The rise of Etsy white nationalism

Alternative healing meets extreme politics

Dear subscribers,

Welcome to our new members who joined this week from the Jewish Chronicle, where I wrote a short article about Jeanette Archer. She’s one of Britain’s most prominent activists alleging the existence of a Jewish paedophile network, and has been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to murder. More to follow on this story.

Today we’ve got a piece about the small but unmistakable strand of New Age hippies within the British far-right, who we’re calling the Etsy white nationalists. If you like it, please forward it on to a few friends and ask them to sign up.

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‘Optimise your vibrational frequency’

Jody Swingler, a sound therapist and gong practitioner, is now a senior figure in Britain's most active far-right group.

Jody Swingler is a 38-year-old aspiring singer who, like so many others, hopes to break out of the internet boondocks and hit the big time. At first glance, her YouTube page appears no different from any small-time musician trying to grow their audience of a few thousand followers. Among her videos there are clips of Swingler rehearsing new songs, photos of her artwork and footage from old performances where, clad in a tartan skirt and a hat adorned with flowers, she sings about summertime.

What makes Swingler’s cutesy channel different from most bedroom artists is that in addition to being a folk singer, she is also a senior figure in Patriotic Alternative. PA, which we covered a couple months ago, is a white nationalist group run by Mark Collett, a man who describes himself as a “Nazi sympathiser”.

PA’s ranks are filled with Holocaust deniers, Hitler worshippers and exiles from banned far-right terrorist groups. Their leadership believes that Jews manipulate global affairs and they promote the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which claims white Europeans are being eradicated by the coordinated immigration of Asians and Africans. 

How strange, then, that Swingler should be part of a group like this. Her hippie credentials could not be more robust. Only five years ago, she described herself as a “sound therapist and gong practitioner” living in Ibiza. There she ran poolside sessions to “optimise the vibrational frequency” of serotonin-depleted ravers. She’s also a qualified yoga instructor with a belief in the healing power of crystals. On her Twitter page, she reposted Bob Marley lyrics, Hawaiian prayers and the proverbs of the philosopher Hazrat Inayat Khan, who as her new friends in PA would be horrified to learn, was a Muslim.

Top right: Jody Swingler, aka Jody Kay, sings about acorns in front of a “white lives matter” banner.

PA believes that white “indigenous” Britain is under threat from multiculturalism, which makes it bizarre that Swingler, whose New Age beliefs are thoroughly multicultural, now has a leadership position in the group. She appears on PA’s livestreams, gets promoted by their official social media channels and delivers speeches at their conferences. Last year, she gave a talk entitled “My Struggle”, which given Mark Collett’s endorsement of the book is surely a nod to Mein Kampf. Before that, she trolled Keir Starmer’s radio show on LBC by calling him up to talk about white genocide. It seems a universe away from the everyone’s-welcome Balearic gong baths she used to host.

Not that long ago, it seemed like members of the British far right could be placed into two loose groups. There were lagered-up racists who shaved their heads, donned army surplus boots and went off to hassle immigrants. Then there were sinister intellectual types who wore stained ties and boxy suits and invoked Enoch Powell to vainly make their movement more respectable.

As different as these two generalised categories might have seemed, they moved in similar circles, attended the same events and drank in the same pubs. It would have been hard to imagine that one day the likes of Jody Swingler, with her didgeridoos and Tibetan singing bowls, would have fitted into that picture.

Before Jody Swingler joined PA, she was a yoga instructor living in Ibiza.

And yet, if you look at the British far right today, it seems to have a small but unmistakably hippie-ish contingent. You would think that these two worlds were mutually exclusive, but on a recent livestream of far-right influencers, Swingler appeared in front of a banner that said “White Lives Matter” while performing an acoustic song about planting acorns. Swingler is the most prominent example of this unlikely mishmash of extreme views and the paraben-free world of alternative living. Call it Etsy white nationalism, after the online marketplace that sells handmade, environmentally friendly creations.

There are others like Swingler. Piers Corbyn, brother of Jeremy, appeared on a livestream with Mark Collett to discuss “the Jewish Question”. Chris Mitchell, a regional organiser of PA, calls himself a “Nazi Buddhist” and claims to practice meditation. Claire Ellis, a fellow PA activist, runs a company with Swingler called Clean and Pure that sells bars of soap infused with jasmine, bergamot and calendula petals.

Nancy Richardson in an official Patriotic Alternative photo released last week, and right, in her social media (identified by Red Flare).

Nancy Richardson, an animal rights activist who was the Green Party's 2016 candidate for a council seat in a suburb of Manchester, was also exposed as a member of PA this week. She appeared in an official pic at their March conference and was identified by Red Flare, an antifascist collective who are well worth following.

Richardson is a software engineer whose LinkedIn page lists her interests as “civil rights and social action”, along with various green causes. In 2017, while working for the Co-op’s digital team, she appeared in a promo video in which she said her favourite thing about the company was “the diversity”. Scout understands that she used to volunteer for an animal rights group that placed hidden cameras in abattoirs to observe malpractice. Her Facebook shows pictures of her before she joined PA, attending an earthy trip to Lapland, singing folk songs around a campfire, working in a forge and practising archery.

Nancy Richardson, on a 2016 holiday in Lapland before joining Patriotic Alternative

So how did Richardson go from candidate for the Greens, whose manifesto calls for the end of racism, antisemitism and prejudice, to joining an activist group that would like to see a lot more racism, antisemitism and prejudice? Richardson did not answer Scout’s request for comment.

Perhaps there’s a clue in what she’s been doing for PA. Red Flare reports that Richardson has been circulating leaflets containing coronavirus conspiracy theories. PA, as we wrote last month, has been working hard to enlist anti-vaxxers into their cause, claiming that it is only a short ideological hop from thinking that Covid shots are a tool of depopulation to believing the white race is being targeted by the jabs. Could Richardson have been drawn in through PA’s anti-vaxx messaging?

Or given her environmental activism, could PA’s recent propaganda have been appealing? The group has been handing out leaflets with pictures of red squirrels on them, asking people to “protect our native species and stop building on the green belt”. It claims to have undertaken “rewilding” projects to improve the number of hedgehogs in the east of England, although the video accompanying this announcement showed one dismal hedgehog house being placed in a field.

Red Flare @redflareinfo

Richardson has been involved with PA since late 2020, attending hikes as well as leafletting homes with conspiracy theories around coronavirus and the supposed threats posed by non-white immigration.

For whatever reason Richardson, Swingler and co got involved in PA, they are emblematic of the curious subset of far-right believers who hold extreme political views and also know what a sun salutation is. It’s especially curious in Richardson’s case, as her leap from the leftist world of the Greens to PA looks like a real-world example of the horseshoe theory. 

Alternative healing, like the kind Swingler practices, sees the body as a pure, sacred being corrupted by modern life — poisoned by digital technology, processed food and indoor living. Correct me if this sounds like a stretch, but I wonder if that belief isn’t too far away from the far-right view of the nation as a pure, ethnically homogenous society corrupted by immigration and moral degeneracy. The difference of course being that meditation and chanting isn’t going to suffice for PA’s vision of a perfect nation.

So how is the Etsy contingent going down among PA’s rank and file? It’s not necessarily the same, but it’s worth saying the arrival of the anti-vaxx brigade hasn’t been a roaring success. Activists from PA complained about the arrival of “freaks” and “nutcases” into the West Midlands branch, according to an analysis this week by Hope Not Hate. “Trying to recruit them probably just isn’t a good idea,” the activists said.

PA's environmental propaganda: using red squirrels to soften its extreme image.

The Etsy crowd might seem like a total anachronism, but it’s interesting to point out that the far-right has historically taken an interest in environmental causes. Nazi Germany passed a number of laws to improve animal welfare and reverse the decline of endangered species. Historians have suggested that Nazi efforts to protect wild horses and bears might have helped to introduce the idea that some creatures were superior to others and in need of defending, just like the German nation.

Plus, the manifestos shared by the perpetrators of recent far-right terrorist attacks in New Zealand and the US referenced environmental themes. A gunman who shot up a Walmart in Texas in 2019 wrote:

“The decimation of the environment is creating a massive burden for future generations. Corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly overharvesting resources. If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can be more sustainable.”

There’s no sign that PA’s attitude to the environment is that violent, or even that coherent. The red squirrel stuff might conjure up an image of an indigenous, symbolic animal at risk of extinction from a nasty foreign species. But when it comes climate change, PA’s official website claims that it’s a man-made hoax.

It seems more likely that PA is trying to soften its image by defending green causes. In Scotland last week, the group organised a litter-picking PR stunt and flyered neighbourhoods to tell them about their “community building teams”. Importantly, the leaflets didn’t mention PA’s more strongly held convictions about Jews and immigrants. These stunts would appear to be too cheap for most people to fall for. How weird, then, it seems to have worked for the likes of Nancy Richardson.