"Right Wing Extremists"

This piece is an updated version of the work published in Countering terrorism and insurgency in the 21st century edited by James J. F. Forest (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007) and intended for publication in Praeger’s Essentials of Counterterrorism (July 2015). Due to space limitations, it was cut from the volume and now appears here. All websites were active as of last access date.

2012

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Journal of Right-Wing Studies, 2023

What are the most urgent issues and problems—either in research or policy—for those concerned with right-wing politics today? The voices assembled in this roundtable provide widely divergent answers to this question. They reflect on the state of the right from different disciplinary fields, from different regions of the world, and with different issues in mind. At the same time, these twelve brief essays, taken together, highlight recurring themes in the contemporary academic study of the right. These overlapping concerns and areas of agreement map the terrain of present understanding and gesture toward new avenues of investigation.

The Journal of Right-Wing Studies, 2023

We spent the year 2008 trying to get the UC Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies (CRWS) off the ground. There was pushback. In part, it was because there was no precedent-right-wing studies?-for such an entity on a major research campus. But above all, the pushback was about timing. Neoliberalism was suffering comeuppance in the form of transnational catastrophic financial collapse and near depression. In the USA, the most right-wing presidency in at least seventy-five years was coming to a shattering end, seeming to give way to a "transformative" administration under a Black Democrat. Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times reflected the widespread mood, publishing The Death of Conservatism. Why now was there a need for right-wing studies? The Tea Party swiftly put this objection to rest. Its populist uprising was the defining political event of the Obama years. It was launched in February 2009, one month after Barack Obama's inauguration as president and one month before CRWS opened its doors. We held an early conference on the Tea Party, wrote reports and a book on it, and the center attracted attention from many quarters around the world where right-wing populism was similarly on the rise. By the time US populism morphed from the Tea Party to Trumpism, immigration surges had made the worldwide dimension of the trend unmistakable. Liberal democracy was back on its heels in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Trumpism was of a piece with illiberal democratic regimes erupting across the continents. Behind them were populist right-wing mobilizations possessed by local variations of replacement theory. This state of affairs has only deepened over the past several years. Surely it is time for a Journal of Right-Wing Studies. JRWS will publish essays, research papers, book reviews, and commentary. We believe the problems we will address here are urgent, and that discussion and analysis need to be as widely diffused as possible. Accordingly, we are an open access journal available worldwide without economic barriers for readers or for potential authors. Our first full issue-Issue One-will be published early this year. What we are publishing today we are calling our "Issue Zero." We have asked a dozen scholars to comment on what they consider to be the most compelling questions in right-wing studies today. We believe this provocative series of short essays offers a robust suggestion of what is to come in JRWS. It is a pleasure to welcome you to our initial publication, Issue Zero of the Journal of Right-Wing Studies.

Counterpunch, 2015

Puntorojo magazine, 2021

It is important to understand the differences between the authoritarian Koch project and the mindset of significant sectors of the Trump base that are evolving in a fascistic direction at an accelerating pace. Although both political tendencies are authoritarian, the Koch project is meant to take over from above the basic institutions of government, and strangle most of its functions except for that of state repression, while the fascist-leaning movement is one in which the “plebeian” masses expect something in return; something that the Koch project is single-mindedly working to prevent. The Kochian and the hardcore Trumpist strands of the Republican Party are not reducible to slightly different versions of each other, for there are very significant contradictions between these camps. Yet in the current political climate, they feed into each other. Every attempt at voter suppression by Republican governors and their legislatures is welcomed by the Trump-aligned base. The segment of the Republican base that sees the other mainstream political party, the Democrats, as illegitimate and treasonous is not relenting on these assumptions—now taken as principles. URL: https://www.puntorojomag.org/2021/06/18/the-u-s-far-right-poised-to-extend-its-reach-and-scale-of-violence/

Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus, 2021

The theorisation of cosmopolitanism can be dated from Kant’s “right to hospitality”, where the reciprocal welcoming of foreigners is supposed to lead to universal understanding. Differences in languages and religions are recognised as obstacles in the way to that ideal, yet Kant has little to say about how to get around their differences – translation is strangely absent. A role for translation in cosmopolitanism nevertheless appears in the discourses that assume an age of effective economic globalisation. The cosmopolitanisms elaborated on by Ulrich Beck (2004/2006) and Gerard Delanty (2009), among many others, adopt a sense of cultural translation that requires no anterior text, no language barrier, and thus no mediator: the cosmopolitan becomes an intercultural space where relations transform subjects. Those views may be tested on the narratives of three Afrikaans-speaking intellectuals who recount how they grew up under Apartheid and progressively dissented from totalitarian dis...

2021

Jack McLean, “Baha’i Faith: The Basics by Christopher Buck: Review (2020).” Published online (January 15, 2021). Excerpts: One outstanding feature of this book for either Bahá’ís or non-Bahá’ís is its contemporary relevance. Even well-informed readers could not possibly be fully aware of the overview presented by Buck of all the multifarious activities taking place in the Bahá’í world community. … Buck’s treatment of the material is throughout well-researched, and rich in the detail that an alert reader expects. In sum, despite its unpretentious title, this book is more than the Basics of the Bahá’í Faith. It not only covers well the religion’s early history, three central holy figures, spiritual and social teachings and organization, but also it presents a complete contemporary picture of the remarkably diverse economic, social, and spiritual activities that are being planned and executed by the Bahá’í community in all countries of the world.