Episode 98plus: Ash Sarkar 'Orangegate' Interview w/ Annie Kelly
"🍊🍊🍊" — an Instagram post containing three emojis is how it all started. UK-based Journalist & Activist Ash Sarkar joins us to describe being at the center of a far-right conspiracy theory, one that culminated in a massive wave of death threats. Together with Annie Kelly, Ash discusses the "QAnonification" of the UK far-right racist landscape and what political purposes these symbol-based conspiracy theories serve.
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Welcome, listener, to a bonus addendum to the 98th episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Ash Sarkar Orangegate interview episode.
Hello there, beloved listeners.
It's your UK correspondent Annie here.
I'm sat at an appropriate social distance from Ash Sarkar, a British left-wing journalist and activist who found herself at the centre of a far-right conspiracy theory that she was sending coded messages celebrating a terror attack through orange emojis on social media a few weeks ago.
Ash, thanks so much for coming on.
Thanks for having me.
So we go into a little bit of the madness in our latest episode but I wonder if you could tell us what went down with the orange emojis from your point of view.
So from my point of view it started on the Saturday evening.
I'd gone to the park with my partner to meet up with some friends.
Before they got there I was like, I think I look really cute and I've got an orange lolly and there are orange bits on my bike.
Why don't you take some pictures of me looking really hot?
So long-suffering partner that he is, he took some photos, friends arrived, I didn't think any more about them.
Then we got home at about 10 o'clock.
I hadn't been looking at my phone or checking the news.
I tend not to when I'm out with friends and I went through the photos.
I chose one that looked nice and I posted it on Instagram and on Twitter with three orange emojis because I'm eating an orange lolly, you can see an orange bike saddle and an orange bike wheel and also three emojis.
It's kind of the most pleasing number.
It wasn't until the next morning that I both learned about what had happened at the park in Reading and I'd seen the number of violent threats that I'd been getting.
So overnight, far-right Twitter, I think coordinated through activities on Parlay, I just went completely mad for it.
So I was waking up to people sending me pictures of nooses, saying that they were gonna pour petrol on me and set me on fire, people posting the address of the school where I work in Amsterdam, people sending rape threats, racist abuse, someone saying that the same thing that happened to Joe Cox should happen to me.
And it was all off the basis of this photo because they decided that the three oranges symbolized the three murdered victims.
Some people suggested that the park that I was in, which was actually in Hackney, was the same park in Reading and the way in which I was kind of looking off-camera was a smirk to literally witnessing the murders.
People were suggesting that I was smirking like that because you could see people behind me so it was almost like a smirk of you're about to get murdered.
The really funny part was was people going yeah there's three white people behind her and I was like um no they're black and Latin like I remember like they were having like this amazing party with like loads of sulfur.
And then people were suggesting that the oranges symbolized Libyan oranges.
I didn't even know Libya grew oranges.
No me neither I saw that one yeah.
It's kind of nice when you get racially abused and educated at the same time.
So they were suggesting to symbolize Libyan oranges, which would have symbolized my affinity with the attacker.
And then there was this other thing of oranges being a well known symbol of death, because in the Godfather movies, when there are deaths, in particular Vito Corleone, you can see oranges in the shots.
So I guess the first question I wanted to ask you is how are you doing?
How are you coping?
So again, being racially abused and educated at the same time.
So thanks, ding, ding bats.
So I guess the first question I wanted to ask you is how are you doing?
How are you coping?
Because I think it's really easy to forget for those of us who look at conspiracy theories
from quite a sort of detached perspective, that there's a real human cost to these things,
Like, I was really struck when I was just looking through the responses, purely to just put together the segment, about just how vitriolic they were, how violent they were.
And I do remember thinking, like, there were thousands and thousands of these.
And I remember thinking, you know, God, she's brave.
I mean, this isn't my first rodeo, so this isn't the first time I've had violent threats.
In fact, a little while ago, I guess about a year and a half ago, I was contacted by a journalist from CNN who asked me if I was aware that one of the people who'd been sending me death threats was the guy who'd sent pipe bombs to Robert De Niro and Barack Obama and all this kind of stuff.
And luckily the like cheap motherfucker was too tight to pay for international delivery so I was fine.
But, you know, I've had the onslaught of violent threats before and unfortunately they've been a part of my life for a few years now.
The difference between this occasion and other occasions was one, the volume.
So it was just a lot bigger, lots more people involved, it felt more coordinated.
And also that it was just so unhinged that there was this whole narrative and story that had been concocted in order to You know, it's people making up a story just to make themselves murderously angry.
And I think because of that, it's actually hard to feel upset.
Because you feel upset when you question yourself and you go, I could have done this differently or maybe I really got this thing wrong.
But when it's something that's so unhinged, it's hard to feel upset.
You do feel more tense and stressed and frightened about going outside, so obviously my relationship to public space and my safety changes because of stuff like this.
But I don't feel tearful, I don't feel upset, I don't feel depressed or anything like that because
it's so deranged that I kind of know I'm not the problem here.
Yeah, it was literally just a picture in a park. It was so normal.
I remember just being, like, stunned.
Because I scrolled past it and I think I just, like, favoured it.
Just like, oh, cute picture.
See, that's you supporting terrorist propaganda right now.
I hope you're pleased to be yourself.
So I think something that really interested me about the response to this, because obviously our podcast is about QAnon, which has its own flavour I think of symbolism and interpretation and this kind of thing.
And so I was particularly interested about the discussion about the symbols and this belief that you personally are sending hidden or coded messages through completely innocuous or innocuous seeming, from their point of view, social media posts.
Is this the first time you've been at the center of something like this?
Has something like this ever happened before?
In terms of people getting really wound up about symbolism and coding, yes, this is the first time.
Before that, it's been comments taken out of context, misinterpretation, or just straight up, you know, fuck off back to Pakistan, you paki bitch.
And I'm like, actually, it's Bangladesh, but whatever.
But this is the first time it's involved this kind of really strange conspiratorial thinking.
And I think what it speaks to is you need your own form of evidence when you want to justify your own completely murderous rage.
And so you need to come up with a language which purports to see things which go on underneath the surface.
Because if you were to say what it is, which is, Katie Hopkins was banned off Twitter this week, we want to take down her leftist scalp, and look, she's Muslim, and she's a woman, and she's a communist, well, it's hard to get everyone feeling invested in that, because someone's gonna go, well, that doesn't sound fair to me.
But if you say, look, and what this shows is that there's this, you know, kind of subterranean language of terrorism and violence, and this is how they communicate with each other, to take down white people, to encourage violence against white people.
It's a way of getting people, you know, radicalized, for want of a better term.
Um, so I think that it speaks to a kind of QAnonification of the UK racism landscape in a way that's quite worrying and I don't think it's going to be the last of this kind of thing.
Um, far from it.
My worry is that It's not brand new.
It overlaps with other forms of conspiratorial thinking in terms of, you know, great replacement theory, which itself has a lot in common with much older thinking, which comes from, you know, the NF and that kind of particularly British history of, you know, far right activism.
And I worry that incidents like this can be more correctly identified as a form of stochastic terrorism.
So it's a way of providing pretexts which make the possibility of random acts of violence significantly more likely against an individual or indeed a whole community.
Yeah, absolutely.
I just wanted to add to that, that that connection with Great Replacement Theory, which itself is kind of like an amelioration of the white genocide phrase that they used to use for it, right?
I've often thought has a kind of similar device where it will take images from, I don't know,
advertising, which show an interracial couple or something like this.
And then they'll kind of write over it sometimes.
I mean, I often, I mean, literally write over it.
You know, they hate you, they want you dead.
And I think it is, as you say, it's not just ginning up kind of a victim complex.
I said this on the podcast.
It is, I think, justifying what comes next, which is what's so frightening.
And on that note, I guess I wanted to ask you for my final question, what are some trends
that you see in British far-right politics lately in a kind of post-Brexit, post-2019 election?
Really, one of the main trends is nurturing a sense of white grievance.
And this isn't anything that's new.
Enoch Powell did it with his rivers of blood speech.
You know, I see in 15, 20 years time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.
And it's about nurturing that emotional affect, which is whiteness is under attack, but having to do this kind of sleight of hand, which is, but we're also not talking about skin color because in the British consciousness, we go, I'm not, I'm not racist.
I've got no problem with the color of your skin.
Right, that's the starting point and then goes on to say deport all the Muslims or black people are drug dealers, whatever it is, you know, so it kind of essentializes forms of cultural deviance and justifies specific forms of either state or vigilante violence in order to police or eradicate that perceived cultural deviance.
That's been going on for a while.
But I think in particular in the age of Black Lives Matter, there's been an amplification of that way of thinking.
So people saying, well, if you can say Black Lives Matter, why can't you say White Lives Matter?
Well, White people aren't nine times more likely to be stopped and searched than black people.
White people haven't been subject to the same levels of police brutality as black people.
You don't have the same unequal outcomes in housing or employment or healthcare.
And so it becomes a way of understanding almost all oppression that exists in society through the lens of racism, which then means you can't actually talk about racism because it makes you the real racist because you're not thinking about the things that do actually sincerely affect white people.
It's just it doesn't affect them on the basis of their race, it affects them on the basis of their class or something else.
Um and so I think that that's a growing trend and it's going to be something which is uh encouraged by this government and unfortunately I don't think that we've got a Labour Party which is interested in combating that or even ameliorating it in any way.
I think we've got a Labour Party which is interested in harnessing some of that energy for itself which is worrying.
Yeah yeah I would agree with you that it does really feel as if now would be the time to have a really strong labour line on some of these issues and at the minute it
seems as if the Labour Party is particularly interested in not rocking the boat at
a time when it feels very much like the boat has been rocked right it doesn't
really feel politically expedient at this time I'm not a politician that's just
just my take I mean you know you can you lose a lot when you try and chase
so after the votes of radicalized pensioners you also lose a vote lose a
lot by not chasing off the votes of radicalized pensioners
It's a double bind.
But yeah, that's what Keir Starmer's got to work out.
Not my job.
It's his.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
This has been really great.
And as I say, it was so nice to hear from the perspective of somebody who is in the centre of a Pizzagate-style conspiracy theory.
Except possibly even more deranged.
Yeah, I mean, I really hope that you never have to talk to anyone who's at the center whenever again, but unfortunately, I doubt that will be the case.
But yeah, I think if there's one last thing that I want to say, it's been the support that I've gotten,
even from really unusual quarters, has been really lovely.
And it's also a way of staying sane when you're at the center of something completely deranged.
It's when you've got people who can reinforce what you already know,
which is like, this is completely bat shit.
So yeah, just the last thing I want to say is that I really appreciate everyone who took the time
to say something nice or say something supportive report an account.
It made a world of difference to me.
Go and be nice to Ash Sarkar on Twitter.
No, no, no.
I've had enough niceness.
I've had enough niceness.
Go be nice to somebody else.
Anyone but me.
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