Instead, the most successful right-wing nationalist groups in Canada foreground liberal ideas and fetishize law and order politics (rather than being anti-state/anti-authority), with the objective of ultimately delegating violence to the state, such as demanding increased policing and surveillance of certain marginalized groups, such as Muslims and undocumented immigrants. My findings show that, contrary to dominant expert narratives, the Canadian right-wing nationalist movement is not primarily white nationalist nor promotes vigilante violence. My ethnographic approach involves 35 semi-structured interviews with 42 Canadian right-wing activists (RWAs) (ten of which I consider “far-right” or white nationalists), and over 40 hours of observational fieldwork at 20 right-wing political rallies and meetings in Alberta, almost all of which were organized by my participants. I use empirically informed analysis based on semi-ethnographic data to argue that the preceding three trends can hinder our understanding of right-wing politics and nationalist movements. Using Canada’s yellow vests movement as a case study, this project identifies and critiques three broader trends in scholarship on right-wing and far-right social movements: 1) the passive acceptance of the ambiguous concept “hate” as an explanation for right-wing mobilizing 2) the growing popularity of criminological or security-centric methods for understanding how right-wing groups mobilize as a social movement and 3) Eurocentric scholarship that defines right-wing populism as inherently ethnonationalist and illiberal. Experts struggle to explain how right-wing and far-right groups operate as a social movement seeking mainstream legitimacy in Canada, and the dominant fixation on “extremism” in the form of white nationalism and criminality sometimes obfuscates significant trends in right-wing organizing. Upon closer scrutiny, dominant scholarly and popular discourse tends to reduce this discussion to a problem of white nationalist ideology and the public safety risks posed by these groups, such as terrorism, hate crime, threats and intimidation, and hate speech. Academics, journalists, and public figures assert that Canada is experiencing “similar trends” to Western Europe’s wave of right-wing populism, pointing to the “growing threat” posed by Canadian far-right groups, also referred to as “right-wing extremists”, “hate groups”, and sometimes the “alt-right” (Perry & Scrivens 2018: 177, Boutilier 2018, Mastracci 2017, McKenna 2019, Habib 2019). Anti-Islam rhetoric, for instance, has substantial legitimacy in popular discourse and Canadians are increasingly skeptical of the country’s federal multiculturalism policy (Angus Reid 2017, Braun 2018, Andrew-Gee 2015 Angus Reid 2010, Canseco 2019, Todd 2017). Contrary to Canada’s benevolent international reputation, Canadians have demonstrated increasingly exclusionary politics in the last decade. Right-wing nationalist movements have gained traction in Westernized countries such as France, Greece, Hungary, Austria, the United States, and Germany, where political figures or groups have mobilized nationalist ideas and right-wing populist sentiment to gain governmental power and/or influence public policy (Mudde 2014, BBC News 2019, Perry & Scrivens 2018: 177). This analysis examines social media posts through word cloud visualization and social network analysis to provide a foundation for a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between online activity and the real-world presence of Alt-Right gangs. Secondly, novel data collected from the social media site Gab are analyzed to explore the online activity of one particular Alt-Right gang, the Proud Boys. Firstly, this chapter describes the evolution of Alt-Right gangs from inhabiting online niche communities (e.g., Stormfront, The Daily Stormer) to utilizing mainstream digital platforms (e.g., Facebook, Gab, Reddit, 4chan, Twitter) to recruit and connect members, as well as manifesting into recurrent, violent masses at public demonstrations. Understanding this online to real-world movement is a necessary step for both the Alt-Right and conventional street gang research so that we can better prevent, intervene, or suppress violent behaviors that begin online before manifesting in the material world. This chapter explores how social media have allowed Alt-Right gangs to advance not only their ideology and subculture online, but to facilitate organizing in the physical world.
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