Though estimating the vote share of radical right parties in advance of an election is politically important, it is always a challenge. This can be due to sampling bias in the polling, in which the sample may not represent the population of radical right party supporters, or critical events, such as scandals about radical right… Continue reading “Estimating vote share of radical right parties with “Wisdom of Crowds””
Shortly before opening fire at the Gilroy Garlic Festival on July 28th, the now deceased gunman posted two photos to a recently created Instagram account. Although the posts were quickly removed after being linked to the attack, screen captures had already made their way onto other parts of the web. One of the photos was of the… Continue reading “The Influence of Might is Right in the Gilroy shooting”
Trump refers to Hispanic migrants as if they are an infectious disease while he detains them in inhumane detention centers. We must learn from history. In an article published in 2007, Andreas Musolff, a scholar working in ‘critical discourse analysis’, showed how the metaphors employed by Hitler in Mein Kampf advanced the idea that the German nation was an… Continue reading “Holocaust Historian: Trump Needs To Stop Speaking Like A 20th Century Fascist”
The inability of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to identify potential perpetrators, much less anticipate their attacks, provides support for Louis Beam’s “leaderless resistance” tactic. During the 1980s, Louis Beam — a Vietnam War veteran, Klansman and Aryan Nation activist — wrote what became an influential observation about ways in which racial supremacists… Continue reading “Lone Wolf Attacks Prove Louis Beam Was Right About “Leaderless Resistance””
The white supremacist terrorist who targeted Hispanics in El Paso, Texas parallels rhetoric from President Trump and past white supremacist manifestos. At least 22 people were killed, with dozens injured, at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, on Saturday. Patrick Crusius, a suspected white nationalist terrorist, has been taken into police custody. In a world… Continue reading “How The El Paso Terrorist’s Manifesto Echoes Trump’s Rhetoric”
VOX knows how important young people are for their political goals so they cherish and pamper their junior supporters. During the first conference organised by the Centre of the Analysis of the Radical Right in London last May, Cas Mudde in his wonderful plenary drew our attention to the relationship between the Radical Right and… Continue reading “Beers for Spain and Instagram: VOX and the youth vote”
The electorate are engaged at some level in a fictive transaction, where we know that what we intend to buy is indeed a counterfeit. It is, it seems, a good time for nostalgia. It is received wisdom that this is what support for Donald Trump in the United States has meant, just as the… Continue reading “Going back somewhere: nostalgia and the radical right”
Introduction Distributed web, cryptocurrencies, blockchain-based video live-streaming are some of the so-called “Alt-Tech” tools that some radical right actors are beginning to use as they continue to be removed from regular social media platforms such as Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter. In this series of articles, I’ll break down how a few of the key Alt-Tech… Continue reading “Alt-Tech and the Radical Right, Part 1: Why the Shift?”
One of the most unsettling ways in which postwar Europe used its alleged Christian identity was to normalize modern totalitarianism. Illustratively, by the end of the Second World War active efforts began to be made throughout the continent to prove that Spanish dictator Francisco “Franco was not really a ‘fascist’, but was in fact an… Continue reading ““Christian Europe” and the normalization of the radical right”
Democracies still face threats to their existence today. With autocratic regimes, political power is clearly based upon executive prerogative, meaning a potentially unchecked use of force by police and military, thereby guaranteeing domestic stability through force. In contrast, the political power of democracies is ultimately based upon their power of persuasion; a principle that is… Continue reading “Autocracies vs. Democracies. A theoretical approach”