Why did this progressive campaigner join a white nationalist group?
Nancy Richardson's strange journey from the Green Party to Patriotic Alternative
Since Nancy Richardson was exposed as a member of Patriotic Alternative last month, I’ve been puzzling over why such a committed left-winger joined Britain’s most notorious far-right group.
How could someone whose progressive credentials were so impeccable join a white nationalist organisation? Richardson wasn’t a 4chan-obsessed troll (as far as we know) but a former electoral candidate for the Green Party. She campaigned with animal rights activists to expose abattoir malpractice. She even appeared in a promo video for the Co-op’s tech team, where she used to work, and praised the company’s diversity policies. Her LinkedIn page still lists her interests as “civil rights and social action”.
So what was she doing with Patriotic Alternative, a group run by Mark Collett, the man who describes himself as a “nazi sympathiser”? Civil rights and social action couldn’t be further from PA’s agenda. This is an organisation that invites Holocaust deniers to their conferences and wants to deport all immigrants from the country. PA has repeatedly applied to the Electoral Commission to become a political party but has been rejected because its anti-gay constitution does not comply with equality law. (This week, PA was rejected a fifth time because the authorities raised questions about its financing arrangements).
Richardson is not the only person who has moved away from leftwing politics to embrace the far-right. There was a trend a couple years ago for American YouTubers to post videos titled “Why I Left The Left”, in which they expressed dissatisfaction with identity politics and described their path to Donald Trump’s Republican Party. One of the highest profile examples of these influencers was Candace Owens, the American commentator, who used to run an anti-Trump blog before she became a contributor to Alex Jones’s conspiracist TV show (you might recall Owens for her declaration that Hitler's plans for Germany were “OK”).
But what makes Richardson’s case rare, as far as I can tell, is how extreme her ideological journey has been. It’s one thing to write a blog that includes the odd joke about Trump’s penis size (as Owens once did) before swinging rightward. But campaigning for the Greens and proclaiming your admiration of diversity policies before joining PA is quite another.
I wanted to understand what was behind Richardson’s weird trajectory. After her photograph at a PA event was identified by an antifascist collective called Red Flare, I contacted her. No response so far. Her ideological journey looked like it was going to remain a mystery until a couple weeks ago, when she popped up on a PA livestream, discussing her move with the group’s Scottish organiser, Simon Crane. In lieu of being able to speak to Richardson directly, I think it’s worth looking at what she said.
1) Birthrates, demographics and diversity
“I was genuinely worried about the birthrates, demographic replacement, the impact of diversity,” Richardson says, introducing the first reason she decided to join PA. “We are being colonised and we are being demographically replaced.”
The claim that white people are being existentially threatened by immigrants from Asia and Africa is a far-right conspiracy theory called the Great Replacement, which also encompasses the fear that the birthrates of white people are too low. This line has also been used to justify acts of terror. It appeared in the opening lines of Brenton Tarrant’s manifesto — he shot up two mosques in New Zealand — who said: “It’s the birthrates, it’s the birthrates, it’s the birthrates.”
One important component of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory is the claim that demographic upheaval is being coordinated by a shadowy elite, which in most cases just means Jews. As Richardson’s interviewer Simon Crane claims, immigrants are being “transported” across Europe by “non-profit organisations, let’s call them, in treble parentheses”. Putting three brackets around someone’s name (((like this))) is a code that means they are Jewish. Richardson agrees with Crane that Jews are nefariously funding migrant journeys into Europe.
But to what extent was the Great Replacement a factor in convincing her to join PA? It’s interesting to note that she defers to Crane, her interviewer, a couple of times on the livestream, asking him to explain things like Westminster corruption. She says she became a member of PA in 2019, and I thought it odd that she would still be uncertain about what it stands for two and a half years after joining. Is there anything else drawing her to the group beyond its politics?
2) Disliking the left
This is the familiar talking point from those old “Why I Left The Left” videos, and indeed Richardson repeats that phrase in describing how she took the plunge into far-right politics. The seeds were sown at university, apparently, when she became frustrated at feminist friends telling her that it was sexist for men to hold open the door for her. In her telling, they also didn’t want to engage with her on certain topics.
“It always felt like I was being gaslit when I was talking about demographics,” she says. “I couldn’t get any honest, frank conversation about how the change of demographics affects white people in the British Isles.” She describes how uni peers brushed off her attempts to bring up demography (which if you were just trying to enjoy a pint in the student union might be understandable) and laughed at her for being racist.
According to Richardson’s LinkedIn page, she went to Sheffield Hallam to study computer science in 2003-7. For many years after that, she was stuck into progressive politics (running for the Greens in Stockport in 2016, working at the Co-op in 2017). The idea that a few awkward encounters at uni almost 20 years ago led Richardson to Patriotic Alternative doesn’t ring true. I wondered if by claiming that the roots of her conversion date back that far, Richardson is establishing a pedigree of sorts to be accepted by PA.
3) Discovering far-right YouTube
“I went down the YouTube algorithm before a lot of people got banned,” Richardson says, referring to the last few years. She started tuning into the channels of Mark Collett, Black Pigeon Speaks and VertigoPolitix.
There’s been some very interesting research done that indicates social media platforms make it easy for users to find extreme content. YouTube has been accused of creating a user experience that sends someone watching and commenting on videos that make fun of feminists, for instance, down a rabbit hole that ultimately leads them to hardcore channels like VertigoPolitix.
Who knows which of his videos Richardson particularly enjoyed, but to give you an idea — he claims that Jews are encouraging effeminacy among white men in order to eradicate their race:
“By eliminating white masculinity altogether, you remove the white male from reproductive dominance. Once this is achieved, it only takes a few short generations to exterminate his race completely.”
It was at this point, Richardson says, that “everything they were saying made a lot more sense, it fitted with reality more”. She describes how as she discovered far-right YouTube, she posted some of what she learned on Facebook. It didn’t go down well. She recounts one occasion — this must have been long after uni — when she got “completely flamed” by her friends for discussing a debunked claim that immigrants in Sweden have created “no-go zones”. “I got called everything under the sun,” she says, coming to the conclusion that her friends weren’t going to hear her out.
4) On the lookout for friends
This next comment is small, but I think it speaks volumes. Richardson says that when she got involved with PA — sometime in 2019 apparently — she didn’t have many friends she could talk to. Explaining how she became convinced to take her online interest in the far-right to the next level, she says: “I really wanted to start meeting people in real life to have a social circle again that I could relate to. Luckily PA was starting up, and I really liked what I saw… I thought, ‘these are a good bunch’.”
She goes on to animatedly talk about being welcomed into PA, her joy of going paintballing with her new mates and the thrill of exchanging shots with Mark Collett, the group’s founder. I don’t think it’s too much of an extrapolation to say that an element of loneliness, or at least wanting to belong to a group, seems like an important factor in Richardson’s move to PA.
Radicalisation experts say that your friendship groups and the psychological dynamics that they create can be key factors in a journey towards extremism. We don’t know for sure, but from this interview it looks like the social appeal of PA drew Richardson to the group in addition to its white nationalist politics.
In recent posts on Scout, we’ve talked about how PA tries to present a softer image of itself by organising hikes, camping trips and movie nights. Given that their leadership contains members of banned terrorist groups, it was hard to imagine anyone being taken in by this faux-friendly image. But it looks like it worked for Nancy Richardson.
Man, at least the jew diaspora is dying. Will be even better when climate change makes it permanent.
Of possible relevance here: the areas where the Greens outpoll Labour tend to be the likes of Suffolk or Dorset. Obviously that doesn't mean that everyone in those places is racist, but ...