Review of Undercover: Exposing the Far Right (2024)
Seen in 2025.
Patrik Hermansson mentors a journalist investigating the funding of British far-right propaganda, partly via the 1937 Pioneer Fund.
This production is unrelated to “Undercover in the Alt-Right: My Year in Kekistan” (2018), but revisits the same organization doing the same thing in basically the same way, albeit in Europe and before Trump’s second inauguration, rather than after his second. Social-media networks, set to star in Trump’s oligarchy, are less interested in banning right-wing influencers like Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as “Tommy Robinson”.
The documentary is well produced as something akin to a thriller, but it is not oriented around facts and not intended to dissuade anybody on the far right, whether through the knowledge-deficit model or any other. Given too little room to do it, the director and the activists at Hope Not Hate are still able to summarize a lot of racist pseudoscience and put it in the context of dishonest and motivated reasoning, but there is no attempt to debunk it. In the process, all evolutionary psychology is lumped in with the racist pseudoscience. That is probably intentional, but uncharitable.