QAA Podcast - Episode 180: Grenfell Tower Conspiracy Theories with Annie Kelly

Episode Date: February 26, 2022

A real conspiracy rooted in profound greed and corporate collusion with government. Conspiracy theories attempting to blame everything on a very different "cabal". Some years after it happened, our UK correspondent Annie Kelly explores the tragic fire at Grenfell Tower in West London that led to mass casualties. Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week: http://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous Follow Annie: https://twitter.com/AnnieKNK Vaccine: The Human Story Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/VaccinePodcast Our first QAA records release: 'Hikikomori Lake' by Nick Sena is available to listen for free at http://qaarecords.bandcamp.com (12 original tracks) QAA Merch / Join the Discord Community / Find the Lost Episodes / Etc: https://qanonanonymous.com Episode music by Nick Sena (https://nicksenamusic.com), editing by Corey Klotz.

What's up QAA listeners? The fun games have begun. I found a way to connect to the internet. I'm sorry, boy. Welcome listener to chapter 180 of the Q&ONANANANANANANAS podcast, the Grenfell Tower conspiracy theories episode. As always, we are your host, Jake Rockatansky, Annie Kelly, Julian Field, and Travis View.

This week, we continue our journey. into the dark recesses of Annie Kelly's mind. One obsessed with child abductions, murder, and other horrifying tragedies. Yes, she produces great coverage of the conspiracy theories associated with these events, but her real motivation seems clear. To politely, and with great talent, hurt and destroy our beautiful listeners by generating vibes so bad they make from software blush. Now, you might think that our role is to defend you against these kinds of British psychic attacks

to say, hey, Annie, can you cover something less depressing? depressing, but that would be a fundamental misunderstanding of what our podcast is and does. Instead, we vow to continue providing lethal aid to the KNK, Annie's QAA splinter group. We will erect statues in her name, and we will harvest the tears of this fallen world. Guys, if you want less depressing stories, don't have a UK correspondent. I keep on telling you. It's rainy all year over there. So I guess this week's topic is the Grenfell Tower tragedy, a 2017 fire that broke out in a 24-story high-rise in West London, leading to the deaths of 72 people and the injury of over 70 others.

In the wake of the fire, an inquiry was set up to understand what exactly led to such a profound breakdown in safety protocols. Compounding the horror, the Grenfell Tower incident led to the birth of multiple related conspiracy theories, so we'll be taking a look at those two. But before all of that, Annie has a little bit of developing clone news from the UK. like it's becoming a vertical in your papers. Yeah, I'm having to do a clone update every two weeks at this point. All's Fair in Love and Clone War.

So, before I get into my main story today, I thought I'd give you an update on a story I talked about on this podcast a few weeks ago now. Listeners may remember the tale of two Borises, which began when our esteemed Prime Minister essentially declared the leader of the opposition, Kirstama, a nonce protector, who was personally responsible for letting off Jimmy Saville. Qan honours, who were mostly under the impression that they were both satanic paedophiles, had to come up with a reason for why Boris was acting so based all of a sudden in sharing one of their favourite memes.

And luckily, with the help of an old Q drop, which said, Think PM UK install, the best is yet to come. They concluded the most likely answer. Johnson was a clone, cleverly installed by the white hats to wake people up. He's good now. Mm-hmm, yeah, he looks good, he just seems good. He looks great. I can tell he's good now.

What I hadn't realized at the time was this conspiracy theory has a celebrity supporter and one with former romantic links to the man himself. Jennifer Arcuri is an American technology entrepreneur and a past illicit flame of Johnson from 2012 to 2016 while he was mayor of London. Wait, is she saying like, that dick changed? Essentially, yeah, yeah. Is now a clone? The one she slept with for years?

I don't understand. I also want to accuse my exes of being clones now. It helps you get over them quicker. Since the relationship, Arcuri has been on something of a journey, promoting QAnon and anti-vaccine conspiracy theories on her social media accounts. Recently, she appeared on G.B. News,

which is like the British version of Fox News, only with worse production values and less attractive hosts. And seem to endorse, alongside other things, the theory that Johnson was replaced with a doppelganger at some point when he was in hospital suffering from COVID-19. You know, there is something that happens to you before you take office when you become a world leader. There are certain rituals, let's say, let's call them for fun, that happen.

And then when one takes office, one has to adhere to those around him, obviously seeking endorsement and validation from those, especially within the establishment, would have been very, very important to Boris. And then, you know, per the episode, the entire nation watched, one man entering the hospital and another one, you know, leaving. I've had several sources confirm, you know, this isn't the same man. However, we want to, you know, I'm not the one to look into this. I'm not an investigative journalist.

Someone should be looking into this. This isn't the same man by a long shot. Not just in spirit and character and demeanour. We're talking completely different. Now, for those who think this is just a coy way of doing the classic, he's not the man I knew line, so popular with faded romantic relationships, it might be worth looking at some of the other things Arcurys posted to her telegram channel and Twitter account.

Last year, she heavily implied that Johnson's wife, Carrie, was a Satanist, and said, quote, I encourage you to explore beyond this woman and look at how Satanism is actually, you know, surprisingly used in a lot of ways in government. According to Vice reporting in December last year, her Twitter feed is a stream of COVID denialism, an anti-vax sentiment. On the 12th November, a retweet from a Curry's account showed a video saying that COVID vaccinations are a, quote, genocidal initiative against young children and that it is important to, quote, deal with the issue. A tweet posted on her account on the 6th of December said, four shills, shilling paid for lies in response to footage of someone encouraging people to get vaccinated on a daytime TV show. On the 3rd of December, a tweet from her account said,

quote, stay distracted with scariance. Meanwhile, the IMF issued a warning about an economic collapse. It's worth noting that this radicalization of Arcuri happened long after she was involved with Johnson, but that doesn't stop her playing up her political insider credentials to both bolster her credibility talking about these things and get a much bigger platform to spread them than most telegram users could ever dream of. So, the result of this is we now have the message that the Prime Minister has been secretly replaced

by a doppelganger as something that was said, unchallenged on TV. It's good. Although this might feel like a pretty dark thermometer reading of the British political landscape and its relationship to supposedly fringe conspiracy theories, I, as an adept political strategist, think that Labor could make something of this.

After all, if Johnson's going to use QAnon-adjacent smears, it only seems fair to fight fire with fire. All Starma needs to do now is demand on live TV that the Prime Minister tell us something only the real Boris Johnson could know. Something simple, perhaps, like how many children do you have? Ah, that couldn't backfire. He definitely has that number on recall.

In 1992, you and I went for, went for sodas, what did you order? By how many children you have, I mean have locked away in the adrenachrome farms. I want to go back to two British people going for sodas. I don't know. What imagination, you think London's just people drinking soda pop. That is great. That's good.

Yeah, that makes sense. No, we call them fizzy drinks here. They went to the soda jerk to get a fizzy drink. is it's quite a like degrading name for it i think soda is a much nicer name yeah soda soda pop um so yeah thank you annie you know this is uh by far the the only important and darkest news to come out of europe recently so it's you know crucial that we uh track the development of um this clone theory you know i think that like british tv has always been a little bit wacky and i think the tabloids are doing bad boy stuff. So why not have also the tabloidification of television? So we could have some

stories about, you know, an ancient mummy coming back to life. Boris Johnson's a clone and of course the classic bat boy. Yeah, I don't know. This is good. Yeah, I mean, I guess the real question now is why isn't this being covered on the woke BBC? That is, they keep saying Boris Johnson is the same human being and not a clone. Yeah, because they're the ones, they are the puppet masters who they're They create the clones. They're actually cybernetic sort of AIs. And they create, they manage the clones. They put plants in the UK in Parliament.

So, yeah, of course they're going to be silent. Yeah, the Boris Boris Company. I'm just going to kill myself now. But now, my dear listeners, for the main topic of tonight's episode, because the comings and goings of our Prime Minister and his shadow self have sadly not been the only conspiracy theory to hit the headlines in my home country during the last few weeks. On the 11th of February this year, it was reported that Tara Ahmed, a 51-year-old anti-lockdown activist who goes by the name Tara Pure in conspiracy circles, had been jailed for 11 months on the grounds of inciting racial hatred.

Specifically, two Facebook posts in which she claimed that the Grenfell Tower fire of 2017, in which 72 people died, had been set deliberately as a quote, Jewish sacrifice. Oh boy. Oh boy. Ahmed, who volunteered in the aftermath of the disaster, posted a comment on Facebook four days after the fire, saying, I've been at the scene at the protests and at the community meetings and have met many of the victims. Some were still in the same clothes they escaped in. They are very real and genuine. Their pain and suffering is raw and deep, and their disgusting neglect by authorities continues. Watch the footage of people trapped in the inferno with flames behind them. They were burnt alive in a Jewish

sacrifice. In a further comment on Facebook, she remarked, Grenfell is owned by a private Jewish property developer, just like the Twin Towers. I wonder how much Goldman Sachs is standing to make in the world's most expensive real estate location, Kensington. Grenfell Tower was a 24-story, high-rise council housing complex in North Kensington, London. It was not, in fact, owned by a private property developer of any ethnicity, but Kensington and Chelsea London Borough Council, although some of the flats had been bought under the right to buy policy under a leasehold basis. The management of the building and its safety was handled by the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, or KCTMO, who were effectively

the landlords of the rest of the tenants. Now Ahmed, in her defence, would say that she had chosen her words imperfectly in a moment of great stress, and that she had never intended to blame the fire on all Jews. Speaking to a small rally of supporters outside the old Bailey Courthouse, she attempted to refine and modulate her position, which, funnily enough, didn't sound a great deal less anti-Semitic to my untrained ear. They want to rehabilitate me because I believe that there's a criminal cabal who's genociding us, who's dividing and conquering us. They think that that is an evil concept. They're claiming that I'm saying that all Jews, I'm targeted all Jews, when I've literally

out of the thousands of comments, there are only two comments in which I haven't prefaced the word Jews with, like I usually do, with cabal, with evil or satanic, targeting the Rochschilds and the Rockefellas, which is all I ever did, and they had to probably scour for God knows how long, months with a fine tooth comb, with a huge magnifying glass, to find these two obscure comments. And they are hanging, drawing, and courting me in a place built for murderers. The Rockefellers are Episcopalians. Yeah, I know. What are you talking about?

I'm so not anti-Semitic. I'm accusing all of the rich families I can think of of being secretly Jewish. Guys, I know you, the hate that I said, I blame the Jews. But if you remember, I said I blame the satanic Jews. Yeah, it's just the evil ones. Look, guys, there are good Jews and bad Jews. Man, this is exactly what they were saying, like, when QAnon moved over to vote, and they were immediately just talking about Jewish people,

and a couple nervous posters were like, oh, oh, well, isn't that? And they were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're not anti-Semitic. Look, we're talking about the Jews who use their Judaism to do evil, okay? There are plenty of great Jews, like Jake Rakitansky, great Jew, don't want to do anything to him. They mentioned you? She also managed to pepper in some references to COVID conspiracies and satanic ritual abuse theories while she was there.

It's that the power structure at the moment comes from those, the tiny fraction of the ones who unfortunately are beholden to Satan. They literally worship Satan, they sacrifice to Satan, they get their power in Satan, they make contract with Satan in blood. And unless we all realize that we also need to get our power from a far higher source than just going out and doing activism and taking practical actions, which are so important. But unless we do the spiritual work, unless we go within, unless we get our power from that divine source that is the antidote of their satanic power, we won't win this war. Because this is a spiritual. Firstly, in the prophecy is a spiritual.

For me, the last six months, has been the most traumatic, but they've also been the most empowering, the most uplifting, where I just keep just about surrendering to that higher power. Trusting, having faith, that what's being done at the moment with the raising of consciousness, as we're seeing, we have to surrender. I have to surrender. I am paying a price, but it's for the greater good.

It's, look what's happening. It's bringing people together. It's raising people's awareness about this topic, which nobody was talking about, because all we were talking about was the vaccine, vaccine passports, lockdown. But really, the hidden hand behind everything, they have shot themselves in the work with this case,

because they have brought to attention. hidden hand. That's okay. She's just going to go on a tangent about the Wizard of Oz now. The Wizard of Oz. What's that film with Dorothy? I know. Fuck. Anyways, I'm trying to, it's a Wizard of Oz thing, but I'm using it to say Jewish bloodlines, okay? Something, something, something behind the curtain. The hand, the hand behind the curtain, you know, the Jew, the Jew behind the curtain in that Dorothy movie. Don't you remember

at the end? Something, something, something. thing, the lead paint killed the tin man. When I found out what they did to little children, when I found out about satanic ritual abuse and I started researching him, and I researched and researched because I wanted to debunk him. Because what I was reading was so horrific and so hurtful, so traumatizing,

I wanted to debunk them. And I got stuck in this horrible, depressing six months and I couldn't tell me and I made a pact before you do whatever you can with me to stop that abuse of children so the price I'm going to pay and the price I have paid and the price I might pay is nothing compared to the suffering of those children and I am so honored to do what I can to do whatever it takes to stop this so it's nothing to happen nothing is happened even if the worst happens to me

and they want to put me away for four years no they won't even if they want to do that even if they want to do that so yeah posting lurid conspiracy theories about juror sacrifices on Facebook is actually saving the children

yeah and also like she has nothing to do with any of this right like I mean it seems like someone who just hopped on another topic from like anti-lockdown stuff She's just like, well, while I got you, got some other shit on offer, you ever heard the vaccine causes AIDS? You ever heard the Jewish cabal? You ever heard the reptilians? I've got a whole menu for you.

Oh, you guys liked my first pitch. I've actually got more. Way more for you. No, you're completely right. I'll talk about her a little bit later on, but there's basically never been a conspiracy theory she hasn't believed. Beautiful. Yeah. I mean, she does present it like somebody's mom.

Like, she's very accessible. Unfortunately, not all of Ahmed's supporters were particularly helpful in spreading the word that her posts hadn't counted as incitement to hatred against Jewish people because she actually only meant the satanic kind. Here's one of them defending her outside the courthouse. She'll get Judge Goldberg.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Swartzberger. Yeah, and a jury consisting of 11 out of 12 of them are from the state of Israel. Looking around uncomfortably red-faced as you just keep doing yes-and to the anti-Semitic jokes. Yeah, I was listening to that. I was like, are they dissing me? It was like, the first guy's like, Goldberg, second guy's like, hook-nose. Third guy's like, Israel. Yeah, and actually what our listeners can't see in that. clip is that the guy who starts saying she'll get Judge Goldberg or something actually has the

balls to wear a Jewish star. Right, because he's like the Jews. The star of David that the Nazis made the Jews wear because this is something that the anti-vaxxers have taken to wearing in this country because they're saying that they're persecuted in much the same way. To be fair, if you're essentially a Holocaust denialist, it could be true that in your world that, you know, COVID is worse Or the vaccine is worse. Yeah, I guess I hadn't thought of that. There's a weird, like, there's a weird consistent logic. They're like, why is everyone getting mad at me about, like, comparing myself to the Holocaust, which never even happened?

Yeah. Well, what I'm saying is that these lockdowns are, you know, bad, but not really that bad, much like the Holocaust. But they're slightly worse, slightly worse, just on the scale. Although Ahmed may not have realized it, she was actually. actually taking part in a centuries-long European tradition of blaming a long scapegoated minority for a devastating and unexpected tragedy. Jewish people are historically no stranger to this kind of treatment, including in my own home city of Norwich, which has the dubious honor of being one of the earliest originators of the blood libel myth in the medieval era when a child was killed

and the local Jewish community accused of engaging in his ritualistic murder. You bring this up a lot. Are you being paid by the tourist authorities over there? This is the second time. It's almost like, hey, come visit the origins of anti-Semitism. Forget the Holocaust Museum. Oh, my God. I don't know. And he's like, bro. Yeah, I really, I highly recommend you take the Blood Libel tour. It starts, it starts near the river, and we work our way up, and there's a great, um, Sasha's stand on the way. Okay, I'm starting to feel really bad for dissing my home city that much. I love it here.

There's loads of nice stuff here as well. Next episode, I'm going to put in something nice about Norwich. I'm sorry for bullying you. But fires in particular, because of their seeming spontaneity and the huge amount of death and destruction they can cause, have a long history of sparking conspiracy theories and revenge killings in their wake. In September 1666, a fire that began in a bakery engulfed the city of London for over five days, raising much of its oldest buildings to the ground. Immediately, conspiracy theories began that the fire was set deliberately by one of England's internal enemies. According to Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, writing for the Smithsonian magazine, Before the flames were out, a Dutch baker was dragged from his bakery while an angry mob tore it apart.

A Swedish diplomat was nearly hung, saved only by the Duke of York who happened to see him and demand he be let down. A blacksmith felled a Frenchman in the street with a vicious blow with an iron bar. A witness recalled seeing his innocent blood flowing in a plentiful stream down his ankles. A French woman's breasts were cut off by Londoners who thought the chicks she carried in her apron were incendiaries. Another Frenchman was nearly dismembered by a mob that thought that he was carrying a chest of bombs. The bombs were tennis balls. Ahmed's close contact with traumatized Grenfell survivors in her position as a volunteer, and the fact that she apparently even discussed her beliefs with some of them, was submitted as incriminating evidence in the case that she

very well could have sparked a similar act of violence. Thankfully, no such event occurred, but that was probably because the residents, some of whom had even warned about the possibility of a fire at Grenfell before it happened, had much better people to blame for the devastation. As failed by the state, the struggle and the shadow of Grenfell, a documentary produced infronted by a Grenfell resident of 25 years convincingly argues, what happened to the tower and the 72 people who died there cannot be separated from the social context of its location in the Lancaster West Estate,

a council housing project in North Kensington Borough, a wealthy district in North London. I was born in Grenfell Tower. It was my home for 25 years. After seeing the heart of my state burn, I can't sleep. That night will follow me and my peoples for the rest of our lives. You won't see any shots of the fateful night in this film. We never want to see that again. Grenfell burned for local and global reasons. There's a bigger picture that I learn more about every day.

We talk politics now and how we can take power because we learned that we have to look after ourselves. Grenfell changed everything. The deadly consequences we suffered make the cranes loom in the horizon in different, more threatening ways now. I live in Kensington and Chelsea. It's one of the richest areas in the whole country.

whole country. But the north, where we live, has one of the highest concentration of people on low incomes. The growing inequality is pushing so many out the area. It's obvious global capital has no regard for people like me. It's the same story the world over, from Berlin to Rio, Madrid to New York. But maybe because we're in such prime real estate, what we had to live through could be a warning for you all. In particular, the documentary pointed to the recent refurbishment of the tower as part of the regeneration of the area. The attractive new cladding on the building's facade, an inquiry would later prove, was made of a highly flammable material that rapidly exacerbated the spread of the fire

from one flat to the entire building. As was standard safety advice for many high-rise blocks in London, residents were advised to stay put in the case of a fire, the theory being that the thick walls and fire doors would contain the flames long enough for the fire service to arrive. The cladding made that advice deadly. Formed in 2010, the Grenfell Action Group was a grassroots organization of residents, set up to, in their own words, defend the rights of the residents of the Lancaster-West Estate, a sprawling inner-city social housing complex of nearly a thousand dwellings, mostly working class, multicultural and multi-ethnic. In 2015, the group joined with the Unite Community

membership, a union community guide, as a result of concerns about the refurbishment of the tower. In particular, the Grenfell Action Group raised concerns about fire safety. In November 2016, just under a year before the fire, they posted an eerily prophetic blog, writing, It is a truly terrifying thought, but the Grenfell Action Group firmly believe that only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord, KCTMO, and bring an end to the dangerous living conditions and neglect of health and safety legislation that they inflict upon their tenants and leaseholders. Only an incident that results in serious loss of life of residence will allow the external scrutiny. to occur that will shine a light on the practices that characterize the malign governance of this non-functioning organization. Two months after the fire, it was revealed by the Guardian that

building safety experts warned in 2014 that the insulation planned for use on Grenfell Tower should only be used with non-combustible exterior cladding. The chief reason it wasn't, in this case, was because of expense. The combustible cladding materials were considerably cheaper than the non-combustible alternatives, saving the project team at around 293,000 pounds. The professor of criminology Steve Toombs at the Open University described Grenfell as an avoidable tragedy and a form of state corporate violence, writing about the decision of the KTCMO to use cheaper cladding. It must then be utterly devastating for anyone remotely connected to Grenfell Tower to realize that this atrocity was a result of a conscious decision by the council to save 293

thousand pounds. This does not mean that there was any intention to cause the fire, nor the deaths that resulted. But this level of cost cutting by the richest council in England could be viewed as indicative of the contempt which Grenfell residents stated that they had endured for years. As one teenage resident stated outside the tower as it continued to burn, we're dying in there because we don't count. Another local resident put it, quote, the people who died and lost their homes, this happened to them because they are poor. Such views were widely articulated by the local community across media coverage in the immediate aftermath of the atrocity. Where the residents and survivors did engage in conspiratorial thinking about the causes of

the fire, it was mainly through being asked to describe the deadly results of this sheer state indifference to their lives, homes, and physical safety as an accident. In the aftermath of the fire, BBC journalist Victoria Derbyshire interviewed North Kensington residents who had witnessed the fire. In a clip that would go viral, one local, Piki Suku, spoke candidly about the social regeneration that the area had been undergoing in previous years and how this fueled his belief that the fire was not an accident. Piki, hello, I gather you witnessed much of what happened last night. What did you see? I was riding back maybe like 2 a.m. I seen that one line of fire. It looked like it was contained at the time. And then by the time I got here, it was

probably two of those lines of flats were on fire like that mainly the top bit and then certainly even an hour and then like most of the building was on fire but I'm not going to lie one thing I wanted to say though

this thing that they're all saying about oh it might have been a fridge that exploded or something like that I don't know about all of that but what I do know is they did regeneration last year to that building that they're talking about doing to all of these buildings they did it to that building only 10 million pounds they're talking about

and put these shoddy plastic things on there that set up a light because they want more reasons to knock these blocks down. There's two options. They could either regenerate the blocks or they could knock them down and after that, I'm not so sure that was totally an accident. I'm not even going to lie.

I'm not even going to lie to. You could pause me there, but I'm not going to lie. The whole situation that's going on in this area, the way that they don't want us here and they put those rich man's blocks over there and then they tell a certain man in Frinstead they can't even go into that section. That's outrageous. I can't lie.

The way that the street man here is terrible, isn't it? So I can't even take the belief out of my mind that that wasn't just an accident. Do you know what I'm saying? I'm not going to lie. I think it's fucked and I think... But we don't know. Yeah, we don't know, we don't know, but you're talking about

the regeneration that happened last year to apparently make these blocks better. And then these fires have never happened. I've lived here my entire life. My mom's lived here a very long time. And these kind of things have never, ever happened in this. I don't know what they spent 10 million pounds on, but the lifts in this block and all the blocks around, they only cost 60 grand to fix and they still never replaced them throughout the time I've lived here. So 10 million for that. No, they didn't, no, no, no, no. I'm not really, I'm not really fucking with the government around. That's all I'm saying. Hey, I'm going to apologize for your language. I'm going to apologize for the language. Yes, I know, and I do apologize, but I also want to say that is, that is symptomatic of some of the anger. in this community.

Ah, that's adorable. I'm going to apologise for the language. When he said he doesn't really fuck with the government, he's just angry. You know. Peeke's implication that the fire was set deliberately because, quote, they don't want us here, was certainly straying into conspiracy theory.

But it clearly tapped into a justified vein of anger that many Lancaster West Estate residents felt about having their safety concerns ignored until it was too late. Such anger was only intensified by the, slow and shambolic relief response to the survivors, many of whom still didn't know if their loved ones made it out alive. As the late great journalist Dawn Foster wrote about the situation on the ground. Information has been lacking since day one. One woman I spoke to at the scene,

searching for her friend, told me that though there were many community centers open, there was no centralized list of missing people and survivors. She attempted to compile one with a few other volunteers and proffered it to the police who told her they didn't know who to give it to. To many who had just lost their homes, belongings, neighbours and loved ones, the line between deliberate murder and manslaughter through continued deliberate neglect and disinterest must have felt pretty immaterial. Of course, because the internet is a hellhole, it didn't take long for the trauma and righteous anger of the survivors to become itself

twisted into a conspiracy theory that presented itself in much less defensible terms. Piki Suku's interview with Victoria Derbyshire went viral, And suddenly, speculation in conspiracy circles began that he himself was a crisis actor, hired to direct attention away from the true culprits of the fire, or even the fact the fire never happened at all. As a vice interview with Suku at the time, puts it. Most of these focus on the fact that Piki attended the fee-paying public school Charterhouse. He got a scholarship, but conspiracy theorists don't believe that,

calling him sneaky peekie and claiming he's part of a Zionist agenda. A flat earth-truther analyzes the hand gestures, Piki, who is a rapper, makes in his music videos and says, quote, this guy's a satanic player, guys. He don't care what he does. One video was simply titled, This Little Bitch Went to Charterhouse. One of them seizes on a clip of Piki talking about the ongoing questions around the fire, as of saying ongoing questions is beyond a working class person. Oh boy. Interestingly, when I was watching one of these videos, by now four years old, titled Piki Saku Brackets Glitch in the Green Screen Matrix, I noticed what appears to be Tara Ahmed's YouTube account in the comments.

The account goes by a pseudonym but is addressed by one of the other commenters as Tara Ahmed and has a picture which is unmistakably the same woman as in the videos from the front of the courthouse and the clips we played. In the comments, she defends Piki from accusations that he's a paid actor, although she acknowledges, quote, the authorities will always have their plants to provide their controlled narrative, but those will only be a handful. Ahmed's YouTube channel consists mostly of recycled content, although there's a clip from an anti-lockdown March in August 2020, which seems to be original. It's something of a

grab bag of conspiracy theories titled things like, they poison your cereals with actual iron shavings, mammograms and scans cause cancer, and UN pushing graphic sex education on children. Most recently, like a lot of the anti-lockdown movement, she seemed to be taking an interest in common law in the sovereign citizen movement, subscribing to several playlists on the topic, although this knowledge didn't seem to help her much in her actual court case. The Grenfell Tower fire, shamefully, became a feeding frenzy for online conspiracy theorists like Ahmed.

They were not satisfied with the explanation given countless times by residents and survivors themselves, which was that their lives were treated cheaply because they were poor and mostly not white. Instead, they decided to speculate about the legitimacy of those residents and nitpick their accounts of the worst day of their lives. In doing so, they revealed not just a callous lack of empathy for the fire's victims, which will surprise nobody who researches conspiracy theorists, but also a peculiar lack of interest in holding power to account, despite their frequent claims to be a thorn in the side of elites everywhere. I say this, because there is plenty of evidence all out in the open for who was responsible for the Grenfell fire and how. Conspiracy theorists made

dismiss the findings of the inquiry is tainted by its institutional nature, but reading the Phase 1 report, it seems to me that there is plenty in there that is damming, even if the Grenfell victims will never see the justice they deserve. As I mentioned, the report confirmed that the exterior cladding of the building was the primary reason the fire spread from the original flat on the fourth floor, making it uncontrollable. This was a largely expected outcome, given how much press the flammable nature of the cladding had received. What was less reported was the discussion of what started the fire itself. An expert witness in the inquiry concluded that the source was faulty wiring in the flats fridge freezer. The expert added that...

Models made in the US must have a back casing made from metallic steel, which can help contain internal fires. The plastic allowed for back casings on UK and European models were combustible and could contribute to fires. The fridge freezer was made by a company called Whirlpool, who challenged this finding and even came up with a wild alternative theory of their own, that the fire had been sparked by a lit cigarette thrown through a window. The lawyer representing the occupant of the flat where the fire started responded with all the respects such a notion deserved. As far as the theory of the fire having started as a result of something being thrown

through the open window is concerned, this is pure speculation, desperate to put it politely. There is no evidence in support. It would have been impossible for a cigarette or some other mystery item to have been launched from ground level four floors down, and it is equally impossible to imagine how a cigarette or some other mystery item discarded from a flat above, could have miraculously entered the kitchen through the open window, let alone set anything in the vicinity of light. In fact, as explored by Professor Steve Tooms, in his essay, Home as a site of state corporate violence, Grenfell Tower,

Ateologies and Aftermats, this was not the first fire to have been caused by a faulty whirlpool appliance. And a Freedom of Information Act response released a few months after Grenfell, the London Fire Brigade revealed that White Goods had triggered 2,891 fires from 2009 to 2000. According to the document, brands under the Whirlpool Corporation umbrella accounted for 895 of those fires, the highest of any manufacturer. Partly as a result of public scrutiny after Grenfell, the House of Commons established a cross-party committee on the safety of electrical goods in the UK, producing a report in early 2018. The report found that Whirlpool, quote, failed to provide an appropriate representative to give evidence, give incomplete answers to questions, and were required to provide subsequent clarifications. This does not strike us as the actions of a company seeking to repair consumer trust after serious safety failures with its products. Even more damningly, the report found that Whirlpool

and their regulatory body, Peterborough Trading Standards, continued to advise consumers that they could use appliances that had been ruled defective and a safety risk. Wellpool's relationship to the Peterborough Trading Standards is one that Toombs describes as one of the most crucial aspects of this whole episode, representing the way in which over the last 17 years in this country, quote, private business, ostensibly the object of regulation, has increasingly become the key vehicle of regulation. Under the private authority, or PA scheme, established under new labor and vastly expanded by the coalition government, a manufacturer and retailer like Whirlpool, which has production

sites and retail outlets across most of the local authorities in England and Wales, can reach an agreement with one local authority to regulate its systems across all of its stores in every local authority for complying with a relevant body of law. Peterborough City Council in the context of trading standards, for example. To regulated systems, the company makes a payment to the local authority agreed through contract. The benefit for the company, of course, is the absence of oversight in the vast majority of its premises. It's worth bearing in mind that this scheme coincided with local councils everywhere having their

funding slashed under austerity conditions. What sounds like the much-loved value of austerity politicians, streamlining the Byzant the Byzantine process of health and safety regulations, then begins to look an awful lot like a corporation holding a huge amount of financial power over the very people who are meant to be marking its homework. Toombs puts this clearly in the closing to his article. The PA scheme is a regulatory system which encourages non-enforcement and, one might say, collusion in wrongdoing since the financial benefits of such contracts to cash-strapped local authorities are real incentives to avoid adversarial relationships with business.

Thus, it was, in effect, the shield of Peterborough's trading standards through their contractual PA agreement, which allowed Whirlpool to continue to refuse to recall products they knew were not fit for purpose and, indeed, posed a proven safety risk, which had led to fatalities. Regulation, ostensibly in existence to protect consumers, residents, workers, and so on, is being transformed into a form of state corporate collusion by contract which protects the private sector from law enforcement, a form of state corporate violence, no less. So, to recap, the Grenfell fire began due to an electrical fault on a fridge freezer, made by a company who had made defective products that they had not been forced to recall by their regulatory government body

before. It then spread too rapidly to control across the building, as a result of combustible cladding combined with foam insulation plates that safety experts had warned about back in 2014. These materials were chosen because they were considerably cheaper than the alternative. After the KCT management organisation mentioned in an email to the building's renovation team, the need for, quote, good costs for Council of Fielding Mellon, the council's former deputy leader. And most heartbreakingly of all, as the fire spread across the building and desperate residents called the fire brigade, they were told to stay in their flats due to outdated pre-cladding fire safety standards. This advice was withdrawn at 2.47 a.m., nearly two hours after the fire had begun, and when for many, it was too late to

escape. Mickey Paramycifan, who managed to flee his seventh floor flat with his family after he woke up and smelled smoke, describe the situation for those who tried to leave. So I went to the hallway and see smoke everywhere. I've opened the door and the neighbors were there and people were screaming. Only one fire escape to get down and apparently that caught on fire. And the fire alarm that was going off, that wouldn't have woken no one up. It was as silent as it could be. When I got outside, there were explosions everywhere you looked, lots of bangs, blue gas coming out of everywhere you looked. About 12 floors up, I saw three children waving from a window, and then there was just an explosion and they disappeared. They were three kids. They were banging on the

windows. You could see their silhouettes, and then bang, it just went up. Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg would later go on an LBC radio show and suggest that those who obeyed the advice from the fire brigade and stayed in their flats lacked common sense. There have been suggestions that in part the tragedy was caused by either racism or policies of class. Are these suggestions correct? I don't think so. I think the tragedy came about because of the cladding, leading to the fire, racing up the building, and then was compounded by the stay put policy.

And it seems to me that that is the tragedy of it, that the more one's read over the weekend about the report and about the chances of people surviving, if you just ignore what you're told and leave, you are so much safer. And I think if either of us were in a fire, whatever the fire brigade said, we would leave the burning building.

It just seems the common sense thing to do. And it is such a tragedy that that didn't happen, but I don't think there's anything to do with race or class. I would like to prepare some maybe cheap cladding and just kind of make his suit out of it and then have, you know, a tiny fridge maybe under his armpit. Just fuck you, Jacob Reesmog. He is one of my least favorite British politicians. You just see his awful little face and you know there's nothing good coming out of it. I know. And he's like, he's got this kind of reputation as kind of being the sort of

the no-nonsense Tory who tells it like it is. But there was there was justifiably so much kind of outrage at him saying that that he did have to walk it back. He gave a sort of mealy-mouthed apology. I think he is giving you the straight tory, which is I'm a fucking goblin under a bridge that like takes children from families passing. To be honest with you all, this has been one of the hardest episodes for this podcast I've ever had to write. I knew that the victims of Grenfell had been failed, but until I started researching this episode, I had no idea to what extent and how many warnings had fallen on deaf ears. In the words of Edicture Chakrabotti, writing for the Guardian, over 170 years later, Britain remains a country that murders its poor. When four

separate government ministers are warned that Grenfell and other high rises are a serious fire risk, that an inferno isn't unfortunate. It is inevitable. Those dozens of Grenfell residents didn't die. They were killed. What happened last week wasn't a, quote, terrible tragedy or some other studio sofa platitude. It was social murder. Researching all of this, in light of the Tara Ahmed court case, compounds to me just how destructive and hateful anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are about this kind of disaster, because they grab people's instinct, in this case a correct one, that someone is to blame, and then point them in entirely the wrong direction

at a blameless ethnic minority community. It speaks to the character of the residents of North Kensington and the West Lancaster estate that even after the worst event of their lives, they didn't fall for those lies. Instead, they set up the Grenfell United and Justice for Grenfell organisations, which focus their campaign in seeking justice against Kensington tenant management organisation, local and central government, the companies who supply the dangerous cladding and insulation materials placed on the building, and other organisations who are responsible for the safety of the building. They also campaigned to ensure the safety recommendation from Phase 1 of the Grenfell Inquiry are implemented. Since the inquiry is ongoing,

a criminal investigation can't go ahead. And reading interviews, it feels as if many survivors don't expect to see justice of that kind. But they are determined to make sure that a disaster like Grenfell never happens again. Yeah, this is, yeah, I guess like a stark reminder that, you know, tightening your belt in many ways when we say that to people, especially working class people,

it means tightening, you know, the belt around their neck, essentially. And putting them in more and more dangerous positions, so that accidents like this can occur as part of a system that seems to be functioning. And it's understandable that, you know, people would put intent behind this and then spin out sometimes into conspiracy theories because, you know, I mean, the intent is nefarious at every level. Perhaps it wasn't direct choice of murder. It's more like, hey, we just kind of like stack this so that murder's going to be the only, like, logical results. You know, it will end in this kind of awful result.

And, yeah, it's depressing. But, yeah, I thought you did a great job, you know, showing how the people who pushed the conspiracy theory didn't have, I think, an extended effect over the people who actually experienced this, which is really important. I think once you have the people who were on the ground saying stuff like that, I mean, I remember, for example, after January 6th, the boyfriend or partner of one of the people that was trampled to death right in front of him was talking about Antifa that very day. And so, you know, when horrible things happen to people, you can only hope that I think that the people who are there on the ground, you know, are spared by these disgusting conspiracy theories.

Yeah, and I think you really hit the nail on the head in the last passage. It's like, there is somebody to blame. There is a cabal, if you will, of lazy, sort of indifferent, cheap housing, you know, constructors and organizations. that are perfectly, you know, are perfectly in the path to be blamed and the evidence is showing that they are, you know, responsible in many ways. And yet the people who aren't on the ground, you know, it's like there's somebody to blame. Like, there's your conspiracy. It's, it's right there. Yeah, it's almost like it's just like not exciting enough, is it? Yeah, or they're just not Jewish enough, you know? Yeah, the Whirlpool Kabal is not very Semitic. It's like, I'm sure you could find, like, Whirlpool executives whose last names are, you know, Rockatansky or, you know, another Jewish name.

Wait, are you saying that Mad Max is Jewish? Yeah, he's Jewish. Rockatansky is a Polish of Polish descent. I hope that people who've joined recently know that. That's Jake's voice. But it is. It's so mind-melting to me that it's like there is somebody to blame, you know, you actually, you know, if you raise awareness about them,

there is more, you know, there is a better chance that, that justice, you know, could potentially be done. And yet it's like you try to steer, you know, your social media followers or the people who will listen to you into a direction where nothing will ever happen. And maybe that's the thing. Maybe conspiracies are only fun when nobody ever gets caught. Because then you can keep conspiracy, you know, you can keep theorizing. If actual justice happens, then your game ends or the adventure ends or the investigation

ends and there's that little broken piece of people's brains that's like that knows deep down they're like oh well if I you know if the crime is solvable then like you know essentially I have to go back you know to I don't know like pushing papers in an office or whatever I don't get to be a fucking a secret sleuth at night

you know you're pouring through YouTube videos and cracking the case myself I mean there there really is you know we've talked about it before on the show and other people people who are, you know, more knowledgeable about conspiracy theorists than I am, you know, have talked about narcissism sort of being, you know, a sort of central component of a lot of conspiracy influencers. And I mean, it makes sense to me. It's like, oh, if I can't be in the center, you know, telling people that I know the truth and I figured it out and here's who to

blame, if somebody actually goes to jail, then, you know, you don't get to be the center of it anymore. And it's so tragic that, you know, it's pulling attention away from uncovering the actual sort of mystery. And then when the reports come out and it makes perfect sense like we've seen in this episode, you know, that that's disregarded or it's disinformation or, you know, it's, oh, it comes from the institution so it can't be trusted or it's the cover-up. And it's like, you're literally throwing away any potential justice. And it's just, it's maddening. On the flip side, Jake, Tara is having, you know, one of the most exciting parts of her live. She's having a great time.

Yeah. She's, you know, she used to just listlessly read Reddit, and now she's out there getting interviewed about the Jewish Kavall. And that's the, you know, that's a pinnacle right there for her. Yeah, and as we know, in the modern day, the more, the more engagement you get, the more likes, more comments, more interviews, that's the writer you are. I mean, that's, I know writer is not a real word, but it works well for this analogy. I'm so lost. But no, I think that was a really good point, Jake. And I guess it, yeah, it speaks to the way that conspiracy theory spread particularly on the internet, right, where it's like a game, or it's like an ARG, or it's like something where, you know, you kind of just keep on going to uncover further and further layers.

And you actually have no interest at all. and, as you say, in like, real justice being done because you keep on trying to go to the next level, right? Which is kind of something I was thinking about when, yeah, that video of Piki Suk, the rapper talking outside of Grenfell, and he kind of says, you know, this wasn't an accident and it gives a pretty good explanation of the kind of cladding, which proves essentially that residents knew the cladding was dangerous already before the fire.

And then conspiracy theorists get that video, and then they start, you know, saying it's been green screen, and he's a crisis actor and stuff like that. It's almost like the material is right there in front of them, but because they're consuming this content on the internet, they have to get to the next level because it's like a video game, do you know? Yeah.

Yeah, and they're certainly not satisfied with just, you know, the pedestrian-pilledness that he was expressing where it's like, you know, a little conspirator. They're like, not even close to enough, bro. What are you, a fucking Soros paid fake agents? Yeah. Yeah, because, I mean, you know, we are oftentimes, I mean, so much of what we're fed is to, you know, do not believe what your eyes are telling you or what

your ears are hearing, you know, or facts that you're reading. You know, nobody wants a nice linear sort of story, you know, you go to the first level, you get to the second level, that leads you to the third level, and then you beat the game. You need a sprawling open world with tons of side quests, like, you know, you want to, they want to spend 500 hours, you know, plunking around, you know, looking for the rarest items. And then it's just like, yeah, uh, Oh, man. What a bummer. What a well-researched and thoughtful ex-baze.

What an anti-episode. We don't say bummer around here. We say any episode. Sorry, guys. I'll promise I'll do something more fun next time. No, it's perfect because it's a perfect microcosmos for how conspiracy theories completely ignore actual conspiracies. Yeah. But last time you said that, that you were going to bring us something more upbeat,

I think the next one was like two child corpses in a. in a box. Well, but that was Richard the third. Much more uplifting. That was my version of a fun one. Yeah, for sure. They're ancient child murders. Child murders of history, you know.

Yes, right, yes. Were generations removed from it so it's more fun? First in a tragedy, then in a farce. Like, those children's deaths are officially in farce territory. Thank you for listening to another episode of the Q-Non Anonymous podcast, you can go to patreon.com slash Q&On Anonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month and you'll get a whole second episode every week. This week, we were present at the American, the start of the first trucker convoy in the United States. So go check that out a little later.

And also if you sign up, you'll get access to our entire archive of premium episodes. And when you sub, you help us stay advertising free and editorially independent. Annie, you also have a podcast called Vaccine, The Human Story. Could you tell us a bit more about that? Yeah, so vaccine the human story is a six-part series, which is about the history of smallpox, the development of the first vaccine, and the beginnings of the first ever anti-vax movement, which I had a lot of fun with, as you can tell. Yeah, I tried to get you some listeners at the trucker rally over the last couple days. I was just blasting the episodes out of a small Bluetooth speaker that was clipped to my belt, but it was drowned out by, you know, classic country hits,

Old Country Road and, you know, people screaming into a microphone. So I don't know how well it worked, but I would encourage you everybody to go check that out. And for everything else, we have a website, QAnonanonymous.com. Listener, until next week, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you. It's not a conspiracy. It's fact. And now, today's AutoCube. We grew up so natural, you know, we learned from one another.

Our parents gave us wings. They're the ones who gave us rings, and we flew away with those rings, but they were our parents' rings. Not these woke teachers that work for the unions and are controlled by the unions. I'm an Italian American. You might be German America, black American, Polish American, Greek American. Nobody had to tell us who we were. We socialized, we grew up with one another, and we went on to find the American dream together. They think we don't get it. How much longer can they keep insulting us? I don't think too much longer, guys. Welcome to Pennsylvania. America starts here.

My name is Vincent Fuska, and I'm running for the United States Senate from our state of Pennsylvania. Thank you.