Researching Young People and Far-Right Populism

Abstract

This paper considers the challenges facing qualitative researchers who study far-right populism and youth. First, there is the question of the method itself. Across the relevant literature, it seems more popular to use online methodologies rather than conduct face-to-face interviews. This is not surprising given the difficulties of talking face-to-face with a specific cohort of young people who are often suspicious of outsiders and who may even pose a personal security risk to the interviewer. Second, the age, gender, and institutional status of a researcher may constitute an obstacle to the effectiveness of a face-to-face interview. Common features of far-right populism are mistrust of elites and misogyny. Moreover, the online world of youth today is a dynamic technological sphere that may be hard to grasp for someone from a previous generation. This paper is a reflective essay that uses examples of research in action. It aims to invite reader reflection on attuning research approaches to the lived experiences of youth drawn to far-right populism

1. Introduction

Many of the classic ethnographies of the far right (for example, Blee 2007; Simi 2006; Blazak 2001) were conducted before accessing online youth culture became a primary way to interface with this population. There is a new generation of researchers, as well as veteran investigators who are new to this angle, who might benefit from the matters raised in this reflective essay.

Methodological issues always need to be carefully considered in youth research. Regular critical reflection is required when undertaking qualitative research. Studying young people and far-right populism proves to be no exception. Moreover, there are important questions to consider when engaging with the far right, particularly the well-being of investigators who might possibly be distressed by what they are exposed to. In the discussion below, far-right populism is understood to be located within the field of far-right politics, which is further on the right of the left–right spectrum than the standard political right. Populism may be understood as an ideology that simplistically divides society into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups: pure people on one side and the corrupt elite on the other. That ‘black and white’ discourse appeals to young (white) people facing a precarious labor market who feel that they have lost the entitlements of race and gender (Mudde 2014). Mudde (2018) advises taking masculinity very seriously indeed because far-right populist influencers play on white male victimhood, talking up the risks posed by feminists, liberals, the LGBTQ+ community, along with invading ‘outsiders’. Inglehart and Norris (2017, p. 445) argue that conservative populism routinely refers to a mythical ‘golden past’ when society was less diverse, the nation was actively defended, and traditional gender roles were not questioned.

Let us consider the trend in more detail. First, the discourse of right-wing populism may seem to offer young people ‘a space to express anger, rebellion and resistance against the mainstream’ (Miller-Idriss 2018, p. 356; see also Mudde 2014; Kimmel 2018). Some youth end up feeling like a ‘lost generation’ (Krasteva 2016, p. 150) because in late modernity they lack economic and political power over their own lives (Storm et al. 2020). That may be one reason why those who support right-wing populism are more numerous among the younger generation (see Abou-Chadi 2024; Mieriņa and Koroļeva 2015). There is a notable thinning of the ranks after the age of 30, as more pressing life demands come into play (Simi and Futrell 2015). The difficult circumstances experienced by contemporary youth per se in western countries are primarily driven by deep economic and political changes. Yet disenfranchised young (white) people are encouraged by right-wing populist propaganda to blame immigration, diversity equity strategies, and removal of traditional privilege (Nilan 2021; Rydgren 2013). We know that far-right populist discourse in Europe advances the view that a deliberate process is underway to demographically and culturally replace white ‘natives’ with people from other cultural backgrounds (Zúquete 2018). For French white nationalist Camus (2018), this means men (sic) of the soil must rise up and take defensive action.

Second, in western countries, young white men in particular are drawn to right-wing populism (see Abou-Chadi 2024; Ralph-Morrow 2022; Campbell 2022; Van Valkenburgh 2021; Dietze and Roth 2020; Stern 2019; Graff et al. 2019). There is an avalanche of far-right propaganda, conspiracy theories, fake news, and hate speech that circulates through social media. This is often framed in masculinist paramilitary terms regarding not only the defense of the nation but of enforcing traditional male gender and nationality privileges (Ralph-Morrow 2022). We know that men spend more time online compared to women (see Petrosyan 2024). Offline and online, discourses of race, class, work, and heterosexuality are emphatically linked to masculinity (Elliott 2019) through popular discourses such as those expounded by the Proud Boys (Campbell 2022; Stern 2019). Some young men find themselves floundering when elements of their gendered and classed habitus (Bourdieu 1990) encounter unstable segments of the male labor market, as well as fluid gender identities and relations (Kimmel 2010; Standing 2011). The resulting ontological insecurity (Giddens 1991) may pull them toward far-right propaganda that constructs them as white male victims yet at the same time (potentially) as brave combatants in a gendered race war (Marantz 2019; Johanssen 2022).

2. Conceptual Framework

As mentioned previously, this is a reflective paper on the matter of collecting data from young men who engage with some far-right ideas. It addresses both methodological issues and the nature of far-right discourse itself. In methodological terms, it is anchored in critical considerations of qualitative research. In conceptual terms, it calls upon recent scholarship on the ‘manosphere’– networked sites and posts promoting martial masculinity, misogyny, traditional gender roles, and racial supremacy.

The Importance of Inside Knowledge

There are three important points to be made that bear on the productive alignment of research approaches to the lived experiences of youth drawn to far-right populism.

First, young people themselves can provide a valuable source of research assistance, particularly if the topic of youth research includes the online world, not least because youth today lead ‘digital lives’ (Tilleczek 2019). A report from Statista (2023) indicates that global internet usage is higher among individuals aged between 15 and 24 years compared to the rest of the population, with young Europeans constituting 98 per cent of usage saturation. That deep penetration makes the youth generation—in any country—a prime online political target for right-wing propaganda. For example, Deutsche Welle (2024) reports on a major poll that found the German far-right populist party AfD to be the preferred party among those under 29. This is attributed to social media influence, particularly TikTok. In the Scandinavian context, Åkerlund (2020) draws our attention to young people’s high social media usage, where radical right propaganda is algorithmically tailored to fit with users’ apparent pre-existing views and social characteristics. Yet to assume that internet use directly leads to extremist views would be to underestimate the complexity of online influence.

With the current online world apparently limitless in scale, any young person today tends to interact closely with only a relatively small set of contacts with whom they share ideas and feel comfortable. However, that online closeness may not be as safe as it seems. The ‘echo chamber’ effect happens when something seems to be true because it comes from a known contact and also appears on a lot of sites at more or less the same time. This is the phenomenon of confirmation bias (Pariser 2012), and far-right populist messaging takes every algorithmic advantage of that bias that it can, including the spillover tactic. For instance, there is a hyper-partisan online media ecosystem on the far-right fringe in Australia. It originates on unrestricted platforms like Gab, then by weight of dissemination, it spills over into commonly-used widely accessible platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook (Peucker and Fisher 2023).

Second, grasping the salience of online peer-generated content is important for achieving a solid understanding of how far-right populist messaging affects young people, including gamers. For example, while apparently superficial, likes and swipes are, at the same time, indicators of solidarity and agreement. Furthermore, there is pressure to keep up on social media. Young people today are continuously invited to compare themselves with peers. Anxious self-surveillance can certainly be generated by the 24/7 online capacities of smartphones (Colak 2024), for instance. There is also the issue of rapid widespread dissemination. In the case of far-right online influencers, they routinely promote conspiracy theories and hate speech, then encourage followers to share that content. By the time that content is disseminated across the digital world, it will be glimpsed by untold numbers of young people doing all kinds of things online, whether they agree or not. That virtual deluge can amplify far-right support (Nilan 2021) and it needs to be thoroughly understood by youth researchers in the field.

Third, history demonstrates an elective affinity between discourses of male supremacy and white supremacy (Ralph-Morrow 2022; Stern 2019). Thereby, youth studies researchers who investigate the far-right influence need to take strong account of the ‘manosphere’—networked sites and posts promoting martial masculinity and misogyny—tied to preservation of the traditional family and varying levels of racism (Copland 2021; Kelly 2017; Ging 2017). As Roose et al. (2020) point out, far-right discourses are artfully calibrated ‘to reach men at an emotional and experiential level’. They attempt to amplify the strong emotions of anger and disappointment experienced by young men who fall short in relationships with women and feel that the labor market is letting them down. Elsewhere, young (white) men may drift into far-right discourse through experiencing the defiant ‘fun’ of white power rock music and partying (Shekhovtsov and Jackson 2012) and the iconoclastic attraction of neo-fascist ‘merch’ (see Miller-Idriss and Graefe-Geusch 2020).

Finally, the attraction of young (white) men to far-right discourse may well represent their temporal location in the period of youth (Latif et al. 2020) rather than signaling a life-long pathway of involvement in the field (Cassam 2022; Kruglanski et al. 2019; Berger 2018). Kimmel (2007) points out that supporting far-right discourse may be a ‘rite of passage’ for some young (white) men, echoing their temporal involvement in petty crime and fight clubs. Miller-Idriss and Graefe-Geusch (2020) found that perhaps the majority of (white) German youth who profess support move in and out of scenes associated with far-right discourse throughout their adolescence, representing that discourse primarily in clothing, hair style, tattoos, and musculature. It is likely that engagement with the far right will diminish as they get older and try to achieve important life goals in their careers and personal lives (Latif et al. 2020). That makes it even more important that research projects on young people and the far right engage youthful informants directly, accommodating the likelihood that this constitutes a temporal phase.

3. Methodological Challenges

The phenomenon of rapidly rising far-right populism has created the demand for not only more information but more studies in the field of social science (Ashe et al. 2020). Accordingly, a lot of academic research has been conducted on the topic. For example, there have been studies of far-right political parties (McSwiney 2024), far-right groups (Stern 2019; Campbell 2022; Forberg 2022), far-right movements (Toscano 2019; Zúquete 2018; Blee 2007), far-right online networks (Urman and Katz 2022), neo-fascist perpetrators (Hutchinson 2019), and acts of far-right violence and terrorism (Ahmed and Lynch 2021). Yet, as Korstenbroek (2024) points out, much research risks disengagement from the people concerned. Often such studies talk about, rather than with, supporters of far-right populism. Frequently, they do not venture beyond analysis of online content (notable exceptions include Castelli Gattinara and Piero 2024; Caiani et al. 2022). There is no doubt that non-face-to-face research creates useful knowledge in the field. Network analysis, for example, has effectively demonstrated how far-right social actors connect to one another and how information and resources flow through their social networks (Urman and Katz 2022). Elsewhere, US researcher Forberg (2022) has illustrated how the far-right populist conspiracy theory group QAnon is able to appeal to a wide constituency by applying the innovative social science method of algorithmic ethnography. In another study of QAnon, this time in the Netherlands, Korstenbroek (2024) deployed multi-method virtual ethnography to map out online right-wing nationalist discourses and the kinds of people that support them. Nevertheless, as a dedicated youth researcher, I find that I want to hear the voices of young people themselves, even if they are saying things that I would not normally like to hear. I therefore pose the question—what happens when the supporters of far-right populism are from a younger generation while the researchers are from an older generation?

The Problem of Generations

Many researchers looking at the far right in my own field of youth studies feel it is appropriate to engage directly with young people rather than observe them from afar, as it were. However, direct engagement with informants on the topic of far-right support presents a number of obstacles. A significant challenge for senior academics investigating the world views of young people (sympathizers with far-right populism or not) is the generation gap, or what Karl Mannheim (1972) called ‘the problem of generations’. Generations are not just defined by chronological age but also by the shared experiences and social conditions of one generation compared to another, which can be very different indeed. Thus, the first barrier to understanding between the senior academic and the youthful informant is a generational one. A familiar methodological question arises: ‘How does an outsider gain an insider’s view?’ (Carspecken 1996, p. 17). More cogently, how do you collect data from ‘angry’ young white men (see Korstenbroek 2024), when not just your age but your gender, political views, and digital capacity do not match? Vaughan (2024) points to the ‘epistemic exclusion’ of some kinds of researchers from engaging in direct (face-to-face) data collection from supporters of far-right populism. It amounts to more than a generational struggle to create rapport with informants (Sibley 2024; Damhuis and de Jonge 2022). The challenge is compounded by political and gender differences, as well as likely lack of familiarity with up-to-the-minute technological affordances online. A solid bridge is often needed. That brings us to the matter of research assistants and their compatibility with youthful informants.

I suggest that younger male research interviewers might be more suitable to establish rapport and gain better insights. This follows from the point made by Damhuis and de Jonge (2022, p. 5) that ‘there are some factors that can make it particularly challenging to gain access to radical right respondents (e.g., gender, race or ethnicity), which cannot simply be masked or downplayed’ (see also Vaughan 2024). Similarly, as Lofland et al. (2006) point out, depending on the nature of the project, there may be great value in matching the ascriptive characteristics of the researcher and the informant. Of course, the claim that it is beneficial for interviewers and interviewees to be similar to each other cannot be applied to all cases and research settings. There is extensive literature on qualitative research in dangerous, violent settings and with hard-to-reach populations, which claims that being different in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, cultural background, or status can actually be a door opener.

Researchers are expected to examine phenomena and groups beyond their own lived experiences using the tool of interview. However, at times interviewing carries particular risks. One of these risks is for the interviewer to ‘uncritically accept interviewee responses at face value’ (Khalil 2019). It can be argued that the likelihood of that increases if there is interviewee hostility aroused by age, gender, and race gaps that pertain directly to the propaganda favored by the informant in the case of the far right. For instance, the interviewee may choose to offend and shock rather than explain and offer justifications. Carthy and Schuurman (2023) point out the specific challenges in collecting live data from any larger group that legitimizes and supports extremist violence, such as far-right direct action. They pose the important question of how to ensure candid responses in such an interview. That dovetails neatly into the findings of the paper by Wilkinson and Wilkinson (2024) that looks at instances of what can go wrong in an interview encounter. Using examples from their own studies, the researchers conclude that intersections of age, gender, and appearance can negatively affect the interview context. Yet at the same time, we are reminded that while researching young male supporters of the far right can be challenging, it may not be inherently more difficult than researching other marginal and possibly resentful communities.

To support my suggestion about positive aspects of age/gender alignment, I offer two reflective insights from the field of my own research as a youth sociologist who has been working on far-right populism. In the main, the data quotes below come from work that has already been published (see reference list).

4. Analytic Reflection

4.1. Accessing Online Youth Culture

In this section, I focus on how far-right, misogynist, and homophobic messaging intervenes into young male-dominated gaming culture via unregulated platforms such as Discord, a free communication app. I suggest ways that older researchers might obtain useful knowledge about this phenomenon.

The example comes from when I was assembling background information for my book on young people and the far right (Nilan 2021) in 2019. I realized that I needed some insider knowledge about what was happening online. It was clear from the relevant literature that far-right populist influencers capitalize on the affordances of digital platforms for the purpose of disseminating intolerant ideas, especially to young people (Zhang and Davis 2022). For example, I found the intriguing claim that gaming platforms and apps are infiltrated by far-right discourse that encourages hate speech and harassment (Urman and Katz 2022). It was clearly something I needed to know about, but just reading the academic literature was not going to be sufficient for me to gain a deep understanding of what happens in online gaming. As an older female academic, I do not play video games or frequent platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Reddit, nor do I watch youth-oriented YouTube clips.

The solution I chose was to employ young net-savvy (male) research advisors¹. Unlike the usual research assistants recruited to work on social science research projects (postgraduate students), these were two male gamers in their late teens who spent a lot of time online. Through their valuable input, I was able to identify key narratives shaping discourses and typical patterns of communication, including acronyms, catchphrases, visual puns, and the like. This greatly assisted my assembly of a fine-tuned literature review. My later reflection was that those gamers had contributed to my knowledge like ‘key informants’ in the anthropological sense. In traditional anthropology, key informants provide insider knowledge about kinship and family organization, gender and age hierarchies, modes of governance, and religious/cultural beliefs and practices (Bernard 2017). In short, key informants help the researcher to understand cultural patterns in the relevant community (Creswell 2007). They can provide vital background information for a research project that might otherwise prove inaccessible, confusing or difficult to verify.

I was fortunate to sign up keen gamers who quickly confirmed Cameron (2019)’s finding that young men prefer ‘shooter’ genres. I sat and watched as they enjoyed playing their favorites, making notes by hand. In 2019, the most popular games were of the action/adventure virtual world genre, Minecraft and Apex Legends, and an epic multiplayer shooter game, Battle Royale. There was also Fortnite, which is similar to Apex Legends. The Counter-Strike series was also current. It was a tactical shooter game where you form a team with other players comprising either terrorists or the government agents trying to stop them. The military genre series Call of Duty was also popular in both single-player and multiplayer modes. Call of Duty inducts players into fast-paced battles across various historical time periods, fictional eras, and other worlds. Discord is one of the gaming chat apps that players use to talk amongst themselves as they play. One of the gamers told me, ‘I play this game [Apex Legends] constantly talking to friends on Discord’. Discord and other sites like it have long been seeded with misogynist, white supremacist, and anti-democratic discourse (Nilan and Gentles 2024, p. 41).

I recorded the young gamers chatting boisterously online as they played exciting competitions in teams made up of peers across the world. However, I did not analyze those recordings as primary data but rather treated them as background knowledge that informed my sense of the interactive talk that took place. The gamers showed me comment pages where some participants anonymously posted misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, and racist material, very often disguised as jokes, appended with laugh acronyms such as LOL or LULZ. I found that discourse quite disturbing. However, the young gamers said they paid little attention to such ‘trash talk’ or ‘shit posting’ (see Nagle 2017). They were not in the habit of intervening or arguing back (see Obermaier 2024). Later, using YouTube clips, the gamers were readily able to demonstrate to me a typical trip down the ‘rabbit hole’ of ever more extreme far-right conspiracy theories and expressions of race and gender hatred.

One valuable insight I gained from my young key informants concerned the practice of ‘griefing’. Griefing means deliberately causing trouble for other game players, not just trying to beat them. For example, griefing might be repeatedly killing the same combatant avatar so that another player cannot move forward. It might be reversing the play of newer gamers so they do not learn the rules, or messing with another gamer’s play by blocking their shots. Griefing tactics are not about winning. They are conducted so the griefer can have a nasty laugh at someone else’s expense (Nilan and Gentles 2024, p. 39). In form, they resemble trolling, which is a favored right-wing and misogynist tactic. The gamers also described for me the ‘edgelord’—typically a man who represents a provocative or extreme persona online. He gains attention by posting exaggerated opinions with regard to nihilism or even genocide, for example. All of these insights from the young gamers were invaluable for forming a sense of the online sphere where far-right discourse is informally disseminated to young men. It confirmed for me that far-right populist influencers indeed target the young white male gaming environment. A further insight was that hate discourses build semantically on the basic goal of shooter games: ruthless elimination of the enemy, invariably depicted as an ill-intentioned ‘other’ (Baumgarten 2017). They capitalize on the mischievous practice of griefing, and the fact that young men ‘live chat’—swearing, cursing, and yelling—during multi-play (Dauber et al. 2019, p. 23). I came to see how the bellicose masculinist environment of gaming might offer fertile ground for far-right populist ideas to take root.

All of the above was unknown to me prior to the book project. It made me sharply aware that I knew almost nothing about this online world in which far-right populist influencers found ways to appeal to young men. The example implies that a senior researcher in the dynamic field of youth studies should critically question the accepted wisdom and methodologies in the historical canon of studies of young people and the cultural worlds they inhabit. As Mannheim (1972) pointed out, a generation may be defined as a set of temporally co-located individuals who all experience a specific historical event that signifies major transformation. The younger generation today grew up in the Web 2.0 era and probably cannot imagine an entirely offline world, whereas previous generations such as my own did not have that same experience.

4.2. Matching Interviewers and Interviewees

The second example in this reflective essay is taken from a funded project on masculinity and the far right in Australia. The project received university human ethics research approval for both quantitative and qualitative data gathering. It should be noted that the questions avoided probing into the nature of informants’ illegal practices, intended or otherwise. In Australia, as in the UK, researchers are legally obliged to report individuals who appear to have the potential to engage in terrorist or violent activities. We were interested primarily in far-right discourses and personal explanations.

In 2020, during the COVID19 pandemic, decisions had to be made. The first was that interviews would be conducted by Zoom. The four chief investigators on the project then discussed how to best collect data from men who had agreed on the survey form to be interviewed later. The survey results showed that 203 of the 335 voluntary respondents (over 60%) were men aged 18–35. Those younger men reported using digital and social media for their news and information and were frequent gamers. Their responses to open survey questions demonstrated some strong far-right views and extensive misogynist discourse (see Nilan et al. 2025). I felt that I could not conduct interviews with those who had subsequently volunteered for interview. Not only did I not match the predominantly youthful cohort in terms of age, I constitute the non-aligned gender. And there were other risks. Sometimes, data-gathering engagement can pose a risk in itself for the researcher (see Lee 1995; Van Maanen 1988).

For instance, as a cutting-edge journalist, Andrew Marantz has interviewed young male fans of the US-based Proud Boys, a right-wing extremist group whose supporters embrace misogynistic, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic, and anti-LGBTQ+ ideologies. The material he obtained has a great deal to tell us about young white men and the far right. For example, one informant told him at a right-wing rally, ‘[now] I’m proud to be white (…) Being a white cis male is the worst thing you can be. Like Gavin [McInnes] always says, why should I apologize for being who I am?’ (quoted in Marantz 2019, p.22). However, in his writing, Marantz expresses anxiety at embedding with ill-intentioned people on the far right. He fears that no matter how much critical distance he tries to maintain, the very act of immersion implicates him somehow. Furthermore, he and his family have been subjected to online threats, trolling, and doxxing.

The reader may be wondering why so many researchers in the field use the term ‘angry young white men’? According to Kalish and Kimmel (2010), some young white men, especially those in precarious work situations, feel a strong sense of ‘aggrieved entitlement’. The labor market has changed markedly for their generation. For instance, secure employment as a male blue-collar worker is now consigned to the past. Short-term, contract, and even day-by-day work has become the norm for unskilled and semi-skilled workers. Even those with qualifications and experience must try to manage in an atmosphere of work precarity (Standing 2011). As Elliott (2019) points out, there are affinity links between masculinity and constituent statuses of race, class, work, and heterosexuality that are impressed on young men as they grow up, offline and online. When those elements of an ideal self encounter the increasingly precarious and uncertain structures of an unstable labor market, fluid gender identity, and gender relations, then some young men flounder (Kimmel 2010; Standing 2011). Populist rhetoric encourages their anger (Marantz 2019) and they express it outwardly against elites, women, feminists, LGBTQ+ people, people of color, recent immigrants, and so on (Kelly 2017).

Women academics and experts are often the target of much far-right vitriol (Kavanagh and Brown 2019). Indeed, recently two younger female researchers of my acquaintance who conducted interviews and then published their research on the far right have been extensively trolled and threatened online, with one being forced to move house after she was doxxed—her home address was publicly disseminated.

Thus, the project team decided to match the interviewers to the interviewees as much as possible, aligning them primarily in terms of age and style of masculinity. That tactic acknowledges the argument of Khan and MacEachen (2022) that an interviewer’s gender, sexuality, race, and age will have a profound impact on building rapport in the interview conversation. We felt we were likely to obtain more informative answers if the male interviewee, often a far-right sympathizer, felt comfortable talking to a neutral peer interviewer. At the same time, there was to be no covert angle. Under the human ethics protocol approval, the interviewees viewed a clear statement of information about the project. The chief investigators were clearly identified on the information statement. Once they had read the statement, they were asked to sign a consent form before the interview commenced.

We trained a couple of younger postgraduate men of neutral appearance² as interviewers, offering advice on how to remain calm, encouraging, and objective. The interviewers were encouraged not to verbally disagree with the interviewees but rather to politely ask for clarification.

Confirming the survey trend, a lot of the interviewee commentary was oriented to far-right populist discourse, for example:

[When] I think of the left, I think of like Soviets, Mao Tse-Tung, Pol Pot, Hitler a little bit, he’s a complicated figure, the left will be like oh, he’s right wing (…) but he wasn’t, it was the National Socialist Party.

(Evan, 35³, landscaper, de facto, original emphasis)

Another informant said that he really liked what Donald Trump had to say:

Trump is just saying the things that I’d been thinking for most of my life’.

(Scott, 30, truck driver, married)

The discourse of white male victimhood was frequently articulated, for example:

Like, a white male under 25 is the worst thing I could be right now.

(Ethan, 24, studying agriculture, single)

Informants were often highly negative on the topic of feminism:

Feminism, to me, should have been finished in the 70s. I mean there’s equal rights, there’s equal pay, if anything, it’s gone the other way in a lot of ways, and now it’s just forcing women into roles that I don’t know if they even think they want.

(Scott, 30, truck driver, married)

The mention of roles here was instructive. Many of the interviewees thought men and women were biologically determined to carry out heteronormative roles. In a similar way, several interviewees explained that violence was natural for men:

Violence is a part of man’s psyche, violence is what men have had to use in the past to get what they need and get what they want, protect what they want to protect, so it’s sort of ingrained in men from, I don’t know, say thousands of years ago.

(Paul, mid-30s, engineering sub-manager, married)

And:

Men are flooded with testosterone which is a hormone that increases violent tendencies, so if you take a cross section of the violent to least violent people, nine out of ten of the most violent people will be men (…) So that means it’s a part of our nature.

(Ian, mid-thirties, allied health worker, married)

To some extent, this echoes the claim in the relevant literature that one of the core characteristics of collective far-right radical action is ‘the moral precondition of violence as natural’ (Heino 2024).

Use of the word ‘our’ in the last line of Ian’s reply above implicitly includes the (male) interviewer, suggesting gender co-recognition. Further indication of this rapprochement was shown in the interviewer’s reaction to a state of high emotion in the interviewee. So for example, if an interviewee answered the set interview question about men and violence in a loud and angry way, the male interviewer would calmly inform them that their answer was interesting and ask them to explain further. They usually then explained their comment in a less volatile way. Ian laid it out quite didactically:

You can either channel that [violence] constructively or fail to channel that constructively, or you can attempt to quash it with disastrous consequences (…) either channelling it effectually into non-constructive activities, or it’s trying to quash it with labels such as toxic masculinity.

(Ian, mid-thirties, allied health worker, married)

Yet another interviewee gave an example of channeling men’s violence constructively, along the traditional path of ‘leadership’, connoting patriarchal authority:

There’s a podcaster in the states that I listen to, his name is Ryan Michler, his podcast is called Order of Man, and he basically advocates for a revival of masculinity (…) talking about a traditional idea or sense of masculinity and trying to spread that (…) it’s largely about encouragement for men to lead families, to lead communities, to lead societies, basically.

(Will, mid-thirties, farm supervisor, single)

Reading over the interview transcripts, I could see that when answers to questions were short, the interviewers successfully used polite and friendly prompts to move the conversation on in the direction of the project objectives. Thus, one of the interviewers asked: Interviewer:

Okay. I’m interested when you say women’s rights have gone too far. Can you be more specific about that?

The informant seemed keen to answer:

Yeah, sure. One big thing is the gender pay gap (…) you’re not even allowed to argue how they’ve got to that statistic, and like I said (…) women don’t spend as long in the workforce because they have children.

(Bryce, early 30s, solar panel installer, de facto)

Bryce claims that men are now condemned for questioning gender-affirmative action based on the Australian Bureau of Statistics figures on women’s economic disadvantage. He infers the figures are wrong because women spend time out the workforce. The implication is that the statistics have been manipulated by a feminist-friendly government to justify giving women a labor force advantage of some kind. Scott articulated more or less the same discourse of male victimhood:

Why are we not talking about men’s place now in the world? Like you look at social media and it’s obvious that women sit on top of that hierarchy, right? And I just think men these days, I think a lot of us are lonely.

(Scott, 30, truck driver, married)

The assertion that today’s men are victims and women call the shots makes for difficult listening. Women in Australia experience endemic social and economic barriers and disadvantages, as well as high levels of domestic violence (Government of Australia 2020). Nevertheless, rich evidence about the prevalence of the discourse of (white) male victimhood constituted productive data for our research.

Racial prejudice was typically aired in anti-immigration sentiments, such as:

I think a lot of the immigrants, like [from] India, well of Indian appearance, they can’t really keep up with the way our traffic works, social etiquette, you’ve got two families in a house—and like how they keep the street!.

(Evan, 35, landscaper, de facto)

And:

I just think bringing boatload after boatload of people is doing nothing but diluting our culture.

(Scott, 30, truck driver, married)

When informant Scott became highly emotional on an issue such as immigration or women, the interviewer would typically pose a question that invited a moment of reflection, for example: Interviewer:

Does the Australian dream apply to you?

In the interview, the informant replied in a calmer tone, yet pessimistically, and with a nostalgic twist: Scott:

It did when I was a child growing up, I grew up in it. I don’t know if it’s possible anymore.

Toward the end of his interview, Scott strongly concurred with Evan’s similar view of Adolf Hitler, saying angrily that he ‘wouldn’t call Hitler right wing, if anything he was a fucking socialist’. Yet shortly afterward, Scott’s interview finished politely, as follows: Interviewer:

I really appreciate your time.

Scott:

No worries. Thank you.

Interviewer:

No worries. Take it easy.

Scott:

You too, mate, bye.

From this exchange it seems that Scott felt he was listened to carefully and treated with respect by the young man interviewing him, whom he warmly addressed as ‘mate’ in the final seconds, further signaling co-recognition. As Lareau (2021) points out, there is nothing like carefully listening to people openly tell you things if you want to know what is going on. It seems doubtful the informants would have been so comfortable and frank about their contentious views if they were not talking ‘man-to-man’ with someone who was not too dissimilar.

5. Discussion

Several points concerning research on youth and far-right populism emerge from the examples above that can productively inform our ongoing practice. First, we can make worthwhile use of the knowledge and status of young people who more or less occupy the demographic position that is regularly targeted for far-right propaganda and persuasion. Even if they are not full ‘insiders’, they may be considered as ‘insighters’—investigators who can identify with certain key structural experiences on the part of informants (Sharp 2020). Second, as the digital world becomes rapidly more complex and immersive, youthful key informants should arguably play a more significant role in the field of youth studies. As cultural experts in their own quotidian activities, they can readily explain contemporary youth culture and practices to established academics in the youth studies field who are nonetheless relative novices about what is currently happening in the relevant online sphere.

Third, young (male) sympathizers with far-right populism typically have little tolerance for non-whites, women, gender-diverse people, older academics, or for men who do not match their own style of masculinity. That is a key component of the right-wing populist discourse they follow. So, it makes sense to engage demographically similar men as interviewers. In principle, co-recognition should better enable the interviewer to elicit highly relevant accounts (Hochschild 2016) and gain rich accounts from young men who engage in forms of far-right populism. As we glimpsed in the second example above, such an interviewer can also help to calm the emotions of the interviewee, encouraging productive reflection on the part of the informant.

Both of the examples from my previous research, linked thematically as they are, point to how social scientists studying youth and far-right populism can pioneer some new approaches. There are indications here of how a researcher might expand away from focusing on the external and clearly visible signs of online far-right discourse and activity, to allow the voices of young sympathizers with far-right discourse to be heard. Building on that argument, there are other benefits in engaging appropriately positioned youthful research assistants. Given the nature of far-right discourse, which is often ‘distasteful’ and ‘repugnant’ (Pearson 2019, p. 1253), young key informants may reveal other ways to read the data. For example, when my 2019 teenaged informants showed me gamer comment pages, I was initially horrified by the virulent far-right and misogynist content. However, they said they routinely disregarded such ‘shit posting’. Their ‘insighter’ attitude encouraged me to look beyond sensationalist far-right messaging itself and focus on the diverse effects that same discourse might have on different kinds of young people.

6. Conclusions

This paper has reflected on the challenges facing qualitative researchers who study far-right populism and youth. The arguments throughout have salience for the broader field of qualitative youth research. In the fast-moving world of the present day, the generational gap between researchers and the researched never disappears. Rather, it intensifies. Senior researchers can help to overcome that challenge by availing themselves of vital cultural knowledge about contemporary youth though the paradigm of the key informant, even one who may not be directly connected to a far-right network. My argument above also acknowledges the difficulties of talking face-to-face with a specific cohort of young people who are often suspicious of outsiders and who may even pose a personal security risk to the interviewer. Accessing young people whose voices are seldom heard for research purposes may require approaches that go beyond business as usual. Using examples from my own research practice, I hope to open reflection on the part of readers about new generational angles that may be required and approaches to data collection that recognize and work through the deeply imbricated generational interface between the offline and online worlds of young people. Successful projects of that kind will maximize the chances of obtaining informative data on the rapidly-growing phenomenon of youth supporting far-right populism. Moreover, success in data collection will ultimately benefit the quality and integrity of research outputs. I am reminded that young people who engage with far-right discourse may be trying to make sense of unprecedented and disruptive global and personal events, including gender diversity and increasingly precarious labor sectors. The black and white contours of far-right misogynist and racist discourse not only offers a framework for making meaning out of apparently threatening changes but gives them a sense of agency—the idea that there is something that can and should be done to restore the old order. Strategically, we need to gain vital information about the contours of that framework from young people themselves.

Institutional Review Board Statement

The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee of the Australian Catholic University, 2020-64H on 30 July 2020.

Informed Consent Statement

Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.

Data Availability Statement

No new data were created or analyzed in this study.

Conflicts of Interest

The author declares no conflicts of interest.

Footnotes

Notes

1. They were paid for their time.

2. All informant names used here are pseudonyms.

3. Neutrality here refers to: (1) neither too young or too old; (2) neat haircut; (3) low-key casual clothing; (4) no visible tattoos or piercings.

Footnotes

Disclaimer/Publisher’s Note: The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of MDPI and/or the editor(s). MDPI and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content.

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