Dark Enlightenment: The US Far-Right War on British Institutions
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#LightUpTheDark
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What is the Dark Enlightenment?
The extraordinary anti-DEI media campaign against Cambridge Professor Jason Arday was but the latest salvo in an ideological war.
British institutions – from its prestigious academies to its esteemed centres of culture – are enduring a coordinated far-right assault backed by influential actors at home and across the Atlantic.
‘The Dark Enlightenment’ once referred to a bizarre fringe online movement, described at length in the screeds of US blogger Curtis Yarvin and British philosopher Nick Land.
But that anti-democratic and eugenicist ideology – which calls for racial hierarchy and for a CEO to serve as head of state – has found a powerful set of backers forcing it into reality.
Elon Musk and Peter Thiel champion far-right movements as their companies embed themselves in the machinery of state. Discredited race science is rehabilitated at elite universities. Politicians speak in the language of ethnic purity, while receiving ludicrous sums from offshore crypto moguls.
Politics, as Andrew Breitbart famously said, is downstream from culture. The frontlines of this war are now being waged over art, entertainment, civics and education.
From the National Trust to the National Theatre, from the BBC to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, Britain’s landmark institutions are locked in the sights of an extreme ideological network.
Byline Times Has been on the bleeding edge
Byline Times was incredibly early to identify these broader trends as they first began to emerge.
In November 2021, Nafeez Ahmed first exposed a Thiel-backed Cambridge University network promoting race science under the banner of academic freedom – revolving around ‘ethics’ professor James Orr.
Five years later, we’d reveal that Orr – who became Reform UK’s policy chief – was facilitating a far-right political recruitment pipeline at the same university.
Orr is now under investigation by Cambridge – and Reform UK faces a series of Parliamentary and police probes into its finances.
Through the years, Byline Times has been there to scrutinise the opaque think-tanks and offshore paymasters of Britain’s right-wing populists.
We were there to scour the Epstein Files and shine a light on the dark corridors of global power where a nexus of wealthy elites sought to shape the world and its future.
This independent newspaper was there to sound the alarm about growing national dependency on companies like Peter Thiel’s Palantir.
And critically, we were there to call out the attacks, often serving as a lone voice defending the culture war’s victims from the deluge.
What’s Next – With Your Help
With your support, Byline Times will launch a dedicated #LightUpTheDark investigative series into the people, money and institutions seeking to transform British public life.
We’ll follow that money. Who is funding the new ecosystem of think tanks, publications, campaign groups and political organisations? What financial connections link the British culture war to wealthy interests overseas?
We’ll identify the institutions being targeted. How are universities, private clubs, conferences, fellowships and cultural organisations being derided, infiltrated or used to cultivate new generations of political operatives? Who is applying the pressure – and what happens when institutions refuse to bend?
We’ll map out the infrastructure of the culture war. How does an idea travel from an anonymous account on ‘X’ or niche online publication into a think tank, from a think tank into a newspaper, and from a newspaper into Westminster? We’ll trace the people and organisations laundering once-fringe ideas about race, hierarchy and democracy.
And we’ll scrutinise the media itself. The treatment of Jason Arday demonstrated how quickly claims originating in ideological networks can be amplified across Britain’s press before their foundations are properly examined. We’ll investigate who is manufacturing controversy, how they spread, and why so much of our media remains susceptible.
This investigative series – led by Nafeez Ahmed – will map Britain’s Dark Enlightenment and defend our institutions and our democracy from concerted far-right ideological campaigns.
But the network is growing. The institutions are under pressure. And we intend to #LightUpTheDark.
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