Right wing populists are able to speak directly to our spinal cords, by telling dramatic stories of moral misconduct. A story of an existential threat can spread like a wildfire in dry grass. When gossip is spread in wide circles, it can ignite fear of and hate against a minority, and undermine the standing of a rival.
Right wing populism use an ancient broadcasting medium: gossip
Anti-immigration demands constitutes the far-right’s primary mobilising strategy. An important far right tool is telling stories about refugees and immigrants as threats, doing extreme amoral and dangerous acts. This storytelling leads to pre-judging, fear and hate in the public, and lowers the general understanding for refugees and immigrants. Such stories of reinforce demands for stricter immigration policies.
These stories are mostly spread through informal fora like oral gossip in friends or family groups, or through online gossip. These informal sources have in common that they do not have any reality control, like editorially controlled media has. It has therefore nothing to say for if a story is spread, whether they are true or not, or if they tell any truth.
Right wing populism use an ancient medium that existed long before the written language, storytelling, to win public support. These modern stories are in form and content like the pre-writing-age stories. Like the old folk tales, myths, legends that once were told from person to person. Right wing populists today also spread stories on social media on the Internet.
Online stories have the same form and language as the orally spread stories. It is the drama that is important. Just as the ancient epics framed conflicts as battles between good and evil, right wing populist stories paint minorities, immigrants, or refugees as villains.
We tend to pay attention to gossip because it is useful for us. In the pre-modern epoch Europe lacked a strong centralised state with institutions like police and hospitals, so people relied more on friends, family, religious communities, and other social groups for support. In the days before written language, all information, from the tales about the gods to information on a personal level, had to be told mouth to mouth.
Gossip is useful for social construction of community even today. It marks social norms by telling what to do and not to do in groups of people. On the other hand, gossip can lead to stereotyping, the false assumption that all members of a group or category share the same social behaviour. It can lead you to judging other people before you even meet them. Opposition to immigration is a central issue for the right-wing, and a key strategy involves portraying refugees and immigrants in general as morally corrupt or deviant.
Dramatic tales become effective tools for gaining authoritarian power in modern representative democracies because of their compelling power. We are genetically hardwired to pay attention to gossip, and to react to cries of alert. Stories about alleged serious moral misconduct done by members of a minority, immigrants or refugees, can lead to fear and hate in those who believe them, xenophobia.
Even if they are unrepresentative, these stories awake great emotional response in the public. These stories hijack our emotions. We pay attention to these tellings, as they trigger strong emotions in us, releasing powerful hormones through our bodies. This emotional response enable the stories to go under the radar and bypass rational scrutiny.
Political mainstream uses measurable concepts
The political mainstream and left mostly use literalist communication, falsifiable arguments based on empirical research and cause-and-effect effect explanations, on a macro level or societal level. Since right wing populism and the political mainstream use different media for spreading their ideas, they also use different language.
Facts are presise claims, that can be easily tested. Facts are sometimes manipulated. Still, they are open to be checked and falsified if wrong. To use the term “classical rhetoric” about mainstream and leftist communication is useful, to distinguish it from right wing populism.
Published texts are precise, because you do not have to remember them. And they can easily be fact checked. They therefore contain much more, and more precise information than the spoken word can. Measurable concepts rest on written tradition.
The ideals of democracy from the Age of Enlightenment became dominant, when mass published written texts became common. Measurable concepts are efficient in making means to end plans, and govern a modern state. They are therefore often preferred by main stream politicians and administrators in modern democracies. However, quantitative facts do not awaken strong emotions, and the public does not get easily aroused by statistics.
The ancient stories were spread by telling and retelling them orally, directly from person to person. This shaped the form of the stories. Gossip is spread extremely efficiently mouth to mouth, as shown in chapter 2. Gossip stories arose long before the written language. Gossip stories are not possible to prove false if wrong, in the same way as facts.
Modern rumourmongers: Influencers spread gossip online
The Skalds were the Old Norse storytellers. Online influencers are todays storytellers, and they have growing audiences and influence. Social media and influencer postings has now overtaken edited news media as as the top way Americans get their news. Social media are not reliable sources.
In most cases influencers do not reality check before they share stories. Right wing politicians often rely on support from influencers. Influencers have the power to amplify controversial narratives, allowing politicians to maintain plausible deniability while benefiting from the exposure.
The gossip stories are today spread effectively through social media platforms. The online spreading of rumours, slogans and memes referring to them often go viral by being published on social media platforms and by click-and-share. The repetition of the short memes make them stick to your mind.
Modern variants of the tales are called “Urban legends” in North America, and “Wandering stories” in Scandinavia. Conspiracy theories are a kind of stories in the same category, where the claimed villains are an alleged conspiracy of a secret powerful elite.
The Swedish folklorist Bengt Klintberg documented that the old tales are fully present and alive in a modern form in modern Scandinavia. He named these modern folk tales “Wandering stories”. These tales are called “Vandringssägen” or “Klintbergare” in Swedish.
Jan Harold Brunvand has documented such stories from North America. An example is an old story of Vietnamese immigrants eating pets, similar to the falsified story about Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating cats that was used by the Trump campaign.
These modern folk tales spread through gossip in informal fora like friends or family groups, or through online gossip. These informal fora have absolutely no reality check, and the chances for them to corrected them are limited. These stories therefore spread, no matter if they are false or true.
The fairy tale about the Emperors new clothes tell us that it can be efficient to uncover a lie, and that fact checks should not be underestimated. Yet, the efficiency of exposing disinformation through fact checks in the editorially controlled mass media have been less than expected. One of the reasons could be that Americans, and especially those who support Republicans, have little trust in editorially controlled mass media. Only 40 % of Republicans had some trust in the national news media in september 2024, before the presidential election.
Systematically cherry-picking stories about immigrant crime is disinformation
A main focus of right wing populists is spotlighting stories about individual immigrant crime to undermine a political rival. The idea they propagate is that there is a threat of terrible immigrant crime against defenceless victims, that their political rivals do not confront, or even enable.
Right wing populists spread a mix of false and true stories about immigrant crime. Some of the stories that make greatest political impact are the individually true ones. Selective storytelling is a commonly used tool in right wing populism.
Right wing organisations selectively gather and present stories with refugees and immigrants as perpetrators as political campaigns. Some of these stories might be factually accurate individually. These stories can spread more or less unopposed by campaigning politicians, by influencers, or by editorially controlled news media, since the fact checks will not object to them.
Still, the telling of these cherry-picked stories of individual crime does not tell any truth about crime in general. Their total presentation is false, since the selection of information is unrepresentative. Cases of sexually motivated murder and other violent crime is found in all nations and in any larger group of people. You can easily paint a negative bias of any larger group of people by systematically cherry-picking the worst examples.
The logic in the connection of individual murders to the claimed weak border control is very marginal. Though, these stories are not effective because of logics. A defenceless victim or the victims family telling a story of a brutal crime evokes powerful emotions in the recipients – sympathy, fear and outrage.
Some of the most used stories in propaganda are about sexually motivated murders committed by undocumented immigrants. These stories ignite an emotional spark that easily overwhelm statistical facts in the political debate, like data showing that illegal immigrants in Texas are less likely to commit murder than native-born US citizens.
Still, these stories are useful for the anti immigration claims of the extreme right, because they lower the general empathy for refugees and immigrants.
Statistics do not awake as strong emotions as dramatic stories. Stories of peace and harmony, like the stories of all the immigrants who walk quietly to work, do not awake strong emotions.
A good lie can travel from Baghdad to Constantinople before the truth can get its sandals on (Old Arab saying).
The reason why disinformation is so hard to counter, is that it spreads through other channels like oral gossip and social media platforms, much faster and to a much wider audience than traditional news media journalism. It has also been a shift in the public, from getting news from edited news media to unedited social media platforms as main source. A correction by fact checks in news media will probably not reach much of the public as fast as the disinformation on social media platforms.
By using these stories of violent crime on digital social media platforms, right-wing populist can outperform and bypass the influence of traditional, editorially controlled media. Right wing populism can thereby surpass the political mainstream, who focuses more on research, statistics and other falsifiable analysis. A key factor in Trump’s election win was the growing influence of online political communication over traditional news media.
“What are your sources”
Disinformation ? What to look up for:
Half of U.S. adults report occasionally getting news from social media. The vast majority of regular news consumers on Truth Social (88%) and Rumble (83%) identify as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, while about half of those on Facebook and YouTube also lean Republican.
Conspiracy theories and other urban legends interlock together with other tools of propaganda such as memes. Storytelling is still a key element in right-wing populist propaganda, and what the memes refer to. A hint is often enough, as anyone familiar with the story will immediately understand the reference. The Trump campaign used social media to spread urban legends, conspiracy theories and other controversial themes, and memes reflecting such narratives.
Dog whistles are memes with hidden messages with reference to conspiracy theories or other controversial themes, that give meaning to the inner core that knows the conspiracy theories or the theme.
Conspiracy theories as right wing extremist ideology
Conspiracy theories are a type of stories where the alleged perpetrator is not an individual, but a secret group of an anonymous elite. The conspiracy theories are stories where an alleged secret elite is manipulating events and hiding the truth from people. Conspiracy theories are closed and and uncheckable belief systems.
It is hard to falsify conspiracy theories because they lack open and controllable sources. It is therefore hard to fact check them. Instead of open sources, they refer to an alleged secret conspiracy. Fact check are often dismissed as a part of the conspiracy, and as a “cover up”. Conspiracy theories represent a closed belief system. They are more based on belief than reality check.
Since the narratives also are about amoral and dangerous conspirators, they are are useful as ideology for violent hard core right wing groups and terrorists.
Big Tech platforms have offered right-wing populists powerful channels to the unopposed spreading of often false narratives targeting political opponents, and especially refugees and immigrants. Major social media networks have thus helped bring far-right ideas into the political mainstream. These narratives demonise refugees and immigrants, creating an atmosphere of fear and hostility.
Modern right wing populists use similar propaganda methods as the old German Nazi party
Such stories can wander around on their own when set into circulation. Like the old folk tales, they can travel long distances and live for a long time. Some of the conspiracy theories and other urban legends we see today are like stories set out in the propaganda of the old German nazi party NSDAP, like the “Pizza Gate” conspiracy theory which is strikingly like the old “Blood Libel” conspiracy theory.
Antipropaganda.help is a website dedicated to countering right wing propaganda, including nazism, neo-nazism and racism. This non profit project addresses populist narratives and conspiracy theories. Please feel free to copy and share !
This project stands in solidarity with refugees, migrants, and asylum seekers.