Dissertation - Mainstreaming Fringe Beliefs: Pathways from the Margins to the Mainstream
Over the past decade, violent attacks linked to misogynistic ideologies, conspiratorial beliefs, and extremist movements have highlighted the urgent societal impact of fringe ideas. From Elliot Rodger’s 2014 Isla Vista killings and Jake Davison’s 2021 attack in Plymouth, U.K., to mass shootings inspired by the Great Replacement theory, and the January 6th, 2021, U.S. Capitol insurrection, these cases reveal a broader pattern: extremist ideologies, whether centered on gender, race, or political legitimacy, can mobilize individuals toward violence. Understanding how such ideologies and conspiracy theories gain traction and move into mainstream political discourse is critical for both theory and policy.
My dissertation develops the concepts of cultural alignment and political alignment to explain why some ideologies enter mainstream discourse, while others remain marginalized. Cultural alignment refers to the convergence of fringe beliefs with widely shared cultural symbols, myths, and nostalgic narratives. I distinguish this bottom-up mechanism from political alignment; wherein extremist ideas gain legitimacy when they converge with the rhetoric of influential political actors. While both processes contribute to mainstreaming, my research demonstrates that cultural alignment plays a dominant role in facilitating ideological uptake.
In doing so, this dissertation examines four empirical cases. First, a digital ethnography of incel forums reveals how misogynistic discourses leverages cultural nostalgia and symbolic gender hierarchies to normalize extremist attitudes. Second, media and textual analysis of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory demonstrate how narratives of demographic threat gain mainstream resonance through appeals to moral decline and national myths. Third, an analysis of Telegram messages surrounding the 2020 U.S. presidential election traces the amplification of election-fraud narratives via digital platforms, embedding extremist beliefs within broader cultural anxieties about demographic decline. Fourth, the chemtrails conspiracy illustrates how fringe beliefs persist despite weak cultural resonance, highlighting the conditions under which ideas remain isolated versus achieving mainstream legitimacy.
Together, these analyses advance theories of political violence by shifting focus from individual-level radicalization to the cultural and symbolic mechanisms that facilitate mainstreaming. Methodologically, the dissertation demonstrates the value of digital ethnography, media analysis, and textual data in tracing the circulation of extremist ideas. By illuminating the role of culture in legitimizing fringe ideologies, this research provides both a theoretical foundation and practical guidance for interventions designed to prevent the normalization of extremist beliefs.
Male Victimhood and Misogyny Online: Incels as a Continuation of Patriarchal Narratives (under review at Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society)
Misogynist incels (“involuntary celibates”) have gained increasing visibility as an online subculture and political formation. This article argues that incel discourse exemplifies entrenched patriarchal and misogynistic narratives, not an aberrant subculture. Drawing on a unique dataset collected from the forum incels.is (September-October 2023), I show how incel communities mobilize digital platforms to circulate affective discourses of male victimhood and gendered resentment. Incel ideology is sustained by longstanding misogynistic tropes, rearticulated and amplified through the affordances of digital media. By situating these practices within broader systems of symbolic violence and gendered power, I demonstrate how incel discourse both reproduces and updates Western patriarchal logics. This analysis contributes to feminist media studies and cultural theory by tracing the historical continuities of misogyny across digital and cultural contexts, highlighting how online platforms mediate and intensify structures of gendered domination.
Reframing the Future: The Far-Right's Narrative of the Great Replacement and Its Cultural Resonance
The Great Replacement conspiracy theory has gained increasing attention in recent years, evolving from a fringe online far-right discourse into a broader political narrative. The Great Replacement theory holds that a group of elite political actors are deliberately replacing Western, White people through immigration. This means that immigration is perceived as an existential threat to the White, Western cultural and racial identity. This paper argues that the Great Replacement theory is not a novel development but rather a resurgence of longstanding historical and cultural narratives that have shaped Western anxieties about identity, belonging and demographic change. By analyzing four lone actor manifestos, this study examines how these manifestos utilize symbols, myths and narratives to justify ideological extremism and political violence. The findings demonstrate that the Great Replacement theory is drawing upon the existing cultural context, using cultural symbols, myths and narratives, rather than a new movement. Its potential to incite political violence underscores the need for addressing its historical and cultural roots.
Comparative Homonationalisms: Far-Right Visions of LGB(TQ+) Belonging in the United States and the Netherlands (with Jana Foxe) (Under review at The European Journal of Politics and Gender)
This article examines variations in homonationalist discourse among far-right parties in the United States and the Netherlands. We theorize two particular forms: White Christian homonationalism, rooted in frontier nationalism and muscular Christianity, and secular homonationalism, grounded in civic secularism and nativist ideals of tolerance. Using Critical Discourse Analysis of party manifestos and campaign materials, we show how these discourses discipline LGBTQ+ identities, particularly TQ+ identities, by reinforcing binary gender norms through national myth-making. Far-right homonationalism constructs the “proper homosexual subject” to legitimize exclusionary nationalism. Masculinity plays a central role in shaping national myths and out-grouping dynamics, with differential implications for how TQ+ identities are framed as threats. MAGA discourse aligns with White Christian homonationalism, PVV with secular homonationalism, and FvD integrates characteristics of both. These findings challenge assumptions about far-right support for LGBTQ+ rights, and reveal the gendered logics of nationalist belonging.