This demonstration, which took place on Saturday morning, marks a potential turning point in Britain’s anti-migration politics. In the social-media era, the most important aspect of protest is the image it presents to audiences watching elsewhere, and this was a spectacle designed to appear not just intimidating but, more importantly, organized and disciplined. That message was further amplified by the protesters managing to catch the authorities unawares, leaving them free to block a major port without the escort of high-vis police minders that tends to make such events look like futile tantrums.

What followed on Sunday night in Portsmouth was more messy. Another large group of demonstrators, apparently including a contingent of locals, tried to prevent the authorities from moving a newly arrived boatload of Channel migrants inland, leading to chaotic nighttime skirmishes with riot police. But here, too, there was a concerted effort to look organized and even official. Danny Thomas, the activist who appears to have orchestrated both protests, was filmed parlaying with police, making demands and requesting meetings with senior politicians. At one stage, he even read out a statement from a lawyer on a loudspeaker. In both Dover and Portsmouth, the demonstrators ultimately withdrew rather than escalating.

Having caught the country’s attention, Thomas has now burst onto the political scene. He describes his movement, Patriot Platform, as a “Christian patriotic army” which originated in a South London church (one of its slogans is “Christ is King”), and he claims it numbers in the tens of thousands. According to news reports, his previous career involved a number of manual and white-collar jobs, as well as a two-year prison sentence for attempting to kidnap someone at knifepoint over a drugs-related dispute. Besides his Christian awakening, in the past decade Thomas has been an associate of Tommy Robinson and has become a full-time anti-migration activist, traveling to the French coast to deter migrants from crossing.

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The most intriguing aspect of Thomas’s past, though, is his stint as a tank driver in the Royal Hussars. As the Dover protest suggests, he aspires to a quasi-military style of politics, nonviolent but muscular, masculine and regimented. As he told Reform UK’s Zia Yusuf in a public dialogue this week, “we have working-class men… who build the houses that you live in, they build the roads that you drive on”, and now “they’re standing up for their women and children”. Insisting that he had no intention of breaking the law, Thomas theatrically asserted that the goal was to forge a mass-movement which would deliver a political party to power at the next election: “we are building a voting bloc… and that voting bloc will go to the most suitable candidate, and to the most suitable party that is able to bring this country back into order.” He ignores the fact that a patriotic Christian voting bloc sounds very much like the sectarianism which mass-immigration is routinely blamed for.

It remains to be seen whether Thomas really has the authority or the motives he claims, but any degree of professionalization in anti-migration protests will be a significant change. Until now, participation by concerned locals and sympathetic groups such as the Pink Ladies has tended to be overshadowed by aggressive and inebriated men seeking out confrontation with the police. This has suited the Government and other opponents quite well. Their strongest defenses against such demonstrations are social stigma and a police force which tracks down and arrests wrongdoers after the fact. So long as protests are associated with hooligans, coke-heads and petty criminals making a fool of themselves in front of police cameras, their political impact will be limited.

A movement with a semblance of structure could present a more serious challenge, to the state and potentially to British society as well. Protesters backed by a considered legal and public relations strategy will likely be more difficult to contain than those who simply want to express themselves. But, more ominously, a lesson of the 20th century is that disaffected young men find uniforms and institutional discipline rather appealing. In times when manpower mattered more than technology, political movements of Left and Right, and indeed entire nations, organized themselves around the mobilization of men in clubs, unions, and other associations. Dressing up and parading around for a political cause offers a sense of purpose and belonging, something that is hard to come by in an atomized, economically stagnant society like our own.

There is something to Orwell’s notion that this tendency has been less pronounced in England than elsewhere: in response to Mosley’s Blackshirts, the Government in 1936 went as far as banning political uniforms in public, a law that some have suggested should now be used against Thomas’s movement. But the picture looks rather different when you include Ireland. Armed and uniformed supporters of the Irish Unionists marched through English cities in the 1910s, and paramilitaries were, of course, central to the carnage of the Troubles in Northern Ireland during the Seventies and Eighties. That period of sectarian violence was the precedent that many observers reached for after Saturday’s demonstration in Dover.

The main reason for such chilling comparisons was the protesters’ use of masks and balaclavas, essentially a threat of anarchy in visual form. It is true that large masked crowds have been a feature of Palestine marches for years, and that masked adolescents on e-scooters have become commonplace in British cities since the pandemic. The latter may reflect the influence of drill music and its associations with gang culture, but generally speaking, masks are a natural consequence of the panopticon quality of contemporary society, where identification by the authorities or by online partisans is an ambient threat that can lead to entering a police database or being hounded out of employment. This was the basis on which Thomas defended the use of masks at protests. He will find sympathy from parts of the Right, where there is already a culture of online anonymity, presented as a necessary precaution for dissidents against a woke police state.

None of this changes the fundamentally threatening character of a group of men in masks. Whatever the intention, it is a gesture that communicates a willingness to act beyond the bounds of law and social norms. Given that our faces are our most intimate means of communication, it also signals a rejection of the public sphere as a place of political dialog. It is a sign of how powerful this symbolism is that it instantly created a divide within the broader anti-migration movement, with Nigel Farage and other Reform politicians denouncing the masked protesters in categorical terms. Farage has since gone further and proposed a ban on all face-coverings in public, including religious ones, on the grounds that “in a civilized soci­ety, people should be identifiable in pub­lic”.

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This looks like an obvious way for Reform to draw a clear line between itself and more extreme expressions of anti-migration sentiment, but in fact, a figure like Thomas is a nightmare for the party. To offer him any kind of backing would leave Reform open to the very real risk that his protest movement will unravel into violence and criminality. That would be a stupid bet to make; but not making it will drive Thomas’s supporters towards Reform’s rival on the Right, Restore Britain, whose leader Rupert Lowe has endorsed the masked protests as “perfectly reasonable”. Lowe is targeting a smaller and more radical section of opinion, and so has less to worry about in terms of reputational harm; but his base is already big enough to cause serious electoral damage to Reform.

Another clear winner is Andy Burnham, who has denounced the weekend’s events as “the politics of poison”, and who can now use the specter of fascist mobs to help him lure Left-leaning voters back to the Labour Party. The only way that anti-migration protests are likely to persuade a broader section of the public is through the participation of people who appear ordinary and non-threatening, but it is unlikely that Thomas’s outfit will be any-more attractive to such people than his scrappy predecessors were.

Still, much will depend on how a more organized protest movement, assuming such a thing actually emerges, chooses to act. The most instructive examples come, ironically enough, from Left-wing politics, which has had a far greater impact in terms of direct action in recent years. In one scenario, the migration protests could follow the lead of groups like Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and Defend Our Juries, staging provocations that are calculated to polarize the public and thus build pressure on political parties. Another possible outcome is suggested by Antifa in the United States, a movement which exudes chaos and violence to the extent that it is more likely to discredit politicians who fail to distance themselves from it.

Antifa, of course, is no stranger to masks and uniforms, and herein lies the starkest warning about this style of politics. Orwell hated aggressive military displays because he thought they represented the raw enjoyment of power, in the form of a laughable spectacle that one is not allowed to laugh at. But when this tendency seeps into the politics of the street, another danger emerges. Uniforms may suggest a degree of order and discipline, but they are more likely to produce chaos: they invite individuals to submerge their identities in a collective commitment to a cause, a radicalizing process which can rapidly become a conduit for reckless and unpredictable forces to emerge. Thomas thinks he can direct his anonymous foot-soldiers, but once you put men in masks and identical clothing, you have started something that you likely cannot control.

Five years on from the Taliban’s return, and life for Afghan women like Manizha has become a kind of hell. Banned from schools, universities and even parks, they need a “male guardian” to travel more than 70 kilometers from home. And now, the mother of three fears for her children’s future too. Taught that unbelievers should be killed, and that women’s rights are mere Western propaganda, young Afghans are being groomed to become the extremists of tomorrow — with worrying implications for their country and the world.

Since returning to power in 2021, the Taliban has become infamous for its restrictions on female education, locking over two million girls from the classroom. But that still leaves millions of boys, and millions more girls under 14, in the regime’s pedagogical clutches. Certainly, it’s clear that the Taliban itself understands its power here. As far back as 2022, a 78-page leaked document outlined a raft of changes to what was dismissively called the “modern curriculum”. Instead, the document argued, schooling should be transformed in line with the Taliban’s radical interpretation of Islamic law, suggesting, among other things, that natural disasters should be explained both scientifically — and in terms of “Allah’s will and power”.

If that’s the theory, the practice is equally grim. “They asked schools not to teach some parts of certain books to the students,” explains one anonymous educator. “They’ve also removed subjects such as civic education, life skills and a subject about loving the homeland.” In its place, the teacher adds, schools now hold classes on the Quran, with textbooks reviewed by UnHerd exhorting battle against “invaders” and “apostates”. Other subjects, including English and biology, are no longer covered for lack of teachers, unsurprising when the Taliban has banned thousands of female staff.

Not that the curriculum is the only thing to change. Boys, after all, are now expected to wear a beard — or at least try to — while girls as young as six now attend class in the burka. That, in turn, reflects the spread of out-and-out madrasas, the religious schools common across the Islamic world. According to research by the Hamrah Network, a cohort of Afghan organizations, there were 23,000 such schools in Afghanistan last year, up from just 5,000 in 2023, with some 3.65 million Afghans now enrolled in madrasas or Islamic seminaries.

The Taliban has achieved this growth by operating what the Hamrah Network calls a “franchise model” — whereby private madrasas are nationalized in return for government salaries and a formal certification. With the Afghan economy in a state of near collapse, it’s little wonder that everything from broadcast facilities to guest houses have taken up the offer. One notable example is the Abdul Hai Habibi High School in the east of the country. Once among the most progressive institutions in Afghanistan, it became a madrasa in 2022, displacing 6,000 students and 130 teachers.

If anything, meanwhile, Afghanistan’s burgeoning madrasa system is even more extreme than regular schools. Framed around the hardline Deobandi movement — a revivalist form of Islam founded in India — it brings extremism to the heart of every classroom. Manizha has witnessed this firsthand, and not only in her son: her young daughter has been taught about marrying a jihadi fighter. “What place does jihad have in the 21st century?” the girl’s mother asks. “Why does a 10-year-old need to know about participating in the war or killing people? How do you expect a kid to have a bright future if all they are being taught is killing and bloodshed?”

They’re all good questions — with a depressingly plausible answer. Experts speculate that reshaping young minds is the very reason the Taliban are consolidating their control over Afghan schools. In this, the militants have history, shadowing other Islamist insurgencies in recruiting almost exclusively from religious institutions. More than that, the emirate continues to maintain a militant insurgent group, complete with suicide bombers on call, with the madrasas ensuring a steady stream of brainwashed recruits.

If this obviously has domestic implications — Dr Timor Sharan, co-founder of the Hamrah Network, suggests it deepens the subordination of women and girls across Afghan society — this matters beyond the country’s borders too. After all, the Taliban continues to support terror groups across the region. That includes the remnants of al-Qaeda, which has been blamed for a number of recent atrocities in India and Pakistan, as well as Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which wages war on Islamabad from bases inside Afghanistan. The East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), a Uyghur group battling China, also enjoys training grounds in the emirate.

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Yet whatever the geopolitical implications here, it’s hard not to return to the plight of Afghanistan’s children, with parents suggesting that the steady drumbeat of extremist content is affecting the younger generation’s mental health. “The way the teachers behave with the students, my children now dislike going to school,” Manizha says. “Especially my older son, who has experienced schooling in better days.” Other evidence supports this claim: the student dropout rate, even among boys, is rising, perhaps also a symptom of the rise in corporal punishment since 2021.

Of course, it’d be wrong to suggest that the Taliban invented these schools wholesale. Afghanistan was a deeply conservative country long before they returned. All the same, locals suggest one key difference, in that regressive ideas are now lauded by the state.

“The funny thing is I grew up in a community where we already experienced having that one family member, an uncle who was a little too conservative, who would get mad if women in the family went out or they wore clothes he considered inappropriate,” explains Pashtana Durrani, founder of Learn Afghanistan, which runs underground classes for girls banned from school. “We know that type in all South Asian communities”.

But now, Durrani suggests, these attitudes are “celebrated” in public — even as they’re seeping into formerly liberal, urban areas too. Given the already-shocking rates of gender violence in Afghanistan, this could have disastrous consequences, as whole new cohorts of boys grow up thinking that women are there to submit.

There are, to be sure, glimmers of hope, and Durrani’s Learn Afghanistan project is one. Operating covertly, it follows the pre-2021 curriculum, educating some 400 students in everything from history and geography to robotics, AI and even feminist literature. At one point, Durrani’s team held discreet lessons in person, but Taliban crackdowns forced them to go almost entirely online. It’s a move that poses problems all its own, obliging Learn Afghanistan to invest in new laptops, and the solar-powered batteries to run them during power cuts.

That’s better than nothing — but hardly enough to stem the extremist tide. Indeed, though Manizha says her family tried to complain about her children’s curriculum, they were dismissed out of hand. “We can’t raise our voice because we know the outcome could hurt the kids and also the family members within the community,” she says, adding that she works to counter the Taliban’s educational extremism once her children return home every evening.

That might explain Manizha’s remarkable optimism in light of everything that’s happened. “We are Muslim,” she says, “and we will be Muslim with or without the Taliban, and are capable of teaching our kids about Islam. Everything comes to an end eventually. People won’t always tolerate this form of extremism.” Perhaps — but, for the moment, the Taliban and their madrasas remain.

Known in Spain as El Pelirrojo (“the Ginger”), Suri was not the sort of ginger jihadi Britain produced, the kind who chased you around Whitechapel distributing leaflets proclaiming “sharia-controlled zones”. Instead, he belonged more in a Joseph Conrad novel. Living a quiet life in Neasden, he fused Islamist ideology, Marxism and modern insurgent tactics into a worldview whose legacy has colored countless later terrorist campaigns. For while bin Laden became famous for the hierarchy of al-Qaeda, Suri quite deliberately, wanted its opposite. As such, modern violent Islamism, with its lone-wolf protagonists and random stabbings, takes from Suri, not bin Laden, even as the Syrian’s legacy continues to loom large.

Born in 1958, into a conservative Aleppan family with a strong Sufi tradition, Suri came of age as Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father and Syrian dictator from 1970, was tightening his grip on power — and crushing the Islamist opposition as he went. As a young man, Suri joined an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood known as the Fighting Vanguard, and which concluded that the only way to overthrow the regime was through armed struggle. Trained in explosives, Suri was part of a campaign of bombings and assassinations against the Assad regime, culminating in a massacre of army cadets in 1979.

The confrontation reached its climax in 1982, when the Fighting Vanguard, joined by local supporters, rose against the regime in the western Syrian city of Hama. Hafez’s brother Refaat crushed the rebellion with  brutal force, effectively ending the Muslim Brotherhood as an organized force inside Syria and scattering the survivors of the Fighting Vanguard. Many, including Suri, made their way to Afghanistan to fight the USSR.

Suri found himself in Peshawar, in north-west Pakistan, alongside Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian cleric often described as the godfather of global jihad. In the rugged mountains abutting Afghanistan, he also met a wealthy Saudi benefactor — Osama bin Laden. According to Suri’s own account, he spent three years training bin Laden and other so-called “Afghan Arabs” before traveling to Madrid, acquiring Spanish nationality by way of marriage, then eventually settling in London in 1994.

In the Nineties, London had become an unlikely haven for Islamists, to the late 20th-century Muslim world what Paris, Istanbul, Cairo and Beirut had been to political dissidents in the 19th. The city’s cosmopolitan character made it the intellectual center of the Anglophone Muslim world, teeming with bookshops, activists, Afghan war veterans and assorted other political exiles — all trying to make sense of their movement’s future.

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It was in London, too, that Islamists began developing a bewildering range of political philosophies. At one end stood Tunisia’s Ennahda movement, looking to Britain’s parliamentary democracy for inspiration. At the other were those who dreamed of planting the black flag over 10 Downing Street. It was in this extraordinary milieu that Suri started turning the lessons of Syria and Afghanistan into a theory of global insurgency.

That theory marked a radical departure from the way Islam’s martial tradition had long been understood. Traditionally, anti-colonial figures in places like Algeria had conceived of jihad as a form of resistance. To them, noble means led to noble ends. The rules were simple: the enemy was the Western invader. No women. No children. No priests. Only combatants.

Suri threw those assumptions aside. Instead, he asked a wholly different set of questions, the sort that anarchists and Marxists wrestled with in the last century. Does terror achieve political aims? How should asymmetric warfare be waged? Are Muslim governments legitimate targets, as the Algerian military junta had become for Islamist militants? In many ways, Suri reimagined jihad into what the American writer Robert Taber called “war of the flea”: a strategy of guerrilla warfare, terror and asymmetry designed for the weak against the strong.

For a brief moment, following a series of terror attacks in France, Suri was noticed by MI5. But that was about it. The British security services largely turned a blind eye to Islamist activity throughout the Nineties, partly because they had yet to grasp the problem of blowback. There was also an understanding, as the infamous Abu Hamza of Finsbury Park Mosque once put it, that Islamist dissidents were free to agitate against their own governments so long as they did not bite the hand that fed them.

There was another calculation too. Some of these dissidents might one day overthrow the regimes they opposed, so it was better to keep them close than drive them underground. Indeed, some of the sons and daughters of Syrian Muslim Brotherhood exiles, who themselves grew up in London, are now advising the government in Damascus. Suri, however, always had far more global ambitions. In 1991, he attended the Popular Arab and Islamic Congress in Sudan, where he mingled with everyone from Hezbollah militants to Afghan mujahideen to Carlos the Jackal. Another attendee recalls meeting Suri there, describing him as intensely angry and confrontational.

Back in London, Suri helped publish the influential Islamist magazine Al-Ansar, publishing letters from leading jihadist figures, including al-Qaeda’s future deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri. Suri also arranged for Western journalists to travel to Afghanistan to interview bin Laden, becoming one of the unlikely intermediaries between Britain’s Islamist exile scene and the emerging leadership of al-Qaeda. Suri was also an advocate of the Taliban, and its leader Mullah Omar, encouraging bin Laden to fall in line and preserve the nascent emirate.

By the late Nineties, Suri had returned to Afghanistan, settling in the outskirts of Kabul. Talha Ahsan, a former jihadist and Dulwich College alumnus who met Suri at this time, remembers him as “one of the smartest people” he had ever encountered. His vision foreshadowed practices that later became commonplace among groups such as ISIS. As Ahsan tells me, Suri believed in recruiting criminals, men with the courage to do things that bourgeois kids like himself could not. It was precisely these sorts of men, alienated from ordinary life, who would later carry out many of the atrocities that scarred Europe during ISIS’s heyday.

Suri’s 1600-page magnum opus, The Global Islamic Resistance Call, which appeared online in 2004, was a hard-nosed articulation of what modern jihad should look like. In it, he anticipated the lone wolf and the autonomous cell, each operating without a rigid hierarchy. The destruction of the Fighting Vanguard had convinced Suri that formal organizations were too easily dismantled. Jihad, then, had to become leaderless, to exist beyond any single group. In modern parlance, he wanted the fight to go viral.

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To that extent, Suri was not opposed to the objectives behind 9/11 — so much as the way al-Qaeda was organized. He well knew that charismatic leaders could be hunted down, leaving the movement in disarray. Bin Laden’s death and the subsequent decline of al-Qaeda, followed years later by ISIS’s struggles after the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, appeared to prove him right. All the while, Suri argued that jihadist organizations wasted too much energy on theological infighting, instead of concentrating on what he saw as their wider struggle against the West and its allies.

Though Suri remained in the fringes during his lifetime, his ideas nonetheless seeped into the Islamist discourse via the internet and radical preachers. There are doubts as to how far he masterminded the Madrid bombings of 2004 and 7/7, yet both attacks were certainly Suri-esque. “[In my teachings] I have mentioned vital and legitimate targets to be hit in the enemy’s countries,” he remarked later. “Among those targets that I specifically mentioned as examples was the London Underground. [Targeting this] was and still is the aim.”

Beyond outrages like 7/7, Suri’s decentralized approach helped inspire other atrocities: including Nidal Hasan’s shooting at Fort Hood, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s attempt to bring down an American airliner in 2009. The countless stabbings, vehicle attacks and small-scale acts of terror carried out over the next 15 years would become the most enduring and disturbing expressions of Suri’s ideas.

Suri himself spent his last years hiding from the Pakistani authorities, before being captured and transferred to a Syrian prison around 2005. Widely believed to have died there, he disappeared into the same system of repression that had shaped him decades earlier.  But his ideas did not die with him. For if bin Laden is remembered as the face of global jihad, Suri may prove the more consequential figure in the long run, especially as warfare is becoming increasingly asymmetric and unconventional. Besides all that, the Syrian who once edited magazines in London, and took British journalists to meet bin Laden, bequeathed his successors something more durable than an organization. He left behind a method, one that continues to echo wherever individuals kill not in the name of a group — but, in vivid Conradesque fashion, in the name of an idea.

It was 2013, her first ever march. A few months before, she’d discovered Tommy Robinson on Facebook. A few months before that, Islamists had murdered Lee Rigby outside his barracks in Woolwich — and something happened to mum. An anger exploded, a flashpoint I couldn’t get my head round. Where did it come from? How did she go from a shy Cumbrian farm girl to a 60-year old gran marching with an EDL splinter group too Right-wing even for Robinson? “Sandy,” their leader Paul Pitt once told her at a protest in Rotherham, “You’ve got more balls than most men.” I mean, the man had a point. Sandra Wilding was feisty. She cared. She had always cared.

Mum had been a carer for over four decades. She’s cared for the elderly, for dementia sufferers and adults with complex needs. She’d been attacked; kicked, bitten, punched; had her hair yanked out, a sink thrown at her head. But she loved her clients and her clients loved her, clung to her warm, no-nonsense practicality as their own lives unraveled. They all knew if it came down to it, she’d have their backs. When an elderly client died, mum would gently wash and dress them in their favorite outfits, pick a flower from the garden and press it into their folded hands. “The least a body deserves,” she told me once.

People deserved dignity and respect, she believed. You didn’t abandon them. That word there — abandonment — was the key to understanding mum’s anger. It didn’t explode overnight. It took decades. Mum was one of eight, brought up on a farm in the Eden Valley in Cumbria, a lush agricultural valley that sits between the backbone of the Pennines and the messy jumble of the Lake District fells. Grandad was a farm laborer, on the bottom rung of the rural ladder. It was a hard life and the burden of eight kids and rural poverty eventually took its toll. Nana kept running away, leaving mum and grandad to hold the farm and the family together.

Rural poverty breeds a hard self-reliance, a sort of bootstrap fatalism where the political solidarity fostered in urban industrial England can feel like a world away. What use is collective bargaining against bad weather? The seasons don’t give a shit about solidarity. You survived alone against forces bigger than yourself. Winter was kept out with blankets stuffed under doors and draped across sofas. There was never enough money for food, but there was milk from the house cow, eggs from the chickens and always potatoes. When the flour ran out, mum would use animal feed from the mealhouse to make pastry. All that beef in the byre but none for the table. But you made do.

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Mum wasn’t political. Not at first. She spent much of the Seventies on the dole, bringing me up in and out of stormy marriages while working-class power crumbled under Thatcher. In 1985, she bought our council house through Right to Buy, but when we fell behind on payments, loan sharks circled and mum escaped by marrying a soldier who promised stability and security.

That’s when things started getting political. In 1993, mum and my siblings were posted to Lisanelly barracks in Omagh, while I stayed in England for university. One day outside the barracks, a group of men spotted mum’s British number plate as she was returning to camp. They started shouting abuse. She jumped out of her car to confront them as soldiers roared at her to get back inside. That was the moment she quickly realized she couldn’t come here and mind her own business. Her very existence was political.

Inside camp, she ran the barracks pub, watching young working-class lads coming back from close ops patrols with haunted, hunted looks. 1993 was one of the bloodiest years in the Troubles. Mum felt a maternal protectiveness and a defensive, brittle pride. It pulled everything into focus at once: her class, her Protestantism, her Britishness.

Twenty years later, when mum learned of Lee Rigby’s murder outside the gates of his barracks, it felt personal. Memories of Northern Ireland. Another young lad abandoned by the state he had served. But this time, to be hated in your own country. When Tommy Robinson said they’ll come for your daughters with grooming gangs and your sons with meat cleavers, it sent her marching over Tower Bridge singing “I am England till I die”.

London was just the start. Mum traveled to demos across the country: Rochdale, Luton, Bradford. Her fellow marchers wore “FCK ISIS” t-shirts and called each other patriots. She went to Rotherham twice, protesting the state’s handling of the grooming gangs and its abandonment of vulnerable white girls. But on her third visit to Rotherham, in 2015, she never made it into the town center. Police shut down the road until mum’s minibus was the only vehicle on it, boxed in by police cars. Every time her bus neared a slip road, another police car shot ahead to block them. “It was all a bit Benny Hill,” mum laughed. The whole operation had cost the police £750,000. “Don’t you think,” mum asked me later, that “money wasted on escorting a minibus of pensioners could have been better spent?”

At the time, I watched her drift into far-Right protest groups with a kind of shocked bemusement. I was a documentary TV producer, telling other people’s stories, while mum was out there on the streets. I watched her rage harden, her worldview reinforced with every news headline, every anti-fascist screaming in her face. Things got sticky when she started with the “Defund the BBC” posts. “Mum,” I asked her, “do you want me to be jobless?”

I also asked if sharing Facebook posts about Muslims was racist. “Islam isn’t a race!” she snapped back. When white supremacists chanted the notorious “14 words” under the white cliffs, at a protest she attended in Dover, I asked if she really believed it all. “Not everything,” she replied, losing the courage of her convictions. “But I do believe we will be a minority one day.”

A protest in 2016 helped me finally understand her sense of loss. Howe Barracks, on the edge of Canterbury, had been my family’s home in the Nineties, the first place mum and my siblings finally put down roots. It was a safe, close-knit community, filled with quiet cul-de-sacs and pretty gold-brick houses and cherry trees. Then came the cuts. The barracks was abandoned and left to rot. Now it would house London’s most vulnerable — migrant families — while locals missed out because social housing operated in a weird market economy where the richest councils could outbid for homes anywhere. So mum pinned her Union Jack on the chain-link fence outside her abandoned home, and raised her fingers in a “V for victory” salute at the local-news photographer. At the time, I was making a film about the housing crisis, and it felt like our universes had aligned. A few months later Brexit happened, much to half the country’s surprise. Not mine though. I knew mum.

Then, three years after that, Covid. I begged mum to quit her care job, to shield. She had a bad heart. But she refused.“I’ll die in harness, standing up,” she laughed. But care workers were twice as likely to die from Covid as the rest of the population. Social care, once run by local councils, was now almost fully privatized: a system built on a shaky structure of debt and faceless offshore companies exploiting minimum-wage workers like mum. I didn’t trust those companies to protect her or the people in her care.

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One Thursday, a few weeks into lockdown, mum left the house to start her night shift. She lived on an ex-council estate. Others were coming out of their houses too, and gathering on the overgrown green, abandoned after the council stopped maintaining it. People smiled at each other over the tatty wasteland and started clapping. They were clapping for carers and they were clapping for themselves because they were the ones keeping it all going.

They were the low-paid and unskilled, the gig-economy grafters, the left-behinds, the precariat: an atomized working class who had built the country, only to watch their inheritance —  power, security, a stake in the national story — sold off. Mum felt the tears welling. It wasn’t so long ago that people were calling her fascist scum on the street. Now, for a few minutes, the country stood and clapped for people like her. And for those few minutes, she stood still and felt it and just let the stupid tears come; hot tears not of anger, now, but of pride. But it didn’t last. Britain clapped on Thursday and forgot on Friday. And, 10 years on from Brexit, that sense of abandonment hasn’t gone away.

Whatever happens in Clacton, the rise of Farage and Reform shouldn’t surprise us, not really. People like mum are still looking for someone to speak to them in the language of loyalty and belonging, to pull them back into our fraying national story. Someone to tell them they are not far-Right for feeling discarded. And if Reform finally wins? Chances are commentators will probably treat it as something sudden, like an earthquake. But for families like mine, the ground has been shaking for decades: in abandoned farms and barracks, privatized care homes, hollowed out communities, the slow erosion of the dignity and security that work once promised.

I wish I could tell you mum voted Reform in the recent elections. Not because of my own political leanings — but because it would mean she would still be here. But we lost her to cancer and a broken NHS a year and a half ago. She was a proud, passionate, loyal woman trying to muddle her way through the mess of modern Britain. She died at home with all us around her. My sisters dressed her in her favorite summery dress and denim jacket. I placed a flower in her folded hands.

***

These Wild English: A family, a class, a country on fire is published by Profile Books.

The prisoner sprawled on the floor was no ordinary inmate. In 2003, during a counter-terrorism raid in Manchester, Bourgass stabbed four police officers; Detective Constable Stephen Oake later died of his wounds. Convicted of murder and given a life sentence with a minimum term of 22 years, he was later handed another 17-year sentence for his part in the so-called “ricin plot”. He was, in every sense, a defining figure of that early wave of al-Qaeda-linked offenders.

Two decades later, Bourgass is reported to be on the cusp of his first full parole review. The precise timings are unclear, but the decision may already have been made; Bourgass might walk out of prison as early as this month. The Parole Board’s role is not to punish retrospective horror, but to weigh current risk: it must assess the man before them, not the man he was. And yet, as Bourgass’s minimum tariff is now expiring, the country is left with a more uncomfortable question: what does “rehabilitation” really mean when the beliefs behind the violence are so hard to change?

I pose that question not as a distant commentator, but as someone who spent 17 years inching through every category of the prison system, after being convicted of murder in 2005. Along the way, I lived alongside some of the most dangerous men in the country and, eventually, sat before a stern-faced parole panel myself.

The Parole Board is one of the few parts of the justice system that still works with forensic calm. It takes nobody’s word for “change”. Before any file reaches a panel, the Public Protection Casework Section (PPCS), inside His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS), manages the referral and compiles the core dossier, coordinating the required reports from prison and probation. The Board then conducts a first-stage review of that dossier, and decides whether the case can be settled on the papers alone or needs an oral hearing, with witnesses called and challenged.

But terrorism cases expose the profound limitations of this process. Everything is documented, but not everything is meaningful. The ERG22+ risk tool, for instance, measures behavioral and psychological indicators linked to extremism — factors such as grievance, identity needs, susceptibility to influence and capability for violence. It can, therefore, help flag patterns, but can never reveal what someone truly believes. The Healthy Identity Intervention (HII), meanwhile, is designed to challenge extremist thinking and help offenders build up a non-violent identity. Yet its success depends entirely on honesty, while ideologically committed prisoners can learn the jargon without ever changing their core beliefs. And that is the central difficulty: the system is designed to reward behavioral compliance, not to test ideology’s durability. The file may glow; the risk may remain.

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I saw early signs of that tension when Bourgass first entered Frankland. Days after he was felled in that dinner line, he went looking to settle scores and picked the wrong target — a 21-year-old who had once been kept in a cage used for Charlie Bronson. As he made his move, the younger man clamped his hands around Bourgass’s head and bit his face. Bourgass was quickly moved to the wing next door, but the atmosphere remained tense.

Months later, Bourgass’s cell was set ablaze after claims that he and a handful of fellow Islamists had boasted they would “run the wing” once enough of “the brothers” arrived. What followed was sharp and ugly: a white prisoner was slashed across the face, followed by a small riot that left several prisoners and staff injured, one officer with a broken arm.

Those early years should have been a moment of clarity. Instead, the danger was consistently downplayed, and a new dynamic took root. With similar flare-ups happening across Category A prisons, there soon emerged what prisoners called “the brotherhood”: less an organization than a network, one fusing Islamist extremism and grievance with the gang discipline of existing prisoner groups.

In practice, these Islamist groups came to operate with a subtle but unmistakable authority, their days revolving around small acts of domination. They often isolated themselves from non-Muslim inmates, for instance, deciding who cooks in a jail’s communal kitchen. Pressure often arrived as a “friendly chat”, an offer of protection, a meal placed on a new arrival’s bed or even a copy of the Quran — gestures that looked charitable but carried an unspoken price. Refusal meant isolation, threats, or the quiet sense of eyes following you around the wing, sometimes ending in violence.

For some men it was easier to blend into the group — to “convert” for safety — than stand outside it. Their routines blended the swagger of a jailhouse thug with the absolutism of jihadist doctrine: instilling the most literal interpretations of scripture, holding cell sermons, debating conflicts in the Middle East, always framed as proof that the West was at war with Islam. The impressionable gravitated toward this intensity; the harder cases used it to justify enforcing discipline. Ideology gave the violence meaning; violence gave the ideology weight. In the dark corners of a prison cell, simple grievances hardened into hate.

And that ideology didn’t stay contained on a single wing. The brotherhood’s strength lay in its reach — often vengeful. A slight against a brotherhood-aligned prisoner in one jail might be “answered” months later in another, by different hands of the same network. I witnessed the results of that cold logic when the man who had floored Bourgass arrived at HMP Long Lartin. A decoy question at his door — “Where you from, mate?” — before a brutal rush from behind. He woke with stab wounds dotted across his face. “I was lucky not to lose an eye,” he told me later.

To anyone who hasn’t lived it, this sounds like exaggeration. It isn’t. In 2016, former prison governor Ian Acheson, in his report on prisons, told ministers to separate the most dangerous ideological influencers — men who radicalized others or used violence to enforce Islamist discipline — into dedicated units. Jonathan Hall KC’s 2022 review went further. He found that the service had long under-appreciated Islamist gang-type activity and the “perverse esteem” enjoyed by terrorist prisoners, noting how “brotherhood” groupings dominated wings and exerted coercive control. Both Acheson and Hall urged governors to take clear ownership of terrorist risk.

The uncomfortable reality is this: poorly managed prisons can entrench ideology more readily than they can challenge it. When a group holds authority and the cultural high ground on a particular wing — through numbers, status, and a ready-made sense of belonging — the incentive to change almost inevitably vanishes. Hall’s point, and Acheson’s before him, is that treating this as mere “prison culture” is how control is lost — and how the rest of us inherit the risk.

Bourgass himself later spent months in segregation at HMP Whitemoor amid concerns about his influence over others. In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that parts of his extended segregation had been unlawful on procedural grounds: decisions to keep him isolated beyond the initial 72-hour limit had been repeatedly renewed by prison managers rather than the Secretary of State, as the law requires, while he had also not been given enough information to meaningfully challenge these decisions. They might sound arcane, but these details matter: it shows how long the service has wrestled with the question of what to do with ideological leaders who make already-violent places more dangerous. That tension now sits at the center of Bourgass’s parole bid.

A case like this rarely reaches a parole hearing without formal evidence of risk reduction. As always, PPCS coordinates the referral and dossier; on life sentences, the Parole Board review begins as the minimum tariff nears, and considers whether the case should go to an oral hearing. Yet terrorism cases unsurprisingly don’t sit in a silo: counter-terrorism police and MI5 both contribute, and any release plan runs through what’s known as a “Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangement”. Parole management, for its part, falls to the Probation Service’s National Security Division — a specialist unit created to handle the most complex, high-risk cases — if the Board agrees to release a convicted terrorist.

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Paperwork, though, is not certainty. I learned that on my first day out of prison, when I helped restrain Usman Khan on London Bridge, an act for which I received a Royal Prerogative of Mercy and later a Queen’s Gallantry Medal. Khan, too, had “done his rehabilitation work”, had sat on a de-radicalization program in custody, and was under tight license conditions. But none of this was enough to prevent the murders of Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones. As the coroner’s subsequent report lays out, a man can look “compliant” yet remain ideologically primed.

That is the paradox the Parole Board now faces with Bourgass, if it hasn’t faced it already. Ideology disrupts the usual calculus. A stable workplace, supportive housing, a curfew, an electronic tag, a conscientious probation officer — these are all important. But they do not neutralize an extremist belief system. HII may genuinely shift thinking for some, but for the most committed, it becomes a vocabulary lesson, a guide on what to say, not a mechanism for change. The Board knows that and will probe it.

When Bourgass is ultimately released, the next question becomes whether the state can safely manage him outside. Probation will model scenarios; police will develop contingencies; MI5 will again contribute its view. But someone must ultimately sign a license and believe it will hold. Risk can be managed or mismanaged; it cannot be eliminated. And even if release were judged manageable, the question of deportation introduces a different kind of difficulty. Terrorist offenders like Bourgass, who entered the UK unlawfully, cannot simply be removed at the end of their sentence. Deportation requires the receiving state’s agreement, and a court must be satisfied there is no real risk of torture or degrading treatment on their return. Algeria has repeatedly resisted forced returns, and British courts scrutinize diplomatic assurances with caution, often finding them insufficient.

My hunch? Bourgass is unlikely to be freed on his first attempt. The Parole Board tends to be more conservative in cases where ideology intersects with violence, and where deportation complications muddy the supervision picture. But whether now or the next time, his return to public life is no longer a distant abstraction. It is approaching.

And that is where the deeper national problem lies. For years, parts of the high-security prison estate have served as incubators, raising up the most committed ideologues and silencing more moderate Muslim voices. The brotherhood, for its part, understood this dynamic long before the institution recognized what was happening. Until we confront that internal culture — not with euphemism, but with honesty about who commands influence on prison landings — we will keep returning to cases like Bourgass: underplaying the risks, and hoping they don’t spill back onto the streets.

In 2005, the author of this piece was convicted of murder, and sentenced to 17 years in prison. In 2019, he was was involved in stopping the London Bridge terror attack, and is now a writer and speaker. 

In its report on the 2024 summer riots, His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary quizzed senior officers on their intelligence strategy. As shops were looted and cops dodged bricks, they confessed to “writing the manual as it happened”. This is new. Historically speaking, British police were masters at investigating domestic extremism, something they achieved by asking three fairly straightforward questions. What is the issue motivating a protest group? How likely is there to be wider support for that issue? Who are the agitators seeking to weaponize the issue?

It’s an approach that worked well in the past. Public order and counter-extremism intelligence helped police environmental and animal rights extremism in the Nineties and early 2000s. It pinpointed potential IRA sympathizers inside radical Leftist organizations. Later, investigators established links between criminal groups and extremism, encompassing everything from football hooligans and the far-Right to urban street gangs and Islamists.

I witnessed these successes myself. Monitoring Belfast flights from Heathrow in the mid-Nineties, I remember stopping a nervous-looking man from Andersonstown in west Belfast. I telephoned the RUC. “Ah, that fella? He did six years in the Maze for firearms,” said the Special Branch officer down the line, who knew which pubs he drank in, the school he attended and the registration number of his car. “He’s also got size 11 feet,” he added.

To give a sense of how much things have changed, consider the example of “Stand Up to Racism” (SUTR), the most prolific pro-migrant organization in Epping and elsewhere. However harmless its middle-class activists may seem, the group is closely linked to the Socialist Workers Party, itself a sect of avowed revolutionary Trotskyists. That, in theory, should mean the activist’s motives should be suspect — Trotskyists, after all, are committed to undermining oppressive state organs, using any cause du jour as their weapon.

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These days, unfortunately, representatives of activist groups are virtual police consultants. For example, His Majesty’s Inspectorate included analysis by the controversial group Hope Not Hate in its post-Southport report. More cynical officers see such relationships as anti-officer Trojan Horses, welcomed through the gates by spineless senior officers. The firebrand activist Lee Jasper, for instance, was once famously made a policing adviser by Ken Livingstone. I remember officers joking how inviting him inside Scotland Yard was akin to putting Dracula in charge of a blood bank.

That institutional closeness, in turn, eventually created a ghost in the machine, one which has calcified into allegations of two-tier policing. Certainly, Reform activists are unlikely to be invited into any independent advisory groups. In my experience, ambitious senior officers are more likely to listen to the advice of media-savvy and politically connected advisers than their own officers.

Ideology, then, is clearly an important factor here — yet it’s far from the only issue. After all, the initial retreat from domestic intelligence-gathering was driven by circumstance. From 9/11, officers focused almost exclusively on jihadism. Then, when budgets were squeezed post-2008, police began culling their public order intelligence units, preferring to monitor social media instead.

Yet as the kids-glove approach to groups like the SUTR implies, it’s hard here not to return to the question of ideology. “Islam and terrorists are two words that do not go together,” proclaimed Deputy Assistant Commissioner Brian Paddick, when I was a Special Branch officer at the time of the 7/7 bombings. Yes, we raised our eyebrows too. Nonetheless, Paddick’s words were consistent with the establishment narrative around the sanctity of British multiculturalism. A decade or so later, London’s mayor famously suggested terrorism was “part and parcel” of living in a global city. This gaslighting spawned a counter-narrative: one of two-tier policing.

This, it goes without saying, augurs badly for British police forces, which now answer to a political class openly sympathetic to the sentiments underpinning radical activism. It hardly helps, of course, that shorn of its long heritage of investigating domestic extremism, officers are increasingly taking a more broad-brushed approach, with forces seduced by the technological panopticon of social media aggregation and sentiment monitoring. Rather than expensively and intrusively snooping on the hardcore minority seeking to ferment unrest, they’ve decided it’s somehow fairer to monitor everyone.

And so the securocracy creates new definitions of extremism, such as “cultural nationalism“, or incels, or the other phantoms haunting Whitehall’s imagination. This, of course, ignores the more compelling issues, the ones politicians find intractable. Ethnic tension. Direct action. Sabotage. An era of harassment and violence, segueing into terrorism, all occurring during a time of technological plenty, one where would-be urban guerillas have cheap access to drones, encrypted communications and AI.

What’s clear, then, is that police chiefs must urgently reconfigure their national intelligence-gathering capabilities, as the Met’s Sir Mark Rowley himself lately acknowledged. Nor do we even need to grasp back into the depths of time here. Before the Metropolitan Police disbanded its Special Branch, in 2006, there were detectives who specialized in monitoring extremists within London’s diaspora communities. They excelled at the painstaking work of cultivating and maintaining discreet relationships with religious and political leaders. Situations were diffused. Disorder was averted. Ringleaders were identified. And cards, to put it bluntly, were marked.

Now, Britain’s non-existent borders means new arrivals import a smorgasbord of causes, disputes and feuds. That’s even as police intelligence-gathering activity — especially surveillance and recruiting informants — often invites allegations of bullying and racism. I remember when Left-wing groups, sometimes endorsed by radical MPs, supported militants like the IRA and the Kurdish PKK, and were bitterly opposed to police monitoring their activities. A more recent example would be the furore created when UK BLM supporters were approached to offer confidential information on protest activity after George Floyd’s murder.

Senior officers, understanding the nature of the beast, carried on regardless. The uncomfortable truth is that beating domestic extremism means monitoring radical activism — but not necessarily criminal activity. Such grey zones are the terrain in which extremists hide. In the late Nineties, far-Right nail bomber David Copeland passed through the radical, but not illegal, British National Party. The comparison is far from perfect, of course, but a more contemporary example might be activists vicariously linked to the newly proscribed Palestine Action. This would identify thousands of people sympathetic to “the cause” involved in entirely lawful organizations, and it would be wrong (not to mention impossible) to track them all.

Understanding the law is important here too. In the dry language of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, police must be mindful of intelligence-gathering for reasons of “collateral intrusion”. This is partly why senior officers became overreliant on open-source social media monitoring: surveilling the public online is less politically risky and resource-intensive than focusing on the hardcore. That surely explains why police are wrong-footed when activists on e-scooters cause havoc inside critical military facilities. As social unrest increases, anyway, lawmakers should accept unlawful political action has always rubbed shoulders, albeit uneasily, with lawful activism, from the Suffragettes to Irish Republicanism.

And though such intensive surveillance is obviously expensive, it’s arguably still cheaper than the alternative. After all, public order policing is eye-wateringly expensive. Between October 2023 and February 2025, policing pro-Palestinian demonstrations in London has cost the Met over £53 million. How much would a rolling campaign of public disorder cost? Imagine disturbances occurring — everywhere, constantly. Apart from being tragic on its own terms, this normalization of political violence would quickly bankrupt the state.

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For the police, one answer to this dilemma is reassuringly simple: local policing, the alleged core principle of British law enforcement. Beat cops are an essential part of the police’s early warning system, especially now forces find themselves with a newly radicalized, racially aware faction to consider: disaffected and underprivileged white communities. That’s especially true when they lack the religious links and clan networks found elsewhere in Britain; in places like Epping, protests are generally spontaneous and “leaderless”. Yet as they say in Belfast, nobody hears “the dogs on the street” bark as quickly as a switched-on copper.

What’s clear now is that a new approach is urgently required, one where gauging potential disorder is routine. Again, Northern Ireland hoves into view. During the Troubles, the Royal Ulster Constabulary embedded local special branch teams into police stations, purely to identify subjects of interest. Was the tactic controversial and bitterly contested? Yes. Was it effective? Absolutely.

Not that this is just a question of institutional change. If they were cannier, senior police officers might recognize how the system is rigged against them. They might also be less inclined to tip-toe around the elite’s luxury beliefs. After all, they remain constables, swearing an oath to keep the peace without “fear or favor”. And, if the current crop of chief officers, Linkedin technocrats with warrant cards, aren’t up to the challenge? Sack them. Keep indulging failure, though, and the uniforms on our streets might eventually be less hi-viz yellow and more camouflage and khaki.

But the foreigners were there all right, as I found when I met a busload of Uyghur fighters visiting the horrific Sednaya Prison. They were al-Sharaa’s most disciplined fighters and crucial in his rise to power. Six months on, however, the very fighters who delivered him victory now threaten his bid for international legitimacy. For if the Trump administration has just announced that it will no longer designate al-Sharaa’s group as a terrorist threat, Syria’s new president may yet be unable to contain the foreign extremists who brought him to power — without plunging his country, and the wider region, back into blood-stained chaos.

When the Syrian uprising began, back in 2011, foreign fighters Instagrammed their “five-star jihad” to the world, a life filled with swanky villas and the latest gaming consoles. There were tens of thousands, then, from all over the world, from red-bearded Chechens to diminutive Maldivians. The survivors now have beards flecked with grey, and wander through the Umayyad Mosque pushing prams, as their wives snap photos in fake Gucci shades. Perhaps al-Sharaa, or just life, had tamed them.

But given how jihadist foreign fighters had dominated the news cycle and occupied the nightmares of Western policy makers for over a decade, beheading journalists in Raqqa and launching terror attacks on European streets — their very presence in Syria needed a response. They couldn’t be left to rural obscurity in the desert. When Donald Trump met al-Sharaa in Saudi Arabia, back in May, no wonder the Americans gave him an ultimatum: get the foreign fighters out, and crushing US sanctions will be lifted.

Trump’s offer was immediately celebrated in Syria. Billboards all over Damascus thanked the president for finally lifting the sanctions. Fair enough: Syrians are tired of the crushing poverty sanctions have brought, with shoppers forced to carry around bundles of Syrian pounds in black plastic bags. Yet amid the jubilation, there were questions too. Whatever the benefits of taking Trump’s deal, would al-Sharaa really sell out the men who stood by him through the hardest of times? No wonder Western media speculated that the American offer might prompt yet more bloodshed, with the Washington Post suggesting that al-Sharaa’s foreign fighters “pose a profound challenge to his political survival”.

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But as the political analyst Jerome Drevon points out, how does one expel the foreign fighters to their homelands when they’re clearly not wanted there? European capitals, after all, are hardly likely to take their jihadis back, given both the security threat and the populist far-Right sentiment sweeping the continent. In any case, many of these foreign fighters have no desire to return to Europe. Many face long prison sentences for terror-related offenses, and even those who don’t suffer long-term surveillance and social exclusion. Female returnees also aren’t able to access basic services for their children, thanks to the absence of legal documentation. That, in turn, means they become wholly reliant on state handouts.

And if these foreign fighters cannot stay in Syria or go to Europe, that could lead them to places where the state is weak: Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan. In a worst-case scenario, in fact, they might be roused from quiet domesticity and join Ahmed al-Assir brigade, a newly formed Lebanese jihadi group that’s actively recruiting. Or, perhaps, they instead lend their support to Free Masked Youth, a new opposition group intent on bringing down the house of Saud? Or, buoyed by the fall of Damascus, they could even start agitating in Gaza and Jordan.

In other words, then, their departure from Syria could mean foreign jihadis scattering embers across a region already primed to burn. And, in such volatile circumstances, it will be these very same foreigners who’ll likely emerge as the victors, as they’ve become immensely adept at surviving for over a decade of savagery. Letting them go could turn them into jihadi Ronin — masterless and wholly unpredictable. And no one wants that.

Yet the truth, as one anonymous Syrian government insider tells me, is that “everyone is really exaggerating the ‘burden’ of foreign fighters”. In many ways, after all, most of these people have already signed up to al-Sharaa’s vision. He has happily given many foreigners high-ranking roles in the new Syrian military, while others work as civil servants. No less important, those who don’t like his vision know that it’s not worth taking him on. Certainly, Donald Trump himself saw something he liked, referring to him as an “attractive, tough guy” as if he were a UFC fighter.

By implication, many of the foreign fighters still in Syria have accepted al-Sharaa’s more moderate politics, too. Taken together, US envoy Thomas Barrack’s recent comments — that keeping the foreign fighters within the Syrian state project rather than excluding them — surely make sense. And if that wasn’t enough, the Americans have history on their side too: from Northern Ireland to the Balkans, bringing extremists into the political fold can bring results.

Then there’s al-Sharaa himself. Immensely affected by the Palestinian issue and US intervention in the Middle East, he was essentially radicalized and travelled to fight the Americans in Iraq. It is even said that he fought in the brutal battle of Fallujah, when militants killed dozens of US troops in 2004.

According to one former associate, however, al-Sharaa “joined al-Qaeda because it was the only group that took in foreigners”. And while he received an intimate education in insurgency, his experiences also turned al-Sharaa into a skilled politician. As one insider who knows him puts it, he’s alternatively known as “Machiavellian” and “muwaffaq” — someone who knows just how much to push and get away with it.

It was these attributes that allowed him to emerge on top. In 2013, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the sometime ISIS head, tried to reassert his authority over al-Sharaa’s group. Al-Sharaa refused, and an intra-jihadi conflict duly broke out in northern Syria. With al-Sharaa’s back to the wall, he outfoxed al-Baghdadi by swearing allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri: Baghdadi’s boss. Al-Zawahiri backed al-Sharaa’s cause, and many foreign jihadists rallied to his standard.

At some point around 2015, meanwhile, al-Sharaa realized that no state in the Middle East could flourish with a transnational jihadist vision. Certainly, the downfall of the Islamic State testified to that. Of course, that didn’t mean that al-Sharaa had suddenly turned into an Arab liberal who’d happily crack open the arak. Far from it: he remains an Islamist and has not abandoned the idea of jihad. What he has done, however, is keep the bit that serves as a vehicle for national liberation and defense, while discarding the suggestion that Muslims are obliged to overthrow any government that doesn’t implement Islamic law.

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This ideological clarity was accompanied by a series of remarkable power grabs. After 2016, al-Sharaa renounced al-Qaeda and formed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). By 2020, what al-Qaeda called “the betrayal” was complete. Al-Sharaa had crushed all his former jihadi friends, while also mobilizing his band of well-disciplined Uyghur fighters against Ahrar al-Sham, the dominant rebel faction in northern Syria. By the time he set up a civilian government in northern Syria, then, al-Qaeda’s foreign fighter networks had been neutralized.

Taken together, then, al-Sharaa is well placed to control the foreign fighters in his midst — or destroy any dissenters if needs be. No less important, he’s in a strong position with places like al-Hol, detention camps which hold ISIS wives and children, many of whom are from Europe. Nor does he seem particularly troubled by the ISIS fighters held by the Kurds.

Yet if al-Sharaa is safe from a practical perspective, more symbolic challenges remain. Foreign fighters carry immense symbolic weight in the Syrian religious imagination, with many known as Ansar. “Helpers” in Arabic, the Ansar in Islamic tradition supported the early Muslim community, and are viewed in a sanctified light. After the failure of the international community to act against Assad, it was these latter-day Ansar, and their Syrian brothers-in-arms, who stepped into the breach.

That fact has its own status both in Syria and across the Muslim world. The Syrian revolution, after all, is not just a national one but one replete with religious symbolism. Jihadism — albeit in its localized form — is no longer external to Syria’s revolutionary movement. Rather, it is woven into the social and political fabric of the country. Wander around the markets of Damascus and you’ll see the revolutionary banner alongside jihadi ones. Stop at a checkpoint and you’ll find long-haired and bearded Syrians, emulating the jihadi style.

It’s easy to see how that could cause problems for al-Sharaa, especially now that relations with the US seem so crucial to his future plans. Beyond removing HTS from the terror hit list, after all, Secretary of State Marco Rubio also expects Damascus to “combat terrorism in all its forms”. But doing so might alienate al-Sharaa from both his foreign supporters, and those Syrian jihadis who view them as brother-in-arms. At best, anyway, such a move could lead to civil unrest. At worst, the President risks damaging the foundational myth of the revolution. That would obviously undermine his credibility, even as the West might lose a willing and cooperative partner.

What al-Sharaa must therefore do, and it is by no means easy, is to strike a balance between honoring the foreign contribution to the revolution — while sidelining them or co-opting them into the state. Fail, and he risks suffering a similar fate to Bashar al-Assad.

That attack stands out as among the most brutal of the 2010s, a decade which saw Isis reach the height of its powers, and in which terrorism came to seem routine, inevitable and all the more horrifying for it. The perpetrator of that era was reliably one of two archetypes: an Isis jihadist or a white supremacist. The immediate context of London Bridge shows this: less than two weeks before the massacre, 22 people had died in an attack on the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester Arena, stuffed to the gills with excited little girls. Two weeks after it, a far-Right extremist would ram Muslim worshippers in Finsbury Park, killing one. Other attacks that year took place in Westminster, Stockholm, Barcelona and St Petersburg.

My generation — toddlers during 9/11, and tweens as the horrors of the 2010s filled the news, in which we were just beginning to take an interest — was raised in ambient terror. I was 12 when Anders Breivik slaughtered scores of teens on Utoya Island; I remember pictures of him on the TV, dressed as a police officer, picking his way calmly over rocks in the stream with his rifle. He was given free rein of the Norwegian Labour Party summer camp for 90 minutes before police could reach him; by the time they did, he had killed nearly 70. In him a horror-movie figure, the dead-eyed man in the woods, was made flesh; my sister and I watched the news in silence, realizing that in the real world, nowhere was safe.

The psychic residue of the low-level dread these attacks instilled has persisted into this decade; the acceptance that a joyful day out can turn, within seconds, into a nightmare, is reflected in the paranoia of crowds in present-day Britain. A video posted shortly after the recent Liverpool car ramming showed a small group of friends leaving Water Street just before the incident unfolded; “we’re leaving because I have a gut feeling”, one told the camera. He had seen snipers, he said, and felt “something’s gonna kick off, like a terrorist attack or something”. Similar stories of foresight haunt all attacks; Xavier Thomas’s fiancée told reporters in 2017 that she had had “premonitions” the day before the London Bridge killings, and that on the bridge itself she had felt something was “not normal”.

Without passing judgment on the coincidental nature of these feelings, it is telling that the apparent ability to foretell doom in this way, like a preapocalyptic seer, has returned in an age of secular rationalism. Because of the continuous uncertainty of the era of Isis attacks, the public is now primed with jumpy superstition. Social media, too, is whipped into delirium as soon as the first details of any apparent attack emerge; immediate speculation about race, asylum status and motive speaks to the desire to sort attackers into familiar categories, to know your enemy. The 2010s made us not only superstitious but less trusting, drawing out the bloodhound hatred of the other from darker periods in British history.

Looking back at the 2010s, it strikes me that those attacks marked a rare moment of the best and worst of Western societies colliding; on the one hand there are the attackers, fanatical, furious, broken outcasts, and on the other there are the victims, random bands of normal people often united merely by the desire for a nice day out. Among them would have been all sorts: good people and bad people, angry drunks and talented tennis players, bricklayers and bus drivers and management consultants — but no matter; terror attacks have a habit of flattening a scene, so that to read about it the next morning is to imagine a cataclysm happening to people as generic and benevolent as the cartoon crowds in Lowry’s Fairground at Daisy Nook.

One of the most unexpectedly frightening things about these acts of public murder is that when you imagine being caught up in one, as children of the 2010s constantly did, you perceive yourself being flattened in this way too, reduced to a smiling headshot taken from your uncle’s Facebook page and placed on a gallery spread with a single-line caption. Not only is your life taken away, but the story of your life is never your own; you become, simply, a totem of “us” violated by a despicable, remote, alien “them”.

Since Covid, terror attacks have shifted in form and geography. Islamism has not gone away, but the regularity of Isis “claiming responsibility” for graduates of jihad training camps has waned in favor of lone wolves radicalized online. Often, the motivations of recent attackers have been confused, fragmented, unanchored from specific political objectives and moored more generally to a creed of hate. Brick dust from different ideological monoliths has come to coat dark internet forums; what results is a chaotic bricolage of extremism, the purpose of which is to prop up the personal mythology of a violent loser, rather than that loser having been recruited to an established cause.

Manifestos reflect this shift. The venomous specificity of manifestos like the Unabomber’s or even Breivik’s 1,500-page Islamophobic tract has been replaced by muddled, vengeful wailing akin to an online rant, like the manifesto left behind by the Palm Springs IVF clinic bombing suspect. Meanwhile the motivations of perpetrators are getting weirder, with niche, internet-issued dogmas such as promortalism, 5G conspiracies and even “ecofascism” increasingly peppering suspect profiles. Government agencies began using “mixed, unstable or unclear” as a category of concern in the late 2010s, with the Home Office Channel programme finding in 2023 that it constituted a vast 37% of referrals, compared to 19% for extreme Right-wing and 11% for Islamism.

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The figure of the Islamist or white supremacist, so totemic in the 2010s, is not gone — the Isis-inspired rampage in New Orleans on New Year’s Eve shows us as much — but he (and it is almost always he) is now flanked by forum-haunting fundamentalists motivated more by personal grievances than the intoxicating heft of traditional fascism or jihad. The terrorist of 2025 is less likely to be a foot soldier — instead he is a main character; he is not redeeming the world from deviance, but lashing out at it for rejecting him. This makes him harder to spot, his movements trickier to predict; it also makes his fury more difficult to douse with the deradicalization initiatives of the 2010s, which knew to home in on acolytes of Anjem Choudary or Tommy Robinson for seams of extremism.

Terror in the 2020s is lonelier, murkier, stranger. And so while the legacy of the 2010s is ambient, grinding dread, the source of that dread has become dispersed, undetectable. One consequence is that this leaves us unprepared for the new face of terror; where we once watched for Islamist cells we should now also expect new heads of the hydra. As I write, Liverpool reels from a ramming incident; so too does Leicester. In Boulder, Colorado, an Egyptian national, illegally in the US, is suspected of firebombing people demonstrating on behalf of Israeli hostages. For my generation, these stories are met with a sense of weary inevitability; for our parents, there must be a parallel in the constant vigilance of the Seventies and Eighties over Provisional IRA bombs.

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The failures of Prevent — to which, let’s not forget, Axel Rudakubana was referred three times — do not show us the futility of such programs so much as their toothlessness in the face of more nebulous forms of extremism (his case was closed as no “fixed ideology or motivation” was found). Those susceptible to radicalization or violent breakdowns will always mill about in our societies; a responsible culture is one which denies them access to content on the internet which will push them over the edge, stops them buying knives and guns, and is quick to stopper the pipelines of hatred which run from social outcast to woman-hater to murderer, from devout to extremist to killer.

Eight years after the London Bridge attack, Britain is still on a hair-trigger; the fundamental objective of terrorism, to create fear, is being met. Each time an attack happens, agencies and government departments own “failings” and promise to learn from them; costly inquiries stretch into years, inquests reveal minute-by-minute the events which, we tell ourselves, must “never happen again”. But can we really say those horror-filled final moments of the eight victims of June 3, 2017 won’t be repeated? Being on the back foot, as we always seem to be, is something we can all sorely afford.

The Year of the Rat is a revealing book, but not in the way it aspires to be. The extreme fringes of the British far-Right, it turns out, are, well, pretty extreme and the oleaginous assortment of oddballs, cranks and grifters Shukman meets there are racist, sexist and homophobic. Which is to say that the big revelation of the book isn’t all that revelatory. What the book reveals instead, despite its driving thesis, is the dire state of Britain’s far-Right, which, far from becoming “mainstream”, is so exotically fringe and weird that most normies wouldn’t even have heard of its various ideologues and acolytes. It also reveals the dire state of a progressive mindset that can’t seem to discriminate between Alan Partridge-sounding populists such as Nigel Farage on the one hand and mouth-frothing racists on the other.

What little drama there is in The Year of the Rat depends on the conceit that Shukman’s cover could be blown at any moment. As part of his disguise as Chris, a zip-up fleece-wearing everyman who is “concerned about demographic replacement”, Shukman grew a mustache and cut his hair short. “I wanted to get close to the British far right, find out what kind of people join, and, if possible, do what I could to disrupt their operations,” he writes.

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To read Shukman’s breathless prose about Chris’s “infiltrations”, “safety protocols”, secret meetings with his “handler” Patrik Hermansson (who himself went undercover in 2016) and the many near-misses where his hidden camera is almost discovered, you could be excused for thinking that he’d breached the inner sanctum of a terrifying Mexican drugs cartel or a sword-wielding, spy-hating jihadist group. But the far-Right activists with whom Shukman ingratiates himself are more ridiculous than terrifying. People like the Basketweavers, a “far-right community” that no one has ever heard of.

According to Shukman, the Basketweavers are “a kind of clandestine discussion group” that scorns online communication and only meets in person. Indeed, Hermansson “has good reason to believe that this is no ordinary community”. It soon transpires that instead of weaving baskets, the Basketweavers trade in racist conspiracy theories, doing this in the backrooms of British pubs where they regularly meet up in small and exclusively male groups. It also transpires that the number of people who belong to the Basketweavers is tiny: around 2,000 worldwide, with “hundreds” from the UK.

Shukman devotes a whole chapter — his first — to the Basketweavers and in it we learn that once he infiltrates the group, he discovers that they are very racist and harbor an especial antipathy toward Jews. Revealingly, Shukman observes that it’s “remarkable” that the Basketweavers “have so far escaped media attention”, seemingly oblivious to the idea that no one cares very much about the Basketweavers’ racist pub chitchat.

Next Shukman goes to Tallinn, Estonia, where he infiltrates a far-Right conference organized by someone called Fróði Midjord. He runs into a host of unsavory characters who are very racist and make little or no effort in concealing that they’re very racist, such as an American white nationalist who talks about the “capture of America by non-whites” and a Holocaust denier who insists that African-Americans should be repatriated “back” to Africa. Indeed, almost the entirety of The Year of the Rat is organized around Shukman meeting a lot of racist people no one has ever heard of and surreptitiously recording them saying racist things. It is thus quite a boring book, enlivened only by the bits where Shukman comes close to having his cover blown.

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One activist who I had heard of and who Shukman met and skirted around is Paul Golding, the leader of the far-Right party Britain First and the protégé of Nick Griffin, former leader of the BNP. Britain First, Shukman explains, is no ordinary party: it pickets refugee centers with flash mobs and conducts “mosque invasions”, where its activists berate Muslims about the evils of Islam. And Golding himself is no ordinary party leader, having been found guilty of hate crimes and a terrorism offense (the latter because he refused to hand over the pin codes for his electronic devices to counter-terrorism police on re-entering the UK from Russia in 2019). “I want to understand what Paul Golding is like,” Shukman confides, with all the sincerity of a pick-up-artist who feigns interest in a woman’s point of view. In Shukman’s telling, and to no one’s surprise, Golding is a nasty piece of work: a bully and grifter who trousers party donations which he duly splurges on a 10-day holiday to Thailand.

Golding’s crew of minions, which includes a coke-head with missing teeth, isn’t much better and Shukman soon discovers, with “horror”, that many believe that the Holocaust is made up. “Here was proof that Britain First is a nasty party whose activists traffic in some of the vilest conspiracy theories,” he writes, as if relaying some dark truth he’s just brought to light. But most people who have heard of Golding know full well about the nastiness of his politics, which is why his party has so few members — no more than 40 active ones, Shukman estimates — and why it has failed so abysmally at the ballot box; in the London mayoral election of 2024, Britain First received fewer votes than a candidate called Count Binface.

This is emblematic of a deeper problem with The Year of the Rat, which is that it’s a profoundly dishonest book. It is so, in part, because it suggests that the far-Right activists who Shukman infiltrates have a hidden agenda, when in fact only an imbecile would be surprised by Shukman’s “revelations” about the far-Right, not only because it’s so unabashed about what it believes but also because so many journalists and experts have been loudly warning us for years about how its odious beliefs — about race science and the “great replacement” — have gone mainstream.

It’s also dishonest in the sense that it attributes far more political power and cultural sway to the far-Right than it actually possesses. Not a few, he says, are “sophisticated” campaigners and “enjoy the support of American tech tycoons and Conservative policymakers”, which may well be true. But most of the characters that populate his book are the sort of people that any normal person would determinedly avoid on the street or in a pub. Shukman clearly knows this and takes no small amount of pleasure in reporting on the abject political failures, internecine squabbles and ineptitude of the sorry activists he joins and spies on. For example, when canvassing with Britain First in Finchingfield, Essex, the entire village makes it very clear that they’re not welcome. This must have heartened Shukman, but it’s a detail that doesn’t exactly flatter his thesis about a powerful and ascendant far-Right in Britain. No less dishonest is Shukman’s use of the term “far-Right”, which he uses to refer to figures as ideologically far apart as Golding and the Reform Party’s leader Nigel Farage. But because the latter has a substantial following and sounds the alarm about tens of thousands of undocumented migrants milling around in the towns and villages of Britain, he is “far-Right” and hence proof-positive that it has gone mainstream.

If Shukman has a bad conscience, it’s not chiefly because he’s deceived so many people in the process of researching his book — he actually justifies deception as a necessary if regrettable tactic to get close to the far-Right, which is suspicious of outsiders, and to expose all its unpleasantness. Rather, it is because he felt morally tainted — “complicit”, as he puts it — by participating in their activism while undercover with them. On several occasions, he uses the word “grubby” to describe how this made him feel.

Shukman should feel grubby, not just because he lied to people, but because he lied for no discernible benefit. Indeed, he has not advanced the study of the far-Right one inch. He has no theory of mind of the far-Right activist and nothing of interest or originality to say about why or how people become part of its orbit, other than referencing some trite clichés about loneliness and alienation. And the revelations he discloses are scarcely earth-shattering.

In fact, Shukman, along with several other researchers who shamelessly tout their proficiency as undercover infiltrators, has likely set back the study of the far-Right, making it much harder for genuine researchers to study its members up close and to win their trust. The next time such a researcher approaches the far-Right with a research project in mind they ought to be prepared for something decidedly more earnest than the mock punch Paul Golding launched at Shukman when they first met.

Taken together, in fact, I think that the ideas animating Magaworld, though contradicting each other on the surface, represent a distinct societal force — one that divorces the republic from reality, and though years in the making represents a bewildering new retreat from empirical truth. A few years back, Kurt Anderson wrote a book exploring how America has become, to use his eponymous term, a “fantasyland.” I’d go further: it’s clear that the Trump presidency is a fantasyland administration for a fantasyland people, and one with depressing implications for the future of American democracy.

Perhaps the clearest example of Trump’s loony politics is Pete Hegseth. The Secretary of Defense, as the latest case study for America’s obsession with boring redemption-conversion stories, has morphed from a binge-drinking lothario into a fire and brimstone Christian fundamentalist. Forget his toe-curling leaks to journalists: in a series of podcast interviews last year, Hegseth spoke warmly of “sphere sovereignty” — which posits that civil law should defer to the Old Testament, even on matters of women’s rights and homosexuality.

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Such theocratic ambitions are central to the dogma of “Christian Reconstructionism” — the same theology that guides Hegseth’s church in Tennessee. Part of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, its founder Douglas Wilson has argued that, in the war for Christian supremacy, women, children, and other civilians are legitimate targets, stating that “the word of God tells Christian soldiers what to do.” Wilson’s rabid form of faith prompts questions as to whether or not Hegseth, a member of his flock, believes that the Geneva Conventions and the US Constitution should dictate military policy — or the ravings of an Idaho preacher.

Certainly, Hegseth extends his apocalyptic worldview to domestic affairs, writing that the Christian Right is in a “holy war” against the “Leftist spectre”. Nor is that the only spot where the far-Right fringe is now at the very heart of government. That’s clear enough around the so-called “unitary executive” theory. Developed by Russell Vought, Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, it posits that, contrary to centuries of Supreme Court rulings and scholarly interpretation, the US Constitution gives the president complete and exclusive control over anything that falls within the purview of the executive branch of government.

The “unitary executive theory” resides in the same cul-de-sac as the dreams of techno-monarchy that Curtis Yarvin promotes in books and interviews. His belief that democracy is bloated and ineffective, and therefore, in need of replacement from a governing elite, has inspired Peter Thiel — mentor to none other than JD Vance.

Yet amid this unsurprising fear of far-Right influence, the far Left, too, has made its mark. To understand what I mean, look no further RFK Jr. He may have a name and history that many Americans associate with liberalism, but the Secretary of Health and Human Services’s lineage is deceiving. Unlike his father and uncles, he’s a promoter of deranged conspiracy theories, including that HIV does not cause AIDS; that the Covid-19 vaccine was a medical experiment on blacks and Latinos; that Covid itself was engineered to spare Jews and Chinese; and that African Americans have different immune systems than whites, resulting in reduced need for vaccination.

Commentators of the Left typically wonder “what happened” to Kennedy — once a respected environmental lawyer — while those on the Right parade him as a prop for the power of MAGA ideology. The reality is that Kennedy simply represents a faction of the Left that looks at the “medical-industrial complex” with contempt.

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Tulsi Gabbard, for her part, has followed a similar trajectory. Once the co-chairperson of the Bernie Sanders campaign, the former Democratic member of Congress and presidential candidate advocates for Trump policies with a convert’s zeal. Yet if she’s dumped her support for universal health care, and abandoned the eradication of fossil fuels in the Honolulu surf, her foreign policy positions have remained consistent. In 2017, Gabbard introduced legislation in Congress to “end our country’s illegal war to overthrow the Syrian government” — and shortly after the bill failed to reach a floor vote flew to Damascus to meet President Assad.

These sympathies extend to the leader who helped Assad drop bombs on the people of Aleppo: Vladimir Putin. In this, Gabbard retains support among the so-called “anti-imperialist” Left, people like Max Blumenthal and Matt Taibbi who blame every geopolitical problem on the United States.

I could go on here — but beyond these varied examples, what does this frantic blend of Left and Right actually signify? I think that vivid phrase “fantasyland” can start to offer an answer. As America’s democracy weakens, it becomes aggressive and epistemologically reckless. There’s no longer any belief that the leading institutions of American society — from major political parties to the mainstream media — refuse to accommodate. Accusations of “elitism,” “snobbery,” or “disrespect” of religious faith await anyone who utters a complaint about hallucinatory fantasies that now pollute every conversation of political importance.

The bipartisan phantasm of the Trump administration signifies the completion of a national transformation, one resulting from this misguided accommodation. And it isn’t as if the former gatekeepers of discourse, especially in the legacy media, didn’t, at least in part, invite their own destruction. The leading newspapers, journals, and television networks, with few exceptions, were wrong about the disastrous war on Iraq. They ignored the warning signs of the 2008 financial crash — even as, long before that, they offered shortsighted reporting on the Vietnam War and the AIDS crisis.

Noam Chomsky famously lambasted the mainstream media for “manufacturing consent”. Yet if it’s clear that elite opinion-making is in desperate need of an overhaul, the anything goes, anything is possible blend of cynicism and gullibility that’s replaced it is even worse.

Consider, if nothing else, how quick mad-as-a-hatter conspiracy theories now spread online. There was the “plandemic” documentary asserting that a cabal of international elites planned the Covid-19 pandemic, even as millions of Republicans believed that Joe Biden “rigged” the election in his favor. All the while, large numbers of Leftists reflexively assumed that the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life was fake. The mentality that propelled Trump to power is, in other words, bipartisan and deeply cultural — rather than merely political. Nearly half of Americans believe in demonic possession, while almost a third believe in astrology, and 57% think that ancient advanced civilizations like Atlantis actually existed.

None of this is totally new. Religious fundamentalism, con artistry, and hateful manias have always troubled the American psyche. The Know-Nothing nativists of the 19th century; McCarthyism and the Lavender Scare of the 20th; and the evergreen quality of End Times preachers all show that there is a bottomless appetite for American absurdity. But what made the inauguration of Donald Trump different was that it marked the first time that the forces of absurdity became the country’s governing force. Discontent with the decadent status quo led not to thoughtful reforms — but a rejection of reality itself.

To be fair, not everyone is happy at Trump’s carnival mix of extremism. Many of his policies, especially his assault of vital social services, have already provoked outrage. Opposition will only grow if the Republicans proceed with their plans to make massive cuts to Medicaid. Yet even if his policies ruin Trump’s presidency, the mindset they represent is here to stay, not least given the poisonous effects of social media. Expect America’s fantasyland to remain open for many years to come.

Between the riots of last summer and record migration rates of 900,000 in 2023, a broader feeling of discontent has been supercharged by the return to the headlines of Asian rape gangs — in particular, the apparent failures and cover-ups by establishment politicians. Farage’s softer nationalism, as well as his online spat with Elon Musk over support for the activist Tommy Robinson, has presented parties to the Right of Reform UK with an opportunity. Reflecting a resurgent brand of impassioned ethnonationalism, they feel like their moment has come.

At heart, the ethnonationalist believes that nationhood — and the resultant social and political benefits — can only truly be shared by those with a common race. Their movement is fueled by the sense of a coming threat, the idea that a racial identity dating back over a thousand years could be wiped out. The flood of immigration in recent years and the ensuing change to Britain’s ethnic make-up has given succor to ethnonationalist arguments, and these are growing louder on the political fringes.

The far-Right in the UK was once dominated by the British National Party, led in its heyday by Nick Griffin. The BNP reached its peak in 2009 when it secured two MEPs and a little under a million votes in European Parliament elections — spurred on by migration figures that had reached around 200,000. Later that year, the party received further notoriety when Griffin appeared on the BBC’s Question Time, during which he managed to refer to the Ku Klux Klan as “almost totally non-violent” and claimed that “a lot of people find the sight of two grown men kissing in public really creepy”.

But the 2010 general election, in which the BNP failed to win any seats, marked the beginning of the end for Griffin. He stood down as leader in July 2014, before being expelled later that year for allegedly harassing BNP staff. The party has now been essentially inactive for the past half-decade. Tommy Robinson may be the poster boy of the English far-Right, yet the English Defence League he co-founded has effectively been defunct for years too. Just as many on the ethnonationalist Right judge Farage to be a liberal in populist clothing, Robinson is also widely dismissed in those circles as a self-promoter who isn’t serious about building a coherent and lasting movement. That work is being done further below the surface.

For it is the personalities involved in Griffin’s fall a decade ago — a chain of events encompassing power struggles, ideological splits and murder threats — who are furthering the cause of Britain’s ethnonationalist Right, threatening to spill its grievances on to the streets.

One key figure is Mark Collett, who leads Britain’s largest and most proactive explicitly white nationalist group. Called Patriotic Alternative (PA), by its own count the organization has over 16,000 supporters. Collett starred in the 2002 Channel 4 documentary Young, Nazi and Proud, produced when he was leader of the BNP’s youth wing. The film describes him as one of the party’s “best and brightest”, while a proud Griffin refers to him as a potential successor as leader.

But after admiringly claiming in the documentary that “Hitler will live on forever” and admitting that he was a “Nazi sympathizer”, at a time when Griffin was attempting to detoxify the BNP brand, Collett was temporarily expelled from the party. He returned, rose to become publicity director, and again positioned himself as an heir to Griffin. This progress was undone in 2010, a matter of weeks before the general election, when Collett was accused of plotting a BNP palace coup before being arrested for allegedly threatening to kill his leader.

His new organization is similarly controversial. PA has been linked to National Action, a proscribed terrorist organization, and it was namechecked last year in Parliament in relation to the new Government definition of extremism, accused of promoting neo-Nazi ideology. Unsurprisingly, Collett’s hard-Right group has thus far been unsuccessful in registering as a political party, its applications rejected at least four times by the Electoral Commission. With both the group and Collett himself banned from Twitter for, among other things, celebrating a 2023 riot outside a Merseyside hotel housing refugees, online operations have largely moved to the messaging app Telegram, where the PA leader has over 20,000 followers.

There, he argues that immigration initiatives are “all part of a concerted effort to destroy the country”, and following the death of Jean-Marie Le Pen he posted a tribute praising the National Front founder’s “pro-White ideas”. The obituary concludes: “Le Pen’s memory today urges us to continue struggling unapologetically for our worldview, which is neither right nor left, but White.”

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Central to Collett’s belief system is the idea of “remigration”. The euphemistic term for forced mass repatriation of immigrants is one well-used on the Right, and increasingly heard in the mainstream. The view was adopted by the far-Right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) which came first in last year’s national election, and invoked again at the weekend by Alice Weidel, co-leader of Alternative for Germany (AfD), who called for “repatriations on a large scale”. When US President-elect Donald Trump proposed remigration in America, the policy was compared in the press to ethnic cleansing. The term disgusts even Marine Le Pen, who split with the AfD over proposals to “remigrate” Germany’s foreign population.

Remigration is also vital to the platform of another burgeoning force on Britain’s nationalist Right: the Homeland Party, which was established in 2023 by former PA officials who had lost patience with Collett’s messianic brand of leadership. Unlike PA, Homeland managed to register as a political party at the start of 2024, though a Home Office official had previously expressed concern that the group would try to force a successful application “by stealth”, using different names or applicants with no far-Right background. Several of Homeland’s activists have been revealed as former members of neo-Nazi groups, and have engaged in Holocaust denial. Party chairman Kenny Smith, who led the breakaway, is alleged to have recruited armed members and in 2022 pled guilty to firearms offenses.

Perhaps in an attempt to counter these optics, Homeland’s website has endeavored to convey a political platform that reaches beyond immigration concerns, addressing proportional representation, fixing road infrastructure, and preserving the green belt. Homeland will fix your potholes. Indeed, in leaked audio from the group’s first meeting, as reported in The Times, Smith, another BNP alumnus, told activists: “The organization needs a focused approach to winning power, taking control of budgets and policymaking in places. Ultimately we want local authority, and then who knows beyond that.”

But its shiny website can’t conceal the uglier views aired online. Consider its posts on TikTik, including a clip criticizing the England national football team for featuring “Africans” such as Bukayo Saka and complaining that “we have to pretend that David Lammy and Olakemi Olafonteu Adeoke [sic] are both British or English”. The latter is otherwise known as Kemi Badenoch, and Homeland accounts consistently refer to the Tory leader using her full Nigerian birth name. Smith has posted that she “needs to return to Nigeria”.

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This is arguably feeding the rising anti-immigration tendency among the young. As Paul Jackson, an expert on Britain’s far-Right, tells me, “social media has transformed far-Right politics and allows for the easy sharing of quite extremist positions.” He adds: “youthfulness and rebellion are core tropes of the far-Right, and in recent years the online space has become filled with far- and extreme-Right messages designed to appeal to these sentiments.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, around 70% of its 700-odd members are aged under 30.

But if Homeland has attempted to hide its extremist elements beneath a reasonable-sounding policy platform, other groups aren’t so cautious. Collett argues that electoral politics is “a waste of time, money and resources”, with PA instead turning to initiatives such as raising money to support the families of convicted rioters.

If anything, these hard-Right groups seem to thrive on national chaos. Another of the groups which emerged from the ashes of the BNP, Britain First, is similarly described by its leader Paul Golding as a “street defense organization”. Golding himself has multiple convictions for offenses, including acts of terrorism and religiously aggravated harassment, while former members have claimed that the organization routinely plotted violent attacks on British Muslims and harassed asylum seekers. “I want this country to become a shithole,” Golding told an undercover reporter for a Channel 4 documentary last year. “I want this country to descend into a fucking nightmare, because that’s the only thing that’s going to get people off their backsides.”

The danger here is that as Farage softens his offer, he pushes his more radical supporters towards more extreme organizations. Homeland knows this. As one of its more presentable activists, Pete North, formerly of Ukip, wrote last month, “Farage should note that while he takes the credit for killing off the BNP, he could just as easily revive it” by disavowing Robinson’s supporters and “softening his line on immigration”. North claimed that “for every new voter [Farage] attracts as he moves his party to the center, the more the grassroots right may conclude that another party better represents their interests.” Meanwhile, Patriotic Alternative has claimed Starmer’s comments about the Tories’ “open-border experiment” as a victory for the “great replacement” theory.

How, then, does mainstream politics respond to this threat? Labour cannot assume that popular anger over immigration will be confined to the comparatively benign Reform UK. Indeed, Jackson predicts that, in the next couple of decades, an openly ethnonationalist party could exceed the level of support the “amateurish” BNP commanded at its height.

As the resurfacing of the grooming gangs scandal and last summer’s riots have proved, the main parties are ill-equipped to deal with such growing resentment. And with powerful figures such as Elon Musk fanning the flames, Nick Griffin’s protégés are poised to capitalize. The sense of febrility and fury is growing; the violent unrest which tore through England’s capillary towns and cities last summer was just a taste. As Starmer’s tenure is increasingly undermined, ravaged by social unrest and economic sclerosis, the nightmare of which Golding speaks may yet lie on the horizon.

But “misogyny” is also a slippery beast, and not just thanks to many Labour politicians’ well-documented inability to give a coherent definition of “woman”. What counts specifically as hatred towards women is at least somewhat subjective, a fact that led LBC’s Ben Kentish to suggest that the policy might unduly chill speech. But Jess Phillips, the minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, told Kentish that the new provisions would simply be subject to the same test as Islamist or far-Right ideology.

So that’s all fine then, isn’t it? Well, perhaps — at least if this is rigorously followed. But the difficulty with “misogyny” as a metric is that it’s both very emotive, and also very broad. At the risk of stating the obvious, half the planet’s human population is female, and this in turn means you could attract accusations of misogyny for criticising almost any large-scale group or institution. Given this, it would surely be difficult for any politician to resist wielding such a useful designation on Schmittian principles.

Accordingly, several groups outside the political mainstream have already expressed concern about being targeted unfairly by Cooper’s initiative. The far-Left Morning Star, for example, treated the whole extremism review with deep suspicion, viewing it as marching in lockdown with Tory clampdowns on the freedom to protest. Some women’s rights campaigners, too, expressed a concern that the next move would be including trans-identified men in the “women” category, in order to reclassify any accurate description of such individuals’ biological sex as “extreme misogyny” and therefore a matter for counterterrorism.

Others again responded cynically to the announcement with photos of women in burqas, sex-segregated Labour Party rallies, or videos of Islamist men talking about how praiseworthy it is to be jealously controlling of your wife’s behaviour. The aggregate insinuation was that the “extreme misogyny” which ought to be the focus of Labour’s counter-extremism was not the one Cooper has chosen to highlight — and that, in fact, Cooper is content to ignore misogyny from Muslims, or even to protect it in law, preferring instead to persecute Right-wing anons and forum nerds.

Such cynicism is perhaps somewhat understandable, given Sir William Shawcross’s recent independent review of Prevent. Shawcross described the service as good overall, but unevenly distributed in its foci: specifically, “too narrow” in its definition of Islamism, and “too broad” in its definition of the “far-Right”. This was misguided, he argued, given that the most severe and large-scale material threat to British security still came from Islamists.

When even an independent review of British counterterrorism identified some institutional bias in favour of Islamists and against Right-wingers, it is not wholly unreasonable for the latter to feel some concern about new measures that might be used to target them. And yet, taken on its own terms, the Home Secretary’s proposal is not unreasonable either. The subculture to which she is referring really does exist, and can be nasty. Cooper’s statements make clear that the addition of “extreme misogyny” to a list that already comprises Islamist, far-Right, animal rights, environmental, and Northern Ireland related extremist aims to address “gaps in the current system”. And as she makes clear, the specific gap she has in mind is the subculture associated with “incel” or “involuntary celibate” young men.

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Is this really extremism? Surely just being disparaging about “foids” on the internet doesn’t make someone an extremist? In most cases, no it doesn’t; but this culture does sometimes appear to influence or help to inspire real-world atrocities. The first such documented instance occurred in 2014, when 22-year-old Elliot Rodger went on a murder spree in California, killing several of his housemates before shooting three women outside a sorority house, then committing suicide. He left behind a lengthy manifesto that described his lonely youth, resentment of women, and envy of everyone who managed to have sex.

Nor was Rodger unique. He inspired three copycat killing sprees in 2018, and a US shopping centre shooting and Canadian massage parlour machete attack in 2020; there have been other murders reportedly associated with “incel” ideology, including the Plymouth shooting in 2021 in the UK, where 22-year-old Jake Davison murdered five people and injured two others before killing himself. Clearly, then, sometimes adherents to this ideology do more than just post mean words on the internet. It is sensible for the government to keep an eye on an ideology demonstrably associated with real-world violence, much as they might Islamists who are a bit too interested in explosives, or the kind of animal rights fanatics who call for scientists to be assassinated.

And yet if Islamism keeps recurring in objections to the proposal, this is because it serves as shorthand for a crossover between the emotive issue of women’s safety, and Britain’s broader politics of migration, cultural difference, integration, and policing. Arguably, it was broadly this same crossover that helped spark the recent public order disturbances that prompted Cooper’s review. And one implication of this is that unless our new Home Secretary is unusually scrupulous about impartiality, focusing an “extreme misogyny” clampdown just on “incels” runs the risk not just of unevenly distributing counter-extremism measures, or doling out justice on more than one tier, but — by omission — of actively endangering British women and girls of every culture and ethnicity.

For the reality is that “incel” type “extreme misogyny” really only reads as “extreme” relative to Western egalitarian norms. It’s not difficult, for example, to find progressive articles lamenting the misogynistic attitudes to women endemic in Afghanistan. These are, indeed, the attitudes the West’s failed regime change efforts spent trillions trying to alter, to little avail: hundreds of cases of femicide have been documented since the Taliban takeover, with this believed to be merely the tip of the iceberg. Surely no Westerner would seriously try and argue that normative Afghan attitudes to women are no different to those in Britain — let alone claim moral equivalence between the two cultures where women’s safety, freedom and rights are concerned.

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Similarly there are many extant UN reports and Guardian articles on “gender-based violence” in locations such as India and Pakistan, where extremely misogynistic practices such as child marriage, gang rape, “honour” killings, or deliberate disfiguration of women through acid attacks are distressingly common and often trigger large and furious protests. At the time of writing, for example, India’s doctors are on strike following the horrific gang rape and murder of Dr Moumita Debnath while on duty in a Kolkata hospital.

Of course, there is no need to direct British counter-extremism resources at such offences. Firstly, they are already illegal in the UK; secondly, the incidents I’ve just described occurred overseas. Yvette Cooper might add to this that, by contrast, extreme misogyny is clearly present in Britain, and not yet covered by existing counter-extremism provisions. But while these things are all true, it’s also true that as well as being unenthusiastic about misogyny, Labour politicians tend also to be keen on diversity, and broadly in favour of a generous immigration and refugee policy.

And migrants bring their cultures with them. Indeed, progressive supporters of migration argue that it is beneficial because the resulting diversity enriches the host country. And perhaps it really is true that migrants bring only the nice bits of their original cultures, such as tasty food. But if they bring everything else, as well, what happens when that includes being habituated to the kind of extreme misogyny the West spent futile trillions trying to expunge from Afghanistan? Then it must surely follow that the kind of misogyny normalised in places such as Afghanistan will no longer be irrelevant to British policy, and British women, but will find expression here as well.

On the kind of websites already being monitored by Prevent for “far Right” ideology, and perhaps soon for “extreme misogyny” as well, you will find plenty of voices arguing, from selected news headlines, that such diverse forms of extreme misogyny already are finding expression here. But of course the whole point is that “misogyny” is such an expansive concept that you can cherry-pick cases to support any argument you choose — including against migration.

And this fact, again, highlights its potential to be weaponised in partisan ways: something that should concern anyone who attracts the ire of Yvette Cooper’s Home Office. We can only hope Cooper and Phillips have superhuman powers of impartiality, and will be able to resist the overwhelming temptation to be Schmittian in their imputations of “extreme misogyny”. And we must hope that, even if they won’t embolden the “far Right” by saying so in public, in private our new Home Secretary and Minister for Safeguarding are clear-sighted about the full extent of global cultural diversity, including those aspects with implications for British women and girls, and willing to use Home Office powers accordingly.

Should we discover the new and pliant weapon of “extreme misogyny” is being less evenly deployed, though, this politicisation of woman-hating will come with a bitter layer of irony. For in this case Cooper and Phillips will be exhibiting so casual an indifference to the real-world safety of British women and girls we might even call it misogynistic.

Granted, Robinson hasn’t gone as far as to declare that the riots are an inarticulate rebellion against capitalist society, much less a “form of queer birth”, as Vicky Osterweil might put it. But he has suggested that they are an all but inevitable response to white working-class grievances that have been ignored by the elites in the media and government.

At the same time, progressives who once expressed support for those who participated in the George Floyd protests of 2020 have adopted a decidedly harsher line on the current anti-immigration protests. Back in June 2020, for example, the former head of British counter-terrorism policing, Neil Basu, encouraged his colleagues to show empathy towards BLM protesters and their “legitimate anger”. “We need to listen to our communities, and our people, and focus on what we in the UK can do better,” he counselled in a conciliatory tone conspicuously missing from his comments about the riots of the past week. They are “bullies and cowards”, he said of the rioters, coming close to describing those who had tried setting fire to a hotel in Rotherham as terrorists. “Not only does it fit the definition of terrorism, it is terrorism,” he remarked. Basu may well have a good point; it’s just not one he showed much interest in raising about the torching of the Minneapolis Police station amid a George Floyd protest on 28 May 2020.

The ironies here are obvious and worth probing for the light they shed on today’s confused discourse. Consider, first, the Left-sounding apologia of the Right, as expressed by Tommy Robinson in the following post on X: “When British people are ignored and labelled ‘far-Right’, when children’s safety isn’t a priority, and when fighting age men from foreign lands come here to take the piss, something has to happen. This is on the British government, they own this problem, because they created it.”

This is not a fringe view. Matthew Goodwin, for example, wrote in a recent piece on the riots: “What did you expect? Seriously? What do you expect ordinary British people to do given the deeply alarming things that are now unfolding around them, in their country, on a daily basis?” Among those things, he singled out the mass rioting in minority communities in Harehills, the stabbing of a British Army Officer by “a member of a minority community”, and a Kurdish migrant who pushed a man onto the tracks at a London Underground station. Douglas Murray, too, has similarly lamented how “completely predictable” the riots were. “Labour and Conservative governments”, he said, created “a powder-keg”.

It is important to note that Robinson has not openly justified the riots, and both Goodwin and Murray have explicitly condemned them. But the substance of their remarks and the shifting of ultimate blame onto the Government serves, in effect, to minimise the agency of the rioters, who were somehow launched or pushed into violence by circumstances beyond their control. Indeed, the current insistence on “understanding” the roots of the riots bears a striking resemblance to the way that apologists of the 2005 London bombings insisted that they were “only” trying to understand the causes of that atrocity, while also firmly pinning the blame for it on Britain’s involvement in the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Consider, next, the progressive narrative of the riots. This is typically clobbered up in the garbs of an undergraduate-level media sociology that holds that the riots are being fuelled by a combination of misinformation and Right-wing populist demagoguery. As has already been exhaustively documented, many prominent X accounts had circulated false information about the identity of the Southport attacker, claiming that he was a Muslim asylum seeker who had illegally entered the UK by boat; he was, in fact, born in the UK to Rwandan parents. According to a report by Marianna Spring, the BBC’s “disinformation and social media correspondent”, this served to “inflame pre-existing tensions” and likely affected the trajectory of the events that followed. Alan Rusbridger went even further, arguing in Prospect that “a foul virus” of misinformation and far-Right hate speech on X had “led to the rioting” in Southport; Owen Jones blamed “a much broader Right-wing populist ecosystem” that had whipped up ordinary working-class people into an “anti-migrant and anti-refugee frenzy”.

There are two key problems with this line of analysis. The first is that it assumes that, had the rioters in Southport not been exposed to false information, they wouldn’t have taken to the streets in protest or violently targeted a mosque in the town. But this doesn’t really hold up, since the disturbances in Southport happened after it had become clear who the perpetrator was. Indeed, in the violence that unfolded, the police and the mosque had, in effect, become reviled effigies for the Southport attacker and the indifferent government the rioters blamed for producing him.

The second problem is that, by assuming that the protesters had been radicalised by a far-Right online outrage machine, progressives fail to take seriously the possibility that they may have had reasons of their own for protesting. If the rhetoric of Tommy Robinson resonates among this quarter, it might just well be because it faithfully captures their “lived” experiences and not because Robinson himself has mythical powers of rhetorical manipulation.

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An alternative and more promising way of analysing the riots would be to focus on the profiles of the violent few at the forefront of them, what links (if any) they have to Right-wing activists, and whether their violence was planned in advance. But we won’t know this until convictions are secured — and this will take a while. Based on online footage of the disturbances, the majority of the violent few appear to be young men and the violence itself looks poorly coordinated and incompetent. There also seems to be a carnivalesque aspect to some of the violent exchanges between rioters and the police: a not-insignificant number of rioters are clearly enjoying themselves and it’s not inconceivable to think that their involvement may have been driven by the sheer thrill of smashing things up and defying authority.

In his brilliant study of English football hooliganism, Among the Thugs, Bill Buford writes of the “state of adrenalin euphoria” that comes with crowd violence and how the euphoria itself, and not deeper social scientific factors, is the key to understanding it. We shouldn’t underestimate this as a factor in the current riots, especially in places where joy is in short supply. Many participants, too, are filming the disorder on their phones, and perhaps they too are getting some vicarious pleasure from doing so, just as the actual rioters are perhaps getting an additional pleasure high from knowing that they are being filmed.

Returning to the issue of the protestors’ grievances, it is obviously important that we understand what they are and take them seriously. After all, many protesters and their supporters have been clear about what they are. They believe that there is a system of two-tier policing in this country that favours Muslims and other minorities over whites; they believe that the mainstream media is biased in its reporting of crime and disorder; and they believe that privileged elites in government hate them and their culture, while going out of their way to appease Muslims and other non-whites.

Keir Starmer was right to unequivocally condemn the rioters. But this should not come at the expense of addressing these concerns. Whether or not you are sympathetic towards them, it’s undeniable that we really do need an urgent and open conversation in this country about uncontrolled migration, the involvement of asylum seekers in violent crime, and how this impacts citizens with already limited opportunities and resources.

At the same time, we also need to recognise the vast causal chasm between deeply or even rightly held grievances and actual violence, property destruction and looting. Most aggrieved people who protest do not carry out acts of violence, while many of those who do commit violence do so for reasons that are not always related to rational grievances. Any explanation that elides or fudges that chasm is unlikely to tell us much about how and why riots happen — and, as we have seen, may even end up excusing those who are responsible for the ensuing carnage.

A recent article in The Telegraph, warning of “the ‘perfect storm’ turning teenagers into terrorists”, is a case in point. The opening few paragraphs focus on Joe Metcalfe, a white neo-Nazi from Haworth, West Yorkshire, who had plotted to kill Muslims in an attack modelled on the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand in 2019.“The acne-afflicted teenager,” we are told, “is part of a growing phenomenon of teenage terror offenders in Britain, with 2023 seeing a new record of 42 under-18s arrested.” The report also singles out the case of another white teen, albeit one who converted to Islam and planned to attack non-Muslims at the Isle of Wight music festival in July 2022.

The subliminal message conveyed here is that indigenous British white boys are not all right, but rather are potentially far-Right— a message that news outlets have been pushing ad infinitum for the past few years. Drill down into the actual data on Britain’s convicted teen terrorists, however, and you will find a different and less politically convenient story. According to a report published last November by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, between January 2016 and October 2023, 43 individuals in England and Wales were convicted of terrorism offences they committed as minors. The majority were far-Right (25), while 16 were jihadi and two had no clear or known ideological motivation. All except one — Safaa Boular, who was jailed for life for her role in an Isis-inspired plot to attack the British Museum — were male. The youngest was just 13. (The authors of the report, Hannah Rose and Gina Vale, have posted their dataset here.)

More striking, though, was the fact that none of the 43 had managed to commit an act of terrorist violence, none had procured a firearm and only one had come close to making a workable explosive device. Indeed, most were not, in fact, terrorists at all, but were instead the online fanboys of terrorism: they had downloaded, disseminated or created terrorist content on the internet — and a few had done a combination of all three. These are all offences under UK terrorism legislation and are punishable by up to 15 years’ imprisonment. One of the teens, a neo-Nazi from west London, had made a poster inciting violence against Prince Harry, calling him “race traitor” on account of his marriage to Meghan Markle. Another, a Muslim from Sutton Coldfield, had set up a “mujahdeen channel” on Telegram, where he gave a lesson on how to make a Molotov cocktail and offered advice on how to travel to Syria to join the jihad there.

The data cast an illuminating light on the ideology of the offenders, but you need to probe further to understand its implications. Of the 43 teenagers in Rose and Vale’s dataset, 13 — almost a third — were convicted of preparation of terrorist acts, which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. And of those 13, seven had sought to join jihadi groups in war zones in the Middle East and North Africa, but were stopped by counter-terrorism police, while eight had unsuccessfully plotted to carry out terrorist acts in the UK. Among that last group, five were far-Right and three were jihadi.

Rose and Vale acknowledge that the “more serious” terrorism offences “were more common among Islamist individuals”, but they don’t enlarge on this point, although they make it clear that of the eight who plotted terrorist violence, the two who came closest to succeeding were jihadi-inspired. “While the extreme Right-wing teenage plotters outnumber Islamists in our dataset,” they write, “it is interesting to note that two planned large-scale Islamist attacks could meet the threshold of ‘late stage’ disruption after months of research and reconnaissance.”

It is also interesting to note that Rose and Vale’s dataset would look very different had they gone further back to the declaration of the Isis caliphate in mid-2014, giving them a decade-long perspective. That dataset would have included Shamima Begum and her two now deceased schoolmates, Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase, and the other Bethnal Green schoolgirl who apparently inspired all three, Sharmeena Begum. It would have also included Talha Asmal, 17, who travelled from Dewsbury to Iraq to join Isis and in June 2015 carried out a suicide bombing there. And it would have included many other teenage boys who made the same dismal life-choices as Asmal. It would, in short, have produced an overwhelming statistical disproportion between jihadists and the far-Right and further cemented the impression that British teenagers who embrace jihad are far more dangerous than those who engage in far-Right terror fandoms in their bedrooms.

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Another striking detail is that there are no incels among the 43 convicted teens. I point this out because while incel culture has reportedly “gone mainstream” in UK schools, no British schoolboy until now has been convicted of incel-related terrorism offences in this country. Given the enormous gaslighting around this issue of late, and the even bigger public and private digital-training-grift that parasitically engorges on it, the conspicuous absence of incels in the data is more than noteworthy.

A yet further striking detail is that of the 43 offenders, 13 had been referred at least once to Prevent, the UK’s counter-radicalisation programme, which, according to William Shawcross’s review last year, is excessively focused on Right-wing extremism, despite 80% of live police investigations involving Islamist plots. Prevent’s defenders insist that the scheme has stopped countless young people from engaging in extremism, but it’s impossible to empirically demonstrate this, given that we can’t know how their lives would have turned out had they not received support from Prevent. What we do know, however, is that a significant number who had received such support went on to commit terrorism offences. In one revealing section, Rose and Vale quote one of the teens as boasting: “I just had a two-hour conversation with a coconut mozlem which works with the government…He tried to ‘deradicalise’ me…They think we’re gunna stop following the haqq [truth] out of fear of them or of ignorance.”

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Looking at the cold data, then, the overwhelming picture that emerges is not of dangerous masterminds, but of chaotic and cretinous loners immersed in an infantile online demi-monde of gore, murder fandom and sectarian hatred. Many grew up in troubled families and suffer from mental health problems, particularly autism. And while they were all vigorously invested in their ideological beliefs, their ability to competently act on them was, as Rose and Vale moderately put it, “less clear-cut”. Joe Metcalfe, for example, would have been a more serious proposition had he known how to drive: his plot came to a pitiful end when he stole his dad’s car and crashed it into a fence. Another far-Right plotter from Rugby was similarly ham-fisted, prompting the judge at his trial to describe his attack-planning as “inept”.

None of this means that teenage extremists are not a potential threat, and Rose and Vale are rightly determined to dispel the idea that they have no agency and were led astray by mysterious “online groomers”. The recent stabbing of an Assyrian bishop by a 16-year-old boy in Sydney testifies to this: he survived the attack, but his right eye didn’t.

The attack was revealing in other ways, too. Bishop Emmanuel has apparently forgiven his attacker, which is his right to do of course, while a spokesperson for the attacker’s family has relayed to the media that the teen had “anger management” problems and is a devout Muslim without being “fanatical”. Here we can see the inverse of today’s extremism panic, where the temptation is to pretend that it’s not happening at all, or that it’s only happening among those sketchy white kids.

The Head of the UK’s Counter Terrorism Policing, Matt Jukes, recently told a journalist that, when he first started his career in counter-terrorism 25 years ago, the dominant foes were organised groups such as al-Qaeda, whereas today the threat-picture looks very different: “One in five of the people we arrest [today] is a child… principally boys,” he said, adding that some were as young as 11 and that much of his work is now taken up with liaising less with MI5 and more with child and adolescent mental health services, schools and colleges.

Counter Terrorism Policing, in other words, has become an ancillary of Britain’s already over-bloated and ever-expanding therapeutic state. This is alarming for all sorts of reasons. Not only does it risk stigmatising the young people who come within its remit, but it also diverts resources away from investigating threats that are far more serious than that posed by acne-ridden teenagers in their bedrooms.

Britain had been caught completely off-guard by Islamist extremism, and reasserting fundamental British values appeared to be the answer. In fact, extremism was even defined by the Government as “vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs”. The only problem: the reassertion of fundamental British values against this threat never really came. Many schools were confused and just did their best to keep Ofsted inspectors at bay. I saw “fundamental British values” hall displays made up of portraits of semi-obscure Royals and pictures of fish and chips. Elsewhere, the use of the word “British” before “values” made the mainly Left-leaning public and education sectors expected to promote them squirm. And so, in the absence of any revitalisation of British democratic values, Islamists largely just carried on going about their business.

Almost a decade later, Britain has once again been caught off-guard by Islamism, with the Government expected to unveil a new practical definition of extremism today. But this will always prove a very difficult task: “extremism” is a fundamentally subjective notion, and is open to an inherent risk of politicisation and abuse, particularly at a time when there seems to be less and less agreement on what our shared values actually are.

It is by now a cliche in academic circles to point to Britain’s lack of written constitution, a problem not shared by our European neighbours. France, for instance, has dissolved both Islamist and far-Right groups for being contrary to Republican principles, while Germany has a Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which monitors and produces public reports on far-Right, far-Left and Islamist subversion. The UK, however, has no such luxury, and, as a result, the Government’s efforts to define “extremism” have left two of the most significant Islamist movements largely untouched: the Muslim Brotherhood and their South Asian equivalent, Jamaat-e-Islami. This has allowed individuals connected to these movements and their front groups to continue growing in power, through official appointments and even through the receipt of taxpayer money. Indeed, the logic behind renewing the definition seems to be exactly this — to provide clear rules for government departments for how to engage with organisations that are not merely opposed to the current government, but agitate against liberal democracy altogether.

When it comes to this brand of “non-violent” Islamism, British authorities have been incredibly lax. But even if they had been vigilant, tackling their influence would have been far from straightforward. To start with, Muslim Brotherhood networks in Britain are obsessively secretive (indeed, one formerly prominent member left because of this), which makes debating and defeating their ideas in the public square almost impossible. The resulting obscuration of their political programme means that these groups are unlikely to fall foul of the British values definition of extremism. On democracy, for instance, their representatives talk a great game: they are happy to work within existing democratic frameworks and even make pragmatic alliances in unlikely quarters, such as with Jewish and LGBT groups to advance their agenda. The ends (an eventual Islamic state) justify the means. Jamaat-e-Islami’s founder, Abul A’la Maududi, for instance, detailed how their agenda to reshape society should be so gradual as to be imperceptible to the host country, making it impossible to identify, much less confront.

To counter this, attempts have been made to position extremism in close proximity to “hate”. But “hate” doesn’t best describe the public face of these Islamist groups, whose members are mainly professional, educated and expert communicators — a far cry from the stereotype of a snarling hate-filled thug. And even for jihadists, this framing is not clear-cut: in 2015, before he murdered them, Amedy Coulibaly chatted calmly with his Jewish hostages in the Hypercacher supermarket, telling them he had “nothing against Jews”. His massacre, he explained, was ideologically — divinely — ordained.

According to reports, the new proposed definition will — like the definition before it — still be values-based. The Times suggests that it will take in those who promote or advance “an ideology based on intolerance, hatred or violence that aims to undermine the rights or freedoms of others”, with a second rung of the definition targeted at those who seek to undermine or overturn Britain’s parliamentary democracy. On the face of it, this proposal seems better equipped to tackle the complex challenges posed by the aforementioned Islamist movements, while bringing Britain closer to how European states perceive their own constitutional threats. Within the Conservative Party behind it, however, there are fears that the definition will be used against social conservatives or gender-critical feminists. It’s not hard to see why there is concern, especially at a time when various political tribes are busy accusing one another of supposed extremism. Revelations that training materials and briefings under Prevent and other counter-terrorism efforts have expanded so far as to include the likes of Brexit voters, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Douglas Murray and Joe Rogan show that this alarm is far from unfounded.

A convincing alternative approach is offered by philosophy professor Quassim Cassam, who argues that any definition of extremism should be focused on behaviours, rather than beliefs. Cassam does not deny the central role of ideology, but warns of the dangers of a definitional focus: “It’s not that a person’s ideology is irrelevant or that extremism doesn’t have an ideological dimension. Rather, the main focus should be on what extremists do. What they think matters to the extent that it influences their actions.” He continues: “An extremist, then, is someone who engages in politically or religiously motivated intimidation, threats, or violence for political or religious ends.”

As sympathetic as I am to this argument, it nonetheless begs the question: how do two of the most significant Islamist organisations fit into this configuration? And not only that, but two Islamist organisations that are central reasons for the renewed Government concern.

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Cassam is right to point out the unfairness of penalising a group or individual simply because their beliefs fall outside of the Overton window, but neither the Brotherhood nor Jamaat operate within these constraints. They are not open about their actual political agenda and so neither supporters nor opponents of their front groups in Britain can test or debate their actual ideas. To make matters worse, criticising the activities or policies of these fronts is often met with socially and professionally ruinous Islamophobia allegations, or financially ruinous legal threats. In other words, they are not playing by the rules of the game.

It’s for these reasons that the UK Government is also reportedly establishing a “centre of excellence” to tackle extremism. The lack of information relating to non-terroristic Islamism has made it tricky for officials and institutions to make informed decisions about engagement and funding, leading to repeated blunders. It remains to be seen how such a centre would be protected from the Islamist scene’s aggressive litigiousness — or, perhaps even more so, how it can be protected in the long term from meandering towards figures such as Andrew Tate instead of the various movements genuinely wielding the freedoms afforded under British democracy against itself.

It is in this context that a new definition of extremism will emerge. Striking the balance between protecting people’s essential liberties and marginalising the unique and subversive challenge posed by domestic Islamism — or at least ensuring that we are not paying for and legitimising that subversion — will be the key to whether we are here again in a decade, clamouring around for yet a new definition. In this eventuality I propose a simple test. Would I trust my political opponents with this definition? If the answer is no, then it’s back to the drawing board.

“The wider effects on public discourse have been chilling. Many… have started to self-censor… In theory, progressives campaign in the name of diversity and inclusion. In practice, they destroy open debate and suffocate those who hold different views… In theory they say they want to protect their democratic rights. In practice, they destroy all trust in democracy.”

Except this isn’t Rufo. This, in fact, is the extremism expert Julia Ebner, writing in her new book, Going Mainstream: How the extremists are taking over, on how the fringes of the far-Right have taken over the mainstream. I simply substituted “progressives” for “the enemies of progressive liberalism” and “diversity and inclusion” for “free speech”. The alarmism was all her own.

We have reached a curious juncture in the culture war where the most entrenched combatants on either side have come to believe that the most deranged ideas of their enemies have politically and culturally triumphed, conquering the mainstream. Both believe that their sacred way of life is under existential threat from dangerous and deviant ideas that have marched from the margins to the centre. Both believe that some form of counter-revolution is needed to stop the rot. Both, bewitched by the excesses of their adversaries, have succumbed to the very derangement and loss of perspective of which they accuse the other side.

The crucial difference between Ebner and Rufo, however, is that Ebner bills herself as an expert and academic, while Rufo is explicit and unapologetic about being an activist with political aspirations. I won’t comment on Ebner’s credentials as an academic or extremism expert, but she’s certainly not a conventional one. For a start, it is rare for an extremism expert to be the subject of a long and lavish feature in a leading national newspaper. “I infiltrate incel groups posing as a man: my life undercover,” ran the headline of a recent Times magazine piece on Ebner, accompanied by two glossy photographs of her, brandishing her weapon of choice: an Apple laptop.

Clearly, the cloak-and-dagger intrigue of going behind enemy lines is a big part of Ebner’s appeal. Equally clearly, it isn’t something she feels particularly bashful about: “Views based on data + undercover research,” her Twitter bio says. In an earlier book, Going Dark, Ebner put on a blonde wig to disguise herself (she was meeting a far-Right activist in a café in Vienna). This was one of five fake identities she used as part of her research for that book. “There is an adrenaline rush in doing any kind of undercover work,” she told a Guardian journalist in 2020.

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In Going Mainstream, Ebner deploys three new fake identities: a French-British mother of two toddlers who is “opposed to Black Lives Matter, climate change action and Covid vaccines”; a white American incel who is “is fed up with feminism”; and a pro-Russia Bavarian whose “social vacuum” is filled with German QAnon and anti-vaxxer groups on Telegram. As Ebner explains, she uses these aliases to “infiltrate movements that I wouldn’t be able to join using my real identity”. One might well recoil at the use of “infiltrate” here, since Ebner doesn’t so much infiltrate any particular “movement” as marvel at and “fact-check” the misapprehensions of the extremists she comes into contact with.

In any case, this still leaves the larger question of whether Ebner has any right to deceive these people, however odious they may seem. There was an (arguably more ethical) alternative: like most researchers and journalists, she could have just requested to interview the extremists. This may well have given her a much richer perspective into their lives.

In choosing to do “undercover research”, as she calls it, Ebner is fundamentally and irrevocably at odds with the academic community in which she now finds herself. She is currently doing a PhD at Oxford, where she studies online radicalisation. And deceiving human research subjects is not only frowned upon in academia, but is strictly forbidden and potentially career-ending for the academic who engages in it. It has been this way for some time, certainly since the controversy that engulfed the American sociologist Laud Humphreys, who went undercover for his book on men who visit public restrooms in search of sex with other men. More recently, Peter Boghossian came under trenchant criticism for hoodwinking the editors of several academic journals as part of a hoax intended to expose the intellectual lunacy of grievance studies. Boghossian resigned from Portland State University in September 2021.

Ebner, who is scarcely a junior researcher, must surely know the stakes here, yet the insouciance with which she discusses her undercover approach is quite extraordinary. “Adopting a fake identity,” she writes in Going Dark, “is not unlike developing the character in a novel.” Or acting. According to The Times, Ebner’s spell as a children’s TV actor — she played “the part of a villainous bicycle thief called Lady Lila in an Austrian children’s TV show, Tom Turbo” — helped her “to develop her research abilities”.

As evidence for her thesis that “extreme ideas have conquered the mainstream”, Ebner doesn’t so much conduct research as selectively gather material from news websites and progressive NGOs and think-tanks to confirm it. The picture she paints of contemporary Britain is particularly bleak, and if you had never visited these shores and with only Ebner’s book to go on you could be forgiven for thinking that the UK is a freak show of racist football fans, misogynist cops, climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers and despicable “Terfs”. In her discussion of racism in English football, she cites an Economist article on how non-white players performed better when stadiums were empty during Covid lockdowns. “Experts linked this to the absence of racist abuse during games,” she relays, accepting this finding at face value and neglecting to add that the research was carried out in Italy.

But the cardinal error at the heart of Going Mainstream is that it conflates Right-wing populism and even liberal opposition to radical progressivism with the beliefs of violent extremists and mass-killers. Tucker Carlson, for example, is accused of purveying the so-called “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, an idea that “has inspired multiple deadly terror attacks in recent years”, including the 2019 Christchurch massacre in which Brenton Tarrant murdered 51 Muslims in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Carlson, of course, has never sought to justify, much less called for, the use of mass-murder to halt migration to the West, but in Ebner’s rendering there is little daylight between Carlson and Tarrant, the former simply the mainstream incarnation of the latter. Ebner doesn’t flatly say this, but she assuredly implies it.

Insinuation is also the means by which she seeks to tarnish gender-critical feminists. “Transphobia is not limited to online commentators,” she writes, citing the Labour MP Rosie Duffield as an example of a “high-profile” politician who has “lent legitimacy to anti-trans attitudes”. Immediately after quoting Duffield’s comment that trans women are “male bodied biological men”, Ebner seamlessly transitions to Vladimir Putin and his “defence of traditional family values”. Duffield, apparently, is on Team Putin. As for Ebner, it’s very clear whose side she is on, because she takes pains to tell us. “As a cis-gender woman I refuse to yield to those voices who want to sow divisions in the feminist and LGBTQ communities,” she writes.

Ebner’s elisions and exaggerations also extend to the political power and cultural prestige of those she denounces as extremists. “Andrew Tate is an example of toxic masculinity that has made it to the mainstream,” she writes, despite him being a globally reviled figure, albeit one with a huge online following. Similarly, she describes “dangerous” Jordan Peterson as “an establishment figure”, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he been ritually vilified in legacy media outlets and faced numerous cancellation efforts.

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Towards the end of the book, Ebner approvingly cites her fellow extremism expert Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who in 2018 published a book with a near-identical thesis. Last month, Miller-Idriss came to public attention for an article she had written on “the intersection of extremism and fitness” and how neo-Nazis were using gyms and combat sports to lure in new recruits. The piece was roundly mocked, prompting Miller-Idriss to respond on Twitter by insisting that “I was a high school & college athlete. I work out several times/week. Fitness is key to my own well-being…” In Going Mainstream, Ebner has her own Miller-Idriss moment when she suggests that the UK parenting platform Mumsnet is a hotbed of extremist radicalisation. “Many parents who come to Mumsnet for knowledge, advice and support find themselves in a breeding ground for transphobia,” she remarks, citing one user called “Mike” as an authority for this statement.

While much of Going Mainstream is taken up with curating and correcting the most extreme views of anti-progressives, Ebner also interviews — using her real name — radical activists on the Left, including the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion’s London offshoot and a Black Lives Matter activist from Brooklyn called “Dr J”. Here she praises their idealism and bravery and resilience. There is no fact-checking. There is only credulous deference.

As a guide to how people become extremists, Going Mainstream offers scant illumination because it’s rooted in a tremendous epistemic arrogance that sees extremism as a deviation from the cosmopolitan liberalism to which Ebner subscribes. From her perspective, people become extreme because they have fallen prey to disinformation or are working through some psychological issue, and that, were it not for this, they would be on the side of the angels. And until they realise this, she seems certain that they should be “deplatformed” and that “harmful content” on social media should be removed.

It is here that her tactics bear a striking resemblance to Rufo’s, who, as a recent appointee of Governor Ron DeSantis to the board of New College of Florida, hopes to dismantle its gender studies department. Both Ebner and Rufo would no doubt be horrified at this: their political views and judgements are radically at odds with each other. But in their alarmism, selectivity and censoriousness, they are surely kindred spirits, transfixed and perennially triggered by the Twilight Zone-like unreality of the extremists they’re obsessed with.

Manchin’s rejection of the Democrats has been a long time coming. His voting record is complex, diverging from the party line on numerous occasions. A lifetime member of the National Rifle Association (NRA), Manchin opposed the more progressive elements of his party after Sandy Hook. And as one of the few anti-abortion Democrats in Congress, he has consistently voted in favour of restrictions on abortion access. Meanwhile, his support for the coal industry — an important economic driver in his home state and the industry that made him a millionaire before he entered politics — has often put him at odds with their green agenda. He was also the only Democrat to vote in favour of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination in 2018, drawing the ire of many within his party, and he voted with Donald Trump more than 50% of the time.

Manchin’s ideology is consistent, though. It’s grounded in the history of West Virginia, a former Democrat stronghold that has become solidly Republican in recent years. And his conservative bent could be perceived as a survival strategy. After all, he is currently staring down a 55% disapproval rating in West Virginia, as he contemplates seeking another term in the Senate. His opponent is likely to be the state’s Republican governor, Jim Justice, a former conservative Democrat who switched parties. And one does wonder: why doesn’t Manchin jump ship to the Republican Party, given his voting patterns seem slightly more aligned with theirs? Trump, in 2022, actually suggested on Truth Social that Manchin be brought into the GOP.

But Manchin’s comments signal a desire to reject both major parties. In America, there is a large cadre of “politically homeless” voters: roughly 49% of the electorate according to some polling. Where once they might have been drawn to candidates who could see the other side’s point of view, these voters now seem disenchanted with party politics altogether, put off by the extreme fringes of the Republicans and Democrats alike. Manchin is appealing to them.

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While polls show dissatisfaction with candidates within both parties, Manchin’s potential candidacy would inevitably benefit one of them. He could appeal to a critical 1% or 2% in Rust Belt swing states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan, which would probably be enough to tilt the scales in favour of the GOP.

More broadly, his rhetoric is a sign of a shift in American politics. Bipartisanship and consensus decision-making, celebrated ideals for nearly three decades after the end of the Second World War, have lost their lustre, ceasing to animate the base of either party. Marginal struggles currently define internal and external political battles. But Manchin and allies, such as former Democrat Krysten Sinema — now representing Arizona in the Senate as an independent — believe there’s still a silent majority to be found in the centre, one that is indifferent to the culture war that drives the loudest political engagement. 

Manchin’s paradox is that, while the most active voters are increasingly drawn towards the extremes of their respective parties, he is gambling on the centre. While his voting record paints a picture of a moderate Democrat — often erring on the conservative side — this suggestion of a third-party candidacy implies a critical redefinition of his political stance. Instead of being the swing vote within his party, Manchin would be a fulcrum between the two major political forces. Would he survive it?

Much of Manchin’s political career has been characterised by his unusual resilience in the face of the onrushing deep-red political tides in West Virginia. His endurance owes much to his somewhat unconventional stances, which resonate with a Rust Belt populace disenchanted by what they perceive as the Democratic Party’s preoccupation with identity politics at the expense of working-class concerns relevant to their area, such as the protection of jobs in fossil fuel industries.

But is there a national appetite for this brand of centrism? The country is polarised. The Pew Research Center has found that twice as many members of the two main American parties now view their opponents unfavourably, compared to 1994. In a sociopolitical environment where labels — LGBTQIA, America First, MAGA, they/them — have become essential to the identities of young people, not to mention their self-marketing, will there be significant support for a “No Labels” campaign?

Third-party bids have gained some traction in America’s political history. Billionaire Ross Perot’s Reform Party campaign racked up some impressive numbers in 1992 and 1996. But while Perot aimed to transcend partisan politics in order to win, Manchin appears more focused on exerting influence to create a moderate shift in policy. If he runs, he’s more likely to follow in the footsteps of activists such as Green Party nominee Ralph Nader, remembered more for inadvertently tipping the scales in favour of Republican George W. Bush in 2000 than for his actual campaign. And since America today is even more polarised than in the Nineties, ultimately the implications of a third-party bid are more dangerous.

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The mooted “No Labels” party does seem like a hurried experiment in political transcendence, a far too simple answer to the broad discontent with the current political binary. But if Manchin wants to be remembered as the man who shed the shackles of partisanship, this move may tarnish the legacy he has already created for himself. His bold attempt to coax the country towards the centre could end up deepening the divisions he has exposed.

This has been the case with his prior attempts to preserve or create a “centre” on controversial issues. On gun control, Manchin co-sponsored the bipartisan Manchin-Toomey bill following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, which proposed expanded background checks for gun sales. Seen by much of the Left as an inadequate middle-ground solution, it failed to gain traction. As a result, the United States has been unable to make even minor changes related to background checks, and the two sides have only become more entrenched.

On energy policy, Manchin’s support for the fossil fuel industry is out of step with his party’s support for a progressive “Green New Deal”, while his reluctance to fully endorse the coal industry’s unregulated expansion has drawn ire from the Right. Manchin has recently joined with Republicans to oppose the climate legislation to which he had added a degree of moderation. But in general, seeking the centrist position in America does not lead to a union of the factions; rather, it leaves the centrist isolated, at odds with both sides.

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His campaign would simply highlight the structural flaws of America’s political system, in which centrism can empower extremism. Part of the problem is the dynamics of party primaries. Candidates often find themselves compelled to pander to the ideological extremes to gain the nomination, pushing them away from the centre. Even if they later shift, their original stances are remembered; in the long run, this discourages bipartisan cooperation.

Here is a lesson for moderates, if they really want to effect change: instead of conforming to extremism, they should look to their long-term influence on political norms and the policy-making process, as Manchin at least tried to do prior to signalling his frustration with the Democrats. They need to somehow communicate the importance of pragmatic governance, and the necessity of compromise in a democracy — ideally through political advertising that emphasises the value of bipartisan dealmaking over ideological purity, of “fighting gridlock” and “getting things done”.

It won’t be easy. Divide and conquer has always been a potent strategy for generating enthusiasm, and centrists such as Manchin are working in an atmosphere where both parties are cynically leveraging polarisation. Democrats have recently started funding extreme Republican primary candidates, whom they believe will be easy to beat in the general election. It’s a manoeuvre that, while it may yield short-term electoral gains, could backfire, by enabling candidates with more extreme views to gain power. And, if moderates abandon the major parties, they will only empower these extreme candidates, driving the Democrats and Republicans further and further apart. It would be an ironic outcome for Manchin, who claims to want the parties to come together.

So what is Manchin really trying to achieve? He has been a self-avowed independent within the Democratic Party for years; his last-ditch embrace of a potential “No Labels” movement, then, could be characterised as an act of egoism. At the age of 75, Manchin is probably not seeking political longevity. Rather, “No Labels” feels like a legacy move. Manchin might just be looking back at his long career of crossing party lines, and making a final, and perhaps sincere, plea for American politics to move back to the centre. 

Then again, if he is against the erosion of collective solidarity by personal politics, there would be an irony in him launching a highly individual campaign. There’s no point standing in the ideological centre if you’re there all by yourself.

The online abyss, with its proliferation of the repugnant, the vile and the downright perverse, makes the vast oceans my grandfather navigated appear almost quaint. Still, he grasped what would prove to be an essential truth of the internet: inhumanity is overlooked in the distribution of awards. In our digital era, attention goes to the most shocking, the most outrageous, the most hurtful.

Like many disaffected young men, I spent a phase of my life drawn to the grimmest corners of the internet, frequenting shock sites such as Ogrish. I would stay up late into the night, the glow of my screen illuminating images of brutal violence, the aftermath of bombings and scenes of torture — much of it related to the various global conflicts occurring in the early 2000s. This was, perhaps, a misguided attempt to understand the depths of human suffering. But does the internet merely reflect our inherent depravity, or does it make it more extreme?

I recently spoke to Monica Garnsey, the executive producer of  a harrowing BBC documentary which some of her colleagues described as among the worst assignments of their careers. These were veteran reporters who had seen the horrors of war zones, yet the subject they were uniquely disturbed by was an online underbelly: a monkey-torturing ring. What bothered them was that, unlike soldiers, or even individuals with abhorrent sexual desires, many who revelled in these gruesome videos displayed an unsettling lack of guilt. These videos showed innocent animals subjected to unspeakable cruelty at the viewer’s request, with other individuals who sought out the clips admitting they also took pleasure in it; for some, it was just a way of “passing the time”. They spoke of it as an intriguing hobby, a release valve for pent-up anger, or even, in some twisted cases, as entertainment. One of the primary sadists recalled stumbling upon a torture video and “chuckling to myself”.

Though much of the actual torture was taking place in Indonesia, the videos were mostly being watched by people in America. Propping up this twisted subculture are “torture-media influencers” — individuals who monetise the abuse of stars like Mini, a monkey whose popularity made her too valuable to kill, despite the complaints of torture aficionados who had grown weary of her starring role. (“Mini is so over,” some would post.)

The business model of these “torture-media influencers” was sickeningly straightforward, selling videos on a pay-per-view basis. But the internet doesn’t actually make it easy to make money; the financial gain was relatively minor. After expenses, even the top purveyors were earning only a few hundred dollars through private sales of more explicit films. There are plenty of easier ways to make that amount of money. These influencers must derive some satisfaction from their work.

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The majority of this disturbing content is circulated on platforms such as YouTube, where unsuspecting viewers stumble upon it; it’s a site with resources, and one that most people believe to be relatively well-regulated. Indeed, its content moderators are required to watch anything from acts of suicide and murder to incidents of child abuse. The depraved content that slips through the net is actually only the tip of the iceberg.

The job is known to be traumatic. In 2018, a lawsuit was filed against Facebook and its associated companies alleging that the companies failed to protect their content moderators from the psychological impacts linked to reviewing disturbing images. The case was settled in 2020, with Facebook agreeing to pay $52 million to thousands of American workers. Might it be possible that some derive perverse pleasure from this line of work? Since we know that there are people who pay to watch this content, surely there’s a possibility that some people want to watch it and get paid. Most, though, claim to do it out of necessity. And it’s a growing field of employment, especially in regions where employment opportunities might be scarce.

These content moderators are real-life incarnations of Alex from A Clockwork Orange, a juvenile delinquent “reformed” into utter brokenness through non-stop involuntary exposure to violent films. It reminds me of my grandfather. He joined the military with intentions that were less than noble — to avoid jail time — but what he did, in the name of service, left him psychologically broken. Is the internet as corrupting a force as war: a system that rewards depravity and punishes those charged with maintaining order?

Mike McCartney, a former gang member now known as the “Torture King”, is an incontrovertible piece of evidence that the internet actually inspires abuse. He knew nothing about monkey torture until he stumbled upon a video on YouTube. He found it amusing. And it served as a gateway drug. The very worst monkey torture content is shared on private, and therefore unmoderated, channels. The Torture King sought out out likeminded people on Telegram, where the abuse is both normalised and escalated to unimaginable levels, with members conspiring and voting on cruel methods of torture. He started selling and trading torture videos, deriving a meagre profit, starkly disproportionate to the risks he took, including a potential seven-year prison sentence.

In some ways, this is an extreme case of a broader pattern, whereby people pursue validation and clout on social media at any cost, even when it involves catering to their basest impulses. The founder of Ape’s Cage, known as Mr Ape, told the BBC investigation that he felt affection for the monkeys, particularly Mini, whom he hoped would make it out of the ordeal alive (she did). Like several other torture fans, he even justified his actions by claiming he was trying to expose others involved in the trade. Perhaps he was just trying to avoid the consequences of his actions, but he wouldn’t be the first man to profess one set of beliefs when alone and online, and quite another when offline and in the company of others. The internet encourages psychological compartmentalisation, as well as the feeling that you can escape reality. But let us be clear: these depraved men were the instigators, not the liberators.

Can anyone take them on? Earlier this month, Meta, the conglomerate that owns Facebook and Instagram, established a task force dedicated to curbing the distribution and sale of child sexual abuse material on its platforms — a problem further exacerbated by ceaseless improvements in deepfake technology. This move was a response to a damning report by the Stanford Internet Observatory that unveiled a network of accounts peddling self-generated explicit material, primarily through Instagram’s direct messaging feature. A key point in the researchers’ findings was that the site was enabling buyers and sellers to find each other, thanks to the effectiveness of its algorithm.

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But are these sites giving people what they want, or making people want it? Perhaps it’s both. They are designed to keep users hooked because that’s their business model. They promote and amplify our darkest desires; they whet our appetite for more. TikTok has, for instance, faced criticism for contributing to the radicalisation of individuals by leading them down conspiracy theory rabbit holes.

And this then has resonance in the real world. What we see on the internet can directly impact our faith in reality — in other people. As an insider from the BBC documentary expressed: “What you realise is that anyone — the person in front of you in line, the person next to you on the street — could be a monkey torturer.” In a society where trust is already fragile, the danger is profound: bombard us with the worst aspects of human nature, and we view each other as suspects. We retreat into isolation, further eroding our faith in others. In other words the internet, in feeding our darkest desires, fans the flames of societal fragmentation.

The omnipresence of depravity has other consequences. It can numb us; or it can inspire a terrible guilt, akin to my grandfather’s, about our inability to prevent inhumanity. It leads to dehumanisation, and political apathy: if humans are terrible, what’s the point of trying to make society better?

But perhaps we can draw comfort from the fact that, while depravity generates a lot of views, so too does the fight against it. The BBC investigation into monkey torture is, in many ways, a successor to NBC’s television programme To Catch a Predator, affectionately known as TCAP. In the early days of social media, the show capitalised on the commonality of child predators, setting up intricate traps to catch these maladjusted individuals in the act. It was immensely popular. The programme paraded the perverts before the public eye, drawing attention to the staggering number lurking online. It featured the shy and morbidly obese Peter Sciacca, who went by the username “Don Ceech” and met his lonely demise in 2021 after serving time in prison. The trouble is, this sort of voyeurism is also problematic. Was Sciacca vulnerable? Marginalised? Exploited by the internet, just as he used it to exploit others? Exploited by the TV show, which turned his emptiness and alienation into a spectacle for others to consume, deepening his isolation, escalating their propensity for depravity?

We do have to take some responsiblity. The internet is, after all, a reflection of us — a mirror to our collective consciousness. But that digital mirror also allows us to detach consequences from action and to leave empathy behind. And it is this, arguably, that poses a far greater threat to our societal fabric than the individual acts of depravity. So even as those sickos are brought to justice, we ought to ask ourselves: what would we do, if we thought we could get away with it?

The scene painted by the footage is both horrifyingly perplexing and peculiarly British. The sky is overcast. No one seems to be running or screaming, or trying to confront and overpower the killers. A consolatory moment is provided by the “Angel of Woolwich”, the woman who calmly conversed with and challenged the killers before taking off to catch her bus. In the background, there is a bundle in the middle of the road. It is the body of Lee Rigby.

Michael Adebolajo grew up and went to school in Havering, where East London spills into Essex. Nevertheless, he addresses bystanders as “you people”, telling them they will “never be safe” before warning that British soldiers must leave “our lands”, meaning Iraq and Afghanistan. To his mind, he is no longer a British man born to a Nigerian-Christian family and schooled in Romford, but a member of the global Ummah, which is under existential attack from the West.

The murderers never attributed their attack to al-Qaeda, but in many ways it fit the al-Qaeda bill. It was a highly specific act of violence, targeting a member of the enemy’s armed forces. It was the kind of attack the group’s Yemen branch had directly called for in their English-language magazine less than a year beforehand. It was so discriminate that Adebolajo was careful to assure bystanders they were not his targets, even going so far as to apologise to nearby women for the bloodshed. Two years later, the al-Qaeda trained Charlie Hebdo killers would similarly — and impatiently — remind a journalist that they had only killed blasphemers; that they hadn’t harmed “civilians”. This was honour, jihadi-style.

In other ways, Lee Rigby’s murder was the kind of gruesome spectacle that al-Qaeda’s leadership would later warn against, but which Islamic State would make their hallmark. A gruesome spectacle, but a shoddy and amateurish one, too: Adebolajo and Adebowale rammed Lee Rigby with a Vauxhall Tigra before trying, and failing, to behead their victim. The rusty antique revolver they had acquired malfunctioned, and they were denied martyrdom by arriving armed police.

By contrast, the Charlie Hebdo attackers came clad in all black tactical gear, wielded Kalashnikovs and raised their fists having avenged the Prophet. They looked the business, and they went down in a hail of bullets. Adebolajo, in his Stone Island beanie and Primarni toggle jacket, did not. Adebolajo and Adebowale didn’t pledge allegiance to al-Qaeda in their attack, but perhaps notably, al-Qaeda never claimed them either.

Still, this did not stop others from imitating them. As Raffaello Pantucci notes, it served to “lower the threshold of what constitutes a terrorist attack, suddenly making the act much more accessible”. It showed other extremists that neither a cell, explosives nor serious weaponry were necessarily prerequisites to action. In the days to follow, a soldier was stabbed in the neck in Paris, while a year later another young extremist convert was apprehended en route to behead a British soldier. Brusthom Ziamani, the would-be copycat who thought Michael Adebolajo a “legend”, has since emerged as a leading and troublesome figure among imprisoned jihadis. In 2020, while he was eight months into a deradicalisation programme, he attempted to murder a prison officer.

The fact that Adebolajo and Adebowale were careful to target a soldier — and only a soldier — reveals much about the evolution of jihadism and the ideological divides within it. While mass casualty attacks are associated with jihadist terror, prior to Isis, discriminate plots were more the norm in Europe: against Jews, military personnel and alleged blasphemers. There were even bitter divides within Adebolajo and Adebowale’s networks: some believed that attacks at home were illegitimate due to a covenant of security with Britain, while others came to view the covenant as null and void since UK participation in the invasion of Iraq.

The 7/7 bombers deemed Britain a legitimate target, but it was not until Lee Rigby’s murder that jihadists were able to successfully attack again — an eight-year wait. Some observers assumed the jihadist threat was a thing of the past: Bin Laden was dead and the London Olympics came and went without a hitch. But it was the same year as the Woolwich attack that British extremists were trickling into Syria to fight — a trickle that became a flood in 2014 when Isis declared it had restored the Caliphate.

In the eight “quiet” years between attacks, Salafi-jihadist activity did not cease. The Islam that Adebolajo and Adebowale had converted to was the Islam of Omar Bakri Mohammad, Anjem Choudary and their acolytes in al-Muhajiroun. Its activity during the 2000s and early 2010s consisted of proselytising, attention-grabbing stunts, establishing European offshoots, and more proselytising. On a day-to-day basis, it also meant living according to the incredibly strict, incredibly demanding lifestyle of a Salafi-jihadist activist, which often involved cutting oneself off from friends, family, jobs and many of life’s pleasures — from football to television. It was to enter a totalitarian pact voluntarily.

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Because of his closeness to these networks, Adebolajo had flirted with the attention of security services on several occasions, but never enough to warrant intervention. In 2010, however, he was apprehended by Kenyan authorities; he was most likely on the way to join al-Shabaab in Somalia, with whom a number of Britons were already fighting at the time. Despite this, a Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee report determined MI5 could not have prevented the attack. Instead, it blamed an unnamed American company — Facebook — which had closed several of Adebowale’s accounts without informing British authorities. Five months prior to the attack, Adebowale had even graphically communicated his desire to kill a British soldier. The trouble was the offending content was picked up algorithmically and closed automatically — no human being ever laid eyes on it.

At the time, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, determined that Facebook was the “one party which could have made a difference” in preventing the murder of Lee Rigby. In some quarters, particularly among civil liberties groups, this conclusion was viewed as all too convenient for the security services, as well as paving the way for more anti-terror legislation and more government control over the internet. The drumbeat for tech companies to act on terrorist and extremist content online would grow louder the following year, as Isis flooded social media with gore and Silicon Valley could no longer refuse to act. Today, it is nongovernmental groups as much as governments leading the charge for more control over the internet.

And yet, despite the infamy of Michael Adebolajo’s image, neither he nor his accomplice live on in the annals of jihadi lore. Although I’m told security services would cast doubt on these claims, Adebolajo allegedly regrets his act and the Jihadist worldview, a fact which is of no consolation to the family of his victim. Instead, it is Lee Rigby’s name and image which lives on — while his killers, denied their martyrdom, must live out their days anonymously and forgotten, somewhere in the bowels of His Majesty’s prison estate.

For years, they targeted me, calling me an “Islamophobe”. I am a Muslim. But I had had the temerity to call out Muslim establishment leaders who won’t acknowledge the Islamic extremism lying at the heart of crimes such as those of the Boston Marathon bombers. I am far from alone in suffering harassment on LoonWatch. Other Muslim reformers — such as Syrian-American physician Zuhdi Jasser and Pakistani-Canadian writer Raheel Raza — were also targeted; so, too, were ex-Muslims — including Somali-American author Ayaan Hirsi Ali — and agnostic thinkers such as comedian Bill Maher and scientist Richard Dawkins. Indeed, LoonWatch has denounced conservatives in general, as well as the FBI, the US military, the state of Israel and, more recently, Hindus and the state of India. I wondered: who was behind this network?

After a decade of research, I have revealed the architects of LoonWatch in my new book, Woke Army. They are none other than officials at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, which presents itself as the face of American Islam and the nation’s largest Muslim “civil rights” organisation. It is anything but. Rather, CAIR is a front for an extremist form of Islam. (The organisation didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.) I also discovered that it is not acting alone. Although the internet often makes cancellations seem like spontaneous uprisings, the kind of character assassinations taking place on LoonWatch are targeted attacks by a loosely organised coalition of leftists and Islamist sympathisers. They seek to destroy, in the court of public opinion, anyone who strays from the “progressive” party line.

You’ve heard their catechisms: racism, not freedom, is America’s bedrock; white people are oppressors and black people are oppressed; meritocracy is white supremacy. And, as my own trolls so often implied, it is unconscionable to link Islam to the ghouls who murder in the name of Allah. Opinions straying from these principles cannot be tolerated.

These puritans are prolific beyond LoonWatch. I first encountered them after the beheading of my friend and colleague, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, in 2002. He was kidnapped in Karachi and then killed for being American, Jewish and of Israeli heritage. Danny’s savage murder in the name of Islam propelled me from the news pages to the opinion pages, where I rejected the extremism of my friend’s killers and advocated for an Islam compatible with human rights, women’s rights, and secular governance. For this, I was pilloried, labelled not only an “Islamophobe” but also a “Zionist media whore”. I was accused of being an agent of Israel, and of having sexually transmitted diseases. My son, born after his father abandoned us, was called a “bastard”.

The creation of LoonWatch — a watering-hole for these extremists — presented an opportunity to unmask some of the individuals enabling this hate. In 2018, I filed a defamation lawsuit, Nomani v. John Doe et al., winning the power to subpoena internet service providers for the real identities of 48 “John Doe” anonymous attackers. This led me to a treasure-trove of files, including one that revealed the identity of “Zuhair Thomas”.

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His order was recorded in GoDaddy’s internal “Shopper Info” files with the note: “Verified by Fraud Dept — Customer OK”. But data in the documents makes it possible to identify “Zuhair” as Muhammad Tauseef Akbar, a staffer at CAIR’s Chicago chapter, who used the moniker “Garibaldi” to harass critics of the organisation. Over the years, the bills for the account he set up were paid by the credit card of Ahmed Rehab, a longtime official with CAIR’s national headquarters and the executive director of CAIR Chicago. Rehab’s email, home address and work phone number appeared on the documents, although he used “Emperor” as his fake name on LoonWatch. This GoDaddy account also bought other websites on which CAIR critics were anonymously attacked — including IslamophobiaToday.com and IslamophobiaSucks.com.

Akbar and Rehab didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment, but an attorney did respond on behalf of the anonymous “John Doe” defendants. She wrote little more than: “My name is Lena Masri, and I represent persons affected by the subpoenas you have issued against GoDaddy and Twitter.” Lena Masri is the National Litigation and Civil Rights Director at CAIR.

It’s clear that Muslim ideologues have allied themselves with leftist activists to exploit the freedoms of the West. Their aim, which they are pursuing relentlessly and often viciously, is to utterly discredit Muslim reformers, in order to promote a system of beliefs that runs counter to democratic values. These individuals, and the organisations they work for, seem determined to eliminate as much discussion of Islamic extremism as possible; the actual enemies of civilisation, in this twisted narrative, include the “Israeli apartheid state”, “white supremacists”, and more recently “Hindu extremists”. And these anonymous trolls have borrowed one of the most pernicious tools of the American Left to fuel their propaganda machine: critical race theory, which divides the world into white oppressors and oppressed people of colour. In the LoonWatch world, any criticism of Islam is a racist ploy to harm all Muslims. This framing is a diabolical co-opting of civil-rights language aimed at protecting people who are in fact determined to stamp out the civil rights of their critics. But we have reached a turning point.

Establishment Muslims and their far-Left sympathisers strike more openly now. Earlier this month, on the floor of the Virginia Senate, state Senator Ghazala Hashmi, a Muslim American from India (no relation to Javad Hashmi), hurled the “white supremacist” smear at another Indian-American woman of colour, albeit a Hindu one. Her name is Suparna Dutta. Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin appointed her to the Virginia Board of Education last year. On January 31, this year, the Virginia Senate Privileges and Elections Committee voted unanimously, 14-0, for her nomination. Every Democrat was on her side. But when the issue arose in the state Senate, a cohort of allegedly “progressive” Democrats derailed her appointment, in a 22-18 vote straight down party lines.

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What had Dutta, an advocate for meritocracy in education, done to deserve this? She had had the gall to call out the educrats who were behind the illegal dismemberment of the merit-based admissions process at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) — replacing it with a race-based process that, a federal judge ruled, discriminates against Asian students. In other words, in the name of “anti-racism”, real racism is being practised. With Dutta, in 2020, I got involved in the campaign to oppose this new “progressive” policy at TJ, where my son was a pupil. At one point, a school board member promoted the anti-Israel, antisemitic narratives of CAIR officials. At another point, teachers were instructed not to call the 9/11 hijackers “terrorists”.

Just as Dutta was labelled a “white supremacist”, I, too, was labelled a bigot for protesting against these policies. In September 2020, Virginia Education Secretary Atif Qarni, a Democrat, barred me from speaking at a town hall meeting he was hosting, though I was there as the TJ parent-teacher association representative. He claimed I belong to an “extremist” organisation: the Muslim Reform Movement, which advocates for women’s rights, human rights and secular governance.

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Over the past several days, I have worked with Dutta through the night to trace the roots of the campaign against her. The day after the Select Committee approved her nomination, February 1, Dutta got into a back-and-forth with fellow board member Anne Holton, the wife of powerful Democratic Senator Tim Kaine. Dutta was supporting an effort to remove divisive ideology from Virginia’s history curriculum. Holton advocated for socialism and said the US Constitution wasn’t “remarkable”. Dutta, referencing her experience as an immigrant from India, begged to differ. This enraged her critics.

On the night of February 5, the Twitter account @RedForEdVA — a teachers’ union group that self-describes as supporting socialism — posted grainy photos from a parents’ rally that took place in Fairfax County, Virginia, in October 2021, which far-Right activists had tried to hijack, unbeknown to Dutta and other parents. By the next morning, activists on Twitter were equating the protest to the infamous Charlottesville Unite The Right rally and and the riots of January 6. Shortly afterwards, a Facebook account, Herndon-Reston Indivisible, shared an online campaign, led by the “Virginia Grassroots Coalition”, which includes about 51 far-Left groups; it declared: “Don’t let the Virginia Senate Confirm a Far-Right Extremist to the Board of Education.”

In six days, Dutta had gone from unanimously approved to being a pariah, because of beliefs and events that have nothing to do with her. Plenty of Muslim leaders publicly trashed Dutta, including Raheel Ahmed, a Pakistani-American mosque leader in Manassas, Virginia, and Atif Qarni, the former education secretary who smeared me as an “extremist”. Democrat leaders apparently accepted their criticisms unquestioningly. After Dutta was rejected, Democratic lawmaker Chap Petersen told constituents that “mosque elders” with important connections had called him. Those familiar with the calls say that one was from Rafi Ahmed, the Pakistani-American chair of an organisation representing northern Virginia mosques, and that his message was: “Vote no on Suparna Dutta. She belongs to an anti-Muslim extremist Hindu organisation.” Ahmed shared no evidence, and didn’t respond to requests for comment. He is part of a network of Muslim establishment organisations. It includes CAIR.

This network is dangerous. It purports to stand for the admirable principles of racial justice and equality. But it is distracting the public from illiberal Islamism by loudly and perpetually accusing the institutions, history and people of the United States of blanket racism. Claiming to have the moral high ground, the Woke Army attacks anything and anybody that stands in its way. It’s time to see this project for what it is.

Many of them had travelled to the capital from the coastal towns where al-Shabaab was most active, and where all the structural “push” factors one could imagine are present: poverty, boredom, marginalisation, corruption — and extrajudicial killings. Perhaps that’s what enabled them to diagnose one of the central shortcomings of the policies generally known as Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), of which Britain’s Prevent Strategy is a part. In his independent review of Prevent, published last week, William Shawcross came to the same conclusion: the overemphasis on vulnerability in the process of radicalisation strips individuals of their agency, obscures reality and sucks the politics out of political violence.

This framing is inadvertently written into the policy from its birth in 2011: according to Prevent’s foreword, one of its core objectives is to “prevent people from being drawn into terrorism” (emphasis mine). In this model, the individual is a passive participant in their own descent into terrorism, sometimes manipulated by mysterious online recruiters or pushed by socioeconomic circumstances beyond their control. Over time, the strategy moved into more and more safeguarding settings, and this notion evolved further. As one practitioner told me: “radicalisation is just another form of grooming”.

Such thinking has seeped into broader counterterrorism discourse, but perhaps worst of all it has allowed now-stranded jihadists in Syria to play back Western tropes for domestic consumption. In their versions of events, they were groomed, manipulated or brainwashed into joining Isis, just as they were only ever cooks or engineers in the Caliphate. It’s “only following orders”, updated for the therapy era. The type of people Prevent interacts with has helped to crystallise this notion. No doubt many of those referred to Prevent have various sources of instability in their lives, but this should not be surprising for a policy which relies on local authority services such as mental healthcare as some of its main vectors of delivery. Drawing conclusions about radicalisation based on Prevent referrals and interventions tells us about the type of people referred to Prevent, not necessarily those joining terrorist movements.

Likewise for the increasing concern over the radicalisation risk to children and young people, particularly online. Of course children make up large numbers of referrals for a strategy which is a legal duty for schools. But the involvement of children in political violence is exceptionally rare: the majority of Isis recruits were in their 20s (many much older), and most terror attacks in Western countries to further a racist worldview are being perpetrated by, as Naama Kates puts it, “grown-ass men”.

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Prevent may well be doing a fine job of diverting genuinely vulnerable people away from extremism, but it should be just one part of the strategy’s function. What of the people unlikely to appear on the radar of local services — those who are stable and confident enough in their convictions to justify violence? The man considering killing a human being for eternal reward or the survival of his race is not simply misled or a walking checklist of needs and vulnerabilities; he has never been more assured. It’s not clear Prevent has an answer.

Another concern identified by the review has proven the most controversial — and already the most mischaracterised. Shawcross found that there is a disproportionate focus on the far-Right, and that while Islamist extremism is defined so narrowly as to only take in the likes of Isis, far-Right extremism is defined so loosely as to sometimes include Brexit, populism and garden-variety conservatism. To explain this, it’s necessary to describe the Prevent sector as a whole, which extends well beyond the civil servants, local coordinators or police officers it employs. It includes Prevent-funded civil society organisations, academic centres, NGOs and think tanks (one of which I belong to). Not all of them have a formal connection to Prevent, but all of them help to shape and guide the discourse on extremism and terror. And where the discourse goes, policy praxis follows.

It’s easy for a headline to blame “woke civil servants” for not wanting to talk about Islamist extremism, but the reality is: delivery is bent out of shape by parts of the Prevent sector which have nothing to do with government at all. These are the institutions which churn out paper after paper on the video game-extremism nexus or the trauma of their own work, but which are deafeningly silent when a schoolteacher is decapitated across the Channel and another is forced into hiding closer to home. Some of the organisations which influence thinking are based in North America, which has an entirely different threat picture, but the online discourse flattens this distinction. The effect is clear in Shawcross’s observation that, inside Prevent, resources are distributed concerning organisations with no actual presence in Britain.

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Those delivering Prevent are also subject to external pressures which help pull the strategy “out of kilter” with Britain’s counterterrorism apparatus, as one senior official put it. On one school visit, I was anxiously informed by the concerned headteacher that some of his students’ parents are Daily Mail readers. I have seen third-sector organisations show slides of Mail headlines immediately after Dabiq — Islamic State’s blood-soaked propaganda rag. Others I worked with had slides counted by audiences to ensure equal time was given to the EDL as to ISIS. This was in 2014-15 when hundreds of Brits were travelling to the Caliphate, and in parts of London with no far-Right presence whatsoever. These are the external pressures, but in other cases the call is coming from inside the house, such as the suspicion and accusations identified by Shawcross against those who focus or specialise on Islamism. I’ve seen this for myself, and it’s not clear the strategy can ever function properly while this persists.

Given these pressures, it is not hard to see why some will opt for the easy life or go along with the mantra that the far-Right and jihadists are simply two sides of the same coin. They are of course worthy of a response, but the street hooligans of Britain First or the EDL (let alone the Daily Mail) simply do not exist in the same tactical or moral universe as the present-day génocidaires of Isis — in that they are not orchestrating the mass killing of civilians or exterminating minorities in the Middle East. Since my own experiences some years ago, this trend of equivalence has accelerated and entirely new categories of extremism have come into the Prevent sector’s purview, in what one insider described as the “Andrew Tate-ification of counterterrorism”. Any strategy which concerns itself as much with the EDL as with Isis is probably suffering a lack of conceptual clarity, but any strategy which concerns itself as much with adolescents watching Andrew Tate’s videos as Anwar al-Awlaki’s is probably so broad as to be rendered meaningless.

It means, for instance, that in the past week, violent demonstrations in Knowsley have been used to discredit the Shawcross review and its alleged dismissal of the far-Right threat. Having slugged through all 188 pages, I can confirm no such dismissal is made. In fact, this narrative rather makes the review’s point: that there is a clear difference between unrest — even law-breaking and violent unrest — and the bombing of children at a pop concert or the assassination of an MP. After all, if there is no such distinction, then to remain ideologically fair, Prevent must consider the frequent law-breaking and unrest perpetrated by Left-wing environmentalists. But it largely doesn’t, and nor do I think it should.

While some of the findings of the review will be shocking to many on the outside, the actual demands made of those delivering Prevent are hardly earth-shattering. In fact, amid years of controversy, the review is potentially a lifeline. Shawcross’s only demand is that it returns to its core purpose: preventing the next Thomas Mair or Salman Abedi, not the next online shitposter or Andrew Tate.

The women did not hold back. Every day I turned on my phone to a deluge of Isis slogans, religious memes and terror threats. Images of destroyed western cities were particularly popular. I was told that terrorists such as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (the Boston bomber) were heroes. My new contacts would make jokes about blowing up London. They bantered about beheadings.

These women had been holed up in the Kurdish-run desert camp since the fall of Baghouz, the last Isis enclave, in March 2019. They wanted money — and were getting it. With the help of Isis women who had already managed to return to the EU or Turkey, they were spearheading a fundraising campaign to “free the sisters” from the Kurds. Their rhetoric was typically fiery, and the groups used encrypted apps such as Telegram to organise donations. Since then, I’ve watched as their language has softened — and begun to poison the West’s mainstream media.

Around the beginning of the pandemic, family and friends of Isis members began to gently craft a new narrative about their women. They had never supported the caliphate. They were innocents forced to travel there by men. They were, in their own way, victims. These grown women had been “trafficked” into Isis territory. Ignore the fact that many of them bought their own tickets.

This narrative was being peddled by a cluster of online groups, which had sympathetic names such as “Repatriate the Children”. The funding behind them is questionable: in Ukraine, where I am now, some organisations supporting Isis families were connected to Russia. Most claimed to be primarily concerned with the wellbeing of minors, many of whom had been born in Isis territory, were injured and, yes, should have been repatriated — albeit to countries many of them had never even visited. But soon the remit of these groups broadened. They began to speak of “women and children” in a Syrian “refugee camp”.

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A number of NGOs have fallen for this narrative — as has the Western media. Where reports once condemned evil Isis brides joking about beheadings, now they depict the plight of innocent Isis brides who just want to come home after a terrible ordeal. Last month, the New York Times ran an article on the repatriation of Australian Isis families headlined: “After years of ‘Hell’ in Isis Detention Camp, 17 Australians Return Home”. The story celebrated the return of 13 children, as well as four grown women who were almost certainly committed to Isis once, even if they aren’t anymore. It also featured comment from the ecstatic patriarch of a large Sydney-based family from which several adults have fled to join the caliphate. There was no mention of those for whom Isis made life “Hell”: the Yazidis, who were brutally enslaved, and the Kurds.

This NYT report appears to be the result of three years of lobbying to ensure that anyone who makes the terror group look bad is utterly erased. The truth is, the women of Isis are rarely passive victims. I have visited the section of al-Hol that houses foreign women and children several times. It is many things, but it is certainly not a refugee camp, unless the women are refugees from a terror state many of them travelled thousands of kilometres to join. It is a prison camp full of inmates who support an extremely dangerous ideology. (That’s not to say the camp doesn’t deserve criticism: the conditions are inhumane, and children in particular should never have to experience them.)

The first Isis “bride” I encountered, shortly after Baghouz fell, was a woman in niqab who started to shout, condemning me and everyone from my country for destroying the caliphate. More women gathered around us, triggering a ritual with which I would become quite familiar: exhausted Kurdish women from the YPG, a group that not only fought Isis but were then tasked with guarding them, brandishing their AK47s and telling me to move. I was “exciting” the inmates, who, I was warned, could become aggressive. During my visits, I saw women making beheading gestures. They often spat at our feet.

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My observations weren’t unusual. Colleagues ran headlines describing the camps as “toxic” and the inmates as “radicalised”. Women screamed on camera about the glorious legacy of Isis ideology and scoffed that they would never go to prison. The Guardian described al-Hol as an “incubator for Islamic State resurgence”, and reported several brutal murders carried out inside the camp.

But a year after the fall of the caliphate, Covid-19 raged across continents, and foreign correspondents with experience in Syria were refocused. The international news cycle was now in a furious pandemic-obsessed spin. Pro-Isis lobby groups saw their opportunity — and started to change tack.

Women inside the camps were instructed to tone down their language. Twitter accounts that had previously called for the beheading of journalists like me now took a more humanitarian approach. And it wasn’t long before NGOs adopted this rhetoric. Human Rights Watch started to issue press releases with titles such as “’Bring me back to Canada’: plight of Canadians held in Syria for alleged Isis links”. That particular publication includes quotes from Kimberly Poleman (“Let me be who I am, a Canadian”), who met an Isis fighter online and travelled to the caliphate in 2015. A year earlier, Isis’s Yazidi genocide of August 2014 had been well-documented. Poleman could hardly claim to be ignorant about the crimes of the organisation she was going to support.

But, disturbingly, Yazidis, Kurds and the caliphate have slipped out of NGO press releases, which instead focus on the rights of foreigners held in “filthy conditions”. Meanwhile, aid organisations have reduced their services in the Yazidi camps in Iraqi Kurdistan. Yazidi girls held as sex slaves by Isis receive messages on social media apps from Isis supporters telling them they are coming back to get them. Some girls refuse to leave the sprawling, under-resourced camps for this reason. Meanwhile, young Yazidi boys, having been groomed by Isis to fight and dig tunnels in Mosul, spend their days shooting things in online games. Many local aid workers are terrified of these children returned from Isis. “Can you take them to your country?” one camp worker asked me, when I visited.

Journalists, like NGOs, have also lost interest in these Yazidi victims, while anything featuring Isis brides continues to receive exposure — which, perhaps cynically, is why I believe some NGOs continue to champion foreign repatriations. Headlines generate interest, interest generates donations. No one seems to realise that Isis itself is perfectly capable of supporting its women — it may have been defeated territorially but it still has a lot of money in the Middle East, and a well-organised global network of supporters.

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More than anything, these last three years have felt like a bizarre experiment in how to whitewash the actions of terrorists. The time, effort and resources that went into reframing women who supported slavery — and openly told journalists they wanted to kill them and destroy their societies — is remarkable. Late last year, those of us who covered Isis for years joked that the next narrative to take over would be “save the innocent men!” And then, like clockwork, CTV News ran a piece about the British-Canadian Isis fighter Jack Letts that described him as a “bright teenager”. A few months later, the Guardian ran a piece headlined, “The UK government’s hypocrisy is keeping Jack Letts and his mother in purgatory” — in which the Brit is described as an Isis “volunteer”, rather than a fighter. The piece again omits any reference to the victims of Isis; lines are blurred, language is changed, and suddenly a man who joined a terrorist organisation is “a symbol of this government’s shameful unwillingness to confront the hardest of its responsibilities”.

Yet despite all this, you might find it strange to learn that I have campaigned for the repatriation of Isis members. Ireland, my native country, still has one naturalised citizen in Syria. I have advocated for his repatriation and subsequent trial — because Ireland is one of the few countries to have successfully prosecuted Isis members.

Former soldier Lisa Smith travelled to Syria twice and was ultimately sent to al-Hol. In July, she was tried in Ireland as a fully-grown adult whose actions have consequences. Joining a terrorist organisation that enslaved an ethnic group and sold young girls for sex is an action that deserves punishment. NGOs and journalists might see a softer narrative as a means to ensuring children are removed from prison camps, but there is no excuse for whitewashing the crimes committed by the women of Isis. The cleansing of their story will undoubtedly provide a template for terrorists — and only serves to embolden the well-resourced group, who are quite frankly laughing at us all.

Anyone who builds a career out of watching such material, whether it’s for the purposes of documenting it, reporting on it, or inquiring into its wider causes and meanings, ought to have some thoughts on the moral ambiguities intrinsic to it. In his memoir, Unreasonable Behaviour, first published in 1990, the British war photographer Don McCullin explains how he was drawn to war by a sense of adventure and the belief that by documenting its horrors he could stir the conscience of those who could put an end to them.

But he soon came to doubt that conviction and to question the true nature of his motives: “If war had become so hateful to me, why did I not keep away?” Reflecting on his long and celebrated career, he can’t repress the nagging suspicion that war photographers are nothing more than glorified profiteers, coldly trading on other people’s unspeakable suffering and grief. “Yet, I ask myself, what has all my looking and probing done for these people, or for anyone?… What have I done with my life?”

Reading Unreasonable Behaviour today is a jarring experience, not just because of its raw honesty, but also because of the contrast it invites between McCullin’s temperament and his peers who now cover war and conflict. McCullin is ambivalent, self-reproachful, measured and stoic, whereas his successors tend to be self-righteous, ideological and fragile. When McCullin was asked about Covid, at the height of the pandemic, the then-84-year old contemptuously snorted: “I couldn’t give a sod about it.”

There are certainly no Don McCullins in the extremism profession today, where stupefying levels of self-aggrandisement are matched only by a stupefying absence of any self-awareness. Consider Vidhya Ramalingam, founder and CEO of a counter-extremism company called Moonshot. Referring to the Eradicate Hate Global Summit held in Pittsburgh last month, Ramalingam insisted that its purpose was “to stop an epidemic of violence that has cost us so many lives… We are the group that are going to stop this”.

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The self-promotion and self-regard on display here is really quite breathtaking. So, too, is the sense of unreality. How, you might ask, does Team Ramalingam plan to go about the task of stopping America’s epidemic of violence? By speaking at plush conferences about “novel forms of safeguarding”? By supporting workshops on the intersection between gaming and extremism? By posting insufferably smug tweets about men “taking responsibility” for male-dominated power structures?

Of course, all of this raises a bigger question: what is the point of the extremism profession? Ramalingam would say its overriding purpose is to make the world a better place; that it’s only by properly understanding how extremism works that we can identify effective solutions for combating it. Yet if you take even a cursory glance at the extremism profession it becomes glaringly obvious that the driving imperative behind it is not to eradicate extremism, but to hunt down, if not outright invent, new forms of it in order to drum up business from all the internet-scraping, report-writing, and digital counter-messaging that the industry trades on.

This explains why so many industry-insiders have embraced the concepts of hate speech and the related notion of “online harms”, and it’s why some extremism experts have heartily endorsed the notion that violent extremism has become “mainstream” in American culture and society. They have done so not necessarily because they are committed to radical activism, although some certainly are, but because the alarmist, progressive vision of a society saturated in mutual hatred affords so many opportunities for the extremism profession to engorge itself on.

The result is a curious, if mutually beneficial and lucrative, alignment, where the concerns of Left-leaning activists are leveraged and repackaged for profit by hard-nosed extremism hucksters who are now suddenly awakened to the lethal menace of Tucker Carlson, Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate. At the same time, the radical activists have embraced the language of violent extremism — “mass radicalisation”, extremist “eco-systems”, dangerousness, vulnerability — to impugn their political enemies on the Right and to legitimise their social banishment through censorship.

Another curious aspect of this alignment is how readily so many extremism experts and scholars have embraced the infantilising trauma discourse of radical activists. This is a subject I address in my new book on the seductions and repulsions of violent online spectacles. If you spend all your time watching this stuff, out of choice, as many extremism experts do, you will inevitably run up against the suspicion that you might secretly enjoy it or have been irreparably desensitised by it.

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Nobody in the extremism profession would ever dare confess to harbouring such feelings — and if they were to voice them they would be ostracised as a degenerate voyeur or sociopath. Instead, many claim to have been traumatised by what they have seen. And while I have no doubt that some have been psychologically or spiritually damaged by over-exposure, the invocation of trauma serves to deflect or neutralise any deeper inquiry into the murky business of tracking extremist material on the internet and the complex motives and emotions that it involves.

War, as many illustrious war correspondents have testified, can be a warping experience. In his memoir about covering the war in Bosnia in the early Nineties, Anthony Loyd remarked that although war didn’t fundamentally change his already black-pilled perspective on the world, it did serve to reinforce his “views about the pointlessness of existence, the basic brutality of human life and the godlessness of the universe”. For Christopher Hedges, the feeling was far more visceral and dramatic. Recalling a ruck he’d gotten into with an airline clerk on the way back from a particularly harrowing trip to El Salvador, where he’d been covering the war there between 1983 and 1988, he wrote: “Blood streamed down his face and mine. I refused to wipe the dried stains off my cheeks on the flight to Madrid, and I carry a scar on my face from where he thrust his pen into my cheek. War’s sickness had become mine.”

Similarly revealing is an anecdote told by Rukmini Callimachi, the New York Times journalist who made her name reporting on Isis, in which she describes hearing someone repeatedly banging on her apartment door late at night. She called the cops, fearing it might be an Isis operative paying her a menacing visit. (It was actually someone from the local water company.) Callimachi tells the story with humour, but the moral behind it is a serious one: to be exposed to carnage and chaos, all of the time and without let up, can seriously derange one’s perception, judgment and sense of proportion.

The best reporters are acutely aware of this danger and try, as best they can, to inoculate against it. Loyd, by his own admission, failed miserably on that front. Not only did the war in Bosnia wrench open the lid on the darker side of his mind; it also blew a gaping hole in his sense of professional detachment and made him contemptuous of the “complacency of Western societies”.

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This hints at a greater paradox that extremism professionals would do well to consider: that through over-exposure to the very worst places of the internet, they succumb to the very radicalisation dynamics that they’re trying to expose and hinder. When mainstream journalists think that MAGA is an armed insurgency or declare that, as one headline put it in Foreign Policy, “White Supremacists Want a Dirty Bomb”, or believe that a red dress or “ok” sign is a fascist dog-whistle, it becomes impossible to deny that some kind of warping has occurred. By staring too intently into the twilight world of online megadeath, mayhem and tribal hatred, they inevitably project this gruesome and fringe demiworld onto the real world that the rest of us inhabit. As the terrorism scholar Peter Neumann has observed:

“If people end up spending too much of their time in virtual communities, the online forums come to function like one of Edwin Sutherland’s “criminogenic environments”, in which deviant and extreme behaviours are learned and absorbed and in which extreme ideas come to seem normal because of constant interaction with people who hold similar—and similarly extreme—views… As a result, people acquire a skewed sense of reality…”

The irony, which seems lost on the extremism reporters and experts, is that this dynamic applies as much to them as to the extremists they spend all of their time “infiltrating”. Don McCullin knew all about the dangers of getting too close to his subject and, along with other like-minded war reporters, he has much to teach us about the ambiguities of their profession and their own conflicted relationship to it. The new generation of hate eradicators and extremism experts would no doubt benefit from reading them — although such are the exigencies of saving the world that they probably don’t have the time.

Held on 17 September outside the Bank of England, the demonstration was pithily titled the “Nationwide Rally for Freedom: For Truth, Justice & Freedom”, and featured speeches by Piers Corbyn and David Icke. It was, notionally at least, against Covid jabs — but some attendees had their own agendas.

The couple introduced themselves as Lee and Morag, and explained the message behind their jumpers. It refers to Satanic Ritual Abuse, and it imagines that devil-worshipping paedophiles operate a trafficking network that kidnaps tens of thousands of children every year in order to ritualistically rape, torture and murder them.

It goes, of course, all the way to the top. Believers in the various iterations of SRA think that the court system has been paid-off to separate children from their parents, and that these kids are smuggled to remote country estates via vast underground tunnels so that senior figures in the British establishment can dismember them in grotesque rituals. “It’s going on, 100%,” said Lee.

Later in the rally, I found Piers Corbyn marching alone, shouting a protest chant through his megaphone. I asked him what he thought about SRA. “It’s real,” he said. “It’s happening. We ought to press on talking about it.”

SRA is the conspiracy theory that refuses to die. An American import, it arrived here in the Eighties and Nineties, and became accepted in some circles as gospel truth. The NSPCC even gave a press conference in 1990 alleging that mothers were handing over their newborn babies to be sacrificed in occult rituals. Therapists, social workers, and writers began spreading sensational claims: children being hung upside-down by hooks so their organs could be cut out; women having their foetuses aborted, carved up and eaten. It’s hard to gauge how many people in the UK today believe in SRA, but one well-known activist, a retired police officer named Jon Wedger, has 36,000 subscribers on YouTube.

It sounds horrific, but so do plenty of made-up things. Rosie Waterhouse, an investigative journalist who researched SRA claims for the Independent on Sunday, found that there has never been any evidence to substantiate them: “No bodies, no bones… no bloodstains. Nothing.”

But try telling that to Lee and Morag. The couple frequently go to Hampstead in north London, where, in 2014, a group of parents was falsely accused of running a satanic paedophile ring that tortured babies to death in the local McDonald’s. For years, these parents and their children have been hounded by conspiracy theorists. When I asked Morag what she and Lee do in Hampstead, she gave a startling response. “Harassment,” she said, laughing. “We go around harassing people. We know the families. They shit themselves.”

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Are you an extremist?

By Terry Eagleton

I’ve researched conspiracy theorists of all stripes for my website, Scout, and I’m continually struck by how many share the common denominator of antisemitism, accusing Jews of malign, behind-the-scenes influence. Jewish people were not the focus of SRA activism in the Nineties, but today that seems to have changed. This January, an SRA campaigner, who cannot be named for legal reasons, organised a rally targeting the Rothschilds, whom she called “the most powerful, vile family in the world”. It was held at Waddesdon Manor, the Buckinghamshire estate owned by Ferdinand de Rothschild, a 19th-century banker from the Jewish finance dynasty, and 50 people turned up to accuse the family of hunting children for sport.

Back at the London march, Lee told me about how “Khazarian Jews” (a conspiracy theory about a powerful Jewish cabal) are ultimately responsible for satanic abuse. Later, a campaigner named Grant told me that abducted children are transported through secret tunnels that run underneath the Rothschild & Co bank.

This may sound like a load of dismissible basement crankery, but accusations of satanic abuse have real consequences. In 2020, a campaigner named Wilfred Wong kidnapped a child in Anglesey, claiming he was a victim of satanic abuse in need of rescue. Wong held a knife to the throat of a foster carer while an accomplice snatched the eight-year-old boy from a car. The child was bundled into a waiting vehicle: the plan was to drive to an airport and take him out of the country. Police stopped the car 150 miles away in Northamptonshire and the boy was safely recovered. Wong is now serving a 22-year prison sentence, but his work in the SRA movement continues to inspire followers.

One of those followers is Susan Fownes, who seems to be a key player in the movement. She has set up an organisation called Pacha House in the Highgate area of Birmingham, which has become a hub for activists campaigning against satanic abuse. At Pacha House, Fownes organises conferences and activist get-togethers. She rents it from Birmingham City Council, which gives spaces in the former Quaker Friends’ Institute to community groups. Pacha House is not a registered charity, although it is considering an application to the Charity Commission.

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I wanted to understand what was going on at Pacha House, but having seen Fownes’s Facebook posts about her distrust of the “MSM”, I was certain that she wouldn’t respond to an ordinary interview request. So I got in touch under a pseudonym, identifying myself as a potential donor, and she invited me to visit.

Pacha House is set in a crumbling Victorian mansion. On the surface, it looks no different from any other ramshackle community project: there’s a kitchen garden, a room filled with art supplies, a study with an old computer. It fits with the wholesome image that Fownes is keen to project. “Providing space for seeding initiatives for holistic living,” reads the aims of Pacha House on her Facebook page. “Advocating wellbeing through the common language of nourishment and nature.”

However, this appears to be cover for Pacha House’s real purpose: campaigning against ritual abuse. Fownes told me she first became wary about SRA after seeing the same young mothers on her estate pushing prams containing different babies. “And you start to wake up to the fact that these girls are delivering babies,” she said, referring to the conspiracy theory from the Nineties that claimed women were being used like broodmares to provide infants for sacrifice.

Fownes has posted Facebook videos in support of Wilfred Wong and invited “survivors of SRA” to come to Pacha House. Sharing a video of one SRA influencer, she wrote: “We are debating these themes and others that affect the wellbeing of our communities and children in Pacha House’s Knowledge Library, Fridays and Saturdays.” On her website, Fownes has shared (and since deleted) a list of celebrities, politicians and other public figures baselessly accused of ritualistic abuse and murder.

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During our conversation, Fownes suggested that she may have misled Birmingham City Council about Pacha House’s true purpose as an SRA campaign hub. Advising me to set up a sister operation, Fownes said: “I wouldn’t use the word ‘front’, I would say ‘set up a community service project, community engagement’, all of that, but you know between yourselves why you’re really there. And just allow it to grow.” In dealing with the council, she said: “Don’t talk about SRA, don’t talk about child abuse, none of that. Say you want to do a community project… but your real intention is to create the space for people to talk about what’s going on.”

Fownes boasted that councils “can’t really refuse” an application, and indicated that Pacha House was beyond scrutiny. “We’re a private club, so it’s none of their damn business,” she said. “We’re not doing anything wrong: we pay our rent, we look after the space that they have not looked after.”

But the most surprising revelation was yet to come: Pacha House, an organisation devoted to eliminating the apparent scourge of ritual abuse, has itself been accused of putting children at risk by inviting men convicted of sexual assault onto their premises.

On 25 June, Fownes hosted an event at Pacha House, and invited a fellow activist called Jane Kelly. Kelly brought her son with her, a man named Stelios Andreas Anatselopoulos, who was jailed for six years in 2014 after taking four children hostage, punching two of them and sexually assaulting a girl.

The incident led some activists to split from Pacha House. Maria Clarke, an online paedophile hunter who was briefly associated with the organisation, said she left after learning that Anatselopoulos attended the meeting. “How can you let a man convicted of child sex abuse in?” she said.

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In my meeting with Fownes, she brought up the Anatselopoulos incident without my prompting. She insisted she was unaware of his conviction, and that while children and parents do come to Pacha House, none were present when he visited. “I was absolutely shocked that I had someone on our premises who had a sexual assault conviction on a girl,” she said. “I was furious.”

However, during the afternoon I spent with Fownes last month, there was a knock at the door, and she excused herself from the library to answer it. When she returned, she explained: “That was a guy who comes in. I know he has a previous conviction for sexual assault, which was a few years ago, but as long as there’s no children here I let him in.” Fownes continued: “His personality has changed such a lot,” she said. “I explained to him from the beginning, if there are children here you can’t be here, I’ll have to refuse you entry, but Tuesdays and Fridays you can eat here with us.”

Fownes, without a hint of self-awareness, told me: “When you label someone as a paedophile, you’re actually putting them at risk of harm.” If only the same courtesy could be applied when it comes to accusing innocent people of satanic abuse.

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When I put this Birmingham City Council, it responded that it expects Pacha House to abide by its safeguarding rules. “The city council takes its duties under the no-platform policy seriously,” said a spokesperson, “and if presented with evidence that this policy is being breached we would look to take appropriate steps, depending on the circumstances.”

Fownes did not respond to multiple requests for comment. And I’m still uncertain what drives her. But the researcher Karen Douglas says people can turn to conspiracy theories when they feel anxious, uncertain and powerless, typically when the obstacles of life upset their equilibrium. I’ve interviewed plenty of hardcore conspiracy theorists who mention their unhappy stints in the army, their alcoholism, and their lost custody battles.

Contrasted with this, believing in SRA offers a reassuringly simple view: shadowy satanic elites are secretly responsible for the wickedness of this world. Perhaps fighting back, even if that just means standing on a north London pavement to yell at people, is one way to feel powerful. As Morag told me at the protest: “I’ve always been a rebel.” Turning to her partner Lee, she added: “We’re freedom fighters, just the two of us together.”

Her name was Tooba Gondal, a then 21-year-old from East London. She was a savvy operator on social media and had revealed little about her personal life in her numerous pro-Isis Twitter accounts. But she couldn’t do anything about that tweet from an earlier account she had used before she became an Isis true believer. It was innocuous enough, but there it was: a casual reference to her father by his full name.

Last month, Benedetta Argentieri’s documentary The Matchmaker premiered at the Venice Film Festival. The film is about Gondal, who, in her incarnation as Umm Muthanna Al-Britannia, sought to enlist foreign women and girls to Isis, where they would become the wives of the male fighters. The film’s title self-consciously appropriates Gondal’s tabloid name (“the Isis matchmaker”), but there’s nothing remotely sensationalist or cheap about the film.

Argentieri first met Gondal in March 2019, where she was filming at the Ain Issa Camp, and where Gondal, now 28, had surfaced with her two young children shortly after Isis’s final territorial defeat at Baghuz. Never shy of media attention, Gondal was a willing participant in the documentary. The entire project is a riveting case study in the psychology of denial and dissimulation: Gondal portrays herself as a victim, flagrantly lies and contradicts herself. [1. I appear in the film as an interviewee, and I count Argentieri as a friend, but I wouldn’t hesitate to call her film a stinker if it were a stinker. It isn’t a stinker.]

“It’s a mystery why anybody talks to a reporter,” Lawrence Wright has observed. Why would you willingly expose yourself to a cold-hearted stranger with a story to tell? Of course, Wright knows all-too-well why people talk to reporters: because they want to be heard and understood, because they enjoy the attention and feel important, and because they want to shape or control the narrative about themselves.

Yet often they come to regret their credulity, realising that their journalist-interlocutor is not, in Janet Malcolm’s words, the “permissive, all-accepting, all-forgiving mother” they’d imagined, but “the strict, all-noticing, unforgiving father”. Even the most powerful and privileged people are susceptible to this delusion: earlier this year, when Mohammed bin Salman agreed to an interview with The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood, he must have thought that Wood would be a soft touch. (He wasn’t.)

Gondal, I suspect, will come to regret her involvement in Argentieri’s film. Perhaps she thought she could project an image of herself that would go some way towards reversing the negative press she’s received in the UK. Almost certainly, she would have enjoyed being at the centre of attention and welcomed the distraction it offered from the ball-breaking grind of life in the camp. No doubt she thought she was dexterous enough to walk the boards and avoid any trap doors that might lie in wait. On this last count, she failed.

Of all of Isis’s many war crimes, the genocide it perpetrated against the Yazidis is one of the gravest. It is by now well-documented that not only did the group brutally slaughter Yazidi men, but also subject thousands of Yazidi women and girls to sexual enslavement. It’s also well-documented that many Western men and women who joined Isis were active participants in this horrific genocide. Some of the most affecting scenes in The Matchmaker centre on two of its victims: 15-year-old Rawa and 22-year-old Salwa. Rawa was bought and sold 13 times. “The Isis women were really violent to us,” she says, adding: “My god, the women were worse than the men. They beat us up thousands of times, put us in obscene clothes, and sent us to the men.” Salwa concurs: “The women were the most guilty in the selling of our girls.”

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Argentieri takes this up with Gondal, who denies knowing anything about the involvement of Isis women in such barbarity. Argentieri, who is a highly skilled interviewer, knows better than to express incredulity, much less outrage, at this response. She calmly follows up by asking Gondal if she’d ever met a Yazidi. Gondal bites: she says yes, but only once and at a dinner with other Western foreign Isis members. “She was maybe 13,” Gondal says of the Yazidi slave-girl. “She was very happy and in love with him,” she continues, referring to the girl’s Islamist slave-master. Having now fallen squarely into the hole, Gondal keeps on digging, caking herself in dirt and grime:

“He had spoiled her with everything that she wanted. She had her own phone, her own tablet, it was like very, very good treatment. I don’t know how much he bought her for, but she was crazy in love with him. I remember he wanted to eventually get rid of her, like he was just tired, she was just too clingy or I don’t know what the problem was. He wanted to sell her off to someone else and she was crying and she didn’t wanted to… I think one man from Saudi bought her.”

This is an astonishing piece of testimony, not simply because of the way in which Gondal inverts the victim-perpetrator relationship, but also due to the psychopathic insouciance with which she delivers it, and the utter contempt she shows towards a child victim of rape.

Another piece of striking testimony concerns Allison Fluke-Ekren (Umm Mohammed), who led the Khatiba Nusaybah, an all-female battalion based in Raqqa, and had plotted attacks on targets in America. In June, Fluke-Ekren, a 42-year-old former school teacher from Kansas, pleaded guilty to one count of providing material support to Isis and admitted to training over 100 women and girls for defensive combat.

Although Gondal doesn’t name her, she says she knew Fluke-Ekren “personally”, disclosing that “I saw her planning, I saw her training the women and everything… she was real, real American”. Gondal is adamant that she was not part of the Khatiba Nusaybah, yet she confides that she saw one of the Khatiba’s “training sites”, which she describes as a “very dark, underground basement”. Their aim, she says, “was to target every woman”. Despite clearly knowing a great deal about the Khatiba Nusaybah and its leader, Gondal claims that she didn’t even know how to use a gun.

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Her tweets, however, tell a different story. On 1 March, 2016, she told her followers: “Muhajirat muaskar [an all-female training camp] is the best thing so far for me loving it! Alhamdullilah [“Praise to God”]… firearm training is wajib [duty] in the land of Jihad.” In another tweet, using a different account, she declared that she was about to buy a Makarov [a Soviet semi-automatic pistol] and a suicide belt.

When asked to address accusations that she acted as a recruiter for Isis, Gondal says: “No, it’s not true, I never recruited any women.” The film then cuts to Gondal’s tweets where she openly invites Isis sympathisers at home to message her so that she can help them come to Isis-controlled territory in Syria and Iraq. It isn’t known just how many girls and women she recruited, but it’s a matter of public record that she tried recruiting her younger sister to the group.

In another tweet, in late 2015, Gondal declared: “I came here to die. I will not leave till I get what I came here for: shahadah [martyrdom].” When Argentieri raises this, Gondal laughs and feigns surprise. “Oh god, was that really my tweet? That is a really distressed tweet.” Later that year, after the Paris attacks in which 130 people were killed by Isis terrorists, Gondal gleefully tweeted: “Wish I could have seen the hostages being slaughtered last night with my own eyes. Would have been just beautiful.” Argentieri asks her to comment on this. Gondal doesn’t deny writing it, but says she has no memory of doing so. “I’m shocked that I even said that,” she says.

Who, really, is Gondal and how or why did she radicalise and leave Britain to join Isis? The film sheds only a partial light on this, chiefly because Gondal can’t or won’t convincingly explain it herself. According to Gondal, she lived a very secular life as a teenager in London: “I tried clubbing, I tried smoking, drinking, I tried having a boyfriend… everything you can imagine to find happiness.” She didn’t find it. Instead, she found misery and a spiritual void. But returning to Islam, she says, helped fill the void and gave her “inner happiness”.

But if Islam had indeed given her inner happiness (Gondal reverted in late 2012), why travel to war-torn Syria? Perhaps what Gondal was really searching for was not happiness at all, but struggle, excitement, danger: an all-engulfing emotional experience that would give her life a deeper meaning. Gondal, of course, can’t voice any of this, because it would directly contradict the other voice she’s assiduously learned while in detention. This is the passive voice of denial and dissociation.

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When Argentieri asks how she became “pro-jihadi”, Gondal says that she was “manipulated” and “brainwashed”. On only one occasion does Gondal break cover from this and level with Argentieri. This is when Argentieri expresses her puzzlement as to why so many Western women joined Isis. Gondal, with uncharacteristic directness, says: “It’s clear, they were looking to live under Sharia.” When pressed on what she found so appealing about Isis, Gondal falters and invokes the register of contrition: “If I’m honest, I regret that I even travelled to Syria.”

The Matchmaker has no thesis to advance about how Gondal came to renounce her life in the UK, where she had the support of a warm and well-off family, and join Isis. Nor does it have a view about what should be done about Gondal, who fled from her detention at the Ain Issa camp after it was shelled by Turkey in October 2019, is now in custody in France, where she was born and lived as a child before coming to London with her family. What it does have is the thing that all journalists and filmmakers long for but rarely find: a grippingly dire character with a story to tell.

One of the great merits of The Matchmaker is that it doesn’t judge or condemn Gondal and it certainly isn’t interested in forgiving her. That would be boring and political. Instead, it holds a mirror up to her and lets her do all the talking. The result is an absorbing incursion into the cursed complexity of radicalisation and human malevolence.

“Every villain,” Janet Malcolm writes, “wears a mask of goodness.” At many points in Argentieri’s film we see Gondal’s mask drop. But the woman it reveals remains a puzzle — to me, to Argentieri and even to herself.

Like the rest of America’s ruling class, Clinton fears we are hopelessly divided, possibly forever. The media tends to agree. Books and op-eds are churned out, hyping everything from the “polarisation spiral” to predictions of a coming civil war. We are past the point of no return, pundits warn. Apparently even scholars of polarisation are polarised, according to the New York Times. As Tiffany Cross put it on her MSNBC show a few weeks ago: “People keep saying a civil war is coming. I would say a civil war is here. And I don’t mean to be hyperbolic.”

The trouble it is, it is hyperbolic. It’s true that our political and media elites, and those who run corporations and Big Tech companies, are increasingly partisan. But that’s because they have a lot to gain — in terms of money and power — from making Americans hate each other. Nevertheless, despite the billions and billions of dollars being spent trying to divide us, polarisation remains an elite phenomenon. When it comes to the fundamental values this nation was founded on, Americans are much more united than they are divided.

The evidence is everywhere. Last week, for instance, Gallup reported the latest approval rating for interracial marriage between black and white people. The polling company first started asking Americans about their feelings on the subject in 1958, when approval was an abysmal 4%. As of 2022, it stands at 94%, and there is almost no difference between white and non-white respondents. The regional difference has also evaporated. Southern Americans now approve of interracial marriage at the same rate as their eastern, Midwestern, and western neighbours. As recently as 1991, approval for interracial marriage in the south was at just 33%, compared to 54% in the east and 60% in the west. Today, those figures are 93%, 94%, and 97% respectively.

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You could argue that people haven’t become less racist, but simply less willing to admit their racism to pollsters. But even that is a huge leap forward. 93% of Southern Americans want pollsters, and presumably also their neighbours, to believe that they have the same views as the liberals they probably mocked just 20 years ago. Racism has become socially taboo.

Something similar has happened with gay marriage. Approval among Republicans has absolutely soared in recent years — from 16% in 1995 to 55% last year, including 61% of young Republicans. Many believe that at least ten Senate Republicans will join the Democrats in enshrining the right to gay marriage into law. At a time of intense polarisation — when even baby formula divides the house — this is a major feat.

And then there’s abortion, an issue that the media and our politicians assume is hugely divisive. In fact, the vast majority of Americans agree on the major points. They oppose abortion bans and want it to be generally legal in the first trimester, and in cases of rape, incest or where the mother’s health is threatened. On criminal justice, too, there is no longer a partisan divide. In recent years, Republicans have been at the forefront of criminal justice reform. Red states like Oklahoma, Georgia and Idaho have been quietly releasing prisoners and reforming their justice systems for the better part of a decade. Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch has consistently sided with liberal judges in criminal justice cases. And President Trump’s First Step Act released 5,000 black men from prison, although those men seem to be the only ones who took any notice.

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Even when it comes to police brutality, Republicans have been becoming more vocal. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, the South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham announced he was seeking proposals to improve policing and combat “racial discrimination regarding the use of force”. Soon after, Senator Tim Scott, the only black Republican senator, introduced a police reform bill — which was later killed by Democrats.

Scott and Graham were joined by none other than the then-leader of the Republican Senate majority, Mitch McConnell, who told reporters in the wake of Floyd’s murder: “We are still wrestling with America’s original sin. It is perfectly clear we are a long way from the finish line.” And at a lunch for Republican senators, Tom Cotton of Arkansas stood up and said: “Young Black men have a very different experience with law enforcement in this nation than white people, and that’s their impression and experience, and we need to be sensitive to that and do all we can to change it.”

Meanwhile, the most vocal Democrats on the subject are those who support progressive prosecutors and bail reform efforts — policies often billed as divisive. But they are not divisive; they are just wildly unpopular — like Republican efforts to ban abortion in all cases. Democrat and Republican Americans alike oppose these measures, especially now, amid a crime wave. Our elites want us to believe these issues divide Americans, but they simply don’t.

The Pew Research Center recently released a study that they claimed showed signs of “partisan hostility” growing. “Growing shares of both Republicans and Democrats say members of the other party are more immoral, dishonest, closed-minded than other Americans,” the study claimed to find. But the questions they asked respondents weren’t about members of the other party as much as they were about the parties themselves, or politicians: “Do you have a favourable or unfavourable opinion of the Republican Party, or the Democratic Party?”; “How well do each of the following phrases describe the Republican or Democrat Party?”; “How much do you like or dislike Republican or Democrat political leaders who…” People aren’t turning on their fellow Americans so much as they are on political parties and leaders.

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And it’s not just this study that suggests so; a 2019 study by James Druckman and Matthew Levendusky in Public Opinion Quarterly found that “when answering questions about the other party, individuals think about elites more than voters”. When the elites of the party were separated out from average Americans, the researchers found that on every measure, “respondents are more negative toward the elites of the other party than they are toward voters”. And Anthony Fowler, a professor of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, has done numerous studies that fly in the face of the polarisation narrative, finding that voters are more moderate, more informed by policy, and more willing to change their views than many in power would have you to believe. “To be sure, there are real policy disagreements among Americans,” writes Fowler. “But for every extreme liberal or conservative who agrees with their party on most issues, there are far more people in the middle who think that Nancy Pelosi is too far to the Left and that Mitch McConnell is too far to the Right.”

Every week, I talk to working-class Americans across the country who work with people who disagree with them on politics. They tell me the same thing over and over: we don’t have the luxury of hating co-workers who vote for the other party. We rely on them too much. Party politics just doesn’t matter as much as having a good working relationship. It’s our elites who want us to believe that we are divided, simply because it benefits them.

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It’s clear how this works in politics: if you can convince you constituents that the person you’re running against is a fascist — or a groomer — then the race is over. Because if the choice is you or Hitler, you pretty much have it in the bag. And if you can also convince people that your opponents’ supporters and voters are fascists and deplorables, who cling to their guns and their Bibles and their bigotries, well, who wants to be in that category? Divisiveness in politics is a shortcut — a workaround to actually having to deliver the promises you make your constituents.

Something similar has happened to the mainstream media. With the collapse of the local newspaper industry, a new business model has emerged that is diametrically opposed to the goal of getting the widest circulation. The business incentives of digital media see success in terms of engagement rather than circulation or ad revenue, and the tools of digital media make it possible to target content to specific audiences based on income and zip code. Online publishing software tells you exactly what these audiences are clicking on, how often, and for how long — so you can give readers more and more and more of it. Of course, the most engaged readers online are always the most extreme, which means that our news outlets gain most by catering to them.

Social media companies work in a similar way. The currency there is attention, and the stronger you feel about something, the longer you stay on a page dedicated to it, and the more likely you are to click on an ad. Every time you hate a stranger on the internet, someone makes money.

At a time when the death of Elizabeth II is uniting her nation in grief, it’s hard to watch our own head of state fall into this trap. President Biden — who campaigned on unifying the country, and promised to represent not only those who voted for him but also those who did not — has made a habit of casting his political opponents as extremists. Recently, for instance, he has smeared MAGA Republicans as “semi-fascists” and a threat to democracy. Not exactly the behaviour of a unifier.

The thing that was miraculous about the response to 9/11 was not that Americans united, because we were not divided. It’s that our leaders did: they showed the grace that ordinary Americans show every single day, working alongside each other in nursing homes in Florida and factories in Iowa and construction sites in Minnesota. For once, our leaders were worthy of our support. For once, they were representing us. Today, by contrast, they simply demand that we defend them — to the extend that it means indulging in meaningless fantasies about a looming civil war.

The last time Begum hit the headlines it was because she’d had a makeover. This was exactly a year ago: gone was the bulky black burqa, and in were the skinny jeans, Nike baseball cap, sunglasses and pink nail-varnish. Had a new beauty salon opened up in Al-Roj, the arid and austere holding-pen in north-east Syria where Begum is housed, alongside other former female Isis members and their children? It seemed unlikely, but Begum had somehow got her hands on a new bit of clobber and wanted the whole world to know about it.

Subliminally, the message seemed to be: I’m not one of them – them being the burka’d ghouls she’s detained with and who routinely throw dirt and blood-curdling insults at visiting Western journalists. No, she was saying: I’m one of you, a normal British girl who you wouldn’t look twice at in the street. The sort of girl her former comrades-in-arms want to blow up in nightclubs.

Begum has again returned to the block caps of front-page news. This time it is because the Sunday Times journalist Richard Kerbaj has a book to flog: The Secret History of the Five Eyes. The book, which is about Western spycraft and was published this week, claims that Begum was smuggled into Syria aged 15 by a Syrian man who was leaking information to the Canadian security services about Western Isis recruits. Begum, with her legal team, has also been working with the BBC on a 10-part podcast series that is due to air any day now: you’ll be hearing a lot more about her in the coming weeks and months.

In his book, Kerbaj recounts how Mohammed al-Rashed, a people-smuggler who worked for Isis, helped Begum and her two schoolmates, Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase, cross from Turkey into Isis-controlled territory in Syria shortly after they flew from London to Istanbul on 17 February, 2015. According to Kerbaj, al-Rashed had photographed the girls’ passports and sent the images to his handler with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) at the Jordanian embassy. But by the time the handler had received news of the girls’ travel, it was too late — they were in Syria. Al-Rashed is thought to have helped many more Britons migrate to Syria to join Isis.

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This revelation about Begum is not actually all that revelatory: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation ran a story on it in March 2015. But it didn’t attract much interest at the time. Kerbaj, the BBC and Begum’s legal team and her apologists want to change that, refocusing the story on how Begum was trafficked and how the West had a hand in it.

According to the Begum family’s lawyer, Tasnime Akunjee, one of the main arguments he expects to marshal in an forthcoming legal hearing to challenge the removal of Begum’s citizenship rests on her putative status as “a victim of trafficking”. It was “shocking”, he said a few days ago, that a Canadian intelligence asset was involved in the smuggling operation that facilitated her travel to Syria. Joshua Baker, the producer of the new BBC podcast on Begum, seems to agree with this rhetorical framing: “Shamima Begum was taken to Syria by a highly organised smuggling network and at the centre of it was Canadian Spy,” he tweeted on Tuesday.

The podcast, I’m Not A Monster: The Shamima Begum Story, is yet to be released, but it doesn’t bode well that its producer is flagrantly misleading the public about Begum’s passage to Syria in an effort to promote it. Begum was not “taken” to Syria, if by “taken” it’s meant that she was kidnapped or coerced into going to Syria by others against her will. On the contrary, she went under her own steam with Sultana and Abase, both now thought to be dead.

Of course, and in a very trivial sense, Begum and her schoolmates were “taken” to Syria by the pilot who flew the commercial jet that transferred them from Gatwick to Istanbul, where they were then “taken” to southern Turkey by a bus driver. And from there they were “taken” across the border into Syria in a car driven by a smuggler. But this isn’t what Baker means by “taken”: he means it in the Liam Neeson sense of a staged disappearance organised by shadowy criminals.

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In reality, Begum was not the victim of human traffickers, but a willing client and beneficiary of their criminal services. Her decision to go to Syria was stupid and short-sighted, but it was still her decision. And let’s not pretend that she was a vulnerable and clueless little girl, as she is now incentivised to retrospectively claim that she was. Far from it: she was a smart, brave, bolshie and precocious teenager. It took a lot of guts and cunning for her to go to Syria, and no one made her believe that the caliphate was a glorious idea. She enthusiastically believed in it, because she needed or wanted to, and because when she traded Raqqa for London, ISIS was a revolutionary political movement in the ascendant. She volunteered to join it and then paid for the services of a smuggler by stealing jewellery from her family, as did the other two girls she went with. This cannot, in good faith, be categorised as “trafficked”; to try to do so is an insult to the real victims of human trafficking, who are sexually enslaved against their will.

And here’s the thing about the younger Begum that unthinking journalists like Baker can’t or won’t comprehend: she wanted to submit to the sexual enslavement of a god-fearing jihadi husband because the logic of her ideological-belief system commanded it. Far from being trafficked to Syria against her will, Begum wanted to go there because she felt it was a divine duty to join Isis and help build the nascent caliphate. To see Begum as groomed is to catastrophically fail to see the attractions of violent political movements, especially to the young who are impassioned and recklessness enough to join them.

None of this, however, is to say that Begum should be abandoned and that Britain should expect the Kurdish authorities in northern Syria to indefinitely house her. That would be callous and irresponsible. Begum’s detractors say that she is a security threat. But the evidence for this isn’t very strong: yes, she was once a supporter of ISIS and had joined the group to help advance the caliphate project as a baby-making machine. But there’s no credible evidence to show that she fought for the group or that she learned how to use weapons or make bombs. Begum’s fighting ability is thus in serious doubt.

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In the absence of any credible evidence that she’s a threat, Begum’s detractors revert to the argument that she’s a monstrous traitor who doesn’t deserve a second chance. She’s dead to us, and nothing she does or says matters. There can be no repentance; she should rot in Syria. This, I think, is not only profoundly illiberal but pathologically harsh, and wholly disproportionate as punishment for her actions. It exhibits the sort of catastrophic hurt and wounded pride that one would expect of an Islamist who wishes death on all apostates.

The strongest way of defending Begum isn’t to say that she was trafficked, but to acknowledge she did a bad thing and that it’s time to forgive her for it. She has endured over three years of suffering and sorrow in conditions that would test the resilience of the most hardened jihadi jailbird. This ought to be enough punishment to cleanse her of the imperious arrogance and idiocy that animated her to join Isis.

Imagine her despair, her uncertainty over her fate, her risk of capture and abuse by militants, and her knowledge that she is loathed by so many. Britain must now forgive her and allow her back. In return, Begum should take responsibility for her actions and not cloak herself in denial and evasion.

Will Begum ever fully reckon with her actions and acknowledge the full scale of the horror that Isis unleashed in Syria and Iraq? Will she reflect in an open and honest way on why she was once so passionate about joining the group? Will she properly recognise the crucial role that she and all the other Isis women played in helping the group expand? This seems unlikely, because no one is really interested in hearing Begum’s unfiltered thoughts about all this.

For her defenders, she is a wretched victim of circumstance and abuse by sinister outsiders, so she must speak only to this and to the broader question of how evil, Islamophobic Britain radicalised and then abandoned her. For her detractors, she is simply an untrustworthy villain who deserves zero sympathy, so she shouldn’t speak at all. She is a symbol of everything wrong with weak, Islamist-friendly, woke Britain.

I, for one, relish the day when Begum will speak for herself, neither spoken over by her critics, nor shackled to a script prepared by her cynical yet naïve supporters.

Many of Britain’s most dangerous jihadists are imprisoned, perhaps affording us this false sense of security. But the sporadic information we get from behind the prison walls is anything but reassuring. While much hope is pinned on the largely uncharted territory of “deradicalisation”, its targets are making a mockery of these efforts. As the Chief Inspector of Prisons made clear a few weeks ago, the highest-risk prisoners in the country are outright boycotting these interventions, with some offenders listening to music or pretending to sleep during their one to one sessions.

On the other hand, even those who appear to comply may pose a threat, as Usman Khan’s slaying of those who sought only to help him tragically demonstrated. While participating in an educational course or qualification can be taken by authorities as a sign of progress, it is no objective measure of deradicalisation, not least when the knowledge gained can be put to use for the cause, to better proselytise or wage war.

Prisons are not isolated and cut off from the world, their walls are porous: people, information and material come and go. Meanwhile, the jihadists inside do not see imprisonment as an end to their struggle — so nor should we. The West’s experience with jihadism, now into its fourth decade, shows how its adherents often see their incarceration as a rite of passage and opportunity: to better prepare for jihad, to gain qualifications and skills on the taxpayer, to forge crucial connections and relationships, to proselytise among the prison population, and to test their faith.

Prisons around the world have proven integral to the global jihadist movement’s remarkable resiliency and regenerative capability, but so has naivety. In 2005, a jailed Parisian named Chérif Kouachi led his social worker to believe he had been “tricked” into associating with extremists busy funnelling fighters to the insurgency in Iraq. On the inside, however, Chérif fraternised with jihadi veteran Djamal Beghal, who had helped recruit “shoe bomber” Richard Reid in London in the Nineties. Exactly a decade after being “tricked”, Chérif and his brother Saïd burst into the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine to massacre the writers, satirists and illustrators inside.

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Today, no longer pick-up riding or passport-burning, the Islamic State’s jihadists are marooned in the dilapidated camps and makeshift prisons of Northern Syria, where — like the Islamists in Bosnia and Afghanistan before them — they play back our own tropes about their manipulation and vulnerability for the domestic audiences they once threatened on social media. Some even offer to help deradicalise or prevent radicalisation in future, while lying about their own trajectory into terror.

Inside the British prison system though, a more bellicose extremist subculture appears to be developing. According to a recent review, among the imprisoned extremists an Islamist gang culture has developed. The counterterrorism lead at HMP Whitemoor, the site of Britain’s first attack inside the prison walls, told an inquest that terror offenders are held in a kind of “perverse esteem”. while Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, Johnathan Hall QC, wrote how some offenders enjoy a “distinctly heroic profile”.

The risk, though, is not just of attacks. The failed state-building project of Isis should have made clear there is an ideological endgame, an all-encompassing worldview, a way of living and a revolutionary overhaul of state and society which jihadis seek to usher in. In their own microcosms, imprisoned jihadists are trying to live their lives in accordance with this endgame from the inside. There are cases of extremists intimidating staff and prisoners who do not comply with their interpretation of Sharia and holding crude Sharia courts which mete out floggings. Self-styled ‘emirs’ exert such influence over prison wings that authorities sometimes appeal to them to help restore order.

Surrounded by like-minded practitioners of their faith, they are living pure, virtuous and rigorist lives in accordance with God’s will. To them, this life of belief is the straight and narrow, while the rest of us are morally decayed hypocrites and criminals. For them, the idea they need deradicalising or rehabilitating is a bad joke and worthy of scorn. Just a few hours a week of mentoring and interventions stands little chance of competing with the offender’s entire social circle, the moral universe which colours it, the norms which govern their every action and interaction, and the status they enjoy as a terrorism offender on the inside.

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This is not to say that there is no hope, but that it will take an almighty effort to dismantle a worldview that we don’t seem able to fully comprehend, or at times even discuss out of misplaced sensitivities. Being realistic about the scale of the challenge and treating the extremists as intellectually serious and rational beings, rather than unthinking vessels driven to terrorism by circumstances beyond their control, gives the best hopes of averting tragedy like at Fishmonger’s Hall.

As we have seen, when the chips are down, jihadists have historically pleaded innocence or ignorance. But the reports above suggest this is not how Britain’s imprisoned extremists are behaving. Far from it. This indicates that they do not perceive themselves to be in a state of weakness but in one of strength. After living their lives as close as possible to the ideal Islamic state from inside the prison walls, it seems likely that upon release, many will continue to try to do so while they wait for the caliphate or divine reward they are assured will eventually arrive.

I have written before about the possibility of the jihadist movement in Europe evolving into a belligerent and destructive social force, rather than one merely focused on mass-casualty attacks, which were only ever a means to an end. The subcultures developing in prisons translating to the outside world would see these extremists creating micro-communities which reject and withdraw from the surrounding unbelief of society, in order to instil their own norms and values in line with the principle of “loyalty and disavowal” (al-wala’ wa’l-bara’).

Of course, the problem should not be overstated: the numbers being discussed here may be unprecedented, but they are nonetheless small. There are graver threats and societal issues facing Britain and her allies. But at the same time, being prepared to combat the threat, not just through security or intelligence, but intellectually, is critical. In certain locations, a mere handful of extremists have already been able to multiply their followings into several hundred over the course of a decade. The networks — perhaps better thought of as micro-communities— they fostered would go on to fill the ranks of Isis.

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Far from radicalised online and overnight, many of those who migrated to Isis’s Caliphate project were extremist activists who were already, as Bernard Rougier put it, “living in an imagined caliphate” from inside the unbelief of the West. Through the barrel of an AK-47, Isis transformed their fantasy into an irresistible operational reality, so they merely diverted their energy from practice and proselytising in the likes of Brussels, Trappes, Portsmouth or Gothenburg towards migration to Islamic State.

The risk is that the genie is again out of the bottle. 9/11 resulted in al-Qaeda’s decimation but nonetheless succeeded in advertising jihadism to the entire world on live television. ISIS, by contrast, declared itself a caliphate and invited confrontation with the West which reduced it to rubble, but nevertheless succeeded in advertising not just attacks, but the Salafi-jihadist endgame to the world. We do not yet know who and how many were paying attention.

With the time they are afforded in British, European and Kurdish prisons, the movement is currently assessing the mistakes and shortcomings of that episode so as not to repeat them. Some will conclude the attacks of Bataclan or Manchester Arena were counterproductive, so will channel their energies into other means but remain believers. Others will no doubt remain committed to more of the same. Despite its apparent medieval rigidity, jihadism is a constantly mutating phenomenon which adapts to its own time and place. How the movement evolves and re-emerges from its current ailing condition depends on the discussion and debate happening right now inside cells and on prison landings. It’s time to start paying attention.

These new school paranoiacs divide into two camps: a progressive one and an anti-progressive one. While diametrically opposed politically, they nonetheless share the same conviction that the sin of their enemies is everywhere and must be vanquished to save the soul of America. And, like all moral panic entrepreneurs throughout history, their deepest concern centres on the purity of young people, who they claim are being “groomed” into demonic tribes, whether of the Left or Right.

The liberal version of apocalyptic alarmism is by now all too familiar: the broad gist of it is that Donald Trump is a tyrant who has unleashed the atavistic and peculiarly American impulses of white rage that will inevitably lead the country to civil war and ruin — unless he and his base are repelled by the valiant Democrats. In his bestselling book On Tyranny, published just after the 2016 election, Yale historian Timothy Snyder sternly warned that America could descend into fascism under Trump. By the time Trump had all but completed his first term in office and was seeking another, the liberal prophets of doom had gone into overdrive. “I can’t say this more clearly,” Thomas Friedman wrote in The New York Times in late September 2020. “Our democracy is in terrible danger…”

The events of 6 January served to confirm their darkest warnings: it was an attempted coup! It didn’t matter that most of those who broke into the Capitol had not the slightest idea what they were going to do once they got inside the building, or that the only lethal shot fired during the whole ludicrous debacle was at a Trump supporter, or that there was zero chance that Trump would be violently returned to power. It didn’t matter that Trump, despite new testimony that he wanted to join the protesters in marching toward the Capitol, had scurried back to the White House, where he returned to his usual state of lethargy, or that one of the defining traits of his presidency was ineptitude. None of that mattered, because it complicated the preordained narrative: Trump and his supporters are an existential threat to the republic.

Once Biden moved into the White House you would have thought that the apocalyptic fantasy surrounding Trump would have eased up a bit. It didn’t, and the crack-pipe of progressive paranoia soon flared up again. In May last year Slate published a piece on how “Trump Is Planning a Much More Respectable Coup Next Time”. But the crack-pipe was at its hottest in the editorial traphouse of The Atlantic, which ran a cover-story in January proclaiming that “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun”.

More recently, the US Supreme Court’s decision to revoke Roe v. Wade has served to refocus progressive premonitions of doom. The Guardian reported that the revocation of the 1973 ruling, which enshrined Americans’ constitutional right to abortion, “could drive the biggest wedge yet between what appear to be two irreconcilable nations coexisting under one flag”. “Some wonder if the country’s social fabric, frayed by four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, can survive.”

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A persistent thread in much of this alarmism is a deep preoccupation with children and their “safety”. The concern is not so much that children, or indeed their children, will grow up under tyranny, a “terrifyingly real” prospect according to Snyder. The fear, rather, is that children might become the tyrants: they are in danger of being “groomed” into fascist little monsters, whether it be through video games, Instagram or even online fitness groups. And if you don’t treat extremism like it’s a virus and inoculate your kids against it, then you’re part of the problem.

On the other side are the equally shrill and hyperbolic anti-progressives, who think the Democrats and their supporters are trying to stage a socialist coup by stealth and that anything but Republican rule will spell disaster for the country.

Trump’s style, of course, was nothing if not apocalyptic. In the run-up to the 2016 election he had warned, invoking one of his favourite rallying points, that: “Right now, we don’t have a country, we don’t have a border.” By the time the next election came round, he was warning about the existential threat of Biden. “He’ll bury you in regulations, dismantle your police departments, dissolve our borders, confiscate your guns, terminate religious liberty, destroy your suburbs,” Trump thundered at a campaign rally in late October 2020. On Twitter, he said that the election was a choice between the “TRUMP BOOM” or “Biden’s plan to kill the American Dream!”

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In a recent article in The Washington Times, David Bossie, a conservative activist and long-time Trump adviser, declared that the “Democrats are purposefully trying to destroy our country as we know it in their quest to change America into the world’s next failed socialist state”, citing the rise in violent crime across American cities and the incursion of critical race theory into schools as “part of the Left’s grand plan” to destroy America as we know it.

Bossie didn’t mention children, but many conservatives in America can’t keep off the subject, believing that legions of Left-wing activists and sexual deviants are “grooming” children into the cult of woke zealotry. “When did our public schools, any schools, become what are essentially grooming centres for gender identity radicals?”, Fox News host Laura Ingraham demanded to know earlier this year.

A few months ago, the focus of the story shifted to how Disney had positioned itself as one of the country’s preeminent grooming hubs. According to The Federalist: “Disney’s Obsession With Grooming Children Is Nothing New, But Their Openness About It Is.” More recently, the focus has switched to taxpayer-funded Drag Queen Story Hour events at city schools. “Progressives may have no problem with child grooming and sexualisation, but I do,” protested Vickie Paladino, a New York City Council member.

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What explains the current upsurge in apocalyptic alarmism and its insistent encroachment into the centre of American political life?

Part of the answer is that it’s strategic: sounding the alarm about impending catastrophe is what political partisans do, especially if they can’t persuade a good number of people on the merits of their policies. And, of course, alarmism about extremists has been used everywhere by politicians of all stripes to clamp down on critics and infringe their rights in the interests of “security”.

Alarmism is also a well-rewarded grift, especially for extremism experts and journalists who have perverse incentives for amplifying threats. In a recent article on the new-Right in America, James Pogue made the point in this way:

“Someone like me who has made a career of writing about militias and extremist groups might go about my work thinking that all I do is try to tell important stories and honestly describe political upheaval. But within the Cathedral [Curtis Yarvin’s phrase for an amalgam of universities and the mainstream press], the best way for me to get big assignments and win attention is to identify and attack what seem like threats against the established order, which includes nationalists, anti-government types, or people who refuse to obey the opinions of the Cathedral’s experts on issues like vaccine mandates, in as alarming a way as I possibly can…”

Another possible explanation for the rise of apocalyptic alarmism is the warping effect of spending so much time looking at extremist material on the internet. As someone who studies violent extremism as part of my job, I’ve thought a lot about how over-exposure to violent imagery and hateful propaganda can affect the mental health of those who do this work. Some researchers and journalists claim to have been traumatised by what they have seen, while others worry about the spiritual harms they may have incurred.

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But I also wonder whether those who spend so much of their time in highly radicalised online spaces might slowly, bit by bit, succumb to the warping impact of that exposure. If all you do is read online forum posts praising the murderous actions of Elliot Rodger, you just might start thinking that men really are monsters or potential ones, in the same way that if all you do is watch extreme porn, you just might think that women are sexual objects to be used and humiliated. Or, if all your news about woke liberals comes from the derangement porn of Libs of TikTok you just might start thinking that demented woke people really are everywhere and bent on destroying Western civilisation.

The problem with apocalyptic alarmism, whatever its stripe, is not just the self-aggrandising melodrama that usually accompanies it, or the hypocrisy of sounding like the “semiotically aroused” fringe the alarmists loath. It is its lack of proportion and basic common sense. As Matt Welch has noted: “the moral of ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ is not that there is no wolf, but rather that warnings should be saved for when the beast actually arrives.”

Nawaz’s story of radical self-transformation from extremist to counter-extremist is a classic tale of personal redemption. But it’s also an unmistakable product of our current moment: an age of extremism that demands not only that there must be extremists but, equally, that there must be a whole cadre of experts to monitor, evaluate and police them.

Whenever extremists do or say anything of note, experts are invariably called on to “unpack” it, duly appearing on TV, radio or a podcast to disseminate their expert-takes. Many of these “researchers” are contractually obliged to do these appearances by the organisations they work for, and it’s with some reluctance that they trudge off to the studio, racking their brains for something interesting to say. But quite a few clearly relish the opportunity, especially if it’s on TV, excitedly sending missives from the green room to mark the occasion. For the extremism expert, TV affords the chance to reach a wider audience; above all, it confers legitimacy on them.

Extremism experts now command such prominence that they’re not only breathlessly quoted in news stories on extremism but often drive the coverage itself. Earlier this year, for example, USA Today ran a report headlined: “’Fringe ideas’ are going mainstream in US politics. That’s a danger to democracy, extremism experts say.” More recently, ABC News ran a story titled: “After Buffalo shooting, experts question whether America can face its far-Right extremism problem.” Last week, Voice of America published a piece with the headline: “Anti-LGBTQ Rhetoric Could Galvanize Extremists, Experts Say.”

Indeed, the phrase “experts say” seems to have become a standard reportorial convention in news stories on radicalisation. And more often than not what the experts have to say is a veritable counsel of doom: “I think we’re truly in free fall, and don’t have any sense of how to grasp this,” one prominent scholar told Slate, referring to the threat of the far-Right in America. Almost always, the alarmist rhetoric of the expert quoted mirrors and legitimises the alarmist political concerns of the progressive media platforms which petition them for comment.

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The epistemic authority of extremism experts used to derive from a period of sustained academic research carried out under the patronage of an academic institution or think-tank, or from direct experience of policing extremists. That’s now changed, chiefly because epistemic authority everywhere has become atomised. You don’t need to be a scholar or former counter-terrorism cop to be an extremism expert anymore: you just need the right kind of “lived experience”.

Up until recently, the kind of “lived experience” required to be an extremism expert came from former membership of an extremist group. Who better to educate us on the dynamics and perils of extremism than those now repentant “formers” who have directly participated in them first-hand?

Before the extremism expert, there was the terrorism expert: these were typically middle-class white men whose specialist knowledge came from extensive foreign travel or prior military service. Their main focus was sub-state terrorist groups and the threat they posed to Western democracies. These people still exist, but they have become less relevant in a political climate in which the more nebulous category of extremism has come to displace terrorism as the primary frame of analysis. They have also fallen victim to the politics of democratisation that “centres” lived experience, because theirs are clearly not the right kind: they are too white, too male, too privileged.

It is no accident that the extremism expert came to prominence just as the threat of terrorism began to wane in Western countries following the final collapse of the Isis caliphate in March 2019. Jihadi attacks haven’t stopped happening since then, but they are considerably fewer in number, more amateurish and less lethal. At the same time, the threat of far-Right terrorism has increased, particularly in America, though it’s still rare and has yet to match the lethality of jihadi terrorist attacks when Isis was in the ascendant in 2015.

With a finite number of terrorist groups to map and study, the experts needed to branch out: so they heartily embraced the concept of extremism, a category so capacious and permissively malleable that it encompasses not only behaviour and thought but conceivably anything that the expert in question deems politically undesirable or “problematic”. This made the field acutely vulnerable to exploitation by political activists whose interest is less to study extremists than to manufacture them in an effort to stigmatise and silence their political opponents.

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Over the last few years, as my colleague Liam Duffy has documented, the study of extremism has ballooned exponentially: there are now experts on gaming and extremism, climate-change and extremism, sport and extremism, gender and extremism, fashion and extremism, music and extremism, neo-Nazi accelerationists, incels, femcels, jihadi poetry, and far-Right speech-codes. One expert has even written an article on “LOL extremism”.

Whereas terrorism experts used to venture off to foreign locales to do research on terrorist groups, the typical extremism expert doesn’t even need to leave their flat to retrieve data: they just need to go online, where they can access terabytes of extremist “chatter”, postings and propaganda. Consequently, many extremism experts have never even met or spoken with an actual extremist.

Unsurprisingly, the role of the extremism expert lends itself to the kind of person who thrives on secrecy, dissimulation and drama. Julia Ebner, for example, spent two years cultivating five fake online identities in order to spy on the online activities of extremists for her book Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists. On one of the rare occasions when she met a far-Right activist in real life, she put on a blonde wig to disguise herself. Ebner insists that the social utility of her findings justified the ethical breach of lying to her research subjects. Similarly, Talia Lavin, a far-left writer and activist who is often quoted by journalists as an authority on the far-Right, adopted numerous fake identities, which included posing as a white nationalist huntress from Iowa, for the purpose of researching her book Culture Warlords.

Before the rise of the extremism expert, an extremist was someone who occupied the margins: which is to say that they were at a distance from the mainstream, if not in direct contention with it. Now, it seems, an extremist is anyone who comes from or embodies the mainstream. He is the “normie” next door. He is your brother, father, husband or son. He is you, whether you know it or not. The Extreme Gone Mainstream, as the title of one recent book puts it.

This was a particularly insistent theme in much expert commentary on the racially motivated mass-shooting in Buffalo last month, where 18-year-old Payton Gendron murdered 10 people at a supermarket. The LA Times, for example, published an op-ed by Colin P. Clarke on how the “Buffalo gunman emerged from a far-Right ecosystem that’s gone mainstream”. Clarke noted, referring to the hate-filled manifesto that Gendron posted online before carrying out his atrocity, that the “great replacement” idea at the heart of the manifesto “is not merely in the dark, conspiratorial corners of the internet”, but “has been mainstreamed on cable news shows, including by Tucker Carlson, who routinely regurgitates far-Right talking points…” Rolling Stone published an even more polemically strident op-ed by Talia Lavin, titled “The Buffalo Shooter Isn’t a ‘Lone Wolf.’ He’s a Mainstream Republican.”

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The notion that the extreme has gone mainstream is, of course, a wild exaggeration. The extreme still lurks where it always has: at the extreme. What has instead happened is that extremism experts have been ideologically captured by progressive politics, believing that anything that challenges elite dogmas — such as the belief that a woman can become a man or that masking mandates are effective — are forms of extremism that must be somehow explained and then silenced in the interests of online “safety”.

While it’s true that Trump and his hardcore supporters believe that the last US election was stolen from them and that there are broad parallels between their thinking and that of the tiny few who have wreaked far-Right murderous violence both in America and beyond, there are, as Graeme Wood has put it, “countless shades of difference between, say, supporting a border wall and wanting to snipe at Mexicans along the Rio Grande”. Anyone who can’t distinguish between the two is not only morally and intellectually unserious, but also singularly undeserving of the title “expert”.

The rise of the extremism expert did not happen independently of the rise of the intensely politicised age in which we now live. It is, in fact, a symptom of that politicisation. Extremism experts are the new clergy, telling us what to affirm and revere and what to fear and banish. Some of them even claim to have special healing powers, advising governments and communities on how to build “resilience” in the face of extremist temptation and seduction. No doubt many feel that they are on a social mission to make the world a better place. But they are no more to be trusted as the objective arbiters of truth than the religious clergy before them.