Undercover in The Basketweavers

By Harry Shukman

Within minutes of my first meeting undercover at the Basketweavers at the Crosse Keys pub in central London in November 2022, I heard a member mention “the JQ” – an acronym for the “Jewish Question”, a term used by the Nazis when discussing how to rid Europe of Jews. I also met a former member of the white nationalist group, Patriotic Alternative, and listened to a discussion about racial purity as described by the Italian “super-fascist” philosopher, Julius Evola. There was chatter about the “holo-cough”, the group’s joke name for COVID-19, and praise for the neo-Nazi activist Mark Collett.

For a year, I attended their events in pubs and secret conferences using a pseudonym. The Basketweavers attract young men and a handful of women from all social backgrounds. There were delivery drivers and engineers; university students and civil servants. They tended to be in their twenties and thirties, although I met people who are considerably older. While Basketweavers espoused an extreme form of white identity politics, and repeatedly disparage miscegenation as a social ill, curiously not everyone I met in the network is white. There was a university student who is half-Japanese (insulted as a “mixed race fucking mutt” by one Basketweaver) and an office worker of south Asian heritage (he was nicknamed “Apu” after the Simpsons character).

The Basketweavers are overwhelmingly male. I attended events for six months before I met a female member. This was hardly surprising: conversations about women tended to describe them in two ways. Either they were referred to as baby-making “tradwives” or else as gullible fools who could be hoodwinked into bed with “pick-up artist” techniques. In both contexts, women were frequently described with contempt. “Women will believe whatever you want them to believe,” one member told me. “Misogyny is the natural position,” another said.

Loneliness seemed to attract many of the young men to Basketweaving. “I consider myself pretty low down on the totem pole of society,” one said. “I spent most of my formative years being rejected by people.” I heard about members who weren’t on speaking terms with their parents. I met one Basketweaver who had been kicked out of his family home after spending his allowance on sex workers. Others described how the relationships they yearned for had yet to materialise. Many described feelings of alienation and boredom, working long days in tedious, unfulfilling jobs, and spending their evenings watching hours-long racist live streams.

Despite providing a real-life meeting-place for the socially isolated, Basketweaving is not as convivial as it might seem. Members were vicious to each other: they refused to invite social misfits to meet-ups; rich members insulted poor ones who couldn’t afford to attend expensive events; the sexually inexperienced were mocked. I listened to white Basketweavers insult an ethnic minority member as “a dredge upon society, first into the gas chamber”. Another was aggressively berated for experimenting with a vegan diet. If some lonely young men turned to Basketweaving in search of a community, not all of them were likely to find it here.

The far-right politics espoused by Basketweavers demands an adversarial approach to those with liberal views. This creates a vicious cycle whereby members become aggressive towards their loved ones and then complain of subsequently feeling isolated from them. I frequently heard about arguments with parents and partners. One of the older members described the breakdown of his marriage due to political differences. He said he tried to engage in “counter-subversion” when his kids came home from school having learned about Nelson Mandela. The subsequent arguments with his wife ultimately led to divorce.

There were variations within Basketweavers’ opinions: some are devout Christians, others pagan or atheist. Some wanted to find wives and start families, others listened to the podcasts of pick-up artists and approached women on the street for casual hook-ups (with low degrees of success). All were concerned about what they consider to be the coming collapse of civilisation, anticipating a civil war on ethnic or religious grounds. Some went as far to make preparations for impending social disorder – I met one man who has a garage filled with fifty jerry cans of petrol that he treated with fuel stabiliser.

Some of the members were conspiratorially minded to a yet more drastic degree. They shared with me their fantasies that climate change is a hoax, or that modern medicine does more harm than good (for this reason, one man sought to heal his hernia “naturally” by doing nothing instead of going to the doctor).

I heard one conversation about how “the guys with big noses” are pressuring white women through TV advertising to have babies with black men and, through miscegenation, end white bloodlines. “It’s in the interest of Talmudic forces,” one Basketweaver said. “Jews want us weaker so we are easier to rule.”

The conspiracy theories that I heard most often were antisemitic. Members enjoy denying the Holocaust and complaining about what they consider to be Jewish control of media, finance, and politics. Some members have such antipathy to Jews that they have taken DNA tests to prove their European ancestry. When I got to know Basketweavers a bit better, they opened up further. “Hitler did do a lot of good,” one member told me. Frequently I heard that Jews are ruining gentile societies with pornography and poisoned processed food. At no point during my time undercover did I hear any members dispute or criticise the antisemitism that pervades the group.