What makes the academic Julia Ebner lurk on the dark web as an angry far-right misogynist, despite the risk to her mental health and the danger of being uncovered?
Julia Ebner is slim, pale, brown-eyed, bookish, softly spoken, with a formidable intelligence and a gentle handshake — precisely not the sort of person you expect to find hanging out with packs of male supremacists venting their hatred of women and fantasies of misogynist violence.
Yet this is where Ebner spends her days (and, I suspect, too many late nights): lurking in unpleasant corners of the internet pretending to be Alex Williamson, an “unhappily single”, unemployed, white American male in his late twenties who is “fed up with feminism”.
Williamson is her incel — involuntary celibate — avatar and his online world is “a really toxic space”, Ebner says. A place where, on average, someone shares a rape fantasy every 29 minutes. “More than many of the groups I infiltrate, incels talk a lot about wanting to use violence. It’s a very violence-condoning atmosphere.”
For the best part of a decade, Ebner has been studying extremism and watching its terrifying, multifaceted, high-speed spread from the far-flung fringes of the web to the front line of political and social discourse. This shift is the subject of her new book, Going Mainstream, and you don’t have to look far to see evidence of her thesis.
There is the MP Andrew Bridgen, who on Twitter has described the Covid vaccination campaign as “the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust”. In the Devon town of Totnes, once a byword for liberal hippy progressives, a fervent anti-vaccine movement has embraced a wealth of conspiracies.
Teachers report how rape apologism and words like “feminazi” have crossed from the “manosphere” — the network of online men’s communities — to the playground, thanks in part to the influence of Andrew Tate (currently awaiting trial in Romania for human trafficking and rape).
“My research tells me that the coming decade will bring one major threat: the mainstreaming of extreme ideas,” Ebner says. She conducts that research by immersing herself in the world of the “crazy and not so crazy”, from white supremacists to QAnon adherents, climate-change deniers to rabid anti-vaxers and pro-Putin conspiracists. In this world, talk of the racist “great replacement” theory rubs shoulders with age-old antisemitic myths and the ever present belief that they, whoever they may be, are stealing our freedoms.
Ebner encounters the devoted, the dangerous and the deranged (including a few who believe the royal family are cunningly disguised reptiles who drink the blood of babies to stay young).
Most people who believe one conspiracy theory are all too willing to adopt another one, two or three, embracing a fusion of delusions.
“It’s a salad-bar ideology,” Ebner says. “You cherry-pick certain elements because you can curate your own content on platforms like Telegram. Some people might be part of a misogynist group but also of a radical pro-Putin or an anti-vaccine group. We’ve seen satanist ideas mixed with misogynist ideas or a blending of white nationalist and neofascist ideas.”
In one closed forum, a subscriber worries about whether he can be vaccinated against Covid and still be a white nationalist.
“Psychologists talk about a conspiracy mentality, but it’s also about populations becoming more susceptible during times of crisis. When the stress levels increase, when personal situations become more challenging, then people are much more open to believing conspiracy theories.”
Ebner’s immersion in these subcultures is physical as well as digital. She has inveigled herself into clandestine meetings in London of a far-right group called Generation Identity, attended neo-Nazi gatherings in Germany and mingled at anti-vaccine rallies.
Right now, it is the almost exclusively online world of incels that disturbs her sleep the most. Paradoxically, the incel movement was started by a woman in the Nineties with the “very innocent purpose of wanting to connect people who felt lonely, who couldn’t find a romantic or sexual partner”.
Today it has “tens of thousands” of followers in easy-to-access online groups and forums, but has morphed into a community of angry men fired up with misogyny, a burning hatred of feminism and an unhealthy dose of self-loathing.
“We’ve seen terrorist threats inspired by the incel ideology, by what incels would call the ‘black pill’ ideology — basically having given up all hope in humanity and all hope of finding a romantic partner, and blaming that very often on women or feminists or even just liberal policies,” Ebner explains.
“It’s actually surprising we haven’t seen more incel attacks and I know this is something the security services are very concerned about.”
At the age of 32, Ebner is a sought-after international adviser on extremisms of all kinds. A senior research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, she writes books, lectures students and advises the United Nations, the World Bank and Nato.
More discreetly, she speaks with intelligence services and policymakers. Her age is a marked advantage in a world heavily populated by men in bad suits who “might not even know how TikTok works”.
A spell as a children’s television actor helped Ebner, who grew up in Austria, to develop her research abilities. As she explains, “I’ve been chasing extremist groups to get to the inside and to observe them from the inside because that’s usually how you get most information.” Getting inside an extremist group “takes some acting skills” and Ebner had earned money for her studies by playing the part of a villainous bicycle thief called Lady Lila in an Austrian children’s TV show, Tom Turbo.
She arrived in London nine years ago to complete a joint degree with Peking University and the London School of Economics, after which her first job was with an anti-extremism think tank. The attack on the Bataclan theatre in Paris in 2015 cemented her interest.
“I started when Islamic State was beginning to recruit foreign fighters from Europe and launching its first terrorist attacks in the UK and in Europe. The Bataclan was a turning point personally, because that’s when I decided to devote my life to studying extremism. I had friends who were caught up in the area. I remember being so scared that night, because no one was sure what was going to happen.
“It was a point where I thought it’s really important to understand better what drives people towards extremism and terrorism on a psychological level. I wanted to do something to prevent attacks.”
Around the time Ebner was beginning her research into extremism and terrorism, I was extricating myself from that world, having spent the years since 9/11 following the subjects as a crime and security journalist.
We compare notes and agree that what is striking is the radical change in the nature of extremism over the past decade and the speed of its evolution.
In the years following 9/11, the bogeymen in the UK were the hook-handed cleric Abu Hamza, who turned a mosque in north London into an al-Qaeda indoctrination centre, and the so-called Tottenham Ayatollah, Omar Bakri Mohammed. Young men inspired by these two “clerics” carried out attacks like the 7/7 suicide bombings, which killed 52 people in London in 2005.
Extremism was already shifting shape. In 2013, a senior counterterrorism official told me the threat that worried him most was the rise of the violent far right. I wasn’t sure I believed him. Then, three years later, in the middle of the bitterly divisive Brexit referendum campaign, a lone right-wing terrorist armed with a homemade weapon shot dead the Labour MP Jo Cox in Birstall, West Yorkshire.
It was one of the events that made Ebner realise “how big the backlash was from far-right extremist groups who tried to mobilise off the back of terrible terrorist incidents, to spread hate against Muslims and against minority communities”.
Her first book, Rage, looked at the vicious circle in which Islamist and far-right extremists fed off each other. The second, Going Dark, concentrated on her undercover activities. Her latest work spells out the scale, speed and fluid nature of the new extremisms.
Back in 2010, there was disbelief in security circles when a young student radicalised online in her bedroom stabbed the MP Stephen Timms at a constituency surgery. There is no such disbelief today, Ebner tells me. “It used to be unusual that someone would be radicalised in weeks. Now it’s the norm.”
This tidal wave of extremism is carried along by the sense of permanent crisis — Brexit dislocation, the rollercoaster Trump presidency, the Covid pandemic, the Ukraine war and the cost of living emergency — combined with a host of new mass communication technologies.
“I would say now that what is new is that we’re facing this combination of new technologies that we’ve never had before — social media, but also the AI-based technologies — while also experiencing a series of crises on a global scale. That has really caused a lot of people to have very deep frustrations with politics and with any kind of established institutions, including the media and even the sciences.”
The Covid lockdowns appear to have been a major driving force in the growth of the male supremacy and incel movements, driving lonely people to spend more and more time in the online world.
The incel phenomenon was almost unknown in Britain until two years ago, when 22-year-old Jake Davison went on a killing spree, shooting dead his mother and four other people, including a three-year-old girl, in Plymouth, before killing himself.
Davison spent hours online absorbing incel and nihilistic black-pill ideas. He subscribed to incel material and posted hostile comments about his mother, who had challenged his diatribes against women.
Ebner says, “A lot of people came to incel platforms during Covid times, during the lockdowns, when it was really hard to meet people. That was unfortunately an accelerator. We saw the volume in the content and in the accounts on incel forums go up sharply during lockdowns.”
In her double life as Alex Williamson, Ebner tells me she has met many young men like the Plymouth killer who are caught up in a spiral of low self-esteem and rage.
She describes men so depressed and hopeless that they talk of suicide. In one forum, someone called Allan types, “I really feel like I should just kill myself. One of my biggest fantasies in life is killing myself and then watching my family as a ghost and being vindicated by the fact that my death meant absolutely nothing to them.”
In incel terminology, Allan had become someone who wanted to LDAR (lay down and rot). Troubled by what she was reading, Ebner tried to think of something to cheer Allan up, but before she could type a word other users stepped in with suicide instruction manuals.
It is, she says, a real challenge to stay in her undercover persona and not intervene either to try to stop a suicide or help someone who is being sucked into conspiracy extremism.
“Sometimes you are looking at really young people, even minors, and I can see them being radicalised step by step. One of the biggest challenges for me is you can’t intervene if you’re doing undercover research, because that would blow the cover.”
The incel world is, she senses, “divided into two parts. One is leaning towards self-harm and suicide, but the other part of it is more prone to violence against others or hatred for others who are perceived as an enemy.
“That dynamic is, from a research perspective, interesting to watch — how this self-hatred and loneliness and deep frustration is turned into hatred for others, and into something potentially quite dangerous for terrorist attacks.”
This pivot point between violent words and deeds is where Ebner applies her sharpest focus. She has been analysing the psychology of terrorist “manifestos” for her recently completed Oxford PhD to better understand the minds of the killers.
“I’m basically developing a formula of different psychological factors that always come together when people actually turn to violence, when they translate their extremist ideas into action, or when they translate the words into action.
“One of the biggest problems right now in the online space for security and intelligence services is that there are so many threats and you never know which one you have to take seriously. There are many empty threats, and that’s what I’m really interested in — what is the difference between someone trolling and someone potentially committing a terrorist act?”
Before the Christchurch mosque attacks of 2019, when a white supremacist gunman attempted to make his killing of 51 people resemble a video game, Ebner struggled to make intelligence and security officials grasp the reality of the developing extremist threat emerging in gaming and other online cultures.
“No one was really taking it seriously. The view was they might be really politically incorrect, but no one truly believed that they might be dangerous. There was certainly a time lag in the security services world catching up with these dynamics.”
The longer we talk, the more I find myself wondering — almost worrying — what all this exposure to violence and hate does to Ebner’s mental health. She is reticent about discussing her personal and family life and explains some of the strict security precautions she has been advised to follow.
She concedes that it is probably time for her to stop going undercover in the real world. Her face is too well known, especially among white supremacist groups. “I don’t think you can do undercover investigations offline for ever,” she says.
The first hate campaign against her began in 2017 after she wrote a newspaper article alleging links between Tommy Robinson, the English Defence League founder, and US white supremacists.
Robinson came to her office at the Quilliam think tank, where Ebner was working, and demanded an apology. When she refused, Quilliam dismissed her. But it was the relentless storm of online threats she faced that caused most distress.
“Although it’s online, it feels very real. It reaches you wherever you are and that can cause sleepless nights and really make you paranoid. After the Tommy Robinson incident, I had to move house and I had just lost my job, so I was literally without anything. I have had serious death threats and sexual threats online.
“But it’s also personally challenging going into the incel forums and violent misogynist channels. That touches my own identity as a woman. I think that has a really big psychological impact.”
Every so often, Ebner attempts a “social media detox” for a few days, because she knows it “can be quite dangerous to get too far into the rabbit hole”.
She is also afflicted, however, by a dark strain of Fomo — a fear that by shutting the laptop and muting the haters and the plotters, she will miss a threat to herself or the signs of a terror attack.
“I want to know if there are explicit threats. It’s very hard just to ignore that. Often the advice you get is just pay no attention to it or block these people, but it’s potentially a real threat, both online to my reputation and offline in physical terms.
“I do take breaks, but I don’t want to miss something either. If there’s an attack being plotted, or if there is a new campaign that’s being announced, I want to know about it, because that’s the whole point of being undercover or being on the inside of a movement.”
Is it worth it? The stress, the uncertainty, the lingering fear?
“I’ve asked myself that a few times. I think in the end it’s a price that a lot of people have to pay in different professions — being exposed to threats, being exposed to hate campaigns. It’s the same for politicians, activists, journalists, even for researchers or artists.”
Mental resilience has proved essential for her work, but Ebner also likes to work on physical defence. She has trained in martial arts — including the krav maga techniques developed for the Israeli Defence Forces — and taken boxing and fencing classes.
“A lot of that is about the perception of personal safety,” she says. “A lot of it is of course in my head — if I feel safe or if I feel like I can defend myself, that makes a huge difference. Because a lot of campaigns really tried to intimidate and I think the antidote to that is to feel safe. And for me that meant, for example, doing a kung-fu camp in a Shaolin temple in China and learning self-defence.”
Ebner is more fearful of the current sustained assault on the evidence-based thinking that has made the world relatively secure for a long time. She writes in her book of how, during the pandemic, more and more people started to believe that Bill Gates and health organisations were waging a chemical war against all of us.
Those who deal in facts and evidence are “up against unparalleled levels of fantasy, paranoia and outright lies. The key conflict of our time increasingly seems to be between crazy and not so crazy.”Are things really that bad, I ask. Maybe she spends too much time on the crazy side?
The battle between the crazies and the not so crazies is at a crucial stage, Ebner thinks, and it is imperative those on the side of facts challenge and debate and educate and inform. “The numbers of people who believe in QAnon-related ideas is really scary. None of these conspiracy myths is grounded in evidence or science.
“There’s also a rising level of distrust in the sciences. We could potentially see a reversal of everything we achieved in the Renaissance of going from mythos to logos — myth to logic. We are seeing a return to not using evidence-based scientific frameworks but going the other way, towards using more myth-based thinking and ideas that are no longer based on scientific evidence.
“The most disturbing question we have to face is whether we could potentially be entering a new form of the Middle Ages — the digital Middle Ages.”
Written by: Sean O’Neill
© The Times of London