide with Prime Ministers who were genetically more distant from the English. This is consistent with the idea that leadership alignment matters most at moments of regime change, when new defaults are being established, rather than during steady-state management.

The role of the Home Secretary was more ambiguous. While Home Secretaries clearly matter operationally, their genetic distance did not show the same stable relationship with immigration outcomes once broader regime context was taken into account. This is not especially surprising. Home Secretaries operate within constraints set by the governing regime, administering a bureaucratic machine with a direction largely having been fixed elsewhere.

The relationship between gross immigration and Prime Ministers’ genetic distance from the English was non-linear. Instead, the relationship appears to behave more like a threshold. Below a certain boundary of foreignness from the English, more foreign leaders tended to import more immigrants, and once crossed, additional genetic distance added relatively little explanatory power. The genetic distance threshold which best fits the data is around 0.004 in the Global25 space, roughly the distance between Cornish and English people. While David Cameron is just about as foreign to an Englishman as a Cornish person, Boris Johnson for example is about as genetically distant from an Englishman as a baguette-munching Parisian is. Statistically, much of the explanatory power of this is due to more recent leaders being much further away from the English, while they have increased immigration.

This threshold behaviour is what one would expect if the mechanism at work is based on an in-group, out-group distinction. In most social contexts, the largest shift occurs when someone is no longer perceived, consciously or unconsciously, as part of the in-group. Beyond that point, further distinctions matter less.

Average genetic distances of immigrants, Home Secretaries and Prime Ministers to English reference, and a multiple of immigrant genetic distance by immigrant numbers over 1975-2019

A separate analysis of genetic distance of immigrants themselves shows significant changes over the observed 1975-2019 period. More genetically distant Prime Ministers not only imported more immigrants, but they also tended to import immigrants who were more genetically distant to the English than those previously imported. While the data from 2020 onwards are not directly comparable due to methodological changes, this pattern appears to have held until the present.

The Persistent Scottish Raj

Placing these findings into historical context strengthens the interpretation. New Labour taking power in 1997 marked a clear political transition. Under what was known as Prime Ministers Blair and Brown’s “Scottish Raj” rule until 2010, the immigration and asylum system was repeatedly restructured through major Acts, beginning with the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 and continuing through the early 2000s, opening up the country to mass immigration. One of Blair’s speechwriters Andrew Neather claimed that this was politically-motivated, to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity”, meaning in practice to introduce large populations of other ethnic groups into Anglo-Saxon areas, triggering mass informal evacuations of urban environments known as “white flight” and local minoritisation of those remaining.

In 2004, a structural break occured with EU enlargement. The UK’s implementation choices determined how this expansion translated into actual population flows. Blair, who despite his English admixture is effectively as foreign to an Englishman as a Scotsman, chose to ramp up immigration from the enlarged EU in 2004 despite having the power to postpone immigrants’ access to the UK for several years instead. Then, in 2008, the Points Based System was rolled out through changes to the Immigration Rules, further entrenching the new baseline. Throughout this period, Home Secretaries changed, but the overall direction remained consistent.

Then, from 2014 onwards, the focus shifted toward internal enforcement and access to services. This phase was often described as a clampdown, but did not reverse the earlier step changes. When Boris Johnson took power as Prime Minister in 2019, a leader as foreign to the English as a Frenchman oversaw the implementation of a new post-Brexit immigration regime and historic records of immigration known as the “Boris Wave”, with historically high numbers through the brief Truss and longer Sunak premierships until Starmer took over in 2024 and numbers appear to have fallen back down again.

Taken together, these results do not prove that Prime Ministers’ genetic distance causes mass immigration, or disprove the importance of economic conditions, international obligations, or institutional inertia. What they do suggest is that Britain’s immigration system has been defined by institution of regimes, and that the genetic distance from the English of those in power during the establishment of new regimes may influence persistent levels of immigration.

So when natives express scepticism that leaders who are clearly not of their ethnic stock will act to preserve the demographic status quo, are they merely indulging prejudice, or are they responding to a real pattern? The evidence suggests that their intuition has been grounded in something observable.

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These questions are loaded with assumptions, showing us how framing of popular concepts can influence our perceptions. By “the government's men in the woods”, I am referring to the 146 migrant men installed by the Home Office in a large hotel in Peterborough's woods, located next to a children’s play area, close to primary schools and with direct access to two military bases from the bus stop a couple of minutes’ walk from the door. This is a propagandist’s dream, but in the state media-dominated UK, the government often has first-mover advantage and channel dominance.

It is an open secret that we are nudged and subconsciously coerced into viewing politically sensitive issues in certain ways by information warfare techniques deployed by a small clique of propagandists, including the famous Nudge Unit that grew out of the Cabinet Office and other units in the Home Office and other departments. What’s missing is a proactive counterbalance to this in the private sector. There is a loosely aligned vanguard of op-ed writers, pseudo-independent think tank personnel and video commentators across the media ecosystem, but no core of media planners operating organically at the proficiency level of a government communications unit. This is a drawback, but also an advantage, as it is worth assuming that any such political organisation will be subverted through infiltration or otherwise influenced heavily by the state to the point of ineffectivity.

As the UK information environment develops, how are politically active people likely to organise to resist the information warfare efforts of the government’s clique?

Such movements typically use a mixture of formal and informal organisational tactics to resist governments, with a core organisational structure around which ideas and people coalesce. Much as the communist vanguard would discuss policy at London pubs during the Bolshevik-Menshevik split after their congresses were banned in Europe, nativist movements in the UK tend to have to keep venues secret until the last minute to prevent disruption by state-affiliated media and activists on the Home Office’s payroll lobbying to close their events down, with some event organisers abandoning London altogether in favour of European host countries. Such political activism will likely continue to require flexible organisational behaviours domestically. With the rise in political persecution through the UK’s speech restrictions, several activists currently live in de facto exile in Europe due to likely arrest on arrival if returning to the UK, creating the potential for a more stably organised nationalist hub beyond the reach of the state.

Social media sites are currently a primary method of such informal organisation, though such venues are most at risk of subversion by UK and other government actors. Messages are passed between users in digital bottles floating in a sea of messages from information warfare accounts run domestically, by other militaries directly or by outsourcing to marketing agencies running bot accounts out of Nigeria, the Philippines and other low-cost markets. For every authentic public message a member of the political vanguard receives on X, there are accompanying comments and elicitation statements from militaries actively trying to subvert political activity. Frankly, the potential for immediate reach, perhaps enhanced by a journalist reading the message floating by, mixed with the addictive intermittently-reinforced dopamine hits from notifications, makes social media likely to continue to be preferred in spite of the vulnerabilities.

Outside of formal events and social media, decisions on policy direction and how to communicate new ideas to the public to advance political causes will likely be made at otherwise unassuming social events, now rather less excitingly mixed with group chats and video calls, rather than requiring anything close to the organisational resources of the state.

Concept Fusion and Small Boats

And how could this currently loosely-organised vanguard overcome the state’s information warfare efforts to enact political change?

Returning to the idea of “the government's men in the woods”, this phrase presents a simple link in the reader’s mind between migrants and the UK state. Neurons that fire together really do wire together, and the simple act of labelling the men in this way strengthens the physical connection in the reader’s mind between thoughts of the government and the sinister vision of the unknown men near children in the woods. The more often concepts are expressed at the same time, and the stronger the emotional context, the better people recall associations.

With this in mind, consider the recent use of the term “small boats” to refer to the large-scale Channel migrant crossings. The term, used across state media channels, is perfectly suited for state propaganda. Firstly, it takes the focus off the men in the boats by not even mentioning them. Much effort has been made to suppress news of the men arriving across the Channel over the years, including building a walled walkway on the shore to obstruct photography, and state media until recently almost never showing pictures of the men arriving, only the much rarer images of women and children. The absence of the men from this term can be seen as a part of that.

Secondly, the diminutive “small” shrinks the concept in a person’s mind. In neurolinguistic programming, it is common when considering a problem to visualise it then shrink what is visualised in the mind’s eye. One common example is imagining that critics are small dogs yapping, becoming smaller and quieter. Focusing on boats also minimises the overall scale of the crisis, as people would not commonly visualise the arrival of tens of thousands of people when thinking only of the boats. The state's use of this term encourages acceptance of the government policy to transfer large numbers of illegal immigrants into residential areas. The political vanguard do not, of course, have to use it.

What good is a platform if you’re unable to speak?

French academic Renaud Camus was recently banned from entering the UK due to his discussions of the Great Replacement, a concept the state has expended a lot of effort to stamp out. There remains no politically acceptable way in mainstream media of describing the displacement of many millions of Europeans and the importation of millions of non-Europeans to live in the homes they have abandoned. The concept has simply not been allowed to be exchanged freely, as the state has the resources of its political police, with significant support from American, European and other security forces, to restrict the flow of ideas at home through censorship. This has included pressuring social media platforms into soft censorship, detention and court-mandated silencing of political activists. There is therefore an asymmetric balance of power in the battleground of ideas.

With the loosening of censorship on X and recent pivot of the US government, the tide appears to have turned, and ideas are now floating into mainstream discourse. While the state may still detain political vanguard members for causing offence on the platform, its censorship operations are far less restrictive than even a few years ago. This opportunity to exchange ideas has been seized on, with the new concept of the Yookay used to label the degraded shadow of what the UK once was being a prime example, and the US State Department openly discussing population displacement in Europe.

So what about the small boats?

While I do like my surname Small, a competent activist would outright refuse to use the term “small boat” in this context. The obvious choice would be to call it an “armada”, a word with salient historical meanings for the British, associated with a foreign force invading. A multitude of other words could be used alongside it, but when competing with state propaganda it pays to be pithy and consistent. Calling it the “paedo armada” or “rape armada” based on the high number of sex offenders the government brings into the country via this route is emotionally salient, but unlikely to be oft-repeated in the press. Calling it the “government’s armada” or “traitors’ armada” emphasises who is responsible for this - it is government policy to bring these men into the country and put them in the woods next to the children’s play area. Calling it an invasion separates it from the state, as if it wasn’t caused by government policy intentionally.

The most effective approach would be to think strategically about which concepts activists wish to be associated with the regular outrages of the migrant crisis. Fusion of the concepts of mass immigration and the government would likely enact change most rapidly by degrading the reputation of the state.

Let’s consider the potential impact of using the term “the government’s men” instead of “small boat migrants”. Repetition of the term in every child rape or murder headline, which appear in the news near-daily, would suddenly drive home the fact that the state is importing people en masse who as a group frequently carry out atrocities against the population of the UK. The “small boat” framing positions the headline reader beside the UK government looking across the Channel at tiny boats floating far away, whereas the “government’s men” framing positions the reader as being confronted by an alliance of both the state and the migrant settlers, far more emotionally salient.

Until the UK’s political vanguard take an active interest in information warfare techniques, the state’s clique will continue to dominate discourse. For now, I still wonder what the government’s men are doing in the woods.

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Without getting technical, the methodology that allowed me to predict the race riots is based on the assumption that groups of humans tend to organise broadly along genetic lines. I built on this assumption using open-source intelligence techniques, monitoring ethnocentric sentiment by using keyword and network analysis on a weekly basis for around a year, focusing on accounts with characteristics consistent with involvement in information warfare campaigns.

Using kinship realism and my expertise gained from working in the private security industry and witnessing civil unrest and revolutions on the ground, I predict that the most likely scenario given the current trajectory is that the security situation in the mainland UK declines into a Northern Ireland-style low-intensity conflict by the mid-late 21st century.

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New Informal Borders

Based on historical precedent worldwide, this situation is most likely to lead to a conflict drawn along pseudo-tribal lines. Just as rural Britain is already divided politically along genetic lines, urban residents of Britain tend to vote in ethnic blocs. Currently, this division only leads to occasional political violence, as was seen in the 2024 riots. Under the current trajectory, the generational race riots are likely to escalate in intensity, causing further segregation via the speeding up of the “white flight” process described in the UK government-commissioned 2016 Casey Report as being caused by immigration.

The movement of local peoples from the cities and arrival of historically unprecedented numbers of immigrants are highly likely to follow the pattern already seen across the USA, which has a longer comparison period for study, wherein the Great Migration of African Americans to the North following the civil rights movement led to effective evacuation of Midwestern cities by previous residents. In the USA, these large population movements “flip” a city or metro area to voting differently.

The regions around UK cities have also changed politically as the demographic transition has occurred. While there has been limited research into the future demographic composition of the UK’s regions, it is likely that some areas will become effectively devoid of substantial cohesive White British populations. The focus of successive governments on connecting Southeast England and the Midlands to London have produced large areas where the English have already been minoritised: around London, the English are already in the minority in a large contiguous area approximately the size of Northern Ireland. Based on the long-term infrastructure plans, housing policies and migration patterns, I expect the contiguous area in which the English are minoritised to expand and envelop the areas marked in red below. Within decades, it will grow from Northern Ireland-sized to Belgium-sized.

There is a question of what to call this area. The “Yookay” is a currently popular term used to describe the state of the country in general, but is also used for places outside of this geographical area. I prefer calling this entity New Mercia due to its geographical parallels with the old borders of the ancient Kingdom of Mercia.

New Mercia, the new polity forming in the United Kingdom (bordered in red)

Due to the UK’s electoral system, geographical contiguity is very important. First-past-the-post advantages populations who are concentrated in geographical areas by granting the winner of each local constituency a seat in Parliament, and the losers nothing. Being spread out is disastrous, and it is possible for parties to receive hundreds of thousands of votes nationwide but no seats, despite constituencies only having tens of thousands of voters each. The creation of New Mercia will effectively disenfranchise its minoritised English populations, but outside of the region their likely majority presence in many rural areas will lead to concentration of local political power.

A kinship realist approach would predict resistance from the English population to losing political power in the UK. Sovereignty is nominally with the Crown but is de facto with the English ethnic group. Without the English, there is no UK: the English are the country’s backbone, and are themselves historically headed by an Anglo-Norman elite. An inflection point is coming in the decades ahead when elections can be decided without paying the Englishmen and Anglo-Normans regard. Under a Parliamentary system, the future of the country will be decided by the recently-arrived voters of New Mercia.

Why It Hasn’t Happened Yet

My prediction of armed conflict is not simply an extrapolation of population projections. There are qualitative features of revolutionary movements that are not yet currently present in the UK. While I assume they will naturally emerge, this will not necessarily be the case.

The first feature currently missing is political organisation of the disenfranchised English populations. There are minor street movements with financial backing from figures connected to military organisations of the UK’s nominal allies, but little coherence. What’s missing is a capable revolutionary core seeking to exploit and shape events to suit the goal of political emancipation of the English from their impending disenfranchisement. There are some minor organisations, beset by factional infighting and showing clear signs of infiltration by the UK government, but nothing more. The modus operandi of government appears to be to sabotage such movements rather than build them up and direct them.

While frequent comparisons of such “far-right” groups to Nazis are made, they are fundamentally different in where they sit in the political hierarchy. The German Nazi Party was taken from its fledgeling form and built up by German military intelligence via its undercover agent, Adolf Hitler, working as a spy instead of demobilising after World War I. Hitler joined the Nazi Party while drawing a salary from the military, regularly reporting back to his superiors. His early speeches, including antisemitic ones, were signed off by his commanding officer in German military intelligence. The German military also directly financed the Nazi Party, paying for thousands of flyers in the early 1920s even after Hitler was off their payroll, and it continued to be supportive during the Nazis’ rise to power. It is common for activists to call for more government intervention to stop Europe’s far-right from producing another Hitler, but in modern terms, Hitler was a fed.

There is not presently an effective activist military or other organisation mobilising the British masses in such a manner. This can be seen in how activities are organised. Unlike places heavily targeted by competent political warfare operatives, there is no exploitation of anniversaries of tragedies. If you asked anyone on the street when the Manchester Arena bombing or even the Southport massacre occurred, it is highly unlikely that they would be able to tell you. This would be unthinkable in places like Hong Kong or Israel, where the dates of tragedies are seared into public consciousness. This says something of the competence of the UK’s adversaries. Even China and Russia with their formidable psychological warfare and communications capabilities have not tied tragedies to dates, exploiting the power of emotional memory. Instead, days pass and life goes on.

With limited predictability, protests are more reactive and spontaneous. This comes with significant disadvantages for protestors, who are likely to be identifiable on camera and face punishment for participation in such events. The best examples of modern protests were in Hong Kong. With a tradition of well-organised subversion, the message went out that people should all wear white on a particular date. Protest dates were spread by word of mouth, forums, in international news and even by using dedicated protest-organising dating app profiles. People came in uniform, giving anyone the ability to blend into the crowd. Soon, the uniform switched to black, a colour known to induce more aggressive behaviour in sports, and the real turmoil began. Volunteers enforced a no photography policy, constantly looking for spies, while specialist teams moved seamlessly, using umbrellas as visual cover to avoid collection of evidence as they dismantled roadside fencing and created roadblocks impeding the progress of the police. The Hong Kong protests were highly organised and professional. Without a revolutionary vanguard, either organic or supported covertly by a domestic or foreign military organisation, English protests will remain sloppy in comparison.

The second feature is the lack of a clear distinction between “us” and “them”. There is no widely used term for migrants who arrived in the UK after World War II. The word “foreigner” is too broad, and other racial epithets too specific to describe the arrival of a diverse population that, as the Casey Report said, caused white flight. Evidence from neurolinguistics implies that without the right terminology, people are slower to accurately perceive their environment, even being slower in identifying colours. With no term, let’s use “replacements” as an example, Englishmen can’t easily verbalise what has happened. There isn’t even a cat-and-mouse-style game of censorship and evasion by shifting terms and rhyming. Even the term “English” has been co-opted from its original use as an ethnonym to being anyone born within the borders of England. The term “indigenous” is attacked in state-affiliated media, dominant in the UK, and anybody using that term in public debate is likely to receive personal attacks labelling them racist, threatening their job security by effectively blacklisting them for background checks. There is also a lack of accompanying symbols that have not been co-opted by the state. Waving the England flag either identifies you as an ethnonationalist or a supporter of England’s ethnically diverse football team.

The third feature is the most important in defining the terms of the future conflict. There is no conception in the public consciousness as to why the dramatic population changes have happened in Europe since the end of World War II. This is not tied to the presence of the American military in Europe and the constant political warfare that goes with a military presence, including overt and covert psychological operations waged against nationalists in Europe by the USA. To any historian looking back on this era, it will be blindingly obvious. The populations were suddenly displaced because Western Europe was part of the American Empire at that time. Empires erode borders and typically move very large numbers of people into their occupied territories to enrich the metropole. The British did it in their American imperial possessions, and now the Americans are doing it in Britain.

Again, adversaries have done a terrible job of establishing this. Russian propaganda, generally the best in quality and targeting outside the West, focuses obsessively on NATO, which is far too technical a topic for the average person. There has been no effective effort to draw the link in the average person’s mind between mass immigration starting after World War II and Europe being occupied by the Americans since then. Saying that “the [replacements or equivalent term] came when the Americans took over” would mean very little to the average person. Instead, some discuss the famous admission by senior Labour Party figures that mass immigration was initiated by Tony Blair and his immigration minister Barbara Roche to “rub the right’s nose in diversity”, the “right” generally corresponding to the English ethnic group. Others may believe the state-affiliated media lines about Trump causing a surge in Europe’s far-right, without addressing the tacit admission that the boundaries within which Europe can decide its policies under American occupation are decided on the other side of the Atlantic.

The conception of the USA as an occupier will become important as the English come into greater conflict with the state. It is likely that the USA will prioritise its state-state relations with the UK over any solidarity with the disenfranchised English. The USA has mobilised its security apparatus to tackle the “far-right” as its greatest threat, and despite the blip during the current Trump administration is likely to revert to form and continue cracking down on nationalist movements in Europe afterwards. The USA itself is also changing rapidly demographically. Kinship realism predicts that genetic proximity of leaders influences the likelihood that they will be allies and adversaries, and soon that traditionally short genetic distance between American leaders and the English is likely to lengthen as America’s old Anglo elite go the way of the English in Britain.

The Calm Before the Stormtroopers

There is still time to avert a tragedy, or at least postpone it. Whether we like it or not, mass movements of people tend to lead to conflict. These conflicts never truly end, and instead resurge in generational expressions of grievances and, usually in the UK, race riots. It’s best to view the interactions between genetically distinct groups as a process, and riots and armed conflict as manifestations of this process that can be postponed and interrupted without changing the underlying competitive dynamics. It is likely that the deliberate introduction of very large numbers of genetically distant people into the British Isles and the consequential population movements we are currently witnessing will lead to a rise above the baseline levels of political conflict into low-intensity warfare. It is also likely that this conflict will draw American security forces further in from their current activities of monitoring and subverting European nationalists to being in direct armed conflict with them. It’s just a question of when, and it doesn’t have to happen by the mid-late 21st century. With more coherent organisation and support of an interested military, it could happen sooner, but with effective subversion by the UK and its allies, the disenfranchised English could be kept in check for much longer while their population and therefore capacity to challenge the regime collapses.

Charles Small is an open-source intelligence consultant. Get in touch for a consultation: charles@csmall.co.uk

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Brains are lazy and ideas are people

It’s easier to associate an idea with a particular person, judge whether being associated with that person is broadly socially good or bad, and choose a belief that way rather than to think through various arguments for and against an idea. It saves calories and time. It’s also evolutionarily beneficial to be associated with people who are liked. Neurons that fire together wire together, and generally being associated with positive feelings related to a person is beneficial and will associate you with those feelings by proxy. It also signals allegiances to others, a benefit for in-group definition.

Next time you consume media, watch out for the journalist forming connections in your mind between people and concepts. Let’s call the process of fusing the person and the idea personaganda. The personagandist journalist will embed a person’s name in pejorative terms, put on a negative tone of voice when discussing them, and in this context mention the concept that becomes associated with all this extra social baggage. The idea cannot be expressed without this. It doesn’t exist abstracted in Plato’s world of forms. Instead, the idea acquires a social form.

This phenomenon had a significant effect on my life while researching the origins of the pandemic in 2020. I’d found records from a bat virus database run by the suspect Wuhan lab showing unusual activity around the time the virus most likely spilled over into humans. I considered going public and basking in the glory of fame, but something stopped me: cowardice. You see, there had been a personagandistic media campaign associating the belief that a lab leak likely caused the pandemic with President Trump. In mainstream media, the belief was deeply associated with him, and he with racism, and thereby anybody who put forward evidence supporting the likely industrial accident risked becoming viewed as racist by proxy. A writer for the highly influential New York Times wrote about the allegedly racist origins of the lab leak hypothesis. Associating my name with racism at that point would have made me effectively unemployable.

I was living on a shoestring budget at the time after a travel app failed, in a house of multiple occupancy with a rat infestation and black mould, working odd programming jobs while my main source of joy in life consisted of training a neighbourhood squirrel to be my alarm clock (leave nuts out at a set time and they’ll knock on your window when you don’t). One mainstream media article labelling me personally would have been read by any HR department and destroyed what chance of a stable career I had. I saw other volunteer lab leak researchers face career pressures and one lost his job due to pandemic policy-related social media posts. So, I remained anonymous, sending evidence to journalists and other researchers under pseudonyms and from disposable email addresses. I kept a low profile for years out of self-preservation.

Why did I feel the need to do that?

Because ideas are people.

Associating myself with an idea would have meant in effect allying with the international press’ adversary Donald Trump, somebody I’ve never communicated with. It was election season and the press would say whatever they needed to to lose him a vote or two. I heard later from a reputable journalist who shall remain forever nameless that their news organisation deliberately didn’t emphasise the lab leak hypothesis to avoid benefiting Trump’s election campaign.

Personaganda - propaganda via personas

These considerations are widespread in the advertising industry, where it’s typical to find a face for a brand. Influencers are scrutinised very carefully, their past posts combed through for signs of anything that a brand would not want to be associated with. This happens when presenting ideas to the public too.

During the pandemic, the face of the vaccine program was Dr Fauci, and his face and name were everywhere. Famous TV hosts did bits and dances honouring him. He frequently addressed the public. He appeared in a white lab coat, building his image as a medical professional. He stood in front of the world and promoted the natural origin hypothesis for the pandemic. He was the face of vaccines, of masking, of natural origins for the pandemic, and broadly of state policy.

This establishment of the person as a concept explains why there has been so much focus in the media on attacking his record. To criticise him was to criticise the whole pandemic response programme. People on the industrial accident hypothesis side brought up his mishandling of the AIDS crisis decades ago, funding bizarre experiments and so on. Critiquing the person critiqued the idea.

An adept personagandist fuses the idea with personas already established in the audience’s mind. Seeing someone in a white lab coat connects them with the personas of the family doctor, the genius scientist and other trusted authority figures seen over the years. The coat increases credibility and thereby makes the ideas they communicate more persuasive. A personagandist journalist is careful to present the person and thereby the idea in a positive context. In contrast, notice the unflattering images they present of people they disagree with. You’ll see their jaws agape, mid-bite of a sandwich, or face contorted mid-sneeze.

This power to rewire people’s minds and fuse concepts with people and social context grants the media far more power over the individual than one would likely grant them voluntarily. It’s become very difficult to discuss certain ideas publicly, of particular concern in the universities, our great centres of idea incubation. Instead, ways of viewing the world are walled off due to the reputational risks of being associated with figures granted pseudo-immortality as personas. So, to keep our jobs we keep our heads down. Because ideas are people. And you’d better be careful who you associate yourself with.

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I first noticed the pattern when reading Jim Wilson’s work mapping the genetic landscape of the British Isles. His team found, by looking at Scots with ancestry from particular regions, that the country is still genetically divided along the borders of the old kingdoms of Pictland, Strathclyde and others. Wilson’s genetic maps look startlingly similar to Scotland’s electoral ones.

It’s one thing to not move around much, and who could blame you in that climate, but why would the modern inhabitants of these ancient kingdoms also vote along those lines? As a part Scot myself I’m open to the idea that we’re uniquely tribal savages, but there appears to be something driving this that applies universally, something that may fundamentally change the way you view the world, dear reader.

Consider the graphic below. On the left, you see genetic clusters mapped near the ancestral homes of those who volunteered their genomes for study. On the right is a selection of UK Parliamentary election results.

Genetic map of the British Isles based on work by Professor Jim Wilson from the University of Edinburgh’s Usher Institute and MRC Human Genetics Unit (source) alongside voting data.

A keen eye will notice that when the clusters are mapped to the Parliamentary constituencies, they appear to choose different Parliamentary parties to their neighbouring clusters. Indeed, over the sample period most of the time clusters voted differently to their neighbours regardless of the party in question.

Number of times a genetic cluster voted differently to most of its bordering neighbours (excluding cities) in general elections over 1964-92

This phenomenon is also visible on a wider scale. Callaway’s genetic map of the rural UK (source) based on those with four grandparents from a particular area closely resembles the 2017 electoral map, and many others before and since.

Callaway et al. (left), BBC (right)

Northern Ireland is of course known for its sectarian conflict, and the division of votes along ethnic lines is not surprising there. Such division is not widely consciously practiced in the rest of the country, however. Yet here it is, in plain view. Staunchly Labour-voting North West England is revealed to be inhabited by a genetic cluster distinct from the Tory-voting Home Counties in England’s Southeast for example. Likewise, Northumberland maintains itself as distinct both politically and genetically. While the sample for Brighton was small, Callaway’s study picked up a Devonian cluster around the city, which prides itself on voting Green as distinct from the traditional conservative heartland surrounding it. The Cornish independent streak is visible on older electoral maps, but its recent lack of political distinction in general elections has coincided with increased settlement of English internal migrants from the 20th century, reinforcing the idea that voting still occurs along genetic lines.

Bring Back Biology

The most parsimonious explanation for this phenomenon is rooted in our biology. Culture, economics and all the social sciences offering explanations for political phenomena are determined by the limits set by the harder sciences. To study human behaviour, we must understand humans.

Like any other creatures, humans have evolved to favour genetic relatives as well as ourselves as individuals. There is a simple logic to this: our genes don’t need to be present in us individually to propagate. If the same genes present in us are present in our relatives, it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective to behave altruistically towards those relatives to keep our genes alive. Geneticist J.B.S. Haldane encapsulated this idea in his quip that he would lay down his life “for two brothers or eight cousins”.

This logic of genetic altruism holds for groups of those similar to us too, though the precise mechanism of how this happens beyond the extended family is still debated. Rather than laying down your life, it may make sense to sacrifice one vote and choose a candidate favoured by the extended kinship group rather than the political candidate most aligned to your political principles in order to benefit the wider group and make survival of your genes more likely. Ethnic nepotism in voting can be genetically beneficial to the in-group you share genes with by directing more resources from the governing body towards those more likely to be related, and helps maintain your cluster of genes’ distinction from other genetic groups in competition.

This competitive alliance system does not require that the groups be formally discussed. Due to the influence of genes on phenotypes, genetically similar people recognise each other as part of an in-group unconsciously, without having to vocalise a shared identity. This perception of similarity to oneself is a cue of kinship, and would be sufficient within the social contexts that emerge in larger groups to give preference to more related people in political alliance formation.

When applied to politics and warfare, I call this analytical approach kinship realism. In international relations theory, realism purports that nation states act independently in their own self-interest, forming and dropping alliances as they go. I propose that kinship groups act in this manner in the political realm, prioritising their own genetic interest above those even of their countrymen from rival clusters.

Let’s apply this kinship realist framework to one of the great political issues of our day: the rise of the German “far-right”. As in Scotland, the voting appears to be concentrated along ancient political lines. The much-maligned AfD does well in the historically Slavic regions of East Germany.

German 2025 Federal election results mapped by Wikipedia, showing AfD winning in East Germany.

Ancient Slavic tribes mapped by Wikipedia, showing East Germany inhabited by tribes not present outside of AfD-voting regions.

The lands formerly inhabited by the Sorbs, Obodrites and Veleti still contain direct descendants of those tribes. The genetic signal of those ancient Slavs is present more in East Germans than West today, even outside of the modern Sorbian population that maintains a distinct language and culture. Simply put, a kinship realist approach would predict that East Germany should vote distinctly to the rest of Germany. The rise of the “far-right” appears instead to be the rise of Slavic Germany limited to its traditional homelands.

Kinship Lives

Humans have no overriding reason to behave fundamentally differently to how we have done since time immemorial. Why shouldn’t the Scots still be tribal? Why shouldn’t East Germany organise along ancient genetic lines without announcing it to the world? Being as we are, could we ever behave differently?

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