I recently had to go to Bristol for work, so I decided to get in touch with a friend of mine who lives an hour down the road in Glastonbury. As luck would have it, on the day I was able to visit, two local groups called Glastonbury Independence Alliance and Community Solidarity Glastonbury were holding an event called Blinded By The Light, an event aimed at countering extreme right wing messaging in Glastonbury, with particular focus on The Light newspaper.
As a member of the Skeptical community in the UK, I had heard of The Light Newspaper through listening to Skeptics with a K, and from reading Mark Horne’s articles about The Light and the community pushback against it taking place in Stroud.
Put briefly, The Light is a free newspaper, founded in September 2020. Self-styled as a “truth” newspaper, it spreads misinformation and conspiracy theories. Had I heard about this event taking place anywhere I would have been interested, but the fact that it was taking place in Glastonbury made the event especially intriguing.
I’m sure that most people know of Glastonbury as the UK’s largest mud and music festival, but not as many will be familiar with the small town in the county of Somerset after which the festival is named. To those in the know, the town of Glastonbury is synonymous with all things alternative, spiritual, and occult. This is abundantly clear to anyone just taking a walk down the high-street. It seems every other shop is offering crystals, decks of tarot cards, incense, bundles of sage, singing bowls, aura readings, soul healing, sound therapy… The list is endless. There are even a surprising number of private residences with posters in the window advertising mystical services of one sort or another.
It is fair to assume that a good chunk of the visitors and local residents are here because of the mythology around Glastonbury, and its reputation as a spiritual hub. Given the often discussed pipeline from alternative health and spirituality to right wing conspiracy nonsense, you could be forgiven for thinking that Glastonbury may well be the sort of place where The Light could garner a loyal readership with little effort. It’s these factors that make this event particularly interesting, and dare I say it, hopeful?
The event was held in the United Reform Church. As we approached there was a polite yet sharp-edged conversation taking place between an older man wearing a camera-mounted hat and a woman, who appeared to be one of the organisers, in a white T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Anti-Fascist”. As we walked past I heard him say “but how is he a fascist”, to which the woman responded “I didn’t say he was a fascist, but he is extremely right wing…” On entering there was a big board with key facts about the event and The Light, including a list of event rules. A collection of handwritten questions were also pinned to the board asking “What is Fascism” and “What’s Fascism got to do with The Light?”
In the main body of the church at the pulpit stood a woman with brightly coloured hair in a pixie cut laying down the law. “This is a discussion, not a debate. If you want a debate you can have one, but not here. If you don’t like the agenda, leave, no one is forcing you to be here, go organise your own event.”
She also said something to the effect of “We will not tolerate hate speech. If you want to say something and you think it might offend someone or be interpreted as hate speech, don’t say it, here or, well, anywhere!”. It was clear that this was going to be a friendly but no-nonsense event.
After going over the ground rules, she gave an overview of the motivation for the event from her perspective. She stated that she had no interest in shutting down debate or in shutting down The Light, and said that she thought some of the content is actually quite good, having enjoyed an article in a previous edition which focused on the Rwandan Genocide. Holding the paper in her hands she said “some of the articles are good, some of them are benign, some are just facile” injecting the word facile with such naked disdain that the audience erupted in laughter.
She went on to say “but it uses left wing talking points to smuggle in a different agenda. There is an article in here on Palestine and the first half is good, but the second half involves quotes from a known antisemite! There are so many people they could have contacted for quotes! Why have they chosen to go for a known antisemite! You only need to google him to know that he is openly anti semitic! They’re using support for Palestine as a Trojan Horse!”
She went on to decry how this paper, masquerading as alternative and anti-establishment, is actually promoting regressive right wing views.
After her rallying cry of an introduction, she introduced the speakers who would be delivering talks on various key topics for the rest of the afternoon.
Challenging The Cosmic Right
First up was a representative from Community Solidarity Stroud District with his talk Challenging The Cosmic Right. It seems he has a long history of activism and is no stranger to direct action, including but not limited to living in trees to block the building of new roads and such.
He had sympathy for those who had been pulled in, and agreed that the government ought to be scrutinised over their response to and handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, he drew the line at denying that COVID-19 was real and spoke of the worrying trend towards the denial of other illnesses, such as the claim that sexually transmitted diseases don’t exist and that germ theory is a lie.
Being a long standing member of left wing community groups, he told us that he had witnessed friends of his go from being members of Extinction Rebellion to believing that anthropogenic climate change was a hoax. He also told us that he had recently heard people with Palestinian flags on their lapels come out with Islamophobic talking points. For him there was no doubt that The Light was effective in recruiting leftie liberal types to the conspiratorial right.
Speaking from experience, he stated that simply ignoring The Light wasn’t working. He explained that this is why Community Solidarity Stroud exists. They write open letters and hand out leaflets explaining why The Light is so toxic (often only a matter of feet away from individuals handing out The Light, he said that this particular bit of direct action can on occasion get tense).
Members of Community Solidarity Stroud even go to the effort of reading every single issue of The Light and reviewing it on their website. Their website also makes leaflets available free of charge so people can print them out and distribute the leaflets themselves. This sounds like arduous work, but, according to the speaker it is starting to have the desired effect. These acts of information sharing and non-violent resistance are starting to help people see The Light for what it is and some people are starting to turn their back on it.
The Light, The Right, and the Fight Ahead
The next speaker introduced herself as a lifelong socialist, and early in her talk told us that her feelings could be pretty easily summed up with the oft-shared meme of an older women holding a sign which reads “I can’t believe I still have to protest this fucking shit”.
She started by restating the concern that The Light picks up on leftist issues and uses them to bring people to the right, and said “left wing people are feeling adrift at the moment”, briefly highlighting what could be one of the key reasons why The Light has been so effective at recruiting people to the right, and why individuals on the left might be particularly vulnerable to radicalisation at the moment.
Her observation was that The Light has managed to dovetail libertarian and neo fascist arguments, which at first glance seem contradictory, given the libertarian position argues that governments should be minimal, allowing individuals as much freedom and responsibility as possible, while the fascist right often wants to assert high levels of control over the population. But, she explained, haven’t fascists always wanted total freedom for heterosexual, cisgendered white men – or at least the dominant group – and total subjugation for pretty much everyone else?
Her talk focused heavily on the role of misogyny in the far right agenda, and the regressive ideas they espouse when it comes to gender and reproduction. She references The Great Replacement theory, and how it centres the fears of some white people that they will become the minority in countries where they currently hold social and political dominance. If one buys into this argument and sees white people becoming a minority as a problem that must be solved, then the solution is obvious – white women need to get back to the home, stop focusing on their own careers and the “unnatural stress of the workplace” and fulfill their moral obligation to reproduce with white men.
Alongside this “white women as baby factories” approach, indigenous peoples, black people and all people of color need to be prevented from reproducing as as frequently as white people, or even at all – through the use of forced sterilisation. This is classic eugenics.
She argued that women’s bodies are, and have for a long time been, a political battleground, and explained that “misogyny is as central to fascism as racism is”, concluding that in the fight against fascism, we must protect the rights of women to make decisions about their own bodies and protect women’s access to safe reproductive healthcare, including access to birth control and abortions. She ended her talk by focusing on the importance of abortion access in the fight against fascism and highlighted a campaign backed by MSI Choices, which proposes that all pregnant people should be protected from prosecution for ending their own pregnancy. I didn’t realise at the time, but MSI Reproductive Choices was previously known as Marie Stopes UK and, well, the less said about Marie Stopes, fascism, and eugenics the better.
Gender Diversity: Hidden Histories and Fighting For The Future
The next talk covered another area where The Light shines with technicolour nonsense – the topic of gender. This talk was delivered by a representative of The Diversity Trust, who focused on the myth that transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people are somehow a new phenomenon. They gave a clear-eyed crash course on the history of gender in different cultures, and the evidence we have that demonstrates how gender as a binary thing that maps perfectly onto external genitalia is a relatively new concept, exported from north-western Europe across the globe as part of colonial expansion. The Victorians have a lot to answer for.
The speaker explained that the destruction and systematic suppression of research into gender diversity goes a long way towards revealing why many people are convinced that this is a new phenomena. Gender non-conforming people have always existed, it’s just that across time and culture the words used to describe people who do not fit into a binary have changed, and that in some instances their existence and history have been actively suppressed. They illustrated this by showing us one of the most famous images of the Nazi book burnings and explained that, despite having seen this image countless times in school and in documentaries, they had only recently learned that the books being destroyed when that image was captured are books from Institut Für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin, an institute specializing in sex and gender studies; a pioneer in transgender medicine which famously treated Lili Elbe.
Science denial – doing your own research
The next talk was half an hour of bread- and butter- skepticism happening in the heart of Glastonbury; a whistle stop tour of the key tenets of the scientific method, and a defence of the need for experts in the face of the oft-repeated-but-hollow mantra “do your own research”. The speaker emphasised that what we are up against is not an abstract philosophical problem – it is imperative that we fight anti-science and anti-expert rhetoric if there is any hope in curtailing climate change, which many people, including the speaker, see as being the real existential threat of our time.
She went on to say that individual action is important, but for real change to happen governments and big businesses need to change. They won’t change unless we put pressure on them and hold them to account, which we will not do if we do not believe in and take seriously the impact of anthropogenic climate change. I found it encouraging that a basic primer on scientific skepticism was being presented in this setting, and the fact that the organisers recognised the need for it showed, for me, an astute awareness of the vulnerability in the public that The Light is trying to exploit.
What is Conspirituality?
The final talk was delivered by a woman who introduced herself as a philosopher of science and a pagan. The aim of this talk was to explore the historical link between the occult and fascism. This promised to be a fascinating talk but unfortunately it was difficult to hear what was being said due to issues with the microphone. Because of this, and with work commitments looming, I decided to take my leave.
Overall this was an excellent event, although one thing that seemed to be missing was a talk focusing on racism delivered by a person of colour. The topic of racism was broached several times, and perhaps if we had stayed to listen to the final speaker they would have covered this more. It’s difficult to know why there wasn’t a single talk delivered by a person of colour, perhaps the organisers couldn’t find a person of colour who was willing to speak at the event – as we all know, when people of colour try to speak up, especially on the topic of racism, they face disgusting harassment and even death threats. As an attendee I was surprised how cordial the whole event was, but I could understand anyone refusing to speak at an event designed to challenge a highly circulating right-wing conspiracy newspaper.
Despite the event covering heavy topics and discussing some of the uglier aspects of humanity, overall it was a very hopeful event. There, in Glastonbury, the locus of UK mysticism, the residents are fighting back against right wing rhetoric, promoting some real honest-to-goodness skepticism, and drawing attention to the threat of the ‘wellness to right-wing’ radicalisation pipeline in the de facto capital of English spirituality.
It is easy to become disheartened in what is often described as a post-truth world, but it gave me a renewed sense of hope to find that there are allies in the fight against propaganda, conspiracy, and radicalisation in a town where alternative beliefs are the norm.
