Why did the press ignore a gathering of the world's leading fascists?
Right-wing extremism is going mainstream, but it's not getting the coverage.
Just before he confirmed his attendance at a neo-fascist summit in Portugal, Gregory Bovino, the former U.S. Border Patrol commander who was once the face of President Donald Trump's mass deportations, posted a photo on X showing himself giving a salute familiar to anyone who has heard of Nazi Germany.
It would be easier to dismiss this Hitlerian greeting as an awkward gesture — as some did when X's owner, Elon Musk, gave it at Trump's 2025 inauguration — were it not selected and shared by a man on his way to a racial-purity conference. The "Remigration Summit 2026," so called, was held May 30 at the Salmanha Residence hotel just south of Porto, Portugal, and its organizers were not subtle.
"Weimar conditions require Weimar solutions," argues Afonso Gonçalves, chief organizer of the event. He's the founder of the far-right group Reconquista, so named for the mass expulsion of Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula. That's who Bovino was photographed standing next to after he landed in Europe.
Martin Sellner, an extremist from Austria, is best known for pushing the "great replacement" conspiracy theory — that Jewish elites are seeking to exterminate the white race via mass migration — that has motivated mass shooters from Pennsylvania to New Zealand. He was the other man standing next to Bovino.
Other speakers included a Belgian fascist convicted of Holocaust denial and the founder of a Swiss neo-Nazi group called "Junge Tat" who is quite open about his fondness for "National Socialism."
Charles R. Davis
I first learned of this gathering on Facebook, where it was promoted by Reconquista with paid advertising (Meta refused to comment or to take down the ads). The only secret was its precise location.
And yet? No media outlet in the English-speaking world covered the fact that a former Trump administration official was at a gathering of the world's leading fascists to promote "remigration," a far-right euphemism for the ethnic cleansing of non-white people from the United States and Europe.
Major media outlets also ignored the presence of Stefano Forte, president of the New York Young Republican Club. A spokesperson for the group — informed of the extremist views (and criminal convictions) of those attending — told The Redoubt that it would "never apologize for standing alongside our European brothers and sisters."
The only English-language outlet that covered this event was The Redoubt. On Sunday, the Spanish newspaper El Pais reported on the presence of Rocio de Meer Méndez, a politician with the far-right Vox party. But otherwise? Coverage appeared limited to the far-right outlets that were invited, such as the AfD-affiliated Deutschland Kourier (Alternative für Deutschland lawmaker Lena Kotré was another featured speaker).
The mainstream right is crawling into the sewer of neo-Nazi ideology but you probably wouldn't know it unless you were a right-wing extremist yourself. Even news outlets that dedicate significant resources to covering the scourge of antisemitism generally ignore it, at least in the United States, when it comes from Republican operatives and retired Trump administration officials.
There is no need to argue about whether there is a double standard; the lack of media coverage speaks for itself. The only question is why it exists.
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Right-wing capture of the corporate media in the United States is one response; there's just no incentive to highlight one side of the aisle's extremists.
Bari Weiss, an opinion columnist with no record of actual reporting, was handed full control over CBS News based on her willingness to turn it into a mouthpiece for its new owners' politics. ABC paid Donald Trump millions of dollars for the crime of accurately describing his civil liability for sexual assault. Jeff Bezos has turned The Washington Post into a conservative blog, and not a particularly interesting one.
These outlets will cover extremism and antisemitism if the dots can be connected to an elected Democrat, no question, but not when it's the other way around. After all, it is in the interests of their ownership, and the reactionary cause, for right-wing politics to be seen as a necessarily brutish response to the dangers of a loony left.
Charles R. Davis
But I think it's more than that. I think it's that we, broadly speaking, demand nothing from the right, even if we don't share the politics. When illiberal figures behave badly, as they are wont to do — when they give voice to their basest and oft-libidinal desires and hatreds — it is viewed as akin to a mangy dog chewing on a slipper. They are not defying expectations; they can't really be helped.
Whether from sympathy or condescension, far-right politics are interpreted as naturally occurring in a way that left-wing politics are not. Small-minded, reactionary tribalism is the default setting of the world, or so it is thought. It's only news, and only interesting, when someone who purports to be better shows that they're not.
Eventually, though, what's left of the free press will have to reckon with the fact that the far-right fringe is now the modern world's governing elite — and openly declaring an intent to repeat the 1930s. That's a story.
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