An entire industry has been built on narcissism
… With a finite number of terrorist groups to map and study, the experts needed to branch out: so they heartily embraced the concept of extremism, a category so capacious and permissively malleable that it encompasses not only behaviour and thought but conceivably anything that the expert in question deems politically undesirable or “problematic”. This made the field acutely vulnerable to exploitation by political activists whose interest is less to study extremists than to manufacture them in an effort to stigmatise and silence their political opponents.
Over the last few years, as my colleague Liam Duffy has documented, the study of extremism has ballooned exponentially: there are now experts on gaming and extremism, climate-change and extremism, sport and extremism, gender and extremism, fashion and extremism, music and extremism, neo-Nazi accelerationists, incels, femcels, jihadi poetry, and far-Right speech-codes. One expert has even written an article on “LOL extremism”.
