By Andrew Joyce
Neither man nor angel can discern
Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks
Invisible.John Milton, Paradise Lost
The Anglosphere stands transfixed by an elusive bogeyman: ‘right wing extremism.’ And more than any other nation at the present time, the United Kingdom seems to be in the grip of a media-engineered social panic bordering on paranoid hysteria. This same country, it should be recalled, banned Richard Spencer in June because he had the temerity to advocate for the founding of a White nation on lines similar to those of the State of Israel. Spencer also dared to suggest an ideal of racial self-improvement. In the view of the British Home Office, then under the authority of Theresa May (now Prime Minister), if Spencer continued making such suggestions on British soil it would not be “conducive to the public good.” Furthermore, and without any self-awareness of its own hyperbolic unreason, the same department claimed that Spencer’s positions amounted to the “fomenting” of “serious criminal acts,” “terrorist acts,” and “inter-community violence in the UK.” Spencer, according to this narrative, is an ‘extremist.
Given such an assessment, one might expect that the aftermath of an average NPI conference would be a veritable war zone. One imagines minorities fleeing the disintegrating streets of Washington D.C., pursued by radicalized and frenzied militants in trendy three piece suits. All, presumably, against a cacophony of…