Teun van Dongen, Eviane Leidig
From the very beginning of the pandemic, government officials in the UK, Germany, and Australia voiced concerns that extreme right individuals would use the lockdown to spread their propaganda to audiences who were sitting at home, glued to their phones and laptops trying to make sense of what was going on around them. And even more worryingly, the difficult circumstances brought on by government responses to the pandemic would play right into the hands of these individuals as they could easily spin the current situation in ways that lend credibility to their narrative. Or as Europol’s 2021 TE-SAT report put it: “Right-wing extremists exploited COVID-19 to support their narratives of accelerationism and conspiracy theories featuring anti-Semitism, and anti-immigration and anti-Islam rhetoric.”
Whose side are they on? The diversity of far-right responses to Covid-19 – ICCT
