Where I Really Stand On Remigration

This is a Total Shit Show

About Last Night

Last night’s video with Far-Right (actual Far-Right) remigration pusher Steve Laws already has 10,000 comments on YouTube alone overnight. So it’s fair to say it’s a topic that inspires passion and debate in the British people.

Rightly so.

Steve’s position is that anyone who is not ethnically English should be deported. Where to? I suppose other countries will have to figure that out. In some cases, this would be relatively simple - Polish parents? Off to Poland you pop.

But a range of grandparents from Romania, Poland, Canada and, say, Malaysia…ah, we’ll figure that out later. The details don’t matter.

It’s not a racist policy.

Except it is (importantly, Steve admits he is racist).

There is a vague notion that Europeans are fine. If we were to be charitable, this would ostensibly be because their culture is more similar to ours. But Albanians and Jews don’t count as European in Steve’s world.

So, off they trot.

Who Will Be Deported?

It is hard to work out from Steve’s remigration policy exactly who’d be left on these beautiful isles. He told me he doesn’t want to get boiled down in percentages of ethnicities (he claims he is 98% English), but suggested that his proposed government would expand its tentacles into the public’s medical records to sort the purebloods from the mudbloods!

We can only guess, but you’re talking about a country-wide purge on a scale of tens of millions.

Which begs the question: wouldn’t it save a lot of hassle if we simply deported him? That 2% Irish (if we believe his account) stands out as a blemish, and I could swear I saw him yammering about leprechauns and potatoes in the corridor before we started.

DEPORT!

There is historical precedent for this, too. Napoleon was indisputably native French, but was DEPORTED to Saint Helena. Jacobites native to England who supported James II were DEPORTED. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was native Russian but DEPORTED to West Germany.

The deporting game is fun.

But as Carl Benjamin said - reacting to my Steve Laws interview - Laws is the Greta Thunberg of the Right. It’s all fun and games, but it isn’t realistic, practical or desirable, beyond deporting illegal immigrants and immigrant criminals.

The Social Media False Impression

Of course, Carl was destroyed by his own followers in the comments. The pureblood dared to show too much humanity to the untermenschen. This points to a problem. The Remigration scene - while tiny and insignificant outside of social media - uses Discord servers to alert one another to swarm anyone who doesn’t comply with its purity spiral.

On top of that, the most fervent and zealous are most likely to post beneath social media videos. This gives the illusion that they have a far larger presence than they actually do. In the real world, the British public has no appetite for judging others on immutable features, and the overwhelming majority of us would be appalled by Steve Laws.

Even on the cesspit of X, the silent majority disagrees. One way to get a sense of this is simply by looking at followers. I started growing my social media presence in the last year, while Steve started some time beforehand. At the time he came on my podcast, we each had around 128,000 followers, as my account rapidly closed the gap. Steve - not up to date - gloated that he had more followers than me and that meant his side was winning.

In the two weeks since we filmed, he is still at 128,000, and my account just passed 133,000. To be clear, follower numbers are no indicator of moral worth. But in this case, they do suggest that the swarm of negativity aimed at me by pro-remigration extremists represents nothing but a passionately-held fringe view.

Steve was right about one thing: I’m a Jew, so naturally I will argue against the deportation of…myself. But the idea of anyone being kicked out of the country based on their immutable features is horrific to me and to most British people.

Even Carl Benjamin’s suggestion that we send back those who came in the grotesque Boris wave from the past five years rings authoritarian and unjust to me. Ultimately, while I agree that this has absolutely fucked the country, these individuals mostly entered the country legally, often at great financial and personal cost. To then revoke their pass and uproot their lives because we decided that our prime minister(s) made a big mistake wouldn’t be right.

That said, I have great sympathy with the English people (ethnically or otherwise) who have been screwed by a globalist, cowardly mindset that tore their land and culture from them. The ‘patriots’ calling me out for disagreeing with Steve Laws might want to check my previous 300 or so videos in which I pushed back against mass immigration and postmodernist progressivism in terms so vehement that they lost me any opportunity of working again in the public sphere.

There is a space for anonymous social media accounts, because whistle-blowing is so essential. At the same time, those users should have more respect for those of us who put our faces, reputations and safety on the line.

So, where do I stand?

Firstly, I consider myself English. Not ethnically, but nationally and civically. I was born and raised in England, with an English culture, by parents and grandparents who had never known anything but England.

Moreover, Jews have been a part of the English culture that has grown around us for more than 400 years, and some just after the Norman Invasion (before they were exiled). There is centuries-long historical documentation of people being referred to as English Jews. Benjamin Disraeli was a Sephardi Jew voted in as prime minister twice in the 1800s. This idea of Jews not being English is discordant with our history and a new invention by a scared Far-Right looking for scapegoats.

I understand why some would say that Jews - or blacks or Asians - cannot be English. But I think it is slippery to assert this (even by minority ethnic friends of mine like Suella Braverman) without clarifying that you are speaking merely of ethnicity. Of course, indeed, an Englishman’s children or even grandkids in Japan are not ethnically Japanese. There is no magic soil that would make them ethnically Japanese.

But let’s reverse it.

An Englishman moves to Poland. His grandkids or great-grandkids speak not a word of English; they grew up, for all intents and purposes, Polish. Are they English? Ethnically (providing no admixture), yes. Nationally and culturally, no. Which of those two is more important to make for a better English culture?

Not his blood.

The ethnonationalist has no non-arbitrary way to decide when blood stops mattering. One generation? Three? Ten? If ancestry alone defines belonging, then integration is meaningless and loyalty is irrelevant. But if ancestry eventually stops mattering, then the whole doctrine collapses into culture and citizenship anyway.

There are flaws and exceptions in both my argument and the ethnat one. Unlike gender - which really is binary - concepts such as race and ethnicity, as well as culture and nationhood, are ambiguous and on a spectrum, making this too hard to pin down.

The Israel Conflation

Many of my Right-Wing detractors bring up Israel as a gotcha. Ethnonationalism for me, but not for thee, they say. They’re wrong, and I’ll explain why. But first, let’s bask in the irony of Steve calling Tommy Robinson out for his Zionism, before insisting that I, based on nothing but my Jewish ethnicity, must naturally go to…Israel. Turns out he’s more of a Zionist than he thinks.

Israel is a state that puts its Jewish identity forward. Although I have very little ancestrally or racially in common with Ethiopian, Mizrahi or Sephardi Jews, they all come under the same umbrella of what I consider a Jewish civic (not ethnic) nationalism.

It gets complicated.

Theoretically, a Jew with zero Jewish culture or religious belief could call upon his right of return based on nothing other than his ancestry. But people can convert to Judaism and move to Israel. Even though 1%-2% of those moving to Israel are converts, the fact that this is permitted shows that it isn’t purely ethnicity-based.

Those on the Right who hold Israel up (and down) as a paragon of ethnonationalism often don’t realise that only 70 per cent of its inhabitants are Jews, and less than half of them are white Jews like me. Of the remaining 30 per cent, 20 per cent are Muslim Arabs, and many of the rest are Christian Arabs and various other cultures and races. These people are as Israeli as any Jew, and could run for prime minister - even if it’s unlikely they’d succeed.

Israel shows that even a state founded explicitly to protect an ethno-religious group cannot escape internal diversity, legal pluralism, and moral tension - and has spent its entire existence managing those contradictions rather than eliminating them.

One thing that the remigration supporters and I agree on is that something needs to be done. There is a lot the UK can learn from Israel, the one Western country with above-replacement birth rates. When you walk around Israel, you notice the national pride in the air. Israeli flags are everywhere, much like we see in the States. People are taught to love their country, rather than denigrate it as we do here, particularly around our history and Empire.

Some friends of mine have pointed out that Britain is a Christian country and its particular form of Christianity helped inspire one of the greatest cultures in the world. I appreciate this and would be open to a system that puts forward Christianity. But even in Israel, the Islamic call to prayer reverberates through the streets, and there are countless churches. So it’d just have to be about promoting a Christian-First culture without becoming authoritarian.

I understand the instinct to deport people.

But imagine an England that immediately halts immigration, incentivises those already here to love the country, and - importantly - instils pride in its people and encourages them (culturally and financially) to have more children. The white English percentage would soar in a matter of years.

It’s not ideal.

But I feel that - unless you want creepy doctors ascertaining your blood admixture through medical records - that is the only way forward.