The Basketweavers

Executive Summary

• HOPE not hate sent an undercover reporter inside the Basketweavers, one of the largest far-right networks active in the UK

• There are 1,300 vetted members of the Basketweavers in the UK and an additional 1,100 in the US, Europe, Australia and beyond

• The Basketweavers stand out among far-right youth groups in prioritising offline events instead of internet communications vulnerable to infiltration

• The network organises meet-ups for the British far right, which have been attended by current and former members of Patriotic Alternative, the Homeland Party, Generation Identity UK and the Traditional Britain Group, among other organisations

• It has been promoted by extremists like Edward Dutton (the race science influencer), Keith Woods (a self-described “raging antisemite”) and Neema Parvini (a former academic who has said black people are “impulsive and low IQ”)

• The Basketweavers have intellectual pretensions and aspire to form a new elite that will displace the current system of government

• The Basketweavers hope to create connections from which new far-right projects emerge. One such project is the creation of a separate whites-only community within Britain where they can live entirely outside mainstream society

• They are affiliated with a secretive conference group called Scyldings which has hosted Curtis Yarvin (a neoreactionary blogger read by J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel) and Michael Wright (aka Morgoth), a far-right author who influenced an American terrorist

Introduction

The Basketweavers could be the most important far-right network you have never heard of. Operating in the shadows, it is an interconnected group of extremists who want to build their own society away from the mainstream.

Despite their secretive nature, the Basketweavers may be among the largest far-right networks in Britain, with chapters in London, Edinburgh, Bristol, Sheffield, and beyond. There were approximately 1,300 vetted members in the UK Basketweaver network as of September 2024. Estimates on Basketweaver turnout vary, but according to one senior figure, approximately a fifth of vetted members regularly attend events. Chapters containing an additional 1,100 members have also been set up in the US, Europe and Australia.

HOPE not hate sent an undercover reporter into the Basketweavers in 2022-2023. From the first meetings attended by our infiltrator, members discussed their affiliation to other far-right groups, their belief that Jews control global affairs, and their violent fantasies of murdering refugees.

The Basketweavers claim to be an apolitical group that primarily organises “social” events, but like their name, this is a ploy to distract outside attention from their far-right politics. Promoted by extremist, antisemitic influencers, the Basketweavers are a deeply racist network whose goals are the radicalisation of lonely young men, the creation of a separate society, and ultimately the cultivation of a new elite that hopes to one day rule Britain. The group has links to numerous groups and figures of the traditional far right. Despite their size, they have avoided press coverage until now.

What makes the Basketweavers unusual in the British far right is their commitment to secrecy. Although they hope to attract members and grow, the tactics they have used to stay off the radar of media and anti-fascists reflect a greater level of sophistication relative to other far-right groups.

The promise of secrecy is not the network’s only allure. It claims to be a “community building service” offering lonely young people an opportunity to make like-minded friends. Unlike other organisations that are openly extreme and engage in traditional political campaigning, the Basketweavers provide an easy way for first-time activists and fans of far-right influencers the chance to meet. It is the hope of the group’s leaders that once inside, recruits will become more extreme and grow the network by inviting new members.

Who Are the Basketweavers?

When Mark Houghton took the stage at the secretive far-right Scyldings conference in 2021, he proposed a new organisation with a funny name. The purpose of the “Basketweavers”, he told his audience, was ostensibly benign. Basketweaving would provide lonely young men with a community and a sense of belonging. The reality, however, would be very different.

Basketweaving, according to Houghton, was not just about providing community to the isolated but radicalising them. “Meeting in person will do more for you – will do more for us – than a hundred online Discord sessions,” he said. “It will do more for your thinking, for your social interaction, than listening alone to a dozen podcasts.”

Houghton, who is now a contributor to the Lotus Eaters, a popular far-right media outlet, anticipated that members of the Basketweavers could one day bring “a brother or a cousin or simply a friend from work” to events for indoctrination. In person, potential recruits will be “much more amenable to listening to what you have to say”, he explained. “It will humanise you to them.”

The name of the organisation was chosen by Houghton’s associate, Neema Parvini (aka Academic Agent), a disgraced academic who has called black people “impulsive and low IQ” and has spoken admiringly of the Nazi Brownshirts. Basketweaving was chosen as an innocuous, nonsensesounding word that aimed to divert scrutiny from the media. It worked. Until now.

What the Basketweavers Do

The group came to HOPE not hate’s attention when it was promoted by the race science influencer Edward Dutton, the “folkish” pagan YouTuber Thomas Rowsell (aka Survive The Jive) and Keith O’Brien (aka Keith Woods), an Irish white nationalist who once described himself as a “raging antisemite”. The Basketweavers were also advertised on the website of Neema Parvini, whose list of recommended books contains titles by a neo-Nazi and a Holocaust denier.

While posing as a potential member called Chris in late 2022, our undercover reporter joined the Basketweaving community. He applied online and underwent a vetting test in the form of a political questionnaire and a brief chat with a senior member. Having passed, HOPE not hate gained access to a private server on Discord, the messaging app. Inside, we found more than 2,400 Basketweavers across the UK, the US, Europe, Australia and beyond.

A calendar is circulated at the start of every month, advertising events that members can attend. One typical month for the London chapter involved two Friday night meet-ups at the Pommelers Rest pub in Tower Bridge and a hangout for west London members at The Orange Tree in Richmond. Some members in south London went to the monthly Libertarian Drinks meet-up of Dick Delingpole (brother of Spectator columnist James). There was also a hike in Kent, a trip to a right-wing organisation’s event, and a Soho club night called The Cathedral, inspired by the neoreactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin. Periodically, members would travel to meet Basketweavers in other cities like Bristol, and once a year a handful of members go to the French Alps for a ski trip (our reporter declined his invitation).

Members would also arrange to attend overtly political events, including the New Culture Forum, the Traditional Britain Group, and talks from figures like the far-right conspiracy theorist James Delingpole. Notably, members also arranged to attend the Nomos and Scyldings conferences, where they would hear an array of far-right and fascist speakers, including Neema Parvini, Michael Wright (aka Morgoth) and Colin Robertson (aka Millennial Woes). The Basketweavers were planning an event in June 2025 at the East India Club featuring John Sweeney, Benjamin Afer, and Howard Cox, Reform UK’s former London mayoral candidate.

Over the period of a year, our infiltrator went to Basketweaver events in London (the busiest chapter), Sheffield and York, plus an art exhibition and a conference in the Oxfordshire countryside. Activists from the wider British far right attended these meet-ups, including former members of the neoNazi group Patriotic Alternative (PA) and the now-defunct identitarian group Generation Identity UK.

Basketweaver Beliefs

On the surface, Basketweaver events are primarily about socialising and are open to those who follow a range of radical and far-right beliefs. However, there is a wider purpose to this. What they intend through their events is a form of prefigurative organising by which intellectual and political connections are forged, ultimately leading to the construction of a far-right elite. Basketweavers, in large part, hope to live as separately as possible from mainstream society and rely on their network: they socialise together, work together, and in a few cases marry and have children together. As many of them are antidemocratic, they believe that political activism within the current system will not bring about change. The best way to achieve their goals, they believe, is starting on a small scale.

Attracting new members is thus important to the success of this project. Whenever members attend public events, they are invited to proselytise with the directive to “keep to Lotus Eaters levels of spice”, a warning not to be too extreme. At a Battersea pub meet-up organised by a staffer of the New Culture Forum, our infiltrator overheard a senior Basketweaver telling a nonmember to read about the so-called “Kalergi Plan”, a conspiracy theory that claims white people are the victims of a genocidal plot. “I heard it might be some racist thing,” replied the man. “Just check it out and read into it before you make any judgements,” said the Basketweaver with a smile. Although the Basketweavers enforce an offline-communication policy in their main Discord server, they have another, inviteonly group for 50 of their most trusted members. HOPE not hate’s undercover reporter was invited inside. There, Basketweavers were much less restrained. They shared racist video clips of the American white nationalist Nick Fuentes calling Jews “filth”, memes warning against miscegenation, and photos questioning the number of Holocaust dead. Posting pictures taken at one event, a veteran member described it as “Basketweavers NSDAP Adventures”, using the acronym for Hitler’s Nazi Party. At the event, members jokingly posed for a camera making straight arm salutes.

[[h-s-harry-shukman-patrik-hermansson-david-lawrence-4.png 90f][Right: These March 2023 images show the London Basketweavers discussing an event at the Candlemaker pub in Battersea, hosted by a staffer of the New Culture Forum. one member says: “Think of it as outreach and a bit of a laugh.” Another member warns anyone attending to “hide power levels”, and not mention the extremist influencer Michael Wright (“Morgoth”) or Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber terrorist (“Uncle Ted”)

Many Basketweavers share a belief common to far-right politics: the conspiratorial view that a cabal of international Jews is responsible for many of the world’s problems. In this baroque fantasy, Jews are trying to poison gentile Westerners with toxic food, distract them with pornography, make children gay or trans, and convince white women to have children with black men to erase the white race. Basketweavers also frequently express hatred towards other groups traditionally targeted by the far right. At one meet-up, members described how black people “don’t have souls” and gleefully shouted racial slurs; at a different event a member called for the murder of left-wing civil servants. “Shoot them dead, so the streets run red with their blood,” he said.

The Basketweavers are committed to remaining obscure, and so while the group cryptically advertises itself through extreme influencers, in addition to hosting a website and publishing an online magazine, they also insist that their members use their Discord server only to plan offline events. The network encourages real-life meet-ups, rather than online discussions vulnerable to infiltration. Discord conversations that stray off the topic of scheduling these meet-ups are quickly deleted by administrators. This discipline reflects a growing complaint within the far right that prominent figures prioritise hosting live-streams instead of arranging in-person activity. The Basketweavers, as Mark Houghton explained in his speech, are intended as a response to that frustration.

[[h-s-harry-shukman-patrik-hermansson-david-lawrence-5.png 90f][July 2022: Posted in a secret group chat for senior Basketweavers, a member teasingly described these pictures as their “NSDAP Adventures”

[[h-s-harry-shukman-patrik-hermansson-david-lawrence-6.png 90f][Members of the Basketweavers at Nomos in Birmingham, 2022. Circled left: the race science writer John Rayner-Hilles; circled right, the Lotus Eaters contributor Dan Tubb. Note the Basketweaver in the middle giving a straight arm salute

Elite Aspirations

The Basketweavers are now an important meeting place for the British far right, especially those with pseudointellectual aspirations. Edward Dutton, the race science influencer, spoke at a Basketweavers event in 2022. His colleague, John Rayner-Hilles, a contributor to the race science journal Aporia, has also appeared at Basketweaver meet-ups. Presenters of the Lotus Eaters internet show, including Dan Tubb and Luca Johnson, have gone to events with Basketweavers. Hugh and Justine Brown, supporters of the Traditional Britain Group (TBG), have also been involved. Basketweavers have used their Discord server to plan their attendance at TBG events.

Lotus Eaters

Set up by the misogynistic influencer Carl Benjamin (aka Sargon of Akkad), the Lotus Eaters is a far-right media outlet. While many Basketweavers consider its politics too soft for their tastes, it is nonetheless a manifestation of their ambition to create like-minded companies that function outside the mainstream. There are overlaps between the two groups. Mark Houghton, a Lotus Eaters contributor, founded the Basketweavers in 2021. Luca Johnson, a Basketweaver, is now a commentator on the Lotus Eaters. Harry Robinson and Dan Tubb, both Lotus Eater hosts, have gone to The Witan (the far-right conference organised by Scyldings).

The Basketweavers are part of a larger group called the Beowulf Foundation. Named after the Old English epic, it oversees the Basketweaving Discord server. The Beowulf Foundation is a partner of a number of other far-right influencers and organisations, including Imperium Press, a company that sells books by Edward Dutton and Jonathan Bowden (the BNP’s late culture officer) plus posters of Julius Evola.

Scyldings

Scyldings, a far-right conference run by Basketweavers and the wider Beowulf Foundation, is part of the network’s aspiration to form an intellectual elite. Founded in 2021, it runs expensive academic-style conferences in the UK and the US.

Curtis Yarvin (the anti-democratic author who is friends with J.D. Vance, Peter Thiel and Maurice Glasman) spoke at the 2022 conference. The following year, the pseudonymous influencer Morgoth, whose antisemitic writings influenced the American terrorist Dylann Roof, was a speaker at the conference. Morgoth has defended the Waffen SS, quoted admiringly from Mein Kampf, and was last month identified by HOPE not hate as Michael Wright, a 49-year-old man from Seaton Delaval, Tyneside. Scyldings’ most recent British event, called The Witan, was held in August 2024 at the University of Warwick. It will hold an event in Australia in October 2025.

In November 2023, Scyldings offered their conference-organising apparatus to the Human Diversity Foundation, a race science organisation led at the time by Matthew Frost. It held a ticketed event featuring speeches by Erik Ahrens, the German white nationalist, and Edward Dutton at the Little Ship Club in central London. Kenny Smith, founder of the fascist Homeland Party, and his National Media Officer Alec Cave, both attended Scyldings in August 2024. They were interviewed by the Lotus Eaters host Dan Tubb.

In May 2025, Scyldings held their first conference in east Germany. Dutton, Carl Benjamin, and Charles Cornish-Dale (aka Raw Egg Nationalist, exposed by HOPE not hate) will speak at the Scyldings conference this August in Birmingham, where tickets cost £540.

[[h-s-harry-shukman-patrik-hermansson-david-lawrence-9.png 90f][Luca Johnson, a Basketweaver member and Harry Robinson, who provided tech support to the 2023 Scyldings conference. Both are now commentators at the Lotus Eaters, a far-right media outlet

[[h-s-harry-shukman-patrik-hermansson-david-lawrence-10.jpg 90f][A flyer for The Exhibition at the Fitzrovia Gallery, promoted by Basketweavers in July 2023

[[h-s-harry-shukman-patrik-hermansson-david-lawrence-11.png 90f][Homeland Party activist Callum Barker, left, wearing a skull balaclava, and right, at a Basketweavers meetup in London, August 2024. In excerpt: Alec Cave, Homeland’s National Media Officer, at the same event.

Under the auspices of the Beowulf Foundation, members hope to launch a book publishing company and a digital payments system that would prevent users from being “debanked”. The foundation’s leaders write: “We are dedicated to promoting the growth and success of organized minorities through the development of networks, infrastructure and training programs.”

To that end, the Basketweavers are seen as essential in cultivating connections from which new far-right projects might emerge. One such project is the creation of a separate community within Britain where Basketweavers could live entirely outside mainstream society. Other members set up a discussion group dedicated to off-grid living and homeschooling.

Key to motivating the Basketweavers is the belief that they are in a countercultural vanguard that one day will become the new elite. “Power lies in the organised minority, not in the disorganised mass,” Neema Parvini has said. “The organised one hundred will always defeat the disorganised one thousand. Just as fire drives out fire, so an elite is only ever driven out by another elite.” Mark Houghton believes that the Basketweavers will build this intellectual cadre that will eventually displace the current system of government.

At their events, Basketweavers express a belief that democracy is a sham. Some describe their desire to retreat from mainstream society, which they view as degenerate and on the verge of collapse. Many want to purchase their own land and live in whites-only communities with separate institutions. This is a longstanding goal of the far right, and in the Basketweavers is often expressed by a desire that no money should be spent on products and services that are not “ours”. Members took a step towards this ambition when they hosted a show called The Exhibition at the Fitzrovia Gallery in west London in July 2023. It featured works by Alexander Adams and Fen De Villiers (who attended Scyldings in 2023). “We realise that art at the highest level can never be egalitarian, nor espouse egalitarianism,” reads an extract of The Exhibition’s manifesto. “There is no equality, nor can there be.”

Ultimately, the Basketweavers are unlikely to achieve their grand ambitions of creating the new elite. Our undercover reporter noticed factional differences about the direction of the organisation. An attempted rebrand by an online administrator to “Club Weave” was mocked by members (“sounds like some dated ibizan nightclub to me”) and ultimately overturned.

Nomos Events

Set up by Evelyn Grant and John Sweeney (behind the Scrumpmonkey YouTube channel), Nomos Events is a farr-ight conference. Its first event was held in October 2021 in central Manchester. An October 2022 event in London saw Colin Robertson (aka Millennial Woes) and Neema Parvini deliver speeches. The Mises Institute in Alabama, which is dedicated to the Austrian School of Economics, partnered with Nomos for an event planned in May 2023 (which was ultimately cancelled). Basketweavers discussed attending _{Nomos London, October 2022: A panel of} Nomos Events in their Discord channel, where senior John Sweeney, Colin Robertson, Benjamin members encouraged the network to buy tickets. As of 2025, Afer (aka Panama Hat), and Neema Parvini the conference appears to have fallen into abeyance, although

Grant and Sweeney’s other social media channels remain active.

Far-Right Networking

The desire of becoming the new elite is not the only fantasy within the organisation. “Basketweaving and the idea it upholds is a commitment to meaningful local connections, promoting healthy and positive values,” Mark Houghton said in his opening speech. He went on to identify poor mental health as a problem, exacerbated by social isolation and internet addiction. And then he included “the crimes of Islam” in his assessment, in addition to “hypergamous dating”. This is the belief that women can be ranked according to looks, and thanks to dating apps, can ignore men of equal rank in favour of more attractive matches. If lonely young men join the Basketweavers in search of meaningful connections and healthy values, they are unlikely to find them there.

Despite Basketweavers broadly not engaging in traditional forms of activism, some members are involved in, or have passed through, such organisations. The Basketweaver Zachary Stiling, for instance, has been an electoral candidate for the Heritage Party (an anti-5G party whose leader has dabbled in antisemitic conspiracy theories). The Basketweavers have also proved attractive to those immersed in the UK’s neo-Nazi fringes. Shaun Caldwell, a Scottish activist who has passed through Patriotic Alternative, White Stag Athletic Club and Active Club Scotland, has appeared at an event alongside the Basketweavers. A London Basketweavers barbecue in August 2024 hosted senior members of the fascist Homeland Party, including its National Media Officer Alec Cave, and core activist, Callum Barker.

The Basketweavers are also connected to Evelyn Grant and John Sweeney, both the organisers of Nomos Events, an occasional conference that has partnered with the Mises Institute in Alabama. Basketweavers at a 2022 Nomos event in Birmingham were photographed alongside Tom Webster, a member of Patriotic Alternative who appeared in a BBC documentary and admitted to giving out wrong information at his civil service job to people “just because they’re not white”.

Mapped: The Basketweavers Network

Undercover at 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.