It seems like the world is out of control. That’s a fair perception. But in reality we’ve had marches, riots, even deaths on the streets many times before in world history. Never a year nor a decade goes by without them. Those pro-Hamas marches across the Western World definitely seem menacing—and they are extreme, run by extremists. Yet, humans have always craved war. The question is are we more extremist today or is it something else entirely?

The elephant in the room

On October 7 2023 Hamas, an Islamist terror group funded by Qatar and Iran, invaded Israel across its southwestern border on the Gaza Strip and killed over 1,200 people taking another 251 hostage including women, Holocaust survivors and children. In fact, more Jews were killed that day than any single event since the Holocaust of WW2. It was an act of sadistic barbarism.

In a Middle East, where an eye is an eye, Israel was goaded into responding. Given a legal casus belli—a trigger for war—Israel launched a ferocious air, land and sea counter-invasion of the Gaza Strip. 

It was a surgical ferocity—a campaign of guided bombs and stealthy manoeuvre against improvised booby traps. Precision came not just because it was a rescue mission, but Israel knew that Hamas lay hidden in billions of dollars worth of underground tunnels dug below schools, hospitals, UN and UNRWA facilities. Hamas’s militants changed into civilian clothes. They used Israel’s hostages and their own people as human shields. They blended with the teeming life above their lairs. Their cowardice put innocents at risk.

There was no genocide. That would require Israel conducting a deliberate fire-bombing of the entire Gaza Strip in the style of Hamburg, Dresden or Tokyo in WW2. Rather, Israel targeted terror tunnel complexes, Hamas strongholds, vehicles and infantry movement with smart munitions and weaponry homed by bird’s eye communications. Of the 2.5 million Gazans, it’s believed that 40,000 are dead—mostly Hamas militants: a combat brigade’s worth of war fighters in other words. Yet, humanitarian supply routes remained opened while Hamas stole the food that trucked in on them.

Forty thousand sounds like an horrific number but by contrast: 600,000 were killed in the Syrian Civil War waged by Bashar al-Assad, and 60,000 died in just Khartoum alone during the latest manifestation of the Sudanese Civil War. Both were Muslim versus Muslim affairs.

In a little over a year then, Israel all but eliminated Hamas’s military power. Israel killed Hamas’s military leaders locally and overseas. Israel and Hamas are now engaged in a negotiated temporary ceasefire swapping convicted Islamist prisoners for Israeli hostages: some of Israel’s are dead.

A herd of elephants in the room

What confuses this debate, is that starting soon after October 7 and continuing to this day, the streets of Europe, Canada, Australia and the US exploded in antisemitic unrest.

“Gas the Jews!” was the cry that went up at the Sydney Opera House. A Jew hunt swept Amsterdam after a soccer match last year. From Oxford University to Harvard, harassment of Jewish students reigns large. We’ve since learned that these protests whether in our streets, or at Columbia University, UPenn or UCLA are organised, funded and directed by overseas terror interests.

But worse. They have caused left wing governments to cower and, particularly in the UK, seen police protecting antisemitic mobs against pro-Israel and pro-nationalist responses.

So, synagogues have burned, Jewish community centres have been vandalised, homes and schools have been defaced, sexual harassment and rape have gone unpunished. Yes, antisemitism has proliferated. And that is definitely a type of extremism that has worsened over the past 16 months.

The question

Today a friend said to me while discussing DEI: “The world has become more extremist since October 7 2023”.

Without doubt, the recent election of a second Trump presidency, already turning the US upside down in its first month, had a lot to do with this perception.

But has it?

I disagree. The world isn’t more extremist at all. It’s just become more narcissistic than ever.

Let me explain.

It started with Covid-19.

Step 1: The Birth of mainstream Denialism

It’s now official according to the CIA that Covid-19 was a Chinese biotech experiment that escaped its laboratory. Despite the World Health Organization taking pains in 2021 to shut down that theory saying, “a laboratory origin of the pandemic was considered to be extremely unlikely”, it was just too obvious. I’ve always said it: Covid-19 didn’t come from a chance encounter with a scaly mammal in a wet market.

Now consider this.

It is also plausible to argue that Covid-19 became something much more once it escaped intentional or not. It became a social experiment testing the boundaries of human “Denialism”.

Fact 1: A year before Covid, Hong Kong was in a popular uprising against China. The power to extradite Hong Kong nationals to China was the spark. The streets were awash with protests. The international mainstream media ran the story. China was embarrassed. Then came Covid, Covid-corpses in the streets, and Covid lockdowns. Those Hong Kong protests haven’t been heard from since, and by the time the pandemic had fully taken hold, China had Africa’s backing as evidence of international support for its extradition measures.

Fact 2: Covid then became the first pandemic in human history that medical science would deny. It’s called “Covid-Denial” for a reason. Deny vaccine efficacy, deny mask efficacy, and deny the role of science and research in health. And you get people willing to kill themselves today getting repeatedly ill with a fully-preventable airborne disease.

The next step then became easier.

Step 2: Deny it all!

It’s a short hop from Covid Denial to letting groupthink, delusion and narcissism redefine other realities.

It couldn’t have happened without the belonging and abuse that social media provides. Indeed we get some thoroughly extremist views today. But this extremism is psychological coming from a place of populist self-entitlement.

Hence:

  • Zionism Denial (post Oct 7 2023)
  • Rape Denial (post Oct 7 2023 and into Sudan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Europe, UK)
  • Abortion Denial (US post 2022)
  • Female Gender Denial (post 2020)
  • Mass Child Exploitation Denial (UK post 2024)
  • Sedition and Treason Denial (US post 2020)
  • And International Hijab Day aka—Misogyny Denial (just last week)

Who’d have guessed that Denialism borne by 21st Century social media data centres, and exploited by our mainstream media for left and right wing government control, could trigger a mass psychosis?

Folks it was so certain, but the gaslit will never know.

1930s Germany through print, film and radio, gave us the clue. Propaganda, just like the urge to join a mob, never dies.

No, we’re not more extremist today at all. We’re just more stupid.

© 2025 Adam Parker.

Picture credit: “OMG” reads a church in Melbourne, Australia, its steeple transmitting into the 4G cell network where heaven obviously gets clearer. Author’s photo.