QAA Podcast - Episode 202: Grooming Panic

Episode Date: September 8, 2022

Out in the field again, Annie Kelly attended the protest (and counter-protest) of a UK Drag Queen Story Hour event in Norwich. There she found a group of fascists and bigots with increasingly slick talking points designed to ratchet up anti-LGBT panic and recruit people into far-right movements. Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to the full Trickle Down 10-part miniseries and all upcoming extra series: http://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous Tickets to our tour: http://tour.qanonanonymous.com New Merch dropped! http://merch.qanonanonymous.com Annie Kelly: https://twitter.com/VaccinePodcast / https://twitter.com/AnnieKNK Music by Pontus Berghe. 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 202 of the Q&O anonymous podcast, The Grooming Panic episode. As always, we are your host, Jake Rakatansky, Annie Kelly, Julian Fields, and Travis View.

Drag Queen Story Hour. Norwich Hello listeners, it's your UK correspondent Annie here, surprisingly. I was meant to be taking the month off this podcast in August to work on mine and Julian's upcoming podcast series, Man Clan. But something happened to me last week that I thought was worth talking to you about. As you might have heard me mention on the podcast before, I live in a small city in the east of England called Norwich.

I was alerted recently that our city library was planning a drag queen's story arrow event, which had become a target for protest by various groups, claiming that the event was inappropriate for children. This protest wasn't happening in isolation, but was part of a series that have been happening across the country, with some events either having had to be cancelled or secretly relocated due to safety fears. In fact, very close to me in Norse Walsham, one such event starring the same performer as planned in Norwich, Auntie Titania, had already been cancelled. Now, I know when I say that various groups have been protesting these events, these events? That sounds almost deliberately vague, but it really is a strangely mixed bag.

In fact, it seems as if almost every far-right nationalist or COVID-skeptic organization in this country is showing up to have a go at these protests. Part of the reason for why that is, is to do with how these groups tend to organize themselves these days. On platforms like Telegram, protests like these get rapidly shared across networks with lots of overlapping audiences. Another reason is that, having experienced a surge of interest and energy during the anti-lockdown protests, many of the organizers of these groups need a new offline outlet to keep the momentum going, as users tend to lose interest and drift away without a direct and immediate cause. We're not angry anymore. Please, we need more red meat.

Yeah, I mean, that is literally exactly it. Anger levels lowering. Heart rate slowing. It's crank. where they have to keep injecting with hatred. I fucking love that movie, by the way. One and two. Of course.

Both, both classics. They're pretty fun, actually. I admit, when he, like, he literally applies a defibrillator to himself. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Or he realizes that he has to engage in intercourse with his girlfriend and, like, in, like, in front of, like, a crowd of, like, a hundred people. Oh, boy.

One thing that I think a lot of the left don't quite understand is that the contemporary far-right is genuinely jealous of their protesting power and wants to emulate that ability to mobilize. This was something admitted by the American neo-Nazi Christopher Cantwell, more commonly known as the Crying Nazi, at the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina of various far-right groups ostensibly got together to protest the removal of a Confederate statue. Can you talk a little bit about the right adopting the politics or the political style of the left? We don't have the camaraderie, we don't have the trust level that our rivals do.

And that camaraderie and trust is built up through activism, and that is one of the tactics that we're adopting. A bit like when QAnon rebranded as Save the Children, the far right have cannily deduced that most people care about children's protection, and so hope to gain support by picketing events that they can falsely claim are grooming children by playing on long-standing latent homophobic tropes about gay and trans people, represented here through drag queens. Also a little like QAnon, this is a trend that began in the United States with groups like Proud Boys

and has traveled over here. Lots of people have pointed out the fact that this country actually has a long-standing and uncontroversial tradition of male actors and dresses called pantomime dames, entertaining children in theatres. Yeah, wait until you show these people the Globe Theatre that shakes. Yeah. Yeah, I actually saw Ian McAllen as a pantomime dame as Widow Twanky in Aladdin when I was a child. It was very fun.

Dame Magneto. Yeah, I've heard of Dame Edna, I believe she's Australian. I always thought she was British. She was little before my time, Dame Edna. That's the only one I know. Oh, yeah, you're right. Australian. Well, close enough. Close enough, love.

But for far-right groups like Patriotic Alternative, the difference is clear. One is LGBT culture and thus dangerous to young minds, and the other is not. If it wasn't Drag Queen Story Hour, it would be some other innocuous event because these groups are fully aware that they need to stay active and self-promoting to survive. As an excellent report put together by David Lawrence and Gregory Davis for Hope Not Hate, put it, The White Nationalist Group Patriot Alternatives campaign against Drag Queen Story Hour is also highly opportunistic. Discussing the topic in a live stream on 29th of July,

leader Mark Colette said little about the supposed harms of these storytelling sessions, but instead spent over 10 minutes gloating about the media coverage and supposed public support it had garnered for its fringe group of fascists. In Colette's eyes, the campaign serves to, quote, put concerned individuals in touch with PA and its ethno-nationalist politics. Upsettingly, some of our right-wing press have even been egging these protests on and giving them an air of legitimacy they don't deserve.

A telegraph article described the protesters at an event in Reading as mothers, and the Daily Express as furious parents. It would be more accurate to call them neo-fascist and anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists who've gathered with the express purpose of slandering LGBT people as paedophiles and gaining notoriety themselves. Now that this show was showing up in my own city, I decided to go and see it for myself. I hadn't actually really intended to go in a journalistic capacity, so much as to join the counter protest,

which had been organised by local LGBT and anti-fascist activists to allow the parents and the children's safe passage to the library. I brought my microphone just in case, but assumed I wouldn't use it. When I arrived, about an hour before the story I was meant to start, the counter-protesters already vastly outnumbered the protesters themselves, who at that point were just about a dozen people. They were mostly middle-aged with a mixture of men and women. One grey-haired lady held a sign that read,

not homophobic, not transphobic, just protecting children's innocence. They looked too old and disorganised to be patriotic alternative, so I deduce they were probably evangelical Christians, a suspicion which was immediately confirmed when one guy began yelling at us that Jesus loves us and just wants us to repent. Another guy with grey hair, glasses, and what I think was an Australian accent, began to yell that we had no future and would, quote, all be gone in 30 years, unquote, because we wouldn't have children, which did seem to contradict the not-homophobic message. Interestingly, two of the only young people with the protesters at that point had cameras, set up on tripods, which were aimed firmly at us counter-protesters.

It seems that the United Kingdom has its own fledgling Andy knows, who show up live streaming at far-right rallies in the hopes of getting footage of supposed Antifa activists acting particularly weird, angry, or best of all, violent, in order to gain a foothold in the right-wing digital media sphere. One of these aspiring documentarians I would later learn was a teenager whose parents were attending the protest themselves. She was pretty non-confrontational

and chatted with the protesters but didn't really address any of us. The other one, a man who I'd guess was in his 30s, seemed to understand better that if you want to get shocking, violent content that will go viral, you need to try to provoke it. I watched him shouting, insulting, and sometimes straight-up bigoted things at many of the people in our crowd, trying to rile them up into throwing a punch. I wasn't recording anything at the time,

but luckily for me, his live stream is still up, so I have audio evidence of that. Don't touch me off the fucking touch you know. Do you know what I'm saying? Fucking little moose. Chaos. I really do wish they didn't sound exactly like my somewhat racist imitation of them. Despite the protesters continued insistence that they had no problem with gay people,

just this particular event, it wasn't hard to find evidence of them being derogatory and shouting homophobic slurs at the parents as they walked into the library with their children, cheered on by the pro-LGB crowd. He doesn't even want to go. He doesn't even want a goal. He doesn't even want a goal. He doesn't even want a goal.

That is bad. That is bad. Just from an impartial point of view. Impartially, you're wrong. Those fucking two big dikes, dragging is in there. I know, I know. I watched. Baffles the brain.

He doesn't even want to go. That was really clear. He's like, no, mums. No mums. Don't take me in there. It's fucking gay mums. Don't take me in there. Wow.

They're like, yeah, that kid was thinking homophobic slurs. I could tell it in his face. Yeah. Yeah, that kid was being, was no doubt agreeing with me and being homophobic about his own parents. I know when I look at a kid's face and he's like, this is gay. I can tell it when he's thinking that. I'm normal. Around the time that the event was meant to start, Patriotic Alternative arrived.

Patriotic Alternative, as I said earlier, are a British, far-right white nationalist group who've become notorious for their racist publicity stunts, such as leafletting campaigns saying white people are being, quote, replaced with immigrants, and flying White Lives Matter banners over historic sites. By contrast to the original protesters, they were organized. They were mostly clean-cut young guys in their 20s, wearing shirts, with one older guy among their ranks who looked to be their leader. They came with professionally made identical signs,

which showed stick figures of a man and women holding an umbrella over two children to protect them from the rain, which was coloured like a pride flag. It's raining men. We got to stop it. It's raining men. Open your umbrellas. They unfurled a banner which read, Leave our kids alone, patriotic alternative. Yes, that's what Pink Floyd meant.

They faced away from the counter-protesters and out from the front of the library so it could be seen by as many passes by as possible. From the way they faced and the time they arrived, At which point most parents had already entered the library, it was clear there was a difference in goals between them and the other protesters. The first half were a mixed assortment of anti-vaxxers, white nationalists and evangelicals, with handmade, hard-to-read signs, and it really just wanted to come and shout at gay people or start a fight for content. Patriotic alternative, by contrast, wanted everyone to see them.

It was clear that they'd been told to be on their best behaviour and appear as respectable as possible, but they couldn't always help themselves. A friend of mine who was attending with me said she heard one yell, it's okay to be white, before being quickly shushed by the others. At one point, a woman with a trans flag stood in front of them trying to block their banner, and the young guys began yelling groomer scum off our streets at her in a parody of an anti-fascist chant. I was honest. I was honestly in two minds about whether to interview the protesters at this point.

There were a few reasons for this hesitancy. One was that, frankly, it was a bit of a scary prospect. Interviewing Qan honors and anti-lockdown protesters was one thing, but explicit fascist was another, particularly in my home. city with a number of my friends in the counter-protest crowd. The other reason I was cautious was that it was obvious patriotic alternative were running a pretty slick operation with an eye to optics, and had ensnared a number of journalists into reporting on them in exactly the way they wanted before.

Part of me worried that by interviewing them, I'd just be amplifying that message. Now, I don't think I'm a particularly great interviewer with the ability to unseat them and get them to expose themselves, but I do think I know a fair bit about far-right movements and how they use language, so I could at least frame what they told me in a critical light, so I decided to be brave and start chatting. What I hadn't reckoned on was that it was actually quite hard to get people to talk to me. Unlike the anti-lockdown or Save the Children demos I'd been at where people were desperate to share their message, it seemed some media discipline had been instilled in these protesters, who politely turned me down again and again. Finally, I spoke to a guy who was holding

copies of polite newspaper, which is an anti-vaccine conspiracy publication, found during COVID. He, surprise, surprised, didn't want to be interviewed either, but did point me towards someone who would, which seemed to have the effect of reversing my streak of bad luck. Even then, I did get asked by everyone who I worked for before they agreed. This is yet another case of me being relieved that our podcast has a relatively ambiguous name, and if my potential subjects were still looking uncertain, I would add that we were an independent podcast as well, which is true, but I knew carried a certain cachet in far-right circles, as it's often how their media describes themselves.

I think I had a couple of other things on my side too, which was that even though I had been in the counter-protest earlier, I didn't look like I had, since we'd all been told to wear brightly coloured clothes like a Pride Festival, but I'm quite a boring person who doesn't own that much colourful clothing. I guess I looked enough like a normal white blonde lady who was being friendly to them, which I guess made them think I could plausibly be one of them,

or at least someone sympathetic to their ideas. One of them, a red-haired guy and a flat cap carrying an England flag that he would unfurl sporadically throughout the protest, agreed to talk to me. He said he was from something called the Independent Nationalist Network, which I later learned was a pretty small splinter group from Patriotic Alternative. Now, something I should be clear on here for our listeners with these interviews is that even though most of them tried to keep it respectable with me, you're going to be hearing a lot of anti-LGB dog whistles in all of these. That shouldn't be a surprise given the nature of the protests, but it doesn't. did just feel worse flagging up. So we're here at the drag queen story hour protest. Do you want to tell me about why you're here?

Yeah, we're protesting against the drag queen story hour. Like at the end of day as a taxpayer, I think this is a complete waste of money, a complete waste of resources. You know, it could be up to, I don't know about this specific one, but the main one, Ada, is it Ada? It's reported 450 pound a day.

Obviously every day, that mounts up, obviously, police with protection. Some people say, well, they wouldn't need police with protection. if we wasn't here, but of course as a taxpayer, we do not believe that children should be introduced at such a young age to adult entertainers. We don't see a police story time hour, we don't see, like, firemen's story time hour,

so what is drag queens got what to do with talking to our children at the end of the day? And again, as a taxpayer, at the very least, could the parents who want to bring children into this environment pay for it themselves? You know, we're in a living crisis right now. Everything's costing through the roof. You know, we have veterans on the streets, homeless.

They don't seem to be getting much support. We have children already in education, struggling to get, struggling for support as well. So we just think this is a bit immoral as well. All right, thank you. Is this the first protest you've been to for Drag Queen Story Hour? Are you going around the country? I've been to the one in North Orcham, you know. It was actually in the media for that, for helping to get that shut down real ways of waiting us.

We've been leafleting every day, me and many others, different groups, obviously. We've got a PA lab, we're from the Independent Nationalist Network, like there's two of us here from there, and then other independents as well, so we're not all part of this one group. But obviously we're all uniting under one banner, which is to stop grooming and sexualisation of our children. And the Independent National Network, so that's an England phenomenon then, why you've got the England flag.

Yeah, we are here for the English people first. We should be putting our own people first. You know, charity begins at home. Obviously, you know, we know that other countries need our help and other people in our country that's not necessarily English needs help. But we believe we are the forgotten ones, and it's quite evident of seeing what's going on.

Just going through the town centres in all our major cities, they are a super majority English people that's on our streets, and we should be offering support for those people. English children The indigenous English children are struggling the most at the moment in education So, you know, we believe we're being treated like second-class citizens

In our own nation Now I'm trying to imagine what Police Story Hour would be Yeah, I mean, but like what's so weird Is that like police do come into schools Like 100% But do they read C-Spot Run C-Spot die in an officer-related shooting?

No, they hold They held up a bag, they hold up a bag of, you know, oregano, and they're like, this is, this is marijuana. Oh, this is, uh, dangerous. It's a gateway drug. This is what happened in my school. It was called dare. Yeah. And the police officers came in and they held up drugs and they showed off the, you know, they came in.

By the way, with their full, you know, kit on, they've got handguns, you know, attached to their waist. I was probably in like, like, what, like third or fourth grade, maybe. Yep. Yeah. So that was, that was my police. story hour. I bet you felt safe. I walked away from that being like, I'm never, ever, ever going going to smoke marijuana. Yeah, we had something really similar actually, although he didn't have a gun, obviously, but he did come in and told us all about drugs. And I remember there was a bit where

he was like, marijuana has a very strong smell. So you'll be able to smell of someone smoking it around you. How many of you have been able to smell when someone was smoking marijuana near you? And like, loads of people put up their hands. And I just like felt like such a loser, because I didn't know what it's not like. Put up your hand if you have cool parents, kids. Yeah, people offering me free drugs was less of an issue than my dare officer. Yeah. Yeah, I remember my dare officer.

His name was Deputy Puyett. And, yeah, he told us about the evils of drugs and also smoking. And also one of the students asked him if he ever shot. shot the guy before, and he gave a winding answer, kind of confusing answer that kind of indicated to me that he totally had. Oh, my God.

I mean, at least your school allowed the officer to use their real name. Ours was called Officer Friendly. Oh, my God. Yeah. To prevent reprisals? No, it's officer friendly. No, it's the police are friendly

and they're here to help. Just a bunch of children taking down a police officer like raptors taking down a T-Rex. Get off me. I'm officer-friendly. Yeah, we didn't have dare in my schools, but we still had the guys coming by to tell us about drugs. It was the era of just say no, K-N-O-W, and they would explain the different drugs. I mean, all of them are bad, but it was just like they're all bad in different ways, different interesting, unique ways. But then our art teacher had a key chain.

and when you opened it, it smelled like weed and had weed in it. Of course, yeah. And everybody was like, she's cool. Anyway, yeah. His attempt to connect the drag queen's story hour event with public waste, poverty, and the cost of living crisis struck me as a particularly clever bit of spin. The cost of living is rising everywhere, but the United Kingdom is currently facing one of the worst cases in Europe, and there is mounting public frustration at how unwilling our government seems to be to do anything about it. other than patronising money-saving tips. In particular, winter this year is predicted to be very bad,

with huge unpayable heating bills having the potential to become, in the words of the NHS Confederation, a humanitarian crisis. In other words, people are angry and likely to become angrier as more of them start to feel the pinch. So by acknowledging that problem, and then directing people to supposed wastes of taxpayer money that just happened to align with his own far-right bug bears, this representative clearly felt confident he could persuade more people to his cause.

It was clear he was aiming for the appearance of respectable conservative economic talking points, so I decided to push him as gently as I felt I safely could on the LGBT angle. I want to be clear, this is going to be a cold gay winter. Winter is coming with the help of another guy. Jesus Christ. what do you think is there's been obviously a really big counter protest here today lots of people with kind of pride flags and lovers love and stuff like that what do you think about that do you think you are giving off like a hateful message

sorry say that again so they would say you're giving off a hateful message what would you respond to that well i think we're not giving a hateful message we're just trying to raise awareness on the sexualisation against our children you know this this drag queen today obviously is on titania i think it's pronounced goes by the name of titty trash now i've just debated one guy here which you know i have recorded if it was one of us if it was one of us reading in that um library today yeah it the same book would you would you be here protested no no i went off in a huff you know what i mean so even ourselves as our people because they believe we're giving off a hateful message they would be protesting against us if

There's us in there, but at the same time, look, we're not protesting against gay pride, are we? We're not protesting against gay clubs. We're here because it's against children, and that's our main focus. They're trying to legal, they're trying to normalise paedophilia. They've now come up with a new word, maps minor attractive persons. And we think this is just going too far. When's it going to end? When's it going to stop?

So who's trying to normalise paedophilia? Well, we believe, obviously, everyone involved the establishment, the education system, you know, this mob over there, you know, when's it going to end? If we don't start raising awareness now, when is it going to stop? When is it going to stop? Will this be coming into our schools in the next few months? So your position is, if parents want to do this on their own dime for their own kids, fine, but don't get the state involved? Yeah, I mean, obviously I would be against that, but I wouldn't process it because at least you're using your own money as such. So, again, I am against that.

But if it's using their own money, what else can I do? But this is using our taxpayers' money. You know, a lot of us have to take a day off work today to try and protest against this. We had to. I'm missing out on my wage because I'm so fucking hateful. Yeah, yeah, that's actually a common theme. There's a lot of the interviews that point out, like, when I say that they say that they're going to, counter protest is a lot bigger, they'll go, well, we all had to take days off work. We've got

jobs. I was like, yeah, I mean, it's not like these are professional protesters, do you know, like they've got jobs too. Or he took a day off from my job at the racism factory. Yeah. Well, also, one thing I should say, because this is another thing that does get brought up in lots of interviews, this minor attracted persons thing. I mean, as far as I understand it, it's a term that some sociologists have used to describe, like, adults who are attracted to children. They think it's a kind of desigmatizing thing. It's a very controversial term. But it is nothing to do with gay people or pride or, yeah, it's completely unrelated to that. It's just a kind of intra-academic sort of debate and discussion. So, yeah.

At the end of the interview, when I turned the microphone off, he decided to try to figure out my angle. Did you agree with anything I just said there? He asked. Although I deliberately described myself as ambiguously as possible when approaching him for an interview, I am ultimately a pure of heart soul who cannot tell a lie when faced a direct question like that, so I told him that honestly, I didn't. He asked me for the name of our podcast again and began Google searching it right in front of me. Oh boy. It's good. It felt like being honest about who we are had been the ethical thing to do as a journalist, but I suspect word got round the protest quickly due to what happened in the next interview. The next person who agreed to talk to me

it was the older guy I'd seen with Patriotic Alternative. This man was clearly media trained and knew how to frame the group in a way that emphasised them as just a wholesome, pro-family, pro-British organisation. You said you're with Patriotic Alternative. So as I understand it, that's the sort of nationalist group, is that right? Patriotic Alternative is a patriotic, as the name suggests, patriotic nationalist organisation.

We're not yet registered as a political party. Our main focus is making sure that our... We build a strong sense of community amongst our people. It's sad to say that our people seem to be the most... I've lost my thread. That's all right. Okay, I've just got a dry mouth as well. Hold on.

Right. Patriotland, as the name suggests, is a patriotic organisation. We're not yet registered as a political party. Our main focus is building a sense of community amongst our people. That people being the British, the native British, English, Welsh, Scottish, and we believe that we have a right to self-determination, just like everybody else has, and everybody has in this world, every ethnic group has a right to self-determination in their own homeland. And our focus is making people aware of the demographic change

that's taking place here in Britain, the anti-family policies that are taking place, in fact they're sweeping the nation right across the systems of education, the media and other forms of public life. So we're here today as part of that protest against what we see as the pro-LGB plus agenda, which is very anti-family. We believe in natalist policies. We believe that the nuclear family is the core of a healthy nation. And anything that stands in the way of having those strong family bonds is a impediment to having a strong society. So you've got people, you've got a big counter-protest here, people with rainbow, they know to hate and stuff like that, they obviously think that what you're saying is

a hateful message, as a bigoted one. What do you respond to that? We actually say that they're the bigots. We're the ones that are saying that it is completely wrong and inappropriate for grown men dressed as women to read stories to young, impressionable children, and that we believe that this is a prelude to ultimately the legalisation of paedophilia. These people over here with their rainbow flags and all the other funny coloured flags that they see and never-ending changes to their flags and never-ending changes to their vocabulary. These are the ones who are the real bigots trying to impose their rather twisted agenda on the rest of society. So you said you were here with Patriotic Alternative.

I've already spoken to a guy who said he was from the Independent Nationalist Network. There was somebody here who had an anti-vaccine sign or T-shirt? I can't see them. So it's a broad tent, right, this movement. Well, Patrick O'Ternative here under its own steam, the other organisations that you mentioned, I think possibly the anti-vax individuals are from an organisation, a very loose organisation called Stand in the Park.

It's a leaderless organisation. And we have similarities with organisations. A lot such as Stand in the Park. We're opposed to compulsory vaccination. We believe that it's the right of everybody to determine what vaccines or what medical treatments they are offered and what they decide to choose and what they choose to have inside them.

So yes, there are similarities, but as I said, Patroo Alternative is here in its own right. We are possibly the fastest. we are sorry qualify that pattern alternative is by far the fastest growing and largest nationalist organization here in Great Britain everybody here today is from our region and the fact that we've got nearly two dozen people out from our region on a weekday shows that two things first of all our level of dedication the fact that we've taken days off work to get here on a weekday and that we

managed to get a very good number of people out on a work day shows the level of commitment that we've got, the fact that we're fast, fast growing and the level of commitment and dedication. You need my, we can pause. No, no, let's go. I'm just giving an interview to, he's listening. It's incredible how they'll be like, could I take that line again and then do it exactly the same way?

So they clearly just had, you know, kind of script. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, it's just very, very obviously media trained. He knew, like, if he stumbled in a sentence to start again, you know, just that kind of thing. He kind of knew how to, how to, and whatever question I asked, he would kind of just bring it back to. Like, I sort of tried to sort of unseat him a little there, like bring up the other organizations. I wanted to kind of needle and see if they were going to be like, oh, we're not like those crazies. But he just kind of, again, brought it back to Patriotogat alternative and said pretty much the same thing.

Yeah, and just proved your point by basically being like, yeah, like these other organizations, yeah, there's some overlap here. And, yeah, we also believe that, you know, you shouldn't be forced to take. vaccine which nobody's doing by the way nobody's forcing you to take it the other thing that that's funny is that like he's like oh like LGBT people are like anti-family and it's like oh wait it's like wait the people who have been like literally fighting for decades to be allowed to get married and be allowed to adopt children are like anti that's anti-family somehow like well their version of the family well of course they were literally the whole point of that protest was to harass families going into the library do you know yeah yeah that

Who looks soundy family there? But yeah, that interruption that you hear at the end where I say, oh, we can pause. What's actually happening there is two of the younger PA guys in sunglasses walked up to us. I originally assumed they wanted something from the older guy, which is why I said we could pause the interview, but they just said they wanted to listen. Since none of the younger lot had agreed to talk to me, it's possible they just wanted to learn how to work the media from their leader. The other possibility, which was very much on my mind, was that they had either learned

or guessed that I wasn't a friend to their ideas and wanted to intimidate me with plausible deniability. I kept going without looking at them and I guess they got bored pretty quickly as we chatted since by the end of the interview I could see they'd wandered off. Okay, so is this the first drag queen story hour you've been to? Because I know there've been other drag queen story hours across the country. Patriotic Alternative has been opposed

and protesting against the drag queen story hour activities right across the country. This is the first drag queen story hour that has taken place here in the eastern region. We managed successfully to stop the drag queen story hours going ahead in Cromer and North Walsham earlier on this month. The fact that we announced and told Norfolk County Council that we would be protesting outside the libraries at North Walsham and Cromer was enough for them to call off the drag queen story hour, but they seem to want to make Norwich here probably because it is a the headquarters of, it's the largest town in Norfolk and it's also the headquarters of

the council. It's also the largest library in the county as well. They wanted to make a showcase here and ensure that the drag queen story are did go ahead. We've only seen one, we believe only one parent has taken his children into the library. We haven't seen any other parents go in so we're not sure how successful the drag queen story are is this afternoon. But the fact that we hear at all is a win for people who are by far the majority of people in this country who are opposed to the sexualisation of our children. So if that is true, because I think most people would describe themselves as like anti-pedophilia, right?

We really much think that paedophilia is very much a minority and probably, as well as being a criminal activity, possibly some sort of mental defect as well. So how do we explain then that, you know, there's a society. so many counter-protesters here today and such a smaller, even if it's a good turnout. Yeah, okay. Several reasons. One, people who think like us, most of us have got day jobs. We've got families to look after and we give that priority. The fact that we're here today, as I said earlier on, just shows our level of commitment that we decided to take a day off work. We've made arrangements for family care and so on while we're here. Why are there so many

counter-protesters here today? Partly because it's a university city. a lot of these people will be students who are in between terms at summer holidays of course and it is generally a liberal town with both capital L and a small L so I can imagine that's why a lot of people here the presence of a very large university and a large student population is without doubt the single biggest factor why aren't there more of us well as I said most of us have got day jobs and we have to we have to give that the priority yeah all right okay just one more question yes of course let you go um so you kind of say you know it's up to a parent individually for their choice to have a vaccine which i agree with but what would you say to people who say

well it's up to parents individually if they want to take their kid to see the drag queen read them a story well of course every parent has got the i'm not i'm not saying that every parent should simply not go every parent's got a free choice in the matter of course they have What we're here to say is that we're here to protest against the sexualisation of our children by the whole concept of drag queen's story are. By the end of that, I knew it probably wouldn't be long until ranks had closed completely. So out of desperation, I asked if there was anyone else the patriotic alternative leader suggested I talked to. To my surprise, he singled out a middle-aged hippie-ish lady in glasses who had been there from the very beginning,

and I'd heard shouting something about Jesus at us earlier. He said she'd be a good person to interview if I wanted the moral, religious angle on these protests. I did the usual, Who Do You Work for, Dance with her, and eventually she agreed to an interview. Now, I know I've already given you a warning for content, but I'm just going to re-up that one here because while my first two interviews spoken barely concealed dog whistles about gay and trans people, this woman didn't even bother with that. Yeah, so I wondered if you could tell me a little bit about what has brought you to here, which is the Norwich Drag Queen's Story Hour protests.

It is to stand against the sexualisation of children, which is happening. It's happening not only here, it's happening in schools, it's happening in primary schools, it's happening with associations like Stonewall. Children are becoming sexualized from a very young age. And that's why I'm here. I'm here to be a voice against that. Did you talk to us, because I'm not a parent, and I don't think many of our listeners are, so they won't really know what this looks like.

What is the sexualisation that's happening in schools? The LGBT rainbow flag is, it's being promoted to young children. Now, I worked in primary schools, and there was a boy at the age of five years old, and he said to me, when I grow up, I'm going to be called Sarah. And I didn't doubt that for a minute. And I got me thinking, is homosexuality nurture or is it nature? I do believe some people are born into this world gay. I do believe that.

I think this is a burden upon them. But I do also believe that children can be taught and indoctrinated into a lifestyle that they wouldn't normally take because it's popular. because it's colorful, because it's got rainbows and unicorns and it's got everything that young children like. And the particular drag artist, Ada H.D., has openly said that he wants to be a role model for young children. A role model is something some people look up to to aspire to become.

He is a drag queen. So if they think it's okay, mommy, that's my role model. Our role models used to be, our mom and dad, Our role models used to be the police officers upholding the law. The role models used to be heroes from stories. Role models are now aggressive footballers. Role models are the likes of Miley Cyrus that are doing nude photographs. When she was Hannah Montana, she then changed to be Miley Cyrus.

So all her young followers thought, well, Mummy, she's taking her clothes off of the camera. I'm going to take my clothes off of the camera. That's not okay. And the likes of Madonna, the younger generation. like a virgin, it started years and years and years ago and it actually started, this whole movement actually started with the Frankfurt School, with the School of Sexology where it was, Magnus Hensfeld was practicing sex changes on people.

This is not a new thing. This has come down from generation to generation. So a role model used to be something you would look up to you to aspire to be. A man in drag that is promoting anal sex, promoting orgies, why do young children need that as a role model? If they want to explore that when they're older, they're grown up, they can make their own minds up. Children are influential, they're vulnerable, they will look to anything, what do I want to be when I grow up?

I want to be this, I want to be this, I want to be this. Well, now they're being told, well, you can now be a boy. You can now be a girl. That is against nature. It is against the Bible. I'm pretty sure the stories they're reading them have nothing to do with anal orgies, but Yeah, I would imagine that the storyteller would get in some serious trouble if they walked into the library and was like, And now for our story about anal sex, gay orgies, here we go, page one.

Like, come on, like, the thing is all the, and I mean, this is always the case, right, is what these people are mad about is the fantasy of what they imagine is happening. happening in these places. It's not based in anything real. It's just the idea of sexuality or orientation I don't like and what could they be saying because I hate this so much. It's like. Yeah. They want them to become invisible again and shamed.

And the idea of the, that this is a burden on people who are gay is directly related to people like you. Yeah. That's why it's a burden. Yeah. I mean, it was a bit like my, the second interview I did with the Patriotoc Alternative guy where he said something like, you know,

oh, drag queens who would be found, they should normally be found in burlette clubs and stuff. And I kind of sort like, I didn't say it, but I was like, are you, do you think that drag queens, like, are strippers? Like, they take off their clothes, do you know? Because actually drag queens are more like kind of stand up, right? It's like stand up in costume. They don't take off their clothes because they've got all this padding

and amazing kind of like amount of work. like I don't know it's kind of a strange kind of misunderstanding of like what the whole thing involves yeah but the children are thinking about how they there's a penis under that dress maybe but like like anything like kids desires are fleeting like everybody who came through my elementary school hawking something I wanted to be that person for a couple hours you know it's like the you know the animal handler came in and I was like oh it'd be so cool to be an animal. handleer. I want to be that. And then the police officer friendly came in. I was like, oh, I really want to be a police officer. Like, that would be so cool. The magician, you know, came in to do an auditorium presentation. Oh, I really want to be a magician. I didn't end up as any of those things. We didn't have a podcaster coming to my school. And this is where, you know, this is where I like ended up. It's just, we can only hope. Yeah. We can only hope. Next stuff is podcast a story hour. I don't, I, I'm actually very much against that. Children should

be exposed to podcasts until they're properly developed and sort of understand what they're looking at because they might look like it's cool but man this is not the life you want children no podcasters may sound like they're cool but they don't look cool yeah mommers don't let your babies grow up to be podcasters the great hal sparks came into my school to give like a like a presentation to my theater class about like you know working in hollywood and he essentially was like I broke for a really long time and it was like really hard and you know if you you know if there's anything else you're interested in you you know you should probably pursue that but if you have to pursue acting or you know a career in entertainment like it's gonna be really tough and i honestly

at that point i was like this guy is the coolest motherfucker i have ever encountered that's so funny he was like trying to do scared straight for being an actor yes yes that's so cool i like the idea that Drin are being led to believe that you can take a rabbit out of a hat. That's against Jesus. Anyway, one thing that she said that my ears pricked up at was the Magnus Hirschild and the Frankfurt School reference. The Frankfurt School reference is, of course, a pretty common far-right dog whistle

referencing the anti-Semitic cultural Marxism conspiracy theory. Magnus Hirschfeld, who actually had nothing to do with the Frankfurt School, was a German-Jewish sexologist based in Berlin, who is targeted by the Nazis for being gay, Jewish, and an advocate for gay and transgender rights. Many of the famous pictures of the Nazis burning so-called degenerate books are actually then burning his institute's research into sexual minorities. So hearing a lady happily referencing him as a devious mastermind behind a modern-day secret LGBT agenda targeting children,

well, pretty significant and just a little Nazi? As it happens, I was completely right to be suspicious. I posted a picture of the protesters on Twitter while I was there and an investigative journalist called Catherine Denkinson, who has written about the drag queen's story hour protest for the byline times, got in touch with me. She told me the woman I was talking to was Jodie Swingler, a far-right activist who's worked with Patriotic Alternative before,

and who grabbed headlines last year by calling into an LBC show and grilling Kier Stama, the leader of the Labour Party, about demographic replacement, something I actually talked about on QAA at the time in our episode on The Christchurch Report. She's appeared on live streams with Patriotic Alternative Leader, Mark Collette, where they've talked openly about the Jewish question, which I think makes it pretty clear where she's coming from with those comments, and her next one about Benjamin

Disraeli, this country's first and so far only Jewish prime minister, and the certain religions that supposedly teach inversion. You mentioned the Bible earlier. Do you see this as a spiritual fight? I see the society we are currently living in as a spiritual battle. This is an existential battle. This is good versus evil, this is light versus dark. This isn't about left versus right.

This is about right versus wrong. This is becoming the devil's playground. The satanic rituals, the satanic... The rainbow is God's promise from the Bible. The rainbow is a biblical sign. It has been stolen, it has been taken from us, and we will reclaim the rainbow back. So, do you think then that this is an expression of Satanism?

And if so, do people know that they're doing it? Have they been duped into it? So many people don't have God in their lives. They don't have God, they don't have religion. And that's no accident either. Our government, I believe it was 1830 to 1858, our government, we're trying to take the Christian oath out of our government so that politicians that served us,

our people didn't have to sign a Christian oath on the Bible. Once that was removed, our MPs were no longer true to the faith, they were no longer true to religion, the Bible. And what has been happening is a very steady process over generations over generations. First, homosexuals just wanted to marry the same sex. That was, it couldn't happen generations ago. So the first step was,

Homosexuality became popular. Now homosexuals can have same-sex marriages. Now we've got two years ago, they tried to bring Drag Queen Story Hour to the UK two years ago. It got cancelled two years ago because the public said, no, this is wrong. Two years on, it's now happening. Well, this year, there was a family sex show

that wanted to do a tour, which was aimed at children, having sexual positions, sexual identity, sexual conversations for children on stage. That was cancelled this year. So can we expect in another two years that there will be children being taken to sex shows where they will be watching adults having sex with other adults and because this minor attracted person nonsense is coming in, could we be seeing children having sex with adults on stage in another two years because if we don't stop what's going on now, pedophiliate will be

normalized and we have to stop that because children are innocent, they need to remain innocent. You clearly have done so much research on this stuff, you know, you're going back to dates in the 1850s and yeah, and obviously a lot of this stuff isn't readily available. It's not going to be published in mainstream newspapers and stuff like that. So where should people go if they want to learn more about this? If you look at the Christian, I believe Benjamin Disraeli was the MP at the time, or he was due to be the MP. I'm not sure of the date on Benjamin Disraeli. Look up the Frankfurt School, look at the ideology of Karl Marx, look at the ideology of

ruining and disrupting the nuclear family, where it was mum, dad, and a lovely, happy, healthy family of children. Children now are mutilating themselves. They're not breeding, they have to recruit and that is the grooming essence. So look, go to the Frankfurt School, go to 1830 to 1858 with the Christian Oath being removed from UK Parliament. Where else can people go? Look at people like Douglas Reed, The Controversy of Zion, read his book. And this is a battle, we have been facing this battle for thousands of years and this is the battle against nature.

This is where they have turned nature upside down. It is inversion. And there are certain religions, certain groups that will teach inversion. And we have to stand with nature. We have to stand with God. That's my final question. I'll let you go. This has been great.

So why do they teach inversion? What's the end goal for them? To end God. That they can themselves, they see themselves as God. they preach that they had an argument with God and they won so the end goal is to remove God it's to have themselves as God we are living in a religion where liberalism is the new religion

the person becomes God I can do what I want I can do it now this is my life we have if you look at the Muslims they have their book they follow their book strictly they live cohesively with their communities you look to the Jews they have their book They live cohesively. Us as Christians, we used to be a Christian nation.

We are now a mess. We are a rainbow, confused, mutilated mess because we have lost our book. We have lost our way. So that's the end goal. Get rid of God. Devil, it's the devil's playground. Oh, God. There's so much in there.

It's like, oh, my God. Where do you even start to break that down? Yeah. We represent evaporated tiny droplets of water struck by sunlight at a certain angle and we're taking the rainbow back. Yeah, it's like, looky charms, reclaim the rainbow. Doesn't, like, also, doesn't this woman realize

that, like, every character in the Bible is, like, super gay? And what? And many of them a Jewish. You got Moses. He's, like, in robes. He's looking good. He's building ships.

He's talking to a burning bush. You've got the Maccabees. These are like some jackdudes and like some revealing armor. They're burning candles for eight days inside of a temple. Like, come on, I mean. I love the idea that Jewish people are living cohesively, even though their religion involves like constant reinterpretation of the text and arguing with each other. Of course.

Have you talked to any Jewish people? Yeah. No. Well, of course not. And it's like, I have a feeling that she was really biting her tongue as she named two other religions that she probably hates. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it is really funny to be, yeah, talking about, like, I don't know, certain religions that teach inversion.

And she's saying, oh, you know, they preach that they had a fight with God and they won. Like, it's just all got like those three brackets around everything she's saying. And then she's just like, look at the Jews. They're cohesive. We should be more like them. I'm like, mm. The whole thing is people being like, I can't help it. I was made this way.

It's actually the exact opposite of, like, arguing with God or nature. It's basically accepting nature and experiencing, like, so much trauma and so much, such a more painful existence than, you know, if you had just kept who you really are bottled up inside and private. It's, oh, and also, I must say, God help us. If any of our politicians discover her incredible catchphrase, which is, it's not right versus left. right versus wrong i gotta say that is a great fucking phrase and and it needs to stay contained within the audio files of this of this podcast or or else it's like what everybody says here

they all say this shit they all say it's not political um yeah but i think the specific turn of phrase i think yeah right so good marketing well now it's been like it's been tainted by a neo-nazi saying it. So hopefully that'll just keep it. There we go. Yeah. Yeah, she is astonishing. She's like, we just want the userers to live outside the castle gates.

Like the old days. She's like, we want them intense begging for money, stepped over outside of our glorious castle, our glorious Christian castle. After that interview, I scan the protesters for any more people who'd be willing to talk to me, but the show seemed to be wrapping up.

It was nearly half three, two hours after the story hour had begun, and it seemed that all the parents and children had managed to leave the library safely and unharassed. It almost felt as if by the time patriotic alternative had showed up, most of the protests had forgotten that was what they were meant to be preventing in the first place. I would later learn that, contrary to what one of my interview subjects said about there only being one child in attendance, Auntie Titania had in fact read to 167 people in the library that day. And even though they may have thought the protesters' numbers of about two dozen people was a good result, they were ultimately met with a pro-LGB counter-protest at least

three times the size. My home city, which is a pretty small place, far away from more obvious progressive metropolises like Manchester and London, had pretty firmly rejected the politics of patriotic alternative. In fact, as the group left, they stopped to take pictures with their banners outside city hall, only to be chased off by a much larger group of counter-protesters waving pride flags, which was a pretty amusing sight. Nonetheless, if I'm honest, the whole experience had shaken me up a little. Talking to anti-lockdown protesters, and even at the safe the children march, I could find something to relate to and even sometimes empathise with with my interview subjects. Although I thought they were caught up in a network of dangerous

conspiracy theories, I could see where many of them were coming from. Here, there was a stronger a sense of a genuinely malevolent bigotry bubbling beneath the surfaces of what they were saying, even at least some of them were careful about maintaining plausible deniability. Even if they'd managed to hook some anti-vaxes in with this new protest movement, the drag queen's story hour protests undeniably felt different to what I'd covered for this podcast before, more confidently and cohesively far-right and white nationalist, pushing at the edges of a hard-won societal tolerance to see how much of it they could chip away. It isn't lost on me that this is happening in the United Kingdom

at a time when there is an ongoing attack on transgender people by the press and our politicians. The Labour Party faces an internal rift in its ranks over trans rights that the leadership seems determined to ignore and it's one that much of the Conservative Party and the British media has been all too happy to use as a stick to beat them with, meaning transgender people are essentially used as a constant punching bag over polling leads and Westminster parlour games. I don't intend to imply that these mainstream politicians

share patriotic alternatives politics. In fact, I think most of them would be horrified by their beliefs. But it seemed to me as if fascist networks have been watching that mainstream ambivalence towards LGBT rights carefully, and we're now happily exploiting it for their own gain. This feels really dangerous to me, and I don't think it's something we can just ignore and hope it goes away. I really hope I'm wrong, but my instinct is that the drag queen's story hour events were a convenient an excuse for far-right anti-LGB mobilization in the UK, but it won't be the last.

Yeah, grim stuff. And, you know, I felt the same kind of difference in vibes when I went to that Disney anti-LGB protest run by Sean Foyt and his crew of evangelical fascists. It is.

It's truly malevolent and kind of ill-willed in a way where other movements or not. You know, it's, there's, obviously she did mention, do your own research, but really it's not. It's like, listen to these talking points and join the fight. Yeah, exactly.

It almost feels as if, you know, there was always that kind of stuff, you know, kind of like tendentially there, kind of, you know, sort of like implied there when you're talking to people at QAnon protest, you know, sometimes they'll say, you know, they're trying to legalize paedophilia. Have you heard about this and things like that? But it's, it's often I feel like people kind of just hearing a talking point and not knowing where it comes from. Right. But it's almost as if now there feels like they don't even, the far right, have kind of become, you know, become so kind of confident, so bold over the pandemic that they don't even have to bother with that kind of fig leaf anymore. They can kind of show up and be like, yeah, we think you're all paedophiles, do you know? Yeah, we think the Judeo-Bolsheviks are instilling a pro-LGB agenda. Well, thanks so much, Annie, for that great report.

and I think it is valuable to talk to these people, you know, even though obviously their talking points are well organized. You know, I think he did a good job breaking down why they're saying these things and what their techniques are and also what the deficiencies in their movement are and why they kind of are trying to become more media trained and are trying to slip stories into the mainstream media. And like you mentioned, a lot of the times that's successful. People will just be like, some angry parents were there. And it's like, no, no, they fucking weren't. Yeah, exactly. Like, you know, I don't even think many of those people were local at all. They're just kind of touring the country, do you know?

Yeah, he said it himself. We went from like city center to city center pamphleting and stuff. Yeah, I'd be curious to know how many of the people there protesting actually had a child that was in a, you know, that was part of the program that was, you know, involved in this event in the first place. I would, I would guess very few. Yeah. I mean, none of them, because it's just a totally voluntary event. Like, you know, you can just bring your child if you want, like. Yeah.

Yeah, which, yeah, I do think it's funny when, yeah, they will kind of also, because they want to get as many anti-vax people on board as possible. So they're also all keep on saying, you know, it's every parent's choice to vaccinate their child. You're just like, well, yeah. Funny when parental choice is important and valid and when it isn't. I imagine them telling their boss, oh, I'm sorry, I have to take a couple days off work.

I've come down with a terrible case of homophobia. Thanks for listening to another episode of the Q&Nanonymous podcast. You can go to patreon.com slash QAnonanonymous and sign up for five bucks a month. That'll get you access to a bonus episode every week, the upcoming man Klan, 10 episode series, the already fully extant trickle-down 10 episode series, as well as pre-sales discount. for live shows, discounts on our merch. And yeah, go check us out. We still have tickets, I believe, to a lot of different venues.

We have like 12 or 13 or 14, I think 15 total cities that we're visiting coming September, October and November. You can go check that out at tour.cunonanonymous.com and the merch is atmerch.com. Annie, where can people check you out and your stuff? Yeah, so I've got a little limited podcast series called Vaccine, The Human Story, which is a little history series just about the first ever vaccine against smallpox and the first ever anti-vax movement. And you can find that on any podcast app, and we also have some video content on YouTube as well.

Amazing. Listener, until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you. It's not a conspiracy, it's fact. And now, today's autochew. They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round. They all laughed when it had a some recorded sound. They all laughed at Nurted on a steamboat. Hershey and his chocolate bar.

They told Marconi, wireless was a phony. That's how people are. They laughed at me wanting you. said I was reaching for the moon But oh you came through Now they'll have to change their tune Why? Because I drink my own urine

And the yogis have been doing it for thousands of years And it makes me feel juicy And it keeps me sober from drugs and alcohol You know, people say, oh, you're not a doctor Well, it's like people who are doctors Are killing my friends and family left right and center so just because your doctor doesn't necessarily mean anything.