While every political and cultural moment is singular, there’s a case to be made that our own is uniquely disorienting. Given the speed and unpredictability of events and the scale of current social and political crises, it’s perhaps unsurprising to see a proliferation of conspiracy theories across unusually broad swathes of society.

Author and activist George Monbiot, however, finds something singularly dark and sinister about our present moment. In a recent column for the Guardian, he writes with urgency about the extreme right’s appropriation of countercultural idioms and revolutionary language in the age of QAnon and COVID. In a wide-ranging conversation, Jacobin’s Luke Savage sat down with Monbiot to discuss the issues raised in his latest piece, the corrosion of community in the neoliberal era, and the desperate need for a new narrative of solidarity and common good in an age of resurgent fascism and ecological collapse.