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All The Kings’ Horses and All the Kings’ Men Can’t Put the US-UK ‘Special Relationship’ Together Again

It will take far more than some clever speechifying from the King to repair the deep damage the US President has done to relations with his country’s former closest ally, argues Alexandra Hall Hall

King Charles has played a blinder (or “knocked the ball out of the park” as we say here in the US) during his state visit.

The logistics proceeded without a hitch. The atmospherics were genuinely friendly. His personal gift to the President – a golden bell from a former British submarine, HMS Trump – was perfectly suited to appeal to the President’s love of shiny things and vanity. Above all, his two setpiece speeches on 28 April – one to the Joint Houses of Congress, one at the State Banquet at the White House – were absolutely pitch perfect.

His first address, to Congress, was packaged with a masterful blend of gentle humour, warm reflections on the deep ties of history, culture, shared values and sacrifice that have bound the US and the UK together and his repeated praise for the US, as a “citadel of democracy”, imbued with a “spirit of liberty.” These flattering remarks were all well received by his bipartisan audience, who collectively rose to their feet multiple times during the speech to give standing ovations – no mean achievement in America’s highly polarised political environment.

But the heart of the speech contained a series of surprisingly pointed remarks addressing the issues which currently threaten to divide the US and the UK.

Against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s frequent criticisms of NATO, the King’s strongest pitch was in defence of the alliance, arguing that the transatlantic partnership between Europe and America was more important than ever in today’s volatile world. He drew on the words of British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer to caution that “we should not disregard everything which has sustained us for the last 80 years, but build on it.” He argued that today’s challenges were “too great for any one nation to bear alone,” and said that he “prayed with all my heart that our Alliance will continue to defend our shared values, with our partners in Europe and the Commonweath, and across the world.”

In a direct rebuke of the isolationist tendencies of some in the MAGA movement, he also urged that “we ignore the clarion calls to become ever more inward-looking.”

The King additionally reminded his audience that in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, when NATO had invoked Article 5 and the UN Security Council stood united in condemnation of the terrorists, “we answered the call”, and that the UK had stood “shoulder-to-shoulder” with the US through two World Wars, the Cold War, the war in Afghanistan, and many other moments affecting shared security.

This was followed up by a direct appeal to apply the same “unyielding resolve” to support the defence of Ukraine “and her most courageous people”, in order to secure a “truly just and lasting peace” making it crystal clear where the UK stood on this conflict.

The King stressed that the joint commitments of the US and its allies to each other’s defence were at the heart of NATO, helping to keep both Europeans and Americans safe from common adversaries. He noted in particular that UK-US defence, intelligence and security ties were hardwired together through “relationships measured not in years, but decades.”

In what was a standout line for me from the speech, to rebut those who contend that the so-called UK-US special relationship is purely a sentimental one which has outlived its practical relevance, the King went out of his way to stress that the UK-US do not “embark on these remarkable endeavours together out of sentiment. We do so because they build greater shared resilience for the future.”

The King also used his speech to make the case for interfaith dialogue, referencing his own Christian faith in the process, and for living up to our “shared responsibility to protect nature.” Though he did not call anyone out by name, these remarks were clearly directed at religious extremists in the US, whose passion for their own religion increasingly manifests itself in bigotry towards other faiths, and at right-wing climate sceptics.

No Kings

However, the King’s bluntest remarks, though delivered in a subtle way, were a very clear expression of concern about the trajectory of American democracy under Trump, and will clearly have been understood as such by his audience. Noting that many of the US’s democratic traditions, including its Bill of Rights, stemmed from earlier British documents, such as the Magna Carta and the 1689 Declaration of Rights, he pointedly observed how these had been cited in many Supreme Court cases “not least as the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.” He went on to say that the spirit of liberty, and the promise of America’s founders were present in every session and every vote cast of the Congress “not by the will of one, but by the deliberation of many.”

This was about as black and white as it can get – a deliberate reminder to Congress that America’s system is based on checks and balances, and that it has a duty to ensure that American government does not become beholden to the whims of one person.

Though his speech was ostensibly well received by everyone present, his words will have been discomfiting for many on the Republican side, who have so cravenly abdicated their Congressional duty to hold the Executive branch to account.

The King’s second speech, at the State Dinner, was probably therefore carefully crafted to assuage any bruised feelings. This time, the speech was much more personal, directly addressed towards President Trump and the First Lady, and focussed on less contentious themes. There was a very heartfelt expression of sympathy and support for the President, his wife, and all those present at the recent White House Correspondent’s dinner where an assailant tried to attack the guests. There were references to President Trump’s own familial connections to the UK, and his golf courses in Scotland today. There were more reminders of the importance of NATO, supporting Ukraine, and other joint endeavours, such as the trilateral nuclear submarine deal with Australia, known as AUKUS. But the main focus of the speech was a repeated emphasis on the unbreakable bond and historic friendship between the UK and the US, which had survived differences in the part, and should continue into the future.

As in Congress, the speech was punctuated with many good jokes – with the King even managing to get away with several sly pokes of fun at the President himself, such as about Trump’s massive new ballroom (“I can’t help noticing the slight adjustment in the East Wing”) and a riposte to Trump’s oft-made claim that if it was not for the US intervention in World War 2, all of Europe would be speaking German (But, if it wasn’t for us, you would be speaking French”). These were so gently delivered that they could not possibly cause offence, and the President appeared happy to laugh along as well.

All involved in the King’s visit, particularly his speech writers, should therefore feel genuinely pleased with how it has gone so far. The King has succeeded in delivering some useful messages to America’s political leaders, and – by appealing to America’s finest traditions and historic shared values with the UK – will undoubtedly have reminded his audiences of the best aspects of the UK-US relationship.

But, I do not believe it will translate into a dime of difference in relations between the current British government and American administration. President Trump personally has a remarkable ability to compartmentalize. Despite lavishing praise on the King, and expressing his own appreciation for the UK as a country, he will not feel any greater sense of goodwill or obligation to be nice to the Prime Minister Keir Starmer. In his mind, the Royal Family, and the nation of the UK, are distinct entities from the current UK Government. Trump even inadvertently blurted out this distinction in his mind during his own remarks at the State Banquet, when he suggested that the King shared his own views on Iran, implying, unlike the British Prime Minister.

Indeed, it seems to elude many Americans that the King is here representing the British state, at the behest of the current British Government, and that everything he says, even if he uses his own choice of words, will have been at its direction.

One Republican Congressman, interviewed about the King’s speech a day later, demonstrated this even more clearly, when he was quoted saying “as opposed to Keir Starmer, who is looked at as a leftist weenie, we saw in King Charles someone that is proud of Britain.”

Unfortunately, the problem also goes beyond just this administration, or just Republicans. Many Americans are genuinely fond of their shared history and traditions with the UK, admire many aspects of British culture, and feel affection for the British Monarchy, but still deplore the trajectory of British politics in recent years, or even actively dislike recent British political leaders and their policies. There is a shared concern, on both sides of the political aisle, that the UK, especially since Brexit, has entered a period of erratic political leadership, drift and decline. National security experts are particularly concerned about the decimated state of the British armed forces, which vastly reduces the UK’s value, influence and relevance to the US.

For their part, many British citizens are appalled by the antics of President Trump, deeply offended by his insults towards the UK, and worried that under his leadership, America is not only no longer so reliable as an ally, but also heading in an illiberal direction, completely at odds with its original founding ideals. They also fear that Trump’s antipathy towards Europe is not a one-off, but symptomatic of a widening divergence of viewpoints and interests across the Atlantic.

The current UK Ambassador to the US, Sir Christian Turner, was only speaking the truth, when remarks he gave to a private group were leaked on the eve of the visit, saying that the US’s real “special relationship” was with the state of Israel.

It will take far more than the King’s visit, and some clever speechifying, to repair the underlying fraying of UK-US relations.

Alexandra Hall Hall is a US-based former British diplomat with more than 30 years experience. She resigned from the UK Foreign Office in December 2019 because she felt unable to represent the Government’s position on Brexit with integrity. She is a co-host of the Disorder podcast.

Reform UK’s leader in Basildon – a council Farage’s party hopes to take over – has faced a barrage of complaints after regularly wearing Meta-style camera glasses during council meetings and whilst doorknocking local residents, in a move described as intimidating by multiple local sources.

Cllr Sam Journet, who is running for re-election for Reform, was arrested last September on suspicion of stalking, harassment and a public order offence after facing complaints from council staff and elected officials about his conduct.

In November, Essex Police announced there would be no further action taken against him, but this outlet has learnt that bail conditions were imposed (and later extended) in the aftermath to ensure he did not contact two councillors allegedly targeted. No bail conditions remain.

Journet was also asked to apologise and undergo council training following a separate incident in which he posted footage on social media of a young man with disabilities in Basildon Town centre in an alleged attempt to shame him. He does not appear to have apologised, has not undergone the training and the footage remains online.

His arrest, and subsequent release last September, came after Basildon Council reinstated a previously established policy restricting councillors’ access to staff-only areas, following reports from concerned officials to the Chief Executive about his behaviour.

Journet was then arrested at Basildon Council offices on 8 September 2025.

A Basildon Council spokesperson said at the time: “Following repeated public disorder in the council offices, harassment of staff and councillors and trespassing into areas of the council they are not permitted to be in, a councillor [Sam Journet] was this morning arrested by Essex Police officers in the council building and taken into custody.”

Shortly after his arrest, on 11 September 2025, he wrote on Facebook after the murder of Charlie Kirk: “This is the far left in its rawest form, unpredictable, hateful, and DANGEROUS. They cannot win the debate, so they try to destroy the person.

“That’s why from today, I will be wearing a body worn camera every time I am on duty as your councillor, whether in the Council or on the streets. I will protect myself, because those in power have proven they won’t protect people like me or Charlie.”

One council source dismissed the safety rationale for wearing the camera glasses, saying Journet is a “6 foot 4 burly guy.”

By 18th September, he had posted publicly a video of him filming in a meeting with the council leader and the council’s monitoring officer. She tells him: “Can you please put your camera away.”

Byline Times has spoken to residents, councillors and officials in Basildon, revealing a raft of concerns over Cllr Journet and his conduct.

On 31 January 2026, Journet published a video accusing the council leader, Cllr Gavin Callaghan, of being “stood outside my home” and characterising the alleged behaviour as “creepy” and “stalker-like”. We have seen clear documentary evidence that Cllr Callaghan was miles away from Journet’s home at that time, at Foxes Farm Fields in Billericay.

Byline Times has also learnt that three complaints were lodged against Journet on 12 August 2025 over an incident involving a young man with disabilities in Basildon town centre, with Journet accused of repeatedly calling him a “terrorist” and shaming him by posting a video of him on X as an example of “Broken Britain”. On 27 November 2025 the council’s Interim Monitoring Officer referred the matter to the Standards Committee. The committee asked Cllr Journet to apologise and attend training, which it is understood that he has not done.

Journet has also repeatedly posted inflammatory statements about the council leader, branding him “criminal”, “breaking the law,” “crooked, rotten, vile” and referring to him and his wife, Cllr Emma Callaghan, as “the crooked Callaghans.” At least one of Journet’s August 2025 posts attacking Cllr Callaghan included a photograph of Cllr Callaghan’s home.

Cllr Journet also publicly refused to undertake a Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check that all Basildon councillors are required to hold. He is now understood to have completed the checks.

Residents Speak Out

Kelly Horseley, a Basildon resident, has stated on the record that Journet falsely claimed on Facebook that she had chased Reform canvassers down the street, swearing at them. She was recovering from pneumonia at the time, and told this newspaper the claim is impossible. “It’s a total lie…I would have loved to have been able to run,” she said.

Horseley is deeply concerned by his use of camera-glasses, and told Byline Times: “I don’t think he should be filming residents on the doorstep when they’re answering their doors. People could be vulnerable. Have they given their consent to be filmed? It’s not right. If you’re recording people they should know.”

“If it’s a sunny day he should just wear a normal pair of sunglasses like everyone else. I don’t know why he has to use these.”

“I asked him if he is filming residents when out canvassing. He just kept deleting my comments.”

Another Basildon resident, Katrina Tighe, reported Journet to the police over a Facebook post of his, under which a commenter said they would burn a house down if a “Muslim P*ki” lived there. The comment remained live in the week of publication. Tighe claims Journet has deleted other comments rapidly which have criticised his use of camera glasses.

Tighe, a Labour supporter, said: “He blocked me on social media, despite me never having interacted with any of his posts. About six months ago, he put a post up saying he has ADHD and is autistic, and that’s the reason he behaves the way he does.

“I’ve got a daughter who is 15 and has both ADHD and autism, and she knows how to behave. I can always tell when she’s having an autistic meltdown — that’s how her brain is wired — as opposed to just being badly behaved. There was a gentleman who supported [Journet] quite a lot who actually commented saying that neurodivergence is not a green card to act the way he’s acting. I simply liked that comment, and he blocked me.”

One council staffer described Journet as a “bully” and claimed he has repeatedly tried to enter staff-only areas.

Of his camera glasses, Tighe added: “I genuinely don’t think he believes he’s doing anything wrong, but he is wrong.” She is concerned when he posts pictures of elderly people on their doorsteps. One recent photo – not taken with his camera glasses – features an old woman in a dressing gown smiling with him.

Jewel Aspect

Journet’s company, Samuel Perry Jewellery Ltd, was the subject of enforcement action by Companies House which could have dissolved the company, starting in March this year. This is legal action taken by the regulator, usually when a firm is in breach of its legal reporting obligations.

Journet attributed delays in filing required documents to an “administrative error” by Companies House, in an article focusing on his response published by the local Southend Echo and on social media posts.

A day after Companies House issued its notice for compulsory strike-off, the jewellers’ first legally-required accounts in nearly two years were published.

Filing deadlines for a private limited company’s accounts are nine months after the financial year-end, in this case 31 December 2024. The deadline was 30 September 2025. The signed, published accounts state: “Approved by the Board on 9 March 2026 and signed on their behalf by: Sam Journet, Director.” They weren’t filed until 18 March 2026, roughly five and a half months late.

He told the Echo: “Given acknowledged security vulnerabilities within the system affecting millions of director’s data, I took a cautious approach until the position around the verification process and date handling was clarified. Once confirmed, the matter was completed promptly and correctly.”

“As both a local business owner and councillor, I take compliance seriously and ensured everything was handled properly. It’s very much business as usual.”

Journet’s firm also had outstanding business rates, which were paid off in September 2025 after Labour publicised questions over the issue.

Bullying Claims and Council Warning

Cllr Journet is also running to be elected onto Essex County Council. Reform are hoping to make significant gains on both authorities.

But one councillor elected for Reform in Basildon has quit. Cllr Sarah Shields publicly stated on 9 April 2026 that “Sam Journet has been bullying me”, including over a “period of months”, alleging he referred to her as “thick” because she is dyslexic. She has now left the Reform group. Cllr Shields did not respond to a request for comment.

Basildon resident Tighe says the political atmosphere is toxic in the area: “Two or three months ago someone might have quietly said they were going Reform. Now, [if] anything criminal happens, straight away, before any evidence or description, they’re online blaming immigrants. And they won’t be scared to say it openly.”

In a recent Facebook post, another resident, Lee Cocker, wrote: “It is entirely reasonable for residents to ask questions about the use of recording-enabled glasses while engaging with the public. This is not about attacking a person. It is about a principle: people should know if there is potential for conversations to be recorded.

“If any other candidate including Cllr Gavin Callaghan was regularly wearing technology capable of filming and recording while canvassing, people, including Sam Journet himself, would rightly raise concerns too.”

Cllr Sam Journet and Reform UK were contacted but did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

A spokesperson for Essex Police said: “A man who was arrested in Basildon on 8 September [2025] has been told he faces no further action.”

A Basildon Council spokesperson told Byline Times: “The council is unable to comment on individual cases or ongoing matters, as this may involve confidential information.

“On the use of Meta-style camera glasses, the council’s position reflects the general legal framework rather than any technology-specific policy.

“In public places there is no legitimate expectation of privacy and the use of body cameras or similar is permitted. There may be issues and discomfort felt by others if it is perceived to be used in an intimidatory manner. Data protection issues may arise if the images are stored or published.

“Within the council chamber and at public meetings, there is a right to record proceedings provided this does not disrupt the meeting, in accordance with the Openness of Local Government Bodies Regulations 2014.

“The council does not regulate political activities. The Electoral Commission has published its own guidance in relation to canvassing and electioneering. It recommends caution when engaging with electors on their doorstep.

“At an election count, the requirement to maintain secrecy has led the Returning Officer to restrict cameras to a designated space for the press separate from the counting area. Breach of S.66 of the RPA is a criminal offence.”

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com

From her position on the comfy red benches in the House of Lords, former Green Party leader Natalie Bennett is planning nothing short of a revolution. As she reveals in her new book Green Thinking, Bennett (aka Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle) doesn’t have armed struggle in mind; more a complete transformation in how we see the world — a change she hopes will infuse our politics.

In an interview with the Byline Times Podcast, she says it’s time to dispense with many of the foundational thinkers of western cultural and economic tradition, whose perspectives promote conflict rather than co-operation. “There’s so many things that we were taught at our mother’s or grandmother’s knee, that we were taught at primary school and secondary school; things we now know to be untrue, but they still are really pervasive in society. I hear them in the House of Lords all the time.”

As an example, Bennett cites 19th Century naturalist Charles Darwin, whose understanding of the ‘survival of the fittest’ has been used since Victorian times to bolster the idea that ruthless economic competition is the natural order of things. Bennett points out that the more modern research of evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis offers a powerful alternative view — one in which all life on earth is interdependent.

Bennett explains that, “In the 1960s and 70s, Margulis came to understand that mitochondria — powerhouses in the cell that keep your body going — and chloroplasts - which collect the sun’s energy and put them into sugars - were originally independent organisms.”

Their mutually dependent evolution, “built the whole foundation of life on Earth. The technical term for this is symbiosis, but what it really means is cooperation. So if we start to think about what’s the whole foundation of life on Earth — our life, other living things — it’s cooperation.”

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This sounds like a simple, perhaps even uncontroversial premise, but its runs directly counter to the profit-oriented, extractive essence of capitalism. Bennett’s deep research builds out from here into a narrative which challenges the view that previous civilisations were somehow inferior to our work and money-oriented milieu.

“There’s this stereotype of ‘primitive man’, but actually in what we call hunter-gatherer societies, the best evidence we have suggests they worked four or five hours a day, and had the rest of the day to care for the children, to sit around the fire and have a yarn, to have a really pleasant life. When we started what we call farming, human health and well-being actually went down.”

Bennett draws on archaeological evidence to suggest that indigenous populations in both North America and Australia carefully cultivated and managed their land in ways that counters the offensive, and now outdated, stereotypes of what were portrayed, for generations, as ‘backward’ societies. In Australia, for example, Aboriginal people grew a staple crop called murnong, “and then the white settlers brought in sheep and cattle that just ate the whole thing out and destroyed it. One of the really big things we’ve got to tackle is the idea that people in the past were stupid or dumb or primitive. We’ve been around on this planet for about 300,000 years. People from that time were just as smart, just as innovative as we are, and there are things we can learn from those indigenous communities.”

As well as questioning the West’s contemptuous treatment of other cultures, Bennett also recoils at our treatment of other species, and tells a story to illustrate the intelligence of dolphins. “A researcher who was working with dolphin mothers and babies found that when it was time for the kids to stop playing and go off and have lunch, the dolphins would signal to her, as the chief of the researchers, that it was time for her to stop and get her people to stop playing with their babies.”

She marvels at the “level of sophistication involved in understanding human hierarchy” among the dolphins and observes that “we’re starting to acknowledge animal feelings. One of the things that that challenges hugely [is] both factory farming — what we are doing to pigs, to chickens, etc — and it also challenges what we do to animals in laboratories. We’ve discovered recently [that] rats and mice sing to each other just like we can. All of those horribly mistreated rats and mice in laboratories are singing to each other in the same kind of way. And if you really know that and think about that, then you really have to start to think about the world differently.”

Bennett’s book can be seen as an informed broadside against many established cultural preconceptions, but it’s also a clarion call for radical change in our politics. How likely is her latest successor as Green Party leader, the ‘eco-populist’ Zack Polanksi, to achieve that?

“Zack’s doing a great job. What he’s communicating has always been the Green Party political philosophy — that economic and environmental justice are indivisible. That’s our absolute foundational thinking. And the way I express green philosophy, which very much reflects what Zack says, is there’s enough resources on this planet for everyone to have a decent life, for us to look after climate and nature, if we share those resources out fairly.

“We’re also at a point where society is really ready to listen, and people are looking for an alternative to Reform. People want hope, they want inspiration, and politics is increasingly turning into Green versus Reform. That’s where we’re at, and Zack’s doing a great job of lifting us up to be able to rival Reform.”

Watch or listen to Adrian Goldberg’s interview with Natalie Bennett here.

Green Thinking: Unlearning Outdated Ideas in Science, Economics and Politics by Natalie Bennett is out now published by Routledge.

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Last December, James Orr stood on stage at the annual AmericaFest conference in Phoenix, organised by Turning Point USA, and rebranded the event “a tribute to Charlie Kirk”.

Kirk, Turning Point’s co-founder and chief executive, had been shot dead three months earlier on 10 September, on a stage at Utah Valley University by a sniper on a nearby rooftop.

More than 30,000 people turned up for the first event organised to commemorate Kirk’s murder. A replica of the tent in which he was shot was erected inside the convention centre, flanked by ring lights for attendee selfies.

Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk’s widow, opened the conference and used it to endorse JD Vance for United States President in 2028. Vance later gave the closing keynote speech.

The speaker roster included a who’s who of ‘MAGA’ luminaries: Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Ben Shapiro, Donald Trump Jr, Robert F Kennedy Jr – and James Orr.

When he walked out on stage to a standing ovation from an audience of thousands in front of blazing lights and blaring music, the attendees might have been hard-pressed to imagine that this Orr was an academic, an Associate Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at the Faculty of Divinity, at the world-renowned Cambridge University.

But Orr was also more than that. Two months earlier, he had been appointed as a senior advisor to Nigel Farage, Leader of Reform UK.

As Orr emerged before the audience, a recording of one of his previous speeches was played: “What we recognise is that… freedom without constraints descends into tyranny, the tyranny very often of the minority over the majority. Freedom without fairness leaves people at the mercy of forces that divide a nation against itself.”

The audience roared as sparks and pyrotechnics surrounded Orr, who approached the podium and waved regally to his fans.

Why was he there?

Kirk on Race

Orr was well-acquainted with Charlie Kirk, having previously made appearances on his podcast show.

One of his most consequential contributions occurred on a show titled “Why is Europe choosing to replace itself?”, shortly before Kirk was killed. The interview was not published until January of this year.

Through Turning Point, Kirk had built a conservative youth empire on a particular kind of racial politics. On his own podcast, he had declared that, if he saw a black pilot, “I’m going to be like, ‘boy, I hope he’s qualified’.” He described George Floyd, the African American truck driver murdered by a white police officer in Minnesota, as a “scumbag”; and called Martin Luther King “awful” and “not a good person”.

Kirk said the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – which provided equal rights to black Americans and outlawed racial segregation and discrimination – had been a “huge mistake”. He alleged that “prowling blacks go around for fun to go target white people”. He said black women in prominent positions – Ketanji Brown Jackson, Joy Reid, Michelle Obama – owed their status to having “stolen a white person’s slot”.

On Jewish donors, Kirk told his podcast audience that they were “the number one funding mechanism of radical, open-border, neoliberal, quasi-Marxist policies” and that “the philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country”. He called on American Jews to stop “subsidising your own demise”, and accused Jewish philanthropy of controlling “the non-profits, the movies, Hollywood, all of it”.

Kirk also sympathised with scientific racism.

In October 2023, he hosted leading ‘race science’ advocate Steve Sailer, who coined the term ‘noticing’ to describe the act of recognising that racial disparities are rooted in biological and genetic differences, rather than social policies. Kirk described Sailer, who used Kirk’s show to promote white nationalist Charles Murray – co-author of The Bell Curve which claimed that black people are cognitively inferior to white people – as “one of the most talented noticers in the country”.

The Far-Right ‘Comintern’

Orr’s sit-down with Kirk was not merely friendly, but deferential.

The Reform advisor began by telling Kirk that American conservatism was “changing the world”, that he admired the scale of what Kirk had built, and that he had flown in to learn.

He also told Kirk something more specific.

“You’re doing extraordinary things in transforming America, recalling it to its founding ideals, promoting people of calibre and character and courage, particularly among the young,” Orr said. “This is a huge problem for us on the right in Britain. We’re working very hard on it. I felt both envious but also excited, because I thought: we can bottle some of that Kirk juice and take it over to Britain. We need to work out what the DNA is and try to replicate it as best we can.”

As a statement of Orr’s intent to import Kirk’s ideology into UK politics, his comments speak for themselves.

The interview, recorded before Kirk’s death, contained four crucial admissions.

The first – the most consequential – was in response to Kirk’s question on whether 2016 marked a real historical turn. Orr agreed, then widened the frame.

“It’s not just Brexit and Trump,” he said. “It’s also the rise of national conservative movements all across Europe. You’re seeing it with Vox in Spain, with Chega in Portugal, with the AfD in Germany, with the Rassemblement National in France, with Fratelli d’Italia in Italy, and in Austria and Hungary, all going at different speeds.”

He then highlighted his own role as a key lever in this network.

“One of the challenges conservatives always have is conserving what is our own,” Orr told Kirk. “So it’s very difficult to form what the communists used to call a Comintern. Marx could say ‘workers of the world, unite’ – progressives can say ‘wokesters of the world, unite’ – because it’s a fundamentally transnational ideology. Conserving our own nations means it’s much harder to have that sense of international solidarity. But various movements are trying to catalyse that. The National Conservatism movement – of which I’m proudly the UK chair – is helping to do that.”

National Conservatism, for Orr, is the transnational coordinating infrastructure for the European far-right. The seven movements he named include four parties with direct fascist lineage or formal extremist classification.

The AfD in Germany was classified by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution – the BfV, Germany’s democratic immune system – as a “confirmed right-wing extremist endeavour” in May 2025, following a three-year investigation.

The BfV’s 1,100-page finding described the party as a racist and anti-Muslim organisation incompatible with the German constitution. More than 10,000 AfD members are on the BfV’s register of far-right extremists. The party’s Thuringia leader, Björn Höcke, has been legally ruled by German courts to be accurately describable as a fascist. AfD-connected figures attended the January 2024 Potsdam meeting, exposed by Correctiv, at which the mass deportation of millions of people from Germany – including naturalised German citizens – was discussed.

Fratelli d’Italia is the living institutional continuation of Italian fascism.

It occupies the same Rome headquarters as the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), the neo-fascist party founded in 1946 by veterans of Mussolini’s Nazi-collaborationist Salò Republic. Its tricolour flame emblem is said by party tradition to represent the flame on Mussolini’s tomb at Predappio. Its leader – now Italy’s Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni – joined the MSI youth wing as a teenager and publicly praised Mussolini. Its co-founder, now President of the Italian Senate, has reportedly described himself and his colleagues as heirs of ‘Il Duce’.

Austria’s Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ) was founded in 1956 by Anton Reinthaller, an SS-Brigadeführer and former Nazi Reichstag deputy. His successor, Friedrich Peter, had served in the 1st SS Infantry Brigade – a unit responsible for the murder of civilians in the occupied Soviet Union. The party harbours intimate ties to neo-Nazi networks and German nationalist fraternities.

France’s Rassemblement National is the renamed Front National, founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen, a convicted Holocaust denier who described the Nazi gas chambers as “a detail” of the Second World War. The party drew on Waffen-SS veterans, the neo-fascist Ordre Nouveau, and veterans of the Algerian OAS.

‘Reversing’ the Great Replacement

Orr’s second significant admission was on migration, in a response to a question framed by Kirk in the language of the far-right ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory.

Popularised by French writer Renaud Camus, it baselessly suggests white European populations are being systematically replaced by non-white immigrants through engineered mass migration. It has been cited in the manifestos of the terrorists who carried out the mass shootings at Christchurch, Buffalo, El Paso, and Poway.

The previous year, Kirk had declared on his show: “The Great Replacement strategy, which is well under way every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.”

The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism describes it as “one of the most dangerous white supremacist conspiracy theories out there” and notes that the conspiracy “often blames the ‘elite’ and Jews for orchestrating these changing demographics”.

In Kirk’s interview with Orr, he asked: “Why is Europe continually importing people who will replace core European identity and culture? Who is voting for this? What is the argument?”

Orr accepted the framing.

“In the last five years, one in 27 people in Britain has arrived,” he said. “One in 60 arrived in the last 18 months. In the first 25 years of this century, gross immigration has been somewhere between 12 and 15 million people – roughly four to five times as many people as arrived on our shores in the first thousand years of our history. This has had a profoundly traumatic shock on us Brits. A tectonic effect on the landscape of British politics.”

Then, speaking about free speech, he said: “Once you go through this extraordinary, unprecedented experiment in mass demographic reconfiguration – all the norms are dissolved.”

Orr had already told GB News that the task is now to “arrest and preferably reverse mass unvetted immigration” from countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan with “backward moral cultures”.

The Kirk interview underlined that stance and paired it with a specific figure. The UK cannot “reverse” 12 to 15 million arrivals since 2000 simply by closing its borders to new ones. Any reversal on that scale would, it appears, require the removal of long-settled residents, naturalised British citizens, UK-born children of migrants who are British from birth, and the breaking up of mixed-citizenship families.

This is the programme the Austrian far-right leader of the Identitarian Movement, Martin Sellner, calls ‘remigration’. It explicitly includes the expulsion of ethnic minority citizens deemed insufficiently assimilated.

Orr closed his answer to Kirk by saying that the biblical model he offered for the integration of migrants is the Book of Ruth. “Even at the end of the book,” he said, “she’s still Ruth the Moabitess – her identity is still there. She’s incorporated into the people of Israel, but she remains a Moabitess.”

Ruth is incorporated but never becomes ‘an Israelite’. A few minutes later, Orr made the architecture explicit: “If anyone can become a woman, what is a woman? If anyone can become an Englishman, what is an Englishman?”

An Englishman, in the analogy he draws, is presumably a biological person; a thing you are at birth. The suggestion that is reasonable to infer from Orr’s comment is that the nation belongs to the Englishman as one of the white – native – race.

“We’re not an idea,” Orr told Kirk. “We’re not a proposition. We’re people with a home, a history, a heritage.” This is the precondition for claiming that some people, regardless of citizenship, cannot truly belong.

On why he felt at home in Phoenix, Arizona, Orr added: “I can land somewhere like Phoenix and be surrounded by the English-speaking peoples – be in the Anglosphere – and that now carries an almost nostalgic quality. A sense of homecoming, a strange homecoming, because I can see glimpses of the old world in the new. Glimpses of the old world that are beginning to fade in the old world itself.”

On why British Muslims, in his telling, fail to integrate, he said: “There’s a wonderful book by my Cambridge colleague, Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism, which shows that the English from the 12th and 13th Centuries onwards were constantly moving around, not very clan-based. Whereas our newer arrivals don’t take that approach at all.”

On whether a country’s claims require reasoned defence, Orr said: “I don’t owe you an argument for why my country is the best country in the world any more than I owe you an argument for why my mum is the best mum in the world.”

Taken together, these passages suggest a doctrine of the nation as lineage rather than idea; one that requires no reasoned justification. Englishness reaches back eight centuries and cannot be acquired by incomers. The Anglosphere is a civilisational community in which Phoenix is presumably more home than contemporary multi-ethnic England; and Englishness, like biological sex, is what you were born as.

This is ethno-nationalism.

The ‘Net Drains Myth’

Orr told Kirk that the claim that migrants are “net drains” on the British economy, has “been one of the myths”.

But the Office for Budget Responsibility’s 2024 modelling found that a migrant arriving at age 25 on UK average earnings contributes approximately £341,000 to public finances over their lifetime – more than a UK-born worker on the same salary, because the UK has not paid for their education.

OBR forecasts consistently show higher net migration reducing the deficit and the national debt. Home Office earnings data for 1.7 million migrants who arrived on work visas between 2019 and 2023 show them earning, on average, slightly more than UK-born workers aged 16 to 64.

Orr also told Kirk that “something like 80 to 85% of Muslims vote Labour”, and used this as evidence that bloc voting had delivered the UK five MPs loyal to a foreign cause. The 80% figure was accurate in 2019. But, by the 2024 General Election, according to analysis by the UK in a Changing Europe group, Labour’s share of the Muslim vote collapsed to just more than 60%. In the 28 constituencies where more than a quarter of residents are Muslim, Labour’s vote share fell from 63.7% to 37.1%. Ironically, those five MPs ran as independents precisely due to their opposition to Labour’s policies on Gaza.

Orr did not respond to requests for comment.

A month after this interview was published by the Charlie Kirk Show, Farage promoted Orr to be his head of policy at Reform, where he sits in prime position to unleash “Kirk juice” into Westminster.

Following in his footsteps, as of April, his son Godfrey Orr – who accompanied his father on his Phoenix trip last year and watched him on stage at AmFest’s Charlie Kirk tribute event – is standing as a Reform candidate in East Chesterton in next month’s local elections.

Nafeez Ahmed is Head of Investigations at Byline Times, and the author of Alt Reich: The Network War to Destroy the West from Within

Standing among the growing crowd of families searching for their loved ones, 51-year-old Svitlana wiped tears from her eyes as she displayed two photos of her missing son.

“As of today, it has been 263 days, and we hope that he is alive,” she says. “We have no confirmation he was captured, but we simply hope, believe, and wait.”

On July 22, 2025, her 31-year-old son Denys went missing during a battle outside Izium. He had volunteered for the army on February 27, 2022, three days after the invasion began.

“The comrades who were with him said that he was alive, but then went missing. They left him at the position because there was no possibility of evacuation — the guys were also wounded and couldn’t get him out,” she explains. “I am from the Odesa region, Sarata district, the village of Pakhtivka. This is my first time at an exchange — I just couldn’t stay at home anymore.”

Svitlana is one of hundreds of mothers, grandmothers, wives, fathers, and others who have traveled to the Chernihiv Regional Clinical Hospital on this cold spring day in anticipation of the arrival of 175 Ukrainian soldiers freed from Russian captivity. It is April 11, the day before Orthodox Easter, and this is the latest prisoner exchange in the unrelenting war. For some, the day will bring relief; for most, it will only prolong the pain and uncertainty as they search for any information about their missing loved ones.

“All we have left is faith and hope,” says Svitlana, before disappearing into the growing crowd of family members adorned in shirts and flags emblazoned with the faces of their missing soldiers.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has brought levels of death and destruction not seen in Europe since the Second World War. High-intensity combat has left dozens of cities and hundreds of villages across eastern Ukraine in ruins, scarring the landscape and displacing millions in the process.

Though neither Ukraine nor Russia releases consistent casualty data, the losses are undoubtedly profound. A January 2026 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) estimated that combined losses could be as high as 2 million people by the time spring arrived. Russian casualties are estimated at roughly 1.2 million killed, wounded, or missing, with around 325,000 soldiers killed since February 2022.

On the Ukrainian side, losses may have reached as high as 600,000 by December 2025 when combining estimates of dead, wounded, and missing. Estimates of Ukrainian military deaths have reached as high as 140,000. This past February, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated that roughly 7,000 soldiers are in Russian captivity and 55,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed.

Even these figures likely understate the true toll. The Ukrainian military records soldiers as missing until a body is recovered and identified through DNA testing — a process that is not always possible. More than 90,000 Ukrainian military personnel and civilians are estimated to be missing, and the French newspaper Le Monde recently reported that 66,000 Ukrainian soldiers are listed as missing. This uncertainty often brings immense psychological strain to families, though some continue to find strength through hope.

“I am searching, waiting for my husband,” said 37-year-old Anna, who traveled to Chernihiv from Khmilnyk in the Vinnytsia region.

“I’ve already lost my brother in this war, but I believe in miracles, and I believe my husband will come back,” she says. “He has been missing for 18 months. I don’t have any official information about him — only what I’ve found myself — but I believe with all my heart that he is alive, and I will wait for him. I love him very much — he is my soulmate.”

Accompanying Anna from Khmilnyk are 44-year-old Svitlana and 50-year-old Zoya. Svitlana and her husband Ruslan have two daughters together, but she has no confirmation that he has been captured.

“We have been waiting for him for three years and three months,” she says. “He was a regular worker who went to defend Ukraine from the very first days. Today is my birthday, and I hope I receive the gift of his return.”

Zoya’s husband Oleg also volunteered for the army, leaving in March 2022. “When he left, he said, ‘If not me, then who?’” she recalls.

Oleg went missing in 2024, but Russian volunteers later contacted her and sent a video message.

“In the video, he said that everything was fine, that he was being fed and not harmed — but you could see from his condition that it was the opposite,” she explains. “We are all waiting for every one of our men. We are waiting for each of them. I hope he comes back.”

After hours of waiting, the first ambulances arrived carrying those who required wheelchairs or other medical care. As they pulled into the hospital compound, chants of vitáyemo (“welcome”) erupted from the crowd. As the freed soldiers were wheeled into the hospital, relatives of the missing lined the path holding photos of their loved ones, hoping someone might recognise them and provide information.

Shortly afterward, a series of buses carrying the majority of the 175 returned soldiers arrived and parked outside two hospital entrances lined with metal barriers and roughly 2,000 people — all hoping their loved ones would be among those returning. Children in an apartment across the street watched from their balcony and waved.

As the soldiers exited the buses — with shaved heads, sunken eyes, hollowed faces, and pale skin — chants of vitáyemo again broke out. Those lining the path surged forward, calling out and showing photos, hoping for answers. Some of the returned soldiers smiled and waved; others moved in a daze, supported by medical staff. Many had been captured in 2022, spending years in a prison system widely documented for the systemic torture and abuse of Ukrainian prisoners.

After all the returned soldiers were escorted inside for medical and psychological evaluation, family members gathered at the windows, raising posters in another attempt to be seen. Others handed out pamphlets and photographs to soldiers and hospital staff, collecting them into large cardboard boxes that quickly overflowed.

For the majority present whose loved ones were not among the 175 returned, the waiting would continue. But one mother, Tamara, was able to breathe a sigh of relief — her 39-year-old son Serhii was among the returned.

“My son was captured at the beginning of the war at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, when it was occupied. I just saw him come off the bus and hugged him for the first time,” she said. “I’m so proud of him and very happy he came back,” she added before being quickly whisked away by friends.

As the day wore into the afternoon, the crowd began to dwindle as those unable to gather new information started to depart. With the fighting dragging on and the Russian government showing little interest in ending its war of conquest, the number of missing and captured will continue to rise, leaving families across Ukraine with little choice but to hope and wait.

Hardeep Matharu: The Conspiracists follows you both on a road trip across the US, meeting women drawn into the world of conspiracy theories.

For former Marine drill instructor Yvonne St Cyr, her involvement in the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol was one element of fighting a “spiritual war between good and evil” after an unstable upbringing and her turn away from the church during the pandemic. Meanwhile, Tammy Butry, who like Yvonne was convicted for her actions at January 6, became attracted to conspiracy following a number of traumatic life experiences – including suicide, sexual abuse and violence; and her children being taken into foster care in the ‘kids for cash’ scandal in which judges accepted financial kickbacks to send children to private juvenile detention centres.

In all of the iconography that emerged around January 6, and the ‘MAGA’ movement more generally, men tended to dominate the interpretation of that event as the embodiment of a hyper-toxic-masculine violence channelled by Donald Trump under the guise of white supremacist patriotism. What I found striking about your film was the footage of a number of women who were present that day, who I don’t recall seeing in media coverage at the time. How did the idea for a documentary following the journey of women living with such belief systems come about?

Noelle Cook: I ended up going to January 6 to take photos of the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally and to use it to create some kind of comparative visual anthropology project on the various protest movements that had been going on for the past five or six years in the US. Because I was working in [the field of] women and gender studies, I focused on women and their participation in right-wing movements.

When I got home and looked at the pictures I had taken at the Capitol that day, what struck me was, as you described, that here were these men in full body armour and camouflage, decked out in Trump paraphernalia, and next to them were these white, middle-aged, middle-class women who were sitting there like they were at a church picnic, taking it easy, while the men next to them were standing up and yelling. It was a weird, sinister, carnival, revival, reunion kind of situation.

But what I recognised was the camaraderie – and it reminded me a lot of the Women’s March I went to in [Washington] DC on the day after Trump’s first inauguration in 2017, where people were packed shoulder-to-shoulder and there was this joy of being amongst like-minded people. That was what I had experienced at the Capitol as well, but it had a very sinister feeling to it because of the rhetoric being thrown around.

There was a real surrealness of these women, who acted like nothing was happening and were using it to livestream to Facebook; an opportunity to plug their businesses from inside the tunnel while the police were spraying tear gas. It was just so surreal. So, I followed these women for a year, and they all led me down the path to conspiracies and ‘conspirituality’, which had nothing to do with what I set out to study in the beginning.

The film poses many interesting questions for viewers – one of them for me was the extent to which women such as Yvonne and Tammy really support Donald Trump and ‘Make America Great Again’ as a political movement, or whether they see him merely as a vehicle in their conspiratorial, spiritual, belief system?

Noelle Cook: Tammy, for example, didn’t really vote or pay attention to politics. Yvonne didn’t like Trump but she voted for him. There’s something about him, clearly, that is weird and charismatic, even if it’s evil. So many of these people are tired of broken systems so, when he came out originally saying he wasn’t a politician and that he wasn’t here to play that same game, and he uses that very coarse language and says ‘I’m one of you’ and that he’s not very presidential, [it appeals].

I studied middle-aged people and was watching them get to that stage of life where they’re kind of in that ‘integrity versus despair’ stage of development. Their lives don’t look exactly like they thought they might at age 50 or 55 and there’s a lot of loneliness, a lot of isolation, and the tipping point really was the pandemic. It was during that time that Yvonne and Tammy became Trump fans. But Trump could leave today and this doesn’t change – because it became a community, and then it’s people’s identities.

Even right now, with all the infighting going on and Trump turning on some of these loyal supporters, and Tucker Carlson and all those people who now are disagreeing or being shut out, [the people believing in this kind of ideology] know that, if you stand up because of any of [what is now unfolding around Donald Trump, such as the Iran war, higher prices, the Epstein Files], you get shunned – and when you’ve built a community around you for six years, and you’ve gone through a pandemic which also messes with people’s heads in lots of ways, it’s not now about disavowing the war in Iran, it’s not about what you’ve been screaming about for six years – ‘release the Epstein Files’, right? Now, it’s about preserving your identity and community, because starting over, how are you going to do that?

I don’t honestly think any [of the women I followed] particularly love Trump. In fact, Yvonne told me once that God works through flawed men and that’s why he’s there. They recognise that he’s flawed, and that’s okay.

So, if Donald Trump has a role in Yvonne and Tammy’s beliefs, what it is that they believe?

Liz Smith: It’s this mix between conspiracism and New Age spirituality: ‘conspirituality’ – which is a way of understanding the ‘divine feminine’ and the ‘divine masculine’, which I found very interesting. Do you want to explain it, Noelle, as you’ve explored it in your book?

Noelle Cook: It’s very strange because Yvonne will sometimes say things that take me by surprise because they sound like something I might actually say, right? So, she believes that warrior females have worth and you can’t have a balanced world without them, but at the same time, women have very specific roles in what they’re allowed to do. For Yvonne, the patriarchy exists, no matter how feminist she might sound in one moment. I think part of this is why these women are drawn to Trump, because there is something about this personality that’s drawn to ‘soul contracts’.

It’s not unlike religion in many ways: this belief that they’re suffering and that they need to have patience for something that’s promised to come. There’s a set of rules by which you have to operate to exist in the world in order to get that reward, and it may not come your way for a long time, and they know that. What I see, again, [as leading to these beliefs] is another broken institution of organised religion. The pandemic created a scenario where people had to turn online if they wanted to participate in spiritual practices in an organised way with other people.

[Yvonne turned to online conspirituality beliefs particularly during the pandemic when her church closed. She believed something was wrong because God would never close his doors to his congregation].

In the film, Yvonne and Tommy assert a number of conspiracy theories for which there is no evidence including: that The Matrix film was a documentary; that the Queen and the Royal Family kidnapped children from Canada and that they hunted and ate children; that the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers are reptiles and that they created cancer; that Mother Theresa trafficked children and that she was Anthony Fauci’s father; that Fauci – the former Chief Medical Advisor to the US President – created the HIV/Aids virus.

Many of these are the sorts of outlandish claims people might expect to hear on the conspiracy front. But, Yvonne and Tammy also speak extensively about their belief in being ‘starseeds’ – an ideology which is elaborate, spiritual, and self-reinforcing?

Noelle Cook: A lot of it asks questions like: do you feel like your life has lost purpose? Are you tired and lacking energy? If you’re in the right frame of mind, and you’re looking for a coping mechanism and you need something to cling on to that badly – which again, to keep talking [about how this is similar to] religion, because it’s not that different – then it’s pretty easy to go ‘oh, wow, that resonates with me’. In Yvonne’s case, she’s taken it a step farther – she believes in something called ‘algorithmic conspirituality’: she’ll go on Facebook and because a post will pop-up at a particular moment, she’ll say ‘it’s a message from the divine as I wouldn’t have turned my computer on at this very moment and had that popping up unless it was meant to happen, and everything’s predetermined’.

Traditional gender roles in which the ‘divine masculine’ is dominant is just another way of expressing gender ideology, but it’s also a space where women can be celebrated for being intuitive and trusting their guts – and where they’re encouraged to do that because that allows them to start asking questions. So they start attending school boards and become these momma bear warriors who use violent rhetoric, and when what you’re saying is in defence of children, you can say whatever you want – and that really is true.

This [belief system] appeals to women who are around 50, when you go invisible. You’re really past your reproductive age. You no longer potentially contribute to the GDP. Oftentimes, you’re somewhere between caring for children and ageing parents. More and more of these people found themselves online, not just because of in-person gatherings being cancelled during the pandemic, but because of middle-aged circumstances. I saw that across the board – and because I related to them, right? I’m exactly the same age as these women. I’m able to understand some of this because I was observing enough of it in myself to see how I used different coping mechanisms to get through that time. And I really do think that a lot of it is a coping mechanism.

You’re at that stage of life where you have an existential crisis and all kinds of questions – and it’s much easier to believe that ‘one day I’m going to ascend to Heaven on Earth’. It’s not that unlike finding religion in midlife, as it’s based on a belief system where you don’t need tangible evidence. You don’t need science to back it. You don’t need anything other than another human to tell you: here are your instructions, go about your day.

And the idea that any challenges that come your way can be explained by this being part of your ‘soul contract’? So that real structural and political inequalities, which more tangibly help explain why life might be tough, remain unengaged with…

Liz Smith: It’s a ‘soul lesson’. Every time you confront some form of adversity, you’re going to be thinking: why is this happening to me? That’s shit and that’s not fair. But, if you’re in this conspirituality world, then you actually have a narrative to explain why you’re having a shit time – because it’s all a soul lesson, and you can learn from that. I can learn forgiveness and then I grow as a person. So, every time you come back into the world – because they believe in reincarnation – you’re building on the lessons you’ve already learned in [a previous] life, and you’re becoming a better person, every single time. So rather than just accepting that, actually, life can be rubbish and awful, you want to find a reason for why it is [that way]. The ‘soul contract’ is a kind of ideology which really helps, because you’ve got a reason why something is happening to you.

Noelle’s book has a whole chapter about the origins of the New Age movement and how this ‘starseed’ theology [developed from the work of] the Russian-American, Helena Blavatsky, in the late 19th Century [who co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875 and whose 1888 work, The Secret Doctrine provided a foundational occult framework for the belief that human souls originate from other planets]. She believed that everyone has an ‘inner god’ and that everything comes from your intuition – and the [emphasis in the starseed ideology on] female intuition comes out of that as well.

You see that translating directly into what Yvonne and Tammy say. They got it from watching lots and lots of YouTube videos, but it’s incredible to me that actually the spirituality piece of this goes right back to the late 19th Century and the start of the concept of the starseed being from another galactic planet who has come down to help us understand the world through soul contracts.

I found the film so memorable because it provides a very human look at these women and why they believe what they do. At no point are they presented as stupid, requiring judgement, or seen as ‘other’. How did you decide that Yvonne and Tammy’s stories were the ones you wanted to follow?

Noelle Cook: It started out as an academic project, but I crossed boundaries [in developing relationships with some of the women] so I wasn’t going to pass an academic review and I gave up on that. In the first year, I studied them at a distance – following their social media accounts. And everybody kind of looks the same when you do that. It’s easy to categorise everybody in one pool when there is so much more nuance going on. Even January 6, not everybody was there for Trump – there was another rally going on that day, attended by a lot of granola-eating women who were anti-vaccination. Women from that rally were also sitting on the Capitol steps. I have them in my photographs.

But then Yvonne’s journey got so complicated, following her through social media, I started to get stumped – I couldn’t really figure out some of the language [she was using] anymore without asking her some questions. So I reached out to her on Facebook on my research account, and said I’d been following her spiritual journey and that I had a couple of questions. And Yvonne being Yvonne, she gave me her cellphone number instead. I called her and we talked for an hour, and then we kept doing that.

It was some time in 2022 when things changed with Tammy. I had been getting to know her but still keeping some distance, but she kind of drew a lot of the empathy out of me because her story was so tragic. In so many ways, she had so many real-time crises while I was talking to her, that I would keep finding myself wanting to jump in and help her find resources.

So I made peace with the fact that I was actually developing relationships with these people. I didn’t want to do that. There’s only two of them, because they were the only two I could tolerate developing relationships with – most of the other people I talked to, it was very clear to me, had an agenda of some kind.

Spending three years talking to [Yvonne and Tammy] consistently over time, I got to know them really, really well, and because of that I developed more of a story [about their lives]. But I don’t know what that methodology looks like in the real world on a large-scale – because, honestly, that’s what it would take if you want to try to understand why people are completely discarding a shared reality to the point where it actually has real world consequences in material ways for them.

This giant right-wing pool is not purist: there are neo-Nazis, Christian nationalists watching for Armageddon, conspiritualists waiting for ascension. All those messages are adjacent. And so, in the process, ordinary people – like the ones I write about – will start dabbling in things that they’ve never [said or thought] before.

Yvonne [believes herself to be] a ‘divine sovereign citizen’ and that playing into the system is keeping her a complacent slave – and so she stopped paying her mortgage and quit her job. She ended up living in a camp trailer in the middle of a field in Idaho where, in the winter, her pipes and the trailer would burst, and she had no water. She sees that as part of her sacrifice for her godly mission, essentially. When she [was waiting to go to prison to serve her sentence for her January 6 conviction], she kept denying it would happen. But then, when it did happen, it was because ‘the spirit wanted to place her there so that she would find a new soul’. Everything Yvonne did was to stand for the truth till the last breath. And she’s completely vindicated. Because she had her case on appeal, when her pardon [from Donald Trump] came down, [the conviction was completely wiped from her record]. It wasn’t rewriting history for Yvonne, it was erasing history – as if it never happened. Yvonne feels more sure of her power than ever.

The film is nuanced portrayal of Yvonne and Tammy’s beliefs in that they are neither simply dismissed nor endorsed. These women are allowed to be themselves so viewers can decide what they think and feel about them. It’s an approach I also favour journalistically, and I’ve received some criticism in the past for ‘providing a platform’ for somebody espousing dangerous conspiracies when I interviewed former nurse Kate Shemirani, and provided viewers with an insight into her beliefs.

How did you walk that line, Liz, between listening but not agreeing, and doing it in a human and personable way?

Liz Smith: Noelle and I met about 18 months before the road trip and we were introduced because I was looking into polarisation. I was asking myself questions like: why would any woman vote for Trump when he’s a misogynist? Why did January 6 happen? My films are all about democratic backsliding, and this was a great example of that. I’m also, obviously, particularly interested in women’s stories because I am a woman director and I am in my 50s. The story of women in their 50s isn’t one that’s often told.

The road trip was about seven days so Yvonne had the opportunity to explain [her beliefs] to me – and she’s a teacher, so she wanted to take us into the ‘5D’ world with her. So that dynamic really worked. Being a British filmmaker, the women didn’t quite know where to put me, so I could just be there and listen. If I had constantly pushed back and interrupted, we wouldn’t have gotten that deep story – and that’s an approach I take with all my films.

The level of polarisation that we’re at is so dangerous for society. If we’re going to get out of that, we need to start understanding what each side is thinking – and therefore letting them tell their stories, not ridiculing them or pushing back and saying that they are stupid [was crucial because] that wasn’t going to get us anywhere near the truth of why and how they think what they do by the end of the film. I still don’t have the same belief system as Yvonne or Tammy. In fact, I’m far, far away from that. But at least I understand where it comes from, and hopefully, when people watch the film, they will understand where it’s coming from.

The big shock of that journey for me was [realising] that they actually are true believers. These aren’t things that they say because it’s funny or interesting or it gives them a platform or they earn money from it. I think they really, really, genuinely, believe it – and I wouldn’t have been able to get my head around that until I’d been on the road trip with them.

Noelle Cook: After talking to dozens of women, they were the only two I was convinced were true believers, and part of the reason we were able to create this human look at them is because I originally approached this from an academic point of view with the methodology of ethnography in mind. Ethnography is a great shield in these situations, because I’m not an activist – I’m not going into it to change minds – I’m going into a different culture to understand their traditions and customs and the language. To understand what those things mean to them, not what they mean to me, and so that doesn’t require a push back – because I’m trying to learn from them. I was just hearing how they feel, which was a great tool.

What I hadn’t anticipated in doing that is developing empathy for them. I thought I’d be able to maintain a clinical distance from it but, by year two, I [had learned about] their entire childhood, their adulthood, and I could see the trajectory, and those tipping points throughout their lives that probably helped push [them in this direction]… That moment where you could go this way, or this way – and then you can see how this conspirituality belief system also serves as a set of coping mechanisms. In many ways, their explanations are part of a faith-based belief, but it’s also a coping mechanism, and I don’t think you can see that if you’re arguing with someone.

There’s a poignant moment in the documentary, Noelle, when you speak about developing empathy for these women and the human need for hope. It’s not something that may immediately come to mind for people when they think about those with conspiracy beliefs, but it seems to be a pretty key insight that helps explain why people are willingly escaping reality…

Liz Smith: With the current film I’m making about asylum seekers, I’ve met a lot of people who’ve been through dangerous journeys across the world, on boats, through deserts, and all these awful things, and I have been wondering what keeps them going. And they are using the method of hope as well, even when their situation is hopeless. I see so often in my conversations with them that [what keeps them going is] that they hope to get to the UK or to the next stage [of their asylum process] or whatever, and the alternative is so bad to even think about.

So the thing that keeps you going, even if it’s almost totally unrealistic, is hope. It’s so powerful, isn’t it? But what I find interesting is: why do some people go down the route of conspiracy theories to find their hope and others don’t? There are other forms of finding hope. Many people, with similar kinds of backgrounds, didn’t go down the rabbit hole during COVID. From the women we followed in the film, we’ve got some ideas around trauma and isolation; the need for participation. But other people who have had traumatic lives or were isolated and needed participation, didn’t all necessarily go down the conspiracy route.

Noelle Cook: They didn’t have nurturance. The one thing I know I had that they didn’t is at least one supportive adult in my life from the time I was small who I could rely on in some way. That is something neither Tammy nor Yvonne ever had.

[Tammy had an inconsistent relationship with her father growing up, while her stepfather sexually abused her. Her mother died when she was 11. Tammy had four children of her own by the time she was 25. Yvonne’s father was an alcoholic and she spent considerable periods of time in foster care and living away from her family growing up].

Liz Smith: That’s true. What I also think is interesting is when people ask: how do we get somebody out of conspiratorial thinking? And the first research [cited] is that fact-sheets aren’t going to work because they don’t trust trusted sources. What then often happens is friends and family can’t bear it anymore and so they step away – and that means the person with the conspiratorial thinking just goes to their ‘conspiracy family’ to find support and so the whole thing gets amplified in confirmation bias. The problem is there’s nobody left in their lives to help pull them back. I can totally understand why people shut [those with] conspiracy theories out because it’s just too much, it’s exhausting, and it’s really difficult – but, actually, in a way, that’s the worst thing to do, because if there is an opportunity [to engage with them] if they have a change [in their belief system], there’s still someone there that they can trust [to turn to]. I think, Noelle, you played that role quite well with Tammy unintentionally. You were that person she could trust, right?

Noelle Cook: But it was more about her real life circumstances, not her conspiracy beliefs.

In all the time I spoke with these women, we almost never spoke about Trump. I was never once asked about my political affiliation. It was automatically assumed I was okay with everything they were saying because I wasn’t pushing back and I wasn’t fighting them and I was still being kind to them – so I must be like them. That happened to me everywhere I went, from January 6 to the truck convoy I attended in Maryland, I was always accepted because I’m a white middle-aged woman, so I’m harmless and, if I’m there, I’m one of them. These women knew I was at January 6, they knew why I was there, they knew I was looking for a project and I was studying women’s participation – but they never asked me anything about myself. Yvonne said to me, after talking to me for two years, ‘I don’t think I even know what you do’.

Only a minority of people may hold the sorts of conspiracy beliefs that Yvonne and Tammy do, but there is a lot to learn from why the things they believe become attractive and convenient. In the film, when Yvonne is asked about why she believes what she does, she says that this world doesn’t make sense to her otherwise.

The loneliness epidemic, the loss of shared community spaces, ‘bowling alone’, the alienation and addiction of social media platforms, corruption, vast levels of socio-economic inequalities in hyper-capitalist societies such as the UK and the United States, ‘rugged individualism’… What are the more fundamental strands, which go beyond the situations of those like Yvonne and Tammy, that are illuminated by following the journeys of those who venture down rabbit holes for a way to live?

Liz Smith: With a lot of conspiracy theories, there’s this grain of truth, and then it just gets warped. It’s so interesting watching this film in the context of the recent Epstein revelations, because a lot of this [ideology] comes from the QAnon conspiracy theories that there is a cabal of paedophiles who are running a sex trafficking ring and sucking the blood of children. It seems so incredibly absurd, but then the Epstein Files came out and you realise there is an elite group of sex traffickers. There’s a lot of corruption. And so the idea that the elites are making us slaves, which actually comes from these deep, deep structural inequities that we have in life, which have just got worse and worse… It’s the same kind of fight, whether you’re on the left or the right, against these elites, which has a lot of truth in it. But with the conspiracy theories, this all just gets warped and put into whatever convenient narrative, such as ‘Pizzagate’, in which Hillary Clinton was apparently one of the Democrats who were the sort of reptiles doing the blood and sex trafficking, as well as the Royal Family. When you see so many things in life actually kind of relating to these theories a little bit, you can see where it comes from.

Our big problem is we’ve completely lost trust on all sides – left, right, centre: nobody trusts anybody anymore, and we’ve got to find our way back to truth. But how do we get there? If we can do these investigations, these explorations of different social groups and how and why they’re thinking and feeling [what they are], and start to understand and learn a bit more about them, rather than just shutting each other out, then that’s hopefully a little bit of a pathway back to building trust between the groups. But we’re so far gone I just sometimes wonder how we can ever rebuild the bridges and get the trust back.

Noelle Cook: What I’m just raging about inside right now is we wouldn’t be where we are right now if people with self-serving motivations, and their own personal goals, weren’t perpetuating it. Trump has been playing the ‘Q’ theme music at every rally in the background – average people aren’t going to pick up on that, but the Q supporters do and go ‘he’s sending us a message guys’. People like [Republican Representative] Marjorie Taylor Greene – she didn’t have an overnight epiphany, it wasn’t until Trump came at her and she fought back that now, all of a sudden, she is speaking out like she could have spoken out for the last 15 years if she wanted to. But because of her own motivations, her own goals, her own self-serving needs, she perpetuated this. These are self-serving opportunists who absolutely have no regard for human life and no respect for democracy. That’s why we moved into authoritarianism in America.

People like Yvonne and Tammy, they’re self-radicalising. And this wouldn’t exist without the internet. The right in the old days would have stayed in their fringe pocket. It would be a guy sitting within the four walls of his house, right? But the internet brought the right together and made it a movement, to the point that our politicians saw it as something they needed to glob onto in order to get elected.

Liz Smith: And of course, the people who are running the main platforms on the internet, have very, very vested interests and agendas.

Noelle Cook: A whole coverage industry sprung up. This can’t go away because a lot of people have no jobs. How many podcasters make a living from their office at home now? How many influencers rely on their monetised platform?

Coming back to identity and belonging – our human need for this as conscious, social, emotional, psychological creatures is not going to go away. At the same time, hyper-capitalist societies feel increasingly fractured, disconnected, and dehumanising – which is part of the appeal of conspiracies. How hopeful are you as to what can be done?

Noelle Cook: I don’t know about [what can happen in this] lifetime because what is required is dismantling and rebuilding so many things that were deliberately built from the beginning to keep us divided. Every country has its own version of a caste system, essentially. And there are no shared spaces where people can really congregate anymore. People go to the Trump rallies not to hear what he has to say, but because they can’t wait to meet the personalities that they know online – just like, if you go to Disneyland, you need to go and find Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy.

What I realised was how much of the social situation [of all this] was a replacement; [a way to deal with] the isolation and the loneliness. There’s a lot of reasons for that, but we don’t value people’s mental health in society. That’s the problem. And that’s why I’m still in touch with Tammy – I’m someone she can rely and depend on who doesn’t judge her; I’ll give her solid information that is in her best interest and not in my own. I [don’t see it so much as being a ‘good human’] as cooperative living. I see it as we’re all struggling through this together, and struggling in isolation is really awful. I think sometimes just knowing that [Tammy] has somebody she can pick up the phone to, who will answer her call, and spend even a couple hours with her, is what she needs. That’s what people need.

[When Tammy's child hung themselves in prison, Noelle was the first person she called].

Liz Smith: The key turning point was the 2008 financial crash. We thought it would be the end of the neoliberal philosophy. Suddenly, everybody realised that the American Dream… [wasn’t possible]. So bringing this back to identity and belonging, suddenly everyone starts questioning the story they’ve been told and this thing they’ve been building toward. They start asking: what is my identity in life? Where do I belong? And when you completely lose trust in this system that we’d all been bought into since the Reagan era, when that falls away, what do you do? You start getting your news just from Facebook and your close friends – because you no longer trust the biggest systems and structures that were in place for us. So I think 2008 was a really key tipping point for us which was then just loaded onto by COVID, and then a number of other instabilities.

Noelle Cook: She has had so much trauma in her life and, even though Tammy trusts me in the way she does, it doesn’t mean I’ve changed her belief system – because I can’t replace her identity in that community. If she was to say to me ‘you’re right’, then what’s she going to do for 16 hours a day? Because in 2012, her Facebook page showed her up at two in the morning asking if anyone was awake and wanted to talk. She was looking for any conversation, any human interaction. There was a constant attention-seeking for validation, for loneliness, because she was bored. [The conspiracists] have got an identity, a whole community around them now, and I can’t replace any of those things for her.

[Tammy has seen the film and was pleased that the main ‘hero image’ used to promote it is of her. She is still in touch with Noelle].

Noelle Cook is the author of The Conspiracists: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging. Liz Smith is an award-winning independent investigative filmmaker

For more information visit linktr.ee/TheConspiracists

A democratic republic will always attempt to root out corruption, as Thomas Paine, the English-born political activist who galvanised support for American independence, observed. But a monarchy or mixed government — he was thinking of Great Britain of the late eighteenth century — cannot survive without it. Corruption is the operating principle of autocratic rule. This is worth bearing in mind as we take in the Trump administration’s setbacks in the past weeks in Hungary and Iran.

To listen to conservative apologists, you might think that the defeat of Viktor Orbán’s pseudo-religious kleptocracy in Hungary offers a valuable lesson for supporters of Trump-style “populism.” Just go easy on the corruption, and don’t forget about the economy, and maybe then you won’t lose the next election.

But corruption is the baseline principle of autocratic regimes everywhere, and economic destruction is its inevitable byproduct.

The Iran war has prompted a similarly misguided hunt for a teachable moment. Maybe if the America First team had invested a little more in analysis and management, it wouldn’t be lurching from one deadly fiasco to the next, or so some suggest.

However, incompetence is ever the eternal helpmeet of corruption. Asking the Trump administration to relinquish ineptitude is like asking the proverbial leopard to give up its spots. It wouldn’t be Trumpism if it didn’t involve pushing individuals of principle and talent out of Government in favour of flunkies and grifters.

Consider last week’s election results in Hungary, where Peter Magyar’s centre-right party trounced former Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán, and the chaos and strategic folly involving Trump’s war of choice in Iran, which has unnecessarily turned the Strait of Hormuz, a critical global pipeline, into a political football. Both developments expose much of the basic machinery — and major failures — of the anti-democratic movement. They also represent a culmination of Christian nationalism and its modes of operation.

Pseudo-Religious Kleptocracy

Former Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán famously coined the term “illiberal democracy” to describe his own Government. It was nothing of the sort. It was a pseudo-religious kleptocracy: “pseudo-religious” because it involves the use or exploitation of religious imagery and narratives for political purposes, often by people who don’t even believe in the religion they are selling.

The outlines are at this point well-known, and the overwhelming majority of voters in Hungary appear to have seen the essentials. At the centre is the kleptocrat-in-chief. Everyone near him — his school buddies, his lieutenants — gets extremely rich. Everybody else gets a gerrymandered political system; a propagandistic media system; and, above all, a rush of religious nationalist ideology, spiced up with racist and misogynist rhetoric, because every authoritarian movement needs scapegoats.

To those with a passing grasp of American politics, this all sounds familiar. What is less well-known, however, is the extent to which this model relies on global support from like-minded pseudo-religious kleptocrats. Orbán received critical support from Russia, in exchange for which he abused Hungary’s membership in the European Union to stymie and degrade European interests and undermine the NATO Alliance. He also made excellent use of America’s supposedly conservative movement and its Christian nationalist organisations.

Here are some of the highlights of American religious nationalist movement’s involvement in the organised looting of Hungary:

The Heritage Foundation, the powerful organisation that coordinated Project 2025, signed a landmark “cooperation agreement” with the Danube Institute, a rightwing think-tank which that manufactured ideology for Orbán.

CPAC, which runs MAGA and Christian nationalism-aligned conferences several times every year, hosted five conferences in Hungary. In return, Orbán funnelled taxpayer money to CPAC.

But CPAC was hardly alone in supporting Orbán’s regime. The Alliance Defending Freedom, the well-funded legal advocacy organisation behind many of the court cases undermining church-state separation in the US, has dramatically increased its funding for its international outposts, which pursue the culture war causes dear to the hearts of autocrats like Orbán.

A Hungarian foundation channelled Government funds to Orbán-friendly American intellectuals like Rod Dreher and Christopher Rufo and the Claremont Institute’s Jeremy Carl, to dress up illiberalism in grand philosophical language.

The Claremont Institute has intensive ties, lavishing Orbán’s regime with gushing reviews as “the future of Europe” and getting involved in lobbying on behalf of Orbán.

JD Vance, who is best seen as the love child of the far-right Claremont Institute and the billionaire Peter Thiel, made his famous visit to Hungary on election eve, where he castigated the EU for alleged interfering in the election even as he himself interfered to help Orbán.

And, of course, Trump met with Orbán, praised him, and got him to denounce the threat of “antifa” . In fact, he and members of his administration are reportedly trying to invent “antifa” — or resistance to fascism — as an international threat and to tie it to groups and individuals in the US, in order to prosecute them.

For these and other groups who signed up for Orbán’s programme of enrichment for his friends and family, the election results must come as a setback. It remains to be seen whether democratic groups will succeed in rolling back the systemic changes Orbán enacted.

What we can take for granted is that neither America’s Christian nationalist leaders, nor their Russian allies, are likely to re-think their basic vision or mode of operation. In both Russia and America, the money machine that funds pseudo-religious kleptocracy is still present.

Furthermore, while the MAGA movement is showing some division around the war in Iran, there is little sign that the base of religious nationalist supporters has lost its appetite for culture wars against the supposedly “woke.”

I’d like to dwell a little longer on the religious-nationalist element that we saw in Hungary and continue to enjoy in the US.

Those who have not studied the movement often express some surprise on seeing the connection between Christian nationalism and corruption. These people are supposed to have Jesus and the Bible on their minds, not Mammon, right? But religious grifting is something of a cottage industry in the US.

Does anybody remember Jerry Falwell Jr, the high and holy Christian nationalist whose endorsement of Trump in 2016 was pivotal, but who then lost his job in a morass of yacht-based sex and money scandals?

This is a movement that doesn’t just succumb to the occasional grifter, but rather produces them regularly, and then backs the grifter-in-chief all the way to the end of time. More than that, as both Orbán and Trump have understood extremely well, religious nationalism offers a permission structure for the worst kinds of corruption, violence, and abuse. If God is on your side and the devil is on the other side, after all, anything goes.

Trump’s War-of-Choice

Now let’s turn from Hungary to Trump’s war-of-choice on Iran. A clue to the extraordinary blend of corruption and incompetence in this venture is to be found in Trump’s family deals with weapons companies, oil interests, and real estate ventures in the region. All of it is justified by the Christian nationalist rhetoric that has inevitably come to envelop it.

Here’s the key feature of these extraordinarily anti-democratic moves: It is that they are all done out in the open.

In the old days, we may have imagined that authoritarianism is something that happens in darkened rooms and in the silence of the oppressed. Today, authoritarianism operates according to a different set of principles. Its proponents don’t need or want to break the law in private or through secret dealings. They want to do it as publicly as possible, so that the public comes to the conclusion on its own that the law no longer matters.

The strategy here is to break the law in the open, over and over, until the law itself appears to be broken.

And that is the conclusion that the new, postmodern authoritarian wants you to reach. They want you to understand that all the nice words from the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation about the Constitution and “rule of law” are just for show. The Constitution, they say or imply, just means whatever the Dear Leader says it means. The “rule of law” just means that the leader is the law.

For those of us who live outside the information bubble of the anti-democratic movement, the meaning of events in Hungary and Iran should be clear. There is no compromise with Trumpism, wherever it is to be found. Like the Hungarians, we must throw the bums out. And then, as the Hungarians have vowed to do, we must hold them to account.

Katherine Stewart is the author of the New York Times bestseller Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy

Come and join Adrian Goldberg in conversation with Byline Times Political editor Adam Bienkov at 9am on Friday 24th April to discuss the question of the moment: “How long can Sir Keir Starmer survive as Prime Minister?”

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A Labour Government in deep trouble. A Conservative Party failing to take advantage. A new anti-Europe, anti-immigration party poaching disillusioned and dispossessed voters from both main parties. Industrial disruption across the public sector. Violence in the streets. Britain, in the late 1970s.

As a young reporter in Bradford, I was inspired to write about all this by what was going on around me. Having left journalism to write for the stage, I wrote a play about the rise of the National Front (not impenetrably disguised as the Nation Forward Party), in order to try and work out how a far-right, racist party could gain purchase in a country which had defeated Hitler less than 30 years before. The play was called Destiny and it was premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford 50 years ago.

Now, to mark the anniversary, Byline Times is producing readings of key scenes of the play – readers including Roger Allam, Geoffrey Streatfeild and Emma Manton –accompanied by a discussion of the play’s resonance today, on Sunday 3 May at the Cockpit Theatre in London’s Marylebone.

How it Began

For me, Destiny began with a national and a local event. Locally, in Bradford, I had covered meetings of an outfit called the Yorkshire Campaign to Stop Immigration. Its leader was a maverick and rather dapper ex-Conservative councillor, who produced a lurid duplicated newsletter (full of dire warnings of chicken bones lying in fetid rubbish piles and leprosy breaking out in Bradford schools), and presided benignly over chaotic meetings in which microphones fed back and films were shown upside down and without sound.

Later the organisation merged with the National Front. Racist and unpleasant it certainly was. But was clear was that – for its leader and his followers – the Yorkshire Campaign answered many real needs and some real fears.

Nationally, the Edward Heath Government’s correct decision to admit 27,000 British passport holding Asians from Uganda led to a hitherto obscure anti-immigration party, the National Front (NF), saving its deposit in a 1973 by-election in West Bromwich. The NF was thus well positioned to take advantage of the collapse in Conservative morale following its two election losses in 1974. Picking up some Conservative defections, the NF began to gain significant votes in 1976, winning 20% of the vote in Leicester (while the breakaway National Party won two council seats in Blackburn).

By then, Destiny was scheduled for production at the RSC’s small Stratford theatre, the Other Place. It had not been an easy journey to the stage. I’d wanted the play to be performed in a large multicultural city: the first draft - vast and impossible - was presented to and politely shelved by the Nottingham Playhouse. The second – slimmer and better - draft was scheduled by the Artistic Director of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre but vetoed by its Board.

The play then went round the houses, and was finally picked up by a young director at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Ron Daniels, who, despite the company’s earlier rejection of the play persuaded Artistic Director Trevor Nunn to programme it in the then fledgling Other Place, a small tin hut in the middle of rural Warwickshire. Its critical and box office success led the RSC – bravely – to transfer it to the RSC’s West End theatre, the Aldwych, the following spring.

The play hit town at an ominous moment – the National Front had just won 119,000 votes in London local elections. At the Aldwych, we were in repertoire with King Lear during the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, and it gave us some pleasure that the only two shows that didn’t see a dip in audiences during Jubilee week were an old play about a mad king dividing his kingdom, thereby provoking a civil war and a foreign invasion; and a new one warning that Britain was at risk of a fascist takeover.

Less enjoyably, a couple of weeks later, the play was picketed by the National Party, whose union flags echoed the patriotic bunting on the front of the theatre. The scuffles that broke out between the emerging audience and the National Party pickets were pretty small beer, compared to the (by now) regular confrontations between National Front marchers, the Anti-Nazi League and the police. But they demonstrated that the play was touching nerves.

The following January, a television version directed by Mike Newell (later to make Four Weddings and a Funeral and much else) was broadcast as a BBC Play for Today, the day after Margaret Thatcher had sought to see off the NF threat to her vote by assuring a television audience that “people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture”, a dog-whistle to be blown with increasing desperation by William Hague, David Cameron and Kemi Badenoch, and with greater assurance by Robert Jenrick and his new leader in Reform UK.

Destiny’s aim was put human flesh on the question of whether 1930s Germany was being repeated in 1970s Britain. The play’s opening was inspired by the fact that, the day of Indian independence, Major Enoch Powell had burnt his army uniform.

As Britain settled down to partying in the 1960s, the sudden collapse of the British Empire hung, silently, as a mighty dark cloud over the feast. This spectre was given substance when citizens from the newly-independent commonwealth countries flocked to Britain, in what seemed a taunting reminder of a time when they were Britain’s subject peoples.

The Britain of the 60s was full of the kind of people who had turned to the German Nazis – tradesmen, small businessmen and shopkeepers who felt threatened by conglomerate capital above them and a newly invigorated and confident working class below. It seemed to me that the loss of the Empire produced a similarly bewildered, angry, vengeful sense of defeat and betrayal as the loss of the first world war had in Germany.

From the beginning, I’d decided that the play should be built round a by-election, in which a loosely fictionalised far-right party would field a candidate. Now, I decided that the play should begin in India, on the night of its independence from Britain in August 1947, and establish four characters who would appear, 30 years later, in the same west midlands town: the British Colonel as a dying Conservative MP, the Major as a candidate for the nomination to succeed him, the Sergeant as a candidate for a far-right party and the Indian servant boy as a shop steward in a local foundry. During the by-election, a strike by Asian workers at the foundry becomes an election issue, turns violent, and transforms the election from a cosy English ritual into a bloody battleground. Finally, the Nation Forward party turns to the very ruling class forces that they claimed to oppose for succour and support.

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What the Play Got Right and What It Got Wrong.

In its immediate aftermath, the tally was this. The play had been right to assert that the leaders of the National Front had not only been Nazis but remained so, promoting Nazi anti-Semitic conspiracy theories (and holocaust denial) in an increasingly blatant way: in the slogan of the Anti-Nazi League, the National Front was indeed a Nazi Front. (This was by no means an accepted truth in liberal circles who saw an analogy between 1970s anti-immigration activists and 1930s German fascists as a grandiose left-wing fantasy).

The play demonstrated a then emerging split between fascists who wanted to appeal to the working class with left-wing economic policies (the equivalent of the Strasser faction of the German National Socialist Party, purged in the 1934 Night of the Long Knives) and those who supported capitalism – unless it was Jewish. By dramatising this split, Destiny predicted the emergence of the allegedly more moderate, “pinstriped Nazi” BNP leader Nick Griffin in the 1990s.

The most obvious thing the play got wrong was its overestimate of the strength of the National Front, which reached its zenith in 1977 and went down to a humiliating defeat in the 1979 general election, averaging 1.3% of the votes in the 303 seats it contested.

There is debate about the cause of the NF’s collapse: some point to Mrs Thatcher’s swamping statement and the revival of Tory confidence and élan under her leadership; others cite the cruelty of first-past-the-post to small parties; while the left (properly in my view) credits the Anti-Nazi League, Rock against Racism, Searchlight magazine and other organisations that mobilised so successfully against the far-right.

Most of all, the play seemed wrong in proposing that the British ruling class would consider supporting a militant far-right party to protect capitalism from militant trade unions and other left forces, as the German ruling class had done in 1933.

Certainly, there were former army officers (including General Sir Walter Walker and David Stirling, founder of the SAS), and newspaper magnates like the Mirror’s Cecil King, quietly canvassing paramilitary rule against trade union power; clearly, the National Front was trying to move into a growing hinterland between itself and the right-wing of the Conservative Party, including anti-common market organisations, supported by wayward businessmen.

The Conservatives certainly feared it: in December 1976, Thatcher’s ideologue Sir Keith Joseph presented a discussion paper arguing that if a Tory Government did nothing about the unions it risked “being pushed aside by parties to our right with the stomach to resist”. But the idea that British capitalism might consider backing a far-right party in the way that German business bankrolled the Nazis, as the only way to bring political and industrial anarchy under control, was clearly wrong.

So How Do Those Judgements Look Now?

National-populists across the continents have promoted left-wing economic policies in order to attract working-class voters, from Trump’s infrastructure promises via Boris Johnson’s levelling-up to Reform UK’s manifesto commitment to take a national stake in public utilities. (Like national populists in the 1930s, tending to drop the interventionist rhetoric when in or approaching power, as Jon Bloomfield and I point out in our Little Black Book of the Populist Right).

Conspiracy theories about sinister financial manipulators seeking to destroy the economies and cultures of nation-states – sometimes identified as Jewish, sometimes not – have become commonplace in right-wing discourse, and calls for “remigration” of immigrants and their descendants – a policy deemed too extreme by Nick Griffin’s BNP – are mouthed by allegedly mainstream politicians.

And, as Trump’s Republicans and Farage’s Reformers ditch loose talk about state intervention to protect the poor, MAGA militants are edged out of power and influence by the moguls of the US commanding heights, from Elon Musk to Peter Thiel.

Back in the day, Farage described Brexit as a victory over banks and big business; now, the core leadership of his party is dominated by multi-millionaires. Doubtless, it was Tice, Yusuf, Candy and their ilk who encouraged Farage to promise that Reform was “shamelessly pro-business and pro-entrepreneur”.

It’s bad news for democrats and progressives that the chickens which Destiny assessed wrongly are now coming home to roost.

So much of what seemed unthinkable in polite discourse then has elbowed its way into the mainstream now. Yes, of course, US democracy (and ours for that matter) is more robust and resistant than that of 1930s Germany (or Italy or Spain). But the widening of the Overton Window does beg the question that has been asked with ever-greater urgency since Trump’s second inauguration: whether he and other national-populist leaders are fascists in a 1930s mould.

Retrospect is a good servant but a bad master. The thing most people have forgotten about the National Front in the 1970s is that a lot of sensible liberal people thought they weren’t fascists until it was proved by what they said and did that they were. The crimes which defined Hitler’s regime lay (largely) uncommitted during his first year in office. If you weren’t Jewish or a Communist or a trade unionist, how might Hitler have looked in 1933? Might things have looked that much worse than they looked this very January, as masked and armed ICE agents stormed through Minneapolis?

Readings from Destiny will be performed, followed by a panel discussion - speakers include Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, the Observer’s Kenan Malik, former Searchlight editor Andy Bell and Asad Rehman, chaired by Byline’s Hardeep Matharu - at 2.00pm and 6.30pm at the Cockpit Theatre, Marylebone, on Sunday 3 May.

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In August the RSC’s long-standing Stratford Summer School will be devoting a day (27 August) to the history and legacy of the Other Place and its founder director Buzz Goodbody, and to the theatrical and political impact of Destiny.

Details and tickets here

David Edgar is co-author with Jon Bloomfield of The Little Black Book of the Populist Right, published by Byline Books and recently updated.

Polls consistently show that a majority of the British public hold a negative view of Elon Musk. Beyond his businesses and immense personal wealth, the US billionaire is best known for declaring that “civil war is inevitable” in the UK, and for amplifying far-right nativist movements across Europe.

But as historian Quinn Slobodian and technologist Ben Tarnoff argue in their new book Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, Musk is better understood not just as an erratic culture warrior or an influential billionaire, but as an exaggerated caricature of our broader economy and social settlement.

Muskism, nurtured in the tech fortress of apartheid South Africa and hardened in the gold rush of early Silicon Valley, is a philosophy both cynical and utopian. It amasses vast private fortunes by selling sovereignty – and dependency – to people and states alike. It woos investors with science fiction dreamworlds. And at its extremes, it treats people like bugs in the code, human life as little more than a system to be engineered by an elite minority.

Slobodian spoke to Byline Times about the state-backed foundations of Musk’s success, the power of technological fairy tales, and how a politics that begins on networks now risks reducing politics – and human connection itself – to a programme to be optimised.

Matt Gallagher: Elon Musk has been quieter recently – at least he’s not dominating the headlines as much – but it feels like we’re still living in his world. How would you best distill this broader idea of ‘Muskism‘?”

Quinn Slobodian: Since the late 1990s, a small number of tech firms have come to dominate economic life, and with that, power has concentrated in a very small number of individuals. Even when these companies go public, founders retain extraordinary control through things like dual-class shares. So the old idea of shareholder democracy has been hollowed out. That’s what makes a figure like Musk – a self-described “techno-king” – possible.

What we’re pointing to, then, is first the way the state has felt compelled to prop up and accelerate the growth of Silicon Valley firms, regardless of the phase – whether it’s social media, generative AI, or now hard tech and military applications. US governments, really since Clinton and Gore, have subordinated the future of the American political economy to the direction and desires of Silicon Valley.

Muskism is the outcome of that. It’s a system in which states, individuals, and households become dependent on tech infrastructure and services to exercise basic forms of sovereignty, or even just to carry out everyday tasks. We’re all, quite literally, inside the “walled gardens” of tech firms from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep – and, in many cases, even while we’re sleeping.

MG: How did Musk benefit from state intervention? And how do we compare his empire to companies like Peter Thiel’s Palantir, embedded in our militaries and health institutions?

QS: In the book we call it “state symbiosis.” Musk sought to leverage state capacity and state backstops for his enterprises. You see that from the very beginning: the internet itself is state-funded infrastructure. PayPal, which he co-founded with Peter Thiel, depended on the banking system and federal deposit insurance.

But we see it really clearly when Musk founds SpaceX in 2002, and the company exists largely because of the “network-centric” demands of the Global War on Terror.

Musk steps into that space and, in doing so, helps displace legacy military contractors. He does it in part through a particular kind of legal argument about procurement – arguing for open tenders that allow new entrants, rather than defaulting to established defence firms. What’s striking is that Palantir later uses almost exactly the same argument to secure its own early state contracts.

Then in 2008 Obama advances the idea that one way to achieve national security goals –specifically, disengagement from the Middle East – is to reduce fossil fuel dependency in the US economy. Musk was able to make a persuasive case that Tesla could be the carrier of Obama’s new green automotive future. That helped secure a nearly $500 million government loan at a critical moment – one that effectively saved the company from bankruptcy and set it up for what followed.

As these essential elements of national strategy and sovereignty are contracted out, you can see the dependency begin to build. In the book, we call it sovereignty-as-a-service.

MG: I’ll confess that, as a teenager in the mid 2010s, I read Elon Musk’s biography and I fully bought what he was selling. Can you speak to the power – and the profitability – of the science fiction stories he tells?

QS: Silicon Valley was always a high-risk, high-reward environment. What you’re expected to propose isn’t an incremental improvement, but something that creates an entirely new market. You have to come in and say: this product is going to change everything. So exaggeration – what could be called fabulation – is almost a necessary condition of success.

You have to be outlandish. And Musk is interesting in that context, because he’s not an especially polished or charismatic speaker. Like Peter Thiel, he often seems to fumble, to speak in half-formed thoughts. But that itself becomes part of the mystique for investors backing his ventures.

His promises about Mars, we argue, are often really about Earth. The grand visions tend to underwrite much more immediate, terrestrial projects. So, for example, you raise capital for something like Starship by talking about colonising Mars – building a vehicle large enough to carry people and infrastructure there. But the actual application, reportedly is likely to be suborbital delivery for the military.

So you have to take these far-reaching speculations seriously – but also ask what more immediate, material outcomes they’re serving. It’s in that space, between the grand narrative and the practical application, that the engine of Muskism really operates.

MG: That fabulism, those stories, become a key part of the persona he later builds on ‘X’. Can you speak to that ill-fated decision to purchase Twitter – what is that really about under the doctrine of Muskism?

QS: Around 2015–16, Musk is arguing that the best way to guard against a runaway, malevolent superintelligence is for humans to merge more fully with machines – to become a kind of human–machine symbiote capable of keeping pace with AI development.

So the mandate, as he sees it, is to deepen that integration. Neuralink, which follows quite soon after OpenAI – which he also co-founded – fits directly into that vision. And if you listen to how he talks about it at launch, it’s clear this isn’t just about medical applications – helping people with paralysis, for example. It’s conceived as a consumer technology, a way of expanding the interface between humans and networks.

He talks about creating a kind of “giant cyborg” – a tightly integrated human–machine system that can operate at a much faster rate than our current, relatively slow interfaces of eyes, fingers, and thumbs allow.

Our argument is that he’s operating with what you might call a cyborg vision of politics. In that view, political opinions don’t originate in the offline world – through material interests and social interaction – and then get expressed online. Instead, politics begins on networked platforms and then moves offline. So if you want to influence politics, you start with the machine.

And from that perspective, the acquisition of Twitter – however it was framed at the time as a commercial misstep – starts to look more intelligible. It has a kind of rationality within this cyborg model of politics, even if it doesn’t always appear that way when taken on its own terms.

MG: That was the beginning of what he called the ‘woke-mind virus’. Where did that idea come from, and how did it play out on ‘X’ and later when Donald Trump invited him into the White House?“

QS: The “woke mind virus” idea sounds absurd, and it’s often treated that way by critics, for good reason. But it actually draws on something more established. The notion of a “mind virus” comes from Richard Dawkins, who, whatever his politics, is a very prominent evolutionary biologist – and the person who coined the term “meme.”

Both concepts are built on the same premise: that human interaction operates in a way analogous to network technologies. Ideas aren’t necessarily processed rationally; they replicate through systems in a more mechanical way.

That allows bad or delusional ideas to spread, often uncontrollably, and to become very difficult to contain once they’re in circulation. When Dawkins introduced the term in the early 90s, he was explicitly drawing an analogy with computer viruses, which were then becoming a major concern in an increasingly networked world.

Musk takes up that framework, and it fits quite neatly with his broader, machine-first understanding of politics. The idea is that if you can control the network and eliminate the “virus,” then the system will function properly – people will fall into alignment with your goals.

Projects like DOGE were very explicitly framed in those terms. Musk described them, repeatedly on X, as efforts to enter the state and eliminate the woke mind virus from within the federal government. One part of that involved targeting what Althusser would call the “ideological state apparatuses” – higher education, research funding, and institutions tied to soft power, like USAID.

You saw this quite crudely in the way DOGE operatives used tools like ChatGPT to scan for anything associated with DEI, and then automatically flag or remove it. That’s the logic of deletion applied to politics – trying to excise the “virus” at its source.

He starts from this idea that politics originates in networks and then moves offline, he ends up seeing people themselves in quasi-digital terms – as contaminants within a system. The “illegal immigrant” becomes, in effect, an embodied computer virus – something that disrupts the optimisation of the system in the same way malicious code disrupts a network. And just as you would clean a codebase, the implication is that you cleanse the territory of these elements to restore proper functioning.

You can see that logic in how he operated at Twitter—becoming fixated on bots, on the idea of ghost employees, and then cutting the workforce dramatically. And then again in government, where a key part of the DOGE agenda was to make databases across different agencies interoperable—so they could be queried and cross-referenced more easily.

The goal there was legibility and control: to identify and remove what he would see as “human bots,” which in practice means undocumented migrants.

MG: Our latest edition looks at the AI industry today and its impact on society. Can you map Muskism on to what we’re seeing there – from notions of a ‘bubble’ to people communing with chatbots?“

QS: You absolutely can. What has motivated Musk and Altman is this idea that you can’t think about your moral obligations as an entrepreneur in terms of a single human lifespan. If you’re asking how your product improves people’s lives tomorrow or next year, you’re asking the wrong question. The real question, in their view, is how what you’re building now might shape human life thousands, even millions, of years into the future. This idea of “longtermism” has fallen out of fashion lately, but I don’t think it’s gone away.

The problem is that this isn’t a timescale that maps onto democratic politics. It’s not how political accountability works. So translating that kind of vision into real political legitimacy has proven extremely difficult.

The conditions for it are now breaking down. Energy is getting more expensive, capital is tightening – especially in places like the Gulf – and people are starting to see AI’s effects directly in their lives and workplaces. They’re also seeing the physical infrastructure – eyesore data centres being built in their communities – which makes the whole thing more tangible, and often more contentious.

Musk was previously able to maintain a certain legitimacy through consumer-facing products. He made desirable cars. He ran a social media platform where, at least for some users, there was a visible payoff – monetising engagement, even getting paid for posting. So there was something like a “fan contract,” if not a social contract. People could see what they were getting out of it.

With AI, it’s not clear there’s a contract at all. If you ask people what worries them most, it’s not necessarily job loss – it’s that the technology lies to them. They feel they’re being misled by generated text, images, and video, that they can’t trust what they’re seeing. That’s a very difficult foundation on which to build something as large as a transformation in the mode of production.

MG: What emerging forces pose the greatest challenge to Muskism?

QS: We started framing the response in terms of three “Rs”: regulation, replacement, and reimagination.

Regulation is the most familiar. That includes a return to something like the Biden-era antitrust and oversight policy. You also see it in the EU, especially around content moderation and data privacy. In many ways, Europe is ahead of the US here, simply because it has regulatory frameworks – like data protection laws – that the US still lacks.

But the more ambitious move now is replacement. There’s a growing push to build alternatives to Silicon Valley products. You can see that in things like the French government moving away from Microsoft systems toward Linux, or in the use of Eutelsat, the European low Earth orbit satellite network, for connectivity on major shipping fleets.

But the one we’re most interested in, is reimagination. That goes beyond simply replicating existing systems. It asks more fundamental questions: why are we using these technologies in the first place? How are they shaping human interaction? And in the case of generative AI, how are they shaping creativity in ways that might not be beneficial – and are likely to be destructive?

Our hope is that Musk, as a kind of extreme case, produces a sort of pedagogical shock. That it becomes harder to passively accept dependence on Silicon Valley infrastructures simply because they’re convenient.

At a certain point, once someone like Musk openly asserts that technology is political, it forces a broader recognition that it always was. And that opens up space to think differently about what we actually want these systems to do.

Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff is published by Penguin.

The first time I interviewed Dr Matthew Taylor, based on his book, The Violent Take It By Force, I finally understood the deal that religious leaders had made with Donald Trump and how they sold it to their flocks. The religious scholar explained that Trump was viewed as someone who had conquered mountains – media, business, government, arts and entertainment, among them – and that Christian supremacists felt their objectives could be met by supporting him, regardless of his flagrant un-Christian-like behaviours.

It was a Faustian deal, and quite frankly, Trump delivered. He delivered the judicial coup that led to the overturning of Roe v Wade, denying women bodily autonomy and health care rights – a longtime objective of the religious right. He gave them all they asked for – even moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to satisfy both evangelicals and his orthodox Jewish supporters.

As his Catholic base is forced to do some soul-searching over the fight he’s waging with Pope Leo, his Protestant Christian supporters must grapple with his recent blasphemy.

At Easter, he wrote on his social media site: “Open the fucking strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah,” referring to the Strait of Hormuz that has been closed since the US and Israel launched strikes on Feb 28.

Two days later, he posted that Iran would see its “entire civilisation” destroyed if it did not comply within 48 hours. And then, on Wednesday, he reposted and subsequently deleted an image of himself as Jesus with Satanic iconography in the background.

In a new interview with Matthew Taylor, whose forthcoming book Defying Tyrants: Following Jesus in a World of Christian Antichrists, offers Christian believers an off-ramp to safely turn away from supporting any global tyrants – from Trump to Putin – by explaining that Jesus was radically anti-authoritarian.

Heidi Siegmund Cuda: Before we get into your latest work, can you remind us of your background and the discoveries you made along the way related to Trumpism?

Dr Matthew Taylor: I grew up mainstream evangelical in Southern California. I had a career detour into doing a PhD into religious dialog and working on Muslim-Christian dialog. In recent years, I’ve gotten drawn into studying Christian nationalism and these different forms of Christian supremacy that we see ascendant all around us, and the ways those are intersecting with our politics – this far right, authoritarian shift that we’ve had in our politics and some of the theological forces behind that.

My second book, The Violent Take It By Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy, was focused on this movement called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) that I argue were the principal theological architects of January 6 and of Christian Trumpism.

These are the folks who were serving as that point of interface between American evangelicalism and the Trump-MAGA movement. And a very important figure in there is Paula White-Cain, who is now the Director of the White House Faith Office – literally the gatekeeper for religious leaders trying to get access to Donald Trump. And the New Apostolic Reformation, this network of leaders, has supplied the theological rationales for evangelicals to support Trump.

These include things like the ‘Seven Mountain Mandate’. This concept of Christian takeover of society through strategic deployment into particular sectors of society – government, education, arts and entertainment, media, etc – is a strategy for enacting Christian supremacy over a society. The NAR conceptualised and popularised this, but it’s spread far beyond traditional NAR circles.

This also includes all these prophecies about Trump, things that we’ve seen in recent weeks. People have been putting forward this idea that Trump is this prophesied saviour of America. I think he’s internalised that narrative in certain ways, especially since the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Trump has really pivoted into a bigger embrace of this. He doesn’t always understand the religious vocabulary that he uses. I mean, we’re speaking right after he posted this bizarre meme of himself as Jesus, and really overreached and even made some of the NAR people angry, right? So Trump doesn’t always calibrate his use of religious appeal, and I think part of that is for him, even when he makes a move into religion, it’s still about him, right?

He is still the centre of whatever religion he’s doing, where for those folks, at least ostensibly, Jesus or God or Christianity would be at the center of that. So he doesn’t always calibrate his appeals correctly, but those appeals are still rooted in theological frameworks, in prophetic frameworks that are often supplied by the NAR and Paula White-Cain and have become a big chunk of the Christian propaganda that keeps Trump in good standing with a radicalised portion of American evangelicalism.

HSC: Thank you. I think it’s really difficult for people to wrap their head around how so-called Christians can support him, and that was incredibly helpful. Let’s jump right into Defying Tyrants. What a perfect topic for this moment in time.

MT: My previous books have been more in the mode of religious studies, where I’m trying to describe religious phenomena. I identify myself clearly in those books as a Christian, but I’m not trying to speak Christianly, in those books. I’m trying to describe Christian phenomena, or in my first book, Muslim phenomena as well – how theology and identity is operating in modern America, in these communities, and especially in The Violent Take It By Force, where I am sounding a warning about the NAR.

But it is more of a civic warning. I’m trying to say “this is potentially a real threat to our democracy.”

We’ve already seen the ways through January 6, and through the first Trump administration. We can see this corrupting influence of these particular forms of theology on our democracy, the ways that they are polarising and harming our democracy, and even attempting to overturn our democracy to set up this more Christian authoritarian state.

Defying Tyrants is different in that I am trying to speak Christianly. Here, I am trying to use Christian theology. I have training in Christian theology. I can do both of those voices. I’m trying to argue against the worst excesses of these theologies.

Part of my motivation here is I’ve done a lot of work over the last few years of talking to experts and activists who have been opposing religious nationalism around the world.

My colleague Susan Hayward and I – Susie used to work at the United States Institute of Peace – we met in our PhD program. She’s a pastor on the front lines in Minneapolis, and was very involved in the protest there.

We did a podcast series in the Fall of 2025 called American Unexceptionalism, interviewing experts and activists from the front lines of opposing religious nationalism outside the United States.

So we were interviewing activists and scholars who study Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, or Islamic nationalism today in Turkey under Erdogan, or Hindu nationalism with Narendra Modi in India. And we’re trying to glean insights from people who have already been doing this work of protecting democracies against these religious nationalist, far-right authoritarian movements.

And one of the things we just kept hearing over and over in those interviews is just how important theology is for resisting these things. Because if you have a public square where one side of the argument is using theological arguments as saying, “Listen, Donald Trump is the divinely anointed king over America”, and the other side is coming back and saying, “Well, no, we have the rule of law, and we need to protect the Constitution, and we should have checks and balances in our government.” Those are just abstractions for a lot of people. And if one side is speaking using the vocabulary and symbolism of religious tradition, and the other side is trying to do this kind of secular enlightenment, “protect democracy” thing, then there’s a mismatch.

And part of what happens then is the people using religion start to dominate the religious conversation. I think we see that today. It is right-wing, and I would argue even far-right, voices in American Christianity who tend to dominate the conversation today.

I’m trying to intervene in that and say, “Actually, we the people who want to defend democracy, who want to protect the values of pluralism in our society, we can use theology too, and we need to counter these things.”

So the central argument of the book is that Jesus was deeply and profoundly anti-authoritarian. I mean, I think Jesus Christ might have been one of the most anti-authoritarian human beings to ever live. Right? He’s living under the Roman Empire where, literally, the Caesars proclaimed themselves to be gods that everyone has to bow and worship.

And they don’t really care whether you actually believe that they are a god. They want to see you bow, because that tells them that you are in line, that you are submissive.

And Jesus gets in a lot of trouble, because his teachings are pushing back against that and saying, “Actually, we know what a divine human being looks like and Caesar isn’t it”.

Jesus is calling his followers to subvert the logic of empire. And when Jesus talks about the kingdom of God, he’s not saying, “Well, we just need a heavenly empire to come in and take over”. The kingdom of God grows up from people.

This is why he’s always using nature parables. The kingdom of God is the place where the followers of Jesus are supposed to deny themselves, are supposed to take up their crosses, are supposed to serve and care for the people on the margins of society.

And so I think that understanding that kind of anti-authoritarian bent in early Christianity is very, very important.

Then the second sub-argument of that, and this is where the subtitle comes in – “following Jesus in a world of Christian antichrists” – I think we have, throughout the Christian tradition, largely misunderstood and misconstrued this concept of antichrist, even just at a biblical exegetical level.

I think people have just run roughshod over this biblical concept. So the word antichrist only occurs in two small epistles in the New Testament, First and Second John, and in those epistles, it’s as often plural as it is singular.

The very important pivotal passages in First John, chapter two, where the author says “you’ve heard that antichrist is coming, but now many antichrists have come”... and so clearly there’s a plural dimension to this word. And if you read those texts carefully, I argue in the book, the way it’s using this term antichrist is referring to Christians who are abusing power and claiming that they are superior to other people, superior to their fellow Christians, and superior to people outside of the church, and that therefore they are entitled to power. And from the perspective of the other church, this was antithetical to the teachings of Jesus.

And so you have this dynamic of people claiming to be aligned with Jesus, to be following Jesus, but doing the opposite, doing harm in the name of Jesus. And those are the people that get called antichrists in the New Testament. And so I think that’s actually a very valuable concept.

I’m not doing this to be polemical. I’m not doing this to be pejorative. Like, “Oh, we’ve got a new insult to throw around here. Peter Thiel wants to talk about the Antichrist.”

No, I think this is actually a meaningful theological concept that can help us make sense of how awful Christianity has been throughout history, because it’s a mixture of people who genuinely want to follow Jesus and who are doing good in the world, and many people who are there for just the power and the exploitation. And I think that when you use that lens to think about Christian history, I think it gives a new vigour to those of us who want to claim the way of Christ, to lay hold of the gospel and to actually defend the gospel, and not always be defending Christianity, because Christianity is a very mixed bag in its history.

HSC: What I think is so important about this is you are giving people on off ramp.

MT: I think the structure of our media in the United States today really wants to maintain a sort of even keel, and so there’s commonly this practice of what is sometimes pejoratively called ‘sane washing’, right? You’ve got a figure like Pete Hegseth who is undeniably an extremist in his rhetoric, in his ideology. I mean, Pete Hegseth has three tattoos on his body that invoke the Crusades, right, and the Crusades… the Crusades were objectively awful… he (reportedly) took those same images from his tattoos and stamped them on the cover of his Bible that he uses at these Pentagon prayer meetings.

This is a very deep ideology for him. And the Crusades are part of this medieval Antichrist theology that emerges. I argue in the book that this mentality of Christian imperialism, of Christian empire, of Christendom, that says that Christianity can be a tool for world conquest – and we see this pattern throughout Christian history – these things begin in the Crusades, but they also lead to European colonialism. And conquering the world for Jesus and sending out all these armies of missionaries that then subjugate native peoples and enslave Africans.

These things are all wound together around very toxic forms of Christian theology. And I think Pete Hegseth is a carrier of those toxic forms of theology, what I call in the book Antichrist theology. And when you think about somebody that extreme being in the position that he is in, what we worry about is exactly what is happening today. Pete Hegseth is a man who hates Muslims, and I don’t know any other way to put it. It’s there in his book, it’s there in his rhetoric. It’s there in his actions… and that’s the person who is the point of interface between our armed forces, the most lethal military force ever assembled on earth, and the president, who has a Messiah Complex.

Part of what saved American democracy at the end of Trump’s first term in the lead up to January 6, was that we had commanders in our military and secretaries of defense in that role who had a commitment to our Constitution and who, as Trump was trying to weaponize and use and deploy the US military against domestic protesters, they said no. They ruled out the possibility of Trump staging a military coup, and those ideas were percolating, that those ideas were being kicked around by people who were surrounding Trump and advising him, and it was the integrity of our armed services and our Secretary of Defense that stopped that.

Do you think that Pete Hegseth, if that situation arises in 2026 or in 2028, is going to stand on the principles of the Constitution? I have not seen any evidence of him having any commitment to those principles. His commitment is to Holy War, to Crusader ideology, and to this project of Christianization and Christian power. And frankly, of slaughtering and destroying Muslims through civilizational conflict. And so it is extremely concerning…

Trump is susceptible to the people around him. Trump is not ideological. Trump’s ideology is himself, and enriching and empowering himself. But it’s the people around him, the advisors, that he has, and he has surrounded himself with Christian extremists, a variety of kinds of Christian extremists, who don’t always agree.

JD Vance is a Christian extremist who leans more towards this kind of Catholic integralist, often vaguely anti-semitic, anti-Israel, anti-interventionist, Christian nationalism.

Hegseth is more a neo-Crusader ideologist, who just wants to see things blow up, especially Muslims. And then you’ve got the Paula White-Cains, who are in it for Israel and Christian Zionism and their own enrichment. Those are very different strands of Christian supremacy, and yet they are all people who are surrounding and advising Trump, and I think oftentimes, pushing him towards more extreme actions than he would personally be inclined to. Again, because his agenda is himself. They have these other agendas in the world that they are enacting through him.

You see Jesus pushing for this egalitarian vision, that in the economy of God, all human beings are equal before God, and there is no hierarchy. There are no oligarchs in the kingdom of God. There are no princes in the kingdom of God. There’s God who is the king, the king who serves, the king who sacrifices, the king who becomes one of us, who walks among us, and then there’s the rest of us who are dignified in God’s presence with us, and who then go and serve each other and care for each other.

So I think all attempts at creating Christian states and Christian governments are deeply, deeply misbegotten, and in fact, are violations of the ways that Jesus talked about and thought about politics and thought about humanity in the world. What we are seeing today is a rebellion against some of the insights of the Enlightenment.

The Founding Fathers, one of their great insights, was this idea of separating church and state. They had watched what happened in Europe through all of these Church State mergers that happened both in the lead up to the Reformation, the Holy Roman Empire, the ways the Catholic Church and the Pope played political games with the different princes and kings of Europe. But also in the aftermath of the Reformation, as you see these different forms of Protestantism, Calvinism, Lutheranism, making these different kinds of Constantinian bargains with the emerging nation states of Europe, and then prosecuting and persecuting the Christians who don’t conform to that. And the Founding Fathers said “we want to get away from that dynamic”.

And the separation of church and state was a very original idea at the end of the 18th century, somewhat inspired by the Enlightenment, but also just by pragmatics. There was no dominant Protestant sect in the United States. And if you empower the Episcopalians, aren’t they going to persecute the Lutherans and the Baptists? If you empower the Lutherans, aren’t they going to persecute the Episcopalians and the Baptists and the Presbyterians? So let’s actually just separate these things out. Let’s not have an official religion of the United States. Instead, let’s make this a space for everyone – that was a brilliant move, but there’s always been a backlash to it throughout American history. I am in favor of the separation of church and state, both because it benefits our government not to have religious extremists trying to capture our government for their extremist ends, but it also benefits the churches.

Religion has flourished in the United States because of the separation of church and state, because you don’t have a single entity at the top dictating American religion.

This is why you see all these varieties of religious expression throughout American history, many of them not even part of Christianity, right? These new religious movements that emerge and spring up within American pluralism. Pluralism benefits everyone except the people who want to dominate others.

What has happened, though, is that those who do want to use their religion to dominate others have gravitated and banded together around Donald Trump. They’ve all seen Trump as a vehicle for enacting their Christian virtues and Christian values and Christian dogmatism on others, and they are all trying to use this administration as a vehicle for that. I think that is deeply against the vision of Jesus and the life of the early church. It’s also incredibly harmful in this world.

I mean Christendom, this idea of the realm of Christian empires that dominate people and that of Christian tyrants, that has been one of the most harmful ideas in world history. That is what gave us the Crusades, that’s what gave us the Inquisition. That is what gave us European colonialism. That is what gave us the enslavement of Africans, right? And I think downstream, it was a huge contributing factor in the Holocaust.

We are still trying to restore some of the equality that existed in the world before the advent of Christian colonialism, and these folks want to bring it back. And I see the war in Iran, I see even Trump’s intervention in Venezuela and kidnapping Nicholas Maduro, as part of this global project of Christian power and Christian domination. You can see the ways that his advisors and even Trump himself, at times, are framing this as an empowerment of Christianity to the disempowerment of everyone else.

HSC: Anywhere I go, I seek out the oldest churches, the oldest cathedrals. Last week in London, I was in a church that was initially built in 1123. And I went to a church that had laid its first stone in 675 AD, and I got to look at a preserved Roman sidewalk and a Roman arch discovered in the Blitz. And I just love feeling close to the history in these really incredible spaces. And never in my lifetime did I think that an American president would pick a fight with the Pope, put out images of himself as Christ, and of course, lie about it. But what I’d like to get a comment from you about is his behavior forces those in his camp who wear the cross, like press secretary Karolyn Levitt, who acts holier than thou, and Speaker Mike Johnson, who acts holier than thou, to have to back him and make sense of his actions and what is wrong with them? Why at the risk of everything that allegedly they may believe, do they get up there and lie for this tyrant that everybody needs to resist, regardless of their faith?

MT: I think for a lot of these Christians, they have made a cynical bargain. The simple way of putting it is, “Trump is not a good man, but he’s God’s man for this moment”. This is the idea behind the kind of Cyrus anointing prophecy that is very popular in NAR circles equating Trump to Cyrus. This is the kind of rationalization that you sometimes hear from the more Calvinist crowd that inspires people like Pete Hegseth, that he’s the Christian Prince – “He is the one who is put atop the society by the hand of God”.

And so the goal is then to help shape and inspire that Christian Prince towards a particular vision of Christianity. This is nothing new in Christian history, there’s been a long legacy of Christian tyrants, people like Henry VIII, people like Constantine, who have manipulated and claimed religion for the furtherance of their own political ends and personal power. And I think part of what happens when you have a new tyrant emerging, a new Christian tyrant emerging, whether it’s Vladimir Putin, whether it’s Victor Orbán, whether it’s Jair Bolsonaro, whether it’s Donald Trump, is that almost like pilot fish around a shark, there are these theologians who emerge.

They are predators who are symbiotically tied to that tyrant and feel that they need to justify and continue to frame that tyrant as a means to their own power, as a means to their enacting their vision on the world. To put it in the terms that Jesus used, false prophets are making false messiahs out of tyrants, right? That is what we see. That’s the pattern we see throughout Christian history. And I think that those of us who identify as Christians, who identify as followers of Jesus, and I recognise not all of your audience would necessarily identify with that, and that’s fine, but those of us who do identify as Christians, I think it is our theological duty to call this stuff out, to confront this stuff with the gospel of Jesus.

Just to make a quick point, the word ‘gospel’ that we use in Christianity did not come from Christianity. It actually was being used by the Caesars as part of the Imperial cult, as part of the Pax Romana. And we found these inscriptions in the ancient world that say, “Hey, good news, good tidings, you are now dominated by a tyrant. His name is Augustus Caesar, and he is a son of God. He has been sent from God to dominate all the rest of you. And we have peace in the empire because you are dominated, good news”.

And so when Jesus and the other followers of his in the early church pick up this word, ‘gospel’, that is a political move, that is a political statement, and they are saying that is a false message. That is a propagandistic message. Let’s tell you the real good news, that God is not a tyrant, that God is not a dictator, that actually God is the kind of being that walks among us, the kind of being that lowers God’s self to be among the lowest in society to serve and to care and to sacrifice on behalf of others, right?

I think that part of the problem is that so many Christians throughout history have embraced the gospel of Caesar and rejected the Gospel of Jesus while claiming that it was the gospel of Jesus. And that is this Antichrist dynamic that I’m trying to get at in the book.

I think that this is a huge problem today, because, again, it’s not just Trump. We see this happening around Vladimir Putin. There are these Russian Orthodox priests and prelates today who are who are telling the Russian people that Vladimir Putin is God’s man on the throne, and that if you go and fight in Ukraine and go slaughter innocent Ukrainians that we invaded, that is part of a holy war and part of your redemption, using the old logic of the Crusades that is still going on today right now.

It’s a different manifestation, because it’s being filtered through a Russian Orthodox tradition, but it’s the same logic. It’s what we hear from Paula White-Cain and from Pete Hegseth and from JD Vance. And so yes, it is shocking to see a US President beefing with the Pope over theology and over his own megalomania. But it is not new in Christian history. In fact, it fits a very long and old pattern.

HSC: In your forthcoming book Defying Tyrants, you write: “If those of us who choose to follow the narrow path of Jesus Christ are true to our calling, we will incubate an entirely different way of being in the world from the way of being that supremacy offers. If we have no need to dominate, then we are indomitable.”

And that’s what I want to leave people with. I think that’s a beautiful summation of where we should be heading. Jason Stanley, the great political philosopher, who understands very much how fascism works, believes faith leaders have to lead us out of this together. And I think you’ve just made a strong argument for that.

MT: Thank you. I hope so.

Defying Tyrants: Following Jesus in a World of Christian Antichrists will be published in October 2026 by Broadleaf Books

Dr Matthew D. Taylor is the author of The Violent Take It by Force, Defying Tyrants, and Scripture People, and his work has appeared or been featured in the New York Times, Weekend Edition, On the Media, Rolling Stone, The Bulwark, Politico, Sojourners, and Religion News Service. A religious studies scholar who specialises in American Islam, Christian nationalism, and Christian extremism, he is also the creator of two podcast series: Charismatic Revival Fury and American Unexceptionalism. Taylor holds a PhD from Georgetown University and an MA from Fuller Theological Seminary. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Center on Faith and Justice at Georgetown University.

Emmy award-winning investigative reporter, Heidi Siegmund Cuda is an American correspondent for Byline Times and her Hot Type column runs bimonthly in Byline Times Substack. She is a #1 Amazon bestselling author, the co-host of RADICALIZED Truth Survives podcast, and her Bette Dangerous Substack is read in 99 countries.

The world has crossed a tipping point into an era of permanently declining fossil fuel supplies — and unless governments and industry act on that reality now, the result will be a full-system breakdown across every sector on which modern civilisation depends.

The war on Iran has broken five critical systems at the same time — energy, food, industry, pharmaceuticals and government finances — and each failure is feeding every other in a self-reinforcing spiral. The fossil fuel system driving it all was already in structural collapse before the first missile was fired. The war has accelerated a process that physics and geology had set in motion long before it. There is no return to normal.

The components of the crisis are being reported in isolation — the oil price spike, the fertiliser shortage, stagflation, pharmaceutical supply chains — but what the fragmented coverage misses is that they are faces of a single systemic fracture.

Our new working paper published by the Club of Rome’s Earth4All initiative, co-authored with energy and finance specialists with experience across Shell, Lightsource BP, the World Economic Forum and the Energy Transitions Commission, maps the full architecture of this crisis – and the exit route.

How Civilisational Collapse Works

In 2002, systems analyst Thomas Homer-Dixon mapped how modern civilisations break down. He chose an Israel–Iran war closing the Strait of Hormuz as his example. A quarter of a century later, the process he described is now unfolding in real time.

Complex societies do not collapse from a single blow. They collapse when multiple systems fail at once and each failure makes every other one worse – faster than institutions can respond. Homer-Dixon called this “synchronous failure”.

The mechanism is a ratchet: each crisis depletes the buffers – savings, fiscal headroom, political trust, industrial capacity – that the next crisis would need. Eventually the gap between the scale of the problem and the institutional capacity to respond becomes too wide to bridge.

Consider where Britain and Europe stand right now. The same Gulf disruption pushing up energy bills has shut down the Qatar Fertiliser Company (QAFCO) – the world’s largest single producer of urea, the most widely used nitrogen fertiliser. The Gulf supplies nearly half the world’s traded urea.

The shutdown arrived just as farmers were preparing to plant. Fertiliser that was not applied in March and April means smaller harvests this autumn and unstoppable food price rises over the winter – landing at the same moment that higher energy bills hit households from July.

The same shock is degrading pharmaceutical supply chains. Generic medicines make up 85% of NHS prescriptions and operate on razor-thin margins. Freight costs are running 45% above pre-war levels. Within months, medicines for chronic conditions – cardiovascular, diabetic, psychiatric – may become too expensive to supply. These are the daily medications on which millions of people depend.

The same petrochemical disruption is accelerating the collapse of European industry. UK chemical output had already fallen 30% from 2019. The UK’s last major ethylene cracker at Grangemouth is on government life support. Once it shuts, the country will have no domestic polymer production of scale. Facilities closing under current cost structures are unlikely to be able to attract the capital to reopen. There is a serious risk that the industrial base on which any future recovery depends is being permanently destroyed.

And the UK Government has already spent much its capacity to help. More than £100 billion went to supporting households through the 2022 energy crisis. That capacity is gone. Inflation is forecast at 4% for 2026, potentially above 5%, so the Bank of England cannot cut interest rates, let alone keep rising rates at bay. Raising rates pushes up mortgage costs for people already paying more for energy and food. The two instruments that governments normally use to soften a downturn – fiscal spending and central bank rate cuts – are being crunched at the same moment. There is no institutional cushion left.

This is Homer-Dixon’s ratchet in action. In 2022, every buffer available was deployed to cushion the crisis impacts, and the conditions were still destabilising. Governments could borrow. Central banks could lend. Households had savings. Industrial capacity was intact. The system buckled, but it held.

In 2026, the load is higher across every channel and every buffer has been depleted by the last crisis. Each failing system degrades the environment in which every other system must operate.

The Government’s inability to borrow at scale means it has limited means to cushion the coming food and energy shock. Industrial closures destroy the tax base and skilled employment that would fund recovery.

The food and energy price spikes, landing on a population with depleted savings, generate the political conditions – short-termism, demands for immediate relief, fragmented mandates – that make any longer term structural response difficult to sustain.

The crisis may well consume the political capacity that would be needed to solve it. The danger of looming synchronous failure is hanging over UK and European economies like heavy clouds ready to unleash the storm.

The Engine Behind the Collapse

The experts are sounding the alarm. But they don’t really understand the stakes.

Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), called this “the greatest energy security threat in history.” The IMF’s chief economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas described it as a “classic negative supply shock.” Jeff Currie of the Carlyle Group warned that the world will have the energy transition “forced on us in a very painful way.” US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pressed for fossil fuel expansion as the answer. They are all right about the severity. They are all wrong about the cause.

Birol’s prescription – diversify suppliers, diversify fuels, diversify trade routes – assumes a functioning fossil fuel system that can be rerouted. Gourinchas’s IMF assumes a “short-lived conflict” and therefore a temporary disruption. Bessent’s argument assumes US production can expand to fill the gap. All three share a hidden premise: that the global fossil fuel system is recoverable.

Our assessment is that this is simply not the case. The war has accelerated the collapse of a system that was already dying. The window into the realisation comes from a concept called “Energy Return On Investment” (EROI).

Every energy source requires energy to produce. Oil must be drilled, pumped, refined and transported – all of which consumes energy. The critical measure is how much usable energy you get back for each unit you put in.

In the 1960s, the global oil industry got roughly 44 units of energy back for every one it spent. But that ratio has been declining, and by today, it has roughly halved. A study published in Nature Energy found that once you account for all the refining, transport and processing, the real return is as low as six to one – and falling.

By 2030 – in just four years – the oil industry is projected to burn through a quarter of all the energy it produces just to keep producing.

Everything in modern civilisation runs on the surplus energy that the fossil fuel system delivers. Every hospital, every harvest, every heating system, every factory, every supply chain depends on the margin between the energy the oil industry produces and the energy it consumes in producing it. That margin is collapsing.

As it shrinks, the energy system that sustains industrial civilisation loses the capacity to sustain it. The repeated crises of 2008, 2020, 2022 and 2026 are the symptoms of a system whose surplus is vanishing – each one arriving sooner and hitting harder, because the energy physics beneath the global economy are deteriorating on a curve no ceasefire can reverse.

US shale – which supplied 90% of the world’s oil production growth since 2015 — is plateauing before a peak and terminal decline, according to the US Government’s own Energy Information Administration. Nearly 90% of the money the industry has invested since 2019 has gone to stopping existing wells from dying, rather than opening new ones.

Production is declining simultaneously across the UK, Mexico, Nigeria and Europe. The world’s supply buffer – OPEC’s approximately 5.3 million barrels per day of spare capacity – sits behind the Strait of Hormuz, physically inaccessible because of the conflict causing the shock.

This reveals why the 1970s analogy that Birol and others reach for is so misleading: in 1973, the shock was a political embargo on a physically abundant system, and the solution — drill more, diversify suppliers — worked because the underlying resource base was rich. In 2026, the resource base itself is exhausted.

The damage is permanent because because both supply and demand are being destroyed at the same time, and neither can return to what it was. The oil and gas taken off the market by the Hormuz closure and the Gulf infrastructure strikes cannot come back for years: Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG complex alone needs three to five years to rebuild, because the specialist gas turbines required sit behind global order backlogs of two to four years.

While that capacity is offline, production is already declining across every other major producer, with no one left to expand into the shortfall. And what does eventually come back will be restoring a fraction of what was lost into a global system whose total production base is structurally smaller than it was before the war.

On the demand side, households and industry are restructuring around scarcity — factories closing, supply chains rerouting, consumption patterns permanently reshaping. The IEA is now recording the first global oil demand drop since the COVID crisis.

But unlike that crisis, there is no route for these changes to reverse: the capital is gone, the infrastructure is repurposed, the demand is destroyed. The age of cheap, abundant oil is over, and it is not coming back.

The Exit to Superabundance

The scale of the threat demands an exit of equal scale. Thankfully, that exit already exists. We just need to walk through it.

Solar panels and wind turbines, once built, produce electricity at near-zero running cost with no fuel input. This is a fundamentally different kind of energy system – one whose costs are set by domestic infrastructure investment rather than global commodity prices, and whose output does not deplete with use.

In February 2026, an international scientific review by more than 25 expert teams, published through the IEA, confirmed that fully renewable electricity systems – delivering power around the clock, every day of the year – are achievable and affordable if we do one thing: design for superabundance.

We need to build a system that generates far more electricity than the country currently consumes. RethinkX modelling identifies an optimal UK system producing eight to 14 times current electricity output, at $747 per person per year over 20 years – roughly what the country already spends on energy.

That surplus electricity is itself the foundation of industrial revival: cheap, abundant clean power enables green hydrogen, synthetic fuels for aviation, ammonia for fertilisers, low-carbon steelmaking and data centres.

Countries that build this capacity first will host these new industries, protect their populations, and secure their sovereignty. Countries that do not will import energy from those that do, and remain exposed to every future fossil fuel shock.

Offshore wind delivered through Contracts for Difference at £37–50 per MWh already undercuts gas-fired generation at £80–120 per MWh.

Building the superabundant alternative costs less than what the Government spent on emergency fossil fuel support in 2022–2024. That £100 billion bought temporary fiscal relief and left the country just as vulnerable to the next shock. The same sum invested in clean energy infrastructure will deliver a permanent productive asset and removes the vulnerability for good.

But it’s not enough to build the new supply. Backwards thinking has meant that clean energy we are already producing is not being supplied where it’s most needed due to grid bottlenecks.

Our working paper sets out five immediate actions.

First, invoke energy security powers to fast-track planning for shovel-ready renewable and storage projects. Every month of delay is a month of continued exposure to gas-price shocks on household bills.

Second, force grid operators to clear connection backlogs within six months under regulatory penalty, and rebalance policy levies so heat pumps are no longer penalised against gas boilers despite being three to four times more efficient.

Third, end the marginal pricing rule that lets gas set electricity prices even when renewables dominate supply. This is the single most effective measure to shield households from the next fossil fuel shock.

Fourth, redirect UK pension capital — more than £2.5 trillion that remains systematically underweight in domestic clean energy while holding fossil fuel exposure — through reformed FCA and Pensions Regulator fiduciary guidance.

Fifth, build manufacturing capacity for solar panels, batteries and critical minerals by leveraging AUKUS for lithium and rare earths, and EU-India for solar.

Windfall profit taxes on oil and gas majors — currently running at €81.4 million a day in the EU alone — fund the transition.

This is the roadmap to rapid transformation – unlocking renewables as the route to what we call “electrified sovereignty”: industrial protection and national prosperity.

The Civilisational Stakes

The world has reached an inflection point. How governments respond in the coming weeks will determine whether the global economy undergoes a managed transformation to a fundamentally more powerful energy system, or an unmanaged breakdown. The window is narrowing with every shock. The question is whether policymakers recognise this in time to build the alternative — before the political capacity to act has itself been destroyed.

Watch Nafeez Ahmed here in conversation with Adrian Goldberg on the Byline Times podcast.

General Michael Flynn, Trump’s former National Security advisor, boasted to the Young America Foundation soon after Trump’s first election victory in 2016, that the President’s campaign had been a quasi-military “insurgency” run by “digital soldiers”.

That same year the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence’s official journal StratCom, published a paper entitled ‘It’s Time to Embrace Memetic Warfare’.

Its author was Jeff Giesea, an investor and political operative, who had run companies on behalf of pro-Trump billionaire Peter Thiel, co-founder of defence surveillance giant Palantir and business partner of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

At the time Giesea defined memetic warfare, a term he coined, as “a subset of information operations or psychological warfare tailored to social media”.

To illustrate its applications, he drew on the expertise of a co-contributor he described as “an annoying gadfly or guerrilla warrior, depending on one’s perspective”: far-right activist and disinformation operator Charles C. Johnson.

The paper proposed methods by which to undermine ISIS: “systematically lure and entrap” recruiters; subvert its messaging via “fake ‘sockpuppet’ accounts” – online personas manufactured to simulate grassroots support or opposition – and “expose and harass people” within its funding network, “including their family members”.

To the editors of the NATO journal, these may have appeared as novel strategic prescriptions. In fact, they had already appeared – in a different context entirely.

In 2011, hackers breached the servers of HBGary Federal, a private US intelligence contractor, and leaked internal documents revealing a proposed operation – developed with involvement from Thiel’s data company Palantir – to deploy near-identical tactics against trade unions, journalists and left-wing activists on American soil.

This reporter was among those who covered the breach at the time, and who first drew public attention to Palantir’s role in it — the beginning of more than a decade tracking the network this piece describes.

The proposal included fabricating fake online personas, planting false information, and running coordinated harassment campaigns to discredit targets. Palantir suspended the employees involved and issued an apology, but the documents had already established that this tactical repertoire existed, was operational, and ran through Thiel’s own firm.

Those tactics had been developed and deployed over years by a loose network of far-right organisations – funded, in part, by figures directly connected to Thiel.

That infrastructure centred on a cluster of white supremacist and hard-right online platforms – among them the neo-Nazi publication Daily Stormer — covertly funded, according to participants, by Giesea. The same platforms served as testing grounds for the harassment campaigns, disinformation operations and memetic tactics that Giesea would later present to a NATO-affiliated journal as a respectable strategic toolkit.

Connecting those platforms to Thiel’s wider network was a single figure: Andrew Auernheimer, a hacker and neo-Nazi provocateur known online as “Weev”. His ties to Thiel had been rumoured in leaked Epstein correspondence, but had never previously been corroborated. They can now be established — through Auernheimer’s own private statements and a decade of documented network activity — for the first time.

Auernheimer was, in effect, a bridge. He moved between the anarchic image-board subcultures of the early internet and organised white supremacist movements. He connected the PayPal and Palantir milieu around Thiel to the alt-right he helped create and harness. And he linked the first generation of online harassment operations to the contemporary influence networks that today increasingly shape mainstream political discourse.

Jeff Giesea, Charles Johnson

In Discord server logs – a messaging platform used widely by gaming and political communities – as first reported by journalist Luke O’Brien in his 2020 investigation into Thiel’s development of the alt-right, Auernheimer described Giesea as “a major investor providing help to racists”.

Giesea initially denied this. When confronted with evidence of a $5,000 donation to the white supremacist organisation led by Richard Spencer, he replied: “No comment.”

Giesea’s financial support for the neo-Nazi platform Daily Stormer along with other associated projects run by Auernheimer and Johnson has since been confirmed by other participants in those networks.

One identified Epstein attorney Alan Dershowitz as another Epstein associate involved in the Giesea project during his producing role on Mike Cernovich’s 2016 documentary Silenced: Our War on Free Speech – a film featuring Auernheimer, Johnson and Milo Yiannopoulos.

Andrew Auernheimer: Formation and Function

Like Johnson, Weev served as an operational connector, moving between overlapping worlds that were, in other contexts, kept separate – the anarchic image-board subcultures of the early internet, white supremacist organising, the investment and intelligence networks around Thiel, and the broader influence ecosystems that shaped the 2016 political cycle and its aftermath.

Auernheimer’s elevation was made possible by such things as 4chan, the image-board platform that served as an incubator of memes, organised harassment campaigns known as “raids”, and novel forms of information warfare.

He was also a prolific editor of Encyclopedia Dramatica, a wiki that catalogued 4chan-era internet culture and its developing repertoire of tactics.

Auernheimer gained early notoriety for using an Amazon exploit to flag LGBT materials as inappropriate in what he characterised as a strike against “the hypocracy [sic] of the gay community” – and for founding trolling collectives from which he recruited operatives for more consequential ventures.

After being indicted by the Department of Justice (DOJ) for exploiting a vulnerability in AT&T’s systems to extract exposed data of more than 100,000 customers, which he shared with the outlet Gawker, he became a temporarily useful ersatz hero of civil liberties campaigners.

The Thiel and Epstein Connections

As with much else involving Thiel’s network, Aurenheimer’s role was initially concealed until referenced in leaked correspondence.

On 17 November 2014, the technologist Vincenzo Iozzo emailed the financier Jeffrey Epstein, alerting him that a novel hedge fund strategy he and Epstein had been developing was already being executed by Auernheimer, reportedly funded by Thiel:

“I’ve heard rumors that Thiel (who I believe you know) was bankrolling this dude: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev to do similar things.”

Auernheimer had effectively confirmed his relationship with Thiel six months earlier in what he believed to be a private conversation.

“I have run a hedge fund, I am starting another one, and it is not nearly as regulated,” Weev stated, having separately referenced “a meeting with Peter Thiel’s right hand this week”.

In the same exchange, he spoke warmly of the eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who played a central role in PayPal’s creation alongside Thiel: “I’ve met Pierre, I like Pierre, and he’s a friend of a close friend.”

The /pol/ Board, GamerGate and the Radicalisation Infrastructure

In November 2011, Boris Nikolic – a biotech investor later named as a trustee in Epstein’s will – wrote to Epstein linking to a Washington Post article on 4chan’s political influence, noting: “The potential for manipulation is huge.”

The email followed Epstein’s first meeting with Chris Poole, 4chan’s founder. Days later, 4chan launched its /pol/ board – a “Politically Incorrect” forum that would become a central organising space for online far-right radicalisation.

The /pol/ board subsequently served as a primary incubator for GamerGate, the 2014 online harassment campaign directed primarily at women in the games industry. Auernheimer and Yiannopoulos were both instrumentally involved in driving elements of that campaign.

Auernheimer came from the same 4chan ecosystem that had given rise to Anonymous, but from an ideologically opposite direction: he played no part in its broadly leftist anti-authoritarian campaigns.

Soon after he was released from prison – his chest now adorned with a massive swastika tattoo – in 2014.

GamerGate and the constituency it mobilised later migrated to 8chan, the image-board founded by Auernheimer’s associate Frederick Brennan, who also contributed to Daily Stormer. 8chan went on to function as a central dissemination space for QAnon as it continued to embed itself in mainstream Republican politics.

By 2016, Auernheimer was writing to an associate that he was “working on facial recognition, specifically about black people”. In 2017, Charles Johnson announced on Facebook that he was “building algorithms to ID all the illegal immigrants for the deportation squads”.

Clearview AI – the facial recognition company that subsequently expanded the capabilities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – launched in 2018, seed-funded by Thiel, operating under Johnson’s Giesea-funded software framework WeSearchr, and represented in legal matters by Aurenheimer’s longtime lawyer, Tor Ekeland.

Johnson, Auernheimer, Giesea, Yiannopoulos, Dershowitz and Thiel did not respond to requests for comment.

Ekeland objected to the allegation that Auernheimer used an “exploit” on AT&T, telling Byline Times: “All that happened was his alleged co-conspirator Daniel Spitler wrote a script to access non password protected, publicly facing information – email addresses, on an unsecured server.”

The Scale of the Network

In 2016, Jeffrey Epstein wrote to Peter Thiel summarising what he saw as the political opportunity opened by the Brexit vote: “return to tribalism. counter to globalisation. amazing new alliances.” This, he concluded, was “just the beginning.”

What the documented record shows across a decade is a consistent pattern.

Tactics developed in far-right corners of internet culture – harassment campaigns, disinformation operations, sockpuppet networks, memetic influence campaigns – were progressively absorbed into elite political and strategic discourse, sometimes through the same operators who first deployed them.

Far from an anomaly, the NATO StratCom paper Giesea co-authored with Johnson was a culmination of this activity.

As General Flynn’s son, Michael Flynn Jr., boasted last year: “The public has no idea how massive our Digital Army is.”

“Voters in Hungary are aware of the fact that this was a decision between two evils – and Péter Magyar is the lesser evil.”

Amid the rejoicing of liberals across Europe and the United States over the defeat of Hungary’s authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán, Dr Georgios Samaras, an academic specialising in the far right at the School for Government and the Policy Institute, King’s College London, sounds a cautionary note on the latest Byline Times Podcast. Yes, the new Prime Minister Magyar may be more friendly towards the European Union and NATO but he is, says Samaras, still a conservative figure working within a framework established by Orbán’s Fidesz party.

“There’s this assumption that once the strongman loses, democracy returns [but] over 16 years, Fidesz managed to rewrite the constitution to weaken institutions,” Samaras argues. “Judicial independence is no longer a thing. Media freedom is no longer a thing. So in order to reverse this, a political party must come from the left. It must come from an extremely progressive political land that doesn’t exist in Hungary. The fact that Orbán lost doesn’t mean that a return to liberal democracy is guaranteed, because Fidesz had entrenched itself in laws and state bodies. It’s literally everywhere. So I would definitely push back firmly on the idea that Péter Magyar represents a progressive break.”

Samaras points out that Magyar was himself a prominent Fidesz politician who once held various Government roles, including a position in Orbán’s office, before rebelling against Government corruption and joining the opposition Tisza party in 2024. Part of his electoral appeal derived from the fact that he was not Orbán, but in Samaras’s analysis, the two men aren’t that far apart ideologically. “Magyar wants to suspend permits to workers from outside the EU; he opposes migration quotas. He doesn’t like location of migrants. He has not really addressed LGBTQ rights…”

The “deeply authoritarian” structures imposed by Orbán will now, Samaras says, empower his successor. “So Orbán is gone. Fine [but] these embedded forms do not disappear overnight. In this case, we are talking about a system that was created over 16 years, and loyalists remain in power. It’s the whole public administration. So this kind of conservative ‘common sense’ that Fidesz spent years creating still exists. Now the question is, does Magyar go after this? I don’t see him abandoning the tools that Fidesz left behind. These are powerful political tools that, once inherited, create powers and flexibility that most leaders would not really want to just destroy.”

At the same time as urging caution about Magyar’s ascendancy, Samaras acknowledges that Orbán’s departure will come as a blow to President Trump, Nigel Farage and other conservative nationalists – a view echoed by David Edgar and Jon Bloomfield on this Substack.

Hungary’s symbolic value to Trump and MAGA was underlined a few days before Sunday’s election when US Deputy President JD Vance appeared at rally for Orbán and posed for pictures with him – to no avail. Magyar romped home with a two-thirds majority, and now has a secure grip on power, despite fears that his opponent might seek to undermine the legitimacy of the vote.

“Hungary has indeed achieved something quite real,” Samaras says. “I’m not going to downplay this. Orbán has been removed, and we have a new political entity and a new political leader who has secured a parliamentary super majority.” Magyar, he acknowledges, may even “repair some of the ties with the EU and reverse some of the worst forms of capture.”

But he cautions that the new leader’s “continuity with Hungarian rights on migration and nationalism is deeply alarming. Hungary is a broken country under Orbán. Hungary is the most expensive country right now in the EU [and] the question we need to ask is, ‘what made Orbánism possible?’ If we pinpoint the reasons why it became so powerful [and ask] ‘has Hungary fixed itself after this election?’ I think that the answer is no.

“Orbánism survived for 16 years. It is a political ideology that is not going to go away anytime soon.”

Watch or listen to Adrian Goldberg’s full interview with Dr Georgios Samaras here.

As Neville Chamberlain said of Czechoslovakia when approving of its break-up in 1938, “it’s a small, far-away country of which we know little.” For many, the same could be said today of its neighbour Hungary, a land-locked country in the centre of Europe, with only ten million people, an impenetrable language and whose GDP per head ranks as just 23rd out of the 27 EU countries. Yet Sunday’s national election result has profound significance not just for its own citizens but for the rest of the world too.

Why?

Viktor Orbán, the country’s four-time Prime Minister, first elected in 2010, has been the creator and arch-promoter of national populism’s core philosophy of ‘illiberal democracy.’ The former liberal dissident, aided in the 1980s by the George Soros foundation, swung his Fidesz party dramatically to the right in the 2000s. Once elected Prime Minister in 2010, he oversaw the take-over of the judiciary and most of the media by Fidesz loyalists as well as ensuring ownership and control of key companies was secured by his cronies.

He has combined this institutional power-grab with assertive policies in support of traditional Christian family values and an increasingly vicious rhetoric against foreigners and migrants, particularly Muslims, becoming one of the foremost proponents of the conspiratorial Great Replacement theory. He and his Government have increasingly directed their nationalist rhetoric against the European Union, echoed Russian arguments in EU discussions, and for the last four years obstructed every effort by the EU to rally support for Ukraine.

Standard Bearer of the Populist Right

Thus, for a decade and a half Orbán has been the primary flag-bearer of the national populist right, its voice in Europe’s corridors of power and the mentor to aspiring fellow-travellers across the world. He has been central to building a far-right alliance in the European parliament including France’s Marine Le Pen, the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, Spain’s Vox and Austria’s Freedom Party, and his ‘Patriots for Europe’ is now the Parliament’s third-largest faction.

But even more significant has been his influence in the US, where Orbán has been the icon for Trump and his MAGA followers.

Regularly feted by the organising core of the American populist right – the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) – Orbán’s policies and methods were seen as a central influence on Project 2025, the blueprint for Trump’s second term, which has been described as a plan to ‘Orbánise’ the US government.

The Trump administration has assiduously followed the Orbán view on Europe’s slide into decadence and decline as outlined in its National Security Strategy. Trump has welcomed Orbán to the White House and Vice-President JD Vance, at the height of the Iran war, saw his priority to be to make a direct intervention in the Hungarian election, visiting Budapest to speak in Orbán’s support at a triumphalist, Trump-style eve-of-poll rally.

UK Fellow Travellers: Scruton, Orr, Goodwin

Orbán has had a magnetic appeal to the populist right in Britain too. Its leading post-Powellite ideologue, Roger Scruton, helped Orban on the path from liberal dissident to post-liberal autocrat and was rewarded shortly before his death when he was awarded the Hungarian Order of Merit by Viktor Orbán for “foreseeing the threats of illegal migration and defending Hungary from unjust criticism.” Tim Montgomerie – the founder of Conservative Home and Unherd and, after his defection from the Conservatives, now an influential voice within Reform UK – was an early convert addressing the Danube Institute in 2019, one of Orbán’s key think tanks, on “the limits of liberalism” and the potential of its pro-natal family policies.

The Orbán links to the UK were cemented by the appointment of Frank Furedi – the former ideological guru of the Revolutionary Communist Party and very regular Spiked contributor – as the executive director of the Brussels office of the Mathias Corninvus Collegium (MCC) , a private college and think tank lavishly financed by the Hungarian Government to promote Orbán and Orbánism in the West.

In addition to its Brussels activities, MCC also operates in London, by favour of the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation where the Cambridge theology academic and now Reform UK’s Head of Policy James Orr is the co-chair.

The MCC’s budget was significantly enlarged in 2020 and the latest revelations from the Good Law Project show the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation (RSLF) has received £512,500 – more than 90% of its funding – from MCC since 2023, enabling it to host events with key figures from the populist right such as Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin, and pay generous fellowships to familiar figures like Matt Goodwin.

In his co-authored 2018 book National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, Goodwin described Orbán’s conspiratorial ideas about the Jewish philanthropist George Soros as “not without credence”; while Furedi widens the conspiracy from a “globalist-cosmopolitan perspective” to embrace the “wider objective of de-legitimating the status of the nation and the sovereignty of its people”.

As we point out in our Little Black Book of the Populist Right, Orbán himself speaks in terms which directly echo sinister interwar rhetoric of opponents with faces “hidden from view” who “do not fight directly, but by stealth”, who are “not national, but international”, don’t work but “speculate with money” and who “have no homeland, but feel that the whole world is theirs.”

Now, who could they be, and where have we heard that before?

Across the widening Orbán ideological empire, then, we can detect the assiduous use of state funding to promote the ideas of national populism, much of it with a sinister conspiratorial twist. It has been the application of the Gramsci playbook of cultural hegemony in the service of the far right.

Sunday’s election result has put an end to that.

Orbán’s resounding defeat at the hands of Péter Magyar’s Tisza party, in a record high turnout, was the result of Hungarians decisively rejecting a Government and party that has brought prolonged economic stagnation to most of its citizens while overseeing vast accumulation of wealth to an elite band of cronies.

Less Obstruction, More Hope?

The impact of this result will be profound. For Hungary itself, the key task of the new Tisza Government will be to unravel the damage wrought by the Orbán regime. This will not be easy. The difficulties faced by Donald Tusk’s Polish Government in untangling the institutional changes brought in by the predecessor Law and Justice Government serve as a warning.

The new Government must dismantle corruption and Fidesz’s illiberal democracy, in the hope that the swift receipt of currently suspended EU aid will help to boost the economy and that many of the young Hungarians of talent who have emigrated in the Orbán years will decide to return to their homeland.

For the EU itself, the result should mean the end of Hungary’s endless policy obstruction, above all over Ukraine, enabling the release of much-needed blocked funds.

However, this should not mean a reversal to the status quo. The experience with Orbán has shown that the current EU rules for policy-making are not fit for purpose: in an EU of 27 states, the unanimity principle cannot survive. As the German foreign minister, Johann Wadephul said recently, to cope with the contemporary world the EU has to introduce qualified majority voting for key policy issues to prevent the chokehold that individual countries can currently exert.

More broadly, the result reinstalls hope into the political arena. It shows that the far right is not omnipotent, and that Trump and Vance are not the electoral assets they once assumed.

There are signs that the populist right may have reached its peak. In France, Le Pen’s RN stalled in March’s local elections; in the UK, Reform has been defeated in two recent parliamentary by-elections while national polls are showing a noticeable fall in their voting numbers. The big issue remains America and whether, despite the gerrymandering, the US electorate will deliver a body-blow to Trump in November’s mid-term elections. Nothing is certain but the Hungarian result, following last November’s defeat for Geert Wilders in Holland and the 2023 dethroning of Law and Justice in Poland, has shown that the far right can be beaten. That should offer hope to us all.

Jon Bloomfield and David Edgar are authors of The Little Black Book of the Populist Right, whose 2nd edition has just been published by Byline Books

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The Epstein Files have released something undeniably diabolical into the air.

The reprise of Peter Mandelson’s nickname, the Prince of Darkness, and Jeffrey Epstein’s own eerie denial that he was ‘the devil himself’ reveals there is something demonic going on.

But it is not the devil we are dealing with, but his intermediary.

Despite the whiff of brimstone and conspiracy this isn’t a Satanic narrative. It’s a Faustian one.

The story of Faust, the successful yet dissatisfied man who exchanges his soul for secret knowledge, power, and worldly pleasure, emerged as a folk legend in 16th Century Germany. Whatever evidence there may be of a historical progenitor to its eponymous protagonist, Faust is recognisable as the archetypal Renaissance magician dabbling in the dangerous arts of alchemy, astrology, and necromancy.

First dramatised by Christopher Marlowe in his groundbreaking play The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus c1592, and reworked by Goethe into his magnum opus Faust c1808, the story continues to inspire countless literary, artistic, musical, and cinematic works.

Its central conceit is of reckless and amoral ambition; of calling upon unconscionable means to satisfy dubious desires.

Faust risks all by summoning a hellish spirit. But it’s not the devil himself he conjures, it’s Mephistopheles.

Mephistopheles is an emissary for forces greater than his own and a protean figure.

In Marlowe, the crude demon of the medieval morality play has already evolved into a sophisticated tempter; witty and cultivated. In Goethe, he’s a suave and persuasive creature of the Enlightenment.

In a contemporary world of transactional politics, he becomes the broker, the mediator, the consummate player in the art of the deal, promising the cruel excesses of capitalism for his corrupt clients.

Epstein was a modern Mephistopheles, deploying a seductive charm to draw influential men into a hellish orbit while ruthlessly exploiting the powerless. And his modus operandi extended from iniquitous business to even darker worlds of intelligence and statecraft.

For gathering kompromat is very much like harvesting souls, and Mephistopheles’ supernatural tradecraft is similar to that of espionage and disinformation.

In Goethe’s work there’s even an ambiguity as to who he might really be working for; a sense that he could be an asset to some vast celestial intelligence agency.

“Well, what are you then?” Faust demands on their first meeting. The reply is intriguing in its duplicity: “Part of the power that would, wish forever evil yet do forever good.”

The suspicion that Epstein was a kind of double agent worked its own cover, running the interference that being in the pay of a higher purpose could somehow excuse base and degenerate activity.

Beneath the grandiose premise of the Faustian myth are very personal stories of sexual abuse and misogyny.

Mephistopheles enthusiastically pimps vulnerable women for a decadent coterie, his most famous victim being Helen of Troy. Presented as the epitome of female beauty and classical aestheticism, Helen’s depiction is also an ugly and primal narrative of abduction.

In Marlowe, it is observed that “Sir Paris crossed the seas with her and brought the spoils to rich Dardania”. Denigrated as a mere possession in the currency of entitled men, Helen’s legend is that of trafficked women down the centuries. As Mephistopheles created a lavish playground for his clientele, access to an emperor’s court where the rich and famous might be summoned, Epstein, too, promised an invitation to a very select party, where power and influence could be traded.

Here, our tempted protagonist takes his place at the top table, and his own modern archetype is disturbingly familiar.

The Tech Bro is the New Faust.

A latter-day Renaissance magician, dabbling in new forms of alchemy, astrology, and numerology in an attempt to unlock secret knowledge, gain fantastical powers, and even transcend mere mortality.

Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos all appear in the Epstein Files, as does Peter Thiel (pictured), arguably the most Faustian of this self-styled cognitive elite, whose venture capital fund Valar Ventures received $40 million from Epstein in 2016.

Thiel, the German-born co-founder of PayPal and data mining firm Palantir – and a would-be philosopher king – advocates the realm of the ‘sovereign individual’ with powerful economic fiefdoms operating outside of political boundaries, moving between jurisdictions at will.

Rejecting liberal ideals and egalitarianism, Thiel’s fiercely right-wing libertarianism envisages a rigorously engineered future, based on traditional values and hierarchies and driven by visionary individuals. A new breed of people with unimaginable wealth and influence, beyond the reach of any earthly power, on a trajectory to a higher state of being.

In asserting it as a solution to all our problems, Thiel has invoked his ancient countryman. “I badly miss the misguided optimism of a Faust,” he declared in the 2015 article ‘Against Edenism’. “At least he was trying to do something about everything that was wrong with the world.”

But the ‘heroic agency’ of Thiel’s apocalyptic philanthropy is shot through with delusional self-interest and fear.

Although he imagines being in possession of great power, it is ultimately power that possesses him. An obsession with life-extension technologies and transhumanism betrays him. He might not fear hell, but he is clearly scared of his own mortality.

Yet it is Mephistopheles himself who admits to that very mundane terror, when he explains his parole from the Underworld. “This is hell,” he says of his earthly state, “nor am I out of it.” And this is the essential humanism of the fable: that we might want a better place for everyone.

With selfish pride Faust gives up his own soul which, in a secular world, might simply mean a sense of moral integrity. Of course, many named in the Epstein Files had already divested themselves of this tiresome burden.

But if we consider a more benign version of our hapless hero we find a true fall from grace.

Faust was also a scholar, a seeker of truth who aspired to high ideals. Noam Chomsky (pictured below) is probably the most famous academic of our age and one of the defining figures of the American left.

For the past six decades, he has been an outspoken critic of imperialism, colonialism, contemporary capitalism, and corporate influence on political institutions. An unflinching advocate of human rights, equality and freedom of thought, he appeared to represent all that was best in the public intellectual seemingly free of taint or compromise.

But how the mighty have fallen.

A long-standing relationship between Chomsky and Epstein emerged from the files in the form of very friendly email exchanges that make for depressing reading.

There is Epstein’s advice in a rather sordid financial dispute between Chomsky and the children from his first marriage. A breezy reply from an invitation from the sex offender in which Chomsky confesses that he’s “really fantasising about the Caribbean island”. And various payments of more than $250,000 through Epstein’s account (which Chomsky insists were from another source).

Most egregious of all is a document dated February 2019 in which Chomsky lent moral support while Epstein was facing sex-trafficking allegations. “The best way to proceed is to ignore it,” Chomsky advised his friend, 11 years after Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting sex with an underage girl. “That’s particularly true now with the hysteria that has developed about abuse of women.”

It is the professor of linguistics’ use of the word “hysteria” that is particularly damning: a semantic seal to his pact with the devil’s disciple.

The language of misogyny marks Chomsky out as a willing apologist for Epstein’s crimes. Near the end of his long life, it leaves an indelible mark against his reputation, his legacy, and yes, his soul.

And that is the true tragedy of Faust, and a cautionary tale. Not only the old warning that all power corrupts – but also that even the most brilliant minds are not immune to its temptation.

Jake Arnott is a dramatist and author. His latest novel is Blood Rival

This article appears in edition #84 of the Byline Times monthly magazine

While pundits and politicians ponder the ultimate objectives of the war on Iran which Donald Trump, in league with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, launched on 28 February, it is worth putting this tumultuous moment in context against the rationale of the American President’s career so far – which has always been a deep and dynamic relationship with the irrational.

We can try to surmise how the MAGA leader’s objection to “forever wars” fits in with the massive bombardment of a country that is as mountainous and impregnable as Afghanistan, and with double the population of Iraq. We can puzzle over the continuously improvised war aims. Is it regime change and setting the Iranian population free? Defending Israel? Or hunting down any possible precursors to nuclear WMDs?

But this search for cue and motive would miss the point about Trump – he is a master of chaos. That’s where he finds meaning and strength. His supporters also thrive in the wake of his psychological and cultural whirlwind.

“I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” Trump wrote to great applause on social media last year. “Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of War,” he added, along with three helicopter emojis.

Channelling the character of Air Cavalry Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 epic Apocalypse Now (itself a re-imagining of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness), the meme is a telling addition to Trump’s arsenal of iconography now that he has cast himself as a wartime leader.

Just like Trump, Kilgore – played by the iconic American actor Robert Duvall, who died on 15 February at his Virginia horse farm at the age of 95 – mashes up the old and new in a pastiche of American exceptionalism: combining the classic black Stetson of crossed sabres with 60s shades and unbuttoned fatigues.

Duvall actually toned down his dialogue in the original script after consulting Vietnam veterans. He told the Tribeca film festival in 2019: “Coming from a military family, I wanted to treat the military with respect … without caricature.”

For Trump, who avoided military service in Vietnam, who called decorated war heroes like Senator John McCain losers, Kilgore epitomises the kind of WASP operatic imperial hubris he’d love to tap.

In one of the film’s famous scenes, Kilgore’s helicopter brigade swoops on a Vietnamese village on the Nùng river, pumping out Richard Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ from loudspeakers because it “scares the hell” out of the insurgents.

One moment, Kilgore is scattering ‘death cards’ on slain Viet Cong bodies as a psyops warning. Next, he is rebuking US soldiers for torturing a dying enemy fighter by denying him water. Then, suddenly, he drops everything when he hears that a famous Californian, Lance Johnson, is travelling with his brigade.

That’s when the film’s most memorable moment happens. Lance’s surfing expedition is interrupted by snipers from a nearby treeline. Irritated, Kilgore calls in an airstrike. Moments later, after the whole forest has been incinerated in a sudden blaze, he sits on his haunches and ruminates: “You smell that? Napalm … Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning … It smelled like … victory”.

Impulsive, visceral, and easily distracted, the US President surfs the world’s zeitgeist in the same way as his devoted followers doomscroll social media.

In his first inauguration speech in 2017, he revelled in wanting to put a stop to “American carnage”. But disaster is not an obstacle; it’s an addiction. Like Duvall’s Kilgore – who closes the beach sequence with the wistful sadness of “some day this war’s gonna end” – Trump would be lost without the chaos of conflict.

The Vietnam War did end, but the smell of napalm did not augur victory.

Despite Operation Rolling Thunder, which dropped hundreds of thousands of tonnes of bombs on transportation networks, oil facilities, and air defences in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, military escalation in Vietnam ended in humiliating and traumatising defeat for the United States.

Opinion polls on the US/Israeli war on Iran should be a dire warning for today’s conflict. Fifty years on, Donald Trump’s current war of choice remains more unpopular with American voters at its beginning than the Vietnam War was at its disastrous conclusion.

For all these reasons, Trump could well declare victory and withdraw. But that would assume reason has a role here.

Facing the discontent of his MAGA base over the Epstein Files, and possible obliteration in the midterm Congressional elections this autumn, Trump may well decide that the spectacle of power matters more than the pursuit of any rational goal.

Unforgettable Fires

Through his meteoric career (and, remember, meteorites eventually burn out on impact), Trump has viscerally triggered the unconscious ‘politics of feeling’ and animated a whole constituency that feels disconnected from the procedural and process-driven functions of democracy.

Anger and violence are powerful factors in this emotive sphere, and technology is constantly changing the aesthetics of war and its terrible beauty.

Coppola understood the ‘unforgettable fires’ and hypnotic seduction of destruction right from the opening sequence of Apocalypse Now.

Lying in his Saigon hotel, in a (genuinely) drunken haze, the army captain Benjamin L Willard, played by Martin Sheen, confuses the rotor blades of the ceiling fan with assault helicopters. Over slow-motion shots of a burning jungle canopy, Jim Morrison from the Doors intones, “this is the end, my only friend, the end”.

Vietnam not only provided a visionary palette for what Gaston Bachelard called, in The Psychoanalysis of Fire, the primordial reverie of looking into flickering flames, but it changed the whole communication of conflict.

Vietnam was the first colour-televised war. From 1965, Movietone footage piped napalm infernos – vivid, almost painterly – into suburban American living rooms, transforming industrial slaughter into a nightly spectacle. The medium didn’t merely report the war; it wrapped atrocity in the grammar of cinema before cinema had even processed what it was seeing.

Then came the inversion.

On 11 September 2001, instead of American fire consuming distant jungles, foreign conflagration consumed New York’s landmark World Trade Centre. The whole world watched in real time as two towers dissolved into a rolling cloud of pulverised concrete, asbestos, and human remains.

The image was, in its terrible way, as cinematic as anything Coppola had staged – which is precisely why it demanded a cinematic response.

In March 2003, President George W Bush’s Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, announced his sequel – his version of The Empire Strikes Back – with the ‘shock and awe’ opening bombardment of Baghdad.

That was a prime-time son et lumière show of cruise missiles and tracer fire, choreographed for the satellite news cycle. The Pentagon had learned from Vietnam not to suppress the images but to curate them – to make destruction beautiful, controlled, and above all ours, because we’re in the director’s seat.

But it wasn’t the end, beautiful friend. After the fireballs, the dust.

The towers’ collapse aerosolised decades of construction material into a toxic cloud that settled across Lower Manhattan and into the lungs of thousands. The 9/11 dust is still killing people – slowly, bureaucratically, through mesothelioma and rare cancers and interstitial lung disease – in a death toll that has long since surpassed the count from the day itself.

It’s too early to calculate the aftermath of the US/Israeli attacks on Iran. By the time Byline Times was going to print, within a week of full-scale war being unleashed, US Tomahawk cruise missiles had already killed 175, mainly young schoolgirls, at Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab.

Within a week, Israeli jets had bombarded multiple oil depots and petroleum facilities around the Iranian capital, Tehran, with some residents describing the darkness at noon as thick black smoke blanketing the city, “rivers of fire” as oil spilled into the sewers, with officials warning of a toxic “black rain” looming which will affect the public health of the city’s 10 million residents for years to come.

Apocalyptic scenes, indeed. But this war won’t end with a bang but a whimper for long-term survivors.

As Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London, observed in the Financial Times: “The intended part of the war is going to plan. Israel and the US quickly achieved command of the skies so that they could attack targets with impunity … But the unintended consequences will largely be in the political, social, and economic spheres – and they will be felt for some time.”

The Fire Next Time

Whatever the practical consequences of Trump’s new war, some very powerful forces in his MAGA coalition will be looking forward to more destruction.

Within days of the missile and air attacks on Iran, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation – the watchdog organisation that documents the creeping theocratisation of the US Armed Forces – reported that, as the assault was launched, combat-unit commanders told non-commissioned officers that the Iran war was part of God’s divine plan, and that President Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth”.

Just so you know, Armageddon is a real place – the Greek rendering of the Hebrew Har Megiddo – a dusty hill in northern Israel where, as archaeologists have revealed, real conflicts from the Egyptians to Napoleon have been fought for more than 4,000 years.

These paranoid apocalyptic delusions among right-wing American evangelicals are a vocal force in Trump’s base.

War Secretary Pete Hegseth often plays into these tropes of Christian Zionism and courts its core preachers. Republican Senator Kevin Cramer echoed the ideology by claiming the war on Iran as a “biblical responsibility”.

Like Nigel Farage and other Trump cheerleaders who talk of ‘Judeo-Christian’ civilisation, it is worth remembering that the evangelical final ‘rapture’ concludes with the Judeo element erased (again). Only the Jews who convert to Christianity are saved.

As the National Council of Churches noted in 2007, Israel is loved and bankrolled by American evangelicals, not as a democracy, but as a stage set for a drama in which Jews are expendable and “mere pawns in an eschatological scheme”.

Steve Bannon – Farage’s mentor, and Trump’s former White House chief strategist – has his own version of this eschatology. He believes in a cyclical historical crisis and that we’re now entering a ‘fourth turning’ of racial war and violent rupture before a great renewal.

His Russian contemporary and soulmate (they met in Rome in 2018 and talked for eight hours), philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, believes in something very similar – a ‘fourth politics’ beyond fascism, democracy, and socialism, which will be led by Russian orthodoxy as a ‘katechon’ or shield against the false messiah of liberalism.

Bannon and Dugin’s only major disagreement is over the final role of Judaism and Islam in the end times. The Russian believes Iran is a key ally against the Anti-Christ, while the co-founder of Cambridge Analytica characterises Iran as an enemy – a disagreement that also mars Trump’s otherwise close alignment with Vladimir Putin on most things.

But any potential fissure here, at least in Trumpworld, has been bridged by the arrival of the Silicon Valley PayPal mafia, its billions, and its strange ‘Dark Enlightenment’ set of beliefs, which sees the economic and social ruptures caused by big tech as just the start of a revolution against liberal democracy.

Primus inter pares among the tech bros is Peter Thiel, a key investor in Facebook, co-founder of the data surveillance giant Palantir, and a major supporter and commercial beneficiary of the war against Iran.

Thiel has recently been touring the world giving lectures on the coming of the Anti-Christ. From reports, he is unsure whether the false messiah is Greta Thunberg or AI regulation, but – inspired by a misinterpretation of Stanford teacher Rene Girard, who also influenced Dugin and Bannon – he seems to be convinced that there must be some mass slaughter, some ritual sacrifice of ‘scapegoats’, for a corrupt society to renew itself.

For his fellow broligarch, SpaceX founder and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, that sense of purity through bloodshed is even more explicit. The X owner is frequently tweeting that civil war is “inevitable” in the UK and the rest of Europe because of its multiculturalism.

It’s an open question whether the broligarchs and their far-right acolytes actually believe in a ‘final battle’, a racialised version of Armageddon when ethnicity and culture will separate us into ‘sheep’ and ‘goats’, but the very invocation of the conflict – the mental polarisation that happens when humanity is categorised into ‘us’ and ‘them’ – has long suited the divide-and-rule playbook of right-wing populism.

In this way, doomsday is effective even if it never comes. The literary critic Frank Kermode, in his canonical study of apocalypses, The Sense of an Ending, argued that Judgement Day is not imminent but immanent: perpetually looming, never quite landing, because its function is not prophetic but psychological.

Kermode also made a trenchant point about the difference between disaster movies and millennial myths. Fictions are a ‘let’s pretend’ suspension of disbelief, so their ends demand only a conditional kind of assent – unlike the absolute assent demanded by religions and ideologies.

So here’s the rub. Whatever the memes, many of Trump’s followers, and apparently some of his military commanders, actually believe we are heading to the end times. And for the new leadership of Iran, the conflict is a matter of life and death, and a genuine doomsday for its ideological regime.

When the dust finally settles, what cost will we have to pay for this spectacle of fire?

Peter Jukes is Co-Founder and Executive Editor of Byline Times

This article appears in edition #84 of the Byline Times monthly magazine

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Dan Clayton: Your book comes out at a point in US history where anti-fascism is probably more necessary than ever but also at its most vulnerable. How do you make sense of that?

Christopher Mathias: It’s a scary moment, I think. In September the Trump administration claimed to designate antifa a domestic terrorist organisation which is on one hand farcical because there is no statute to designate any group a ‘domestic terrorist group’, but on the other hand very dangerous because what it does is send a signal to Trump-supporting District Attorneys, police officers and vigilantes and fascist groups that it’s open season on the left.

When you look at what happened in Minneapolis with the murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, what did the Trump administration call them immediately after their murders which we all saw on video? It was ‘domestic terrorists’. And what they were doing there is saying that if we call you a domestic terrorist, we can do whatever we want to you. So if they’re calling antifa domestic terrorists, and what I describe in the book is that MAGA has a really expansive definition of who constitutes antifa – they are not as maybe diligent as I might be in identifying who constitutes antifa – they will call whomever they want antifa.

Dan Clayton: So we’ve heard of the Trump ‘antifa bogeyman’, as he presents it – a shadowy, black-clad, George Soros-funded army of militant anarchists ready to riot at the drop of a hat but how closely does his nightmare match the reality of the anti-fascists you met when you were researching the book?

Christopher Mathias: It couldn’t be further from the truth, and that was a big part of the reason I wanted to write the book. There are still so many misapprehensions and misunderstandings about what Antifa is.

Basically the far-right was really emboldened by Trump’s election and was doing all these rallies in the streets, and everywhere they went, they were confronted and there were suddenly all these viral videos of Nazis getting punched, which led to a flurry of explainers of what antifa was.

By the end of 2017 in America, Webster’s Dictionary, adds ‘antifa’ to its dictionary. And then Oxford Dictionary shortlist ‘antifa’ for Word of the Year. So that cements this idea in the public imagination of antifa as solely Nazi-punchers.

Obviously, what my book is about is the bulk of the work they actually do: often intelligence gathering, research, espionage, and identifying, unmasking, doxing thousands of members of this new, fascist movement in America.

Dan Clayton: So how do you describe antifa?

Christopher Mathias: I describe it as a decentralised, underground network of largely anarchists, socialists and communists, dedicated to destroying the far-right by any means necessary.

They’re basically part of this radical tradition, which in the US we can largely trace back to groups like Anti-Racist Action (ARA) and Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice (SHARP), which were essentially punks trying to kick Nazis out of the punk scene. Those groups in the eighties and nineties developed a set of principles which still operate as the foundation for the modern iteration of antifa. And although they are anarchists, socialists, communists and may disagree ideologically on some things when it comes to confronting the far right, they all agree on a basic set of tenets or beliefs: firstly, ‘We go where they go’ – you have to follow fascists and the far-right, wherever they go and confront them. You can’t let them have the streets. They have to be confronted, sometimes violently.

The second tenet is the idea of ‘No platform for fascists’. So basically, you are going to rip down and cover their propaganda, you are going to try to get their permits revoked when they want to hold a rally. You are going to try to get them to be deplatformed from social media for violating terms of service, or maybe get their websites taken down.

And then the third tenet is this idea of, ‘We protect us or we keep us safe’, which is basically saying that you can’t rely on the institutions that are allegedly supposed to protect you – law enforcement and the Government, the State – because those institutions are inherently or systemically white supremacist or when push comes to shove, those institutions will collaborate with fascists.

Dan Clayton: So tell us a bit about the rise of the far-right in the States.

Christopher Mathias:   The rise of the far-right in America in a big way was in response to us electing a Black president and a demographic panic that whites were going to be a minority in the US eventually. And then of course you have the dawn of the internet and spiralling inequality in the US. I think a lot of these factors contribute to the point where in the mid-2010s suddenly there’s this explosion in secretive white supremacist and other far-right groups organising online, eventually under the banner of the ‘alt right’, which is a way of euphemising fascism and Nazism. The way I often describe it is as if they were trying to resurrect the Ku Klux Klan’s invisible empire for the digital age.

So by the 2016 election, when Trump emerges as a candidate and starts his campaign with blaming Mexicans and Muslims for all of our problems, and proposing a Muslim ban and calling Mexicans rapists and murderers, talking about building a wall, obviously there’s excitement in these far-right corners and they in a lot of ways become a propaganda arm of the Trump campaign.

Dan Clayton: And you see the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017 as an inflection point in the story of both antifa and the far-right in the US?

Christopher Mathias: I think the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville was a coming out party for the alt-right. It was when it moved offline and said that we have the numbers and the power to take the streets and the name ‘Unite the Right’ was to unite all of these various factions and fascist groups. After the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally – the largest white supremacist gathering in a generation – a Nazi drives his car into a crowd of counter-protestors and kills Heather Heyer.

Dan Clayton: In the book you say how antifa had already gathered information and done undercover work on Charlottesville.

Christopher Mathias: Yeah, a single anti-fascist spy went undercover into the Unite the Right Charlottesville planning server, where for months he gathered reams of data of their messages and the memes they were sharing, collected all this evidence of their murderous intent for that day, and just how extreme they were. Anti-fascists tried to show this evidence to city officials in Charlottesville to get them to cancel the rally. They didn’t listen and then people died.

But afterwards, a lawsuit was filed against the organisers of Unite the Right, which was based almost entirely on all of this material that the anti-fascists collected, and that lawsuit ends up bankrupting, disbanding, sending certain fascists into hiding – it really deconstructs the coalition that was in Charlottesville.

Dan Clayton: And after this?

Christopher Mathias: Afterwards, the right knows that what happened in Charlottesville is a really bad look: essentially that the GOP, the Republican Party, Trump, MAGA, has honest-to-God Nazis in their coalition. So this pseudonymous pro-Trump troll named ‘Microchip’ starts a viral petition to the White House to designate antifa a domestic terror group.

Microchip gives this remarkable interview to Politico where he spells out why he’s doing this, which is to “set up antifa as a punching bag”, and basically to distract and deflect from the right’s very real violence. And to create this false equivalence between the right and the left to say, yeah, sure, the right can be violent, but look, the left is just as violent too, which of course is an absurd equivalence.

Over the course of the next few months, all of these MAGA influencers follow suit and basically after every mass shooting in America, of which there were many in this time period, when, you know, the facts aren’t in yet, these influencers rush into this information vacuum and baselessly blame antifa. And then over the course of the next few years, you have incidents where they blame antifa for wildfires and natural disasters and train derailments.

During the 2020 uprisings for George Floyd – arguably the largest mass demonstrations in United States history – MAGA and Trump blame the uprisings and some of the property destruction on antifa, which is absurd. Those were organic, grassroots, largely black-led uprisings. Antifa is a very small political formation that wouldn’t have the power to propel millions of people into the streets. And then during that summer you have all these rumours again being put forward by MAGA influencers and by white supremacist groups that there are roving bands of antifa roaming the countryside, threatening to set fire to white-owned businesses.

It imagines antifa as this kind of highly regimented underground group with a hierarchy and headquarters and billionaire benefactors. It is not only an attempt to paint the George Floyd uprisings as somehow artificial or the work of provocateurs, but it creates a pretext for far-right vigilantes to start confronting the uprisings across the country. And you have incidents where far-right militia groups are carrying around guns and occupying towns, because of this perceived antifa threat.

Dan Clayton: So what are some other examples of the kind of antifa work you cover in the book?

Christopher Mathias: One of the more remarkable stories is about the guy, ‘Vincent’ – the main character in my book – who goes undercover into Patriot Front, method acts as a Nazi for about five or six months, goes on their hikes, goes to their meetings, he earns their trust to such an extent that he is named the official photographer and videographer, which is amazing. He eventually collects 440 gigabytes worth of their messages, contributing to about 80 of their numbers being doxed or unmasked, some of their marches are sabotaged, their cars are, you know, ‘redecorated’ and  I don’t want to give too much away, but he collects a lot of their material and propaganda  at the end of the infiltration, has a bonfire and posts a video of the bonfire online for Patriot Front to see.

Another group infiltrated was Identity Europa, which was a suit and tie fascist group – a lot of college kids who considered themselves more educated. They were trying to infiltrate the GOP (Republican Party). They were running for lower level, Republican party positions: a lot of them held very respectable jobs and positions of power, and they organised behind pseudonyms online in a private server. Then one day in the spring of 2019, all of those messages end up online, in a public database for anti-fascist researchers to use and to mine those messages for clues to reveal these Nazis’ real offline identities. Eventually anti-fascists unmasked and identified 100 members, and we’re talking police officers and teachers, politicians and an executive board member of the NRA (National Rifle Association), a lot of soldiers and people in the military. And this leads directly to Identity Europa disbanding. There are so many other stories like this. but I think part of the reason I wanted to write the book is that people don’t quite understand just how successful antifa was in so many ways.

Dan Clayton: Doxing seems to be a preferred tactic of antifa in the USA. What can you tell us about that?

Christopher Mathias: In the anti-fascist context and the anti-fascist parlance, ‘doxing’ refers to the digital equivalent of ripping the white hood off a Klansman. It refers to identifying, unmasking or exposing previously unidentified members of organised fascist groups or independent actors, people that are white supremacist actors who hide behind usernames or avatars.

And the reason anti-fascists do so much of this work of doxing, disclosing or unmasking is twofold: one is that it’s important for communities to know who among their neighbours has these beliefs because they pose a threat, they could commit violence. Two, because it creates a social cost for being part of organised fascism. It leverages existing societal taboos against, explicit racism and bigotry and white supremacy and fascism; it leverages that taboo to create the social cost. It says if you are part of these fascist groups, we will figure it out and we will name and shame you and you might get fired, your girlfriend might dump you, your family might be angry at you, you might have to skip town. And that is very destabilising for fascist groups who often thrive on organising in the dark.

Dan Clayton: You quote an antifa activist in your book, who says ‘Hate has consequences’ but what happens when the taboo weakens, and the social cost diminishes? You’ve got a US administration that supports the far-right in many cases.

Christopher Mathias: That’s the animating question of my book, and in that way I think my book becomes essentially a document of rising fascism in the US; and anti-fascists, I think in many ways saw before anyone else just how potent, or dangerous, this insurgent fascist movement was becoming in America because we saw in real time their doxes starting to lose their effectiveness when this taboo against explicit white supremacy or fascism was becoming diminished because it was going mainstream.

So we are in a completely mask-off fascist moment and I think it’s a really interesting dynamic that I try to describe in the book: in previous eras in America when you wear a mask in organised fascism, you do so in hopes of creating a world in which you won’t need a mask at all. And so in that way, as much as antifa had a victory over the alt-right, maybe the alt-right in some ways had a victory, in so much as they helped propel their views into the mainstream. There are obviously other elements at work there, but it is interesting now that the people wearing masks aren’t secretive white supremacist groups, but armed agents of the state – ICE (Immigration & Customs Enforcement) and CBP (Customs & Border Protection) – are the people actively trying to round up immigrants, human beings, because they don’t have the right pieces of paper.

And so it is a very scary development. That said, I think if you talk to anti-fascists, they are still doing this work because it is still important to identify people in organised fascism and to fight to maintain the taboo against explicit white supremacy and fascism and sometimes it is still effective. I think it’s also telling that a lot of anti-fascist work has moved towards identifying these masked ICE agents and creating a social cost for being a part of ICE.

To Catch a Fascist: The Fight to Expose the Radical Right by Christopher Mathias is published by Simon & Schuster

“We’ve been hoping for 18 months that eventually, somebody – an adult in the room – will restrain Trump. Somebody will say, ‘this is clearly inappropriate’ – but hope is not a strategy”.

As former UK diplomat, Alex Hall Hall surveys the temporary ceasefire holding back the US and Iran from conflict (whilst allowing their respective allies Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon to continue to wage war with each other) she despairs of any positive change in global affairs so long as Donald Trump is in the Oval office. In an interview with the Byline Times Podcast, the one-time ambassador to Georgia and former UK Brexit advisor in Washington says the time has come for the United States’ European partners to accept that that post-war world order is broken, and to seek new partnerships.

Reflecting on Trump’s threat to erase Iran’s “entire civilisation” – which followed previous threats to annexe Greenland – she said: “Every single norm has been broken. I feel it is impossible to rebuild the amount of damage that has been done. We are in a new world now. Even if the US doesn’t formally withdraw from NATO, the confidence in the alliance has basically gone. It’s been shattered. European countries must do what they can to rearm and can no longer rely upon the US.”

Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric has been echoed by his Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who has cited Old Testament verses to justify the United States’ unprovoked attack on Tehran’s Islamist Government, pitting Jews and Christians against Muslims and raising the spectre of a holy war in the Middle East.

Hall Hall describes the overtly religious overtones of Hegseth’s language as “stomach churning and nauseating” and decries the “sanctimonious bigots who claim to be Christians, laying hands on Donald Trump and praying with him; a man who is a serial adulterer, has had multiple divorces, whose family is corruptly amassing huge riches, and who has broken sort of every norm of America’s democratic traditions. There they are, praying for him; this sort of ghastly religious zealotry is precisely what they decry when they see it in Iran or Afghanistan with the Taliban.”

It should be pointed out that the former diplomat is no enthusiast for Tehran’s theocratic regime, but she questions claims by the White House that the war, launched in late February, has been a success.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei may have been assassinated and its military capability downgraded, but the Islamic Republic has nevertheless cut off traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the conduit through which around 20% of the world’s oil passes, inflicting huge pain on Western economies. Hall Hall, now a US citizen, has been astonished at the outrage this retaliation has provoked among many American commentators and acquaintances.

“It’s like, what were you expecting when you attacked Iran? Did you not anticipate that they might fight back? Yes, they might fight back in a dirty way [but] they’re a smaller country. They’re less powerful. We may not like their tactics. We certainly don’t like their regime, but somehow to expect that Iran would reply with conventional methods, because, ‘hey, we’re all gentlemen here…’

“What world are they living in? There is an air of unreality about the debate here. I feel those that are drunk on MAGA [and] drunk on Trump really don’t understand the damage that has been done, and are blaming everybody except themselves for the situation they’re in.”

She argues that the UK and other European partners should now block US military flights from their airbases – even when these are launched in a ‘defensive’ capacity – and says it’s time to accept that the old world order has permanently disappeared.

“We’ve allowed ourselves to be too dependent on the US for our security. We never imagined a President as erratic as this, and we trusted the checks and balances in the US system to work, so we’ve got ourselves into a very vulnerable situation. Our ‘Plan A’, in an ideal world, would be to try and put things on track, but you simply cannot rely upon this administration. It is too erratic, so we have no option but to look for alternative allies [and] invest in our own defence, because we should no longer count on the US.”

Listen to Adrian Goldberg’s full interview with Alexandr Hall Hall here