The UK’s Antiterror Unit Reads My X Posts!

Notes From Nina: Week of March 11, 2024

It’s not every day you receive a personal email from the Commission for Countering Extremism. “Oh dear,” I thought, as Milan Kundera’s 1967 novel, The Joke—in which a humorous comment on a postcard sees a young man expelled from the party and punished ever after—came to mind. “What’s this about?”

The day before, I’d tweeted some jokey criticisms of Prevent training, which anyone in England and Wales who works in specific contexts with members of the public must undertake by law (I teach two hours a week at an adult-education college). The so-called Prevent Duty forms part of the government’s Counterterrorism Strategy—if you work in education, health, a local authority, and the like, you’re obliged by law to look out for individuals who might be being drawn into terrorism.

Like many things in Britain today, the training was outsourced to an online company. As I clicked through the lessons, it started to become apparent that they had a very specific kind of potential “radical” in mind:    

Under “Spotting signs of Extremism” the material includes the following:

You are not expected to be aware of the significance of tattoos, but if—for example—you are worried about someone with what seems to be far-right imagery on their skin, you should pass the details onto the Designated Safeguarding Lead (DSL) or a member of the safeguarding team in your organization. They can contact local Prevent coordinators or Prevent officers for help, if they need to.

On the other hand:

It should be noted that: Individuals taking their religion more seriously, choosing to grow a beard or wearing a headscarf for religious reasons are NOT signs of extremism. Equally, an individual expressing an interest in or enthusiasm for politics or peaceful protests is NOT a sign of extremism.

I certainly don’t want people reported to the government for wearing a headscarf, growing a beard, or attending a protest, but I also don’t want them reported because they have a rune or a Union Jack tattoo. I don’t want people reporting on each other at all—which is not the same as being concerned for someone’s well-being as a fellow human being. Outsourcing state surveillance to public servants is a terrible idea: the mark of a society completely given over to fear, mistrust, and the centralizing and bureaucratizing of permissible views. We already live in a country with a CCTV camera for every 11 people, where people go to prison for stickers, where police go around to women’s houses if they tweet that men can’t be women, and where Christians who following a request for feedback object to their bank pushing transgenderism see their bank accounts closed without appeal—not to mention arrested for praying outside an abortion clinic (yes, praying). Meanwhile a religious studies head who showed a cartoon of Muhammad is still in hiding after being placed under police protection.

Other material in the training gave the following as examples of extremism: “white supremacy,” “anti-Semitism,” “animal-rights extremism,” “homophobia,” “incel,” “misogyny,” “Holocaust denial/revisionism,” and “race and religious hatred.” Lumping in young men who can’t find a girlfriend with people who deny the murder of millions seemed like something of a stretch.

People who exhibit conspiratorial thinking are also mentioned in the training—though it isn’t clear how this relates to extremism. The example in the material was someone who believes that the Covid vaccines would reduce fertility, and who believes that there is a global elite that includes the likes of Hillary Clinton and Bill Gates. One of the descriptions for conspiratorial thinking was “the false suggestion that nothing happens by accident and that there are no coincidences; nothing is as it appears and everything is connected.”

There are many people—among whom hippies, psychoanalysts, religious believers—who do indeed think that things happen by necessity; that the outer world is an illusion and that everything is connected. Are these people to be shopped to the nearest Prevent officer for maintaining a non-acceptable worldview? By the way, in Scotland, where things have really gotten pretty bad on the whole freedom front, the authorities have now set up “‘Hate Crime Third Party Reporting Centres,” one of which is in a sex shop. If ever the revolutionary potential of the sexual revolution were definitively over….

Anyway, after my tweets criticizing Prevent, I received that email from the head of the Standards and Compliance Unit of the Commission for Countering Extremism, which informed me that “during our open source horizon scanning, we observed your tweet on X featuring a screenshot of Prevent training.” What on earth is open-horizon scanning, I wondered. Is it just typing “Prevent training” into Twitter and seeing what results pop up?

Once I got over the initial shock, I looked them up. What’s going on, it turns out, is a war at the top. The William Showcross report was published last year, in response to concerns that the Prevent had lost its way and wasn’t actually fulfilling its remit, because “those who commit terrorist acts in this country have been previously referred to Prevent,” among whom the man who murdered Sir David Amess, a member of Parliament killed at his constituency office in 2021 by Ali Harbi Ali, an Islamic State sympathizer.

William Showcross’s report was clear: “It is correct for Prevent to be increasingly concerned about the growing threat from the extreme right. But the facts clearly demonstrate that the most lethal threat in the last 20 years has come from Islamism, and this threat continues.”

The group that contacted me has been recently set up (last month!) to see that Prevent is being delivered properly in the wake of the Shawcross report. In other words, one group of civil servants is looking at the guidance being pushed by another. I spoke to a pleasant woman from the unit on the phone. I said it’s perhaps a bit intimidating to randomly contact people on the basis of their tweets. She seemed to agree.

Photo: Nina Power

Meanwhile, Michael Gove, the secretary of state for Leveling Up, Housing, and Communities yesterday proposed an expanded (they say more precise) definition of extremism, including nonviolent extremism, to ensure that “the government does not meet, fund, or provide a platform to extremist groups or individuals.” According to The Telegraph, “the government insists the definition will not stifle free speech or apply to ‘debate within the boundaries of mainstream discourse’, such as conservative religious views, climate change, abortion rights, or gender-critical issues.” Well that’s alright, then!

One can’t but note that not only are we in an election year—and it is easy to make Labour look weak on militancy when there are weekly pro-Palestinian protests that many on the left support—but that weak and opportunistic states often engage in increasing authoritarianism. Your views may not be criminal today, but the framework is increasingly in place to ensure that tomorrow they will be.

Latest pieces in Compact

Why does the world look so ugly these days? David Schaengold, in “A World Nobody Wants,” asks this most plaintive of questions: “Why have we built an entire world that nobody loves? Why are the riches of the wealthiest civilization in history spent on hideous highway viaducts that crumble as soon as they are built, instead of temples, monuments, towers, boulevards, and gardens?”

Shaengold argues that this cumulative banality is the effect of an entire culture become mediocre: “If the built world is ever to be recovered from the forces of mediocrity, we must develop a cultural immune system that rejects mediocrity.” Let us instead embrace architectural extremism!

A.I. is one of those issues that seems to induce either indifference or terror. In “Big Tech’s A.I. Power Grab” Jake Denton argues that we need to look at the way in which large tech companies will embed the technology: “It is becoming increasingly clear that the real existential threat posed by AI isn’t, as is often claimed, the speculative risk of a sentient superintelligence, but the all-too-immediate danger of unaccountable tech giants wielding society’s most transformative tools as their own proprietary assets.”

In other news, populism becomes ever more popular! In Portugal, the right-populist Chega party quadrupled its seats. Thomas Gallagher reported on the shock vote, noting that what has taken the left by surprise “has been the rise in popularity of conservative sentiment, especially among young Portuguese.”

Photo AP

Meanwhile Haiti became yet more troubled. Juan David Rojas set the scene, while noting US complicity in the background to the current state of emergency: “As if the United States weren’t dealing with enough international crises, it now faces the prospect of total state collapse in a Caribbean nation at its doorstep—a fate brought on, in part, by Washington’s own malfeasance in recent decades.”

Dune: Part Two has been widely viewed and discussed, including on our own latest Compact podcast. This week for the first time we published Carlos Dengler (yes, from Interpol!) who argues that Canadian director Denis Villeneuve bows too much to the progressive narrative: “To overcome the white-savior problem, Villeneuve has Chani refuse to bow, do a mic drop, and run, girlbossing into the last frame holding rappelling gear as she awaits a giant worm to spirit her to what one can only assume will be a progressive-liberal spiritual victory in the next movie.”

In more thoughtful cultural volleys, Valerie Stivers reviews Andrew Boryga’s debut novel, Victim, arguing that “Boryga gives voice to many widely shared but controversial ideas. The novel suggests that a worldview focused on “systemic oppression” makes reductive and insulting assumptions about people based on their skin color.”

In the wake of American Fiction and Boryga’s work, we can but hope for a return to a funnier and more realistic world in which we are all idiots, regardless of skin color.

Christian Parenti discussed immigration in the context of the demographic collapse in developed countries, drawing, among other things, an interesting distinction between the possibilities of assimilation and Europe and the different climate in the United States:

European cultural rigidity seems to produce real alienation between immigrant groups and the host culture. Maybe it’s because these Europeans lack the imprint of frontier culture, in which strangers clustered together out of desperation and necessity. Whatever the case, America doesn’t isolate immigrant cultures; she eats them by the shovel full. America is the voracious assimilator, consuming wave upon wave of mass migration with barely a burp.

Ryan Zickgraf makes a strong plea, in the wake of (understandable) public mistrust of the media for the link between news and democracy: “Professional news media, especially local news, are foundational to democracy.” It’s a thoughtful piece, and readers should take it in slowly—half the problem is revealed right there.

Justin Lee covers Jessica Solce’s recent documentary about Cody Wilson, inventor of the first 3D-printed gun (which word gets you throttled on X): “Implicit in the idea of universal access to firearms, in Wilson’s account, is a critique of the totalizing means the state employs to secure bare life and constrain its flourishing.”  

Finally, I reviewed Judith Butler’s new book Who’s Afraid of Gender? You won’t be surprised to discover that I’m very unimpressed and, indeed, in the wake of Britain’s National Health Service this week banning the use of puberty blockers in children, angry at Butler’s complicity in what amounts to a grotesque medical scandal that must surely come to a complete stop as soon as possible.

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I went to see Tricky at the Roundhouse in London this week. Tricky’s 1995 Maxinquaye captured the 1990s in a way that few other records managed, combining a deep wistful stoned and melancholic floaty feeling with hip-hop, grunge, and the sampling that was proliferating around Bristol and the whole “trip-hop” scene around Massive Attack, Portishead, and others. The gig was muted and sleek, and almost completely dark, rendering mobile-phone shots useless (Good! Put your damned phone away!). Black Steel in particular was incredible, and I was reminded that the 90s really did conjure another world, where identity was something to play with and escape, not “be.”

Until next week!