<span style="color: windowtext;">‘Executed in Front of Your Children’: Writing from the Body to Understand Victims of Nasty Politics

A far-right populist nativist party is currently holding tangible powers, dictating the ambitions, content and process of Swedish politics. Nasty politics including hate speech and hate crime is systematically used to radically change politics and governance. In acts of demonisation and dehumanisation, the prime minister and other top political leaders use hate speech to silence scientist, journalists and activists in the public debate on climate policy. Embodying and resonating with my personal experiences of far-right hate speech and hate crime, I qualitatively analyse testimonies of 50 victims of hate speech and hate crime to understand the nature of nasty rhetoric. To victims, nasty rhetoric is perceived as an asynchronous or coordinated swarm of instants that keep coming in a vertical temporality. It leaves many victims with fear of crime and anxiety from not knowing when life will go normal. They resign or stay silent in the public policy debate. Nasty rhetoric also ignites anger, a holy wrath, radicalising some victims. Not to turn violent, but to intensify peaceful protests to pursue their science-based argumentation for strong climate policy. Thus, nasty rhetoric victimisation can also be seen as a traffic cone. Some victims hide in the wide end and turn silent, others use it to speak louder to backfire on the perpetrators of nasty rhetoric.