Conspiracy Theory, Anti-Semitism, and Anti-Trans Hatred in Far-Right Ideology

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My research concerns the connections between the anti-'gender ideology' discourse in contemporary Euro-American radical right politics and the purportedly left-leaning 'gender critical' feminist movement, through their mutual connection to forms of antisemitic conspiracy theory. I will research how coded, antisemitic conspiratorial modes of thought are used to encourage anti-transgender attitudes and mobilise opposition to the human rights of transgender people; while at the same time, intolerant attitudes towards transgender people are being used as a way both to recruit people into the antisemitic radical right, as well as shift mainstream attitudes and sentiments around gender and sexuality, race, and ethnicity, rightwards. Primary Research Questions: 1. What roles do anti-trans and antisemitic conspiratorial thinking and affect play in the anti-'gender ideology' movement?2. What is relation is there between anti-trans hatred and antisemitic modes of thought and affect?3. How might anti-trans hatred be being used as a vehicle to mainstream far right and illiberal politics in the UK?Empirical methodology: I will analyse my case studies using the methodology of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Fairclough, 2010) but with an additional affective dimension with which to analyse ways in which affect is intertwined with discourse and discourse provokes political affects. Boler (2021) pioneers this approach effectively in the study of racial discourse and effects on online platforms. CDA will allow me to identify conceptual and linguistic themes across my case studies and analyse them within the broader context of antagonistic social relations and processes which ideological formations both express and act within. CDA allows me to engage with texts which present themselves as academic, and as such demand the assumption of 'good-faith' argumentation, with the critical distance necessary to understand them rather as political texts, embedded within an ecology of far-right extremist political movements. What makes this method of analysis apt for the study of contemporary antisemitism, transphobia and far-right ideology is the commitment to a theory of ideology as not simply a set of ideas free-floating in social discourse, but express experiences of real social processes and antagonisms grounded in the social positionality of its adherents (Fairclough, 2010). Crucially, ideologies satisfy certain epistemological and affective needs of their adherents, and this is what gives them their power. This is especially important for the analysis of ideologies which make claims to social, scientific, and historical truth. Proposed Case Studies:Selection Criteria: case studies are to be part of the intellectual output of radical right political movements, as such I am selecting texts which are specifically understood by the authors and audience as making truth-claims and critical and normative judgements about society and history. I am interested in the form and content of the intellectual debate internal to the radical right movements and therefore seek to analyse texts which have a higher educational "price of entry", and which are therefore not intended primarily for use as mass propaganda but for debate within the already ideologically committed. I am interested in these texts in particular as they tend to contain more extreme ideological content which appears in watered down version in texts intended for a more mainstream audience who can be expected to be averse to the more extreme conclusions of what they are reading. 1. The Occidental Observer: an anti-Semitic pseudo-scientific online magazine in which a significant amount of neo-Nazi 'scholarship' is published on the matter of historical and contemporary Jewish political involvement in the trans, gay and women's liberation movements (Houck, 2017; A. Joyce, 2015, 2016; Langdon, 2019, 2021; Sanderson, 2015a, 2015b).2. 'The Transgender-Industrial Complex' by Scott Howar