Devin Burghart, President of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, was featured as a guest on The Paths to Understanding Podcast.
“Today at the Institute we track 1,700 different COVID denial groups with over 2.4 million members. They’re fed a constant diet of conspiracy theories and far right ideology. Which has moved so many of them from thinking about this as an individual or public health problem to seeing this as something of epic proportions that they need to take up arms against.”
Burghart explains that the process of radicalization has become much quicker than ever before.
“One of the things that we do at the Institute, while tracking this, is we look at those efforts to move from the margins into the mainstream. So in May we’ll release a report that looks at the efforts of the Far Right to enter the state legislatures around the country”
“So part of what we try to do is help people unpack those mythologies that we have from the past and what this used to look like and help them understand what it’s really like today. Because the situation certainly is dramatically different than when I started doing this thirty years ago and I know it’s a lot different than even what it was a decade ago. It’s always good to help people get ahead and look to where this stuff is going so that they’re not stuck on thinking about just how it was in the past.”
Listen to more here
