Report: London conspiracy group uniting far-left and far-right

A joint report by Britain’s foremost antisemitism monitor and a leading anti-fascist group has shone a light on a conspiracy site called ‘Keep Talking’ which is uniting the far-left with the far-right.

Investigators from the Community Security Trust (CST) and HOPE not hate said they had been tracking users of the site for three years and had come to realise that traditional left-right labels no longer apply in the realm of extremist beliefs.

“The deeper we looked into the ‘Keep Talking’ group, the harder it became to know whether it was far-right, far-left, a mixture of the two, or something else entirely,” said Dave Rich and Joe Mulhall, joint authors of the report.

“The old political labels no longer apply when you have a shared belief in a hidden hand that secretly runs the world.”

They said social media meant that “even ridiculous cranks have influence and connections today that were unimaginable just a few years ago,” with internet access substituting the need for secret group membership.

“Their conspiracy theories spread across ideologies, connect political movements that were previously opposed to one another, and embed the view that the world is shaped and controlled by hidden hands. And more often than not, just as it always was, that hidden hand is identified as Jewish.”

Among the London group’s co-founders are Ian Fantom, who argued that MI6 poisoned a former Russian spy in Salisbury, and former academic Nick Kollerstrom, who said Auschwitz inmates “sunbathed by the swimming pool”.

Both men engage in a wide range of conspiracy theories, with Fantom having used the diaries of Zionist thinker Theodore Herzl to dismiss reports of antisemitism in the Labour Party in a report published on the far-right website The Unz Review.

In 2015, he wrote that British businessman Cecil Rhodes “was in fact working with Lord Rothschild to create a network of central banks in order to dominate the world by means of financial power”.

Meanwhile Kollerstrom, who has attended several meetings of the far-right group London Forum, has written of “phantom gas chambers” and argued that Israeli intelligence service Mossad was behind 9/11.

In their report, Rich and Mulhall said: “There are few people who can bring fascists and other far-right activists and pro-Palestine Labour activists into the same group, but Kollerstrom and Fantom have made it a regular occurrence.”

Attendees and speakers at Keep Talking events include disgraced jazz singer Gilad Atzmon, expelled union official Peter Gregson and antisemitic singer Alison Chabloz.