Anders Ravik Jupskås was one of the researchers who made a name for himself after 22 July. Where Lars Gule was provocative, Jupskås was low-key. Now he has presented the anthology “Right-Wing Extremism in Norway after 22 July – Opinions, People, Mobilisation and Resistance”. A group of researchers participates. Jupskås still works at the Centre for Research on Extremism (C-REX) which was founded by Erna Solberg with a pot of 50 million kroner after 22 July, at the time with Tore Bjørgo as the front figure.
C-REX is part of the Faculty of Social Sciences at UiO. Research on a part of the population defined as a danger is thus made into a task within academia. That is special. There is no equivalent centre for research on radical Islam, only in the terrorist variant and then as preparation for or investigation of terrorism. What is preached in the mosques and associations is not monitored.
Now that surveillance and censorship are a matter of course in the fight against right-wing extremism, one can notice that the same focus is not directed at Islamic environments.
When one reads the interview with Jupskås in Universitetsavisa one gets a feeling that a radicalisation of the research environment has taken place. They resemble the environments they research on: They are locked inside their own world and build it with their own language. Since this language is financed by the taxpayers, people should perhaps pay attention to their work, for they provide the academic foundation for the persecution of a part of the population. Those who believe that Norway belongs to Norwegians.
There are quite a few who believe that if one scratches a little at the surface, but most will not admit it in open conversation.
The hunt for right-wing extremists can function as a warning: We have you in the sights.
The journalist asks no such questions. Cathrine Th. Brundell agrees with Jupskås even though what he says is startling.
Jupskås estimates that there are 3,000 who fit the definition of right-wing extremist today. He paints a picture of people with big problems, paranoid. That Norway is being taken over by foreigners is given a deranged character. We are to unsee, as it is called in English, what we see every single day. This demand to not-see meets us in everyday life, and it is demanded of us. It gives an obedient population.
Norway is being taken over by foreigners, but if one can lock up those who believe that and make a diagnosis of it, people will continue in sleepwalker mode.
Unregulated public space
Jupskås says several serious things that people should note. Especially the need to control social media and alternative media.
If one calculates on the basis that Norway has 4,500,000 adult inhabitants, 1.6 per cent corresponds to just over 70,000 of us.
Jupskås believes part of the explanation lies in a naive relationship to social media.
The one who puts in freedom as a value worth defending is naive. The use of such a word says something about what Jupskås could imagine.
– The entire digital landscape is very unregulated. There I think that the democratic elite in the Western world has been incredibly naive. Now we also see that more and more in Norway, especially the younger ones, get their news via platforms such as Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram. They are controlled either by opportunists who want to make money, like Mark Zuckerberg (the man behind Facebook, ed. note) or right-wing extremist capitalists like Elon Musk, says Jupskås.
Furthermore he says that Musk in addition to making a lot of money uses his social media platform as a radicalisation machine. Europe is in the process of doing something, but hateful messages and violence videos spread incredibly fast. The same applies to the comment sections in alternative media, he says.
A radicalisation machine? On X you find the news the media do not want to publish. Without X we would have had a much poorer debate and a lower knowledge level.
That is where Jupskås and his like-minded want to go.
Strange, but VG’s editor, Gard Steiro, used the same term in Debatten this winter: He said we cannot live with having a public space that is “unregulated”. When did editors start expressing concern that the public sphere is “unregulated”? Is it not their task to ensure that the public sphere is free from state control?
And: Is it coincidental that Ine Eriksen Søreide constantly talks about how the rules-based world order is under attack from people like Putin and Trump?
Comment sections
For the first time we see that comment sections are now being brought forward as a problem child that something must be done about.
Is it coincidental that complaints about Document to the Norwegian Press Complaints Commission allege comment sections as a breach of the Code of Ethics of the Norwegian Press?
Meanwhile we see that the comment sections in the major newspapers are closed when the topic is combustible. That is their solution to rules-based conversation: silence.
The academic elite and the media have lost the battle. They have got a silent opinion against them, and they sense it every single day. But they still believe that they can terrorise people into obedience.
Jupskås simply seems a bit dumb. The language is devoid of nuance.
One of the questions the book asks is about right-wing extremism’s image of the enemy. It is composite, Jupskås says, and comes both from outside and from inside.
– An external enemy is a threat to the community, and an internal enemy is a traitor because he paves the way for the external enemy to gain more power. Some of the enemies have a lot of power, while others are regarded as “useful idiots”. They can be teachers, or the politically correct middle class, which because they do their job maintain “the system” the right-wing extremists despise.
Has Jupskås heard of woke? Jupskås projects a model he has inside his head onto a complicated reality out there.
He clearly wants to do something about the unruly and the possibility people have to communicate freely.
Norwegian researchers say without circumlocution that we cannot have a free conversation.
It must be regulated.