Episode 180: Grenfell Tower Conspiracy Theories with Annie Kelly
A real conspiracy rooted in profound greed and corporate collusion with government. Conspiracy theories attempting to blame everything on a very different "cabal". Some years after it happened, our UK correspondent Annie Kelly explores the tragic fire at Grenfell Tower in West London that led to mass casualties.
Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week: http://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous
Follow Annie: https://twitter.com/AnnieKNK
Vaccine: The Human Story Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/VaccinePodcast
Our first QAA records release: 'Hikikomori Lake' by Nick Sena is available to listen for free at http://qaarecords.bandcamp.com (12 original tracks)
QAA Merch / Join the Discord Community / Find the Lost Episodes / Etc: https://qanonanonymous.com
Episode music by Nick Sena (https://nicksenamusic.com), editing by Corey Klotz.
Welcome, listener, to Chapter 180 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Grenfell Tower Conspiracy Theories episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Annie Kelly, Julian Field, and Travis View.
This week, we continue our journey into the dark recesses of Annie Kelly's mind, one obsessed with child abductions, murder, and other horrifying tragedies.
Yes, she produces great coverage of the conspiracy theories associated with these events, but her real motivation seems clear.
To politely, and with great talent, hurt and destroy our beautiful listeners by generating vibes so bad they make FromSoftware blush.
Now, you might think that our role is to defend you against these kinds of British psychic attacks, to say, hey Annie, can you cover something less depressing?
But that would be a fundamental misunderstanding of what our podcast is and does.
Instead, we vow to continue providing lethal aid to the KNK, Annie's QAA splinter group.
We will erect statues in her name, and we will harvest the tears of this fallen world.
Guys, if you want less depressing stories, don't have a UK correspondent.
I keep on telling you.
It's rainy all year over there.
So, um, I guess this week's topic is the Grenfell Tower tragedy, a 2017 fire that broke out in a 24-story high-rise in West London.
Leading to the deaths of 72 people and the injury of over 70 others.
In the wake of the fire, an inquiry was set up to understand what exactly led to such a profound breakdown in safety protocols.
Compounding the horror, the Grenfell Tower incident led to the birth of multiple related conspiracy theories, so we'll be taking a look at those too.
But before all of that, Annie has a little bit of developing clone news from the UK.
Seems like it's becoming a vertical in your papers!
Yeah, I'm having to do a clone update every two weeks at this point.
So, before I get into my main story today, I thought I'd give you an update on a story I talked about on this podcast a few weeks ago now.
Listeners may remember the tale of two Boruses, which began when our esteemed Prime Minister essentially declared the leader of the opposition, Keir Starmer, a nonce protector.
Who was personally responsible for letting off Jimmy Savile.
QAnoners, who were mostly under the impression that they were BOTH satanic paedophiles, had to come up with a reason for why Boris was acting so BASED all of a sudden in sharing one of their favourite memes.
And luckily, with the help of an old Q drop which said, Think PM UK install, the best is yet to come, they concluded the most likely answer.
Johnson was a clone, cleverly installed by the White Hats to wake people up.
He's good now.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, he looks good.
He just seems good.
He looks great.
I can tell he's good now.
What I hadn't realized at the time was this conspiracy theory has a celebrity supporter and one with former romantic links to the man himself.
Jennifer R. Curie is an American technology entrepreneur and a past illicit flame of Johnson from 2012 to 2016 while he was mayor of London.
Wait, is she saying, like, that dick changed?
Like what?
The man is now a clone?
The one she slept with for years?
I don't understand.
I also want to accuse my exes of being clones now.
It helps you get over them quicker.
Since the relationship, Arcuri has been on something of a journey, promoting QAnon and anti-vaccine conspiracy theories on her social media accounts.
Recently, she appeared on GB News, which is like the British version of Fox News, only with worse production values and less attractive hosts.
and seemed to endorse, alongside other things, the theory that Johnson was replaced with a doppelganger
at some point when he was in hospital suffering from COVID-19.
You know, there is something that happens to you before you take office
when you become a world leader.
There are certain rituals, let's say, let's call them, for fun,
that happen.
And then when one takes office, one has to adhere to those around him.
Obviously, seeking endorsement and validation from those, especially within the establishment, would have been very, very important to Boris.
And then, you know, per the episode, the entire nation watched one man entering the hospital and another one, you know, leaving.
I've had several sources confirm, you know, this isn't the same man.
However, we want to, you know, I'm not the one to look into this.
I'm not an investigative journalist.
Someone should be looking into this.
This isn't the same man by a long shot.
Not just in spirit and character and demeanor.
We're talking completely different.
Now, for those who think this is just a coy way of doing the classic, he's-not-the-man-I-knew line so popular with faded romantic relationships, it might be worth looking at some of the other things our Curies posted to her Telegram channel and Twitter account.
Last year, she heavily implied that Johnson's wife, Carrie, was a Satanist, and said, quote, I encourage you to explore beyond this woman and look at how Satanism is actually, you know, surprisingly used in a lot of ways in government.
According to Vice, reporting in December last year, her Twitter feed is a stream of Covid denialism and anti-vax sentiment.
On the 12th of November, a retweet from Akurey's account showed a video saying that Covid vaccinations are a, quote, genocidal initiative against young children and that it is important to, quote, deal with the issue.
A tweet posted on her account on the 6th of December said, paid for shills, shilling paid for lies, in response to footage of someone encouraging people to get vaccinated on a daytime TV show.
On the 3rd of December, a tweet from her account said, quote, Meanwhile, the IMF issued a warning about an economic collapse.
It's worth noting that this radicalisation of Arcuri happened long after she was involved with Johnson, but that doesn't stop her playing up her political insider credentials to both bolster her credibility talking about these things and get a much bigger platform to spread them than most Telegram users could ever dream of.
So, the result of this is we now have the message that the Prime Minister has been secretly replaced by a doppelganger as something that was said unchallenged on TV.
It's good.
Although this might feel like a pretty dark thermometer reading of the British political landscape and its relationship to supposedly fringe conspiracy theories, I, as an adept political strategist, think that Labour could make something of this.
After all, if Johnson's going to use QAnon-adjacent smears, it only seems fair to fight fire with fire.
All Starmer needs to do now is demand, on live TV, that the Prime Minister tell us something only the real Boris Johnson could know.
Something simple, perhaps.
Like, how many children do you have?
Ah, that couldn't backfire.
He definitely has that number on recall.
In 1992, you and I went for sodas.
What did you order?
By how many children you have, I mean have locked away in the adrenochrome farms.
I want to go back to two British people going for sodas.
I don't know.
What imagination?
You think London's just people drinking soda pop?
That is great.
That's good.
Yeah, that makes sense.
No, we call them fizzy drinks here.
Yeah, they went to the Soda Jerk to get a fizzy drink.
It is quite a, like, degrading name for it.
I think soda is a much nicer name.
Yeah.
Soda, soda pop.
So, yeah.
Thank you, Annie.
You know, this is by far the only important and darkest news to come out of Europe recently.
So it's, you know.
Crucial that we track the development of this clone theory.
You know, I think that, like, British TV has always been a little bit wacky, and I think the tabloids are doing Batboy stuff.
So why not have also the tabloidification of television?
So we could have some stories about, you know, an ancient mummy coming back to life, Boris Johnson's a clone, and of course the classic Batboy.
Yeah, I don't know.
This is good.
Yeah, I mean, I guess the real question now is why isn't this being covered on the woke BBC?
They keep saying Boris Johnson is the same human being and not a clone.
Yeah, because they're the ones, they are the puppet masters who they're actually, they create the clones.
They're actually cybernetic sort of A.I.s and they create, they manage the clones, they put plants in the UK in Parliament.
So yeah, of course they're gonna be silent.
Yeah, the Boris Boris company.
I'm just gonna kill myself now.
Grinfell Tower.
But now, my dear listeners, for the main topic of tonight's episode, because the comings and goings of our Prime Minister and his shadow self have sadly not been the only conspiracy theory to hit the headlines in my home country during the last few weeks.
On the 11th of February this year, it was reported that Tara Ahmed, a 51-year-old anti-lockdown activist who goes by the name Tara Pure in conspiracy circles, had been jailed for 11 months on the grounds of inciting
racial hatred.
Specifically, two Facebook posts in which she claimed that the Grenfell Tower fire of 2017,
in which 72 people died, had been set deliberately as a "Jewish sacrifice."
Oh boy. Oh boy.
Yeah. Ahmed, who volunteered in the aftermath of the disaster,
posted a comment on Facebook four days after the fire, saying,
"I've been at the scene, at the protests, and at the community meetings,
and have met many of the victims."
Some who were still in the same clothes they escaped in.
They are very real and genuine.
Their pain and suffering is raw and deep and their disgusting neglect by authorities continues.
Watch the footage of people trapped in the inferno with flames behind them.
They were burnt alive in a Jewish sacrifice.
In a further comment on Facebook, she remarked, "Grenfell is owned by a private Jewish property
developer just like the Twin Towers. I wonder how much Goldman Sachs is standing to make in
the world's most expensive real estate location, Kensington."
Ehh, oh.
Grenfell Tower was a 24-story, high-rise council housing complex in North Kensington, London.
It was not in fact owned by a private property developer of any ethnicity,
but Kensington and Chelsea London Borough Council, although some of the flats had been bought under
the right-to-buy policy under a leasehold basis. The management of the building and its safety
was handled by the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, or KCTMO,
who were effectively the landlords of the rest of the tenants.
Now, Ahmed, in her defence, would say that she had chosen her words imperfectly in a moment of great stress, and that she had never intended to blame the fire on all Jews.
Speaking to a small rally of supporters outside the Old Bailey Courthouse, she attempted to refine and modulate her position, which funnily enough didn't sound a great deal less anti-Semitic to my untrained ear.
They want to rehabilitate me because I believe that there's a criminal cabal who's genociding us, who's dividing and conquering us.
They think that that is an evil concept.
They're claiming that I'm saying that all Jews are... I'm targeting all Jews when I've literally, out of the thousands of comments, there are only two comments in which I haven't prefaced the word Jews Like I usually do, with cabal, with evil, or satanic, targeting the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers, which is all I ever did.
And they had to probably scour for God knows how long, months, with a fine tooth comb, with a huge magnifying glass, to find these two obscure comments.
And they are hanging, drawing, and quartering me in a place built for murderers.
The Rockefellers are Episcopalians.
Yeah, I know.
What the fuck are you talking about?
I'm so not anti-Semitic.
I'm accusing all of the rich families I can think of of being secretly Jewish.
Guys, I know you hate that I said I blame the Jews, but if you remember, I said I blame the satanic Jews.
Yeah, it's just the evil ones.
Look, guys, there are good Jews and bad Jews.
Man, this is exactly what they were saying, like, when QAnon moved over to vote, and they were immediately just talking about Jewish people.
And a couple nervous posters were like, oh, well isn't that?
And they were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're not anti-Semitic.
Look, we're talking about the Jews who use their Judaism to do evil, okay?
There are plenty of great Jews, like Jake Rokitansky, great Jew.
Don't want to do anything to him.
They mentioned you?
She also managed to pepper in some references to Covid conspiracies and satanic ritual abuse theories while she was there.
It's that the power structure at the moment comes from those, the tiny fraction of the ones sent, who unfortunately are beholden to Satan.
They literally worship Satan, they sacrifice to Satan, they get their power from Satan, they make contracts with Satan in blood.
And unless we all realise that we also need to get our power from a far higher source than just, you know, going out and doing activism and taking practical actions, which are so important, but unless we do the spiritual work, Unless we go within, unless we get our power from that divine source that is the antidote of their satanic power, we won't win this war.
Because this is a spiritual war.
Firstly, obviously, it's a spiritual war.
For me, the last six months has been the most traumatic, but they've also been the most empowering.
The most uplifting, where I just, it's just about surrendering to that higher power.
Trusting, having faith, that what's being done at the moment, with the raising of consciousness and mercy, we have to surrender, I have to surrender.
I am paying a price.
But it's for the greater good.
It's look what's happening.
It's bringing people together.
It's raising people's awareness about this topic which nobody was talking about because all we were talking about was the vaccine, vaccine passports, lockdown, but really the hidden hand behind everything.
They have shot themselves in the butt with this case because they have brought to attention the hidden hand.
That's okay, she's just going to go on a tangent about The Wizard of Oz now.
The Wizard of Oz?
What's that film with Dorothy?
I don't know.
Fuck!
Anyways, I'm trying to, it's a Wizard of Oz thing, but I'm using it to say Jewish bloodlines, okay?
Something, something, something behind the curtain.
The hand behind the curtain, you know?
The Jew behind the curtain in that Dorothy movie.
Don't you remember at the end?
Something, something, something, the lead paint killed the tin man.
When I found out what they do to little children, when I found out about satanic ritual abuse and I started researching it, and I researched and researched because I wanted to debunk it, because what I was reading was so horrific and so hurtful, so traumatising, I wanted to debunk it.
And I got stuck in this horrible, depressing six months and I couldn't do anything.
And I made a pact with God.
You do whatever you can with me to stop that abuse of children.
So the price I'm going to pay, and the price I have paid, and the price I might pay, is nothing compared to the suffering of those children.
And I am so honoured to do what I can to do whatever it takes to stop this. So it's nothing but
hope, nothing is that.
Even if the worst happens to me and they want to put me away for four years.
No they won't.
Even if they want to do that, even if they want to do that.
So yeah, posting lurid conspiracy theories about Jewish sacrifices on Facebook is actually
saving the children.
Like, I mean, it seems like someone who just hopped on another topic from, like, anti-lockdown stuff.
She's just like, well, while I got you, got some other shit on offer.
You ever heard the vaccine causes AIDS?
You ever heard the Jewish cabal?
You ever heard the reptilians?
I've got a whole menu for you.
Oh, you guys liked my first pitch.
I've actually got more.
I've got way more.
Way more for you.
No, you're completely right.
I'll talk about her a little bit later on, but there's basically never been a conspiracy theory she hasn't believed.
Beautiful.
Yeah.
I mean, she does present it like somebody's mom.
She's very accessible.
Unfortunately, not all of Ahmed's supporters were particularly helpful in spreading the word that her posts hadn't counted as incitement to hatred against Jewish people because she actually only meant the satanic kind.
Here's one of them defending her outside the courthouse.
She'll get, um, Jug's Go-Bot.
Jug's, Jug's Schwartz, sort of.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Schwartzburger.
And a jury consisting of 11 out of 12 of them are from the state of Israel.
Looking around uncomfortably red-faced as you just keep doing yes and to the anti-Semitic jokes.
Yeah, I was like, listening to that, I was like, are they dissing me?
The first guy's like, Goldberg!
Second guy's like, hook nose!
Third guy's like, Israel!
Yeah, and actually what our listeners can't see in that clip is that the guy who starts saying she'll get judged Goldberg or something actually has the balls to wear a Jewish star.
Right, because he's like the Jews.
The Star of David that the Nazis made, the Jews wear, because this is something that the anti-vaxxers have taken to wearing in this country, because they're saying that they're persecuted in much the same way.
To be fair, if you're essentially a Holocaust denialist, it could be true that in your world that, you know, COVID is worse, or the vaccine is worse.
Yeah, I guess I hadn't thought of that.
There's a weird consistent logic.
They're like, why is everyone getting mad at me about comparing myself to the Holocaust, which never even happened?
Well, what I'm saying is that these lockdowns are, you know, bad, but not really that bad, much like the Holocaust.
But they're slightly worse, slightly worse, just on a scale.
Although Ahmed may not have realised it, she was actually taking part in a centuries-long European tradition of blaming a long-scapegoated minority for a devastating and unexpected tragedy.
Jewish people are historically no stranger to this kind of treatment, including in my own home city of Norwich, which has the dubious honour of being one of the earliest originators of the blood libel myth in the medieval era when a child was killed and the local Jewish community accused of engaging in his ritualistic murder.
You bring this up a lot.
Are you being paid by the tourist authorities over there?
Do I bring it up a lot?
This is the second time.
It's almost like, hey, come visit the Origins of Antisemitism.
Forget the Holocaust Museum.
Oh my god.
Yeah, I highly recommend you take the Blood Libel Tour.
It starts near the river and we work our way up and there's a great sausage stand on the way.
Okay, I'm starting to feel really bad for dissing my home city that much.
I love it here.
There's loads of nice stuff here as well.
Next episode I'm going to put in something nice about Norwich.
I'm sorry for bullying you.
But fires, in particular, because of their seeming spontaneity and the huge amount of death and destruction they can cause, have a long history of sparking conspiracy theories and revenge killings in their wake.
In September 1666, a fire that began in a bakery engulfed the city of London for over five days, raising much of its oldest buildings to the ground.
Immediately, conspiracy theories began that the fire was set deliberately by one of England's internal enemies.
According to Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, writing for the Smithsonian Magazine, Before the flames were out, a Dutch baker was dragged from his bakery while an angry mob tore it apart.
A Swedish diplomat was nearly hung, saved only by the Duke of York who happened to see him and demand he be let down.
A blacksmith felled a Frenchman in the street with a vicious blow with an iron bar.
A witness recalled seeing his innocent blood flowing in a plentiful stream down his ankles.
A French woman's breasts were cut off by Londoners who thought the chicks she carried in her apron were incendiaries.
Another Frenchman was nearly dismembered by a mob that thought that he was carrying a chest of bombs.
The bombs were tennis balls.
Ahmed's close contact with traumatised Grenfell survivors in her position as a volunteer, and the fact that she apparently even discussed her beliefs with some of them, was submitted as incriminating evidence in the case that she very well could have sparked a similar act of violence.
Thankfully, no such event occurred, but that was probably because the residents, some of whom had even warned about the possibility of a fire at Grenfell before it happened, had much better people to blame for the devastation.
As failed by the state, the struggle and the shadow of Grenfell, a documentary produced and fronted by a Grenfell resident of 25 years convincingly argues, what happened to the tower and the 72 people who died there cannot be separated from the social context of its location in the Lancaster West Estate, a council housing project in North Kensington Borough, a wealthy district in North London.
I was born in Grenfell Tower.
It was my home for 25 years.
After seeing the heart of my state burn, I can't sleep.
That night will follow me and my peoples for the rest of our lives.
You won't see any shots of the fateful night in this film.
We never want to see that again.
Grenfell burned for local and global reasons.
There's a bigger picture that I learn more about every day.
We talk politics now and how we can take power because we learned that we have to look after ourselves.
Grenfell changed everything.
The deadly consequences we suffered make the cranes looming the horizon in different, more threatening ways now.
I live in Kensington in Chelsea.
It's one of the richest areas in the whole country.
But the North, where we live, has one of the highest concentrations of people on low incomes.
The growing inequality is pushing so many out the area.
It's obvious global capital has no regard for people like me.
It's the same story the world over, from Berlin to Rio, Madrid to New York.
But maybe, because we're in such prime real estate, what we had to live through could be a warning for you all.
In particular, the documentary pointed to the recent refurbishment of the tower as part of the regeneration of the area.
The attractive new cladding on the building's façade, an inquiry would later prove, was made of a highly flammable material that rapidly exacerbated the spread of the fire from one flat to the entire building.
As was standard safety advice for many high-rise blocks in London, residents were advised to stay put in the case of a fire.
The theory being that the thick walls and fire doors would contain the flames long enough for the fire service to arrive.
The cladding made that advice deadly.
Formed in 2010, the Grenfell Action Group was a grassroots organisation of residents set up to,
in their own words, "defend the rights of the residents of the Lancaster West Estate,
a sprawling inner-city social housing complex of nearly a thousand dwellings, mostly working-class,
multicultural and multi-ethnic." In 2015, the group joined with Unite Community Membership,
a union community guide, as a result of concerns about the refurbishment of the tower.
In particular, the Grenfell Action Group raised concerns about fire safety.
In November 2016, just under a year before the fire, they posted in the eerily prophetic blog, writing, It is a truly terrifying thought, but the Grenfell Action Group firmly believe that only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord, KCTMO, and bring an end
to the dangerous living conditions and neglect of health and safety legislation that they
inflict upon their tenants and leaseholders.
Only an incident that results in serious loss of life of residents will allow the external scrutiny
to occur that will shine a light on the practices that characterize the malign governance of this
non-functioning organization." Two months after the fire, it was revealed by The Guardian that
building safety experts warned in 2014 that the insulation planned for use on Grenfell Tower
should only be used with non-combustible exterior cladding.
The chief reason it wasn't, in this case, was because of expense.
The combustible cladding materials were considerably cheaper than the non-combustible alternatives, saving the project team around £293,000.
The professor of criminology Steve Toombs at The Open University described Grenfell as an avoidable tragedy and a form of state corporate violence, writing about the decision of the KTCMO to use cheaper cladding.
It must then be utterly devastating for anyone remotely connected to Grenfell Tower to realize that this atrocity was a result of a conscious decision by the council to save £293,000.
This does not mean that there was any intention to cause the fire, nor the deaths that resulted.
But this level of cost cutting by the richest council in England could be viewed as indicative of the contempt which Grenfell residents stated that they had endured for years.
As one teenage resident stated outside the tower as it continued to burn, we're dying in there because we don't count.
Another local resident put it, quote, the people who died and lost their homes, this happened to them because they are poor.
Such views were widely articulated by the local community across media coverage in the immediate aftermath of the atrocity.
Where the residents and survivors did engage in conspiratorial thinking about the causes of the fire, it was mainly through being asked to describe the deadly results of this sheer state indifference to their lives, homes and physical safety as an accident.
In the aftermath of the fire, BBC journalist Victoria Derbyshire interviewed North Kensington residents who had witnessed the fire.
In a clip that would go viral, one local, Peaky Siku, spoke candidly about the social regeneration that the area had been undergoing in previous years.
And how this fuelled his belief that the fire was not an accident.
Peaky, hello.
I gather you witnessed much of what happened last night.
What did you see?
I was riding back, maybe like 2am.
I seen like one line of fire.
It looked like it was contained at the time.
And then, by the time I got here, it was probably two of those lines of flats were on fire.
Mainly the top bit.
I'm not gonna lie one thing I wanted to say though this thing that they were saying about I might have been a fridge that exploded or something like that I don't know about all of that but what I do know is they did regeneration last year to that building that they're talking about doing to all of these buildings they did it to that building only 10 million pounds they're talking about And put these shoddy plastic things on there that set up a light because they want more reasons to knock these blocks down.
There's two options.
They could either regenerate the blocks or they could knock them down.
And after that, I'm not so sure that was totally an accident.
I'm not even going to lie.
I'm not even going to lie to you.
You could pause me there, but I'm not going to lie.
The whole situation that's going on in this area, the way that they don't want us here and they put those Those rich man's blocks over there, and then they tell a certain man in Frinstead they can't even go into that section.
That's outrageous, I can't lie.
The way that they treat men in here is terrible, innit?
So, I can't even take the belief out of my mind that that wasn't just an accident.
Do you know what I'm saying?
I'm not gonna lie.
I think it's fucked.
But we don't know.
It's so early in the semester.
Yeah, we don't know, but you're talking about the regeneration that happened last year to apparently make these blocks better.
And then these fires have never happened.
I've lived here my entire life.
My mum's lived here a very long time.
And these kind of things have never, ever happened in this area.
I don't know what they spent £10 million on, but the lifts in this block and all the blocks around, they only cost £60,000 to fix and they still never replaced them throughout the time I've lived here.
So £10 million for that.
No, they didn't.
No.
No, no.
No, no.
I'm not really fucking with the government right now.
That's all I'm saying.
Hey, I'm going to apologize for your language.
I'm going to apologize for the language.
Yes, I know.
And I do apologize, but I also want to say that is symptomatic of some of the anger in this community.
Ah, that's adorable.
I'm going to apologize for the language.
When he said he doesn't really fuck with the government, he's just angry.
You know.
Yeah.
Peaky's implication that the fire was set deliberately because, quote, they don't want us here, was certainly straying into conspiracy theory.
But it clearly tapped into a justified vein of anger that many Lancaster West Estate residents felt about having their safety concerns ignored until it was too late.
Such anger was only intensified by the slow and shambolic relief response to the survivors, many of whom still didn't know if their loved ones made it out alive.
As the late, great journalist Dawn Foster wrote about the situation on the ground, Information has been lacking since day one.
One woman I spoke to at the scene, searching for her friend, told me that though there were many community centers open, there was no centralized list of missing people and survivors.
She attempted to compile one with a few other volunteers and proffered it to the police, who told her they didn't know who to give it to.
To many who had just lost their homes, belongings, neighbours and loved ones, the line between deliberate murder and manslaughter through continued deliberate neglect and disinterest must have felt pretty immaterial.
Of course, because the internet is a hellhole, it didn't take long for the trauma and righteous anger of the survivors to become itself twisted into a conspiracy theory that presented itself in much less defensible terms.
Peaky Saku's interview with Victoria Derbyshire went viral, and suddenly speculation and conspiracist circles began that he himself was a crisis actor, hired to direct attention away from the true culprits of the fire, or even the fact the fire never happened at all, as a Vice interview with Saku at the time puts it.
Most of these focus on the fact that Peaky attended the fee-paying public school, Charterhouse.
He got a scholarship, but conspiracy theorists don't believe that, calling him Sneaky Peaky and claiming he's part of a Zionist agenda.
A flat-earth truther analyzes the hand gestures Peaky, who is a rapper, makes in his music videos and says, quote, this guy's a satanic player, guys.
He don't care what he does.
One video was simply titled, This Little Bitch Went to Charterhouse.
One of them seizes on a clip of Peaky talking about the ongoing questions around the fire, as if saying ongoing questions is beyond a working class person.
Oh boy.
Interestingly, when I was watching one of these videos, by now four years old, titled Peaky Sikoo Brackets Glitch in the Green Screen Matrix, I noticed what appears to be Tara Ahmed's YouTube account in the comments.
The account goes by a pseudonym but is addressed by one of the other commenters as Tara Ahmed, and has a picture which is unmistakably the same woman as in the videos from the front of the courthouse in the clips we played.
In the comments, she defends Peaky from accusations that he's a paid actor,
although she acknowledges, quote, "The authorities will always have their
plans to provide their controlled narrative, but those will only be a handful."
Ahmed's YouTube channel consists mostly of recycled content, although there's a clip
from an anti-lockdown march in August 2020 which seems to be original. It's something of a grab
bag of conspiracy theories, titled things like "They poison your cereals with actual iron shavings",
"Mammograms and scans cause cancer", and "UN pushing graphic sex education on children".
Hmm.
Most recently, like a lot of the anti-lockdown movement, she seemed to be taking an interest in common law and the sovereign citizen movement, subscribing to several playlists on the topic, although this knowledge didn't seem to help her much in her actual court case.
The Grenfell Tower fire, shamefully, became a feeding frenzy for online conspiracy theorists like Ahmed.
They were not satisfied with the explanation given countless times by residents and survivors themselves, which was that their lives were treated cheaply because they were poor and mostly not white.
Instead, they decided to speculate about the legitimacy of those residents and nitpick their accounts of the worst day of their lives.
In doing so, they revealed not just a callous lack of empathy for the fire's victims, which will surprise nobody who researches conspiracy theorists, But also a peculiar lack of interest in holding power to account, despite their frequent claims to be a thorn in the side of elites everywhere.
I say this because there is plenty of evidence, all out in the open, for who was responsible for the Grenfell fire and how.
Conspiracy theorists may dismiss the findings of the inquiry as tainted by its institutional nature, but reading the Phase 1 report it seems to me that there is plenty in there that is damning, even if the Grenfell victims will never see the justice they deserve.
As I mentioned, the report confirmed that the exterior cladding of the building was the primary reason the fire spread from the original flat on the fourth floor, making it uncontrollable.
This was a largely expected outcome given how much press the flammable nature of the cladding had received.
What was less reported was the discussion of what started the fire itself.
An expert witness in the inquiry concluded that the source was faulty wiring in the flat's fridge-freezer.
The expert added that Models made in the US must have a back casing made from metallic steel, which can help contain internal fires.
The plastic allowed for back casings on UK and European models were combustible and could contribute to fires.
The fridge freezer was made by a company called Whirlpool, who challenged this finding and even came up with a wild alternative theory of their own, that the fire had been sparked by a lit cigarette thrown through a window.
The lawyer representing the occupant of the flat where the fire started responded with all the respect such a notion deserved.
As far as the theory of the fire having started as a result of something being thrown through the open window is concerned, this is pure speculation.
Desperate to put it politely.
There is no evidence in support it would have been impossible for a cigarette or some other mystery item to have been launched from ground level four floors down, and it is equally impossible to imagine how a cigarette or some other mystery item discarded from a flat above could have miraculously entered the kitchen through the open window, let alone set anything in the vicinity alight.
In fact, as explored by Professor Steve Toombs in his essay, Home as a Site of State Corporate Violence, Grenfell Tower, Etiologies and Aftermaths, this was not the first fire to have been caused by a faulty Whirlpool appliance.
In a Freedom of Information Act response released a few months after Grenfell, the London Fire Brigade revealed that white goods had triggered 2,891 fires from 2009 to 2017.
According to the document, brands under the Whirlpool Corporation umbrella accounted for 895 of those fires, the highest of any manufacturer.
Partly as a result of public scrutiny after Grenfell, the House of Commons established a cross-party committee on the safety of electrical goods in the UK.
Producing a report in early 2018, the report found that Whirlpool, quote, failed to provide an appropriate representative to give evidence, gave incomplete answers to questions and were required to provide subsequent clarifications.
This does not strike us as the actions of a company seeking to repair consumer trust after serious safety failures with its products.
Even more damningly, the report found that Whirlpool and their regulatory body, Peterborough Trading Standards, continued to advise consumers that they could use appliances that had been ruled defective and a safety risk.
Whirlpool's relationship to the Peterborough Trading Standards is one that Toomes describes as one of the most crucial aspects of this whole episode.
Representing the way in which over the last 17 years in this country, quote, private business, ostensibly the object of regulation, has increasingly become the key vehicle of regulation.
Under the private authority, or PA scheme, established under New Labour and vastly expanded by the coalition government, A manufacturer and retailer like Whirlpool, which has production sites and retail outlets across most of the local authorities in England and Wales, can reach an agreement with one local authority to regulate its systems across all of its stores in every local authority for complying with a relevant body of law.
Peterborough City Council in the context of trading standards, for example.
To regulate its systems, the company makes a payment to the local authority agreed through contract.
The benefit for the company, of course, is the absence of oversight in the vast majority of its premises.
It's worth bearing in mind that this scheme coincided with local councils everywhere having their funding slashed under austerity conditions.
What sounds like the much-loved value of austerity politicians, streamlining the Byzantine process of health and safety regulations, then begins to look an awful lot like a corporation holding a huge amount of financial power over the very people who are meant to be marking its homework.
Toomes puts this clearly in the closing to his article.
The PA scheme is a regulatory system which encourages non-enforcement and, one might say, collusion in wrongdoing since the financial benefits of such contracts to cash-strapped local authorities are real incentives to avoid adversarial relationships with businesses.
Thus it was, in effect, the shield of Peter Braun's trading standards, through their contractual PA agreement,
which allowed Whirlpool to continue to refuse to recall products they knew were not fit for purpose and indeed
posed a proven safety risk, which had led to fatalities.
Regulation, ostensibly in existence to protect consumers, residents, workers, and so on, is being transformed into a
form of state corporate collusion by contract which protects the private sector from law enforcement.
A form of state corporate violence, no less.
So, to recap, the Grenfell fire began due to an electrical fault on a fridge freezer made by a company who had made defective products that they had not been forced to recall by their regulatory government body before.
It then spread too rapidly to control across the building as a result of combustible cladding combined with foam insulation plates that safety experts had warned about back in 2014.
These materials were chosen because they were considerably cheaper than the alternative.
After the KCT management organisation mentioned in an email to the building's renovation team the need for, quote, good costs for Councillor Fielding Mellon, the council's former deputy leader.
And most heartbreakingly of all, as the fire spread across the building and desperate residents called the fire brigade, they were told to stay in their flats due to outdated pre-cladding fire safety standards.
This advice was withdrawn at 2.47am, nearly two hours after the fire had begun and when, for many, it was too late to escape.
Mickey Paramysophan, who managed to flee his 7th floor flat with his family after he woke up and smelled smoke, described the situation for those who tried to leave.
So I went to the hallway and see smoke everywhere.
I've opened the door and the neighbors were there and people were screaming.
Only one fire escape to get down and apparently that caught on fire.
And the fire alarm that was going off, that wouldn't have woken no one up.
It was as silent as it could be.
When I got outside, there were explosions everywhere you looked.
Lots of bangs, blue gas coming out of everywhere you looked.
About 12 floors up, I saw three children waving from a window.
And then there was just an explosion and they disappeared.
They were three kids.
They were banging on the windows.
You could see their silhouettes.
And then bang!
It just went up.
Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg would later go on an LBC radio show and suggest that those who obeyed the advice from the fire brigade and stayed in their flats lacked common sense.
There have been suggestions that in part the tragedy was caused by either racism or policies of class.
Are these suggestions correct?
I don't think so.
The tragedy came about because of the cladding, leading to the fire racing up the building, and then was compounded by the stay-put policy.
It seems to me that that is the tragedy of it, that the more one's read over the weekend about the report and about the chances of people surviving, if you just ignore what you're told and leave, you are so much safer.
And I think if either of us were in a fire, whatever the fire brigade said, we would leave the burning building.
It just seems the common sense thing to do.
And it is such a tragedy that that didn't happen, but I don't think it has anything to do with race or class.
I would like to prepare some maybe cheap cladding and just kind of make his suit out of it.
And then have, you know, a tiny fridge maybe under his armpit.
Fuck you, Jacob Rees-Mogg.
He is one of my least favorite British politicians.
You just see his awful little face and you know there's nothing good coming out of it.
I know.
And he's like, he's got this kind of reputation as kind of being the sort of no-nonsense Tory who tells it like it is, but there was justifiably so much kind of outrage at him saying that, that he did have to walk it back.
He gave a sort of mealy-mouthed apology.
I think he is giving you the straight Tory, which is, I'm a fucking goblin under a bridge that, like, takes children from families passing.
To be honest with you all, this has been one of the hardest episodes for this podcast I've ever had to write.
I knew that The Victims of Grenfell had been failed, but until I started researching this episode, I had no idea to what extent and how many warnings had fallen on deaf ears.
In the words of Aditya Chakraborty, writing for The Guardian, Over 170 years later, Britain remains a country that murders its poor.
When four separate government ministers are warned that Grenfell and other high-rises are a serious fire risk, then an inferno isn't unfortunate.
It is inevitable.
Those dozens of Grenfell residents didn't die.
They were killed.
What happened last week wasn't a quote terrible tragedy or some other studio sofa platitude.
It was social murder.
Researching all of this, in light of the Tara Ahmed court case, compounds to me just how destructive and hateful anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are about this kind of disaster, because they grab people's instinct, in this case a correct one, that someone is to blame, and then point them in entirely the wrong direction, at a blameless ethnic minority community.
It speaks to the character of the residents of North Kensington and the West Lancaster estate that even after the worst event of their lives, they didn't fall for those lies.
Instead, they set up the Grenfell United and Justice for Grenfell organisations, which focus their campaign in seeking justice against Kensington Tenant Management Organisation, local and central government, the companies who supply the dangerous cladding and insulation materials placed on the building, Since the inquiry is ongoing, a criminal investigation can't go ahead.
And reading interviews, it feels as if many survivors don't expect to see justice of that kind.
one of the Grenfell Inquiry implemented. Since the inquiry is ongoing, a criminal investigation
can't go ahead. And reading interviews, it feels as if many survivors don't expect to
see justice of that kind, but they are determined to make sure that a disaster like Grenfell
never happens again.
Yeah, this is, yes, I guess like a stark, a stark reminder that, you know, tightening
your belt in many ways, when we say that to people, especially working class people, it
It means tightening the belt around their neck, essentially.
and putting them in more and more dangerous positions so that accidents like this can occur as part of a system
that seems to be functioning.
And it's understandable that people would put intent behind this
and then spin out sometimes into conspiracy theories because, you know, I mean, the intent is nefarious at every
level.
Perhaps it wasn't direct choice of murder.
It's more like, hey, we just kind of like stack this so that murder is going to be the only like logical result.
You know, it will end in this kind of awful result.
And yeah, it's that's it's depressing.
But yeah, I thought you did a great job, you know, showing how how the people who push the conspiracy theory didn't have, I think, An extended effect over the people who actually experience this, which is really important.
I think once you have the people who are on the ground saying stuff like that, I mean, I remember, for example, after January 6th, the boyfriend or partner of one of the people that was trampled to death right in front of him was talking about Antifa that very day.
And so, you know, when horrible things happen to people, you can only hope that I think that the people who are there on the ground, you know, are spared by these Disgusting conspiracy theories.
Yeah, and I think you really hit the nail on the head in the last passage.
It's like, there is somebody to blame.
There is a cabal, if you will, of lazy, sort of indifferent, cheap housing constructors and organizations.
That are perfectly, you know, are perfectly in the path to be blamed, and the evidence is showing that they are, you know, responsible in many ways.
And yet, the people who aren't on the ground, you know, it's like, there's somebody to blame!
Like, there's your conspiracy!
It's right there!
Yeah, it's almost like it's just, like, not exciting enough, is it?
Yeah, or they're just not Jewish enough, you know?
Yeah, the Whirlpool cabal is not very Semitic.
It's like, I'm sure you could find, like, Whirlpool executives whose last names are, you know, Rakitansky or, you know, another Jewish name.
Wait, are you saying that Mad Max is Jewish?
Yeah, he's Jewish.
Rakitansky is Polish, of Polish descent.
I hope that people who've joined recently know that.
that that's Jake's voice. But it is it's so it's so mind-melting to me that it's
like there is somebody to blame you know you actually you know if you if you
raise awareness about them there is more you know there is a better chance that
that justice you know could potentially be done and yet it's like you you try to
steer you know your social media followers or the people who will listen
to you in into a direction where nothing will ever happen and maybe that's the
thing maybe conspiracies are only fun when nobody ever gets caught because
then you can keep conspiring.
You can keep theorizing.
If actual justice happens, then your game ends, or the adventure ends, or the investigation ends, and there's that little broken piece of people's brains that knows deep down, they're like, oh, well, if the crime is solvable, then essentially I have to go back You know, to, I don't know, like pushing papers in an office or whatever.
I don't get to be a fucking secret sleuth at night, you know?
Pouring through YouTube videos and cracking the case myself.
I mean, there really is, you know, we've talked about it before on the show and other people who are, you know, more knowledgeable about conspiracy theorists than I am, you know, have talked about narcissism sort of being, you know, a sort of central component of a lot of conspiracy influencers.
And I mean, it makes sense to me.
It's like, oh, if I can't be in the center, you know, telling people that I know the truth and I figured it out and here's who to blame.
If somebody actually goes to jail, then, you know, you don't get to be the center of it anymore.
And it's so tragic that, you know, it's pulling attention away from uncovering the actual sort of mystery.
And then when the reports come out and it makes perfect sense, like we've seen in this episode, you know, that that's disregarded or it's disinformation or, you know, it's Oh, it comes from the institution, so it can't be trusted, or it's the cover-up, and it's like, you're literally throwing away any potential justice, and it's just, it's maddening.
On the flip side, Jake, Tara is having, you know, one of the most exciting parts of her life.
She's having a great time.
Yeah.
She's, you know, she used to just listlessly read Reddit, and now she's out there getting interviewed about the Jewish cabal, and that's the, you know, that's a pinnacle right there for her.
Yeah, and as we know, in the modern day, the more engagement you get, the more likes, more comments, more interviews, that's the writer you are.
I mean, I know writer is not a real word, but it works well for this analogy.
I'm so lost.
But no, I think that was a really good point, Jake.
And I guess it, yeah, it speaks to the way that conspiracy theories spread, particularly on the internet, right?
Where it's like a game, or it's like a ARG, or it's like something where, you know, you kind of just keep on going to uncover further and further layers.
And you actually have no interest at all, and as you say, in like real justice being done, because you keep on trying to go to the next level, right?
Which is kind of something I was thinking about when Yeah, that video of Peaky Sikoo, the rapper talking outside of Grenfell, and he kind of says, you know, this wasn't an accident and gives a pretty good explanation of the kind of cladding, which proves essentially that residents knew the cladding was dangerous already before the fire.
And then conspiracy theorists get that video and then they start, you know, saying it's been green screened and he's a crisis actor and stuff like that.
It's almost like The material is right there in front of them, but because they're consuming this content on the internet, they have to get to the next level because it's like a video game.
Do you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And they're certainly not satisfied with just, you know, the pedestrian pilledness that he was expressing, where it's like, you know, a little conspiratorial.
They're like, not even close to enough, bro.
What are you, a fucking Soros paid fake agent?
Yeah.
Yeah, because I mean, you know, we are oftentimes, I mean, so much of what we're fed is to, you know, do not believe what your eyes are telling you or what your ears are hearing, you know, or facts that you're reading.
You know, nobody wants a nice linear sort of story, you know, you go to the first level, you get to the second level, that leads you to the third level, and then you beat the game.
You need a sprawling open world with tons of side quests, like, you know, you want to, they want to spend 500 hours, you know, - Polunking around, you know, looking for the rarest items
and then it's just like, oh man, what a bummer.
What a well-researched and thoughtful exposition.
What an Annie episode. - Such a massive bummer.
We don't say bummer around here, we say Annie episode.
(laughing)
Sorry guys.
I promise I'll do something more fun next time.
No, it's good.
It's perfect, because it's a perfect microcosmos for how conspiracy theories completely ignore actual conspiracies.
Yeah.
But last time you said that, that you were going to bring us something more upbeat, I think the next one was like two child corpses in a box.
Well, but that was Richard III.
Much more uplifting.
That was my version of a fun one.
Yeah, for sure.
They're ancient child murders.
Child murders of history, you know.
That's right, yes.
Yeah.
Where generations were moved from it, so it's more fun.
First in a tragedy, then in a farce, like those children's deaths are officially in farce territory.
Thank you for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAnon Anonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month and you'll get a whole second episode every week.
This week, we were present at the American The start of the first trucker convoy in the United States, so go check that out a little later.
And also, if you sign up, you'll get access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
And when you sub, you help us stay advertising-free and editorially independent.
Annie, you also have a podcast called Vaccine, The Human Story.
Could you tell us a bit more about that?
Yeah, so Vaccine the Human Story is a six-part series which is about the history of smallpox, the development of the first vaccine and the beginnings of the first ever anti-vax movement, which I had a lot of fun with, as you can tell.
Yeah, I tried to get you some listeners at the Trucker Rally over the last couple days.
I was just blasting the episodes out of a small Bluetooth speaker that was clipped to my belt, but it was drowned out by, you know, classic country hits like Old Country Road and, you know, people screaming into a microphone.
So I don't know how well it worked, but I would encourage everybody to go check that out.
And for everything else, we have a website, QAnonAnonymous.com.
Listener, until next week, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's a fact.
And now, today's Auto-Tune.
We grew up so naturally, you know, we learned from one another.
Our parents gave us wings.
They're the ones who gave us wings.
And we flew away with those wings, but they were our parents' wings.
Not these woke teachers that work for the unions and are controlled by the unions.
I'm an Italian-American.
You might be German-American, Black-American, Polish-American, Greek-American.
Nobody had to tell us who we were.
We socialized, we grew up with one another, and we went on to find the American dream together.
