Sorry to drag up this unpleasantness, and I know that the vast majority here are well informed enough to know what they're looking at when they see it. Just felt that this was a worthwhile thing to be on top of.
Kristy also did a decent podcast here last year on right wing extremism:
https://aca.st/fb05dd
Extreme right groups exploiting virus fear and tension
Right-wing extremists are chatting on the internet about how to spread false information about the coronavirus.
www.smh.com.au
Right wing extremist groups are rallying to fuel coronavirus panic by exploiting images of social division - including fights over toilet paper, a leading expert warns.
Dr Kristy Campion, a lecturer and researcher at the Australian Graduate School of Policing and Security (AGSPS) at Charles Sturt University, said members of extremist groups were using encrypted internet sites to encourage followers to exploit tensions during the crisis.
"They are basically encouraging people to create fake news about the coronavirus to create social unrest," she said.
"In certain Telegram channels they are encouraging followers to spread disinformation about coronavirus in order to exacerbate tensions.
"They are saying create and share social media posts about people killing each other for resources or people deliberately infecting food or even calling police and journalists and threatening them that you have coronavirus and will deliberately spread it in crowded areas."
Dr Campion said this was part of an ideological movement that tried to capitalise on and exacerbate panic "because they want society to collapse".
Some extremist groups held an ideology known as accelerationism - a belief that society is doomed to collapse and that the best way to achieve social change is to accelerate that collapse. This would then allow society to be rebuilt according to a preferred world view, such as white nationalism.
Dr Campion said accelerationism can manifest among the various Extreme Right groupings including fascists, neo-Nazis and wotansvolk (the white nationalist movement).
"They want to speed up the collapse so society can be destroyed and rebuilt in the way they want it to be," she said.
"Once society has been destroyed, these various movements believe it can be rebuilt in a form which they believe is purer (and superior) to current society."
Shooters behind the massacres in Christchurch, New Zealand and El Paso, Texas called themselves eco-fascists who believe that forces including overpopulation or birth rates were contributing to the destruction of a white supremacist society. Similar views about the displacement of a white supremacist society are perpetuated by neo-Nazi groups.
"Disunity and ruptures of social cohesion are a very common tactic in the extreme right and the best way to combat that is to band together and to be united in a common cause rather than allowing them fragment us and have us fighting, bickering," Dr Campion said.
Research from Dr Campion and her team was in high demand nationally and internationally. She said right wing extremism had been active in Australia for many years.
The university's Master of Terrorism and Securities Studies is one of only a handful of terrorism courses in the world which focuses on terrorism threats as opposed to general theory on politics or international relations.
