At the entrance to The Clarkson Academy was a dark, black and blue poster of a lightbulb. It looked, at first, like a corporate stock photo. Inside a London meeting room, I took a seat among a mostly white audience who cheered on Brexit and laughed about Extinction Rebellion, and listened intently to a former lobbyist share his insight into UK politics.

Looking more closely, the filament in the lightbulb on the poster had been shaped in the outline of a fetus, illuminated in orange. The men and women around me hadn’t assembled to talk about the EU or climate change. And the former lobbyist focused his speech on “blood sacrifices” and abortion and homosexuality as part of a “Satanic revolution”.

Yes, you read that correctly. His exact words were “homosexual agenda is one front of the Satanic revolution. Other fronts include abortion” – as well as supposed pushes to legalise cannibalism and paedophilia. Abortions are “ritual child sacrifices”, he continued, claiming that Satanists conduct ritual abortions in (unnamed) “high profile” facilities in the US, including women who sway while chanting “our bodies, ourselves”.

It was, by far, one of the most bizarre events I’ve attended. But I wasn’t the organisers’ target audience. I’m a journalist who writes about women’s and LGBTIQ rights. I enrolled in this ‘academy’ to get a closer look at the movement behind recent protests targeting a prominent pro-choice MP, Stella Creasy, who has filed a harassment claim with police.