What progressive extremism experts get wrong: An entire industry has been built on narcissism

Unsurprisingly, the role of the extremism expert lends itself to the kind of person who thrives on secrecy, dissimulation and drama. Julia Ebner, for example, spent two years cultivating five fake online identities in order to spy on the online activities of extremists for her book Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists. On one of the rare occasions when she met a far-Right activist in real life, she put on a blonde wig to disguise herself. Ebner insists that the social utility of her findings justified the ethical breach of lying to her research subjects. Similarly, Talia Lavin, a far-left writer and activist who is often quoted by journalists as an authority on the far-Right, adopted numerous fake identities, which included posing as a white nationalist huntress from Iowa, for the purpose of researching her book Culture Warlords.

Before the rise of the extremism expert, an extremist was someone who occupied the margins: which is to say that they were at a distance from the mainstream, if not in direct contention with it. Now, it seems, an extremist is anyone who comes from or embodies the mainstream. He is the “normie” next door. He is your brother, father, husband or son. He is you, whether you know it or not. The Extreme Gone Mainstream, as the title of one recent book puts it.

This was a particularly insistent theme in much expert commentary on the racially motivated mass-shooting in Buffalo last month, where 18-year-old Payton Gendron murdered 10 people at a supermarket. The LA Times, for example, published an op-ed by Colin P. Clarke on how the “Buffalo gunman emerged from a far-Right ecosystem that’s gone mainstream”. Clarke noted, referring to the hate-filled manifesto that Gendron posted online before carrying out his atrocity, that the “great replacement” idea at the heart of the manifesto “is not merely in the dark, conspiratorial corners of the internet”, but “has been mainstreamed on cable news shows, including by Tucker Carlson, who routinely regurgitates far-Right talking points…” Rolling Stone published an even more polemically strident op-ed by Talia Lavin, titled “The Buffalo Shooter Isn’t a ‘Lone Wolf.’ He’s a Mainstream Republican.”

The notion that the extreme has gone mainstream is, of course, a wild exaggeration. The extreme still lurks where it always has: at the extreme. What has instead happened is that extremism experts have been ideologically captured by progressive politics, believing that anything that challenges elite dogmas — such as the belief that a woman can become a man or that masking mandates are effective — are forms of extremism that must be somehow explained and then silenced in the interests of online “safety”.

While it’s true that Trump and his hardcore supporters believe that the last US election was stolen from them and that there are broad parallels between their thinking and that of the tiny few who have wreaked far-Right murderous violence both in America and beyond, there are, as Graeme Wood has put it, “countless shades of difference between, say, supporting a border wall and wanting to snipe at Mexicans along the Rio Grande”. Anyone who can’t distinguish between the two is not only morally and intellectually unserious, but also singularly undeserving of the title “expert”.