Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgement
- Introduction: Toward a New Politics of Fear
- 1 Crisis Communication and Crisis Management During COVID-19
- 2 Nozick, the Pandemic and Fear: A Contractualist Justification of the COVID-19 Lockdown
- 3 The Pandemic, Freedom and Fear: A Reply to Moser
- 4 Castration Anxiety, COVID-19 and the Extremist Right
- 5 A Reply to Castration Anxiety, COVID-19 and the Extremist Right by Claudia Leeb
- 6 Politics of Fear in Brazil: Far-Right Conspiracy Theories on COVID-19
- 7 ‘Fora, Bolsonaro genocida!’: COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories, Neo-Nationalism and Neoliberal Necropolitics in Brazil. A Reply to Kalil et al
- 8 Fear and the Importance of Race-Based Data in COVID-19 Policy Implementation
- 9 The Collective Disorientation of the COVID-19 Crisis
- 10 Disorientation, Distrust and the Pandemic: A Reply to Fernández Velasco et al
- 11 Orientation, Disorientation, Reorientation: A Reply to Fernández Velasco, Perroy and Casati
- 12 Obedience in Times of COVID-19 Pandemics: A Renewed Governmentality of Unease?
- 13 What Is the New Governmentality of the COVID-19 Pandemic? A Reply to Bigo et al
- 14 Lockdown: A Case Study in How to Lose Trust and Undermine Compliance
- 15 Lockdown, Breakdown and Trust: A Reply to Paul Faulkner
- 16 Fear, Pathogens and Political Order
- Index
7 - ‘Fora, Bolsonaro genocida!’: COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories, Neo-Nationalism and Neoliberal Necropolitics in Brazil. A Reply to Kalil et al
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 January 2025
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgement
- Introduction: Toward a New Politics of Fear
- 1 Crisis Communication and Crisis Management During COVID-19
- 2 Nozick, the Pandemic and Fear: A Contractualist Justification of the COVID-19 Lockdown
- 3 The Pandemic, Freedom and Fear: A Reply to Moser
- 4 Castration Anxiety, COVID-19 and the Extremist Right
- 5 A Reply to Castration Anxiety, COVID-19 and the Extremist Right by Claudia Leeb
- 6 Politics of Fear in Brazil: Far-Right Conspiracy Theories on COVID-19
- 7 ‘Fora, Bolsonaro genocida!’: COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories, Neo-Nationalism and Neoliberal Necropolitics in Brazil. A Reply to Kalil et al
- 8 Fear and the Importance of Race-Based Data in COVID-19 Policy Implementation
- 9 The Collective Disorientation of the COVID-19 Crisis
- 10 Disorientation, Distrust and the Pandemic: A Reply to Fernández Velasco et al
- 11 Orientation, Disorientation, Reorientation: A Reply to Fernández Velasco, Perroy and Casati
- 12 Obedience in Times of COVID-19 Pandemics: A Renewed Governmentality of Unease?
- 13 What Is the New Governmentality of the COVID-19 Pandemic? A Reply to Bigo et al
- 14 Lockdown: A Case Study in How to Lose Trust and Undermine Compliance
- 15 Lockdown, Breakdown and Trust: A Reply to Paul Faulkner
- 16 Fear, Pathogens and Political Order
- Index
Summary
In both popular culture and academe, renewed interest in conspiracy theories (CTs) has followed in the wake of the recent global rise of far- right extremism. Examples abound: allegations that Hilary Clinton ran a childtrafficking ring from a Washington pizza parlour gained momentum during the 2016 US elections; survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018 have been portrayed as crisis actors hired to advance gun- prohibition policies; QAnon supporters aver that Donald Trump has defended US democracy against the ‘deep state’, namely political and economic elites that supposedly control democratically elected governments from behind the scenes; more recently, voter fraud accusations were raised to counter Trump's defeat in the 2020 presidential election; and during the coronavirus pandemic, Trump has furthered theories that the virus was created in a laboratory in China to advance its plans of economic domination, while in Brazil Jair Bolsonaro has championed smear campaigns against health authorities and the media, undermining their recommendations for masks and physical distancing.
This overlap between CTs and far- right extremism is not that surprising for at least two reasons. On the one hand, CTs flourish in moments of stark social change because they serve as explanatory devices to make sense of events that threaten existing worldviews (Douglas et al, 2019). On the other, studies seem to suggest that right- wingers (and authoritarian ones at that) are more prone to foster conspiracy thinking due to their need to manage uncertainty which, in turn, provides grounds for extremism (Richey, 2017). Defined as ‘allegations that powerful people and organizations are plotting together in secret to achieve sinister ends through deception of the public’ (Wood and Douglas, 2013:1), CTs offer right- wing authoritarian populists the discursive and affective grounds for pitting ‘the people’ against a cunning progressive elite that plans to destroy the status quo. The internet has catapulted this dangerous coupling to unprecedented levels (Prochazka and Blommaert, 2021). Nowadays, there is no shortage of CTs online, and far- right populists in the US and elsewhere have capitalised on them for political gain.
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- COVID-19 and the Politics of Fear , pp. 125 - 130Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2024