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PaperclipPerfector  10hr ago (text post)   1401 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026

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The Civic Identity of my Outgroup.

Recently, Melanie Phillips, a jewish zionist conservative journalist and British media personality, wrote a post on X that raised some eyebrows:

This is very muddled. British identity is civic and not ethnic. It is totally different from Jewish identity, which is ethnic, religious and cutural. Judaism is the unique fusion of a people, a faith and a land. That's why the Jewish people, as a people, is entitled to live in its ancestral homeland.

This is different again from Israeli identlty. Arabs, Druze and others are also Israeli citizens with equal civic and religious rights. But (unless they convert to Judaism) they can't be Jews with their unique claim to self-determination in the land and their unique political right to a state of their own.

Because of the unique and multi-faceted nature of Judaism, there's no crossover with British identity. But as I have written for decades, the British are not only entitled to but should promote and defend their historic nation, identity and its culture. There's no conflict between those two positions, and the suggestion that Jews want to deny to the British the self-determination that the Jews have fulfilled in the State of Israel is false and disgraceful.

As can be seen in the link, she was replying to small time Scottish comedian and media personality Leo Kearse, who is also a self avowed zionist, but a 'zionist' for British people as well. Who tried to make equivocations between British and jewish identity which Melanie rejects.

There's a lot to unpack here. The Principal disagreement rest on the idea that the British should defend their civic identity, but, for some reason, not their ethnic one. American Dissident Right wing personality Dave Greene got to the heart of the matter:

This is a remarkable document as it captures, in perfect platonic form, the mode that ruins all Jewish-Gentile discourse.

  1. By linguistic construction, British people DO NOT have an ethnic, religious, cultural identity, just a “civic” one
  2. Also by linguistic construction, Jewish people DO have an ethnic, religious, cultural identity in addition to their civic one
  3. Both British and Jewish people have EQUAL right to defend their ethnic and cultural heritage, but since the former, by definition, has NO ethnic identity they don’t really have anything to defend.
  4. So obviously, by linguistic construction, we treat Jews and British people the same. Therefore any assertion of a double standard is “Anti-Semitism”!

What is obvious now to everyone is that “civic” identity based on a relationship to a liberal multicultural post-civil-rights nation state is meaningless. These types of “civic” identities are so broad they basically include the entire world, and in practice they just amount mewling easily-faked HR platitudes that no one actually believes.

Only ethnic/cultural/religious identity matters because it’s the only identity specific enough to wield power. But here Melanie Phillips, along with many other Zionist counter parties, build the double standard into the language itself.

“The decreed definition of ‘British/English’ demands that the identity not be ethnic!”

But who decreed that the British / English not have a valid ethnic identity? Was it history? Obviously not. Was it God? Maybe Melanie believes this, but I doubt anyone else thinks the Lord on High has intervened to justify her people’s special pleading.

But ,ultimately, it’s clear what’s going on. The reason why we are using this loaded language with an implicit double standard built into it, is because people like Melanie’s push it. They word-cast a double standard into the received definitions so it looks like British dispossession is just the will of the language / God.

And look, I know not all the Z people are like this, but guys, you gotta give me something else beyond an iteration of this little linguistic hat trick. We can see it a mile away, and it insults our intelligence.

Even if taken as a simple matter of fact, Melanie Phillips is obviously just wrong, as British nationalist and media personality Connor Tomlinson pointed out:

"the suggestion that Jews want to deny to the British the self-determination that the Jews have fulfilled in the State of Israel is false and disgraceful."

Melanie, you opened by denying the ethnic roots of British identity, and said Jewish identity was unique in it's ties to ethnicity, religion, and territory.

The English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish, prior to recent unwanted waves of migration, had ethnic continuity of over 90 per cent dating back to 927 AD. The Anglo Saxons converted to Christianity by 686 AD. The first Archbishop of Canterbury banned cousin marriage in 597 AD. Our historic faith has shaped our genetic inheritance.

We have some of the clearest genetic distinctions, and ties to faith and territory in the world. We're an Island, for God's sake. So if your definition applies for Jewish people, it applies for British people too.

And just as the Jewish people get to define their identity, British people get to define our identity.

So what is going on here? Why did she write what she did? It's not a matter of political fairness, like Dave Greene posited. Since this is obviously not fair. Nor is it a matter of factual categorical accuracy, like Connor Tomlinson noted.

The immediate answer is that Melanie Phillips is expressing her views earnestly as a jewish supremacist. She genuinely can not feel the emotional pull in her heart towards other identity groups as to when it comes to the jews. It does not emotionally intuit for her. She's simply honest in verbalizing her emotional state when faced with the concept of venerating a groups sanctity and integrity when that group is jewish and when a group is not jewish. To her they are simply not the same.

To that extent there's not much to take issue with. Zionism to Melanie is not nationalism. Zionism represents nationalism for one nation only. Within the zionist worldview there are no other valid nations than the jewish one. Every other identity is lesser or simply not a thing. That's genuinely what those like Melanie feel. That's why the holocaust is the most important and not the tens of millions of Russians who died, or why Israel has a special status before any other nation on earth, or why the jewish people are the most distinct despite being a hodgepodge of ethnicities more genetically diverse than the entirety of Europe. These are all verbal qualifiers empty of meaning or content outside of the emotions felt by those who express them.

What's less clear is why that is the case. Why does zionism not represent itself as the pan-nationalist identitarian movements in Europe? You have these right wing politicians and media personalities falling over themselves to praise zionism and Israel, but when the time comes for the zionist to scratch back, they don't. And it's genuinely bizarre. Because the insult here is far graver than what any mealy mouthed opposition to 'the left' can make up for.

The implication behind every oppositional argument to 'the left' from a point of view that's not explicitly nationalistic in the same way that right wing jews are zionistic, is that you don't have a right to exist. An implicit recognition of the fact that they don't believe that your identity, your family and your nation is valid. This is doubly highlighted by media personalities who stand on identitarian business for Israel, but make platonic arguments for everyone else. Ben Shapiro's famous 'I don't care about the browning of America' continues to echo throughout time.

The buck has to stop here. It's not possible to maintain anything else. Zionism is not just nationalism for the jews. It's not even Nazism for the jews. It's beyond that. In fact it would be safe to say that there is hardly a difference between how a zionist views non-jewish nations and how a radical open borders leftist views non-jewish nations. These aren't nations to them at all. To conceptualize of them in such a way just isn't valid. They are simply economic zones to be managed. Creedal nations. Ideas to be played with.

With all that said, ostensibly nationalistic people like Leo Kearse who think zionists are a natural ally are simply wrong.

For an empire, to be ‘ethnically’ part of the main ethnicity is eventually meaningless- there was not such thing as an ethnic Roman in 400 AD, either. Sic semper imperium.

That doesn’t make it cosmic justice or revenge for colonialism or whatever bullshit. It is simply the way things are; thé ethnic component of Britishness or Americanness is gone. You want to maintain ethnic purity then you don’t get to be the empire, you have to live under it.

You just shouldn't give citizenship to whoever. That simple. The supply of third world peasants vastly outstrips the demand for labor - so there is no need to make them citizens, unlike the romans. Dubai offers vastly worse deal than UK to the people from the subcontinent, and the quality of the workers they get doesn't seem to be that different.

The Roman face still exists today. You can literally compare marble busts from back then to Tony Soprano, an Argentinian, or an Italian and see the same face.

So yes the Roman Empire existed without Rome being not Roman. The British Empire existed without London being British. You can manage colonies under your law that are a part of your empire without you yourself not being you.

Now do the Arabs and their empires.

The rejection of the ethnic component of Britishness coincided with the collapse of the British Empire. Likewise you note the loss of ethnic Roman identity circa 400 AD Rome, at the twilight of their own empire. America is TBD but the rejection of the ethnic component of Americanism has led to disastrous consequences within a single generation.

All of those empires grew and thrived under the auspice of a distinct ethnic identity and sense of destiny, and then they wilted when it was lost.

"Ethnic purity" is a false dichotomy. Ethnic purity is impossible for empires but maintaining a sense of imperial ethnic identity is not impossible and is a core feature of building and maintaining empires. For everything you could say about Israel, they do not maintain ethnic purity as dailydogma showed below. Yet they maintain a collective ethnic identity and could not survive without that identity.

America is TBD but the rejection of the ethnic component of Americanism has led to disastrous consequences within a single generation.

Did I miss some catastrophes coming from massive Catholic/non-WASP immigration in my readings?

I feel like this argument has been done a lot and basically has name in internet lore - “What about the Italians”.

And of course then you basically just jump into HBD arguments plus harder forced assimilation.

For Rome the HBD arguments seem harder in retrospect. No one thinks the Germans weren’t capable of being more than barbarians today.

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