Challenges in Studying Youth and the Influence of Far-Right Populism

Abstract

This reflective essay presents some examples of overcoming challenges that can face academic researchers who study young people and far-right populism using qualitative methods. Misogyny and mistrust of elites are common features of far-right populism. Therefore, a challenge lies in the markers of age, gender and institutional status of the researchers themselves, which might prevent rapport from developing between an interviewer and interviewee. Moreover, there is the challenge of the digital generation to be faced in any such investigation. Young people today inhabit a fast-moving world of social media engagement which can be difficult for anyone older to comprehend. Suitably selected young people can assist research endeavours in the role of cultural brokers. Using examples of lived research experience, the author invites reader reflection on attuning research approaches to the lifeworlds of young people, especially young men, who engage with far-right populism.

1. Introduction

In the field of youth studies, methodology is always in need of improvement through critical reflection. This paper provides a reflexive academic consideration of some of the challenges in studying youth and the far right.

Young people dominate the ranks of sympathisers with radical right politics (Abou-Chadi, 2024; Mieriņa & Koroļeva, 2015). Categorical nationalism has become much more popular among youth, strengthening the racialised boundary between ‘us’ and ‘the other’ which is fundamental to right-wing populism (Mudde, 2014). According to Simi and Futrell (2015), 15–25 year-olds are those most likely to endorse the far-right, with significant drop out after the age of 30 as other life course imperatives take hold. Youth may be drawn to far-right messaging because it seems like ‘a space to express anger, rebellion and resistance against the mainstream’ (Miller-Idriss, 2018, p. 356; see also Mudde, 2014; Kimmel, 2018). Krasteva (2016, p. 150) reports that right-wing extremist youth in Europe said they felt like a ‘lost generation’. Franc and Pavlović (2023) found that attraction to far-right extremism was most evident among young Europeans who felt they lacked power, both politically and over their own lives. Rydgren (2013) maintains that disenfranchised young (white) people tend to perceive injustice and inequality in subjective, even personal terms. Their precarious circumstances almost invariably arise from deeper economic and political changes, but far-right propaganda invites them to blame cultural invasion, affirmative action, and abrogation of racialised and gendered entitlement (Nilan & Gentles, 2024).

Although some young women certainly do get involved, far-right populism has particular appeal for young white men (see Abou-Chadi, 2024; Campbell, 2022; Van Valkenburgh, 2021; Ralph-Morrow, 2022; Dietze & Roth, 2020; Stern, 2019; Graff et al., 2019). Moreover, the reception of populism is inflected by socio-economic status and levels of educational attainment, especially the economic challenges young men face. Thus, it is predominantly young men from lower socio-economic groups that support populist right candidates and parties. Mudde (2018) warns us to take masculinity far more seriously in our discussions of far-right populism because influencers directly appeal to a fragile masculinity, allegedly threatened by emasculating feminists, effeminate liberals, and invading ‘outsiders’ who demand an active defence (Nilan et al., 2025). The popular notion of ‘white male victimhood’ is strongly mediated online. It encourages men to believe their lives have been ruined by women’s rights, women per se, queer politics and immigration (Banet-Weiser, 2020). As Elliott (2019) points out, there are affinity links between masculinity and constituent statuses of race, class, work and heterosexuality that are impressed on young men as they grow up, offline and online. When those elements of habitus (Bourdieu, 1990) meet the increasingly precarious and uncertain structures of an unstable labour market, of fluid gender identity and gender relations, then some young men do feel they are floundering (Kimmel, 2010; Standing, 2011). They become more vulnerable to far-right populist rhetoric that constructs them as the victims of feminism and/or unrecognised heroes in a race war (Marantz, 2019). We can readily find emotive narratives of heroism redeemed (see Johanssen, 2022) that suggest white (male) victimhood can only be resolved by taking a strong stand. For example, Zúquete (2018) points out that European far-right discourse claims there is a deliberate process underway to demographically and culturally replace white ‘natives’ with people from incompatible ethnic, religious and cultural backgrounds. The answer is for far-right supporters to stand up and take action against them (Camus, 2018).

2. Conceptual Framework

The Effect of Digital Media

Young people can be valuable cultural brokers when digital media form part of the phenomenon under investigation. Unlike previous generations, young people today lead ‘digital lives’ (Tilleczek, 2019). As of 2022, global internet usage was higher among individuals between 15 and 24 years, with young people in Europe representing the most significant usage penetration of 98 per cent (Statista, 2023). Therefore, the youth generation has become an online political target of the far right. For example, early in 2024, key figures in the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD) were capitalising on the popularity of youth-oriented social media TikTok to spread extremist views. According to a major poll published in April 2024, AfD is now the favourite party among young people aged 14 to 29 due to social media influence (Deutsche Welle, 2024). As a general observation, the online world is now so vast in scale that even net-savvy youth tend to occupy only a relatively small niche of contacts with whom they share ideas and feel comfortable. That online filter bubble makes the digital world seem safe and comfortable. Yet while the secure bubble of the apparently like-minded is reassuring, it carries its own risks. It can increase the likelihood of an ‘echo chamber’ effect, where something is judged to be true because it comes from someone you know, and appears in a lot of places simultaneously, leading to confirmation bias. Far-right populist messaging takes algorithmic advantage of that digital affordance. For instance, Peucker and Fisher (2022) identify a hyper-partisan online media ecosystem at the far-right fringes in Australia, operating not only through niche platforms like Gab, but spilling out into moderated platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Men are the ostensible targets of that propaganda, particularly since they spend more time online compared to women (Petrosyan, 2024).

Taking account of the affective aspects of discourse and practice is important for understanding the appeal of far-right populist messaging to young people. A major risk is that young people typically trust online peer-generated information and advice as legitimate sources. The high-pressure 24/7 online environment means young people face constant self-comparison with what age- and gender peers are saying, doing and achieving. The smartphone itself is a notorious generator of status anxiety, facilitating fretful self-surveillance and the search for personal validation (Colak, 2024). A typical pattern is that far-right populist influencers plant a provocative claim on social media, then encourage their young followers to massively share it. The human initiators of hate speech—far-right influencers and content-generators—may not be many in number. However, by the time their latest biased speech, post or meme passes around the digital world, it will likely have appeared on the devices of a huge mass of unaffiliated young people, whether they want it or not. That virtual deluge can amplify prejudicial thinking and boost support for far-right populism (Nilan, 2021).

A significant affective conduit into far right populism is the active misogyny of the ‘manosphere’—the online network of diverse websites, blogs, and online forums promoting masculinity, misogyny, and opposition to feminism (Copland, 2021; Kelly, 2017; Ging, 2017). Far-right groups skilfully calibrate their narrative ‘to reach men at an emotional and experiential level’ (Roose et al., 2020, p. 16). Their propaganda would seem to appeal strongly to the emotions of young men who have troubled relationships with women (Roose et al., 2022). According to other reports, young men may first be attracted to the far right by iconoclastic music and partying, gaming and ‘merch’ (Miller-Idriss & Graefe-Geusch, 2020). The take-home message is that alienated young white men can symbolically achieve heroic hyper-masculinity by conducting a populist discourse of online hate against immigrants, people of colour, feminists, queer people, Muslims, the greedy and corrupt elite and, very often, women per se (Kelly, 2017). Historically, there has always been a considerable overlap between male supremacy and white supremacy (Ralph-Morrow, 2022; Stern, 2019), one that is exacerbated by 24/7 social media discourse.

3. Methodological Considerations

As Ashe et al. (2020) point out in the introduction to their edited collection, Researching the Far Right: Theory, Method and Practice, there is constant demand from the public, the media, policy-makers and activists for information about the rising phenomenon of far-right populism. Academics have responded, focusing an abundance of studies primarily on: Far-right groups (Stern, 2019; Campbell, 2022; Forberg, 2022), movements (Toscano, 2019; Zúquete, 2018; Blee, 2007), online networks (Urman & Katz, 2022), political parties (McSwiney, 2024), neo-fascist perpetrators (Hutchinson, 2019) and acts of violence and terrorism (Ahmed & Lynch, 2021). Yet, as Korstenbroek (2024) points out, much of this research risks disengagement from the people concerned. It tends to speaks of, rather than with, far-right supporters, and rarely ventures beyond analysis of online content. Of course, research of that kind does make a valuable contribution to the field. For example, Peucker and Fisher (2022) productively used techniques of data scraping and content analysis to categorise over 45,000 posts from Australian users of the far-right alt-tech online platform Gab. They complemented this with in-depth analysis of 298 Gab posts that communicate far-right ideologies. Urman and Katz (2022) made effective use of network analysis to examine interconnections between far-right actors and groups that use the Telegram platform. Network analysis allows researchers to examine how social actors are connected to one another, how information and resources flow through social networks, and how social networks shape individual behaviour and collective outcomes.

Some researchers have used a triangulation of methods to collect data. For example, in the US, Forberg (2022) successfully employed what he calls algorithmic ethnography to examine how the far-right conspiracy theory group QAnon is able to appeal to a wide constituency. Korstenbroek’s study (2024, p. 9) deployed a multi-method virtual ethnography to map out online right-wing nationalist discourses in the Netherlands. He first conducted observations to scope out Dutch nativist virtual communities and select suitable communities for further analysis. He then undertook thematic discourse analysis of 800 moderator-generated posts and nearly 1800 user comments in four relevant Facebook groups sampled during two separate two-week time periods. He subsequently organised ten in-depth interviews with respondents who frequently expressed their beliefs in those Facebook pages (Korstenbroek, 2024, p. 9). His combination of methods produced a rich and compelling account of those who support QAnon conspiracies.

When researching far-right populism, Dobratz and Waldner (2020, p. 223) recommend the following. First, each researcher needs to make their own methodological decisions about what kinds of information to obtain and how. Second, they need to decide what will be shared with informants and what will not. Finally, they need to understand how to remain within their own comfort zone while collecting data. As Damhuis and de Jonge (2022) point out, researchers studying far-right populism can often struggle to create rapport with their informants, since their social positions and political positions may differ considerably (Sibley, 2024). One solution is to employ carefully selected young people as ‘cultural brokers’ (see Kowal et al., 2017) to explain and bridge the possible engagement gap between senior researchers and the youthful constituency in question. Inevitably, there are issues of age, class, gender and ethnic differences between informants and researchers that arise in ethnographic research. For example, large international research projects focused on ethno-national minorities, seeking language skills, may hire younger (often female) researchers, especially PhD students, as ‘insiders’. However, although the language skills are there, they may not be able to successfully engage with certain sets of informants. Ethical reflection is needed on such academic practices, not least because they may not yield informative data.

Careful deployment of cultural brokers may also help discourage covertly crossing the ‘empathy wall’ (Hochschild, 2016); to go undercover, either online or offline. For example, Julia Ebner (2020) infiltrated a number of right-wing extremist groups when gathering data for her book. She went undercover as a supporter for two years, both online and offline, attending many in-person events and interviewing high-ranking members. She attended gigs and a neo-Nazi music festival. Ebner’s study undoubtably yields a valuable vein of insights into the personal narratives of far-right supporters, yet it begs the question of ethical conduct of research since the participants were not aware of her real identity. Similarly, Shoshan (2021) conducted an up-close-and-personal ethnographic study of young right-wing extremists in East Berlin, using a false name for successful infiltration. Wood (2024) draws critical attention to the tenuous ethical territory of covert participant observation of far-right people and spaces. Secrecy and going undercover means that informed consent cannot be given by the research subjects. Moreover, the approach carries risks and dangers to the researcher should they be unmasked. Such research may not in fact be permitted. In most academic settings, permission to conduct a study of the far right requires the approval of a Human Research Ethics Committee. Covert infiltration of a ‘risk zone’ such as the far-right network is regarded as not only unethical but highly unsafe.

The Problem of the Generations

When it comes to researching youth and far-right populism, a specific epistemological point of departure seems warranted since age seems to matter so much in whether someone is a short-term or a long-term supporter. As Simi and Futrell (2015) point out, after the age of 30, more far-right supporters fall away as other life course demands come into play. Similarly, Kimmel (2007) points out that supporting far-right populism may be a relatively brief ‘rite of passage’ for some (white) adolescent boys in Scandinavia, similar to their temporary involvement in petty crime and fight clubs. Miller-Idriss and Graefe-Geusch (2020) concur, pointing out that perhaps the majority of (white) German youth who profess support for far-right populism are on the periphery; moving in and out of far-right scenes throughout their adolescence, but not so later in life. Overall, for many, engagement with the far right will diminish as they get older because it does not align well with important life goals to be achieved in other fields such as career, financial prosperity, meeting a partner, buying a home and starting a family (Latif et al., 2020).

One of the generic problems for older people investigating the world views of young people (far-right sympathisers or not) is the generation gap. As Carspecken puts it, ‘how does an outsider gain an insider’s view?’ (Carspecken, 1996, p. 17). Carpecken’s question is even more salient when the ‘insider’ context is not only age-bound but gendered, racialized, politically charged, and online 24/7. How do you collect data from angry young white men when your age, gender, political views and digital capacity do not match? Vaughan (2024) includes this dilemma in her discussion of what she calls the ‘epistemic exclusion’ of some kinds of researchers from engaging in direct data collection from far right supporters. To illustrate partial solutions to that problem, I offer two relevant insights from the field of far-right research, both developed from my own experience as a youth sociologist. My main premise is that, in research on youth and the far right, appropriately selected young people working as research assistants and interviewers can productively operate as cultural brokers.

4. Examples from Experience

4.1. Tapping in to Far-Right Influences in Online Youth Culture

In 2019 I began to gather background and data for my book on young people and far-right populism (Nilan, 2021). There were some logistical problems to be solved, not the least of which was finding out what was happening online. As Zhang and Davis (2022) point out, actors on the far right, including reactionary conservatives, antagonistic communities and right-wing extremists, exploit the affordances of mainstream and other digital platforms for the purpose of disseminating intolerant ideas. Urman and Katz (2022) maintain that gaming platforms and apps have been infiltrated by the far right to encourage hate speech and harassment. It was therefore important to investigate that claim. However, even though I am an experienced youth researcher, and knew what I was seeking to find out, I was sure I would fall short in navigating what Urman and Katz (2022) call the online ‘shadows’ of youth cultural practices.

One solution for a senior social science academic like me (an older woman) was to employ young net-savvy (male) research assistants1. Unlike the usual research assistants recruited to work on research projects (typically postgraduate students) they would ideally be young men who match in demographic terms the typical aficionados of the online interface. That is, young white gamers and YouTube fans who spend a lot of time online. As someone who does not play video games or frequent youth-oriented platforms like TikTok, Instagram and Reddit, let alone watch YouTube clips, I productively employed this strategy in order to identify key narratives, shaping discourses, and typical patterns of communication, including acronyms, catchphrases, visual puns and the like. As it eventuated, those young men proved to be ‘key informants’ in the anthropological sense, as well as cultural brokers who brought my knowledge up to speed. In traditional anthropology, key informants are selected due to their standpoint as a well-informed source of knowledge about kinship and family organisation, gender and age hierarchies, modes of governance, and religious/cultural beliefs and practices (Bernard, 2017). Beyond anthropology, key informants are typically selected due to their evident ability to help the researcher understand cultural patterns in the relevant community (Creswell, 2007). They provide vital background information for a research project that would otherwise be inaccessible, or difficult to verify. The key informant or cultural broker role is different to that of an interviewee, who is invited to give an account of the phenomenon according to their own lived experiences, personal opinions and beliefs.

I was fortunate to sign up two teenaged research assistants (keen gamers) who quickly confirmed Cameron’s (2019) claim that young men favour ‘shooter’ genres. I made notes as I sat with them and watched as they enjoyed playing their favourites. Back then the most popular games were action/adventure virtual world genre Minecraft, and Apex Legends, an epic multiplayer Battle Royale shooter game. There was also Fortnite, which is similar to Apex Legends. In 2019, these three games were followed in popularity by the latest offerings in the Counter-Strike series—a tactical shooter game where you form a team with other players comprising either terrorists or the government agents trying to stop them. The military genre Call of Duty series was also popular in both single player and multiplayer modes. Call of Duty inducts players into fast-paced battles across various historical time periods, fictional eras and other worlds. There are convenient gaming chat apps like Discord that suit these popular games. One of the research assistants told me, ‘I play this game [Apex Legends] constantly talking to friends on Discord’. Gaming chat sites like Discord have long been seeded with misogynist, white supremacist, and anti-democratic discourse (Nilan, 2021).

I recorded the two key informants chatting boisterously online as they played exciting gaming competitions in teams made up of young people across the world. However, I did not analyse those recordings as primary data, but rather treated them as background information that gave me a sense of the interactive talk that was involved. The research assistants also showed me gamer comment pages where some de-identified people posted misogynist, homophobic, transphobic and racist material, very often disguised as jokes, appending laugh acronyms such as LOL or LULZ. The research assistants said they paid little attention to such content, calling it ‘trash talk’ and ‘shit-posting’ (see Nagle, 2017). It seems they were not in the habit of intervening or arguing back (see Obermaier, 2024). Other gamer chat comments relevant to the influence of far-right populism included doom-laden warnings of an impending race war, a looming final battle for civilisation, so-called ‘evidence’ of a global semitic conspiracy and world domination by Lizard people, along with an array of other conspiracy theories (see Lewis, 2018). The research assistants said they found these ideas comical. Using YouTube clips, they readily demonstrated a typical trip down the ‘rabbit-hole’ of ever more extreme far-right conspiracy theories.

An example of the specialised knowledge I gained from my young key informants concerned the practice of ‘griefing’. Griefing means deliberately causing trouble for other game players, not just trying to beat them. For example, griefing might be repeatedly killing the same combatant avatar so that another player cannot move forward. It might be reversing the play of newer gamers so they do not learn the rules, or messing with other gamers’ play by blocking their shots. Griefing tactics are not about winning. They are conducted so the griefer can have a nasty laugh at someone else’s expense (Nilan, 2021). In form, they resemble trolling, which is a favoured right-wing and misogynist tactic. Finally, they told me about the status of the ‘edgelord’—typically a man who represents a provocative or extreme persona online. He tries to impress or shock by posting exaggerated opinions such as nihilism or extremist views.

In summary, the first invaluable insight gained from my cultural broker research assistants was that far-right populist influencers indeed target the young white male gaming environment. The second insight was that they seem to build semantically on the basic goal of shooter games: ruthless elimination of the enemy, invariably depicted as an ill-intentioned ‘Other’ (Baumgarten, 2017). They capitalise on the mischievous practice of griefing, and the fact that young men ‘live-chat’—swearing, cursing and yelling—during multi-play (Dauber et al., 2019, p. 23). I came to see how the bellicose masculinist environment of gaming might offer fertile ground for far-right ideas to take root.

All of the above was unknown to me before I began the book project. As a dedicated youth researcher, the experience made me sharply aware that as an older person I knew almost nothing about this vibrant online world in which far-right populist discourse appealed to young men. As Karl Mannheim (1972/1936) pointed out, a generation may be defined as a set of temporally co-located individuals who all experienced a specific historical event that signified major transformation. The younger generation today grew up in the Web 2.0 era, and probably cannot imagine an entirely offline world, whereas previous generations such as mine did not have that same experience. It means that my own post-World War II generation struggles to fully grasp the digital cultural interface through which young people today experience their everyday world.

4.2. Matching Interviewers and Interviewees

The next example addresses the matter of matching up those who ask the questions and those who are invited to respond. In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, my colleagues and I were planning how to collect interview data for a funded project on how some men in Australia might be drawn to support far-right thinking. The project received university human ethics research approval for both quantitative and qualitative components of data collection. We had previously conducted an anonymous online survey in which 203 of the 335 voluntary respondents were men aged 18–35 who primarily relied on digital and social media for their news and information, and were frequent gamers. Those who completed the survey were invited to participate in an interview. It seemed likely to me that the majority of interviewees would be young men, with the majority in precarious or intermittent work.

I knew at once that I could not be one of the interviewers for the project. Not only did I not match the predominantly youthful cohort in terms of age and socio-economic status, but I was the wrong gender. And there were risks. Women academics and experts are already the target of much far-right vitriol and relentless trolling (Kavanagh & Brown, 2019). Sometimes, data-gathering engagement can constitute a risk in itself for the researcher (see Lee, 1995; Van Maanen, 1988), and even more so when it comes to a woman asking about misogynistic right-wing radicalism. Indeed, recently two younger female researchers of my acquaintance who conducted interviews and then published their research on the far-right have been extensively trolled and threatened online, with one being forced to move house after she was doxxed (her home address was publicly disseminated).

Korstenbroek (2024, p. 4) reminds us that ‘one must suspend moral judgements when engaging with right-wing populist supporters, place oneself in their position, and connect with their emotionally guided stories to gain insight into what they feel is true’. It seemed unlikely that the informants for this study would be amenable even if I, as an older woman, tried hard to put them at their ease. Moreover, I knew that, once again, I would struggle to comprehend what the world looked like young men so deeply embedded in the online world. Thus, the decision was made by the project team to recruit interviewers who matched those we estimated would likely volunteer as interviewees—(white2) men aged 18–35. We aimed to match the investigator to the investigated in this case, aligning the interviewer to the expected interviewee in terms of age, gender and style of masculinity. That tactic concurs with the observation of Khan and MacEachen (2022), that an interviewer’s gender, sexuality, race and age will have a profound impact on building rapport with an interviewee. In regard to our project, we knew that we were likely to obtain far more frank and informative answers if the interviewee, often a sympathiser with far-right populism, felt comfortable talking to a gender/age matched peer as interviewer. The point of reference here was Hochschild’s (2016) argument that the ideal interviewer should be able to readily traverse the ‘empathy wall’ to gain a deep understanding of another person’s worldview. At the same time, there was to be no covert angle. The interviewees received a clear statement of information about the project, and signed a consent form before interviews commenced.

We trained a couple of younger postgraduate men of neutral appearance as interviewers, offering advice on how to remain calm, encouraging and objective. As expected from the survey results, much of the interview commentary turned out to be right-wing oriented. For example,

[When] I think of the left, I think of like Soviets, Mao Tse-Tung, Pol Pot, Hitler a little bit, he’s a complicated figure, the left will be like oh, he’s right wing (…) but he wasn’t, it was the National Socialist Party.

(Evan3, 35, landscaper, de facto, my emphasis)

Another informant Scott said that he really liked Trump because he is ‘honest’, ‘Trump is just saying the things that I’d been thinking for most of my life’ (Scott, 30, truck driver, married). This informant was also negative on the topic of feminism,

Feminism, to me, should have been finished in the 70s. I mean there’s equal rights, there’s equal pay, if anything, it’s gone the other way in a lot of ways, and now it’s just forcing women into roles that I don’t know if they even think they want.

(Scott, 30, truck driver, married)

The mention of roles here was instructive. Many of the men thought men and women were biologically determined to carry out their assigned heteronormative roles. For instance, in answer to a question about men and violence, several of the younger informants explained that they thought violence was natural for men. Thus,

Violence is a part of man’s psyche, violence is what men have had to use in the past to get what they need and get what they want, protect what they want to protect, so it’s sort of ingrained in men from, I don’t know, say thousands of years ago.

(Paul, mid-30s, engineering sub-manager, married)

And,

Men are flooded with testosterone which is a hormone that increases violent tendencies, so if you take a cross section of the violent to least violent people, nine out of ten of the most violent people will be men (…) So that means it’s a part of our nature.

(Ian, mid-thirties, allied health worker, married)

It has been argued that one of the core characteristics of fascism is ‘the moral precondition of violence as natural’ (Heino, 2024). It is possible the use of ‘our’ in the last line of Ian’s reply, implicitly includes the interviewer on the basis of masculinity, suggesting that rapport has been established.

If an interviewee answered the question about men and violence in a highly emotional way, the interviewer was instructed to tell them calmly that their answer was interesting, and ask them to explain further. Which they were usually glad to do. One informant laid it out thus,

You can either channel that [violence] constructively or fail to channel that constructively, or you can attempt to quash it with disastrous consequences (…) either channelling it effectually into non-constructive activities, or it’s trying to quash it with labels such as toxic masculinity.

(Ian, mid-thirties, allied health worker, married)

Yet another interviewee gave an example of channelling men’s violence along a traditional path,

There’s a podcaster in the states that I listen to, his name is Ryan Michler, his podcast is called Order of Man, and he basically advocates for a revival of masculinity (…) talking about a traditional idea or sense of masculinity and trying to spread that (…) it’s largely about encouragement for men to lead families, to lead communities, to lead societies, basically.

(Will, mid-thirties, farm supervisor, single)

When answers to questions were short, the interviewers for our project used polite prompts to move the conversation on in the direction of the project objectives. Thus, one of the interviewers asked,

Okay. I’m interested when you say women’s rights have gone too far. Can you be more specific about that?

The informant seemed happy to answer:

Yeah, sure. One big thing is the gender pay gap (…) you’re not even allowed to argue how they’ve got to that statistic, and like I said (…) women don’t spend as long in the workforce because they have children.

(Bryce, early 30s, solar panel installer, de facto)

Here, Bryce implies the discourse of male victimhood. He claims that men are now condemned for questioning gender-affirmative action based on the Australian Bureau of Statistics figures on women’s economic disadvantage. Scott articulated more or less the same discourse of male victimhood,

Why are we not talking about men’s place now in the world? Like you look at social media and it’s obvious that women sit on top of that hierarchy, right? And I just think men these days, I think a lot of us are lonely.

(Scott, 30, truck driver, married)

As did Ethan,

Like a white male under 25 is the worst thing I could be right now.

(Ethan, 24, studying agriculture, single)

Such talk of men’s victim status can be hard to listen to, especially given the continued social and economic disadvantages experienced by women in Australia, as well as high levels of domestic violence (Government of Australia, 2024). Nevertheless, the discourse of male victimhood constitutes productive data for our quest to know more about how ordinary men might be open to far-right populist persuasion through their skewed perception of relative disadvantage. The interviewers were encouraged not to verbally disagree with the informants.

Racial prejudice was typically aired in anti-immigration sentiments such as,

I think a lot of the immigrants, like [from] India, well of Indian appearance, they can’t really keep up with the way our traffic works, social etiquette, you’ve got two families in a house—and like how they keep the street!

(Evan, 35, landscaper, de facto)

And,

I just think bringing boatload after boatload of people is doing nothing but diluting our culture.

(Scott, 30, truck driver, married)

When informant Scott became highly emotional on an issue like immigration, which was often the case, the interviewer would typically pose a question that invited a moment of reflection, for example:

Interviewer: (pause) Does the Australian dream apply to you?

In the interview, the informant replied in a calmer tone, yet pessimistically:

Scott: It did when I was a child growing up, I grew up in it. I don’t know if it’s possible anymore.

Towards the end of his interview Scott strongly concurred with interviewee Evan’s similar view of Adolf Hitler, saying angrily that he ‘wouldn’t call Hitler right wing, if anything he was a fucking socialist’. Yet shortly afterwards, Scott’s interview finished politely as follows,

Interviewer: I really appreciate your time.

Scott: No worries. Thank you.

Interviewer: No worries. Take it easy.

Scott: You too, mate, bye.

From this exchange it seems Scott felt he was listened to carefully and treated with respect by the young man interviewing him, whom he warmly addressed as ‘mate’ in the final seconds. On this occasion, the interviewer had clearly been able to establish rapport with Scott. As Lareau (2021) points out, there is nothing like carefully listening to people openly tell you things if you want to know what is going on. It is doubtful whether the informants would have been so frank about their contentious views unless they were talking ‘man-to-man’ to someone with whom they could immediately identify with in terms of gender, age and general appearance.

5. Discussion

Several points about conducting productive research on youth and far-right populism emerge from the examples described above. First, much can be gained from using the knowledge and status of younger people who are not so much insiders or precisely matched peers, but who occupy the general position of the age group and gender that is regularly targeted for far-right propaganda and persuasion. In that way, they can operate as cultural brokers. They may not be full ‘insiders’ but they may be considered as ‘insighters’—investigators who remain objective, yet can identify with specific experiences on the part of informants (Sharp, 2020). In Sharp’s study of young queer punks, taking up an ‘insighter’ position yielded rich data and interpretive angles which would have been unachievable for either a complete outsider or even a full insider. As the digital world becomes ever more complex and immersive, youthful key informants can play a vitally important role as cultural brokers. They can readily explain contemporary culture to established academics who might be experts in youth research, but are novices when it comes to what is happening right now in the online sphere—a fast-moving domain that changes all the time. Since the ranks of far-right supporters are so dominated by net-savvy younger people, gaining ‘insighter’ knowledge of what is going on in digital space is vital for contemporary understandings.

Second, male far-right sympathisers typically have little tolerance for people from diverse ethnic backgrounds, women, gender-diverse people, older academics, or for men who do not match their own style of masculinity. That is a key component of the far-right populist discourse they follow. So, it makes sense to engage demographically similar men as interviewers. Thus, while the interviewers might disagree with the political position of the men they are interviewing, they can, for example, readily understand the specific pressures on young men today. In principle, that co-recognition should better enable the interviewer to traverse the ‘empathy wall’ (Hochschild, 2016) and gain rich accounts from young men drawn to far-right populist ideas. Moreover, younger interviewers are far more likely than an older academic to understand colloquial references to the online world in interview accounts, and to ask interviewees to expand on them. Finally, the age/gender peer similarity can assist attempts by the interviewer to calm the emotions of the interviewee. At certain points in the interview, informant Scott was in a heightened emotional state, indicated by increased swearing, rapid speech, and using extreme words. The interviewer then carefully framed questions to invite him to take a step back, as it were, and reflectively consider his situation. Of course this is standard procedure for effective interviewing, but when it comes to obtaining accounts from angry young men with far-right sympathies, the age/gender parity clearly helps.

Both of the examples in this paper, linked semantically as they are, enrich our view of how youth researchers studying youth and far-right populism can pioneer some new approaches, even if the virulent rhetoric and accusations of angry young men can be hard not only to listen to but to represent objectively. There are indications here of how a researcher might move away from the dominance of methods that concentrate only on the external and clearly visible signs of online far-right discourse and activity, to allow the voices of young far right sympathisers to be heard. It also promises a move away from the personally risky and ethically dubious option of undertaking secretive undercover ethnography, or covert observation.

Building on that argument, there would seem to be other benefits in engaging appropriately positioned youthful research assistants to help academics study young people and the far right. One advantage is to encourage a reflexive approach to the troubling experience of looking at iterations of far-right discourse online, which are very often ‘distasteful’ and ‘repugnant’ (Pearson, 2019, p. 1253). As mentioned previously, my 2019 research assistants showed me gamer comment pages aflame with misogynist, homophobic, transphobic and racist material. I admit to being horrified at the time by the content, but they said such ‘trash talk’ or ‘shit-posting’ was of no consequence to them, and by implication, should not be to me. Their ‘insighter’ attitude encouraged me to look beyond sensationalist far-right messaging itself and focus on the variable effect that same vitriolic discourse might possibly have on different kinds of young people.

6. Conclusions

This paper has reflected on research challenges and strategies for researching youth and far-right populism. It has also considered ethics protocols and emotional involvement in fieldwork research with young people. I conclude by pointing out that young people who favour far-right views may be reacting to a sense of powerlessness, economically, politically and over their personal lives. My own published research on the topic supports the view that disenfranchised young (white) people tend to perceive injustice and inequality in terms of identity politics, flavoured by racialised and gendered tropes of nationalistic nostalgia, rather than grasping that their experienced precarity results primarily from structural changes in the economic base and the nature of work, as well as the ubiquity of 24/7 online engagement. Certainly, the discourse of ‘white male victimhood’ continues to be strongly mediated online. It encourages young men to believe that their lives have been ruined by women’s rights, queer politics, the left and immigration. Researching such affinities is necessary if we want to understand the apparent swell of grassroots support for far-right populism among young (white) people in western countries across the globe. I suggest that new epistemological angles may be required: approaches such as cultural brokerage that can explain and engage the deeply imbricated generational interface between the offline and online worlds of young people. For their part, the youth researcher—junior or senior—is encouraged to actively manage their own emotions in regard to violent, racist and misogynist data, while remaining hopeful of change in the future life trajectories of informants.