61: From Anti-Feminism to Anti-Vax (w/Dr. Annie Kelly)
It takes patience, empathy, and a steady hand to paint a detailed landscape of the politics and culture that connect anti-feminism to ethnonationalism to the broader obsessions of conspirituality.Dr. Annie Kelly’s scholarship in these spaces reveals a network of “subversion anxieties”: that patriarchy will be replaced by social justice autocrats, that the privileged will be brought low, that feminism will destroy hetero freedoms and pleasures, that human bodies will become cyborgs, that collectivism will replace capitalism. As our guest host this week, she’ll be our tour guide through the last decade of hot internet garbage, and explain how she’s kept her manners and wits intact enough to gain the trust of QAnon moms on the front lines of the U.K.’s anti-lockdown movement. We’ll also talk about her new brilliant podcast “Vaccine: The Human Story,” which takes the history of smallpox and its eradication as an object lesson for the COVID era.On the vaccine tip, our brief Ticker will address how the yoga world showed its anti-vax ass by trolling a Yoga Journal writer who dared to argue that getting vaccinated was a practice of non-violence.Show NotesWolf Terry: Getting the COVID-19 Vaccine Was My Act of AhimsaMatthew Remski: How Yoga Journal Set Off an Anti-Vax BacklashKelly: Opinion | The Housewives of White SupremacyKelly: The alt-right: Reactionary rehabilitation for white masculinityQAA Episode 110: Mothers For QAnon w/ Annie Kelly by QAnon AnonymousKelly: Vaccine, the Human StoryAnti-Vaxxers Could Be Helping Create Deadlier Versions of Covid
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Well, that is a voice I've heard in my ears for many months now, so I'm very happy that Annie is here to join us.
For Conspiratuality listeners, you can follow us on all of our social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and at Patreon, where at patreon.com slash conspirituality, you can support us for $5 a month and get access to our Monday bonus episodes.
Conspirituality 61, from anti-feminism to anti-vax with Dr. Annie Kelly.
Welcome.
It takes patience, empathy, and a steady hand to paint a detailed landscape of the politics and culture that connect anti-feminism to ethno-nationalism to the broader obsessions of conspirituality.
Dr. Annie Kelly's scholarship in these spaces reveals a network of subversion anxieties.
That patriarchy will be replaced by social justice autocrats.
That the privileged will be brought low.
That feminism will destroy hetero freedoms and pleasures.
That human bodies will become cyborgs.
That collectivism will replace capitalism.
As our guest host this week, she'll be our tour guide through the last decade of hot internet garbage and explain how she's kept her manners and wits intact enough to gain the trust of QAnon moms on the frontline of the UK's anti-lockdown movement.
We'll also talk about her new brilliant podcast, Vaccine, The Human Story, which takes the history of smallpox and its eradication as an object lesson for the COVID era.
On the Vaccine Tip, our brief ticker will address how the yoga world showed its anti-vax ass by trolling a yoga journal writer who dared to argue that getting vaccinated was a practice of non-violence.
This is the Conspirituality Ticker, a weekly bullet point rundown on the ongoing pandemic of messianic influencers who spread medical misinformation and sell disaster spirituality.
Yeah, so that's our first story this week.
On Thursday, I believe of last week, Yoga Journal published an article by a returning writer.
She had an opinion column for, I think, over a year.
Her name is Wolf Terry, and her argument was that getting vaccinated was an act of non-violence, and she used the Sanskrit term ahimsa.
It's a really reasonably written article, very mild-mannered, well-argued.
She writes, just to give you a taste of it, based on everything I've learned about the pandemic, it seemed that COVID-19 and the collective risk the virus has on the population was proof that we are all truly connected.
The health and wellness of those around me can and do affect me personally, and my health could impact others too.
When it was time for me to decide whether or not to get the COVID-19 vaccine as a yoga practitioner and teacher, I turned to the values instilled through my practice.
It was clear that my duty was throughout the pandemic to practice Ahimsa, non-violence, non-harm.
So to me, getting vaccinated against a rampant virus that has killed more than 4 million people around the world felt like the ultimate exercise of the first ethical discipline of the yamas, she's referring to principles laid out in a number of Iron Age texts, ethical principles.
By protecting myself against COVID-19, I was in turn protecting my loved ones, my community, and the world at large.
Sounds very reasonable.
Obvious shill for Big Pharma.
She was punished roundly on social media, especially when Yoga Journal flagged this article with a little teaser text on Instagram, and I recorded some of the thousands of comments that were full of Rage and Bile for an article on Medium that we'll link to.
And yeah, this is the opening of the back to yoga era, whether that's a safe thing to do or not at this point after the pandemic.
And this is where we're at.
Some of the comments were incredible that came in on Instagram.
Well, we're not after the pandemic.
Sorry, Matthew.
We're not after the pandemic, though.
You know, Julie and I are in Los Angeles where we are masking again.
And I think that I think the comments section actually, I know we're going to read some off, but actually reflects that the fact that we're treating it as if it's over.
And I know we'll talk about Annie with Annie.
Smallpox was around for a little longer than a year and a half.
So, this comment section is truly treating it as if it was either a hoax or over, but neither of those things are true.
Yeah, as were quarantine measures, right?
As were quarantine measures back in the heyday of smallpox.
Yeah, well, I mean, looking through the comments, we have Bite-sized Yogini saying, What a disappointment.
Very sad to see such a post coming from Yoga Journal.
This seems like an agenda push.
As yogis, shouldn't we want to care for our bodies?
In what way is injecting ourselves with a known poison showing ahimsa towards ourselves or others?
Complete nonsense.
What stood out for you guys?
Samantha J. Loveday.
If people cared more about their health in the first place, we wouldn't be here.
My body doesn't come second to anyone else's.
I shouldn't have to subject myself to poison and carcinogens just because others can't roll with nature's punches.
Goodbye, Yoga Journal.
I'm going to read one by AlexSandoval85 that I quite like because it fits how I feel about it.
This comment section brought to you by doTERRA, high vibrational thinking, and the RNC.
Then we have Tai Chi Explorer.
Wow, even the yogis are selling out promoting harmful satanic drugs.
That's probably the most obvious.
Save the Children, QAnon, a crossover comment that leaps out from that page.
Here's one by The Drum Yogi that I feel is really on point too in terms of some of what we're discussing today as well as the overall landscape.
The virtue signaling is off the charts.
This is people's personal choice.
It has nothing to do with yoga.
Would you publish an article from the opposing viewpoint?
For many people, the shot is not the issue.
The pressure, the coercion, using any means necessary to pressure people into making a choice they simply aren't comfortable with is the opposite of ahimsa.
Do what you want, but stop pressuring people.
We've had enough.
Also, side note, I'm sick of people glorifying the yamas and niyamas and yogapada as the totality of yoga.
Read the Gita.
For all of you lost people, for all of you who lost people due to sickness and old age, that's what it means to be human.
It's not dispassionate to see the truth.
For one who is born, death is certain.
And for the one who is already dead, they're sure to take birth again.
I always wonder why the hardcore yogis who reference the Gita don't read actual history from India during that period, and what was happening in the Harappan civilization, and one of the first real spreads of disease vectors, because that was the first collection of nation states.
So that, you know, one person writes an awesome poem, but then that gets taken as historical record, which is not at all what actually happened during that time.
I think it's really interesting how many of the comments, just sort of scrolling through, just getting a feel, just to remind myself now, how many of the comments have taken this aspect that they feel as if the author is trying to make them feel guilty somehow, she's trying to make them feel ashamed.
And I think that's a really interesting response, because when you actually look at what she's writing, you know, she is purely talking about herself.
And then, you know, saying, you know, I'm doing this because this is the principle that I live by.
And it's kind of really interesting how many have interpreted that as an attack on them and their values.
This is something I see in anti-vax groups all the time as well, you know, this feeling that, you know, oh they want to make you feel guilty, they want to shame you into getting the vaccine, which is, I think, yeah, has a real correlation, I think, with other kind of, yeah, more traditional hard right communities as well.
You know, it makes sense and it doesn't make sense because the implication, I mean the shame response, because the implication from Wolf's article or Terry's article is that she is making a personal choice but with the caveat that the vaccine is a public health intervention that works if everybody partakes in it and so
You know, it's like there's a double edge in there, and I can understand why the anti-vax crowd picks up on the second part of it, which is, oh, you're actually implying that for your choice to make sense, I have to do the same thing as well.
But yeah, for a group of people who really love personal liberty and want to talk about the freedom of choice, they really have a condemnatory attitude towards somebody who's saying, well, you know, it was good for me to do this.
I don't know how yoga is perceived and practiced in the UK, but in the US, one of the most popular mantras, at least when I began my practice in the 90s and continuing from them, was, may all beings be happy and free.
And what this comment section shows is part of what the pandemic has exposed in the American yoga and wellness communities.
Which is the actual translation for a lot of yogis is, may all beings be happy and free in the ways that I define happiness and freedom.
Or, may I be happy and free.
Yeah, may I be an island of sovereign happiness and freedom, and you can be too, right?
Separate but equal, it kind of harkens back to apartheid in a way.
Like, we can all be free together on our little islands of weirdness.
But I think the way, in this comment section overall though, a lot of them are saying, no, your island should be cast away.
You know, there's not even that you can enjoy.
Some are like, you know, you can do a vaccine if you want.
Now I'll have my freedom.
But when that first comment that Matthew read about taking or you might have joined taking the toxin, like that misperception and the whole concept of vaccine shedding, there is very much of like, let's outcast.
This is the island of misfit toys that you need to be on over there.
And we'll we'll actually construct a society based on our health sovereignty.
Now, Julian, you saw something similar in Men's Health this week, is that right?
Yeah, this was almost too good.
Men's Health published an article too.
They're the world's largest men's brand magazine, and it's kind of in the bro science category that we talk about here with regard to diet and exercise, but they also cover lifestyle and fashion.
And their story was warning that anti-vaxxers could be helping to create deadlier variants of COVID.
And they similarly just received a fire hose of negative comments.
Their Instagram, which tends to average 50 comments or less under each post, had over 8,300 comments under the post just about this article.
And most of them were absolutely interchangeable with the Yoga Journal comments, with the exception of some of the cultural signifiers in terms of whether it's like being a really healthy bro or being a true yogi.
Here's one comment I pulled from their website.
Please stop with the fear porn.
People vaccinated are still getting SARS-CoV-2, and more than 10,000 deaths reported to VAERS is only a fraction of the true numbers of deaths.
Harvard studies showed VAERS only reports 1% of the real numbers.
You just lost one subscriber.
And that's a common theme across both of these posts for these different magazines, right?
Is that people saying, because you have taken a stance that is pro-vaccine, I'm going to turn you off.
I'm not going to subscribe.
you're losing me as a follower. - Dr. Kelly, You've got this amazing new podcast project, and I think you knew that this was the kind of landscape that you were going to be delivering it into, not only with regard to the wellness world, but also more generally.
Now, we'll get into the great details on that pod a little bit later, but in general, how is it going, and why did you choose the history of smallpox as an object lesson for this time, and how do you think it's going to speak, and and how do you think it's going to speak, and to whom?
Yeah, so I suppose I should sort of start with my own background in kind of vaccines and science, which is absolutely nothing, right?
You know, I had one lesson, I think, when I was about 13 years old about vaccines, which was told the very kind of usual story of kind of Dr Edward Jenner here in England, you know, noticed that people who got cowpox didn't get smallpox and hey presto, you know, had the brilliant idea to come up with a vaccine.
And that was sort of all I knew about it.
But when you're investigating a conspiracy theory community, you need to just sort of by virtue of kind of investigating their claims, you begin to pick up a lot more because you have to understand how what they're saying is wronged.
So I began to research a lot about vaccines and in particular I was very interested in the history of vaccines because I was interested in how You know, just things like the kind of abuses of vaccines and, you know, how this stuff can get used and reused and recycled in these kind of cyclical sort of backlash or kind of reactionary events that kind of arise out of the end of pandemics.
And I think I became really, really Fascinated by this idea of vaccines, not as this quite unrelatable, I felt, story of just a genius having a genius idea, but actually as this kind of process of knowledge that had come from all over the world and the smallpox vaccine essentially being the product of that.
And then I began to get very frustrated actually with how I could see in anti-vax communities the way that new vaccines were being announced at the end of last year.
Often I felt in a way that was supposed to prioritise, you know, their medical and technical brilliance to sort of show, you know, how fantastic and brilliant they were and how cutting edge.
But it almost felt as if it was further Alienating the people who really needed to be reassured about this technology.
You know, all of this kind of emphasis on, you know, how what brilliant cutting edge science they were and stuff like that just wasn't cutting through.
And in fact, it was making them more suspicious.
So I sort of thought, you know, It would be really good if someone could create a kind of history of vaccines that kind of looked at them as a, you know, a social phenomena and one that people could relate to that, you know, doesn't just come from kind of elite scientists and kind of ivory towers, but actually, you know, has all of these kind of ramifications in ordinary people's lives.
And I sort of did that thing of kind of hoping that someone was having the same idea and was in a better position to make it than me.
And they didn't.
And then I lost patience and thought, well, I'll just I'll make it myself then.
Because I think, you know, this is an important way to
Look at vaccines and particularly to kind of look at where the kind of emotional needs that vaccine skepticism often comes from and a way to address that emotional need rather than simply just kind of debunking this claim, debunking that claim, which I think is really important work, but you will always be playing catch up because you're not speaking to, I think, the central kind of
Uncertainty that I think characterises a lot of vaccine hesitancy.
I'm really, really curious about this.
I mean, it seems like as long as there have been vaccines and before that early inoculation methods, people have been stridently opposed.
It seems to be a sort of predictable phenomenon of social psychology goes back at least to the 1600s as you talk about and persist to this day.
Just curious if you have thoughts about the historical reasons and then how, in light of that, you make sense of anti-vax arguments today.
There are always conservatives, right?
There are always people who, I think in the words of William F. Buckley, said they stand at the cusp of history and yell, stop, or something like that, which I always thought was a lovely, lovely turn of phrase.
And those people always exist, but I think sometimes the mistake can be to have this narrative of history in your head, which I think we all have, where it's all kind of just moving forward, right?
And anybody who was standing at the cusp of history and yelling stop was therefore, you know, just kind of bigoted, backwards, you know, probably some kind of religious zealot as so many were back then that we couldn't comprehend their thinking.
When that's actually not really true, you know, one thing I find really interesting is how the battle lines along the process of kind of creating a vaccine are not, you know, purely science versus religion or anything like that.
There's, you know, all sorts of kind of groups that for whatever reason, I think, will, you know, disregard a new technology.
They don't think it's important.
In the case of, you know, the early British Empire, it's actually quite ideologically important to them that inoculation isn't accepted as a practice because that might mean admitting that, you know, people in colonies such as India had thought of a technology before the British had. people in colonies such as India had thought of a Yeah, it's sort of this weird inversion, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, you know, people have all sorts of reasons, essentially, for, you know, saying, I'm not sure about this new technology, or more often, you know, I'm very against this new technology, and I think it's really dangerous and needs to be, you know, suppressed.
And, yeah, it's not always a simple case of, you know, science marches forward and, you know, everyone else just catches up.
Yeah, all the ignorant people are opposed to it somehow, right?
Do you know one of the reasons for hesitancy that you're flagging in your opening comments that I haven't actually considered, but it makes total sense once you say it, is that the rejection of the kind of flashy scientific You know, Tesla rollout of the mRNA vaccine I think brings up, it might bring up amongst this community a kind of anti-consumerist nausea actually.
And in fact, as I'm thinking about some of the comments that probably I didn't read too closely in the Yoga Journal Instagram feed, there are a lot of references to You know, rejections of the kind of consumerist world that Yoga Journal actually sells as part of its package of neoliberal wellness.
And so, those two issues, I hadn't really thought about it that way, is that it's not just that we're rejecting something unknown, but that we're tired of being sold things in very enthusiastic and flashy ways.
Yeah, absolutely.
And especially by people you may not necessarily trust, right?
You know, I often, I got very angry at this kind of glut of politicians who are all taking their photo ops, holding the vaccine, you know, above their head and kind of peering at it and all of this sort of stuff.
Because, you know, obviously, obviously, if you're a politician, you can't not do it.
It's such a fantastic photo.
But I sort of thought, you know, actually, you know, who are you to kind of associate yourself with this technology, which people, many people are uncertain about, not to say they're necessarily anti-vax, but are uncertain about, and kind of try and market it to them that way, do you know?
Yeah, it's the perfect intersection for conspiracy theorists of political power, financial motivation, and then, you know, new technology that they don't necessarily trust.
And also just loathing, too, because depending upon the politician, you know, this is the worst possible person to present it for the photo op.
There was a poll that was done this week asking anti-vaxxers in the U.S.
if endorsements from politicians or celebrities they trust would change their mind, and the overwhelming majority said no.
I don't know if there's anything similar to that in the U.K., where there's just such a distrust where it doesn't matter, it'd actually turn them off if the politicians were holding them.
Yeah, I certainly think there can be.
I mean, you know, we don't have the same kind of, I think, yeah, associations with kind of Hollywood here, which I think can kind of change that.
That's good.
But I certainly think there is just a, you know, the minute you touch it, you are associating it with that kind of that institution, right?
And yeah, I think this is specifically in the US where I think the vaccine debate is so really, really politically polarised.
It's not quite, doesn't quite fall down the same lines here in the UK.
I can really see why that would be the case.
I wonder whether the lads from the Three Lions, if they were the spokespeople for vaccination, do you know if you put the football club forward, whether that would be a good choice?
Is that part of what you're saying is that public health campaigns have to find voices of trust and we're not finding them?
Yes, I think so.
And also I think that there are certain institutions that will not generate puppet trust even if, you know, you may trust a certain person within it.
So I think when you're talking about anti-vaxxers, the really perfect example is always, you know, plenty of anti-vaxxers trust their local And I just think it's so fascinating.
If you'll bear with me here, you talk about how these early forms of inoculation came, as you said, from Chinese, Indian and even African folk medicines, it appears.
as a whole.
You know, there is something we touched on and I just think it's so fascinating.
If you'll bear with me here, you talk about how these early forms of inoculation came, as you said, from Chinese, Indian, and even African folk medicines, it appears.
And so of course the resistance in Europe and America was characterized by cultural chauvinism.
And ironically, as you said, it came from the scientific project of discovering knowledge via rigor and evidence, right?
As opposed to these sort of outdated methods.
And then you also talk about Lady Mary Montagu, who was an early adopter and organizer of other women to spread the news in England.
And of course, they were derided as uneducated women, touting suspect and unscientific methods.
How do you think that changed?
Yeah, I think it was a funny combination, almost, of Early statistical reasoning.
This was just at the time when you could start to begin to collect a decent data set that would actually try and make the proof that you were attempting to make.
In England and in France, a few mathematicians tried it.
I'm not particularly convinced that was the full reason, though, because we're talking about a population which is still largely illiterate and statistical reasoning is still very, very early in its heyday in terms of a kind of way that people can understand.
So I think it was a combination of that, but also I think things like fashion, you know, and the fact that I think it would have been Queen Charlotte, I might have her name wrong, but Queen Charlotte was an early adopter here in England, which, and she did it with her own children, although This is something you have to get used to when you're researching vaccine history.
She tested it first on some local prisoners.
Oh dear.
As you do.
Yeah, which is just something you really have to get used to.
You're talking about these amazing technologies that saved thousands and thousands of lives, but also there's a lot of just experimenting on local orphans.
Did Lady Montague do that as well?
Because I'll be very disappointed if that's true.
No, she didn't.
She was a real convert straight away.
She saw it happening and immediately tested it on her own son.
She believed it 100%.
Amazing.
What an amazing person.
There's a follow-up there, which is, it makes me wonder about anti-vax activists today, right?
Because especially the ones we cover on this podcast, they tend to idealize folk medicine.
They tend to reject scientific methods, often invoking a supposedly more feminine, intuitive, holistic approach, right?
So it's flipped in a way.
It's not hard to imagine that the people who we cover who are anti-vaxxers today might have been quick to adopt those ritualized and alchemical-seeming cures from afar, right, that were sort of exotic and spiritual, before they became part of the mainstream narrative.
And today, these folks might argue that vaccines are unnatural, just as mainstream Western voices did back then, right, and religious voices within the European establishment, but for different reasons.
They might also say that one day science will catch up with their alternative methods, right, as your story seems to imply kind of happened, and realize that vaccines were actually the dangerous and outdated mistake.
So, how do you square all of this?
Like, how do we know they're wrong?
It's certainly been the most interesting characters in a way in the kind of evolution of vaccines, I think, are the people who aren't necessarily quote-unquote following the science, right?
And Lady Mary Montagu is a perfect example, you know, she is not necessarily following the science, you know, she's not really aware of kind of any sort of You know, she's got no kind of background in kind of researching this sort of thing.
She just sees this invention, thinks it's fantastic and wants to take it to England, you know.
And part of that is wrapped up in, I think, that she sees herself as this very exotic woman of the world and kind of wants to, you know, bring through this new kind of folk medicine, which she knows will be, because she's a little bit trendy, will sort of, you know, excite her friends back home and stuff like that.
It would have played incredibly on Instagram, actually.
She's an influencer for the good.
She's an influencer, yeah.
And I think I relate to that because I think actually many of us don't really follow the science, or not as much as we think we do, do you know?
And I think we are often just kind of working to our own kind of assumptions, our own sort of prejudices, our own kind of, you know, Yeah, the things that we would like to believe about ourselves, which I think Lady Mary Montagu was.
I think, yes, certainly in the later half of the 18th century, then they began sort of tying inoculation to, you know, you're a really rational, enlightened person if you do this.
And, you know, this kind of really works to sort of sell it to, yeah, kind of the elite and the sort of merchant class as well below them, who want to think of themselves this way.
And I think that generally tends to be how persuasion works, even if...
Even if what you are doing is the right thing.
Do you know, I think lots of people may well believe the right thing, may well do the right thing, but quite a lot of the time it's, you know, not just simply because we are, you know, perfectly virtuous and rational beings who have deduced the best course of action, but a lot of it is wrapped up with all these kind of other things.
And I sort of see that as how vaccination progresses, really.
We don't necessarily kind of need to convince We don't need to make everybody an expert on vaccines, but we do need to kind of think about how we persuade people to take them.
Yeah, so even when the current science is on your side, it's still not just a matter of telling people that.
There is some artistry in terms of persuasion.
And now we're in this position where we're not only having to persuade people that vaccines are safe and effective, but we're also perhaps having to talk them out of all of the misinformation or figure out how to take a position in relationship to that.
Yeah, absolutely.
Speaking of artistry, it occurred to me listening to your third episode that as we're listening to the 17th century Chinese technique of grinding up smallpox scabs into powder and putting them into metal tubes and then blowing them into the noses of those that are being inoculated.
Or in India that the pus from active blisters, smallpox blisters, was pierced and then smeared into cuts while chants to particular goddesses were uttered. was pierced and then smeared into cuts while chants to
That, you know, everybody that we're actually trying to reach, they would find that so incredibly cool that it's almost as if... As long as it's gluten-free rice paste that you cover it over with.
I was just, like, it just really struck me that there's something embodied and ritualized and visible.
There's no black box there, right?
Like, the magic of the treatment is on full display and it's administered in, you know, a non-alienating environment where there's Music, and I think Lady Mary Montagu describes going to like an inoculation ceremony in Istanbul that was administrated by the elder women of this small community.
And no wonder she was taken by it, because this is so different from what she would have been exposed to in the medical practices of her own country in her own time.
And so it almost feels like the anti-vax movement is a rejection of a kind of aesthetics of modernity as much as an ideology, like a rejection of just this antiseptic.
Yeah, it's a disenchantment.
So anyway, I think we should try to figure out how to take those COVID vaccines and boil them into public rituals for consumption.
Well, you're actually closer than you think because one of the ayahuasca circle that I've associated with Do Rape, which is the blowing up the nose of tobacco, where one person does it.
And I did one ceremony with them of that and did not enjoy it at all.
But they are definitely open to that sort of romanticized mysticism that comes with that sort of engagement, that ritualistic behavior.
So if we can put some COVID vaccine in that too, we might have success.
It's so funny how, again, all of these thought processes just cycle back again and again, because when the smallpox vaccine is invented, the British take to it really quickly.
They're like, brilliant.
And I think part of that is because they're like, oh, now we have a new medical technology that definitely came from us and that we can say is actually better and more modern than, you know, this kind of inoculation process with its eastern sort of origins.
And they take it to India, who is, you know, who lots and lots of parts of India are very, very familiar with inoculation and don't really see the need for them to take the smallpox vaccine.
Honestly, you know, they're quite happy with what they've got.
And there's quite a funny thing where you'll have your British chain doctors, you know, in kind of every colonial outpost and they will then hire and train some native people to go out to the villages and mass vaccinate everyone there.
And what's funny is that the further and further those native vaccinators get out, the more they start adopting the old inoculation ritual back into vaccination.
Because the British have been very keen that this should be totally de-ritualized, totally medicalized, just in and out.
Um and naturally this doesn't really this kind of comes up against um you know these kind of parts of the world are sort of saying well we don't need that we've got inoculation we've we've had inoculation for hundreds of years we're happy with it um and so you can sort of see is the more agency and kind of further away um these vaccinators get the more they sort of start you know having to negotiate with the local population and sort of saying okay well what if Have you visited the catacombs to your research or just as a tourist in Paris?
No, I never have.
thank you to Shatala at the end and all of this kind of stuff.
And it's almost the exact same negotiation that, yeah, I think you're talking about Matthew right now.
Have you visited the catacombs to your researcher just as a tourist in Paris?
No, I never have.
I'd love to though.
I was happy the last season of Lupin on Netflix visited that as part of it.
It It made a part of the story.
But besides that, it was the most visceral place I think I've ever personally been in because you go down this very thin tunnel into the catacombs and then all of a sudden you walk through tunnels of tens of thousands of bones.
And it's like, here's the bubonic plague.
This is what it did.
And I wonder, as you were working on this series, if you thought of any sort of visuals or metaphors that could make people understand the urgency of what viruses actually do to populations?
Yeah, so I think there was a metaphor that did really strike me, which I mentioned in one of my episodes, so apologies if I'm just repeating myself to you guys.
But it was of a crypt under the Christ Church in Spitalfields, which is in East London, which had been closed, I think, since the 18th century and was being excavated for the first time in the 1980s.
And it was all of the coffins were lead lined and there was this huge concern amongst the archaeologists that this would be a biohazard because nobody and still nobody really knows how long a smallpox microbe can last for.
And so there's this kind of concern which hasn't been felt in London for about 100 years of The disease smallpox, you know, and this concern of outbreak and they have to talk to all these medical authorities to figure out what's the best way to do it.
And it almost felt to me, reading that story, as if, you know, there was a kind of portal for a second between 19th century London, which is gripped with fear of smallpox, which takes, and smallpox is endemic and has been for centuries, it's just understood it will probably, you know, kill your, you know, one and a third of your children.
And modern day London, where no one has had to think about that for such a long time.
And that really, really struck me, I think, because it's sort of, yeah, it seems to be one of those moments where history isn't a straight line, but almost kind of loops back on itself.
You both are referring to visceral experiences that would bring something home and I think part of the struggle of the age is that we live in this age of images and spectacle where throughout the world this drone footage of open burning crematoria in Delhi can be broadcast like it's the end of the world and somehow
Some people can still partition that off as though it's not happening or as though it might not happen where they are.
And so, yeah, I mean, visceral experiences, yes.
But we also have with visceral experiences, you know, reports of people dying in hospital denying that they have COVID right to the very end.
And so it almost, it's amazing to listen to your podcast and realize that you are speaking a pre-modern story largely into a late capitalist environment.
And the medium through which it's broadcast is like very sort of classic radio and it's gorgeously put together.
But it's also speaking into this world that That has very, very short memory and in which the most bizarre scenes and impactful scenes almost get brushed away because of the scroll function or something like that or because they are indistinguishable from what you would see on Netflix.
So, that's just really striking to me.
Yeah, it's like hyper-reality almost.
Yeah, and some of that, Matthew, also comes from perhaps this belief that those people in India that we see suffering don't actually need the vaccine, that it's not because of a lack of COVID vaccines that we're seeing that absolute carnage happening there.
And when they do, you know, even though forms of inoculation existed in India for hundreds of years, they still need the COVID vaccine right now.
There isn't a folk remedy that is going to do the trick.
The title of our episode is From Anti-Feminism to Anti-Vax to sort of track your own research career.
And so maybe we'll sort of roll back a little bit so we can see how you got there.
I mean, you started by saying that, you know, in researching You know, QAnon and COVID-era conspiracy theories and doing all this great work on the QAA podcast as a co-writer and co-host, that you really needed to understand what the history was.
And so that was the progression.
But your academic work in digital anti-feminism traces various websites and forums at the intersection of the manosphere and the alt-right.
There are connections to the men's rights movements, to the pickup artist movement.
There are, you know, there's, you comment on incel culture.
You cover a lot of territory in this great thesis that I read.
It's called Fear, Hate, and Counter-Subversion American Anti-Feminism Online.
And you start in 2012, and what comes into focus is this series of trickles and streams that just sort of flow towards each other as time goes on.
And you end your study in 2016, but then I get, you know, I finish the thesis and I get left with this impression that from then on, there's just sort of a downstream flood of, you know, misogyny harbored by men, internalized by some women, you know, internalized by some women, you know, coming out in the form of body and ethno-nationalist purity panics, and then also just high impact conspiratorial thinking.
And that eventually rolls out the red carpet for the QAnon fever dream.
Is that a good way of sort of tracking your progress through this landscape? - Great.
That's a fantastic way of putting it.
Yeah, I might have to re-listen to this and transcribe it.
Put it on the jacket of the book.
Good.
Well, I mean, OK, so it was wonderful to read your thesis.
I do hope, I know that it's not public, so thank you for letting us all have a peek at it.
And I really do hope that you're able to mainstream it in some way.
But early on in the work, I just wanted to start by asking about, like, How you came to it and how you were situated in it because, and this was really striking from early in the thesis, you have some notes about the general position of women online and you also make a nod to your own position as well.
You write that Eugenia Siapera draws convincing parallels with witch hunts and online misogyny as quote-unquote disciplining women who represented folk knowledge and beliefs that were not compatible with capitalism.
This means that online misogyny is not simply a question of sexually or otherwise frustrated men venting out, rather it involves very important stakes in the future of our societies.
Online misogyny has to be seen as a form of primitive accumulation in the age of techno-capitalism.
In which women's labor is stolen or denied, their knowledge and contributions ridiculed and denigrated, and where women's virtual bodies are banned from certain online spaces, just as women were once banned from the public sphere.
So, yes, that is an amazing encapsulation.
And so, how did you get here, and what was that like, to the extent that you're comfortable saying?
Yeah, so I actually began looking at anti-feminist websites, although I didn't know that that was what they were then, probably around the age of 11 or 12.
Oh my!
I know, yeah, I was of the kind of middle-class background that had a computer in our house, I had the internet for my parents' work, but also my parents had absolutely no idea really what the internet was.
So I had that free reign of a certain age millennial, which I don't think we'll really see the likes of again, in terms of just the gap between my own knowledge of what could be accessed on the internet and my parents'.
And I was of the age where I really wanted to know what dating was like, you know.
And so, you know, I just sort of, I don't even know how I stumbled across it, but I come across some very, very early proto-manosphere blogs, which I realize they are now.
And these are, you know, looking back in comparison to what came after, they are so mild, actually.
There's, you know, they are talking about what I now realize to be quite misogynist and disempowering concepts.
There was one called Ladder Theory, which was essentially the friend zone, right?
About how men had one ladder for their female friendships and potential romantic relationships, but women had two, one which was friends and one which was potential romantic relationships.
If you're on one ladder, you had to try and jump to the other.
But how could you do that?
So it's kind of, you know, the sort of proto sort of pickup artist style.
But it was incredibly mild compared to what came after.
And I just read all of this with, you know, the kind of interest, I think, of a child who, you know, is just absorbing everything.
I found it just fascinating.
And I think I always just sort of kept that interest just throughout, you know, my sort of lost interest in the internet when I sort of became a teenager and was actually dating and didn't really need to know any of this stuff.
But I always sort of kept it in the back of my mind and I always found it a little curiosity, I suppose.
And I would keep on, you know, Finding new interesting sites of, yeah, I suppose, these kind of, yeah, sort of dating sort of blogs and stuff that were quite trendy in the sort of early, early noughties or so.
And then I think just as I was sort of finishing my undergraduate degree, I became really curious about what I saw as, you know, by this time I was kind of politically aware enough to see this kind of emergence of anti-feminist, quite hard right, some of them quite sort of white nationalist, other sort of blocs that were sort of just gaining traction and just becoming It was quite sort of like early community hubs, I suppose.
And so I just began keeping an eye on that and then realized that nobody else was really writing about it yet.
And if I wanted to do a PhD, this might be a good topic.
So this was sort of before the alt-right and before things like Gamergate and stuff like that.
But I think I always Yeah, I always knew far too much about these places to the total boredom of my friends who didn't see why I found it so fascinating.
But it's been kind of a long relationship for me and I suppose these slightly reactionary parts of the internet.
And but you say that also that when your research proper begins within it that it also becomes a dangerous space that you say that the behavior towards me ranged from civil acquaintanceships to insults and violent threats and you talk about how You know, you published a piece in Eurovision which we'll link to.
I think this is the one where, afterwards, you found people posting on Gab that users should track down your family and things like that.
You also remarked that, luckily, they either didn't attempt it or possibly, owing to the commonplace nature of my last name, didn't get very far.
But, yeah, I mean, you bend back around, it sounds like you have this very early window, and then it's like, wait now, what did that space turn into?
You go back and begin to research it, but you have to enter into something that really doesn't want you there.
So, yeah, that's just a fascinating arc.
Yeah, I mean, I suppose it's the move from, you know, observer to, I suppose, once I start publishing, I kind of become an agent.
And even before then, you know, just on social media, I'm commenting on it and I sort of find a like-minded kind of community of people who also find this interesting.
So, it's sort of when I become, I suddenly appear on these people's radar as opposed to them just being on mine, which can be an uncomfortable experience, you know?
Yeah, lots and lots of threats, lots of insults, all the rest of it.
Yeah, it did turn out to be something.
I remember thanking my parents for giving me such an untraceable name, actually, just for being one of millions of Kellys in the world.
Yeah, unlike, say, Anita Sarkeesian, huh?
Yeah, that is tough luck.
It's really tough luck.
But some of them, you know, I think it really also influences my research because many of them are, when I say them, I mean kind of anti-feminist or alt-right users, users who would kind of consider themselves in or adjacent to this network.
Many of them are very flattered by the fact that they are being studied, which was a reaction I wasn't expecting.
I kind of had factored in that I would get threats, I would get insults, such is the nature of the internet, and particularly a woman on the internet who's saying things that this group doesn't want to hear.
But what I think was more surprising to me was how many wanted to talk to me about my research.
And many of them would often offer to help in ways that could be quite funny.
I'll never forget one guy talking to me and saying, oh, I know this guy and I know the real name of the guy who runs this blog.
And I said, oh, really?
Are you friends?
And he said, yeah, I can get you his address if you want.
And I was like, no, I don't want this man's address.
So attention, it's really in some ways, it's attention that at the basic human level, they're acting out in some ways.
But when you actually see them, regardless of whether you agree with them or not, that attention is appealing to them.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think, you know, particularly on the, yeah, on the side of the kind of incels and stuff like that, you know, just the fact that a woman was kind of interested was just very, you know, amusing to them, slightly intriguing to them.
I mean, I should be clear that This all stems from this kind of belief in lots of these places that, you know, these are subcultures and communities that women, you know, dare not tread.
That, you know, no woman would dare kind of looking at this sort of stuff because it's too ugly, it's too real, you know, they can't handle it.
But that is in fact not actually true.
That's just a myth that they build up because, you know, it's sort of very flattering and it makes them feel good.
Are you claiming that men have no idea what women are thinking?
And that we like to pretend we're in a treehouse by ourselves where the girls can't come.
But yeah, so you know, they would often treat me like a rarity, I suppose is what I'm saying, but I am not claiming I was that rarity.
Plenty of women are researching, were and are researching these places.
You know, turning to the sort of core of your content, as I understand it, in the thesis, you've got this killer phrase throughout your work, which is subversion anxiety.
And you use it to describe the overall feeling state of the anti-feminist and racist materials that you're looking at.
How did you come to the formulation of subversion anxiety and just what in the in the broadest terms does it mean?
So I found the phrase the term counter subversion from a fantastic book.
It's part political science and part media analysis and it's called Ronald Reagan the movie by Michael Rogan and it's just wonderful and it was the first
book that I had read that I suppose slightly counteracted this slightly older way of talking about reactionary politics, which was The Paranoid Style, which was written by Richard Hofstadter in the 50s.
It's an incredible essay.
It's It's very well written.
He's a conservative and he's talking about the kind of anti-communist sort of fervor that he sees gripping his compatriots and he is sort of talking about how they're gripped by madness and they've all become completely paranoid seeing communists under the bed and everything like that.
Writing 20 years later sort of says, well actually it wasn't that paranoid because that's what they were being told.
That's what they were being told by, you know, movies, by their government, by, you know, every institution they mattered.
They were being told that there were subversives You know, hiding amongst them, hidden in plain sight, who were prepared to destroy the nation state that they loved and subvert it into, you know, the People's Republic of America.
Whatever.
And, you know, he quite methodically goes through and sort of talks, so he rejects the kind of paranoid style and says, you know, I call this the counter-subversive style, which is talking about, you know, this kind of reaction against the perceived subversives in your midst.
And I found that was an incredibly useful
word to describe what I was kind of picturing, or what I was picturing, what I was kind of analysing, which was this kind of, yes, the writing is very dramatic, yes, they talk about, you know, feminists want to take video games and then destroy the world, and it's easy to have a laugh at it, you know, it's easy to sort of, you know, say it's so dramatic and silly and, you know, juvenile and all the rest of it.
But the truth is, you know, it's not a fringe belief.
It's not from outside society.
It is within society.
And, you know, these men or these users aren't crazy.
They're not paranoid.
They are responding to, you know, messages that are being sent about the role of men and women, about, you know, kind of feminism's utility.
You know, the idea that feminism's work is done now and therefore any active feminist right now must really want domination is not a fringe view at all.
It's very common.
It's, you know, you can pick up any tabloid and you'll find it.
And so I talked about this anxiety as being the animating impulse which I saw linking, not just by kind of Not just by their technological network, by the fact that, you know, the alt-right and the anti-feminists tend to kind of borrow a lot of language and stuff from one another, but I saw it as more than that, as though they were both responding to the same anxiety.
You can use sex, you can use nationhood, you can use race, depending on, you know, what the political utility is to you right now.
But they were sort of responding to, I felt, the same fear, the same anxiety that was kind of surrounding this sense of subversion, of imminent subversion.
The themes are very complex and I want to just put a flag in subversion and then tie it to another flag forward in your work to the anti-vax movement and I'm wondering if you have a brief comment on whether or not subversion anxiety is at play in anti-vax discourse and rhetoric.
Absolutely.
I mean, one thing that I keep on seeing everywhere is all of these anti-vax protests, anti-lockdown protests.
Lots of them, they're all wearing yellow stars, right?
Have you guys noticed that?
Right.
You know, the Star of David, which is, you know, just, of course, is just especially in places like France, where I've seen them in places like England and stuff, you know, they have such a raw kind of of raw kind of association with the Holocaust.
And people respond naturally with repulsion, do you know?
And in a way I almost think that's a bit what they're designed to do.
They want you to kind of to be revolted and to reject them because it only solidifies their belief more that they are about to be, you know, kind of ghettoized and kind of ostracized and dominated by this kind of vaccine, vaccine tyranny.
Yeah, thank you.
And I even saw, yeah, I was just watching one of the anti-lockdown protests that have been happening in London every day, funnily enough, since we actually came out of lockdown.
And there was a man shouting at the police and he was saying, you know, Are you going to put us all in the concentration camps that they're building?
Because we know that they're building them for us and people started yelling FEMA camps and stuff like that.
And yeah, I sort of thought, you know, what is that if not subversion anxiety, right?
Particularly since lots of these people It's hard to, it's hard to kind of make a guess with people that you don't know, but lots of them do not look like, you know, the downtrodden, dispossessed.
Many of them, you know, look well-dressed, you know, have this sort of accents in this country which usually like signal, you know, certainly not being kind of, you know, one of the downtrodden classes.
So I thought that was a real, you know, this kind of focus on this imminent, this kind of, yeah, this imminent sort of loss of citizenship, of sovereignty, of rights, seemed very much to me like the same kind of subversion anxiety that you see in anti-communists in the 1950s and anti-feminists just, yeah, half a decade ago.
I just want to note too that you, in mentioning FEMA camps, To me, that's a great example of what appears to be one of America's hot new exports, right?
That's an Alex Jones meme.
What is that doing at an anti-lockdown protest in London?
Yeah, that's the internet world in which spaces collapse, though, in which you can have, like, underground tunnels with the Mould Children in them beneath, you know, Big Ben in London that go all the way to the, underneath the US Capitol, right?
Like, they're just, the whole, the world is, there is no space, really.
Now, okay, so combining the, you know, really trying to honor your research path here.
Because the anti-vax movement is largely online and it ends up being adjacent to, in many ways, Some of the older versions of online agitprop that you're studying that may have these nasty politics to them, you say that, you know, the primary subversion anxiety is documented in this project.
You're talking about the thesis.
In these systems, white supremacy, or in this anxiety, white supremacy becomes black supremacy, patriarchy becomes matriarchy, and one of the simplest terms What anti-feminists and indeed mainstream media will use to reference this narrow concept of subversion is that of the pendulum swing when discussing identity politics.
And so it's almost like this research you do in anti-feminism provides this model for understanding how social movements can be driven by this kind of panic that everything is going to turn upside down.
Yeah, absolutely.
And this kind of understanding of, I think, yeah, rights and progressive movements, particularly that kind of organize around a group's rights as really playing on a zero-sum game, right?
You know, one group gains and another one has to lose.
And that's actually not a point of view that I'm, you know, totally unsympathetic to.
You know, there often is a loss of privilege, you know, in one group when another group gains kind of You know, rights that have been restricted before or have been taken from them.
You know, that is a real loss and it's one that is felt emotionally, I think, by the kind of privileged group in whichever situation you want to talk about.
But I think it's definitely something that I think, yeah, you see, it's a framework that you see anti-vaxxers and certainly anti-lockdown people Often framing themselves around.
So when, you know, the big focus was anti-lockdown here in the UK, you know, there was lots of, you know, well, I don't see why, you know, I should have to be punished because other people, you know, need to be shielding or need to be protected from the virus and stuff like this.
The same kind of thing of, you know, by us kind of protecting this society, it's not really protecting society, it's victimizing me.
That kind of seems to borrow from the same kind of framework, almost, of subversion anxiety, essentially.
This kind of, you know, the stated reasons that, you know, this group might want to advocate for this policy or this kind of thing are all very well and good, but, you know, how is it diminishing me?
How is it, you know, swinging that pendulum back to the other side, essentially?
It's very interesting in terms of thinking about Gamergate, right?
That here you have this sort of male-dominated gaming space, feeling that any kind of feminist critique or analysis of video games in general was going to take something away from them.
And I feel also in terms of the types of forums that we started off talking about on this topic, I wonder to what extent these are men, and even white men, who don't necessarily feel privileged, who feel like losers, and that this is this little kingdom they've created for themselves, which includes gaming, and then along comes this horrible feminism that's going to make an incursion and subvert what they value.
Definitely, and I think in a way Gamergate was never really about video games so much as it was about the internet itself, of which gaming culture was this quite significant part.
it seems so interesting to me that it happens in 2014 and um so you kind of a good while into this slight but this slow process of democratization of the internet which happens with things like social media and smartphones and you know kind of uh cheaper access to internet and all of this kind of stuff which um essentially begins this kind of slow um
I can't think of a better word than infiltration, but just trust that infiltration is not what I mean, of much more diverse groups to the internet.
And in a way, I think Gamergate was the last of many attempts, essentially, to begin a sort of networked A kind of networking event for all of these groups that had, and these blogs and stuff that had, you know, to their credit, been around on the internet for a long time.
You know, the pick-up artists have been on the internet, I think, since 1992.
You know, the neo-Nazis were early adopters of the internet.
And I do think that even though Gamergate was made up of more than these groups, it represented the last of many attempts to move towards this new democratised internet, to move towards social media, to kind of create A network to stop saying on their little blogs and forums and stuff, which, well, you know, all had communication with one another.
We're not quite the same sort of powerhouse that lots of left wing and progressive movements had become using social media like Black Lives Matter and the Ferguson protests was, you know, this huge explosion of internet activity, which brought, you know, all of these kind of local black activists into communication with one another.
And I'm pretty sure that Well, lots of people were watching that and thinking, you know, wow, that's so interesting.
It's interesting how social media can be used for those ends.
I'm pretty sure that, you know, people who did not agree with Black Lives Matter at all were watching it and thinking the same thing.
Yeah.
And I do think Gamergate was, there were lots of attempts, there were lots of attempts to start something going on, on places like Twitter and Facebook and things like that.
And they all sort of ran into the ground until Gamergate managed to get off the ground.
Subversion anxiety that we can track from your research in anti-feminist spaces and how that moves into, you know, more contemporary conspiratorial thinking, QAnon, and the conspiratorial thinking that will also influence anti-vax discourse.
There's another big thread, I think, in the really dreadful nihilism That you study and that you detail.
You know, I don't know if you see a connection between the black and white thinking of subversion anxiety and the tendency towards emotional extremes, especially the nihilism of The sort of black-pilled attitude that dominates the content of the men that you're citing.
But I feel that there's something in that as well, because one of the things that we've noted so often on this podcast about the QAnon movement is that it really offers no hope.
There's kind of like a dearth of hopefulness that this story offers.
But I think you've found that in history as well, going back in your research.
Yeah, it's a really interesting question because in many ways I feel like lots of these groups are almost a kind of placebo, the word I mean, a kind of Temporary antidote to nihilism.
You know, many of the more successful ones will offer a community of sorts.
They will offer, you know, I often say there's, you know, the long goal, the kind of, you know, the long term goal, which is usually something totally unrealizable.
You know, the end of modernity, feminism undone, you know, all these kind of things, these genies that just cannot be put back in the bottle like that.
But that's the long term stretch goal.
But then you have these little goals, these kind of, you know, more achievable ones.
And they often kind of involve things like online activism.
You know, let's go, yeah, let's go bully Anita Sarkeesian is a great one.
Let's go, you know, let's go, you know, turn her comment sections into just hell on earth.
You know, let's, you know, let's kind of do this.
Let's, sometimes they move on to the real world.
Things like Charlottesville, I would argue, you know, were one of those kind of achievable little goals.
And this is, I think, this is just the perfect way to keep people invested in your digital subculture, your community, your little hub, because it offers them something that can never be achieved, and therefore they're always working towards that thing.
But you also have to give them these little wins, these tiny little victories, these little, you know, things that make them feel like they are chipping away at it slightly.
And so I think You can stave off nihilism for quite a long time if you try that.
But of course, there is a fundamental nihilism to it, which is that your goal is inherently unachievable.
And I think you really get a sense of that when you start looking at the Incel communities, which are, you know, for someone who's made of pretty stern stuff, I do actually find quite difficult to look at sometimes because they don't quite have that same sense of hope that a lot of the other communities do.
You know, in fact, you know, the whole concept of hope is like a, is a joke there.
It's, it's, you know, ridiculous and it, you know, you're considered to be coping if you have any kind of hope that you will ever be anything other than an incel.
And so it comes as no surprise, right, that that is, you know, one of the deadliest forms of anti-feminism that are out there.
Because, you know, nihilism breeds this kind of indifference to violence.
The other related thread is that you're studying the emergence of the concept of redpilling in online anti-feminism and then that shows up in QAnon.
So, how did that, how does that thread come together for you?
Red Pills, which obviously, you know, begins with nothing to do with anti-feminism.
It just begins with The Matrix, which is just a great movie.
I think it captures something in the way that, you know, new terms and new phrases are made up for all the time when there's not an appropriate word for it.
So you have to make one up and Red Pills might as well have been the one because everyone's seen The Matrix.
This concept of the veil being lifted from your eyes, of waking up to how the world really is as opposed to how you would just like it to be, how it's comfortable for you to be, is a fantastic concept.
And I even think, you know, there are parallels on the left with, you know, getting woke, stay woke.
This kind of language I often think describes the same thing in parallel, you know, about kind of removing the, yeah, removing the shackles essentially of, you know, ignorance and, yeah, complacency.
So I think it basically required a, it was a concept that required a noma, you know, But it is interesting, I think, how, you know, one, I mean, well, woke is actually, I don't know if it has where you guys are, but here it's sort of become almost pejorative.
Our tabloids and, you know, right wing press will now all use it, you know, to refer to anyone kind of, you know, too left wing or too feminist or anything else.
Yeah, so that's had like a, yeah, kind of interesting journey and you could probably compare why that is.
Whereas Red Pills has almost, yeah, has just worked its way through all of the reactionary communities because they're all looking to describe that concept.
And if they don't have any aversion to it from, you know, the previous community, you know, so anti-feminists and white nationalists and all the rest, then why not just borrow it?
Because it's such a fantastic term to describe what you're talking about.
I think the last thread that I want to see if we can tie together is, of course, how the research environment, which is almost completely homosocial that you're involved in, ends up crossing some sort of gendered threshold into the QAnon age, the Save the Children age, and then, of course,
The majority of the anti-vax activists that you're interacting with are women.
And so you study in your thesis the emergence of women anti-feminists, and you say that they appear to act primarily as a shield for the wider digital anti-feminism movements and you say that they appear to act primarily as a shield for the wider digital anti-feminism
But is there a concise way of tracking the figure of the female anti-feminist and her jobs and her roles through to the figure of the QAnon mom or the person who is actually fronting for or in many cases laundering some very reactionary and horrible politics?
In the very most basic sense, a lot of the anti-feminist women I looked at became anti-vax moms and QAnon moms.
And I think I even saw one who I began following probably about five years ago now, you know, saying, posting something today about how, you know, the pedophiles, you know, don't want you to know about how the vaccine contains bits of Fetuses and all of the kind of rest of it.
It was just such a kind of perfect encapsulation of that transformation.
But you know, in terms of Researching women, I think it was certainly something I became concerned about when I was researching my thesis was, you know, a lot of interest began to get paid to male anti-feminists, particularly incels, and not much interest was shown in the women of the anti-feminist movement.
They were often kind of treated as an afterthought.
And I thought this was a real mistake, personally, because sure, the men are going to be more likely to, you know, do something terrible like, you know, shoot up a school.
But actually, it was the women who often lent the movement legitimacy and became some of its biggest stars.
You know, women like Lauren Southern, who, you know, would later to become You know, become almost the poster girl of the alt-right began in anti-feminist, you know, spaces.
She began, I think, her kind of media career by trolling Slut Walk.
She would go and hold signs saying, you know, there's no such thing as rape culture in the West.
Yeah, so it sort of, it seemed like a mistake simply to kind of, you know, feel like, oh, we don't, you know, we don't kind of know what to do with those women, so we'll just sort of ignore them.
Because actually, I thought they were in many ways the most dangerous part of the movement.
And certainly, I think, yeah, the first women I began talking about or writing about were, you know, this kind of return to traditionalism,
That the alt-right sort of began pushing, which sort of slightly rejected its earlier sort of more 4chan roots and began to move in this very idiosyncratic way towards, you know, we want a trad wife, we want to have 10 babies, we want to live this kind of perfect, idyllic, pastoral life that has been stolen from us.
It was a vaguely effective propaganda campaign in some aspects.
I think it was very good at reaching young women on places like YouTube and Instagram because lots of these women had fairly sizable accounts at one point with very nice aesthetics and stuff like that.
But it always had that paranoid conspiratorial edge to it.
Because it wasn't just, you know, I would really rather...
Stay at home and have my babies and cook for my husband and stuff like that.
It was always, but I can't do that, or at least if I can do that, you know, dark forces are trying to pressure me not to do that.
Because it's because of this kind of, you know, because the powers that be have this kind of anti-white, anti-western Anti-femininity hatred just kind of, you know, coursing through their veins and therefore this, you know, this way of life has been stolen from us.
Which naturally I think was going to open the way, I mean, first off to, you know, anti-semitism straight out the bat.
Like, you know, everything I'm saying there is just, you know, The real life blood of online anti-feminism, of online anti-semitism even.
But then there's also, you know, that also fits quite comfortably with a lot of anti-vax and I suppose this slightly kind of
New Age kind of reactionary ethos, which kind of rejects, I suppose, not only the kind of life that you think the elites have kind of set out for you, but you begin, you know, saying, and they want to poison us with these chemicals and these kind of clothes and these kind of, you know, sort of Vaccines and medicines and all the rest of it.
And it sort of generates, I think, this kind of thinking.
And that's certainly what I've seen with many, you know, many of the women of the movement.
They don't last particularly long.
They don't keep up a public profile for very long.
You have to be very thick skinned to do it.
Because it's not just that The other side is, you know, angry at you.
A lot of your own side are just purely for being a woman online in the first place.
You detail the story of what happened to Lauren Southern, actually.
That it was impossible for her to actually have an actual life, regardless of what she said she wanted for it, when her life actually happened.
It was unacceptable to everybody, except her, of course.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's, you know, it's a punishing community to be part of.
You really have to, you know, be very, very tough, much tougher than me to, you know, the kind of treatment you'll get.
Because resentment against women is the key recruiting device, right?
So it's not really something that you can get rid of in your own community.
Some of the women of the alt-right tried, Lauren Southern being one of them, you know, sort of tried to do a kind of standing up to You know, the trolls and the user base responded incredibly poorly, of course.
You know, I think I wanted to end, or head towards ending, just by quoting Andrea Dworkin on right-wing women from your thesis, because it took my breath away.
She writes, right-wing women have surveyed the world.
They find it a dangerous place.
Right-wing women are not wrong.
They fear that the left, in stressing impersonal sex and promiscuity as values, will make them more vulnerable to male sexual aggression, and that they will be despised for not liking it.
They are not wrong.
Right-wing women see that within the system in which they live, they cannot make their bodies their own, but they can agree to privatized male ownership, keep it one-on-one, as it were.
They know that they are valued for their sex, their sex organs, their reproductive capacity, and so they try to up their value through cooperation, manipulation, conformity, submission, and obedience, and especially through the use of euphemisms like femininity, total woman, good, maternal instinct, motherly love.
And these all, of course, come back to haunt the anti-vax rhetoric.
It's a great quote.
That intelligence displayed in a woman is a flaw, that intelligence realized in a woman is a crime.
They see the world they live in and they are not wrong.
It's a great quote.
Yeah, as I said, As I said, it took my breath away in the thesis, and I'm just wondering whether this kind of gender essentialism and idealization of natural motherhood is going to be a lasting and defining feature and I'm just wondering whether this kind of gender essentialism and idealization of natural motherhood is going Yes, I think so.
And I can even tie it back to the vaccine history we're talking about a bit before, because it's been there for so long.
Do you know, the very first anti-vaccine protests This was when the smallpox vaccine was mandated in England and it was full of mothers.
They would get arrested by the police for refusing to vaccinate their newborn babies.
There was incredible outcry, you know, the kind of the sort of police violence done to young mothers.
It was integral to the movement.
And And it sort of seems to me that, why wouldn't it be again?
Do you know the same kind of questions are coming up here about kind of, you know, yeah, the sort of maternal wisdom versus state control, you know, what the kind of ethical kind of concern, I suppose, or ethical question of, I suppose, or ethical question of, you know, where does the state step in, in terms of family life, which always remains a kind of complicated and nearly always a sort of quite sore point.
For lots and lots of political discussions, not just vaccines.
And so it seems to be a kind of winning, a winning aesthetic, but also quite a significant wedge issue that they found that they can kind of use to their advantage.
Just to say, You know, no one kind of, no one likes the idea of the kind of government sort of wrestling, you know, children away from their mothers or telling mothers that they're unfit and this kind of thing.
It's just a powerful image, and I think for that reason, they'll continue to use it.
Hey, everybody.
Before we sign off, I wanted to curl back around to finish up the YJ reporting.
Because I actually emailed Yoga Journal's brand manager, Tracy Middleton, with some questions about, you know, Yoga Journal's response to the Instagram melee.
And she replied very cordially, Hi Matthew, I expected the backlash.
We've had similar comments on previously published articles about QAnon and know that many in the yoga community don't support vaccination.
Vaccinations are a divisive topic in this country and across the world and the yoga wellness community is no exception.
Editorially, we report on credible research, such as the type that Wolf cited in her article.
As I have not seen any credible research supporting that vaccinations are harmful, we have not assigned anything from the other side.
So that was in response to a question about whether they were taking an editorial position that was pro-vaccine and whether they were going to both sides the issue.
She goes on, in line with our parent company's best practices, we currently don't delete comments unless they are malicious.
And that was in response to me bringing up the fact that with thousands of comments on that post, and many of them carrying some pretty serious misinformation, did they feel an obligation to take them down.
She signs off looking forward to listening to the podcast.
So here we are Tracy.
Thanks for your comment.
And I want to flag also that we're going to be covering this issue in more depth in a couple weeks time.
And that's going to center around an interview that I've conducted with Colin Hall and Sarah Garden of Bodhi Tree Yoga in Regina, Saskatchewan.
Now they made national news here in Canada because they announced their studio reopening plans.
And those plans included a requirement that clients provide proof of vaccination to enter the building.
Now, if people don't want to offer that proof, or if they can't get vaccinated for any number of reasons, then Bodhi Tree Yoga is still offering virtual classes.
Well, they announced this on Facebook and, as you can imagine, they were punished by it in some very interesting and disturbing but also hilarious ways.
So we'll be talking to them about that.
And then lastly, relatedly, I might do a little bit more reporting on a local story, to me anyway, here in Toronto.
And I'll point out that in the Medium piece, in which I review the Yoga Journal Instagram post, I included a number of screenshots of comments, and one of those screenshots was of a comment from Marla Mainakshi Joy, and she is somebody that I've known for years here in Toronto, and I've been on friendly terms with her and so on, and I was surprised to see this comment.
It said, As a yogini and yoga studio owner of many years, this is not a himsa.
I have no more to say than this.
Big unfollow.
Now, the yoga studio owning part refers to the fact that she has been the co-owner of Downward Dog Yoga here in Toronto, which is one of the city's largest, you know, and oldest and most famous studios.
But in my initial footnote explaining those relationships, I actually identified her as a present co-owner, not having realized that she hasn't been a co-owner for about a year.
And so the new owners actually got in touch with me and said that they appreciated the article and also said, you know, please make this correction because we do not share Marla's views at all.
And, you know, the new management of Downward Dog Yoga doesn't want to be associated with views like that at all.
Another sort of side issue here is that one of the original founders of Downward Dog Yoga was Diane Bruni.
And you might remember me speaking about her over the past year.
She died in January of cancer.
And she spoke to me a lot about how horrified she was at the anti-vax and conspirituality type sentiments that were ripping her community apart.
And how painful it was for her as a cancer patient to be going for inpatient treatment during the pandemic with all of the horrible isolating restrictions that she had to undergo.
