“Swallowing the Red Pill”: The Coronavirus Pandemic and the Political Imaginary of Stigmatized Knowledge in the Discourse of the Far-Right

Pandemic disease is not merely a biological reality but also a cognitive and socially constructed phenomenon which intensely mobilizes a multiplicity of political frames. Far-right political entrepreneurs are, despite their remoteness from actual decision-making processes, active stakeholders in the current crisis. Existential threats to societies breed a sense of urgency and heightened cultural warfare that is a hotbed for extremism. Our study seeks to map, compare and contrast the symbolic responses to the Coronavirus crisis articulated by various far-right actors in two established democracies in the transatlantic area: the United States and France. We aim to shed light on how entrenched far-right mythologies and tropes—which appear increasingly transatlantic—are channeled into a new synthesis as part of an “alternative” political epistemology. Infused with the mythos of resistance and insurgency, resolutely anti-systemic, this alternative epistemology can better be described, following Michael Barkun, as a form of “stigmatized knowledge”. Our study will employ a Critical Discourse Analysis framework to bring into focus the ideological semiotics of the current “infodemic” in the Euro-American far-right’s response to the COVID-19 crisis. To some extent, all groups and actors under study exhibited a conspiracist framework. We contend that conspiracist counter-epistemologies are an integral — and increasingly important — part of the semiotics of the new culture wars which have engulfed the COVID-19 response.