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”
To prevent such developments, mainstream parties need to shape political discourse, instead of being shaped by it. In August 2017, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) co-leader Alexander Gauland proposed to ‘dispatch’ the then Federal Commissioner for Immigration, Refugees and Integration, Aydan Özoğuz (SPD), back to Anatolia. Some weeks later, the AfD party entered the German… Continue reading “Merkel’s dilemma: Germany’s polarising ‘Turkish issue’ returns”
Populist radical right parties and their leaders openly despise expertise: they often parade their ignorance and inexperience by developing, in electoral terms, propaganda depicting them shoulder-to-shoulder with ordinary citizens (“the People”) – as distant as possible from accultured, intellectual cosmopolitan elites. Mainstream political parties have, especially in recent years, often championed recourse to unelected experts… Continue reading “Expertise in politics: boon or bane?”
The radical right uses the lack of clear definitions of hate speech to exploit its right to free speech. As the recent furor surrounding British comedian Jo Brand’s comments on the BBC Radio 4 Heresy program attest, there is very little clarity about what does — and, importantly, what does not — constitute hate speech.… Continue reading “When Free Speech Becomes Hate Speech”
The creation of new symbols and rituals to evoke belief in a higher cause are central to the concept, ‘political religion’, prevalent in fascism studies for at least two decades. ‘I’m beginning to comprehend, I think, some of the reasons for Hitler’s astounding success. Borrowing a chapter from the Roman church, he is restoring pageantry… Continue reading “Political religions and fascism”