“It's the salesman tactic. You find a point of agreement and take it from there.”

The move to draw in the anti-vaccine crowd is part of a concerted effort by the extremist right to appeal to an expanding and credible audience that has little faith in the “mainstream media,” medical science or statistics, experts said.

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“The far right has certainly seized on anti-vaccine ideology as an important new front in their ideological and cultural struggle,” said Brian Hughes, associate director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University. “They see anti-vaccine sentiment and COVID denialism as a market that they can exploit for views, for clicks and for merchandise sales.”…

This glomming onto controversial new talking points is what the extremist movement does, Holt said. It’s all about recruiting new members by finding “soft” issues that resonate with mainstream conservatives. The aim: Finding ever-larger pools of recruits for more extremist ideas, he said.

“That’s the bread and butter of extremist movements – to find developing issues and try to capitalize on them,” Holt said. “It’s the salesman tactic. You find a point of agreement and take it from there.”

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