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      The Trump Administration Targets Critical Race Theory

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      In his latest attack on democratic values and principles, US President Donald Trump issued executive orders purging critical race theory (CRT) from diversity training in US federal agencies. According to the first order issued on September 4, “The divisive, false, and demeaning propaganda of the critical race theory movement is contrary to all we stand for as Americans and should have no place in the Federal government.” The order refers to diversity training that involves discussions of white privilege and the systemic forms of racism that are embedded within US history and institutions. According to the president’s most recent Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping issued on September 22, the so-called “destructive ideology” of white privilege is “grounded in misrepresentations of our country’s history and its role in the world.”

      Should We Say Black or African American?

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      It is significant that these directives follow months of nationwide protests against racism in policing and the criminal justice system. The interdisciplinary field of critical race theory occupies an important position in the ideological basis of the Black Lives Matter movement. Activists protesting against systemic racism have made a point of acknowledging the many important critical race theorists and philosophers of the past and present who have advanced struggles for racial justice. The radical right has taken note of the relationship between CRT and Black Lives Matter. Breitbart News, for example, defines CRT as “the leftist, racist doctrine that forms the intellectual underpinnings of Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and other radical organizations currently engaged in unrest on America’s streets.”

      Context and Reaction

      The Trump administration’s censorship of CRT is an effort to counter the scholarly and intellectual critique that has been integral within advocacy and policy change to advance racial, sex and gender justice. It is the ability of CRT to name and challenge systemic racism that makes it confrontational to the ability of white and male privilege and power to remain unmarked, unnamed and unchallenged. In their response to Trump’s directive, the deans of all five California’s law schools stated that “CRT invites us to confront with unflinching honesty how race has operated in our history and our present, and to recognize the deep and ongoing operation of ‘structural racism,’ through which racial inequality is reproduced within our economic, political, and educational systems even without individual racist intent.”

      Critical race theory has been put into practice through diversity education and training, showing how racism and sexism are not merely beliefs held and perpetuated by individuals, but that these and other forms of discrimination and exclusion are institutional and systemic. To eliminate CRT is to censor words and concepts like intersectionality, implicit bias, stereotyping, stigma, whiteness, white privilege and systemic and institutional racism, which effectively closes down processes of naming and unlearning unearned privileges associated with one’s race and gender.

      CRT and cognate forms of diversity training have become important means of advancing the equal recognition and rights of those who have been historically excluded and victimized on the basis of their race, gender, disability or sexual orientation not only in the United States but in many parts of the world. In South Africa (the main context in which this author conducts research and teaching), CRT has been integral within efforts to name and challenge the persistence of white supremacy and white privilege in public and private sectors. Critical diversity studies has also emerged as a recognized academic field and area of professional development and training in South Africa.

      While diversity training within US federal agencies is the immediate target of President Trump’s executive orders, scholars have raised alarm about implications for CRT as an area of scholarship. The Association of American University Professors issued a statement highlighting this concern, arguing that the order “denies and dismisses the efforts of experts across a wide variety of disciplines — such as law, history, social sciences, and humanities — to help us better understand and reckon with our legacy of slavery and persistent institutional racism.”

      Right-Wing Hostility

      Radical-right hostility toward the intellectual left is nothing new. In the United States, a right-wing intelligentsia has taken shape over the past 40 years, largely funded by conservative corporate philanthropic organizations. As Donna Nicol reports, conservative  American critics have accused race and ethnic studies, as well as women’s studies, of being anti-Western and anti-American, arguing that these disciplines radicalize students toward “social anarchy” and undermined the American “free enterprise system.” The September 22 executive order, which accuses CRT of being a form of “propaganda” that amounts to “offensive and anti-American race and sex stereotyping and scapegoating,” grants this hostility new levels of power, influence and acceptability.

      The recent orders that ban CRT in diversity training for US federal agencies is a warning that US-based critical academics are joining the ranks of critical scholars internationally who are facing repression by radical-right populist leaders. Trump’s blitz on critical race theory comes amidst a trend of growing attacks on academic freedom in many other parts of the world. Censorship of CRT also comes amidst the president’s refusal to condemn white supremacist organizations. His comments during a recent debate for these groups to “stand back and stand by” was lauded by the self-described “Western chauvinist” Proud Boys as a call to arms.

      On the one hand, then, the Trump administration and other populist regimes’ agendas against the naming and interrogation of white supremacy may be indicative of their awareness that they are losing ground against anti-racist and anti-colonial movements for social justice and are feeling a threat to their hegemony. On the other hand, the banning of critical race theory in US federal agencies is indicative that academic freedom is the next democratic principle at stake and that critical scholars, especially those in publicly-funded institutions of higher learning, have good cause to be alarmed.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Donald Trump, COVID-19 and America’s Love of Conspiracy

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      US President Donald Trump and his wife Melania tested positive for COVID-19 on the evening of Thursday, October 1. In retrospect, the diagnosis should not have become as a complete surprise. For months, Trump and most of his entourage ignored the advice of public health specialists, in his own administration, to wear masks in public settings and maintain social distance between the president, his key advisers and other White House personnel.

      QAnon: A Conspiracy for Our Time

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      Despite warnings from infectious disease specialists inside and outside the administration, Trump persisted to hold public rallies, often in confined indoor settings, as part of his reelection campaign. These events appeared to gratify the president’s need for attention and unqualified adoration, irrespective of their partisan political benefits. Based on this behavior, extended over the course of the pandemic, it was almost inevitable that the infection caught up with Trump.

      Alternative Facts

      This interpretation seems perfectly reasonable. But it is unlikely to satisfy voices on the far right of the American political spectrum despite the House of Representatives’ bipartisan vote on October 2 to condemn the QAnon conspiracy. It requires some speculation, but not all that much, to expect QAnon believers and such deranged media figures as Alex Jones to produce a set of “alternative facts.” 

      These “facts” are likely to involve the discovery of still another “deep state” conspiracy within the federal government. According to such a conspiratorial view, Trump’s attempts to achieve his “pro-American” white nationalist objective are being sabotaged by a secret conspiracy formed among federal bureaucrats to thwart his policy goals. “Deep state” conspirators will stop at nothing to bring down Trump and his “conservative” administration. We should not be surprised if, over the remaining weeks leading to the November 3 presidential election, various versions of such a “deep state” conspiracy appear across the internet. It remains to be seen how much will be taken up by Fox News and other outlets.

      Multiple “deep state” conspiracy assertions and interpretations have surfaced in American political life over the decades. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the journalist John T. Flynn and other right-wing isolationists, including “Colonel” Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, claimed that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had deliberately goaded the Japanese into attacking the United States to make gullible Americans abandon their “America First” ideals and support the country’s entry into the war against the Axis powers.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Flynn and others believed that Roosevelt knew of the Japanese plans to attack Pearl Harbor but deliberately did not alert US commanders in Hawaii, Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter Short, so that the attack could proceed with maximum effect. According to this scenario, the blood of the sailors on the USS Arizona was on Roosevelt’s hands.

      During President Dwight Eisenhower’s second term, when fears of communism became a national obsession, Robert Welch, a retired Massachusetts candy manufacturer, formed the John Birch Society. (Birch was an American missionary in China who had been killed by Mao’s Communists in 1946.)  Welch went on to publish a widely publicized “Blue Book,” which, among other things, included a list of domestic “communists” and communist sympathizers who were scheming to bring down America. The president’s brother, Dr. Milton Eisenhower, then the chancellor of the University of Minnesota, was allegedly his superior in the communist conspiracy. The president himself was simply a dupe instrumentalized by powers that be inside the communist movement.

      The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in November 1963 yielded a bonanza of conspiracy theories. The assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had defected to the Soviet Union, returned to the US and became a member of the “Fair Play for Cuba” committee while living in New Orleans. Those who espoused this conspiratorial interpretation claimed either the USSR — the assassination occurred after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis — or Fidel Castro, who had been targeted for assassination by the CIA, were behind the murder.

      Left-Wing Conspiracies

      At the time, competing left-wing conspiracy theories flourished as well, according to which Kennedy had been the victim of right-wing generals and businessmen who wanted the United States to abandon plans for a peaceful end to the Cold War. Film director and Vietnam War veteran Oliver Stone made a movie depicting the dynamics of this conspiracy, featuring an imaginary New Orleans district attorney uncovering the “truth.”

      The New World Order (NWO) conspiracy arose at the end of the Cold War. Following the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991 by an international coalition led by the United States, President George H. W. Bush referred to the emergence of a new world order dominated by America as the world’s only “hyper-power.” His celebration of American dominance was understood by members of various active well-armed “patriot” groups around the country as the government’s attempt to compromise American sovereignty.

      Bush’s aim, according to this conspiracy, was to turn the United States over to the United Nations and other dark international evil-doers. In parts of the West and Midwest, NWO believers spotted black helicopters hovering above farms and ranches. Others detected the movement of black trains carrying Chinese communist troops to obscure destinations. Suspicions were aroused in the Northwest that detachments of China’s People’s Liberation Army were massing on the Canadian border, preparing to invade the US. Reverend Pat Robertson, a prominent televangelist, even wrote a book entitled “The New World Order,” warning  of the NWO threat and encouraging  followers to be prepared.

      If Donald Trump’s COVID-19 infection is blamed on the “deep state,” it will surely become part of a line of right-wing conspiracies involving American presidents, either as victims or, in the case of Roosevelt, perpetrators.  

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Britain’s Refugee Policy Is a Fantasy of Fear

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      In December 1938, French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet told German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop of a French plan to deport 10,000 Jews to Madagascar, a French colony. After the defeat of France in June 1940, the idea was taken up by the German Foreign Office. On July 3, 1940, Franz Rademacher, an official in the Foreign Ministry’s Department of Internal Affairs, produced a report entitled “The Jewish Question in the Peace Treaty,” in which he wrote: “The imminent victory gives Germany the possibility, and in my opinion also the duty, of solving the Jewish question in Europe. The desirable solution is: All Jews out of Europe.”

      His main suggestion was that France “must make the island Madagascar available for the solution of the Jewish question,” that the 25,000 French citizens living there already should be resettled and compensated, and that “all Jews deported to Madagascar will from the time of deportation be denied the citizenship of the various European countries by these countries.” The idea was received enthusiastically by Adolf Eichmann’s section of the Reich Main Security Office, the umbrella organization for the German police and security forces, including the SS and its intelligence agency, the SD. His office noted in a memorandum sent to Rademacher on August 15, 1940, that “To prevent lasting contact between the Jews and other nations a solution in terms of an overseas island is superior to all others.”

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      In preparation for deporting Jews to Madagascar, groups of Jews from Alsace-Lorraine and the areas of Baden and the Saarland (into which Alsace and Lorraine were incorporated following the defeat of France) were transported in sealed trains to the Gurs concentration camp in the south of France, to be held there in catastrophic conditions under which many, especially the elderly, died, prior to their journey overseas.

      Stages of Dehumanization

      The propaganda value of the Madagascar Plan was, from the Germans’ point of view, huge: They planned to trumpet their “humanity” in granting the Jews self-government — under German supervision, of course — on the island while preventing the creation of a Jewish “Vatican State of their own in Palestine,” as Rademacher put it. Furthermore, the Jews would “remain in German hands as a pledge for the future good conduct of the members of their race in America.”

      The Nazis never managed to deport French or German Jews to Madagascar, as their failure to defeat Britain meant that the British Navy retained control of the Indian Ocean. But the Madagascar Plan had its value: It was an important mental stage in the process by which the Nazis moved from schemes to remove Jews from Germany, then from Europe altogether and then, during the war, to murdering Jews in situ, where they lived, and finally creating specially-designed extermination camps to which Jews were sent from across Europe, beginning with the Jews of occupied Poland.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Notions that the Jews would be left to create their own self-governing society were pure eyewash. The scheme was inherently genocidal in that there were no plans to provide for the deportees on their arrival. As the Holocaust historian Christopher Browning writes, the Madagascar Plan, which, “like a spectacular meteor … blazed across the sky of Nazi Jewish policy, only to burn out abruptly,” was “an important psychological step toward the road to the Final Solution.”

      In the last few days, the UK press has reported that civil servants have been instructed to look at creating offshore centers for “processing” migrants and asylum seekers. The places mooted have been Moldova, Morocco, Papua New Guinea and the South Atlantic islands of Ascension and St. Helena, both British territories. None are straightforward options, for reasons of corruption and internal strife (Moldova, especially over Transnistria); lack of willingness on the part of the local authorities (Morocco), or sheer distance (PNG, to which there are no direct flights from the UK, is 8,500 miles away).

      But the island solutions are the most remarkable. So remote that it is used solely as a transit point for goods on their way to the Falkland Islands, Ascension, like St. Helena, has a minute population, lies 5,000 miles from the UK, and the cost of building and staffing such a center would be astronomical. One begins to wonder whether these plans have been thrown out to the public in order to make the more likely decision to use decommissioned ferries and oil rigs in UK waters seem sensible.

      A Threat Within and Without

      There are important differences between the Nazis’ plans to deport Jews from Europe to Madagascar and the UK Home Office’s investigations into sending migrants as far as possible offshore. I am not suggesting that what the UK government is talking about is genocidal or that the idea is borne of hatred and fear of a specific group of people believed to be part of a worldwide conspiracy to destroy the British people, in the way that leading Nazis believed that Jews were a threat to the Aryan “race.” The Jews were believed to be a threat within, who had to be expelled; migrants to the UK are perceived as a threat from outside, whose entry into the country must be prevented, albeit a “threat” that resonates with those who believe that the UK is already being “Islamized,” meaning that the danger already lies within.

      Nevertheless, the logic of what the Home Office is talking about does stem from the sort of fantasies and fears that have driven the persecution of minorities throughout modern history. The notion that the UK is full and cannot accept more immigrants, despite more than 40,000 deaths from COVID-19; the idea that migrants have chosen to come to Britain because they “know” they will receive better housing and welfare than long-established locals; the fear that migrants bring disease and crime, and that they will refuse to adapt to “our way of life” — all of this lies behind current and mooted policies that are as irrational as they are infantile.

      The Australian policy of holding migrants in PNG or on Nauru in appalling conditions has resulted in spiraling mental and physical illnesses. The spending of huge sums of money by Frontex and by the UK Border Guard in the Mediterranean and the English Channel has not stopped migrants from traveling, and the hypocrisy of blaming people traffickers is eye-watering given that such criminal gangs only exist because of the lack of proper channels for migration.

      It has been shown many times that the migrants who make the journey are among the most enterprising and energetic people in the world, desperate only to make better lives for themselves. Treating them like criminals will make them, many of whom already extremely vulnerable, ill. The cost to the taxpayer of running these centers will be far greater than the gain to the economy of allowing migrants in and letting them work.

      Above all, the idea of sending migrants to far-flung places is a policy of fear and paranoia — a fear of pollution and paranoia about difference. It is a ludicrous, though deeply harmful concept, and one which will not stop migrants trying to get to the UK. Most important, it is one whose logic points only in the direction of increasingly radical measures. When we have a government that is willing to break international law in one context, how long will it be before the UK breaks it in another, with respect to human rights legislation or the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, even if only in a “specific and limited” way?

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Europe’s Far Right Fails to Capitalize on COVID-19

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      Europe’s radical-right parties have quickly understood the benefit they can derive from criticizing their respective governments in managing the COVID-19 health crisis. Their communication focuses on three main areas. First, they question the animal origin of the epidemic through the use of several conspiracy theories. Second comes the criticism of globalization presented as the root cause of the pandemic. And, finally, they criticize the threats that lockdowns and other measures, such as the wearing of face masks, impose on the individual freedoms of European citizens.

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      The conspiratorial mindset of the European radical right is evident in the current COVID-19 moment. Like other extremist milieus, the idea of a ​​hidden cause according to which any historical event occurs is prevalent. The search for mysterious reasons that the powerful media and political elites would like to hide from the people is never far away in the far-right diagnosis of the origins of the pandemic. In particular, as the origin of the virus is still disputed in public discourse, the pandemic is the ideal issue for those who are prone to such conspiratorial thinking.

      Orwellian Society

      We shouldn’t get too carried away with ourselves here, however. Not all radical-right actors have reacted to the pandemic with conspiracy theories. One of the most interesting issues is that some of them have reactivated the theme of the West having to fight communism, embodied no longer by the USSR but by China as a new bête noire. Swedish MEP Charlie Weimers, for example, accused China of using opacity and lies to downplay the scale of the epidemic, an attitude which he says stems from the command-and-control nature of communism itself.

      Other parties or figures on the European radical right have raised questions not only about the responsibility of the Chinese government for a late and inappropriate response to the pandemic, but also put forward the idea that the virus escaped from a virology laboratory in Wuhan. This theory, propagated in mid-April by Professor Luc Montagnier, the winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine, was relayed in France by the elected representatives of the National Rally (RN), Julien Odoul and Gilbert Collard. The RN, however, did not fully follow in the footsteps of Professor Montagnier and calls for the creation of an international commission of inquiry into the origins of the epidemic.

      Added to this, the pandemic has allowed the European radical right to develop the notion that “elites” are using the health crisis to hasten in an authoritarian form of government. For example, Spain’s Vox MEP Jorge Buxadé accused President Pedro Sanchez’s left-wing government of authoritarianism when it withdrew from parliamentary control lockdown measures limiting freedom of movement. The RN, which published “The Black Book of the Coronavirus: From the fiasco to the abyss,” a brochure criticizing the French government’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis, accused the authorities of using “guilt, infantilization and threats” against the French people in order to enforce a lockdown.

      Other more marginal movements, which do not have to worry about achieving political credibility, have protested against outright “dictatorship,” such as the Italian fundamentalist neo-fascist and Catholic New Force party. In Hungary, the nationalist Jobbik party, which now seeks to defeat Viktor Orban by allying itself, if necessary, with the center-left opposition, decided to denounce government attacks on media freedom during the pandemic.

      The European radical right everywhere has fired bullets at incumbent governments, accusing them of failing to meet the challenges of dealing with the epidemic. In March, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Rally, accused President Emmanuel Macron of ordering the state to lie and cover up the extent of the pandemic by giving the French people incomplete or false information in order to hide his incompetence. It was the only French political party to absolutely refuse any policy of national unity in response to the pandemic and to support the hydroxychloroquine-based treatment recommended by Professor Didier Raoult.

      The Spanish Vox party also issued very strong words against the government, using such phrases as “criminal management,” “obscurantism,” “loss of all credibility” and “insulting” (in respect to the people of Spain). The situation in Italy also prompted the far-right League party to attack the coalition formed by the Five Star Movement (M5S) and the center-left Democratic Party. On the night of April 29, for example, the League’s leader Matteo Salvini showed his contempt of parliament by occupying the senate hemicycle with a dozen other elected officials to denounce economic restrictions, delayed aid to Italian citizens and small businesses, the limitations on freedom of movement and the side-lining of parliamentary powers by the Conte government.

      But a poll carried out on May 8 shows that even if the League remains in the lead, with 26.7%, when it comes to voting intentions, its popularity has been declining since the start of the health crisis while another nationalist party, the Brothers of Italy, is credited with 14.1% — more than double of the 6.2% it won in the 2019 European elections.

      No Coherent Response

      Despite all this, the European radical right seems to have failed to develop coherent responses to the COVID-19 crisis. The speed with which the pandemic spread was unrelated to the limited migratory flows observed on the Greek island of Lesbos at the end of February, thus depriving the radical right of the possibility of singling out immigration as the cause of the pandemic. Instead, in all European countries, the radical right put the blame on globalization.

      Their idea, therefore, is that the pandemic was caused by globalization itself, which generates continuous flows of travel and international exchange, immigration notwithstanding. Globalization, they say, allows multinationals to make financial profits in times of crisis, while the poorest are hit hardest by unemployment and the overwhelmed national health systems. Thus, as a way of example, the Hungarian Mi Hazànk party writes: “We are happy to note that the government accepted our idea of ​​a special solidarity tax on multinationals and banks” and calls for a moratorium on debts and evictions.  

      Embed from Getty Images

      For the European radical right, the health crisis was an opportunity to denounce the European Union, which leaves the competence over health policy to individual member states, and to underline the absolute necessity of returning control of the borders back to member states. As Thierry Baudet, the leader of the Dutch far-right Forum for Democracy, says, “the Nation-State is the future.” During the COVID-19 crisis, European radical-right parties, including the National Rally, have continued to reiterate that they were the first to have warned of the dangers of bringing “back home” potentially strategic industries such as pharma away from China and India.

      The European radical right has failed for several other reasons as well. In Hungary and Poland, the conservative, illiberal right who are in power very quickly closed their borders, which led to the pandemic being contained. In addition, the governments of the most affected countries, Spain and Italy, have (belatedly) managed the crisis well, as had Germany, where the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has dropped to its lowest levels in voting intentions since 2017.

      To add insult to injury, the AfD is even faced with the birth of a single-issue party, Resistance 2020, that is even more conspiratorial than the AfD and lobbies for the complete rejection of all government-sponsored measures to fight the pandemic. At this point, Marine Le Pen’s popularity rating only rose by 3%, to 26% in May. Were presidential elections set for 2022 held today, she would lose to the incumbent Emmanuel Macron by 45% against 55% — a sobering thought for theorists who suggest that extremism inevitably grows in a crisis.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      QAnon: A Conspiracy for Our Time

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      Those of us who, in the late 1980s and 1990s, frequently traveled in the United States might recall being approached by young men, dressed for business in suits and ties, at major airports. They distributed tracts and asked for contributions. No, they were not Mormons but followers of Lyndon LaRouche, one of the most eccentric figures on the American radical right. A perennial candidate for the American presidency, LaRouche was the head of a political cult that subscribed to the notion that current events were orchestrated and manipulated by dark forces, most notably by the queen of England (charged with presiding over the international drug trade) and the “Zionist British aristocratic oligarchy.” Among other things, he was a great proponent of fusion power, a legacy that continues to inspire his admirers.

      Lyndon LaRouche might be dismissed as a nutjob. He was, and at the same time he was far from it. LaRouche was not only the only presidential candidate to campaign for the presidency “with a platform that included his own version of quantum theory.” He was also the only candidate to evoke Plato. In the words of a leading expert on conspiracy theories, LaRouche was convinced that “history is a war between the Platonists (the good guys) and the evil Aristotelians. Anyone who has taken Philosophy 101 can follow the drift: Platonists believe in standards, an absolute truth that can be divined by philosopher kings like Mr. LaRouche. To the Aristotelians everything is relative.”  

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      While Platonists seek to use technology and classical music to the benefit of humanity, Aristotelians are out to thwart them. “With their bag of brainwashing techniques” — such as sex, rock music and environmentalism — “they hope to trick civilization into destroying itself, bringing on a ‘’new dark ages’’ in which the world’s riches will be firmly in the hands of the oligarchy.”

      Brilliant or Unhinged?

      A few years ago, such ruminations might have been dismissed as the delusional musings of a brilliant yet unhinged mind, gone off the deep end. Today, it appears that LaRouche was way ahead of his time. LaRouche, who passed away in 2019 at the ripe age of 96, presumably would have a field day were he still alive today, delighting in the fact that in the first years of the Trump presidency, the “Platonists” have finally come into their own, having made significant gains in the struggle for gaining the upper hand in the quest for cultural hegemony.

      The terms originated with the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci as a heuristic construct to explain why Italian workers acted against their objective interests. For Gramsci, cultural hegemony is strongest when subordinate classes “come to believe that the economic and social conditions of their society are natural and inevitable, rather than created by people with a vested interest in particular social, economic, and political orders.”  

      The struggle over cultural hegemony is a war of position, a slow process of creating and diffusing alternative narratives capable of subverting the hegemonic ones. Success in the struggle over cultural memory means being able to define concepts and fill them with meaning, seductive enough to appeal to a significant portion of the population. This is what has happened in the United States over the past several decades, reflected in what has come to be known as the culture war. In 2016, Donald Trump promoted himself as an “aggressive culture warrior” ready to take on the establishment.

      Central to this strategy was coming to the defense of the white Christian (both Protestant and Catholic) communities, who increasingly saw themselves as strangers in their own land, their values and beliefs ridiculed and disparaged, their voice marginalized and ignored, more often than not drowned out by minorities, such as gays, lesbians and transgender people, whom they consider immoral.

      Central to any religion is the notion that there is an absolute truth, which can only be grasped by faith. You either believe that human beings were created some 10,000 years ago — as a third of the American population seem to believe — or you don’t. You either believe that today’s natural catastrophes are part of a grand divine scheme, heralding the beginning of “the end times” ushering in the return of Christ, or you don’t. You either believe that you are among the few lucky ones who will be spared, via rapture, from having to live through the times of great tribulations, or you don’t. Surveys suggest that a growing number of Americans don’t. As a result, true believers feel even more beleaguered, victimized by a society increasingly not only slowly but inexorably “de-Christianizing” but more and more hostile to their beliefs and way of life.

      In 2016, Barna, a leading Christian pollster, revealed that a large majority of Americans viewed Christianity as “extremist.” For instance, more than 80% of respondents considered it extreme if a service provider refused to serve a customer (as has happened to gay customers ordering a wedding cake for their wedding) because “the customer’s lifestyle conflicts with their beliefs.”

      These results are only one indication that America’s Platonists, to stay with the LaRouchian frame, are on the verge of losing some of the major gains they made in the initial phase of the Trump presidency. In fact, in recent months, a number of Trump’s “culture war allies” have defected; his advisers have warned that with COVID-19 and the uproar over police brutality, the world is fundamentally different from 2016. This does not mean, however, that the conflict identified by LaRouche has abated. It has only moved to a different plane — the realm of conspiracy theory, the most famous one these days being QAnon.

      Just Ask Q

      A recent poll revealed that around 55% of Republicans believe that QAnon is mostly or partly true. Against that, more than 70% of Democrats agreed with the statement that QAnon is not true at all. For those not familiar with QAnon, it is a conspiracy theory that holds that Donald Trump is fighting a globally operating secret cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles, consisting of liberal politicians, “deep-state” government officials and their fellow travelers in finance, the media, higher education and the entertainment industry — i.e., the liberal elite. QAnon might sound absurd and abstruse, yet it has, over the past several months, found a rapidly growing number of adherents and supporters, not only in the United States, but also on the other side of the Atlantic, from Italy to Switzerland, from France to the far corners of central Europe.

      In recent demonstrations against the measures put forward by Angela Merkel’s government in Germany designed to slow down the spread of COVID-19, most notably the obligation to wear a mask, a number of demonstrators identified themselves as QAnon adherents, wearing T-shirts displaying the slogan “Save the Children.”

      Save the children is the relatively more benign side of QAnon — as far as conspiracy theories go. It explains, for instance, why in the United States women have been particularly attracted to it. As Annie Kelly recently wrote in The New York Times, it is motherly love that draws women to the “theory,” with “concerned mothers taking a stand for child sex abuse victims.” Saving children, however, only one facet of Q, and arguably of lesser importance. The reality is that QAnon serves to a large extent as an empty signifier, a term devoid of meaning in and of itself, and as such in a position to accommodate each and every conspiracy theory, folding them “into its own master narrative.”  

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      A prominent example are anti-vaccination activists, the anti-vaxxers, one of the groups participating in the anti-mask demonstrations that have been held in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Their argument is not only that vaccinations pose dangers, but that vaccinations are part of an insidious, evil plot hatched at the headquarters of the global satanic elite. Its supreme villain is Bill Gates, the Ernst Stavro Blofeld of Q’s imagination.

      A German video posted on YouTube and produced by a relatively unknown former radio show host quickly went viral. The author’s claim: COVID-19 is part of a conspiracy conceived by Bill and Melinda Gates, aimed at drastically reducing humanity via mass vaccinations laced with sterilization molecules. So far, the video has been seen by more than 3 million viewers, and its author has been the subject of discussion in Germany’s leading media.

      In Italy, a former deputy of the Five Star Movement managed to expound the “theory” in parliament. In justification of her opposition to proposed anti-COVID-19 emergency measures, she charged Bill Gates with having, for ages, devised plans to reduce the world population and establish a “dictatorial hold on global politics” designed to gain “control over agriculture, technology and energy.” For years now, the deputy charged, Bill Gates had argued that vaccinations and reproductive health would reduce the world population by 10% to 15% and, more importantly, “only genocide could save the world.”

      Particular Resonance

      QAnon started out as an obscure internet-based conspiracy theory. In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, it has morphed into a cult, an ersatz religion, a great narrative that gives sense and meaning to an increasingly disconcerting, if not frightening reality. In LaRouchian terms, it is the ultimate Platonists’ dream. QAnon is true because common sense says it is true. It is true because a substantial number of ordinary people believe it is true. It is true because some celebrities of newly acquired internet fame, who got their degree from the “University of Google,” say so. It is true because it can be found on social media.

      In a world where truth claims are subjected to rigorous scientific scrutiny, QAnon would easily be debunked as utter nonsense. In today’s chaotic world, however, any attempt to unmask Q not only appears to strengthen the resolve of the theory’s adherents but also attracts new converts. In the process, it has turned into a movement “united in mass rejection of reason, objectivity, and other Enlightenment values,” as Adrienne LaFrance has put it in The Atlantic.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The example of the Moldovan Orthodox Church provides an illustration of the far reach of the movement. In May, the church released a statement charging that the “global anti-Christian system wants to introduce microchips into people’s bodies with whose help they can control them, through 5G technology.” Vaccination, developed and promoted by Bill Gates the church stated, “introduces nanoparticles into the body that react to the waves transmitted by 5G technology and allow the system to control humans remotely.”

      Given widespread public skepticism toward scientific knowledge, if not outright rejection of it, it seems QAnon is the perfect narrative for all those who live in an alternative reality where Donald Trump is the white knight In shining armor indefatigably laboring to thwart the diabolical plots of satanic avatars and their deep-state allies — Gates, George Soros, Warren Buffett, Tom Hanks and Jane Fonda. The list is long, and anybody can add to it.

      Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that QAnon has had a particular resonance among white evangelicals, who generally “exhibit the strongest correlation, among any faith group, between religiosity and either climate science denial or a general anti-science bias.” At the same time, white evangelicals are the voting bloc most committed to Donald Trump, a constituency he cannot afford to lose. This might explain why Trump has refused to reject QAnon out of hand, instead expressing his appreciation of the fact that its adherents “like me very much” and “love our country.”

      Evangelicals are LaRouche’s ideal Platonists. When belief clashes with scientific knowledge — as it does on evolution — they invariably side with faith as the ultimate source of truth. Unfortunately, these days, in the face of a devastating pandemic, a seemingly never-ending series of environmental catastrophes and mounting global tensions, evangelicals are hardly alone in seeking refuge in an all-encompassing “theory” that provides answers, comfort in the knowledge not to be alone and, most frighteningly, a rationale for violent action. These are chilling prospects, given the upcoming US presidential election. Whatever happens, tensions are bound to rise, with potentially devastating consequences.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      COVID-19 Drives Conspiracy Theories and Islamophobia

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      For the past decade, I have been researching the impact of Islamophobia on social media. After the outbreak of COVID-19, I was commissioned, alongside my colleague Roxana Khan Williams, by the chair and independent members of the Anti-Muslim Hatred Working Group to produce an evidenced-based research report that looks at the impacts of conspiracy theories perpetuated by the radical right and how these norms have impacted Muslims.

      For me, it was very clear that COVID-19 could be acting as a trigger event that would galvanize hatred against Muslims, but I needed to find out whether this has already started amid the pandemic. After examining a range of social media posts, we found that Islamophobic tropes pushed the narrative that Muslims were solely responsible for spreading COVID-19. This narrative was perpetuated by, firstly, dehumanizing Muslims; secondly, through creating a “them and us” narrative; and, finally, by driving forward the message that Muslims are not to be trusted.

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      It was clear that some of these narratives being pushed by the radical right had created Islamophobic online cyber hubs that had linked Muslims to the spread of COVID-19. This was being shown through the visual anti-Muslim memes and fake news stories shared across social media.

      We also found a shift in online trends that started by arguing that Muslims were superspreaders of the virus and then quickly moving on to the notion that they were also to blame for the virus in the first place. For example, according to digital human rights group Equality Labs, the hashtag #CoronaJihad had appeared nearly 300,000 times in global conversations on mainstream social media sites (excluding Facebook) in just one week between March 31 and April 6.

      In Britain, one video, shared on the Tommy Robinson News channel on the messaging app Telegram, alleges to show a group of Muslim men leaving a secret mosque in Birmingham to pray. Despite the fact the video is fake and West Midlands Police have confirmed the mosque is closed, it has been watched over 14,000 times.

      These issues led to offline incidents because people have used fake narratives on social media to portray all Muslims as being part of the problem. For example, in another viral tweet posted on March 26, a user claimed to have spoken to his local mosque in Shrewsbury, UK, and was “horrified” to find that this Mosque was still open. He added that the people inside could be “super spreaders” of the virus and urged the police to act.

      After a fact-finding exercise, it was quickly revealed by the police that there was no mosque in Shrewsbury. This example, along with numerous others, reveals how individuals can create fake news stories which, if left unchecked, can spread quickly on social media. We also found that online narratives were rooted in anti-Muslim bigotry through the dehumanization of Muslims. These themes of dehumanization also link back to how Muslims are being described as “vermin” and “disease.”

      We also found the depiction of British Muslims on social media becoming synonymous with them being a “risky and problem-group.” A number of fake news stories featured claims that Muslims are flouting social distancing measures to attend mosque. One picture, for example, taken outside a Leeds mosque, appears to show Muslims breaking the rules of lockdown despite this having been taken two weeks before the official lockdown began.

      Overall, the COVID-19 pandemic has created unity among groups and communities that have come together at this unprecedented moment. However, at the same time, it has caused wider divisions among smaller communities and groups, and has been used as a weapon by the radical right in promoting conspiracy theories, raising questions about how our society can come together to tackle the ills of social media.

      As lockdown measures ease, the worry is that we will start to see a rise in offline incidents. Unless we can get to grips with people’s attitudes online, we risk seeing more problems emerge. Social media companies can do much better and start the process of identifying perpetrators and working with the police and other agencies to combat the rise of Islamophobia online.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      The Infiltration of Law Enforcement by Racist Extremists

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      As protests continue to bring cities across the United States to a standstill, the problem of racist policing is more evident than ever before. The killing of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department was the latest in a long line of violent assaults on people of color by law enforcement, and his name joins an ever-growing list of those who have been killed by ones who are sworn to protect and serve. The United States is grappling with the issue of police racism before the world’s eyes, and the scale of the conversation currently happening is unprecedented and, sadly, still not enough.

      While the unconscious bias of some officers of the law has been laid bare for all to see, the conscious and hateful bias of others has remained largely in the shadows. The systemic issue of racial profiling is evident, but the hidden epidemic of far-right activism in police departments around the country is an insidious and even more dangerous threat. The links between the police and organized racism are as old as the institutions themselves. During the civil rights movement, Southern police chiefs coordinated with local Ku Klux Klan chapters, and many officers and commissioners in the deep South were accused of aiding Klan activity and even being active members of KKK organizations.

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      While this trend seems like an archaic symptom of the era of segregation, links between law enforcement and far-right organizations have remained constant through the 20th century and into the 21st and are now seemingly more widespread than ever. In the 1990s, a federal judge found that a number of deputies in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office had concrete links to neo-Nazi organizations and that a number of cases of police violence against black and Latino communities had been motivated by their racist hostility and “terrorist” sympathies. Likewise, in 2008, a prominent Chicago-area police officer was fired and prosecuted over links to the Ku Klux Klan.

      Widespread Infiltration

      A 2015 FBI investigation found that white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement agencies was at epidemic levels, and suggested that right-wing and anti-government “domestic terrorists” were using links with law enforcement to gain intelligence and restricted access privileges, as well as ultimately evade capture. The report found that the vast majority of law enforcement agencies across the United States did not screen potential recruits for links to far-right organizations and often turned a blind eye to those recruits with questionable political beliefs.

      The bureau was aware of widespread infiltration as early as 2006, suggesting in a heavily redacted report that white supremacist activists were taking advantage of weak vetting procedures in local law enforcement agencies to gain access to “restricted areas vulnerable to sabotage and to elected officials or protected persons, whom they could see as potential targets for violence.” The 2006 report suggested that this was a systematic effort, coordinated by high-profile far-right figures such as William Pierce, and infiltration was seen as a key element in the philosophy of leaderless resistance.

      Despite the concerns and recommendations outlined in the FBI’s latest report, recent research has shown that the links between law enforcement and the extreme right have continued to flourish. Last year, a Reveal News investigation found that hundreds of active duty and retired law enforcement officers were members of online forums dedicated to Islamophobia, neo-Confederate ideology and even neo-Nazism. Almost 400 police officers from 150 different departments had their identities verified, and many were found to have been actively peddling hate speech, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and anti-government rhetoric.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The Proud Boys in particular have strong links to law enforcement, and a number of high-profile investigations have highlighted the extent of the collusion between police and the hate group described as the “alt-right fight club.” In May this year, a Chicago PD officer, Robert Bakker, was found to have been an active member of a Proud Boys Telegram channel called “Fuck Antifa,” where he actively coordinated Proud Boys meet-ups and bragged about his connections in the police department and the government.

      Six months earlier, a police officer from East Hampton, Connecticut, was forced into retirement after his links to Proud Boys groups in the area. The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law led an investigation into the officer’s social media activity, finding that he was an active member of the self-described “western chauvinist” group. A year before that, a female officer from Clark County, Washington, was fired after she was pictured wearing a Proud Boys sweatshirt and was later discovered to have been merchandising Proud Boys apparel on the design-sharing RedBubble website.

      Even in cases in which officers are not active members of hate groups, collusion remains a very real issue. In 2019, police officers in Washington, DC, were pictured fist-bumping Proud Boys members at a July 4 rally in front of the White House. The members of the group were then given a police escort to a local bar, while anti-fascist protesters were met with violence from both the police and the Proud Boys. In an even more egregious case, an investigation in Portland, Oregon, found that a senior police officer had been exchanging friendly text messages with Joey Gibson. Gibson was the leader of the far-right Patriot Prayer, a sometimes violent offshoot of the Proud Boys defined by both the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group.

      In the lead-up to a number of high-profile clashes between the group and anti-fascist counterdemonstrators, Gibson and Lieutenant Jeff Niiya shared joking messages and talked about Patriot Prayer’s planned actions, with Niiya even confiding in Gibson that he had told officers to ignore outstanding warrants for the arrest of a prominent Patriot Prayer member, Tusitala “Tiny” Toese. A separate investigation found that Niiya had submitted police reports on Gibson’s behalf, launching criminal investigations against “antifa activists” based on footage Gibson had privately sent him. This raised concerns that far-right demonstrators were being given preferential treatment by Portland police, particularly given the reputation for forceful suppression of anti-fascist counterprotest in the city.

      Not Immune

      Although this trend reaches uniquely epidemic levels in the United States, the rest of the world is not immune. A 2019 report showed alarming levels of collusion between law enforcement and violent right-wing extremists in Germany. The investigation, led by the nation’s general prosecutor, found that the extreme-right Nordkreuz group had compiled a death list of leftist activists, journalists and pro-refugee targets using police records and was in the process of planning a major terror attack. It was found that the 30 members of the group had close ties to law enforcement, with at least one member actively employed by a special commando unit of the state office of criminal investigations.

      A recent investigation by Der Spiegel found that the elite unit, known as the KSK, openly tolerated extremist right-wing iconography and membership, even using widely-known Nazi ciphers such as “88” — code for HH, or Heil Hitler. The investigation uncovered high-level officers openly promoting “national-conservative ideology” and espousing racist ultranationalism. Earlier this year, a KSK soldier who reportedly had links to extremist groups was arrested after a weapons and explosives cache was found in his back yard. The German government responded to Der Spiegel’s exposé by launching its own investigation into the unit, finding that racist extremism was endemic across all ranks. As a result, the unit was officially disbanded in early July.

      As historian Kathleen Belew has shown in her most recent book on the long history of the far right’s links to the United States military, “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America,” the siphoning of weaponry and ammunition from military bases to white supremacist organizations has been a constant tactic of would-be terrorist groups. There is no doubt that the continued militarization of police forces in the United States and Europe, combined with the high levels of extremist infiltration, offers new avenues for the theft of high-grade weaponry and tactics, and further armament of extremist right-wing groups.

      These links between law enforcement and white supremacist organizations are deeply concerning, and present a very real threat to peace, justice and liberty in the United States and around the world. As police racism once again enters the spotlight, it is more important than ever to examine and challenge the infiltration of law enforcement by racist extremists. A centralized vetting process that directly seeks out links to organized racism and excludes candidates with any affiliation with far-right groups is the bare minimum and should be the first step toward a total overhaul of the training and oversight procedures.

      Despite a number of legal challenges to the protective role of policing, law enforcement, at its core, still exists to protect and serve the people regardless of race, religion or creed, and any affiliation with hateful ideology compromises an officer’s ability to execute this role fairly and without prejudice. Until the systemic and personal racism of law enforcement is no longer an issue, we will see more George Floyds, more Breonna Taylors, more murders in the name of law and order. Preventing and eliminating racist bias in police departments across the US is only the first step toward a long process of reckoning and reconciliation.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Donald Trump and the “Kung Flu”

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      Over the course of his 2016 campaign and his subsequent presidential term, Donald Trump has sought to exploit popular fears of foreigners and certain American ethnicities to his political advantage. His verbal attacks have been selective. Irish, Italian and Polish Americans, for example, have proved immune to his insults (at least in his public utterances). Trump’s favorite targets for public abuse have been Hispanics, especially individuals seeking to enter the country clandestinely along the border with Mexico. He has also complained bitterly and profanely, in a semi-public setting, about immigrants from Haiti and sub-Saharan African countries.

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      This is hardly the end of things. Early on in his administration, Trump imposed a ban, which was overturned by courts, on all Muslims seeking to enter the United States based on popular fears of terrorism. Very much unlike his two predecessors, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who were careful to distinguish between terrorists and the followers of Islam, Trump sought to equate Muslims in general with terrorism, thereby inflaming existing popular fears.

      Classic Demagoguery

      Then came COVID-19, a disease that has taken the lives of nearly 168,000 of Americans to date. After some initial hesitation, Trump labeled it “kung flu.” To cheers and wild laughter at mass rallies and other public events, the president has sought to deflect widespread criticism of his handling of the pandemic by blaming the Chinese — not merely the government but the people in general — conflating the Chinese martial art of kung fu with influenza to the delight of his followers.

      All this, of course, is classic demagoguery intended to mobilize Trump’s base of whites with less than a college education and win him their renewed support at the polls in November. The fact that he actually appears to believe what he is saying adds to the appeal of his message. 

      Trump’s demagogic appeals have consequences for those targeted by his abuse. Using data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report and the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey, researchers have reported a substantial decline in hate crimes committed against Asian Americans over the periods 2003-07 and 2014-18.  Asian Americans appeared to be well on their way to acceptance by their fellow citizens. The arrival of COVID-19 arrested this development and turned it around. So that, for example, in the three months ending on July 1, another source reported over 800 discrimination and harassment incidents, including 81 assaults, aimed at Asian Americans in California alone. 

      The situation of American Muslims is somewhat different. For members of this religious minority, there was no reversal of the trend toward greater acceptance, simply a continuation of widespread animus. Illustratively, as reported in The Daily Beast, in the two months following the murder of 51 Muslim worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15, 2019, by Brenton Tarrant, a young Australian man who reported being a “fan” of Trump, mosques in San Diego, California, New Haven, Connecticut, and Queens, New York, became the targets of arson attacks.

      These crimes were simply the most menacing of some hundreds of anti-Muslim hate crimes in the United States that followed upon the Christchurch killings. Abbas Barzegar, the director of a national watchdog organization that tracks anti-Muslim bias incidents, told The Daily Beast in 2019, “We’ve already reported over 500 incidences of anti-Muslim bias or harassment just this year so far.” Barzegar went on to say that the uptick in anti-Muslim events began in 2015 and continued unabated thereafter.

      Poisonous Atmosphere

      For how much of this is Trump responsible? The answer is not easily quantifiable, but at a minimum, we can say Trump has done little to qualm the poisonous atmosphere in the country. At a maximum, we can claim he has sought to promote a politics of inter-group hatred to advance his career and improve his chances of reelection.

      There is a striking contradiction in this situation. As Trump and his base insult or, in some cases, physically assault Chinese Americans and Muslims, holding the Chinese responsible for COVID-19, individual members of such now stigmatized groups have been busy trying to save Americans from the disease. A long list of Chinese American epidemiologists, emergency room physicians and virologists, led perhaps by Dr. David Ho (director of the Aaron Diamond Research Center at Columbia University) and Dr. Thomas Tsai (Brigham and Women’s Hospital), have been playing vital roles in fighting the disease, often at the risk of their own lives.

      About the same applies to America Muslims from both the Middle East and South Asia. The list here would have to include Dr. Ashish Jha (director of Harvard Global Health Institute), Mahrokh Irani (Harvard Global Health Institute), Dr. Najy Masai and Dr. Imran Siddiqui. Of course, the list could be extended.

      Will these performances by Chinese American and American Muslim physicians and scientists have any impact on Trump’s campaign rhetoric and the bigoted perceptions of his base? Probably not. To do so would require Trump voters to link the physicians’ backgrounds to the groups to which they belong and modify their attitudes accordingly — not an easy feat. Further, the president and his campaign operatives have too much invested in his crowd-pleasing rhetoric to change at this late date.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More