In Western liberal democracies, extremist subcultures appeared indeed ideally positioned at the crossroads of the converging fluxes of fear, anger and disenfranchisement to benefit from the upending of normal political rhythms. It comes hardly as a surprise that the far-right emerged as a major player in the Covid-19 pandemic. Our study will employ a Critical Discourse Analysis framework to bring into focus, in the response of the Euro-American far-right to the COVID-19 crisis, the ideological semiotics of the current “infodemic”. Infused with the mythos of resistance and insurgency, resolutely anti-systemic, this alternative epistemology can better be described, following Michael Barkun, as a form of “stigmatized knowledge”. We aim to shed light on how entrenched far-right mythologies and tropes-which appear increasingly transatlantic-are channeled into a new synthesis as part of an “alternative” political epistemology. Our study seeks to map, compare and contrast the symbolic responses to the Coronavirus crisis articulated by various far-right actors in two established democracies in the transatlantic area: The United States and France. Existential threats to societies breed a sense of urgency and heightened cultural warfare that is a hotbed for extremism. Far-right political entrepreneurs are, despite their remoteness from actual decision-making processes, active stakeholders in the current crisis. Pandemic disease is not merely a biological reality but also a cognitive and socially constructed phenomenon which intensely mobilizes a multiplicity of political frames.
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