The Radical Right During Crisis

The Hanau shooter, who in his manifesto said that he had a very high standard for choosing women and that he avoided entering into relationships with them because they were a “temptation”, was initially labeled an incel, although he was later better described as belonging to the MGTOW movement. 12Several experts on the subject of misogyny and the far-right have argued persuasively that labelling every misogynistic violent attack as incel only muddies the discussion about the consequences of misogyny as a whole. 13

Even then, some voices have challenged that the Hanau shooter fit neatly into the MGTOW category, as he was also displaying strong paranoia and white supremacy sentiment. 14This debate over the different strands of the manosphere and how the borders between categories can be diffuse is illustrative of the wider difficulty in determining what is “radical right” or “white supremacy” and how that interlinks with other ideologies. Scholars Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware have noted how incel ideology is getting interwoven with typical white supremacist ideology, which can be emboldening for members of the incel movement. 15This can go on both directions, as several memes incorporating incel language and depicting terrorists like the Christchurch shooting as “Chads” made the rounds in online radical right forums in the aftermath of attacks last year. 16

Aside from the porous borders between different strands in the radical right, other variables can further add to the confusion on what constitutes radical right ideology. There was a heated debate after the Hanau shooting on whether the mental illness aspect of the case disqualified it as a terrorist incident, which experts such as Cynthia Miller-Idriss found problematic for risking glossing over how people are being radicalized and the role of white supremacy ideology in this process. 17

Many differing, and often contradictory, extremist movements are covered under the term “radical right”. From the manosphere to accelerationists, through anti-government patriot militias and anti-Muslim protest movements all the way to Russian ultranationalists and Satanic-inspired neo-Nazis; it is not always clear-cut that these movements share a common ideological ground. As such, the battle against a diffuse threat with no clear leaders and high levels of infighting ends up being reactive and fails to keep up with how the threat develops.

Yet, seeing as how the incel threat continues to wreak havoc, it is imperative that we start to understand more about how terrorism materializes in the radical right, including what ideological trends are connected to acts of violence, how do strands relate to each other, and how attackers radicalize and mobilize for action.

Cristina Arizais a Policy and Practitioner Fellow at CARR and an analyst at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.

1Stewart Bell, Andrew Russell and Catherine McDonald, “Deadly Attack at Toronto Erotic Spa Was Incel Terrorism, Police Allege,” Global News, May 19, 2020, https://globalnews.ca/news/6910670/toronto-spa-terrorism-incel/.

2Joana Cook, “Incels,” Global Network on Extremism & Technology Insights, January 20, 2020, https://gnet-research.org/2020/01/20/incels/.

3Zack Beauchamp, “Our Incel Problem,” Vox, April 23, 2020, https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/4/16/18287446/incel-definition-reddit.

4Beauchamp, “Our Incel Problem”.

5Bell, Russell and McDonald, “Deadly Attack at Toronto Erotic Spa Was Incel Terrorism, Police Allege”.

6Colin Clarke and Lilianna Turner, “The ‘Incel’ Ideology Continues to Build a Strong Following in the Online ‘Manosphere’,” Global Network on Extremism & Technology Insights, April 22, 2020, https://gnet-research.org/2020/04/22/the-incel-ideology-continues-to-build-a-strong-following-in-the-online-manosphere/.

7“Elliot Rodger: How Misogynist Killer Became ‘Incel hero’,” BBC News , April, 25, 2018, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-43892189.

8Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware, “Incels: America’s Newest Domestic Terrorism Threat,” Lawfare, January 12, 2020, https://www.lawfareblog.com/incels-americas-newest-domestic-terrorism-threat.

9Bell, Russell and McDonald, “Deadly Attack at Toronto Erotic Spa Was Incel Terrorism, Police Allege”.

10Hoffman and Ware, “Incels: America’s Newest Domestic Terrorism Threat”.

11Hoffman and Ware, “Incels: America’s Newest Domestic Terrorism Threat”.

12“Far-Right Terrorist Attack Puts Germany on Edge,” The Cipher Brief, 2020, https://www.thecipherbrief.com/column_article/far-right-terrorist-attack-puts-germany-on-edge

13Greta Jasser, Megan Kelly, and Ann-Kathrin Rothermel, Male Supremacism and the Hanau Terrorist Attack: Between Online Misogyny and Far-Right Violence (The Hague, Netherlands: International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, 2020), https://icct.nl/publication/male-supremacism-and-the-hanau-terrorist-attack-between-online-misogyny-and-far-right-violence/

14Jasser, Kelly, and Rothermel, “Male Supremacism and the Hanau Terrorist Attack”.

15Hoffman and Ware, “Incels: America’s Newest Domestic Terrorism Threat”.

16Ashley Mattheis, “Manifesto Memes: The Radical Right’s New Dangerous Visual Rhetorics,” openDemocracy, September 16, 2019, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/countering-radical-right/manifesto-memes-the-radical-rights-new-dangerous-visual-rhetorics/.

17Cynthia Miller-Idriss, “Stop Calling Far-Right Terrorists ‘Crazy’,” Politico, February 20, 2020, https://www.politico.eu/article/stop-calling-far-right-terrorists-crazy/.

The COVID-19 Pandemic

Dan Stone

In his televised 9 April Easter message, the Catholic Church’s spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Bucharest, Father Francisc Dobos, said that the disciples of Jesus ‘feared the Jews, and here in the bracket we should read: feared the virus’. 1It is hardly surprising that anti-Semites have revived one of their favourite, oldest tropes: the association of Jews with disease, both as carriers of disease, deliberate infectors of other groups and, in the most extreme versions, Jews as a disease. As I have noted previously, this language shifts from metaphor to reality all too easily. 2

It is true that movements such as PEGIDA in Germany have embarrassed themselves by their response to the COVID-19 crisis; as CARR Fellow Sabine Volk shows, they remain fixated on migrants rather than safeguarding the people they supposedly represent. 3The same is true of right-wing populists in power. Hans-Georg Betz, another CARR Fellow, powerfully argues that the response of populist leaders, especially Trump, Johnson and, most notably, Bolsonaro, exposes the vacuous nature of the populists’ worldview. 4That is quite true: Trump and Bolsonaro blaming the Chinese, with Trump referring to the virus as a “hoax”; Johnson’s programme of “getting Brexit done” now looking irrelevant when it is obvious that the world faces a challenge that does not respect national borders and which demands international cooperation and a reliance on much-derided experts. Yet, whatever idiocy the coronavirus crisis has exposed in the populists’ slogans of national independence, anti-immigration, and disregard for science, the scope for entrenched and institutionalised right-wing populist parties to exploit the crisis remains strong. It is not the radical right movements which do not hold power that we should fear; it is the “mainstream” which does that presents the real threat today.

In the US, Trump has already hinted at delaying the election this autumn. This is a highly unlikely scenario but provides cover for seemingly less extreme measures to slip through. Trump’s announcement, for example, that the president rather than the state governors has the power to decide when lockdown measures will be eased, could have proved highly contentious, possibly even leading to legal action. Even if he performed a remarkable volte-face just one day later, to many Americans his assertion will not have seemed unreasonable. 5His position, however, represents an arrogation of power to the office of president that oversteps constitutional norms. No wonder commentators have been led to remark that the US has a president, not a king.