Table Of ContentGLOBAL POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY
Race, Popular Culture,
and Far-right Extremism
in the United States
Priya Dixit
Global Political Sociology
Series Editors
Dirk Nabers, International Political Sociology, Kiel University, Kiel,
Germany
Marta Fernández, Institute of International Relations, Pontifical
Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Chengxin Pan, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin
University, Waurn Ponds, Australia
David B. MacDonald, Department of Political Science, University of
Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada
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tally global, in that it is spatially dispersed and temporarily contingent.
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Priya Dixit
Race, Popular
Culture, and Far-right
Extremism
in the United States
Priya Dixit
Department of Political Science
Virginia Tech University
Blacksburg, VA, USA
Global Political Sociology
ISBN 978-3-031-10819-8 ISBN 978-3-031-10820-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10820-4
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Acknowledgments
I am deeply indebted to my friends and family who have been supportive
and loving throughout this process. My thanks, too, to Dr. Anca Pusca
and various editorial staff at Palgrave who have been exceedingly patient
as I dealt with family and personal issues during the global pandemic. I
am grateful to Rachel Palermo, Maddison Berlinghoff, Kathryn Miller,
and Sami Milner who provided much-needed assistance for various parts
of this project. Working on this book was a solitary process—more so
than most as I dealt with isolation, working from home, and concern
over family members here in the United States and overseas. My thanks to
everyone who “checked in” and provided conversation and community.
v
Contents
1 Introduction: Far-Right Extremism in the United
States and the World 1
2 Race, International Relations, White Supremacy,
and Methodology 23
3 Whiteness, White Supremacy, and Far-Right Extremism
in the United States 65
4 American Renaissance and Far-Right Extremists’
Use of Numbers and Pseudoscience for Legitimation
of Violence 105
5 Memeing the Far-Right: Pepe and the Deplorables 135
6 Red Pills, White Genocide, and “the Great
Replacement”: Rewriting History, and Constructing
White Victimhood in/through Far-Right Extremist
Manifestos and Texts 173
7 Conclusion: Far-Right Extremism and Strategies
of Legitimation and Resistance in US Politics 207
Index 225
vii
List of Figures
Fig. 4.1 The figure with no title from Taylor, 1992 111
Fig. 5.1 Trend in interest in “alt-right” (blue) and “alt right” (red)
from November 12, 2010 to December 12, 2021 142
Fig. 5.2 Trump/Pepe smirking on one side of a fence labeled
as “US border” while a family stand on the other side.
The woman carries a baby in her arms 149
Fig. 5.3 A reworking of a film poster of Les Miserables into Les
Deplorables, with various US and Trump-related flags
added. There is also an eagle flying in the foreground 154
Fig. 5.4 A reworking of a film poster of The Expendables
but with Trump, his allies and sons, and Pepe 155
Fig. 6.1 Overview of Tweets by President Trump regarding
“caravans” during a six-month period (Source Trump
Twitter Archive [Brown, www]) 176
Fig. 6.2 Archetypes of three modes of the “great replacement”
conspiracy 178
ix
List of Tables
Table 2.1 Selection of books on terrorism and their mentions
(or otherwise) of “racial terrorism”, the Ku Klux Klan,
and lynching 26
Table 2.2 With selected terms (race, racism, racialization, whiteness,
white supremacy, empire, imperial, colonial, colonialism)
in the title of articles, from December 2000 to December
2021 34
Table 2.3 With selected terms (race, racism, racialization, whiteness,
white supremacy) in the expanded keyword search,
from December 2000 to December 2021 35
Table 2.4 Archetypes of far-right extremist sources that are analyzed
in Chapters 4–6 57
Table 3.1 US government hearings on “confronting violent white
supremacy” held in 2019–2020 68
Table 4.1 Analyzing narrative strategies of pseudoscience
and quantification in American Renaissance 106
Table 5.1 Analyzing narrative strategies of irony and humor
(trolling) in online memes 136
Table 6.1 Analyzing narrative strategies of rewriting history,
self-as-whole community in influential text,
and manifestos 174
xi
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Far-Right Extremism
in the United States and the World
In Summer 2020, tens of thousands of people marched in support of
racial justice around the world. The marches began as protest against the
police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, United States but they
spread across the world as people took to the streets to call for racial
justice and to protest systemic racism. Like many others, I was outside of
the United States and watched the marches growing and spreading across
US cities and globally. Surely, this would be the catalyst for change, I
thought. Surely, the state cannot just ignore these calls for racial justice,
calls that came from a multiracial group of people of all ages (PBS,
2020). And, yet, by Spring 2022, it is not just racial equity that appears
elusive in the United States but, instead, there have been reactionary
moves toward codifying and strengthening anti-Black, anti-LGBTQA+
and anti-women’s rights laws and policies. The racists, it seems, have won.
The issue that began the anti-racist protests of Summer 2020—that
of police brutality in the United States—has also not changed much in
the two years since then. In the United States, police budgets remain
disproportionately high as compared to budgets for social services. Police
killings are at similar levels. Gun violence has not declined. Indeed,
recent studies have shown the police attacked civilians and journalists
repeatedly (“nearly 1,000” cases of police brutality, according to one
study) during Summer 2020 while treating far-right protesters far more
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1
Switzerland AG 2022
P. Dixit, Race, Popular Culture, and Far-right Extremism in
the United States, Global Political Sociology,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10820-4_1
