Abstract
The study of rhetoric, throughout its history, has generally focused on production rather than reception. The same applies to studies of extremist political rhetoric. In this context, albeit with some important caveats, social media offers an accessible way to pay closer attention to ‘what people hear’. This chapter will use evidence from Twitter and Facebook to explore what people make of the extremist discourses around them: what they notice, how they understand it, and how they respond to it. It pays particular evidence to examples where communities vilified by extremist rhetoric show an awareness of it and explores the poetics of those responses.
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- 1.
Versions of this chapter have been discussed with participants at a symposium on extremism and the far-right, held by Victoria University in Melbourne in December 2017, and also a conference of the Global Rhetoric Society at the University of Huaqiao the same month. The authors are grateful for all input received.
- 2.
As the language here implies, not one of this chapter’s authors is a far-right figure, whether senior or otherwise. Doubtless more sympathetic researchers would write a different paper.
- 3.
- 4.
There were a few years at the start of this millennium when the phrase was Web 2.0 media platform. It was already essentially an emphasis on interactive publishing, before social media platforms made both participation and exposure ubiquitous.
- 5.
In a spirit of transparency, we should declare that one of the authors knows Dastyari personally, and gave pro bono speechwriting advice for his first speech to the senate. It is coincidental that the abuse incident described here also occurred at that author’s workplace.
- 6.
This affiliation had a farcical reprise over subsequent days, when the lawyers for a television drama series about a far-right group in Melbourne, Romper Stomper, sent a letter of demand to the putative advocates for Patriots Blue, demanding they use a different name. It is the moniker for the fictional band of extremists at the heart of the show. Intellectual property laws are in tension with life imitating art.
- 7.
Since resigning from parliament, Dastyari has taken down his Facebook account, meaning that only archival versions are now available.
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Clark, T., Gerbaudo, P., Willis, I. (2019). Hear What I Hear, See What I See: Relating Extremist Rhetoric to the Communities That Notice It. In: Peucker, M., Smith, D. (eds) The Far-Right in Contemporary Australia. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8351-9_7
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