The Dutch political scientist Cas Muddle says that right-wing extremist movements advocate at least three of the following five doctrines: nationalism, racism, xenophobia, opposition to democracy and support for strong states. Using this definition, researchers from the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue recently analyzed over 5,000 pieces of far-right content gathered from over 50 different platforms used by these groups. Their findings are striking.
What's new is the level of cooperation and cross-pollination among groups that gather for crowdfunding on alternative platforms such as the Twitter-like Gab.ai and Hatreon, and on Discord, a chat application originally developed for gamers. The research suggests that the Daily Stormer — the neo-Nazi website associated with the alt-right — made the fourth-most-frequent use of the hashtag #MGGA (Make Germany Great Again) to help promote the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party that just entered the German parliament. The alt-right hacker Andrew Auernheimer (best known by his pseudonym weev) reached out to French and Germans to build troll armies that could influence European elections. [...]
The U.K. has experienced a rise in hate crimes (which also spiked during the 2016 campaign that preceded the vote to leave the European Union) following terrorist attacks on Manchester and London Bridge in May and June this year. The U.K. government reports a 27 percent increase in hate crimes this year over last year. [...]
Trump's retweets and his subsequent defense of them undermined British policies to counter far-right extremism at home. They have thus prompted the most serious diplomatic row between the two allies since Ronald Reagan had to apologize for leaving Margaret Thatcher out of the loop in the 1983 invasion of Grenada. That was short-lived. Thatcher and Reagan had a strong friendship and working relationship and were united against a common enemy. Trump and May have no friendship, a strained working relationship and now Trump seems to have taken up with the enemy. No wonder May is struggling to find common ground.
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