Popular wisdom is that between 2016 and 2020, things kind of got a little bit strange.

Whether it was Brexit or the rise of Donald Trump, we saw a cascade of political events

which nobody expected and which got increasingly bizarre, it seemed to culminate in Covid.

So you would think that in recent years, things have got a little bit more banal, simple,

easier to explain certainly less extreme, but in fact, the opposite seems to be the case.

These individuals, organisations who were previously marginal, radical, out there, you probably

wouldn't even mention them, have moved increasingly to the centre stage of our social and

political conversation.

This isn't embodied by Elon Musk, the world's wealthiest person, who himself engages

with and enables often far-right rhetoric.

So who better to discuss all of that than Julia Ebner?

Julia's new book Going Mainstream looks at precisely these forces from the margins and extremes

of politics as they go right to the middle of what we're talking about every day.

Julia, welcome to Downstream.

Thank you for having me.

It's a pleasure.

We will be talking today about this book, primarily, and some of the themes that going

mainstream, how extremists are taking over.

This is something of a follow-up to your previous book, which I loved, I read it in 2020,

Going Dark.

And as I'm sure you were wearing Britain because of Brexit, Corbin, etc. politics was sort

of very mono-focused and what was great with Going Dark was that you did all this amazing

...