Beyond the Ballot Box: On the Far Right with Mike Wendling

Radicals in Conversation

This is episode 1 of ‘Beyond the Ballot Box' - our new mini-series exploring some of the major political currents in US politics.

With the presidential election just around the corner, American politics is increasingly a focus of international attention as well. Electoralism, reproductive justice, the climate crisis, Palestine, a resurgent far right, the criminalization of protest, and the militarization of policing are all swirling in a maelstrom that is unlikely to abate, whatever the outcome on November 5th.

In this episode, series hosts Chris Browne and James Kelly sit down with Mike Wendling. Mike is US National Digital Reporter for the BBC, co-founder of the BBC's disinformation unit and the former editor and presenter of BBC Trending. Based in Chicago, he has decades of experience covering extremism, the American far right, social media and disinformation. He is also the author of Alt-Right: From 4chan to the White House and the new book, Day of Reckoning: How the Far Right Declared War on Democracy, which was published by Pluto earlier this year.

We talk about how the movement known as the ‘Alt-Right’ morphed over the years of the Trump presidency, in response to events such as the Covid-19 pandemic and January 6 Capitol riot. We talk about the ways in which conspiratorial thinking has bled from the fringes of the far right into the mainstream Republican movement, and the ways in which Donald Trump has reshaped the party and the wider political terrain. We get Mike’s reflections on the recent Republican and Democratic National Conventions, and the extent to which the assassination attempt on Trump and the substitution of Harris for Biden on the Democratic ticket have changed the electoral calculus, less than 2 months out from the election.