Using this German analogy, the alt-right frantically talked about the fact that they needed a crisis; a wave of discontent to lift their boats, just as the social and economic crises in the Weimar Republic propelled the Nazis.
Along came Covid-19.
In the US, the alt-right saw the election of Donald Trump as evidence of a public "awakening", and believed the response to the pandemic – which was alternately a hoax or a bioweapon, depending on what was convenient at the time – was a conspiratorial effort to regain control.
The US quickly discovered that conspiracies are a shared language, and other fringe groups took up the same or similar – often completely mind-blowingly bizarre – ideas.
And this is what we have seen in New Zealand. The anti-mandate protest in Wellington, for example, excited the alt-right but also brought together a wide variety of different causes that were invigorated by conspiratorial beliefs. The issue of the alt-right had morphed into something bigger and more difficult to define.
The concerted strategy of these groups to enter local body elections in New Zealand directly mirrors what has already occurred in the US, where the crazy conspiratorial have made considerable gains in taking control of democratic institutions at a local level.
The generally poor voter turnout in local elections leaves these bodies vulnerable to concerted efforts from radical groups, who can have a disproportionate impact on the outcomes simply by standing for their own candidates and convincing their members to turn out and vote. The same goes for other local government processes too: much as councils allow for wealthy retired Nimbys to exert a disproportionate influence because they're often the only people with the spare time and inclination to make submissions and attend meetings in any meaningful numbers, so too have conspiratorial groups been able to make absurd conspiracies into central issues for councils and school boards in many parts of America.
While we can learn much from what has occurred in the US, the parallels are far from exact.
In America, the fiction of the stolen 2020 election – the "big lie" - is driving the political right in the same direction. Trump's big lie has also held the door open for conspiracy theories to seep into the mainstream, which further serves to undermine public trust.
While New Zealand's fringes have a shared language of a general mistrust of the Government and a panoply of conspiratorial ideas, they don't have something like the big lie, which is such a powerful binding agency in the US.
Furthermore, unlike the US, we have been protected by the leadership of our political parties that have so far refused to make room for any of the wild-eyed conspiracism that has successfully infiltrated the American right. Unable to get traction with existing parties, the fringes in New Zealand have had to set out alone, but without the veil of legitimacy a mainstream party offers, they have been exposed by the spotlight of public scrutiny.
Advance New Zealand contested the 2020 general election headed by twin chancers Billy Te Kahika and Jami-Lee Ross but did about as well as a snowball in summer.
Whether or not a new party can succeed to get the 5 per cent threshold to enter Parliament where Advance New Zealand failed is unclear. But certainly, the path toward school boards and local councils is an easier one to tread.
Alternative views and scepticism of the state are good things, but what we are seeing play out has more than a streak of the sinister, and where no sinister exists it is replaced with madness.
Like many others, I have written before about the dangers of disinformation and conspiracy theories and how we need to tackle them online. And while that remains true, the unhinged online communities are wanting to bolster their computer keyboards with community boards.
It's up to voters to have the final say on whether or not they succeed.
• Dr Jarrod Gilbert is a sociologist at the University of Canterbury and the Director of Independent Research Solutions.
