Marcela Uchôa

Endorsement of a Far-Right Subjectivity in Portuguese
Movements Against COVID-19 Sanitary Control Measures

Mónica Soares and Marcela Uchôa

The COVID-19 pandemic created a unique political environment that required governments to implement strict measures to control the rapid spread of the virus. This period also served as a critical moment for the global far-right ideological resurgence, albeit with variations depending on local contexts. This article explores how protests, mobilizations, and digital activism in Portugal, particularly by movements opposing sanitary control measures, represent not direct militant involvement in the far-right but rather a renewal of far-right subjectivity. These movements echo the far-right’s pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric and modus operandi, with conspiracy theories playing a fundamental role. While not all participants may immediately support far-right parties electorally, they adopt thought patterns that align with the far-right’s ideological framework, potentially nurturing the social acceptance of an innovative far-right political vanguard. This relationship remains ambiguous, as the far-right opportunistically capitalizes on the social impulses against sanitary measures.

SOARES, Mónica, UCHOA, Marcela. Is It Just About a Renewed Conspiracy? Journal for the Study of Radicalism, v. 18, n. 1, pp. 179-206. / 10.14321/jstudradi.18.1.0179

Introduction 

Conspiracy thinking sprang up strongly during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Portugal presents itself as an important context to analyze such relation  because it attracted a diverse array of protests and mobilizations inspired  on such conspiracy theories and performed in the country’s main cities (i.e.,  Lisbon, Porto, and Coimbra) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Social media  have been a privileged avenue to disseminate such protests through Facebook  groups and other social networks, while several conspiracy theories have  occupied the forefront of diverse Facebook posts in order to make sense of  the pandemic’s causes and related sanitary control measures (e.g., lockdown,  social distancing, mask use, testing, vaccination). This article delves into three  concrete endeavors: (1) an incursion on the links between modern conspiracy  theories, health concerns, and popular/civic protests; (2) a problematization  of protests and mobilizations against COVID-19 control measures beyond the laypeople conspiracy hypothesis, but rather as the constitution and  expression of an ideological space prone to the contemporary renewal of  a spurious far-right alternative subjectivity; and (3) a content analysis of  the social media platform related to the organization and dissemination of  several protests and mobilizations, while taking the timeline of June 2020  until August 2021 in Portugal. Based on such analysis, some more detailed  accounts on the contemporary articulation of such ideological space, within  the context of COVID-19 pandemic, are finally suggested. 

Modern Conspiracy Theories, Health Concerns and Popular-Civic Protests: A  Point of Departure 

Even if understood as unpredictable and atypical events, pandemics have  occurred in several times in history and across different geographies, usually  facilitated by the exchange of goods through Asia, Africa, and Europe.¹ From  all the pandemics in history, modern ones brought conspiracy thinking  to light. Even if medieval populations could in fact insinuate coniuratio 

against elites or other religious or heretical groups (e.g., Jews or witches),  they were not developing a conspiracy theory (conspiratio) or it may be  argued that they were only making it in partial terms. For Zwierlein,² it  was mainly around 1500 CE that new historical–cultural reconfigurations  (i.e., the constitution of a public sphere, an epistemic shift toward modern  secularization, a pluralization of the post-Reformation confessional schisms,  the production of anonymity) announced the formulation of the modern  episteme and a context of massive communication in which the actor–thing  relation is not self-evident. Modernity instituted conspiracy and made it  integral to its social functioning. It turned out to be its negated mode of  thinking, dialectically constructed. Conspiracy thinking usually embraces an attitude to think based on  secrecy, hoax, or hidden plots. This tendency is usually derived from some  erratic or nonlogical patterns to link and explain related or nonrelated events,  that is, conspiracy theories.³ These tend to connect dispersed suspicions  or multidomain ones, usually following sequential patterns leading to  more diffuse and intuitive leaps.⁴ They may be partially based on rational  and irrational inferences, and partially based on rumors, while merging  objective–fictional elements.⁵ Several historical and political movements seem to have been particularly prone to conspiracy thinking in the nineteenth  and the twentieth centuries. Both the Dreyfus Case and Nazi antisemitism  were nourished by conspiracy thinking, often based on the Protocols of the  Elders of Zion,⁶ as well as the during the Cold War (i.e., the “red threat” on  several occasions was strengthened by conspiracy thinking), and more recent  intensive conspiracies, focused on anti-establishment or anti-global elites.⁷ 

It is not surprising that pandemics and epidemics have also been prone  to intensifying conspiracy thinking.⁸ These have always augmented a set of  social conditions (e.g., social isolation, mobility restrictions) that reinforced  social anxiety, entropy, and loss of control.⁹ The COVID-19 pandemic has  been no exception; moreover, it has been one dictating several protracted  sanitary control measures. More and more people began to cast doubt on  the existence of the pandemic itself, its severity, or the proportionality of the  measures; in other cases, many found themselves believing that the virus  was created as a bioweapon intentionally disseminated by China or Russia,  or by George Soros or Bill Gates.¹⁰ Reduction of population and a new world  order were common explanations.¹¹ 

A lot of times conspiracy theorists tend to see themselves in neutral  political forms, usually as “critical freethinkers” who are opposing to power  holders. Distrust and suspicion lead to a selective confirmation bias of  evidence, often falling into several cognitive errors and into an illusion of  an exactness that does not exist.¹² There is usually an academic confirma tion of such a vision that endorses that conspirators are usually just lay  people questioning, with available resources, the power imbalances and  real threats that are occurring in their lives.¹³ They may claim that people  are often compelled to question power elements by “natural suspicion”  in a given social–historical time, which may be true in their experiential  form even if their premises are often incorrect. In the nineteenth century,  during cholera outbreaks, popular masses in Ireland, England, and Russia  believed that the upper classes were intentionally poisoning poor people to  exterminate them.¹⁴ This kind of conspirative speculation was also recently  presented during the spread of Zika.¹⁵ But what may be superficially seen as  a lay understanding of people’s social problems cannot be separated from  the terrain of political struggle. What is called “conspiracy thinking” needs  to be further questioned in its diverse determinations and expressions. It is not just a lay reaction to the unknown and entropy, because there is no such  thing as a lay reaction absent of any kind of sociopolitical determination. 

The Far Right, COVID-19, and Its Current Renewal: A Problematization 

In contrast to the laypeople hypothesis on conspiracy, we strongly believe  that the processes of how the content and forms of conspiracy are expressed  need to be captured as ideologically determined. First, conspiracy is strongly  related to ideology because it usually supports an imaginary resolution of  social contradictions—what is a plain expression of dominant ideologies.¹⁶ Second, ideological inputs are surely politically motivated. Ideology is the  political mediation, presented in representational discourses and practices,  that provides political subjectivity to the social world and to the common  sense of their agents of production, namely, to apparent disjointed and  wide-ranging chains of interactions.¹⁷ Ideology expresses power and social  interest, and it is an inescapable terrain: it is constitutive of social practice  and traversed by ambiguity. 

Ideology helps us to understand how political support to a certain  political force is constructed. It may come from different social segments,  more or less militant, and more or less organized. The far-right can be  defined as a political force overtly antidemo-liberal (it cannot be reduced  only to populism and conservatism even if they tend to define them)¹⁸ while  searching for the neutralization of the emancipatory struggles of a given  historical time, opposing both progressive views and communism.¹⁹ For the  purposes of this article, the term “far-right subjectivity” helps to illuminate  movements and social groups that mirror, benefit, and/or support, more  or less openly, the effective or potential rise of a reactionary or protofascist  political force. It is worth mentioning that subjectivity is not reducible to  the individual level. Subjectivity is here understood as synonymous with  an organizing social force that usually creates ideological inputs because it  “constitutes actively the human subjects at the root of lived experience and  aims to equip them with forms of value and beliefs relevant to specific social  tasks and for the general reproduction of the social order.”²⁰ The militant far-right, expressed at Portugal into the party called Chega!,²¹ has openly and ostensibly professed its antisystem or antiestablishment  nature.²² Moreover, nowadays the rise of the far-right is made clear by the popularity and adherence to political parties like Chega!, ideologically  associated with themes such the defense of nativism and cultural self preservation (e.g., against the Roma, for example), an antiestablishment  populist approach (e.g., the common people against the state decadence),  authoritarianism, and punitivism, as well as producerism (i.e., divisions  between producers and takers).²³ 

Even so, such adherence to party form is not built immediately nor  based only on strong bonds of political militancy, not even in cultural  groups openly incorporating ready-made far-right tendencies and groups.²⁴ It needs to creep throughout more diffuse social representations, cultural  imaginaries, rhetoric, and social discourses to catalyze a reactionary subject.²⁵ 

In order to proceed with such social accommodation, at the center of the far  right’s ideological underpinnings lay the constitution of a pseudo-alternative  revolutionary subject. It is well known that far-right growth requires the  conquest of mainstream indignation and more alternative-like segments  while covering its reactionary politics (e.g., racism, ethno-nationalism)  with apparently more innocuous oppositional claims (e.g., to end economic  restrictions caused by sanitary regulation) and alternative-like rhetoric (e.g.,  claiming to be the true opposition against power, to be the critical mindsets  against the social acceptance of sanitary restrictions).²⁶ 

The far-right is also totally parasitic and subversive of the social  problems and the social impulse. As the classic work of Evgeni Pashukanis²⁷ explores, fascism (and, it may be said, far-right movements in general) has  no originality and often fails to have a consistent internal logic, but it also  tends to acquire rapid and solid political support as it presents itself as a  revolutionary force. To be portrayed as a profound social alternative, far-right  subjectivity intrinsically requires a mystified and conspiracy-prone vision  of the social conflict of its own,²⁸ but one that opens a social space in which  its political subjectivity seems to offer a fierce combatant force that solves  such simplified accounts of social conflict.²⁹ For instance, movements against  sanitary control measures have been constituted within a conspiracy mindset  that keeps alive such spurious alternative-like and combatant feelings that  far-right subjectivity requires in order to creep within social audiences,  discourses, and practices. 

This process has gone together with a populist opposition vision against  the elites in power (mainly intellectuals, liberal or leftist politicians) while focusing on a struggle against those classes in themselves, and not on the  social relations that created such social conflict. Conspiracy theories usually  elect one corporation or set of corporations—such as the big pharma taking  center stage during the pandemic.³⁰ They usually help renew racist targets  against Asian and other groups, like minorities groups in Europe, such as  Muslims and Jews.³¹ On the other side, conspiracies antagonized leftist forces  and movements, as well as other liberal, technical, or epistemic-perceived  authorities. To illustrate, QAnon groups related Tom Hanks’s diagnosis of  COVID-19 on March 12, 2020, with the clear elites’ involvement in the virus,  also framing subnarratives related to the Black Lives Matter protests due to  George Floyd’s death and framing the Antifa as terrorists. In accordance,  both were aiming to block Trump’s reelection. QAnon also forged bridges  with antivaccine and anti-5G conspiracies.³² 

Our working hypothesis is precisely that other COVID-19 adaptations  of conspiracy theories and related protests and mobilization have served to  inflect important ideological maneuvers for far-right political subjectivity  (e.g., racism, ethnonationalism, antidemocratic attitudes, apology of natural  hierarchies, proclamation of white privilege, white supremacy), including  beyond the context of the United States. The pandemic conspiracy-prone  context enhanced the growth of a far right’s spurious alternative subjectivity  (i.e., antisystem, antiestablishment). This was not a mere opportunistic  entanglement, because far-right subjectivity is founded on conspiracy think ing. It appears as a necessary consequence of a political subjectivity that is  based on the exacerbation of moral decadence, but also on the creation of  hyperbolized threats and on the obtuse discredit of its political opponents, and  other abstractly created enemies. Ultimately, far-right subjectivity legitimizes  disobedience and violence based on the protection of new truth-tellers,  national heroes or saviors who are being continuously endangered by the  power of the “leftist elites” and movements, communism, and democracy  alike. Indeed, conspiracy ends up being not only the basis for the far-right  popularity and contemporary renewal, but also a logical consequence of its  reinforcement. Even so, COVID-19 conspiracies’ brought specificities that  need to be examined. Here we will approach them by taking the case of the  movements opposing sanitary control measures in Portugal. The Current Study: Movements Against the Sanitary Control  Measures in Portugal 

The Facebook group we have been following for the purposes of this article  is called Verdade Inconveniente (Inconvenient Truth), which operated as a  Facebook platform that served throughout the pandemic to disseminate  several contents (e.g., memes, videos from the demonstrations, publications  announcing new demonstrations or public marches, online mainstream  newspaper articles, alternative media articles, and solicitations for crowdfund 

ing) related to opposing sanitary-control measures (e.g., lockdown, social  distancing, mask use, testing, vaccination, green passports). It became active  in June 2020, one month after the end of the first Portuguese lockdown  between March 18 and May 2, 2020. The group understands itself as a civic  movement, an opinion-making one, and a promoter of critical thought, as  well as of citizenship involvement and street action. 

Since its inception, this platform has been aligned with the so-called  “freedom rallies’’ that sprouted all over the world during the COVID-19  pandemic, in line with the Querdenken in Germany,³³ the Yellow Vests in  France (among other movements competing in France for the leading role  in such rallies),³⁴ and other rallies performed in Belgium, the Netherlands,  or Italy, in all cases organized or partially supported by a larger platform  named World Wide Demonstration for Freedom.³⁵ In Portugal, these freedom  rallies have been mediated by the Verdade Inconveniente platform. Many of  these freedom rallies materialized as an amorphous spectacle of “coronavirus  deniers, anti-vaxxers, 5G truthers, sovereign citizens, QAnon believers and  other fringe conspiracy theorists.”³⁶ They have in fact served as a platform  for long-existing (often dissimilar and tensional) creeds and movements,  because these social subjects are now searching for a rebranding of their  rhetoric (e.g., calling themselves freedom fighters and truth seekers) around  a common cause.³⁷ It is important to mention that during the COVID-19  pandemic such freedom rallies and related movements have been the  most common audiences occupying the public space and endorsing public  demonstrations in Portugal. 

Also in Portugal, the first vigil for liberty was announced June 8, 2020;  the second one, “Vigil for liberty! For the true,” occurred on July 25, 2020; and the third one on August 15, 2020. These were followed by the gradual  organization of a huge mass of demonstrations. The first one was on August  29, 2020 (Lisbon and Porto), and then there was another on September 20,  2020 (Lisbon, Porto, and Coimbra). In October 2020, several public initiatives  were developed. From this point on, the epicenter of demonstrations began  to be in Lisbon. The demonstrations led in October 2020 were directed  against the use of masks, decrees of emergency or calamity, and so on.  Demonstrations led by other movements have also been supported by this  Facebook platform, such as A pão e água (Surviving with bread and water)  from Porto and Sobreviver (Surviving) from Lisbon. These movements were  headed by small local business owners, night-activities owners (e.g., bars and  discos), and restaurants. The opposition to the vaccine was born by the end  of 2020, when administration of the vaccines turned out to be embodied in  national vaccination plans. 

In February 2021, a new movement led by business owners—Reabrir  Portugal (Reopen Portugal)—developed during the second lockdown in  Portugal between January 15 and April 1, 2021. In August 2021, during one  of the peaks of vaccination, protests occurred at the entrances of the vac 

cination centers. One of the largest demonstrations, held on August 7, 2021,  was entitled Verão Quente (Hot Summer), an open reference to the political  power dispute that developed after the Carnation Revolution in the summer  of 1975, among reactionary, liberal, and socialist–communist forces. Many  of these movements claim to live in a sanitary dictatorship—a reference  that has been adopted by André Ventura himself—administered by the  perceived red-socialist government of the prime minister António Costa. 

Method 

Data Collection Procedures 

The research team participated in some of the demonstrations carried out  at Coimbra and Porto during 2020. Several notes about the participants  of these demonstrations are mainly about descriptions and alignment of  the participants with the demonstrations. At the same time, the research  team gathered physical pamphlets distributed by the movements in the main cities of Portugal before the first demonstrations. In terms of online  research, traditional social media has been the elected space to accomplish  the study. We followed the Facebook group Verdade Inconveniente from June  2020 to August 2021. All the Facebook posts made by the platform during  this period have been registered and catalogued. Comments on Facebook  have not been considered. 

All the textual contents and images presented both in Facebook posts  and physical pamphlets—shared between June 2020 and August 2021—on  the streets and on the Facebook group Verdade Inconveniente constitute  the data of the present study. Data retrieved from the online platform were  collected with the help of the application NCapture. Dates of publication  have been saved in order to identify all the entries that compose our sample  of Facebook publications, but we will not fully disclose the complete dates— only the month and the year. No personal names or any information that  may identify some individuals are displayed. 

Data Analysis Procedures 

Content analysis has been selected as the methodological procedure for data  analysis. This procedure has been defined as a “set of analysis techniques in  regard to communication which aims to obtain, by systematic and objective  procedures, the description of message contents, indicators (qualitative or not)  which allow knowledge inference in relation to the conditions production/ 

reception of these messages.”³⁸ Content analysis requires the definition of the  units of analysis that will be coded.³⁹ For the present analysis, we categorized  words (e.g., frequency of words like “liberty,” “true,” and other values) and  themes, that is, consistent topics emerging from data, normally identified  through repetition and theory oriented (i.e., based on previous theorizations  helpful for identifying the emergence and consistency of the definition).⁴⁰ After defining these units of analysis, content analysis followed a cod ing process divided into two cycles of coding.⁴¹ The first cycle was mainly  oriented by a strategy of structural coding (i.e., research goal-oriented  codes) that helped to perform open coding guided by our concrete goals.  The second cycle was governed by an axial strategy. Axial coding is oriented  to find relations between codes and to fortify the generation of categories.⁴² A constant comparison of data has been helpful for organizing the finer system of relations presented in in four main categories (i.e., subjects of  oppositions, discourses of opposition, claims, ideology and social conflict).⁴³ Some units of analysis have been coded in more than one category. All  images and textual content of dissemination were analyzed with the help  of the NVivo software. 

Results 

Subjects of Opposition 

As expected, there was a significant presence of business owners (i.e.,  restaurant owners, nightclub owners, other business owners) mainly in  movements such as A pão e água and Reabrir Portugal. Another frequent  group encountered in demonstrations was composed of spiritual and well 

being professionals. Previous literature shows spiritualists or apocalyptical  believers, but also alternative medicine and alternative lifestyles audiences,  often carrying former pseudoscience and conspiracy theories against medical  procedures.⁴⁴ Some of these participants, as showed in other evidence in  Germany,⁴⁵ may already have had connections with far-right-influenced  esotericism and defense of natural ways of life. In Portugal, many of these  participants promoted musical and dancing moments to celebrate freedom  during the rallies. 

Libertarian groups, not identified with traditional politics or closer to  the right or left wing, were present. Also present were some professionals  officially banned from carrying out their professional activities, but also the  so-called selected “experts” (e.g., doctors, lawyers, judges), as they serve to  certify that no scientific or social consensus exists around COVID-19 and  that sanitary control measures deserve to be questioned. “When an expert of  excellence leaves his comfort zone and embarks on a march to warn us about  the risks of experimental inoculation in children, I think that we should all  reflect very well on the subject” (May 2021; free translation). 

A multitude of various civil actors are also found. It is common to find  a relation between conspiracy thinking and the search for compensation of  certain estrangement, which is used to impose specific, vague and nonlogical  understandings of reality.⁴⁶ With the exception of business owners, who had very specific interests on these demonstrations (e.g., open their restaurants  and other stores, to obtain economic compensations), with a limited  participation in time, other subjects fall in this category of compensation  for estrangement. This also explains their continuity over time within these  demonstrations. 

Identitarian nationalists are also common part of the demonstrators.  In January and the following months, a movement called Defender Portugal (Defending Portugal) organized a demonstration on January 16, 2021, in  Lisbon. This movement has also been aligned with the Verdade Inconveniente Facebook page. Defender Portugal was created in 2019 with a clear mission  of supporting nationalistic rhetoric. This movement encompasses a catch-all  indignation. The pandemic led to the growth of publications because they  usually tend to ask for a nationalistic approach to solve the pandemic. In  addition, they have been developing offline face-to-face events to develop  their nationalistic duty. 

Discourses of Opposition 

The Facebook activity of Verdade Inconveniente makes clear that the COVID-19  pandemic is not as it seems. Maybe it does not exist at all. Maybe it exists  but does not warrant such rigorous action. Sanitary control measures have  more disadvantages than advantages for the well-being of the population  or may exist only for the sake of social control in itself. 

The main discourses of opposition were usually critical of democratic based and public institutions. Following the Querdenken Movement, this  platform and freedom rallies announced a funeral procession for democracy.  The sanitary control measures inaugurated a dictatorship. In total, 600  references were registered in this category. Institutions were criticized also  in terms of their specialties, like health and education, but also following a  shared set of criticisms that were applied to all of them. 

Regarding criticisms of particular institutions, the criticisms of public  administration and governance are at the top of the list. The most common  one is the obliteration of the constitutional rights of the Portuguese people  and other important legal codes: “Do they know that according to the  Nuremberg code, they are committing a crime against humanity? No one  can be forced to take an experimental vaccine. I will not take it even though I subsidize it too. Below I will leave the Nuremberg code: so that you are  aware of what I am talking about here” (February 2020; free translation). Other critiques include the imposition of an unnecessary isolation of  children and the elderly, as well as the imposition of unnecessary sanitary  control measures. In turn, health institutions were also under suspicion.  The underestimation of non-COVID-19 health problems and interventions,  as well as doubts about the security of vaccines and about the secondary  effects of sanitary control measures, are commonly mentioned problems  at this level. “It seems to me that doctors continue to choose who ‘lives’ or  ‘dies,’ who is entitled to treatment or not, based on the same criterion: Covid!  That is, if you have or are suspected of having Covid, you are immediately  treated, VIP treatment, even if it is to influence the statistics. . . . If it is not  [Covid], the other diseases can already be relegated to the background,  maybe an ‘online appointment’ even if the numbers are much higher!” (July  2020; free translation). 

Other issues included the economy, such as the closure of restaurants  and the right to work. The mainstream media was also under attack for  being an institution of censorship; the educational system because of school  restrictions and their closure; and the security forces for the violence used  in demonstrations against the people. These were particularly problematic  institutions in terms of intervention strategies for the pandemic. 

Regarding the shared critiques applied to all institutions, the data  analysis emphasizes the adulteration or inflation of numbers to legitimize  COVID-19 sanitary measures, the promotion of segregation, the impossibility  of controlling the pandemic, and the lack of preparation for dealing with  COVID-19. Within this scenario several threats were foreseen by the participants  of this platform. Some examples are the compromised future of children;  poverty and misery; and the technologization of life, among marginal  others. As discussed in the following, this platform normally criticizes the  fear exhibited by those who support sanitary control measures, calling them  “acceptanceist” (from the Portuguese created word aceitacionista—that is,  a subject who accepts everything without confrontation or questioning).  However, at the same time, the platform instigated fear in rechanneled and  pungent forms, most of the time centered in their discourses on “save the  children”: “If you don’t have the courage to disobey now, and knowing that there is nothing they can actually do to you, what are you waiting for? For  the laws to be changed? Or that they will arrive at your home and get your  children, for example . . . in order for you to finally wake up?” 

Most of the discourses of opposition were governed by the defense  of different values. Liberty was the most common one, followed by truth,  dignity, and work. 

Claims 

Among the Facebook posts made between June 2020 and August 2021, we  registered 173 references concerning measures to be taken to combat the  sanitary control measures. These demands are threefold: (1) the immediate  suspension of all the sanitary control measures; (2) the introduction of  alternative approaches; and (3) the reformulation of certain control measures.  Regarding the immediate suspension of the measures, users of this Facebook  page sought the immediate exclusion of children as the recipients of measures,  the application of the Human Rights Letter in the Digital Era, the end of  state emergency decrees, and the immediate normalization of the national  health system, among other things. 

A couple of alternative approaches have been suggested, such as no  intervention at all, the immediate reactivation of all economic activity  without exception, the criminalization of the pandemic bad management, the  reinforcement of social welfare support, a focus on the promotion of health  (e.g., good habits of eating and well-being), and maintaining all services and  businesses open to the public. All of them exposed the need to ignore or to  refuse the pandemic in some extent: “to assume that confinement and other  ‘draconian’ measures not only had no practical effects, but actually slowed  down the natural process of herd immunity” (July 2020; free translation).  Also, the reformulation of some already approved measures was put forward,  such as illustrations on the optional use of masks, informed consent for all  medical acts, and noncompulsory vaccination. 

Ideological Entanglements and Exploration of the Social Conflict 

Our analysis dealt with other critical points in order to understand the  political ideological entanglements presented in the platform that tie the subjects, discourses, and claims to a far-right subjectivity. We focused on  themes such as the enunciation of a sanitary dictatorship (119 references);  on the features of actors opposing the platform—the “acceptanceist” (108  references); about the self-concept of the demonstrators themselves—who  have assimilated the identity of “negacionists” (65 references); on the usual  forms of discussing the pandemic and methods for gaining public legitimacy  (92 references); on the principles to organize a disobedient reaction (58  references); on the use of populist rhetoric and their particularities (54  references); and on references to the reconfiguration of social conflict during  COVID-19 pandemic (14 references). 

Regarding sanitary dictatorship, this has been frequently described as  the implementation of a totalitarian state, but also associated with socialism,  communism, and leftist ideals of control, and with the government using  the pandemic to have more political authority. Indeed, it has been usually  expressed that a pandemic is the dream of any government to control the  population. “Preventive State of Emergency. . . . more than 210 days of total  unconstitutionality. State of totalitarianism and sanitary dictatorship, state  of imbecility” (April 2021; free translation). 

Put more simply, a sanitary dictatorship has been put into practice because  of alleged ongoing fascism and Nazism’s implementation, technologization,  gerontocracy, cultural Marxism, and because of hate speech promoting  the end of freedom of speech. The users of the platform under study felt  endangered by such kinds of historical abstracted enemies. There are no  doubts that these enemies are nowadays artificially created, but they show  how the creation of such enemies is not politically random. Contrary to the  way the Querdenken Movement openly used the idea of imagined Jewish  elites on the command of the authoritarian (democratic) government leading  to sanitary control measures,⁴⁷ in Portugal such antisemitic sentiments had  only timidly vague expressions. For instance, George Soros was a usual  suspect for a kind of deep state governing the pandemic crisis in his favor,  as claimed by the Querdenken Movement.⁴⁸ 

The “acceptanceist” is usually seen as noncritical because the ones  who try to promote social divisions to gain social power tend to attribute  responsibility to negationists to hide their own social defects. The acceptanceist  is also portrayed, even if less frequently, as nonnationalist, “nonbrave,” and  a snitch. “One of the big problems to avoid a dictatorship is the negationist of the dictatorship. These dictatorship negationists [acceptacionists] were  historically always present at the beginning of any dictatorship constitution.  They are usually the majority, and they believe in everything, even in what  the State and the Media are saying” (June 2021; free translation). 

The negationist is often portrayed, on the other hand, as a victim of censor ship and persecution, nonpartisan, part of a unique critical mass, disobedient,  and with no secondary interests in the activism. Also, in a few cases they  are seen as a warrior, prophet, or hero. In order to reinforce the mindset of  persecution, and to justify their own existence as counterknowledge, that  is, to question “epistemic authority by advocating alternative knowledge  authorities,”⁴⁹ several strategies can be applied. It has been a common  practice to mobilize biased experts, as seen before, and to make historical  parallelisms (e.g., police and acceptanceists as collaborators of PIDE, that  is, the state police of the fascist Portuguese New State). In Germany, it was  common to make historical parallelisms with 1933 and 1989. Querdenken’s  participants saw themselves again as subjects of authoritarian powers.⁵⁰ Also,  Portuguese rallies usually tended to invert common arguments used against  them (e.g., the antiscience of the public administration of the pandemic,  the negationism of the true conspirators or as far-right indirect promoters),  among marginal others. 

Regardless of the situations, this platform dedicated several Facebook  posts in which disobedient reaction is the privileged pathway to respond  to sanitary control measures led by the Portuguese government. Two main  principles guide such a disobedient approach and tend to legitimize violence:  the need to contest the single-thought narrative, and contestation of the “fear  narrative.” They usually make severe critiques of mainstream media because  it is not providing space to their contestations and, therefore, to pluralism.  More important than the content and coherence of the critique are making  the comment and being heard, according to the platform. This goes together  with a tentative search for alternative means of communication like the  MeWe or Telegram. As these non-indexed platforms are subjected to less  social control, this may instigate the emergence of more misinformed and, in  some cases, hateful communication.⁵¹ Online platforms such the traditional  Facebook social media may be used but, in other times, participants may  migrate to non-indexed ones. The former allow participants to reach more vast  audiences. The latter migration allows the creation of a space for those who already have been conquered by conspiracy, while at the same time combatant  uniqueness and confirmation bias are reinforced. Within the so-called dark  non-indexed Web, many conspiracy theories tend to be radicalized and to  acquire a racist and/or white supremacist frame that usually does not arise  within regular Internet and social media, because such frames run the risk  of being banned.⁵² In other countries in Europe, as in the case of Germany,⁵³ it has been recognized that many of the freedom rallies’ participants have  been associated with real-life violence, namely, with rioters who, in August  2020, during a freedom rally, attempted to storm the German parliament. 

On the other hand, there are plenty of populist-based discourses.  There is often the construction of naive Portuguese people who do not see  any problem with the COVID-19 pandemic while trusting the epistemic  authorities, the system, the mainstream parties, the corporate interests, or  European foreign interests. People prefer to trust such authorities and create  a distinction between acceptanceists and negationists, between people who  got the “fashion injection” (i.e., the vaccine) and those who did not: “I will  basically explain this: the system fixes a problem, terrifies the population in  an apocalyptic way and then sells us the solution. I can give the example of  the 80s, in which there was talk of a supposed hole in the ozone layer, that  due to a specific gas the planet would not reach the year 2000. Incredibly, the  same scientists who would discover the problem with the old gas, would be  the same ones who have come to produce and sell the substitute” (January  2021; free translation). 

For the platform Verdade Inconveniente, there is a reconfiguration of  the social conflict to legitimize its combatant style. Thus, the system created  new social identities focused on persons who adhere to the measures and  on those who disobey. Those who adhere are manifesting an affinity with  issues like race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. On the contrary, another  dominated and victimized group is born: the nonvaccinated. In Germany,  some participants used to put on a yellow star, like the star of David, but  with the word “nonvaccinated” written on it, to enhance the discrimination  suffered by truth-tellers and freedom fighters.⁵⁴ In Portugal, the same use of  the star of David happened. New victims and fighters are created, and they  usually overlap. They are the same. The ones who are being discriminated  and victimized are the ones who need to take responsibility for the struggle  for freedom. As further discussed, this victimization has been extremely important to implement a discourse based on the need for protection.  “What still shocks me, beyond what I can express, is to see so many people  who consider themselves proudly anti-racist and who vociferate against the  most diverse discrimination (race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or  others), and who support discriminatory measures that have nothing to do  with sanitary control. We are subtly establishing another type of Apartheid!  In Europe, in the 21st century!” (December 2020; free translation). 

Discussion 

The freedom rallies, movements, and the platform Verdade Inconveniente itself cannot be understood as militant far-right movements because most  of the social groups and their narratives are not necessarily conceived to  overtly defend a far-right militant politics. Nonetheless, our data strengthen  this paper’s working hypothesis: the ideological substratum of these move ments is aligned with far-right spurious alternative subjectivity.⁵⁵ Obviously,  conspiracy thinking cannot be reduced to right-wing politics.⁵⁶ Historically,  several conspiracies can be related to the Left. Some self-identified libertarian  and leftist actors have been found within freedom rallies.⁵⁷ Despite such  participation, we believe that freedom rallies have not been well-defined  nor politicized by leftist forces. Instead, as we will further discuss, the  pandemic conspiracy-prone actually enhanced far-right political ideological  underpinnings that have been constantly inflected and nourished during  freedom rallies (e.g., endorsement of producerism, the rise of identitarian  nativism, an imagined and overestimated red-threat). Additionally, these  have conformed to the contemporary modus operandi and communication  strategies of the far-right (e.g., victimization, populism, the massive use  of social media) that is contemporaneously creeping through a so-called  post-truth environment,⁵⁸ in which conspiracy thinking is an ever-present  constitutive feature, encountered, for instance, both in ongoing counter knowledge claims and in supporters’ radicalization. 

Indeed, in Portugal, the conspirative environment promoted by the  COVID-19 pandemic gave a central stage for the far-right creeping under  the sign of post-truth while relying on antisystem, counterknowledge, and  alternative-like rhetoric. Such processes are part of the paradoxical expression of a far-right subjectivity that aims to turn it more socially accepted and  palatable. For such an end to be achieved, the reactionary far-right, which  struggles against emancipatory class struggles, presents itself as a spurious  and combatant force of struggle. To make the more reactionary interests in  contemporary societies popular and appealing, the far-right is required to  present itself as the most pungent political vanguard that accepts no other  true social voice or government than itself. Such political construction is  strongly dependent on conspiracy thinking to react and subvert common  understandings about social problems, in this case, the sanitary control  measures that curbed the rise of COVID-19 infection rates. Our data suggest  some similarities of the Portuguese freedom rallies with the Querdenken  Movement and other European freedom rallies, namely, in how to create  an appealing discourse and in the sorts of protests that were developed. 

The obstinate nonacceptance of sanitary control measures, based  on economic reasons and individual liberty, points toward a reactionary  subjectivity incapable of recognizing the community’s interest in trying to  contain the virus. As shown in our results, the expression of truth-telling  within these movements is usually based on the individual. These movements  are preoccupied with liberty (e.g., economic liberty, liberty of expression),  the right to work (e.g., often movements say they do not want social benefits,  they want to work; producerism), property (e.g., they feel unsafe with the  occasional civil requisition of hotels that happened to manage the accom modation of some infected subjects in Portugal), and dignity (e.g., they feel  the imposition of mask use or a vaccine as threats to dignity), but not worried  about values like social justice, equality, protection, or, perhaps most impor 

tant, access to health. The freedom rallies and movements against sanitary  control measures, announced by the platform under analysis, searched for  immediate, nonreflected political demands toward the extinction of all the  measures that inaugurated pandemic life, as if all the problems, inequalities,  and restrictions were born in the moment of pandemic sanitary control.  Before that, there were no problems, just normality, usually painted with  children laughing and adults traveling. The rhetoric of these movements is  trying to recruit privileged audiences who define themselves as oppressed,  those who could not see the immediate defects in a life before the pandemic  and who saw their economic activity impaired, from restaurant owners to nightclubs to spiritually based audiences, who organized retreats and other  well-being practices. 

The creation of such kinds of victimization is common within far-right  politics. Historical oppressed groups, as well as their respective struggles,  are no longer the central axes of social struggles, but rather the sanitary  apartheid with new oppressed people on the rise. It is claimed that these new  oppressed subjects need protection from the abstractly created enemies (e.g.,  communism, cultural Marxism). The need for protection is an important  inroad to draw people toward far-right subjectivity because it dissimulates  and blurs social conflict while redirecting people to focus and to react merely  in terms of their own survival and protection.⁵⁹ Victims are the Westerners,  the white ones, the combative freedom fighters, the private owners, who do  not want to take the vaccine and to be subjected to perceived unnecessary  measures. 

The negative measures applied to those who refuse to obey sanitary  control measures prove the violence and tyranny of contemporary elites  usually associated with big pharma. Moreover, this elitist enemy from whom  we should emancipate ourselves had, in the context of COVID-19, two other  central and frequent features. It is commonly constructed as a red threat  and it is foreign-perceived. Unsurprisingly, these movements enhanced a  strong and misleading postpolitical position. Freedom rallies are apparently  civil-based initiatives. They claim not to constitute a right- nor a left-wing  movement, but they end up being overtly against leftist political actors, who  may be possibly translated into governments, elites, social movements, or  communism. Even if the Great Reset narrative⁶⁰ is not directly quoted, our  data show a proclivity toward it. There is a usual rejection of any sanitary  control measure that jeopardizes private property or social privileges, as  well as a general disregard toward social guarantees in terms of health and  social benefits. Such measures are typically understood as a leftist assault  to seize population control. 

It was common to see an association of Prime Minister António Costa  with a dictatorship in street images and textual publications. It is also worth  mentioning that other Facebook publications suggest that the control of  hate speech is an offense to the freedom of speech. These narratives are  characterized by a strong focus on the supposedly oppressive character of a  democratic state that turned out authoritarian during COVID-19 pandemic. It began to limit freedom of movement, work, health, and individual and  ethical choices. The fear of pandemic management like the one developed  in China, with stronger measures of sanitary control, usually comes to the  fore. The government’s management—led then in Portugal by the Socialist  Party with the support of left-wing parties, such as the Left Bloc and the  Portuguese Communist Party—is therefore compared to the Chinese Com 

munist Party. According to our inquiry, many believed that a totalitarian  state was on the move in Portugal. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has been seen to take economic–cultural  sovereignty away. The search for emancipation is the struggle for the defense  of the Portuguese identity affected by a foreign virus—an expression of  identitaria nativism. It follows and articulates the common online rhetoric  seen in other Portuguese nationalistic groups, like Escudo Identitário 

(Identitaria Shield).⁶¹ In the case of the nationalistic group presented in  the online platform and demonstrations—Defender Portugal—the usual  antiglobalization rhetoric and the cultural impositions of an immigrant  low-cost workforce are now coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic, as if  supporting sanitary control measures meant supporting an offense against  Portuguese culture and economic sovereignty brought to the country by the  hands of global dynamics. 

Also, freedom rallies analyzed in this article, in line with other self-defined  online far-right movements,⁶² are operating with rumors and fake-news,  , weaponizing conspiracy theories with the aim of developing apparent  counterknowledge or alternative media networks within a so-called post-truth  environment.⁶³ The main premises of the freedom rallies analyzed in this  article depart from the idea that a lie being told to us about the pandemic  is as important as finding an epistemic autonomy. Here authoritarianism  is subjected to profound scrutiny because it is associated with the “enemy”  from whom we need to be saved. The mobilization of these movements is  made around their own libertarian–populist idea of questioning political– epistemic authority, which justifies the importance of creating supposedly  alternative knowledge and freedom of speech. This is followed by historical  fraudulent parallelisms (e.g., the PIDE as the ones who enforce sanitary  control measures; the contemporary repetition of the revolutionary period  of the summer of 1975), which augments such spurious revolutionary and  alternative-like epistemes. But, in fact, these counter knowledge networks, nurtured by digital  activism, do not aim to enlarge knowledge, but rather to reinforce the  consumption of detached information, because it is not accompanied by  greater methods of analysis and interpretation. This process is necessary  to the constitution of popular reactionary and conservative audiences, as  well as far-right subjectivity in general,⁶⁴ because it maintains a sense of  confirmation bias and instructed ignorance in its political audiences, which  reinforces conspiracy and negative-emotion catharsis (usually with insults  and hate implied) without any kind of more systematized political accom modation of such negative emotion. Dissent becomes often nonexistent.⁶⁵ 

Truth-tellers often see themselves as critical subjects who have the historical  mission to criticize realities, but they quite often do not accept any kind of  critique to their own “truth-telling” positions. Therefore, disinformation  tends to be perpetuated. 

Overall, our data show that movements against sanitary control measures  may be recognized as nonelectoral political activity with a strong affinity  to far-right subjectivity. They form a “common” and “oppositional” social  basis that can progressively reach the party to make its concerns succeed.⁶⁶ In a country known for its great rate of vaccination, the party Chega! tried  officially to echo these movements’ concerns. André Ventura was infected  by the coronavirus, and he was not inoculated at the time. He said publicly  that he had no sufficient data to appreciate the safety of the vaccine. The  party was opposed to some of the sanitary control measures in Portugal,  arguing that they were disproportionate and were affecting the real working  class of Portugal (i.e., white people who genuinely want to work and who are  not benefiting from welfare support). This is like Germany, where the AfD  has demonstrated support, in Italy with a group called the Orange Vests  (whose participants are Euro-sceptics to far right extremists), or in France  and the United Kingdom where the Yellow Vests were strong supporters of  antilockdown protests in the streets.⁶⁷ The party does not directly create all  the movement’s support. But these movements also have material interests  and demands to be released (e.g., support to business owners), and the far right party must, in some concrete moments, support their demands. The  ideological echoes, the practical support and/or antiglobalization protectionist  proposals of far-right parties, may appear to be the most attractive mediation  to make those demands effective. Still, relative autonomy should be endorsed on both sides but without  forgetting the zigzagging concatenation between them. On one side, freedom  rallies have prompted a worldview compatible with far-right political ambi tions. This means that usual far-right proposals (e.g., restructure of the state,  dismissal of social guarantees, ethnonationalism)⁶⁸ now have more social  echoes who accept such political interventions and who will be possibly voting  for such parties to solve concrete demands. For instance, in Germany, there  is documented evidence⁶⁹ showing that many of the participants presented in  Querdenken’s protests saw AfD as the real alternative to defeat the sanitary  dictatorship. In terms of far-right movements expansion, some people have  come closer to networks created with far-right radicalization purposes in  mind. On the other side, militant parties also may play some distance from  these movements, even if in some moments they may support certain demands  and narratives to gain political support. They tend not to present strong ties  with these movements because such a kind of involvement could lead to  demobilization due to association with a party seen as radical or far-right. 

Conclusion 

The COVID-19 pandemic set the stage for a particular political balance of  forces that called upon governments to take measures to control the acceler ated dissemination of the coronavirus. This has been a key moment for the  ongoing far-right ideological battle and renewal worldwide, although surely  with contextually based differences. This article discussed that protests,  mobilizations, and digital activism in Portugal led by movements opposing  sanitary control measures are best captured not as a form of militant far right involvement, but as a social renewal of far-right subjectivity, namely,  its pseudo-revolutionary subjectivity, its rhetoric, and its grounded modus  operandi. At this level, conspiracy is of fundamental importance. Maybe not  all participants of these movements are going to give immediate electoral  support to far-right parties, but they are going to end up thinking in ways  compatible with the subjective alignments needed to slowly instigate a social  

acceptance of a far-right innovative “political vanguard.” We believe this relation is ambiguous and operates with a practical  selective distance. The far right is opportunistic regarding social impulses provided by movements against sanitary control measures. At the same  time, these movements find resonance in the selected forms of the far-right  understanding of social reality, but with growing militancy and engagement.  This article is restricted to the Portuguese context. In future research designs,  it would be relevant to compare data from other contexts. This work also  leaves open a reflection on how these movements are going to be recycled  when the COVID-19 pandemic is on the wane. How the activity of these  movements is going to be reconfigured and how the far right is going to  consolidate such operations in postpandemic societies is an important  question to bear in mind.