The Women of the Far Right: Social Media Influencers and Online Radicalization by Eviane Leidig

Author:Eviane Leidig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

6

FROM PROTESTS TO PARLIAMENTS

To think that myself, a young Christian woman from Canada, who has never been part of any terrorist organization—I’ve never endorsed any terrorist organization, I’ve no criminal record whatsoever—I’m sitting in a room with the Kent police being asked how I feel about running over Muslims with trucks, was just absolutely absurd.”1

This is how Lauren Southern described her experience of being arrested and detained for six hours at the U.K. border after traveling there from continental Europe in 2018. She was detained along with Brittany Pettibone and Brittany’s then boyfriend, Martin Sellner; the couple were imprisoned for three days and then deported due to their extremist political activism. Meanwhile, Lauren was detained under the United Kingdom’s Schedule 7 Terrorism Act, which she described as not giving her “even … the right to remain silent.” Following this incident with U.K. border control, she had difficulty securing a visa that summer to visit New Zealand and Australia, where she participated in a speaking tour with the Canadian white nationalist Stefan Molyneux and was featured in an infamous photo wearing an “It’s okay to be white” T-shirt. Lauren’s tour was funded by an Australian company that had also supported Milo Yiannopolous and Jordan Peterson.2

But in 2018 Lauren wasn’t describing the incident via a webcam in a bedroom, nor was she livestreaming from outside the police station. She was speaking within the chambers of the European Parliament, with a recording uploaded onto her YouTube channel.

Seated on the panel with Lauren was the former far-right U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) member of the European Parliament Janice Atkinson, who invited Lauren to discuss the issue of “free speech” in the wake of this event. Lauren continued, “They asked me how I felt about right-wing terrorism, which I once again told them, you can watch any of my social media, you can look at any of my videos online, not once have I endorsed terrorism.”3

That a YouTube influencer who first began broadcasting from her bedroom discussions about antifeminism was defending herself against accusations of supporting right-wing terrorism in the European Parliament shows the extent to which the far right has become a mainstream phenomenon.

Cas Mudde, a pioneer political scientist in the study of the European far right, argues in The Far Right Today (2019) that we’re currently witnessing the so-called fourth wave of the far right: its mainstreaming and normalization.4 This mainstreaming is symbolized by the posting of Lauren’s Instagram photo of having coffee with Janice Atkinson and Nigel Farage, former UKIP leader and lead Brexit spokesman, the same day as giving her talk.5 Only a few days earlier, she had shared a photo of herself giving a speech for the youth wing of the Belgian far-right political party Vlaams Belang.6

Mudde observes that just a few decades ago the far right was seen as being on the fringe of the political margins, with ideas and behaviors considered too toxic to be legitimate. Today, the far right occupies the political mainstream: more far-right political parties have

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.