Meanwhile, other people on the internet, with strange pseudonyms and even stranger avatars, processed the news and footage in a rather different way: they liked it. This is because they thought Kirk deserved to be murdered — because of who he was, what he had said and how he lived. Their joy was a righteous joy and they didn’t feel embarrassed about sharing it. And if they showed any empathy, it was towards Kirk’s murderer, who, in their eyes, had done the world a favor.

Many of these people, judging by their social media profiles and other obvious tells, were from the liberal Left, where justifying or excusing violence against the powerful or the “oppressor class” has a long and shameful pedigree. But a good number came from two fringe communities that on the face of it would appear to have little in common: incels (i.e. sexually frustrated men who self-identify as “involuntary celibate”) and trans women. I know this because last week I spent the best part of a day trawling through their respective online echo-chambers to see what they were saying about Kirk’s murder.

One of these forums is estimated to have more than 20,000 active members. Here, incels share their personal testimonies and vent. The news of Kirk’s death provoked a chorus of celebration: “Rest in Piss bitch,” wrote one poster. “I feel kind of happy to hear this news and see this video,” chimed in another. “Good, death to all normies,” read yet another post. Soon enough, a consensus had solidified, which was that Kirk’s murder was a good thing because he was a normal person — a “normoid” — who had a wife and children. “Not a single drop of empathy for a 6’3 MTN [mid-tier normie] neurotypical IQ mogger with wife and kids,” read one post. Mogger, for those who aren’t familiar with internet incel slang, refers to a male who, by virtue of their physical attractiveness or rhetorical skills, threatens the masculinity of other men lacking in those traits, while “mid-tier normie” refers to a moderately attractive male. “Agreed,” noted one poster, “he was a normie sex haver.” In other words, Kirk deserved to die because he had the sort of life that incels vehemently desire but are unable to achieve.

In many posts, a narrative had formed: they (the normies) hate us (the incels) and want us dead: so fuck them. For example: “Just because troons [trans-identifying people] hate him [Kirk] as well won’t make me change my opinion… He would’ve bullied me to my death. I celebrate the death of normscums.”

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Some incels had more specific reasons for celebrating Kirk’s murder, mainly to do with his support for Israel and their own raging anti-Semitism and misogyny. “He was a gynocentric constantly talking about protecting white foids [women],” thundered one poster. “He was a zionist dog,” fumed another.” One self-avowed accelerationist (i.e. someone who agitates for the demise of liberal capitalist society) excitedly wondered whether Kirk’s murder would spark a wider civil war leading to societal collapse and anarchy.

This is not to say that there were no dissenting voices on the forum. There was one, who valiantly pleaded: “Whatever the disagreement you and others had with him [Kirk] over his support for Israel, this kind of violence is not the solution. We can’t lose our humanity.” This post drew precisely zero responses.

The same perverted logic that classifies Kirk’s murder as a justifiable punishment was similarly rampant across the trans women online forum I visited. It is a forum where thousands of posters share personal stories and vent about their troubles in much the same way incels do. Many posters responded to the news of Kirk’s murder with unbridled glee, not by saying anything but by posting GIFs. One showed a man smoking a cigar, with the caption “Rest in piss you won’t be missed”. Another showed Jeremy Clarkson sardonically mouthing the words “Oh no! Anyway.”

Most posters, though, were more forthcoming. One asked: “Anyone else suddenly feeling in a good mood?” Another responded: “I’m celebrating too. I did a little dance. I sang ‘Stayin’ Alive.’ And I had a couple of tequila shots.” Others were more measured, clarifying that what they were celebrating was not Kirk’s death, exactly, but rather, in the words of one post, “the prevention of future harmful and hateful actions/effects to society that his death represents”. This was a persistent theme in many of the hundreds of posts I came across: that Kirk constituted an existential threat to trans people and thus deserved not a shred of empathy. “I feel sorry for his family,” one poster wrote, “but this guy was a piece of shit. For years, he advocated violence against transgender people, insinuating he was going to kill us.” Others were even more scathing: “He wasn’t a person. Just a Nazi in human skin.”

A few responded to the news of Kirk’s murder by expressing alarm at how it would rebound on them. “My concern,” said one, “is that MAGA/GOP will use this as another dog whistle to eradicate us.” Another confided that while they were thrilled to hear the news of Kirk’s death, this feeling was attenuated by the “fear that the government will use this as an excuse to harm us”.

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The hagiography of Charlie Kirk

By Darren McGarvey

Not all of the posts on the trans forums I documented were unhinged. On the contrary, some were decent: “I find this terrifying and sad,” one confided. It continued: “Obviously we all here completely disagree with Charlie Kirk’s beliefs in a deeply profound way… But political violence has no place in a democracy and it speaks to a sickness within our democracies.” Nevertheless, such sentiments were either ignored or ridiculed by many others. “It [violence] has a place. Utah!,” replied one poster to the above plea for common decency and humanity.

On deeper reflection, the similarities between the two forums shouldn’t be so surprising, for there are many striking parallels between these two subcultures. Both incels and trans women have experienced a profound sense of personal crisis and frustration due to perceived problems with the bodies they inhabit — whether, in the case of incels, because the body is experienced as physically unattractive or, in the case or trans women, because it is at odds with how they see their “true” gender identity. Both have come to believe that mainstream society is conspiratorially ranged against them and threatens their very existence. Both, at the extremes, celebrate or condone violence against their enemies. Both dehumanize certain kinds of women and exhibit blatant misogyny towards them: “Stacys” and “Terfs” respectively. Both suffer from high rates of depression and self-harm. And both have provoked moral panics. Indeed, incels are to liberals what trans people are to the Right: namely, a threat to their most sacred values. Where trans people threaten the sanctity of the male-female distinction, incels threaten gender equality.

The other parallel that stands out is that violence associated with these two subcultures is exceedingly rare when compared to other kinds of political violence. According to one well-cited academic study on incels, incel-related violence has claimed the lives of nearly 50 victims globally. This is 50 too many, but is vastly overshadowed by, for example, the menace of jihadi terrorism, which in Western Europe alone has caused the deaths of over 650 people since 1994, injuring well over 5000 more. Levels of trans-related lethal violence are considerably lower, although solid data is still lacking on this. Understanding why there is so little incel and trans violence, given the inflammatory rhetoric that both groups engage in, would be a useful area of future research. (The evolutionary psychologists William Costello and David Buss have gone some way towards explaining this in respect to incels, tentatively speculating that sustained exposure to online pornography, gaming and shit-posting has a sedative effect on incels.)

I have written before about the moral panic over incels and how the response to them has been so disproportionately excessive among liberals and in the media. I would caution against the same over-reaction to trans culture, which seems to be provoking similar levels of derangement on the Right. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t take the threat of trans violence seriously, but overstating the extent of their violence is wrong and will further inflame their persecution fantasies and militant rhetoric.

Kirk’s murder is an outrage and should be condemned in the severest terms. But it also offers a fascinating mirror onto our rapidly evolving extremist landscape, where fringe online communities with radically different aims converge in a ghoulish embrace of puerility and the dehumanization of anyone who doesn’t think like them.

We should expose these communities to censure and even ridicule. We should also strive to better understand why and how they come to think in such dangerously binary ways. But we shouldn’t bewitch ourselves into thinking that they are more powerful than they are, much less start trading in the same paranoid and apocalyptic language so beloved of the extremists at the edge.

The short answer is that the atrocity couldn’t be absorbed into their preconceived narrative, which holds that Israel is a monstrous “oppressor” state, while the Palestinians are its oppressed victims whose underdog purity cannot be doubted. So the rapes had to be denied or minimized, and anyone who broke this conspiracy of silence was accused of giving ammunition to the enemy.

The same mentality can be seen in the response of many Western liberals to the horrific killing last month of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte, North Carolina. In recently-released CCTV footage that captures the moments before her killing, Zarutska can be seen sitting alone, looking at her phone. Decarlos Brown Jr, a 34 year old with a violent criminal history, is sitting behind her. He pulls out a pocket-knife, stands up, and slashes her neck.

“People have already been murdered for nothing,” writes the narrator of Martin Amis’s crime novel Night Train. “They take the trouble to cross the street to murder for nothing.” Zarutska, who was not known to Brown and had no pre-existing conflict with him, was seemingly murdered for nothing. This, in a way, makes her killing all the more horrifying, because it was utterly senseless.

There is also the compounding horror of the footage, in all its banality, of Zarutska’s final moments. She was killed not in a basement by a notorious serial killer, but in a train carriage, with other travelers sitting around her, in a random attack by a man who has a diagnosis of schizophrenia. When she took her seat, Zarutska couldn’t have known that she was putting herself in mortal danger. The attack happened so quickly that she was unable to protect herself. Zarutska could very easily have been you, or me, or a loved one — and anyone who has watched the footage subliminally understands this. It is a deeply unsettling feeling, one that goes beyond the visceral horror of the killing itself.

Brown also happens to be black, while Zarutska was white. This shouldn’t matter: were Brown white, and Zarutska black, the killing would be no less — or no more — horrific. But for many progressives, it clearly does matter. Had the racial identities of the two been reversed, mainstream media outlets would be in full moral panic mode over the complex harms of systemic racism and colonial trauma. But instead, most of these outlets ignored the story, despite Zarutska being a woman and a refugee — or, if they did cover it, did so to make a point about how the Right has sought to politicize the killing.

For many on the Right, this selectiveness of concern is as obvious as it is damning, and much of the outrage emanating from this quarter is driven by the perception that Zarutska’s killing — and by extension her life — is diminished, in progressive eyes, by the fact of her having been white and her killer black. One does not have to be a Right-wing “rage monster” to have some sympathy for this perception of progressive bias, or to understand how it has arisen. Imagine, for example, that the perpetrator of the Southport massacre had been white and targeted a Beyoncé-themed event where the victims were predominantly black children. Or imagine that the assassination attempt on the life of Salman Rushdie in August 2022 had been carried out by a white supremacist (instead of a radicalized Muslim), not against Rushdie but against (the infinitely less talented) Ibram X. Kendi. In both cases, there might have been a George Floyd moment: an extended period of mass hysteria, racial reckoning and self-flagellation. Yet, in the real world, no one can remember the name of Rushdie’s assailant: Hadi Matar. And much of the progressive response to Axel Rudakubana focused on how a phantom far-Right was “weaponizing” the tragedy.

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BLM’s legacy? Revived white identitarianism

By Andrew Doyle

Once you see this double standard, you can’t unsee it. Its logic is transparently sectarian and unfair. It operates like this: when a white person commits a grievous criminal act against a non-white victim, they are to be potently condemned, while their victim is to be cleansed of any moral taint. In some cases, such as Floyd’s, the victim is even sacralized. Conversely, when a non-white person commits a grievous criminal act against a white victim, they are to be excused, with their life-story exhaustively excavated for signs of trauma, oppression and other mitigating factors. Their victims are not seen as victims; how could they be, given their “white privilege” or “oppressor” status?

This double-standard is an insult to the most basic notions of equality and fairness, since both demand that people should be judged on the basis of what they have done rather than on who they are or what they believe.

It is therefore right and necessary to call it out. But many voices on the online Right have gone much further, adopting a tone that is every bit as unhinged and frenzied as the liberal-left derangements of 2020 over race and its various “reckonings”. For example, Matt Walsh, a prominent American political commentator, seems to have shape-shifted into an inverted BLM activist. Zarutska, in his view, is a quasi-martyr whose death is symbolic of a “deep and widespread systemic corruption” at the heart of America. “She should have the murals and the streets named after her,” he demanded on X — seemingly inspiring one X user called Eoghan McCabe, an Irish entrepreneur, to offer half a million dollars’ worth of $10,000 grants for people willing to “paint murals of the face of Iryna Zarutska in prominent US city locations”. Elon Musk has pledged $1 million to the same cause.

In another post, Walsh shared a screenshot of a menacing Brown standing over a terrified Zarutska. “This image will define the new civil rights movement,” he wrote, insisting that “we have a right to safe communities where violent animals are rounded up and caged”.

Just as those who didn’t performatively condemn Floyd’s killing were accused by liberal activists of maintaining a silence that was “violent”, the online Right has condemned the mainstream media for downplaying the story of Zarutska’s killing and thus colluding in a monstrous lie. And just as BLM activists brazenly politicized Floyd’s murder for clout and status among their in-group, the online Right seems to be engaging in a form of “outbidding” by insisting, with no real evidence, that Zarutska’s killing was racially-motivated. Moreover, these activists are calling for ever more extreme criminal justice policies against violent offenders — like making armed robbery a capital offense, which seems every bit as extreme as calls to defund the police.

These comments are unappealing in both their tone and temper. Particularly unattractive is the instrumentality with which some on the Right are using Zarutska’s death to make a point about delusional Democratic lawmakers and judges. This sort of stuff: “She was 23. She was on her way home from working at a pizza parlor. She bled out on a train. Because the Democrats liberate criminals. We arrest them. We deport them if they’re here illegally. We kill them if they’re terrorists. Choose.” Even if you agree with Sebastian Gorka’s point about the Democrats’ disastrous criminal justice policies, the transition from Zarutska to the terrible Democrats, and then to the triumphant Republicans, is so swift as to be callous.

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How liberal cringe protected the grooming gangs

By Simon Cottee

It is also a mistake to think that since the Left has a long record of politicizing crime and stoking racial resentment the Right should do the same and those cynically making a lot of hay out of Zarutska’s killing ought to be condemned. But the Left still has itself to blame, for the current firestorm of anger over Zarutska is a direct and wholly predictable consequence of years of institutionalized identity politics that vilified whites or whiteness in any form while simultaneously sacralizing blacks or blackness. That the Right is now mercilessly playing the same toxic game of identity politics, albeit in defense of its own tribal interests, is an irony that liberals must acknowledge and properly reflect on.

Liberals, in short, are now picking up their own tab. They treated their in-group with kid gloves, and tried to hide or whitewash some of their more egregious crimes, even as they came down especially hard on other segments of the population for lesser or non-existent crimes. Do this and you will create a reservoir of tribal resentment and hostility that may become difficult to contain at some point.

In Britain, it is precisely this sense of grievance, encapsulated in claims over two-tier policing, that has fueled the protests and distemper of the last 18 months. This unrest has surfaced in the Southport riots, in the widespread outrage over the grooming gangs scandal, and the various protests outside migrant hotels. In all of these cases, the driving grievance is that non-British citizens, or non-whites, are being prioritized, coddled and protected by the state, whereas British citizens are being lied to, unfairly treated and exposed to acts of flagrant criminality from which the state should have offered them protection.

Iryna Zarutska was the random victim of a terrible act of violence committed by someone who should have been in psychiatric care. Ordinary Americans will want to know why he wasn’t, and may well wonder at the state of a criminal justice system that allows serial offenders like him to wander the streets with impunity. Meanwhile, liberals will stick their heads in the sand or make noises about how the killer himself was suffering — and everyone else will be driven mad by their hypocrisy.

This was a reference to the English Defence League and its activism around grooming gangs, which was often ugly and divisive. Now there is much to be said about the EDL, which was disbanded in 2013, and what it did about the grooming gangs. But for Casey to confess that her first thought after coming across a piece of evidence that is indicative of a broader cover-up is to ponder how the EDL might stand to benefit from it suggests a rather strange ordering of priorities.

To be fair to Casey, she was responding to a question about whether the fear of being tarnished as a racist had caused the authorities to turn a blind eye to the grooming gangs; her point, although she didn’t quite put it in this way, was that in not wanting to appear as racist, the denialists were, in effect, helping other racists to exploit the issue because no one else — or no one good — was addressing it.

Casey’s core point, in isolation, is a valid and necessary one: the far-Right has indeed sought to gain political capital from the grooming gangs scandal, and it has been given a free rein in this in part because so many others have shied away from confronting the problem. But it’s also true that the preoccupation with how the grooming scandal might conceivably “play into the hands” of the far-Right has been just as corrosive and detrimental as the insidious imperative not to be seen as racist, with both intersecting to produce a culture of denial over the rape gangs.

Julie Bindel, for example, has recounted in UnHerd how, in 2006, The Guardian rejected her pitch about a story of a missing 14-year-old girl from Blackpool who had been targeted by abusers in the town. Bindel, who was one of the first journalists to write about grooming gangs, recalled that her then editor, Katharine Viner, told her: “We would be called racist if we publish this.” In another piece, retelling the same story, Bindel remembers Viner as saying: “The BNP [British National Party] are all over this and it will just add fuel to the fire if we go anywhere near it.” Despite Bindel’s insistence that neither she nor her sources were racist — that she was “a Left-wing feminist concerned about child sexual abuse” — The Guardian passed on the story and the Sunday Times Magazine took it on.

It is impossible to know how many other stories on the grooming gangs were abandoned because editors thought that the far-Right would use them to demonize Muslims and sow discord. It is similarly difficult to know how many writers deliberately avoided the issue or wrote about it in a highly selective way because they thought that anything they said about it might help the far-Right.

In The Fallout: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence, the Observer’s Andrew Anthony gives an unusually honest account of how, working as a journalist in the Nineties, he would occasionally “turn a blind eye to cultural practices that were problematic or difficult to reconcile with a liberal outlook”. He recalled how, in the course of writing a long feature about crime and policing in East London, he deliberately omitted to include a police officer’s comment about the high incidence of forced marriages and domestic violence among the local Muslim community. “I feared that it might be construed as anti-Muslim,” he wrote.

He also admitted that while working on another story, for which he had temped as a driver for a London minicab firm, he discovered that most of his fellow cab-drivers had been granted or were seeking asylum — or had been turned down. What struck him most about his new colleagues was the “cold contempt” with which they regarded their new home. “Some of the drivers were Taliban sympathizers, some were admirers of Ayatollah Khomeini, but none were pro-British,” he wrote, adding: “Almost none of this I chose to report.” “Why would I write anything that could be construed as a Mail-like attack on a minority?,” he explained, describing his thinking at the time. He also feared that sensationalist reporting on minorities would only serve to fuel hatred towards them.

It is hard to exaggerate just how prevalent and ingrained this mode of thinking is among progressives. George Orwell, writing in Tribune in June 1944, described it as a “sort of charm or incantation to silence uncomfortable truths”. “When you are told that by saying this, that or the other you are ‘playing into the hands of’ some sinister enemy, you know that it is your duty to shut up immediately,” he observed. He also conceded that “objectively” the charge can often be true — that “it is always difficult to attack one party to a dispute without temporarily helping the other”. But he was adamant that the suppression of unpleasant facts was damaging in the long run and that, as he argued in another essay, the cause of progress cannot be served by lies.

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The grooming gang scandal isn’t over

By Julie Bindel

When Bindel’s Sunday Times Magazine investigation was published in 2007, she was roundly condemned by many of her comrades on the Left. A number of people told her that she was playing into the hands of the BNP. “I was truly staggered,” she recalled. “It would appear that I was being told not to wash dirty linen in public, and to hell with the rape and abuse of teenage girls.”

This brings us back to Casey and her implied suggestion that those who suppressed the truth about rape gangs were essentially good people whose motives were well-intentioned, while those on the far-Right who couldn’t keep off the subject were bad people animated by racism. One need not make a fetish of nuance to posit that this is a rather reductive way of looking at the matter, and it certainly flatters the spineless police officers and countless local officials who looked the other way because they didn’t want to displease their superiors or damage their career prospects. It is hard to think of these people as uniformly good. Equally, there are some on the far-Right, notably Tommy Robinson, whose rhetoric about grooming gangs has been incendiary, but who did seek, albeit ham-fistedly, to bring attention to the victims’ plight. Should people like him be seen as wholly bad?

Many would no doubt take issue with this characterization of Robinson — Bindel has insisted that he is “not a man you would usually expect to be interested in the plight of young and abused women” and that his primary concern is to agitate against radical Islam. But might not both of these things be true — that Robinson is broadly motivated by an ideological hostility towards Islam, but also a glimmer of sympathy for the victims of the grooming gangs. Need one exclude the other?

Whatever the case, the temptation among our elites to invoke the spectre of the far-Right whenever the spotlight falls on Muslim rape gangs or jihadi terrorism, or indeed any activity that reflects badly on Muslims, is at best a distraction and at worst an attempt to shut down the kind of honest discussion that Casey’s report sets out.

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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The far-Right is coming for Farage

By Rob Lownie

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.

Welcome, dear reader, to the strange and warped online world of incels, where the fictional brutal murder of a girl is not a crime, but a punishment. Indeed, here is a society of boys and men where sexual failure is extolled as a virtue, sex is seen as contaminating and the real-life mass-killers of women are elevated to the status of martyrs.

Adolescence, Netflix’s much chewed-over drama is notionally about incels; Jamie, the disturbed boy at its center certainly sounds like one and murders a female classmate who contemptuously calls him one. While the show obviously wasn’t intended for incels — its target audience was the parents of teenage boys and politicians — many have watched it and have been avidly discussing its merits and demerits. Jack Thorne, who co-wrote the show with Stephen Graham, ought to listen up and prepare himself for some critical feedback.

For my sins, I’ve spent more time than I’d care to admit lurking on incel online spaces, in part out of a morbid curiosity to see what I would find there, but mainly because I want to better understand their political and intellectual culture — and because conventional writing on incels tends to be so phenomenally bad, with its sensational alarmism and self-dramatizing tone of moral shock (“I infiltrated the dark rabbit hole of incels and what I found there traumatized me to my core…”).

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In some ways, they (“involuntary celibates”) are boringly familiar: yet another victim group that defines itself in relation to an enemy (women) which it blames for all its problems. But in other ways, incels occupy a world that is as strange as it is unsettling, with its own folklore and incomprehensible vocabulary. “Foid” for example, is a derogatory term for a woman, while “Stacy” and “Chad” are two sides of the same reviled coin: respectively, a sexually attractive woman and a sexually successful man. Tyrone, Chadpreet and Chaddam are all ethnic variations on Chad, while a “currycel” is an incel from India. “LDAR” denotes “Lay Down and Rot”, “AWALT” means “All Women Are Like That”, “roped” refers to suicide and “mogging” is when Chads act in ways that threaten or diminish the masculinity of other men. Although Adolescence contains a brief reference to the “80/20 rule”, according to which 80% of women select from just 20% of the male dating pool, the show barely scratches at the surface of this subculture.

From what I already knew about incels and their contempt for “normoids”, I had fully expected that they would unanimously loathe Adolescence, if only because of the wave of adulation it had received in the mainstream media. But I was wrong: some actually liked it.

On one incel forum I found multiple discussion threads on the show. Traviscel* noted that although Adolescence was “blatant anti-incel propaganda”, it was nevertheless “psychologically accurate” in its portrayal of the killer, Jamie. “I liked how the kid had extreme body dysmorphia, and constantly fluctuated between being a troll, being a simp, feeling worthless, and easily irritated in his desperation for power”, he explained. He particularly liked the third episode in which Jamie is interviewed by a female forensic psychologist played by Erin Doherty. “The actress was amazing and so was the incel killer,” Traviscel continued, praising Doherty for her “skilled” portrayal of “a manipulative little whore” who entraps Jamie into confessing. As for Jamie, he was like “OJ [Simpson] in that he constantly denied he killed that bitch, despite getting caught red handed on CCTV”. “I liked how it had simple answers,” Traviscel concluded, which he took to be that Jamie was an incel because he was bullied and because “sluts” had rejected him. If Adolescence was indeed “anti-incel propaganda”, as Traviscel put it, it clearly had no effect in penetrating his breastplate of incel righteousness and self-pity.

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Many more, though, dismissed the show as unrealistic, “retarded”, fear-mongering and superficial. A recurring criticism centered on the casting of Jamie, played by the 15-year-old Owen Cooper. The broad consensus was that he was too good looking to convince as an incel. In a vote on “Would you let Jamie from Adolescence join the forum?”, over 80% said no, reasoning, as one commenter put it, “He’ll grow into a Chad.”

The other point of consensus, across all of the discussion threads on the show, was that the real victim wasn’t the murdered girl, Katie, but Jamie himself. Adamcel*, for example, confided that “I couldn’t see the perpetrator, a 13-year-old boy, as the villain in this, not even logically”, elaborating that Jamie’s violence was a morally intelligible, even excusable, reaction to being bullied.

Some incels were particularly scathing about how the show failed, in their view, to capture the complexities of the manosphere, ridiculing the scene in which one of the detectives working on the case speculates about the kind of mindset-material that might have radicalized Jamie. “It’s the involuntary celibate stuff,” Detective Sergeant Misha Frank says, adding: “It’s the Andrew Tate shite.” This, according to Dariuscel*, was to elide the “redpill”, which holds that women are superficial and only attracted to Chads, with the “blackpill”, which holds that incels, no matter what they do or how hard they try, will never find sexual intimacy or happiness with a woman. Tate, who is not only sexually successful with women but also potently shames other men who lack his confidence and “loverboy” skillset, is thus especially reviled among incels. “Andrew Tate,” Dariuscel clarified, “is a sex haver mogger masculinity coper that shouldn’t be associated with incels at all.” Tate, for his part, has distanced himself from incels, stating, via a spokesperson, that it is “unjust” for him to be made a “the scapegoat for complex problems like radicalization and violence”.

But what really got under their skin was how, as they saw it, the show had trivialized their ideological beliefs by suggesting that they had been brainwashed. Indeed, for incels, the idea that they have been tricked into their beliefs is intolerable, since it contains the fatal implication that those beliefs are untrue and can only be accepted through coercion. If incels believe that society is anti-male or that all women select men based on looks and status, it is because they really do believe this and because it captures their sense, however deranged it may seem to others, of how the world is.

In my brief trawl, I found that, unlike many other journalists who skirt around it, I didn’t want to cry or vomit or cringe in terror at what I saw and read. But I did feel an overwhelming sense of sadness at what a terrible dead end the subculture is, ensuring the self-damnation of so many of those who seek solace and connection in going there.

It also made me acutely aware of how fantastically naive Adolescence is in its exploration of how Jamie came to embrace incel beliefs and in its implicit assumption that if only Jamie’s parents had been more assiduous in protecting him from the manosphere he would have been okay. Spend any time lurking on incel forums and you come to acknowledge that many of these men and boys are there because they want to be there and not because they’ve watched some ridiculous piece of Andrew Tate content or because they’re the unsuspecting victims of a vast grooming operation. They are there because they find it cathartic to vent about their frustrations, because they want to be understood and because they can express outrageous thoughts and feelings that they would be unable to express anywhere else. And because they clearly take great pleasure in defiantly transgressing the civilized norms of a society that they feel has rejected them and because sacralizing misogynistic killers like Elliot Roger is meant to enrage the normies.

Had the makers of Adolescence done their own bit of incel-trawling before writing the show they might have come up with a story that better captured the appeal of an oppositional subculture for boys and men who are unable to form sexual relationships with women and who have come to see their lives as hopeless. Instead, they contrived to make a clumsy and reductive drama that has served to fan the flames of a moral panic that shows no signs of abating.

Of course the smug and self-congratulatory makers of Adolescence would no doubt insist that if there’s a panic about the scourge of violent misogyny then clearly this is all to the good. But the thing about moral panics is they often take on a life of their own and materialize consequences that their instigators hadn’t intended or envisaged. One such consequence is the mass stigmatization of young boys, which is all the more sinister for concealing itself in the benevolent language of vulnerability and safeguarding.

Another and perhaps more unsettling irony is that Adolescence, in trying to expose the dangers of online misogyny, has massively amplified the most extreme exponents of it, catapulting incels to the center of a global conversation about boyhood, masculinity and violence. In doing so, it has brought the most fringe of subcultures to the attention of countless numbers of young boys who might previously not have heard it or had viewed it with indifference. For some incels, all this sudden fervent attention is unnerving, while for the more ideologically strident among them, it is to be welcomed. As one poster triumphantly put it, “Good, that means inceldom is spreading. They can’t ignore it anymore.”

***

*Some names have been changed

Jonathan Hall’s post-Southport review, published yesterday, essentially concurs with these experts, advising that it would be unhelpful to expand the legal definition of terrorism to include non-ideological rampages like Southport.

But Starmer wasn’t wrong to say that terrorism has changed — and those very changes have vastly complicated the business of demarcating between different forms of extreme violence.

To better understand how terrorism has changed and how best to classify opaque and liminal figures such as Rudakubana, I recently spoke to Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown professor and one of the world’s leading scholars on terrorism. “Like any phenomenon, terrorism is always changing and reflects the broader tensions and turbulence of society,” Hoffman told me.

Currently working on the 4th edition of his seminal book Inside Terrorism (1998), Hoffman has been tracing the changing face of terrorism for 27 years. “When I wrote the first edition, I argued that terrorism had to be an organizational phenomenon with an identifiable command and control structure,” he said. In that book he also made a firm distinction between a terrorist and a criminal, insisting that whereas the criminal is “acting primarily for selfish, personal motivations,” the terrorist’s goal is “ineluctably political (to change or fundamentally alter a political system through his violent act)”. Hoffman furthermore noted that the political nature of the terrorist’s motives is what distinguishes him from the “lunatic assassin”, whose “goal is more often intrinsically idiosyncratic, completely egocentric and deeply personal”.

His first order of business, when he started revising the 2nd edition published in 2006, was to soften the emphasis on the organizational structure of terrorism. This was because of the rise of al Qaeda: a group that encouraged lone individuals, with whom it had no direct connection, to undertake terrorist attacks. By the time ISIS came to prominence a decade later in 2016, the era of the “lone wolf” was in full swing. “And that’s when the lines began to blur,” Hoffman said.

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From the late Seventies until the blurring began in 2014, there was a broad consensus in terrorism studies, which was based on three assumptions. First, terrorism was rational: the calculated and discriminate use of violence to achieve a desired political end. Second, and connectedly, terrorists used violence not for its own sake but as a tool for drawing attention to their grievances and believed that excessive civilian casualties would generate the wrong kind of publicity and harm their cause in the long run. Third, terrorists, for the most part, were psychologically normal: they were bad, certainly, but not mad.

But when over 50,000 people from 80 different countries started leaving their homes to join ISIS in Syria and Iraq, that consensus began to fracture. “Right there you’re dealing with an enormous pool and you’re going to have a cross-section of society, including those who may have mental health issues,” Hoffman said. “Terrorism has become so much more egalitarian now,” he further explained, chiefly because “you don’t have to belong to a terrorist organization anymore — you can just show some sympathy or affinity to that organization”. Indeed, with no real bar to entry, other than a willingness to kill or die for a cause, anyone can claim to be a terrorist and have that claim validated both by the terrorist group whose name they invoke and the mass media which thrives on covering terrorism-related stories. Hoffman said that the conventional wisdom that terrorists are normal was “always an exaggeration”, but that in the age of self-ID terrorism it no longer holds.

In addition to becoming more egalitarian, terrorism has become less onerous as a “project of the self”: whereas at one time recruits to terrorist groups had to demonstrate loyalty, discipline and proficiency with weapons, now lone actor terrorists need show only the most superficial commitment to the causes they latch onto. By way of example, Hoffman cited Omar Mateen, who “at the last minute declared his allegiance to ISIS, probably with the assumption that if you can hitch your fortunes to a terrorist organization you’ll get much more attention”. In 2016, Mateen murdered 49 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida; less than half an hour into his attack he made a 9/11 call in which he pledged allegiance to ISIS. “How political is it if you’re leveraging on ISIS because you’ll know you’ll get a lot more attention by doing so?” Hoffman added.

The other major shift Hoffman observes is a new logic of barbarism, where terrorist violence has become more excessive and untethered from any civilizational restraint. Indeed, for many terrorist groups and actors, violence is an end in itself, where the overwhelming purpose isn’t to effect political change, but simply to terrorize and maximally harm a reviled enemy. Expanding on this, Hoffman said that he had just read Emmanuel Carrère’s new book V13: Chronicle of a Trial, which records the horrors of the November 2015 Paris attacks, where ISIS commandos murdered 130 people. Carrère quotes an investigator who, in response to an “odd question” about how he “felt about the killings”, said: “How I felt? I don’t know. I can only tell you that there were 30 holes in one victim, 22 in another, 14 in a third…” He also quotes one of the survivors who says that the terrorists “turned on all the lights and were shooting people, I’d say with a certain relish”. “I’d always argued that terrorism is altruistic, in the sense that it serves some collective goal the terrorist believes in,” Hoffman said, “but that’s now harder to maintain in the face of terrorism’s turn to ultra-violence.”

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So, do these shifts suggest that Starmer’s characterization of Axel Rudakubana was correct? Is the Southport killer a new kind of terrorist? “He may not have stated his allegiance to a terrorist group or done anything that situated his act of violence in a political context, but he was clearly animated by terrorism in the sense that he downloaded the al Qaeda manual and watched beheading videos,” Hoffman said. “This underscores the power of these organizations”, he went on, intimating at a distinction between the substance and style of atrocities. While Rudakubana may not have acted in fidelity to ISIS’s ideology, he certainly enacted the group’s ethos of sadistic and excessive violence; among the many harrowing details that surfaced after Rudakubana’s trial was the vast number of “sharp force injuries” he inflicted on the girls and how he had tried to decapitate one of them. “I’m glad to see those kids are dead, it makes me happy,” Rudakubana was heard to have said shortly after his arrest on the day of the massacre.

Hoffman acknowledged that Rudakubana’s extremist interests and extreme violence are not sufficient to make him a terrorist, but he suggested, convincingly in my view, that their toxic amalgamation foreshadows a newly emergent hinterland in which the sadistic mass killer and terrorist meet. This has been facilitated by what he called the “ubiquity” of terrorism as a mass-mediated global spectacle, subculture and aesthetics — and a seemingly limitless supply of anomic loners who develop a cathartic identification with it.

To further complicate the picture, Hoffman said that not only has it become more difficult to define terrorism, but that it has become increasingly challenging to determine what its motives are, “because they’re not as clear as they once were”. This is also emphasized in a leaked Department of Homeland Security assessment from last year. Hoffman attributes this to the proliferation of lone actor terrorism and the ideological promiscuity that post-organizational violence permits. Referring to Nicholas Cruz, who murdered 17 at a Florida high school in 2018, Hoffman asked, “Was he an incel or was he a neo-Nazi or neither?” For Hoffman, although Cruz outwardly evidenced an interest in both ideologies, it wasn’t clear that either one directly motivated his attack, although they couldn’t be discounted as an influence on him.

As our interview drew to a close, Hoffman confided that, despite studying terrorism for nearly five decades, he still wrestles with the conceptual challenges it continually throws up and that revising Inside Terrorism hasn’t exactly been plain sailing. This will be of scant comfort to the British authorities who must not only summon the clarity of thought to meet these challenges but also work out how to best contain extremist-fixated-non-extremists like Axel Rudakubana. More immediately, they will need to decide on whether Prevent, a counter-radicalization program which was originally envisaged to deal with al Qaeda and then expanded to focus on the far-Right and incels, is the best vehicle for leading this effort.

When I asked Hoffman what he thought of Prevent, to which Rudakubana had been referred three times and which has come under intense fire for failing to thwart his path to violence, he was philosophical. “I’ll be Quranic or Talmudic and say that if it prevents just one act of terrorism then it’s a useful tool and as good as saving the whole world”. But he was also starkly realistic. “We’ve over-exaggerated the power of these programs,” he said. Referring to Shamima Begum and the more than 800 British citizens who joined ISIS, he asked, “where was Prevent?” The core problem, in Hoffman’s view, is that Prevent and other similar programs are based on the assumption that there are pathways to terrorism that can be readily identified. But this is a fiction: “The most serious terrorists aren’t going to evidence the warning signs that a mental health provider, teacher or police officer might pick up on.”

The other problem for Prevent is that there is no real consensus on what these warning signs are nor, in the aftermath of Southport and other recent atrocities, is there much public confidence in Prevent’s capacity to thwart those who are determined to commit mass violence, whatever the driving motivation.

Is there a difference between the rampage violence of a sadistic mass killer and that of the lone wolf terrorist? At the extremes, there assuredly is, but there is also an expanding grey line that makes it difficult to distinguish between the two and for which the authorities and their favored experts lack even the most basic map for navigating. Whether the 4th edition of Inside Terrorism will supply one is unclear, but the next time Starmer feels inclined to make any categorical statements about terrorism he could do worse than find his way to a copy once it’s published.

I don’t know if these particular photos made their way to the internet. But I do know that there are thousands of similar images out there in the virtual world, where, like pornography, murder videos follow you everywhere. It didn’t used to be this way: in the not-too-distant past, if you wanted to see a mutilated dead body or a violent killing, you’d have to trudge off to a video store to rent out Faces of Death. Now, you just need to go on X, where, since Elon Musk took over the platform in October 2022, “death porn” is all over the timeline whether you like it or not.

Over the last year, I have come across footage on X of a brutal stabbing of a homeless man on a street, a marauding terrorist attack in a concert hall, a stabbing rampage at a shopping outlet and, on Christmas Eve, a woman being burned alive on a New York subway train. And I didn’t even go looking for it.

Axel Rudakubana, however, was looking for it. His interest in online death porn was not merely curious but resembled a fixation. Of the tens of thousands of documents that Merseyside police sifted through on his digital devices, many related to war, terrorism and genocide, and included graphic images of dead bodies, victims of torture and beheadings. He had also downloaded (at least twice since 2021) an Al-Qaeda manual which contained an entire section on how to use a knife as an offensive weapon. On the morning of the massacre, as if to ready himself for the violence he was about to unleash, he searched for a video on X showing the stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel at a church in Sydney last April.

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There is no single profile of a mass killer, beyond the fact that the vast majority are male. But there are recurring patterns. In addition to harbouring a desire to kill, most have a voracious interest in killing itself as well as in the lives and psychology of famous killers. There are several reasons for this: reading about a killer or watching CCTV footage of their atrocities holds up a mirror to their own dark desires, which I suppose makes them feel less alone in the world and less pathologically deviant. It also gives them a template for how to carry out a murder. Perhaps, too, would-be-murderers take a vicarious pleasure from watching or reading about killing, insinuating themselves in the minds and bodies of infamous death-takers.

In fact, many mass killers are highly competitive, often with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the body-counts of previous mass killers and a grudging admiration for the big-hitters. The aspiring American jihadist-now-jailbird Mohamed Alessa, for instance, was clearly envious of the mass murderer Nidal Malik Hasan, saying: “Freaking Major-Nidal-shaved-face-Palestinian-crazy guy, he’s not better than me. I’ll do twice what he did.”

Rudakubana has rather a lot in common with Jake Davison, Britain’s last infamous mass killer, who went on a shooting rampage in Plymouth in August 2021. Like Rudakubana, Davison had been diagnosed with autism, had a history of violence, had previously been referred to Prevent, and had no clear or known motive for carrying out his atrocity, much less a guiding ideology. He also shared with Rudakubana an obsession with weapons — in his case, firearms — and an empathetic interest in the minds and actions of mass killers.

It is not really surprising, however, that mass murderers are obsessed with violence. What is far more disconcerting is the idea that so many apparently ordinary people share their revolting fixations. From Plato to Burke, classical writers have long acknowledged the strange attraction of atrocious images. “Plato appears to take for granted that we have an appetite for sights of degradation and pain and mutilation,” remarked Susan Sontag, who wrote at length about the subject. “There is no spectacle we so eagerly pursue,” Burke observed in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of the Sublime and Beautiful, “as that of some uncommon and grievous calamity.” That was in 1757, well before the Netflix true crime special came into its own.

Never was this clearer than during the age of ISIS execution videos, which, though of course popular among the group’s supporters, found a devoted fandom among the self-described “death addicts” and trolls who slum it on internet shock-sites. While researching a book on the subject, I discovered that those who watch gory videos — and they’re a diverse bunch — do so for a whole range of reasons: to satisfy a morbid curiosity about death; to feel a strong emotion; to crush deep-seated fears around death and violation; to learn something about the dark corners of the world; to neutralise feelings of complacency or boredom; or to test their courage.

Others take a sadistic thrill in seeing other people suffer. No one I interviewed quite put it in that way, but one American woman in her early 20s — let’s call her Nicola (not her real name) — came close to articulating this. “I have always been interested in gore and I guess the ‘dark things’ ever since I can remember,” Nicola told me, specifying that her “favourites” were “wood chipper deaths and brutal torture”. “I don’t think I can give you a true answer as to why I enjoy it besides that I just do,” she explained, adding: “I get tingly when I see something different.”

Should atrocity videos be left to feed this desire for gore and brutality online? “Let the atrocious images haunt us,” Susan Sontag said in 2004, arguing that they perform the “vital function” of showing the evil of “what human beings are capable of doing”. Two decades later, nobody needs reminding of the presence of human evil because its extremities are now filmed and shared so widely on the internet.

Gore fans insist that this is a good thing; that atrocity videos are a form of reality news that documents crimes against humanity and can be used to bring perpetrators to justice. But even the most brazen gore fan would have to admit that watching a mass beheading is a strange way of keeping up with the news. And it’s hard to be entirely sanguine about the sheer volume of this kind of material now available online, and the ease with which so many people, including children, can access it.

Even the most trenchant free speech advocates are now expressing concern about what all of this is doing to us. Matt Walsh recently told Joe Rogan that “when I go on social media I’m constantly seeing these horrific videos of people dying… it feels like a relatively recent development”. “It’s got to mess with your mind.”

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One sure way in which it messes with your mind is by warping it, tricking you into thinking that the world is far more violent and insane than it actually is. This is compounded by the highly selective way in which people tend to watch and share atrocity material. If all you do is watch videos of the destroyed bodies of countless Palestinian children killed in Israeli airstrikes, you might risk becoming desensitised to this horror. You might also start to think that Israelis and their supporters are evil. Similarly, if all you do is watch videos of African migrants robbing or stabbing people, then you might start to think that all African migrants are criminals or potential ones. As for the gore fans I interviewed, most confessed that they had a pessimistic, if not outright cynical or “blackpilled” view of the world after years of watching atrocity videos.

So did online body-horror mess with Axel Rudakubana’s mind? The easy but unconvincing answer is that it not only messed with his mind, but that it drove him to murder. This assumption draws on a long-standing and empirically paper-thin thesis about the malignant effects of violent media that is ritually invoked whenever some troubled individual commits an act of horrifying violence that defies sense and comprehension. The chief problem with this explanation, however, is that vast numbers of people have been exposed to violent media, while only a tiny number commit acts of terrible violence.

The more likely scenario is that Rudakubana’s mind was already profoundly warped to begin with, and that it was his pre-existing moral deformation that animated his interest in mass murder. Perhaps, for a time, inhaling dark matter on the internet gave him some sort of cathartic release from wanting to act on his sadistic desires. This is a less comforting explanation as it suggests that censoring information about atrocities or banning images or videos depicting them — as the government is now calling for in the wake of Rudakubana’s conviction — would likely not have stopped Rudakubana. Thrilled by thoughts of death and omnipotence, he would probably have found other outlets to indulge his perverse impulses — until he could contain them no longer.

Neil Basu, the former head of counter-terrorism policing, was particularly critical of Farage, who he accused of giving “succor” to the far-Right, as well as “undermining the police” and “creating conspiracy theories”. Public figures such as Farage, Basu advised, should “keep their mouth shut”. This, by the way, is the same Neil Basu who earlier this month accused Elon Musk of trading in “dangerous rhetoric” about Britain’s grooming gangs; Basu clearly thinks that Musk should keep his mouth shut, too.

Well, Farage couldn’t keep his mouth shut and the more his Left-leaning critics pushed back against him and tried to turn the Southport attack into a story about the far-Right, the more he felt that a cover-up was underway. This is typical now of how Britain treats these crimes, with each political faction talking past the other, asserting a claim to victimhood.

When some three months later the Crown Prosecution Service announced two further charges against Rudakubana, including one under the terrorism act, Farage was positively vociferous. “Perhaps I was right all along,” he said in another video. On Monday, after Rudakubana pleaded guilty to all 16 charges against him and it transpired that he had been referred three times to Prevent, the UK’s counter-radicalization scheme, Farage was unequivocal: “I was right all along.” He again referred to a “cover-up” and suggested that had the authorities disclosed “the truth” at the outset the riots of last summer might not have happened. “This is two-tier policing…it is an outrage,” he added with cold indignation.

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But was he right all along? And what really is “the truth” that the authorities were withholding? On the question of whether Rudakubana was being monitored by the security services, which was Farage’s original suspicion back in July, he is categorically wrong: he wasn’t being monitored by the security services. Indeed, he wasn’t being monitored by anyone, although he became known to a range of services in 2019 as his mental health declined and he engaged in increasingly erratic and threatening behavior. This is what prompted the referrals to Prevent.

It is probably important to clarify that Prevent doesn’t collect intelligence on terrorism suspects nor monitor their activities. Instead, it’s a program intended to foster change in the mindset and behavior of those who have come to embrace an extremist ideology but not yet committed any offenses. And because the Prevent officers who dealt with the Rudakubana referrals were not convinced that he’d been radicalized into an extremist ideology, those referrals went nowhere. Had it been otherwise, and had Rudakubana exhibited support for, say, the Islamic State or some other terrorist group, he would almost certainly have been invited to attend a “Channel” program, where a mentor would have attempted to challenge his extremist convictions. Even so, it would have been well within Rudakubana’s rights to have refused any such invitation, since Prevent has no statutory powers to compel a referred person to cooperate.

But if there was a cover-up, as Farage claims, he might be disappointed. Because it isn’t the one he thinks it is: Rudakubana was not a terrorist. Which is to say that his motive in carrying out the atrocity in Southport was not political. He had no ideology, no injustices he wanted to avenge or draw to public attention, no burning cause that radicalized him and turned his mind to murder. What he had instead was a deep fascination with murder itself and the dark pornographic culture surrounding it.

Rudakubana, who was 17 at the time of the Southport attack, was first referred to Prevent in 2019 when he was 13: he had been searching for material on US school shootings at his school. A further two referrals were made in 2021, after he had sought out material on Libya and past terrorist attacks, including the 2017 London Bridge atrocity carried out by an Islamic State-inspired cell. According to official sources, this material was not terrorist propaganda, but consisted of news articles. On each occasion Prevent officers were satisfied that Rudakubana’s behavior, though concerning, did not meet the threshold for intervention by Prevent.

In a statement on Monday evening, Merseyside police described Rudakubana as “a man with [an] unhealthy obsession with extreme violence”, elaborating that “no one ideology” could be deduced from his online interests and behavior. “And that is why this was not treated as terrorism,” the statement clarified. It also made clear that the police had failed to locate a motive behind the Southport massacre.

Among the 164,394 documents that Merseyside police sifted through on the digital devices Rudakubana had access to, there was an item solemnly titled “Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants: The Al Qaeda Training Manual”. It is a crime under Section 58 of the 2000 Terrorism Act to possess such a document, since it’s deemed “likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism”. But this doesn’t necessarily demonstrate, much less prove, sympathy for jihadist ideology and the authorities clearly believe that Rudakubana’s possession of the document was a function of his acute and abiding interest in violence. Many on the Right, though, leapt on this as evidence of Islamist hatred.

The authorities, for their part, insist that there has been no cover-up and the statement by Merseyside Police directly challenges this accusation. “We have been accused of purposely withholding information, this is absolutely not the case,” it said. “From day one,” it went on, “we have constantly been in touch with the CPS who have advised us on what information could be released. We have wanted to say much more to show we were being open and transparent, but we have been advised throughout that we couldn’t do so as it would risk justice being delivered.”

It is on this last score, then, that Farage is on stronger ground, for it isn’t entirely clear why the authorities were so slow in disclosing details about who Rudakubana was and whether he was being monitored by the security services, especially given the fervent public interest in the case and the unlikelihood of this information jeopardizing the prosecution of Rudakubana. These actions only inflamed suspicions on the Right and consequent righteous anger on the Left.

Farage is also onto something when he invokes the spectre of two-tier policing, for let’s imagine, as I did when I first wrote about the Southport massacre in August, that Rudakubana was not the son of Rwandan immigrants to Britain, but a white teen who had targeted a Beyoncé-themed event where the victims were predominantly black children. Would the police have exercised the same degree of caution in releasing information about the suspect and would they have been so quick to rule out declaring the atrocity a terrorist incident? It seems unlikely, given its fierce commitment to anti-racism and its keenness to publicly demonstrate that commitment.

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Let’s also imagine that rumours were rife about the white teen and how his parents were known racists with links to a white-supremacist group. Riots ensue, with black youths at the forefront. Would Starmer and his government rush to condemn the rioters as mindless “thugs”, as they had done in the case of those who rioted after Southport — or would they instead have empathized with their “legitimate anger”, which is how Neil Basu spoke about the grievances of BLM protesters in 2020.

And let’s imagine further that the police subsequently discover a copy of Brenton Tarrant’s manifesto on the teen’s computer, a document that sounds the alarm about the ethnic replacement of white Europeans through mass immigration and calls for terrorist violence to put a stop to it. Would the authorities, in announcing the new charge, have the patience to explain that that possession of this document, though contrary to UK terrorism legislation, does not by itself indicate a commitment to far-Right ideology, as they had done when announcing the same charge against Rudakubana? This also seems unlikely, especially given the inevitable accusation of racism that would follow.

Farage is right to point out — and to keep pointing out — the double standard in operation here. But the facts of the Southport massacre are not just inconvenient for the Government, they are for all those who want to believe in a sinister cover-up over jihadist terrorism.

The bigger and more urgent question is how or whether the authorities can stop the next mass-casualty atrocity from happening. Clearly, Prevent, in its current form, is singularly ill-equipped to discharge that task, primarily because its remit is to prevent political radicalization and not manage the personal miseries of deeply disturbed people. Moreover, even if its scope were widened to include the risk of mentally unwell people who are morbidly fascinated by violence, it’s unclear how this would work in practice, what coercive powers it would be given and how it could work in an effective way.

Of all the inconvenient truths that Southport exposes, perhaps the most troubling one is our powerlessness to stop the recalcitrant few whose violence is as senseless as it is unpredictable. But it is within our power to respond to any horrors that might befall us by refusing to play politics in their aftermath.

Every multicultural society, it turns out, has the Tommy Robinsons it deserves. Which is to say that if you fetishise identity and create a hierarchy of identities, whereby some are protected and defended while others are stigmatised and attacked, you’ll end up with a less than harmonious society. It also turns out that if you reward “marginalised” non-white identities, many whites will bristle against this and start reasserting their own white identity — or search out those who will do it for them.

It is from this toxic context — the “Lebanonisation” of the UK, as Sam Bidwell strikingly describes it — that Robinson has emerged, becoming the first white “community leader” here. But unlike his counterparts in the “Muslim community”, no British politician or senior police officer would be seen dead breaking fried bread with Robinson. If Robinson has a victim-complex, it is in part because he is one and because he seems to go out of his way to be one. Indeed, it’s almost as if he enjoys being a victim and the sense of righteousness and authenticity this gives him.

Robinson’s arrest on Friday at Folkestone police station, where he was charged under the schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act for refusing to hand over the pin to his mobile phone, and his return to custody immediately after, will further solidify his victim narrative. This will surely be compounded by his appearance today and tomorrow at Woolwich crown court on separate charges relating to repeating libellous statements he made about a Syrian refugee back in 2018.

Though he wasn’t there for it, Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” rally still went ahead, with podcaster Liam Tuffs hosting in his place. I watched a livestream showing the main speakers and I sat through the whole of Robinson’s new documentary, which was shown in its 124-minute entirety. It is titled “Lawfare: Lust, Fear and Loathing — and the UK riots”, which is a bit of a mouthful, lacking the punch and clarity of, say, “The Rape of Britain”, Robinson’s 2022 documentary about Asian grooming gangs. Robinson must have intuited this, because he spends the first 15 minutes performing the yeoman’s work of explaining its subtitle. In short: lust refers to the greed of the elites and their desire for power, fear is about the elites’ capitulation to Islam, and loathing denotes their contempt for ordinary people and Britain.

The documentary begins with an encomium to Peter Lynch, who last week committed suicide in prison. Lynch, 61, was serving two years and eight months after he pleaded guilty to being part of a violent mob outside a migrant hotel in Rotherham during the peak of this summer’s anti-immigration riots; he had shouted “scum” and “child killers” at police. The judge who sentenced Lynch called him a “disgraceful example of a grandfather”, but for Robinson he is a martyr-like figure whose sacrifice exposes the cruel face of a two-tier system of criminal system in the UK.

Robinson’s main complaint is that the anti-immigration rioters were unfairly demonised as far-Right thugs animated by racism and Islamophobia. It is a powerful argument and Robinson makes a good case for it, giving a direct voice to those who were on the receiving end of the demonisation, who make it clear that they had genuine concerns about uncontrolled immigration, particularly around crime and safety. The documentary is worth watching solely for this testimony, which is given to the excellent and empathetic Sammy Woodhouse.

If you’re Keir Starmer and live a life of privilege far from a migrant hotel, it is perhaps easy to dismiss these concerns as atavistic spasms of racism, but then Starmer’s wife doesn’t live in Rotherham and hasn’t been sexually harassed and followed back home by one of those hotel occupants, as several interviewees relayed that their young daughters had been.

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Robinson also makes a compelling case that the rioters were treated with a severity that was not only disproportionate and unjust but transparently inconsistent with how the British state manages other violent protesters who march under the banner of BLM or Palestine. This theme resonates so strongly with Robinson because of his own sense of personal victimisation at the hands of the British state and media.

He is especially aggrieved by the accusation that he circulated misinformation that stoked the riots and had egged on the rioters; he points out that while it was kicking off in Southport he was kicking back on a sun lounger in Cyprus and calling for calm. This accusation, he suggests, would have more purchase if his accusers themselves didn’t trade in spreading misinformation and stirring up racial tension. It would also have more purchase, he argues, if immigrants themselves didn’t brutally rape and murder people across British towns and cities.

Where Robinson goes wrong, however, is his tendency to paint all migrants with the same toxic brush, his tendency to go off-topic (he includes a clip from Ross Kemp’s “Extreme World” in which Kemp speaks to gang members in South Africa about how rape is a hobby) and to see uncontrolled immigration as part of some conspiracy on the part of self-hating elites to destroy Western culture. No doubt the elites are full of self-hating guilty liberals, but the idea that they’re deliberately trying to orchestrate the downfall of the West credits them with an agency they might not possess.

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Robinson’s most fervent critics seem to take a special pleasure in monitoring his myriad legal entanglements and will no doubt be thrilled to see him go to prison. They are the sort of progressive activists who, while advocating for maximum penal severity when it comes to people like Robinson, would plead clemency for “minoritised” violent offenders. They are not credible and shouldn’t be listened to.

Because Robinson, whatever else he is, is credible. He also deserves a proper hearing, not because he’s a teller of unpleasant truths, although he can be, but because if we’re to live in the multicultural utopia of balkanised Britain, then the grievances he voices demand to be heard and taken seriously. Of course progressives will recoil at this, but they created the sectarian shitshow of communal sensitivities and credible messengers so they had best prick up their ears.

Robinson’s chief problem is his tendency to elide his own personal grievances with the political woes of the people he claims to speak for. The draconian severity with which the authorities put down this summer’s riots is synonymous in his mind with what he sees as his own tyrannical persecution by the British state. The political risk for Robinson, then, is that he’s so preoccupied with the latter that it engulfs the former. But if he can rein in his narcissism and temper some of his rhetoric, who knows what heights this community leader might reach. And if he is jailed this week, he will be able to bathe in the musky smell of martyrdom and hope to return from prison with even greater renown and credibility.

The last time Gondal, who was born in Paris but spent most of her life in Britain, was in the news was in October 2022, when The Sunday Times reported on her impending trial in France. But her imprisonment seems to have gone unreported both in this country and in France. I only found out about it recently after idly googling Gondal’s name — as one on occasion does in my game — and there it was in a rather dreary and matter-of-fact diary report of the Musée-mémorial du terrorisme, which was created in 2018 to honour the memory of France’s terror victims.

The report records the following. Gondal’s trial was held from 1 to 5 December 2023. The prosecution requested a sentence of 15 years’ imprisonment, highlighting Gondal’s “role as an influencer in the service of Isis”, her “apology for acts of terrorism, including those of 13 November 2015 in France, as well as the carrying and handling of weapons of war”. Gondal’s defence, led by Marie Dosé, a prominent French attorney who has represented several other female Isis returnees, argued that the prosecution lacked the evidence for its claims and insisted that Gondal, from the birth of her first child, had wanted to “escape the grip of Isis”.

On the last day of the trial, the president of the court asked if Gondal had anything to say before giving its verdict. “This trial means a lot to me. I apologise,” she responded, striking a tone of respectful humility. As the diary report concludes: “The court delivered its verdict at the end of the afternoon, 10 years’ of criminal imprisonment with a security period of two or three years, with socio-judicial monitoring and a requirement for care.”

Gondal’s imprisonment marks the end of a mad sojourn which started in January 2015. Gondal, then 21, quit her university studies at Goldsmiths, relocated to Raqqa, Syria, became a recruiter for Isis, bore two children, married and widowed three times, got grazed between the eyes by an exploding bullet, earned an exclusion order from the UK, survived Isis’s defeat at Baghuz, surrendered to the Syrian Democratic Forces, starred in a documentary about her life, and fled Kurdish-administered captivity after her detention camp was bombed by Turkey. She was eventually recaptured by Turkish forces and deported to France with her two boys in November 2019.

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There will be many for whom Gondal’s 10-year prison term will be woefully inadequate. This is because of the scope and gravity of Isis’s many crimes, including the genocide perpetrated against the Yazidis, and the role that Isis women played in those crimes. Yet Gondal’s sentence is scarcely a lenient one and exceeds the average prison sentence given to French Isis returnees, which, according to researcher Sofia Koller, is six years and eight months. It also substantially exceeds the average prison sentence for female Isis returnees in Germany, which is three years and 10 months. And it’s a considerably more punitive sentence than the one handed down to the only other British female Isis returnee who has faced justice: Tareena Shakil, who is now reportedly an aspiring fashion influencer, after being jailed for six years in February 2016.

Yet back in the UK, Gondal’s repatriation to France and imprisonment raises some uncomfortable questions. The first is reputational: it is frankly embarrassing that the UK is unable or unwilling to deal with someone like Gondal, when the evidence against her was so damning, extensive and easily retrievable. From 2014 to 2016 she would use Twitter to launch tirades against the West and to recruit young women to the Isis cause. It is of course much harder to know precisely what she did in Syria when she was offline and how high up she was in the hierarchy of foreign Isis women in Raqqa, but it surely would have been possible for the British authorities to have mounted a successful prosecution against her. However, they chose not to and instead shifted that burden onto the French. It is additionally shameful if, as the French report notes, there was a “lack of cooperation from the British justice system” in France’s efforts to convict Gondal.

The second question that Gondal’s conviction raises is educational: had she been tried in Britain, we really could have learned something valuable about her radicalisation and the broader context in which it took place. And this in turn would have cast an illuminating light on the scores of other British women and teens who followed the same path as Gondal and who may even have received help from her in navigating that path. Gondal, for her part, says that she was “manipulated” into joining Isis, which is what nearly all the captured jihadi brides say, apart from the most unrepentant ones. The line that they were deceived by the false promise of a brighter world and were unaware of the beheadings etc. is, of course, bullshit — but it would have been useful to forensically sift through the lies in the cold and purifying light of a courtroom.

More crucially, putting Gondal on the stand would have offered an excellent opportunity to probe her about the offline world she inhabited in the months and years prior to her departure to Syria. We know that social networks and familial ties play an important role in radicalisation, so how did this figure in Gondal’s biography? Did she have a radical father, uncle or aunt, say? Which mosque was she attending and who was she rolling with at Goldsmiths (she had once excitedly tweeted about the fund-raising activities of Goldsmith’s Islamic Society in November 2014)? Who (if anyone) did she know in London’s pro-Isis scene in 2014 and what were the nature of those relationships (if any such ones existed)?

Perhaps we don’t have the stomach, here in the UK, to ask such questions because we’re too afraid of the answers. So instead we idiotically blather on about the online “grooming” of jihadi brides, without any actual “groomers” ever being identified or held to account, and warn about the dangers of social media, which can somehow transport someone like Gondal to Syria, make her enter into multiple marriages with jihadi fighters and turn her into a one-woman Islamic State media outlet.

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The third question that Gondal’s case raises is S-shaped, because if Gondal can be successfully returned and punished then why not Shamima Begum? She, after all, is still stateless and stranded in Syria, after last month losing her final bid to appeal the removal of her British citizenship. But Begum isn’t going away and Gondal’s successful conviction in Paris may add additional pressure on a newly formed Labour government to reconsider the practical and ethical wisdom of indefinitely blocking her return to the UK.

Like Begum, Gondal has expressed regret for her actions and apologised to the British public. But has she really renounced Isis’s ideology and accepted her own culpability in the group’s myriad horrors? I doubt it, having watched her denials and delusions in Benedetta Argentieri’s riveting documentary about her. I’m also sceptical that prison will cause a change of heart in her. It didn’t, for example, spark a change in John Walker Lindh, who, after serving 20 years in federal prison for fighting with the Taliban, appears to have remained a devout extremist. So, too, has a Trinidadian woman who joined Isis in 2014 and is currently serving a prison sentence in Iraq; I know this because I follow her Facebook updates detailing the injustice of her imprisonment. “Such ideas do not reliably dissolve with time,” as Graeme Wood wrote about Isis’s ideology in the aftermath of the group’s territorial demise in Syria. “They sometimes become more concentrated.”

This isn’t of course an argument against locking up violent extremists, but rather a note of realism about its capacity to effect positive ideological change. Whether or not Gondal has changed or can change remains to be seen, but either way justice has assuredly been served. The only failure is that it wasn’t served here.

Yet dig a little deeper and things become a tad more nuanced. For all the caustic characterisations thrown the rioters’ way, their motives were far more complex and varied.

Thus far, police have made more than 1,000 arrests connected to the riots. More than 40 people have already been sentenced and that number is likely to rise markedly in the coming weeks. Already, however, what is striking about this group is their heterogeneity. Among the not so usual suspects: a 43-year-old woman who pushed a wheelie bin at police; a 34-year-old homeless mother-of-five who contrived to do the same, but instead ended up face-planting at the feet of her intended target; a 25-year-old homeless man; an 18-year-old with ADHD, a 15-year-old girl and a 15-year-old boy; a bingo-playing gay couple; and a 69-year-old retired welder.

The nature and seriousness of the violence of the rioters seems to vary greatly too, ranging from vandalism on cars to punching a police officer in the face. While the worst of the violence was very grave indeed — a library was torched and sacked in Liverpool, and there were attempts to set fire to hotels housing asylum seekers — some was more ridiculous than properly lethal: one teenager, aged 19, lobbed an egg at the police while chanting in support of Tommy Robinson.

Yet while there doesn’t seem to be a single profile of a rioter, three profiles have emerged — profiles that, ultimately, we need to distinguish if we’re to understand why these riots took place. Based on trial information and extensive online footage of the riots, they are: Combatants, Geezers and Scallies, and Losers.

The first group — Combatants — refers to the kind of rioter that many have in mind when invoking the image of the far-Right thug: namely, inveterate racists alongside self-proclaimed patriots motivated by fears about white replacement and hostility to the British state and police for their perceived collusion in this. Combatants are almost exclusively men who see themselves as defenders not only of English culture, but as the protectors of English women and girls — from, in their eyes, the rapacious sexual desires of non-white, and especially Muslim, immigrant men.

Despite this relatively strict categorisation, what remains unclear is how many Combatants were involved in the riots, how much of the violence they were responsible for, and whether that violence had been planned in advance. Nor do we know whether they were members or affiliates of organised far-Right groups or looser networks of ex-EDL activists and hooligans, like 28-year-old Liam Ryan who assaulted a black man during unrest in Manchester city centre and was already subject to a football banning order.

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The second group — Geezers and Scallies — refers to older and younger men respectively with criminal backgrounds whose participation in the riots was motivated not by any considered ideological grievances, but an abiding interest in manufacturing mayhem and the drama of violent contention. Historically, riots have always attracted this kind of dissolute stress-seeker, because they present ripe opportunities for a tremendous tear-up, including hand-to-hand combat with reviled authorities and the ritualised looting of goods that are later invariably discarded or destroyed.

Unlike the violence of Combatants, there is no instrumental logic to the violence of Geezers and Scallies: it is done and enjoyed for its own sake, because it’s thrilling and existentially satisfying. At the same time, this doesn’t mean that the violence is senseless; indeed, during much of the past fortnight’s disorder, it’s hard to miss the blatant defiance, spite and mockery on show towards the police. One rioter, for example, prior to having a brick thrown at his groin, danced effeminately in front of riot police, an act of mockery that was captured in camera-phone footage that swiftly went viral.

The final group — Losers — refers to that type of rioter, both male and female, whose participation in the riots was spontaneous and situational. Many of these accidental rioters were drunk when they entered the fray, either because they’re alcoholics or had been out on a bender or both; one 30-year-old rioter who hurled metal sheeting at police in Hartlepool had reportedly drank 30 cans of larger and had no memory of his involvement in the disorder. For some, it was the first time they had been in serious trouble with the police before, unlike the other two categories of rioters, many of whom have extensive rap-sheets.

It isn’t fully clear why the roughly dozen Losers sentenced so far participated in the violence, and none can coherently explain it, other than that something in the spectacle of violence beckoned them to enter it and join in the communal revelry of semi-authorised transgression. This is something most now deeply regret and not a few have sought to distance themselves from the ideological convictions of the Combatants they were rioting alongside. For example, Kieron Gatenby, whose sentence of 16 months in prison for lobbing an egg at police in Hartlepool seems especially harsh, did not harbour any racist views, according to a probation report. “He says he is disgusted at being involved with people who were chanting racist slurs,” Gatenby’s solicitor told Teesside Crown Court at his sentencing hearing. Similarly, it transpired at the hearing of Stacey Vint that her involvement in the riots in Middlesbrough was animated more by alcohol than ideology.

Of course, the overall picture may yet change. But it does seem to suggest that the narrative that the riots were wholly the handiwork of far-Right thugs is oversimplistic. Many of the rioters didn’t see themselves as part of some political resistance; they were bored and some were angry.

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The other salutary effect of looking at the profiles of the rioters is that it humanises them: in those pallid and lived-in faces in the police mugshots, we see a cross section of English working-class people from mostly northern towns. We read reports of teenage boys and girls who were involved in the disturbances and perhaps wonder about their turbulent lives and “lived experience” of white privilege. We read about someone like Stacey Vint, who is homeless because she fled an abusive relationship, and perhaps feel a stab of sympathy for her — or at least some sense of injustice that she was given such a punitive sentence (20 months in prison).

By contrast, you don’t find much humane empathy towards the rioters on social media or in the liberal press, but instead contempt and loathing. This expresses itself in different ways, one of which is a blatantly classist revulsion that sees the rioters as an odious and atavistic skidmark on multicultural society. The other is a kind of elite disdain that hides its moral revulsion under the cover of alarmist concern over the “radicalisation” of white working-class people; here, ordinary aspects of white working-class culture such as piss-taking are interpreted as signs of extremism in precisely the same way that ordinary aspects of conservative Islam were once red-flagged by Right-leaning terrorism experts like Sebastian Gorka.

None of this is to say that we should be sentimental or lenient towards the rioters. But it is imperative that we avoid painting them all with the same brush — and that means doing the more painstaking work of looking closely at their profiles and motives. Those who do otherwise — whether they are the Prime Minister, a think-tanker or a grifter angling for the Government’s attention — can call the rioters far-Right thugs or even terrorists if they like. But they shouldn’t kid themselves that they’re doing anything other than playing the grubby game of politics, much less providing any understanding of why the riots unfolded, and how they could unfold again.

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.

Then there are those who, far from being curious, want to stare into the face of a suspected perpetrator and see their worst enemy projected back at them. Since the Southport knife attack on Monday, it is this tribe that has been most vocal.

Until today, the name of the suspect behind the stabbing rampage was not released; he is 17 and the law prohibits the naming of child suspects in criminal proceedings, except in very rare circumstances. And yet, within hours of the Southport rampage, a number of accounts on X claimed to have seen his name. “He is alleged to be on MI5’s watch list, had ‘mental issues’ and was a Channel migrant,” wrote one conservative “journalist” with more than 200,000 followers. Laurence Fox, meanwhile, blamed the attack on the “national emergency” of uncontrolled immigration. In response, he croaked, “you’re about to see the roar of the British lion”. In the event, that lion turned out to be a tanked-up geezer in a tracksuit, while his roar amounted to hurling wheelie bins and bricks at police.

Within hours, it had become clear that these claims were false. According to Merseyside Police, the suspect was in fact born in Cardiff. We also know that he moved to the Southport area with his Rwandan parents when he was aged six. In other words, he was a second-generation immigrant, not an undocumented migrant who had recently arrived in an illegal boat.

But put this knowledge to one side — should the personal identity of the perpetrator of mass-casualty violence matter? From a human perspective, it shouldn’t; had the suspect of the Southport atrocity been a white teen whose parents were from Reading instead of Rwanda, the horror wouldn’t be any less horrific. Yet even so, it does matter, to the degree that it might shed a light on the motives (if any) of the perpetrator. Atheists called John Smith, for example, are unlikely to carry out acts of jihadist violence, while women don’t commit incel-inspired outrages.

And of course, in today’s atomised world, identity has never commanded such political and existential power. Had the suspect of Monday’s stabbing spree indeed been white, and targeted a Beyoncé-themed event where the victims were predominantly black children, it seems likely that many on social media would condemn Britain’s racist superstructure. Which is to say that politicising massacres isn’t just a vice of the online Right, but is fully alive among online progressives too.

Merseyside Police, for its part, has said that the motivation behind the Southport attack is “unclear”, that it is not being treated as terror-related, and that the suspect acted alone. Two possibilities follow from this. The first is that the suspect had personal reasons for launching his attack, however outrageously shallow, incomprehensible or incoherent they may seem to us. For all we know, he may have wanted Taylor Swift to notice him, much like John Hinckley Jr, who tried to assassinate President Reagan in 1981, wanted Jodie Foster to notice him. As Kat Rosenfield recently observed in a smart piece on Donald Trump’s would-be assassin, “the desperate desire to believe that life-shattering violence must have some kind of deeper meaning”, though understandable, belies the fact that a lot of violence is “not just senseless, but depthless, a lizard-brained impulse in search of an outlet”.

The second possibility is that the suspect may be mentally ill and that his illness is such that he had no clear or stable motives for doing his attack; that is, he acted not according to his free will, but in response to some imagined voice, command or imperative that he felt he had no choice but to follow. According to a recent report in The Guardian, police investigators are “increasingly focusing on the state of their suspect’s mental health or potential neurodivergence in the years before the attack”.

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For those seeking to make political hay out of the Southport massacre, this second possibility is vehemently rejected as a form of rank gaslighting designed to distract us from what they see as truth — which seems to be that the sort of people who commit monstrous atrocities against children are not from here but over there, where monstrousness is widespread. As one prolific commentator on the online Right put it: “If they come out and they say this geezer’s got mental health problems… I’m on it… We’re not in a Middle Eastern country… This is England.”

Elsewhere, another prominent poster sought to expose, in his view, the blatant double standards around the reporting of political atrocities in the UK: “If Southport killer is white = far-Right. If Southport killer isn’t white = mental illness/thoughts and prayers.” If this formulation has a familiar ring to it, it is because it is an exact inversion of a particular brand of Muslim victimology which holds that, if the perpetrator of lethal violence is Muslim, he is automatically branded as a terrorist by the media, whereas if he is white, he is portrayed as a lone wolf with mental health problems.

Others have insisted that the Southport attack, for all its unique and unspeakable horror, is part of a wider pattern of mass-casualty violence in the UK, where the perpetrators are disproportionately first or second-generation immigrants. Is it racist to point this out? It certainly can be, and much of the commentary in recent days has been infused with prejudice. But, crucially, it doesn’t have to be. For example, the claim that black or Muslim people are intrinsically violent or terror-prone is, undoubtedly, grossly racist. What isn’t racist, however, is to sensitively explore the economic, social and cultural circumstances in which individuals and groups act, and investigate how those circumstances may allow malevolent impulses to flourish.

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How might this look in practice? Most obviously, it requires us to look at the nature of an individual’s encounters with wider British society and how or whether it has failed them in some way. But it also requires us to explore the pathologies of tribal grievance and cultures of honour, shame and retribution that migrants themselves bring to their host society, and how this in turn shapes their encounters with it. We also need to probe the relationship between migrant populations and mental illness: if culturally displaced people, particularly those who have fled war zones, are more prone to mental health problems, how can we better treat them to manage their risk to others and to themselves?

These are difficult and urgent questions that neither the Right nor the Left seem willing to address; with the former seemingly content to stoke white victimology for clicks and likes, and the latter inclined to pretend that the real problem is the reaction to such violence by the far-Right. And in the middle, many are left idly wondering how such an outwardly normal and introverted kid could be suspected of doing something so unfathomably evil.

Mired in toxicity, there are surely few more depressing ways to honour the victims of Southport. There is nothing “British” about it, and nor is it “progressive”. And, almost certainly, it won’t help to prevent similar tragedies in the future.

For years now, extremism and disinformation experts have been warning about the dangers of Trump’s demagogic and deranged rhetoric, insisting that the former president has helped create “a new era of political violence” in America. Indeed, some have called Trump a “stochastic terrorist”, an obscure term that refers to indirect incitement to terrorism by public figures. “If you’re not familiar with [the] term ‘stochastic terrorism’,” David Corn wrote in Mother Jones back in May, “now is a good time to bone up, for the leading Republican candidate is a stochastic terrorist.” “Stochastic terrorism,” he explained, “is defined by conflict and law enforcement experts as the demonisation of a foe so that he, she, or they might become targets of violence.” According to Corn, “As Donald Trump has faced multiple criminal indictments, he and/or his minions have viciously assailed prosecutors, judges (and their families), and even jurors, and these expressions of vitriol place a target on the back of each of these people.” On this reading, Trump is a kind of satanic puppeteer who radicalises the hearts of damaged men and turns their minds toward murder. To channel Wittgenstein, Trump’s pen or rather his mouth is a mighty AR-15.

By contrast, the demagogic and deranged rhetoric of Trump’s political enemies on the Left – that he’s a fascist who must be stopped to save democracy — has largely escaped the notice of the experts, in large part because they themselves, as partisans of the Democratic Party, have been guilty of trading in it. Stochastic terrorism for thee but not for me.

A strange inversion occurred in the immediate aftermath of the attempted assassination of Trump: progressives stopped talking about stochastic terrorism, while the Right, who were once deeply and rightly suspicious of the concept, wholeheartedly embraced its underpinning theoretical assumptions.

Trump’s newly appointed running mate J. D. Vance, for example, sought to dispel the notion that Trump’s would-be-assassin was a deranged lone wolf who came out of nowhere. “Today is not just some isolated incident,” he wrote on X/Twitter, continuing: “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” Tulsi Gabbard similarly insisted that “the assassination attempt on President Trump is a logical consequence of repeatedly comparing him to Adolf Hitler,” reasoning that “if Trump truly was another Hitler, wouldn’t it be their moral duty to assassinate him?” Meanwhile, over in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders warned that “the hate rhetoric from many Leftish politicians and media, who label Right-wing politicians as racists and Nazis is not without consequences. They are playing with fire.”

This is quite a paradigm shift on the Right, where not so long ago the notion of stochastic terrorism and the related idea that speech could itself be a form of violence was held up to broad and intense ridicule. Consider, for example, the concerted efforts on the part of Democrats to forge a causal link between Tucker Carlson and the Buffalo massacre in May 2022, where an 18-year-old white supremacist called Payton Gendron murdered 10 African Americans in a grocery store. According to his detractors, Carlson had used his show to promote the “great replacement” theory and had thus paved the way for Gendron, who, as his 180-page manifesto makes clear, believed that terrorism against “the replacers” was a necessary defence against “white genocide”. Carlson, in response, sought to distance himself from Gendron, describing him as a “mental patient”; his manifesto, he said, was “a rambling pastiche of slogans and Internet memes” that “is not recognisably Left-wing or Right-wing”. He also rejected the implication that, as he put it, “because a mentally ill teenager murdered strangers, you cannot be allowed to express your political views out loud”. None of this was enough to placate Carlson’s detractors, who called for him to be “deplatformed”, and in very short order the new concept of stochastic terrorism had firmly memed itself into the online discourse of the liberal-Left.

Christopher Rufo has similarly faced and sought to rebut accusations of stochastic terrorism. In an op-ed for Scientific American, published in November 2022, Bryn Nelson insinuated that Rufo’s critical commentary on drag queens participating in book readings was a form of “stochastic terrorism” that works by “weaponising disgust” against sexual minorities and those who support them. Responding to this, Rufo wrote that “nothing in my reporting on Drag Queen Story Hour encourages violence”. “Under the concept of ‘stochastic terrorism’, logic, evidence, and causality are irrelevant,” he noted, concluding: “That concept is built on a lie. It deserves to be exposed and discredited.”

You don’t of course need to be a Republican to baulk at this concept; you just need to have a half-decent bullshit detector that tells you when a perfectly decent proposition — that rhetoric can justify and thereby enable a course of action — is cynically manipulated by partisans for the purposes of ritual condemnation and censorship.

The idea that Carlson or Rufo, who have never called for violence and whose politics and gilded lives are held in contempt within the nihilistic subculture of the violent far-Right, are driving and legitimising that subculture is not only ludicrous on its face. It also serves to minimise the moral agency of far-Right killers and deflect attention away from what may have actually motivated them. Gendron’s chief inspiration, for example, was not Carlson but Brenton Tarrant, another far-Right terrorist who in March 2019 murdered 51 Muslims at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

And yet in the wake of Trump’s attempted assassination, Republicans have now seemingly gone full Talia Lavin, arguing that the demonising rhetoric around Trump helped incubate and legitimise the murderous hate of his would-be-assassin. Lavin, a disgraced former New Yorker  fact-checker-turned-journalist-activist, wrote a piece for Rolling Stone on the Buffalo massacre in which she argued that its root causes were located not in the pathologies of a lone individual but in the wider political culture of mainstream Republicans. “There’s no such thing as a lone wolf,” she declared. “There are only those people who, fed a steady diet of violent propaganda and stochastic terror, take annihilatory rhetoric to its logical conclusion.”

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In expounding on this point, Lavin’s purpose wasn’t to understand the interior world of Payton Gendron and how he came to act on the ideas that inspired him, but rather to demonise Republicans by flatly asserting that Gendron was one of them and that they were responsible for his murderous actions. You will notice that the same polemical purpose animates conservatives who blame Democrats for enabling Trump’s would-be-assassin. In one particularly telling exchange  on X/Twitter, Rufo all but acknowledged this: “The people who have been pushing this must be held to account. Fired. Blackballed. Ostracised. Stripped of their titles. Pushed into bankruptcy. They should never work in this business again.” This comment was captioned above the cover of a recent edition of The New Republic, showing an image of Trump resembling Adolf Hitler, and a Washington Post article titled, “Yes, it’s okay to compare Trump to Hitler.” Responding to a comment that “There’s no indication yet of the motive of the shooter”, Rufo wrote: “It doesn’t matter. This kind of rhetoric was wrong yesterday. It’s wrong today. And it will be wrong tomorrow. It rationalises this kind of violence. It is extraordinarily irresponsible and now we can see the underlying stakes.”

But it emphatically does matter, and while Rufo is right to point out that inflamed rhetoric can rationalise violence, it isn’t yet clear, much less proven, that the inflamed rhetoric of Democrats served to rationalise the violence of Trump’s would-be-assassin, a 20-year-old from Pennsylvania called Thomas Matthew Crooks. We know how he did it, but we don’t know why he did it and without knowing what was going on inside his mind in the period leading up to his attack, it is irresponsible of Rufo to hurl around accusations that were they levelled against him, as they have been, he would regard as unfair and unwarranted.

The psychology of political violence is a complex and maddeningly opaque business. We still don’t know, for example, why Stephen Paddock carried out a mass shooting — the deadliest in US history — at Las Vegas’s Mandalay Bay in 2017, killing 60 people. “In my career of mayhem evaluation,” wrote Graeme Wood, “I have found that a manifesto, or indeed a coherent motive, is a courtesy many mass killers fail to pay.” According to a recent report in The New York Times, Crooks “does not appear to have left behind any written statement that could easily explain his motivations or provide clues to any external connections or influences”. Perhaps, like Paddock, Crooks’s motives will remain forever unknowable, although it’s still too early to tell.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the opacity that surrounds Crooks, speculation about his actions and motives is rife on social media. But if conservatives want to be taken seriously, they should resist fuelling it and they certainly shouldn’t indulge in a discourse on stochastic terrorism that they know to be unserious and that can be readily marshalled against their own side.

“There’s two Tony Soprano’s,” Tony Soprano tells his therapist, Dr Melfi, in a last-ditch attempt to woo her. “You’ve never seen the other one. That’s the one that I want to show to you.” Loury similarly raises the spectre of two conflicting selves, but unlike Soprano who wants Melfi to see his good self while minimising his bad one, Loury wants to immerse the reader in the ways of Bad Glenn. Indeed, this is a deliberate strategy on his part, designed to foster the impression that he’s a reliable narrator. “The more self-discrediting information I deploy, the more credible I will become,” he surmises, echoing George Orwell’s dictum that an “autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful”. “No sane person would invent the discrediting things I’m going to tell you about myself”, Loury writes, reasoning that having shown readers his worst they will be more inclined to believe the passages that “cast me in a more conventionally positive light”.

As an academic, economist and commentator, Loury has had a long and remarkably successful career, holding positions at elite American universities, including Brown, MIT and Harvard, joining the latter as a tenured full professor at the young age of 33. As a father, husband and friend, he has been decidedly less triumphant, and much of Late Admissions is devoted to documenting the myriad lies and betrayals he inflicted on those closest to him. Indeed, Late Admissions is so remorselessly frank and meticulous in tallying up Loury’s dreadful behaviour that the reader is apt to feel like a voyeur, engrossed and grossed out in equal measure.

Over the course of several hundred pages, we learn that Loury is an absent father to his first two children; that he abandons another child that results from an affair and refuses to pay child support to the mother of that child; that he commits further multiple acts of infidelity during his second marriage; that he becomes a crack addict; that he cruises for hookers; that he has flings with his students; that he carries on with the wife of a best friend he knew since childhood; that he continues to cheat on his second wife throughout her struggle with cancer; and that he writes a mean obituary of a conservative friend (James Q. Wilson) because he thought it would make him popular among liberals. Confessions of An Enormous Douchebag would have been a more apt subtitle for Loury’s memoir.

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Anyone who is prudish or puritanical should not read Late Admissions, for it is saturated in illicit sex. Loury recalls that his uncle Adlert had told him that the overriding goal in life, that what really mattered, was “to get as much pussy as you can”. Loury was in his teens when his uncle relayed this to him and it seems like he took it to heart. He has certainly had a lot of pussy, as Adlert would put it, and in recounting his many sexual conquests and romantic entanglements, he displays an almost adolescent pride, bordering on boastfulness. One of the funnier anecdotes he relates is how, when at a conference in Israel, he slopes off to an empty stretch of beach with his mistress, where after several minutes of “going at it” they draw the attention of two IDF soldiers. “A beautiful woman, an exotic beach on the other side of a great ocean, and me, the transcontinental jet-setter who made it all happen,” he writes. “To such lengths was I willing to go to in order to get what I wanted, and I wouldn’t be denied anything.”

Nor does or did Loury seem to have any misgivings about paying for sex, remembering “a wild few hours together” with two prostitutes in a hotel while away on business. “After they leave,” he writes, “I smile and think that I cannot wait to tell Adlert about this one.”

To say that Loury’s private dealings stood in tension with his public pronouncements and personae is rather an understatement. As he rapidly rose to prominence in his academic career, he styled himself as a black conservative intellectual who argued that racial inequality in America persisted not because of white racism (the “enemy without”), but rather because of pathologies within the black community itself (the “enemy within”). He was also a vocal critic of affirmative action, insisting that the problems of the black ghetto could be better managed through entrepreneurism rather than government handouts. The values he most admired were exemplified in the figure of his father, whom he revered and who’s approval he always sought: namely, “rigorous austerity and personal responsibility”. “If black people want to thrive,” he believed, “we can only depend on ourselves to make that happen.” Yet in his private life, Loury was the very personification of the pathologies he railed against publicly.

In other words, Loury was living a lie, all the while publicly donning what the sociologist Laud Humphreys called “the breastplate of righteousness” to conceal and compensate for his disreputable self. And yet he couldn’t renounce the lure of the double life, until it came crashing down when his 23-year-old side-woman accused him of assault (the charges were eventually dropped) and when he got busted for drugs possession not long after. This spelled the beginning of the end of his time at Harvard, which he traded for Boston University. It wasn’t that his colleagues there didn’t support him, quite the contrary. But he felt that they pitied him and his sense of pride couldn’t tolerate this.

Around this time, Loury sought solace and redemption in religion and began attending an African Methodist Episcopal church with his wife Linda. Although this filled a spiritual void, it wasn’t a lasting conversion. He also started to shapeshift into a man of the Left, recanting many of his earlier positions. This was quite a turnaround. Loury had been never less than trenchant in his belief that violent crime was a far more urgent problem for black people than police brutality, but now he backtracked, focusing his attention instead on the racialised evils of mass incarceration. While he once delighted in scandalising what he scathingly called the “Negro Cognoscenti” — middle-class posers who faked authentic blackness, unlike working-class Loury who grew up on the South Side of Chicago — he now went all in on courting them and professing his fidelity to the cause.

But just as things had soured with his conservative bedfellows, they too began to sour with his fellow progressives. While he enjoyed the adulation that came with righteous causes, he felt that it was a pose. “I was a conservative,” he writes, “and in truth I suspected that’s what I always had been.”

More recently, particularly on his weekly podcast, The Glenn Show, Loury has carved out a niche as a fierce and compelling critic of America’s “racial reckoning”, sternly rebuking the excesses of BLM and the sanctification of George Floyd and other victims of police shootings “as though they were civil rights heroes”. “It seemed to me,” he writes, “that the activists concerned with preserving black life and well-being ought to worry about what was going on within black communities at least as much as they worried about the cops.”

It isn’t clear why or how Loury went from being a conservative to a Leftist and then back again, and Late Admissions is not particularly incisive at explaining it. But it offers some interesting pointers. The one enduring continuity in Loury’s life seems to be his desire for contention. It’s as if he needed to unmake friends or manufacture grievances because whenever he achieved anything of worth or settled anywhere he would become interminably bored. He needed contention because of the excitement and sense of purpose it afforded him. “The real story,” he confides, “is that I revelled in playing the bad boy, in drawing the ire of those for whom I had contempt. I loved the fight.”

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At the same time, Loury craves the warmth of comradeship and community, because without that where is the audience for your genius and where is the love? But he also finds community and its “we” talk and its ethical obligations a suffocating imposition on his freedom to live on his own terms. This is one of the tragedies of his life and explains much of the turbulence that defines it.

Loury’s political positioning seems more dictated by his personal needs than by strictly intellectual considerations. While his current thinking is shaped by a thread of common sense and pragmatism that has been latent in Loury from the beginning, it lacks a footing in a wider perspective about how the world is and where it’s headed.

Late Admissions is less successful at capturing the weight of Loury’s intellectual achievements, especially those that relate to economic theory. That isn’t where the energy is and Loury knows this. “I’ve always cared how it went with women and that’s taken up much of my free time,” the late Martin Amis once said in an interview, elaborating: “Even powerful figures start to dismiss what they’ve done in the public sphere. It’s the personal stuff at the very end that’s important and it gives them agony and regret and remorse. It’s a man thing.” I think Loury would more or less assent to this and much of the substance of Late Admissions bears this out.

Loury’s is now 75 and nearing the end of his life. As a young man he’d always wanted to become, in his words, a “Player of his own making”, and he has achieved that and much more. He has also played and wounded a lot of people. But at no point does he excuse or minimise this, much less try to therapise it. In the closing pages of the book, Loury acknowledges that he is a fallen man and that he has an internal enemy and that it is an indelible part of him. This is to his immense credit. Like Philip Roth, Loury suggests that we can never hope to erase the “human stain” that afflicts all of humankind. The great achievement of Late Admissions is that it confronts this head on and in a startlingly honest way.

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.

As someone who researches and writes about terrorism for a living, I could say that I had a professional interest in watching this type of murder porn, but that would be only half-true; I wanted to watch. I had no good reason to, unless writing this article justifies watching a terrorist repeatedly slash a man’s throat with a knife, as was shown in a minute-and-a-half video released on Saturday by Isis’s Amaq News Agency and further amplified on X by a Right-wing British activist called Tommy Robinson. I’m not so sure about the soundness of that justification.

These videos are defiling. No one has the right to watch a video of someone getting murdered or their stricken body mutilated by a group of killers. To do so is to violate their privacy and dignity. And it’s nothing less than an abomination that someone like Cheong, who is handsomely paid via Twitter ad revenue, should receive a financial reward for circulating these videos to his nearly one million followers. Cheong later tweeted on Friday that he would not be posting any more videos or images of the Crocus City Hall attack, “as it does not serve anyone’s interest to see the lifeless, and bloody bodies of so many innocent people”. However, this thought didn’t seem to have crossed his mind a few hours earlier that very evening.

When the American journalist Daniel Pearl was beheaded on camera in 2002, the Islamist militants behind it set a grim precedent, launching an era of the terrorist snuff film that continues unabated to this day. Terrorism, as Brian Jenkins pointed out some 50 years ago, is a form of theatre, “aimed at the people watching”. But Pearl’s beheading signalled something new in the history of political violence: the use of the camera as a weapon of terror and radicalisation.

Prior to this, terrorists parasitically used the international media to disseminate the news of their atrocities, just as that media was in turn parasitic on them for news stories. But now with access to cheaper and better cameras, they could become auteurs of terror, with total creative control over their own spectacles of violence. This development reached its apogee with the rise of Isis in 2014 when, within the space of four chaotic years of expansion and contraction, the group presided over the murder of over 2,400 people on camera. Many of these murders were carefully staged, but others were recorded on GoPro cameras from the POV of the killer-assassins.

Just as Isis was about to lose its last sliver of territory in Syria in March 2019, Brenton Tarrant launched a terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51 Muslims. He had livestreamed part of the attack on Facebook. Tarrant, a far-Right terrorist, had assiduously followed the Isis playbook, using maximum savagery to generate maximum exposure. But not even Isis had livestreamed their atrocities, a further innovation that has since been copied: in May 2022, another far-Right terrorist called Payton Gendron murdered 10 African-Americans at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, broadcasting his shooting spree on Twitch, an online gaming platform.

At the same time, the victims of terrorism have become auteurs of their own terror: thanks to the ubiquity of the smartphone, we can now see terrorism from the point of view of the victims and in real time. This, too, is a new and significant development in the history of terrorist communication and, as with any new technological innovation, the ethics around watching and disseminating these videos have yet to be fully worked out.

Many of the videos of last week’s attack in Moscow were recorded by those who were on the receiving end, desperately fleeing or hiding from the gunmen. These videos are not as shocking as the footage produced by the killers, but they are nonetheless horribly visceral, taking the viewer into the foreground of the horror as it’s unfolding. Should you watch?

There are two contrasting ways of thinking about this. One is that, by recording their “lived” death or near-death experiences, the victims of terrorism want us to watch and to witness their private trauma and suffering as a form of recognising some public truth: This happened to us. The implicit assumption is that the viewer should witness both the horror of their experience and the inhumanity of those who are inflicting it on them: that we should not feel complacent or indifferent to their suffering. As Susan Sontag put it in Regarding the Pain of Others: “Let the atrocious images haunt us”; let us not shy away from “what human beings are capable of doing — may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously”.

Perhaps this is why so many of the partygoers who were attacked by Hamas at the Nova music festival in Israel on October 7 filmed it on their smartphones: they wanted to document and certify the unthinkable horror that was happening to them, just as they had filmed every other significant event in their all-too-short lives. The Israeli government, for its part, publicly released attack footage from both Hamas fighters, who filmed some of their atrocities on GoPro cameras, and terrified Israeli victims as they hid and sought refuge moments before their death. In one tweet, the Israeli government posted footage of Hamas fighters shooting a dog, explaining: “We wish we didn’t have to share these videos, but we can’t stop. We need you all to know.”

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The opposing viewpoint is that watching spectacles of terror is fraught with moral risk and should be avoided. This is for two reasons: first, watching directly colludes with the terrorists who want people to watch their acts of terror, regardless of whose perspective the horrifying footage is recorded from. Second, there is the possibility that, in repeatedly watching images of terror, we become desensitised to them, leading to passivity or even a perverse kind of voyeurism that, like pornography, creates an insatiable desire for ever more extreme content. This was Sontag’s original concern in On Photography, published in 1977, before changing her mind in Regarding the Pain of Others, which appeared in 2003. Atrocity images, she then worried, can “transfix” and “anesthetise” after repeated exposure.

Given the rise of the smartphone and a social media driven by outrage and excess, Sontag’s later position looks less and less convincing by the day. We should, of course, know about the suffering of others, but the sheer volume of haunting images that now assail us, bidden or otherwise, fundamentally changes the calculus. We have surely now gone beyond a saturation point, and although it’s hard to completely avoid gratuitous online atrocity footage, one quick and easy way of seeing markedly less of it is to unfollow or block those shameless content-curators who make a career out of exploiting our most base impulses.

Yet this is easier said than done. “There is a demand for crazy on the internet that we have to grapple with,” former President Barack Obama said in April 2002. And I am just as susceptible to that demand as everyone else hooked on social media. Perhaps this explains why I so loathe the curators of online atrocity porn: they show you disgusting things and arouse your curiosity, and then you feel no small measure of self-disgust for watching. This is, of course, less than ideal — but it’s at least better than feeling nothing at all.

If the same incident replayed today — let’s imagine that the spirit of Glenn has possessed the mind of Gareth — the purification ritual would be just as intense, but its rhetorical architecture would be different. The manager would be called out for disseminating dangerous misinformation. Anti-hate NGOs and think-tanks would conduct rapid-reaction research on how many social media accounts “liked” and shared the manager’s hateful narrative. And Marianna Spring, the BBC’s indefatigable disinformation journalist, would no doubt launch a special investigation to expose all the harm caused, especially to women and minorities with disabilities.

Misinformation, or whatever you want to call it, has always existed. The difference today, as Spring explains in her book, Among the Trolls: My Journey Through Conspiracyland, is that it’s now “turbocharged”, spreading at a rate and volume hitherto unprecedented, thanks to the internet and social media. At the same time, an entire industry of journalists, academics and experts has arisen to hunt down, track and police misinformation. In some ways, this industry is just as creepy and alarming as the conspiracy culture it gorges on, mirroring its familiar pathologies of distortion and hyperbole.

Spring’s book shines a vivid light onto the assumptions and biases of those who toil away in it. This isn’t, of course, the book’s purpose. Spring’s aim, rather, is to journey into conspiracyland and to speak to its inhabitants in order to better understand who they are and how they got there. Her intention is also to show that what goes on in conspiracyland can cause suffering far beyond it. Often, she steps into the centre of her own story, relaying all the voluminous hate that she herself has received as a result of her reporting. She even reaches out to several of her trolls to understand their motives.

Spring argues that disinformation (i.e. deliberate lying) doesn’t just cause harm to private citizens and journalists like herself, but threatens the very fabric of democracy. She cites the January 6 storming of the US Capitol as a primary example, even though democracy didn’t in fact die in darkness on that day — and the chance of Trump’s motley crew of mostly unarmed supporters seizing power was almost zero.

One side-effect of hate, Spring observes, is that it intimidates people and makes them fearful to speak out. She’s right, of course: many people, for example, are afraid to criticise or mock Islam because they’re worried that some Muslim believers might murder them for it, as happened to Theo Van Gogh in Amsterdam in 2004 and in Paris in 2015 at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, where 12 people were coldly executed by brothers Saïd Kouachi and Chérif Kouachi. Many, too, are afraid to criticise the political claims and activities of Islamists, believing — with some warrant — that to do so will incur the damaging and sometimes dangerous charge of “Islamophobia”. This point holds with even greater vehemence within the Islamic fold, where Muslims have been murdered after hateful accusations of blasphemy and apostasy have been levelled against them.

However, Spring doesn’t discuss these examples, intuiting perhaps that were she to do so it wouldn’t be good for business or her personal safety. (“How I Confronted My Jihadi Troll” isn’t happening anytime soon over at BBC Sounds.) Nor does she show any curiosity about the huge, roiling global conspiracy theory called jihadism that has directly led to the deaths of hundreds of British civilians over the last decade and a half — to say nothing of the tens of thousands of Muslims and other minorities it has killed elsewhere across the globe.

The book goes on to argue that because hate undermines free speech it should be censored and that social media companies should be more vigorously pressured by governments to eradicate hate from their platforms. This is a weak and incoherent argument: even controversial ideas, such as the view that some women make poor football pundits, deserve to be protected from censorship. Of course, there are limits to free speech and there are laws that punish speech which causes direct and serious harms, such as incitement to violence, fraud, perjury and defamation. But the kinds of limits Spring has in mind are far more expansive than this and would permit the prohibition of a vast swathe of speech that is offensive but not dangerous. At no point does she consider that prohibiting such speech would itself cause serious harm to the very democratic values she claims to uphold.

Indeed, Among the Trolls is a somewhat repetitive and predictable book written in the tone of a concerned school mistress whose reprimands are more in sorrow than in anger. The conspiracy theorists Spring meets are more banal than demonic, the tech companies she presses for comment are cold and unresponsive bureaucracies, and the ordinary normies who are harassed by conspiracy theorists are all very lovely and relatable.

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These clichés of thought are dutifully recorded in clichés of prose. Popular conspiracy theories, we’re informed seven times, “spread like wildfire”, while the people who believe in them have “fallen down the rabbit hole”. One prominent conspiracy theorist, it turns out, “seemed to have gone off the deep end”, while a long-suffering son of another “had reached his wits’ end”.

Spring seems to have fallen down a “rabbit hole” herself. Recent research by academic Sacha Altay and his colleagues shows that, contrary to Spring’s narrative, the internet is not saturated with misinformation, but with memes and entertainment; that falsehoods don’t spread faster than the truth; that people don’t believe everything they see online; that they’re more likely to be uninformed than misinformed; and that the influence of misinformation is exaggerated since it often “preaches to the choir”.

Many of the popular misconceptions identified by Altay inform the overarching narrative of Among the Trolls, and while Spring tries to be non-judgmental toward the conspiracy theorists she meets, especially the “true believers”, her approach is deterministic and a little patronising. Many, she thinks, “are misguided and misled, vulnerable to the worst liars and lies”. Indeed, Spring often suggests that were it not for some wound in their lives they would have never journeyed to conspiracyland.

What this account fails to capture is not only the agency of those in conspiracyland, but also its intrinsic appeal to those who jump towards it. Conspiracy culture, for those who are part of it, offers a profound spiritual enlargement of the world, imbuing it with hidden meanings, mysteries and secrets. Conspiracies can be engaging and fun and thrillingly transgressive. But you wouldn’t know this from reading Among the Trolls.

Anyone who touts themself as a disinformation journalist will inevitability be accused of purveying disinformation. Spring’s online critics have said the same about her, and when it transpired that she had once told a lie to advance her career — she’d made something up on her CV — many sought to make a great deal of hay out of it. There are no lies in Among the Trolls, as far as I could tell, but there are several instances when Spring trades in what she herself would call misinformation. One of these concerns the racist abuse targeted at England’s black players after the Euro 2021 final against Italy, which England lost on penalties. She writes that “a mural that honoured [Marcus] Rashford in Withington, the suburb of Manchester where he’d grown up, was defaced”, strongly implying that this was motivated by racism. It wasn’t.

But the deeper problem with Among the Trolls relates to its sins of omission. It is here that the inherent political bias of Spring’s wider enterprise reveals itself. “I’m driven by exposing disinformation, hate and polarisation that cause serious harm and often reach a significant number of people,” she writes. Yet only insofar as it has a Right-wing valence, for Spring has little interest in conspiracy theories or misinformation that lean Left. This reflects a broader selectivity bias among disinformation journalists, for whom, as the statistician and writer Nate Silver has observed, the “term ‘misinformation’ nearly always signifies conservative arguments (which may or may not be actual misinfo)”.

There isn’t much self-awareness or self-doubt in Among the Trolls. Spring notes that conspiracy theories thrive because of a distrust of mainstream media. This is surely true, but she doesn’t recognise that the kind of politicised journalism she engages in helps deepen that distrust. On a few occasions when she meets the denizens of conspiracyland, she pushes them to defend their beliefs with evidence and then gently chides them when they cannot. Yet it never seems to occur to her that she, too, has beliefs or that those beliefs, which closely adhere to the official consensus that now underpins all elite institutions, require any kind of defence. Rather, she just assumes that they are true — and that any deviation from them amounts to misinformation.

Despite the best efforts of disinformation journalists, conspiracyland is here to stay: the demand for it is just too great. People want and like conspiracies — and nobody more so than those who make a lucrative and celebrated career out of finding and exposing them.

To read the accusations levelled at Silber, you could be forgiven for thinking that he was a blood-curdling white supremacist who turned up to class in white robes and a pointed hood. His sins, however, were somewhat different: his course focused on Islamist terrorism, he had previously worked for the New York Police Department (NYPD) as Director of Intelligence Analysis (2005-2012), and he had co-authored a NYPD-sponsored report of jihadist radicalisation. “It is extremely and violently Islamophobic, racist, unconstitutional, and imperialist,” wrote the organisers, referring to the course, without bothering to substantiate how or why it was all of those things. “Hence, another key demand,” they went on, “is that Silber be fired, his course cancelled forever.”

I drag up this pitiful episode from the US-Derangement File because it sharply parallels a recent case that has been doing the rounds here in the UK: the demonisation of King’s College London (KCL) as a citadel of progressive infantilism that endangers the British security state. It all started on 9 January, when a journal that nobody had heard of (Fathom) published an article by a former civil servant that nobody had heard of (Anna Stanley). Within days of its publication, Douglas Murray (who everybody has heard of) was calling for the suspension of a senior KCL academic; and now the Security Minister Tom Tugendhat has ordered a review into “biased” civil service training.

There are differences between the two cases: most notably, the cancellation effort aimed at KCL is coming from the Right, whereas Silber’s antagonists were coming from the Left. But in their ideological zeal and hyperbole, KCL’s most vocal critics sound every bit as puritanical as the progressive types they loathe.

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In her article, Stanley recounts a three-day course she attended last year at KCL while she was working at the Foreign Office as an open-source intelligence analyst. The course, “Issues in Countering Terrorism”, was organised by the Centre for Defence Studies and was attended by around 40 civil servants from the Foreign Office, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Defence and Home Office.

It was “a deeply, existentially depressing experience”, she wrote. This was not because of the dark subject matter of the course, but rather because so much of its content was informed by “typical post-modern identity politics”. Indeed, she charged, the course was not so much an educational training programme as a form of anti-government “indoctrination” that downplayed the threat of Islamist extremism, which, she rightly pointed out, remains the most serious security threat in the UK.

According to Stanley, the course went downhill as soon as it started. It began with definitions: “What is Terrorism? Without anyone providing an opposing standpoint, we were taught the adage, ‘One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist’.” This was rank “cultural relativism”, she argued. One lecturer told the class that “labelling a group terrorist can increase the state’s power”, while another used slides that showed Left-wing inanities about how condemning terrorism is siding with the oppressor and how the real problem isn’t terrorism but state power. Yet another lecturer, Stanley alleged, smeared William Shawcross, the government’s independent Prevent reviewer, as an anti-woke zealot and spoke scathingly about Douglas Murray and podcaster Joe Rogan: they were far-Right demagogues and needed to be suppressed, the lecturer said.

It is hard to know what to make of these accusations. On the one hand, they are extremely damning, suggesting that instead of cultivating an atmosphere of open inquiry about a subject as fiercely contested as terrorism and national security, KCL was imposing a radical pedagogy fundamentally at odds with official government policy on terrorism. But on the other hand, as Stanley herself partly concedes, many of the progressive platitudes she mentions were obviously used to facilitate discussion and were not intended to express the views of the lecturers.

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If the KCL lecturers had indeed sought to impose their “post-modern identity politics” onto students then this would be an unforgivable breach of their calling as educators, and the government should never work with them again. But the problem with Stanley’s polemic is that it’s short on supplying the contextual evidence to prove this, whereas the problem for KCL is that it will need to prove otherwise if it is to keep the public’s and government’s trust. “What I want to know,” a senior KCL academic who had no part in delivering the course told me, “is were they [the course’s attendees] exposed to a range of views, or was it all completely one-sided?”

The lecturer who made the disobliging remarks about Shawcross, Murray and Rogan, and who Stanley chose not to name in her article, has since been outed by Murray as Peter Neumann, who is Professor of Security Studies at KCL and the former founding director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation. Neumann, for his part, rejects Stanley’s portrayal of the course and the academics who taught on it. He told The Times that, far from being a woke ideologue, he was in fact a “centre-right liberal and, as such, am highly critical of ‘cancel culture’, whether from the Right or Left”. However, he did acknowledge that he had “criticised the Shawcross review for prioritising the threat from jihadism at times when security agencies said that Right-wing extremism was more dangerous”. What he neglected to say is whether he’d described Murray or Rogan as Right-wing.

For what it’s worth, I think Neumann is wrong about Shawcross and the severity of the jihadist threat, but as academics we’re allowed to disagree over these sorts of things. And quite what Neumann was doing in bringing up Douglas Murray and Joe Rogan in a counter-terrorism class isn’t clear. Perhaps he was discussing the opinion, common among progressives, that they have provided rhetorical cover for dangerous far-Right extremists. But whether or not Neumann actually believes this, he is nonetheless entitled to express it in his classes. What he isn’t entitled to do is foist off his views onto his students, and Stanley supplies no evidence to show that he had tried to do so.

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Stanley is no doubt right to worry about the civil service being captured by progressive ideologues and the most damning observations in her article concern the robotic Left-wing platitudes of the participants she attended the course with. One, apparently, gave a biased talk on Prevent — accusing it of being racist — and had a brother who went to Syria to join Isis, both of which are hardly the fault of the course’s organisers. But it’s a bit of a stretch to think that KCL’s security department is a bastion of progressive radicalism or that Neumann, a centrist who himself has been subject to accusations of Islamophobia, is its dastardly avatar.

There are certainly far more deserving targets, such as the dismal apologia of a recent hire at KCL, a certain Doerthe Rosenow, who reposted an appalling tweet celebrating the October 7 attacks on the very day they took place. The tweet, posted by another academic called Kai Bosworth, showed a photo of Hamas militants breaching into Israeli territory with a bulldozer. It was captioned: “Seeing these border infrastructure come down just so fucking beautiful. this could become the dominant image of our future, if we make it so.”

Rosenow, who is a lecturer in international relations, was not on the staff delivering KCL’s counter-terrorism course, according to an anonymous source at KCL. But in her unreadable prose and radical politics — she aspires to “move understandings of (global) colonialism(s) beyond unitary and homogenous notions grounded in predominantly Anglo-American experiences” — she is indicative of a broader rot in UK academia. And had Stanley been minded to find further evidence of it she wouldn’t have needed to venture far.

She would, for instance, have found no shortage of low-hanging fruit to pulp from my own field of criminology, where abolitionist sentiment and liberal sentimentality towards terrorists, such as Usman Khan, is common and of a piece with the kind of ideological puritanism that came for Mitchell Silber in 2020. But instead she chose to identify a problem where there probably isn’t one. And unsurprisingly, it seems to have backfired, alienating potential allies while soothing sworn foes.

When I first embarked on an academic career 20 years ago, I became friends with Geras after reading his blog, which he launched in 2003. What I most admired about him was his moral clarity and unerring political judgment, as well as his congenital aversion to bullshit. If I was ever uncertain about a political issue, or couldn’t articulate why I felt the way I did about it, Norm’s blog, which he assiduously kept right up until his death from cancer, would invariably supply the answers. The world has changed dramatically since he left it, but his thinking, especially on evil and political atrocity, provides an essential guide for navigating its darker fringes.

Long before BLM and Harvard students were siding with the murderers of partygoers and children in Israel, Geras was contending with the same diseased mindset that saw the September 11 attacks and subsequent jihadi atrocities in the West as a form of retribution for the crimes of imperialism. The dean of this school of casuistry was Noam Chomsky, who is now lauded by some on the Right as a champion of free speech. He responded to 9/11 by changing the subject: he compared it to far worse atrocities that the US had committed, according to his calculus.

“Nothing,” Chomsky remarked, “can justify crimes such as those of September 11. But we can think of the United States as an ‘innocent victim’ only if we adopt the convenient path of ignoring the record of its actions and those of its allies, which are, after all, hardly a secret.” Howard Zinn similarly argued that 9/11 served as a reminder of “the resentment all over the world felt by people who have been the victims of American military action — in Vietnam, in Latin America, in Iraq”. And Tariq Ali, another prominent figure on the Left, was even more forthright: 9/11 was first and foremost an act of anti-colonial resistance. “The subjects of the Empire had struck back,” he declared.

Christopher Hitchens famously and acrimoniously broke with the Left over 9/11. But Geras remained within the fold, forensically criticising its worst excesses in the hope that he could salvage what honour it still had. He wrote scathingly of the callousness of those comrades whose grudging acknowledgment of the horror of 9/11 contrasted starkly with their extravagant efforts to “contextualise” it. “Half the world stood aghast,” he observed, “but in no time at all there was a great chorus of Left and liberal opinion… saying, ‘Yes, terrible, appalling, but…’; the ‘but’ following so close upon the ‘yes’ as to squeeze out any adequate registration of either the significance or the horror of what occurred.”

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Geras was no less scathing about the unwarranted slippage inherent in the rhetoric of the apologists. “For it was not American imperialism or the US government that they struck at,” he noted, referring to al-Qaeda. “It was a large number of (mostly) American citizens.” He continued: “It is no more a response to imperialism and its effects to massacre thousands of civilians at random, than it would be a response to bad conditions in some inner-city for a person aggrieved about them to rape the child of a wealthy family or kill a few passers-by.”

I don’t need to wonder what Geras, who identified as a “non-Jewish Jew” and had a deep concern for the future of his people, would have made of Hamas’s recent war crimes against thousands of innocents in Israel. He would have vehemently repudiated them, along with any efforts to minimise or excuse the horror that was inflicted on the victims and their families. While he opposed the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, he was categorical that nothing justified the indiscriminate murder of Israeli civilians. And he would have been outraged by Hamas’s barbarism, knowing full well of the group’s genocidal ambition to destroy Jews.

But, especially, he would have been taken aback by the ghoulish howls of support emitted by some progressives in the West. Najma Sharif, who describes herself as “a Somali-American writer based in the digital world”, tweeted: “What did y’all think decolonisation meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Losers.” Zareena Grewal, an anthropologist at Yale University, proclaimed on the same platform: “Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard.” She was criticising the idea that Israeli civilians are entitled to non-combatant immunity from murderous violence. Among this contingent, not even the most perfunctory throat-clearing was considered necessary. Indeed, to read their pronouncements, you wouldn’t have had the slightest idea that a terrible and monumental crime had been committed against innocent Israelis, because they made no reference to it.

It is an irony that many of those who gloried in Hamas’s attack on Israel see themselves as anti-racists whose goal is to create a more just and equitable world. And it is a further irony that many of them have condemned and sought to cancel their political adversaries for using speech that was somehow “violent”, even when it incontrovertibly wasn’t. Perhaps these people are unaware of this and of Hamas’s explicit and genocidal racism towards Jews, or perhaps they just don’t care. But their indifference to the systematic slaughter of innocents by Hamas suggests a grotesque devaluation of human life that borders on evil.

Geras knew all about evil and the all-too-human capacity for it. Evil, as he saw it, wasn’t some metaphysical entity that mysteriously ebbs and flows into the world, but is something that men and women do to one another. Like Dostoyevsky and Conrad, whom he had closely read, Geras was acutely alive to the darker emotional forces that animate not a few of us: resentment, greed, spite and the horrible allure of bloody vengeance and violence. It is hard to imagine how he could not have been so attuned, having spent so much of his academic career thinking and writing about the Holocaust and crimes against humanity.

Although he saw much of value in Hannah Arendt’s work on the “banality of evil”, he was aware of its explanatory limits, because it failed to capture the sheer bestiality and sadism that marked so much of the killing in the Holocaust. Arendt’s emphasis on the “social and administrative structures” that facilitated the industrial slaughter of the Jews, he wrote, “gives insufficient weight to — where it does not altogether deny — those human-natural impulses of cruelty, the actual enjoyment of the misfortunes of others, regularly unleashed when the usual restraining circumstances allow them to be”. Anyone who has followed the reporting and testimony coming out of Israel over the last few days will be hard-pressed not to use the word “evil” in trying to make sense of the horror that was inflicted there. But it’s obviously not the kind of evil that Arendt had in mind when she described Adolf Eichmann as “neither perverted nor sadistic…[but] terribly and terrifyingly normal”.

From an ethical perspective, anyone who goes door to door machine-gunning defenceless civilians, including babies, and kidnapping women and children, forgoes that descriptor. What they emphatically are not, as Arendt had described Eichmann, is “thoughtless” with an “inability to think”. On the contrary, these Hamas murderers can and did think. And they had no doubt spent a lot of time wolfishly fantasising about how they would inflict maximum degradation on Jews. And they would have been able to entertain these demonic thoughts because they were raised in a culture that is saturated in a genocidal hatred toward Jews.

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Despite this, Western liberals tend to be uncomfortable using the term evil, unless they’re applying it to the historical record and foreign policies of their own governments. Geras was a trenchant critic of that schizoid impulse — not because he thought Western societies were above criticism or had not done terrible things in the past, but because he found it dangerously reductive. Not all the ills of the world stem from the West, he argued, just as not all resistance to the West is driven by a humanistic impulse to change it for the better. Geras warned that Islamist fanatics had no such impulses and that, in an Islamist utopia, progressive liberals would be the first to be cleansed from its dominion. Unlike so many of his colleagues on the Left, he had no illusions about the purity or sanity of the underdog.

At the same time, he never lost hope in the idea of a better social order free of the familiar horrors of human history, although he was always more of a “pessimism-of-the-intellect” type himself. He worried that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians would worsen, and that, as he put it, “it may yet turn into a further great catastrophe for the Jews, one way or another”. Optimism is certainly hard to cling to these days, but in a political climate poisoned by tribal division and creeping nihilism masked as progressive activism, Geras’s voice — sane, humanistic and proportionate — is now more urgent that ever.

Journalists wrote alarmed pieces about nice boys and girls being transformed into jihadist monsters. Politicians made speeches about the “disease of Islamic extremism”. Academics constructed entire theses on the etymology and evolution of Jihad. Former Islamist radical Maajid Nawaz even seemed relevant. This all now seems a distant memory. How did this happen? Did the jihadists go away, or did we just get bored of them?

Unfortunately, the jihadists haven’t disappeared; Isis, for example, is reportedly resurgent in sub-Saharan Africa, as are its rivals, al-Qaeda. But global jihadism as a movement is in grave disarray . The Isis caliphate is gone, and doesn’t look set to return anytime soon. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Isis leader, is dead: he blew himself up in October 2019 when US Special Operations forces raided his compound in Idlib, Syria. His replacement, Abu Hussein al-Husseini al-Qurashi, is also dead, biting the Syrian dust earlier this year. But few Western journalists took much notice, and nobody was writing op-eds on a posthumous “martyrdom bump” for Isis, or how they would come back stronger after his demise.

Al-Qaeda, meanwhile, is arguably in better shape, maintaining footholds and some measure of success in ongoing conflicts in Syria, Yemen, Somalia and the Sahel. But its capacity to stage attacks against the West is greatly diminished, thanks to a sustained and successful counter-terrorism operations by the US and its allies, and a shift in the group’s strategic vision, which now prioritises local grievances over global contention. The killing of leader Ayman al-Zawahiri last year in a US drone strike has further weakened its internal solidarity and outward prestige.

According to terrorism scholar Daniel Byman, the last significant jihadist attack in the US was four years ago when a Saudi Air Force trainee working with al-Qaeda’s Yemen affiliate shot and killed three sailors at the Pensacola Naval Air Station, Florida. We have to go back even further to locate the last jihadist attack in the US that resulted in mass-casualties: that was in 2016, when Omar Mateen, inspired by Isis, went on a shooting rampage at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing 49 people.

The last deadly Isis-inspired attack in America — Florida again — was in March 2018, when a 17-year old stabbed to death a 13-year old at a sleepover. And while several individuals, including a teenager, have recently plotted in the name of Isis, none have been able to successfully convert inspiration into competent lethal violence. It certainly doesn’t compare to the 2014-2016 period, when Isis-inspired individuals were responsible for more than three-quarters of all deaths (107 in total) caused by jihadist terrorism in America since September 11, 2001.

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A similar downward trajectory can be seen in Europe, although the threat there remains far greater than in the US. According to a recent report by Scenor, there were 105 jihadi attacks in Europe between 2014 and 2022, involving 133 perpetrators and resulting in 405 deaths, far exceeding the death toll of all deadly jihadist attacks in the US since 9/11. The vast majority (90%) were carried out by so-called lone-wolves and most were Isis-related. But the tempo and lethality of attacks has changed. The deadliest (Paris, Nice, Brussels, Manchester) were carried out by Isis attackers, both directed and inspired, between 2015 and 2017, resulting in a collective death toll of 270 victims. But since losing its caliphate, Isis has neither been able to coordinate attacks in Europe nor inspire attackers there in any great number. And when those attacks do happen, they are often amateurish and of limited lethality.

As the threat of jihadist terrorism has receded in the West, so too has media interest in it. And it is hard to exaggerate what a sea-change this represents. “We are in a battle, and more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media,” Zawahiri wrote in a letter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the spiritual founder of Isis, in 2005. A decade later, the consensus was that Isis had conclusively won that war. “They’re using the internet better than we use the internet,” as Trump put it in November 2015, simplifying a widely held view that Isis propaganda was far more sophisticated and “slick” than anything the US State Department could come up with.

But the victory was jettisoned as rapidly as it was acquired. By July 2017, the Isis horror show was almost over: in that month, it lost Mosul, its de facto capital in Iraq, and three months later it was to lose Raqqa, its de facto capital in Syria. At the same time, new horror-shows were vying for our attention, much closer to the nascent obsessions that now polarise the political landscape in the West. In April 2018, Alek Minassian drove a truck into a crowd of pedestrians in Toronto, killing 10. It had all the hallmarks of an Isis attack, except that before his attack, instead of proclaiming to be a “soldier of the caliphate”, Minassian had declared the arrival of an “incel rebellion” on Facebook. All of a sudden, incels seemed to be everywhere. Then, in March 2019, just as Isis was losing its last sliver of territory in Syria, Brenton Tarrant, an Australian white supremacist, murdered 51 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

All of a sudden, white supremacists seemed to be everywhere too. And then something strange happened: journalists and extremism experts who had once made careers out of covering jihadists started to cover the far-Right in almost exactly the same way. Just as Isis had been a transnational, “networked” threat, so too were the white supremacists. And just as Isis had been radicalising children in their bedrooms over the internet, so too has the far-Right. Almost overnight, Brenton Tarrant became the new “Jihad John”, Andrew Tate became the new “charismatic” jihadist preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, and 8Chan became the new radical mosque, incubating hate and inciting violence.

The broader context for such a dramatic transposition was the culture war and its insatiable demand for new folk devils with which to wage symbolic battle. For one side in this war, a malevolent progressive ideology, promoted by Left-wing activists, is taking over cherished institutions and perilously endangering our democratic way of life. For the other, a no less toxic ideology of white male supremacy is taking over cherished institutions and perilously endangering our democratic way of life.

Correspondingly, the chief bête noire of anti-progressives are radicals who embrace gender non-conformity and who want to abolish the patriarchy, prisons and much else, while for progressives, the root of all evil lies in the figure of the toxic white male. Jihadists, however, resist assimilation into this classificatory scheme for the obvious reason that they’re Muslims and (mostly) from minority backgrounds. Indeed, in some respects they serve to threaten this scheme, because they’re both anti-LGBTQ and militantly opposed to classical liberalism.

Hence jihadist violence has become a symbolic cul-de-sac for both sides in the culture war, affording neither the opportunity to bring attention to or amplify the concerns — pre-eminently around race and gender — that so preoccupy them. This new hermeneutic regime was sharply in evidence in the lethargy which marked the response of both progressives and conservatives to the murder of the Conservative MP David Amess two years ago by a British Isis supporter. The very day after his killing, the Metropolitan Police declared it an act of terrorism with “a potential motivation linked to Islamist extremism”. But among British elites there was little appetite for exploring that link; instead they chose to focus on the proliferation of online hate speech aimed at MPs.

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Two months prior to Amess’s murder, a 22-year-old British man from Plymouth went on a shooting rampage, killing five, including his mother, before fatally shooting himself. Devon and Cornwall Police did not categorise this rampage as a terrorist incident. But that didn’t prevent many British journalists and commentators from trying to turn it into one. This was because the perpetrator, Jake Davison, supposedly had links to the incel subculture: he was a self-confessed virgin; he believed that women are biologically hardwired to select men based on appearance; he had made references to the “blackpill”; and he had ranted that “women are arrogant and entitled beyond belief”.

Within 24 hours of the attack, The Guardian had described Davison as “a hate-filled misogynist and ‘incel’”, and speculated that “Plymouth shootings may be a sign ‘incel’ culture is spreading.” A day after the murder of Amess, an editorial in The Observer sternly reprimanded anyone who was in mind to “politicise this tragedy” on the basis of “scant details”. No such reprimand was issued by that paper in the days after Davison’s killing spree, despite the considerable uncertainty surrounding his motives. They were too busy politicising it, because they could. By contrast, Ali Harbi Ali, the British-born man who murdered Amess, couldn’t be so readily marshalled for symbolic service in the culture war over race and gender.

It was proof that, in some ways, we have become jaded by jihadists, desensitised to their threat and moral squalor by over-exposure to a media discourse and entertainment industry that, for over a decade and a half, couldn’t get enough of them. If they were once exotic and possessed a certain “jihadi cool“, they now resemble some ageing crooner trading on past glories. We just know too much about them and their shabby pasts as failed rappers, drug-dealers, potheads and porn enthusiasts. Jihadi terror has transmogrified into jihadi triviality.

Yet as Emile Durkheim, the founding father of sociology, once observed, society needs its criminals. We just don’t need jihadists anymore, since new and seemingly more forbidding folk have displaced them. And they have done so not because they are objectively more threatening or murderous (they’re not), but because they reflect the shifting existential anxieties of Western elites in a moment of great and rapid change. These anxieties were once focused on the threat of Islamism to democratic norms. Now, they are entangled in fears and loathing around gender and race. And when these moral panics eventually burn out, no doubt a new breed of devils will emerge, too.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

It was early 2016, and I had gone to Trinidad to report on Trinidadian ISIS foreign fighters for The Atlantic. Between 2013 and 2016, some 240 Trinis travelled to Syria and Iraq to join the caliphate, making Trinidad one of the world’s biggest exporters, per capita, of ISIS foreign fighters. I wanted to know how a country famed for calypso, rum and carnival could incubate something so profoundly unTrinidadian.

As a former resident of the country, I’d heard a lot of things about Yasin Abu Bakr, none of which contained the word “spiritual”. He had led the Jamaat al Muslimeen (JAM), a fringe group of black Muslims, with all the tact of an inebriated pitbull — and it was clear there was a connection, albeit tangled and complex, between the JAM radicals of the Nineties and the ISIS fighters who came later.

It was here, 32 years ago this week, on 27 July 1990, outside the mosque where Fuad and I were standing, that Bakr gathered his men for a group prayer and pep-talk. They were armed to the teeth with AK47s, pump-action shotguns and rifles. According to Fuad, Bakr was seeking guidance from God, a sign that he was on the right path: “He was saying to God, ‘if I’m gonna do the wrong thing, then stop me from leaving here’.” But there was no divine obstruction, and Bakr and his men, all 114 of them, sped off into Port of Spain to overthrow the government.

When Bakr and his men left the compound at 1 Murcarapo Road, one group headed for the nation’s parliament in the Red House, and another to Trinidad’s only TV station, Trinidad and Tobago Television (TTT). Within hours of laying siege to the parliament, which was still in session, a senior JAM member had shot Prime Minister Arthur Robinson in the leg. A female clerk was killed, and Leo des Vignes, a government MP, was also shot in the leg: he died from blood loss a couple of days later. Robinson, already wounded, was made to lie on the floor with his trousers pulled down.

In the TTT building, where 27 hostages were being held, Bakr was preparing to address the nation. Like the stars of the present-day global jihad, Bakr instinctively understood the power of the media, both as a tool for attracting attention and for spreading propaganda. At just after 7pm, TTT went on air with the most dramatic newscast in its 28-year-old history: “At 6pm this afternoon, the government of Trinidad and Tobago was overthrown,” Bakr coolly told the nation. “The Prime Minister and members of the cabinet are under arrest. We are asking everybody to remain calm. The revolutionary forces are commanded to control the streets. There shall be no looting.”

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Almost immediately, looting began — but there was no uprising. The JAM leadership had made a gamble: that once they took over the parliament and TTT, a groundswell of popular support would propel them forward to a real and durable political takeover. But it didn’t happen, because while many Trinis sympathised with Bakr’s critique of political corruption and social injustice, they were appalled by his violent contempt for democracy. This included the vast majority of Trinidad’s mostly East Indian Muslim population, who were suspicious of Bakr’s group and did not take kindly to Bakr’s inflammatory suggestion, voiced to the Trinidad and Tobago Sunday Express in 1985, that they were not “really practising the true tenets of the religion”.

The coup continues to cast a dark shadow over life and politics in Trinidad. Bakr and his followers were never properly punished for their actions — they were pardoned after serving just two years in prison — and Bakr not only took perverse delight in playing up to the monstrous image that the local media had assigned to him, but remained a vexatious and controversial public figure in Trinidad right up until his death last year aged 80.

Furthermore, many Trinis believe that the spiralling levels of crime in the country since the late Nineties is a legacy of the coup: Trinidad and Tobago currently has one of the highest crime rates in the world. In Freudian terms, Bakr, the big monster, cleared a path for all the little monsters, showing them it was possible to unleash murderous havoc in Trinidad and more or less get away with it. Then in 2013, Trinis began joining ISIS; many were the sons and daughters of original JAM members.

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But how could this mainly Christian and Hindu country, with a population evenly divided between descendants of African slaves and Indian indentured labourers, fall victim to an attempted Islamist coup?

The answer doesn’t lie in ideology — although Bakr would have journalists believe that the JAM had sacrificed themselves for “the poor and oppressed”. While it’s true that Bakr’s group attracted many impoverished families, providing them with shelter, food, work and a supportive community, the coup had nothing to do with advancing the interests of Trinidad’s marginal men and women. Nor was it about some grand plan to create an Islamic State in Trinidad.

The primary cause, rather, was far more prosaic: it was to do with a convoluted land dispute between the JAM and the government over the ownership of 1 Murcarapo Road. When the JAM moved there in the late Seventies as guests of the Islamic Missionary Guild (IMG), it was mostly swampland. The IMG left, but the JAM remained: they drained the land and started building on it, putting up a mosque, a medical clinic, housing quarters and a primary school. But they did so without the approval of the local government, and on land that they had no legal right to. And so began the JAM’s conflict with the government.

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Three months before the coup attempt, the army and police entered the Murcarapo premises and set up positions. This was to prevent the JAM from continuing to build on the land. Bakr not only saw this as an intolerable challenge to his moral authority; he also came to believe that the authorities wanted to kill him and destroy his group. When asked, in 1993, by criminologist Ramesh Deosaran what “really sparked” the 1990 insurrection, Bakr said: “It was a military solution to a military problem.”

Last year, I made a 12-minute documentary: Diary of a Jihadi: The 1990 Coup in Trinidad and Tobago, supported by the Airey Neave Trust, on how the coup unfolded over the course of six days. The opening scene features the late Raoul Pantin, a prodigiously talented journalist who was working at TTT when Bakr’s men came calling and was taken hostage alongside his other male colleagues. In his personal account of the coup, Days of Wrath, he sharply conveys the sheer ridiculousness of Bakr and the strangeness of the events he unleashed. In one telling passage, he recalls that three days into the coup Bakr and his men broke into song:

There was Bakr, using the mouth of an AK47 rifle as a microphone, singing along with a popular calypso playing on the radio. It was the old legendary calypsonian, Sniper, crooning, “Trinidad is my land and to love it I’m proud and glad”… Two or three other gunmen had joined in, one of them using his rifle butt as a drum, and the other strumming an imaginary guitar on his AK47.

Just days earlier, these militants had aimed those very same weapons at the heads of the hostages in TTT, and had already put them to vigorous use. Now they resembled the kind of moronic extremists that Chris Morris would go on to satirise with such verve in Four Lions.

In an observation that cuts to the very psychological core of Bakr, Pantin speculates that it was “not wholly implausible that Bakr had staged a bloody coup merely to appear on television and harangue the nation… In his two earlier appearances on TTT that Friday night, Bakr had been the star of his own show, relishing every moment of it, switching from the angry Leader of the Revolution, to the humble Imam who was merely carrying out ‘the will of Allah’”.

Toward the end of Days of Wrath, Pantin wonders if Bakr is crazy. On the last day of the coup, after he had successfully negotiated a deal with the government and agreed to surrender, Bakr invited all the hostages at TTT to dinner at his Murcarapo compound once the coup was over. “A shuddering thought went through my mind,” Pantin wrote. “He’s insane. He’s probably been insane for years.”

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Political violence is such a horrible and serious business that there’s a strong temptation to think that violent extremists must be deeply serious people. Pantin’s book calls this into question. A good number of the JAM militants were very young, Pantin observes, and clearly didn’t know what they were doing. But did Bakr and the other senior leaders of the JAM know any better? Despite their rhetoric about martyrdom, they clearly did not want to die. Indeed, they eventually surrendered. And the idea that 114 self-styled jihadis could overthrow a democratically-elected government in a majority Christian-Hindu country was utterly insane. Pantin teaches us to prick the self-glorifying rhetoric of extremists and to recognise their fundamental lack of seriousness.

Of all of Bakr’s critics, perhaps the most trenchant were the Trini ISIS jihadists, whose parents were once part of Bakr’s orbit. In July 2016, Dabiq, ISIS’s glossy propaganda magazine, published an interview with Shane Crawford, one of the first Trinis to join ISIS. He would have been five years old in 1990: “There was a faction of Muslims in Trinidad that was known for ‘militancy’,” he told the magazine, referring to the JAM. “Its members attempted to overthrow the disbelieving government but quickly surrendered, apostatised, and participated in the religion of democracy, demonstrating that they weren’t upon the correct methodology of jihad.” This was no idle reminiscence on Crawford’s part: according to many classical interpretations of the Islamic faith, the punishment for apostasy is death. Crawford was, in effect, saying that the blood of the JAM was halal and could be shed. In February 2017, Crawford’s own blood was shed: he was severely injured in a US airstrike in Raqqa and died.

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The irony is that without Bakr and the JAM, Crawford would probably still be selling fish along the Southern Main Road in Enterprise, central Trinidad, for it was from the JAM that an ISIS-supporting faction emerged. Nazim Mohammed, who fought in the coup and is now in his late seventies, split from Bakr and set up his own radical Islamic community in the south. At least 15 members of his family left Trinidad to join ISIS in Syria and Iraq — but he denies any association with ISIS.

No one in Trinidad has yet been charged for joining or supporting ISIS, and there are reportedly around 100 Trinis in detention in camps in Syria, while Nazim Mohammed’s daughter and three granddaughters are currently locked up in an Iraqi prison. At some point, they will return.

Whether the jihadi spirit will be rekindled in Trinidad is yet to be seen. But Bakr’s coup shows just how easy it is for a small group of marginal men, radicalised by grievance and inflamed with ideological zeal, to inflict a tremendous amount chaos and suffering on a democratic society. It also serves as a salutary reminder that, while we should resist the temptations of apocalyptic alarmism, we should never take for granted the resilience of democratic institutions.

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.

“The most affecting gore thriller of all and, in a broader view, among the most effective horror films ever made… The girl watches as her unconscious boyfriend is cut into fillets by a chainsaw. As the afternoon wears into night, more of the youngsters are stalked and murdered … What is remarkable … is that its outrageous horrors seem entirely real.”

The remarkable thing about Isis execution videos, of course, is that the outrageous horrors staged in them are entirely real. You can point to the strategic logic behind the videos, if you want. You can say that they serve an instrumental purpose, that terrifying violence works, that it pushes people away, while drawing others in. But you also have to acknowledge the total insanity of the videos. They are insane. The violence is terrible, graphic, excessive and real. Despite (or because of?) this, large numbers of people have watched them. What prompted them to do so and what impact, if any, did the videos have on them?

In my efforts to find out I spent three months in 2017 closely tracking four popular internet shock-sites. During this period, I watched scores of appalling videos and read thousands of comments that forum-members had made in response to them, focusing on jihadi execution videos. I collected thousands of member-posts that spoke to or touched on the issue of motive, and I interviewed several prolific gore enthusiasts who had shared and commented on jihadi execution videos. I also interviewed the sites’ founders to ask them about the voluminous amounts of jihadi content on their sites and what they thought about this.

Gore fans are naturally defensive about their specialist interest, as well they might be. It is one thing to watch an actor scream and squirm in a scene of simulated torture, but quite another to watch a real person scream and squirm at the hands of a real torturer. We all recognise this elemental distinction, and we all recognise the line we cross when we watch real, as opposed to fictional, victimisation on camera. Gore fans live over on the other side of that line.

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For gore fans, the Holy Grail is snuff: that is, real-life murderous violence on camera, the more monstrous the better. As one war-porn obsessive explained to the journalist Olga Craig, referring to the beheading video of Kenneth Bigley: “This is no horror movie. If it is titillation I feel, then it is because this is happening to a real person. The fear is real, the brutality is real, the blood is real, it is all real.” This same gore fan confided that he had watched the Bigley execution video at least half a dozen times. “I suppose you could say it is one of my favourites,” he clarified. Whereas most people would go out of their way to avoid watching this kind of thing and would question whether they had any right to watch it were they to come across it, gore fans go out of their way to locate it at its very worst.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, the parents of Daniel Pearl, who was beheaded on camera in 2002, spoke of their anguish in knowing that the video of their son’s murder was on the internet and would likely be on there forever. “We could never, ever watch our beloved son’s murder,” Judea Pearl, the father of Daniel, said. “What sort of depraved person would want to?” This nicely distils the conventional or “normie” view, which is that only a freak, deviant, odd-ball, voyeur or pervert would want to watch a real person being butchered to death. Gore fans vigorously dispute this portrayal by insisting on the normalcy of their preoccupations and the hypocrisy of their condemners. From the perspective of gore watchers, it is perfectly comprehensible for someone to want to watch the total insanity of an Isis video.

***

“I’m pretty sure I’ve literally seen every single Isis video out there, man,” Donnie told me when I first spoke to him. I met Donnie on “Watch People Die”, the notorious forum on Reddit that was banned in March 2019 for violating the site’s rules on glorifying violence. The ban was a result of several posters uploading the video of the Christchurch massacre, where Brenton Tarrant murdered 51 Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand on 15 March, 2019; Tarrant, using a GoPro Camera, live-streamed part of his rampage on Facebook.

Donnie is a 25-year-old political science graduate from the south-east of England. He was intense, smart and swore profusely. “It’s gotten to the point where I’d go on Watch People Die and if it says Isis I’ve probably seen it already and if it’s a beheading, I’m like, it’s boring because like I’ve seen so many beheadings.” Donnie, who is a non-Muslim and has never been religious, said that he had watched so many Isis videos that “you get to the stage where you can basically start reciting a couple of their nasheeds, like ‘Salil al- Sawarim’, that’s a big one”. Donnie said that he visited Watch People Die “at least every other day”.

Donnie recalled that the first gore video he watched was the beheading of Kenneth Bigley. This, he said, “was way back, in the early war in Iraq”. (The video was released in October 2004). Donnie must have been around 13 then. He heard about it on the evening news, and then straight after started to search for it on the internet. “It was like really shit and recorded on like a wobbly camera phone, you know, it was really bad quality but I just remember it being super shocking, you know, I was literally like, ‘oh my god, like what the fuck?’”

I asked Donnie what he found appealing about Isis videos. He paused and then said:

“One, they’re really high quality, they’re high production value. If you’re watching videos like that anyway, you get used to watching shit videos on like grainy screens and everything like that. Second, they’re interesting, because this is actually happening, it’s current and, it’s kind of like a story that follows on, if that makes sense? Third, it’s a reality-check in a way, like I’m lucky enough to live in the UK and, you know, I’m a white male and stuff, I don’t have to deal with these fucking issues.”

“They’re doing it,” Donnie continued, referring to the act of killing, “in really intricate ways as well, like have you seen the cage burning video, the drowning video? I nodded. Donnie went on: “Take that video where they chain everyone up and then just slash their necks, they’re in a sort of slaughterhouse, abattoir type thing.” I told Donnie that I knew of the video, but had refused to watch it. The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood described it as “the worst thing I have ever seen”.

“Oh man,” Donnie said, “it was like one of the best fucking videos I’ve ever seen.” I asked what he meant. “I’m comparing it to other videos of that nature, but it was one of the best,” Donnie clarified. “Purely because there was a lot of content, if that makes sense? Like, for example, you get one video and they’ve beheaded a guy and you’re, like, okay that’s a beheading, whereas not only was that like really, really fucked up, it was something that I really get empathy from. Kind of like, I can really put myself into someone’s shoes.”

This response baffled me. I didn’t understand what he meant about empathy and it wasn’t clear whose shoes he was imagining himself standing in — the Isis slashers or those of their victims. I told Donnie that I wasn’t sure what he meant. “Like it feels incredibly real,” he explained. “Well, when I was younger I used to have a lot of morbid dreams of dying or bleeding out and stuff like that and it creates like an adrenal response, if that makes sense? The shock value doesn’t come from the fact that his throat’s been slit, it’s from imagining if I was there, if that was happening to me.” In Donnie’s telling, as I understood it, watching Isis gore was a way of trying to imagine his own death. Later on in our conversation, he said that one of the main reasons he watched Isis videos, and gore in general, was to do with what he called “the philosophy of death”. “That’s a huge thing,” he said. “You know, like what does it feel like to die, what does it look like to die?”

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I was curious to know what Donnie thought of Isis. He’d absorbed huge quantities of the group’s propaganda. Had that altered his view of the group, I asked him? He was emphatic: “Unless you’re a sympathiser there’s only one other view you can have of Isis, which is they’re a bunch of cunts tarnishing the name of their religion.” Yet the sheer extravagant cuntiness of Isis didn’t seem to put him off from wanting to watch the group’s atrocity propaganda. I mentioned this apparent paradox, which prompted him to reflect on why he thought it was useful to watch real online gore: “Desensitisation is power, somewhat. If anything ever happens in real life, I’m not just gonna sit there… Because I’m not shocked, I’m not frozen, I’m not fearful.” This sounded like an ex post facto rationalisation to me, although I couldn’t be sure. I followed up on Donnie’s reference to desensitisation. “I can watch a [gore] video now and not be fazed at all, or even bored,” he said.

Throughout our several interviews it became clear that watching Isis atrocity videos for Donnie was as much about prurient curiosity and thrill-seeking as empathetic transportation into the shoes of a doomed person. Donnie said that Isis videos improved markedly after the demise of Jihadi John in late 2015. (He was killed in a US drone strike on November 12, 2015.) This, he said, was when “they started getting intricate”. One mass-beheading video, which involved explosives instead of knives, struck him as being “really inventive”.

This sounded tone-deaf, if not indeed outright callous. Real individuals — with families, commitments, ambitions and whole lives ahead of them — were horribly murdered, and here Donnie is discoursing on the video’s envelope-pushing innovativeness. At one point, Donnie said, in one of his many digressions, that Isis videos were so well filmed that “it’s easy to distance yourself from it”. I wondered if the demonic creativity that Donnie refers to here served to create a yet further layer of distance for him from the human horror in the foreground of the video. Perhaps, it made it seem less real and more movie-like. Or perhaps the staged atrocity in the video was so preposterously monstrous that Donnie just couldn’t absorb it on a human level. It’s also possible that there’s just a streak of callousness in Donnie and that, like most people, he’s selective in his empathy.

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Donnie didn’t use the term “thrill-seeking”, but instead spoke of “the cringe”, which he described as a sort of somatic recoil — in Susan Sontag phrasing, “the pleasure of flinching”. “It’s your body reacting. It’s not just your brain saying, ‘oh, this is fucked up’. Your body is literally reacting to what is happening and you don’t get that in movies, you don’t get that on television… I don’t know, it’s just an adrenal response basically and it’s so fucking intense and there’s loads of things that go through your head.” I think what Donnie is sharply conveying here is what Mathias Clasen calls the “primary and irreducible appeal of horror”, which is “the pleasure of experiencing strong and rich emotions in a safe context”.

When Donnie watches gore videos, it’s the cringe — the visceral throb, jolt, shiver, the “ick” — he’s looking for. But why would he go looking for such a fundamentally aversive feeling? “Death is a morbid thing in itself and having that kind of thing in your face is like the closest you can get to experiencing that without actually dying,” Donnie explained. He returned to the Bigley video, the first filmed execution he ever saw. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days. Like, oh my god, imagine being that guy.” The cringe, it seems, was the price Donnie paid for indulging his curiosity about violent death; but it was also something he found, after a while, to be emotionally exhilarating all by itself. For Donnie, gore seemed to engage his gut as much as his mind.

Gore enthusiasts and the philosophical defenders of morbid curiosity insist that death is ultimately life-affirming, and that we can only truly appreciate our existence when we recognise its inescapable fragility and temporality. Well, watching Isis videos didn’t make me appreciate life more — it did, however, give me a sharper appreciation of how cheap and meaningless lives are to murderous zealots. Above all, it intensified my sense of how evil and shameless human beings can be. I would not classify this as trauma, in the clinical sense, but instead see it as a kind of moral unease. And there is no treatment for moral unease, because this is the stuff of life in all its richness and dark complexity.

Simon Cottee’s new book, Watching Murder: ISIS, Death Videos and Radicalization, is published by Routledge,

Last week, Breivik appeared before a parole hearing, asking to be released from prison. If you’re unfamiliar with the procedural mechanics of Norway’s criminal justice system, you might think that “Breivik” and “parole” have no business belonging to the same sentence. But in Norway offenders are legally entitled to apply for parole at the halfway point of a maximum prison term.

Breivik, who in 2016 ludicrously filed a complaint that he was being subject to degrading and inhumane treatment in prison and who has now served 10 years of his 21-year sentence, was never going to renounce the opportunity to further ridicule the largesse of his liberal jailors: when he walked in to the courtroom, ponced-up in a black slim-fit suit that was plastered all over him like cheap spray tan, he flashed a Nazi salute. He then gave an hour-long speech, in which he said: “Today, I strongly dissociate myself from violence and terror… I hereby give you my word of honour that this is behind me forever,” straining credulity not least by his invocation of the word “honour”. For some reason, the court allowed this travesty to be filmed and broadcast. It did not, however, allow the travesty of freeing him: Breivik’s parole was denied.

As a criminologist, I am not supposed to say that Breivik is a monster, much less express any vengeful emotions toward him. Rather, I am supposed to place him within a broader context and resist the seductive temptation to “Other” him.

I am supposed to say that he’s a product of society, whose homicidal actions speak to the deep alienation that some young men experience in a spiritually depleted world at the End of History. Or I am supposed to highlight how Breivik had internalised the trauma of a painful childhood — his mother tried to orphan him and his sister when he was a child — and then sought to cancel out that trauma by violently imposing it on the people who inhabited that same desolate society. I am supposed to take all the monstrousness that Breivik unleashed against his multiple victims, most of them teenagers, and causally tie it not to Breivik the person but to other sources of social dysfunction that produced him. I am supposed to say that Breivik is, to annex the title of Åsne Seierstad’s account of his massacre, One of Us.

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As a criminologist who studies terrorism, I’m all too familiar with Hannah Arendt’s thesis that while human cruelty can be monstrous, its perpetrators are often pathetic men (and sometimes women) who are neither demonic nor sadistic, but ordinary people with grubby little motives, like career advancement, pleasing superiors or not wanting to stick one’s neck out for fear of censure.

When I first read Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men, a book about how ordinary Germans, from all walks of life, willingly participated in the open-air slaughter of tens of thousands of Jewish civilians in occupied Poland between 1941 and 1942, I was impressed by its overall Arendtian argument; it seemed profound and radical. According to Browning, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 killed not because they were fanatics motivated by the ideology of murderous anti-Semitism, but because they were psychologically weak.

As Browning puts it: “To break ranks and step out, to adopt overtly nonconformist behaviour, was simply beyond most of the men. It was easier for them to shoot…” A broader argument soon materialises: that there is a line of good and evil that runs through every human being; that we are all, when the circumstances permit it, capable of terrible acts of inhumanity.

I have now come to think of this account of human evil as banal and partial. And I have come to dislike the glibness with which the account is expressed by its defenders, as though they are imparting some deep and unsettling truth about the human condition that is lost on the plebs with all their talk of evil and mythical monsters.

Well, we are not all capable of inhumanity, and while some people fearfully succumb to the weight of group dynamics and kill, others can’t wait to get started with the business of slaughter and need only the flimsiest of pretexts to enter a berserk state. And still others not only refuse to follow orders, but bravely intervene to stop their fellows from killing civilians.

The problem with the Arendtian thesis about ordinary killers, and the broader consensus that has hardened around it, is that it can’t explain ideologically fervent men who revel in the idea of murdering and humiliating scores of their perceived enemies. Men like Breivik.

Granted, Breivik was a pudgy-faced, piggy-eyed loser with blond sweaty hair — all now shaven off. As Seierstad recounts in her book, Breivik’s life was an elaborate catalogue of miserable failures. The problem was his tremendous narcissism and resentful anger, which sabotaged him at every turn.

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As a teenager, he reinvented himself as a graffiti artist called “Morg”, claiming to be the top “tagger” in Oslo. But he was shit and annoying and was soon excluded from the “tagger” community. In another reinvention, he tried his hand at selling fake university diplomas on the internet, until he nearly got caught. He then joined the anti-immigration Progress party, intent on becoming a politician. That, too, went nowhere. Women, in particular, seemed to find him radioactive: he ordered a Belarusian mail-order bride who left as swiftly as she came. He would brag to his friends that he was a brothel man; this self-righteous and disgust-prone creep was probably terrified of women.

But for all these squalid and all-too human details, Breivik was a singular individual with a troglodytic interior world that made him stand out. Around 2006, he moved back in with his mother and retreated from the world, living almost entirely in his imagination. He became obsessed with the idea that white European culture was under existential threat from marauding hordes of Muslim migrants, abetted by white cultural Marxists and multiculturalists. And he began nurturing the fantasy that he would lead a secret order of knights to stop this cultural “genocide”.

Yes, Breivik was a chump and a radical loser, but he was no ordinary killer following orders, still less some colourless bureaucrat orchestrating mass-murder from behind the scenes, as was the case with Adolf Eichmann, the apotheosis of Arendt’s banal evil. Far from being banal, Breivik’s motives were related to his sense of worthlessness and lack of virility. Only by violently crushing all those who had made him feel weak and pathetic could he restore his sense of manly “honour”. In short, Breivik was an enthusiastic killer who wanted to kill.

One of the dark ironies exhibited in Breivik’s parole hearing was his appropriation of liberal explanatory motifs to excuse his monstrous behaviour. “I was brainwashed,” Breivik told the court on the first day of the proceedings. He had been radicalised online, he elaborated, embracing the language of victimhood that he so despises in others and that so many progressives employ to rationalise or explain away the crimes of “the oppressed”.

Breivik once had a grudging admiration for al Qaeda, and the courage with which its foot-soldiers embraced death in defence of their beliefs. There was no culture of violent martyrdom among neo-Nazis, and he bitterly lamented that. Now, it seems, Breivik has taken a leaf out of the jihadi apologia playbook, claiming that he was radicalised by dangerous material on the internet. While he hasn’t gone the full Shamima Begum, who has explicitly renounced Isis and its ideology, his displacement of responsibility onto the internet closely resembles hers and many others like her.

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It is hard to know if Breivik’s claim that he was radicalised online is sincere. Given that he continues to hold firm to his to neo-Nazi beliefs, it seems doubtful. In fact, I am inclined to believe that it was some private joke aimed at other neo-Nazis to mock liberals who use the self-same explanatory trope to excuse the radicalisation of jihadists.

I also don’t blame Breivik for flagrantly ridiculing his liberal oppressors, as he sees them. In Breivik’s eyes, they are his enemies, and he is a political prisoner. Perhaps the Norwegian authorities should in turn take him seriously and recognise him as such, which would mean refusing him any public stage on which to propagandise his vile beliefs.

Even in liberal Norway tolerance should have it limits — as should the virtue that professes that even the most fanatical and dangerous of murderers should be given a chance to present a case for their release.