On January 6, 2021, the world watched as hundreds of ‘Make-America-Great-Again’ (MAGA) rioters broke into the US Congress, walking the halls of the Capitol Building carrying confederate flags — some in combat gear, others in face paint and antlers. There were only a few hundred guards on duty at the time, and only a handful posted at make-shift barricades, the mob was easily able to force their way through. This was not innocuous, it was violent.
Five people were killed, including one of the guards after being hit over the head with a fire extinguisher. Throughout the riot, threats were sent via social media to members of Congress opposed to the move to reject the election results, by the so-called ‘Stop the Steal’ mob. Yet most of the criminals who unlawfully broke into the Capitol Building were simply allowed to walk away.
Among the mob that stormed the Capitol Building were individuals sporting symbols of white supremacism and the letter Q sometimes paired with a white rabbit, a symbol associated with the so-called QAnon conspiracy theory.
What was once a fringe group believing in outlandish theories of a cabal of monied satanic pedophiles who secretly run the world, are now, worryingly, becoming more mainstream, with research suggesting as many as four million people subscribed to Facebook groups affiliated with the movement in August 2020. How is this possible?
Enter the rabbit hole.
Social media platforms such as YouTube and Instagram are programmed to keep users watching and are constantly tweaking their algorithms to make sure that the constant stream of videos or images is directed to your feed to keep you glued to your screen. It is these algorithms that have come under scrutiny recently when it became clear that they were responsible for the unprecedented rise in subscribers following accounts promoting far-right wing, and even extremist content.
YouTube was reluctant to step in and moderate content. The reason? More extreme content gets more views, and keeps users watching for longer periods of time. As a former design ethicist for Google, Tristan Harris said, YouTube will always drive your feed towards ‘Crazy Town’, because, chances are, it will keep you watching and engaged with the platform for longer periods of time.
In March 2019, YouTuber Caleb Cain chronicled his indoctrination into the so-called ‘alt-right’ in his video ‘My Descent into the Alt Right Pipeline’. He documents how he went from being a left-leaning teenager to an individual sympathetic with extremist right-wing views within the space of five years.
Initially attracted to innocuous content on self-improvement and philosophy, Cain rapidly fell into increasingly intolerant content and pseudo-psychology, such as the content produced by French-Canadian Stephan Malanou, who suggests that Caucasians are intellectually superior to other races based on IQ test data. (This pseudo-science has been thoroughly refuted by statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb).
In 2020, there were 75 people who expressed support for the views of QAnon running for office in the US, 18 of whom made it onto the ballot in November and two of whom won seats in Congress.
Marjorie Taylor Green is a right-wing Republican from Georgia who endorsed the message of the QAnon movement back in 2017 and has more recently expressed a litany of hate-speech including fear mongering about an ‘Islamic invasion’. These events are not benign. Between 2019 and 2021 there was a 320 per cent rise in white supremacist violence around the world, including the Christchurch mosque shooting in March 2019, killing 51 and injuring 49, followed four months later by a mass shooting in El Paso Texas where 23 people lost their lives.
How can we explain the growing proliferation of right-wing extremism in the US? While there are undoubtedly several factors that contributed to the storm that resulted in Trumpism, QAnon and the mobbing of the Capitol Building, three trends stand out as creating the atmosphere in which right-wing extremism has been allowed to thrive.
The federal minimum wage is worth 31 per cent less than it was in 1968, according to the Economic Policy Institute. While successive governments, Democrat and Republican, have pandered to Big Business, middle and low-income families have continued to be squeezed to make ends meet. Many feel excluded from a society where the winner literally takes all, leaving the rest with nothing. Globalisation has allowed large corporations to outsource labour and services in order to cut costs and increase their profit margins.
The result has been a steady decline in the number of jobs available in the domestic market and a steady rise in the number of unemployed and underemployed. Since 1994 the real unemployment rate has risen, peaking in 2020 at close to 25 per cent.
The right-wing has led to the systematic dismantlement of welfare systems that previously helped lower income families get by month to month. The ‘family’ and ‘American’ value campaigns of the right have done more to push social reform, preventing women from working, preventing universal healthcare and access to higher education for all but the wealthiest Americans.
Since the 1970s the cost of childcare in the US has risen by 2,000 per cent. Yes, that’s 2,000. The right-wing has been successful in curtailing federal welfare programmes, including childcare facilities and welfare support to low-income and single parent families.
“People aren’t drawn to QAnon just because they’re ill-informed, or because they clicked a link that skewed their algorithm…the conspiracy theory … preys, specifically, on vulnerable people”, writes Faith Hill in The Atlantic.
In a culture where entertainment has replaced education and opportunism has replaced objectivity, we must do more to educate people, particularly young people, on the dangers of predatory hate groups, and find ways to provide them with acceptance, community and purpose.
The writer is a sustainable finance consultant. Her writing has been featured in Afronomics Law Blog, The Startup, Age of Awareness and elsewhere.