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

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.