The weaponisation of nostalgia

The weaponisation of nostalgia is a pernicious trend infecting democratic deliberation and affecting the outcome of elections around the world.
ICFJ's Disarming Disinformation project has tracked this trend from Tbilisi to Washington DC via Manila, Sao Paulo and Cape Town through a study of news organisations’ encounters with disinformation narratives in five countries. In Georgia, the Kremlin’s allies have seized political control with the aid of Soviet Era nostalgia, while the MAGA movement delivered President Trump a second term in the White House despite his 34 felony convictions and an attempted insurrection. In the Philippines, thanks in part to a successful revisionist history campaign, the Marcos family was returned to Malacanang Palace 30 years after Ferdinand Marcos was overthrown in the People Power revolution, and anti-apartheid warrior Jacob Zuma’s new party performed astoundingly well in the 2024 South African election despite the former president serving jail time for corruption. Meanwhile, Bolsonarist forces are resurgent in Brazil.
It's back to the future all over again.
We are seeing autocratic political actors in these countries weaponizing nostalgia - creating a yearning for simpler, safer, more optimistic times - in tandem with fear-inducing disinformation-laced rhetoric about migration, race and gender rights, and violent crime - with serious consequences for human rights.
How can journalists and news organisations respond to the weaponisation of nostalgia, which is now an effective tactic of the authoritarians’ playbook? And how can we make audiences resistant to this form of narrative capture?
Organised in association with International Center for Journalists.