Writing in Fathom earlier this month, Anna Stanley recalls an academic expert on extremism telling attendees that author and journalist Douglas Murray and comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan were examples of ‘far right’ extremists. The lecturer then told attendees that society needed to find ‘ways to suppress’ such figures. He complained that just de-platforming them ‘would cause issues’, because ‘they have millions of followers’.

It gets worse. While this extremism specialist was only too happy to call for tough action against the likes of Joe Rogan, who is not ‘far right’ in the slightest, other lecturers on the course were restrained and even sympathetic towards Islamist extremists. Though the course took place before the atrocities of 7 October, it is still shocking to read of extremism experts encouraging civil servants to consider Hamas as ‘freedom fighters’. After all, Hamas is a proscribed terrorist group under UK law. Yet lecturers were warning civil servants of the risks of making ‘moral judgements’ about Islamist terrorists.

Stanley’s experience of the King’s College course illustrates the double standards at work in our elites’ approach to terrorism and extremism.

[Actually, it reveals more than hypocrisy. It shows how committed the elites are to the destruction of the Western order and civilization, and the depths to which they’ll sink in effecting it. Even if you don’t like Rogan — I do — he’s just a guy with a microphone. Hamas rapes, kidnaps, and slaughters civilians in the most grotesque manners possible and openly declare their genocidal mission. You have to either be a total idiot to consider Rogan more extreme, or have a nihilist agenda to promote. Or both. — Ed]