I guess just to clear the ground a little, the catalyst for your piece was, you know, the perceived sense that various countercultural and even perhaps left milios are being seduced by conspiracy theories and perhaps in a way that potentially makes them open to embracing reactionary politics.

So just to begin, I wanted to ask kind of what prompted that thought and what exactly this

phenomenon is as you see it.

So I've been, what, 36 years now as an environmental activist on the left, of the left, but also seeing myself as part of the

counterculture, a sort of hippie culture, really. I might not look like a hippie, but I'm a hippie

in there. And I have just seen over the past few months

this acceleration of a trend which has been there for quite a while,

but it's really becoming extremely worrying now

of people uncritically accepting some of the themes, the memes, and the conspiracy theories generated on the right.

And I think the pandemic has greatly accelerated that.

And the sort of quite rightful suspicion of power on the left and on the green left and the hippie alternative countercultural scene

seems to have mutated with astonishing and really alarming speed

into an acceptance of any conspiracy theories based around powerful cabals,

taking away our freedoms, taking away our rights.

And the uncritical nature of that acceptance,

the preparedness to subscribe to themes which are racist, anti-Semitic,

which resonates strongly with certain themes in 20th century

European history is extremely alarming and needs urgently to be resisted.

So, I mean, you observed that there is a bit of a, there is precedent for this.

You know, the far right has for a long time, I mean, almost as a kind of structural element,

it could be argued, you know, it's embraced frames and themes and narratives that are drawn

from countercultural or alternative sources. You know, we might think,

...