Ideological Contradiction in Mediated Far-Right Food Discourse: Elitism and Environmental Unsustainability

Abstract

In recent decades, democratic governments have faced repeated challenges related to the rise of contemporary far-right populist movements that thrive on the fear stoked by far-right politicians’ racist, xenophobic, antisemitic, sexist, and nationalistic discourse (Wodak, 2020). Within far-right political ideologies, a glaring contradiction emerges between these movements supposed anti-elitist positions (Wodak, 2017) and their embrace of neoliberal economic policies that benefit the socioeconomically advantaged (Betz, 1993; Harvey, 2005). Given Bourdieu’s (1984) identification of how food-related behaviors reinforce current class structures as well as DeSoucey’s (2010) elaboration of how food and political thought are often intertwined, in this thesis, I investigate food-related discourse to further explore how such ideological contradictions are naturalized in interaction.

Taking inspiration from recent scholarship on language and materiality (Shankar & Cavanaugh, 2012), elite discourse practices (Thurlow & Jaworski, 2017; Thurlow, 2020) and elite authenticity (Mapes, 2018, 2021; Mapes & Ross, 2020), I conduct a multimodal critical discourse analysis (van Leeuwen, 2017) of an episode of the Tucker Carlson Originals docuseries episode The End of Men. Specifically, I show how segments focusing on an anonymous right-wing bodybuilder called The Raw Egg Nationalist make use of non-diegetic dialogue and visual semiotic resources to establish an anti-elitist stance while simultaneously displaying their elite status through the evaluation and recommendation of specific dietary practices. Supplementing this data with an analysis of extracts from The Raw Egg Nationalist’s recent book, The Eggs Benedict Option, I take an eco-critical discourse approach (Stibbe, 2014, 2018) to demonstrate how the dietary recommendations espoused by The Raw Egg Nationalist in The End of Men contradict the environmental positions and policies for which he advocates.

This analysis is paired with a discussion on how the elite food-related discourse practices are utilized by The Raw Egg Nationalist (and, by extension, Fox News and Tucker Carlson) to simultaneously promote a racist and xenophobic politics of nationalism to the audience. Additionally, I connect these dietary and environmental discourses to historical eco-fascist movements, underscoring the need to conduct contemporary investigations of these movements as political parties across the political spectrum begin to recognize the irrefutable evidence of pending climate catastrophe. Finally, I illustrate how the notion of interpassivity (Žižek, 1989; Pfaller, 1996, 2017) can be further developed as a tool for understanding how material objects interact with discursive practices to create multimodal coherence and cohesion of seemingly contradictory ideological positions.