Far right, far left: The widening abyss between extremes

While political leaders frame left-wing extremism as the rising domestic terror threat, the actual data (who commits violence, against whom, and why) points in a more uncomfortable direction.

This week on Conflicts of Interest, Clionadh Raleigh and Bron Mills break down what ACLED's data reveals about political violence in the United States and beyond:

• Is the far left genuinely becoming a greater security threat, or is the danger being overstated for political gain? 
• What does the data actually say about violence committed by far-right vs far-left actors? 
• Why does the perception of the threat diverge so sharply from the reality?
• How does partisan framing of national security distort counterterrorism priorities?

They also discuss the rising tide of violence against politicians and local officials, the Trump administration's latest gender politics in the US military, and the accelerating trend of everything — from national security to football — becoming partisan.

For more conversations like this, subscribe to Conflicts of Interest and watch the full episode on YouTube. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

One was kind of the legacy of these Islamist groups, right? Which is and we see some activity, certainly, you know, continued concern about the Sahel and some parts of Nigeria and also, of course, what's happening in Pakistan and Afghanistan and Hezbollah, etc. Right. So there's these legacy Islamist threats that are casting a long shadow. They seem to be at a not a low point at the moment, but they're not in an active phase. Conflicts of interest brought to you by ACLED. Hello everybody, welcome to Conflicts of Interest. My name is Cleaner Raleigh, and I'm here with a lovely Ron. Hello.

SPEAKER_01 0:42

Hello, good morning. So it's a it's a very good morning for quite a lot of my team this morning. From Spain. There's a couple of them from Spain. So they're in in their celebrations this morning. And we did say we would mention quickly, didn't we? My sofa is new and covered in plastic.

SPEAKER_00 0:56

Not You're not at your grand's house.

SPEAKER_01 0:59

No, or or planning some kind of mass murder or something. That's not what this is.

SPEAKER_00 1:03

Well, the funny thing is that uh when I get a cat covered in plastic, I just assume that you're at an older person's house who has never sat on their own furniture. Right? Never. But maybe that's maybe that's my own background coming out. Yeah, it could be. Yeah, because I w I'm a big fan of kind of using all of your nice things when you have them. That's why you have them, right? So use them all. Use the good plates and sit in all your rooms and all the rest of it, right? But I'm always amused to see a plastic covered couch.

SPEAKER_01 1:33

Yeah. It'll be coming off as soon as I finish the painting. I just don't trust myself.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

Well, I'm so actually on the week, right? Because uh, if we're gonna talk about the World Cup, I think that the game between England and France was absolutely brilliant. Have you watched it?

SPEAKER_01 1:50

I did, and I only started watching it sort of halfway through because I thought, oh, it doesn't matter, nobody cares. And then I started to see the the scores popping up on my news and I was like, what's the thing?

SPEAKER_00 2:01

Yeah. It was such a beautiful game because I don't know if I meant it to you, but after the the England Argentinian game, which led to a lot of tears in my house, it was such a I felt like it was like watching somebody be mugged. I thought it was an awful game in every way. And then this game, I mean, you know, we weren't going to stay up to watch it, but then Ezra wanted to get up at like five in the morning and see it. And it was absolutely beautiful to watch, you know. The like the long play, the real the you know, the use of the whole field. I just loved every bit of it. And it gave me an excuse, however, briefly, of course, to look at Jude Bellingham's face, which I always appreciate, and my favourite, Saka, who I love.

SPEAKER_01 2:44

No, it's absolutely fair. And you know, one of the commentary team at one point said that anyone from the States is gonna get confused. We are indeed watching football, but this feels like basketball because of how sort of free-flowing and and wonderful it was. But I think that's why I enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_00 3:00

Because I don't like football because I find it quite boring and short and but that was a really good, as you say, really flowing and open and well, it was just such a marked contrast to the one earlier in the week because there weren't fouls and there weren't kind of, you know, these performances of injury. It was an actual game, as you say, free-flowing and and really, really a delight to watch. I didn't stay up to watch last night's match. Ezra had to kind of negotiate with us both to really get permissions to do it. But in no surprise, Argentina decided to start beating people up at the end.

SPEAKER_01 3:39

I know that was bizarre to watch because you had the sort of Spanish players that were kind of falling to their knees and were so the relief on their faces. It was amazing what they'd done. And then it just turned really nasty within within sort of seconds. And that was after all of the kind of controversy, I suppose, maybe not as strong as controversy, but people had certainly mixed reviews about all of the Americanisms in the in the halftime show situation, didn't they?

SPEAKER_00 4:06

So it started with Polly Walnuts giving a song in the beginning, also known as Robbie Williams, and then it went to this truly atrocious halftime show. But one of the things, and it had nothing to do with football. That's the thing that annoyed me the most, right? Because if I'm going to watch something, granted it's mostly for Sam and Ezra, but if I'm gonna watch something, then I wanted to have some sort of a, you know, a role within the event itself. And this kind of just watered down American nonsense about love and children in the middle of it was stupid. It was just absolutely stupid.

SPEAKER_01 4:41

Yeah, it was. It did it didn't really work. And then the commentary team did make me laugh at that point because I think that the two more diplomatic members were trying to find something nice, and they did make a comment, and then Wayne Rooney went, I thought that was crap. I love Wayne Rooney. I don't know if I mentioned this before, but I love him, right?

SPEAKER_00 4:58

So do I. I feel like he's a r he's like a long-lost relative, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's how I feel.

SPEAKER_01 5:04

It's the straight talking part, and I don't think you can get more polar opposite to American enthusiasm than a scouse.

SPEAKER_00 5:12

Yeah, I really I think he could be like a cousin, you know, that you would have a chat with. But what I will say is that the thing that annoyed me most, and even though I just did it myself, the thing that annoyed me the most is that Spain's win has been overcrowded or has been kind of shoved aside for this commentary on Argentina's behavior, which is exactly probably what they wanted. They wanted to kind of take this moment from Spain, you know, and turning their back and all the rest of it.

SPEAKER_01 5:37

And I thought it was freaking revolting. Well, and their team photo was overcrowded and overshadowed by by Trump who did not get the memo to to shift. And it was quite funny watching them trying to kind of move him out of there.

SPEAKER_00 5:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:51

The photo, though, is amazing. Like it is really funny. Yeah. And I think there were lots of people quite on edge about how engaged Trump might be with them because of what he was saying about Spain to the Donato summit.

SPEAKER_00 6:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:07

You know, what was it, a terrible partner and would never do business with them. And then he really wants to be in the team.

SPEAKER_00 6:14

Well, in fairness, I'll say this about Trump, right? He's not connecting those two things until such time as he needs to, right? Like the Spanish team and the country of Spain. So I mean he also was commenting on uh Harry Kane's position during the Argentinian game. So I mean, you know, he's a he's uh maybe he's a super quick study of the great game.

SPEAKER_01 6:36

Maybe, maybe. And he was certainly getting involved, which was interesting to see the extent to which he was involved given the renewed escalation in Iran as well. It was like a busy week for Trump.

SPEAKER_00 6:48

Well, one would hope that he's actually kind of aware of that escalation, but we'll see maybe there are problems for further down the road, or nothing's been resolved. I'll put it that way.

SPEAKER_01 6:59

Yeah, nothing's been resolved. And there's a weird element of sort of constant bad news, but it's not necessarily moving in any sort of direction. And so the the summary of headlines say that that I've pulled together recently since we last spoke, there's been a new wave of attacks in Ukraine, and then within Ukraine, the military recruitment officers are facing all sorts of kind of brutality. There's a story in the BBC about that this morning. And so the brutality in that kind of internal friction, it's not progress and it's not good for anybody, you know? And then we're hearing from Nicaragua that President Daniel Ortega has now declared there will be no more elections.

SPEAKER_00 7:44

You know who he should speak to? The Ortegos from the 70s. I think they'd have a lot to say about that. What do you think they would say? I think they would say, what the hell has just happened here? So it was the two brothers who were involved, of course, in the Nicaraguan Revolution at the time. And I'm spacing out at the moment on the details, but we have a lot of these former rebels, former rebel leaders coming into power and then really kind of turning everything on its head and going right back to the problem that they initially, you know, used to justify the recruitment and the generation of a serious rebellion against the state. We're seeing the same in Uganda. So they've stayed in power too long, right? This is and that's what all of these problems amount to. And then they start thinking, well, if I leave, this state will somehow just crumple. It will, it will not be able to stand, which is what, you know, it's what Mugabe said, it's what Mabutu said, it's what I mean, I know I have Africa-specific examples, but such is my area. But all of them think that they and the state are the same thing. And so having people do something as petty as voting is what is the problem, right? It's just complicating their rule of their own country.

SPEAKER_01 8:57

Well, I'm gonna catch up with our expert in that space later on today. So I'd be really interested in what his take is and how that's gonna play out moving forward. And it reminded me of what we said a while ago when we were talking about how it seems from Latin American countries largely, it's kind of these polar opposite everything's very extreme.

SPEAKER_00 9:16

Everything's always very, very extreme. But I'll come back very quickly to what you were saying there about levels of violence. Like it's very, you know, we've been talking about the level of three things constantly, which is the level of defense spending, the level of violence, which as you know kind of hit its peak last year in a five-year high, having doubled in that in those five years. Defense spending is, you know, beyond twice the rate it would have been before. And then there's the level of threat, which is, you know, unclear really, but it's certainly not going away. And that leaves you in a strange position, which is that if you're engaging in what we have now, which is a very, very high violence environment, you can almost seem complacent about it because you're not being alarmist, right? I mean, to be honest, to be alarmist would basically be saying this environment is going to completely shift to become, you know, much more active, or many more actors will start coming into play. And I don't actually think that we're going to get a surge in violence. I do think we're going to kind of change the actors constantly. So even as this Iran-US conflict at the moment seems to sputter along, because neither of them have a particularly good theory about how this is going to end, or even how it's going to change form, right? We know that there will be contests about what the next stage is, whether it's the Red Sea, whether it's, you know, a pipeline going through Iraq and Syria. That was something I saw recently, whether it's the southern strategy through Oman or on the coastline of Oman, or something I even saw recently, which is a very interesting and intriguing idea about a Israeli-Turkish focus on gas fields and energy supply. There's all sorts of alternatives that will kind of change the geopolitics of that whole area, and that will inevitably lead to some sort of conflict opportunity because of the possible returns.

SPEAKER_01 11:19

Yeah. And then that the headline this morning, of course, coming out of Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan saying that they've been intercepting more missiles from Iran.

SPEAKER_00 11:28

Yeah, they're, you know, the US is now kind of fixating they've fixed their positions in Jordan and Israel. And so, uh, but Israel has not been hit in this latest round. And that's because, of course, Iran doesn't want to escalate further, and they know that if they hit Israel, they will. So they're working behind the scenes a lot. Uh, they're trying, you know, even their hitting of Syria recently and a base that is actually in Syria, that's a US base. It's designed to also ward them off of encouraging Syria to engage in the Hezbollah issue with Israel. So there's, you know, there's all sorts of messages, if you will, with every one of these attacks.

SPEAKER_01 12:08

So speaking of messages, what did you think of the Falklands banner that came out with the I thought the Argentinians were a bunch of gobshites the entire time?

SPEAKER_00 12:18

That I mean, listen, you're never going to, you're never gonna get me to say I am actually perfectly fine with Britain's, let's say, Leban's realm, right? No Irish person's ever gonna say, oh, I'm totally fine with them just taking over territories of other countries in the past. But I thought, can we not have just one bloody thing that isn't about some extremely divisive political issue? Can we not just have one thing?

SPEAKER_01 12:45

Yeah, it did it did strike me as like the purpose and who would have come up with that. Because with you know, the best view on the England team that they put out this year, because I think individually they're uh lovely and they haven't caused half as many problems as some previous players, so I'm all for them. But I don't think it would ever cross any of their minds to politicize anything.

SPEAKER_00 13:09

No, no, no, no. Despite I think that they're all seem like pretty good lads, you know? Like uh but I think that they took they took their job seriously, right? Which was to play football for the country. And I think good on them. Good on them.

SPEAKER_01 13:24

Not good on them too. It felt weird for footballers to to kind of go there.

SPEAKER_00 13:30

That's the last thing I wanted to see. You might remember a time, you know, not even ten years ago, where every bloody celebrity had some really deep-seated opinion about different conflicts in the world, such as Angelina Jolie, who was given a position at the LSE to lecture. I mean, I just thought that that was the lowest of the low, this nonsense about effectively trying to create celebrity causes out of conflicts. And then it was a competition as to which conflicts got assigned to different celebrities, and I thought it was atrocious, the whole thing. A very low point, I would say, in the humanitarian celebrity nexus. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:10

But I think that was written off as a low point. And so again, you you are like it was a surprise to see it in in that context.

SPEAKER_00 14:16

Yeah. Yeah, especially because I think that like what was the purpose of it other than to act or to continue to act ratty, which is what that game had been doing. Well, what's it what it's been doing for decades.

SPEAKER_01 14:28

But anyway. I mean, it's a good word because I think that was definitely a sort of overshadowing of that game. The fighting yesterday had the same thing, but you know, they've kept in the headlines if that was the goal.

SPEAKER_00 14:41

Well, I mean, coming back to your statement there about the kind of radical nature of uh Latin American politics, you know, I recall reading about how a few years ago when they were not acting so ratty, there was a discussion, a public discussion in Argentina about whether or not the team should reflect the culture, you know, whether the government should reflect the culture, etc. So maybe they're totally okay with being ratty. But different South American, in particular, teams have, of course, a very different philosophy about how to approach football, which they associate with, I think, a broader cultural positioning. And uh, you know, Argentina's current leader is nothing to be too delighted about.

SPEAKER_01 15:23

So yeah, no, I think you're right. And then then you mentioned this earlier on about the defense secretary announcing that these American service members, so the announcement was that anyone in American service, 30 and over, will be screened annually for low testosterone. So they've been describing the the point of this, I guess, as to ensure troops can operate at their absolute best.

SPEAKER_00 15:48

Yeah. And of course, those troops are not women.

SPEAKER_01 15:51

Well, they wouldn't be. Yeah. And so what what do you think, what message are they sending there?

SPEAKER_00 15:55

Oh, there's, you know, like there's a there's a component of MAGA, and there's certainly a component of the Trump administration that is super eager to get involved in these gender wars that are playing out within the US. And that is an example, one example, of larger kind of right-left positioning within the US in particular, around all s all sorts of things. So you might remember that, you know, we spoke in the podcast once about how a lot more women are voting not just for the left, but have far left causes that are much more important to a component of that population than to their male counterparts who are voting more and more for the maybe the the right, and if not that, the extreme right. You have kind of an online behavior that's really reinforcing this. People believe then that it's you know bleeding out into society at large, and you have lower rates of marriage and lower rates of children, etc. But I think to some degree this is very online people, right, basically trying to take their discussions offline and finding that it's a little it's very tricky to kind of make it work in person. But I mean, as you may have known because of things I've said here, I do not think much of the uh Secretary of Defense. And I think that this is one of his dumber ideas, which is really saying something. Really, I had to root around for for like where is that going to be in the deep competition for his worst ideas.

SPEAKER_01 17:35

Yeah, well, I don't think anyone can say that it's not up there. But the thing for for me is exactly as you were mentioning, the s the kind of online space that feels like these conversations happen. It's the idea itself feels like something that a YouTuber says off the cuff in amongst uh kind of rampage about men versus women as far as, you know, physically stronger or whatever. It feels like that. It doesn't feel like a headline I should be reading is an official policy coming out of the United States.

SPEAKER_00 18:04

Well, I mean, I'm sure you gave it more thought than he gave it, if that makes any sense. But this is all kind of happening in the in front of the an important backdrop, which is that the US did release its 2026, what's it called, like counter-terrorism strategy, right? And in that it listed three big threats, or what it believes to be three big threats to the states. One was kind of the legacy of these Islamist groups, right? Which is, and we see some activity, certainly, you know, continued concern about the Sahel and some parts of Nigeria, and also, of course, what's happening in Pakistan and Afghanistan and Hezbollah, etc., right? So there's these legacy Islamist threats that are casting a long shadow. They seem to be at a not a low point at the moment, but they're not in an active phase. They're still a threat. The second is violent left-wing extremists, is that they believe that this is a significant counter-terrorism issue in the US. And the third is narco-terrorism and transnational groups around drug running, et cetera, and around cartels more broadly. And while I think everybody would say one and three are certainly very, very big threats, both to the US homeland, but also more broadly, and they're and they're very difficult threats to deal with, right? So they require a really innovative understanding of how to wield, you know, the world's greatest military that it's ever seen into these very, very asymmetric and very flexible, adaptable threats. This second one, which is a violent left-wing extremist, that is more about appealing to their political base and what they believe to be this hidden threat that they're all facing. So, of course, the murders of Charlie Kirk and some others are really not helping. And attempted assassinations of President Trump are all kind of feeding into this, right? Whereas the Biden administration would have said that this is on the right wing, but also handled it accordingly, which is that it's a discreet threat that they actually dealt with very, very well, especially after January 6th. This administration wants to be more stretchy with it, and I'll be honest with you, they're not getting they're not getting pure reasons to think that it's that it's an important threat, but what I guess I would say is that there's no evidence that it's a coordinated threat. So if you look at in Britain, for example, the murder of Anne Whittakom, who was a right to far right former MP, right? This was this is an important uh episode here because there's also been another woman, uh Jo Cox, who was murdered about 10 years ago now, right before the Brexit vote. She was pro-Brexit. No, sorry, she was pro, she was not pro-Brexit, but she was murdered by somebody who disagreed with her political opinions. And, you know, we'd often well, we always collect information about political figures who are being threatened and hurt, attacked, killed, etc. In Accolid. We call it the violence against local officials sub-data set. And what we find is that there are lots of threats in in the US, but there aren't a lot of actual attacks. Whereas in Europe, there's been a real surge in both attacks on their property, attacks on their offices, etc., and then attacks on them too. So it's, I mean, it's a problem. But I really want to emphasize here it is not solely in any way a left wing phenomena. This is a problem very broadly. Both extremes are more than happy with more violence.

SPEAKER_01 21:51

Which is what the term extreme refers to, right? And that's why it's used. So on the violence targeting local officials, the Guardian actually quoted our latest release of those figures over the weekend in a broader piece about Anne Whittakom. And so it quoted that our data show between 2024 and 2025 it jumped by 46% across Europe. And the highest proportion of those serious incidents were actually in Italy.

SPEAKER_00 22:21

Yeah, Italy's a big one. France is a big one too, because they tend to trade off like which ones have a very high level. So Andrea, of course, who organized this collection within Accled, often gives reports to the European Union and then its constitutive states about this threat because, as we said, it's it's higher in Europe than I think anybody expected, or still anybody appreciates how high it is in Britain. But it really underscores, too, is that there is, just like in the US, where you get quite a lot of this kind of lone wolf violence, there is, this is the version of lone wolf violence that you find in Europe, where they are attracted to quite an extreme ideology which very uncomfortably fits either right or left. In the same way in the States, it's very difficult to pinpoint on which partisan, it's often not partisan at all, but even on which political spectrum you can position some of these murderers or attempted murderers, certainly attackers, for people in office. It's yeah, it's it's bad, right? It's bad and it's getting worse, but there's there's very little coherence in it, and and I think there's very low levels of organization.

SPEAKER_01 23:36

So when we're talking about the perception of the far left being this almighty threat to the state, is it fair to suggest that as you as a government put forward increasingly extreme policies, rules positioned, they're more likely to generate more extreme responses for those who disagree. And therefore, yeah, you could you could almost guarantee that the people who oppose those are going to feel more strongly if you're taking an increasingly strong stance yourself.

SPEAKER_00 24:08

Yeah, I guess so. Certainly more people are associating themselves with believing, you know, both far right and far left positions, right? So that means there's fewer people in the center. And governments almost always choose some sort of compromise, right? Some sort of relatively centered position because they have a large population to account for. And so you're right. What it does is that it engenders quite strong reactions from both the far left and the far right, or even the left and right, increasingly, right? That need this attention. So part of it is just the attention economy itself and where you get it. So you kind of react, you overreact to literally every single bloody decision that's made by the government, you know, trying to stop building houses or trying to stop digital ID or trying to stop all of these positions that you've decided are the rock you're going to perish on. I think that the bigger issue in the states, which is why I'm worried about why, you know, left, they call it left-wing extremism, has been placed on the counterterrorism agenda, is that if you take, you know, actions against ICE, such as protests, overwhelmingly peaceful, or, you know, assertions that, for example, that the 2024 election was not stolen, which is now increasingly something that you have to disavow on the right. So that it's that position's been made more extreme. All of a sudden, election security has become a partisan issue as opposed to being a non-partisan issue. And it's, you know, it's a little bit like what we were just saying about the World Cup and everything else. Everything has been made, not just political, but partisan. And so you end up having these extremely odd positions that groups are taking in order to kind of represent the larger team rather than something that makes sense within that ideology. And then justifications for violence are going off on both the right and left, in particular the extreme right and left.

SPEAKER_01 26:12

So I think it was about four weeks ago I was reading that the leader of the Antifa cell members in North Texas was sentenced to 100 years in prison for a terrorist attack on an ICE facility. And I think the one of the reasons that I found that so interesting is that I was under the impression that Antifa wasn't a kind of organized group like we might code, that it was more of a an ideology, I guess, that like takes many different forms. And so what does what does a leader look like amongst that? And and obviously they would be considered far left, right?

SPEAKER_00 26:49

Well, yeah, I will say though, that like it's particularly useful for the US government to have an individual representing a group that then they can tie to an action that then they can tie to a consequence that is so, let's say, extreme. That consequence is extreme. It's a problem that the US is happy to have because they feel like they've got these ready solutions for it, right? But it's only on the far left. They, I mean, I would say that the Trump administration hasn't had to deal with a surge in far right activity at the moment, in part because we've discussed this before, not because they feel like they are being placated with their 20 million podcasts and uh everything else or the or the stances of the of the Trump administration, there is still a quite a virulent kind of far right action or group in the states that isn't pro-Trump, right? And you're increasingly seeing this kind of MAGA movement that's moving away from many of Trump's positions that apparently JD Vance is okay with because he was speculating about these conspiracies as if, like, you know, he's no control over them in a recent podcast appearance. Anyway, I I'm getting off topic here. What I what I mean to say here is that you're not seeing a surge of far-right activity in the states. You are seeing a surge of far-left activity in the states. And this is the problem that the US administration wants. They're happy to have it, right? They're happy to shape it the way they want it to look, so then they can claim whatever consequence or whatever changes they want to make in whether it's the right to assemble or election security or whatever. It's because of this threat that they have very carefully molded and shaped and made into a terrorist threat before an election.

SPEAKER_01 28:36

And it's interesting because there are still articles coming out. I mean, there's a piece in Counterpunch, which is uh quite an interesting publication. But in a piece about Antifa, they've called it a conspiracy hogwash and convenient platform for fascism. And the article literally reads, let's start with reality. There's no Antifa organization. There exists no Antifa funding that the FBI director suggests there is. And so the amount of people feeling the need to explain this sort of from the beginning over and over again, it's like, where's the disconnect happening?

SPEAKER_00 29:12

Well, I think the disconnect is happening, is that it everything feels like it's associated together now, right? So let me back up for a second and just talk about the funding, because I think that's quite important. The different US organizations have decided to tackle kind of sacred cows of, let's say, the established West, the liberal West, not West, sorry, left. And they include things like the Southern Poverty Law Center and Amnesty and Antifa and some of the kind of new wave of resistance, right? Or ICE, ICE protesters, things like that, right? And they have found in some cases that there's a little bit of an open door to push to talk about the corruption of these entities, right? So, as in, like, you know, we've heard a lot about how the Black Lives Matter movement, very similar to what we're just saying about the Southern Poverty Law Center, there were real problems there and how money was being used and who it was going to and for what purpose, right? However, they are willing to kind of paint all adherence to the ideology of these organizations, which is often, you know, civil liberties, freedom of expression, you know, and a real push against attempts to get do away with the social justice developments of the last year, you know, all these very positive things for society. They're hoping that they can tar everybody with the same brush as being involved in that. And that's a real shame because I think it we can only go backwards. But there are some ways in which, let's say, bastions of the liberal left have made real problems for themselves. So I'm gonna give you an example here in Britain, which you may be aware of, which is that Amnesty came out and called just a huge number of feminist organizations anti-rights. In part because they'd chosen to take this position that's that is quite far left and say, if you do not adhere to this position, so it was like a real heretic hunting, you know, exercise. If you don't agree with this very far left position, then we're going to try to say quite bad things about you very publicly and uh delegitimize what you do. And they've had to then take the report back. They didn't apologize, said it hadn't gone through its usual screamings and all the rest of it, in part because they took a position that was very far away from what most people think, thinking that they could kind of gain some sort of, I don't know, probably some legitimation amongst them the more progressive slash far-left part of the coalition that they believe support Amnesty's work, which was a much broader church than they were willing to concede. I think that's the problem too, is that some, both on the far right and the far left, don't quite understand the compromises necessary to make sure that you get a crucial mass of people supporting your general direction.

SPEAKER_01 32:11

So was it last week that Marco Rubio brought together leaders from sort of 60 countries to address this far left issue? And what was interesting for me, there was a couple of things. So he was lots of sweeping statements, of course, came out of that with the alarming eyes and this dark image of the future if the communists and Marxists. I think that was a that's kind of carried. Yeah, after the future. Referencing a report that came from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies last year, and that has found indeed that left-wing terrorism attacks as of July the 4th last year had surpassed those from the far right for the first time in more than 30 years. And that is the sort of line they're rolling with. But the journalist who's written this piece and read the report says that when you actually look at the data, it reveals that the uptick is a it reflects a very, very low starting level in the first place. So you can say an uptick, but we're talking about context here. And this concurrent drop on the far right that you were referring to earlier. And so that also seems quite a convenient line for them to be able to take and oversimplify.

SPEAKER_00 33:20

Yeah, Marco Ruby is too smart for this, right? So I'm sure that he's willing to engage in this because it's kind of scratching an itch in the administration that he's been told to do that for it. But, you know, the reaction of the other countries in that meeting was like, are you bloody serious? Honestly, you think this is our biggest threat at the moment? The fact that some people might, you know, post something that they violently disagree with. But I mean, like we were saying, this isn't solely rhetoric, right? It's not solely rhetoric both on the US administration side or on the side of these more radicalized elements of the far left, but also far right, because uh where you get an ebb in some of these issues, especially on the far right, you know, they will become, they will resurge again, they will figure out some way in which they can find an opening in order to move. What we've seen, for example, is that a huge number of people are taking opportunities to engage in not subtle, but maybe more online behavior around Nazism, anti-Semitism, you know, absolutely atrocious misogyny, which is then being kind of mirrored on the establishment or the institutional elements of the US, like Graham Plattner, right? The former Senate candidate for Maine, who had a Nazi tattoo on his body, which was just kind of explained away when it was inconvenient to have to say that it was reflective of his character. Or the fact that he was a misogynist was explained away by the left in order to have him run. And and yet that same behavior, when you see it within Heg Seth, is not explained away by the left, but it is explained away by the right. So, yeah, bad behavior all around.

SPEAKER_01 35:14

Yeah. And speaking of bad behavior, you mentioned misogynists there. The uh the Tate brothers have been arrested again, haven't they, in the in the US. It's taking their total charges in the UK to 59.

SPEAKER_00 35:25

Yeah, th those two are the worst.

SPEAKER_01 35:27

I hope that they are dropped off a cliff. But very connected to the government, big fans of Trump, make lots of public sort of links with with them. And what's interesting as a sort of as a human being that's living and breathing on this planet. At the time of Brexit, I thought, wow, that's an extreme position to take. And then there was Brexit. And then there was reform. And now there's restore, and it's almost of just kind of watching it play out at home, getting more and more extreme to the point at which I wasn't convinced that it could go further than it had at any of those stages.

SPEAKER_00 36:01

I agree with you there, but what I would see, what I would say about reform and restore is they're now locked into a battle amongst their smallest numbers of supporters, right? So they're becoming more and more extreme over the, you know, the relatively small number that need to be placated with those extreme moves in the same way that the Greens had started to be in Britain. These are small numbers of people, right? And the fights over them will destroy parties, right? They may be the most loyal voters once they decide who's most extreme in both areas, right? But only for that cycle. Like these are not loyal voters in general because they're likely to be associated with conspiracy theories, with, you know, general antisocial behavior, with quite extreme positions about everything else besides their one issue that they've decided to hark on for the election in general. So I would say that often these extreme parties burn themselves up. In some cases, such as Brexit, of course, some of those ideas that are on the kind of center, center left, center right, they get kind of taken in by one of the main parties, which of course did no, did no favors for the conservatives in the in the situation with Brexit. What everybody's worried about is the cautionary tale that was, you know, Germany in the early 1930s, where the establishment party thought that taking in all of the kind of energy and excitement around the National Socialists would would give it that boost when in fact, of course, they were overtaken by the National Socialists. You know, it's an important cautionary tale. It's not the only tale about how these things work.

SPEAKER_01 37:46

That's one thing that's come up in conversations recently around what happened with Anne Whiticomb is that over the years she was known to have kind of increasingly strong right views and and moving moving further over. And then of course, what happened happened. It's been labeled as a targeted attack, and MI5 has advised vulnerable L MPs to build a safe room at home.

SPEAKER_00 38:08

I know, yeah. And listen, Anne Whitingham was nuts, but like I I mean, God rest her, because she may have been nuts, but like she was she was expressing those views in a perfectly good way, right? A perfectly healthy, democratic way. And and just shame on anybody who would who would act like you know, hurting your representatives, local, national, international, whomever, is in any way something to even ignore, let alone support.

SPEAKER_01 38:37

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