The Look of Lunacy?

The long post that follows here is something that I have been thinking about for many years, and have finally gotten around to writing about.  As you may be aware, I have spent a lot of time over the last few years looking at right wing websites.  This includes the more "mainstream" ones, generally financed by rich backers, and a long list of more far out sites that I generally do not cover on my blog, because, well, enough is enough. 

As a motion picture art director, I work a lot with graphic artists constructing imitation documents of one kind and another.  Perhaps because that is part of my job, I like to look for stylistic cues that give away the nature of a document, without reference to its content.   This is an area (at least as it relates to politics) that has not received much attention, although institutions like the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore have fine collections of this material, much of it produced by people who are mentally ill.

In particular, very little has been said about this phenomenon on the internet.  This is probably understandable; websites are a relatively recent thing, and some of the relatively well known visual characteristics of the work of the mentally disturbed are eliminated by the template-driven layout of the vast majority of websites.  For example, the chaotic writing of the Miz Thang example, or the handwritten political specimen shown below are not really possible on the internet. Well, enough preface, let me dive in with some examples:

This first one is the website of Jeff Rense, an English radio broadcaster and perhaps the world's leading proponent of the "Our leaders are really shape-shifting reptiles from outer space" school of political thought:

And here's another, to get us started, the website of the Coast to Coast radio show, formerly run by the world champion conspiracy theorist Art Bell.

Finally, this one, from an openly antisemitic, apocalyptic website called Endgame-The Beginning of World War III:

A few notes about the visual similarities between these sites and others I shall discuss (although, really, they are pretty obvious:)  They generally feature black or very dark backgrounds, often filled with semi-identifiable, confusing images; their layout is very confused and complicated; they feature numerous, colorful, chaotically distributed small pictures, they involve many sizes and colors of type.

Here are a few more examples of the ubiquity of this sort of thing.  First, the website of long-time new age guru Alan Watt:

And a couple more:

Not every site has every single characteristic; for example, here is one without the black background, from major right wing loon Texe Marrs:

Well, enough.  Over the last several years, I have collected a lot of these, but this is plenty for a web post.  I think these examples show the frequency of this sort of thing among the lunatic, paranoid right- something visual and easily spotted which you essentially never see from any other part of the political spectrum.

Now, I am not a psychologist, but let me speculate briefly about the antecedents to things like that.  Again, I will mainly give examples; I don't consider myself competent to make definitive judgments about such things.

Here are a couple of examples of art produced by certifiably mentally ill people.  First, a work from Milton Schwarz, a famous outsider artist:

Next, a work by outsider artist Miz Thang:

Again, I have a lot of examples of this sort of thing, but I will just stop here and note the chaotic collage of small, highly colored images, the multicolored, multisized writing, the dark background in the case of the second example (yes, I have many more like this.)

Let me move on to another form of "outsider art," that which is associated with psychedelic drug use.  Here is one example:

Again, note the black background, the chaotic swirls of color, the intensely colored foreground image.  I could provide a lot more similar examples of this, but I have to make some effort to keep this post manageable.

Now, I would like to show two examples of the transition of this sort of composition into political writing.  These lack the vibrant colors and multiple images of what I have shown above; the first because it is part of a legal filing by a member of a Sovereign Citizen movement, the second because it is a pencil doodle from a meeting, made by a politician who has kindly signed her name to it:

 Here, even in a typed document, we can see the chaotic layout and the use of bolding and other type tricks, which render the thing almost impossible to read.  This may actually be the goal in this case- to make the filing as hard as possible for someone to make their way through it and respond rationally- this is an example of a so-called "paper terrorism" filing, often used by Sovereign Citizens to clog up and disable the legal system.

And then there is this:

I don't need to say too much about this one.  It clearly forms a transitional phase between the chaotic writing and imagery displayed in the Miz Thang example above, and some of the websites I have shown.  Too bad someone didn't give Sarah a box of crayons instead of a couple of pens, or we would really see something here.

Well, what, finally, is there to say about this?  Does it document, as you might very well argue, the decline of a political movement into mass mental illness?  Well, as I said above, I'm not a psychologist, so I won't stick my neck out that far, but I certainly think it is an interesting phenomenon, and I hope you got some amusement out of my bringing it to your attention.

Note:  The websites shown above were assembled in Photoshop, using screen captures.  This was done to provide enough of each site so you could get a feeling for its character.  Nothing about the websites was altered or edited, except for this assemblage.  I hardly think this is a problem, but I thought I would make it clear how these images were produced.