Going Dark

The Secret Social Lives of Extremists

De: Julia Ebner

Narrado por: Hera Reed

Bloomsbury presents Going Dark by Julia Ebner, read by Hera Reed.

A TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR

'Engaging and visceral ... Reads like a thriller' Financial Times
'Riveting and often deeply disturbing ... A punch to the stomach' Sunday Times
'Ebner has done some gutsy, thought-provoking research' Sunday Telegraph
'Fascinating and important' Spectator

By day, Julia Ebner works at a counter-extremism think tank, monitoring radical groups from the outside. But two years ago, she began to feel she was only seeing half the picture; she needed to get inside the groups to truly understand them. She decided to go undercover in her spare hours – late nights, holidays, weekends – adopting five different identities, and joining a dozen extremist groups from across the ideological spectrum.

Her journey would take her from a Generation Identity global strategy meeting in a pub in Mayfair, to a Neo-Nazi Music Festival on the border of Germany and Poland. She would get relationship advice from ‘Trad Wives’ and Jihadi Brides and hacking lessons from ISIS. She was in the channels when the alt-right began planning the lethal Charlottesville rally, and spent time in the networks that would radicalise the Christchurch terrorist.

In Going Dark, Ebner takes the listener on a deeply compulsive journey into the darkest recesses of extremist thinking, exposing how closely we are surrounded by their fanatical ideology every day, the changing nature and practice of these groups, and what is being done to counter them.

©2020 Julia Ebner (P)2020 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Fascinating and disturbing

This is a fascinating deep dive into extremists and how they use manipulation and social media to radicalise, written by someone who’s spent years researching them.
There’s some genuinely disturbing stuff in there, but I think it’s well worth a listen because it’s important to understand how these people work - whether they’re Neo-Nazis, left-wing or Islamist extremists.
The narration is good, if a little inappropriately chipper in a few places.