Interview with Annie Kelly on Vaccines, Conspiracies, & Misinformation
Dr Annie Kelly is a writer, researcher, and the British correspondent for the well and deservedly praised podcast QAnon Anonymous. Her PhD research was on digital anti-feminism and the kinds of ideas that float around certain 'tradcon', biological essentialist, or religiously motivated groups. She does research on antifeminism, new digital cultures, conspiracy theories and right wing extremism. Prompted by the resurgence in anti-vax sentiment, Annie's been looking into the history and sociology of vaccinations, and sees lots of interesting roots and themes for understanding what's going on right now. Her new podcast, "Vaccine - The Human Story" has been digging into precisely these issues, and so we had questions for Annie, lots of questions! The history of the germ theory of disease, the early use (and abuse) of vaccinations, and the panics, xenophobia and quack therapies - it's quite simply fascinating stuff, and we get a wonderful overview from Annie in this episode.Annie's work at QAA and elsewhere naturally focuses more on the extreme end of the spectrum, and while pulling no punches, she approaches what can be quite disturbing and confronting topics with a humour and empathy that is incredibly authoritative and reassuring. We talk about COVID and vaccines, but so much more, like the anti-feminist ideas that float around in the hinterland between athiesm and religiosity, pick up artists converting to Orthodox Christianity, and other weirdness.One of our most enjoyable and informative interviews - do check it out! LinksVaccine: The Human Story (on Youtube)Vaccine: The Human Story (podcast)QAnon Anonymous 161: The Northern Irish Satanic Panic (Part 1)Joe Rogan's instagram rant about AustraliaJoe Rogan double standards in defending Trump Jnr.The 'hardcore' metal Matt was referring to in the intro
Welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer, and we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Matt Brown, and with me is the Ringo to my Paul, Chris Kavanagh.
G'day, Chris.
Hello, Matthew.
How are you doing?
I'm good.
I'm good.
Did you like that?
You're comfortable with being Ringo?
You're all right with that?
He keeps the beat.
Don't get the reference, Matt.
Before my time, those names are nothing to me.
Who's that?
What did you listen to when you were a kid, then?
A kid, Irish rebel songs, the Dubliners.
No, I did listen to that kind of stuff, but I was into metal.
Which heavy metal band did you like?
I liked bands like Pantera and Machine Head.
I was not a Slipknot fan, but I was around that oeuvre.
Okay.
Did you like that?
That artist Warrant, he sung that song called Cherry Pie.
That was really hard, gritty rock.
I don't even get that joke.
When I'm trying to focus on work or whatever, I listen to retro wave stuff.
What's that?
It's kind of like electronic music, but using synthesizers and various sounds from the 80s.
Okay.
It's weird.
And the thing is, it turned out that that whole genre became associated with Trumpy-style fascists.
Oh, no.
That's a shame.
I know.
So they've kind of ruined that, but I still like it.
So Kavinsky and things like that.
A bit like the soundtrack to Drive.
Yeah.
Music and work is a funny thing.
There's so much you can't listen to.
I can then listen to Brian Eno or Bach when I'm actually working.
Look at that.
Just trying to show me up.
I'm listening to synth retro rare stuff.
You're like, let's listen to the classics.
That's all right.
There's no shame in that.
There's no shame in that.
Matt, one other thing about musical tastes that I have to mention.
I share Spotify.
Well, I like I just have a Spotify account for my family and most of the time I'm playing Spotify when I'm not playing it for myself.
I'm playing it for my two young children.
So Spotify's recommendation, whenever it's like new releases you might like, it's Octonauts famous song and stuff.
I cannot use most of the you've been listening to.
Like, you want songs around dinosaur films, so they're like, I don't.
Well, I had the same problem because my daughter was sharing my Amazon account to download books, and that automatically linked her to my Goodreads account, which had a photo of me, and I had a beard, actually.
Middle-aged, bearded guy.
But then she was leaving reviews for her book, so she'd read The Fairy Princess Diaries, Volume 7. And the review was like, this is the most amazing book I wish I could be a princess too, and I want to read it a hundred times.
I love it.
You can disguise your avid fascination with teenage girl-oriented fiction all you like, but I know that wasn't your daughter.
The prose and the references, yeah, you can't disguise it.
Everyone at Goodreads is clearly a brony of some kind.
Actually, I got a bit fascinated with the bronies because I thought it was hilarious and interesting.
I actually ended up buying a t-shirt that was...
Gee, I've forgotten what the cartoon is that they're obsessed with.
My Little Pony.
My Little Pony, right?
And it had the rainbow and the love hearts of the stars and the ponies and stuff.
And I bought that t-shirt and I'd wear it to uni.
You were an ironic...
Brony?
For a very brief period of time, I was an ironic brony.
That's a dangerous game to play.
I recently found out on the Patreon chat that you were an edgelord when you were in Japan, wandering about in leather pants and fellered hats and whatnot.
So this just completes the picture.
Very immature.
Matt, so we had an episode that released a week ago or so.
With one Samuel Harris.
And it's fair to say it probably received more feedback than most of our episodes did.
And I've also received various requests for clarifications.
Some put in nicer terms than ours.
And I've received a lot of feedback about my accent, which I do receive anyway.
But when there's more people in the audience that haven't heard me speak before.
You get more feedback themed around that.
So it's been a cornucopia of interesting responses.
I've seen some of them.
I think it's pretty much an equal mix of people who thought that you treated him with kid gloves and gave him an easy ride and people who thought you were just terrible, interrupting him all the time, just hassling him.
No!
I haven't seen myself accused that much of using kid gloves.
I've seen people say, you should have said more about this or that or that kind of thing.
But...
There's a split between the people who think I was hectoring and badgering him and just wouldn't accept his answers and people that saw him as evasive or unwilling to address the point.
And then there's another category of people who found points on both sides that were useful or the discussion, even if they agreed more or less with one or the other, they found it a valuable thing to listen to.
So there's plenty of opinions available.
And I suspect that I probably at some point will need to do a fucking lecture on tribalism to explain the term of what like minimal group paradigm and in-group bias and all that means.
But today is not that day.
I'm not ready for that yet.
There's not been enough time.
So if you want our reflections on the interview or at least us responding to people asking questions about it.
Then we recently recorded the monthly AMA on the Patreon.
So we talked a bit there about the experience and whatnot.
So there you go.
It's behind a paywall.
That's right.
Go sign up your cheapskates.
That's where the gold is.
That's where the good stuff is.
You hear that, Eric?
If you want to find out.
You got to send some money.
So anyway, it was an interesting experience.
I think Sam definitely deserves credit for coming on.
For tweeting about it when he clearly felt rather ambivalent about the experience.
We have to, I think, publicly, now he's been revealed as the mastermind behind it all, give credit to David Pizarro from that Very Bad Wizards rival podcast for setting it up because he suggested it.
And so really, anything that comes from it, any negative consequences for Sam or me.
Or you, Ma, or you.
It all traces back to Dave.
Yeah, contact Dave.
Send your emails to Dave.
Yeah, he actually, he did tell me that he wanted people to send him feedback directly.
You know, any comments you have or any questions, just email him.
You can find the address at VeryBadWizards if you look.
Chris.
Yes.
Joe Rogan.
We haven't covered him yet, but I think it's pretty certain that we will cover him soon.
He's been in the news recently.
On his Instagram page, he took a shot at an Australian advertisement that showed a sort of visibly dying man.
He's parroting vaccine hesitancy.
He's suffering an allergic reaction.
But he won't take the EpiPen because he's asking a bunch of questions about whether it's safe and what about the statistics from Europe.
How many studies have been conducted?
Yeah, and finally he goes, "What did Joe Rogan say?
Call Joe!"
before he dies, right?
Quite funny, quite funny.
And Joe slammed it, and Australia generally, saying not only has Australia had the worst reaction to the pandemic with dystopian police state measures that are truly inconceivable to the rest of the civilized world, but they also had the absolute dumbest propaganda.
There's a little edit, isn't there, Matt, that appeared shortly after under that.
Oh, yes.
He suddenly realized, oh, apparently this is not a real ad.
It is from a satirical show.
Which it is, Chris.
But he left it up, of course.
Now, this is from the Guru and Transfer.
Australians will know this, right?
So this is a satirical ad show where they get companies to submit just ridiculous ads for a joke.
One of the more famous ones they did was they set them the task of making an ad promoting invading New Zealand, military invasion of New Zealand, which was very funny.
Seems reasonable.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think I could make a pretty good argument for it.
Probably most Kiwis did as well.
Yeah, well, you know, the Australasian prosperity sphere would benefit everyone, I think.
I think you're underselling a little bit, though, how obviously satirical this was.
Because, like, when I watch the video, it's actually, it's very well done.
But the notion that this would be a serious advertisement.
By the Australian government, like you have to lack, you have not graduated from the Gadsad school of irony, if you feel to detect the level of satire in this.
If anybody's seen that Mitchell and Webb look, the skit they did about the homeopathic hospital with the doctors saying, give him 20cc of diluted horse spin or, you know, whatever, wolf spin.
And it's like on that level, right?
It's so obviously a parody.
Yeah.
And it's coming on the heels of so many American Republican politicians, like governors and people like that, making speeches comparing Australia to a dictatorship, a police state, more repressive than China.
And Candace Owens saying that the United States should invade Australia, unironically.
So it's kind of annoying.
It's so stupid.
I don't even know where to begin.
I'll be wasting everyone's time by rebutting this.
Stupid fantasies.
So he said about the dystopian police state and how inconceivable it was that the civilized world, what Australia has been doing.
But the reality is that the US response for most of the world is the thing which has been inconceivable.
And it's Joe and his cohort of contrarian.
He has been responsible for promoting vaccine hesitancy, some of the loudest anti-vaccine voices.
And so his kind of outrage, he gets outraged at people making fun of him.
And he's not outraged at the amount that have died in the US.
Because of the hesitancy.
Exactly right.
I mean, the United States has had the vaccines available far longer than Australia.
And they've got, what, 57% have had both doses in the US at this point.
In Australia, it's 80% now.
And as a result, the lockdowns and restrictions are essentially over.
You know, you can fly them out of Australia if you're vaccinated, no problem.
So it worked.
We got away scot-free with 50 times less deaths from COVID per capita than places like Florida or many states in the United States.
So yeah, it's adding insult to injury that they are using Australia.
It's not a funny point, but it's just the fact that Joe and his friends, through promoting vaccine hesitancy, have meant that their country is more fucked right and that things take longer and all these restrictions and measures that people are taking.
They need to last longer because if the population just got vaccinated to a large degree, then you'd be able to relax measures.
And instead, they demonize public health officials and they demonize, you know, the vaccine and exaggerate adverse effects.
Promote quack treatments.
And then just get outraged about the impact.
It's just like, yeah, it's just a frustrating thing.
Anyway, let's let it go.
Let it go.
Deep breath.
Deep breath.
One last thing is that I also saw a clip being shared around on the interwebs today.
There's a clip where Joe is having a discussion with his friends, some comedians, and they bring up Hunter Biden and Donald Trump Jr.
His friends and comedians start joking about them both being cokeheads and that they probably get on.
And Joe is having a joke.
And then as soon as they say, Don Jr. might be a cokehead, he switches to, is that true?
Like, has he been proven to be?
I wouldn't say that.
And there's such a double standard.
It's fine to joke about Hunter Biden or whatever, but then as soon as anybody disparages Trump Jr., we need to like consider, are those rumors funded and stuff?
Joker is just like a reactionary right-wing dude now.
Whatever he used to be, he has some liberal features and he's primarily a conspiracy theorist, but he's a right-wing dude now and he just doesn't recognize it.
Yeah, I think that's the annoying bit that he doesn't recognize it.
It is annoying when people don't recognize where their affiliations are.
That is annoying, Matt.
Agreed.
Agreed.
So after talking about vaccine hesitancy and dystopian injections and so on, this is a good time to turn to our interview guest for this week.
Let's do that.
And today we have a guest to help us figure out what is true, beautiful and real in this crazy mixed up world.
Chris, who do we have with us today?
Coming all the way from Old Blighty, you're currently in England.
Yes, that's right.
That's right.
Yes.
So Annie Kelly from QAnon Anonymous podcast and vaccine the human story more recently.
I listened to it and I'm a big fan.
In general, Annie has been doing good work on digital extremism and online communities of the sort that we often talk about.
So we thought it would be good to have a conversation about the new podcast and some of your experiences researching similar things that we look at.
Yeah, thank you so much for having me on.
It's always really nice when you're invited onto a podcast that you have actually listened to and enjoy.
So yeah, I'm really excited to be here.
Yeah, I've noticed that the full intimacy that you get through podcasts, it translates very well when you actually meet people.
We had Dave Pizarro on from Very Bad Wizards, and I've been listening for a couple of years, so the level of familiarity I had with him was much greater than he had with me.
Oh, it's my friend!
Yeah, remember all those chats we've had?
It's just that I was very quiet.
I have a running theory that the parasociality we experience is actually real.
And it's not a bad thing at all.
So, Annie, on that specific topic, before we talk about your podcast, I listened to your recent coverage on QAnon Anonymous about Colin Wallace.
Yeah.
The timing is very fortuitous because, Matt, you probably aren't aware of this, but Annie was recently doing a two-part story.
About the satanic panic in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, which is close to home.
Yeah, and I gathered from that as well, Annie, that your family are originally from Northern Ireland, or actually you as well, right?
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, my dad's from Belfast and pretty much all of that side of the family live there still.
It's actually very nice to go on a podcast as well and hear a Northern Irish accent.
Yeah, that's just one of my favorite accents because it always just reminds me of my family.
Yeah, so I don't need to apologize to the same extent as usual for the Belfast accent.
You're probably well attuned to it.
We'll probably, if there's a chance later, talk a little bit about the Northern Irish satanic panic because your coverage was really interesting and not something I knew about before.
But the first thing I wanted to ask about was, as I mentioned, you have a series, ongoing series, that's relatively new called Vaccine the Human Story, which, and you feel free to correct anything I summarized wrong here,
but it's about the smallpox, vaccine, the development and reception thereof.
And I find the series so far extremely interesting because there's so many parallels with Things that are happening now.
So our first question is just why you decided to focus on that particular story and telling it in the format that you are.
Yeah, so I guess it's a kind of interesting feature of researching conspiracy theories is you quite often need to figure out why what they're saying is wrong.
So you can't just sort of simply look at all these kind of conspiracy theories about vaccines and just, you know, say this is a bunch of rubbish when you yourselves know nothing about vaccines, which is very much where I was starting from when I began looking into anti-vax conspiracy theories because many of them are very convincing.
You know, conspiracy theorists, particularly the ones who make money of this, are professionally convincing people.
So you need to sort of do research, do your own research, as they'd love to say.
So I began doing that.
I began looking into...
I don't really have a science background at all.
So I began looking into what vaccines were, how they developed, where they came from.
And actually what I found was what I thought was a really interesting and I thought quite unusual story.
Or when I say unusual, I suppose what I really mean is not particularly popularised story of...
This very, very long process, essentially, of humans figuring out, essentially, the very basis of immunity, that if you've been sick with a certain disease, you cannot get sick from it again.
And all over the world, actually, I think it's largely accepted that this probably begins in around medieval China, essentially experimenting with that fact and trying all sorts of kind of...
Quite gnarly medical procedures like snorting dried smallpox scabs up their nose and things like that to try and essentially tweak with this version of immunity.
So in that case, the smallpox vaccine is almost not the beginning of the story of vaccination, but sort of somewhere around the middle, actually.
And it is a story which doesn't really begin with necessarily genius scientists.
But lots of people who would be largely thought of as outside the realm of kind of the scientific or the medical establishment at the time, using this knowledge, evolving it, and passing it from country to country.
And I thought actually this had an element which almost spoke to some of the anxieties that I was seeing in anti-vax or vaccine-hesitant spaces, where people were saying things like, it's just so new, this new vaccine, you know,
it must have just been so rushed.
And this element of mistrust, which I could kind of sympathise with, actually, of the way that the COVID vaccines were being marketed as being the very cutting edge of this brilliant technology that ordinary people couldn't possibly understand.
And I thought that that might be impressive to lots of people who are very impressed by science and technology.
But it was actually, I think, not working to assuage the fears of people who were vaccine hesitant, who didn't necessarily believe that those establishment figures had their best interests at heart.
And so I thought to myself that someone will make a documentary about the development of vaccines, a big flashy documentary, and it'll be wonderful.
And I sort of just assumed, you know, being British, the BBC will just be on this, surely.
So I waited for a bit for this to happen.
And when it didn't, I sort of got frustrated and sort of thought, well, I'll just do it myself then with a much lower budget.
But it sort of seemed important to me that somebody should, do you know?
And that was my idea, I suppose, my theory of the podcast.
There was a book I read a long time ago, I guess it must have been now, by Simon Singh called Trick or Treatment, where he surveyed alternative health.
Claims or treatments, but he went into the history of the development of treatments for scurvy and stuff at the beginning.
And I actually remember that I had a similar feeling when reading that book that I knew a little bit about the history of medicine from GCSE or A-level in England, or well, in North Ireland.
But the story about how, not randomized controlled trials, but kind of...
Controlled trials and the voyages where they were testing out what ways could be used to treat scurvy seemed like this really dramatic and rather intuitive way that you could show people the power of scientific methods and that it didn't really require huge amounts of statistical knowledge or complex machinery.
Just the basic logic made it work.
And it sounds similar to...
A lot of the things, I know what you're describing in the podcast episodes as well, there's a lot of complexities that go into inoculation and vaccination.
But in the same way, it seems that your subtitle suggests the human story does a very good job of making people able to grasp it and perhaps more interested than they would be in a panorama-style BBC documentary that is a bit more detached in nature.
Yeah, that's absolutely it.
And there was a reason I called it The Human Story and it's because I wanted to contrast it almost to what I find quite tedious at times, stories of scientific development.
And it's a bit of a false binary, right?
I'm sure there's lots of history of science and history of medicine academics getting furious at me as I speak.
Because actually, you can't really separate the story of humanity from the story of science.
They are one and the same, they're intertwined.
But at the same time, I did want to, I suppose, contrast it to what I can find some quite bloodless historical narratives.
This technology was processed and then this technology was created and this superseded this technology because it suited this need and that sort of thing.
And I sort of really wanted to ground it in the story of people and what people must have felt.
What emotions people must have felt around this technology and why it was so important, essentially.
Yeah, so I'm sort of aware I am playing to a bit of a false dichotomy, but I do think it's important if you are trying to reach the people who, as I say, do not necessarily have a positive feeling towards technological brilliance,
which I often think some of the language around particularly mRNA vaccines can often push.
Even though they are technologically brilliant, sometimes I think that's not actually the way to go when we're trying to quite urgently convince people of what's there, of the need to take them.
I love the historical framing, by the way.
At the beginning of the COVID outbreak, I happened to read a Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe, and I've mentioned this to Chris Kavanagh a couple of times.
It was just amazing how that was, what, 400 years ago or so?
The psychological dynamics, the kinds of panics and the xenophobia and the people rushing to quack cures and the unrest, it felt like exactly what was happening today.
The history of the germ theory of disease and figuring out that it's these microorganisms and this theory of contagion and so on, there's nothing about it that's particularly intuitively obvious, is there?
It feels more intuitive that it should be some miasma or some terrible fog or something that was making you sick, other than germs.
Yeah, and I'm actually editing and getting ready to record my fifth episode of the series, which is going to be about the very first anti-vax movement.
And one thing that keeps on smacking me in the head every time I read about it is how...
Obvious it was that something like ivermectin was going to happen in a sense that there was going to be this huge craze for some kind of alternative treatment which had enough scientific backing to seem kind of plausible but not so much so that people were put off it.
Do you know?
Because it feels like with almost every single pandemic there is a cure like that.
It just happens time and time again.
I imagine to many historians of medicine, it probably was the second it arrived, they were like, oh, there it is.
Because it sort of seemed to me, yeah, reading back to smallpox outbreaks, but also things like tuberculosis and diphtheria and all of these kind of things, every single time there is an outbreak in a city.
You will have the medical establishment saying one saying, and then one or two rogue figures with just enough credibility, but also that slight charisma that allows them to say, "I'm breaking from the consensus here."
To say, "Actually, you need to be taking this."
And, "Hey, what do you know?
I'm selling it."
Here's the real good oil.
The pre-modern Brett Weinsteins.
The vaccine time.
Matt and I, I think, see a lot of the same parallels that you have highlighted in the episodes that you've presented between the modern era and back then.
But I'm wondering, are there any aspects which you find that don't map well?
Obviously, you know, there's technology.
Differences in that, but is it the continuity which surprises you or are there things that you come across where you're like, well, that element is not really a feature anymore?
Yeah.
It's interesting because it's almost as if the discontinuities emerge from the parallels.
So for instance, in the anti-vax movement in the UK.
You kind of have a two-tier anti-vax movement where you've got some middle to upper class businessmen who are really framing this around the kind of concept of liberty and freedom from vaccine mandates, which do happen and are much,
much more strict than even things like vaccine passports or the vaccine mandates that are happening in the US.
People are getting fined for registering a newborn and not having them vaccinated for the smallpox vaccine.
Within 14 days of being born.
But there's a discontinuity going on here which is that actually if you're poor you're much more likely to get fined and if you can't pay the fine then go to jail.
And it's nearly all young working class single mothers who this happens to.
And so this then creates a huge working class backlash movement which I kind of see as not Really being so much about the vaccine, but being about things like the poor laws and the massacre of Peterloo,
which was only...
15 years earlier and had slum clearances and all of these kind of things which essentially then the government just says we're going to come into your neighbourhoods and lock up young mothers.
It kind of feels like there's this huge backlash and it's incredibly violent.
The city centre of I think Ipswich or Peterborough or somewhere like that gets burned to the ground.
It's huge and it's big.
And I don't particularly see That element to the modern day anti-vax movement.
A lot of the anti-vax celebrities, so to speak, are, I think, more of the middle to upper class style.
They usually have a slightly kind of professionalised job.
They usually are making a fair bit of money and they're framing it all around concepts of liberty, not so much around class consciousness or class warfare or things like that, which was very, very present.
In the first anti-vaccine movement, it seems that even though you're more likely to be vaccine hesitant if you come from a sort of deprived area or if you're an ethnic minority in this country, these people don't particularly seem to rise to the top of the movement or to give it a specific kind of character in that sense,
do you know?
So I think that's probably one of the biggest differences to me comparing the two.
I listened recently to your most recent, the fourth episode, where you were talking about the opposition to vaccines in colonial countries facing colonization and how it could function as a connected to anti-colonial movements and an unfortunate overlap as it would happen.
But you can understand the kind of fear about outside technology or the various purposes that colonial powers might be introducing them for.
Yeah, it just struck me that when you were talking there, that parallel, I'm not sure if I've seen that during the current pandemic.
Like in Japan, for example, I know that here, they wanted their own Japanese vaccine.
They didn't want to rely on a German or American or British vaccine, but the efforts didn't bear fruit.
And so Japan is behind.
So there's definitely vaccine nationalism, but I didn't see so.
Much, except from Scott Adams saying that he would be going for the American vaccine.
So, yeah.
Our last guest, Stuart Neal mentioned the conspiracy theory around the vaccine for the HIV virus in sub-Saharan Africa that he said, anyway, was promoted by the KGB.
The idea that it was a CIA plot to nefarious things.
Did you hear that before, Chris?
It was new to me.
Stuart Neill is a virology professor, but he's worked on HIV research.
And like Matt says, he was highlighting that there were actual efforts by the KGB to implant stories to undermine the efforts for not HIV vaccine that doesn't exist.
Was it the smallpox vaccine began HIV?
Because I've heard that conspiracy theory before.
It was very big in Africa in the 90s.
That must have been it.
The smallpox vaccine was the cause of HIV?
Of HIV, yeah.
It was a very big theory in the 90s.
Yeah, it got promoted by lots and lots of sort of conspiracy theorists of the time.
I think even may have had like a couple of hearings in kind of mainstream newspapers as well.
Like, you know, could this be true?
Which, yeah, sort of said that the...
The WHO program to mass vaccinate, essentially, to eradicate smallpox, which worked, was contaminated in some way.
As with all conspiracy theories, it runs the full gamut of an accident to planned depopulation to bring in the new world order.
This was what began the AIDS crisis.
But you don't hear it that much anymore, apart from on anti-vax telegram channels, where they just love recycling all of this old stuff.
I remember the South African health.
Minister at one point was a HIV, AIDS, the connection between them, denialist, which was at least some calculations suggested there was like a huge death toll associated with that.
But I think the point you just made, Annie, about recycled narratives, that's something that Matt and I, and I know you guys notice it as well over at QAnon Anonymous, that lots of the kind of tropes.
Which are in anti-vaccine communities or conspiracy communities or even now the WSphere.
They're repeating things that if you become familiar with anti-vaccination movements or with conspiracy theories that you see them just endlessly reappear.
They're kind of like zombies.
It doesn't matter how often they're killed or people can show.
That they're just fundamentally incorrect.
They can just regenerate into a new version in any situation.
That's maybe a good point to ask you is, did researching this topic made you hopeful or depressed?
Yeah, I mean, I've always been someone who's found an incredible amount of comfort in the notion that Whatever you feel like you're going through, thousands and thousands of people have gone through the same thing way before you.
It's why I think I live in a very old city, which still has a lot of Tudor buildings and medieval streets and things like that.
I've always think I've been attracted to that for that same reason, because I like walking down a street and whatever kind of little problem is on my mind, thinking like, oh, lots of people have done the same thing, I know.
So I've always kind of found that a little bit comforting.
I suppose...
It does also, I think, give you a sense of perspective that while the internet has changed so much about how we communicate, and it certainly changed, I think, both the style and the rapidness with which we disseminate this level of information,
it does at least give you the sense that this has irreversibly changed humanity.
Our heart, there are still lots of things that people want.
They want comfort.
They want to feel important.
They want to feel loved.
All of these kind of other things that means that, yes, while the internet may change how they seek out those things, there is still kind of a human element there.
So I think I find that generally quite comforting.
Having said that, I certainly can get very frustrated with this, especially I think when it comes...
As it always so often does, these discourses suddenly get circled around to, well, what's wrong with just having a conversation?
What's wrong with just having a debate about these things?
And you sort of think a bit like, okay, but this debate's been going on forever and your side lost.
Do you know?
You lost the debate and you've been losing it continually for about 50 years now.
So I'm thinking of things with not just vaccines, but human biodiversity and these sorts of...
Concepts, eugenics and stuff that just keep on coming up again and again.
And people will often kind of, yeah, so just say, you know, why are you so scared of us talking about it?
And it's just a bit like, well, I don't know how many times we can keep on giving you a participation trophy and saying, try again.
Yeah, I don't know.
Yeah, like that's a less comforting thought.
That's a more frustrating thought.
It just reminded me of the creationism.
Versus evolution types of debates and teach both sides and let all sides be heard.
That sort of journalistic idea where you give equal airtime to both sides.
There's a conflict there where at some point the debate's been had and there isn't a case to be made on one side and it gets a little bit frustrating when you ask yourself.
Can't we just simply move on?
Like you said, I feel the same way.
It is comforting to know that whatever stupid shit is going on today and whatever things that are annoying us, it is a bit comforting in a way to know that the same things have been going on for hundreds of years.
But at the same time, we also hope that there should be some kind of progress, that we don't have to keep reliving and refighting the same things from 400 years ago.
Yeah, and keep on having to go back to restate those principles.
Yeah, I do agree.
That made me think, Annie, that growing up in Belfast in the 90s, I was at the teal end of the troubles.
So in a similar way, I often probably falsely, or because I didn't have it as bad as my parents' generation, I take some comfort when I look around things going badly in various places and thinking, Well, yeah, but...
Because the image that people had of Northern Ireland when I traveled in the 90s was that I'd be walking down the street and under sniper fire.
As you know, there were bombs and there were shootings and kneecaps and all those things, but life was not the way that people imagined it.
So it's just this kind of reminder that things can be bad, but still people carry on and life goes on.
But your recent coverage of Colin Wallace...
So maybe for people on our podcast who haven't heard and will go and listen afterwards, and Matt, I don't think you've heard this either.
Could you summarize, Annie, what the Colin Wallace satanic panic thing is about?
Yeah, so in short, I read a book by the Sheffield sociologist, Professor Richard Jenkins, called Black Magic and Bogeymen, which is a fantastic book, and I really recommend it for anyone who's interested.
And it alleges, well, it doesn't allege, it proves essentially that there was a satanic panic in the early 1970s in Northern Ireland or the north of Ireland, because some of it was in the border counties as well, which sort of spread these kind of very strange stories with very little evidence behind them.
It's been said, you know, some people are worried that there are satanic rituals going on in abandoned houses.
On the islands, off the coast, ruined churches, and that essentially perhaps teenagers who are distressed by the violence of the Troubles are trying to communicate with the dead and participate in these kind of black masses,
these black magic rituals.
And Colin Wallace was a former army intelligence officer who the author of this book interviewed, who said that At least some of those stories were essentially planted by the British Army.
And they had a few reasons for this.
The main one was because he was working to a book written by, I think, a general called Frank Kitson, who had been in Northern Ireland working in army intelligence and before that in Kenya, dealing with the anti-colonialist uprisings there.
Frank Kitson writes a book called Low-intensity operations, which is essentially about how to identify insurgent groups before they have committed violence and to try and destabilise their support with the local population.
And so he says the way you can do this is by seeding stories, essentially, that will lose them popular support because most people aren't willing to take part in.
Insurgent violence, but they might be willing to sympathize essentially with these insurgent groups.
You need to cut that off, make them as small as possible.
This is what Colin Wallace and his colleagues were trying to do essentially.
They were aware it was a very religious population and they were aware that because it was such a tribalistic conflict that based on whether you're Protestant or Catholic, you would probably have sympathies with one or the other side.
He said that they were mainly trying to target the loyalist paramilitaries at this time just because many of them were becoming more radical and were becoming harder to control, essentially.
Even though their primary targets were always the IRA, many of the loyalist paramilitaries had been designated terrorist groups by this point.
But it was also just a way to essentially make people Afraid to go out at night, particularly children, and essentially to create this sort of destabilizing force in popular support for either side.
Yeah.
The thing that struck me about it is, and you did a good job of contextualizing this, that the broad strokes seem to be pretty well validated from a variety of reliable sources, but some elements of it rely...
On Cohen's personal testimony, and there's possible reasons to be skeptical of some of his more extreme claims.
But even with that, it was interesting to me because it's an example where QAnon Anonymous, essentially an anti-conspiracy theory online cultish podcast, you're doing that thing which a lot of the conspiracy theorists basically say that you won't do,
which is admit that there can be Conspiracies and that they do involve government forces doing the, and they write books about how you should do them.
And so, you know, we've encountered this recently because we've been talking about the lab leak and people, they seem to take this view that if you recognize that conspiracy theory dynamics and you're critical of them, that you basically imagine the world is this rosy garden where governments never do anything wrong.
And actually, this also relates to the work that you did with the vaccine podcast.
How is that kind of being received by the audience?
Do you ever get feedback in the case of the vaccine podcast?
Do you get feedback from people that were vaccine hesitant, that were interested in it or back positively or negatively and see them for QAnon Anonymous?
I know that the people in the QAnon community are aware of you.
Collectively and kind of on the lookout for you.
But do they actually ever listen to your material or not really?
I've got very little feedback, actually, from pro-QAnon people about QAnon Anonymous.
My guess is just because it's a slightly larger, but also a little older demographic in lots of places.
And it's quite difficult.
Even I have found this researching the far right.
It's quite...
Difficult to hate-listen to something.
It's quite easy to hate-watch something.
It's quite easy to hate-read something.
But it's actually really hard, I think, to listen to something that you really don't like or appreciate.
I don't know what that is, but it does just seem to be an effect.
I think for normal humans, that is correct.
On the vaccine...
Purely because I wanted to put it on YouTube, largely because we had a very talented editing team being produced by Fall of Civilizations, which is another history podcast.
But also because I was aware that YouTube was where a lot of anti-vax content exists.
So I just thought it would be a better place to reach people there.
There you get a lot more comments from people who, again, run the full spectrum of a little bit unsure to totally against.
Much the same way, my comments reflect that.
I get a lot of "you must be funded by Big Pharma" and that kind of stuff, which, God, I wish.
The phone lines are open.
Yeah, Pfizer, give me a call anytime.
To quite a few comments, actually, which I always do like, where they say, "Oh, I really appreciate that you're not biased."
And I don't think that's true.
Of course, I'm biased.
I think I'm biased about loads of things.
But I think what they mean is that I'm not patronising.
I'm not trying to just sort of say, what do you mean?
Vaccines are fantastic and you're foolish for even thinking otherwise.
I'm trying to give a historical context which says that, yeah, sometimes, even though I think unabashedly that the vaccine is one of...
The greatest human inventions.
It hasn't always been used correctly and it's not always been utilised by governments and the powerful in the best way that they could have been.
Because I think that is actually, everyone knows when they're being patronised, right?
And we don't like it.
So I think it's, even if it is a pro-vaccine podcast, I think it is important to be like, here's where I hear you on this when you're trying to persuade someone.
We're also a...
Certainly a pro-vaccine podcast.
So I'm actually a little bit curious.
What would you think would be the most egregious example of vaccines being promoted or distributed and leading to negative consequences?
Is there anything that springs to mind?
Yeah.
So what I was talking about earlier, I think the vaccine mandates with the smallpox vaccine were, I think, just overall just a kind of catastrophic mistake, which took the best part of a century to undo.
In terms of people's trust of vaccines and the medical establishment as a whole, they had only been in existence for about 10 years when they were mandated by the British government for all newborns.
They were about as new to the population then as something like Bitcoin is to us now.
And you can kind of imagine, particularly when doctors at the time had a reputation of taking your money, not necessarily curing you.
You can understand why people were furious, particularly the poor who, as I said, were both targeted much more strictly and also had a much better reason just not to believe the government had anything like their own interests at heart.
Much like much of the public health laws at the time, it was well-intentioned and you sort of think that it probably would have in a world where the human instinct, the human impulse is just like not a factor.
Yeah, we'll just mandate everyone gets the smallpox vaccine and then we'll never have to deal with smallpox again.
Brilliant.
Fantastic.
And much like things like the slum clearances, which were, again, incredibly unhealthy environments, which did breed disease, you can kind of see how from a just purely sort of bloodless, technocratic perspective, it made sense as a policy.
But the truth is that you're forgetting essentially that these are real people and these are really their homes and these are their children.
And so people take against it.
It causes a huge backlash.
And it takes, as I say, yeah, until conscientious objection gets introduced, which is by this time in the late 1890s, you have this entire generation who do not trust vaccines at all and in many ways actually become much more vulnerable to things like smallpox.
So I think that's a really egregious example where...
You have this wonderful new technology and you try and essentially brute force it through as opposed to the harder work of actually trying to get people to understand what it does and trust it, which is difficult and complicated.
And why should we have to try and appeal to the poor anyway?
They can't even vote.
Yeah, it just seems to me just like such a historical mistake.
And similarly, I think with the way that the British government tries to introduce it in the colonies, they make...
Lots and lots of mistakes which just come from that very kind of imperialistic arrogance.
Trying to say this is a solely British invention made with pure British brilliance and that's why we're banning all of your local mystical witchdoctory ways of dealing with smallpox and other diseases because you're so lucky that you've got us in charge now and we've got this much better invention.
Which again breeds resentment in the local population.
How could it not?
A slightly less arrogant, a slightly less colonialist approach, which really highlighted the connections with inoculation practices, which had been in place in Africa and India far longer than they had been in England, would have probably got a much bigger uptake.
That actually accords with something that we've noticed, and this is coming from a different source, but I think it's playing on the same tropes, is that a lot of the guru types that we They tend to have this kind of this taste for technocratic solutions.
The WHO or these international bodies are pharmaceutical companies and so on, which have legitimate issues.
There are legitimate reasons to criticize them, but they kind of take that sentiment and weave into a view that the traditional, the local, the stored wisdom, which is denigrated.
By the technocratic elites, it's actually this kind of storehouse of ancient knowledge that the guru-type people are able to appreciate and tap into, and they can, as a result, kind of see past what the scientists and bureaucrats are getting wrong.
And you can see how that's, in some sense, it's not illegitimate to imagine that these top-down solutions that are one size fit all could be patronizing and paternalistic and breed resentment and even be counterproductive.
But on the other hand, because of the way that I've seen guru types use that narrative, I'm also aware of how powerful that is as a narrative device.
There are people in India who oppose GMOs, for example, and make appeals to their traditional knowledge that we don't need these chemicals from the outside.
So, yeah, the situation...
It's just a depressing thought that both ways can be abused.
Yeah, I think it's a bit of a difference just to say that they're powerful by virtue of their position and power and their desire to justify their own power.
We'll not always kind of appreciate the sort of response that certain policies and things will get.
Versus I think maybe what you're getting at, which is this kind of slightly reactionary impulse towards actually the old ways were just better, right?
And as you say, they kind of come from the wisdom of the ancestors and all this kind of pound shop traditionalism that sort of traditionalist kind of rhetoric, which always seems to like seep in a little, I think, in the IDW, particularly I think the modern IDW or the contemporary IDW,
I should say.
It's all modern.
So I think that there is a difference because I'm not saying that inoculation was just perfect.
I do think vaccination was a necessary development.
But what upsets me, I suppose, is kind of seeing how such a fantastic development was misused by, I mean, the British government is the one I live the most in history with, but not just the British government.
Actually, lots of governments all over, I think, made just crucial errors, essentially.
And this is actually a lot of the story of just public health in general, I think.
With the IDW sphere, it definitely hovers dramatically around the West as the kind of preservation of important knowledge, with sometimes mild reference that other cultures may have interesting things,
but the values of the West loom large.
That is something I wanted to ask you about, Andy.
The QAnon communities, We have mainly focused around like secular online gurus and we've tried to stay away a little bit from the more kind of alternative medicine, traditional outright conspiracy theories.
And as a result, a little QAnon crops up and there's overlap because of the January 6th insurrection attempt and those kinds of things that there are overlaps between say IDW types downplaying that.
But I'm wondering From your perspective, and maybe you're tracking all these people, so I might be putting you in a pigeonhole that doesn't apply, but do you see much overlap from figures like Jordan Peterson or the Weinsteins or even more mainstream people like Sam Harris into those communities?
Because from my perspective, it doesn't seem like Sam Harris.
For example, would be someone that QAnon types would be that interested in.
But I could see how Douglas Murray or Jordan Peterson could have things that play in.
But I'm largely naive to that space, except from what I hear in QAnon Anonymous.
Yeah, I mean, the question actually brings me back to doing my PhD research, which was about digital anti-feminists.
And I observed this.
Change on the Digital Anti-Feminist Network, which I studied from about 2012 to 2016, where it began incredibly secular.
It was what we'd now understand to be sort of an intellectual dark web rhetoric, referencing biologically essentialist kind of understandings of men and women, these kind of evolutionary psychological dynamics that naturalised essentially male dominance and female subservience.
But it was very atheist, quite rigidly so, and had a real contempt for religion really.
And this sort of began to change.
From probably around 2016 onwards, you actually largely began to notice more tolerance towards Christianity.
There was always still the same kind of total contempt towards religions like Islam and stuff like that.
But even then, sometimes they'd kind of do a sort of like, well, Islam's got a point about women, sort of meaning this kind of idea of Islam that they have in their head, which is about male domination.
And figures like, I don't know if you guys would have heard of Rouchavi.
Is this the MRA guy?
Yeah, yeah.
He was a sort of pick-up artist who ran a couple of very reactionary blogs, which segued quite strangely between how to pick up chicks in a bar.
And Eastern Europe and also why we must defend Western values and really sort of bridge that connection that was always there between the alt-right and anti-feminism.
And at one point, I think in around 2016 or 2017, he deleted pretty much all of his articles which he deemed to be sexually immoral and said he was converting to Orthodox Christianity.
Desire to impugn anyone's religious conversion.
I'm religious myself.
Whatever way people find this, but their ways through religion, I'm not going to be cynical about.
But it certainly seemed to me that it was following a trend that lots and lots of anti-feminist figures and gurus and that were finding themselves kind of drawn more towards not just Christianity, but I would say a very supremacist version of Christianity.
It sort of seemed that this was the way the tide was turning here.
I think you even notice Jordan Peterson, for instance, has never really made any secret of having a sympathy towards Christianity.
But it was often kind of in this Joseph Campbell-esque way of these are the sort of founding myths of our society and here's how they're relevant to our time now.
I think I literally just saw a tweet of his right before I got on here where he was saying something about women being led by a satanic ideology or something like that.
And you sort of feel like it almost seems like the natural end point to a lot of these ideologies or if you are going to continually make the case over and over again.
On why certain aspects of domination or hierarchy should be naturalised.
It may not be the logical end point, but it almost seems to make sense from their point of view why eventually religious arguments would be just another option available to you, essentially, to justify your point.
And not all of them pick it up.
Many of them remain pretty firmly anti-religious.
But it certainly seems to make sense to me why to some of them, they will eventually soften on that aspect.
Yeah, I can say I noticed similar sorts of things that you're mentioning, and especially as people trend towards the right more openly.
It's just a notable phenomenon.
You can teach someone like Dave Rubin.
They start off by enjoying the work of Jordan Peterson.
And Matt and I, we covered Jordan Peterson in some depth.
And when I read 12 Rules for Life, the thing that I remember typing Fred about him, basically saying, like, I'm amazed at the amount of this which is focused on the Bible and theology.
It's almost, like you say, I don't begrudge anybody having an interest in religion and religious iconography and all that kind of thing.
There's lots of religious people in the world.
But it just struck me as odd that people didn't seem to be picking up so much on how central that was to what he was promoting.
When Dave Rubin moved through Jordan Peterson to cultural Christianity to where he is now, which is probably somewhere confused space, but Matt and I, a friend of the podcast who hosts a philosophy podcast called Embrace the Void,
was tracing James Lindsay.
Quite carefully.
He made a bet a long time ago that James is going to become a Christian, which would be a move from atheist activism to Christianity.
And he's already at the point of collaborating with an evangelical Christian and talking openly about the Christian values and the importance for Western civilization.
So there definitely seems...
Anecdotally, at least, something there should have some antenna pinging up when you hear the Joseph Campbell-style talk, which is a shame because there's so much actual interesting stuff there.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I was heartbroken to find doubt.
One of my favorite Bible stories, which always has been, is the story of Exodus, which I just think is so fascinating.
There's just so much really rich, interesting detail there and I think it reverberations throughout history.
For instance, American slave Bibles had Exodus removed from them.
They were missing the Exodus section because it was feared that it had an anti-slavery message which would cause insurrection and things like this.
It's just a fascinating story to me and always has been.
Then I found out that Jordan Peterson was planning on doing a podcast where he Decoded the entire story of Exodus.
And it was just one of those heartbreaking things.
I was like, man, I so want to listen to a podcast that does this, but not by you.
I had the exact same thing when I was preparing a course and needed to do some research about Viktor Frankl, who I wasn't familiar with.
And then I saw, oh, the main thing that YouTube and various things were giving me was Jordan Peterson has produced.
Lectures on Viktor Frankl.
But I actually was like, okay, all right, maybe let's see what he had to say.
But the thing that really depressed me was he had like a two-hour lecture on Frankl and Frankl featured for like 10 minutes.
The rest of it was all Jordan Peterson and Jordan Peterson's viewers with the very slightest tinge.
And I watched about an hour and a half and was like...
I know less about Frank Olsen than I did when I went in.
Yeah, I'm literally unlearning while I watch this.
Jordan Peterson is still, I think, someone, Matt and I probably have, out of the gurus that we've covered, we would still say that he at least is someone that does have genuine idiosyncratic ideas of his own.
Right or not, like the chaos dragon and that kind of thing, it's at least his own rather than...
It's at least an ethos.
Yeah, that's right.
At least he's got an ethos, exactly.
No, I mean, I kind of do agree, actually, because, yeah, there really are some figures in this kind of network that really are so tedious.
And I know I followed a lot of them on Twitter for a while.
Quite a few of them I had to unfollow, not because I was so offended or I was finding them so contrary to my own beliefs.
I'm quite used to reading stuff that's contrary to my own beliefs because it started to get really tedious.
It started to get really boring.
It was just the same point over and over again and often quite a lot of times a day as well.
Lots of them tweet a lot and I was just like, you know what?
I'm not learning anything from this.
This is just dull.
I knew you were going to say that already.
You said it three times this week.
Yeah.
Jordan Peterson is very idiosyncratic and perhaps our standards are slipping or something, but he doesn't inspire the same degree of annoyance or revulsion that some of them have.
Because he's just so strange and I can appreciate that.
But some of these other characters, like James Lindsay, I was going to jump in with him too.
They either dive in the wall atheists who have been attracted by the right-wing reactionary audience and they're just drawn to...
This American evangelical Christianity by default and define themselves already as cultural Christians.
It's like they're embracing the politics without the metaphysics or something.
I'm not sure.
I think it's a very compelling idea of yourself.
When you see yourself as locked in this ideological battle for The classic cultural phrase, the battle for the soul of America, or you might say the West or whatever like that.
It's very compelling to think of yourself, not simply as kind of a heterodox kind of iconoclast, but perhaps even also a spiritual warrior, which is the spiritual warfare idea is so huge in American evangelism and this sort of understanding of...
I saw a clip recently by An American evangelist musician who's doing this tour all over America, where he describes an encounter with some anti-fascists.
He says, "You know, the thing we have to remember is that this isn't a physical fight, it's a spiritual fight.
We're fighting against the forces of demonic powers, not against people."
Having said that, these people do have demons in them, which always seems to be contradicting itself, but it's quite an attractive I think if you're around that sphere, it's quite an attractive way to imagine yourself.
It's a very romantic understanding of the kind of work you're doing, especially if the work you're doing is largely getting into Twitter fights and doing YouTube streams and stuff like that.
It's quite a heroic position to put yourself in.
And so I can understand why even if you personally start out not believing, you may end up believing.
Just because I think we're always attracted more to ideas which give us a flattering view of ourselves.
There's an interesting contrast, though, that I think...
I don't know if it's fair to describe it completely to left versus right, but at least I've noticed that in, say, for example, the QAnon Anonymous broadcast, the atmosphere on there is...
Quite ironic and humorous, right?
Talking often about fairly depressing, dark topics, but with a very dry wit.
And part of the reason I enjoy it, and I enjoy a lot of content that looks at things like Knowledge Fight, where they do the same sort of thing.
They're looking at Alex Jones, who's objectively a terrible human in so many ways, but they approach it with humor.
We try to do the same thing.
To our limited abilities on decoding the gurus as well.
But that strikes me as something which appeals to people on the left and maybe people from the UK and Northern Ireland, Australia.
Specifically, that kind of self-deprecating, ironic humor is very popular.
And parts of America as well, fair to say, as people have highlighted.
But what it doesn't give you...
Is this notion that you're part of a metaphysical battle for the ages that is tied in with these huge spiritual kind of forces and that me and Matt critically evaluated a podcast that was called Defenders of Our Civilization.
It was a discussion between Eric Weinstein and Douglas Murray and they were talking about themselves, right?
But weird.
We're never going to unironically title a podcast, Champions of the Rational Scientific Method.
But that, as a result, means that it feels like that's giving you less of an appeal in some way.
You're kind of handicapping yourself because you're just saying, yeah, we're going to be self-deprecating and ironic and not give you a grand narrative about how special you are.
Yeah, almost every time we record on Q&A.
At one point, one of us will just be like, "I can't believe we pay attention to this.
What the hell is wrong with us?
Why are we dedicating our lives to obsessing over and analysing this complete dribble?"
Having said that, I wouldn't go as far to say that I don't think we don't all hold a flattering view of ourselves and what we do.
I think I certainly do.
I think I probably do have a kind of concept that, yes, we like to have fun, but at the same time, this stuff is very important to pay attention to.
And therefore, I slatter myself into believing I do important work and shining a light on this and assessing what I think the key issues with it are and all of this kind of stuff.
So it is self-deprecating.
It certainly doesn't take itself too seriously, kind of that style.
Which I think is important because a lot of, as you say, a lot of the stuff you discuss is just very depressing.
And I think particularly I had that sense very early on when I was doing research on anti-feminism, which is not just depressing but quite actively hateful a lot of the time.
You sort of do have to just kind of develop a little bit of a sense of humour about it all because otherwise it's just very upsetting.
But I think probably even then people are attracted because they like the thought of being someone who can view These quite serious concepts from a lofty height and find the humour in it.
Yeah.
I think people probably like that idea about themselves too.
Even though, yeah, maybe we should rebrand from QAnon Anonymous.
People always think we're pro-QAnon.
And yeah, we should be like...
The defenders of democracy against...
I'll just sign off on the point that you made as well, Annie, that I'm not saying that people within our sphere don't have positive self-regard or see themselves as doing things that are useful and beneficial.
I flatter myself the same.
Like Matt and I, we can joke around and be self-deprecating as well, but we do think...
That responding to anti-vax stuff and that is important and has value.
I'm not claiming to be that enlightened or selfless, but I think I'm more emphasizing the kind of style.
The style.
Yeah.
Like, you know, the ContraPoints versus Jordan Peterson.
Yeah.
ContraPoints is very popular as well.
So it isn't that you can attract people, but I can see when I look at some of the content we're looking at.
I had came across it at the right point of time in my life, that it would be very appealing to me because I'd be feeling like I'm getting in on this secret knowledge and people aren't noticing what's happening to the society around them.
I don't know, maybe there are people that are giving that same kind of appeal, but I guess I'd view that as inherently manipulative in a way so that it's like it's a tool that you could use, but you shouldn't use it because It comes with a cost.
And if you're not going to use it, you kind of fight with one hand behind your back, but you should because you shouldn't be using those psychological hooks.
Yeah.
Yeah, you both got me thinking, which is that I think it's an important difference.
Like on one level, we don't think of ourselves as anything more than light entertainment.
And I think that's a really healthy point of view to take.
You know, I'm a professor.
I've been a professor for a while and, you know, academic.
And professors aren't known for having a low opinion of themselves.
Generally, self-promotion, stuff like that is part of the deal.
But one of the other things that goes along with being an academic and a researcher is you realize how many clever people there are in the world and how many people that have just accomplished so much more.
And you kind of aspire to being at that level.
You get a...
Better appreciation for the rest of the community.
And that's the thing that I think is different.
Like even though academic types can be narcissistic and grandiose and all that stuff, I detect something different amongst.
Some of these iconoclasts and gurus and heterodox public intellectuals, where they really do see themselves as this breed apart, as standing apart from the rest of humanity, like it's some sort of prophet or something.
And that triggers me in a deep and fundamental way.
Another thing going on, which again, I would hesitate to say this is unique to this community we're talking about.
But it's certainly something I noticed in my research, and I've sort of noticed in almost every community I've studied since, so first from anti-feminists to QAnon to anti-vaxxers, is that there's always a double-edged sword.
It's always, yes, you can be this heterodox iconoclast who thinks outside the box and doesn't blindly follow like a sheep being herded into a pen.
But, you know, the other side of this is you can just be someone who's kind of very weak-minded, very weak-willed, very pathetic, really, who will just do whatever authority tells you to do.
They're often not saying this to their audience as such, but they're sort of saying, you know, these are the people who criticize us.
This is what they're about.
And I often think it's a bit of a threat because it's actually also saying, don't you dare criticize us because then this will be you.
It was a bit like I always thought this worked with The anti-feminist communities, when they would talk about alpha and beta males, it would be like, you can be an alpha like us.
Sigma Kim, right?
Yeah.
You can be really cool.
You can be really confident.
All the women will love you.
Or you can be this just like pathetic, browbeaten.
Probably getting cheated on, kind of weak-willed man.
And they would often say, you know, our opponents, feminist men are beta males.
But really what they were also saying was like, and you don't want to be like that, do you?
So it almost felt like they were negging their own audience in a way.
And you see it with it in anti-vax communities as well, in the intellectual dark web as well.
By focusing so much on their opponents in the most unflattering possible terms, I often do think it's a little bit of a...
Again, that's what you were saying, Chris.
It's manipulative.
It's manipulative how you want to see yourself, who you want to be.
I've been a bit astounded.
Andy, I know you've given us a lot of your time, so we should let you escape soon.
I was quite astounded recently.
Do you know Stuart Ritchie?
Yeah.
Well, I've heard of him.
I don't know him personally, but yeah.
He's in England.
It's a small place.
You'll probably bump into him.
He wrote a review of Heller and Brett Weinstein's new book, The Hunter Gallery's Guide to the 21st Century.
And Stuart is a quite well-known British science popularizer.
And he's written a book about research standards and the issues with the modern science.
And he wrote a review of their book for The Guardian, which was critical.
And the way Heller and Brett framed it on their podcast, it literally, I've been watching their content for quite a while, so it takes quite a lot for them to surprise me.
But they framed him as a dogmatic defender of the orthodoxy who has no interest or background in science.
I know Sirot, but I was also like, you don't need to know him because he's...
His whole reputation, if you just Google him, is like the exact opposite of that.
He's pretty non-woke, you know.
Yeah, as well.
I mean, yes, he's not known for that.
Yes, but they portrayed him and people like us as postmodern, social constructivist.
But that's the theme, isn't it?
Which is you totally disparage any critics.
And the people who praise you and follow you, you lavish praise on them and you build up their ego.
And this goes to the point you're making before, Annie, which is that flagrant narcissism of the leaders.
That's what the manipulation is, which is that you're not going to be a beta kind of institutional, supporting, dogma-accepting person.
You're going to be an open-minded, free-thinking, alpha male.
Like us.
It's the same concept, isn't it?
Which is like this kind of will to power or something.
I like the introduction of the Sigma male into the ecosystem.
That was so funny.
Sigma is like an alternative to the Alpha, right?
Yeah.
It's basically because it was basically, again, this kind of need to create a self-flattering construct, which was… Not alpha, because being alpha naturally has some requirements which most men don't live up to.
You know, being incredibly financially successful, very popular, having lots of friends, lots of girlfriends, real romantic success.
You know, Matt.
You know that.
I know about this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So essentially, Sigma was like, well, you're none of these things, but it's not because you're pathetic.
It's because you choose not to.
Which, yeah.
Easily be alpha, but you choose not to.
So in a way, you're better than an alpha, which I felt like just such pathetic pandering.
I couldn't believe that people weren't seeing through that one.
Yeah, it's sometimes impressive how low the bar can actually go.
You think it's at the bottom and then you're like, oh, wow, it could go lower than that.
I think that's a...
Recurred feature about anybody that decides to cover these communities or groups that you're constantly getting that revelation.
I have the image of the kind of anime character pushing his glasses up.
It was his plan all along.
He's just playing like 20-dimensional tests.
And it works in the same way that objectively, Donald Trump is not this image of Masculine health.
No.
He's a quite heavyset, hair-offending, older guy.
But it doesn't matter.
He's very catty.
He's very catty and loves to gossip.
Yeah.
I think one of the most relatable things about him actually is how much he loves to have a little bitch and a little gossip.
Yeah, he's actually quite camp.
That's actually the most likable thing about him.
I don't think he would see it like that.
So I guess, Annie, the last thing just before we let you go is that, like we said, Matt and I, We haven't looked that much at the QAnon people, but we do get overlap from people in the conspiracy sphere,
right?
Like JP Sears and Russell Brand seem to be branching over.
I'm familiar with the research about there being pipelines from more mainstream to harder right.
And I definitely think those exist.
Like we see them in action.
Like James Lindsay is a one-man illustration of that pipeline.
But I'm wondering, How much you see people like Russell Brand or whatever, like the conspiracy sphere coming into your area?
And also, if you ever see it going the other way, like away from the more conspiratorial fringe into the heterodox sphere or that kind of thing, or whether they're separate camps?
Yeah, it's a really good question.
Because my QAnon research focuses on the UK, just by virtue of my remit, and sometimes in Europe because they're all kind of so interconnected, I have quite a specific understanding of the kind of future of QAnon, which is almost,
I suppose, QAnon without Trump, which seems really difficult to imagine, I think, from an American perspective, because the two are so interlinked.
But one thing you'll notice when you look at QAnon groups outside of the US is actually how little they discuss Trump and how he's certainly a character in the universe, so to speak, the QAnon expanded universe,
but he's not really at the center of it in the same way.
And really what they're more attracted to are notions of the deep state.
Obviously the satanic paedophile rituals, that kind of thing has a huge, huge pull.
And the kind of a spiritual warfare aspect of it, you know, the kind of light versus dark battle between good and evil.
And so largely it sort of makes sense to me that you would see aspects of QAnon trickling in to other spaces outside the kind of
QAnon sphere proper.
Because in a way, Trump was always the least interesting aspect of it for many European conspiratorists and even kind of people on the sort of more mainstream right.
At the end of the day, he was a foreign president, you know, and while the US has a huge pull politically and culturally on many parts of Europe, it's not quite...
Those few people on the right in the UK who did were largely considered by the rest of the right to be real weirdos.
It's just not quite the same thing.
So you see these kind of elements of rhetoric seeping in.
It's certainly unmissable if you go to an anti-vax rally here.
To not see people, you know, talking about the cabal, satanic ritual abuse and all of these kind of elements, which sort of seem to have re-emerged, essentially.
QAnon didn't invent most of those things, but they certainly seem to have given it a bit of a resurgence.
In terms of whether I've seen someone come back from QAnon into the more heterodox sphere, the only kind of example I can vaguely think of, I guess, is Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Who has maybe dropped the QAnon stuff the minute she's got elected and is kind of now just trying to go for this very straightforward red meat eating, gun shooting, magamama, right?
Who kind of, you know, takes no shit from the Democrat communists and things like that.
There are videos of her doing the digital soldier and speaking in this totally pilled parlance.
But she's dropped nearly all of that quite successfully, it seems, in a sort of just...
Even used it to a little bit to be like, lol, look at how much I troll the liberals.
So I guess you would think there might not be a path back.
People would sort of have a bit of wariness, but it seems that she seems to be proving that there is a path back.
If you are just brazen enough about it, you probably can just find your way into mainstream right circles.
That made me think, Andy, that what you highlighted about the Marjorie Taylor Greene and the way that figures like her can play that they obviously were endorsing QAnon like seriously in a respect but you can always kind of present it as it's just a way to trigger people or just like it's a game as much as it is also serious and there's always that way to fall back like that shitposting but what you're shitposting about is actually pretty dark but
you can always just say well it's just shitposting.
So, yeah, I just thought maybe that's the right-wing equivalent of the left-wing irony, strategic irony.
Yeah, it's fascinating to hear this stuff because you guys focus more on the extreme end and we're kind of more in this middle of the road and people like Jordan Peterson that aren't.
For all the way, but a sort of halfway.
But more and more, there's this trajectory that we see with people like James Lindsay and this overlap that we see with stuff like anti-vax, which seems to cover the whole spectrum.
So perhaps a good thing to finish off on is to step back a little bit and just think about the big picture.
Because we talked at the beginning how, in a way, none of this stuff is new.
There's this conflict between rationalist, centralized technocrats versus Populist, naturalist, whatever.
I've run out of adjectives.
But we have social media now, I'm sure.
We have the polarization, whatever.
But one of the things we'd like to try to stay away from is catastrophizing and thinking that this is this terrible new thing and the end of the world is nice.
What's your take on it?
Because I have no good take on this.
Do you think what we're seeing now is just a new version of the same old thing?
Or is there something to be genuinely worried about?
What's your feeling?
I mean, I'm not going to lie, particularly in my own country, I can feel a bit pessimistic.
Largely, it feels like there is a real complacency about this rise of quite extreme right rhetoric and our mainstream newspapers and TV and all the rest of it, which largely doesn't seem to gain much traction.
And that does make me feel...
I feel pretty depressed.
Having said that, yeah, I think it is always important to remember that when you look at the, and it's one thing I've just loved doing about not researching the contemporary but researching mere historical,
is that it does actually give you a sense of not even thinking in decades but in two and three decades at a time and how much can change in that time actually.
It does give me a little bit of a sense of stepping back from that very immediate, that kind of very present sense of, for want of a better word, doomerism, that you can get when you're hyper-focused on digital networks and internet personalities,
where you're getting a lot of information moving very fast.
So it's been one thing that I think has actually been really healing to me in doing this project, is thinking of just how long.
Certain ideas and movements have kind of taken to travel.
So I suppose, yeah, that's my words of wisdom.
But at the same time, you know, that's not to sort of say that we should be complacent.
You know, I do think that this stuff is, well, a lot of what we're witnessing, I would say, is a right wing which is going through a restructuring moment, you know, a re-evolution, essentially.
To combat kind of material circumstances, which just simply mean that the old way of being right-wing just doesn't quite work for them anymore.
They have to adapt.
They have to move on.
It would be foolish to think they wouldn't do that.
If I were them, that's what I'd do too.
That does mean, I think, paying attention and not just simply assuming that you can be lazy about combating what are, at the end of the day, bad ideas, sometimes very dangerous ideas.
And I suppose if we go back to flattering ideas of ourselves, I think that's why what you guys do and what I do is important, you know, to keep tabs on it, to understand why the evolution is happening and also what you can do to reassert,
I suppose, a kind of more egalitarian, democratic way of doing things.
Yeah, I think you guys at...
QAnon Anonymous are genuinely doing, to put it in a Catholic background way, the Lord's work at documenting all of the things that are going on there.
And from my perspective, the tone that you strike with it is perfect.
Like for me, it's perfect because you guys go really in depth and do the research and you don't shrink from, you know, saying what things are connected to and, you know, often quite like dark connections around eugenics and far right movements and that.
But like you said, and maybe this is a connection only with just, you know, an Northern Irish background, having a dark sense of humor and like being willing to see the humor in pretty bleak circumstances, I think is a good thing in general.
Like it's helpful.
Yeah. No, I absolutely agree.
Well, it's been an absolute pleasure.
And I'm looking forward, I'm waiting for the next episode of, I'm afraid all that we're offering in return is an episode on Michaela Peterson.
You talked about, you know, questioning your life choices.
This is one of those weeks.
I can't wait to listen to that.
You guys are predicting democracy and freedom and we're looking forward to it.
We all have our roles to play.
Thank you very much for coming on and I recommend everyone check out QAnon Anonymous and also Vaccine The Human Story and in particular the recent episodes on QAnon Anonymous about the satanic panic in Northern Ireland.
It's interesting even if you're not from Northern Ireland.
Yeah.
Satanic panics are always interesting.
That's rude.
All right.
Well, thank you, Annie, and see you again soon, hopefully.
Thanks so much for having me, guys.
It's been so much fun.
Thanks, Annie.
Boom!
Matt!
There!
Done!
We did it!
What a great interview.
It was amazing.
Sense-making complete.
We nailed it.
What a great guest.
We extracted all of the information that Annie had.
We reached into your brain and just took it out like parasitic power decoders that we are.
It was very informative.
And then it went smoother than all our interviews have gone recently.
It did.
It did.
There was a good back and forth, good communication happening.
Turn taking.
Turn to a talk.
I know that's now your new favorite feature.
It's a thing.
It's just a thing.
I'm just mentioning that it just happened to be randomly popped into my mind at this point.
That's all.
Nothing wrong with turn taking.
Kids know that.
And that was good from Andy.
Now we need to turn to everyone's favorite segment.
And this time it'll be quite short, Matt, because they're short this time.
The review of the reviews.
I got it wrong again.
I was even thinking about it.
You do struggle with that.
The review of the reviews.
It is actually difficult to say.
The review of the reviews.
I have to enunciate.
You added there to make it easier.
Review of the reviews.
And it's easy.
Oh, okay.
Review of reviews.
That is harder.
Yes.
Okay.
So, all right.
Then I'm going to start with the positive one this time to mix it up.
And it's also quite short.
So this is from Feddax and it's titled Strange Days.
Five stars.
A Stadler and Waldorf routine is not uncommon among somewhat educated old men.
Quite fascinating, I find.
The two mostly reasonable and balanced milquetoast liberal hacklers are the new radical chic strange days.
Cool.
That's the thing.
Being milquetoast, being middle of the road, not being special, that's the new cool thing.
That's what's hit about.
It's like shabby chic.
We're the new grunge, you know what I mean?
We're like going around with just an old jumper.
Holes in it.
Yeah.
Oh, well, you know, relating to the intro segment, which I'm sure everyone completely remembers when we talked about metal music, I used to have a T-shirt.
This was my obnoxious teen face that on the front of it, it said machine fucking head.
And on the back of it, there was a big like giant thing giving the finger.
And I think it said underneath that, fuck you.
Charming.
I know I've been very sorry for my parents.
You're like a stereotype of an angry 16-year-old boy.
I know.
I wasn't even that angry.
I wasn't even that angry.
I just enjoyed that.
Actually, for my birthday once, I was young, I was like 14, but my uncle knew that I liked a little band called Guns N' Roses.
And he bought me What are those black shirts with the band stuff on it?
You know how they come to be wrapped in a kind of a cardboard square and behind sellotape, whatever.
So you couldn't see the whole thing.
So I unwrapped it, you know, my mom's there and stuff.
And it turned out, it was like, it was like an image of like, like a woman.
Like the implication was she'd kind of been raped by a robot.
Like it was, it was not.
So that was an awkward moment because I thought it was great.
I was like, that's roses.
That's rocking.
Yay.
And my mom's like, you're not wearing it.
It kind of seems to fit with your brony shirt wearing antics.
This is just like, yeah, we shouldn't be allowed to pick our own t-shirts as well.
I didn't pick it.
It's by my uncle.
That's right.
But you did pick the brony one.
So you're not completely free.
That was irony.
I just swore it a couple of times because I wanted to see the expression on my colleagues' faces.
That's it.
Well, that's always a legitimate defense online.
Yeah, perfectly reasonable explanation.
It was ironic, so that's fine.
This is the rule for all online discourse.
Look, people, this is my advice to you.
If you're getting online and you're struggling, people are dunking on you, and you're sort of floundering, well, then here's the secret.
Be ironic.
Everything is ironic.
That's what all the pros do.
Boomer knowledge being shared here.
This is, you know, internet secrets of the boomer mind.
So the negative review that we have this time, it's three out of five stars, so not that negative.
This is where I'm having the goal because, you know, people are starting to realize they shouldn't be given one out of five stars.
You're scraping the bottom of the negative review barrel.
I am.
So we need...
More reviews.
I'm not canvassing for more one-star reviews.
As before, I will suggest if you want to write a funny negative review, you could still put five stars.
So just keep that option in your pocket.
So this one says it's by Sassy Girl 10. And I do believe that the review is quite sassy, so it's an accurate username.
The title is Try to Listen, Sam's Smart Pants.
The review says, painful, so defensive.
Now, I got a feeling that's either intended for Sam or it's somebody telling me that I should listen to Sam more because he's a smart pants.
Or no, are they calling me smart pants and say, I need to listen to, like, listen to Sam, Mr. Smart Pants.
One of you is a smarty pants and the other one.
Needs to listen.
Should listen.
Look, if it is targeted at Sam, then that's really not fair because...
No!
That's his three-star review.
That's right.
So Sam needs to get on and leave a five-star review just to balance out the three-star review that he incurred.
Yeah, and he will definitely be listening in future podcasts.
I'm sure he'll ever hear this.
Yeah, but I wasn't offensive.
Anyway, we have a three-star review.
I think it's related to the same episode.
I can't be sure, but there's some hints there.
Well, there wasn't a lot of meat on those bones, so there's not much to say about it.
I think for the future negative reviews, please make them a bit longer.
Give us something to dig our teeth into.
Yes.
So that's it for today, Matt.
We're done.
We're finished.
No, we're not finished.
We're wrapping it up.
No, no, no.
We're not finished.
We're doing Patreon shoutouts.
Of course we are, Matt.
We're doing Patreon shoutouts before we finish.
That's what we always do.
And like we said, you know, the Patreons had access in our monthly AMA, the top tier of Patreons, actually.
Got to ask us various questions and probe the depths of our reaction to this episode.
So there you go.
There's one benefit or punishment, whichever way you look at it.
And you even get to find out the color coding I use for my diary, what it means.
What insights people get, Matt, for their $10.
It's hard to impress me at.
The mere fact that you do color code your diary speaks volumes.
We don't need to get into it.
Listen, you brony.
That's true.
But there's all this stuff there, which isn't just color-coded diary information and whatnot.
So should you be interested, check it out.
So one thing, Matt, just very quickly.
I don't know the etiquette of if somebody is a former patron, right?
Like whether I should shout them out because they've left before.
Like they might have left because they were deeply offended at something.
Like, am I sure they might not?
It's like, oh, sounds like they're endorsing us, but they laughed in disgusted rage.
What do you think the etiquette is?
I don't know.
I say shout them out.
Okay.
I'll do it.
I'll make a judgment call.
Make a judgment call.
So our conspiracy hypothesizers for this week are Oh, God, that was terrible.
Sridhar Bhagavathullah.
If you pasted that into the chat, I could say it, I'm sure.
Okay, Mr. Smarty Pants.
He's not racist.
He just has a speech impediment.
I do it as well.
Sridhar Bhagavathullah.
You should have showed me, Matt.
My GP has got a much longer last name than I can say it perfectly, but it's true.
Well, thank you, Sridhar.
Also, this one is easier.
M. M, that's easy.
M. Gwen Boyle.
Gwen.
And Matthew Hatfield.
Good old Matthew.
Gwen Matthew.
Maybe M-Center Matthew too.
Matthew's a good name.
And Shrida.
Anyone else?
Do we forget anybody?
No.
That's it.
That's it.
Fantastic.
And what are they?
Are they conspiracy hypothesizers?
They are indeed.
So thank you very much, you four.
Every great idea starts with a minority of one.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
Okay.
Next, we have some revolutionary geniuses to thank.
So here, Joe Percy, Alex A, and Andy Hunt.
Fantastic.
Andy Hunt.
Andy Hunt.
That's not the joke name, is it?
No.
It's close.
It's almost a joke name.
It's perilously close.
I think it's too rude to say.
Is it?
Okay.
All right.
Well, anyway.
Let me start with Mark.
Oh, right.
Yeah.
I got it.
Yeah.
Andy.
Andy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I got it.
That's right.
Thank you all.
You beautiful revolutionary thinkers.
We're geniuses.
Thank you.
Maybe you can spit out that hydrogenated thinking and let yourself feed off of your own thinking.
What you really are is an unbelievable thinker and researcher, a thinker that the world doesn't know.
Maybe you can spit out that hydrogenated thinking.
Okay.
And last, Matt, we have some galaxy brain gurus.
The highest that people have reached the echelon of the guru cosmosphere.
Yes.
These are the kinds of people that have figured out their own scientific theories.
They've worked standard theories, but they're much more subtle and better.
They're on another level, literally.
So we have Matthew Pickett, Tim Tripp, and Anonymous Ephesus, not a serial killer at all, just asking questions.
I like that.
Matt, Tim, Anonymous.
Ethicist, not a serial killer.
Honestly, just asking questions.
That's good.
That's good.
Not as good a name as Matthew, but still pretty good.
And there was a bit of alliteration there, just in case you didn't know this.
You're sitting on one of the great scientific stories that I've ever heard, and you're so polite.
And, hey, wait a minute.
Am I an expert?
I kind of am.
Yeah.
I don't trust people at all.
I just want to also defensively note that it is genuinely true that I'm just bad at pronouncing names, including Irish names.
Unless I know them in advance, I'm just generally pretty bad at reading out names.
Yes, you are.
Yeah.
And that's okay.
That's okay.
People understand.
That's how I think you say it.
Yes, so it's not their fault.
Those are legitimate names.
It's my fault.
People know that, Chris.
That's right.
I'm glad I, you know.
All right.
Well, Matt, it's been fun.
Enjoy grobbling at the feet of your various muscle masters or whatever you Australians get up to.
