Right wing populists speak directly to our spinal cords, and feed dramatic stories of alleged moral misconduct into the rumour mill, where the stories find their own feet. A story telling of an existential threat can spread to 390 000 people when retold 8 times. When gossip is spread in wide circles, it can ignite fear of and anger and hate against a minority, and undermine the standing of a rival.
These stories spread no matter whether they are false or true. How can such stories convince a large number of voters ? We are inherently predisposed to be affected by gossip stories. It is the drama that makes a story being shared, not the truth value.
Right wing populism use an ancient broadcasting medium: gossip
Aristotle described two opposite modes of persuasion in his foundational work “rhetoric”. The mainstream and leftist argumentation can be described as Logos, the Greek word for “word,” “reason,” or “plan.” It refers to the logical appeal of an argument—its internal consistency, use of evidence, facts, and rational structure. Right wing populism use Pathos. The Greek word for “suffering,” “experience,” or “emotion.” It refers to the appeal to the audience’s emotions, using storytelling, vivid language, and empathy to persuade.
The far-right’s playbook is clear: mobilise support through anti-immigrant sentiment. Their strategy begins by dismantling the distinction between refugees and immigrants, labeling all as “economic migrants.” This rhetorical sleight of hand, now echoed by mainstream politicians and media, strips refugees of their life-saving narratives. Once their stories of danger and escape are erased, a critical barrier falls. It becomes easier to paint all newcomers with the same negative brush, reducing their complex reasons for migration to a simple desire for material gain.
The second step, and their sharpest propaganda tool, is spreading stories that portray refugees and immigrants as dangerous criminals. This storytelling talks directly to our bone marrow, and triggers pre-judging, fear, anger and hate in the public. A fictitious or true story of a crime done by one single person can lower the understanding for all refugees and immigrants, also for the vast law obedient majority. Such stories are used to reinforce demands for stricter immigration policies.
Right wing populism use Pathos, mobilisation of emotions to win public support. The tool to achieve this an ancient medium that existed long before the written language, storytelling. The age-old format of storytelling is still very much alive today. Modern stories are like the pre-writing-age stories in form and content. They have the shape of the old folk tales, myths and legends that once were told from person to person.
In the days before written language, all information, from the tales about the gods to information on a personal level, had to be told person to person. Right wing populists today also spread stories on social media on the Internet. The spreading without fact check fits the stories like a glove, and digital gossip now spreads political influence with unprecedented efficiency, as there is no hindrance for them to spread.
Traditionally these stories are mostly spread in informal fora, like gossip in friends or family groups, or in modern times also through online gossip. Unlike editorially controlled media, these informal sources lack any form of fact-checking or reality control. It has therefore nothing to say for if a the stories are spread, whether they are true or not, or if they tell any truth in general.
Fascism wins when the enmity summoned begins to tell the story itself, as put forward by historian Timothy Snyder. The right wing populist propaganda works and mobilise broad public support when the stories that are spread become folklore. This is when the politicians longer needs to push the narratives, since the stories circulates between people. The stories become a regular part of the daily conversations and discussions in informal social groups, or on social media on the Internet. The sharing of stories between people make them common informal subculture or culture.
Online stories have the same form and language as the word-of-mouth 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 gossip is useful for us. In the pre-modern epoch Europe lacked a strong centralised state, with institutions like police and hospitals. People had to rely on friends, family, religious communities and other social groups for support.
Gossip is still useful for the social construction of community. Gossip stories defines social norms, by telling us what to do and not to do in groups of people by example. 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 judge 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 inherently hardwired to pay attention to gossip, and especially to cries of alert. Stories about alleged dangerous moral misconduct done by members of a minority like refugees or immigrants can lead to fear and anger among those who believe in them;- xenophobia, anger and hate.
As opposed to facts, dramatic stories are easy to remember. Even if these stories are unrepresentative, they awake great emotional response in the public. These stories hijack our emotions. We pay attention to them, 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 factual arguments
The political mainstream and left mostly use factual communication through editorially controlled media, mass publications and scientific publications. The political mainstream use falsifiable arguments based on empirical research and cause-and-effect explanations. They focus on macro political relations between large bodies, like institutions and states.
Right wing populists stories focus on individual personal relations. Simply put, the mainstream and left use numbers and facts and the extreme right use individual stories. Since right wing populism and the political mainstream use different media for spreading their ideas, the two use different language. Right populism present stories of individual violent crimes in a vivid language. The mainstream and left use statistics and other factual arguments, and try to keep a argumentative, yet logical tone.
Facts are precise arguments, that can be easily tested. Facts are sometimes manipulated. Still, factual arguments are open to be checked and falsified if wrong. To use the term “logical rhetoric” as a definition of political mainstream and -left communication is useful, to tell the difference from the right wing populist storytelling.
Written texts are precise, because you do not have to remember them. And published texts can easily be fact checked. They contain much more, and more precise information than the spoken word can carry. Measurable concepts are based on written tradition.
The ideals of democracy from the Age of Enlightenment became dominant, when mass published written texts became common. The concept of modern democracy rests on the assumption of the perfectly informed voter. Factual arguments are efficient in making means-to-end plans, and to govern a modern state. They are therefore often preferred by main stream politicians and administrators in modern democracies. Yet, measurable facts do not awaken strong emotions, and the public does not get easily aroused by statistics.
Modern rumourmongers: Influencers spread gossip online
Storytellers were the old times living libraries, who communicated collective memory used to build community. 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.
Influencer and social media are notoriously unreliable 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 publicity.
The gossip stories are today spread effectively through social media platforms. The online spreading of rumours and memes referring to them often go viral by being published on social media platforms and by click-and-share. The repeated exposure of memes with short messages 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. These modern folk tales can find their own feet and wander around by themselves, when fed into the rumour mill.
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, regardless if they are false or true.
The fairy tale about the Emperor’s new clothes tell us that it can be efficient to uncover a lie, and that fact checks should not be underestimated. In the story, two con men approach the emperor, claiming to sell clothes of the finest material. The fabric is so delicate that only wise people can see it. Neither the ministers nor other people dared to tell that they saw no clothes, because they were afraid to appear as dumb. At least, the conformity was broken by a child, saying out loudly: “But he has no clothes on”. Then all people realised the truth and started talking “But he has no clothes”.
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 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.
Credibility is an asset the extreme right can not control over time, since their communication strategy relies on narrative over fact. Their storytelling-based claims are often debunked by the fact-seeking press. Consequently, an extreme effort is put into sowing doubt about the general credibility of the free media.
Systematically cherry-picking stories about immigrant crime is disinformation
An individually true story of a tragic crime can be used in a political campaign. 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 violent 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 sadly enough 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.
Statistics do not awake as strong emotions as dramatic stories. Stories of peace and harmony, like those of immigrants walking quietly to work, fail to stir strong emotions and fall outside the scope of storytelling.
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 than edited mass media. Disinformation spread by 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. Corrections by fact checks in news media can not keep up with 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 –The ideology of the hard core
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 lack real sources. It is therefore not possible to fact check them. Instead of sources, they refer to an alleged secret conspiracy. Fact check are also often dismissed as a part of the conspiracy, and as a part of the “cover up”. Conspiracy theories are closed belief systems. You have to choose if you believe in them. This makes them ideal as a common code for subcultures of people who do not trust the political system.
The narratives also claim to tell about amoral and dangerous conspirators. They are therefore also powerful instruments as core 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 live on their own when set into circulation. Like the old folk tales, they can travel far 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.