In this paper, I approach online and offline expressions of uncertainty, mistrust, dissent, skepticism, and critique through the scope of conspiracy thinking that has emerged in discourses related to the COVID-19 pandemic1. Some of the several important questions that run across the different critical debates and political contexts during the pandemic concern issues of objectivity, knowledge, information, and, broadly speaking, truth. Inspired by this research and questions, this article will seek to analyze the explicit and implicit conditions of their discursive articulation in political mobilizations surrounding the pandemic. More specifically, I explore changes in digital discourse surrounding COVID-19;?I investigate connections between online practices and offline political organization; finally, I study the relation of the people engaged in public protests to the depiction of the protests and the pandemic more generally in mainstream media, with particular focus on the first and second organized anti-COVID-19 measure demonstrations in Stockholm in the spring of 2021. The article will be using the concept of Cultures of Rejection, which looks at the social and cultural relations and articulations in which rejection of otherness takes form, how scapegoats are created, and antagonisms against perceived enemies are nourished2. The concept of Cultures of Rejection can thus guide analyses of everyday practices in relation to processes of rejection, objectification, and affect, and study such practices in relation to the material conditions that lay the ground for such expressions. For this paper I ask the questions: How do people make sense of COVID-19 in Facebook groups in relation to Cultures of Rejection? What role does the media play in the understanding of COVID-19? I seek to answer these questions in the context of Sweden. I will do so by discussing Swedish rejection discourses targeting COVID-19 measures in online spaces on Facebook, together with anti-COVID-19-measure movements, and the media’s depiction of the movement3

This article offers a collectively developed analysis of the Covid-19 crisis as it relates to contemporary cultures of rejection, i.e. the socio-cultural conditions in which authoritarian and right-wing populist politics thrive, in Europe. We explore how the pandemic and its management reinforces, transforms and/or overrides existing antagonisms and institutes new ones in Serbia, Croatia, Austria, Germany and Sweden. We discuss how the Covid-19 crisis affects the rise of new statisms; gendered patterns of social reproduction; mobility and migration; digital infrastructures; and new political mobilizations.