The rise of the alt-right as a potent and sometimes violent political force has been well documented. Yet the journey of an individual towards upholding these ideologies is less well understood. Alt-righters are not instantly converted, but rather incrementally nudged along a particular medial pathway. Drawing on video testimonies, chat logs, and other studies, this ...

Several incidents of mass violence in 2019 were preceded by manifestoes posted to deep Web social media sites by their perpetrators. These sites, most notably 4chan and 8chan, are buried in the deep Web, away from the neutralizing effects of broad public discourse. Many of the posts to these sites reference earlier extremist incidents, and ...

In the space of 36 minutes on March 15, 2019, it is alleged that Brenton Tarrant, an Australian far-right extremist, fatally shot 51 people in two mosques in Christchurch in the deadliest terrorist attack in New Zealand’s history. What was unique about Tarrant’s attack—at least insofar as extreme-right terrorism is concerned—is that he livestreamed his ...

This essay adopts a critical rhetorical perspective attuned to affect to investigate white nationalist rhetoric on Stormfront, a popular white nationalist message board. My analysis illuminates how Stormfront attempts to appeal to mainstream white audiences by resisting normative expectations and affects articulated with white supremacy and (re)constructing white nationalism as a formation of white racial ...

This study focuses on the role of Internet memes in the communication of two far-right groups in Finland. The material consists of 426 memes posted by Finland First and the Soldiers of Odin between the years 2015 and 2017 on Facebook. Multimodal discourse analysis was applied to understand the contents, forms, and rhetorical functions communicated ...

Over the past few years, new ideological movements like the Alt-Right have captured the attention and concern of both mainstream media, policy makers, and scholars alike. Today, the methods by which right-wing extremists are radicalized are increasingly taking place within social media platforms and online communities. However, no research has yet investigated methods for proactively ...

This article looks at two periods in the history of white supremacy in New Zealand: the short-lived explosion of skinhead groups in the 1990s, and the contemporary rise of the internet-driven alt-right. It looks at the similarities and differences between the two groups, looking at style, symbols, ideology, and behaviour. It looks at the history ...

In this paper, I analyze how the so called ‘alt-right’ is using Twitter to mainstream its politics. Understanding alt-right mainstreaming is important because the movement has embraced a Gramscian view of politics that believes cultural change (e.g. normalizing unpopular ideas) must precede institutional change (e.g. fielding candidates for office). To conduct my analysis I created ...

This article seeks to propose a valuable frame for understanding which processes, either cognitive or practical, take part in the making of a terrorist act within the frame of the onlife region. A term recently coined, onlife, refers to the interacting/indistinguishable domain of online and offline world: this is the environment where today’s global terrorism/extremism ...

The number of lone-actor attacks committed by far-right extremists have surged in recent years, most notably in the West where mass-casualty attacks have occurred, including the United States, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Germany. The fatal attack in February 2020 in Hanau, Germany, revealed the perpetrator’s influences to be a combination of traditional far-right, ...