Unmasking Morgoth, the British influencer who inspired a terrorist

By Harry Shukman, Gregory Davis, Patrik Hermansson and David Lawrence

The far-right influencer known as Morgoth is today unmasked by HOPE not hate.

Morgoth is one of the best-known fascist authors and podcasters in the British far right — and also one of the most extreme. One of his essays was referenced by the American terrorist Dylann Roof, who murdered nine Black people in 2015.

For more than a decade, Morgoth — named after a character who is the source of all evil in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy books — has been a fixture in the extremist political scene. His blog articles, his posts on Substack (18,000 followers) and videos on YouTube (almost 70,000 followers) promote violent ethnic conflict. Morgoth has fantasised about the deportation of Black people from Britain, referred to Pakistanis as “genetic sewage”, and called for his enemies to be “crucified across the white cliffs of Dover, alive, until they rot”.

Michael Wright (AKA Morgoth) photographed at a far-right conference by HOPE not hate’s undercover reporter.

During his career as a self-described “far-right hate blogger”, Morgoth has gone to great lengths to keep his identity a secret, and only rarely divulged personal details in his online output.

A HOPE not hate investigation reveals that his real name is Michael Wright, a 49-year-old man from the Tyneside town of Seaton Delaval. His former neighbours recalled a man who lived a reclusive existence. They described how he occasionally referred to his career as a YouTuber, although he never divulged his pseudonym. Wright, we understand, now lives in Northern Ireland.

Our undercover reporter met Wright at a far-right conference called Scyldings, held at a hidden location in the Oxfordshire countryside in August 2023. It was one of Wright’s rare public appearances, alongside the misogynist influencer Carl Benjamin of the Lotus Eaters, and Neema Parvini, the racist academic. Wright’s speech was meant to be a tightly-guarded secret and the Scyldings team had listed his appearance on their website as “mystery guest”. The organisers, however, let the name slip out.

“I am a fascist”

After years of blogging about antisemitic conspiracy theories and podcasting in a thick Geordie accent, Wright has earned a reputation as one of the most recognisable voices in the far right. He once described Jack Renshaw, then a member of the now-banned National Action terrorist group, as “my kind of lad”. Renshaw was later jailed for child sex offences and a plot to murder the Labour MP Rosie Cooper. “I like Jack Renshaw,” Wright wrote before his arrest. “I even mailed him a while back to see if he’d like to do a piece on the blog or something.”

In January 2015, he shared a graphic from National Action that celebrated the terror attack on the offices of French magazine Charlie Hebdo a week earlier. The graphic contained an edited image of the magazine’s editor with a bullet hole superimposed on his forehead and the caption “Like and share if you think this f*ggot got what he deserved!”

Describing himself as a “fascist”, Wright has adopted a bleak worldview rooted in biological determinism, emphasising that races cannot live together due to genetic differences. “Surely the solution is to remove or vaccinate ourselves against the infection and send the Negro back to where he belongs,” he has written. “An African male, the worst of all ailments Jewry is inflicting us with and genetically killing us with.”

“the Holocaust is the primary tool used to cripple whites in the genocidal war the Jewish community is waging against them”

Michael Wright, 2015

In an article dated December 2015, Wright defended Nazi Germany and quoted a passage from Hitler’s Mein Kampf about Jews threatening racial purity. “The Waffen SS were a reaction, a fighting back against genuine evil, the whipped dog biting back,” he wrote. In another post entitled “Merry Holocaustmas!”, he wrote that “the Holocaust is the primary tool used to cripple whites in the genocidal war the Jewish community is waging against them”.

His blog, Morgoth’s Review, launched in 2014 and has since branched out into an X account, plus channels on YouTube and Telegram. His Substack has more than 18,000 subscribers and is likely a substantial source of income.

“If Jews turned blue”

Wright’s blog attracted the attention of Dylann Roof, an American white supremacist. In June 2015, Roof attended a Bible study class at a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and shot dead nine congregants. In a manifesto describing his attack, Roof also wrote about the need to “destroy the jewish identity”. He said:

“Just like n****rs, most jews are always thinking about the fact that they are jewish. The other issue is that they network. If we could somehow turn every jew blue for 24 hours, I think there would be a mass awakening, because people would be able to see plainly what is going on.”

This scenario in which Jews turn blue is believed to have first been articulated by Wright. He had published a blog five months before the attack titled “If Jews Turned Blue”, outlining a hypothetical scenario in which the skin colour of Jews would magically change and alert whites to the number of Jews in politics, media, and finance.

Roof had mentioned earlier in his manifesto that his radicalisation process had been influenced by his perception of events in Europe, saying he had “researched deeper and found out what was happening in Europe […] in England and France, and in all the other Western European countries”.

After Roof’s attack, Wright noted the similarity between the manifesto and his blog, deleting the latter. He noted in a comment that it “could be construed as inciting a mass murder”. Wright has cryptically referred to the blog on X, posting: “I took it down because of something unpleasant that happened in America.”

Despite referring to the attack as “unpleasant”, Wright has nonetheless continued to write about the need for violence against political enemies. “I look forward to the Right Wing death squads without irony,” he wrote. “I long for the William Pierce style day of the rope and will play along with the fashy punk and cartoon frogs if I must, but the rope is always my main aim.” William Pierce was the American neo-Nazi who authored The Turner Diaries, a novel featuring “the day of the rope”, when lawyers, politicians, and so-called race-mixers are hanged.

Despite his long history of extremism, Wright has featured on the personal podcast of James Delingpole, The Spectator columnist, who referred to him as “one of the smartest people on the planet”, and been quoted on GB News. Since April 2025, he has written for Conservative Woman, a radical-right conspiracy-oriented website. He continues to engage with Britain’s largest neo-Nazi group, Patriotic Alternative.

Wright was contacted for comment.