Annie Kelly is back in the Peak District to delve further into an ongoing struggle between the peaceful residents of Cressbrook Dale and a rogue band of doomsday farmers led by former “Dragon’s Den” host, Rachel Elnaugh. This time, Annie will be speaking to residents and hapless hikers who have been accosted by Rachel’s followers and their recon drones. She’ll also unpack a mysterious “anti-Rachel” website that popped up after being advertised on flyers distributed in the area, in the hopes of discovering just who might be behind it. Here’s a hint… it’s not the residents.
Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to our archive of premium episodes and ongoing series like PERVERTS, Manclan, Trickle Down and The Spectral Voyager: https://www.patreon.com/QAA
Music by Pontus Berghe and NAP. Editing by Corey Klotz.
https://qanonanonymous.com
Welcome, listeners, to the 259th chapter of the QAA podcast, the Pilled in the Peak District, the Cressbrook Dale Saga, part two episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Annie Kelly, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
Welcome back listeners to part two of two of the Cressbrookdale Saga for the QAA Podcast.
If you haven't already listened to the first episode discussing the happenings in this remote part of the Peak District, I recommend you catch up before listening to this episode.
For those of you who have listened but need a refresher, here's the story so far.
In June 2022, the sleepy village of Cressbrook, Derbyshire, with a population of about 175 people, woke up to discover that part of the vast swathe of land that borders their home, known as Cressbrook Dale, had been sold.
One of the new owners quickly introduced themselves on the local Facebook page.
Certain things they said set off alarm bells to the residents there, namely that they were planning to turn the land into a, quote, food forest to nourish the whole community for what they called the predicted food apocalypse.
When the locals did some more digging, they found the new landowners seemed to have a very keen interest in conspiracy theories about the Covid pandemic, vaccines, and something called the Great Reset, an upcoming dystopian future featuring strict surveillance and food shortages.
Although the new landowners, a group by the name of Phoenix Rose, claimed to be leaderless, there was one member who, thanks to a brief stint on reality TV in the early 2000s and an active social media presence, had risen to prominence above the others and become its de facto public face.
That person was Rachel Elnor.
I see what she did there, that's awesome.
on the platforms YouTube and Odyssey, where she wandered around the land,
pontificating on recent events and their connection to a hidden grand plan
by what she calls the powers that shouldn't be.
I see what she did there.
That's awesome.
Yeah.
Here she is, for example, discussing the recent devastating fires in Maui
and their surprising connection to the hated 15-minute city.
Hey beautiful people.
Wow, it's been an intense few weeks, hasn't it?
What with the Maui fires and I wasn't even actually aware of the Maui fires but someone drew my attention to them and I then Went online, saw all of the mainstream media reports.
Oh, it's climate change, it's wildfires.
And then of course did a little bit deeper investigation and really learned a lot about the history of Maui.
How it was originally taken from the people.
Of Hawaii, the tribal people, and essentially handed over to become part of the United States.
And of course Maui is one of the 15-minute cities, one of the kind of state-of-the-art carbon neutral cities that they're wanting to create.
And of course they can't do that unless they can somehow get all of the people who live there to sell their properties.
Oh, this is very cute.
I love to look up Wikipedia and just kind of, you know, oh, Maui, it is the third most popular.
I mean, I would be shocked if she was getting her information from Wikipedia.
I think it's, this is all telegram channels all the way down.
I'm certain of it.
Well, that's cool that they stand up for the indigenous people as well as claiming there's direct energy weapons.
Is this her sort of brand now?
The sort of walking through the forest and talking?
It seems like this is kind of the meter of her videos now.
Yeah, it's a Miyazaki film where this kind of British elven creature comes out and talks to you about QAnon.
Yeah, but they're hiking maybe a little bit too fast.
Yeah, out of breath.
A little bit out of breath.
Not the best place you want to be in for a video, but to each their own.
It's okay, the 5G towers are both giving her all kinds of diseases and also allowing her to make her videos.
No, it was actually funny that I'd watched so many of these videos by the time I traveled to Crestbrookdale that when I was walking through Crestbrookdale, I had a second vision where I could see where I was in Rachel's videos.
You switched to a third-person view for a little bit?
Yeah, I could suddenly place myself in her videos.
It was a really funny experience.
Unfortunately, due to the kind of tempo of satellite images, she now shows up on Google Earth.
You just see a person looking into a phone and walking in various different parts of Cressbrook Dale.
The relationship between the locals and Crestbrook Dale's new landowners had gotten off to a bad start early on, with Crestbrook's original inhabitants alarmed by what they saw as a plan to transform the wild, untamed Dale beyond recognition with music festivals, agriculture and even possible settlement.
By the time I came to visit Cressbrook in October 2022, the relations between Cressbrookdale's new owners and the locals had severely deteriorated.
Much of the village had organised itself into the Save Cressbrookdale campaign, which alleged that the new landowners were illegally ruining the area's natural beauty, and demanded action from the Peak District National Park Authority, who had already sent out official notices demanding a temporary stop on any works going on on the land.
Oh, this is good.
I think we're a few weeks away from them taking to the trees and her having watched a certain movie deciding that she's Navi and they're now shooting arrows down.
Phoenix Rose, in turn, alleged that it was the locals who were behaving illegally, carrying out a campaign of vigilante action, harassment and vandalism in order to drive the newcomers off the land.
It had apparently gotten so bad that the group had been forced to call the police on several occasions.
Rachel Elnor, in the very last email she sent to me before she stopped replying altogether, seemed to reference this.
Hi, Annie.
Many thanks for the invitation.
However, I'm not in a position to discuss Cressbrook Dale at the moment, given that a criminal investigation is currently underway.
In Rachel's videos where she wonders Cressbrookdale, she would often take time to point out various acts of vandalism, such as people ripping down signs, stealing tools, and deliberately destroying the steps that the newcomers had built on the land.
Someone's vandalised another one of our beautiful steps.
So I'm just going to make it safe.
Yeah, because of course this campaign is It's all about power and control.
It's nothing to do with the people or the safety because these amazing steps which were put in place by one of our members took the initiative to create these because before where these steps currently are before it was just a slippery steep muddy slope on which quite a few people slipped and fell when we were looking at the land and also some of our members have walking Disabilities.
So it was extremely tricky for them to walk the land.
Just taking out the stakes.
Stake through the heart.
Oh my goodness.
Yeah, we've had many messages of gratitude and appreciation from the walkers who come here because of course this is a public footpath and it makes it so much easier to walk.
So, uh, why anyone would want to vandalize these steps?
Well, there's only one reason.
It's pure hatred.
And because, uh, because the locals believe that, uh, they have the right, uh, they don't believe that anyone else has any rights.
I'm so happy my mom is not pilled.
Oh yeah, I'm sorry to interrupt this regular broadcast, but Julian, the Blood Feud's back on.
I know we temporarily halted it because of our important work that we were doing on ManClan, but I heard what you said about coming to my mum's house and defiling her bathtub in the last episode of the Spectral Voyager.
So, it's back.
Barely remember this?
What did I say I would do in the bathtub?
I can't remember?
You said you would come to my mum's house and you would defile her bathtub.
I believe the words diarrhea were mentioned.
Oh, that makes sense.
Yeah.
Cause I would never do anything inappropriate, but let's just say I was bursting with, you know, I mean, it's, it's only fair.
The toilet couldn't handle it.
Don't look at me like that Jake, like disappointed mother.
No, continue to look at him disappointedly Jake.
It's the least he deserves.
Okay, well I take it back and I hope the bathtub is doing well and I hope... Hey, listen, I hope the ghost, um, you know, gets the work done that they've started.
The video description which showed the alleged vandalism urged anyone with any information about it to get in contact with the police.
If you have any information regarding the criminal damage to the steps of Cressbrookdale, please report this to the Derbyshire Police.
This is the eighth crime report we have had to make regarding theft, vandalism, antisocial behaviour and hate crimes inflicted on us by what we believe are a small group of vigilantes from the local community who have taken the law into their own hands.
The police have advised us to gather evidence on all of the crimes committed and we will not hesitate to prosecute the offenders.
The police, can you imagine the Derbyshire police getting a call and they're like, somebody's vandalized three steps.
Well, that is actually the average crime in the UK.
The police are very used to this.
They're like, oh, well, this is actually more violent than what we're used to.
Excuse me, miss, how many steps would you say have been vandalized?
More than three.
More than three.
All right, we'll bump this up then.
This'll go ahead of the, uh, someone unwaxed my lawn gnome.
And, uh... And, uh, a child's, uh, a teenager spat towards my doorknob.
When I asked locals about this, they denied any knowledge.
In fact, they claimed that their objection to the steps in the first place had been that they weren't built to regulation and were therefore unstable and unsafe.
But I would also learn that what Rachel had mentioned in her videos were in fact the very least strange part of what she called the local hate campaign.
When I stayed in Crestbrook last year, one place I visited was the Village Club.
The club is the kind of communal amenity that you rarely see in this country these days.
It was built in the days when Crestbrook Mill was still open, as a space for workers and their families to socialise without dipping into the licentious and sinful behaviours that so many Victorian reformers feared tempted the working classes.
Nowadays it operates as a committee-run local pub with volunteer staff, only open a couple of nights per week at most.
It was here that I got chatting with Johnny and Helena.
They are a young couple.
Helena has long blonde hair, and Johnny has a dark beard, and he wears a dapper-looking newsboy cap.
Okay, well, come on.
Come on.
Let's not fulfill every single one of our stereotypes.
Helena told me that she grew up in Cressbrook and has many happy memories of walking through the Dale.
When she first invited Johnny to visit, she said that she took him to the Dale to impress him.
When I asked if it worked, Johnny pointed out that he'd lived in the village about three years at this point, so clearly it hadn't hurt.
Helena spoke very movingly to me about how the purchase of the land by Phoenix Rose had made the locals feel.
I've said before that there's a feeling of grief in people who visit, who love the place and people who live here.
And I think the grief, usually with grief you're feeling a loss of something that you didn't fully appreciate before you lost it.
So a person or a place or a home.
I think with here, it was so special that every single person that visited and lives here absolutely knew what we had.
And so to lose it was even more painful because there was such an awareness before we lost it.
So far, most people I'd spoken to had been primarily concerned with the impact of Elnor's group on the local environment.
And Johnny and Helena were no exception.
They told me about how the group had taken down an old dry stone wall and replaced it with a new one.
I had actually seen the group posting about this online and honestly it looked like a fun and harmless activity.
But Johnny and Helena said that in doing so they had damaged local habitats for the small animals and insects that had lived in the old wall.
Nonetheless, a bit like Phil, the couple had their concerns about Rachel and her fellow travellers' beliefs too, and how those could potentially shape their attitude to the land and the people already living there.
They said that they and some of the other younger people from the village had been monitoring both Rachel's videos and the public telegram groups attached to her channel, and what they had seen uploaded in them disturbed them.
There's a lot of people that think, oh, you know, she's an anti-vaxxer.
That's her most extreme belief.
That's the tip of the iceberg.
And I think, yeah, that's right at the top.
That's reasonable.
The further down you go, even before you get a subsurface, it just gets more and more concerning.
But I think there needs to be an understanding that this group doesn't operate within a logical sphere.
That it starts at anti-vax and, you know, it's not a logical, hey, this isn't safe for some people, there are some mental issues that come from this or heart issues that come from this.
It's, there is a chip implanted in this and that is the top level of crazy.
So I think that there's a lack of understanding generally in the area about the beliefs of these people, but that's the fear.
The fear from people who know about this is that this level of chaos is coming in, not necessarily to our area, but into the general fabric of society.
But the thing that concerned both of them the most, the couple made clear to me, was the very tangible, physical antagonism that had manifested between the villagers and the newcomers.
It made being in the Dale, once a place of tranquility and idyllic rural charm, feel scary and hostile.
The land they've bought, much to their frustration, is access land.
So basically people can walk on it, they can have picnics on it, they can sort of do what they want on it, obviously, as long as it's not illegal.
And also they've bought land with loads of public footpaths through it.
I don't think they realised that they bought land that was access land and had public footpaths on it, because they get incredibly frustrated when people use the public footpath when they're there.
One of my favourite instances is I was going through, I think I was with Helena, and we had decided to take the dog for a walk on the land through the footpath and then back along the footpath because I think that was sort of part of I believe that people should still use the land regardless of how they felt or if they felt intimidated or whatever.
So we walked on and immediately someone on the car park decided to fly a drone after us.
So they filmed us the entire time we walked on the land.
We sat down for 10 minutes.
They filmed us the entire time we sat down.
They followed us all the way back and when we got back they were sort of motioning, you know, get the drone down, like make sure they can't see it.
That's what it felt like anyway.
So, that happened.
I kind of said, while the drone was still in flight, look, I don't like that you filmed me.
You follow me with the drone.
It's a bit weird.
And the guy turned around and he was like, well, it's perfectly legal because it's access land.
I was like, OK, I'm not going to dispute that.
That's fine.
Wow!
A fucking drone?
I know, yeah.
That is bizarre.
It is.
And it's, I don't know, it's so interesting to me because so much of what Rachel talks about is like surveillance and the Great Reset and, you know, kind of being watched, being monitored, being scrutinized.
But yeah, I mean, that's like a really physical example of that, isn't it?
Mm-hmm.
And also, it seems to me that, you know, most of her brand is somebody who is out in nature, they are connected, they are reconnecting with the sort of rituals of pre-modern technology humans.
And yet, here she is, you know, I just imagine her with the VR drone goggles on, you know, crouched in a bush, you know, thumb in the sticks.
No, of course, that's the paradox, is that these are two online boomers.
So these people are very, like, into the tech.
They're very into making videos from the land, which probably there were very few videos made from Cressbrook Dale until she decided to start, you know, making this whole thing into a fucking livestream land.
It's like, we've scraped up enough money to put some money back into the dale.
What's the first thing we should do?
I'm thinking maybe some seeds.
We can replant some of the plants trampled by unruly tourists.
She was like, I think that we should invest in a fleet of drones.
Nonetheless, it seemed like many of the villagers were determined not to be frightened away, and with that in mind had begun organising activities with the purpose of encouraging each other to keep exercising their rights to walk the land.
One such activity Johnny told me about was the introduction of night-time bat walks on the property, although this didn't go unnoticed.
So we decided to start doing bat walks as well.
The Presbrook Bat Watching Society.
Yep, so a bunch of us decided to start, because there's a lot of rare bats there, we decided to start walking down to watch the bats and there was one occasion where A guy jumped out of the caravan that they have on the site.
Followed us.
Very erratic.
Very wide eyes.
Scary smile.
Started saying, I want to join your bat walk.
What are you doing?
This is really petty.
Why are you here?
Why are you here at this time?
This is really weird.
And he asked for validity, I think.
He said, what's your favourite type of bat?
And we answered.
And he just looked us dead in the eye and went, that's pathetic.
Yeah, so we kept walking and there was a group of about eight of us and we're sort of a lot of different ages from like I think like 18 to all the way up to like in the 50s so quite a diverse group of people and they started walking on and me and someone else were at the back and this guy kept following us I mean he was probably like probably like a foot from me he was very very close it was really uncomfortable kept going at us saying he wanted to join and then We stopped and just said, can you leave us alone?
Don't follow us.
We're on a public footpath.
We've not done anything wrong.
And then he starts like bending over and like kind of like curling up a little bit while he stood up and like smiling and like manically laughing and clutching something in his pocket.
So at this point I was like, okay, Both hands in his pockets, by the way, but one hand was sort of like clutched and I was like, right, step back, de-escalate this situation.
I'm not comfortable at all.
You know, leave us alone.
Go away.
And I said, look, if you sort of come near me or follow me or get in my face, I will contact the police.
I'm not fussed about that.
And he said, well, no, you're harassing me.
So he called the police on the spot, said he was being harassed.
And then we just walked down, kept going on with our walk because we knew we hadn't done anything wrong at this point.
And Essentially, that was that.
We went back because we kind of had to go back that way as well.
And he was sat outside.
Clearly, after the phone call, his demeanor had really changed.
And at that point, Helena kind of talked to him about bats for ages.
And then we went home.
I mean, this is kind of sad because everyone's doing things at each other.
No one's actually enjoying themselves anymore.
You know?
Well, I guess we now have a bat society.
Well, I guess I'm now following you, but I'm not.
Well, you're harassing us.
No, I'm harassing.
No, you.
And then, oh, well, let's call the police.
No one's enjoying themselves anymore.
This is kind of the age-old ritual of getting in a long-standing dispute with your neighbors.
This is a British tradition, really.
Yeah, just now with added conspiracy theories.
Yeah, and it's sad that it was just like a place that people could walk, and now that everyone has to think about all of these things when they decide to go for a stroll.
Travis, what would you do if your beautiful mountain town, you know, the paths that you like to hike on, all of a sudden became inhabited by strange worm-tongue style creatures?
Or maybe we should ask the people who were there before.
What do they think about a podcaster taking over their land?
Well, obviously I would start running a SIA by exploiting these people's paranoia by making them believe that they're being surveilled or haunted in some way.
I could take advantage of strange noises, drone surveillance that follows them.
I mean, there's lots of things I could do to scare them away.
Yeah, they should stay calm.
It's not like you've installed a security camera or own a gun.
Sir, your silence is deafening.
I just assume all Americans own guns until I'm told otherwise.
I don't.
Actually, I have three guns at my house.
One is a replica particle thrower from the Ghostbusters proton pack.
I have a pretty heavy-duty airsoft rifle.
And then I have a Nerf Aliens pulse rifle, the collector's Nerf gun.
You know what, you're not wrong.
Although, none of my guns could hurt anybody and... I don't know, maybe I could come over and try to shoot all three of them at you at the same time and see if it does any damage.
I mean, yeah, if I put an airsoft pellet through Julian's glasses, you know...
It probably would cause a little bit of damage.
He wouldn't die.
He wouldn't die.
He would be mildly annoyed.
He might try to hit me.
I wouldn't walk through the public footpath in your house anymore.
You shouldn't.
That's for sure.
I would stop looking for bags.
Oh, I also have two lightsabers, so those are two other weapons.
Okay.
I'm actually gearing up to release a book and it's called, I'm American, All My Guns Are Collectibles.
All my guns are toys.
I am America.
I am American.
All my cultures are IP.
While the Batwalks might have been what in legal terminology is referred to as a bit cheeky, they hardly seem to my untrained eye to warrant either being referred to as a hate campaign or a criminal investigation.
Having said that, they weren't the only bit of activism that the Save Grassbrookdale campaign were engaged in.
Every weekend, volunteers would marshal on the boundaries of the village to pass out flyers to walkers and people driving by, urging them to both keep exercising their right to walk the public access parts of the land, and to put pressure on the Peak District National Park Authority to act.
Although none of the material they distributed mentioned Rachel by name, and everyone was keen to stress it wasn't personal, I was conscious that she would have had to drive through this every time she visited the Dale on the weekends, which I could see might be a bit intimidating.
But there was a separate, much more bizarre flyering campaign going on in this conflict, one which neither party would take responsibility for.
Rachel never explicitly mentioned these to me, but plenty of villagers I spoke to did and even showed me copies.
Supposedly, on the 17th of September 2022, mysterious flyers appeared on people's cars in Cressbrook.
These were entirely read on one side and titled in large block capital white lettering, HATE RACHEL DALE.
Okay, I think we have another case of, like, someone spray-painting their driveway with Blacks Rule or whatever.
Now, as someone who's been to a lot of conspiracy-related rallies for this very podcast, I've read a lot of strange activist literature in my time.
But this absolutely had to be one of the weirdest things I'd ever read.
Here's what the flyer says.
The iconic limestone dale at Crestbrook in the Peak District National Park has just been sold to a group of people led by one-time TV personality Rachel Elna.
If you search for Rachel Elna using a search engine on the internet, you'll see there is sufficient evidence to suggest that she is a conspiracy theorist who believes in food famines, fairies, and the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
Even though Rachel brought a platter of admittedly M&S bought chocolate brownies and strawberries to our well-dressing and offered to share her group's harvest of organic vegetables with everyone in the village, we could see that this was all just a publicity stunt.
Don't trust Rachel as far as you can throw her.
If you can throw her, the further the better.
Please understand, we're all very nice people in Crestbrook.
Everyone is welcome here, just so long as you're not Rachel Elna.
HateRachelDale.com.
Please share any juicy gossip you may have on Rachel with us at ContactUsAtSaveCressbrookDale.com.
It doesn't matter to us whether you just make it all up, no fact checkers here.
Okay, so this is 100% her.
Even though she's very nice, and she bought the, like, who would know that she bought them at Marks and Spencer's?
There's too many details, and there's like, she's very nice, she gives all the vegetables, but we hate her anyways.
This is an incredible honeypot.
I almost want to steal this idea.
It's like if you have any dirt on Travis, if you want to smear him, just send your email with your name to this email address.
If you'd like to throw Travis, if you have any violent intent towards Travis, please send your address and name here.
Oh, come on.
I can't believe she started a hate campaign against herself.
She had to go and register hateracheldale.com, which doesn't even make sense!
Hates Rachel, and then just Dale?
It doesn't... Yeah, some poor woman out there named Rachel Dale is gonna get, you know, all sorts of botherings.
This is an incredible move by Rachel.
Good for her.
She's really, she's escalating the hatred against herself.
Yeah, definitely just one of the weirdest things I've ever read in this job, which involves reading a lot of weird things.
Rachel, who is nice and pretty and is very kind, is the worst person I have ever met.
I would like to do violence to her.
No punching, no kicking, only throwing.
The Hate Rachel Dale website, when I checked it, redirected to the Save Cressbrook Dale campaign website that Phil had first shown me.
Now, every local I've spoken to denies any involvement, and in fact most of them allege something more serious.
The Elnor herself was responsible for the material.
Um, let me apply my detective skills.
Correct, yes.
Detective Julian on the scene.
Yes, I am here saying 100% it was Rachel.
She had to add fairies into her belief to make it sound weird.
It's like, because she clearly believes the other stuff.
I'm just imagining Julian as, like, a Blade Runner, like, hunting down a cybernetic Rachel, you know, in the Crestbrook Dale.
I feel like that would be cool.
You should get, like, a cool trench coat and a... No, I do not hunt down old ladies.
Well, if they're cybernetic, I mean, if they're replicants, yeah.
Hey, whatever allows you to dehumanize somebody and do the weird things that you're clearly thinking about all the time.
Well, I just thought if Julian is a detective and I was like, what kind of detective would he be?
And I was like, a Blade Runner would be cool because I did just recently watch the Blade Runner remake.
That's true.
So it was just kind of like in my head.
I wasn't trying to dehumanize Rachel and I apologize if I did so.
OK, things got very serious.
I think this is also a cyborg.
I'll be executing him and Rachel.
The Save Cressbrookdale campaign website in the FAQ section says this.
The Hate Rachel Dale flyers appeared on cars in the village on Saturday, 17th of September, 2022.
At the same time, Rachel Elnaugh announced on her Telegram channel that the village had created these.
Rachel Elnaugh's son was observed placing the flyers on village residents' cars, and Rachel Elnaugh gave one of these flyers to a passerby in front of our marshals.
It therefore seems very likely that Rachel Elnaugh is the author.
Oh man, simply don't have your son be the one putting it on the cars.
If I were you.
It wasn't the only bit of anonymous counter-warfare that the Save Cressbrookdale campaign had encountered.
Jenny, the Zimbabwean woman that we briefly heard from in the first episode, also told me about another mysterious campaign that had begun popping up around the same time, ostensibly for an environmental cause, banning the use of white plastic, but which seemed to be a passive-aggressive reference to the villagers' use of materials for their own signs.
We've also had A very strange thing where our banners and posters are on white plastic, which actually when we created, we did think about and we thought, well, you know, that's not great for the environment.
What will we do with all of this stuff when the campaign is over?
And have plans for an art installation to reuse the plastic and create something from it.
But, you know, it is the best material to put things out in the weather.
However, we suddenly had a whole lot of white plastic banners appear throughout the village and posted on trees and fences and walls and things that said banwhiteplastic.com and pointed back to the Save Graysbrookdale site.
And one of them actually is still, I think, attached to the caravan up on the site.
So that sort of thing, you know, that's obviously not being created by us.
Wait, so there's layers of white plastic now.
There's the white plastic that says, ban white plastic, and then there's the white plastic that says, please stop using this land, and then... Okay.
That is correct.
This village is... Oh, things are bad.
When my husband Paul and I walked through Cressbrook Dale ourselves, we noticed two things.
One was that the locals weren't exaggerating.
It really was a stunning part of the world.
Huge limestone cliffs jutted out in the distance ahead of us, while to our immediate right, densely forested rolling hills extended down to the valley below.
As you descend down the hill, aided by the same controversial steps that the newcomers had built, you enter a wooded area with a busy brook at the bottom.
The whole atmosphere changes in a second from vast dramatic views to what feels like its own separate untamed little world.
A few of the villagers in our conversations had described the place as magical and I could absolutely see what they meant.
The further you walked, the more you felt like you were entering a fairy tale.
But undoubtedly a weird atmosphere had been created by the antagonism between the two factions too.
We passed several other walkers who all said hello, but having heard stories of unpleasant and awkward altercations, it was difficult not to feel a little on guard, in a way you rarely do walking in the English countryside.
This tense atmosphere wasn't helped by a number of polite but slightly strange signs all over the place.
There were multiple signs attached to the caravan parked at the very entrance of the Dale which referenced the local hate campaign either directly or obliquely.
This vehicle itself was one of the major points of contention between Cressbrook Dale's new owners and the villagers.
The villagers saw it as an eyesore and symbolic of the new owner's carelessness with the natural beauty of the land.
But Rachel had said to me and other journalists that it was a necessary security measure due to local vandalism and theft when her group had left their tools on the land.
Here's me reading out just a small section of the notices that were attached all over the vehicle.
Right, so we're at the caravan which Rachel said that they've had to put on site to stop their tools being stolen by local vigilantes and there's a few signs up there.
There's a little sign with a sweet little cartoon cow that says farm security and then There is an official looking blue notice that says, important this communication may affect your walk.
Peace and happiness of 2022.
This is a formal notice to let you know that on 25th of July 2022 we made the above peace preservation order.
In simple terms, no one is allowed to be unkind to us or anyone else while on our land.
There is an important expediency argument for placing PPC on this land.
There's recently changed ownership, which has raised fears among some of the local residents about potential damage and destruction of the woodland.
These fears have in turn manifested in the actual damage, destruction and violation of our property.
This order came into notice on the 25th July 2022 and will remain in force forever.
People enraged by this order have the right to free anger management sessions from one of the trained therapists in our community.
By order signed and dated Kermit on behalf of the Cressbrook Dale Estate Private Members Association.
So please note if you do not comply with the terms of this peace preservation order you will soon see more fences, barbed wire, gates, signage and security cameras plus the increased involvement of the police.
Yes another great British tradition passive aggression!
I love that yeah just like and if you feel mad at all then have you considered one of our trained therapists?
Yeah.
I like how you're kind of whispering.
I mean, I'd literally just spoken to Johnny and Helena, like, the night before, who had told me about getting, like, accosted by someone coming out of that caravan.
I felt very nervous approaching it.
Another sign was pinned to a tree as we walked up the hill.
It had the Phoenix Rose Group's logo, a purple, red and yellow heart on a blue and green circular background at the top.
Here's how it read.
Warning!
We have been instructed by the local authority to cut this tree down, which has now been approved by the Peak Park Authority.
Under the terms of our contract with the Stanton Estate over this land, we are required to comply.
Due to bird nesting and bat compliance guidelines issued by the authorities, this tree's execution will not take place until 31st October 2022.
Until then, please be extra vigilant around this tree, as it is not our intention to cause harm, injury, or loss to our fellow man or woman.
And if we have caused you any harm, injury, or loss to date, then we apologize, for this was not our intention.
Cressbrook Dale Estate, Private Members Association.
I mean, just... Petty!
Just... I hope there are direct energy weapons, I think.
I think we need some help here.
But we would need more advanced ones, because clearly they can't figure out how to do the energy weapons without destroying the area and setting it on fire around it.
We need the trees to actually be in control of it and develop it and just get rid of everybody else.
The bats, maybe.
Yeah, we need the trees to come alive like Lord of the Rings and pick certain people up and entangle them in their branches and feed on them.
It seemed clear to me that it wasn't only the village's actions which had contributed to the siege mentality indicated by the signs all over Cressbrookdale.
The new landowners had clearly experienced friction with the Peak District National Park authorities as well.
The part of Cressbrookdale that Phoenix Rose had purchased isn't part of the extremely well-protected nature reserve right next door, but it is categorised by the Peak District National Park Authority as a natural zone.
This means that it is recognised by the authority as particularly important to conserve and thus highly protected from obvious signs of human influence.
It was the village's contention that things like the new gravel car park, the steps and the caravan all constituted breaches of this protection.
At the time of our visit, the authorities had issued a temporary stop notice and a planning contravention notice to the landowners, essentially requiring them to stop all works and submit a proposal of their plans for the site in order to gain planning permission.
They had not responded.
When I spoke to some of the villagers over Zoom in November this year for a catch-up chat, I was told that with the exception of the caravan which had been removed, all of the offending changes to the land remained in place, despite objections from both the locals and written warnings from the Peak District National Park Authority.
These changes included the steps, a teepee, a gravel car park and path.
When I spoke to John, the chair of the Save Cressbrookdale campaign, he told me he was aware that from an outsider's perspective, none of the changes the new landowners had made sounded particularly dramatic or imposing, but that the locals essentially didn't trust that they would stop there.
Just the other thing to say about the works on the land, we are very conscious that those items in themselves are quite minor, apart from the car park probably.
But they appeared in a context where the published prospectus of this group had a million pound business plan, which included £90,000 worth of movable structures and I think it was £30,000 worth of solar and wind energy.
So this was just the first early steps of this development.
So I'm sure that the Peak Parks Action was in light of the anticipation of all these other things happening as well.
Here's Jenny getting me up to speed on what happened with the Peak Park Authority since we visited.
So what happened next is that in April the Peak Park issued a proper planning enforcement notice for the removal of the TP, the hard stand parking, The path and the steps, the path to the TP and the steps that they've put in.
So they sent it on the 6th of April.
It took effect on the 22nd of May and basically gave them six months to remove all the engineering.
So three months to remove the engineering works and then another three months to restore the land to its original state.
They completely ignored any of that.
They haven't acknowledged any of it.
They've done absolutely nothing to comply with any of that enforcement notice.
The enforcement notice sent by the Peak Park Authority in April used pretty strong language, saying that the changes to the site by the landowners, quote, failed to respect or enhance the character of their surroundings and have a significant harmful effect on the character and appearance of the landscape.
The deadline to reinstate the land to its original condition was November 22nd, 2023.
Since this deadline has been and gone with seemingly no change, the Derbyshire Times published this comment from a Peak Park Authority spokesman.
The National Park Authority understands that conditions at the site remain largely unchanged from previous officer visits and site assessments.
We have slash will shortly be writing to the landowner with information on how the authority intends to take action in respect of the unauthorized activity and additions to the site and its reinstatement.
Rachel got in contact with the same newspaper to ask that they publish her own response, in which she seemed to suggest that anybody from the Peak Park Authority who attempted to enforce any kind of action on the land themselves would be treated as trespassing.
I believe that all the enhancements we have made to the land we collectively own at Cressbrook Dale are well within our lawful rights as landowners.
As far as I am aware, we have not given consent nor permission for any third party to trespass upon, touch, nor make any alterations to our property.
Any such acts would therefore be criminal and, as such, will be reported to the police.
God, it's like if all the different hobbits were reporting each other to the police.
No, you're an enemy of the Shire!
This response seemed to get to the heart of the villagers' problem with relying on the legal authorities to resolve their dispute.
It seemed to be becoming increasingly apparent that a lot of the Peak Park's power relies on them dealing with people who actually respect that authority.
In my latest update from the villagers, they told me that they were waiting now till January to see what enforcement action the official body would take, but many now seem resigned to the fact it would be a long and torturous process.
This is how- all it takes is just one radical and we can dismantle the entirety of UK society, which just relies on everybody being rule followers.
Yeah, I mean, I guess I am kind of learning that a lot of law just relies on a sort of honour system.
Yeah.
Essentially.
That's right.
In fact, it seems as if the group is continuing with their plans to build on the land.
Although many of the locals have expressed their frustration with the lack of transparency about what the new landowners actually plan to do with Crestbrookdale, if you survey the various prospectus materials that have been sent out to potential investors, you can spot some subtle changes over the years.
One that John had picked up on, and also seems most salient to me, is that the focus had shifted from the land as a source of agriculture to one of spiritual renewal, including new plans to create an interfaith chapel.
The original project was to establish a self-sufficient And this was variously described as a haven from the food apocalypse forthcoming, or just a community farm or whatever.
So it was very much focused on cultivation and community, but that morphed into something rather different, presumably when They started to experience pushback from the Peak Park because the land itself has got the highest level of environmental protection practically in the country, certainly in the Peak Park.
And so none of the stated plans or objectives of the group would have been possible to achieve legally on this land.
Anyway, that was phase one.
When that didn't go as planned, Rachel, who you mentioned, then started to shift the emphasis from agriculture onto some kind of spiritual
haven. She infamously started referring to the Dale as a natural vagina and a natural temple. And I
think it hasn't really developed very much beyond that now. There's virtually no mention of
cultivation now. And bringing us right up to date, the latest wheeze is that there's this plan to
create a multi-faith chapel of peace on the land on the basis that she says, or they say, that
there are the foundations of a previous building which they're hoping to resurrect.
Okay.
It's not a farm, it's a vagina of the sacred Lord upon us.
Almighty Q will be worshipped by people of all backgrounds in this chapel.
The newcomers have set up a website titled Love Cressbrookdale, something I couldn't help but notice sounded like a slightly passive-aggressive mockery of the Save Cressbrookdale campaign website.
Indeed, quite a lot of the Love Cressbrookdale site is dedicated to denouncing their campaign opponents.
On the 7th of June, 2022, our small community acquired 73 acres of land at Cressbrook Dale with the pure intention of protecting this natural temple for generations to come.
Oh, how overjoyed, bright-eyed and full of optimism we were, with no set plan, save working capital budgets for what we imagined might be needed.
Our intention was merely to rest here from time to time, to be in simple harmony with nature, to sing with the birds, to experience the majestic beauty of the trees, and marvel at all the natural inhabitants.
And livestream to Odyssey.
[laughter]
Sick drones upon our enemies.
[laughter]
We began to gather at weekends on our beautiful land and set about doing some maintenance tasks.
We also put up a teepee tent so that we might have shelter as we journeyed with the land.
Okay.
Alas, we did not anticipate a tsunami of anger, fear, assumptions,
and a myriad of what we perceived to be unreasonable demands
from our new neighbours in the nearby village.
Following this were official warnings and notices from local authorities, including around a hundred we counted, Most non-environmentally friendly white laminated plastic A4
sheets festooned across the entire 73 acres.
And following this, a media frenzy that totally blew our minds for the sheer absurdity of what had been spoken with
regards to our treatment and our plans for the land.
Alas, it would appear that our road to peace and freedom would not be so easy.
Man, it's like she kept her previous business and sold herself the experience of being in a feud with a village.
On the same site, they confirmed their plans to build the chapel.
This was published on the 22nd of October this year, so about a month before the Peak Park Authority's final deadline to return the land to its original state.
We're excited to announce that the ongoing Cressbrookdale Estate Community agreed this week that we will restore the building we have discovered at Cressbrookdale as an interfaith chapel for peace.
We've been inspired by the many chapels which can be found around the British Isles and beyond.
This feels important, not only given the horrors which are unfolding in the Middle East, but also the ongoing unprovoked attacks, hatred, theft, vandalism, and blatant propaganda which we are experiencing from what would appear to be a small minority of somewhat militant and seemingly heartless-slash-joyless local people.
Oh, yes, definitely.
Heartless and joyless.
I think the Palestinian people are turning to each other very frequently and saying, you know, I mean, I would believe in our cause if only we were joined by Derbyshire, if only Cressbrook Dale was behind us and had an interfaith chapel.
Yeah, it's funny.
She often will, when she walks the land and does her live streams and videos, she'll often kind of bring up current events.
And in particular, yeah, she did a whole video about Israel and Gaza where she kind of compared the conflict with the sort of dispute over boundaries that she's having with the locals.
Oh, fuck.
Right off.
Before then it was Ukraine, obviously, as well.
Oh, fuck right off, Rachel.
The site has, at the time of recording, not been updated to address or reflect the Peak Park Authority's enforcement notices.
Rachel also rarely brings them up in videos, except for slightly indirect asides which don't exactly make clear the precise nature of their complaints.
Derbyshire, along with many other places in the UK, were the site of the first industrial revolution back in the 1770s with all of the machinery and engineering coming online and The mills and the spinning jenny and all of these inventions and then the second industrial revolution took place in the 19th century in the Victorian era with the advent of trains and railways because of course it meant that all of these goods and things like the cotton could be brought in from the Manchester docks into places like Crestbrook for the mills.
So this was the second industrial revolution in the 19th century and of course if there'd been things like Peak Park Like, planning regulations back in those days.
There's no way on earth that planning permission would ever have been given.
I'm trying to imagine what it would be like for Mark Cuban to, like, move to my small village and start wandering the nearby forest pretending he knows everything about the history and bitching about restrictions.
Well, just you wait, Julian.
You know, we've seen stranger things.
That's right.
Just put me in the shark tank.
Yeah.
One thing many locals said to me that they didn't understand was why exactly Rachel and her group had bought this specific area of the Dale which was so highly protected, when there was surely lots of land in the area for sale which would be better suited for their purposes.
There is, after all, no shortage of disused farms where someone could grow food and construct buildings, with very little fuss from official bodies like the Peak District National Park Authority.
Yeah, it turns out when you're yearning for an idyllic past in a kind of pseudo-fascistic way, yeah, you're gonna go for, like, the forest.
But you don't think for a second, like, actually what we really want to do is, like, you know, build a small village and, you know, like, none of these trees are gonna be able to stick around if we're gonna have a quote-unquote food forest.
And then you're just in a never-ending fight, and now it just feels like everybody, whether or not they want the thing that they're arguing for, is just going to argue the opposite of their opponent.
So, it should be fun.
It's a fair question, and one that I think is worth exploring properly.
When I'd first gone down to Cressbrook, I had assumed that this was because the new owners of the land expected an imminent societal collapse, or food apocalypse, as Rachel had infamously put it in her first Facebook post, and therefore they put very little stock in what the Peak Park Authority, or indeed any government body, had to say.
Put in simpler terms, if you think the end of the world is nigh, you're probably not going to be too fussed at making sure little things like parking fines are paid, for example.
Having watched a few more of Rachel's videos now, I think their beliefs are actually more subtle than that.
They are full of very dark predictions for the future, but they don't seem to be anticipating total civilizational breakdown, so much as the slow dawn of a highly repressive, highly technologized society, something which chimes with
the things other interviews of mine have said are anti-Great Reset events like the 15-minute
city protests in Oxford. Crucially though, Rachel often emphasizes that there is hope for
change at a local, communal level.
"Personally, I'm all in favour of people unplugging from city life and restoring their connection
to nature because to me that absolutely is our salvation with what is coming with this digital
everything and especially if you live in a city where everything, even the supermarkets, it's kind
of like, I mean there's some model supermarkets now aren't there, where you can basically don't
even need to pay, you just go in through some gates and take what you want from the shelves
and all of the digital technology tracks it all and then debits your card."
And you don't even... there's no humans involved.
Oh my god.
That's the way we're going folks.
So well that's that's the way the plan is wanting to go but of course there are others who have a different vision for our collective future.
Which is a restoration of our connection to nature and working in local community, growing our own food.
So we don't even have to go into one of those supermarkets and through local independent food networks and doing things locally, basically.
So we don't have to be subject to the whims of the corporatocracy.
You're a fucking TV entrepreneur.
Quit it with this bullshit.
Knock it off.
You don't know what you're talking about.
That is true, although I think she has very much rejected that part of her life.
Okay, well, rejected coherently and admit that you don't want a local community.
You want someone else's little forest.
You approached a local community that existed and instantly got into conflict with them, which shows that you're going to be incapable in the Mad Max future of anything.
You can't collaborate.
You don't have the chops.
They would wipe you out.
You'd be a slave in Bullet City or whatever.
So convinced is Rachel of this capacity for a localised shifting consciousness to bring about a fundamental challenge to the dark plans of the system that she has decided to run for political office.
See, there it is!
There it is!
Great!
Oh, well, I suppose if we're not going to be doing my beautiful hippie dream, I will rule over all of you!
I will be writing the laws from now on!
You know, if you've lived a media-addled life and you want to escape from that, you want to go to a quaint forest town, I sympathize.
But the way to do it is to do it silently.
So you're unnoticed.
And so the locals only speak of you in whispers, like, do you know what they used to do?
And so and then you don't bother anyone.
And then you'll be accepted because you'll be invisible.
Yes, isn't there a bog where you could become a witch and people would say that you eat children and you just live in harmony with your herbs?
This is an ancient tradition!
This is what has already happened to Travis, which is why he knows about it.
Yeah, Travis is a witch.
Yeah, people walk around his small town and they go, did you hear?
Did you hear?
He was doxxed by the Washington Post.
You know, it's funny, we have two markets in town and one of them I got my first ever, are you Travis View moment?
Uh-oh.
No way!
Yeah, I got recognized in the supermarket and at the time I was like buying like a bag of chips and a bottle of wine.
I didn't even have a good card.
Why yes!
Are those Wiccan tattoos all up and down your arms?
What's up?
Rachel's first political affiliations were with the Freedom Alliance Party, a national anti-lockdown political party.
Due to some interpersonal drama between her, her then-partner, and her local branch, which we sadly don't have time to go into here, she ended up shifting directions and co-creating the Love Party instead.
Here's how the Love Party's website introduces its political platform.
Do you realize that if the 74.2% who have lost faith slash interest in the political system decided to vote for independent candidates who truly stood for the people rather than WEF-aligned big corporate interests, that the old two-party dominated political system would be swept away overnight?
Although LOVE—Liberation, Opportunity, Vitality, Empowerment—started out with the intention of becoming a registered political party, we quickly realized that the Electoral Commission is no longer fit for purpose and that we would be far more powerful operating as a wave of independent candidates rather than as a political party.
Goddammit.
They always end up doing, like, weird botched leftism.
Also doing the classic political rhetoric trick of being like, oh yeah, the 75% of people who don't vote, it's because they all agree with me.
Yeah, the silent majority.
Yeah, you are Nixon.
Rachel ran as a candidate in the local council elections for Bakewell this year, and given the fact her party was both very recently created and not actually registered with the Electoral Commission, won a pretty respectable 175 votes, 6% of the overall ballot count.
I mean, this is a size and scale where you could probably just ply every person separately with baked goods.
I mean, you could take over this place in a kind of, you know, in a kind of small way.
It's not so hard.
The approach to politics and law that's emerging here might strike you as a pretty strange and contradictory one.
On the one hand, rejecting the political system as totally corrupt and illegitimate, while also trying to run for office within it.
This contradiction also seemed to be mirrored in the group's approach to Cressbrookdale itself.
The landowners were firmly ignoring everything they were sent by the Peak Park Authority, and in fact leaving signs around the place which put AUTHORITY ITSELF in inverted commas when describing them, and yet they were clearly more than happy to work with the police when it came to reporting alleged instances of harassment or vandalism, or threatening would-be trespassers on the land.
I think at least some, if perhaps not all, of these contradictions can be resolved when you understand a little more about the pseudo-legal philosophy that the landowners had discovered known as Common Law.
As the Love Cressbrookdale website states, "Every enhancement we've made, every step we plan to take,
falls within the embrace of our common law rights as landowners, and we continue to strive towards effective land management
and security, in harmony with the principles that guide us."
Cressbrookdale Estate stands as a private members' association,
rooted in the principles of common law.
Embracing this ethos means embracing your sovereign rights and responsibilities.
Closely related to the sovereign citizen movement, this philosophy essentially holds that there are certain
rhetorical strategies which a person can learn and utilise in order to
essentially nullify the power of any legal or governing body over their own
personal autonomy.
Since the purchase of Cressbrookdale, I've noticed this idea becoming a more and more frequent topic in Rachel's videos.
You know, the people have the power.
And the system, and the electoral system, all the systems, they rely on consent.
They rely on consent of the people.
So what happens when the people remove their consent?
Like, no, I don't understand.
I don't consent.
I don't agree to this anymore.
Essentially, we have a reversion to our common law rights.
So everything that people say, oh, it's illegal, No, it's unlawful.
It's actually unlawful because our common law rights cannot be removed by any government or body or authority or institution.
They only have authority over us if we consent to it and that is a little-known thing that you won't be taught in school.
But increasingly people are waking up to their rights, to their common law rights.
So no one, just to repeat, no one has any authority over you.
Unless you consent to it.
Okay, if we remove these authorities, you realize you will be driven out of this town by force.
These people will, like, you would be long gone.
They would have absolutely formed a small villagers militia and pushed you out.
Like your only fucking chance is that the cops can intervene.
Come on.
Yeah, but I think that's almost it in a way, isn't it?
It's that under, I think, the philosophy that she's espousing here, which I have to admit I've not looked deeply into the sovereign citizen movement or common law and stuff like that, it's sort of like, you know, the police can protect me because I consent to that, but, you know, the police cannot, like, infringe on me in any way because I do not consent to that.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, sure.
It does.
Yes.
I mean, it makes sense in the sense that that's what the philosophy is.
In the sense that it's coherent in its incoherency and ignorance.
But yeah, you see this quite a lot.
She'll often talk about various people in the anti-lockdown movement who have been arrested or something for, yeah, for, you know, kind of breaking the law in some way or another and sentenced.
And she'll often say, oh, they clearly didn't know their common law rights.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know for sure.
If you just fly the flag with the fringe and et cetera, et cetera, like, yeah, the courts just can't put you in jail.
Try it, try it.
Of all the locals I spoke to, there seemed to be a split on how exactly to reckon with the beliefs of their new neighbours.
Many emphasised very strongly to me that they didn't care what Rachel and her comrades believed or didn't believe about Covid, the Great Reset or anything else.
Their sole concern, they stressed, was the preservation of the land, a value which they felt that newcomers had not shown sufficient respect for.
Others, though, said that they felt deeply alarmed by what they had seen and heard people saying when they ventured online into the forums that Rachel and her followers used for community discussions.
Anna is a university student who has been visiting Crestbrookdale her whole life.
Like many other people I spoke to, she described to me how the arrival of the newcomers had created a shift in the tranquil, calm environment of the area.
I think it makes everything very unsteady and strange.
It's always been... And I think this is the same for everyone who has anything to do with the village.
Like, it feels a bit uncanny and a bit... It's just changed.
The feeling's changed.
And when you see Rachel and her people, you feel a bit... Not intimidated.
I'm not intimidated by them, but I just feel a bit uneasy, especially because of what I've... What I know about them.
Anna, among with some other residents, has been keeping an eye on the telegram channels that have been used by the group and their supporters.
She explained to me that although the most common characterisation of Rachel Elnor and her online followers was that they were anti-vaxxers, she felt this understated some of the darker material that was being shared in these groups.
So there's all your classic conspiracy stuff.
There's a lot of QAnon, which is not a very English thing.
Loads of QAnon.
Loads of sort of... Loads and loads of anti-vaxx.
They don't like the idea of eating bugs.
World Economic Forum, Great Reset, they all sort of merge into one thing, sort of anti-government, anti-healthcare, anti-cabal, anti-tax, anti-law, everything, they're sort of against everything, they make everything up, and any conspiracy theory that's out there, they're like, ah, yeah, that's right, that's just what we believe.
So there's all that, and a lot of it I can take as pretty light-hearted, it's like, What are they believing now?
What are they saying now about this?
And everything comes out in the news.
But then you're sometimes struck by the darker parts, like the anti-Semitism that comes alongside it, anti-LGBT, I don't know, anti-immigration.
Lots of these things that, unlike some of the hippie stuff, are a lot more harmful and directed at certain people and identities and certain groups.
When I asked Anna to show me some examples, she sent me a shedload of screenshots of various comments she'd found in the channels.
These were undeniably horrific.
Commenters said things like, quote, one thing I've learned over the last 15 years of research is that you cannot trust a Jew, and made reference to the royal family being crypto-Jews.
In one discussion of the comedian Russell Brand, a commenter named Wayne wrote, Brand never mentions who's really pulling the strings.
Equal the Zionists, the fake Jews, or further back the Khazarian mafia who have ruled the world for centuries.
Okay.
Now, one thing that's important to emphasise here is that Rachel hasn't posted any of this antisemitic material herself, and nothing she's said has given me reason to believe she endorses any of it.
But these messages were all in a Telegram chat dedicated to followers of her channel, which is the same place where updates about Cressbrook and open invites to attend various events on the Dale are also regularly posted.
It's easy to understand why many of the villagers were frightened by the kind of politics that the newcomers were potentially attracting to their front door.
This was particularly true for locals who were Jewish themselves, a couple of whom I spoke to but, unsurprisingly given the circumstances, asked not to be identified.
Some of this encroachment had already happened in the online sphere.
Jenny mentioned to me that the Save Cressbrookdale campaign received a threatening email from someone using their real name.
When she investigated, the author turned out to be living with a signed-up member of the British National Party, an extreme far-right political party in this country.
It was yet another example of how online conspiracy politics in the pandemic era had thrown together what seemed like completely separate ideological worlds.
Peace and love new age hippies alongside neo-fascists, all swimming together in one big online soup.
To Anna, the convergence of ideologies only made this brand of conspiracy culture more dangerous.
She worried that the new-age, hippie-ish language and aesthetics that the newcomers employed on their promotional materials, videos and website ran the risk of masking the darker side of conspiracy politics that their project had invited into the village.
But when I've been marshalling at Crestbrook Dale, we just like stop cars and give some leaflets out and say, oh, check out our website and whatever.
Some people are like, oh, they just sound like a group of hippies.
Oh, they're just hippies.
They're just like, let them be.
It's just like a little eco farm.
But then I sort of have to explain to them, like, oh, it's not really that simple.
And there's a much deeper and scarier message behind all this.
For now, it feels unclear how far the Cressbrook Dale Estate Private Members Association will get in their stated plans to continue building on the land.
Much like the online conspiracy subcultures they inhabit, the landowners' vision for the future seems constantly in flux.
It's clear that they perceive the land to be a haven against the powerful forces of darkness that rule us, but its exact qualities seem to shift.
Sometimes the Dale is an eco-farm and food forest to sustain the community during upcoming food shortages, Sometimes it's more of a spiritual retreat to nourish the souls of anti-Great Reset activists before they go back into the corrupted, highly technologised society they despise.
Much of Cressbrookdale's future depends on the Peak Park Authority's ability to enforce their demands on the landowners and how exactly they intend to go about this with a group that declare themselves to be operating under a separate legal system.
The locals who make up the Save Cressbrookdale campaign continue with their efforts to put pressure on the body to do something.
And they tell me that there will be an announcement in January which will more or less say how they're planning to go ahead.
But it feels to me like there won't be a dramatic finale to this saga, so much as a long and drawn out conflict made up of several interconnected battles ongoing in the physical, online and legal sphere all at once.
Some of you might be wondering why I've made you listen to two whole episodes about this highly localised feud in a part of the world where you're very unlikely to ever visit.
Unless, of course, you're one of the blessed listeners of this podcast, lucky enough to hail from Derbyshire.
I think the reason why I've been so fascinated with the story, following it for over a year now, is because of what it represents more broadly in terms of the rise of conspiracy politics.
Most of us won't have the online conspiracy sphere arrive in our world as unavoidably and dramatically as the residents of Cressbrook, but more and more people seem to be becoming aware of the phenomenon as it bumps up in our day-to-day lives in unexpected ways.
Increasingly, people are discovering that their friends, loved ones or neighbours have views that they can't understand or won't accept, and are looking for help on how to navigate that.
Most of us like to think of ourselves as accepting and tolerant people, but we all have our limits.
And it seems that those are being especially tested in the post-QAnon, post-Covid world.
Cressbrook seems like an especially vivid example of this very common story, and so I'll keep watching to see what happens here, in case there's anything we can learn about the future of conspiracy politics in this country.
It's a lesson which I increasingly believe is going to be relevant to us all.
Yeah, and I mean, it affects you if you're one of the Canadians in that small town where, you know, one of the buildings was taken over by Queen Romana Didulo's little QAnon cult.
I mean, this is definitely a story that seems to be replicating.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, it's also just a sort of a minor microcosm of about why this podcast even exists in the first place is, you know, there's some sort of like unwelcome invaders, not just in the physical space, but in the information space.
And they because they're so noisy, they become unavoidable.
You have to figure out what the hell to do with them and how to live with them.
I was really struck by some of the first locals who got in touch with me about this story, saying that, yeah, it was because of this happening that they'd had to research what the Great Reset was and QAnon, and that was how they discovered this podcast.
And so now they were listening to this podcast, trying to understand what was going on in their backyard.
Welcome fellow bog eaters.
Honestly, yeah, the majority of this podcast listeners are people who noticed something weird online or among their friends and family and wondered what the hell they were talking about and then googled some of the weird phrases that are emanating from their mouths and posts and then came across us to help us with the hope that we could sort of explain what the hell they're talking about.
Yeah, Travis will come and help you set up your, um, militia.
He's done it before.
Hi there, everyone.
This is just a quick update from Annie about the situation in Cressbrookdale since we recorded this episode.
At that time, I thought there wasn't going to be any further action on the issue until at least January, but events seem to have overtaken me.
On December 6th, Rachel Alnor posted an open letter to the Secretary of State for Leveling Up Housing and Communities, Michael Gove, in which she complained about what she called the unlawful, inappropriate and dispiriting actions of the Peak District National Park Authority, and heavily implied that they were corrupt.
Either in response to this letter or possibly just wanting to have taken some action by the end of the year, the Peak District National Park Authority seems to have decided to take the no more Mr Nice Guy option.
The Derbyshire Times reports that on the 14th of December, the authority confirmed that they had sent a team to remove the teepee and car park on site, with further works to remove the steps also scheduled.
The chief executive of the authority, Phil Mulligan, said they were disappointed that the landowner had consistently refused to acknowledge the laws protecting the land.
Rachel has only addressed this so far in a comment on one of her videos, in which she confirmed she had reported the matter as theft to the police, quote, citing Phil Mulligan as a prime suspect, end quote, and confirmed her plans to write to the chief executive demanding £25,000 in compensation, as well as his resignation.
The resident who originally put me onto this story, who is also called Phil but is not the same person, said to me that the village were very pleased with this outcome, but were aware that it wasn't over yet.
So that should fully bring us up to speed on the topic.
A very Happy New Year to you all.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAA Podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAnonAnonymous and sign up for just five bucks a month to get all of our premium episodes, the entire archive.
We put out one for every normal episode and all of our miniseries.
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.
Two years on, they're being sacked!
We're dealing with psychopaths and sociopaths in this government.
They're heartless, they're soulless, they're controlled by the World Economic Forum.
by the New World Order that wants to push through totalitarianism and we have to stand and say no, we do not consent.
This is all about money.
You followed the money.
Look at how many billions are being sucked away from taxpayers into big pharma, big pharmaceuticals.
Look at how much money is being wasted on big media, mainstream media that won't tell the truth, that is just taking the money for big ads.
You see them around Sheffield, get your booster jabs.
No one's talking about the side effects.
No one's talking about all of the people with blood clots who are dropping down dead.
Athletes, people like No backs in Australia, not even allowed to compete in the Australian Open for holding his human rights.
This is about our fight for liberty and freedom and humanity and we have to say no because unless we do this is going to creep and creep until we are completely controlled in a transhumanist nightmare and that is what is in store for our children unless we stand strong and say no this stops
