An analysis of YouTube comments and tweets finds that anonymity online leads to the spread of fake news, conspiracy theories, and hate. In 2019, I was asked by the Commission into Countering Extremism to provide my insights into the role of extremism online and whether conspiracy theories about Muslims were leading to hate; both online and offline.… Continue reading “How Fake News Can Lead To Online Islamophobia”
Continually posting online about their inadequacy, writing self-flagellating posts and ironizing one’s misery, incels appear to have found pleasure in their pain. It is easy to see incels — short for “involuntarily celibate” — as just another example of misogyny. This is so, but it is also true that the incel phenomenon departs from how… Continue reading “Incels: The New Politics of Indifference”
Radical right parties seldom break into a national party system all of a sudden. Rather, they usually set foot in subnational parliaments first, but the enhancing effect of subnational representation for their electoral performance in national elections is less well-studied. In fact, subnational parliamentary representation can help leverage radical right parties to the national level,… Continue reading “The Effect of Subnational Representation on Radical Right Parties”
As a Special Branch officer I watched the anti-Islam protest movement, the English Defence League (EDL), develop in 2009, I was struck by their apparent strategic acumen, not something normally associated with the far-right or football-related gang. The traditional Special Branch role of providing chief officers with intelligence on public order had slipped down the… Continue reading “Guest Blog: The catalyst for the EDL: March 2009 Luton – a terrible mistake”
After the collapse of the USSR, Russia, abandoning socialism as a path of development, also abandoned communist ideas, but didn’t replace them with new ideology. With the coming to power of President Vladimir Putin, right-wing organizations in Russia gradually lost their influence. This happened mainly because of the suppression of pro-fascist organizations by force and due… Continue reading “Russia Needs a New National Idea”
In the 1980s, white supremacist Frazier Glenn Miller, founder of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Patriot Party, got active duty Marines to train his followers in violence, plotted to murder civil rights leaders and others, and was finally arrested in a Missouri trailer with a huge cache of military-grade… Continue reading “NPR “Embedded” Podcast: “The Terrorist””
Manifestos and livestreaming seem to be the new trend in radical right terrorist attacks. Halle is the latest in a string of terrorist attacks inspired by radical-right ideology. It follows the same pattern as its predecessors: a manifesto appears online along with a livestream of the attack. Is this becoming the new modus operandi of… Continue reading “Are we witnessing the rise of a new terrorist trend?”
In the latest in Senior Fellow, Chris Webb’s series on Jewish Resistance and Concentration Camps of the Holocaust, Webb looks into the biggest mass execution in one day, in the whole history of German atrocities during WW2, Aktion Erntefest, among others. On 3 November 1943, early in the morning, SS and Police units surrounded the… Continue reading “Aktion Erntefest – Lublin District – November 1943”
Why did the movie become a new cultural touchstone for the alt-right? The far right has long used popular culture as a means of promoting their own ideals. It is a common misconception that extremists live and act within their own, fringe cultural sphere. Whilst much of far right literary and musical culture is produced… Continue reading “Joker, the far right and popular culture”
It may be that, unlike what Europe saw in the 1930s, resistance to a long drift to the right is swelling. In a remarkable confluence of events, the right-wing national leaders of the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel find themselves, at least for a brief historical moment, besieged by criticism and stark political… Continue reading “New Cracks in the Global Far Right?”