The fifth installment of Matthew's Five Big Questions Posed to an Extremely Thoughtful Person. Dr. Annie Kelly joined us in Episode 61 to lay out her research on the manosphere-to-conspirituality pipeline. Today she joins me to discuss the trouble and joy of balancing extremism research with stories of hope and solidarity. Show Notes Annie Kelly Vaccine: The Human Story - YouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| I'd recommend our listeners check out his Skeptical Sunday episode on hydrotherapy, as well as Jordan's episode about Tarina Shaquille, where he interviews an ISIS recruit's journey and escape. | |
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| Hello, everyone. everyone. | |
| Welcome to the Conspirituality Relief Project. | |
| This is your regular timeline cleanser, featuring interviews with folks reflecting on hope, faith, resilience, and building community in hard times. | |
| You know, all of the things that conspirituality itself can't do. | |
| So, these are short, personal visits in which I ask my guests the same five questions about their life wisdom, at least as it is in this moment. | |
| My name is Matthew Remsky. | |
| My guest today is Dr. Annie Kelly, who you might know as the UK correspondent for the QAA podcast and also as our guest way back on episode 61 in July of 2021 when she unpacked her research for us on the Manosphere pipeline of anti-feminism to COVID-era conspiracism. | |
| And I hope you also know her from her incredible standalone podcast series called Vaccine the Human Story, which tracks the centuries-long collective and ingenious and empathetic battle against smallpox up through its eradication in 1980. And in our conversation, | |
| we talk quite a bit about the hopefulness of that story and the intelligence and generosity and organizational gumption displayed by so many people from so many cultures over centuries to solve this horrible problem, none of whom knew how it was going to turn out. | |
| And so I'll post that in the show notes. | |
| I can't recommend it highly enough. | |
| And I also love what Annie says in this conversation about feelings of self-worth Being integral to really jumping into community action. | |
| That if you want to get with people and do things, it can be a real barrier if you don't, for whatever reason, there are many reasons, feel like you deserve it when we all actually deserve it. | |
| So I have one timeline note before we start. | |
| The topics in the Relief Project are evergreen, but some of these interviews, including this one, were recorded back in August. | |
| And in Annie's case, this means that this was just a week after far-right anti-immigrant race riots erupted in the UK, which is where she lives. | |
| Here's our conversation. | |
| Annie Kelly, welcome to the Conspirituality Relief Project. | |
| Thank you so much for having me on. | |
| Now, I sent you the same five questions I've sent everyone, and my job is to ask them and then just try to stay out of your way. | |
| And the first question is a little bit grim. | |
| Actually, it's a lot grim, but I think it sets the stage for the relief part. | |
| Okay, so here it is. | |
| Number one, what terrifies you most in these times? | |
| Yeah, this is a great question to ask people who work in this field, I think, because it really forces you to focus in a field which is full of lots of quite dark material, I think, at the time that we're recording, which is just early August. | |
| My country has just currently been undergoing some Really nasty civil unrest in lots of parts of the country. | |
| Race riots, frankly pogroms, and some areas where the far right have been marauding across lots of deprived towns, specifically looking for Muslim people to hurt, to beat up, to frighten, but also black people as well. | |
| And this is all down to A bit of misinformation around a nasty attack that happened in South Pole, where the attacker was alleged to be Muslim, which turned out not to be true. | |
| But by that point, the message had spread and incited these riots across the country. | |
| And that's really scary. | |
| It's a really scary world to be living in. | |
| I think lots of us, when we first come across the concept of pogroms, of race riots, of lynch mobs, The historical artifacts, you know, to see them unfold on real time via social media and places like Telegram and X, formerly known as Twitter, is really terrifying. | |
| And I think the thing that frightens me Is a concern I have that the people or the institutions that are in power, that have the power to change these kind of resentments, to make a meaningful difference into how they manifest, I don't see much political will to do that. | |
| Our Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, has been, you know, absolutely clear that there will be huge, you know, there'll be severe punishment for those involved. | |
| But in terms of preventing it from happening again, and preventing, you know, stopping it at the source, preventing these kind of hatreds from sort of boiling over and kind of manifesting in the way that they did in the first place, I am concerned, I think, that I don't see much political Appetite to really tackle that, the root. | |
| Because I think, unfortunately, these kinds of societal scapegoats in, you know, marginalized communities and refugees and minorities are quite useful to the powerful as well as these kind of insurgent hate groups. | |
| What really struck me in watching it unfold is how little police presence there seemed to be, how little resistance from the institutions that you're speaking of there seemed to be. | |
| And it really gave the sense that the social contracts that we rely on are very, very frail, in fact. | |
| Yeah, absolutely. | |
| These social contracts are very frail. | |
| I think they have been systematically eroded for quite a long time in this country as well. | |
| The kind of understanding that we have a duty to care for one another beyond your immediate family or your immediate neighbours Even just the notion that, you know, immigration and immigrants are a net good, | |
| you know, have just been, I think, you know, taken for granted, have not really been defended, particularly like vociferously by the liberal left in this country, because it's an easy win to sort of just kind of avoid that tricky discussion. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And, yeah, and, you know, I think also it would be remiss of me not to mention the fact that I think also, yeah, our police are just completely unequipped, poorly equipped for the way that these uprisings bubble over on social media still. | |
| There has been, I think, some kind of... | |
| Efforts to make these police forces more social media savvy and certainly in bigger metropolitan areas like London and Manchester, where I suppose these places are really trained for riots and things like that, there's maybe a bit more understanding. | |
| But these kind of less large, less wealthy towns, yeah, we're just completely unprepared and we're not even really looking for it, I think. | |
| So in light of this and then other precarities, what is the most meaningful and supportive idea or story that you return to for reliable wisdom and relief? | |
| I mean, this is going to sound a bit like a plug, because I wrote and produced a podcast called Vaccine the Human Story, which was all about the creation of the smallpox vaccine and the World Health Organization's campaign to Essentially eradicate smallpox from the world in the 1960s and 70s. | |
| It's going to sound like a plug when I say that that's the story that I return to. | |
| But I think the reason I put that effort in and the reason I created that podcast was because it was such a meaningful story for me that I came across, I should say, at such a meaningful time during COVID lockdowns when the picture felt particularly bleak. | |
| Not simply in terms of the way we were all trapped indoors and missing our friends and families and things like that, but also in what I saw as escalating conspiracism, rising extremism. | |
| Again, increasingly very little political appetite to actually tackle it head on. | |
| And in the cases of things like QAnon, you could say actually political appetite to stoke it, to encourage it. | |
| So the story of the smallpox vaccine, I think, from its very origins, beginning with the technology of inoculation, which begins in medieval China and gradually travels west, | |
| I think really I found a very emotive one because it spoke to I think the huge benefits, again, of cultural exchange, I was just saying how I don't feel like people make the case for why immigration is good, but I think, you know, this is a clear cut case of why people traveling and exchanging ideas and knowledge makes us better. | |
| And in this case, you know, actually means that humanity can essentially achieve a miracle. | |
| And, yeah, also, that's from the early era of the discovery of the smallpox vaccine, which is eventually developed in England as a result of this inoculation technology beginning hundreds of years earlier in medieval China. | |
| But also the WHO campaign, which involved an incredible amount of manpower, lots of which were young volunteers, many of whom had never left their home countries before, being sent to, you know, Incredibly rural parts of Africa and India trying to work with local hospitals there to administer vaccines, which they did not have enough to do the full population. | |
| So people had to get really clever about finding local knowledge, finding out where cases of smallpox were out-breaking, and then ring-fencing around it so that they could essentially cut it off at the root. | |
| I think it's just a moving and incredible story of what happens when people work together. | |
| I think that when people can put aside our kind of petty bigotries, our petty nationalisms, our petty, you know, well, this particular part of the world is my concern, so why should I care what happens in India and what happens in Africa and things like that? | |
| Yeah, I think it's a wonderful story and it's something that I return to a lot mentally, I think, when I feel pessimistic, which is a risk of this job, about what humans can do. | |
| I think there's also something about how, especially the effort, the physical effort that it took for really the evangelists of the smallpox vaccine to load up their donkeys To make sure that their samples were refrigerated. | |
| To make sure that all of the materials would survive as they trekked through jungles and over mountaintops for days on end so that they could find these tiny little villages where the inoculations, where the vaccinations would be effective. | |
| That there's something just so pragmatic, so material. | |
| It's the opposite of online activism. | |
| It's a story of hands-on stuff and hope. | |
| Yeah, absolutely. | |
| And yeah, I like the relationship that you brought up there to activism as well. | |
| Yeah, the need to physically get out there, do you know? | |
| And kind of get involved and get stuck in even when things do not have an easy way forward or an easy route. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And indeed, I guess maybe bringing back to the first point I was talking about, the race riots happening in this country, that is what lots of communities in this country did. | |
| People were taken aback. | |
| People were not expecting these riots to emerge. | |
| But after a couple of days, lots of communities began kind of launching So, on that note... | |
| What is the greatest obstacle you face in forming community relationships? | |
| And how do you work to overcome it? | |
| This is a great question. | |
| And I'll probably have to get quite personal in response, I think. | |
| I was raised, and still am, a Catholic. | |
| I was raised in particular with my parents, really, and school really instilled in me the importance of the Christian principle of charity. | |
| And of it being a worthwhile good in and of itself. | |
| And to a large extent, I think I try to embody that pretty well. | |
| You know, I'm pretty generous with my money. | |
| I'm pretty generous with my time in terms of causes and charity that I find important. | |
| But one area that I think I actually struggle with in terms of charity is extending the spirit of charity to another person. | |
| And in particular, assuming that they have that spirit of charity for me. | |
| So I think I struggle a little bit with often assuming that people think the worst of me, that people are hypercritical of me, are judging me. | |
| And I think this can be quite a serious barrier for the solutions that we talked about in terms of getting involved with stuff, beginning pragmatic, practical processes to changing things. | |
| As I say, I think of myself as quite a charitable person, but I think this is an aspect of charity that I need to work on a little, which is, I think, assuming others see me charitably too. | |
| Or being worthy of community yourself. | |
| Yeah, that's a nice way of putting it. | |
| Okay, question number four. | |
| If you were responsible for comforting and guiding an eight-year-old who was terrified of climate catastrophe, how would you do it? | |
| What would you say? | |
| So this is also a great question because I'm actually on maternity leave at the minute and I have a four-month-old son. | |
| And when my husband and I were thinking, you know, are we in the right space to have children? | |
| I think being well-educated liberals who think a lot about climate change and things like that, this was something I suppose we came across. | |
| Is it right to bring a child into a world where The climate is changing, where environmental conditions are getting harder. | |
| Even if we ourselves exist in a very privileged pocket of the world, it's not necessarily fair to assume that that means that in this interconnected world we live in, it won't touch our children and their children's futures. | |
| It's something I thought very seriously about But my husband runs a history podcast which is called Fall of Civilizations and specifically looks at the collapse of societies across history. | |
| So if anyone had thought a lot about this question, it was him. | |
| And something he says, which I bear in mind, and maybe doesn't sound comforting, but I find it comforting. | |
| He says, you know, people always look to the future for what the apocalypse is going to be like. | |
| And apocalypses tends to be a kind of like a science fiction concept. | |
| It's in the future. | |
| It's somewhere towards people are always looking forward, essentially, to see what it will be like. | |
| But he says, we've had lots of apocalypses. | |
| You know, you can find them all over history. | |
| Things like, you know, kind of societal breakdown, famine, disease, even things like, yeah, the kind of the Western, quote unquote, discovery of the new world. | |
| These were all experienced essentially as apocalypses. | |
| If you ever read any kind of medieval literature as well, you actually become overwhelmed by how convinced everybody is at that point that they are living at the end of the world. | |
| And so this is something I find strangely comforting, which is that actually the feeling that you are living at the end of the world is one of the most ancient feelings there are. | |
| Do you know? | |
| Right. | |
| That this isn't a new feeling. | |
| It's not novel to this time. | |
| It has been felt by people thousands of years before you. | |
| And, you know, I don't want to say just sort of blindly, and life moved on, because actually for lots of people it didn't. | |
| But I think, again, it is testament to the fact of what humans are capable of living through, of building through. | |
| So it's not to say... | |
| I can't shake my hand and say it will be fine. | |
| But I think it's more to say that this is a challenge that has been experienced and overcome by lots and lots of people for as long as there has been the written word, essentially. | |
| So by my count, I think you have about seven years and eight months before you have to come up with an answer in your house. | |
| I have to come up with the child-sized version of this, yeah. | |
| And maybe your child will have listened to your husband's whole archive by that point. | |
| Oh yeah, we're going to play them instead of bedtime stories. | |
| Yeah. | |
| If I think of my own eight-year-old mind being told that, yeah, this is an old feeling and lots of people have had it, I guess I can feel that. | |
| I can feel that that would be resonant. | |
| But it's not like it gives an answer as to what is going to happen, is it? | |
| I see what you mean. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So how do I break this down in a way that's a good feeling for an eight-year-old? | |
| Do you know, I don't know, because I don't actually have experience with eight-year-olds. | |
| Maybe you can do it. | |
| I'm still working with the four months old stage where mainly I can just make silly faces at him or he really likes it at the minute where I jump in the air. | |
| So I don't know. | |
| Do you have any advice? | |
| We do have children in the house at that age. | |
| And I think that the line to walk is between honesty and And hope and making sure that your own anxiety, one's own anxiety, is not the primary inheritance. | |
| Because I think one of the things that's probably most difficult for I'm a little bit older than you, but of our age where we have a pre-digital memory, where we have a memory, I think, of childhoods before climate change was looming. | |
| I think that it's hard for us to put ourselves into the brains of people for whom it has always been part of the water that they swim in. | |
| And so the urgency of the apocalyptic thing that is suddenly happening and that we are suddenly guilty for is not necessarily something that they need to feel. | |
| It's something that I definitely have to own, but it's not something that I have to pass along as some kind of baton. | |
| So... | |
| So I don't know if those are answers either, but I think the key thing is that you can't lie about it, but you also can't diminish hope. | |
| And I don't know how that's like a day by day question. | |
| No, that's good advice though. | |
| I do remember being introduced to the concept of climate change by my own parents and they actually started arguing in the car about how likely it was to happen in my lifetime. | |
| So I remember my mum going, it's not going to happen for a very long time. | |
| And my dad going, well, and then sort of, you know, bickering it out there. | |
| Yeah, that's reminiscent of other conversations, I think, where the child will say, you know, so will I get cancer? | |
| You know, and one parental instinct is to say, oh, no, that's very, very rare. | |
| And the other parental instinct is to say, well, it happens to some people and these are the conditions and we don't know that much about it. | |
| And those are very difficult choices to make. | |
| And it's very difficult when the parents aren't on the same page about it. | |
| Last question. | |
| If your wisest ancestor came to you in a dream to offer you a piece of advice about living in difficult times, what would it be? | |
| So... | |
| In my family, I think, you know, we actually do have a wise ancestor that we look up to, who none of us have ever met apart from my grandmother. | |
| And this is my great grandfather, who was a Jew in 1930s Germany, and made the decision to Get his family out of there. | |
| He essentially saw the writing on the wall and was lucky enough to have a business partner in the UK who could vouch for him. | |
| And this is basically the whole reason that my family exists. | |
| It's not lost on me whenever I visit European cities that were under Nazi occupation and I see the gold plaques that are left on the cobblestones outside where Jewish families lived and were taken. | |
| That very easily could have been my family, my grandmother, who is still alive and who I adore. | |
| I never met my great-grandfather. | |
| None of my family, apart from my grandmother, have. | |
| He got his family to the UK and then died very quickly afterwards. | |
| So I don't really know what he was like, but I suppose it probably is part of the reason why I have always thought... | |
| It's so important to, I think, stare these hatreds, these far-right ideologies straight in the face. | |
| Yeah, to not just ignore them and hope that they'll go away. | |
| And why I've always thought that they are worth investigating and worth being concerned with. | |
| There was certainly, I think, a time when I first set out to work on my PhD which looked at... | |
| Antifeminist and far-right groups online. | |
| And I really felt this was prior to 2016, I should say. | |
| And I really felt like I had to defend that interest because to lots of people in academia, I was simply kind of the equivalent of somebody who's kind of picking up stones and sort of like, you know, looking at the kind of nasty bugs and stuff underneath when, you What's the point in kind of dredging up all of that unpleasantness? | |
| Is it just because you get a bit of a thrill out of how horrible it is? | |
| And I will say this attitude kind of post the Trump victory sort of did disappear quite sharply. | |
| And I think lots of... | |
| realized that this stuff actually had kind of some significance. | |
| But there was a certain liberal complacency, I think, in the run up to that election where people were quite certain that these ideologies were the kind of last gasp, essentially, these vestiges of our pre kind of new tolerant world. | |
| So I don't know. | |
| I don't know if my great-grandfather had any similar thoughts about that. | |
| But I suppose it is an insight that I inherited from him one way or another. | |
| And we don't know, because he passed away so soon after that journey, whether he might have gone on to do the other part of the work that you've done, which is not to just look straight at the bugs under the rocks or to look straight into the face of human evil and to call it for what it is, but to also go on and tell the story of how smallpox was eradicated. | |
| Yeah, absolutely. | |
| And I think that side of things is really important as well. | |
| It's always been really important to me. | |
| I think not to... | |
| Just kind of make my work just kind of pointing at ugly stuff I found online and condemning it. | |
| But I think you have to articulate an alternative, right? | |
| You have to keep advocating for what you think is a good way to approach these issues and these topics, as opposed to kind of just simply saying, you know, look at this Look at this kind of extremism. | |
| Look at this repulsive community I found online. | |
| Which, yeah, I think it's certainly some reporting and research on these kind of topics can evolve into. | |
| And yeah, I think that's another reason why I wanted to do the vaccine project was because I could see all these negative stories being created around vaccines and I didn't see... | |
| I saw lots of people debunking them and saying how silly and ridiculous they were. | |
| It says it's 5G and stuff. | |
| But I didn't see people doing something a bit hard, which is actually advocating a standalone positive vision of a vaccine as opposed to simply negating the hysteria or conspiracism around it. | |
| And yeah, I think that's the next part of it, as you say. | |
| That's the next step. | |
| It can't just be dismissing these ideas. | |
| You have to be constructing something yourself. | |
| Circling right back to the very first thing I talked about, about the kind of establishment response to this upsurge in violence and hatred, I think that's what I fear I'm not seeing. | |
| I'm seeing very strong condemnations, very strong prosecutions, but I'm not seeing an actual alternative narrative which doesn't just say, you know, it's unacceptable that these people have been looting and, you know, roving around in gangs, but actually saying, you know, It's a good thing that Muslims are here, and it's a good thing that black people are here, and advocating for the positive vision of society that that creates. | |
| Annie Kelly, thank you so much for taking the time. | |
| Thank you so much for having me on. |