The New York Times and the problem with ‘radicalisation’

One of the words that has become increasingly useless over recent years is ‘radicalisation’. As more and more terrorist attacks took place across the West in recent years the word got trotted out with some utility. Al-Qaeda and Isis fighters were reported to have been ‘radicalised’. Soon a whole arm of dubious expertise grew, purporting to be able to trace the various ‘paths’ to radicalisation.

But at some point in the present decade the word became used, not just as a term of faux-science, but as a way to dismiss almost any position against which a certain individual or group of individuals were opposed. Voters were said to have been ‘radicalised’ before putting a mark in the box beside the name of Donald Trump in 2016. Likewise every ‘wrong’ vote in Europe has become an example of further ‘radicalisation’ of the general public.

Sometimes these claims are so ridiculous that it is hard to work out whether they are truth or satire. Three years ago the Guardian ran a piece by an anonymous author claiming to have been ‘radicalised’ by watching various YouTube videos. So radicalised did he become that, as the headline put it,  ‘“Alt-right” online poison nearly turned me into a racist.’

That piece – which I wrote about at the time – in fact turned out to be a spoof. So keen was the Guardian to claim that a range of liberal and conservative voices online were in fact causing a problem at least equal to that of Isis and al-Qaeda, that the paper didn’t just not bother to find out if their contributor was for real or not. It didn’t bother to find out whether he was actually real or not.

Now the New York Times has gone one better.