The Quaker Question

In the UK, there is a group called the Centre for Countering Digital Hate. It is a Transatlantic NGO based in London and Washington, DC, run by an Afghani-British Labour activist called Imran Ahmed. In December 2025, President Donald Trump banned this man from the United States due to being a “key collaborator with the Biden administration’s effort to weaponize the government against U.S. citizens” and because he was involved in a campaign to coerce American social media platforms to punish Americans for expressing certain conservative points of view.

In particular, Trump’s administration objected to the way in which Ahmed, and others, campaigned to force American platforms to restrict freedom of expression within the UK and the European Union. If you’re not already familiar, keep the name in mind, as the Centre for Countering Digital Hate is right up there with Hope Not Hate, Stonewall, Mermaids, and their American counterparts, such as the SPLC in terms of suppressing free speech and attacking those who question Woke dogmas.

Now if you’re an ordinary right-wing type you’re probably thinking, “Oh let me guess, it’s funded by the Jews, right?”  No. Well . . .  yes, but they’re not actually the main social group that funds them. If you look into the first three charities that do so then it is only the “Pears” family (originally Schleicher) that are Jewish. The other two funders, Cadbury and Rowntree, are two of the big three British Quaker families who pioneered the confectionary industry through the Industrial Revolution; the other family being the Frys, also minor confectioners but more associated with prison reform.

There is also the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. Paul Hamlyn (1926–2001), a notorious champagne socialist of his day, had a Jewish father while his mother was a Quaker. Paul was raised in possibly the oldest “pedigree woke” schools in the United Kingdom: St Christopher School, Letchworth Garden City. In a similar story to the Steiner schools, St Christopher was founded for the theosophical movement, a popular “spiritual-Woke” craze of its day that stressed universal brotherhood and attacked traditional power structures and even the notion of scientific truth, it was soon after adopted and run by a Quaker family. If we count the Paul Hamlyn Foundation as half and half, then that’s 1.5 Jews to 2.5 Quakers among those who are funding the Center for Countering Digital Hate. What if this is proportionally generally true of all far-left enterprises? What if it is true across the last three centuries of history? What if it has been more the Quakers than the Jews who’ve been pushing and funding left wing social reform since the onset of the Industrial Revolution and even earlier?

We groan in disbelief as the dissident right to ignore the Quaker Question—an exception is Kevin MacDonald’s Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition which has a chapter on the critical role the Quakers played in abolishing slavery in the UK (but not in America where Puritan-descended people took the lead). The power of this super-virtue-signalling, pacifist sect that believes that members are imbued with the “inner light,” such that God is somehow “in them” and guides their righteous consciences. How many times has one of your permanently online friends named-dropped one of the eminent early twentieth-century Jewish banking families: the Rothschilds, the Warburgs or the Schiffs? How many times have they brought up George Soros, Jonathan Greenblatt (of the ADL), Larry Fink (of BlackRock fame) or even Michael Bloomberg?     Compare this with how many times your friend has mentioned equally eminent Quaker banking families: the Barclays, the Lloyds or the Gurneys? Excluded from the professions, the Quakers, like the Jews, went into finance. Has he ever mentioned William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, whose pacifist policies eventually led to the state nearly being overrun by the French and their Native American allies? Or what about Elizabeth Fry née Gurney, who pioneered making UK prisons as easy as possible?

Your friend probably doesn’t even know who the Pease family or the Rowntree family are, unless he’s partial to fruit pastilles, and that’s a terrible shame, because all of these families form part of a powerful sub-ethnic group within the Anglo-European population. Quakerism has for a long time emphasised marriage within their community. Given enough time and evolution, Quakerism might have formed its own Jewish-like ethnic identity. George Fox, its seventeenth century founder, encouraged Quakers to inter-marry and “marrying out” would lead to disownment if the spouse did not convert. English Quakers abolished this requirement in 1860.

You can draw connections between the famous members of old Jewish families and social progressive reform through the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but it requires more work and what you will find isn’t really that exciting. Compare that with what the Quakers got up to: proto-Woke social justice spills off the page, but, of course, it is manipulatively dressed up as “caring” and “equality” such that there can be no rational debate: African American rights, Native American rights, women’s rights including suffrage, trade unionist rights, liberal prison and sentencing reform and religious pluralism. You will struggle to find a single eminent Quaker at any point in history who didn’t have a hand in at least one of these things, because proto-Woke liberal social justice has always been an essential part of the Quaker sect.

There are movements started by Quakers that aren’t even about social justice, yet you would intuitively associate them with puritanical virtue signalling. An extremely proto-Woke sect of the Quakers in the late nineteenth century – the Shakers – came up with the idea that all sex, even in marriage, was evil. Another sect was led by a non-binary natal woman who called herself “Universal Friend” and became furious if her original name was employed. The Quakers are known for their historical advocacy of teetotalism, as we explored earlier, and the temperance movement that ultimately inspired the prohibition on alcohol in the United States.

The Quakers have also been long known for their Pacifism, even against their ideological opposites during World War II. So, if Quakers had approached a majority of the population in Britain and America by the mid-twentieth century, then German, Italian and Japanese Fascists and National Socialists would ironically have easily won the War and wiped out Quakerism. Quakers are even known to be some of the earliest advocates of vegetarianism in the modern era, and played a major role in founding the Vegetarian Society of England in 1847 and their own exclusive Friends Vegetarian Society in 1902. Unsurprisingly, in that vegetarianism is a form a virtue-signalling and of reassuring yourself of your own virtue, practicing it is predicted by the kind of mental instability that would be associated with being left-wing.

When it comes to social justice, the Jewish influence has until perhaps recent decades for the most part stayed confined to fighting post-World War II anti-Semitism. The only areas where the Jews have an edge over their Quaker counterparts in the UK are in the far-left’s bloodiest invention, Marxist thought, where they have definitely been historically overrepresented, if not quite to the degree that has always been claimed. Presumably these political areas involve too much testosterone, conflict and general chaos for the timid and submissive Quaker sensibilities, and so they have allowed that void to be filled by other out-groups.

It’s often taken for granted today, because of the present political climate of polarisation, that Revolutionary Marxism, sexual libertinism, and Woke social justice are all part of the same far left tapestry, but actually historically speaking, especially before the 1960s, these were much more politically disparate. Though some have argued convincingly that it was postmodern philosophers of the Frankfurt School that united these things together, the simpler explanation is that since Fascism has historically opposed them all, in being anti-Fascist one necessarily takes on all causes supposed Fascists dislike.

Quakers are a dying breed today. Historically their numbers and influence in Europe and America, especially in the Anglo World, has been substantial, but now their size is insignificant; only about 75,000 people in the United States self-identify as Quaker. We suspect that Quakerism’s passive, soft and strange religious overtones are too out of touch with the far-left’s burning anger and Neuroticism to be popular with young Woke moralists today. As is inevitable with most liberal left-wing religious sects, their own teachings have brought about their demise, by mass apostasy and demographic collapse. In 1980, there were over 17,000 registered Quakers in the UK, by 2020 there were roughly 12,000. You see the same pattern across all the liberal mainstream Protestant groups, which are arguably just watered down versions of Quakerism today anyway. But although the religion is dying, the elite family networks, the money and the organisations still linger on and shall continue to do so for a while yet, as is evident in the funding structure of Centre for Countering Digital Hate outlined earlier.

As Canadian political scientist Eric Kaufmann has shown in Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, a similar fate befalls the Jewish elite in the West, as they’re demographically in decline, being replaced by a new stock of competing Chinese, Indian and Arab elites, with their own hegemonic interests, and religion plays a relatively moderate role for the dominance and cohesiveness of those groups, especially the Chinese. The Jewish people will nevertheless remain firmly entrenched, even expansive, in Israel for the foreseeable future however, and Israel most definitely does exercise political influence beyond its borders. When controlling for intelligence, religious conservatism predicts fertility.

Jewish people for whom their Jewish identity is salient have been and will continue to be a politically active presence in Western Europe for some time, although in remarkably different ways that depend largely on whether they are secular universalist liberal Jews or religious or Zionist Jews. However, in the UK, only the highly insular Haredi and Orthodox Jews have above replacement fertility. The other Jewish groups are marrying out and simply dying out due to below replacement fertility. There is evidence that the IQ of Orthodox Jews is lower than that of Whites which predicts the Haredi’s high fertility but also their limited socioeconomic success.

Nevertheless the Jewish peoples’ superiority over the Quakers is very clear. The Jewish contribution to science and invention alone is beyond impressive: Fritz Haber, Albert Einstein, Oppenheimer, to name a few, let alone their contributions to art, literature, film and culture.

What have the Quakers ever done for us? Chocolate snacks . . .  that’s about it, and even these were only developed because coco was seen as a virtuous alternative to alcohol. That’s about it. And what have they ever done to us? It was the Quakers who started the modern hegemonic far-left, they laid the foundations for everything, and even now their legacy continues to dominate the insanity of modern Woke politics. Your permanently online is obsessed with the Jewish Question, and that’s exactly how the Quakers want it to be.

The above is an edited version of part of The Quaker Question: Exposing the Sect that Really Rules the World by Edward Dutton and J.O.A. Rayner-Hilles. Hard copies are available from the publisher at https://wylfings.com/ The e-version is available on Amazon.