Rather than avoiding the people pressing copies of The Light onto Saturday shoppers in Stroud, I decided to go up and take one.
The Light is a conspiracy theory newspaper which is known to be funded by right wingers. It’s in the same cognitive twist zone as yoga/natural food fanatics who became right wingers during Covid. The people who pass the paper out in Stroud used to be a fairly gentle mob of left wing conspiracy theory believers. They used to complain about 5G and topics like that. As with the yoga folk, Covid pulled them into the twist and they ended up handing out right wing propaganda.
What is in there?
The Light appears to be a one page per culture war subject newspaper.
It goes thru a sequence of articles including big pharma, Covid, global warming, gender, farming, etc. There are also some quite solid articles about topics like Special Needs education and single pages of freestanding weirdness about climate change as a hoax.
In general, the paper is a page by page attempt to trigger rage in any reader who picks up a copy. At least one topic will annoy them and then that rage will be attached to the other topics in the paper. The conspiracy theories knitted together into whole cloth of outrage and othering. As the front page article notes, you are not alone. If one culture war topic annoys you then you can join a community of people who are enraged about many other topics.
Offhand, the story about Frankfurt School in the picture above is because they are blamed for Cultural Marxism. You can hear an interesting new podcast on that subject on Origin Story Cultural Marxism.
The narratives of resentment and rage
I picked up The Light because I read Disaster Nationalism over Christmas and the author, Richard Seymour, specifically mentioned it.
Within that book that there is an interesting discussion of how right wing radicalisation works and how disinfotainment (neologism of disinformation and entertainment) drives people to rage and violence.
The diagram above is that process. Taking peoples’ resentments (quite often valid ones) and forming them into packages that can be shared. This is what The Light does with its one topic per page format.
What the right wing does well is to create these clear narrative packages. They work in all formats: online, short form, long form and even in old-fashioned print.
The packages do one important thing. They name someone or some organisation that is deliberately doing this enraging action for some ghastly purpose.
The resentment is focussed thru blame as dislike or hatred.
There is a good local community solidarity group in Stroud who have been campaigning against The Light for a while. They wrote The Light article analysing the content, connections and purposes of the publication. The point they make is The Lights is clearly focussing hate onto certain groups that have been hated by the right wing for years: homosexuals, Jewish people, disabled people and so forth.
What is less certain is what that resentment plus naming is intended to do. The Light holds back from stating what all this passionate blame is used to do.
It points out how you can join or set up your own local group or community. The sense of togetherness with shared resentment and agreed groups to blame.
What, from what I can read, it does not do is state actions to take.
There is a Call To Community but not a Call To Action.
In Disaster Nationalism, the final part is action permissioned by the right wing leaders. Those actions are Restorative Violence: abuse or physical violence. The necessary revenge upon those named groups who have created the causes of so much resentment.
There is no point creating a roiling mass of anger and directed hate if you do not release it.
The Light leaves that point unspoken and unprinted. Presumably because that would create direct legal consequences for it and its funders.
Can we break the pipeline?
In the last couple of years I have worked on projects for design for Beyond Net Zero and imagining hopeful futures in cultural organisations and in engineering. There have been many workshops with citizens. We have covered many resentments and many blamed communities.
What had proven to be a problematic solution is Systems Thinking (read Wikipedia for an explanation of its ideas).
It is a solution because it fractures the single responsibility ideal into mulitple parties (human and non-human) who may have created the situation both deliberately and by accident. Systems thinking shows the contellations of parties involved in any action and the emergent complexity of all these elements interacting.
You cannot name and blame so easily with systems thinking framing. There are too many participants and motivations.
It is a problem though because the explanations become too diffuse for easy storytelling. There is neither the narrtive clarity nor the narrative direction that comes so easily to the right wing ‘name and blame’ methodology. In showing the vastness of the constellations, you lose the focus of showing one place.
What to do?
Right wing radicalisation is clearly successful — the rise of Reform in UK and the new Trump administration in the US show that.
How to break that success is something that I am concerned with as it is something I come across in the public work I do with civic assemblies and participatory design. Books, like Disaster Nationalism, have been helpful in trying to frame the issues. Work with organisations, like the Design Council, have shown tools and methods that may help.
What this post is about is me trying to map where effort and tools might be applied in ways that are achievable and impactful. Breaking the radicalisation pipeline at the Responsible zone seems possible.
I am however, wary of the tools. Systems Thinking is a good framework but I still cannot see how to apply it without losing people in the layers of parts, participants, causes and effects.
I would be glad to chat with anyone who could offer better analysis or better tools.