Premium Episode 187: Attending UK Anti-lockdown Protests with Annie Kelly (Sample)
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Annie Kelly heads to London to check on the dregs of the anti-lockdown protests that are still carrying on about a pile of conspiracy theories. Deeper structural problems reveal themselves through the continued social movements surrounding covid-skepticism.
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Music by ATM. Editing by Corey Klotz.
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Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 187 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the anti-lockdown revisited episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Brokatansky, Annie Kelly, Julian Field, and Travis View.
Hello, everybody.
We are back from the first leg of our tour.
It was so wonderful to be out there and to meet you all.
The shows were just more than a success.
However, we are also broken.
Our bodies are broken.
Our spirits are smashed.
So it's as if we had listened to our own episodes, I suppose, for a little while.
That's our current state.
We have an amazing date coming up in our hometown in one week.
Come and check us out on Tuesday the 18th at the Regent Theater in LA.
This is our hometown, so, you know, if we're treated badly, we will probably lash out.
Act out.
We're probably gonna smoke too many cigs.
We're gonna lock ourselves in our bedroom.
We're gonna say, leave me alone.
Jake, what are you gonna do to act out?
Um, I don't know.
He doesn't even know how he would act out.
I've got nothing.
I've got nothing left.
You're gonna play NBA 2K and refuse meals.
Yeah, I'll play some 2K.
You'll refuse to drink water.
I don't have any water actually in front of me.
Oh no.
We'll eat his vegetables.
Come check us out in LA.
It's going to be really fun.
I can't wait.
Then we have the second leg of the tour.
You can find all that at tour.qanonanonymous.com.
We will have stuffed Jake with a variety of different soft fabrics.
Yeah, I'll just be like a frozen taxidermy version of myself on stage.
My lines will be pre-recorded.
More than anything, we're here with Annie.
We're so excited to be here with Annie again.
She is best known for forcing me to do a podcast called Man Clan.
You might know her from that.
You might know her from being part of the British Royal Family.
Yep.
They might know me from my amusing Twitter.
Yeah, that's true.
Which is very, you know, it's a little bit charming, a little bit wry.
A little bit ironic.
It's really an award-winning Twitter account, I've been told.
Apparently, Annie's going to be bringing us on a journey into a movement that you would think was gone, the anti-lockdown movement in the UK, but no, they have lived on because they found the spirit of community and some new fun ideas that they could keep going even once the tank was empty.
Yeah, who says the British can't let things go?
ANTI-LOCKDOWN REVISITED A very warm greetings to you, cherished listeners, from your UK correspondent, Annie Kelly.
Today, I'm breaking my state-mandated period of grieving Her Majesty the Queen to bring you an important dispatch from this sacred aisle.
This will be an update from the anti-lockdown movement in the UK over a year since lockdown officially ended in England in March 2021, to see what kind of shape it's in.
Now, I imagine many of you will be thinking, if the anti-lockdown movement got what they wanted, How are they still going?
That's a completely fair question.
And the answer is, as it so often is on this podcast, conspiracy theories.
The Freedom Movement, as they call themselves now, may have nowhere near the numbers they were getting from when I was reporting on the marches over the last two years, but a much smaller, core group of believers still remain, and in their understanding of the world, the lockdowns here in the UK were only ever the beginning in a series of laws designed to usher in the Great Reset.
It's kind of amazing because it's almost like you can identify the paths in to the kind of morass of conspiracy theories that are currently coalescing together and mixing up.
But then the path out, a lot more tricky to figure out.
It's like an enchanted forest.
On the several anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine channels I follow on Telegram, I noticed the discussion of further protests in London, this time against several different pieces of legislation, as well as, more ambiently, the cost of living crisis.
One message that began circulating read the following.
Like they expect us to tolerate that, while the energy companies make billions each month.
We think not.
They're back in Parliament soon too, and once they've got their new PM high on the agenda are the Public Order Bill, a threat to our right to protest.
The online safety bill, a threat to our free speech.
The schools bill, a threat to our right to parent our own children.
And the genetic technology precision breeding bill, a threat to our whole food supply, with the other six coming soon after.
Now is time to make a stand.
Did they really call it the Genetic Technology Precision Breeding Bill?
Yeah.
Because that sounds like a conspiracy theorist made it up.
Yeah, that sounds pretty nefarious and like, you know, I love Dr. Monroe kind of stuff.
Dr. Monroe.
What was his name?
Yeah.
Dr. Marilyn Monroe.
Yeah.
I was really interested in this development in the anti-lockdown movement's messaging and strategy for a few reasons.
One that I think it's important to mention up front is that on the face of it, the message wasn't actually unreasonable.
As I've said before on this podcast, soaring energy bills are a genuine crisis in this country, and one that neither main political party seems to have a satisfying answer to.
There have already been lots of protests about this and a union-backed campaign called Enough is Enough.
And if the anti-lockdown crowd wanted to join in on making some noise, more power to them.
I also agree that the Public Order Bill, alongside the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act of 2022, are both genuinely threatening moves that make the democratic right to protest less safe than it was before.
The Public Order Bill proposes to create new criminal offences for several forms of non-violent protest that are increasingly being used by climate activists, such as locking themselves to buildings or objects.
On the one hand, it's gratifying to find common ground like this with the anti-lockdown movement, one of those maybe-we're-not-so-different-after-all moments.
But another part of me was concerned, too, that the figureheads of this movement, just as with lockdown, were using actually existing legislation as evidence to bolster the case for their pet conspiracy theory.
The Great Reset, like QAnon, is one of those theories that seemingly has no end.
Unlike conspiracy theories about events in the past, like 9-11 or the JFK assassination, it's more of a lens of interpretation for events as they unfold.
The second thing that intrigued me about the march was the promised empowerment fair.
The social media call to action finished with this.
We will be marching and leafleting from Speaker's Corner and ending with an Empowerment Freedom Fair at Primrose Hill, where you can meet organizations who are providing amazing and wonderfully empowering products and services to enable each of us to become stronger in ourselves.
God fucking dammit, man.
Products, man.
Products and services.
It's a bit of a red flag, isn't it?
I have enough products and services!
I don't want any more!
I, on the other hand, need many more products and services.
That's true.
You can have mine.
You can have all my products and services.
That's right.
Give me all your products and services!
I'm sticking Julian up right now.
You can't see it, but I have illegally obtained a weapon out of state, and I am aiming it at him.
It looks like your fingers, but... But trust me, there is an invisible gun here.
Now, that part, in a message that felt otherwise largely unobjectionable, raised my antenna.
Yeah, proof that the Kelly clan are insects and that they're trying to take over our world.
This has been a Field Clan claim for a long time.
I'm glad we've finally settled it.
More smears from the Field People.
Well, why am I not surprised?
I'm sorry, all I heard was... I've been to lots of marches and protests in my time for anti-government or left-wing causes, but I have never read anything about the opportunity to purchase, quote, empowering products and services.
I wondered if this was the inevitable end point of a conspiracy movement whose better days are long behind it, where the remaining true believers just try to sell as much crap as possible to one another before the clock runs out.
I mean, isn't that just them joining the culture at this point?
It's a pretty good description of where we're all at.
Yeah, that's true.
Spoiler, they don't seem to be selling each other NFTs or anything though.
They were kind of selling each other actual physical products, which would make them a step above the actual culture.
A collection of the Unvaxxed Spermies!
Different hats and earrings on them.
But I believe that wherever possible, it's best not to prejudge.
So I booked a ticket to London to attend the march for myself, and to see what has become of the UK's freedom movement.
Just like when I attended the anti-vaccine passport march in April 2021, the protests began at Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park.
But this time there were no hordes of people getting the same train as me.
The first people I saw as I approached the park were what seemed to be Christian evangelists from a group called Loud Cry Ministries.
As I stopped to look at their sign, which had a baffling computerised image of a bronze statue entitled The Final Superpower on it, one of their members, a black guy in his thirties, approached me.
I asked him if the march was happening here, he said it was, and then offered me a free book.
The book, which I still have actually, was called The Ministry of Healing and it seemed to be a mixture of bible quotes and homeopathic health remedies.
Nice.
You never know when you might need that.
I thanked him and, taking the book, carried on towards the protest.
It was a pretty sorry sight compared to the freedom movement's former glory of thousands of attendees.
There were probably just over a hundred people milling around with signs and flags.
One thing that was clear was that the continued marches had fostered a genuine sense of community though.
People that I assume had met through the movement were recognising each other, giving each other hugs and catching up.
Compared to the previous field report I gave for this podcast, for the Drag Queen Story Hour protests in Norwich, it seemed like a genuinely pleasant and friendly atmosphere.
Nonetheless, in a group this small, I felt a little self-conscious.
Everyone knowing each other meant that I stuck out as someone they didn't know, and there were far fewer opportunities to slip into the crowd unnoticed than there had been on previous London events.
I decided, as I usually do, to approach people with signs, as those tend to be the people at protests most ready to talk about their ideas.
The first guy I interviewed was a friendly long-haired guy dressed in black who looked to be in his early 40s and who, when I stopped to read his sign, handed me a box of playing cards entitled COVID Crooks.
Oh my god, Collector's Edition right there.
Yeah.
I can see you've got a sign that says Justice for COVID Crimes.
Yes.
And there it says, remember this?
Raki Most Wanted Playing Cards.
And you've given me some cards which are COVID Crooks, 100 Most Wanted COVID Crooks.
Is that right?
Well, yeah, there's 52 and two Jokers.
Oh, nice.
Who are the Jokers?
So, you've got Demonic Cummings and you've got Mad Sin Sorcery, which is an anagram for Carrie Simmons, funnily enough.
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