Out in the field again, Annie Kelly attended the protest (and counter-protest) of a UK Drag Queen Story Hour event in Norwich. There she found a group of fascists and bigots with increasingly slick talking points designed to ratchet up anti-LGBT panic and recruit people into far-right movements.
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Welcome, listener, to Chapter 202 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Grooming Panic episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Annie Kelly, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
Drag Queen Story Hour, Norwich.
Hello listeners, it's your UK correspondent Annie here.
Surprisingly.
I was meant to be taking the month off this podcast in August to work on mine and Julian's upcoming podcast series, Man Clan, but something happened to me last week that I thought was worth talking to you about.
As you might have heard me mention on the podcast before, I live in a small city in the east of England called Norwich.
I was alerted recently that our city library was planning a Drag Queen Story Hour event which had become a target for protest by various groups, claiming that the event was inappropriate for children.
This protest wasn't happening in isolation, but was part of a series that have been happening across the country, with some events either having had to be cancelled or secretly relocated due to safety fears.
In fact, very close to me in Norse Walsham, one such event starring the same performer as planned in Norwich, Auntie Titania, had already been cancelled.
Now, I know when I say that various groups have been protesting these events, that sounds almost deliberately vague, but it really is a strangely mixed bag.
In fact, it seems as if almost every far-right nationalist or covid-sceptic organisation in this country is showing up to have a go at these protests.
Part of the reason for why that is, is to do with how these groups tend to organise themselves these days.
On platforms like Telegram, protests like these get rapidly shared across networks with lots of overlapping audiences.
Another reason is that, having experienced a surge of interest and energy during the anti-lockdown protests, many of the organisers of these groups need a new offline outlet to keep the momentum going, as users tend to lose interest and drift away without a direct and immediate cause.
We're not angry anymore.
Please, we need more red meat.
Yeah, I mean, that is literally exactly it.
Anger levels lowering.
Heart rate slowing.
It's Crank, where they have to keep injecting with hatred.
I fucking loved that movie, by the way.
One and two.
Of course.
Both classics.
They're pretty fun, actually, I admit.
When he literally applies a defibrillator to himself.
Yes, or he realizes that he has to engage in intercourse with his girlfriend in front of a crowd of like a hundred people.
Oh boy.
One thing that I think a lot of the left don't quite understand is that the contemporary far-right is genuinely jealous of their protesting power and wants to emulate that ability to mobilise.
This was something admitted by the American neo-Nazi Christopher Cantwell, more commonly known as the Crying Nazi, at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina.
Where various far-right groups ostensibly got together to protest the removal of a Confederate statue.
Can you talk a little bit about the right adopting the politics or the political style of the left?
We don't have the camaraderie, we don't have the trust level that our rivals do.
And that camaraderie and trust is built up through activism and that is one of the tactics that we're adopting.
A bit like when QAnon rebranded as Save the Children, the far right have cannily deduced that most people care about children's protection, and so hope to gain support by picting events that they can falsely claim are grooming children by playing on long-standing latent homophobic tropes about gay and trans people, represented here through drag queens.
Also a little like QAnon, this is a trend that began in the United States with groups like Proud Boys, and has travelled over here.
Lots of people have pointed out the fact that this country actually has a long-standing and uncontroversial tradition of male actors in dresses called pantomime dames, entertaining children in theatres.
Yeah, wait till you show these people the globe theater that Shakespeare performed!
Yeah, I actually saw Ian McKellen as a pantomime dame as Widow Twankey in Aladdin when I was a child.
It was very fun.
Dame Magneto!
Yeah, I've heard of Dame Edna, but I believe she's Australian.
I always thought she was British.
She was little before my time, Dame Edna.
That's the only one I know.
Oh yeah, you're right.
Australian.
Well, close enough.
Close enough, love!
But for far-right groups like Patriotic Alternative, the difference is clear.
One is LGBT culture and thus dangerous to young minds, and the other is not.
If it wasn't Drag Queen Story Hour, it would be some other innocuous event because these groups are fully aware that they need to stay active and self-promoting to survive.
As an excellent report put together by David Lawrence and Gregory Davis for Hope Not Hate put it,
"The white nationalist group Patriot Alternatives' campaign against Drag Queen Story Hour is also
highly opportunistic. Discussing the topic in a live stream on 29th of July, leader Mark Collette
said little about the supposed harms of these storytelling sessions, but instead spent over
10 minutes gloating about the media coverage and supposed public support it had garnered
for its fringe group of fascists."
In Collette's eyes, the campaign serves to, quote, put concerned individuals in touch with PA and its ethno-nationalist politics.
Upsettingly, some of our right-wing press have even been egging these protests on and giving them an air of legitimacy they don't deserve.
A Telegraph article described the protesters at an event in Reading as mothers and the Daily Express as furious parents.
It would be more accurate to call them neo-fascist and anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists who've gathered with the express purpose of slandering LGBT people as paedophiles and gaining notoriety themselves.
Now that this show was showing up in my own city, I decided to go and see it for myself.
I hadn't actually really intended to go in a journalistic capacity, so much as to join the counter-protest, which had been organised by local LGBT and anti-fascist activists to allow the parents and the children safe passage to the library.
I brought my microphone just in case, but assumed I wouldn't use it.
When I arrived, about an hour before the story hour was meant to start, the counter-protesters already vastly outnumbered the protesters themselves.
who at that point were just about a dozen people.
They were mostly middle-aged, with a mixture of men and women.
One grey-haired lady held a sign that read, not homophobic, not transphobic, just protecting children's innocence.
They looked too old and disorganised to be patriotic alternatives, so I deduce they were probably evangelical Christians, a suspicion which was immediately confirmed when one guy began yelling at us that Jesus loves us and just wants us to repent.
Another guy with grey hair, glasses and what I think was an Australian accent began to yell that we had no future and would, quote, all be gone in 30 years, unquote, because we wouldn't have children, which did seem to contradict the not homophobic message.
Interestingly, two of the only young people with the protesters at that point had cameras set up on tripods which were aimed firmly at us counter-protesters.
It seems that the United Kingdom has its own fledgling Andy Nose, who show up live-streaming at far-right rallies in the hopes of getting footage of supposed Antifa activists acting particularly weird, angry or, best of all, violent, in order to gain a foothold in the right-wing digital media sphere.
One of these aspiring documentarians, I would later learn, was a teenager whose parents were attending the protests themselves.
She was pretty non-confrontational, and chatted with the protesters but didn't really address any of us.
The other one, a man who I'd guess was in his thirties, seemed to understand better that if you want to get shocking, violent content that will go viral, you need to try to provoke it.
I watched him shouting insulting and sometimes straight up bigoted things at many of the people in our crowd, trying to rile them up into throwing a punch.
I wasn't recording anything at the time, but luckily for me his livestream is still up, so I have audio evidence of that.
Do you know what I'm saying?
*loud noise* Chaos.
*laughter* I really do wish they didn't sound exactly like my, um,
somewhat, uh, racist imitation of them.
*laughter* Despite the protesters' continued insistence that they had no problem with gay people, just this particular event, it wasn't hard to find evidence of them being derogatory and shouting homophobic slurs at the parents as they walked into the library with their children, cheered on by the pro-LGBT crowd.
He doesn't even want to go!
He doesn't even want to go!
That is bad!
Just from an impartial point of view.
Impartially?
Yeah.
You're wrong.
He's fucking two big dykes.
I know.
I know.
I watched.
Baffled is the brain.
He doesn't even want to go.
That was really clear.
He's like, no mums.
No mums.
Don't take me in there.
It's fucking gay, mums!
Don't take me in there!
Wow.
They're like, yeah, that kid was thinking homophobic slurs.
I could tell it in his face.
Yeah, that kid was being, was no doubt agreeing with me and being homophobic about his own parents.
I know when I look at a kid's face and he's like, this is gay.
I can tell, I could tell when he's thinking that.
I'm normal.
Around the time that the event was meant to start, Patriotic Alternative arrived.
Patriotic Alternative, as I said earlier, are a British far-right white nationalist group who've become notorious for their racist publicity stunts, such as leafleting campaigns saying white people are being, quote, replaced with immigrants, and flying White Lives Matter banners over historic sites.
By contrast to the original protesters, they were organised.
They were mostly clean-cut young guys in their twenties, wearing shirts, with one older guy among their ranks who looked to be their leader.
They came with professionally made identical signs which showed stick figures of a man and woman holding an umbrella over two children to protect them from the rain, which was coloured like a pride flag.
It's raining men!
We gotta stop it!
It's raining men!
Open your umbrellas!
They unfurled a banner which read, Leave Our Kids Alone, Patriotic Alternative.
Yes, that's what Pink Floyd meant.
They faced away from the counter-protesters and out from the front of the library so it could be seen by as many passers-by as possible.
From the way they faced and the time they arrived, at which point most parents had already entered the library, it was clear there was a difference in goals between them and the other protesters.
The first half were a mixed assortment of anti-vaxxers, white nationalists and evangelicals, with handmade, hard-to-read signs, and who had really just wanted to come and shout at gay people or start a fight for content.
Patriotic Alternative, by contrast, wanted everyone to see them.
It was clear that they'd been told to be on their best behaviour and appear as respectable as possible, but they couldn't always help themselves.
A friend of mine who was attending with me said she heard one yell, it's okay to be white, before being quickly shushed by the others.
At one point, a woman with a trans flag stood in front of them trying to block their banner, and the young guys began yelling, groom a scum off our streets at her, in a parody of an anti-fascist chant.
[Chanting
[Chanting]
I was honestly in two minds about whether to interview the protesters at this point.
There were a few reasons for this hesitancy.
One was that frankly, it was a bit of a scary prospect.
Interviewing QAnoners and anti-lockdown protesters was one thing, but explicit fascists was another.
Particularly in my home city, with a number of my friends in the counter-protest crowd.
The other reason I was cautious was that it was obvious Patriotic Alternative were running a pretty slick operation with an eye to optics.
And had ensnared a number of journalists into reporting on them in exactly the way they wanted before, part of me worried that by interviewing them, I'd just be amplifying that message.
Now, I don't think I'm a particularly great interviewer with the ability to unseat them and get them to expose themselves, but I do think I know a fair bit about far-right movements and how they use language, so I could at least frame what they told me in a critical light.
So I decided to be brave and start chatting.
What I hadn't reckoned on was that it was actually quite hard to get people to talk to me.
Unlike the anti-lockdown or Save the Children demos I'd been at where people were desperate to share their message, it seemed some media discipline had been instilled in these protesters, who politely turned me down again and again.
Finally, I spoke to a guy who was holding copies of The Light newspaper, which is an anti-vaccine conspiracy publication founded during Covid.
He, surprise surprise, didn't want to be interviewed either, but did point me towards someone who would, which seemed to have the effect of reversing my streak of bad luck.
Even then, I did get asked by everyone who I worked for before they agreed.
This is yet another case of me being relieved that our podcast has a relatively ambiguous name.
And if my potential subjects were still looking uncertain, I would add that we were an independent podcast as well.
Which is true, but I knew carried a certain cachet in far-right circles, as is often how their media describes themselves.
I think I had a couple of other things on my side too, which was that even though I had been in the counter-protest earlier, I didn't look like I had, since we'd all been told to wear brightly coloured clothes like a pride festival, but I'm quite a boring person who doesn't own that much colourful clothing.
I guess I looked enough like a normal white blonde lady who was being friendly to them, which I guess made them think I could plausibly be one of them, or at least someone sympathetic to their ideas.
One of them, a red-haired guy in a flat cap carrying an England flag that he would unfurl sporadically throughout the protest, agreed to talk to me.
He said he was from something called the Independent Nationalist Network, which I later learned was a pretty small splinter group from Patriotic Alternative.
Now, something I should be clear on here for our listeners with these interviews is that even though most of them tried to keep it respectable with me, you're going to be hearing a lot of anti-LGBT dog whistles in all of these.
That shouldn't be a surprise given the nature of the protest, but it did just feel worth flagging up.
So, we're here at the Drag Queen Story Hour protest.
Do you want to tell me about why you're here?
Yeah, we're protesting against the Drag Queen story.
At the end of the day, as a taxpayer, I think this is a complete waste of money, a complete waste of resources.
It could be up to, I don't know about this specific one, but the main one, Ada, is it Ada?
It's reported £450 a day.
Obviously, every day that mounts up.
Obviously, police with protection.
Some people say, well, they wouldn't need police with protection if we wasn't here.
But, of course, as a taxpayer, we do not believe that children should be introduced at such a young age to adult entertainers.
We don't see police storytime hour.
We don't see, like, fireman storytime hour.
So what has Drag Queen got one to do with talking to our children at the end of the day?
And as a taxpayer, at the very least, could the parents who want to bring children into this environment pay for it themselves?
We're in a living crisis right now.
Everything's costing through the roof.
We have veterans on the streets, homeless.
They don't seem to be getting much support.
We have children already in education struggling for support as well.
So we just think this is a bit immoral as well.
Right, thank you.
Is this the first protest you've been to for Drag Queen Story Hour?
No, I've been to the one in North Orsham.
We were actually in the media for that, for helping to get that shut down.
We've been leafleting every day, me and many others, different groups obviously.
We've got a PA lot, but we're from the Independent Nationalist Network.
There's two of us here from there.
And then other independents as well, so we're not all part of this one group.
But obviously we're all uniting under one banner, which is to stop grooming and sexualisation of our children.
And the Independent National Network, so that's an England phenomenon then, that's why you've got the England flag.
Yeah, we are here for the English people first, we should be putting our own people first, you know, charity because at home obviously, you know, we know that other countries need our help and other people in our country that's not necessarily English needs help, but we believe we are the forgotten ones and it's quite evident, I've seen what's going on.
Just going through the town centres in all our major cities, they are a super majority English people that's on our streets and we should be
offering support for those people.
English children, the indigenous English children are struggling the most at the moment in education.
So, you know, we believe we're being treated like second class citizens in our own nation.
Now I'm trying to imagine what police story hour would be.
Yeah, I mean, but like, what's so weird is that like police do come into schools.
Like, you do get that quite a lot.
100%.
But do they read, C-Spot run, C-Spot die in an officer-related shooting?
No, they hold up a bag, they hold up a bag of, you know, oregano, and they're like, this is, this is marijuana.
Oh, this is dangerous.
It's a gateway drug.
This is what happened in my school.
It was called D.A.R.E.
The police officers came in and they held up drugs and they showed off the, you know, they came in, by the way, with their full, you know, kit on.
They've got handguns, you know, attached to their waist.
I was probably in like, what, like third or fourth grade, maybe.
Yep.
Yeah, so that was my police story, Howard.
I bet you felt safe.
I walked away from that being like, I'm never, ever, ever going to smoke marijuana.
Yeah, we had something really similar, actually, although he didn't have a gun, obviously, but he did come in and told us all about drugs.
And I remember there was a bit where he was like, marijuana has a very strong smell, so you'll be able to smell if someone's smoking it around you.
How many of you have been able to smell when someone was smoking marijuana near you?
And like loads of people put up their hands and I just like felt like such a loser because I didn't know what it smelled like.
Put up your hand if you have cool parents, kids!
Yeah, people offering me free drugs was less of an issue than my D.A.R.E.
officer told me.
Yeah, I remember my D.A.R.E.
officer.
His name was Deputy Pewitt.
And yeah, he told us about the evils of drugs and also smoking.
And also one of the students asked him if he ever shot a guy before.
And he gave me Winding answer, kind of confusing answer that kind of indicated to me that he totally had.
I mean, at least at least your school allowed the officer to use their real name.
Ours was called Officer Friendly.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
To prevent reprisals?
No, it's officer friendly!
No, it's that police are friendly and they're here to help!
Just a bunch of children taking down a police officer like raptors taking down a T-Rex.
Get off me!
I'm officer friendly!
Yeah, we didn't have dare in my schools, but we still had the guys coming by to tell us about drugs.
It was the era of just say no, K-N-O-W, and they would explain the different drugs.
I mean, all of them are bad, but it was just like, they're all bad in different ways, different, interesting, unique ways.
But then our art teacher had a keychain, and when you opened it, it smelled like weed and had weed in it.
Of course.
And everybody was like, she's cool.
Anyway, yeah.
His attempt to connect the Drag Queen Story Hour event with public waste, poverty and the cost of living crisis struck me as a particularly clever bit of spin.
The cost of living is rising everywhere, but the United Kingdom is currently facing one of the worst cases in Europe, and there is mounting public frustration at how unwilling our government seems to be to do anything about it other than patronising money-saving tips.
In particular, winter this year is predicted to be very bad, with huge unpayable heating bills having the potential to become, in the words of the NHS Confederation, a humanitarian crisis.
In other words, people are angry, and likely to become angrier as more of them start to feel the pinch.
So by acknowledging that problem, and then directing people to supposed wastes of taxpayer money that just happened to align with his own far-right bugbears, this representative clearly felt confident he could persuade more people to his cause.
It was clear he was aiming for the appearance of respectable conservative economic talking points, so I decided to push him, as gently as I felt I safely could, on the LGBT angle.
I want to be clear, this is going to be a cold gay winter.
Winter is coming.
With the help of another guy.
Jesus Christ.
What do you think?
Because there's been obviously a really big counter protest here today.
Lots of people with kind of pride flags and lovers love and stuff like that.
What do you think about that?
Do you think you are giving off like a hateful message?
Sorry, say that again.
So they would say you're giving off a hateful message.
What would you respond to that?
Well, I think we're not giving a hateful message, we're just trying to raise awareness on the sexualisation against our children.
You know, this drag queen today, obviously is Aunt Titania, I think it's pronounced, goes by the name of Titty Trash.
Now, I've just debated one guy here, which I have recorded, if it was one of us reading in that library today, yeah, The same book.
Would you be here?
No, no.
I went off in a huff.
Do you know what I mean?
So, even ourselves.
As our people, because they believe we're giving off a hateful message.
They would be protesting against us if it was us in their... But at the same time, look, we're not protesting against gay pride, are we?
We're not protesting against gay clubs.
We're here because it's against children and that's our main focus.
They're trying to legal... They're trying to normalise paedophilia.
They've now come up with a new word, MAPS, Minor Attractive Persons.
We think this is just going too far.
When's it going to end?
When's it going to stop?
So who's trying to normalise paedophilia?
Well we believe that obviously everyone involved, the establishment, the education system, this mob over there.
When's it going to end?
If we don't start raising awareness now, when's it going to stop?
When is it going to stop?
Will this be coming into our schools in the next few months?
So your position is, if parents want to do this...
On their own dime, for their own kids, fine.
But don't get the state involved.
Yeah, I mean, obviously I would be against that, but I wouldn't protest it because at least you're using your own money as such, so again, I am against that, but if it's using their own money, what else can I do?
But this is using our taxpayers' money.
You know, a lot of us have to take a day off work today to try and protest against this.
We had to.
I'm missing out on my wage because I'm so fucking hateful.
Yeah, yeah, that's actually a common theme of a lot of the interviews that I point out, like, when I say that the counter protest is a lot bigger, they'll go, well, we all had to take days off work, we've got jobs.
I was like, yeah, I mean, it's not like these are professional protesters, you know, like, they've got jobs too.
Or I took a day off from my job at the racism factory.
Yeah.
Also, one thing I should say, because this is another thing that does get brought up in lots of interviews, this minor attracted persons thing.
I mean, as far as I understand it, it's a term that some sociologists have used to describe adults who are attracted to children.
They think it's a kind of destigmatizing thing.
It's a very controversial term, but it has nothing to do with gay people or pride.
It's completely unrelated to that.
It's just a kind of intra-academic sort of debate and discussion.
At the end of the interview, when I turned the microphone off, he decided to try to figure out my angle.
Did you agree with anything I just said there?
He asked.
Although I deliberately described myself as ambiguously as possible when approaching him for an interview, I am ultimately a pure of heart soul who cannot tell a lie when faced a direct question like that, so I told him that honestly, I didn't.
He asked me for the name of our podcast again and began Google searching it right in front of me.
Oh boy.
It felt like being honest about who we are had been the ethical thing to do as a journalist, but I suspect word got round the protest quickly due to what happened in the next interview.
The next person who agreed to talk to me was the older guy I'd seen with Patriotic Alternative.
This man was clearly media trained and knew how to frame the group in a way that emphasised them as just a wholesome, pro-family, pro-British organisation.
You said you're with Patriotic Alternative, so as I understand it, that's the sort of nationalist group, is that right?
Patriotic Alternative is a patriotic, as the name suggests, patriotic nationalist organisation.
We're not yet registered as a political party.
Our main focus is making sure that we build a strong sense of community amongst our people.
It's sad to say that our people seem to be the most I've lost my thread, lost my thread.
That's alright.
OK, I've just got a dry mouth as well, hold on.
Right.
Right, Patriarchal Alternative, as the name suggests, is a patriotic organisation.
We're not yet registered as a political party.
Our main focus is building a sense of community amongst our people.
That people being the British, the native British, English, Welsh, Scottish.
And we believe that we have a right to self-determination, just like everybody else has.
And everybody has in this world, every ethnic group, has a right to self-determination in their own homeland.
And our focus is making people aware of the demographic change that's taking place here in Britain, the anti-family policies that are taking place.
In fact, they're sweeping the nation right across the systems of education, the media, and other forms of public life.
So, we're here today as part of that protest against what we see as the pro-LGBT agenda, which is very anti-family.
We believe in natalist policies, we believe that the nuclear family is the core of a healthy nation, and anything that stands in the way of having those strong family bonds is an impediment to having a strong society.
So you've got people, you've got a big counter-protest here, people with rainbow signs saying no to hate and stuff like that.
They obviously think that what you're saying is a hateful message, is a bigoted one.
What do you respond to that?
We actually say that they're the bigots.
We're the ones that are saying that it is completely wrong and inappropriate for grown men dressed as women to read stories to young impressionable children And that we believe that this is a prelude to, ultimately, the legalisation of paedophilia.
These people over here with their rainbow flags and all the other funny coloured flags that they see and never-ending changes to their flags and never-ending changes to their vocabulary, these are the ones who are the real bigots trying to impose their rather twisted agenda on the rest of society.
So you said you're here with Patriotic Alternative.
I've already spoken to a guy who said he was from the Independent Nationalist Network.
There was somebody here who had an anti-vaccine sign or t-shirt?
Possibly, yes.
I can't see them.
So it's a broad tent, right, this movement?
Patrick Alternative here under its own steam.
The other organisations that you mentioned, I think possibly the anti-vax individuals are from an organisation, a very loose organisation called Stand in the Park.
It's a leaderless organisation and we have similarities with organisations such as Stand in the Park.
We're opposed to compulsory vaccination.
We believe that it's the right of everybody to determine what vaccines or what medical treatments they are offered and what they decide to choose and what they choose to have inside them.
So yes, there are similarities, but as I said, Patriot Alternative is here in its own right.
We are possibly the fastest.
We are, sorry, I'll qualify that.
Party Alternative is by far the fastest growing and largest nationalist organisation here in Great Britain.
Everybody here today is from our region and the fact that we've got nearly two dozen people out from our region on a weekday shows that.
Two things, first of all, our level of dedication, the fact that we've taken days off work to
get here on a weekday, and that we managed to get a very good number of people out on
a workday shows the level of commitment that we've got, the fact that we're fast growing,
and the level of commitment and dedication.
You need a moment, we can pause.
No, no, let's carry on.
I'm just giving an interview too.
He's listening.
Oh boy.
It's incredible how they'll be like, "Could I take that line again and then do it exactly
the same way.
So they clearly just had, you know, kind of script.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Like, it's just very, very obviously media trained.
He knew, like, if he stumbled in a sentence to start again, you know, just that kind of thing.
He kind of knew how to, how to, and whatever question I asked, he would kind of just bring it back to.
Like, I sort of tried to sort of unseat him a little there, like, bring up the other organizations.
I wanted to kind of needle and see if they were going to be like, oh, we're not like those crazies.
But he just kind of, again, brought it back to patriotic alternative and said pretty much the same thing.
Yeah, and just proved your point by basically being like, uh, yeah, like, uh, these, yeah, these other organizations, uh, they, yeah, there's some overlap here, and, uh, yeah, we also believe, uh, that, you know, you shouldn't be forced to take the vaccine, which, uh, nobody's doing, by the way, nobody's forcing you to take it.
The other thing that's funny is that, like, he's like, oh, like, LGBTQ people are, like, anti-family, and it's like, oh, wait, it's like, wait, the people who have been, like, literally fighting for decades to be allowed to get married and be allowed to adopt children, are like, that's anti-family somehow?
Well, their version of the family.
Of course.
I mean, like, there were literally, the whole point of that protest was to harass families
going into the library, do you know?
Yeah, yeah.
Who looks anti-family there?
But yeah, that interruption that you hear at the end where I say, oh, we can pause,
what's actually happening there is two of the younger PA guys
in sunglasses walked up to us.
I originally assumed they wanted something from the older guy, which is why I said
we could pause the interview.
but they just said they wanted to listen.
Since none of the younger lot had agreed to talk to me, it's possible they just wanted to learn how to work the media from their leader.
The other possibility, which was very much on my mind, was that they had either learned or guessed that I wasn't a friend to their ideas, and wanted to intimidate me with plausible deniability.
I kept going without looking at them, and I guess they got bored pretty quickly as we chatted, since by the end of the interview I could see they'd wandered off.
Okay, so is this the first Drag Queen Story Hour you've been to?
Because I know there have been other Drag Queen Story Hours across the country.
Patriotic Alternative has been opposed and protesting against the Drag Queen Story Hour activities right across the country.
This is the first Drag Queen Story Hour that has taken place here in the Eastern Region.
We managed successfully to stop the Drag Queen Story Hours going ahead in Cromer and North Walsham earlier on this month.
The fact that we announced and told Norfolk County Council that we would be protesting outside the libraries at North Walsham and Cromer was enough for them to call off the Drag Queen Story Hour but they seem to want to make a Norwich here, probably because it is the headquarters of, it's the largest town in Norfolk and it's also the headquarters of the council.
It's also the largest library in the county as well.
They wanted to make a showcase here and ensure that the Drag Queen Story Hour did go ahead.
We've only seen one, we believe only one parent has taken his We haven't seen any other parents go in so we're not sure how successful the Drag Queen story is this afternoon.
But the fact that we're here at all is a win for people who are by far the majority of people in this country who are opposed to the sexualisation of our children.
So if that is true, because I think most people would describe themselves as anti-paedophilia, right?
We really much think that paedophilia is very much a minority and probably, as well as being a criminal activity, possibly some sort of mental defect as well.
So how do we explain then that, you know, there's so many counter-protesters here today and such a smaller, even if it's a good turnout?
Yeah, okay, several reasons.
One, people who think like us, most of us have got day jobs, we've got families to look after and we give that priority.
The fact that we're here today, as I said earlier on, just shows our level of commitment that we decided to take a day off work.
We've made arrangements for family care and so on while we're here.
Why are there so many counter-protesters here today?
Partly because it's a university city.
A lot of these people will be students who are in between terms.
It's summer holidays of course.
And it is generally a liberal town with both a capital L and a small l. So I can imagine that's why a lot of people are here.
The presence of a very large university and a large student population is without doubt the single biggest factor.
Why aren't there more of us?
Well, as I said, most of us have got day jobs and we have to give that the priority.
Yeah.
Alright, okay, just one more question and I'll let you go.
So you kind of say, you know, it's up to a parent individually for their choice to have a vaccine, which I agree with, but what would you say to people who say, well, it's up to parents individually if they want to take their kid to see a drag queen and read them a story?
Well of course, every parent has got the... I'm not saying that every parent should simply not go.
Every parent's got a free choice in the matter, of course they have.
What we're here to say is that we're here to protest against the sexualisation of our children by the whole concept of Drag Queen Story Hour.
By the end of that, I knew it probably wouldn't be long until ranks had closed completely.
So, out of desperation, I asked if there was anyone else the patriotic alternative leader suggested I talk to.
To my surprise, he singled out a middle-aged hippie-ish lady in glasses who had been there from the very beginning, and I'd heard shouting something about Jesus at us earlier.
He said she'd be a good person to interview if I wanted the moral, religious angle on these protests.
I did the usual who-do-you-work-for dance with her, and eventually she agreed to an interview.
Now, I know I've already given you a warning for content, but I'm just going to re-up that one here, because while my first two interviews spoke in barely concealed dog whistles about gay and trans people, this woman didn't even bother with that.
Yeah, so I wondered if you could tell me a little bit about what has brought you to here, which is the Norwich Drag Queen Story Hour protests.
It is to stand against the sexualisation of children, which is happening.
It's happening not only here, it's happening in schools, it's happening in primary schools, it's happening with associations like Stonewall.
Children are becoming sexualised from a very young age.
And that's why I'm here.
I'm here to be a voice against that.
Could you talk to us, because I'm not a parent and I don't think many of our listeners are, so they won't really know what this looks like.
What is the sexualisation that's happening in schools?
It's the LGBT rainbow flag is, it's being promoted to young children.
Now, I worked in primary schools and there was a boy at the age of five years old and he said to me, when I grow up I'm going to be called Sarah.
And I didn't doubt that for a minute.
And it got me thinking, is homosexuality nurture or is it nature?
I do believe some people are born into this world gay.
I do believe that.
I think this is A burden upon them, but I do also believe that children can be taught and indoctrinated into a lifestyle that they wouldn't normally take because it's popular, because it's colourful, because it's got rainbows and unicorns and it's got everything that young children like.
And the particular drag artist, Ada HD, has openly said that he wants to be a role model for young children.
A role model is something some people look up to, to aspire to become.
He is a drag queen.
If they think it's okay.
Mummy, that's my role model.
Our role models used to be our mum and dad.
Our role models used to be the police officers upholding the law.
The role models used to be heroes from stories.
Role models are now aggressive footballers.
Role models are the likes of Miley Cyrus that are doing nude photographs.
When she was Hannah Montana, she then changed to be Miley Cyrus.
So all her young followers Well, Mummy, she's taken her clothes off of the camera.
I'm going to take my clothes off of the camera.
That's not OK.
And the likes of Madonna, the younger generation, Like a Virgin, it started years and years and years ago.
And it actually started, this whole movement actually started with the Frankfurt School, with the School of Sexology, where it was, Magnus Hörnsfeld was Practicing sex change is on people.
This is not a new thing.
This has come down from generation to generation.
So a role model used to be something you would look up to, to aspire to be.
A man in drag that is promoting anal sex, that is promoting orgies.
Why do young children need that?
As a role model.
If they want to explore that when they're older, they're grown up, they can make their own minds up.
Children are influential, they're vulnerable, they will look to anything.
What do I want to be when I grow up?
I want to be this, I want to be this, I want to be this.
Well now they're being told, well you can now be a boy, you can now be a girl.
That is against nature, it is against the Bible.
I'm pretty sure the stories they're reading them have nothing to do with anal orgies, but I don't know.
I would imagine that the storyteller would get in some serious trouble if they walked into the library and was like, and now for a story about anal sex.
Gay orgies.
Here we go, page one.
Like, come on!
The thing is, all the- and I mean, this is always the case, right?
What these people are mad about is the fantasy of what they imagine is happening in these places.
It's not based in anything real, it's just the idea of sexuality or orientation I don't like and what could they be saying because I hate this so much!
It's like, Yeah, they want them to become invisible again and shamed.
And the idea that this is a burden on people who are gay is directly related to people like you.
Yeah.
That's why it's a burden.
Yeah.
I mean, it was a bit like the second interview I did with the Patriotic Alternative guy where he said something like, you know, drag queens would be found, they should normally be found in burlesque clubs and stuff.
I kind of thought, I didn't say it, but I was like, do you think that drag queens are strippers?
Like they take off their clothes, do you know?
Because actually drag queens are more like stand-up, right?
It's like stand-up in costume.
They don't take off their clothes because they've got all this padding and amazing amount of work.
I don't know, it's kind of this strange misunderstanding of what the whole thing involves.
Yeah.
But the children are thinking about how there's a penis under that dress!
Maybe, but like anything, like kids' desires are fleeting.
Like everybody who came through my elementary school hawking something, I wanted to be that person for a couple hours.
You know, it's like the animal handler came in and I was like, oh, it'd be so cool to be an animal handler.
I want to be that.
And then the police officer friendly came in.
I was like, oh, I really want to be a police officer.
Like, that would be so cool.
The magician, you know, came in to do an auditorium presentation.
I really want to be a magician.
I didn't end up as any of those things.
We didn't have a podcaster come into my school.
And this is where, you know, this is where I like ended up.
We can only hope.
Yeah, we can only hope.
Next up is podcaster story hour.
I don't, I'm actually very much against that.
Children should not be exposed to podcasts until they're properly developed, can sort of understand what they're looking at.
Because it might look like it's cool, but man, this is not the life you want, children.
No.
Podcasters may sound like they're cool, but they don't look cool.
Yeah, mamas don't let your babies grow up to be podcasters.
The great Hal Sparks came into my school to give a presentation to my theater class about working in Hollywood.
And he essentially was like, I was broke for a really long time, and it was really hard.
And if there's anything else you're interested in, you should probably pursue that.
But if you have to pursue acting or a career in entertainment, it's going to be really tough.
And I honestly, at that point, I was like, this guy's the coolest motherfucker I have ever encountered.
That's so funny.
He was like trying to do Scared Straight for being an actor.
Yes, yes.
I like the idea that children are being led to believe that you can take a rabbit out of a hat.
That's against Jesus!
Anyway, one thing that she said that my ears pricked up at was the Magnus Hirschfeld and the Frankfurt School reference.
The Frankfurt School reference is, of course, a pretty common far-right dog whistle referencing the anti-Semitic cultural Marxism conspiracy theory.
Magnus Hirschfeld, who actually had nothing to do with the Frankfurt School, was a German-Jewish sexologist based in Berlin who was targeted by the Nazis for being gay, Jewish and an advocate for gay and transgender rights.
Many of the famous pictures of the Nazis burning so-called degenerate books are actually them burning his institute's research into sexual minorities.
So hearing a lady happily referencing him as a devious mastermind behind a modern-day secret LGBT agenda targeting children felt pretty significant and just a little Nazi.
As it happens, I was completely right to be suspicious.
I posted a picture of the protests on Twitter while I was there and an investigative journalist called Katherine Denkinson, who has written about the Drag Queen Story Hour protests for the Byline Times, got in touch with me.
She told me the woman I was talking to was Jodie Swingler, a far-right activist who's worked with Patriotic Alternative before and who grabbed headlines last year by calling in to an LBC show and grilling Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party, about demographic replacement.
Something I actually talked about on QAA at the time, in our episode on the Christchurch Report.
She's appeared on live streams with Patriotic Alternative leader Mark Collett, where they've talked openly about the Jewish question.
Which I think makes it pretty clear where she's coming from with those comments, and her next one about Benjamin Disraeli, this country's first and so far only Jewish Prime Minister, and the certain religions that supposedly teach inversion.
You mentioned the Bible earlier.
Do you see this as a spiritual fight?
I see the society we are currently living in as a spiritual battle.
This is an existential battle.
This is good versus evil.
This is light versus dark.
This isn't about left versus right.
This is about right versus wrong.
This is becoming the devil's playground, the satanic rituals, the satanic... The rainbow This is God's promise from the Bible.
The rainbow is a biblical sign.
It has been stolen, it has been taken from us, and we will reclaim the rainbow back.
So, do you think then that this is an expression of Satanism?
And if so, do people know that they're doing it?
Have they been duped into it?
So many people don't have God in their lives.
They don't have God, they don't have religion, and that's no accident either.
Our government, I believe it was 1830 to 1858, our government were trying to take the Christian oath out of our government so that politicians that served us, our people, didn't have to sign a Christian oath on the Bible.
Once that was removed, our MPs were no longer true to the faith, they were no longer true to religion, the Bible, And what has been happening is a very steady process over generations, over generations.
First, homosexuals just wanted to marry the same sex.
That was... It couldn't happen generations ago.
So the first step was homosexuality became Popular.
Now homosexuals can have same-sex marriages.
Now we've got... Two years ago, they tried to bring Drag Queen Story Hour to the UK.
Two years ago.
It got cancelled two years ago because the public said, no, this is wrong.
Two years on, it's now happening.
Well this year there was a family sex show that wanted to do a tour which was aimed at children having sex, sexual positions, sexual identity, sexual conversations for children on stage.
That was cancelled this year.
So can we expect in another two years that there will be children being taken to sex shows where they will be watching adults having sex with other adults and because this minor attracted person nonsense is coming in, could we be seeing children having sex with adults on stage in another two years?
Because if we don't stop what's going on now, paedophilia will be normalised and we have to stop that because children are innocent, they need to remain innocent.
You clearly have done so much research on this stuff.
You're going back to dates in the 1850s and obviously a lot of this stuff isn't readily available.
It's not going to be published in mainstream newspapers and stuff like that.
So where should people go if they want to learn more about this?
If you look at the Christian Oath, I believe Benjamin Disraeli was the MP at the time, or he was due to be the MP.
I'm not sure of the date on Benjamin Disraeli.
Look up the Frankfurt School, look at the ideology of Karl Marx.
Look at the ideology of ruining and disrupting the nuclear family, where it was mum, dad and a lovely, happy, healthy family of children.
Children now are mutilating themselves.
They're not breeding, they have to recruit and that is the grooming essence.
So go to the Frankfurt School, go to 1830 to 1858 with the Christian Oath being removed from UK Parliament.
Where else can people go?
Look up people like Douglas Rhee, The Controversy of Zion, read his book.
And this is a battle, we have been facing this battle for Thousands of years.
And this is the battle against nature.
This is where they have turned nature upside down.
It is inversion.
And there are certain religions, certain groups that will teach inversion.
And we have to stand with nature.
We have to stand with God.
That's my final question.
I'll let you go.
This has been great.
So why do they teach inversion?
What's the end goal for them?
To end God, that they can themselves, they see themselves as God.
They preach that they had an argument with God and they won.
So the end goal is to remove God, it's to have themselves as God.
We are living in a religion where liberalism is the new religion.
The person becomes God.
I can do what I want, I can do it now, this is my life.
We have, if you look at the Muslims, they have their book, they follow their book strictly, they live cohesively with their communities.
You look to the Jews, they have their book, they live cohesively.
Us as Christians, we used to be a Christian nation, we are now a mess.
We are a rainbow, confused, mutilated mess because we have lost our book.
We have lost our way.
So that's the end goal.
Get rid of God.
It's the devil's playground.
Oh God!
So much in there.
It's like, oh my God.
Where do you even start to break that down?
We represent evaporated tiny droplets of water struck by sunlight at a certain angle, and we're taking the rainbow back!
Yeah, it's like, looky charms, reclaim the rainbow!
Also, doesn't this woman realize that every character in the Bible is super gay?
And what?
And many of them are Jewish.
You've got Moses.
He's like in robes.
He's looking good.
He's building ships.
He's talking to a burning bush, you know You got the Maccabees
These are like some jack dudes in like some revealing armor.
They're burning candles for eight days inside of a temple.
Like, come on, I mean... I love the idea that Jewish people are living cohesively, even though their religion involves, like, constant reinterpretation of the text and arguing with each other.
Yeah, of course.
Have you talked to any Jewish people?
Yeah.
No.
Well, of course not.
And it's like, I have a feeling that she was really biting her tongue as she named two other religions that she probably hates.
Yeah, I mean it is really funny to be talking about like, I don't know, certain religions that teach inversion and she's saying, oh, you know, they preach that they had a fight with God and they won.
It's just all got like those three brackets around everything she's saying.
And then she's just like, look at the Jews, they're cohesive.
We should be more like them.
I'm like, hmm.
The whole thing is people being like, I can't help it, I was made this way.
It's actually the exact opposite of arguing with God or nature.
It's basically accepting nature and experiencing so much trauma and such a more painful existence than if you had just kept who you really are bottled up inside and private.
Oh, and also, I must say, God help us if any of our politicians discover her incredible catchphrase, which is, it's not right versus left, it's right versus wrong.
I gotta say, that is a great fucking phrase, and it needs to stay contained within the audio files of this podcast, or else it's gonna spread like wildflower.
This is like what everybody says here.
They all say this shit.
They all say it's not political.
Yeah, but I think the specific turn of phrase, I think.
Yeah.
Right.
So good marketing.
Well, now it's been like, it's been tainted by a neo-Nazi saying it, so hopefully that'll just keep it.
There we go.
Yeah, she is astonishing.
She's like, we just want the usurers to live outside the castle gates.
Like the old days, just kidding.
She's like, we want them in tents, begging for money, stepped over outside of our glorious castle, our glorious Christian castle.
After that interview, I scanned the protesters for any more people who'd be willing to talk to me, but the show seemed to be wrapping up.
It was nearly half three, two hours after the story hour had begun, and it seemed that all the parents and children had managed to leave the library safely and unharassed.
It almost felt as if by the time Patriotic Alternative had showed up, most of the protestors had forgotten that was what they were meant to be preventing in the first place.
I would later learn that, contrary to what one of my interview subjects said about there only being one child in attendance, Auntie Titania had in fact read to 167 people in the library that day.
And even though they may have thought the protesters' numbers of about two dozen people was a good result, they were ultimately met with a pro-LGBT counter-protest at least three times the size.
My home city, which is a pretty small place far away from more obvious progressive metropolises like Manchester and London, had pretty firmly rejected the politics of patriotic alternative.
In fact, as the group left, they stopped to take pictures with their banners outside City Hall, only to be chased off by a much larger group of counter-protesters waving pride flags, which was a pretty amusing sight.
Nonetheless, if I'm honest, the whole experience had shaken me up a little.
Talking to anti-lockdown protesters, and even at the Save the Children march, I could find something to relate to, and even sometimes empathise with, with my interview subjects.
Although I thought they were caught up in a network of dangerous conspiracy theories, I could see where many of them were coming from.
Here, there was a stronger sense of a genuinely malevolent bigotry bubbling beneath the surfaces of what they were saying, even if at least some of them were careful about maintaining plausible deniability.
Even if they'd managed to hook some anti-vaxxers in with this new protest movement, the Drag Queen Story Hour protests undeniably felt different to what I'd covered for this podcast before.
More confidently and cohesively far-right and white nationalist, pushing at the edges of a hard-won societal tolerance to see how much of it they could chip away.
It isn't lost on me that this is happening in the United Kingdom, at a time when there is an ongoing attack on transgender people by the press and our politicians.
The Labour Party faces an internal rift in its ranks over trans rights that the leadership seems determined to ignore, and it's one that much of the Conservative Party and the British media has been all too happy to use as a stick to beat them with, meaning transgender people are essentially used as a constant punching bag over polling leads and Westminster parlour games.
I don't intend to imply that these mainstream politicians share patriotic alternatives politics.
In fact, I think most of them would be horrified by their beliefs.
But it seems to me as if fascist networks have been watching that mainstream ambivalence towards LGBT rights carefully, and we're now happily exploiting it for their own gain.
This feels really dangerous to me, and I don't think it's something we can just ignore and hope it goes away.
I really hope I'm wrong, but my instinct is that the Drag Queen Story Hour events were a convenient excuse for far-right anti-LGBT mobilisation in the UK, but it won't be the last.
Yeah, grim stuff.
And, you know, I felt the same kind of difference in vibes when I went to that Disney anti-LGBT protest run by Sean Foyt and his crew of evangelical fascists.
It is.
It's truly malevolent and kind of ill-willed in a way where other movements are not.
You know, it's there's obviously she did mention, like, do your own research, but really it's not.
It's like, listen to these talking points and join the fight.
Yeah, exactly.
It almost feels as if, you know, there was always that kind of stuff, you know, kind of like tendentially there, kind of, you know, sort of like implied there when you're talking to people at QAnon protests, you know, sometimes they'll say, you know, they're trying to legalise paedophilia, have you heard about this?
And things like that.
But it's, it's often I feel like people kind of just hearing a talking point and not knowing where it comes from.
Right.
But it's almost as if now there feels like they don't even, the far right have kind of become, you know, become so kind of confident, so bold over the pandemic that they don't even have to bother with that kind of fig leaf anymore.
They can kind of show up and be like, yeah, we think you're all pedophiles, do you know?
Yeah, we think the Judeo-Bolsheviks are instilling a pro-LGBT agenda.
Well, thanks so much, Annie, for that great report.
And I think it is valuable to talk to these people, you know, even though obviously their talking points are well organized.
You know, I think you did a good job breaking down why they're saying these things and what their techniques are and also what the deficiencies in their movement are and why they kind of are trying to become more media trained and are trying to slip stories into the mainstream media.
And like you mentioned, a lot of the times that's successful.
People will just be like, some angry parents were there.
And it's like, no, no, they fucking weren't.
Yeah, exactly.
Like, you know, I don't even think many of those people were local at all.
They're just kind of touring the country, do you know?
Yeah, he said it himself.
We went from, like, city center to city center, pamphleting and stuff.
Yeah, I'd be curious to know how many of the people there protesting actually had a child that was in a, you know, that was part of the program that was, you know, involved in this event in the first place.
I would guess very few.
Yeah, I mean none of them, because it's just a totally voluntary event.
You can just bring your child if you want, which I do think is funny, because they want to get as many anti-vax people on board as possible, so they also all keep on saying it's every parent's choice to vaccinate their child.
It's funny when parental choice is important and valid and when it isn't.
I imagine them telling their boss, Oh, I'm sorry.
I have to take a couple of days off work.
I've come down with a terrible case of homophobia.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAnon Anonymous and sign up for five bucks a month.
That'll get you access to a bonus episode every week, the upcoming man clan, 10 episode series, the already fully extant Trickle down 10 episode series as well as pre-sales discounts for live shows discounts on our merch and Yeah, go check us out.
We still have tickets.
I believe to a lot of different venues We have like 12 or 13 or 14.
I think 15 total cities that we're visiting Coming September October and November.
You can go check that out at tour.qanonanonymous.com and the merch is at merch.qanonanonymous.com Annie, where can people check you out and your stuff?
Yeah, so I've got a little limited podcast series called Vaccine the Human Story, which is a little history series just about the first ever vaccine against smallpox and the first ever anti-vax movement.
You can find that on any podcast app and we also have some video content on YouTube as well.
Amazing.
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 autocue.
They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round.
They all laughed when they heard us unrecorded sound.
They all laughed and nerded in a steamboat.
Hershey and his chocolate bar.
They told Marconi, wireless was a phony.
That's how people are.
They laughed at me, wanting you.
Said I was reaching for the moon.
But oh, you came through.
Now they'll have to change their tune.
Why?
Because I drink my own urine.
And the yogis have been doing it for thousands of years, and it makes me feel woozy, and it keeps me sober from drugs and alcohol.
You know, people say, oh, you're not a doctor.
Well, it's like, people who are doctors are killing my friends and family left, right, and center.
