‘Your professors are cunts, on the whole,’ Milo Yiannopoulos told University of Oregon students in May. ‘Limp-wristed, pacifistic, sandal-wearing weirdos.’ The tech editor for alt-right news site Breitbart was seated on the low dais of a drab lecture hall, talking with the local leader of Young Americans for Freedom, the hosts for the event.

The refugee crisis has allowed a kind of ‘white internationalism’ to coalesce. The Far Right has not renounced nationalism, but it has foregrounded a whiteness defined in civilisational terms, and defined against the alleged threat posed by Muslim immigrants and refugees throughout the West, and by Latin-American migrants in North America.

Even now, ten months after he announced and nine after he first took his continuing lead in national polling, there is still a stubborn tendency among paid-up political commentators to believe that Donald Trump may fall short of the nomination. Outright Trump denialism of this kind will fade after his triumphs on 15 May, but there are many other ways of not taking Trump seriously. One is to insist that his political views are not deeply held, that he’s a mere opportunist, that even now his campaign is just a bid for publicity, and that in the end, we shouldn’t take what he says at face value.

After the debate came the deluge of interpretation. Almost without exception, the media scored it for Hillary Clinton. As far as everyone else was concerned – on the basis of evidence including measurements of internet chat, post-debate donations, and the results of focus groups – Bernie Sanders won. This is not an aberration. The yawning gap between professional pundits and the electorate at large is a structural feature of US politics, and is just as visible when it comes to the Republican race.

It’s been odd in recent days to witness so much political manoeuvring around a document that no-one outside the upper echelons of the world’s power elite has seen. When the rest of us are finally allowed to read the final text of the Trans Pacific Partnership, we’ll be able to make better sense of the contortions of politicians on all sides of the ocean. Right now, it’s like watching a succession of clumsy people, all of a certain age, fencing with a ghost.

What if our most closely held ideas about nature are reactionary? What if the project of restoring wildernesses that we (humans or moderns) have defiled – is misconceived and counterproductive? What if the deeply inscribed understanding of prelapsarian nature, as McKenzie Wark proposes, ‘an ecology that was self-correcting, self-balancing and self-healing’, is a way of surreptitiously reviving a God who might regulate and constrain human appetites? How would abandoning such ideas help us to address the interlocking emergencies – climatic, economic, humanitarian – that are already underway?

Late last month, it was reported that Wikipedia’s all-powerful Arbitration Committee banned five users from editing the entry on the ‘Gamergate controversy’, and any other article on ‘gender and sexuality, broadly construed’. The banned users* were feminist, and had been attempting to wrest control of the entry from editors identifying with Gamergate, which has recently consolidated itself as a full-blown, online reactionary movement.