Undercover With The Far Right

What happens when you go undercover inside the far right and discover how easily dangerous ideas can become normalised?

In this episode of The Bibliofilles, Sophie and Chaya dive into Harry Shukman’s The Year of the Rat, a gripping work of investigative nonfiction that follows Shukman as he spends more than a year undercover inside far-right groups using a hidden camera and the alias “Chris.”

From secret pub meetings and Holocaust denial to loneliness, online radicalisation and the communities that draw people into extremist movements, Sophie and Chaya explore what Shukman discovered while moving between nine different groups.

The conversation also takes a deeper look at some of the book’s most unsettling themes, including eugenics, IVF, falling birth rates, embryo screening, Silicon Valley funding and the ways dangerous ideas can be presented as completely ordinary.

They discuss the morality of undercover journalism, the psychological tension of gaining the trust of people whose beliefs you fundamentally oppose, and Shukman’s own conflict over whether he was helping the very groups he was investigating.

The episode also explores the book’s criticisms, including arguments that Shukman’s definition of the far right is too broad, before comparing The Year of the Rat with Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and its themes of identity, disguise and living a double life.

📚 Books Mentioned

The Year of the Rat by Harry Shukman👉 https://link.amazon/B0iHxjhnC

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde👉 https://link.amazon/B0ff8BFt1

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee👉 https://link.amazon/B0jd1dgu5

Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee👉 https://link.amazon/B009dtWNa

The Odyssey by Homer👉 https://link.amazon/B009dtWNa