Young, angry men are falling down a rabbit hole of online radicalisation. The isolation of Covid will only make this worse
Read a book, as the old saying goes, and it will set you free. But even the power of literature surely has its limits, and this week a judge in Leicester tested them. Faced with a Nazi sympathiser convicted of downloading bomb-making instructions, and white supremacist and fascist material from the internet, Judge Spencer issued a suspended two-year sentence and instructions to read Jane Austen or Charles Dickens instead. “Think about Hardy. Think about Trollope,” he added, helpfully. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, the judge thought, might be a good place to start.
It might have made more sense had he recommended Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. For Ben John, the 21-year-old former student convicted of downloading more than 67,000 extreme documents, seems to have fallen down a depressingly familiar dark rabbit hole. The judge described him as a lonely individual with few, if any, proper friends. He fits a well-worn pattern of socially awkward, angry young men retreating from the outside world into dark online subcultures, where each click leads to something more extreme. For John, it was white supremacism and fascism. For others it could be Islamist fundamentalism, or a violently misogynistic incel culture, where men who can’t get women to have sex with them vent their frustrated rage against women everywhere.