Wearing a Keffiyeh in the street leads to a variety of responses, ranging between glares, thumbs up, and baffled glances. Sometimes it even leads to conversation – usually constructive, and often interesting.

It’s usually pretty easily to clock the politics of who is approaching and what it is they are likely to want to say.

The lady who walked up to me by Old Steine was in her eighties and wearing a green beret, which marked her out as either an old lefty type or a US military veteran, the kind that John Matrix ate for breakfast in Commando.

The smart money was on the former, and so it proved. She went on to tell me her brother in law, currently in hospital, is Palestinian, his mother family emigrating to Britain amid the Nakba of 1948. I stopped to talk to her, and to commend her non-military beret. 

She asked where I got my scarf from, and I told her, which led to a conversation about the wars on Iraq, and the doomed protests we had doubtless both been on. I told her about a refugee event at The Old Market she might be interested in.

“Do you have children?”, she asked.

No.

“Things are terrible at the moment,” she said. “And we all know why. But they’ll get better.”

An optimistic leftist – quite a thing in 2025. Ever since the year of my birth [1] my tribe has suffered defeat after defeat. 45 years of neoliberalism, outsourcing, austerity and privatisation at home, and imperialism, shock doctrine economics and war abroad, culminating in our nation’s complicity in the genocide in Gaza.

I asked her why she was optimistic, and this was where things took a turn, and gave me a healthy if sad reminder of the dangers of conspiracism and radicalisation both online and off.

The first red flag was the use of the word “cabal” when she explained who the younger generations would have to challenge and defeat. 

And then it all started tumbling out: Extinction Rebellion was a front because climate change isn’t real; then, before I had time to breathe in, she was away: Covid was a hoax, how she only wore a mask at her friend’s death bed – “they finally got me” – and demanding to know whether I’d had the vaccine.

I had, I said.

She stared at me, horrified, her stream of consciousness halted for a moment by the utter wrongness of my actions.

“My god,” was all she could manage.

She spluttered on for another couple of minutes, but the spell was broken. The Keffiyeh had lied. I was one of them.

I made my excuses and headed on with my walk, thinking things over.

I completely see the journey she’s been on, from earnest believer in socialism and justice, to lonely conspiracist in her house, spending the lockdown years furiously agreeing with other people on Facebook. Amplifying fears and spreading paranoia and panic.

I’ve always been fascinated by conspiracy theorism, to the point where I always try to challenge my own views lest I veer unwittingly down that slipperiest of slopes.

Despite the horrendous number done on Corbyn by the press, the old left has just as much as a problem with people falling down these often anti-semitic rabbit holes of lies and madness as the young men radicalised by Musk and Tate.

The only thing, I suppose, is the former are less likely to beat up a trans person, put dog shit through the letter box of a migrant, or shoot up a primary school. 

But they’re out there, lost, lonely, and spreading poison on the boomer and post-boomer corners of the internet.

Like people marching against low traffic neighbourhoods, or demanding a ban on trans women from using toilets, they’re atomised, misinformed, and easily radicalised. 

And at the base of all this is fascism, which is growing everywhere.

There isn’t really any easy answer, particularly with liberal institutions like the BBC either afraid or unwilling [2] to even describe what’s actually happening with any clarity, and the social media giants who have profited over spreading lies, death and discord happily lining up behind Trump now that it’s politically savvy to do so.

All I can say is: these views need to be challenged, wherever you find them. And the best place to do this is in the meat space, as cyberpunk nerds used to call what one once quaintly thought of as “real life”.

The internet big beasts profit from rage, fear, and anger. You’ll achieve nothing “debating” there.

But in the real world, friends and family shouldn’t remain friends or family if they’ll happily throw queer people or migrants under a bus because the Daily Mail or their Facebook group told them to.

Challenge, protest, and exclude as a last resort if there’s no hope for them, as the survival of civilisation is based on figuring out the limits of tolerating the intolerant.

And come together with likeminded folk to fight for a better world.

That’s what I intend to do, at any rate.

[1] 1979.

[2] Elon Musk made a “gesture” at the Trump inauguration, did he? I complained about this misleading coverage and received a very patronising, boilerplate response.