Far-right

It's all true girls! If you see a cartoon illustration of one kiss you'll be on a slippery slope to living in your bedroom, with a bin full of exhausted AA batteries, and an excess bandwidth bill you'll have to sell a kidney for.

On November 14, a 20-year-old woman named Lanah Burkhardt appeared before the school board of the Conroe Independent School District in Texas. Burkhardt told the board that, when she was 11, she read a Scholastic book that introduced her to "a single kiss." According to Burkhardt, her exposure to this Scholastic book was directly responsible for her developing a debilitating addiction to pornography.

Burkhardt said that after reading the Scholastic book with the "single kiss," she "looked for other books that gave me pleasure." This "led to internet searches" that Burkhardt will "never forget." By the time she was 13, Burkhardt says her porn addiction left her depressed and suicidal.

[…] 

Burkhardt's appearance was promoted by SkyTree Book Fairs, a newly formed organization marketing itself as "an alternative to the sexually explicit content distributed in Scholastic's book fairs." 

While SkyTree Book Fairs presents itself as an independent non-profit organization, it appears to be a hastily assembled offshoot of Brave Books, which publishes children's books by right-wing pundits and pseudo-celebrities.

[…]

Neither Brave Books nor Burkhardt disclosed that Burkhardt is an employee of Brave Books. According to her LinkedIn profile, Burkhardt is the company's "public relations coordinator."

Burkhardt's employment was first reported by Frank Strong. It is unclear how an 11-year-old Burkhardt obtained the Scholastic book that allegedly caused her porn addiction. It appears she was home-schooled. Burkhardt did not respond to a request for comment sent via Facebook.

The resurgence of reactionary politics is entirely predictable and has been traced for a long time. Yet every victory or rise is analysed as new and unexpected rather than part of a longer, wider process in which we are all implicated.

The same goes for “populism”. All serious research on the matter points to the populist nature of these parties being secondary at best, compared to their far-right qualities. Yet, whether in the media or academia, populism is generally used carelessly as a key defining feature.

Using “populist” instead of more accurate but also stigmatising terms such as “far-right” or “racist” acts as a key legitimiser of far-right politics. It lends these parties and politicians a veneer of democratic support through the etymological link to the people and erases their deeply elitist nature – what my co-author Aaron Winter and I have termed “reactionary democracy”.

What this points to is that the processes of mainstreaming and normalisation of far-right politics have much to do with the mainstream itself, if not more than with the far right. Indeed, there can be no mainstreaming without the mainstream accepting such ideas in its fold.