Attempts to ban and censor the group have only given it more power and helped usher in a new era of the far right. On 12 August, Donald Trump endorsed a congressional candidate from Georgia, the victor in a Republican primary runoff held the previous day. Like an alarmingly increasing number of congressional hopefuls and… Continue reading “QAnon has gone from fringe conspiracy to full-blown cult”
In early 2019, during ethnographic fieldwork on radical right movements in Australia, I attended a far-right rally against allegedly “African gang crimes” in Melbourne. I spoke to a young man in his 20s about his reasons for taking part in the protest. In response he alluded that the problem was much bigger than the criminal… Continue reading “Alternative epistemologies of the radical right: how grand narratives and the quest for truth offer recognition and a sense of belonging “
Similar to the “Great Replacement Theory,” the “Kalergi Plan” is a false conspiracy theory that claims there is a plot to wipe out white Europeans. When Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi outlined his idea for a unified Europe in his book Paneuropa in 1923, the Tokyo-born Austrian politician had no idea that almost a hundred years later his name… Continue reading “Kalergi Plan: The Undying “White Genocide” Conspiracy Theory”
The murder of George Floyd has sparked increasingly violent protests across the United States in an outpouring of fury and frustration, and an eruption of long simmering racial tensions. An analysis of the social media platforms Gab and Telegram, in the week following his death, has demonstrated how white supremacists are capitalising on this civil… Continue reading “I Predict a Riot: An Analysis of White Supremacist Propaganda in the Wake of the George Floyd Murder”
The COVID-19 conspiratorial cesspool is populated by both right-wing extremists and parts of the liberal left that views itself as woke, progressive and definitely anti-racist. In his recent article on openDemocracy, Matthias Wasser points out the fact that misinformation is not the prerogative of the radical right or the right for that matter. Indeed, the Covid-19… Continue reading “COVID-19 has exposed the odd conspiracy links between left and right”
The QAnon conspiracy theory is part of a larger esoteric belief system known as the ‘Great Awakening’. The enclosed map reveals the depth and breadth of this pseudo-religious belief system. Are more and more people shunning reality to cross over into unfounded and shadow worlds? On 20 February 2020, Tobias Rathjen uploaded a video message… Continue reading “‘The Plan’: Analysing the QAnon conspiracy theory on 8kun”
On December 7th 2019, Tom Newton Dunn, political editor of The Sun, published an editorial that promoted the conspiracy theories of the HIJACKED LABOUR (HL) project. Dunn praised the former intelligence officers behind HL for exhaustively charting Jeremy Corbyn’s “spider’s web of extensive contacts [that] stretch from Marxist intellectuals to militant groups and illegal terrorist… Continue reading “Off the Hook: How the HIJACKED LABOUR Conspiracy Theory Defends the Radical Right”
More than 25 years have passed since the tragedy, yet a web of conspiracy theories that has been spun around the disaster has fueled the Swedish radical right’s imagination. On the night of September 27-28, 1994, the ferry MS Estonia, carrying 989 passengers between Tallinn and Stockholm, sank in the Baltic Sea, hit by hard weather and… Continue reading “The Sinking of MS Estonia: The Swedish Radical Right’s Favorite Conspiracy”
