Radicalisation
An essay on anti-fascism and a guide to the art I’ve just made about it.
The Vault Artist Studios, my wonderful shared studio space which has appeared in my substack cartoons at least several times, are doing a group exhibition for artists to ‘respond to this lurch to the right in public discourse.’, spearheaded by Laura Nelson and the gallery team.
I’ve got a piece in it. And I want to talk about it.
I’ve always liked to handhold people through my art, micro-manage their intepretation, supervise their experience. Because I’m a control freak. So here I am, telling you that my group show piece is about being daunted by fascism in 2025. As a formerly quite active anti-fascist, who checked out for a few years to focus on chronic illness management, coming back to the battlefield feels like I’ve been caught with my pants down. We all have.
Ah, global super power and tech-industry-enabled fascism. Where do we start? Where to begin even making art about this, never mind comprehending what it is in it’s current form?
It feels useless, to be honest, feebly drawing pictures and colouring in whilst impending disaster bulldozes towards us. But it’s not a step backwards, I’m telling myself. It’s not a distraction. It’s not a pure guilt pacifier (although I do feel incredibly guilty on behalf of white anti-fascists everywhere that our actions haven’t been harder, stronger, more finely-tuned and cutting. More widespread and confident. To be honest, I feel such chilling sadness now, posting openly about being anti-fascist in the UK and Ireland, when antifascism is now designated a ‘terrorist organisation’ in the states and our dazed American counterparts are reassessing risk throughout their entire networks).
If anything, spending a lot of my adult life on social media has made very clear the power of carefully crafted images to shake awake empathy and blast apart preconceptions. To radicalise, essentially.
Besides make messages, there needs to be artistic space to express and commune when bad things are happening. Our shaky and scared nervous systems, which are so deeply dependent on feeling connected to other people, sure are inconvenient, but sadly that doesn’t them go away (this is why I think those social media posts that call out people selfishly putting their activated nervous system before taking action on Gaza have a point, but also kind of miss the point. Co-regulate, THEN act. Anyway…).
Over the last year, I know I’ve felt that deep horror, and perilous helplessness at what we’re facing. As someone who was very involved in grassroots, self-starter types of anti-fascism back before I got sick, I still have the reflex to kick off actions. I did a lot of actions. Little ones, mind, but I did them. I wanted to grab the situation by the balls, and do something, instead of watch it unfold and just sit their TALKING about it and looking performatively concerned.
Eugh, useless. Privilege embodied. Hand-wringing, cringing, self-serving, power-serving liberalism at its best.
But as for making these actions happen...my own networks have gone stale. And they need rebuilt. The pandemic did us dirty here. Lots of solidarity and man power is needed to pull off the kind of BIG responses that this stage of growing fascism needs, and the state can’t be trusted to do anything historically but appease. But as I discovered this month, I’m not yet synced back into the kind of work-sharing anti-fascist networks needed to pull it off.
So here I am, making art. And doing investigations. That keeps me happy, for now.
Investigations?
Well. Here’s what’s been happening with me recently.
Back in September, whilst getting my bus back home, we were blocked off on upper Shankill Road by these absolute losers:
I was sat on the top floor, right up the front, so I got the full scene play out, as the confused bus driver idled and the PSNI showed up and limply stood around. Bouncing back and forth like an incensed goblin, I found that throwing the middle finger at them, making a big deal that I was taking photos and videos of them, gesturing at them to show me their faces...was not near enough to sate me. There were plenty of people of colour on the bus who had to sit there and watch this clown show unfold whilst they were just trying to go about their day in peace.
Besides being volcanic with no where to put my rage and no one to share it with, I had questions. I think we all have questions, to be honest.
From an anti-fascist perspective, my thoughts turn immediately to strategy; How did they organise this. This was part of a coordinated protest across multiple locations in Northern Ireland and the UK. How are they getting this organised? This confident? Where are the spaces they feel safe enough to mobilise each other?
Literally most social media platforms, is the resounding answer, everyone rolls their eyes and tells me. The same ones that nurtured our feminism, and kicked off the Arab spring in the 2010s.
Have you tried reporting someone for racist comments on Facebook now versus back in 2017?
So I basically have been researching this. I took my Tiktok account and brute forced it into a right wing hellhole last week. I poisoned it. For research. And it’s fucking grim.
What is it exactly that our increasing far-right auntie and suddenly savagely sexist nephew is watching every day, every hour? What bile are they mainlining from the moment they wake up to when they fall asleep to AI videos of union jack-plastered war ships chasing down migrants on boats? We all know it’s bad, but surely, for anyone who wants to meaningfully push back on far-right, we need to know this stuff? And how much of it there is, everyday to watch, if you wanted to.
To shift the left-wing needle on my algorithm, all I had to do was follow Jamie Bryson, Reform UK, and search for a few local church groups, and I was solidly there. Easy. Watching wide-eyed, brown-skinned people who barely spoke english being harassed in the street about their job status. Many cringe, wannabe-demagogues sitting in their cars making agressively embarrasing videos about scripture, the end of days and secret societies. Preachers filming themselves getting cautioned by the police for gleeful hate speech. ‘Debates’ with angry left-wing women in the street or cornered at a protest (it’s always women they put in these videos; catching them being tongue-tied and stumped by the sheer combativeness of a microphone thrust in their face being shouted at by a grinning, slick-haired Gen Z streamer arsehole...) Anyway. It’s all there.
That, and I had the name of a profile that I had been meaning to investigate for months – that of Orla.
Wee Orla, who, this May, was a key speaker in a counter rally for trans rights, immigration and Palestine solidarity, that I know many of you attended.
Ah, Orla. Who teaches aerial yoga in Lurgan. And wears a crucifix necklace. And she has this long, dyed red hair, which is her recognisable trademark that you can spot a mile off in any protest. That, and he wears the biggest shit-eating grin you’ve ever seen in all her videos. It’s the unmistakable smug face of a school bully twisting in the knife and delighting at your pain. I made sure to caricature her in my resulting artwork.
I find this far right influencer to be particularly disturbing for one big reason – she had enough charisma to have attendees at that protest eating out of her hand. Over the barriers at City Hall separating the two groups, of rally and counter-rally, I looped around City Hall and snuck over to the other side for a few minutes. I wanted in on the echo chamber, even if just for a few minutes I saw Orla’s audience up close, smiling broadly up at her, as she pointed out the OBVIOUS DANGER of immigrant Deliveroo drivers knowing your address (a few months after this we saw the attempted lynching of brown and black Deliveroo drivers at Connswater). God, they were all lapping it up. I saw their faces, gazing upwards. Enraptured. Passionate. Devoted.
I would normally suggest finding her on Tiktok just to see for yourself just how this grooming happens, and observe the language she uses, of spirituality and community, of expanding consciousness and ‘truth-telling’, of being victimised and hated but battling on anyway for her cause (boke), but that would just give her more algorithmic play to work with. If you ever want to see what my TikTok has become, come over and ask me, and I’ll happily give you a peak through the Nazi looking glass.
Everyone has a part to play in anti-fascism. And this, this right here, is where I think I have my territory – analysis. Learning the gateways to radicalism, entry points in a person’s mind to get them just isolated and weird enough to start following cults (like fascism, which is THE modern death cult). I grew up with just the right amount of paranoid conservatism around to feel recognition in some of the more vulnerable, lazy thinking of far-right wingers. Enough to get me started in understanding how a fascist is created, anyway, before I had a chance to research it. The cult language involved in these TikToks, of ‘rising up’, of ‘let’s build a movement’, is striking throughout a lot of my frankensteined tiktok feed (I had always caricatured far right folks as very disorganised, uncreative and work-shy. Clearly not anymore.)
What does this have to do with my art?
Sometimes, when I’m doing my twice-daily sit on the bus, for twenty-thirty minutes a stretch, people play out loud these tiktoks and reels. Obviously most people don’t do this, most people behave themselves on the bus and keep their weird feeds to themselves. But it’ll happen, on the occasion, and we all have to hear what they hear.
That’s what first got me thinking for this art piece. You overhear some unhinged shit on the bus from people’s phones this way, sitting right beside you. Worrying, strange, barely decipherable stuff.
The cut pieces of audio I hear are never outright enough, and blatantly wrong enough to challenge in the moment, as a bystander trying to be responsible (’here, sorry, hi, sorry to disturb, can I say...what you’re watching...it’s complete shite. I just want you to know what. That information isn’t right. Look it up Please don’t believe that video that you just made the entire bus listen to against their will. It’s bollocks. Sorry again’ Immediately get’s off at wrong stop.
I like to think here’s SOMETHING that you could say in a bus encounter, hopefully not add more self-victimising fuel to their growing racist tendencies).
But that’s the thing. You only hear PIECES of crazy. Never a smoking gun. Just dog whistles through and through. Motte and bailey arguments. The whole encyclopedia of manipulation techniques that we’ve been trained to look out for since the left-wing analysis youtubers of the mid-2010s started making videos about them.
That’s what I want to get across in my art for this show – the strange powerlessness when you hear snippets of these TikTok’s, and then you look around at everyone on their phones and start to wonder..oh my god, WHAT are people looking at? How much of it is silly, cute nonsense, how much of it totally harmless, and how much of it is literally people being radicalised in real time?
That has been a terrifying realisation to me. And as someone who likes to take action, it feels like a dead end.
There’s nothing that can be done to stop the seeds being planted. That’s so far out of our control. You meet these hateful, violent beliefs when they are fully formed, and radical. Not when they are still in nascent, questioning, curious growth. And it’s happening in the seats beside us. And as an anti-fascist that’s a LOT harder to push back on and even comprehend, never mind build a workable strategy from.
And finally to the art.
Here’s what I drew:
Some notes about the art itself:
In the cartoon-artwork I’ve done, these are real quotes that I’ve heard on these TikToks, and some things on the bus.
These are also sketches of real people on the bus. I love open-air sketching, with bright colours. I always feel like I’m clutching my phone desperately when I’m scrolling, but when you see peopling holding there’s out in public, and draw a lot of them in sequence, they look like they’re being cradled like precious artefacts. Which is what they are in many ways. It was weirdly affirming to see them be taken so seriously, at least unconsciously.
Also, stereotyping is very far from my intentions as an artist and cartoonist, none of these images are meant to allude to a certain type of person being more susceptible to far-right dogshit than others. I can’t deal with using cartoons to advance classist, fatphobic shite - it’s so BORING, besides not being true. These are literally just the people I saw out and about who made good poses, and frequently you will see a lot of teenagers in tracksuits all happily hanging out with each other on the top floor of the bus I take, so in they go.
The All Welcome exhibition opens on the 6th of November in the Vault gallery in Marlborough House featuring the work of many artists, by immigrants and non-immigrants alike. Go see our work in the flesh.