I went to the Heterodox Social Science Conference 2026
I hate conferences: they bring out the worst in me. I become a fawning, politicking creep, continually eyeing the room for someone important to talk to. Hmm, let’s try him, he looks tall and distinguished. Oh no, he’s a retired lawyer who lives locally and “just turned up to hear what you had to say”! Quick, escape and find a bigshot, you quintessence of dung! I can’t do this well because I disgust myself too much.
Heterodox Social Science is basically a political movement trying to fit into an academic box. The academic thrust, as put by its organizer Eric Kaufmann, is two-pronged: woke studies, i.e. explaining why academia is full of leftists, and heterodox social science, which is a grab bag of potential heresies. The first is a subfield of the study of ideology and is perfectly respectable but quite narrow. The second is broad, perhaps too broad. So the talks were diverse in both topic and quality. There were lots of legitimate scandals, like the Kamloops burials in Canada (which appear never to have existed), and talks that were effectively survival guides to getting cancelled. Interesting but not necessarily the stuff of social science. The crowd varied from old-fashioned folk in the humanities to a few geneticists, evolutionary psychologists and so on, pursuing their individual “naughty thoughts”.
Razib Khan was funny and charismatic. He turned up in a large Stetson (aren’t they large by definition?) with a pretty girl in what I think it is fair to call tow. He referred to everyone of either sex as bitches. He also wandered over to chat to some non-conference related black guys, presumably Buckingham students studying for their MBAs; and at the conclusion of his talk, a gallop through modern population genetics for a general audience, he said “Of course ethnic groups differ genetically, look around you!… Hmm, that doesn’t work with this crowd.” This was true, it was the whitest conference I’ve ever been to. (I don’t think that’s hugely surprising, if your themes include “university job adverts literally saying white men need not apply” then who is going to be most annoyed by that?) His conversation was a whirl of Silicon Valley house parties, girls namechecking tech bros namechecking girls. “You hear how I mogged Richard Hanania?” No, tell me. “I’ll tell ya!” I name him because I don’t think “Razib Khan is outrageous” will come as a surprise to anyone.
The most interesting but also depressing talks were the policy ones. Chris Rufo debated whether academia should be reformed from within, or from above via the power of the state. He was an impressive American policy intellectual, in full command of his material and utterly confident in all his answers, but disillusioned by contact with reality in the form of Trump’s wholesale indifference to academia. But like Trump he believed in leverage, only leverage, and he was able to quite plausibly mock the idea that we should just fix academia from within.
There was definitely a generational divide between old liberal and libertarian packhorses, and the new generation who think simply in terms of getting their allies in power.
Then there was David Goodhart versus someone from Restore Britain on national identity. I arrived to find an dishevelled man on stage in ill-fitting trousers, green socks and trainers. Ah, I thought, this loon must be from Restore Britain. No, it was David Goodhart. The Restore Britain guy was a smoothly dressed Young Conservative type, one of several at the conference. (You can sense where the wind is blowing from these guys now being in Reform or even RB.) He was a confident debater on his terrain of abstract theories of national identity. Really he and David Goodhart did not disagree much in theory. They only differed in what they want as policy responses. David Goodhart wanted stronger citizenship tests. The RB guy wanted mass repatriations. I’m not sure I see much middle ground between these. An Indian guy (by ethnicity) asked how much they planned to pay him, as an incentive to leave. Our man knew how to deal with these questions and his mien turned threatening: “I wouldn’t be so flippant about the aspirations of the British people….”
I got the same sense of unreality from a tall, languid, well-connected sounding young lawyer who I sat next to at dinner. It turned out he’d just been fired and replaced by AI. After a highbrow conversation with my other neighbour, adjudicating the merits of Dostoyevsky, Flaubert and Proust, I asked him what books he liked. He splendidly replied “I’m just getting through some of the Horus Heresy novels” (set in the Warhammer 40K Universe, if you don’t know).
But when we talked about mass repatriation, as you do, as you do, and I said “nobody will vote for this”, he said it didn’t need to be in the manifesto, they could just do it. But there’d be riots? “Oh, I think with enough police and water cannon…”, spoken as if he were calculating Army Points for an Imperial Guard detachment to rough up some xenos. Which I thought but did not say. He’d just been sacked.
Seriously, you can talk about the deep roots of identity all you want, but 40% of kids in UK schools are not white British, their parents will not vote to repatriate their own wives and children, and also don’t plan to repatriate my wife and children, you fucking weirdos.1
I realised I was less interested in mogging than gardening. What age does to a fella. I drove back to my old friend who had kindly put me up at short notice. We had marrows to discuss. Going home I chanced upon this wonderful bit of Kipling sung by Peter Bellamy, better than three such conferences and five such newsletters who am I kidding, it’s a blogpost.
And when they bore me overmuch, I will not shake mine ears, Recalling many thousand such whom I have bored to tears. And when they labour to impress, I will not doubt nor scoff; Since I myself have done no less and—sometimes pulled it off.
Previous conferences I have been at:
I should say that the Restore Britain policies on their website specifically exclude legitimate spouses as repatriation targets… but then, it doesn’t need to be in the manifesto, right?