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A Climate for Hate? An Exploration of the Right-Wing Extremist Landscape in Canada

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Abstract

This article highlights the social, cultural, and political landscape in which organized hate groups emerge, drawing from a 3-year study of the right-wing extremist movement in Canada. Through extensive interviews with law enforcement, community activists and hate group activists, as well as open source intelligence, we examined the factors that are associated with the emergence of right-wing extremist groups and right-wing inspired violence in Canada in the early to mid 2010s. Here, our focus is on the social contexts that enable such groups to flourish. We first lay out the theoretical frame to understand how broader social, cultural and political patterns render “permission to hate”. We consider the environmental factors that we identified, during our fieldwork, as particularly important in facilitating right-wing extremism.

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Notes

  1. All author names were assigned with pseudonyms to protect user anonymity. All online posts were quoted verbatim.

  2. See http://nspcanada.nfshost.com.

  3. See https://immigrationwatchcanada.org.

  4. See https://immigrationwatchcanada.org/bulletins/bulletins-since-2010/page/9/.

  5. See https://www.facebook.com/Pegida.canada/photos/a.1534518543491882.1073741828.1533411596935910/1663626637247738/?type=3&theater.

  6. See http://www.natparty.com/bobsbeat.htm.

  7. See http://golden-dawn-international-newsroom.blogspot.ca/p/our-identity.html.

  8. Following our 3-year study, Public Safety Canada has—in some respects—begun to acknowledge the threat posed by RWEs in Canada, nothing in their 2017 Public Report on the Terrorist Threat to Canada that radical right-wing ideology can fuel terrorism in Canada.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, 325-55 Bond Street East, Oshawa, ON, Canada

    Barbara Perry

  2. School of Criminology, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, Canada

    Ryan Scrivens

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Correspondence to Barbara Perry.

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Perry, B., Scrivens, R. A Climate for Hate? An Exploration of the Right-Wing Extremist Landscape in Canada. Crit Crim 26, 169–187 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-018-9394-y

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