Who is Jack Buckby?

Google the name "Jack Buckby" and the pages in front of you will paint the picture of a young, angry, far-right extremist. In reality, Jack Buckby is a 30-year-old author and counter-extremism researcher who has spent years helping other young people leave extremist politics. Having left white nationalism in the early 2010s, Buckby uses his experience in extreme politics to shine a light on the way in which the politicians and a biased media contribute to the radicalisation of young people across the West. This website, and his books, offer the only accurate look at his life, his work, and his true self. 

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Buckby's 2020 book, Monster Of Their Own Making, takes readers on a journey through England's white nationalist movement in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The book describes the process of radicalization, gives readers an insight into how extremists recruit, and offers concrete proposals for how to prevent this vicious cycle of radicalization we see all around us from continuing. 

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Chapter One can be read for free below:

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Chapter One: The Path to Radicalization

 

To solve a problem, we must first understand it.

 

So, when our political leaders and media class tell us that the far right is growing at an alarming rate, you might be forgiven for expecting those people to have attempted to understand the nature of the problem first. But virtually everyone who makes this claim has either made no attempt to understand it or has drawn extraordinarily inaccurate conclusions as a result of their fundamental misunderstanding of the basics or their own political agenda.

 

When you start with a fundamental misunderstanding of the basics, any conclusion—or even hypothesis—is bound to be riddled with errors and unrepresentative of what is actually true.

 

Meanwhile, those who truly understand the nature and motivation of the far right are routinely ignored. I am one of those people. For years, I sat by and watched in horror as radical progressives and extremists assumed control over the political extremism narrative, labelling the wrong people “far right” and advocating policies that would only further radicalize young, white, working-class men toward the extreme fringe of right-wing politics.

 

Everything we’re told about the far right is wrong, and I know because I was in the far right.

 

As a teenager, I was part of the biggest far-right movement in recent British history. I was a member of a nationalist political party with neo-Nazi roots that attracted the votes of a million desperate, working-class British people who had no other option. I have seen the far right from the inside, I understand how they operate, and I can see just how wrong both liberals and conservatives are on this issue.

 

Throughout this book, I will share with you many of my personal experiences navigating the world of white nationalist politics in my youth. I will tell the stories of how young men from my home county, including people I called friends, went on to become convicted far-right terrorists and extremists. I will also offer what I believe to be a better and more accurate analysis of what the far right really is, and why the far left finds it advantageous to lie about it.

 

Skelmersdale

 

I grew up in a town called Skelmersdale in West Lancashire, in the north of England. It’s a working-class former mining town that is affectionately known as “Skem.” I say affectionately—everyone, including me, moans about how terrible it is. It’s the kind of thing you don’t mind saying yourself, but I get fiercely defensive if anyone else tells me the place is crap. I had a wonderful childhood, the town was pretty safe, and there were lots of trees and fields. I had a great time.

 

But, as with so many working-class towns in the north of England, it has fallen into disrepair. Every time I go back to Skem, I see it getting just a little bit worse. The town seems to have resisted the kind of damage done to many parts of East Lancashire, a result of Tony Blair’s open-door immigration policy. The only immigration we really saw was a lot of Polish workers who came for the jobs in the factories and warehouses. We grew up making jokes about how Poland must be empty because everyone was living in Skem. There was generally no hatred felt for the Poles; in fact, people often commented on the work ethic of the lads who came there. But that didn’t mean there weren’t issues.

 

I remember a protest when I was a child, around 2002. There was a plot of unused land near a school I would eventually become a student at that was earmarked to become a center for asylum-seekers. It was part of a wider plan for more than two thousand asylum-seekers to be housed in centers near airports.[1] Skem was ideal because of its proximity to both Liverpool and Manchester airports. It was also an experimental new town with plenty of empty green land that could be built on.

 

Parish councilor Irene O’Donnell perfectly summed up the feeling of locals at the time.

When I heard the news I was horrified. For a start will it be a visual monstrosity, like a Colditz or something?

We are currently opposing the county council’s plans to expand the estate because there is too much traffic as it is, so the movement of 4000 people per month will not help.

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Sadly, we also have to wonder why, if these people are merely asylum seekers, is the place being built up as a virtual prison?

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I have to say I’m very skeptical indeed.

We were told it was going to happen whether we liked it or not, and Irene had a point—the proposed plans really did look like a prison. Would any reasonable person want to build such a thing right next to two local schools? And did anyone really care that this was being plonked right in the middle of a working-class community and not next to a private school in an upper-middle-class town?

 

The government and agencies involved with the plans didn’t care how we felt about it, and the only reason it got stopped was because we kept protesting.

 

I remember being a nine-year-old boy out protesting with what seemed like the entire town. Thousands of people marched around Half-Mile Island, a particularly large roundabout in the center of the town, demanding the plans stop.

 

The cancellation of the project was a small victory, but this was just one more instance of the government not really caring about the little guy. And over the years, working-class communities in places like Skem just got hurt more and more. Although Skem managed for a long time to avoid the cultural problems that come with mass third world immigration, we were hit by economic problems.

 

Working-class communities started seeing the job market tighten and unemployment rose. The 2008 crash really amplified this effect, so much so that Tony Blair’s successor as Labour Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, was forced to pick up the slogan “British Jobs for British Workers” in 2009.[2] He failed, of course, given it was the Labour Party that started the mass immigration project, displaced working class communities, and oversaw an unemployment crisis in traditionally white working-class towns. It was just a slogan, and the Labour Party offered no real concrete proposals to protect British workers. Once again, the politicians proved that they were not only incapable of addressing difficult issues but were unwilling to do so.

 

Skem was by no means the place to be worst hit by these problems. In fact, everything about the town is remarkably normal. There are other places throughout Lancashire that were hit significantly worse by the crash and experienced higher unemployment, and typically they were the same places affected by the cultural displacement and ghettoization that came from Labour’s policy of mass immigration.

 

It is this political neglect that pushes desperate people toward the far right. It drives some people to madness, some to violence, some to extremism, and some to a feeling of defeat and despondency. Many people just gave up on voting, accepting their new life, while others choose much more radical measures to protect themselves against a political elite that doesn’t seem to care about them. Throughout this book, and particularly in the concluding chapters, I will explain how we can defeat the rise of the far right by addressing the issues on which they capitalize.

 

When the politicians are willing to address the difficult issues that affect normal people, neo-Nazis and genuine far-right extremists have no ground to stand on. They can’t say that they’re the only ones willing to listen to the working class, and they can’t capitalize on the cultural displacement of working-class English towns.

 

Until the politicians stop showing contempt for the working class, the far right will continue capitalizing on it and more young men will be drawn to extreme politics. I know, because it’s precisely what happened to me when I discovered the British National Party in 2008.

 

Discovering the BNP

 

The BNP was founded in 1982 by former members of the National Front, a white nationalist political party that advocated the forceful deportation of nonwhite people from the UK. The BNP was slightly different, encouraging a policy of voluntary repatriation—something that the Conservative Party advocated just a few decades ago.

 

After thirty years of campaigning, the BNP became the only political party representing working-class concerns about mass immigration. The established parties had decided that anyone who dared talk about the issue was bigoted, leaving white nationalists as the only people daring to say maybe we should stop this huge influx of people. Prime Minister Gordon Brown famously slipped up and proved just how out of touch the Labour Party was when he was caught on a hot mic calling a voter “some bigoted woman.”[3]

 

Gillian Duffy was a sixty-five-year-old lifelong Labour voter who just happened to be walking through her neighborhood in Rochdale when she saw Gordon Brown out on the campaign trail. She told the prime minister that she believed too many people were abusing the education and health system, so much so that people who were genuinely vulnerable could no longer access the services they used to. Brown tried to reassure her that he was cracking down on those who abuse the system, but when Duffy made clear she was referencing Eastern European immigrants, Brown got uncomfortable. She asked, “All these Eastern European what are coming in, where are they flocking from?”

 

Brown quickly left but his comments were heard on the microphone as he got in the car. It went like this:

Brown: That was a disaster. Well I just…should never have put me in with that woman. Whose idea was that?

Assistant: I don’t know. I didn’t see.

Brown: It was Sue, I think. It was just ridiculous.

Assistant: I’m not sure if they [the media] will go with that.

Brown: They will go with that.

Assistant: What did she say?

Brown: Oh everything, she was just a sort of bigoted woman. She said she used be Labour. I mean, it’s just ridiculous.

I’ll never forget the response to that. It was shocking. A lot of working-class voters already knew how snobbish the Labour Party, the traditional party of the working class, had become. Those who hadn’t realized certainly got the shock of their lives. I just remember laughing my arse off about the “Sue” comment. I wondered who she was, and how much trouble she must have been in after that incident.

 

But on a more serious note, it reaffirmed to me my belief that if anything was to change in working-class communities, then it would require political action outside the mainstream parties.

 

I remember seeing Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP, on the television during what must have been the run up to the 2009 European elections. There was a local TV news report about how the party was expected to win a seat in our region for the first time, and it showed an interview with Griffin discussing his policy pledges. I found it hard to disagree with any of them.

 

How could I disagree with restricting immigration, reforming the banking system, and putting the British workers first? That was music to every working-class person’s ears during the recession.

 

I went straight to my computer and started researching the party and what it planned to do. I read what the media said about them, and I compared it with what the party actually said. There was a clear disparity, so I felt inclined to believe what members said. A video of a tearful Jewish member of the BNP passionately explaining to an audience at a local branch meeting how hurtful it was for the media to call him a neo-Nazi really made me think. It was shocking. I couldn’t believe how wicked these lies were, and I believed the good intentions of the average member of the party. These were good people. Unfortunately, as it would turn out, the good nature of many regular members wasn’t really the issue. It was the intention of its leaders.

 

I’ll never forget the first time I publicly mentioned my new political interests. I had seen the phrase “far right” thrown around so much by the press that I just assumed it was the appropriate term for someone like me. And so, when my PE teacher asked me on the last day of school what I was planning on doing with my life, I told her “I’m joining the far right. Not the bad far right. The good far right.”

 

She chuckled nervously, wished me all the best, and I left.

 

Seeing the Impacts of Mass Non-European Immigration

 

It must then have been during the summer between leaving high school and joining the local college that I took a trip to Preston, a city on the other side of Lancashire. This is when I saw the impact of non-European immigration up close for the first time. In the UK, the kind of impact of mass immigration on working-class towns depends on whether that immigration comes from nearby European states or third world countries from further afield. For the most part, the Polish immigrant population in my hometown was decent, hard-working, and very similar to us culturally. But that’s not to say there wasn’t conflict. Economic issues—namely, job supply—did cause resentment, and to this day, there are around a million Polish people living in the UK.

 

Non-European immigration is very different. It’s a sad fact that with large numbers of non-European migrants comes ghettoization. Towns and cities become divided on racial and religious lines. According to the 2011 census the native British population made up 83.7 percent of the overall population of Preston. Just 1.3 percent were from Pakistan and 3.7 percent from India,[4] but despite this, entire sections of the city looked unrecognizable. This isn’t a mindless or unfair attack on people who aren’t white; it is merely an observation. As a young white teenager who grew up in a white Christian town, seeing an entire high street of shop signs written in foreign languages and women wearing burkas was shocking.

 

I felt like I was in another country.

 

I knew I wasn’t wrong about this. I know to this day that I’m not wrong about this. Western nations must remain identifiably Western if they are to survive. This isn’t a matter of hating someone for being different or holding negative feelings about people who weren’t born in the same country as me. This is something that runs much deeper.

 

Western nations are defined by their culture. That is everything from the way the country is governed, the way our economic system works, and the way our children are taught right down to how we treat our neighbors, the kind of pets we keep, and the style of our houses. A culture is a wide-ranging thing, and it defines who we are. What I saw in Preston was not identifiably Western, and the values of many of the people brought into the UK by the post-1997 Labour governments are not identifiably Western either.

 

Over a period of years, I learned more about how radically different Western values and culture are to the values held by many people coming from countries like Pakistan. And the more I saw the politicians defending mass immigration and continuing to ignore the cultural and economic problems affecting working-class towns, the more committed to the BNP I became.

 

During the summer between high school and college, I worked at a law firm as a typist. I remember looking for BNP lapel badges on eBay during my lunch breaks. Colleagues saw what I was doing. One just rolled her eyes, but it wasn’t really a big deal. The party was polling well and was becoming fairly mainstream. Their softer approach to immigration and repatriation, compared with the National Front, meant people felt more at ease supporting the party. Of course, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), Nigel Farage’s party, was around at the time—but the general feeling among working class voters was that Farage and UKIP were simply “Tory lite.” Their NHS policy was vague, they came across as posh, and their policies beyond Brexit didn’t seem to chime so well with traditional socialist-leaning Labour voters.

 

I, along with a large chunk of the voting public, found myself entangled in a political movement with good intentions led by people with bad intentions. This is how extremists on the right of politics operate. They hook you with policies that address real problems. These are issues that are observably causing issues within local communities. They are real. Mass immigration was clearly an issue hurting many people no matter how much the politicians tell us diversity is our strength. Muslim rape gangs destroyed the lives of thousands of young girls and their families. That was and is real. And when a party led by genuine extremists is the only political vehicle willing to stand up to these issues, like the BNP was, people are willing to forgive some of their sins. Namely, a history of anti-Semitism and race hate.

 

Why Was I Robbed of My Identity?

 

A number of major failings by the political establishment, commentators, and the media gave people more reasons to support the BNP; specifically, the denial of the existence of a British people and constant references to the racist views of the party’s membership.

 

I am perfectly willing to say, on the record, that many members of the party were not racist. Plenty were, but the average voter and many signed-up members were not. Most supporters I met simply recognized the fact that the native people of Britain and Western Europe are white—an assertion that would be completely uncontroversial if it were made by a Ugandan person stating that native people of their country are black.

 

It is not an assertion of dominance or superiority, nor is it an attempt at saying nonwhite people should be booted out of the country. It is merely a historic and obvious truth that the majority of people who have populated these islands for the longest period of time are what most people would call “white.”

 

The way in which politicians and members of the press reacted to this simple truth gave credibility to the arguments of the genuine far right. When the establishment denies the very existence of a British or European people, and when the politicians say that Britain is a culturally and ethnically neutral place, it gives rise to identity politics and proves the genuine racists right.

 

“The BBC don’t want you to exist!” they say.

 

Every time I heard that, I became more steadfast in my belief that the media and most political commentators hated me. The most striking example I can remember of this is when Bonnie Greer, an American-British black playwright, took on Nick Griffin on live television in 2009. It was during an episode of Question Time, a panel show for elected politicians and commentators, when Greer took Griffin to task and told him there was no such thing as a native British or English person.

 

Her absolute denial of the existence of an English people was fuel for the fire. Politicians had opened our borders and allowed an influx of people on a scale we’ve never seen before, the media called anyone who disagreed with it racist, and now we had activists and commentators suggesting English people don’t even exist.

 

Whether they realize it or not, far-left activists, progressives, and Marxist ideologues are lending credibility to the arguments of the far right. If the extreme right is right about the politicians denying the very existence of English people, then what else could they be right about?

 

I brought this topic up a lot when I first became politically conscious. I’d never once before thought about race. It wasn’t particularly important or significant to me, and to this day I still don’t understand how anyone could harbor a hatred for someone based solely on their race. But nevertheless, it remains true that race does indeed exist, and native Europeans happen to be white. The fact that every single politician made a point of saying there is “no such thing” as a native Brit got under my skin and pushed me further toward racial politics. I was young, I was angry, and I was being told by political leaders that I simply had no identity. As a white man, I’m a citizen of nowhere, and my home country was a culturally neutral space with no native population, just waiting to be enriched and changed.

 

This is how you make someone who doesn’t care about race care about race. Others’ denial of  what is obviously true just made me double down and ignore the obvious and dangerous flaws of the political movement I’d found myself involved in.

 

I thought, so what if some of the leaders in this movement did bad things in their past, when the entire political establishment wants to deny my existence as an Englishman? So what if some of the people I know say nasty things about immigrants, when nobody seems to care about the wellbeing of the working class?

 

Why can’t the media and our political establishment see that denying an identity to young white lads is a sure-fire way of making them care about race?

 

Did the Media Even Care about Me?

 

The media became my enemy, and I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. During my early days in the BNP, smartphones and social media were still finding their feet. Members of the party would talk positively about the future of alternative media, discussing plans for their own radio stations and online TV stations. I never believed it; I always thought it was pie-in-the-sky thinking and that the traditional media would always maintain its stranglehold over us.

 

I couldn’t have been more wrong!

 

Resentment for the media has continued to this day and those alternative radio and TV stations did in fact happen. I have been a part of that alternative media revolution and, throughout this book, I will explain the errors made by much of those actively engaged with it—namely, the tendency to drift away from factual reporting toward hyperpartisan sensationalism.

 

Just the fact that alternative media exists and is engaged in a war with the traditional outlets says that the press was doing something very wrong to begin with, and I will never forget how enraged I felt whenever I saw members of the press calling working-class people like me racist for expressing genuine fears and concerns for our future. I remember the sneering, mocking attitude from reporters when covering the BNP, as if to dismiss millions of working-class people who sympathized with their nationalist policy proposals. During an interview with Sky News, Nick Griffin hit back at a reporter who accused the party of being thuggish by recounting the multiple violent attacks he had received over the years and the thuggish behavior of far-left activists who met the BNP at practically every event they ever held. I felt a great sense of victory when Griffin put the reporter in their place, and every little win we had against the biased press made me prouder to put my name to the party.

 

It felt like someone was really speaking for me, fighting back against the system and telling the millions of people watching the show about the hypocrisy of those who called working-class, patriotic people “thugs.” Did the reporters and the journalists think that constantly demonizing the people at home would work? Did they think they could just brush off millions of people with very real concerns and get rid of the far right?

 

If they did, then they were naïve at best, or dangerous ideologues at worst.

 

When the media demonize normal people, at a time when the politicians refuse to represent their interests, they create fertile ground for the far right. It made me even more determined, and it did the same for many others who chose extremism when given the choice between the far right and a media establishment that hated them.

 

The media outlets have a lot of responsibility for the growth of the far right in Europe and America, and they still have a lot of power to curb that growth. They can’t demonize desperate people who joined the BNP anymore, because the BNP is virtually nonexistent—but today, they smear the Brexiteers and the Trump supporters who have finally stood up and asserted themselves. Journalists should know that every time they misrepresent those people, push false narratives, or demonize working-class people, they are arming the far right with the ammunition they need to recruit.

 

Finding My Feet as a Nationalist in College

 

In the UK, we attend college for two years before we attend university; this happens between the ages of sixteen and eighteen. I started my college studies with a naivete about how my political activity would affect my life. It was shattered one day, near the science block, when somebody from my law class walked past me and muttered “scum” under his breath. I couldn’t believe it. I was still a pretty shy young man at this point. I had a small group of friends whom I didn’t really spend much time away from, and I hadn’t had any altercations with people in college, but this student had clearly heard the rumors and decided he knew enough about me to hate me.

 

I found during this early time in my political life that most of my political opponents would never take the time to consider why I said what I said. I learned that for most people, a political debate could be relatively civil, there would be little interference in their political events by protesters, and life would largely be normal for them. I would never enjoy those luxuries, and instead I very quickly had to learn that everything I said would be examined through a racism-tinted lens. No matter what I ever did or said I would be accused of being an extremist, and every possible measure would be taken to shout me down or sully my name.

 

Naturally, it was extremely difficult for me. I had been shy, reserved, and polite my entire life. It never occurred to me that people would not treat me with the same respect I gave them during political discussion, and within a year I found myself becoming an entirely different person. I entered college as a reserved young man, and by the second year, I was an outspoken and angry BNP activist who treated political opponents with the same contempt they had for me.

 

My politics teacher, Saqib, quizzed me on my political leanings one day. Everyone in class had identified as a Tory, a Liberal Democrat, or a Labourite. I had offered opinions from time to time, but I had never explicitly said in class that I supported the BNP. Saqib was interested and asked me what political affiliation I had, if any. I was sitting next to a girl I’d known since high school, and she chuckled as Saqib asked. She knew it would be difficult for me to say, and it was. I told Saqib, “You’ll think I’m racist.” He said, “Try me.”

 

I told him the truth. I told him I was a supporter of the BNP, that I thought it was wrong to deny the existence of an English people, and I thought the Labour Party had abandoned the working class. He nodded. I figure he understood my grievances in the same way I understand them now. I suppose he knew that the BNP was filling a void created by a Labour Party that abandoned its principles. He asked me if I knew the history of the BNP, and I told him, “Yes, and I think it’s irrelevant.”

 

He sort of pursed his lips and nodded, before telling me, “Jack, I think you’re a Tory. You’re a Conservative.” He was right, it turns out. Well, he was right in a way. I’m not a member of the Conservative Party but I am, for the most part, a conservative.

 

I soon started taking more pride in my political allegiances. I started wearing the BNP badge I’d found on eBay with pride. I was known by classmates as “the BNP guy,” and I started to face up to the fact that my life was going to be more controversial than I’d like.

 

A local antifascist group came to give a talk at the college one day. I decided to go, wearing my best tweed suit and my BNP badge. I had a feeling they weren’t going to like it, but I’d never been face to face with “antifascists” before and honestly didn’t know what to expect. I don’t know whether the teachers tipped them off about me or whether their hawk eyes really did manage to notice my BNP badge from within the crowd, but just moments before the talk was meant to begin the organizer of the event started shouting at me. “A fascist in a suit is still a fascist!” they said.

 

Saqib and the other teachers in the room tried to calm them down. They continued protesting about my attendance and insisted they wouldn’t go ahead until I was removed. I refused to leave, and the teachers managed to convince them to continue. I’m sure they told them that now would be a good chance to try and convert me, but the presentation didn’t come close to changing my mind. I sat through an hour of childish name-calling and wild conspiracy theories. I remember noting down every lie they told, waiting for the Q&A session at the end. When it eventually came and I was the only person with a hand in the air, the presenters thanked everyone, packed up, and tried to leave.

 

I went in with good intentions, to listen, and I was treated like dirt. That was when I realized I was just scum to them. There I was, a white working-class lad who genuinely just wanted to learn, embarrassed in front of a room of people and called a Nazi and a fascist. Those people didn’t know me.

 

If their intention was to deliver a message of hope, they did the opposite for me. They once again reaffirmed my belief that the political establishment, i.e., those who hold power culturally and in the mainstream political world, didn’t like people like me.

 

And if I was being called a racist, then I had another reason not to believe anyone who called the BNP racist. I didn’t think the extreme right really existed because I knew how easily people lied about those things.

 

Imagine you are a naïve sixteen-year-old being called a fascist by people you have never met and called “scum” by your peers. Would you listen to the politicians and the journalists who tell you to be wary of the far right?

 

Looking back, I know I was treated with such disdain because people thought I believed something I didn’t. I was a member (or, then, just a supporter) of the BNP and therefore I must have been a neo-Nazi who wanted to deport all nonwhite people. No matter how many times I said that wasn’t the case, people believed it because that was the common perception (and, to be fair, that was an early BNP policy). I can’t help but wonder, however, what might have happened if people had taken the time to listen to what I said rather than put words in my mouth.

 

If these people were trying to deradicalize me, or to prove me wrong, what made them think their unwavering scorn would do the trick? If I was really the neo-Nazi that they thought I was, wouldn’t their hatred just strengthen my convictions? And if I wasn’t the monster they alleged me to be, wouldn’t treating me that way just push me further away?

 

Those incidents in college were the first time I experienced real-life confrontation over my politics, and I remained surprised each time it happened for the rest of my first year studying there. Over time, my shy nature began to change and I began retaliating. I became more radical, angrier, and more vocal every time someone bullied me or suggested I believed something I didn’t, to the point where I would go out of my way to be as wildly offensive as I could. If they were offended, I wanted to give them something to be offended about—and if they hated me, I wanted to give them a real reason to hate me. Not only did it push me further away from mainstream thinking (and society), but it gave me more reason to become more involved and active within the British far right.

 

I found a home and a community in the group that accepted me for who I was. At least, that’s what I thought at the time.

 

An Antidote to the Cycle of Radicalization

 

Much can be done to make the far right less attractive. Measures currently taken by Western governments to do this have proven to be catastrophic failures owing largely to the inability of the metropolitan elite to understand why white, working-class people turn to the far right in the first place. Most conclusions drawn from research into the phenomenon are also inaccurate as a result of a fundamental misunderstanding of what the far right even is.

 

In order to solve the problem, we must first understand it—and right now, practically the only people who understand what it means to be far right are the ones who have lived and breathed it.

 

This, as I will argue throughout the book, is a result of the political center shifting leftwards over a period of decades, combined with a concerted effort by anti-racism groups to inflate their own relevance and importance by creating far-right monsters that don’t exist. Nobody understands what the far right really is because so-called anti-racism organizations across America, the UK, and Europe are attributing the label to people who would have been considered centrists or moderate conservatives just ten years ago. There is a dark political agenda behind the far-right witch hunt that makes the problem extremely difficult to solve, but that’s exactly the point. For as long as everybody who expresses concern about mass immigration is considered far right, there will always be monsters to slay and money for anti-racism groups to continue their important work.

 

Likewise, it allows far-left ideologues to shape society however they like with virtually no resistance from big business. Who would want to be seen to endorse neo-Nazis?

 

The strategy has been so effective that the president of the United States has been labelled a white supremacist and even a neo-Nazi by mainstream journalists and commentators, and 17.4 million British voters were called racist by Labour Party politicians for voting to leave the European Union.

 

Muddying the waters about far-right extremism is a lucrative industry. It creates well-paying jobs in left-wing think tanks and academia, it allows ideologues to manipulate popular culture, and it makes people with very real concerns keep quiet for fear of being called racist.

 

All the while, the real far right navigates those muddy waters, hard to distinguish from mainstream conservatives and democratic populists. As long as everyone is a neo-Nazi, it is hard to identify the people who genuinely believe white supremacist and anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.

 

Are far-left organizations, activists, and politicians really doing justice to their cause when they make it nearly impossible to tackle the extreme-right activists who pose a genuine threat?

 

It is more likely that, as advocates for social justice and equal rights, the importance of their cause has diminished as society has ditched old prejudices, and they are now looking for new battles to fight. Whether those battles are real is entirely irrelevant to them.

 

The irrational and hate-filled agenda of far-left activists has drawn the attention of populists and conservatives across the Western world, firing them into a frenzy and creating an entirely new counterculture industry that regularly falls into their opponents’ traps without realizing it. Hypocrisy and radicalism amongst the far left are noted by conservatives and populists, but in their fervent opposition and dislike of the left, they have failed to recognize the threat posed by the real far right. It is just too easy to dismiss the left’s claims that there is a new far-right menace growing ugly heads and reaching its tentacles into popular culture as lunacy because most of what they say is insane. That does not mean, however, that the wild claims they make are without any merit at all.

 

Far-right extremists do exist. They are recruiting and growing their influence, and they are operating under the radar while the radical left and the populist right battle it out between themselves.

 

It’s time conservatives take a step back and critically analyze the situation, as well as their own tactics. In the heat of the debate about which side is more extreme, conservatives are often too quick to either ignore the existence of the real far right or to pin the blame of far-right terror attacks on far-left radicals.

 

It is easy for conservatives to blame far-right attacks on the far left when the attacker has advocated some left-wing economic policies. But ask yourself this: is a white nationalist inspired by his left-wing economic views or his extreme-right social values when he shoots Jewish or black Christian worshippers?

 

Failing to even acknowledge that far-right extremists exist—and pointing the finger back at the left—achieves nothing. If anything, it plays right into the hands of left-wing extremists who take great delight in conservatives who look like they are in a constant state of denial. Accepting that far-right extremists exist, and that they are on the extreme end of conservative social values, is not a weakness and it does not mean conservatives are far right. That seems to be the great fear for many conservatives and populists.

 

Equally, liberals have much to learn. As long as moderate liberals sit back and watch as the radical left takes control of their political narrative, this political divide will continue to grow deeper and wider. The power to stop the far right’s profiteering from the madness of the left lies in the hands of liberals who aren’t man enough to stand up to bullies on their own side.

 

If only the people with the power to curb extremism knew they had that power or were willing to put their partisan goals aside and do something good for society. Conservatives and liberals must show willingness to reflect on their tactics amidst this bitter cultural battle, but our politicians and media class must also be willing to consider the possibility that they might have made some mistakes.

 

I believe, based on my personal experiences and my interaction with far-right terrorists and extremists over the last ten years, that young white men are being systematically radicalized by what I call the Three-Pronged Attack. This is a series of life events that see mostly young, white, working-class men neglected by their elected representatives, smeared and demonized by the national press, and relentlessly attacked by far-left ideologues in practically all areas of their lives.

 

Neo-Nazis and white supremacists are not created in a void. A cycle of radicalization is allowing a dangerous movement to recruit off the back of political discontentment and a bitter feud between the right and left that has been created by ideologues who want to completely reshape society. Our deradicalization measures are insufficient and fundamentally flawed from the start, our politicians show no desire to address difficult issues, the media just keeps lying about working-class patriots who experience real injustice, and far-left activists keep chucking bricks at those who stand up for themselves.

 

There is an antidote to this, but it might take listening to a former far-right activist to find it.

 

 

[1] “Anger over Refugee ‘Prisons’ Plan,” BBC News, February 15, 2002, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/1822083.stm.

 

[2] Deborah Summers, “Brown Stands By British Jobs for British Workers Remark,” The Guardian, January 30, 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/jan/30/brown-british-jobs-workers.

 

[3] Polly Curtis, “How Gillian Duffy Nipped out for a Loaf—But Left Gordon Brown in a Right Jam,” The Guardian, April 29, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/apr/29/gordon-brown-gillian-duffy-bigot

 

[4] “Preston Census Demographics, United Kingdom,” Qpzm Local Stats,  http://localstats.co.uk/census-demographics/england/north-west/preston

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