'Following the Science': Far right knowledge, postfascism, and hegemony in Aotearoa New Zealand during COVID-19

We face a global proliferation and consolidation of far-right political movements, regimes, and ideologies, recently theorised as postfascism. This fascism connects a constellation of heterogenous movements that, during the conjuncture of the COVID-19 pandemic, were forced to confront a moment of scientifically mediated crisis. This thesis presents a thematic analysis of three case studies, spanning more mainstream to explicitly white nationalist organisations, and their engagement with scientific knowledge during this moment of potential political rupture. I show how these organisations simultaneously appropriated and critiqued scientific knowledge, its institutions, and representations, mobilising the perceived scientific credibility of (some of) their popularisers to represent pseudo-science, conspiracy theorising, and reactionary ideologies as a populist resistance to power; to gain access to mainstream attention; and to reconfigure the common-sense of ‘ordinary-people’ into a counter-hegemonic project opposed to ‘globalism.’

In service of this project, organisations appealed to Enlightenment values of rational enquiry, open debate, and freedom of speech, scientific ideals of universalism, objectivity and empiricism, and characterised political opponents as inherently political, or emotional. On the other hand, some invoked a deep, romantic, mystical connection to the environment through land, nation, blood, and soil, decrying the degeneracy of modernity, claiming concern for human impacts on the environment, and romanticising a return to a simpler, localised, agrarian lifestyle. I argue that ‘science’ and scientific knowledge functioned as a key feature of the cultural landscape that these organisations had to navigate on a broader terrain of political and cultural struggle—a struggle deeply imbricated with Aotearoa’s history of settler-colonialism and contemporary reactionary responses to interlocking crises of capitalist modernity.