For those of you who have managed to miss the story that has divided America: a former student at the Ivy League university alleges that in October 2024 she was intoxicated with alcohol and ketamine, then assaulted by seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity. She reported them to Cornell police weeks later, saying she’d agreed to sex with two of the men but was coerced into the rest. No charges were brought; the district attorney decided that she had consented to the drink, drugs and group sex. Last month, Jane Doe sued the seven men and Cornell itself.

The story is perfectly pitched for an internet pile-on: X has pounced on Doe — insulting her, martyring her, castigating her, valorizing her — as a stand-in for the experiences or behavior of all young American women. Women have felt compelled to speak out about being sexually assaulted at university; many are using the hashtag #IAmJaneDoe in support. In different corners of the internet, people (mainly men, but some women too) are calling for Doe to be doxxed, shamed and arrested for making false claims. At their extremes, neither side has much patience for due process. Cornell has become a loyalty test for women: believe Doe in sexual solidarity, or prove your independence by despising her.

Whatever the determination of the courts — and it should be theirs alone — this was a grim and debauched event. That “gangbangs”, the most generous interpretation of these men’s actions, are part of the sexual repertoires of university students is unbelievably depressing. They reflect the dehumanizing, unloving, ubiquitous influence of pornography on young people who have in all likelihood rarely even had good normal sex yet. But that, I’m afraid, is as far as we can go in terms of moral dicta before all evidence is in front of us. It is stupid and insulting to frame Doe as the heroine or villainess of the campus rape branch of #MeToo. It is stupid to chase alleged perps around campus and post your tongue-lashing to the internet before they get their day in court. And yes, it is stupid to weigh in, as Nekrasova did, with a craven swipe at the accuser’s appearance. 

Of course, nobody is high-minded enough to let justice get in the way of a bit of online engagement. Photographs of the woman doxxers allege to be Jane Doe have quickly become among the most ubiquitous on social media. I have seen low-res 4chan blackpill memes using her likeness. I have seen sexy AI renderings. To be clear, the accused men should not have been doxxed, and neither should she. There is nothing clear-eyed about either camp in this case, with both unable to resist turning a legal matter into an indictment or redemption of feminism. For one side, feminism pushed Doe to be a reckless liar; for another, every claim she makes — however changeable, however contradictory — must be unquestioningly believed. It happened with Lindsay Clancy; now it’s Cornell’s turn. 

Because the lawsuit has become a pitched battle between liberal feminism and masculine vengeance, some women who don’t fit the first mold have become highly vocal and extreme defectors. For these women on the alt-Right, throwing stones at Doe is a way of stylishly distinguishing yourself as a special case — a rare, based foid in a cesspool of feminazis. As one reply to Nekrasova put it, the post sneering at Doe’s looks made her a “high-T alpha female”. It must take a lot of grit to withstand your own nausea when joining in with a dogpile against your own sex; nevertheless, she persisted.

I understand the instinct to throw in with the chuds. It is more sensible for many young women to move in conservative circles than liberal ones because at least in the former, shame and disgust shore up taboos around high-risk and dehumanizing lifestyle choices. Yes, you may still be pressured into violent sex, insultingly casual encounters or queasy experimentation in a milieu of mossbacks — but you are less likely to be called a prude for demurring. The broad Right, too, is more tolerant of political diversity in general; so it suits white-knuckled wordcels like Nekrasova to drift in that direction in pursuit of more curious and interesting audiences. 

The problem is that it’s difficult to be in on the joke when you’re a foid. The more intrepid the scene, the more vicious its adherents. You might briefly belong, having a glorious moment in the sun as a leggy lodestar, an anti-woke Joan of Arc — all for the low cost of selling your sex down the river. But there are cautionary tales. Lauren Southern, herself a figurehead as a conservative YouTube provocateuse, once said women should not be in leadership positions. When her trad LARP was up and her marriage broke down, the movement treated her like a “leper”. Likewise Amy Dangerfield, a married woman whose public persona is as polished and respectable as you like, made a name for herself by associating with Nick Fuentes, a man who believes “women are made to be fucked”. The groypers inevitably turned on her and started calling her “Dangerslut”. In a movement which regards equality as the original sin, even the edgiest e-girl’s membership is conditional.

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For those darlings the alt-Right has not yet spat out, a case like Cornell is a business opportunity. What better time to capitalize on engagement than when nastiness and stochastic speculation is at its apogee? X can sometimes look like a school disco gone horribly wrong, red-faced boys and red-faced girls shrieking at one another across an empty dancefloor. There’s an opportune moment, while all eyes are on you, to break away from the pack and prance into the vacuum. But tempting as it is, reasonable women should not do that. Both sides of the internet are hell-bent on turning Doe into a lesson for our culture. Really, though, we know nothing about her. 

What we do know very well is the climate that raised these young people, that taught them to discard caution and inhibition in endless pursuit of adventure, or approval, or status. Some of us know that liberal feminism was always meant to make women shed this caution, to make them an easier lay. We know that Zoomer men and boys are for the most part watching hardcore pornography; that they have been oneshotted by bukkake compilations and hentai, AI deepfakes, simulated rapes. Many young women today have, for their part, absorbed the idea that every sexual boundary vaulted is a step closer to empowerment; some men on X think that any woman who is thus misled deserves nothing but contempt. The sexes are perfectly conditioned for the events of Cornell to occur: young men expect extreme and risky sex, and young women believe acquiescing means liberation. 

In a few short days, Cornell became women’s most vicious culture war. I believe that in 10 years’ time this case will be considered a reckoning for sexual politics, a point on a graph marking an all-time low in common-sense debate. But women do not have to choose between liberal feminism and the hard-Right internet subcultures which also happen to identify its failings. If women online must draw “lessons” from this still-unresolved case, it should be that the extremes — softsoap liberal feminism and the dark corners of woman-hating X — are dangerous places for us to be. Blind belief and gleeful contempt are false choices. The Cornell Seven scandal has drawn women into a Left-Right trial of faith; the case’s uncomfortable truths, when they emerge, will probably flatter neither side. At this time, it is only appropriate to condemn one party: the sexual culture which bore this story.

It transpired that the former Breitbart News journalist, 41, had missed an immigration appointment in July; according to a rather gloating tweet by the Department of Homeland Security, he had entered the US legally in 2019 but had outstayed the terms of his visa. A disheveled-looking Yiannopoulos, to whom time has perhaps not been kind, mean-mugged the camera in an accompanying photograph. With barely disguised smugness, the department wrote: “We encourage all illegal aliens to take control of their departure with the CBP [Customs and Border Protection] Home App.” Yiannopoulos may have seen himself as above the category of illegal immigrants he’d spent his career despising; in the end, he was treated just as indecorously as the rest of them. To pour further salt in the wound, the post encouraged other would-be immigrants to seek “the right legal way to live the American dream”; for Yiannopoulos, it appeared, that dream was very much over.

How had this happened? The British agitator’s rise and fall from 2014 was the life-cycle of the alt-Right distilled in one man: he went from shouty grub to poisonous rockstar to a husk tangled in the web of the movement which by now had become the establishment. He had made many enemies on his rise from Telegraph journalist to alt-Right superstar, racking up public feuds with, among many, Ben Shapiro (a “less professionally successful version of me”), the comedian Leslie Jones (he called her “spectacularly unappealing” in a rant that saw him booted off Twitter in 2016), and fellow internet outlaw Azealia Banks, who he had once represented at his refuge-of-the-cancelled talent agency Tarantula Management before a spectacular spat which culminated in Banks presciently threatening: “LMAO now shut up before i call ICE on you and get you deported you filthy migrant”. Yet none of these former sparring partners ultimately did him in. No, the final clobber was delivered by Yiannopoulos’s fellow conservative media darling and former pal Laura Loomer, who claimed his scalp by telling X that she’d snitched about his immigration status to the authorities. 

The pair fell out when Yiannopoulos accused her of having sexually harassed a young male aide during her congressional campaign in 2020 (which Loomer denies). Baby Jane-worthy barbs culminated in Loomer claiming he “was a demonic force” who had called for her assassination and threatened to “throw my bulldog off the balcony”. Now that pooch can sleep soundly in the knowledge that its loving pawrent, whom Yiannopoulos also smeared as Trump’s alleged mistress, shopped this very naughty boy to “Daddy” (as Yiannopoulos called the President). In a final blow that was not a grain of pettiness short of a nanny-nanny-boo-boo, Loomer wrote of the increasingly anti-Israel Yiannopoulos: “Milo is going to be deported back to the UK where he can live among the Muslims he has recently chosen to embrace.” Revenge, served ICE-cold.

The problem with being the Mean Girl of social media — Yiannopoulos has spent years shooting poison darts from the perch of his feared and revered @nero X account — is that the ancient texts have a habit of coming back to haunt you. On Friday the poster AG Hamilton unearthed a gem from the archives: a tweet from last year in which Yiannopoulos joked about the “etiquette” of masturbating at the sight of an ICE raid. It was one of the many approving things he’d said about the agency since it began its crackdown at the start of Trump’s second term; in the end, he looked a wanker indeed. 

It’s tempting to see the saga of Yiannopoulos as that of a juggernaut who ran out of road, an open-and-shut case of poetic justice meted against a hateful gobshite. But in truth his rise and fall is more interesting than that: his flamboyant career ultimately indicates the broader health of the alt-Right. In 2016 Breitbart’s star writer, bylined only as “Milo”, embarked on his “Dangerous Faggot” tour of US college campuses — the ragebaiting debate format which would later be imitated by the Turning Point speaker Charlie Kirk. His boss Steve Bannon had just defected to run the Trump campaign; the tour was a victory lap for the mainstreaming of ironic hard-Right populism, whose many viral moments thrilled crowds like Nero’s Roman candles.

At Rutgers University in New Jersey, student libs smeared fake blood on their faces and chanted “Black lives matter!”; right on cue, the Milo fans responded: “Trump, Trump, Trump!” At DePaul in Chicago, no-platformers stormed the stage and grabbed the mic; hundreds of supporters then marched on the university president’s office. This gave him plenty of set-ups for stylish jabs — when one black student said she’d been “silenced for 200 years”, he quipped that she looked remarkably young. At UC Irvine in California, he arrived on stage in a “stunning burqa thot outfit”; protesters were handed dummies. The Breitbart write-up included a “get the look” postscript: “Combat boots by Diesel, $175. Sunglasses by Gucci, $225. Fishnet stockings: model’s own.”

These stunts were bellwethers for the pyrrhic culture wars of Woke 1, in which expressing heterodox opinions bore the same moral penalty as mass murder. Punchlines could be seeded by simply being outrageous enough. You could set your watch to audiences’ objections — the mantras they’d repeat, the pompous debate-society tactics they’d employ. This was something Kirk would come to leverage in his own campus debates, with liberal opponents never seeming to grasp that by engaging with him at all (or trying to no-platform him) they’d already stepped on the booby-trap. This is also the “gotcha” choreography of today’s X, where the nastiest comeback wins; for all this week’s sniping from poasters delighted at Yiannopoulos’s downfall, it bears remembering that this was a format which he created. In many ways his enemies on the Left and Right were doomed to speak in his language. 

But the Regina George of the alt-Right was always going to be burned in the end. The heyday of the Dangerous Faggot tour — in many ways Yiannopoulos’s apogee — was followed only a year later by those pedophilia comments which would see him booted from the line-up at CPAC and dropped from his $250,000 book deal with Simon & Schuster. He also resigned from Breitbart. His career since 2017 has been a shadow of its former glory, as Trumpism’s one-time favorite court jester settled into life as a fringe internet figure, converted to Catholicism, renounced his homosexuality and worked on Kanye West’s turkey of a presidential campaign (it has been suggested that Yiannopoulos was en route to Ye’s New Orleans concert when he was arrested). Being in the wilderness was rough; in 2019 he complained that “microscopic [Telegram] followings like 20k are not going to sustain people like me” and that “I can’t put food on the table”, describing himself as a “social media refugee”. 

Having toured the country as a “faggot”, his new life as a “100% sodomy-free… ex-gay” was a particularly inglorious chapter. He reported that he had come to regret “mainstreaming homosexuality in the Republican Party”, and was seemingly doing penance by hawking statues of the Virgin Mary on a Christian teleshopping channel — and by announcing plans to open a conversion-therapy clinic in Florida. Yet he has never quite managed to convince in his new ultra-trad packaging. In a manner which must infuriate him, his arrest was digested by X as a scrumptious chapter in a classically gay internet saga, with snark from George Santos (“I’m the new Alfa [sic] Gay conservative in town”) and others (“Grindr profile vs IRL” read one caption comparing images of Yiannopoulos in his bleach-blond prime and in last week’s dour mugshot). 

As things stand he’s back in Britain and back on X — and being relatively good-humored about his deportation. But his reputation as a rebellious princeling will be difficult to salvage now that he has, in the words of Musk, “become meme” by being hoisted by his own pro-ICE petard. It seems unlikely that he will fade away entirely. X is behaving like a classroom of children whose naughtiest constituent has been sent outside: they simply cannot wait to see what happens when he comes back. And with Reform and Restore looking to sweep the next election, now is perhaps a favorable time for the prodigal son to return. Yiannopoulos has carved out a distinctly Yank brand — noisy rabble-rousing may prove terribly impolite in the stuffy halls of Westminster — but this may help him at a time when British politics seems to be mutating into something more brash and populist. What happens in America has ripples in Britain, and Tommy Robinson’s recent ascent — the far-Right activist has spoken at the Oxford Union and gained elite international backing from figures including Elon Musk — suggests greater appetite than ever for the previously unsavory fringe. 

What is certain is that this embarrassing chapter will not convince Yiannopoulos himself of his own inadequacy. It is said that when Nero hesitated to knife himself to death, he cried: “What an artist dies in me!”, so convinced was he still of his extraordinary talent. Two millennia later, his X namesake and comparable braggart is surviving the latest of several political suicides, brought low by a system for which he was the greatest cheerleader. Any other flower would wilt in the heat of such crushing irony; this weed looks sure to find a way.

Let’s look at some of his top hits. There was the video that used the song “Ice Ice Baby” over clips of 72 ICE arrests at a “nightclub run by the cartel”, in Charleston in June. There was an AI-generated Studio Ghibli-style animated image of a Dominican woman being arrested. A real photo of Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, a fentanyl dealer, weeping in a parking lot was posted on social media after her arrest in March for re-entering the US (ICE first removed her in 2020); the picture went viral, then salt was troweled into the wound when the official White House X account posted the Ghiblified update. “You’re sociopaths and you belong in prison,” read the top comment. Kaelan Dorr, a neckbeard on the comms team, said: “The arrests will continue. The memes will continue.”

Then, in August, the Department of Homeland Security’s X account upped the ante. Uncle Sam, scratching his head, hesitates at a crossroads signposted with the phrases “cultural decline”, “homeland”, “service”, “invasion” and “opportunity”. In his hand, a broken section: “law and order.” The caption read: “Which way, American man?” For those uninitiated in the lore of ultraconservative “poasters” — by which I mean most of the public — the meme referenced another, “Which way, Western man?”, which in turn referenced a book of the same name by the white supremacist William Gayley Simpson. Published in 1978, the 1,000-page tome condemned a supposed Jewish ploy to destroy the West with the malicious forces of feminism and multiculturalism. Simpson’s solution was Hitler’s — violence against and expulsion of Jews, “Enemy No. 1”. When asked by NPR whether the post was directly referring to the book, a core text of American extremism, a DHS spokeswoman called Tricia McLaughlin said “calling everything you dislike Nazi propaganda is tiresome”.

The White House’s ragebait strategy is a luxuriant expression of power, a single protracted snort against hand-wringing critics of border enforcement. The message is this: not only can no one stop us deporting people, but they can no longer shame us for laughing about it. The civilized somberness of the Left’s immigration conversation, in which the rights of and compassion for entrants are so often prioritized over those of citizens as a matter of moral superiority, has been torpedoed by the admission that we, the elected American government, no longer care if you think we’re mean.

Criticism only sweetens the iconoclasm: in July, the White House’s X account earned the opprobrium of the cultural landmark that is Jess Glynne — a British singer whose two popular songs are best known for featuring in ads — for using her song “Hold My Hand” over a video of ICE deportations with the slogan “Nothing beats a Jet 2 holiday”. Glynne felt “sick”, she said, adding that her music was “about love, unity and spreading positivity — never about division or hate”. Lib, owned. Olivia Rodrigo found herself in a similar bind last month, and responded by calling the DHS “racist” and “hateful”. Then this month, the White House poked a new bear in the form of the Gen Z songstress Sabrina Carpenter, who criticized ICE’s “inhumane agenda” when they used her song “Juno” in a deportation video. On Friday, more like an infuriating little brother than an official government social media account, the White House doubled down — editing a clip from Carpenter’s appearance on Saturday Night Live to make her appear to call a Hispanic comedian “illegal”.

Offense is the point. So are the inevitable newspaper quotes from the immigration lobby: Angelica Salas, head of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, complained that “the memes are mean”. They “create a terrorizing environment for our people”, she added. “We don’t deserve this.” But as anyone who’s ever known a school bully will recall, appealing to their kindness means you’ve lost the argument. The Trump administration has the liberals hanging by their ankles in a bathroom stall, hair tickling the toilet bowl. To have them beg for mercy is the aim.

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It is difficult to imagine any other American administration, or the government of any other country, being quite so brazen. We are in an era of extreme, swaggering Trumpian confidence where the only constraint on enforcement seems to be time itself. Sensitivity, as well as practical concerns like funding, now seem very remote. Compare this with Britain’s Labour government, whose lurch to the right on immigration under the unexpectedly competent home secretary Shabana Mahmood comes not from the conviction of this Fabian Cabinet but under the pressure of public resentment. As the DHS urges Americans to “remember your homeland’s heritage” above a painting of a young couple cradling an infant in a prairie schooner, the British government struggles to get deportation flights even to take off. Trump’s National Security Strategy, released last week, warns that mass migration and declining birth rates present Europe with “the stark prospect of civilizational erasure”. The document was meant to invigorate like-minded “patriotic” parties across the continent, but short of a Reform election sweep it is hard to imagine mainstream parties in Britain using such grand language. Conversely, the edgelordism of Right-wing meme culture has already found a footing on British X, where grotesque racialized Wojaks abound. If Reform cribbed from the White House’s meme machine, it would find fertile ground in the UK.

This administration’s philosophy of migration is so potent because it combines supreme earnestness with total insincerity. Irony has allowed official government agencies to say the unsayable under the cloak of plausible deniability. This has been the method since the beginning of this term when, in February, the White House posted a video titled “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight” featuring audio of clinking chains and boots trudging up tinny airplane steps. Amid the din of horror from X’s normies was the real prize: the approval of the terminally online edgelords — the Fuentes loyalists, the remote nihilists — areas of the alt-Right Trump must be keen to shore up. One posted a picture of Patrick Bateman in a Maga hat savoring music on his headphones; another wrote: “Gonna play this on a loop tonight when I go to sleep.”

“The average Democrat politician doesn’t understand why this makes us all feel good, hence why they’ll keep losing,” wrote a third. This last commenter was entirely right: these posts are about feeling good, feeling so confident in the morality and effectiveness of your policy that you go online to brag about it. These posts will be remembered by future generations as a victory lap from a corner of the West surrounded by broken and unconfident allies, governments — including Britain’s own — pathologically apologetic about having to involve themselves in the dirty work of enforcing borders. Taking paint-stripper to the veneer of politesse surrounding immigration policy does make many voters feel good: much of middle America is enjoying being a spectator in Trump’s theater of cruelty, delighted that for once they “got what they voted for” — one of the resounding phrases of this second term. These memes may be undignified, “mean”, tasteless — but that is the point. The Boomer mainstream has been quietly initiated in the language of the terminally online, supping on the in-jokes and relishing its risky allusions. The era of “being kind”, it seems, is well and truly over. In its stead arrives something stranger, crawling out the gutter of 2010s forum culture — an unprecedented irreverence that no longer cares what the grown-ups think.

My accounts of questioning this individualistic ideology, and embracing marriage and motherhood have resonated with social conservatives. Most of these, it goes without saying, feel (as I do) that family life and women’s distinctive sexed realities should be better understood and valued in the public conversation. Some, though, take more hardline positions: that women should never work, for example, that we should always be submissive — or even that women’s right to vote should be repealed.

But surely any stance which risks lending momentum to such extreme arguments cannot be in women’s interests? I explored this question recently with the Canadian Right-wing firebrand Lauren Southern, whose early video content regularly challenged liberal feminist orthodoxy, and promoted domesticity. Our stories are symmetrical in some respects: both of us embraced radical politics in our early twenties, me on the Left and Southern on the Right. Both of us embraced ideologies that felt inspiring in the free-floating world of the internet. And both of us, albeit in different ways, have course-corrected back toward reality in part via the fiercely practical experience of caring for a child.

Southern’s story might easily serve as a cautionary tale for how socially conservative talking-points can lead women into danger. For where I lost my twenties to commune life and niche sexualities, she left media at 22 to embrace a socially conservative template for women: the lifestyle often idealised by social media influencers as “tradwife”. Except it wasn’t all Fifties pinafores and cute cupcakes; it was a living hell. Nor, as she has learned, was she the only conservative woman in this position.

Comparing our experiences, though, two things emerge. Firstly, that this is not simply a matter of the Right being uniquely toxic for women — though, as Southern’s story reveals, there’s plenty of scope for toxicity. It’s rather that purist ideologies as such map at best uneasily onto the practical realities of life as a woman – and especially as a mother. And secondly, that the simplifying, polarising incentives baked into the contemporary internet are increasingly warping the ideologies of both Left and Right into such extreme forms, that any sincere effort to apply these in real life will almost inevitably be the stuff of nightmares.

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Southern was perhaps the most telegenic figure in the brash, young, and very online “alt-Right” movement which emerged in the 2010s, quickly gaining international notoriety for her views on mass immigration, Islam, racially-motivated farm murders in South Africa, and the supposed harms of liberal feminism — content that saw her accused by the radical Left-wing Southern Poverty Law Centre of racist dog-whistling, and even hovering “at the precipice of outright white nationalism”. Southern herself has always denied this but that hasn’t stopped her critics on the Left accusing her of “far-Right” agitation.

Then, abruptly, she disappeared in 2019, to embrace marriage and motherhood in her husband’s home country of Australia. She was, it seemed, all set to embrace the nurturing, feminine, domestic role promoted by Right-wing traditionalists, idealised by “tradwife” influencers, and criticised by progressives as “dangerous and stupid”. Four years later, though, Southern caused a new round of shockwaves — this time with a video recounting what happened next: the breakdown of her abusive marriage, her return to Canada as a single mother, and a stint living hand-to-mouth in a cabin in the woods.

Southern has attracted vitriolic criticism from the Right, for speaking openly about how “tradlife” went wrong for her. She, however, sees speaking out not as betrayal of her own “side”, but as continuous with her earlier willingness to challenge progressive consensus on topics such as immigration. “I’m not worried about saying the things I’m saying right now, that are getting me so attacked online. Because I’ve dealt with this, with South Africa. I’ve dealt with this with mass immigration, I’ve dealt with this with my critiques of feminism. And every single one turned out: oh, maybe she was onto something.”

For, she tells me, she’s not alone. She tells me she knows many other women still suffering in unhappy “tradlife” marriages. One of her WhatsApp groups, she says, “is like the Underground Railroad for women in the conservative movement”. Some of these are prominent media figures: “There are a lot of influencers who are not in good relationships, who are still portraying happy marriage publicly, and bashing people for not being married while being in horrendous relationships.” She hopes that in speaking out she can reassure “all of these women who are thinking in their heads: I’m uniquely terrible, and I’m uniquely making a mistake” that no: something is more generally amiss.

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What, then, is amiss? In her view, it’s not that conservatism as such is fundamentally mistaken, or that complementary sex roles are unworkable. But the online “tradlife” ideology has distilled a version of these roles that’s both rigid and wildly over-simplified, and thus woefully ill-equipped for real life — in ways that pose significant risks for women in such marriages.

How, then, did Southern get from posting videos titled “Why I Am Not A Feminist” to defending women’s sex-specific interests within family life? This is, after all, not a million miles from what used to be called “feminism”. It’s a long and bitter story, in which Southern did her best to live a purist internet ideology to the letter — only to receive a grim object lesson in its shortcomings.

Born in 1995, Southern grew up in British Columbia in a middle-class, conservative, Christian home. Southern was, she recounts, part of the first generation to grow up predominantly online. She and her sister (now a DJ and Twitch streamer) spent their adolescence in the kind of internet hinterlands where wild ideas flourish, free of grounding in material reality or practical experience.

Here, once-complex theories are swiftly distilled to their bare essentials, for maximum viral reach. As Southern puts it: “Follow the listicle, and you’ll be fine.” By the time she met her husband, she’d been condensing conservative values into “listicle” form as a media influencer for some years — to the point where it seemed possible to realise this framework in real life, too. So, when marriage beckoned, at 22, she tells me wryly: “I thought I’d won the lottery”. They were married within four months: arguably the equivalent, for the Right, of my Left-wing embrace of communes, anti-capitalist demos and niche sexual subcultures. She was quickly pregnant.

There were warning signs from early on. “If I ever disagreed with him in any capacity he’d just disappear, for days at a time. I remember there were nights where he’d call me worthless and pathetic, then get in this car and leave.” But she didn’t see them, thanks to the simplified anti-feminist ideology she’d absorbed and promoted: “I had this delusional view of relationships: that only women could be the ones that make or break them, and men can do no wrong.” So she didn’t spot the red flags, even as they grew more extreme. “He’d lock me out of the house. I remember having to knock on the neighbour’s door on rainy nights, because he’d get upset and drive off without unlocking the house. It was very strange, to go from being this public figure on stage with people clapping, to the girl crying, knocking on someone’s door with no home to get into, being abandoned with a baby.”

But as she tells it, the nightmare began in earnest when he was offered a work opportunity in his home country of Australia, a few weeks after the birth of their baby. She did not want to leave her support networks behind. But he used the political and religious importance she placed on lifelong marriage as a lever to force her to agree: “Whenever I wouldn’t do something, he would say: I’m going to divorce you.” So, feeling she had no other option, she assented.

He also insisted she should publicly quit work. His work required a high level of government security clearance; she was a Right-wing provocateur who had faced deplatforming, state investigations, and was even banned from entering the UK. In their early, giddy romance this had felt manageable. But “when we moved back to Australia, he really wanted to get back into his old work”. And Southern was a “hardcore liability”, so the pressure was on: “It was like: Lauren, you gotta hire lawyers. You’ve got to disavow everything. You’ve got to never talk publicly again.”

So, in 2019, she announced that she was leaving media and activism altogether. As Southern tells it, she was trying sincerely to put into practice the ideology she’d promoted in her videos. “I believed I had a certain role in my relationship,” she told me. “And it was to be the more submissive one that supports my husband’s dreams.”

Then, thousands of miles from friends and family, she reports becoming “the closest thing to a modern day, Western slave”. With no income of her own, she had to do everything: “The lawns, the house, the cooking, the baby care, his university homework. And I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t have any support. There was no help changing diapers, there was no help waking up in the night with the baby. I’d still have to get up, to make breakfast before work. I’d be shaking and nervous, for fear I’m gonna get yelled at.” Then he’d berate her for spending all her time on tasks other than earning money: “I was told daily that I was worthless, pathetic. Deadweight. All you do is sit around and take care of the baby and do chores.” When Covid shut down all real-world public life, her situation became “hell on earth”. It was, she said, “the only time in my life where I idealised dying.”

Instead, between the lockdown claustrophobia and her husband’s behaviour, she began to revise her initial willingness to leave public life. In part, she told me, she hoped it would win back his love. “He was so much kinder, sweeter and more pursuant of me when I was this ‘boss babe’ travelling the world working. It seemed like becoming a mother made him lose respect for me. It was shocking to me, again, because the traditional view preached the opposite — that men love you more when you stop working and become a wife and mother.” In her experience, though, this was “very much not the case”. So, a year after retiring to embrace traditionalist domestic life on the Right-wing model, she posted her comeback video, and began making sporadic media appearances.

Never mind the pop-antifeminist ideal of a breadwinning husband and homemaking wife that Southern had once promoted — the freedoms (won by early feminists) for women to work and have interests outside the home turned out to be a lifeline. Those already inclined to dislike Southern’s politics might feel a certain vindictive satisfaction at this collision of ideology with reality. But arguably, in having taken so long to see the potential downsides of her own antifeminism, Southern simply shared the same blind spots as much of the mainstream Left and Right.

It is surely true that conservative advocacy for complementary sex roles sometimes ignores questions about women’s physical vulnerability, and the scope this affords for domestic abuse. Conversely, today many self-identified liberal feminists have also forgotten that the earliest women’s movement was grounded in the sex-specific material vulnerabilities Southern experienced first-hand. The magazine pop-feminism that I internalised in Nineties Britain seemed less concerned with such gritty realities than more nebulous goods such as “empowerment”, representation, and smashing stereotypes. By the time Southern made her first viral video denouncing feminism, this was still more pronounced — and joined by the even more disembodied ideology of gender identity. When the physical vulnerability inherent in becoming a mother gets downplayed across the political spectrum, for different reasons, perhaps it’s no wonder Southern only gradually came to grasp the practical value of some first-wave feminist victories.

But even though she was no longer a “deadweight” financially, her job failed to appease her husband. “He kept demanding I contribute more financially, but then would chew me out whenever I would work.” It didn’t seem to matter what she did: “He would just give me impossible tasks all day. Tasks that I simply could not finish. It felt like he would almost send me on errands with the intent of having me fail.”

All of this was, Southern tells me, difficult to square with her religious beliefs. She would pray by his bed when he was angry with her, hoping that if she gave him grace one more time he’d realise the depth of her love and be kinder. And if this didn’t work, she was encouraged to persist by the way online life had conditioned these beliefs into “listicle” form. But as she discovered, distilling religious traditionalism into viral bullet points does not provide an adequate framework for navigating the complexities of a real-world marriage. She thought, she told me, that “as long as I put on the high heels and the lipstick when my husband comes home, as long as I cook the best meal, as long as I’m always submissive, and say yes, sir, whatever you want, things will go fantastic.” And if it’s not fantastic? The listicle version of traditionalism would just say she should make more effort.

It was, she says, “an embarrassing wake up call, finding myself consistently applying these rules and instructions I found on Twitter, and then never getting the results they were supposed to get, in the real realm of relationships”.

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It seems to me, I tell her, that condensing millennia of religious belief and real-world domestic praxis into viral memes has produced a Right-wing gender ideology every bit as over-simplified, dematerialised, and radically disconnected from the complexities of life as the disembodied Left-wing version. In turn, both Southern and other women I spoke to within her wider “underground railroad” of ex-trad women think that, perhaps like its Left-wing analogue, the extremely online nature of this gender ideology attracts a higher than usual proportion of individuals with existing psychological issues.

Ellen (not her real name), 35, is another previously married erstwhile “trad” who is now in Southern’s network. She describes how the men who self-select into these communities are often “wayward, antisocial, disagreeable and very, very misogynistic”, frequently themselves from broken homes and with limited real-world social support. And when their relationships go wrong, as they often do, the very online “trad” gender ideology has no remedy. “If there’s a problem due to the fact that he’s crazy, violent, or hateful,” Ellen says, “that’s just how it’s supposed to be. So there’s nothing really done to fix it.”

Southern is careful to emphasise that she knows many traditionalists in happy, loving, complementary marriages. But, she says, it’s a fallen world, and her community includes many women whose husbands seem to have been drawn to listicle-style gender ideology precisely because of the power it offers over women. “Those guys want someone they feel they can definitely control, who’s never going to leave them, who they can do anything to.”

In the end, it wasn’t Southern who broke the spell, but her husband. Around the time her son was toddling, two family deaths prompted her to arrange a visit home to Canada. Her husband threatened to divorce her if she went, and Southern tells me she had to sign an affidavit promising to return. Finally he relented — only to text after she landed in Canada, declaring that because she’d chosen to travel, the marriage was over.

She moved in with her parents, then into the kind of affordable accommodation available to those on the breadline, in Canada’s brutally expensive housing market: a cheap cabin surrounded by woodland and trailers. Even then she still hoped her marriage could be saved: “I still wanted to make it work. I was texting my husband and calling him, begging to get back together. But he just said ‘No. I don’t even want shared custody.’” The cabin, she said, had an ant infestation; everyone used her washing machine because it was the only one. But, she says, it was unexpectedly healing, and filled with a genuine sense of community.

Still, it was a confusing time for her. “My brain was breaking between two worlds,” she says, “because I couldn’t let go of the ideology.” I was at a similar age when I fell away from the radical Left, and the sense of disorientation she describes is familiar. But where I was free to grapple in private with my cognitive dissonance, Southern had built an international profile promoting this worldview. “I had been banned from countries over this ideology,” she says. “I had destroyed my reputation internationally for this. How am I going let go of this?”

And yet, every manosphere talking point had turned out not to match her experience. It wasn’t true that only women mess up relationships. Being submissive didn’t fix everything. Yes, women mostly initiate divorce — but as she discovered, this can happen because a man wishes to avoid incurring child support liabilities. When she described her redpill-conditioned expectations of divorce to her lawyer, the woman laughed at how mistaken she was.

More than anything, though, what shattered the listicle mindset was simply realising how much nicer life could be, when you live the life that’s in front of you rather than trying to follow rigid precepts. Despite not being “the Right-wing ideal of aristocracy and everyone going to Mass”, she realised she was infinitely happier there in that woodland, among her working-class neighbours, than she ever had been in her marriage. “Every single thing I was experiencing in my real realm, not online realm, was the complete opposite of what I was being told.”

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When she first announced her marriage, she says, she’d been lauded by friends and fans; then, when she announced the separation she was inundated with messages lamenting how her life was ruined. But in both cases the exact opposite was true: “Post-divorce, after becoming a single mother, my mental health started to improve. I started to repair all these really important friendships. And I’m living a much happier, much healthier life than I was before….Some of the most miserable people I’ve met – in fact, absolutely the most miserable people I’ve met – have been stuck in this weird, larpy trad dynamic.” The happiest people she knows, on the other hand, “are just living in reality”.

In Southern’s view, the increasingly visible gulf between Right-wing gender ideology and “living in reality” has an analogue in the memes and talking-points of the broader e-Right — a phenomenon that, once again, is mirrored on the other side of the aisle. Here, viral and overly simplistic ideas replicate with seemingly very little reference to reality, human nature, or the world as it actually is. For example, she describes the “Repeal the 19th” meme, which calls for ending women’s right to vote, as “the Right-wing version of Defund the Police”.

Southern thinks the internet’s baked-in incentives encourage this drift toward ever more caricatured viral politics. For example, she tells me that where earlier generations of “red-pill” content merely focused on exploiting women sexually, it “has become just teaching men to hate women” – simply because this is a simpler, cheaper, and more viral message and therefore easier to sell.

Someone less online than Southern might reply: yes, but surely the error was disappearing into online ideological rabbit holes in the first place, and confusing memes for life principles. This is true; but so much of social life now happens online, including for children, that Southern is far from the only individual to have reached adulthood with a set of templates for life gleaned more from memes than real-world adult guidance. Nor is this a problem for just one side of the political aisle.

Against an online world with entropic, culture-dissolving effects at this scale, then, what hope is there for any of us? A pessimist might say the future looks bleak for interpersonal relationships, indeed for our public life tout court. But I think Southern’s story offers cause for optimism. It suggests that maybe, just maybe, our current crop of internet-generated political derangements will turn out to be a temporary symptom, driven by generations who grew up without the internet and hence without much psychological defence against its many pathologies. By contrast, the first generation to grow up online is now approaching middle age. A great many besides Lauren Southern have road-tested ideologies they developed in virtual space and are finding them inadequate to the real world’s complexities.

I doubt online “gender” arguments will abate any time soon. The tussle between men and women is a culture war as old as humanity itself: men and women always need to find a way to live together, which means negotiating those ways our material interests and physical capacities align or exist in tension. With the wider world in flux, it’s hardly surprising to find ourselves here again; the challenge is finding solutions that are grounded in reality rather than abstract, purist ideologies.

But the internet’s first generation of natives may be the ones who bring us back down to earth. Even the erstwhile queen bee of the extremely online radical Right is now a convert to “living in reality”. So perhaps there’s hope that the rest of us — and our politics — will also find our way back there, in the end.

***

This article was first published on 6 May, 2024

For Farmer, this association has become a problem. He is the Christian deputy chairman of the Council for Christians and Jews. Meanwhile, his son’s wife is blaming Israel for the assassination of JFK; calling historical accounts of the Holocaust “bizarre propaganda”; and indulging in outright blood libel. (In a video, she claimed that “Catholics and Christians were going missing on Passover, then they would find bodies across Europe and they were able to trace them back to Jews.”)

Owens’s rhetoric is not new, but it has escalated since March, when she departed conservative outlet the Daily Wire after months of friction (and public spats with her Jewish co-host Ben Shapiro) over her alleged endorsement of antisemitic conspiracy theories. Not that the Daily Wire deserves much credit here: long before it hired her in 2021, her views were clear. At a 2018 event, Owens responded to a question about nationalism by saying: “Whenever we say nationalism, the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler… If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK, fine.” She later claimed the quote was taken out of context, though it’s striking she didn’t bother to mention the Holocaust.

All this is revealing in its own right. But if, like me, you’ve been aware of Owens since her emergence into public life eight years ago, it’s also shocking because of how far she’s come: a one-time doctrinaire progressive turned radical rightist. A decade ago, Owens was an obscure figure who ran a liberal political blog in the punchy, snarky style of Gawker as-was or the Daily Show. In a 2015 blog, she had celebrated the “good news” that the “Republican Tea Party… will eventually die off”. Another article (not by her) vaunted a mock investigation into Donald Trump’s penis size.

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None of this had won her much attention, though. Her first stint in the headlines came in 2016, aged 26, as the founder of an anti-online-bullying initiative called Social Autopsy. Like most such projects, this was broadly Left-coded. Anonymous abuse was associated with racism and misogyny, with the hate mills of anonymous image board 4chan and Gamergate (the broad collective of accounts that claimed to be mobilising for “ethics in games journalism”, but were in fact heavily focused on berating individual women in the games industry). It made sense that Owens — a black woman who had received a $37,500 settlement in 2008 over racist abuse she suffered as a high-schooler — would advocate against it.

But Social Autopsy was an odd and misconceived scheme from the outset. The idea, according to a promotional video Owens made, was to “attach [people’s] words to their places of employment, and anybody in the entire world can search for them”. In other words, it would have created an open-source doxxing database, and this was not a popular idea with anyone. Owens found herself criticised not only by the “trolls” she believed herself to be combatting, but also by the victims of online harassment who pointed out that attaching someone’s personal information to an accusation of trolling could be a very effective harassment tactic in itself.

This is where the Owens story really begins to take shape. As the backlash to her project spiralled into a classic online pile-on, she reacted in the self-destructive style of the classic social media victim: rather than take stock of the criticisms, or attempt to revamp her publicity strategy, she opted to feud with her opponents. And as she feuded, she began to discern a wider pattern: the abuse she was receiving (much of it racist and misogynistic) could, she believed, all be attributed to a network of secret accounts controlled by key anti-Gamergate figures seeking to protect their status as “professional victims”.

In Owens’s mind, the victims of the abuse were in fact the nefarious architects of it all. “I started piecing it together, and I was like, Oh my God, this is actually who these people are — this is crazy,” she told Jesse Singal, when he investigated the Social Autopsy furore for New York Magazine. Part of her supposed evidence was that one of the Gamergate victims who had criticised Social Autopsy had used the word “dox”. Owens had never encountered it before, and its appearance in subsequent abusive messages confirmed that they must all be coming from the same place.

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There is an obvious through-line here to Owens’s later antisemitism: the false victim who orchestrates their own alleged abuse in order to gain privilege is a clear analogue for the Jew who supposedly fabricates the Holocaust in order to win power over gentiles. In Owens’s philosophy, the afflicted are always suspect. Unless the afflicted in question is Candace Owens, in which case she is a brave and brilliant truth-teller: “I consider the constructs of our society thoroughly, and often. I think analytically. Randi and Zoe [two of her critics and supposed harassers] really banked on my being dumb,” she tweeted at one point during the firestorm.

This is how Owens went from anti-bullying campaigner to pro-Gamergate figurehead, and a particularly valuable one, given that her race and sex offered an instant riposte to claims that Gamergate was inherently bigoted. (Her Barbie-doll beauty, which made her irresistible to TV bookers, was also an asset.) The most likely explanation for the abuse remained the most obvious one: Gamergaters were as fearful of losing their anonymity as their targets were, and lashed out at Owens in the terms they were already accustomed to. Nonetheless, once she declared for their team, she was embraced, and guaranteed a speedy ascent through the alt-Right commentariat.

Her conversion was Damascene: “I became a conservative overnight… I realised that liberals were actually the racists. Liberals were actually the trolls,” she told conservative commentator Dave Rubin in 2017. She endorsed Trump, arrayed herself against Black Lives Matter, and rapidly became fluent in anti-trans talking points (in the Social Autopsy era, one of her main concerns had been anonymous accounts mocking Caitlyn Jenner).

The journey Owens has undertaken is baffling if you attempt to discern any ideological consistency in it. There is no shame in changing your mind — as Keynes reportedly said: “When my information changes, I alter my conclusions.” But in Owens’s case, her information did not change. Trump was the same candidate before her pile-on as he was after it; BLM had the same claims to justice, and the same frailties; Caitlyn Jenner continued to be a woman in exactly the same degree regardless of what was tweeted at Owens.

What changed was her understanding of where she could be most powerful. The liberal blogger space was saturated by 2016. Anyone as ambitious and articulate as Owens would need to look elsewhere to make her mark. Social Autopsy was her attempt to become an abuse entrepreneur; in the end, the fiasco she generated pointed her towards a whole new and unexpected arena in public life. Reinvented as a black conservative, she was suddenly elevated to the highest prominence. The more extreme she became, the more she was rewarded. In 2018, when she married George Farmer — director of the Right-wing campaign group Turning Point and former CEO of libertarian social network Parler — she became half of a radical-Right power couple.

The cancellation to zealot pipeline is well established. Jordan Peterson was a professor with some moderate reactionary opinions (and idiosyncratic takes on theology) before rough treatment from the left convinced him that his own personal hero’s journey was to tear the whole liberal edifice down. Kellie-Jay Keen was regular liberal feminist, chatting away in interviews about her sons’ gender-nonconforming interest in dolls in exchange for a plug for her upcoming clothing brand; her transformation into Posie Parker, gender critical Boudicca and scourge of boys in makeup in John Lewis ads, seems to have been spurred, in part, by her sense of having been slighted by a mythical class of “head girl feminists”.

These transformations have emotional benefits, as well as more tangible ones. They turn the experience of rejection or ostracism into proof of the individual’s particular importance as a martyr to their cause. They bring followers, attracted by the glamour of the self-styled crusader. And those followers bring commercial possibilities: there are books to be sold, merchandise to be shifted (buy a T-shirt for the cause!), monetised views to rack up. The more embattled you become, the more profit you can turn. An agitated base is an open-pocketed one.

None of which is to say that Owens was insincere when she claimed to be the victim of a vast liberal conspiracy: rampant egotism can lead a person into that kind of honest error. With the conservative organisations that made use of her, including the Daily Wire, it is harder to assume good faith. They always had access to Owens’s public statements. Clearly, her apologia for Hitler was acceptable to them. Only when she went so far that she became an undeniable liability did they choose to delegitimise her, and by then, she had already built her own platform and audience. She is ineradicable.

The internet is a radicalisation machine for a person like Owens. There are versions of her in any movement you choose to look at: the proud apostate, the sinner redeemed, the prodigal returned to whatever reality they endorse.

The temptation to succumb to that role is intense. Maybe you’ve felt it too: the raw pleasure of allowing yourself to become what the people who hate you say you are, so the people who hate them will love you more. The intoxicating pull of the role the internet has written for you in advance.

Not everyone falls. For those who do, the determining factor seems to have little to do with politics. The self-made extremist can be anyone from the “liberal mugged by reality” type to the Extinction Rebellion activist threatening to gridlock a city for the sake of environmental apocalypse. The specific beliefs are superficial; what they have is something deeper. Though their politics are very different, what they share is more important. A desire to be the hero. A longing for the validation of their audience. A willingness to shape themselves into whatever wins the most reaction. Feed that psychology into an attention economy, and strange monsters get made.

My accounts of questioning this individualistic ideology, and embracing marriage and motherhood have resonated with social conservatives. Most of these, it goes without saying, feel (as I do) that family life and women’s distinctive sexed realities should be better understood and valued in the public conversation. Some, though, take more hardline positions: that women should never work, for example, that we should always be submissive – or even that women’s right to vote should be repealed.

But surely any stance which risks lending momentum to such extreme arguments cannot be in women’s interests? I explored this question recently with the Canadian Right-wing firebrand Lauren Southern, whose early video content regularly challenged liberal feminist orthodoxy, and promoted domesticity. Our stories are symmetrical in some respects: both of us embraced radical politics in our early twenties, me on the Left and Southern on the Right. Both of us embraced ideologies that felt inspiring in the free-floating world of the internet. And both of us, albeit in different ways, have course-corrected back toward reality in part via the fiercely practical experience of caring for a child.

Southern’s story might easily serve as a cautionary tale for how socially conservative talking-points can lead women into danger. For where I lost my twenties to commune life and niche sexualities, she left media at 22 to embrace a socially conservative template for women: the lifestyle often idealised by social media influencers as “tradwife”. Except it wasn’t all Fifties pinafores and cute cupcakes; it was a living hell. Nor, as she has learned, was she the only conservative woman in this position.

Comparing our experiences, though, two things emerge. Firstly, that this is not simply a matter of the Right being uniquely toxic for women — though, as Southern’s story reveals, there’s plenty of scope for toxicity. It’s rather that purist ideologies as such map at best uneasily onto the practical realities of life as a woman – and especially as a mother. And secondly, that the simplifying, polarising incentives baked into the contemporary internet are increasingly warping the ideologies of both Left and Right into such extreme forms, that any sincere effort to apply these in real life will almost inevitably be the stuff of nightmares.

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Southern was perhaps the most telegenic figure in the brash, young, and very online “alt-Right” movement which emerged in the 2010s, quickly gaining international notoriety for her views on mass immigration, Islam, racially-motivated farm murders in South Africa, and the supposed harms of liberal feminism — content that saw her accused by the radical Left-wing Southern Poverty Law Centre of racist dog-whistling, and even hovering “at the precipice of outright white nationalism”. Southern herself has always denied this but that hasn’t stopped her critics on the Left accusing her of “far Right” agitation.

Then, abruptly, she disappeared in 2019, to embrace marriage and motherhood in her husband’s home country of Australia. She was, it seemed, all set to embrace the nurturing, feminine, domestic role promoted by Right-wing traditionalists, idealised by “tradwife” influencers, and criticised by progressives as “dangerous and stupid”. Four years later, though, Southern caused a new round of shockwaves — this time with a video recounting what happened next: the breakdown of her abusive marriage, her return to Canada as a single mother, and a stint living hand-to-mouth in a cabin in the woods.

Southern has attracted vitriolic criticism from the Right, for speaking openly about how “tradlife” went wrong for her. She, however, sees speaking out not as betrayal of her own “side”, but as continuous with her earlier willingness to challenge progressive consensus on topics such as immigration. “I’m not worried about saying the things I’m saying right now, that are getting me so attacked online. Because I’ve dealt with this, with South Africa. I’ve dealt with this with mass immigration, I’ve dealt with this with my critiques of feminism. And every single one turned out: oh, maybe she was onto something.”

For, she tells me, she’s not alone. She tells me she knows many other women still suffering in unhappy “tradlife” marriages. One of her WhatsApp groups, she says, “is like the Underground Railroad for women in the conservative movement”. Some of these are prominent media figures: “There are a lot of influencers who are not in good relationships, who are still portraying happy marriage publicly, and bashing people for not being married while being in horrendous relationships.” She hopes that in speaking out she can reassure “all of these women who are thinking in their heads: I’m uniquely terrible, and I’m uniquely making a mistake” that no: something is more generally amiss.

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What, then, is amiss? In her view, it’s not that conservatism as such is fundamentally mistaken, or that complementary sex roles are unworkable. But the online “tradlife” ideology has distilled a version of these roles that’s both rigid and wildly over-simplified, and thus woefully ill-equipped for real life – in ways that pose significant risks for women in such marriages.

How, then, did Southern get from posting videos titled “Why I Am Not A Feminist” to defending women’s sex-specific interests within family life? This is, after all, not a million miles from what used to be called “feminism”. It’s a long and bitter story, in which Southern did her best to live a purist internet ideology to the letter – only to receive a grim object lesson in its shortcomings.

Born in 1995, Southern grew up in British Columbia in a middle-class, conservative, Christian home. Southern was, she recounts, part of the first generation to grow up predominantly online. She and her sister (now a DJ and Twitch streamer) spent their adolescence in the kind of internet hinterlands where wild ideas flourish, free of grounding in material reality or practical experience.

Here, once-complex theories are swiftly distilled to their bare essentials, for maximum viral reach. As Southern puts it: “Follow the listicle, and you’ll be fine.” By the time she met her husband, she’d been condensing conservative values into “listicle” form as a media influencer for some years – to the point where it seemed possible to realise this framework in real life, too. So, when marriage beckoned, at 22, she tells me wryly: “I thought I’d won the lottery”. They were married within four months: arguably the equivalent, for the Right, of my Left-wing embrace of communes, anti-capitalist demos and niche sexual subcultures. She was quickly pregnant.

There were warning signs from early on. “If I ever disagreed with him in any capacity he’d just disappear, for days at a time. I remember there were nights where he’d call me worthless and pathetic, then get in this car and leave.” But she didn’t see them, thanks to the simplified anti-feminist ideology she’d absorbed and promoted: “I had this delusional view of relationships: that only women could be the ones that make or break them, and men can do no wrong.” So she didn’t spot the red flags, even as they grew more extreme. “He’d lock me out of the house. I remember having to knock on the neighbour’s door on rainy nights, because he’d get upset and drive off without unlocking the house. It was very strange, to go from being this public figure on stage with people clapping, to the girl crying, knocking on someone’s door with no home to get into, being abandoned with a baby.”

But as she tells it, the nightmare began in earnest when he was offered a work opportunity in his home country of Australia, a few weeks after the birth of their baby. She did not want to leave her support networks behind. But he used the political and religious importance she placed on lifelong marriage as a lever to force her to agree: “Whenever I wouldn’t do something, he would say: I’m going to divorce you.” So, feeling she had no other option, she assented.

He also insisted she should publicly quit work. His work required a high level of government security clearance; she was a Right-wing provocateur who had faced deplatforming, state investigations, and was even banned from entering the UK. In their early, giddy romance this had felt manageable. But “when we moved back to Australia, he really wanted to get back into his old work”. And Southern was a “hardcore liability”, so the pressure was on: “It was like: Lauren, you gotta hire lawyers. You’ve got to disavow everything. You’ve got to never talk publicly again.”

So, in 2019, she announced that she was leaving media and activism altogether. As Southern tells it, she was trying sincerely to put into practice the ideology she’d promoted in her videos. “I believed I had a certain role in my relationship,” she told me. “And it was to be the more submissive one that supports my husband’s dreams.”

Then, thousands of miles from friends and family, she reports becoming “the closest thing to a modern day, Western slave”.  With no income of her own, she had to do everything: “The lawns, the house, the cooking, the baby care, his university homework. And I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t have any support. There was no help changing diapers, there was no help waking up in the night with the baby. I’d still have to get up, to make breakfast before work. I’d be shaking and nervous, for fear I’m gonna get yelled at.” Then he’d berate her for spending all her time on tasks other than earning money: “I was told daily that I was worthless, pathetic. Deadweight. All you do is sit around and take care of the baby and do chores.” When Covid shut down all real-world public life, her situation became “hell on earth”. It was, she said, “the only time in my life where I idealised dying.”

Instead, between the lockdown claustrophobia and her husband’s behaviour, she began to revise her initial willingness to leave public life. In part, she told me, she hoped it would win back his love. “He was so much kinder, sweeter and more pursuant of me when I was this ‘boss babe’ travelling the world working. It seemed like becoming a mother made him lose respect for me. It was shocking to me, again, because the traditional view preached the opposite — that men love you more when you stop working and become a wife and mother.” In her experience, though, this was “very much not the case”. So, a year after retiring to embrace traditionalist domestic life on the Right-wing model, she posted her comeback video, and began making sporadic media appearances.

Never mind the pop-antifeminist ideal of a breadwinning husband and homemaking wife that Southern had once promoted — the freedoms (won by early feminists) for women to work and have interests outside the home turned out to be a lifeline. Those already inclined to dislike Southern’s politics might feel a certain vindictive satisfaction at this collision of ideology with reality. But arguably, in having taken so long to see the potential downsides of her own antifeminism, Southern simply shared the same blind spots as much of the mainstream Left and Right.

It is surely true that conservative advocacy for complementary sex roles sometimes ignores questions about women’s physical vulnerability, and the scope this affords for domestic abuse. Conversely, today many self-identified liberal feminists have also forgotten that the earliest women’s movement was grounded in the sex-specific material vulnerabilities Southern experienced first-hand. The magazine pop-feminism that I internalised in Nineties Britain seemed less concerned with such gritty realities than more nebulous goods such as “empowerment”, representation, and smashing stereotypes. By the time Southern made her first viral video denouncing feminism, this was still more pronounced — and joined by the even more disembodied ideology of gender identity. When the physical vulnerability inherent in becoming a mother gets downplayed across the political spectrum, for different reasons, perhaps it’s no wonder Southern only gradually came to grasp the practical value of some first-wave feminist victories.

But even though she was no longer a “deadweight” financially, her job failed to appease her husband. “He kept demanding I contribute more financially, but then would chew me out whenever I would work.” It didn’t seem to matter what she did: “He would just give me impossible tasks all day. Tasks that I simply could not finish. It felt like he would almost send me on errands with the intent of having me fail.”

All of this was, Southern tells me, difficult to square with her religious beliefs. She would pray by his bed when he was angry with her, hoping that if she gave him grace one more time he’d realise the depth of her love and be kinder. And if this didn’t work, she was encouraged to persist by the way online life had conditioned these beliefs into “listicle” form. But as she discovered, distilling religious traditionalism into viral bullet points does not provide an adequate framework for navigating the complexities of a real-world marriage. She thought, she told me, that “as long as I put on the high heels and the lipstick when my husband comes home, as long as I cook the best meal, as long as I’m always submissive, and say yes, sir, whatever you want, things will go fantastic.” And if it’s not fantastic? The listicle version of traditionalism would just say she should make more effort.

It was, she says, “an embarrassing wake up call, finding myself consistently applying these rules and instructions I found on Twitter, and then never getting the results they were supposed to get, in the real realm of relationships”.

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It seems to me, I tell her, that condensing millennia of religious belief and real-world domestic praxis into viral memes has produced a Right-wing gender ideology every bit as over-simplified, dematerialised, and radically disconnected from the complexities of life as the disembodied Left-wing version. In turn, both Southern and other women I spoke to within her wider “underground railroad” of ex-trad women think that, perhaps like its Left-wing analogue, the extremely online nature of this gender ideology attracts a higher than usual proportion of individuals with existing psychological issues.

Ellen (not her real name), 35, is another previously married erstwhile “trad” who is now in Southern’s network. She describes how the men who self-select into these communities are often “wayward, antisocial, disagreeable and very, very misogynistic”, frequently themselves from broken homes and with limited real-world social support. And when their relationships go wrong, as they often do, the very online “trad” gender ideology has no remedy. “If there’s a problem due to the fact that he’s crazy, violent, or hateful,” Ellen says, “that’s just how it’s supposed to be. So there’s nothing really done to fix it.”

Southern is careful to emphasise that she knows many traditionalists in happy, loving, complementary marriages. But, she says, it’s a fallen world, and her community includes many women whose husbands seem to have been drawn to listicle-style gender ideology precisely because of the power it offers over women. “Those guys want someone they feel they can definitely control, who’s never going to leave them, who they can do anything to.”

In the end, it wasn’t Southern who broke the spell, but her husband. Around the time her son was toddling, two family deaths prompted her to arrange a visit home to Canada. Her husband threatened to divorce her if she went, and Southern tells me she had to sign an affidavit promising to return. Finally he relented — only to text after she landed in Canada, declaring that because she’d chosen to travel, the marriage was over.

She moved in with her parents, then into the kind of affordable accommodation available to those on the breadline, in Canada’s brutally expensive housing market: a cheap cabin surrounded by woodland and trailers. Even then she still hoped her marriage could be saved: “I still wanted to make it work. I was texting my husband and calling him, begging to get back together. But he just said ‘No. I don’t even want shared custody.’” The cabin, she said, had an ant infestation; everyone used her washing machine because it was the only one. But, she says, it was unexpectedly healing, and filled with a genuine sense of community.

Still, it was a confusing time for her. “My brain was breaking between two worlds,” she says, “because I couldn’t let go of the ideology.” I was at a similar age when I fell away from the radical Left, and the sense of disorientation she describes is familiar. But where I was free to grapple in private with my cognitive dissonance, Southern had built an international profile promoting this worldview. “I had been banned from countries over this ideology,” she says. “I had destroyed my reputation internationally for this. How am I going let go of this?”

And yet, every manosphere talking point had turned out not to match her experience. It wasn’t true that only women mess up relationships. Being submissive didn’t fix everything. Yes, women mostly initiate divorce — but as she discovered, this can happen because a man wishes to avoid incurring child support liabilities. When she described her redpill-conditioned expectations of divorce to her lawyer, the woman laughed at how mistaken she was.

More than anything, though, what shattered the listicle mindset was simply realising how much nicer life could be, when you live the life that’s in front of you rather than trying to follow rigid precepts. Despite not being “the Right-wing ideal of aristocracy and everyone going to Mass”, she realised she was infinitely happier there in that woodland, among her working-class neighbours, than she ever had been in her marriage. “Every single thing I was experiencing in my real realm, not online realm, was the complete opposite of what I was being told.”

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When she first announced her marriage, she says, she’d been lauded by friends and fans; then, when she announced the separation she was inundated with messages lamenting how her life was ruined. But in both cases the exact opposite was true: “Post-divorce, after becoming a single mother, my mental health started to improve. I started to repair all these really important friendships. And I’m living a much happier, much healthier life than I was before….Some of the most miserable people I’ve met – in fact, absolutely the most miserable people I’ve met – have been stuck in this weird, larpy trad dynamic.” The happiest people she knows, on the other hand, “are just living in reality”.

In Southern’s view, the increasingly visible gulf between Right-wing gender ideology and “living in reality” has an analogue in the memes and talking-points of the broader e-Right — a phenomenon that, once again, is mirrored on the other side of the aisle. Here, viral and overly simplistic ideas replicate with seemingly very little reference to reality, human nature, or the world as it actually is. For example, she describes the “Repeal the 19th” meme, which calls for ending women’s right to vote, as “the Right-wing version of Defund the Police”.

Southern thinks the internet’s baked-in incentives encourage this drift toward ever more caricatured viral politics. For example, she tells me that where earlier generations of “red-pill” content merely focused on exploiting women sexually, it “has become just teaching men to hate women” – simply because this is a simpler, cheaper, and more viral message and therefore easier to sell.

Someone less online than Southern might reply: yes, but surely the error was disappearing into online ideological rabbit holes in the first place, and confusing memes for life principles. This is true; but so much of social life now happens online, including for children, that Southern is far from the only individual to have reached adulthood with a set of templates for life gleaned more from memes than real-world adult guidance. Nor is this a problem for just one side of the political aisle.

Against an online world with entropic, culture-dissolving effects at this scale, then, what hope is there for any of us? A pessimist might say the future looks bleak for interpersonal relationships, indeed for our public life tout court. But I think Southern’s story offers cause for optimism. It suggests that maybe, just maybe, our current crop of internet-generated political derangements will turn out to be a temporary symptom, driven by generations who grew up without the internet and hence without much psychological defence against its many pathologies. By contrast, the first generation to grow up online is now approaching middle age. A great many besides Lauren Southern have road-tested ideologies they developed in virtual space and are finding them inadequate to the real world’s complexities.

I doubt online “gender” arguments will abate any time soon. The tussle between men and women is a culture war as old as humanity itself: men and women always need to find a way to live together, which means negotiating those ways our material interests and physical capacities align or exist in tension. With the wider world in flux, it’s hardly surprising to find ourselves here again; the challenge is finding solutions that are grounded in reality rather than abstract, purist ideologies.

But the internet’s first generation of natives may be the ones who bring us back down to earth. Even the erstwhile queen bee of the extremely online radical Right is now a convert to “living in reality”. So perhaps there’s hope that the rest of us — and our politics — will also find our way back there, in the end.

At first glance, this group — made up of internet-savvy provocateurs, anonymous contributors, eccentric celebrities, and some vestigial “alt-Right” figureheads — still seems to be supporting Donald Trump, their once and future president. In 2016, they viewed him as a figure of entertainment, a political outsider who was wittily disruptive and assumed the status of a fantastical, Warhammer-esque “God-Emperor”. The portly University of Chicago graduate William Thomas Clark, also known as “Kantbot”, was among those who fervently amplified this narrative, riding a small wave of internet virality after he was filmed shrieking about Trump “completing the system of German idealism”.

Though pollsters and political scientists continue to debate the extent to which this group swayed the outcome of the election, there’s little doubt that their online activities played a role in shaping the larger narrative. Their memes and posts, known for their unique blend of political cynicism, irreverence and humour, served to attract some undecided voters and further embolden Trump supporters. Twitter user @Ricky_Vaughn99, one of the most prominent and vitriolic voices within this community, expressed a keen insight into the fiery populist movements emerging on both the Left and Right. “There is definitely anger among the youth,” he told me in 2016. “The Bernie people are angry. The #BlackLivesMatter people are angry.” (Vaughn, it bears noting, was later outed as Douglass Mackey and convicted by a federal jury of depriving individuals of their constitutional right to vote for his role in a conspiracy that used memes to convince black voters to vote via text, which is not possible.)

Trump, a master of obtaining free publicity in his own right, benefited immensely from the countless articles scrutinising the role of the alt-Right in his campaign — articles of which I wrote more than my fair share. However, it was only after the election, as the alt-Right splintered into factions such as the “Post-Left”, the “Based Right” and a partly tongue-in-cheek, partly earnest “racist Right”, that the complexity of the Online Right’s influence began to fully reveal itself.

Into this arena steps Ron DeSantis, an exceedingly unexciting and well-qualified gentleman known for his relentless pursuit of upper-middle-class excellence. Whether it was leading his Yale baseball team in batting average, graduating with honours from Harvard Law School, or earning a Bronze Star and other military medals in Iraq, DeSantis has consistently demonstrated an unwavering dedication to lining his CV. And now, he’s aiming to add the support of the Online Right to it.

As befits such a plodding overachiever, DeSantis’s approach has been methodical and overt. His systematic attempts to usurp Trump’s dominance in this arena reveal his characteristic ambition, yet also underscore a glaring deficiency in political charisma. Despite his obvious intellect, DeSantis’s rigid demeanour and unusually high-pitched voice can seem off-putting to those accustomed to Trump’s brash and theatrical style.

In a move that couldn’t be more emblematic of his ham-fisted efforts to capture the Online Right, DeSantis chose to formally announce his candidacy in a glitch-ridden Twitter Spaces session, alongside none other than Elon Musk, a veritable rock star within these circles. Despite technical difficulties and a less-than-stellar audience count of around 150,000 listeners, DeSantis pressed on, evidently reading his campaign announcement off a script. Immediately afterwards, DeSantis’s campaign released a video featuring Musk so prominently that one might have mistaken him for DeSantis’s running mate.

Elsewhere, DeSantis’s campaign seems to have actively courted Seth Dillon, the head of the Right-leaning satire site, The Babylon Bee. In return, apparently, the Bee has been churning out pro-DeSantis content in support of his ongoing dispute with Disney, and even purging those who publicly clash with DeSantis’s associates. Only last week, for instance, Gavin Mario Wax, a pro-Trump Bee staffer, was unceremoniously fired by Dillon for a brusque tweet directed at Christina Pushaw, DeSantis’s top media advisor. The spat culminated in Dillon telling Wax — via Twitter, of course, because this is how HR business is transacted today — to remove his association with The Bee from his Twitter bio, triggering a fiery response from its readers, particularly those loyal to Trump.

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As DeSantis wrestled with these issues, Trump, who had seemed adrift on the meme and comedy performance fronts for months, found his groove again with a lively CNN Town Hall. Trump delighted the audience with memorably nasty lines, showing a return to form that contrasted starkly with his opponent’s struggles. Later, on the day of DeSantis’s fraught Twitter Spaces event, Trump’s team did not miss the opportunity to land a body blow: they shared a bizarre fan-made parody of the event, which was doctored to include figures such as Hitler, George Soros, and the devil. And the jabs didn’t end there. Donald Trump Jr. later posted an AI-generated video featuring DeSantis superimposed onto Steve Carell’s character from The Office.

Not everyone in the Online Right was forthcoming with applause, however. For instance, prominent figurehead @LindyMan, a lawyer named Paul Skallas, misses the charm of the 2016 meme war. In a now-deleted tweet, he mourned the loss of “crude photoshops”, deeming the recent onslaught of Trump memes “too much” and comparing their appearance to “encountering a neanderthal on the street”. Despite this, a number of high-profile Online Right figures have told me that Trump still maintains an edge as a captivating figure. But even so, the tenor of the meme landscape has undoubtedly evolved since 2016. Back then, the goal was conversion; today, the aim seems to be to galvanise an existing base.

By this metric, Trump’s recent performance is certainly better than it was following his 2020 loss, though not quite at its 2016 peak. DeSantis, meanwhile, merely provides meme material, à la Jeb Bush, through a persona that lends itself to ridicule. His technical debacle during the Twitter Spaces event didn’t help his cause either. The stark contrast between the two candidates only fed the popular alpha/beta dichotomy that fuels many Online Right memes.

Even the proxy battles, such as the Babylon Bee incident, have taken an eccentric turn. An otherwise unremarkable Twitter scrap between Claremont fellow Dave Reaboi, a DeSantis supporter, and Trump-backing pundit Scott Greer led to an amusing ad hominem exchange over physical stature, age and marital status. This might seem absurd and pointless, yet it aligns with the dynamics of an online arena that amplifies and distorts, especially during political primaries.

These online dust-ups, all too easily dismissed as mere noise, play a critical role in shaping the narrative of a primary election. As thousands of them unfold in real time, they offer raw material for the media to dissect and amplify, drawing attention away from policy issues and focusing instead on personality clashes and personal drama. This can have a significant distorting effect, as perceptions of the candidates end up being influenced as much by these disputes as by their actual policy positions or leadership abilities — two areas in which DeSantis, at least on paper, would seem to hold an edge over Trump. Some Online Right posters have told me they hate seeing their cohort descend into this sort of linguistic violence, but this is precisely what happens during a political dogfight: a political poster can choose to either see the show — and thus risk losing the war for attention — or weigh in and gain followers by being the show.

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In such a scenario, how can DeSantis hope to win? At present, his primary tactic seems to be to harvest online discourse and then turn off the internet — with the result that his attempts to sell himself to the Online Right come across as an application for admission to Harvard rather than genuine engagement. It’s as though the group’s highly memeable and mockable concerns — lax policing, black-on-white and black-on-black crime, corporate and public school diversity programming, transgender rights, unsafe lockdowns and hastily released vaccines — have been diluted in his new strategic approach, which merely involves attempting to address these concerns through legislation.

In other words, DeSantis, a decidedly offline figure, is attempting to serve up a beggar’s banquet of Online Right issues. The problem is that this offering feels disingenuous to the intended consumer. It’s akin to a diner at a restaurant, peering down at the plate of food they’ve ordered from DeSantis’s meme-inspired menu. A friend notices their hesitation and asks: “Is there a problem?” The diner responds: “This is what I ordered, but now that I see it, I realise it was a bad choice.” It’s as if there’s a growing sense of buyer’s remorse with regard to the dullness of DeSantis, or a shock that he is either cynically or selflessly attempting to turn their smoke-filled chatroom banter into a cohesive political platform.

From this perspective, the overarching lesson is that the best and most viral memes cannot be forced into existence through market research (a lesson Hillary Clinton’s social media team learnt all too well). They are an improvisational performance that one can neither script nor control. And, for the time being, despite his age and political scars, Trump remains the most adroit improviser in the Republican field. As we hurtle towards the 2024 election, this tale of two meme strategies will continue to unfold. For now, though, “The Donald” still appears to be winning the war.

Today, the global face of pickup artistry is Andrew Tate: sculpted former kickboxing champion, self-described “misogynist“, and, now, alleged human trafficker. Whatever results from the current allegations, his fall is a defining moment in the cultural history of the now inseparable worlds of the political manosphere and pickup artistry, and provides an opportunity to reflect upon their entangled history.

Pickup artistry burst onto the scene in the 2000s, propelled by the success of Neil Strauss’s best-selling book The Game. More a page-turning potboiler cataloguing the mostly empty lives of pickup artists (PUAs) than a how-to guide (though Strauss wrote one of those too), the methods in the book had been developed through years of research shared on internet forums. The “seduction underground”, as the large online community of people doing this research was called, then became the subject of widespread media attention. Through pickup artistry, the aggressive, formulaic predation of women was normalised as esteem boosting, and men such as those described in Strauss’s The Game could be viewed in a positive light: they had transformed from zero to hero and taken what was rightfully theirs. 

The emergence of PUAs generated a swift backlash. The feminist blogs of the mid-to-late 2000s internet, of which publications like Jezebel still survive as living fossils, rushed to pillory them. The attacks weren’t without justification, but the world of PUAs during this period, much like the similarly wild-and-woolly bodybuilding forums, had no obvious political dimension beyond some sort of generic libertarianism. It was only after these initial critiques that it began to be coded as Right-wing by those on the Left. Duly labelled, PUAs and other associated manosphere figures drifted in that direction. MTV’s dating coaches were not part of the political landscape, merely feckless goofballs and low-level conmen capable of entertaining the masses. But their successors would be overtly political actors.

One such figure, Daryush “Roosh” Valizadeh, rose to fame via his self-titled blog and forum. An Iranian-American microbiologist and self-described “late bloomer”, Roosh discovered the PUA community during his senior year of college and “took to [it] like a fish to water”, later using his writing to share this information with like-minded readers eager to get more women to sleep with them. He also self-published a host of pickup and travel guides about the rough and at times nonconsensual sex he had around the world. In 2012, he founded Return of Kings, a site that published articles with headlines such as “The Intellectual Inferiority of Women” and “When Her No Means Yes”, as well as a 2015 piece (which he characterised as satirical) in which he proposed that rape be legalised in non-public settings. His doctrine of “neomasculinity” holds that “a woman’s value significantly depends on her fertility and beauty”, while “a man’s value significantly depends on his resources, intellect, and character”. 

While Roosh had clearly begun to move pickup artistry into a more politicised dimension — probably because he sought common cause against his critics rather than any deeply held political principles — it was his successors who drove it into full embrace with the Online Right. Roosh, in fact, has had a fairly complicated relationship with the supposed “white nationalist” elements of what journalists were all rushing to lump together as the “alt-Right”, at times defending neo-Nazi Richard Spencer and at others characterising white nationalism as “a frustrated mob that wants to control the sexual choices of all men”. He also feuded with Right-wing activists, such as Lauren Southern, for adding little to the Right besides physical attractiveness. And this stance, combined with his own lack of charisma and decidedly non-“alpha” pedigree, has limited him to fringe status. In recent years, Roosh distanced himself from both the alt-Right and PUAs, removing many of his books from print, and banning PUA and casual-sex talk from his website’s forums in 2019 after converting to the Eastern Orthodox Church. 

Mike Cernovich, by contrast, made a far smoother transition from being a PUA to a member of the Online Right, even as he also gradually drifted toward “trad” stances on various issues. His career began as a stock libertarian concerned with “false rape” accusations (he was on the receiving end of such an allegation, and advised secretly filming sexual encounters and building up a texting paper trail to ward them off). But from there, he progressed to investigations of “alpha male” masculinity — he once even praised former president Barack Obama’s “Alpha Male status” — via his Danger and Play advice blog. The site had a broad brief, ranging from nutritional supplements to male body image, but it also offered tips for becoming more dominant in the bedroom, including choking a woman during sex. Owing to a “seven-figure” divorce settlement from his first wife, Cernovich was able to devote considerable time to these online ventures. 

By this point, the worlds of PUAs and the Online Right had begun to blur; there was simply no way for self-proclaimed PUAs to find fair harbour on the Left or in non-aligned spaces. Cernovich, unlike Roosh, made a fairly rapid and shrewd transition from the alt-Right fringe to something of a “happy warrior” for the far-Right mainstream. Piggybacking on the success of his 2015 book Gorilla Mindset (“a book about embracing your gorilla nature to find dominance and power”), he rushed out MAGA Mindset: Making YOU and America Great Again to capitalise on the 2016 primary success of Donald Trump. From there, he achieved great acclaim fanning the fires of various paedophilic conspiracies and other more conventional Right-wing issues, playing a key role in the early days of Pizzagate and generally using “trolling tactics to build my brand”, as he told The New Yorker.

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Given his openness about his role as a partisan troll, it comes as little surprise that he took greater umbrage at Joe Biden rubbing his daughter’s hair than he did with allegations that Alabama senate candidate Roy Moore, a Republican, had sexually abused underage girls. In recent years, Cernovich has expressed uneasiness wheavy metal and hip-hop, believing them to “open demonic portals via a spirit of fear”, and has generally become much more “trad” than he was in his Danger and Play days. He almost certainly wouldn’t have described himself as a PUA, but back then he was undeniably PUA-adjacent. Even though Cernovich became much more culturally conservative, he remains the most successful parasocial political figure from the early days of this demimonde. 

And if the brand strategy exploited by Cernovich has a clear imitator, it must be Andrew Tate. Tate personifies the fusion between Online Right grift and PUA doctrine. He believes, for example, that women “are given to the man and belong to the man” and should be dated as young as possible to minimise “sperm wars” competition with other men, while also maximising fertility. And like pickup artistry itself, he has become aligned with increasingly extreme figures, with appearances on Alex Jones’ InfoWars and a collegial relationship with the aforementioned Cernovich. 

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He also seems to grasp the essence of being a PUA better than any of his predecessors: the point is not to actually sell skills that turn men into alphas who can go on dates with women; it is to use your own methods to pick up legions of hapless beta-male followers who will pay you in money or clout. Everything else is a means to an end; why else would Tate sell his own book while also condemning the men who waste time reading it? Even the alleged sex-trafficking Tate was arrested for in Romania is, in essence, an advanced PUA ruse: a so-called “loverboy” hustle in which women are lured by promises of romance and free housing, then put to work making low-budget pornographic content. If true, this is a long way from some circa-2005, zero-to-hero PUA operator trying to pop his cherry to feel like a real man. 

Was the transition of the PUA and the associated manosphere into its current state — something associated with the Right by opponents — truly inevitable? Counterfactual history is usually of low probative value since one can’t truly investigate events that didn’t occur, but here it seems impossible to even conjure alternatives. The evolving nature of social media communication forced all these discursive communities into mimetic conflicts as a critical part of the platform providers’ business plans, with controversy yielding clicks and cash. 

As this us-versus-them situation developed and deepened, the manosphere became increasingly about men selling tips on how to be men to other men, rather than anything to do with the actual improvement of all these wayward selves. The proof of a salesman’s coolness, his “alpha” credentials, came from the visible record of his likes, shares, retweets, and subscriptions. By choosing to follow some guru’s example rather than the dictates of one’s own conscience, a hapless young man becomes yet another PUA statistic. He is baited, hooked, and abandoned, with nothing to show for his love or loyalty besides a notch in the far greater man’s follower count. By that measure, the largest group of losers in the Tate contretemps consists not of the women he has already alienated or allegedly abused — but rather the sizeable contingent of lost men and boys who set store by his advice.

Johnson admitted in an apology, made after emails that confirmed his long-denied use of performance-enhancing drugs, that he spent thousands of dollars a month on steroids. The aim was to endow himself with a physique that implied the extreme fitness that he was attempting to sell to others. But that fitness was illusory: one powerlifter who knew him recently mocked his 455-pound deadlift, a decent number for a novice lifter or a teen boy but unimpressive for someone spending as much on steroids as the Liver King.

The Liver King’s story is a microcosm of the ever-evolving Right-wing manosphere, which emerged from self-help roots in the early 2000s to attain a quasi-political, quasi-spiritual status, alongside the ascendancy of Donald Trump. The most obvious Trump train rider in the manosphere was former advice blogger and accused rapist Mike Cernovich, who published the political book MAGA Mindset as a follow-up to his Gorilla Mindset self-help text, between blogging about topics such as grip strength when choking a woman during sex. Liver King never became explicitly political the way Cernovich did, but his message was a streamlined and extremely dumbed-down version of the MAGA-adjacent ideology being preached by anon fitness influencers such as Raw Egg Nationalist — whose alignment with Tucker Carlson led to appearances in a documentary, The End of Men, as well as on Fox News.

For all these men, there is some kind of secret — an ancient secret, in the case of the Liver King — that gullible, inward-looking initiates must uncover, via various steps. The navel-gazing nature of all this recalls the fitness fads, cults, and other New-Age quests for meaning of the Seventies that cultural critic Tom Wolfe labelled America’s “Third Great Awakening”.

The previous two awakenings concerned the revival of Protestant spirituality in the mid-18th and early-19th centuries; all three were spurred by a sense of social disorder. First, New England Congregationalists strayed from the true light of the lord that led them to the New World. Second, newly Independent Americans found themselves facing down the settlement of the frontier with little assistance from their laissez-faire government. And in the Seventies, hippies and flower children found themselves grappling with the violent disappointments of popular protests, while a bloated, bureaucratic state struggled to bring about even a stalemate in Vietnam.

Throughout these three centuries, but with increasing velocity and urgency from the Sixties onward, the personal began to substitute for the political. Now, as Malcom Kyeyune recently noted, we are in uncharted territory: now, with “proliferating numbers of belief systems and fringe political narratives on the Web”, the political is personal. In other words, the “personal” — abetted by the technologies like social media that centre the user, indeed making them the narcissistic centres of their virtual worlds — has completely subsumed the “political”; everything everywhere is personal and filtered through some sort of Freudian superego that functions as a “self-marketing machine”, with the rest of life merely incidental. Online, various quasi-faiths and crude scientism are offering people personal uplift combined with the promise to fix their little communities, the only parts worth saving, the parts open to the elect.

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Though influencers such as the Liver King, Raw Egg Nationalist, and Bronze Age Pervert are new to the scene, relatively speaking, nothing about their appeal is novel (even though certain practices, such as directing red light on the testicles to stimulate testosterone production, are only now technologically possible). They themselves emphasise this: their appeals harken back to past practices, times when “men were men”, even if they cannot agree when exactly that was. Hesiod’s age of gold? A Twenties naval port, with nattily-attired “wolves” awaiting the hearty “rough trade” from the high seas, sure to appear whenever the “fleet’s in?” A seedy Forties YMCA, where the bodybuilding demimonde has gathered to “slonk” raw eggs before proceeding to grease up and commence lifting in jockstraps? Regardless of the time of the last real men, it was very different from our present fallen, failed, and low-testosterone state of existence.

Calls for the rebirth of masculinity echo throughout recorded history, issued by everyone from the aforementioned Hesiod to Japanese author and extreme nationalist Yukio Mishima (a favourite of this current round of fitness-cum-politics influencers). The “Third Great Awakening” of the Seventies ended with the emergence of religious groups such as the Promise Keepers, an Evangelical movement seeking to call men back to “courageous leadership” and “marital” fidelity. Meanwhile, in secular literature, the breakdown of masculinity and paternal authority was addressed in Robert Bly’s influential 1990 book Iron John: A Book About Men — a text which inspired any number of subsequent manosphere efforts, including Tom Matlack’s “The Good Men Project”  (a website that launched the careers of everyone from Hugo Schwyzer and Harris “Dr. Nerdlove” O’Malley to yours truly) and even the pickup artistry of Neil Strauss and Mystery (Iron John, like Robert Greene’s works on power and seduction, found itself on many “PUA” reading lists).

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I mention my personal involvement here — the personal is political, after all — because I’ve followed the manosphere’s trajectory since the early 2000s. I’ve also spent decades strength training and eating raw meat and raw eggs, as well as interviewing and writing about some of the world’s leading strength coaches and athletes. These activities would suggest, on the surface, that I am sympathetic to the cause of egg-slonkers, bronze-age warrior worshippers and bodybuilding aesthetes. Far from it: I see their Liver King-style marketing as sophomoric, the sort of thing I’ve attacked in print whenever possible.

My interest in strength stems solely from viewing it as preferable to incapacity. The enjoyment I’ve derived from weight training arises, to quote venerable strength coach Mark Rippetoe, who I recently interviewed, from “completing a task you couldn’t do previously”. And yet, throughout my career as a journalist covering sports and fitness, I have been asked what I have learned from figures such as Raw Egg Nationalist. When I interviewed the paleo diet influencer John Durant, during the early days of the alt-Right’s emergence as a media phenomenon, he assumed I shared his belief that eating raw or rare meat is a radical political act. I do see it as political, but only in the sense that I stand with politicians who support regenerative grazing practices and increasing access to meat for poor and undernourished children; meat is merely a means, not an end. I’d gladly eat something less primal, including biologically identical lab-grown meat, if such a thing could ever be manufactured cheaply and at scale.

That’s not to say that these fitness influencers don’t offer some useful advice. All popular gurus and spiritual leaders do. Eating organ meats, getting adequate sleep, spending time in the sun, and even taking some pride in one’s body — an edifice that is both temple and tomb — are not bad practices in and of themselves. However, this advice is chained to a lot of gobbledygook, from bizarre, hero-worshiping misreadings of history to faux-scientific racism. The noted dissident author Zero HP Lovecraft, for instance, once used a voice changer to record a podcast in which he argues that the different races are different species.

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It is almost impossible to say how influential these figures are; on the one hand, they will claim that they directly created the Trump phenomenon, but on the other, they will joke that they’re just “frogs” who “shitpost online”, unlike the “facefags” (people whose identities are public) who genuinely care about things. Bronze Age Pervert, whose book Bronze Age Mindset is the sort of amusing Nietzschean pastiche one might expect from a PhD student having a spot of fun, is known to be read by congressional staffers; and yet, he huffily complained about City Journal allowing Kyeyune to publish an article that’s mildly critical of him. Like the Liver King, these figures take zero responsibility for the failures and shortcomings of their acolytes — but unlike him, most of them will never be seen at all, so what difference does it make?

Here, then, is the great weakness that stems from the evolution of “the personal is political” into “the political is personal”: far from allowing the development of strong convictions, the new creed is so malleable as to be meaningless. If one argues that the job of the Republican Party is to win elections and reward its constituencies, those on the Right who preach that “the political is personal” won’t help. Why would they bother? Most are already arguing that the nation or the world has collapsed, which is far easier than facilitating real political change, which would require moving the GOP to the centre.

Things are fairly hopeless, according to the manosphere. Yet if pressed, the Liver Kings and Bronze Age Perverts won’t turn on, tune in, and drop out like millenarian hippies bound for the commune; they’ll hang around, continuing to offer advice on how to infuse the self into politics and vice versa. They and many of their followers — some of whom left the Left by way of the so-called “post-Left” — would gleefully ridicule such “personal-political” posturing were it to issue from gender identitarians or committed anti-racists. Zero HP Lovecraft, however, says the quiet part out loud (in the same podcast in which he compares white and black people to wolves and coyotes): if one side is doing racism, then we will do racism as well.

This is the grave danger behind the very online Right’s turn towards “the political is personal”: at the back of the ironic fitness, the talk of physiognomy, and the IQ-test silliness, there lurks an us-versus-them mentality. And it’s a mentality that allows the manosphere to gleefully join the progressive Left in bidding farewell to any of the remaining civil norms that facilitate debate and compromise. It will do nothing to break the sclerotic gridlock in the body politic — and nothing, ironically, for the young men of America who are actually trying to get stronger.

***

Order your copy of UnHerd’s first print edition here.

But don’t despair. Instead of the annual jamboree that you probably couldn’t afford and wouldn’t be invited to, there’s an online event called The Davos Agenda. This opened on Monday with a “special address” by Xi Jinping.

What could be more Davos than China’s communist dictator telling a bunch of virtual capitalists that we should “remove barriers, not erect walls”? Inspirational stuff — and I’m sure a great comfort to the people of Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Tibet.

For Davos-sceptics, however, this will only confirm suspicions that something has gone very wrong with global capitalism — with the World Economic Forum at the centre of it all. The fact that we’ve exported so much of our productive capacity to China and other countries is one concern. But the bigger worry is about what we’re getting back from the globalised economy. 

For Westerners, capitalism is first and foremost a consumer experience. In the 20th century, the system triumphed over its socialist rival because it delivered the goods. After the long, dark centuries of scarcity, we suddenly found ourselves in a time of plenty. We were grateful — but not, let it be noted, pathetically grateful. Indeed, the real clincher for consumer capitalism is that it made us feel strong. 

Motorised transport — above all the car — gave us the ability to go where we wanted, when we wanted. Combined with modern construction methods, our newfound mobility also massively expanded the supply of new housing. Space and privacy, previously reserved for the rich became available to the masses.

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Then there was the food. Today, we romanticise the kitchen table as the heart of traditional family life. But in most homes it was also a traditional — and very necessary — instrument of rationing. Consumer capitalism transformed the situation. Above all, there was the miracle of meat every day, not just on special occasions; the modern world is defined as much by beef and pork as it is by steel and silicon. 

Of course, abundance comes at a cost. There are the obvious downsides of excess; but also our growing distance from the old ways: the rhythms of nature, the bonds of community, the dignity of craftsmanship. Yet we didn’t sacrifice these deep connections in return for mere comfort. Rather, we were offered an alternative form of vitality: the freedom of the road; the mastery of owning one’s home; the visceral satisfaction of unrestricted carnivory. It might seem strange to describe these things as cultural goods, but within a certain set of consumerist values, that’s exactly what they are.  

Beyond its merely material comforts, the consumer society — especially the American version — offered an empowered, independent and, dare I say it, manly way of life. Whether or not one approves, the fact is that it gave birth to a distinctive culture — one to which most of us remain attached.

Nonetheless, it’s now under threat. While the global economy produces more than ever, there’s a growing anxiety that the associated sense of empowerment — what could be called the red meat of capitalism — is about to be snatched away from us. 

That’s literally the case when it comes to food. One only has to look at the effort being made to promote meat-substitutes. Most distastefully, there’s the argument that we should feed the world on insect protein. A quick search of the World Economic Forum website reveals an obsession with the idea. Here’s a small selection of articles from the last few years: “Worms for dinner? Europe backs insect based food”; “Good grub: why we might be eating insects soon”; and “Fancy a bug burger?”

The house journals of global capitalism, the Financial Times and The Economist, take a similar line. Both publications advocate for entomophagy beneath perky headlines such as “Eating bugs: a culinary idea with legs” and “Why eating insects makes sense”.

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Yet a backlash is underway. “I will not eat the bugs!” has become a rallying cry on the alt — and not-so-alt — Right. The golden age of capitalism gave us affordable meat, and there’s a slice of public opinion that’s in no mood to accept substitutes.

We’re not just talking food here, but a whole way of life. Consider the second part of the anti-Davos mantra: “I will not live in the pod!” This refers to the proposition that we should radically rethink how we allocate living space in crowded, unaffordable cities. And by “rethink”, I mean “reduce” — both in terms of floor area and privacy. In place of apartments and houses, a WEF report invites us to consider “tiny homes” (i.e. boxes) and experiments in “shared living” (i.e. dormitories).  

Then there is mobility. Never mind the “war on the motorist”, vehicle automation threatens to abolish the motorist. In the golden age of capitalism, people drove cars; but Davos looks forward to a future in which cars drive people.  

It’s not difficult to see all this as a process of disempowerment — indeed of emasculation. I’m not surprised to see Right-wingers, especially in the US, leading the backlash. It’s as if some alien force has taken control of capitalism, pulling it in a new and unAmerican direction. I’m also not surprised to see the WEF — with its rhetoric around “The Great Reset” — become a symbol of this apparent change of course. 

Yet, as much as I hate to admit it, Davos isn’t to blame. All of the trends that the Right-wingers see as threatening their kind of capitalism are in fact a consequence of it. 

It’s a paradox of productivity. The greater the abundance of goods and services we produce, the greater the number of people who get to enjoy them. Unfortunately, it also means we use up more of the enabling resources that can’t be as easily multiplied. The most obvious example is the car, or rather the space required for cars. There was a time when the freedom of the road really meant something. But as roads fill up, there’s no choice but to impose speed limits, one-way systems, road charging and other measures required to save lives and keep cities moving. Self-driving cars, if and when we get them, are just the next step — a means of reducing driver error and thus making the most of limited road capacity. After all, that’s what free markets are supposed to do: maximise resource efficiency.

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The same applies to living space. That too is limited, especially in city centres — and, therefore, we can expect the laws of supply and demand to have their inevitable impact. You may not want to live in a pod, but if that’s all you can afford, then you have a choice: either take the deal or move somewhere less expensive. 

Eating the bugs is a yet another response to market forces. Meat is delicious, which is why demand for it is going up as more of the world’s people get rich enough to afford it. Supply responds to demand, but also pushes harder against natural limits — like the availability of land for feed crops. There are ethical concerns too — and so producers and consumers look for alternatives. If you see supermarkets filling their shelves with an ever wider range of meatless meat products, it’s not because someone at Davos told them to. 

What the malcontents see as a conspiracy is just the market doing its thing. And Davos, when it comes down to it, is just a fancy trade fair for a global economy selling whatever it can at a competitive price. 

Of course, that still leaves a lot of good reasons for rejecting the “Davos agenda” — but if you do, then you’re going to have to contemplate a rather more radical break with consumer capitalism. I don’t expect many takers. If the choice is between eating the bugs or eating only carrots, then most people will eat the bugs. 

“Jewish Atheist,” the man said.

Dumbfounded by the answer, the kidnappers eventually muttered: “Are you… Catholic… Jewish Atheist or a Protestant Jewish Atheist?”

Contempt for ambiguity: it reigns when war is real — but also when the extreme politicisation of non-violent social behaviour makes “war” an inescapable metaphor. As in the culture wars of today.

It came for me last year, after I published a book that didn’t sit neatly on either side of the political fence. War for Eternity traces the activities of three high-status far-Right operatives: Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, former Trump White House advisor Steve Bannon, and unofficial guru of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Olavo de Carvalho. It probes the depths of their anti-liberalism, exposes Bannon’s efforts to align the United States and Russia and suggests these figures’ opposition to political consensus contains more fervour and spookiness than even alarmist commentators suspected.

Summarising the content of the book makes it sound like a classic hit-job (and in the US, it was marketed this way). And yet I do not call the people I study names, do not hide the fact that my relationships with some of them grew casual and friendly, and occasionally show interest in their lives beyond topics of obvious political consequence. Moreover, I strived to take them seriously as thinkers.

With a tone more empathetic towards the Right, and a conclusion aligned with the Left, the book seemed a perfect fit for no one — and therefore destined for trouble. If you’re going to write a book on politics, industry wisdom demands you affirm the views of some large constituency. Find an entertaining way to tell a critical mass something they already believe and you can count on sales and positive reviews. Write with an unclear political profile, and at best you’ll be ignored. At worst, you’ll be treated to a brand of contempt reserved for misfits who obscure battle lines in ways transparent enemies do not.

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Granted, I don’t think an opposition between style and substance is a recipe for ambiguity. Certain content speaks for itself: readers’ capacity for discernment is not as fragile as some assume. Nevertheless, the thick editorialising endemic to commentary on political extremism makes for boring writing, belittles readers’ intelligence and seldom persuades anyone to think in new ways.

But the approach is risky at a time when accusations of ambiguity can stand alone as slurs. American writer Thomas Chatterton Williams experienced this during the reception of his recent memoir Unlearning Race, in which the Left-leaning, mixed-raced author criticises race-based political and social mobilisation. The spear-tip of a scorching Bookforum review was the allegation that Williams’ was “politically incoherent.” Dig a bit and you’d see that the reviewer wasn’t actually confounded by William’s arguments; he thought that author was simply (and quite coherently) wrong. But “incoherent” and “wrong” will appear synonymous to those certain of their own virtue and insight.

Still, even insincere branding as “politically incoherent” seems a kind of luxury. More often, cultural authorities respond to ambiguities with frantic attempts to classify in familiar terms. J.D. Vance’s memoir and its Golden-Globe nominated Netflix adaptation provide a recent example.

Hillbilly Elegy chronicles the economic and social traumas of Vance’s childhood in post-industrial Ohio, and the book and its author became oracles for the American centre-Left following the 2016 elections, when understanding the white working-class was in vogue. It didn’t take long, however, for critics to identify the book’s less savoury features: its inattention to racial dynamics in greater Appalachia and its alleged moral of individualistic self-improvement. For these critics, the book’s deficiencies didn’t temper its virtues — they erased them. By the time of the film’s release in late 2020, Hillbilly Elegy had been decried as a Right-wing imposter that exposed poverty in the wrong ways and for the wrong reasons. It was a small step thereafter for critics to dismiss the film, as the New Yorker did, as little more than “a libertarian’s dream”.

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Like Hillbilly Elegy, my book hasn’t had a straight-forward reception. In the UK and the US, it was generally welcomed by the anti-establishment Left and Right, but the political centre judged it more harshly. Centrists complained that I was too chummy with the subjects I was supposed to be taking down — I called Steve Bannon “Steve” — and that analysis of my subjects’ ideas was itself a form of adoration. Few mentioned an opposition between my language and the content of the book, though this was sometimes amusingly implied. Guardian journalist Luke Harding wrote that the book “infuriated” him because its presentation allegedly obscured the consequences of the ideas I profiled, consequences he came to understand — as best I can tell — by reading the book.

Because for much of the Anglo-American cultural establishment, form is content. Symbolic politics reigns as language and rhetoric become the key indicators of ideological virtue and political identity. Things must be called out, fascism described as fascism — so that gullible readers are never duped, and so that nobody will wonder whose side the author is on. And a book that doesn’t proclaim its opposition to Steve Bannon cannot in any meaningful way be critical of him.

It’s striking, then, that the same book was received so differently by the Left and Centre Left in another context. It may have begun with a gift from Olavo de Carvalho — Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s guru and the third main subject of my book. Whereas Bannon was ambivalent in private and mum in public about my book, and Russian Aleksandr Dugin messaged me calling it “much better than anything else” and publicised positive reviews, Carvalho went berserk. From the time of its release and until the present — across BBC interviews, Twitter threads and hour-long YouTube rants spread to his nearly one million social media devotees — he described the book as pure lies. He called me a fake scholar, out to harm him and Bannon, and christened me with a baffling, Trump-style nickname: “Tiger balm.”

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What followed? Universal praise in Brazil’s mainstream media and features in all its major papers. The book was quickly translated to Portuguese and is already selling into its second printing. Olavo vaporised whatever potential the book had to appear politically ambiguous. In Brazil, it was an anti-Olavo book, and his and President Bolsonaro’s many opponents jumped to my side.

It was personal for many of those opponents. Olavo, though he turned down offers for a ministerial post in Bolsonaro’s Right-wing populist government, uses his social media megaphone to drive popular support for the Brazilian president’s anti-establishment agenda, skewering bureaucrats, scientists, academics and the media with the filthiest prose you can imagine.

Those targeted surely feel solidarity with each other, and with me, but there may be other reasons why I got a different read in Brazil. The country’s Left is fundamentally unlike that of the UK and US. While the latter is increasingly defined by social capital, prominent Brazilian leftists are murdered in the streets and coerced, sued or otherwise threatened in their positions as government representatives or journalists. Fighting for survival leaves less space for games of posturing. Content matters more than style if you are in an actual, rather than a symbolic, struggle. And in Brazil, I’m yet to hear a reviewer complain about the names or labels I use.

Christopher Hitchens reminded us, however, that there are serious prices to be paid when battle lines attempt to bisect the dynamism of human life. Outliers and dissidents are erased, figuratively and literally. But as demands for regularity spread into the realm of ideas, it is intellectual risk-taking that stands to suffer most. Uncomfortable readers are better readers, we are told, but seldom do we allow ourselves the discomfort that comes from pausing our familiar methods for classifying thoughts, words and people. As curiosity and patience give way to certainty and closure, the consequences will inevitably be grim.

But it was also rather timely; in the past weeks, Classics has endured quite a hammering. At the beginning of the month, Dan-el Padilla Peralta — a Dominican-born, New York-raised professor of Classics at Princeton — gave an explosive interview to the New York Times Magazine in which he expressed his desire to do away with “Classics” as a term and “explode the canon”, on the basis of it being appropriated by xenophobes and white-supremacists. For Padilla, it’s an endemic problem: “The production of whiteness turns on closer examination to reside in the very marrows of Classics.”

What does this mean in practice? For Walter Scheidel, a professor of Classics at Stanford University who was also interviewed for the NYTM piece, we should simply get “get rid of” Classics altogether: “I don’t think it should exist as an academic field”. Which may seem like an odd thing for a Classicist to say, but it’s a view that’s becoming increasingly widespread, and even institutionalised. Already, some departments in the US have embedded Classics within courses such as “Ancient Mediterranean Studies”. (Such rethinks are, of course, unlikely to be a universal solution; Gormley, for one, is particularly upset about the British Museum’s supposed fixation with the Mediterranean.)

Tensions over the value and ethics of studying Classics have been simmering for some years. Indeed, it is hard to think of another subject that has required its devotees to defend their field of study with such frequency. We’re told that it’s the study of useless “dead languages”; that it’s the preserve of public schoolboys, such as our Pericles-loving Prime Minister; even worse, that it needs to burn because it’s an inspiration for far-Right extremists in the US.

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The latest battle over Classics is a culmination of all the above. The fact that it remains a relatively marginal and unstudied subject in the educational system has made it an easy target in today’s culture wars. It means, for example, that Classics can be dismissed as simply the “history of Greece and Rome” — even though North Africa, Asia Minor, Gaul, the Russian steppe and many other territories also form part of it.

This cognitive blindness is made all the more peculiar when you consider how broadminded and enquiring Herodotus, Tacitus and many ancient historians could be about their fellow citizens. Although they were mostly interested in questions of national identity, when they did write on matters such as skin colour, they tended to do so with more curiosity than judgement, attempting — albeit mostly without success — to explain difference through factors such as climate and geography.

This meant that for Herodotus, the Ethiopians were dark-skinned on account of their proximity to the sun, while the inhabitants of colder territories were paler as they were further away from it. For Tacitus, the climate of Germany was such as to render its people naturally resistant to cold and hunger. It’s all nonsense, of course. But as Padilla himself has conceded, the Greeks and Romans “would have not really understood our racial categories”. One could be a Roman regardless of where you originated or what you looked like.

More importantly, these sources constitute the classicist’s raw materials; they are what lie at the heart of Classics as a field. Why is it, then, that in the debate that is now raging over the future of the subject and its right to exist, they barely get a look in? One would have thought that the actual texts and archaeological finds used by classicists today would be the first things to be considered in any reappraisal of the subject.

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Those who wish to banish Classics instead emphasise what has been done with these sources. They point to entitled Grand Tourists trundling over the ancient sites and pocketing things at will; to the likes of Winckelmann, the German art historian who idealised the whiteness of ancient statues despite the fact that they were once painted in bright hues; to the tendency of today’s far-Right to draw upon Classical imagery. Meanwhile, under the Third Reich the writings of Plato and others were mined and distorted so that they would appear to endorse Nazi eugenics.

But such a history of Classics, one which highlights only the ways the discipline has been used to incite racism and prejudice, is strikingly selective. Indeed, if the main argument against Classics resides, as it appears to, in its development as a discipline and reception in the modern world — more than in the ancient material itself — then the other side of this journey ought to be told, too. For example, it would be easier to refute claims of Classics’s Eurocentrism if attention were paid to things such the transmission of texts; if it wasn’t for the scholars of places such as Baghdad in the eighth and ninth centuries, who painstakingly translated and copied ancient manuscripts, the corpus of literature studied by classicists today would be considerably poorer.

More importantly, for every account of the abuse of classical material, there is another of inspiration. Take the growth in recent decades of “Classical Reception”, a relatively new field through which classicists engage with ancient material through the lens of more contemporary writers and artists. This specialism has helped to broaden the horizon of Classics by revealing some of the positive or at least enriching ways antiquity has permeated the modern world. The works of writers who have drawn legitimately and powerfully on ancient sources — whether it’s William Shakespeare, the St Lucian poet Derek Walcott or Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka – surely form a more meaningful aspect of the story of Classics than the misquotations extremists upload to online forum. Even Antony Gormley’s engagement with the classical tradition has inspired a number of academic papers in this area.

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If anything, the abuse of Classics ought to be used as an argument for saving it. For the alternative, abandoning it, would be to hand it over to those very groups Padilla and others identify as ransacking it. The field does not deserve to be razed because of the way it has been tended in certain quarters. If a study of Classics teaches us anything, it is how much easier it is to knock down than rebuild. As the so-called Liberators of Rome discovered to their regret, assassinating Julius Caesar, rather than what came after, was the easy part. Demolish Classics — and then what?

No one is denying that aspects of the ancient world and its reception are ugly — this is true of all cultures and periods — but that is no reason to abandon Classics itself. There is no call to study the ancient material through the eyes of Nazis. The arguments of Winckelmann can be read to be disregarded. The so-called Classics of white supremacist organisations such as Identity Evropa can be disregarded — they do not deserve the airtime.

The current climate, in which individuals cherry-pick classical quotations to their own ends, ought to be a summons to the original sources that form the heart of Classics. They ought to provide the impetus to return to Classics’ roots, to read old texts anew with our own eyes, to look at art that crossed the globe knowing no borders, to read legitimate engagements with the classical past, to think for ourselves. As Heraclitus wrote: “our eyes are more accurate witnesses than our ears”. So let’s not be afraid of using them.

In theory, the American political mainstream believes that extremism is not acceptable. The minute that people take up arms or act violently against agents of the state is the point at which all democrats (with a small “d”) unite in condemnation. In practice, too, that theory is borne out: a recent Washington Post-ABC News survey found that 89% of Americans denounced the actions of the Capitol rioters.

In the past year, however, both the Left and Right have seen political violence carried out in their name — and both have floundered in their responses to it. Just as the recent Capitol riot tainted the Right, so the violence of last summer’s protests following the death of George Floyd shamed the Left. Yet while both sides have been at fault, neither seems any closer to facing up to that fact. Instead, both prefer to the blame the other, all the while denouncing the unfairness of their own treatment.

The consequences of this are deeply worrying. Polls show that almost a fifth of Republican voters feel some support for the actions of the Capitol rioters. That is a significant, and concerning, chunk of the Republican base. But it is analogous with those on the Left who continued to support the Black Lives Matter movement, even after weeks of nationwide rioting and looting. Indeed, three months after the protests began, 28% of the American public continued to express “strong support” for the movement — a fall of just under 10% in three months.

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So why have both the Left and Right struggled to control their extremes? It seems to me that there are three principal reasons. The first is a by-product of the information age: namely, that today’s fringes are amorphous. In 1964, when then Republican candidate Barry Goldwater sought to draw a clear line between the conservative movement and the far-Right, he was famously urged to excommunicate the extremist John Birch Society. In recent weeks, people have called on Republicans to do the same with the “alt-right” and those associated with the Capitol riots. Last summer, meanwhile, many thought it would be shrewd for the Democrats to disassociate themselves with BLM and Antifa.

The trouble, however, is that today, unlike with the John Birch Society, political groupings on both the Left and the Right rarely meet physically, while their leadership and membership structures are anything but clear. It’s all very well demanding that the Republicans sever ties with the “alt-right” — but how do you decide who is “alt-right” and who is not? On the other side, how — other than referring to the law — do you identify which parts of BLM are acceptable and which are not? The answer may not be impossible, but it is certainly harder than in the past.

What makes this even more tricky are the second and third challenges to reining in political extremes. The second – a feeling of unfairness following the condemnation of political violence – has been evident throughout conservative commentary in recent weeks. The American Right has been almost unanimous in its condemnation of the violence at the Capitol. But, at the same time, there has been a tendency to caveat this denunciation by contrasting it with the reluctance of Democrat officials to criticise the violent BLM-Antifa activists last summer.

Typically, they invoke the case of Kamala Harris, who in June gushingly told the comedian Stephen Colbert: “This is a movement. I’m telling you. They’re not going to stop, and everyone, beware… That they’re not going to let up. And they should not, and we should not.”

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Of course, it is clear that America’s new Vice President was admiring protests, rather than the violence that followed them. Yet a Republican could be forgiven for holding it up as proof that there are double-standards at play. If, after the storming of the Capitol, Donald Trump or Mike Pence had said that the rioters were “a movement”, that they “were not going to stop” and “should not”, they no doubt would have been accused of legitimising violence.

The problem is that this perception of asymmetry – that feeling of unfairness – cuts both ways. For their part, Democrats claim that whereas the BLM protests had a legitimate cause, the Capitol riot did not; that whereas their perception of police racism in the US is accurate, Trump’s claims about the “stolen” election are not; that while the person they blame for instigating the violence was in the White House at the time, the people accused on their side were not in comparable positions of power. Both sides believe themselves to be in conflict with an opponent who is stronger — and that sense of injustice will not just disappear.

Then there is the third structural problem faced by both sides when dealing with their own extremists: the way in which their political opponents gleefully disrupt what should be moments of reflection to score political points. Since the Capitol riot, for example, the words “terrorist” and “domestic terrorist” have rarely had such a good outing on left-wing cable news channels such as CNN and MSNBC. For instance, CNN presenter Don Lemon made the following claim on-air:

“If you voted for Trump you voted for the person who the Klan supported. You voted for the person who Nazis support… You voted for the person who incited a crowd to go into the Capitol and potentially take the lives of lawmakers. Took the lives of police officers. Took the lives of innocent lives who were there on the Capitol that day.”

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Here, Lemon used a shocking but isolated incident to take a broad swing at the entire Republican movement. It was a crude tactic, but I suspect few on the Right would not have done the same had the crowd in Washington on January 6^th belonged to the far-Left. Few would have been able to resist the opportunity to present events in a way that tarnished all of their political enemies.

Yet such opportunism only serves to deepen the cycle of division. It was hardly surprising that, immediately after Don Lemon’s monologue went viral, the GOP sent out a fundraising email to its supporters titled “Did you see what CNN said about you?”.

So what can the American majority — the people who disapprove of political violence on all sides  — do to stop the spread of extremism across American politics? Well, the Left and the Right could start by agreeing that both sides house extremists who need to be identified. Then, when that’s achieved, they should be fair, consistent and nuanced when apportioning political blame.

All of which may seem remarkably straightforward —and, to an extent, that is true. But at the same time, we must not forget that the future of American politics is at stake. At present, it is riddled with hatred. And with politics, like anything, you get out what you put in.

Instead of knuckling down in a Big Four consulting firm like much of my graduating year, I spent most of my twenties flip-flopping between temp work and jobs I hated in industries that filled me with cynical despair, living in sketchy house-shares while pursuing trendy but unremunerative activities such as avant-garde writing, conceptual art and political activism.

In the course of this I met many anti-capitalists, the forerunners of today’s Antifa militants, the far-left radicals behind much of the violence in the United States.

But then of course, because of America’s extreme polarisation, many believe it’s not Antifa fanning the flames of riot in the US, but neofascist accelerationists. Rumours are swirling about provocateur involvement in the rioting by hard-left groups, as well as white supremacists.

Depending on your filter bubble, it could be white nationalists seeking, as Gavin Haynes put it in these pages last week, to give the system “just one final heave-ho before it crumbles” in favour of a new racist utopia. Or if you follow different blue-ticks on Twitter, it’s Antifa creating mayhem in order to bring down Donald Trump.

To muddle things further, far-right activists may be posing as Antifa in order to heighten both these narratives. Trump himself has come down firmly on one side of the partisan divide by designating Antifa a terrorist group.

Between hyper-partisan reporting and confused messages from the front lines, perhaps there is no making sense of US events — certainly not from this side of the pond. But if we step back from trying to pinpoint one ‘side’ as ‘goodies’ and the other as ‘baddies’, and see both Antifa and the alt-right as two sides of the same phenomenon — alt-right and alt-left in fact — there are plenty of warnings here for British politics.

Both alt-left and alt-right have a presence in Britain, though their antagonism doesn’t (yet) approach the running battles that now regularly occur in the United States. Plenty has been written about the constellation of beliefs on both alt-right and alt-left. But — demographically speaking — who are they?

The fact that the radical fringes are often less than keen to have their real identities known makes it difficult to find reliable data on the demographics of these groups today. But a look at past studies offers some clues. First, Ukip: though many ‘Kippers would be offended to be described as ‘alt-right’, the 2018  three notorious alt-right social media figures joining the party in 2018 does little to dispel the sense of at least some relationship. And 2017 YouGov data shows Ukip members be typically less educated and heavily concentrated in the lowest income brackets.

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Over the pond, 2018 research from the US-based Institute of Family Studies supports the contention that adherents of the kind of white identitarian politics common on the ‘alt-right’ is associated with lower education levels, lower earnings and higher unemployment.

This is complicated somewhat by recent reports suggesting that far-right groups such as Generation Identity are focusing their recruitment efforts on young graduates. But the longer-term picture suggests the stereotypical alt-righter is male, working- or lower-middle-class, without a degree, frustrated by stagnation in economic opportunities and liable to blame his problems on immigrants and the ‘globalist elite’.

In contrast, the alt-left are seen as being far higher up the social scale, and in the war of words between Left and Right, figures such as Carl Benjamin and Brendan O’Neill accuse Antifa of being pampered middle-class leftists playing at activism. But from my own recollections, I don’t think it’s that simple. Rather, I think the new alt-left is deadly serious — just pointing the wrong way.

My overwhelming recollection of the movement was a mixture of middle-class culture with economic precarity: people with serious smarts and groaning bookshelves working jobs in bars to fund activism, while complaining about The System that excluded them. (I include myself in this description, in case you think I’m sneering.)

I argued recently that the massive expansion of higher education is creating a new ‘Everywhere precariat’. This group comprises graduates who’ve absorbed a worldview that trains them for ‘metropolitan elite’ job types that turn out to be far scarcer than the graduates competing for them.

The result is a frustrated would-be middle class, treading water in what the writer Venkatesh Rao has called ‘premium mediocre’ lifestyles, a rented simulacrum of a genuinely prosperous existence designed to signal preparedness for the day when, by luck or application, they make it into the dwindling numbers of the real bourgeoisie.

These graduate left-behinds are then stuck in a holding pattern, in precarious housing and employment, as opportunities to take the big steps into adult life — traditionally home ownership, coupledom and kids – recede ever further into the distance. A recent Pew report showed 30% of millennials living with a spouse and child, a fall of 10% on Generation X and a whopping 40% drop on the 1968 generation. That’s America, but ONS datashows the age of first child climbing relentlessly in Britain too — while the birth rate is falling in all cohorts save the over-40s.

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Ed West argued back in 2016 that the disappointed also-rans in the graduate-job Ponzi scheme were increasingly turning to far-left political figures. Both Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, who proved popular especially with 18-30 voters (if not to anyone else) have made heavy use of words such as ‘rigged’. A 2017 NBC interview with an American Antifa student at an elite Bay Area university expresses this sense of a receding dream:

“These false promises we’ve been told throughout our lives that we just have to follow the American dream of working hard and things will be all right. We’ll get a middle class existence with house, lawn and the picket fence,” Daniel said. “This promise, this future has never materialised, and we kind of realized that the system’s rigged against us and we need to do something about it.”

Seen from this angle, the principal distinction between supporters of the alt-right and alt-left is not, contra Carl Benjamin and his ilk, social class. Rather, it’s between different types of ‘left-behind’. Many on the alt-left aren’t really privileged young people playing at radicalism before settling into steady jobs.

Perhaps that’s how they planned it; but the steady jobs they were banking on settling into after a stretch moonlighting as an activist have evaporated, leaving a bleak economic future distinguished from the alt-right version chiefly by different taste in music, coffee and radical aesthetics.

This is supported by a 2017 European Union Politics paper that studied support for radical-right and radical-left parties. While ‘alt’ and ‘radical’ versions of Left and Right may not be quite the same, the paper’s conclusions are suggestive. It showed that in bare economic terms, radical-left and radical-right supporters don’t differ a great deal but where they do — significantly — is on education. That is, both are heavily drawn from economically precarious groups, but for radical leftists these economic grievances are overlaid with cosmopolitan values inculcated via higher education.

Both radical Left and Right are, the authors suggest, “different segments of the same pool of losers of globalization”. The left-behind bottom rungs of the new graduate precariat mix cosmopolitan style identity politics with a simmering anger at a system that feels rigged against them, and a demand for economic redistribution — in other words, the Corbyn/Sanders formula.

Meanwhile, adherents of the alt-right face similarly left-behind economic prospects, just without the graduate worldview. So the main mode is the same anger at a rigged system, just overlaid with the mirror-image of the cosmopolitan worldview: nativist identity politics. We might call this the Tommy Robinson formula.

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By Tom Chivers

The urbanist Joel Kotkin has argued recently that developed economies are heading for a form of neo-feudalism. A tiny class of oligarchs, he warns, is emerging in conjunction with a ‘clerisy’ comprising universities, media and culture that propagates its values. These two classes are in the process of stripping wealth, property and influence from pretty much every other sector of society.

In Kotkin’s terms, we could see both alt-right and alt-left as different subsets of the ‘Third Estate’ losers of this hollowing-out. They may be a militant subset right now, but as we exit lockdown into the teeth of a brutal recession, the precariat is going to get bigger. It’s also likely to get angrier: coronavirus is strengthening the hand of finance, big tech and the biggest corporations, even as it’s eviscerating the middle class. In other words, the pandemic has accelerated many of the trends contributing to the twin radicalisms of alt-right and alt-left.

From the point of view of effecting political change, then, the tragedy of the alts is that they should waste their energy quarrelling among themselves. Alt-left and alt-right represent different subsets of an ever-swelling precariat, watching in real time as the last of the twentieth century social contract goes up in smoke. Right now they largely see the enemy as one another. Should that change, though, we could see our faltering political settlement shaken to its core.

Everyone agreed this could only be a good thing, so towards the end of 2019 a UK television production company decided to monetise it further with a new reality TV show called I’m An Ideologue … Get Me Out of Here! In a radical experiment, the format saw 100 members of distinct political tribes marooned on one of five islands in a small Pacific archipelago. They received basic survival training before being put ashore to see how they would fare over the course of a year in the wild.

Conservatives
It’s not really the Conservative way to start a society from scratch — they being a crowd for whom, at least until the 2016 referendum, the key to happiness is gentle bottom-up tinkering with the institutions you inherit from your forebears. Nevertheless, the castaways made a fist of it. With Burkean efficiency, they organised themselves into “little platoons” — hunters, gatherers, cooks and fire-makers, builders of shelter — and agreed that the division of labour would create a rising tide that lifted all boats.

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Problems first arose when the platoon who discovered the island’s sole source of fresh water started charging exorbitant numbers of seashells — the standard unit of exchange — for access to it on that grounds that they should be entitled to profit from their entrepreneurship. There were likewise restive elements among the women — whose “traditional” role as cooks and fire-makers was expected to go uncompensated in currency. Sufficient shelters having been built a month or two in, the shelter-builders were soon largely unemployed. The monopoly water suppliers, meanwhile, amassed more and more seashells, which they lent to the lower orders at considerable rates of interest.

The experiment ended, unfortunately, before the violent revolution many were predicting came to pass.

Labour
The hope of establishing a paradise — “socialism in one country” — got off to a rocky start on the Labour island. Before they even started to forage for food, shelter and drinkable water, the 100 participants became mired in a ferocious ideological disagreement about the distribution of the island’s still hypothetical resources. A clique of younger members — alarmed by the possibility that those who caught fish or game might assert the unilateral right to eat it — demanded Fully Automated Luxury Communism and forcibly expropriated the remaining stash of Tracker bars and dried apricots. They made camp on the beach on the west of the island and declared “socialism on one beach”.

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The remaining contestants, now desperately hungry, trooped towards the island’s interior in search of sustenance. These “centrists”, smarting though they may have been about the loss of their snack bars, nevertheless made a fist of setting up a camp and within a few months, working co-operatively, were getting on pretty well. But, then, having passed a resolution that radical disruption was essential to prevent neoliberal orthodoxy taking hold, the inhabitants of the beach encampment set fire to the centrists’ jungle — which destroyed 80% of the island’s natural resources.

Liberal Democrats
The Liberal Democrat island was a peculiar one. On the face of it, they all got along rather well — and they proved remarkably hospitable to the handful of desperate refugees who swam across from the other islands. At the end of the year they had survived and even prospered, in a very modest, minding their own business sort of way, but ratings figures for Lib Dem island proved so low that their part of the show ceased being televised after six days. In fact, even the production company slightly forgot that they had six islands, so at the end of the year nobody came to rescue them.

Many hundreds of years later, anthropologists would come upon the remains of their civilisation and discover that they had built a primitive religion around the conviction that their island was going to win a reality TV show.

The Alt-right
This was the most violent of all the island experiments. A collective commitment to “free speech” was the only rule on this paradise of libertarians, but flare-ups ensued every time one freethinker called another a rude name, and got punched in the nose for it — causing a backlash when others punched him in the nose in defence of the original freethinker’s right to robust debate. Unity tended to prevail only when the groups rallied to search the jungle for “antifa”.

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The competition for the conch became more and more intense, and the unity of the island’s various freethinkers broke down as policy divisions emerged between white nationalists, white supremacists, evolutionary psychologists, Randian rationalists and those who remained unwaveringly committed, even on this undeveloped tropical island, to promoting the cause of ethics in videogame journalism. The suggestion among some radical freethinkers on the island that women be held as a common sexual resource showed alarming signs of gaining traction and threatened to unite the warring subtribes — until it was pointed out that there were no women on the island at all.

Extinction Rebellion
A substantial crew of die-hard Thunbergites — with the under-16s and over-60s disproportionately represented — volunteered to participate in the show, citing their wish to “reject the neoliberal industrial-capitalist machine”. Within a few hours, however, a number attempted to swim away when they realised they would no longer have iPhones or be able to use Instagram or Twitter. Some of those who survived this attempt and returned to the island formed a cargo-cult. Its devotional rituals included “hashtagging” disapproving messages in the sand of the beach on the south of the island in the hopes they would be visible to passengers on overflying aircraft.

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Organisation on the island was agreed to be anarcho-syndicalist, and a great deal of energy in the first year went into the debate over what anarcho-syndicalism actually was. The first monsoon season went badly after the commune decided that nobody was to light fires to keep warm and dry on the grounds that to do so would release an unconscionable amount of carbon into the atmosphere. But by sheltering under the bodies of colleagues who had glued themselves to trees, a number of the island’s inhabitants were able to make it through to the dry season.

The statue in the centre of the square is fenced off and signs warn: “City personnel only” Stroll closer and you’ll notice “THIS STATUE SAYS THAT BLACK LIVES DON’T MATTER”, scrawled in chalk on the ground. “WHITE LIVES MATTER TOO!” is the faded response angrily written directly beneath. The past is alive in Charlottesville.

Hate fulled riots filled this space two years ago. Plans to remove the statue of Robert E Lee, General of the Confederacy’s Army of Northern Virginia during the Civil War, had caused an angry coming together of neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Clan and assorted other racists and anti-Semites. The Unite the Right gathering shocked the world, left one woman dead and created in Charlottesville one of the ugliest confrontations in recent American history.

The white nationalist who rammed his car into a group of counter-protesters has since been sentenced to life for first-degree murder. But subsequent acts of far-Right terrorism have shown the Charlottesville attack to be part of a disturbing trend. Last month alone, a shooter in El Paso, Texas, shared a white supremacist manifesto online before killing 22 people while an attack that killed three people and injured 13 in Gilroy, California, is being investigated as a terrorism incident.

 Meanwhile, across the South, monuments to the Confederacy and its heroes have come tumbling down — yet Charlottesville’s Lee is still standing.

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If the violent attacks pose important questions about how America should best deal with the threat of far-Right terrorism, the debate over the statue is part of a parallel discussion: can the nation come to terms with the contradictions of its past in a way that can heal, rather than aggravate, the divides of the present? In Charlottesville that battle is being fought on multiple fronts. 

How the states who seceded from the Union in defence of slavery a century and a half ago remember that chapter in their history has always been difficult. Things became more fraught in the summer of 2015, when Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white nationalist fond of posing with the Confederate flag and at the graves of Civil War generals, murdered nine African-Americans in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. Since then, more than 30 cities have removed Confederate memorials.

Charlottesville’s councillors voted to follow suit in February 2017 — a move that sparked the far-Right protest, but also faced stiff opposition in the courts. According to a 1904 Virginia state law, local governments are allowed to build war monuments but are forbidden from removing, damaging or defacing them. The city’s legal argument is built on the claim that, because the statues had more to do with contemporary politics than any war at the time they were built, then they are not war memorials. It’s a battle destined for the state’s supreme court. 

In the meantime, city authorities continue an awkward dance, erecting fencing and even shrouding the statues in black tarpaulin before a court ordered its removal.

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Wes Bellamy, a Charlottesville city councillor, was involved in the campaign to remove the statues from early on. For him, the logic is simple enough. “The statues,” he tells me, “represent a racist ideology.” They depict men who fought a war in defence of slavery, were “vehemently opposed the equal rights of African Americans”, and owned slaves. “When those statues were put up, there were two Ku Klux Clan rallies that took place to celebrate. Those statues don’t represent the city that we’re trying to be at all,” he says. “They represent a domestic terrorist group who were traitors, who were inherently racist and who do not need to be celebrated in the middle of our city.”  

Statues are meant to be hard to move, says historian Edward L. Ayers, author of The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America, who was one of the experts on a recent commission to help the nearby city of Richmond decide what to do with its own Civil War statues.

But attitudes are changing. While the tiki-torch wielding far-right protestors who descended on Charlottesville inevitably grabbed the headlines, Professor Ayers thinks the reality among the mainstream majority is more encouraging. Debates like the one over Charlottesville’s memorials “can create the impression that people are dug in”, he says, but in reality things are less divided. “I’ve had many conversations about this around the country and I’ve seen people be broadly understanding of what the statues mean to other people. I’ve also seen people understand what the statues are not,” he tells me.

Opponents of removing the statues claim that doing so would mean erasing history, but Professor Ayers sees it differently. The statues, he says, “are called history, but they are a version of history; they were part of a process of revising history… The statues are not history, but representations of history.”

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The representation of history being pushed in 1924, when Charlottesville’s statue of Lee went up, was the idea of the Civil War as a noble, if unsuccessful, defence of states’ rights and an honourable disagreement about the meaning of the US constitution. At the statue’s unveiling, Lee was remembered as a man who embodied “the moral greatness of the Old South”. Slavery was steadily being written out of the story.

The politics of the time cannot be disentangled from this lost cause revisionism. Far from shedding light on the past, the monuments were designed to hide important parts of it. The same year that the Lee statue was erected, Virginia passed the Racial Integrity Act, which criminalised interracial marriage and required that every child in Virginia be identified as “white” or “coloured” on their birth certificate. Two years later, the state passed legislation to enforce racial segregation at all public events in Virginia.

As Mitch Landreiu, a Democratic politician and then mayor of New Orleans, explained his decision to remove Confederate statues in the city in 2017:

“These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitised Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.”

The decision to remove statues, in New Orleans and elsewhere, has not been without opposition, but the Virginia law opposing the removal of war monuments means that it has been the site of a more protracted debate than other southern states.

For Professor Ayers, the difference between the way in which the monuments went up and how they are coming down is important:

“This is democracy. This is a political process. The statues were put up basically without political process because of the disenfranchisement of the African-American community. Now there’s new voices, and we would expect there to be more of a conversation, and that’s not a bad thing.”

The fact that that conversation was hijacked by the far-right should not detract from America’s determination to continue having the conversation, he argues.  

“History is made in every form, and it’s going to have to be confronted in every form,” says Ayers. “From the viewpoint of a historian, watching people wrestle with the complexity of the past is not the worst thing.”

Another historic figure has also been targeted. As with Lee and Jackson, how the city remembers him is of more than just local importance. This time, however, the man in question is not a general who prosecuted a treasonous war against the United States, but Charlottesville’s most famous son, the founder of the University of Virginia, a founding father, the third President of the United States and the author of the Declaration of Independence.

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 Thomas Jefferson was all these things, but he was also a slave owner. His home, Monticello, sits on a hill overlooking Charlottesville. It was there that he kept as many as 130 men, women and children in bondage at any given time. He had five children with Sally Hemings, a slave. He freed only five slaves in his will on his death — the rest were sent to the auction block. Suffice to say, it is difficult to construct the case that Jefferson — the author of the words “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” — was an especially reluctant or grudging slaveholder.

This is why, in an extraordinary move, the city of Charlottesville council has voted to no longer celebrate Jefferson’s birthday, as it has done every year for decades. Instead, it will now mark Liberation and Freedom Day on March 3, the day Union forces arrived in Charlottesville in 1865.

Bellamy, who voted for the move, thinks it “goes hand in hand” with the campaign to remove the Confederate statues. “Thomas Jefferson was a white supremacist,” he tells me. “When he wrote the Declaration of Independence, it wasn’t for people who look like me, I was considered three fifths of a man,” says Bellamy, who is African-American. “And I think that not celebrating his birthday is one step closer to where we need to be in terms of like respecting everyone. You don’t have to like everyone but you do have to respect everyone.”

I ask Bellamy what hope there is for any kind of unity in America if the country cannot agree on memorialising the author of the Declaration of Independence.

“Unity? When has our country been unified? This is the 400th year since the first group of enslaved Africans came here. The idea that we’re happy when we’re unified I think is a fallacy. We’re happy when we’re entertained. But when it comes to treating people fairly and with respect and with equity and equality, there’s always been division… I don’t buy into the whole unified thing. I think we need to be talking about respect.”

There are many dividing lines in American politics — class, race, religion, geography and ideology — but  an under-appreciated distinction is between those who acknowledge the complexity of the country’s past and those who tell a one-sided morality tale.

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As time has gone on, Americans have been presented with a fuller picture of Thomas Jefferson, and commemorate his contribution in spite of his undeniable shortcomings. Confederate generals, by contrast, have been memorialised not in spite of, but for waging a war in defence of slavery. Questioning some states’ reverence for the latter means updating and broadening the ideals America should try to live up to. Ditching any commemoration of the former means doing away with those ideals altogether. 

Here, those who think America’s past sins mean the slate must be wiped clean offer an unlikely mirror image to Donald Trump’s empty patriotism. The President is keen to insist he loves his country. When he tries to explain why, you start to wonder. His speech at the ostentatious “Salute to America” parade he threw himself to celebrate the 4th of July, for example, was revealing in its hollow tribute to little more than the scale of America’s greatness — the biggest and the best. There was “Go team!” spirit and respect for the “noble might” of “America’s warriors”, but little in the way of the values that have energised the country in the past and might energise it again in the future.

“They guard our birthright with vigilance and fierce devotion to the flag and to our great country,” he said of the military.

“Now we must go forward as a nation with that same unity of purpose. As long as we stay true to our cause, as long as we remember our great history, as long as we never ever stop fighting for a better future, then there will be nothing that America cannot do.”  

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It was an unexceptional account of what makes his country great; it could have come from the leader of more or less any nation at more or less any time in history. Similarly, those for whom America’s past is only something worth apologising for would strip the country of the tools it needs for self-improvement.

For some, Charlottesville’s slippery slope from Lee to Jefferson highlights the risk that, once you start questioning who should be remembered, it’s far from clear where you stop. The fear is that this cancel culture will come for everyone eventually. But just as it is unreasonable to hold historic figures to 21st-century standards, it is unrealistic to see history as set in stone. Those who rightly fear the consequences of a culture war over the past will not get very far by shutting down debate. Rather they need to fight for a better conversation.

Martin Luther King understood the promise and paradox of Jefferson’s legacy. In 1962, on the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation issued by Abraham Lincoln, he said of the work of Jefferson and Lincoln:

“If our nation had done nothing more in its whole history than to create just two documents, its contribution to civilization would be imperishable. The first of these documents is the Declaration of Independence and the other is that which we are here to honor tonight, the Emancipation Proclamation. All tyrants, past, present and future, are powerless to bury the truths in these declarations, no matter how extensive their legions, how vast their power and how malignant their evil.”

There has not been a shortage of reminders of the ways in which the America has fallen short of its founding ideals lately. There is, and always has been, hypocrisy in America’s commitment to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

But as it reckons with its past, it is worth remembering that — from independence through the civil war and the civil rights movement to the present day — that charge of hypocrisy has been a prompt for perpetual improvement, not an obstacle to it.

As candidate and President, Trump has gratuitously insulted minorities, retweeted extremist Twitter accounts, and displayed, at best, a morally ambivalent attitude towards violent white nationalists. All this, coupled with growing populism in Europe and signs of increasing political violence, has led some parts of the media to claim that America is entering its Fascist moment.

It has also raised questions about the extent to which the alt-Right feeds off the wider conservative movement, and whether the latter enables and normalises the former. This is the argument of the latest addition to the alt-Right canon, Alexandra Minna Stern’s Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate.

Stern’s work explores the pedigree of alt-Right ideas, showing their origins in a mixture of reactionary, green and even Hindu thought. Whereas progressives look to a future in which their beliefs and goals have triumphed, reactionary intellectuals reject the narrative of linear progress and instead favour a cyclical pattern of conflagration followed by revival. French radical Right author Guillaume Faye’s Archeofuturism, for instance, reaches back into the mists of ancestral time and forward into the high-tech future.

Hence the optimism of Faye and other alt-Right intellectuals about the role of genetic and reproductive technologies in rehabilitating whiteness. This cyclical conception of time, according to Stern, was partly inspired by Hinduism, via French-Greek Nazi intellectual and Hindu convert Savitri Devi, who in turn influenced post-war French New Right intellectuals such as Réné Guénon and Alain de Benoist.

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Then there are the multifaceted green influences. Before reading this book I had no idea that bioregionalism, the idea of an arcadian land separated from modernity in which the inhabitants coexist in harmony with nature, resonated with the separatist dream of a whites-only ethnostate. The pristine zone beloved of deep ecologists is usually imagined as my neck of the woods: the Pacific Northwest, including northern California and British Columbia.

This area, especially in the 1970s, was among the most racially homogeneous in North America, and ecologist Ernest Callenbach’s bestselling 1975 novel Ecotopia describes a utopian society set here; a throwaway aspect of which was the “few dark-skinned faces” evident in Ecotopian San Francisco and the existence of separate city-states for African-Americans and Chinese. From a different angle, American eugenicist Madison Grant in 1916 compared the “Passing of the Great Race” of North European whites with the extinction of the Redwoods and other native species.

Given the fact that barely six in 10 Americans are non-Hispanic whites, a segment of the alt-Right has already written off their country, preferring a racial breakup of the union and vesting their hopes in white separatism. The various proposed ‘whitopias’ in North America tend to focus on the most homogeneous contiguous territories, such as ‘Ozarkia’ in Arkansas and Missouri, ‘Cascadia’ in the Pacific Northwest, ‘New Albion’ in Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire, or ‘Gulflandia’ along the somewhat less homogeneous Gulf Coast.

Yet Stern’s book comes unstuck, as many similar works do, when it tries to link white nationalism to mainstream conservatism, and to hype up the threat. This is a wider problem with academic and journalistic assessments of a phenomenon many see in morally absolute, binary terms. The typical formula is to cite extreme Right approval of a racist Trump tweet or statement, yet Trump is hardly an ideologue with a steady compass. He lashes out indiscriminately at opponents, and yes, makes racist generalisations about entire groups such as undocumented immigrants, Mexicans, Haitians or Muslims.

But support for Trump is not confined to white Americans, and, as the book acknowledges, no more than 6% of Americans share white supremacist beliefs. In Washington Post/Kaiser 2018 survey data cited by the book, when white Americans are asked directly about their support for the “alt-right or white nationalist movement”, the number who answer in the affirmative is just 2%, compared with the 6.4% of African-Americans and 5.4% of Hispanics who identify as white nationalists!

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Sometimes these academic critiques of the alt-Right and the wider conservative movement say as much about the mindset of the contemporary cultural Left as anything. Stern, for example, insinuates that those who criticise feminists or sympathise with Trump are of a piece with white separatists; conservative pundits, such as Fox News’s Tucker Carlson or Laura Ingraham, who have expressed concern about the pace of ethnocultural change, apparently “parrot… Alt-right rhetoric”. Liberal-rationalists such as Jordan Peterson and Claire Lehmann, editor of Quillette, are thrown into the amorphous Right-wing miasma supposedly spreading alt-Right memes.

Many people see the Trump administration’s admittedly ham-fisted and poorly-planned attempt to get control of the very real crisis of Central American migration as evidence of white nationalist thinking, with migrant detention a harbinger of concentration camps and ethnic cleansing. In fact, the crisis has been largely caused by liberal court rulings that created loopholes attracting poor Central Americans to the border. Many are unaccompanied children because the migrants know that US law prohibits their deportation. Family separation was mandated by the 1997 Flores Agreement (and its 2015 reinterpretation by a California court) preventing minors from being detained for more than 20 days. It presumed the US would rather turn a blind eye to an influx of family migrants (few of whom are fleeing war, but most of whom will never be deported) than separate children from parents to allow more claimants to be heard and, therefore, deported.

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By Matthew Goodwin

Trump deserves to be criticised for not securing a bipartisan waiver of the Flores Agreement before the surge, and failing to work with Democrats in Congress ahead of time to get the money to detain families humanely. His nasty, dehumanising words must be condemned, especially as these poor migrants are only doing what any rational person would in their situation. On top of this he has botched relations with Mexico, whose cooperation he needs to stem the flow. But he is not responsible for the border problem and didn’t invent child separation.

It is very tempting to lump in the extreme members of the nationalist Right, the danger of which was most recently illustrated by the El Paso shooting, with more broader conservatives or even classical liberals, since even quite distantly related ideologies share some concerns, goals and beliefs. It is a temptation especially associated with Left-modernism, a totalising “us-them” worldview in which those who criticise the progressive agenda on race and immigration are accused of marching us down the road toward the ethnostate. Progressives probably wouldn’t appreciate a conservative arguing that higher taxes are a slippery slope toward Communism – and rightfully so, precisely because the slippery slope charge cannot be refuted. If you tar a person with the alt-Right brush, you needn’t detain yourself with facts or arguments.

There is a broader problem with ‘scholar-activism’ in the study of nationalism and populism, an interpretive pick’n’mix approach over systematic empirical generalisation. As a consequence, purported links between the alt-Right and mainstream conservatism are asserted through anecdote or painted by the broad brush of guilt-by-association, rather than being substantiated through big data analytics or survey evidence. This activism has itself played a role in today’s white backlash. By weaponising the ‘racism’ charge and using political correctness to shut down the possibility of sensible discussion and compromise over the pace of ethnocultural change, academia and the media have opened up space for both the alt-Right and wider populist movement to emerge.

Eric Kaufmann’s Whiteshift: Immigration, Populism and the Future of White Majorities is out now in paperback. (Penguin/Abrams, 2019).

This element, detectable in his later body of work, feels like a first cast of the ideological tendencies of today’s Alt-Right – with their narrative that men have grown weak and ‘beta’ under the tempering influence of a feminised society.

London explores the tendency most explicity in The Mutiny of the Elsinore, a novel published in 1914, two years before he died.

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Ostensibly about a cargo vessel and its crew, as they sail for Seattle from Baltimore via the treacherous Cape Horn, The Mutiny is narrated by a lone passenger – the wealthy yet world-weary young playwright, John Pathurst. There are two worlds aboard this ship: a small elite of men naturally inclined to rule, and their social inferiors – the poor and non-white, who are relegated to the level of sub-humans.

As Pathurst recounts colourfully: “And we sit on the poop, Miss West and I, tended by our servants, sipping afternoon tea, sewing fancy work, discussing philosophy and art, while a few feet away from us, on this tiny floating world, all the grimy, sordid tragedy of sordid, malformed life plays itself out.”

A bloody and unforgiving struggle between the two classes ensues after a mutiny among the crew – depicted as a collection of madmen and scum. The revolt is violently put down by the ship’s officers.

Events aboard the Elsinore feel at times like an exaggerated metaphor for the sort of class-ridden, hierarchical society that London quite possibly intended to lampoon. But in doing so, in his descriptive zeal, the author reveals something of himself. He details the brutalities of the ship’s crew with relish and a distinctive “streak of savagery”. The racist assumptions of its day echo throughout the book and look forward to a time when the same assumptions would birth the rapid rise of fascism.

Pathurst is a fervent snob and racist. He describes one member of the crew as a “a loathsome, non-human thing”, whereas the “mental and muscular superiority” of the ship’s officers is driven home in gushing tones throughout. Those who control the ship are said to be “as of another species to the sailors under them”. Captain West is referred to as “The Samurai”, a Nietzschean archetype.

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Of course, there is always a danger in treating works of fiction – and especially words uttered by fictional characters – as synonymous with the prejudices of their authors. Yet some of the views expressed by Pathurst are of a piece with the Social Darwinist and racialist theories that were popular at the turn of the 20th century – theories which London also subscribed to. In an 1899 letter, London wrote that First Principles – a book by renowned Social Darwinist Herbert Spencer – had “done more for mankind, and through the ages will have done far more for mankind, than a thousand books”.

In recent years, a more strategically astute version of this race science – one that purports to be espousing inconvenient politically incorrect truths – has made a comeback. As Gavin Evans put it in an essay for the Guardian: “The idea that certain races are inherently more intelligent than others is being trumpeted by a small group of anthropologists, IQ researchers, psychologists and pundits…” In this way, The Mutiny was a century ahead of its time.

London enjoys this theme. His other sailing stories, for example, feature white men taking on the elements and asserting their natural dominion over supposedly inferior races. His non-fiction, meanwhile, teems with visceral language about lesser humans. In The People of the Abyss, his epic 1903 foray into the underclass of the east end of London, the author discovers “a thousand ragged wretches”, people he refers to as the “refuse of a human sty”. Along with the eugenicists of his day, London was obsessed with the apparent degeneration of the human stock.

Today, once again, the Alt-Right is obsessed with the degeneration and the supposed decline of western civilisation. “Future historians will likely look back on the contemporary West as a madhouse,” wrote the author of a recent blog on the influential website Alternative Right.

By the time London sat down to write the book his commitment to the cause of socialism was waning. By 1914, he had already dropped out of socialist activism and resigned from the Socialist Party. He welcomed the First World War in language similar to that deployed by proto-fascists of the day, describing it as a “cleansing that can only result in good for humankind”.

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London understood the emotional appeal of fascism precisely because he was willing to take his own political temperature. He could comprehend the contempt with which fascists viewed non-whites and the poor, largely because he felt similar pangs himself. Even though he called himself a socialist, he held reprehensible views that grew more pronounced towards the end of his life (London lived to just 40-years-old).

But such insight was useful. He was the opposite of most contemporary progressive writers: their ‘wokeness’ rests upon their purported moral purity. As a result, fascism is today understood in a theoretical rather than emotional sense. Fascists are treated as if they were born rather than made; they are depicted in popular culture as a motley cast of deplorables who appear on the scene like ghosts, only to vanish again.

For an ordinary person to confess to fascist impulses today – as the actor Liam Neeson did recently – is to invite the braying hostility of the mob. Such opinions are cancelled and so our understanding of the ideology and its appeal is limited.

The Mutiny of the Elsinore, therefore, is an interesting text for our times. London’s concept of socialism, as can be seen from the book, was an exclusively Anglo-Saxon one, whereby notions of equality were parochial and restricted to a dominant ‘race’ or in-group. From there, it was not a huge leap to portray those who fell outside of this favoured class as inferior types who were temperamentally inclined to savagery. And that gave on to the path towards fascism.

The path London’s socialism eventually took him down,  as captured in the book, offers a cautionary tale to those today enamoured by repackaged theories of racial and class-based superiority. And it should also serve as a warning to those on the contemporary Left whose altruism stops abruptly at the shores of the English Channel.

Perhaps it will be the same with the latest scandal surrounding him and – this time – Cambridge University. Late last year, some people associated with the university raised the possibility that Peterson (who is currently on leave from his teaching position at the University of Toronto) might like to take up a temporary post as a visiting fellow in the Faculty of Divinity. Peterson had planned to use the position to prepare for a series of lectures on the book of Exodus (following on from his hugely successful lectures on the book of Genesis).

The arrangement could have benefited both parties. Peterson would have been able to enjoy the contributions of other fellows at Cambridge, while the university could have shown itself to be at the absolute forefront of the great discussions and the big issues of our time.

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Aside from his body of academic work, one of Peterson’s achievements as an intellectual has been one that very few academics in our age has managed – he has taken academic discussions out into the widest possible public realm. Is there any other public figure who can fill auditoriums around the world night after night with people willing listen to serious and deep lectures on everything from the Bible and Dostoyevsky to neurology and metaphysics? Cambridge would be hard pressed to find another such person. Or anyone who could even come close.

But it wouldn’t have simply been a matter of the University acquiring his ‘star status’. Nor of giving the students greater access to someone for whom they have a great appetite – as Peterson’s packed audiences in the city (including at the Cambridge Union) last year showed. Most important was the opportunity it would have given Cambridge to show that it was a class apart. Specifically, that was above the kind of low-grade, intellectually numbing, identity-politicking of our time.

There is a tendency to assume that the worst of the no-platforming, safe-space, snowflake ideology only exists at the lowest-grade universities, and that the higher up the academic food-chain you go, the less the insistence on intellectual uniformity is tolerated. Certainly, the University of Chicago has tried to lead a way out of the anti-free speech movements of our time, as did Oxford a few years ago when the Chancellor of that University told students that those unwilling to embrace freedom of thought should “think about being educated elsewhere”.

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That is the attitude that a world-class university should take. By giving Jordan Peterson even a temporary berth, Cambridge could have demonstrated that it too was going to lead the way out of the mire that lesser institutions have positively immersed themselves in.

But it has not. Before the university even had the decency to alert Peterson to the fact, it was announced that the offer of a visiting fellowship had been rescinded. And the University itself was not even the one to break the news that the offer had been rescinded. That pleasure – for pleasure it must have been for them – went to the Cambridge University Student Union (CUSU) which announced the news on social media before the faculty itself made the announcement.

It is clearly this group of students who have put pressure on the academics of the Divinity Faculty to rescind the offer. And it is clear from the content of this article on Varsity what the basis of those complaints must have been.

The laundry list of insinuations and accusations include the issue of gender pronouns (naturally) and also such damning facts as the claim that the accused has “further described the concept of white privilege as a ‘Marxist lie'”. As though anybody could ever have even thought such a thing.

Crowing about their victory, the CUSU said:

“We are relieved to hear that Jordan Peterson’s request for a visiting fellowship to Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity has been rescinded following further review. It is a political act to associate the University with an academic’s work through offers which legitimise figures such as Peterson.”

They went on to claim, “His work and views are not representative of the student body and as such we do not see his visit as a valuable contribution to the University, but one that works in opposition to the principles of the University.”

It would require a thesis to unpick the number of fallacies and presumptions in that statement.  For example, the idea that employing Peterson is a political act unlike the recruitment of other academics (are other academics either wholly non-political or political in the ‘correct’ direction?) and the assumption that in order to be at a university, a professor must be “representative of the student body” and much more.

When Peterson was in Cambridge last year he was certainly of enormous interest to the student body. Otherwise he would hardly have packed out of each of his venues. All that the CUSU exercise in neo-bureaucrat-ese proves is that the standard of students, like the standard of faculty, has obviously diminished in Cambridge of late.

Peterson has issued a statement that is justifiably angry. Everything about the University’s behaviour has been shabby – up to and including the claim that Peterson chased the divinity faculty to have a place at the university, rather than the other way around.

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But as with most other episodes involving Peterson, what starts out as a controversy turns into a societal biopsy. On this occasion, it is not only Cambridge University which has been exposed, but other institutions, including the media. For how did the London Times choose to report the news? By running the story under the headline Cambridge turns away alt-right darling Jordan Peterson.

You can learn so much about from a headline like that. Not about the subject of the piece, but about the media that would run it. Of all the things they could have used as a prefix to discuss Peterson (global bestselling author, internationally renowned thinker, world’s most famous Canadian), why choose that drive-by shooting of a description: “alt-Right darling”. A claim which is simultaneously just short of libellous, craftily misleading and undisguisedly contemptuous.

But as I say, this just goes to prove something that Peterson has proved plenty of times before. Those institutions and entities that try to assail him inadvertently end up revealing far too much about their own presumptions and prejudices. And they, not him, are left looking not just shallow, but unmistakably callow.

Patreon, for those who haven’t heard of it, is an online membership platform where people can seek crowdfunding from fans. There are ‘creators’ who use the platform to get people to support them, and there are ‘supporters’ who donate to those whose work they favour. To an extent, Patreon, and companies like it, have filled the space that the internet destroyed as it popularised the idea that you can get almost anything you like for free.

So companies like YouTube, for example, allow people to infringe copyright by ripping videos from actual ‘creators’ (musicians, writers, public speakers and others). Nearly all the benefit goes to the platform; a tiny amount (through advertising) in very specific and approved cases potentially goes to the person who has posted it, and zero goes to the person who has actually created the content. This is the way that the internet has been for many years now, and it has come to be accepted as though it was part of nature, rather than the greatest intellectual property heist in history.

Enter Patreon, which has become popular because it fulfils the function of providing salaries to people the internet has already taken salaries away from. Journalists, who would once have been paid for their work when they delivered it, can instead be supported through the site. Bands and other acts who have lost the money they would have made in record or CD sales to free online streaming services can similarly make up some of that shortfall on Patreon.

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It also secures funding for figures who might have had trouble breaking through in the old media landscape. It is in the nature of such things that anybody who has a large (or potentially large) following, but has been unable to find a place in the mainstream, is likely to be edgy – unlikely to crop up in the broadsheets or be invited on terrestrial television discussion shows.

But it is precisely these ‘edgy’ figures who have given Patreon such a headache. Take the Canadian blogger and activist Lauren Southern. Her provocative stunts (she has since branched out into documentary making) and statements all coming from a vantage point that might be described as ‘alt-light’, were never going to sit comfortably with the deciders in Silicon Valley.

Sure enough, eventually she did something which handed Patreon a reason to ban her from their platform. Southern became involved with a group called “Defend Europe” which was sailing the Mediterranean with the purpose of encouraging shiploads of migrant vessels to go back to the north African shoreline whence they came.

There was some dispute between Southern and Patreon over the ban. They claimed they blacklisted her because she was using the funding to embark on a mission which was “likely to cause loss of life”; she said she was only reporting on the group’s activism and hadn’t used any of the Patreon funds in order to do so and so was not in violation of their terms of service.

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But whatever the truth of the matter, you do not have to agree with Southern’s actions or her interpretation of events to recognise that Patreon’s move to bar her from their platform was a highly political one. No action had been taken by the website against groups openly supportive of illegal immigration, so taking a stance against someone clearly opposed to it opened them up to charges of clear bias.

The ban proved to be an early warning sign. At the time, back in July 2017, a number of prominent Patreon users, including Sam Harris, asked the question: if Southern wasn’t satisfying their ethical standards, then who might next fall victim to the ‘purge’? In response, Patreon’s founder and CEO Jack Conte gave personal assurances that there were specific reasons why Southern was a Patreon persona non grata and insisted that others should have no such fears.

But then, just before Christmas last year, Patreon closed the account of the controversial commentator, Carl Benjamin, also known online as Sargon of Akkad, who has almost 900,000 YouTube followers and who was reportedly earning around $12,000 a month from donations. His content roves over a lot of terrain, from political correctness to how to date women and more. It is not to everyone’s taste, but it is demonstrably to a lot of people’s taste.

In justifying their decision to ban him, Patreon claimed he had been found guilty of using “racial and homophobic slurs as insults in a conversation shared online”. In his rebuttal, Benjamin makes the claim that the conversation in question – the contents of which he disputes – was not featured on Patreon and did not have any link to its platform. Nevertheless, the ban remains in place.

In an interview with Dave Rubin, in 2017, Jack Conte had sworn that decisions to expel people from his platform were taken only on the basis of behaviour and not on the basis of political ideology.

Yet the decision to expel Benjamin from the platform without any appeal looked like a specifically ideological move. It also followed hard on the heels of the banning of other controversial Right-wing figures, including Milo Yiannopoulos and James Allsup earlier in 2018.

It was at this point that a movement away from the platform began with the announcement, by Sam Harris, that he was leaving the site. “Although I don’t share the politics of the banned members,” he wrote, “I consider it no longer tenable to expose any part of my podcast funding to the whims of Patreon’s ‘Trust and Safety’ committee.”

https://twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg/status/1074504882210562048

Then, at the beginning of this year, Dave Rubin and Jordan Peterson (who has been one of the most successful and high-profile users of Patreon) jointly announced their withdrawal from the platform.

In none of these cases has the choice been made easily or glibly. It takes time to grow support on a crowd-funding platform, and switching to another platform will doubtless mean that some of those supporters will be lost along the way.

It remains to be seen whether Patreon will do anything to stem the flow and whether other platforms will be able to match its success. But in the meantime there are a number of important points to be made about its online experiment.

Patreon should have seen this coming. It should have anticipated – just as Facebook should have – that it was going to become an arbiter of what is or is not acceptable speech. As Conte’s interview with Rubin showed, these companies are now attempting to solve dilemmas which, with a little foresight, could have perfectly easily been avoided. If they had stuck to only banning people if their activities were illegal, or if the ‘Trust and safety’ committee’s guidelines had been explicit from the outset rather than a wildly evolving work in progress, then users could have known what they were signing up to and the company would have been within its rights to expel those who broke the rules.

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The second point is that we are seeing John O’ Sullivan‘s law in action in the tech world. That law (which states that all institutions that are not explicitly Right-wing will drift to the Left over time) would seem to be playing out at some of the most important companies in Silicon Valley. And given that Twitter, Patreon and various other online companies started from a fairly Left-wing position, it’s unlikely their direction will be reversed.

Doubtless the political slant has been reinforced by the Hoovering up of all those political activists out of office since the Democrats lost the White House. These people need to find something to do to justify their salaries and it seems their idea of ‘doing’ is shifting the rules regarding acceptable speech. In one particular political direction.

This might all seem a bit inside baseball. But, in fact, it is one of the most important speech wars of our time. A journalist or artist who successfully uses a platform like Patreon will swiftly exceed the salaries available in the struggling older media. In time, this could well challenge the grip as well as the attractiveness of what was regarded as the consensus on a whole range of issues. And that’s why the flight from the site matters. Patreon provided a base for those who wanted to challenge a whole set of dogmas. Let’s hope they can be challenged from elsewhere.

As its influence spreads, so too does its vocabulary. You can see it all over social media. There are Alphas, Betas, Cucks; there are those who have been “Red-Pilled”, as well as those who live in a state of blissful ignorance, asleep to the civilisational threats the alt-Right is fixated on.

The terms aren’t their own. They’ve been borrowed from popular culture, from films or books that have  struck a chord with converts to the cause. There’s something about these works that speaks to those who wish to upend liberal democracy, who feel shut out of the mainstream. Their concepts empower and embolden those on the political fringes. I think if we can understand that attraction, we can better guard against it. Here are their top three primary sources.

Brave New World

At first glance, Aldous Huxley’s 1931 dystopia is the average alt-Righter’s worst nightmare. Dystopias are unpleasant – that’s sort of the point – but Brave New World, in particular, encapsulates some of the alt-Right deepest fears. Inhabitants of Huxley’s futuristic world state – the very concept a rejoinder to nationalism – enjoy a level of sexual freedom at odds with the moralising traditionalist doctrines of the alt-Right. There is even erotic play between children – encouraged by the state – that would disturb the sensibilities of the far-Right, which, even more than your average man on the street, has historically been obsessed with unearthing paedophiles.

The docility of the populace in Huxley’s World State is maintained through a diet of consumerism and regular doses of Soma, an anti-anxiety, hallucinogenic drug of which “one cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy sentiments”. The drug is said to contain “all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol” but with “none of the defects”. It is the opium of the people in a literal sense.

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A blissed-out population too dull and stupid to see what is being done in its name is a recurring theme on the political extremes. Even George Orwell, the supposed champion of the ‘common man’, had his ‘proles’ purring away in stupid contentment to the ditties turned out by the Stalinist ruling class in Nineteen Eighty-Four. “He really did believe that capitalism controls the ‘proles’… not by physical oppression, but by bread and circuses,” wrote Orwell’s biographer Bernard Crick.

But at the same time Brave New World embodies several favoured alt-Right dictums. For a start, the World State’s motto is the distinctly fascistic Community, Identity, Stability. There is no impetus toward equality – something the alt-Right views as anathema to the “hierarchy of competence”, as Canadian professor Jordon Peterson calls it – but instead there is a rigid caste system, in which citizens are hatched in a “social predestination room” in order to fill specific social roles. People are trained not only to accept their inescapable social destiny, but to rejoice in it. There are those at the top of the food chain, and there are those languishing at the bottom. Each is indoctrinated to accept his or her allotted role.

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Through its depiction of strict social hierarchies (though in the book class gradients originate in the laboratory rather than from nature) Brave New World is where the alt-Right takes some of its favourite terms. This includes its labels for men who are said to be naturally superior – “alpha males” – and those who are subservient to them – “betas”. In other words, the world is divided along rigid hierarchical lines to the extent that fixed hierarchies exist within fixed hierarchies. Richard Spencer, an alt-Right figurehead who hopes to turn the United States into a white ‘ethno-state’, told Rolling Stone last year that women gravitated to the alt-Right in order to find partners with “alpha genes” and “alpha sperm”.

Key terms: Alphas, Betas, Deltas, Gammas, Epsilons, Soma, World State.

The Matrix

“The Matrix is a system… That system is our enemy… You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.”

The Matrix features lots of pseudo-profound monologues like this. The inhabitants of The Matrix are not ready to be ‘unplugged’, just as the inhabitants of Huxley’s World State are not ready to be weaned off the drug Soma. The populace is asleep, and it is the job of a band of revolutionaries – or counter-revolutionaries in the case of the alt-Right – to wake them up to what is really going on.

Neo, The Matrix’s nerdy protagonist, is offered a Red Pill as a gateway out of The Matrix by rebel leader Morpheus. If he takes the pill, he can escape the computer simulation in which most of humanity lives, but in the process he must confront a truth that is much harsher than the comforting illusion most people take for granted. On swallowing the Red Pill, Neo can never return to his prior state of ignorance. In other words, he can never un-learn the things he is about to see.

The Alt-Right love to use the Blue Pill/ Red Pill metaphors – the Blue Pill is the existing state of blissful ignorance – to describe when a person converts to their nationalist worldview.

The “red pill” is not just a gradual thing, it involves a fundamental change of perspective and basic principles. Whether Tucker will ever undergo this change—or remain a transitional figure—is all up to him.

— Richard Spencer (@RichardBSpencer) October 2, 2018

It’s a favourite trope, too, for anti-feminists, INCELs and PUAs. For them all, to be ‘red-pilled’ is to be suddenly awakened to a vast conspiracy propagated by women, minorities and ‘cultural Marxists’ against white men.

Alt-right misanthropy also emphasises the way the masses are trained to enjoy the bondage of the simulated world they inhabit, in the manner of consumerism. “Ignorance is bliss,” says a character named Cypher as he relishes a juicy steak that he knows is not real.

This, for the extremists, is a metaphor for humanity’s plight under consumer capitalism. We pump ourselves full of synthetic food and we passively imbibe a diet of ‘info-tainment’ and ‘fake news’ from the hated ‘MSM’ (mainstream media). Yet because ignorance is bliss, most of us are unwilling to snap out of this walking daze.

Key terms: Red pill, blue pill.

The Lord of the Rings

J R RTolkien is one of the alt-Right’s favourite authors. Poor Tolkien; he spoke out against the fascism of his day. However, his antipathy to 20th-century totalitarianism – he called Hitler a “ruddy little ignoramus” – was a rejection not only of fascism’s barbarism but also of its peculiar modernity. The central tenets of Tolkien’s stories are hierarchy, tradition, loyalty, agrarianism and clan loyalty. Thus Tolkien’s work captures several ultra-traditionalist themes that find favour on the alt-Right.

In the Lord of the Rings, an ultra-conservative and bucolic social order is threatened by Orcs, who reside in squalor and poverty. More broadly, the story hinges on worship of the past. A rigid social structure was once presided over by kings, wizards and an elite of Elves. However this social structure is constantly threatened by hordes of foreign and grotesque invaders from the lower orders. The story is one of degeneration, but also of violent cleansing and potential rebirth through the restoration of lost ideals (sound familiar?).

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Steve Bannon, ideological foot soldier of the alt-Right, is fond of making references to the Lord of the Rings. “The Hobbits are going door to door in the shire, and they’re getting everybody out,” Bannon said of the campaign last year to elect Roy Moore as the Alabama Senatorial candidate. In a similar vein, NRA spokesperson and conservative radio host Dana Loesch said that Moore had “pushed back against the forces of secularism and he said, just like in Lord of the Rings, ‘You shall not pass’”. She also called Moore the “Gandalf of Alabama”.

Stories which posit a lost golden age are highly attractive to the adherents of extreme and millenarian ideologies. For the Nazis there was the Volk, an imagined community in which German landowners and peasants had supposedly lived in an organic ‘people’s community’. For the Bolsheviks, before capitalism and feudalism men and women had lived under ‘primitive communism’. In the Lord of the Rings, the plot hinges on the restoration of a feudal structure where authority is worshipped and an absolute ruler wields that authority on the basis of blood-line. No wonder, then, that LotR finds favour on the alt-Right.

Key terms: Middle Earth, the Shire, Hobbits, Elves, Dwarves, Wizards, Orcs, Gandalf the White.

***

There are certain universal truths contained in these three stories. Ones which you might accept regardless of where you are on the political spectrum. Consumerism can occasionally act as an unhealthy substitute for a life of meaning. As a society we often reach for drugs and medication (Soma) instead of dealing with the root causes of our alienation. Societies also tend to perpetuate convenient myths for the sake of social harmony (the blue pill), even when the premises on which these myths are built are suspect.

But swallowing such themes tout court is the mark of a conspiracy theorist. We do not live a vast computer simulation ala The Matrix. Nor are human beings rendered entirely passive by a diet of consumerism as they are with Soma in Brave New World. But something close to these beliefs do exist on the alt-Right, where reality itself is an imposition, behind which stands a sinister and powerful cast of manipulators and puppeteers. Tear away the illusions, the alt-Right tell us, and you will finally grasp the awful truth.

It is a seductive idea, but one that is closer to fiction than hard reality. On a moral level, we ought to deplore those who decide to join the alt-Right, a racist and misogynist movement that wishes to burn pluralism and tolerance to the ground. On a practical level, we should ask ourselves why so many young men are in a place where they are attracted to literal interpretations of dystopian fiction over liberal democracy.

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But what it lacks in those departments, it makes up for in an explosive gearing for what marketing types would call ‘influencer endorsement’. Unlike the others, YouTube is deeply parasocial (a term I’m about to explain), and its success is giving rise to what I shall call the parasocial politician: a new kind of actor, a bedroom press baron, beholden not to party or editor, but only to their own often vast audience.

The term ‘parasocial’ was a term coined in 1956, by the sociologists Horton and Wohl. Their paper, “Mass communication and para-social interaction: Observation on intimacy at a distance”, described the way in which we relate to those who come to us through a one-way lens.

These relationships develop across most media. When JR was shot, a nation mourned parasocially. But Web 2.0 affords a deeper grain of intimacy. Taylor Swift’s Instagram feed, with its faux-candidness, its artfully dishevelled air, the sense of a little secret between you and her, is a better example of how a parasocial relationship develops.

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In that sense, YouTube is perfect for making new one-way friends. “Hey what’s happening guys?” is its unofficial catchphrase, the opening gambit of a million vloggers who often offer us little more than the chance to relate to them, as they plod about the humdrum of their lives, offering makeup tips, playing video games.

YouTubers whisper to you in the earphones of your mobile device. They’re far-off pals, who loom out of a laptop, often in the most intimate of moments: tidying a bedroom on Monday evening, home from a party on a Saturday night, interstitial points when we gladly take off our critical faculties, and seek simply to hear a voice that is not the one in our head. YouTube, with its wan parasocial glow, fills those pockets in the lives of a generation that has forsaken TV.

These are the facts. And as the percentage of the population who get their news media exclusively online increases (now at 84% among the 18-25 bracket), the old red versus blue party politics will have to bend not to Fleet Street or broadcast, but to a new, online commentariat that isn’t responsible to editors, only to the audience they have cultivated. No Murdoch can fire them, their power is a direct mandate from their subscribers, and in turn those subscribers often pay their wages through direct fan-funded donations.

The parasocial politician is part commentator, part political actor, but crucially, is independent of the structures that once bound the press to their quarry.

Further reading

How social media makes fascists of us all

By Jamie Bartlett

Into that void have come men like Sargon of Akkad – a Swindon-dwelling, 38-year old father of two called Carl Benjamin, who broadcasts from his converted garage. A total outsider with no previous interest in politics, who began his career because he “couldn’t stay silent any longer”, Benjamin also runs a separate YouTube channel exclusively devoted to people watching him playing video games. He has built a cult fanbase of 850,000 subscribers by railing against the ills of ‘Social Justice Warrior’ culture, defending what he describes as ‘Classical Liberalism’ (a label claimed by a wide range of viewpoints these days).

Men such as Paul Joseph Watson are here, too: friend of InfoWars kingpin Alex Jones. Another self-proclaimed ‘Classical Liberal’, he makes pithy five-minute packages railing against whatever political correctness has most recently gone mad, whether calling feminists “swamp donkeys“, or arguing for the proposition that certain African countries are, as the POTUS put it, “shitholes“.

Both are increasingly influential. Benjamin receives an average of 250,000 views per video, while an episode of Newsnight averages 344,000. On YouTube, Paul Joseph Watson has 1.4 million subscribers, compared with Owen Jones’s 113,000.

With their revenues – Benjamin alone earns somewhere near £20,000 a month – they could afford to upscale their productions. Yet neither exactly flays himself in the editing department. Benjamin’s set dressing is an old black velour curtain that looks like it was plucked from a closing down sale at a strip club. Paul Joseph Watson’s SFX run as far as speeding up his voice into a high-pitched squeal.

Further reading

The dangerous power of the clickbait king

By Carl Miller

They’d be ill-advised to professionalise. It’s precisely their amateurism that makes them parasocial, affording them a shonky, homemade DIY charm that disarms, that allows these very ordinary demagogues each to penetrate the places that a journalist or a politician can’t, to become yer mate rather than an authority figure.

I’ve just finished making a documentary, for BBC Radio 4 about the rise of the YouTube Right, and one thing that struck me was that Benjamin didn’t seek to define himself as a journalist. I don’t think it would have occurred to him to join those formal structures, even if it were as easy as signing up. He had no idea who Fraser Nelson was; he didn’t even know who Richard Littlejohn was. He might have been on the pro-Trump, pro-Brexit Right, but his agenda was not synched with theirs.

Talking to Benjamin, it’s obvious that the gatekeepers of the old world have been bypassed. There’s now a direct audience-to-ideologue connection. Jordan Peterson often points to this direct connection as one of the key binding agents in the Intellectual Dark Web – that people like him, Sam Harris, Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, have built their own vast audiences from nothing but charisma and ideas worth hearing, on the new technologies of YouTube and podcast.

Further reading

To save democracy, we must disrupt it

By Carl Miller

Though they pre-date his fame, Benjamin and Watson have drawn both intellectual nourishment and fans from the project of Jordan Peterson and his associated Intellectual Dark Web.  Peterson also situates himself as a “classic British liberal” and an “individualist”. But the IDW styles itself as grown up – a heterodox place for the long-form and the nuanced – while there’s often more of an air of Nineties pro-wrestling to the polemics of the YouTube crowd. At the same time, the polarising nature of the culture wars, and especially the free-speech agenda, increasingly sees them lining up next to Tommy Robinson, even though they often consider themselves to be ‘of the Left’. ’The Left left me’ is a cliche of their genre.

A few weeks ago, US think tank Data & Society acknowledged the importance of this model when they published The Alternative Influencer Network, a rather shrill taxonomy of the various strata on the YouTube right that are gradually becoming their own ecosystem.

As their power grows, the strange multiple-narrative universe we’ve entered in the past few years will only grow more confusing as the same events are forced through competing filter bubbles. One of the obsessions of this world is how they stand in opposition not only to certain politics, but to a consensus on what reality is: the dreaded “mainstream narrative”. In the same sense that a Trump or a Brexit was a ‘glitch in that matrix’, they see themselves as being forced into intellectual exile and smeared by an elite that won’t accept them. It’s both a neat rhetorical flourish, and a revolution in the offing.

Carl Miller has written a book that touches on the idea: The Death Of The Gods: The New Global Power Grab. He told me that he sees the conventional parties’ monopoly on messaging breaking down. Increasingly, you have individual actors able to mobilise around a particular issue. Black Lives Matter vs Blue Lives Matter. Feminists vs Anti-Feminists. The MAGA hats vs Antifa. As these thought-leading upstarts gain more traction, the future, he suggests, will involve more rapidly-shifting coalitions between small groups of political actors, often organised around these kinds of fanbases.

Further reading

The truth about Gen Z

By Eliza Filby

That kind of new power broker also fits neatly into the theories of tech philosopher Jordan Greenhall: a networked world that no longer fits with the top-down traditional ‘Blue Church’ mode of distributing power we’ve been used to. The News At Ten World, in which events are plugged into a matrix of gatekeepers that gives reliably high quality, if reductive, answers. Instead, these are Greenhall’s ‘Red Religion’: the coming thing, non-hierarchical actors, plugged into the instant feedback and deep audience connection of social media, not gate-kept, and so prone to going wildly off-the-reservation, but also prone to far more nuance and originality in their ideas.

We tend to imagine that the social media revolution has long since matured, but the rise of the parasocial politicians is still relatively recent: they’ve been going for at most four years. They are in their infancy, and the scene that surrounds them is as crude as it is influential. There is a long way left to run in this story. Its initial actors may fall by the wayside like many of the tech giants of the 90s eventually did. But Miller suggests that we’re primed for “a Farage who knows how to work these new technologies”.

It’s worth noting that Tommy Robinson only roared back into the public eye when he became a correspondent for hard-Right Canadian YouTube TV news company The Rebel. He is probably too tarnished a figure to ever find the mainstream, but he can garner bigger crowds than any politician bar Corbyn. Is it a matter of time before someone else, in their bedroom, finds they possess a talent for raw rhetoric as great as Paul Joseph Watson, but with the message polish of a Trudeau?

Perhaps the next truly powerful British politician won’t be in parliament at all – they’ll be parasocial.

Since then, various members of the Left and far-Left have urged on me a consideration of which they think I am blind. They allege that people like me are taking the new far-Left far too literally, and that when certain of them say that they are “literally” communists, there is, in fact, something else going on. They are not actually planning to institute full-scale communism in the foreseeable future. Rather, they say they are doing one of a number of things, from merely striking a stance, to aiming to wound, to merely flirting with darkness.

Suggested reading

Teen Vogue's idiotic hypocrisy

By Douglas Murray

Well, I’ve heard this interesting line of argument before and it is worth dwelling on. For it can be heard online from figures on – or supportive of – the alt-right.

As it happens, I do think that the term alt-right has some serious definitional problems. It is unclear, for example, how many people it consists of in the real world and what differentiates those who are real and part of it – and not just the online trolls – from simple, ugly, old-school white supremacism.

From early on in the evolution of the term, one explanation of the alt-right was to say, when its online legions were joking about aspects of the Holocaust, that it was just playing around with the dark stuff.  Of course, the defence went, these people didn’t actually want to institute a second Holocaust and didn’t necessarily think that the last one was a good thing. Here was simply a new generation who had grown up long after these terrible events and who were using their own edgy humour and ways to wound and were doubtless making some mistakes along the way. At least this was the claim.

Suggested reading

The characteristics that made the Holocaust the most horrible crime ever committed

By Stephen Pollard

I don’t know that many people are writing about the complicated area of politics that this all opens up, but perhaps we should be. Because I don’t think that all such statements can be put down to pure historical ignorance. Take the Twitter account from Goldsmiths University (the LBGTQ Twitter account) which last month received widespread condemnation for a thread on Gulags.

This account (which subsequently closed down) claimed that the Gulags of communist Russia were getting an unnecessarily bad rap. Far from being the hells on earth that every serious historian and person who lived through them knows them to have been, the Goldsmiths LGBTQ account claimed that they were actually positive endeavours – “rehabilitatory”, “educational” and an enriching way to cure “bigots”.

It is an interesting interpretation to be sure. But, again, can it really be dismissed away as pure ignorance?

One might legitimately suspect that the person saying that the Gulag was good, or claiming the Holocaust wasn’t all that bad, is doing so because of an ideological desire for the claim to be true. That is: these people are motivated to believe the wildest claims about history because they have some instinct that propels them into hoping that history didn’t happen the way it did and are hoping thereby to exculpate their own political inclinations. They’re flirting with the darkness.

Others, of course, are willing to jump right on into it.

Suggested reading

Communism's forgotten victims

By Douglas Murray

Take the case of Richard Spencer in America, probably the most prominent representative in the flesh of the alt-right. He deals in a specific type of something that is more-than a mere flirtation with darkness. In the most famous footage of the man (recorded in November 2016), he leads a crowd of followers in shouts of “Hail Trump“, with some fascist salutes thrown in. It suggests to most of us that he is the real thing: somebody who emulates the words and actions of the Nazis because he admires them and wants to be like them.

But his use of language is interesting, and how it insinuates itself into others’ dialogue. For instance, Spencer refers to the ‘lügenpresse’. There are many reasons why people today might refer to the dishonesty of sections of the press and media. They might even use a term like ‘fake news’. Someone using the term ‘lying press’ may or may not be making a specific reference. But somebody in an English-speaking country using the exact German term as used by the Nazis, is giving the strongest possible hint about their own ideological affiliations. Spencer and others on the far-Right in America play around with the term because they hope that their ideological affiliates will pick it up and stay around for more of the same poison.

There are those who will say that the situation is different on the far-Right and the far-Left. But it isn’t clear to me that the rising alt-left isn’t playing such different and dark games. Next June, one of the alt-left, Aaron Bastani, will publish a book called Fully Automated Luxury Communism – a work which proclaims to set out a blueprint for a future in which everybody will be fed and everybody will be free.

Suggested listening

Why don't we remember the victims of communism?

By Douglas Murray

Anybody who knows anything about the history of communism will heave at Bastani just as those who know anything about facism will heave at Spencer.  In the 20th century, communism was responsible for the starvation – as well as deliberate slaughter – of millions of people. Coming up with a solution to any problems of our time and calling it ‘Fully automated luxury communism’ is as disgraceful as proclaiming some form of ‘Fully automated luxury fascism’.

Is Bastani actually seeking a return to the horrors of the 20th century? Or is Spencer? We have to make our own value judgements. But it does seem that somewhere out there, just south of the Spencer-types, are an increasing number of people willing to play around with the darkest materials, throwing them around and enjoying the gawps of horror that their antics undoubtedly provoke. Ordinarily one would ask them to stop it. But perhaps watching out for how people deal with the darkest materials is one of the best ways to work out who those people really are.

For many years, he relished his role as Britain’s Islamist troll-in-chief, inflaming the public with statements about how when Sharia law was implemented in the UK it would spell the definitive end of democracy, pubs, bookies and the national lottery, and put the Queen in a niqab.

He praised those who carried out the 9/11 attacks in the US and refused to condemn the 2005 London tube bombings. For the most part Choudary, a former solicitor, was ingenious in treading the fine line between offensive speech and criminal offence. His prison sentence, in 2016 – a five and a half year term, of which he has served half – finally came about because he was found to have voiced explicit support for Islamic State.

Choudary’s role was much more significant, however, than simply that of a self-appointed provocateur: such was his radicalising influence that Choudary has been linked to 15 terrorist plots since 2000. His followers included Khuram Butt, who was part of the attack on London Bridge that killed eight people last year, and Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, the killers of Fusilier Lee Rigby.

Further reading

CLR James rejected the posturing of identity politics

By Ralph Leonard

He can lay claim to a leading role, too, in radicalising a small proportion of the English white working class. The English Defence League (EDL) was founded in 2009 – by Tommy Robinson, among others – in response to the presence of the Islamist group Aluus Sunnah wal Jamaah in Luton. Anjem Choudary, predictably enough, was present at the launch of Aluus Sunnah wal Jamaah, which campaigned for holy war and in 2009 took part in a protest against homecoming British troops returning from Afghanistan – the very event that first invigorated the EDL.

The EDL directed its main ire at Islam: it made much of backing a multi-racial but not a multi-cultural society, in which Hindus, Sikhs and black members were officially welcome. Some members didn’t get the full memo, it seems, and Tommy Robinson left the EDL in 2013, reportedly because of concerns over far Right extremists within its ranks. At the time, Robinson denounced the far Right, and publicly apologised for generalised language that may have made British Muslims feel afraid.

Yet while Choudary has been in prison, Robinson has experienced a fresh rush of celebrity among the alt-right in the US, for whom he has recently become something of a cause celebre. After Robinson was tried and convicted of contempt of court in May (he already had a conviction for the same offence from 2017) Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former advisor, later called him a “solid guy” and “the backbone of this country”. Bannon recently described Robinson “a movement in and of himself now. He represents the working class and channels a lot of the frustration of everyday, blue-collar Britons.” For Robinson’s defenders, his brushes with the law are explained away by an excess of passion in opposition to Islam – although Robinson often shifts his criticism, without apparent distinction, between Islamism, Islam and Muslims in general.

Further reading

Marine Le Pen: a populist who will never win the popular vote

By John Lichfield

Robinson’s second conviction for contempt of court was deemed procedurally flawed by the Court of Appeal, and his case will be reheard. In his first conviction, in May 2017, he was deemed to have potentially endangered a sex abuse trial involving British Muslim men and a young female victim. It unfurled against a wider background of costly, complex sex abuse cases involving mainly British Pakistani men and mainly (but not exclusively) white teenage girls in towns such as Rotherham and Rochdale, long-term abuse which was prolonged by appalling inaction on the part of the authorities.

The goal of those who worked courageously to bring such abusers to justice – people such as the journalist Andrew Norfolk and the former crown prosecutor Nazir Afzal – would naturally be a series of criminal trials. For Robinson, however, the smooth operation of such trials appears secondary to his desire to publicise his own outrage: a telling priority.

If the intricacies of the UK justice system don’t much concern Robinson, the same goes for his US supporters, who include not just Bannon but Donald Trump Jr. Beyond Robinson and his anti-Islam stunts and rhetoric, too, there is an ominous rise in far Right terrorist activity: Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary, said last July that “the threat from extreme Right-wing terrorism is growing” with four extreme Right-wing plots disrupted since May 2017. The tiny but deeply nasty neo-Nazi organisation National Action has now been proscribed in the UK.

Further reading

The fake patriotism of the liberal Left

By Paul Embery

Choudary, therefore, will emerge from prison into a Britain in which Islamist extremism remains a threat, and Right-wing extremism is expanding – a combination that will suit his agenda very well. It is doubtful that he will have converted to reticence during his time behind bars. And he will be energised by the noisy and vitriolic hard-Right opposition, from which he will hope to gain converts to his cause. When rival extremisms begin to take root, there is a kind of pinball effect, whereby those – often young men – who are repelled by one are bounced more forcefully towards the other.

Islamism and the hard Right, however, are not the only pinball flippers in town. The third is the hard Left, which is now in charge of the British Labour Party and has united around the cult of Jeremy Corbyn, a party leader who has, in the past, sympathised with both the IRA and Hamas, and recently been accused of anti-semitism by Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi.

Although Corbyn’s rhetoric invokes championing the working class, the direction of the Labour party itself under his stewardship suggests otherwise. As The Economist pointed out in July, 77% of Labour party members now hail from middle-class, or ABC1, social groups. Only 3% of its MPs have any history of manual work (in 1979, it was 16%). The article argued that the most notable rise in party involvement was among “ethnic minorities, particularly Muslims; public-sector professionals; and frustrated millennials, most of them the university-educated children of the salaried middle class who can’t get their feet on the property ladder”.

Further reading

Deluded liberals can't keep clinging to a dead idea

By John Gray

In the wider ideology of the hard Left, which swirls around Corbyn, a version of ‘identity politics’ has taken hold which speaks not of a shared struggle understood in class terms, as was old-style socialism, but of a hierarchy of victimhood which places all ‘white men’ in the most despised position, as the greatest inheritors of ‘privilege’.

By framing a ‘progressive’ movement in a way that largely ignores class to concentrate on gender and race, the new hard Left offers white men a role to play mainly in the perpetual utterance of a performative mea culpa. This vision is likely to be particularly unpopular with white working-class men with very little economic or educational privilege, who would once themselves have been natural Labour voters – and some may be flipped elsewhere, including towards ‘movements’ such as Tommy Robinson’s which offer up an alternative ‘identity politics’, with its own set of vociferous grievances.

Islamism, the hard Right and the hard Left are each distinct ideologies, operating in separate and often complex ways: even within each of those categories, there are manifold fractures and contradictions. It would be misleading to pretend that all three offer the same level of threat to wider UK society, certainly when one looks at the record of UK terrorist attacks in the last few years, the bulk of which were Islamist in origin.

Further reading

How political correctness ate itself

By Bruno Macaes

But it would also be foolish to dismiss the possibility of intensifying violence at the extremes of the hard Right and the hard Left. In 2016, Thomas Mair, who was motivated by far-Right views, murdered Jo Cox, a Labour MP. Last June, a former spokesperson for the neo-Nazi group National Action, Jack Renshaw – who left the EDL early on, dissatisfied because it was not anti-semitic, racist or homophobic enough – admitted buying a replica sword with the intention of killing the Labour MP Rosie Cooper.

Nothing has reached that pitch yet from the hard Left, but the atmosphere remains highly and unpleasantly charged. The Labour MP Luciana Berger, who is Jewish, felt the need to attend this year’s party conference with a police escort. The group Labour Against Anti-Semitism said: “The atmosphere of bullying and intimidation towards Labour Jewish MPs is not coming from the far-Right but from a hard-Left membership.”

There are, however, certain similarities between the three groups that I have talked about. They are all active on social media, using it energetically in a way that prioritises fast reaction and emotion above reason, and are explicitly contemptuous of ‘mainstream media’ or MSM, while using it to garner more publicity. The slow and intricate processes of the judicial and legislative system do not interest them greatly.

Further reading

Insincere politicians are cheapening public debate

By Douglas Murray

They hunger for dramatic action that moves beyond talking and voting. While one naturally associates Choudary and Robinson with street protests, such events also excite the current Labour leadership: when feelings were running high over the Grenfell fire last year, John McDonnell memorably called for a million people to come out on the streets to protest against the Government (they didn’t).

Their style of speech is angry, declamatory, and persistently claiming the moral high ground while conceding none to others. On certain policies, the hard Right and hard Left unite, such as in their admiration for Assad and Putin. And the anti-semitic conspiracy theories that flow from banned Right-wing groups such as National Action, for example, uncannily mirror those of Al-Muhijaroun.

Where will the intensifying game of ‘British pinball’ take us? Its frame is being constructed in a Britain where the political system is in open disarray, and the population is already fractured by the national argument over Brexit. Those of us who grew up in Northern Ireland will know how quickly the Troubles grew out of a peaceful situation that was nonetheless riven with grievances.

Further reading

Victimhood culture will tear us apart

By Jenny McCartney

I would hope that England would be insulated from such horrors by the absence of a long sectarian history, the activity of the intelligence services and by the innate mistrust of political extremes that has long seemed hardwired into wider English society – but we should never forget the grim possibility that extremist movements can start to interact violently, nor what ensues thereafter. Quite apart from any such scenario, even the non-violent interaction of Islamist fundamentalism, the hard Right and the hard Left is starting to damage the nature of our national conversation.

The tone of public debate is now one of permanent rancour: as it grows fiercer and more vituperative, many reasonable people are shrinking from open participation. It becomes harder, not easier, for British Muslims publicly to criticise aspects of Islamic fundamentalism, or for British Jews to criticise Israeli government policy – although they may do so privately – when those communities increasingly feel under broader attack from the Right or the Left. In such circumstances, voicing reservations about wrongs within the community is often seen as siding with the outsiders who are insulting the community: that is precisely what occurred over so many decades in Northern Ireland, with courageous exceptions.

This process could be clearly seen in action during the row over Boris Johnson’s article about the burqa. The Muslim journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who has long publicly opposed the wearing of the veil, described how, when Boris Johnson made his remarks about “bank robbers” or “letterboxes” in reference to the burqa, a young Muslim student said to her: “So, are you for Boris or for the burqa? You can’t sit on the fence.”

Further reading

A culture war the Founding Fathers couldn't foresee

By Henry Olsen

Johnson’s essential view on the burqa was not the main point: many Muslim women also take the view that it is a ridiculous and unlikeable garment, and dislike it even more vociferously than he does. But Johnson’s mockery came as he was praised by Trump and Bannon – both of whom have made sweeping statements about Muslims – and in that heated atmosphere was interpreted by many as encouraging ridicule or worse of veiled Muslim women. Non-Muslim liberals who, ten years earlier, would themselves have attacked the burqa as a garment designed to oppress and erase women, now attacked Johnson for being ‘racist’ for mocking it.

Yet the fundamental point had not changed: only the climate of its reception had, to one clouded by emotion, hurt, suspicion and anger. To counteract the growing danger of political pinball, it will be a job to re-establish a new way of talking to each other. But this is the Britain that Choudary will re-enter. Wish us luck.

He has a knack for getting into high profile confrontations with the liberal (and not-so-liberal) left – and winning.

Numerous attempts have been made to take him down – not least in magazine profiles: hit-jobs that invariably miss the target (which is what happens when you aim for a straw-man instead of the real thing).

One profile well worth reading, however, is by Wesley Yang for Esquire. Yang understands the apparent contradiction in Peterson’s message i.e. that it amounts to nothing more than good old-fashioned common sense, but is also hugely ambitious:

“His life advice concerns the necessity to defer gratification, face up to the trials of life with equanimity, take responsibility for one’s own choices, and struggle against the temptation to grow resentful. How such traditional values came to be portrayed as a danger adjacent to Nazism is one of the puzzles of our time.

”Viewed another way, Peterson’s intellectual project is exceedingly immodest, and can be stated in a sentence: He aims at nothing short of a refounding of Western civilization…”

But here’s another contradiction: Peterson’s project is indeed one of restoration, yet it is also hugely disruptive – in the sense that an innovative company disrupts a market. In fact, Peterson is in the process of disrupting several ‘markets’.

The first is the so-called alt-right. This always was a misleading label, because the alternative on offer is not to the conventional right. Rather, the variation is on the identity politics of the left. The alt-right offers a similar set of victimhood narratives, but with a different set of victims.

Peterson is accused by his stupider critics of having his alt-right tendencies of his own. They couldn’t be more wrong:

“…his refusal of the consolations of group identity also puts him at odds with the alt-right. ‘The alt-righters would say—and they’ve said this to me directly—‘Peterson, you’re wrong. Identity politics is correct. We just have to play to win.’ I think that’s a reprehensible attitude…’

“…Peterson sees himself as a kind of Catcher in the Rye, rescuing alienated young men from such dangerous temptations.”

Disrupting the market for identity politics – by convincing its potential customers that they don’t need its products (whether in rightist or leftist packaging) – is a campaign that Peterson has waged on social media. However, he isn’t just a (highly successful) YouTube personality. He’s also a serious academic and Yang hints that he may have plans to disrupt a second market:

“He had met with Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen to discuss an unspecified future venture. Both of those billionaires have for years called for the disruption of higher education, and Peterson has spoken of his desire to create an online university that will offer accreditation in the humanities at a tenth of the prevailing cost. “

As I’ve argued before, this is a market that desperately needs disrupting. Besides the grotesque politicisation of entire disciplines, it is absurd that students should be racking up enormous debts for the privilege of listening to mediocre academics from the back of a lecture theatre, when world-class teaching resources can be made available online. Of course, there’s more to higher education than attending lectures – but digital could reinvent all of that too.

Recommended reading

British universities should disrupt the US model of gated access to higher education

By Peter Franklin

The professoriat isn’t the only professional group that ought to watch out. If most lectures suffer by comparison to Peterson’s talks, the same is also true of most sermons.

Peterson’s relationship to the Christian faith is famously ambiguous, but what Yang calls his “secular homiletics” – especially his unpacking of Biblical stories – is deeper, smarter and more inspiring than 99% of the sermons I’ve ever heard (and I’m a regular church-goer).

Christian critics of Peterson have accused him of ‘Pelagianism’ – the ancient heresy that sinners can save themselves by their own efforts. However, his message, though infused with Biblical references, is primarily psychological and ethical, not religious – specifically, it is not soteriological.

Moreover, the Church cannot expect members of a thoroughly secularised culture to see themselves as being in need of salvation if they accept no moral framework against which to measure themselves (and find themselves wanting).

The Peterson project is about reconstructing that framework – a task which he’s gone about with a moral clarity that puts bishops and archbishops to shame.

Trigger warnings.

Intersectionality.

The language of political correctness can appear as baffling as the underlying ideology but it matters. Just one unguarded comment, unintended insult or unpopular opinion and your career in academia, politics or the media can be severely damaged – if not terminated altogether.

If you’re a member of one of the Twitter-using professions, watch your mouth – because it won’t take much for you to be lumped in with the real bigots and abusers (of which there are quite enough already). And don’t think that having the ‘correct’ politics or being a member of a minority will protect you – as Clive Lewis, a hard left, ethnic minority British MP found out last week.

So, what’s going on? Why do minor infringements of social codes (real or perceived) attract such a disproportionate reaction. Is it just an internet-enabled mob-effect, or is there something much deeper going on?

On his Righteous Mind blog, Jonathan Haidt highlights an important new analysis:

“I just read the most extraordinary paper by two sociologists — Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning — explaining why concerns about microaggressions have erupted on many American college campuses in just the past few years.”

The Campbell and Manning paper can be read here, but this is Haidt’s summary:

“We’re beginning a second transition of moral cultures. The first major transition happened in the 18th and 19th centuries when most Western societies moved away from cultures of honor (where people must earn honor and must therefore avenge insults on their own) to cultures of dignity in which people are assumed to have dignity and don’t need to earn it. They foreswear violence, turn to courts or administrative bodies to respond to major transgressions, and for minor transgressions they either ignore them or attempt to resolve them by social means.”

The blood feud is one manifestation of honour culture; another, more controlled, manifestation is the practice of duelling. Though honour and dignity cultures have existed side-by-side for centuries, the decline and criminalisation of duelling can be seen as the point at which societies clearly opted for the latter over the former.

That was the first transition of moral cultures; what about the second?

“Campbell and Manning describe how [the] culture of dignity is now giving way to a new culture of victimhood in which people are encouraged to respond to even the slightest unintentional offense, as in an honor culture. But they must not obtain redress on their own; they must appeal for help to powerful others or administrative bodies, to whom they must make the case that they have been victimized.”

While dignity culture negates honour culture, victimhood culture inverts it. Honour culture and victimhood culture are both about status: In an honour system you gain status by displaying your dominance; in a victimhood culture by displaying how put-upon you are.

That’s why minor insults are of such importance to both cultures. Not taking offence is to pass up an opportunity to protect or enhance your status (or, in the case of victimhood culture, have it protected or enhanced for you by the powers-that-be).

It’s also why there are bitter arguments between different groups as to who has the greatest claim of victimhood – and, by implication, over who is oppressing whom. Examples include the conflict between transgender activists and the so-called TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists); and the controversy involving “Ex-Muslim” LGBT pride marchers and those claiming that their placards were “Islamophobic”.

Then there’s the rightwing populist backlash – which is not an attempt to refute victim culture, but to co-opt it. For the ‘alt-right’ and others, men and white people are the real victims – a claim that is inadvertently supported every time an idiot activist from the other side presents ‘maleness’ and ‘whiteness’ as a problem, not just sexism and racism.

The honour/ dignity/ victimhood analysis is a useful one. It provides a conceptual map for all of us who believe in the equal and infinite worth of all human beings. Dignity culture is not perfect. Injustices linger and must be dealt with. Nevertheless the gains already made are without parallel in human history.

Dignity culture is worth defending and must be defended against all its enemies – left and right, old and new.

Until now that is. Monbiot believes that he has the outline of just such a story. Here, from the Guardian, is his elevator pitch:

“Through restoring community, renewing civic life and claiming our place in the world, we build a society in which our extraordinary nature – our altruism, empathy and deep connection – is released. A kinder world stimulates and normalises our kinder values. I propose a name for this story: the Politics of Belonging.”

To get the full gist, you’ll need to read the whole thing, but what might immediately strike the casual reader is the story’s utopianism. Its author, however, makes an appeal to scientific plausibility:

“Over the past few years, there has been a convergence of findings in different sciences: psychology, anthropology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology. Research in all these fields points to the same conclusion: that human beings are, in the words of an article in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, ‘spectacularly unusual when compared to other animals’. This refers to our astonishing degree of altruism. We possess an unparalleled sensitivity to the needs of others, a unique level of concern about their welfare, and a peerless ability to create moral norms that generalise and enforce these tendencies.

“We are also, among mammals, the supreme cooperators…”

Actually, that would be the Naked Mole Rat, which (along with the Damaraland Mole Rat) is the only eusocial mammal. Zoological pedantry aside, one has to observe that, while uniquely compassionate, humans are also uniquely cruel. And though uniquely altruistic, we’re also uniquely avaricious. Indeed, in terms of morality and immorality, we’re peerless in every way. That’s because, in all but the least important sense, we’re not animals. If I were constructing a narrative of hope, that’s what I would begin with – we are not animals.

To be fair, Monbiot believes that we can and should put aside our competitive instincts and make the most of  our cooperative potential. Furthermore, he has every confidence that we can do this in a politically transformative way – because it’s already happening:

“…[it] might sound like an improbable hope – until you begin to explore some of the remarkable things that have been happening in the United States.

“The Big Organising model developed by the campaign to elect Bernie Sanders as the Democratic nominee is potentially transformative. Rather than relying on big spending, big data and a big staff, it uses proliferating networks of volunteers, who train and supervise more volunteers, to carry out the tasks usually reserved for staff. While Hillary Clinton’s campaign was organising money, the Sanders campaign was organising people.”

Back in May of this year, Monbiot argued that “this method could be used to transform the prospects of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party”. He was “widely mocked” for doing so, but he was proved right by subsequent events.

However, in noting – and, in some cases, celebrating – the rise of grassroots political movements, he has, I believe, misunderstood their essence. What’s really going on isn’t some kind of shared spiritual awakening, but a potentially darker phenomenon.

The other week I wrote about the anthropological philosophy of René Girard – who knew a thing or two about human storytelling – and who concluded that “imitation is at the root of all human behaviour.” We are, he said, driven by “mimetic desire”.

Thus when people come together in pursuit of a common goal we should suspect that copying, not community, is the motivating force. Indeed, what the new political movements have in common – from the populist left through to the alt-right – is their profoundly mimetic nature. Their most powerful form of communication is the internet ‘meme’ (a word meaning ‘that which is imitated’).

From ‘oh, Jeremy Corbyn!’ to ‘Pepe the Frog’, memes create a sense of belonging, but only for those who copy.

But stereotypes don’t always accord with reality – and especially not with that part of the Trump coalition known as the ‘alt-right’. Admittedly, the alt-right is predominantly white and male. Some elements are undoubtedly racist and sexist, but what really characterises the movement as a whole is its vociferous opposition to the idea that whiteness and maleness are, in themselves, ‘problematic’.

By stigmatising whiteness and maleness, and not just racism and sexism, the cultural elites have created the conditions for a dangerous counter-movement – one in racism and sexism can thrive, as its members embrace labels that they suspect will be attached to them anyway.

Writing for the American Conservative, George Hawley explains that the alt-right represents a break with, not a hang-over from, the past:

“In my experience with the alt-right, I encountered a surprisingly common narrative: Alt-right supporters did not, for the most part, come from overtly racist families. Alt-right media platforms have actually been pushing this meme aggressively in recent months. Far from defending the ideas and institutions they inherited, the alt-right—which is overwhelmingly a movement of white millennials—forcefully condemns their parents’ generation. They do so because they do not believe their parents are racist enough.”

The alt-right can’t be dismissed as the last gasp of a dying generation; nor can it be written-off as a protest of the uneducated:

“The typical alt-right supporter does not lack education. The movement’s skillful use of the internet alone suggests otherwise. In interviews with people in the alt-right —including the movement’s leading voices and anonymous Twitter trolls—I found at least some degree of college education was a common denominator.

“To complicate matters further, many people in the alt-right were radicalized while in college. Not only that, but the efforts to inoculate the next generation of America’s social and economic leaders against racism were, in some cases, a catalyst for racist radicalization. Although academic seminars that explain the reality of white privilege may reduce feelings of prejudice among most young whites exposed to them, they have the opposite effect on other young whites.”

Hawley is not an alarmist. The “size and influence” of the alt-right shouldn’t be exaggerated, he says. Nevertheless, we need to keep a wary eye on the future:

“According to a large 2016 study conducted by the Hispanic Heritage Foundation, whites in high school favored Trump over Clinton by a staggering margin—larger even than Trump’s margin among adult white voters. Among this sample, 48 percent preferred Trump, 11 percent preferred Clinton, and the rest would not vote or choose another candidate.

“One study is not definitive, and the political identities of Generation Z are still forming, but the rising generation of whites shows signs of being more right-wing than the millennials.”

That’s a pretty big pool of potential new recruits. Time for proper conservatives to give them something positive to believe in.