Chapter 3: Populism, Nationalism and Masculinity Today: A Review

In 2017, Brian Ott published an analysis of the Twitter feed of Donald Trump in the journal Critical Studies in Media Communication. He had done most of the analysis before Trump was elected, but was given a chance by the editors of the journal to reflect on the result of the election. The main part of the chapter outlines in depressing detail how Trump uses his tweets to enhance his rhetoric on the campaign trail and in the public sphere. That rhetoric aligns with conspiracy theories that circulate freely on the alt-right and far-right: falsehoods about Obama not being born in the United States; or falsehoods about corruption among the Clintons and the wider establishment in Washington, DC (Coady, 2019). Trump may believe these, or he may just use them to inflame anger and loyalty among the angry working-class white men who swap these conspiracy theories on the internet (Mudde, 2017). This conspiracy-minded rhetoric elides freely into anti-Semitism, and beliefs that Jews control world affairs, a view that is held by many alt-right followers as well as their populist politicians, even though they also hold onto the belief that Muslims are the enemy of the white race too (Mudde, 2017; Van Prooijen, Krouwel, & Pollet, 2015). The alt-right fear of foreigners, migrants, Latinos, black people and Muslims is the fear that these people are favoured by liberal elites in the same way that the same liberal elites promote gender equality and promote LGBT equality (Neiwert, 2017). Before the election, Ott (2017, p. 64) concludes by saying: