Presentation at a Left Renewal network webinar on confusionism.
A few months into Donald Trump’s presidency, widely considered to be the most right-wing administration the US has yet seen. And yet: Robert F Kennedy Jr, an anti-vaxxer, alternative medicine enthusiast and long-term environmental activist, scion of liberal aristocracy, is the Health Secretary. Tulsi Gabbard, who grew up on surfing and yoga, a former Sandernista (a Fellow of the Bernie Sanders Institute!), is director of national intelligence. Kash Patel, from a Gujarati immigrant background, a former guest on Aaron Mate’s “anti-imperialist” Grayzone YouTube channel, is now the head of the FBI. His director Dan Bongino was a regular guest on Infowars. JD Vance, once a recommended author in every highbrow liberal outlet in America, who compared Trump to Hitler in 2016, is the Vice President. And of course Elon Musk, a long-time Democratic Party donor, who has previously endorsed Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Andrew Yang (and his proposal for a universal basic income), and Robert F Kennedy (as well as Kanye West) for president, is… well who knows exactly what his job is.
How can we understand these new coalitions and confusing times?
The terms red-brown alliance, left-right convergence, unorthodox or countercultural fascism, the fascist creep or the big neo-Nazi crib have all been used to convey the ways in which right-wing forces have marketed themselves in alternative or left-wing spaces and won recruits there.
In France, the term confusionism is used to describe the phenomenon that leads certain groups and individuals belonging to a priori opposite spectra of the political field to ally for opportunistic reasons but also because they arrive at specific subjects to find and develop common ideological bases.
In Germany, the long-used equivalent is Querfront, “transversal front”, which has been described as
a recurrent motif in far-right thought over the past century. Craving the legitimacy that an alliance with progressive forces can provide, reactionaries seize on ostensibly shared positions, chief amongst them opposition to corrupt élites, to create the impression that progressives could benefit from making common cause with them.
More recently the term “diagonalism” has been popularised to anglophone readers by William Callison and Quinn Slobodian in a Boston Review article published in January 2021, shortly after the January 6 insurrection:
Taking a cue from one of the movements itself—Querdenken in Germany, in particular—we call the strategy behind the diverse movements “diagonal thinking” and the broader phenomenon they represent “diagonalism.” Bridging the more familiar concept Querfront and the more recent term Querdenken, the idea of “diagonalism” exceeds the German context of its coinage, where it means something like out-of-the-box thinking. Born in part from transformations in technology and communication, diagonalists tend to contest conventional monikers of left and right (while generally arcing toward far-right beliefs), to express ambivalence if not cynicism toward parliamentary politics, and to blend convictions about holism and even spirituality with a dogged discourse of individual liberties.
Naomi Klein has picked up the diagonalism concept to help explain what she calls the “conspiracy smoothie” exemplified for her by the transformation of liberal feminist Naomi Wolf into a heroine of the anti-vaccine movement and feted by the likes of Steve Bannon. As Jenny Turner summarised in the London Review of Books in 2023:
Bannon likes Wolf, Klein thinks, because [Wolf] brings in the ‘pissed-off, mostly white suburban moms… genuinely worried about the well-being of their kids and… done being dismissed and mocked as “Karens” by mean liberals’. She helps them feel okay about swerving rightwards and she chucks them loads of nonsense for them to get their teeth into. ‘Other Naomi,’ in other words, ‘is at the nexus of several forces that, while ridiculous in the extreme, are nonetheless important, since the confusion they sow and the oxygen they absorb increasingly stand in the way of pretty much anything helpful or healthful that humans might, at some point, decide to accomplish together.’
Let’s look at some key features of this phenomenon.
Conspiracism
One feature of diagonalism that Callison and Slobodian highlight is a belief that all power is conspiracy. Our world today is complex, confusing, deeply unjust and saturated with brutal and subtle forms of power, so it is unsurprising that thinking people, especially at times of flux and crisis, seek explanations, ideally simple ones, and conspiracy thinking provides these. That is, confusionism responds to a radical thirst.
Although fascism has always been empowered by paranoia and conspiracy thinking, this has intensified in the crisis of truth and trust that is a hallmark of our current moment. The crisis of truth is too complex to address here, but it clearly deepened during the COVID pandemic, when publics were gripped by fear and confusion while states and scientists struggled to assuage this. The pandemic saw the rapid multiplication and viral spread of pseudo-science and conspiracy theories, as well as rage at public health controls, and was a key moment for the massification of confusionism.
Authoritarian states, notably but not only Russia, have actively promoted the crisis of truth by memetically “flooding the zone” with contradictory and confusing snippets of truth and falsehood. As blogger Nathan Ormond puts it,
The ultimate objective was to create an information environment where truth becomes impossible to discern. In this constructed reality, even fact-checking efforts by democratic institutions become suspect – just another competing narrative, potentially orchestrated by “deep state” propagandists. Meanwhile, voices challenging established institutions position themselves as defenders of objective truth, creating a paradox where truth itself becomes a weapon of disinformation.
Many confusionists, in common with much of the far right, frame their conspiracy epistemology through the image of the “red pill”, which comes from the 1999 science fiction film, The Matrix, in which our reality is conceived as an illusion or simulacrum in which the forces of power have placed us, but whose spell can be broken by taking the red pill that reveals the hidden truth: “You take the blue pill… the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill… you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
As Rob Gallagher notes, a particularly common motif that expresses the diagonalist belief that all power is conspiracy is the image of the “Deep State”. The concept of the Deep State was first deployed in Turkey to refer to the informal covert network within the military, bureaucracy, intelligence, law enforcement apparatus and judiciary who maintained the order of the Republic outside the control of elected politicians. The term has been taken up globally – initially often on the left by Cold War critics of unaccountable covert regime change and regime preservation actions by agencies of putatively liberal democratic states, but increasingly (as Gallagher describes) by the right (not least the MAGA movement) to refer to elites rigging the political game for its own nefarious ends. Crucially, those who allege the existence of a deep state conceive it as visible to those who have seen the truth, the red pilled, but invisible to the rest of us.
As well as providing answers, however, conspiracism provides comforts and pleasures. Being part of the red pilled community is to be special. As sociologist Keir Milburn notes, referring to one major conspiracy theory network in what he calls “the cosmic Right”:
QAnon resembles a massive, alternative reality, live roleplay game in which participants must actively participate in deciphering clues. People get a thrill from doing it, and find it quite addictive. The QAnon worldview provides a sense of community and messianic agency. Stories of Satanic elites and bloodsucking reptilians help some escape from life’s mundane realities by reenchanting the world.
These pleasures need to be understood as characteristic of particular digital ecosystems. Diagonalism thrives through digital information and communication platforms based on shortform content calibrated to maximise distraction. Shortform content, in which ideas are chopped up into bite-size chunks and removed from coherent analytical frameworks, encourages syncretic and diagonal political formations. As Sarah Banet-Weiser and Jilly Boyce Kay note:
ideas are eminently recursive and (re-)circulated; they travel from one part of the Internet to another, routinely and at speed. Political concepts that are ‘formed in one part of the political spectrum are [. . .] easily picked up, adapted and recirculated’ (Finlayson, 2023). And as political ideas, concepts and practices are endlessly reflected and refracted in the digital hall of mirrors, our means for critically analyzing these dizzying formations can struggle to keep up.
As noted by Calliso and Slobidian:
the attention-absorbing power of social media platforms, and the dynamics of “incitement capitalism” have left the state’s official script ragged with perforations and made space for hostile counterpublics, agents of “disinfotainment,” social movements of rabbit holes, gig conspiracies for the gig economy.
“Brain rot” was the Oxford dictionary word of the year in 2024, defined as the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.” Confusionist conspiracy theory can be understood as a form of brain rot. It thrives on attention economy platforms because it is easy to monetise. Always feeding a thirst for more: it pushes its adherents to look for ever deeper layers of conspiracist reality hidden behind the veil of appearance – behind the Big Pharma the Rothschild Zionists, behind the Deep State a Satanic child abuse ring, behind the Jews the lizards.
This helps us understand why diagonalism, while not necessarily antisemitic, often can be. Antisemitism frequently functions as a meta-conspiracy theory, binding other incompatible conspiracy theories together into an over-arching narrative.
The doppelganger
The pull to antisemitism leads us to the next key point: diagonalism or confusionism always pulls to the right. While syncretically combining left-wing and right-wing elements, it always operates as a gateway to the right for left-leaning people, never as a gateway to the left for right-leaning people.
The fact the diagonal pipeline is always left-to-right and never in the other direction is one reason why the concept of “the horseshoe”, beloved of liberal centrists, doesn’t begin to describe it. Confusionism is not a result of similarities between left and right. Its growth is an indicator both of a thirst for explanations and solutions to injustices that historically drew people to the left and of the failure of the left to adequately provide these at scale.
Klein’s starting image for her reflections on this is Naomi Wolf as her “doppelganger”, but she uses the figure of “doubling” more generally to think about how “fascist forces make a play for the emotional needs of followers that mirrors the approach of the left”. Klein makes the point that the right soaks up energy from the left, but presents itself as something other than the right, as post-partisan, beyond left and right, and therefore actively seeks self-proclaimed left-wingers like Naomi Wolf (or, we could add, Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr in the US, or in the UK the former Leninists of Spiked) into its tent:
Despite claims of post-partisanship, it is right-wing, often far-right political parties around the world that have managed to absorb the unruly passions and energy of diagonalism… Still, it is important for these movements to present themselves (and believe themselves to be) ruptures with politics-as-usual; to claim to be something new, beyond traditional left-right poles.
That’s why having a few prominent self-identified progressives and/or liberals is so critical. Importantly, the role of these progressives is not to renounce the goals of social justice and embrace a hard-right worldview. On the contrary, they must continue to identify as proud members of the left… while claiming that it is the movements and tendencies of which they were once part that have betrayed their own ideals, leaving these uniquely courageous individuals politically homeless and in search of new alliances.
The post 9/11 world and the left’s evacuation of class politics
How can we explain why confusionism is on the rise now? Is it just to do with social media and the crisis of trust, or are there more structural reasons? There is a long history of left-right convergence and syncretic politics, but I think the current cycle of confusionism really starts with the disorientation of the left following the fall of Stalinism and especially the subsequent emergence of the post-Cold War geopolitical reconfiguration.
Klein notes that the growth of fascism is indexical of the failure of the left:
there is always this kind of dialectic between the rise of a fascist right and the failures of a center-left, a far left, a failure to make alliances but also this opening up of vacuums. Politics hates a vacuum. Somebody is going to fill it. If there are powerful emotions out there that are being unaddressed, if you’re a smart strategist, you will study your opponents and you will speak to those feelings even if you don’t actually have serious policy responses to them.
She identifies September 2001 as a crucial moment in which the left allowed one major vacuum to open, after a period in the 1990s when the left had been focused on global capitalism:
I think post-9/11, post-invasion of Iraq, increasingly the left became simply anti-war. And I was part of that left, too… But there’s a way in which [in that moment] structural analysis…dropped off the agenda.
In other words, the failure of structural analysis, of class analysis and anti-capitalism, opens up a vacuum, especially in an age when we lurch from one financial crisis to another, which a populist right can fill.
In the 1990s, popular movements around the world against capitalist forms of globalisation focused attention on analysing and resisting changing forms of capitalism, despite the disorientation caused by the collapse of state “socialism” (and in fact were able to recover traditions of Marxism long eclipsed by Stalinism). In the 2000s, however, after the rupture of 9/11, the centrality of the war on terror shifted attention away from material forces and class struggle and towards a moral critique of the US state and its allies. (Indeed, Klein played a role in this: her 2007 book Shock Doctrine offered an idealist explanation for capitalist globalisation that highlighted the agency of a nefarious deep state elite, instead of a materialist explanation that would highlight the balance of class forces.)
In a long essay 2023 in In These Times, Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet note that the 9/11 was not the first time clusters of leftists moved rapidly rightwards, identifying the collapse of the 1960s hippy new left when figures such as David Horowitz and Eldridge Cleaver shifted rapidly from countercultural leftists to hard right ideologues. They describe such moments as moments of flux, but we can be more specific and see them as moments when oppositional cycles of struggle go into defeat. Similar dynamics unfolded as the 1917 revolutionary wave receded and syndicalists and socialists became fascists.
Rabbit holes and pipelines
For Joyce and Sharlet, flux moments see the opening of “portals” that transport leftists to the far right. They speak about “rabbit holes”: the topics that generate heated engagement and draw left-minded people towards conspiracy theories and right-wing politics. The term “pipeline” is often used too, for instance.
The image of the rabbit hole or the pipeline works well for two reasons. Like the concept of “diagonalism” or “tendril theory“, it captures the sense in which politics is not a neat linear left-right spectrum, but that fascism pulls people towards it from various places.
The image also works well because it captures the way that diagonalism works as a process. Many analysts have looked at how internet culture generates dynamics that move people politically deeper into the hole or further along the pipe, as they stop trusting their previous sources of information, “do their own research” and find increasingly radical ideas confirmed by new information sources.
An inventory of pipelines
There are a large number of diagonalist pipelines, but it’s worth itemising some of the most important.
The pipeline (or perhaps network of pipelines) which Callison and Slobodian focus on is Covid conspiracism and alternative health, the “crunchy to far right” pipeline that many commentators belatedly noticed since 2022 (although it has a far longer history).
Mike Small has analysed how this plays out in the UK, focusing on the conspiracy theorists of the British right-wing TV network GBNews, many of whom come from a New Age background.
These new forms of populism have taken all of the counter-culture of the 1960s 70s and 80s and moulded it into some new form, a grotesque caricature of anti-establishment, denuded of any political analysis, and leaning heavily into critiques of state power and media power with no conception of capital. This is a Hippy Grotesque, Dead Heads in a post-truth fever-dream.
The term “conspirituality“, the fusion of conspiracy theories with new spiritual movements, also captures this.
Joyce and Sharlet identify some of the other rabbit holes leftists are diving down now.
There’s the rabbit hole of a Manichaean anti-imperialism, in which the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and the twisting logic by which some come to believe first in Vladimir Putin and then in the self-declared “illiberal democracy” of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.
This is the anti-imperialism of idiots, which “states themselves at the centre of political analysis. Solidarity is therefore extended to states (seen as the main actor in a struggle for liberation) rather than oppressed or underprivileged groups in any given society, no matter that state’s tyranny.” Starting from an attack on the “main enemy”, the US and its allies, it ends up supporting fascist states that claim to act in the name of resistance.
Next, Joyce and Sharlet continue:
There’s the gender confusion of “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” who begin with a defense of women’s-only spaces and then fall, like J.K. Rowling, into alliances with the Christian Right.
In the UK in particular, a large part of the “gender critical” scene has openly embraced far right actors such as Tommy Robinson, although a small current of “left-wing gender critical” activists have tried to fight back against this. While right-wing anti-trans activists and gender critical feminists have opposite motivations, the former use the feminist credibility and intellectual tools offered by the latter to legitimate their positions and – as Sarah Lamble notes, also to deflect and defuse the strategies the left has traditionally used against the far right.
Finally, there is the anti-identitarian or anti-woke pipeline. Class reductionists proclaim that “identity politics” undermines the primacy of class, while other post-leftists claim to be defending the universalist values of the liberal Enlightenment and classical left against cultural relativism and identity talk.
Often, as Noah Berlatsky (author of the “tendril theory”) notes, this is often underpinned by the fetishisation of a completely mythical “white working class”. He names a range of commentators who
are obsessed with the white working class as a special location of power, strength, and virtue. The racist, nationalist image of an iconically white American volk is by its very nature fascist. But it also fascinates (mostly white) politicians and pundits of almost every ideological stripe.
The apparently unique moral excellence of this mythical white working class has been the focus of many political currents who identify as “post-left” or “post-liberal”, including the websites Spiked, UnHerd and Compact, as well as podcasts such as Red Scare, but left-wing media such as Jacobin and Novara dip into this language too. Spiked is an interesting example here, because it was originally a Marxist party – except back then it was not too keen on the white working class, seeing students and Third World guerillas as more exciting revolutionary subjects, but it has rediscovered the language of class now it can use it to legitimise right-wing politics. In this brand of confusionism, class analysis has been replaced by class reductionism, or class reductionism as an alibi for right-wing politics.
It is important to note that most often these rabbit holes open on to each other.
One example we could point to is the US “anti-imperialist” YouTube channel The Grayzone, which regularly hosts right-wing pro-Trump commentators (such as Kash Patel, or the racist former military strategist Douglas MacGregor) and whose own hosts are regularly invited on to Tucker Carlson’s shows to criticise liberals. Max Blumenthal, editor of The Grayzone, has championed anti-vaccination, anti-lockdown and anti-trans causes alongside a focus on the Middle East.
Another example are the groups mixing fascist and Stalinist activists in support of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Eddie Dempsey, the recently elected general secretary of one of Britain’s most militant trade unions, the RMT, exemplifies this: he has travelled to eastern Ukraine to meet far right warlords, has physically ejected Syrian activists from meetings promoting Assad, and accused left-wing pro-EU activists of being motivated by Soros funding.
In the UK, the Workers Party of Great Britain, led by former Labour politician George Galloway (and briefly holding a UK parliamentary seat in 2024) has targeted anti-immigration and anti-trans literature at white working class voters while appealing for Muslim votes with an anti-Zionist message.
Radicalisation and camp thinking
One of the key dynamics that can drive some people deeper into rabbit holes or further along pipelines is feeling ex-communicated from a previous political home because of a dissident view, getting angry at being treated like a traitor, and finding new allies and friends who seem to have your back as you get more entrenched in a new space. JK Rowling and the scene she is part of is a good example of this: cancelled on the left for relatively mild criticisms of prevailing ideas about gender, they found new and increasingly extreme friends who encouraged them towards increasingly radical bigoted positions.
Turner, Small, and Joyce and Sharlet all mention the website UnHerd as an example of rabbit hole widening, which started with a centrist questioning of “woke” orthodoxies but has moved into COVID denialism and far right themes. The platform was founded in 2017 by the hedge fund manager Paul Marshall (also later co-owner of GB News and the Spectator), who was formerly a small-l liberal and big-L Liberal Democrat. Marshall is the father of Winston Marshall, once the banjoist of the bland folk-rock act Mumford and Sons and also a small-l liberal before becoming increasingly far right since 2021. Father and son seem to have radicalised each other, each encouraging the other into more and more reactionary ideas. But Winston has also spoken of his cancellation after congratulating Andy Ngo, an online personality who poses as a journalist and specialises in doxxing anti-fascists. This is from is a sympathetic interview in the Telegraph:
Over the next three months [Marshall] mulled, eventually deciding that it hadn’t been a blind spot to praise Ngo. That indeed the point wasn’t about Ngo at all, but about the fact that a matter of truth was at stake. By sticking by his apology and remaining in the band, he realised he would be “spreading the lie, that what I actually thought was that violent extremism was good… When I published my apology I was open to being wrong, but the more I researched, the more I felt compelled that I wasn’t wrong, and all the things that were said about the author I think are lies. They were said about me, and I thought, well this is f—— b—-. Then Ngo was attacked and my conscience blew up… Some people who I thought were very close were not and some people who were not really turned up. My friends, I know who they are [now].” [emphasis added]
Here we can see a crisis in trust in previous information sources, leading to “doing your own research” with increasingly extremist sources, being cancelled in a space that previously provided belonging, and new friends turning up to shore up new ideas and create a new space of belonging.
One problem with the image of the pipeline, however, is that it can reinforce common sense ideas of radicalisation that see people as basically dupes, echoing older, discredited “hypodermic” or “transmission belt” models of media influence. In particular, social media itself – or the omnipotent, little understood “algorithm” – is seen as radicalising in its very nature. This idea is strengthened by the notion of “virality”, that social media space and algorithmic processes somehow naturally make ideas contagious. What this misses, as social media scholars such as Alan Finlayson and Kevin Munger have argued, is that digital reactionary politics doesn’t emerge naturally and passively through the algorithm but is actively produced and consumed according to actual supply and actual demand.
The supply of confusionism: Ideological entrepreneurs
In terms of supply, the role of Andy Ngo in Winston Marshall’s radicalisaion is worth dwelling on. Ngo is an example of what Alan Finlayson and Rob Topinka have theorised as “ideological entrepreneurs“. Because confusionism is brain rot, easy to monetise, it attracts entrepreneurs who use it for attention (for clout) and to generate income.
For example, Callison and Slobodian identify three ideal types in the German diagonalism scene. The Movement Hustler is the most public face, exemplified in Germany by Michael Ballweg. He stands for the influencers and entrepreneurs, often active in the tech sector, that use platform economies and monetised social media opportunities to make a living from the gullible but not impoverished enthusiasts of the movement. This is sometimes called the “podcast-industrial complex”, the grifter economy. The Left-to-Right Ideologue is their second ideal type, embodied in Germany by Ken Jebsen, an antiwar activist and public radio host turned antisemitic pseudo-intellectual, selling contrarian dystopian rants to lumpen-intellectual bedroom audiences, who “coalesce around an everything opposition, a Great Refusal to the conspiracy of power.” As with Naomi Woolf or Spiked, an edgy identity as a former radical bestows authority and glamour in the crowded marketplace. Lastly, there’s the Far-Right Esoteric Entrepreneur comes next, represented in Germany by Michael Friedrich Vogt, former academic turned Nazi-curious occultist “freethinker” – who also makes a healthy living from monetising his opinions.
Seeing these influencers as entrepreneurs rather than as traditional movement leaders draws attention to the economics of confusionism. Callison and Slobodian suggest we “may see diagonalists launch another round of what sociologist Paolo Gerbaudo has called the ‘start-up parties‘—modeled on tech companies”. Galloway’s Workers Party would be one example.
A final dimension of the economics of the supply of confusionism before moving on to the demand side, that is important to note a topic too vast to address here: that many of these ideological entrepreneurs and their start-up businesses have had major start-up investment from authoritarian states, in particular Russia, but also Iran, Hungary, China and India, in pursuit of their soft power strategies.
Demand for confusionism (and how class helps explain it)
Who is buying their product? Callison and Slobodian identify diagonalism with petit bourgeois class positions, calling it a revolt of the Mittelstand—those owning and operating small- and medium-sized enterprises. They were writing in 2021, when the self-employed and small business owners were devastated by the pandemic, even as some corporate and white collar sectors flourished, and were thus right to be enraged. Culturally conservative, having a cultural affinity for residual, majority-ethnic stratas of the traditional industrial and rural working class, and with objective reasons to be resentful of the state and big corporations, these are class layers which at times of economic pressure are historically drawn towards certain forms of radical/reactionary politics. That is, they are particularly susceptible to a politics that appears to present solutions to the injustices and resentments the left also responds to, but reactionary solutions, especially if packaged as somehow beyond left and right.
Sociologically, confusionism seems particularly strong among baby boom demographics that have precarious or limited incomes (and thus reasons to be angry) but with residual wealth including property wealth or business assets – wealth that insures them against the burn-it-down consequences of radical politics and thus less risk-averse when it comes to challenging the status quo.
Squeezed by the forces of power and wealth above, and seeking simple explanations for that squeeze, such groups are also drawn to conspiracist explanations such as the Deep State or Big Pharma. We know that such class fractions are also most strongly drawn to what Chip Berlet (influenced by historian Alexander Saxton and Marxist theorist Moishe Postone) called “producerist” narratives:
Producerism begins in the US with the Jacksonians, who wove together intra-elite factionalism and lower-class Whites’ double-edged resentments. Producerism became a staple of repressive populist ideology. Producerism sought to rally the middle strata together with certain sections of the elite. Specifically, it championed the so-called producing classes (including White farmers, laborers, artisans, slaveowning planters, and “productive” capitalists) against “unproductive” bankers, speculators, and monopolists above—and people of color below. After the Jacksonian era, producerism was a central tenet of the anti-Chinese crusade in the late nineteenth century. In the 1920s industrial philosophy of Henry Ford, and Father Coughlin’s fascist doctrine in the 1930s, producerism fused with antisemitic attacks against “parasitic” Jews.
The confusionist coalition (and starting to resist it)
The alliance between platform entrepreneurs who disseminate diagonalist or confusionist ideas, drawn from elites, and the emergent mass of non-elite consumers buying in to it, speaks of the power that the producerist narrative and such conspiracy theories have to bind people across class as well as ideological lines. The strength and vividness of its narratives, in contrast to the dull narratives the left seems to serve up, combines with the sense of togetherness and friendship provided by embattled, encamped rabbit hole-dwelling communities to generate a strong sense of belonging for its adherents, despite its apparent incoherence. It is this emotional offer that makes it so dangerous, and why it is so vital that the left renews its own narratives.
Ben Gidley is an anti-fascist, blogger, and reader in sociology and psychosocial studies at Birkbeck, University of London.