TRASHFUTURE - The Four Traffic Diversions of the Apocalypse feat. QAnon Anonymous

Episode Date: March 14, 2023

This week, Riley, Hussein, and Alice join Annie and Julian from the QAnon Anonymous podcast to discuss the recent ecumenical freakout protests in Oxford on the topic of ‘15 Minute Cities.’ Annie was there interviewing participants—she managed to find the one person who was just there because of traffic concerns—and witnessed what appears to be a nascent reactionary resistance movement fighting in favor of climate change? Or something like it. Check out Qanon Anonymous here: https://www.qanonanonymous.com If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s upcoming live shows here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows and check out a recording of Milo’s special PINDOS available on YouTube here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRI7uwTPJtg Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello and welcome to this free episode of TF. It is me, Riley, in studio with Hussain. What's up? Being joined by Alice from Glasgow. Hi. And, of course, also, as always, being joined by Julian and Annie from QAnon Anonymous. Julian, Annie, how's it going? Hi, thanks so much for having us on.

Yeah, absolutely. What's up? I finally made it instead of sleeping in or something stupid like that. Julian's been running to get to the podcast recording with a piece of toast in his mouth for a year and a half now. I like how you said, as always, you've been on every other recording. I just haven't said that much. I did QAnon Anonymous recently and I was on, as always.

By the way, go check out that episode. It was an update of my Prospera obsession because some stuff has changed. I cannot guarantee it'll be out by the time people hear this, but it will eventually be out and people should definitely check it out. At this point, you can hear me talk more about Prospera as I drive Julian and Travis a little bit more insane than usual. However, we have a very fun episode for you today where, if you're listening to it on the day it comes out, some of us will still be in Berlin, so do factor that into your reactions to the episode.

I'm not sure how that would factor, but yeah, sure. Yeah. Do they have to get on drugs to hear people in Berlin? Like, is it a frequency? Yeah, you need to really slow it down. But we've got a few fun things to talk about today. Mostly, we're going to be talking all about getting an in-depth understanding of the nature and origins of all of this 15-minute city's malarkey that I'm hearing so much about from Wright said Fred.

And actually, Annie, you were at the anti-walkable neighborhood demonstration in Oxford recently, weren't you? That's right, yeah. Now, I personally can't stand the idea of being able to reach everything outside in my neighborhood within 15 minutes, so I went down to demonstrate myself. And by coincidence, ran into a couple of dozen other people who are also there to do the same thing. They're all united by the idea that you should go to the morrisons an hour away because it's different. There's different stuff there. Yeah.

We have to have a militant sort of extreme movement for Big Tesco. Well, you know what that's a militant extreme movement for is taking approximately one hour journeys in your car, where guess what you're listening to? You're listening to the free one on the way there. What are you going to listen to on the way back? The paid one. We're screwing our own business model here. That is a good point.

We should actually be advocating for one hour 20 to 35 minutes. Sissy is depending on... If you tried to listen to this podcast on riding a bike in a British city, you would be killed. 100% fatality rate. No question about that. And it would be legal. It'd be legal to do it. Absolutely.

Not a jury in the world would convict you. But before we get into talking in depth about 15-minute cities, I need... Alice, do you have a sound alert for twink posting patrol? You know, I really don't. And I wish I had known ahead of time because I would have jinxed you up a sort of a twink soundbite. But instead, you just have sort of like regular action news. Tennessee Lieutenant Governor Randy McNally has been liking and commenting on it. The guy who does the atlases, yeah.

Yeah, the guy... Randy McNally from the Map Store and also, let's just say, a case study in nominative determinism has been liking and commenting on a young man's Instagram page from an extended period of time. Yeah, he's a remarkable young man. I'm breaking out all of my vintage Derek McKay material for this. I fully expect to see some DMs that are like, you know, three in the morning, two in the morning, three in the morning, just like, hey, hey, hi, hey. So, have either of our illustrious guests, have you seen some of this breaking Randy McNally material?

Yeah, this is democracy in action. This is somebody, you know, just reaching out to his constituents to like their, you know, half-nude bathroom selfies. I gotta say, he's a, he's a Hirona champion and a good conservative. Yeah, I mean, frankly, let him cook is my opinion, because they had the funniest fucking statement about this, which is, you know, he gets caught on his like official account. I don't even want to say they caught it because he wasn't being secret about it. It's like official account with like the office portrait on there, just sending like a heart emoji to this, you know, sort of like shirtless twink.

I'm just like, yeah, okay. But what they say about it is, you know, sometimes he doesn't always use the right emoji. What emoji was he going to send that would have made that a sort of a normal interact? He was, he could have sent like the, the, the in pain, the in pain face as well. Like, oh, or he could have sent the, or, or what if he sent the guy with his arms crossed, like, not for me, thank you. Just sending sort of like confusing emojis to the twinks, you know, just in the skyline. Yeah, just sending the bus him out to the twink. Avocado.

Yeah. Okay. Whom, Whomst among us has not been tempted to message a cat boy to just tell them they're doing great? Yeah. Well, this is actually what, what Governor Mc, Lieutenant Governor McNally replied to the picture of this twink saying, great picture, Finn, best wishes for continued health and happiness. He's like, he's like a football coach. I mean, that kind of sounds like he's like a confused elderly relative.

Yeah. Do you know? The young man is nude in this picture. Uh-huh. Yeah. It's a hundred percent. Like, like warrior male, you know, he's like a, like a wrestling coach or something. He's like broadly supportive, doesn't really get it.

Just like, just happy to see young men being athletic, you know. Oh God. Okay. I've seen like some more. There's like one where, um, the guy where Finn is taking to take, takes a picture and like, you can see Finn's, uh, Finn's butt. It's very nice picture. Like, aesthetically.

And Lieutenant Governor, uh, Lieutenant McNally responds with free heart emojis and free flame emojis. You can't, you can't, at that point, you can't like say, I used the wrong emojis. Yeah. You can't use the thing of like, I was trying to bookmark it. You did it three times. I was trying to bookmark it. But also, yeah. He meant to say three fax machine emojis, a plane taking off.

Yeah. The Japanese flag and, uh, maybe 100th thing. Maybe he just meant to suggest that this twink was capping and he wanted to send the cap emoji. Yeah. Yo, you don't have an ass like that. That's cap. He just understands the heart emoji to mean like loving support and that's all he's doing. For the statement to make sense, it would, it would have to be that like if you have a government position,

you automatically follow everybody, uh, in your, in your jurisdiction or whatever. Like, you don't, no one, no one forced you to follow someone on Instagram. It's, it's, I really doubt that, that, that this just came up other than, you know, like this horrible new thing where they've tick-tockified Instagram and they're showing you, you know, you're kind of like worst, uh, attention vices. Like they're, they're feeding you back, whatever it is, you know, uh, and in this case, in case they're just twinks. Family guy clipped all at the same time. It's all, it's all just twinks and he's finding them through that.

I, I, I like this idea that you've come up with here. I think we should do this. I think we should, you should have to follow everyone in your constituency because that would put every single legislator who uses social media at all in brain prison. And. I agree. Yeah. I think politicians deserve it. Yeah.

They deserve, they all deserve really big social media following. And you have to like, like every, you have to like every one of your constituents posts as well. Oh yeah. And no, and you have to pick the bright emoji for it. Expand every image. You have to watch every video the whole length. If I don't get at least 10 emojis from my local MP, I'm voting green. This is the first plank of the like movement for big Tesco, you know, our first demand.

All MPs must be made to consume like all social media made in their constituency. Not only that, you have to reply with three relevant and clever emoji. Right. David Lamme, you're on notice. You haven't been replying to nearly as many of my posts with emojis, but before we move on, here's what the lieutenant government now. Rand McNally, the lieutenant governor of MAPS has said, sorry, his, his, his, his representative have said, does he always use the proper emoji at the proper time? Maybe not. But he enjoys interacting with constituents and Tennesseans of all religions, backgrounds and orientations on social media and has no intention of stopping.

He's just like me. Yes. He's just like me. I will continue sending the fire emoji to the twink. And you know what? I will not be. I guess the critical thing you can do, right? Yeah.

Yeah. I agree. Finally a right-wing politician I can respect. I've not looked up any of his views. I assume they're very regular. Lieutenant governor, who cares? Like his views do not matter in less, like unless Bill Lee gets shot, no one cares what this guy thinks. And if he does, it's going to be the funniest possible American assassination because it's going to precipitate this guy being governor of Tennessee and just sitting in the office all day sending heart emojis to twinks.

Yeah. And then, and then what's going to happen is that, is that Finn, that particular twink is going to be like put in charge of like the Tennessee State Senate. Yeah. This guy could be gay, Huey Long. Like he absolutely could. And I'm sad that we're missing out on that opportunity. All right. All right.

So there's one thing, another thing I wanted to talk about, and this is a little bit of, I'd say an advanced discussion of what we're going to talk about in much more detail on next week's free episode, which is the UK's ongoing decision to continue hardening its borders and criminalizing migrants and so on. But we're going to talk about, again, in depth and so on, and on that, on that episode. Yeah. We're going to talk about like the actual policy, but first we have to do the sort of dessert before the vegetables. We have to talk about the silly bullshit that everyone else is talking about instead of the policy. Yeah. So this is a footballer and, you know, social media poster. I haven't seen him respond to a twink on Instagram, but we just don't know yet.

Guy whose career actually has succeeded despite the fact that he shit himself on the pitch. Yeah, that's right. He's the only guy to shit himself and for that to have worked out for him. Yeah. An inspiration to like people with IBS everywhere. I would say not not national hero, not really national treasure, national national guy, guy who's around. Gary Lineker. Yeah.

As essentially said that the continued demonization of asylum seekers to the UK, who I must always remind everyone who will listen at this point, who are coming to the country legally. Again, not that that should really matter, but who are coming to the country legally. And the only reason they have to cross in small boats is because, for example, there's a European level regulation that we're still party to. That means that if someone gets on a plane and flies to a destination and are denied entry at that destination, the plane, the airline is responsible for paying to fly them elsewhere. Right? So if you want to know one of the reasons that people keep arriving in small boats, that's a fucking big one of them.

Right? Yeah, Dublin too, right? So anyway, Gary Lineker has, you know, made, he tweeted something just saying, wow, this is pretty reminiscent of 1930s Germany, this, you know, wave of dehumanization of migrants that is, let's say, getting bigger and more prominent and more, and it's gone from, you know, like comment sections of papers to the headlines, to the halls of government. And it's not new. It's been in all of these places forever, but that it is sort of getting bad and worse recently, recently.

Yeah. And the Nazis weren't, you know, they're not the comparison I would have made, not because of any sort of like moral compunction about making it just because I think it's like slightly imprecise, but it wasn't wrong. Like it is dehumanizing, it is genocidal, sure, all of these things. And the reason to bring this up is, is the usual thing happens when someone from, when someone who's associated with the BBC says something that the government is doing is wrong, which is the usual crop of, you know, 200 syphilitic columnists, all of whom live in inner London,

then get all very up in arms about it. However, what I noticed this time is that he was then doorstepped. He was this guy. Again, no particular love for Gary Linnaker. I mean, he's someone who... He's just sort of like, he's a regular lip. Like, well, this is the thing. Like he's tweeted stuff that's like seemed to violate the BBC's like standard of like impartiality before, right?

Like he's talked about like, oh, you've got a bin Corbin. He like, you know, congratulated Boris on winning and it's like, okay, so those are fine, but we're doing the full court press on like, no, you cannot be involved in politics. It's like a BBC sports presenter for this thing specifically. Yeah. And the idea that, again, a guy who's a, you know, private citizen or would end up being, just be unable to walk out of his house because a gaggle of fucking Sky News or whatever cameras are just trying to get him to either admit he was wrong

or get him to like apologize or whatever. This is the doorstepping from our media class as a form of social boundary enforcement is being directed against more and more and more and more people. I don't think it's even about getting like him being forced to make an apology or even about his BBC job. I feel like those are sort of side issues. The main thing at this stage and like, especially considering that like, from what I understand, and I'm sure we'll talk about this like next week, but from what I understand of like the kind of Tory policy that's being proposed,

most of that can't actually be actioned, right? So it's, it's, it's wildly illegal. Right. Like it's kind of a bit, it's like, it's a bit too illegal for their liking. So the idea is much more like you propose like the most kind of insane and villainous shit. And then when most of that gets rejected, you can then kind of blame the cabal of like enemies that incorporate like European institutions that, you know, you're sort of still signed up to, but, you know,

technically Brexit should have made you free from them, etc. All the people that supported Brexit, like, and that would include Lenica, all these sort of celebrities that... Sorry, you supported Remain, you mean? Well, yes, sorry, my apologies to Gary Lenica. I will shit myself after this to say sorry. But I guess like the idea of like creating this kind of like new bubble or expanding that bubble of like enemies that want to,

yeah, that are just like against the government agenda, which is now sort of all being concentrated around anti-migrant sentiment, because really that's all they seem to have left, right? Well, Suella Braverman managed to, she had to apologize for this. She was forced to by like one of the civil service unions and say, oh, actually I didn't see this before it was sent out under my name, but she had an email to like Tory party members that's like, the reason why we can't do the like stop the boats bill that we want to do

is because of an activist blob of like left-wing civil servants, human rights lawyers, judges, and so... And then it ends with, you know what to do? Big comical wink. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And also, you know what else that is? That just replace all of that.

You scratch that, you know what's under it? The words printed in impact font cathedral. There is the cathedral that is stopping us from implementing the wonderful idea that we all decided was great and the bizarre. But the thing that I wanted to sort of pull out about this as well is that increasingly the acceptable role of broadcast media in the UK, especially when it pertains to the BBC, and this is one that sort of, again,

it's hardcore enforced by the right and then nodded along to by liberals, is that they are there to be the arbiters of culture war. And they are there to be the referees, you know, essentially. Yeah, and referees in a sort of a very, as we've, as I've said, like hypocritical and like... They're supposed to be the referees at a Harlem Globetrotters game. Like that that is... Yes.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the thing is, I agree with the saying that I don't think this is really about Gary Linnaker, because he's in a position where he's like, he's been in this job for like fucking 25 years or whatever. He has like infinity money. He could go and do this anywhere else. It's about sort of disciplining anyone else who might think about

sticking their head up over the parapet to go like, you know, he might be able to do it. You do not want this. You know, you don't want us outside your house. I don't know. It felt sort of like government by trolling in some kind of strange way when Rishi Sunak came out and like, with that podium, which literally had stopped the boats on it.

And then they like posted that tweet, which was just like, if you come here illegally, you will be exempt from our slavery protections and things like that. Do you know, like it felt like... It felt like what a government done by someone like Paul Joseph Watson or something would look like, do you know? Where it's just like designed to be as like, as malicious, as crass, as kind of like vicious as possible.

And I think, you know, they wanted that response. And that's not to be like, you know, oh, you're just put playing into their hands by being like morally outraged, because that's not really how I think about it. I think it's morally outrageous. And so, of course, people were going to be morally outraged, you know? But I think it's exactly right that they were looking for somebody that they could point to as woke BBC out of touch lefty

and, yeah, kind of make a fuss about so, yeah, so swell of brave men and Sunak and everyone else like that can go back and say that they were betrayed. They were betrayed by, yeah, the snowflakes in the ECHR, the, yeah, the woke BBC, all the rest of it. Yeah, I don't... And as Hussein says, it feels like a kind of desperate move. It does feel desperate.

But of course, that doesn't mean it can't cause untold misery while they flame around. Very quickly, this kind of like to add that I think this is also sort of setting ground for what will be a sort of... I don't know how long it'll be in opposition, but I think it's very telling that the labour response to all of this was not like, no, this is morally kind of wrong, you know? Of course, we're not going to fucking send people,

allow people to become slaves in this country. Their thing was like, oh, actually, we're not really sure about the effectiveness of this. So ultimately, it's like, it doesn't really matter whether they're in government or not. Now that this has kind of been like set on the table as a kind of like legitimate political, not even like a legitimate political framework,

because that's kind of always been the case. But one, it basically has now set the terms of like what any kind of future response to refugee crises is going to be. And I think that for like an incoming labour government... Yeah, we all know it's not really going to change anything, but I guess what I'm worried about is that, as that now has sort of been established, what you'll see as a labour government who are like,

yeah, we're going to take the sort of philosophical principles of this and decided like, make it efficient. Yeah, it's like, you're not going to benefit from our modern slavery protections unless you work in a company making an app. So I want to move on to... We'll talk about this obviously much, much more fully in our episode next week.

Both next week and, you know, in a couple of years' time when we talk about how Prime Minister Stalmer has managed to put stopping the boats on the blockchain or whatever. Yeah, of course. So let's get to our main course for today, which is, of course, a deep dive into the 15-minute cities thing. Now, we've talked about it a little before, but we're going to go much further in. So, Julian and Annie, I was hoping,

could you just spend a couple of minutes giving us a little bit of an update on the state of the big conspiracy that conspiracy people now kind of all believe in little facets of? Yeah, sure. So, um, the 15-minute city club is a club which local councils can sign up to.

It's really difficult to get in the bounces if I say about outfits. Yeah, if you think the Q at Bergen is bad. And, yeah, they sign up to this club. And, I mean, it's so mild. It's so hilariously mild. Essentially, what they do when they sign up to this club is that they promise to think really hard

about being a 15-minute city when it's time to invest in some infrastructure or build a new road or anything like this. I mean, it's like, it's so non-binding. They essentially just promise to, um, yeah, think about the 15-minute city principle, which is that when somebody goes to their doctors or their school or their grocery shop,

um, they should be able to do that within 15 minutes' walk or cycle. So, lots of councils have just signed up to this. Like, yeah, oh, that does sound nice. That sounds like a nice idea, essentially. Um, but this has become reframed through the, uh, conspiracy theory surrounding the Great Reset.

Um, and it's theorized by the kind of adherence of the anti-Great Reset movement that this is actually a trap which councils are setting for, um, to... which councils are setting in through all to Klaus Schwab and the Great Reset and the WEF and everything like that, um, which is that these 15-minute cities will be enforced.

So they're going to portion up all of their cities into 15-minute zones, and you won't be able to leave your zone without a permit of some kind. So it's a kind of science fiction dystopian concept, uh, coming out of this very mild council proposal. Yeah. So how do you know living in 2023

and having to, like, make up science fiction dystopian scenarios? You keep getting handed real ones, and you're just like, no, this isn't exotic enough for me. I need the one where I'm, like, you know, sort of locked into, uh, City 17. Well, it's, I need the one that curtailes my, as a radicalized middle-aged homeowner, I need the science fiction dystopia

that I'm not just aware of, or that's not sort of imminent and all around me. I need the one that impinges on the main ways in which I react, interact with the world, which is driving to the shop. I think that's exactly it. Yeah, it's a very bourgeois conspiracy theory because a lot of it relies on people

who live in the suburbs, who own their own home, and who drive everywhere. A lot of people I spoke to were, you know, explaining to me how, you know, it may seem very sudden that we're suddenly all going to be shut in our homes, but it's actually the only part of the, the creeping anti-car agenda,

which has been going on for a long time. And in fact- I do have one of those. I just wish, like, politicians did, too. It's so strange. There's this kind of, and we talk about this sort of, like, more or less every time we get you guys on,

but I think there's this weird sort of cultural whiplash effect that happens where if you go from everything the government does, all of the policy is designed to, like, shield you as a population from, like, everything, whether that's, you know, being a homeowner, being a motorist, you know, being middle-class, whatever, to, like, experiencing some effect,

like, sort of feeling the wings of governments, like, brush past you. Like, it really, really sends you in the opposite direction, and you're like, oh, this is tyranny. Tyranny is happening to me. And so what we have in, there's a few examples, right, of a lot of various initiatives

to fight climate change by just trying to discourage people from using their cars, right, that are completely, have created these enormous street protests of usually people who aren't even living in the cities, like, Oxford was the epicenter of the UK protest against it, but there's also protests in Edmonton, Paris, Brussels,

all over the shop. Yeah, and it's so strange. You would think that they had, like, seen my posts about, like, climate Stalin, but then you look at what they're actually mad at, and the answer is, like, a working paper that's like, maybe you could write a bicycle, and it's got, like, a little drawing of a sun on it, you know?

What I find so funny about this as well is, like, Europe, like, every city in Europe, or most of them, especially in Northern and Western Europe, is a 15-minute city and has been since, like, 1200. Yeah. Yes. I mean, well, I think Oxford is a really interesting example for this, because Oxford is obviously a couple of weekends ago where the protests were,

and you're right, it was, you know, even though Oxford was just one of many councils that had joined the 15-minute club, the reason it was chosen for the protest was because the local council is implementing something which are actually nothing to do at all with the 15-minute cities or even climate change. They're doing some traffic filters,

which essentially means that there are six main roads that run into the city centre of Oxford, and I think from 7am till 7pm, starting 2024, cars, unless they have a permit, won't be able to go on those during, yeah, from 7am till 7pm. But it's all entirely to do with traffic, because Oxford obviously is built around other Oxford colleges,

which have been around since around 1096, and it's just, frankly, not built for that many cars. Do you know? It's all these medieval little cobbled streets. The traffic is really bad there. It's really horrible. So it's just like, I don't know, yeah. It's not even, you know, the kind of, this was combined with the 15-minute cities to say, you know, this is exactly what they're doing.

They're starting the climate lockdowns. They're starting the climate lockdowns here, but it wasn't even anything to do with climate change. It was just, I guess, the tension, which is at the heart of nearly all local politics in the UK, which is, you know, our cities aren't built for cars. Suddenly everybody has a car. How do we make this not a fucking nightmare

without upsetting anyone? But of course, yeah, this has been a tension at the heart of local councils where I live Norwich. They just pedestrianized the whole city centre, which was immortalized by Alan Partridge 50 years ago. But it seems like now you can't do something like that. You can't make a change like that without somebody deciding that this means you want to enslave them

and control them and all the rest of it. Every sort of, like, obstacle that you face as a motorist, that's Klaus Schwab. That's Klaus Schwab. That's the world economic for him. Yeah, he's putting, like, orange cones everywhere. He's putting an arrow in the wrong direction. It's, like, very fun, but it's actually like...

Traffic prankster Klaus Schwab. Like, this is... I'll explain, like, because you were going to say something and then I'll speak out. Yeah, go ahead, go ahead. The suburban driver thing is, like, really fascinating to me because I come from a place, like, I live in grace of London and I feel like in grace of London

you have that tension between people who want public transport and are very happy when they get it in the case of, like, where we are with, like, the Elizabeth Line and everything, but also people who were fucking furious about it because they felt that this train line, which was not like... It was just an extension of the existing train station, because there was, like, big protests about it

when it first kind of was proposed back in 2015 because they were worried that it would disrupt their car commute, right? And I think since, like, the development of that, like, I've seen sort of car politics in that area kind of go in these really, really strange directions and it comes from, like, protests over roadworks, for example. You know, the one... I think a couple of years ago, I saw someone

when I was driving to my parents' house, like, when they live in kind of more of the suburban Kent, they, like, stopped their car in the middle of the road, got out, took the cones away from the road that it's being, like, worked on and just drove past and it was bizarre to me to see, but, like, that sort of tendency. And I guess one of the questions that I had for you guys and for you, Annie, because, like, you were in Oxford,

how much of this is just kind of, like, people with cars for whom they kind of believe that the car is the only thing that sort of gives them an semblance of freedom? And so any obstruction to it, whether that's, like, an LTN or whether that's, like, a temporary traffic light, is kind of a violation of their freedom and how much of this are people who kind of are a little bit annoyed about the whole car thing, but for them, it, like, feeds into this

much broader, more sinister agenda that they have sort of been kind of, like, swooped into and had already signed up to to begin with. I spoke to, gosh, probably about, like, 20, 25 people when I was there at the protest and there was precisely one woman at the end who appeared to be local, had no interest in the Great Reset or the WEF or anything like that.

She just thought, she just thought traffic filters were really bad. Right. And it was so strange speaking to her because, you know, she was, she was just giving me just a completely ordinary local politics spiel. She was just saying, you know, I work as a mobile hairdresser. This is going to make my, you know, commute to my various clients. So much harder.

I'm going to have to go round on the ring road. It's going to be terrible. And I was just totally ill-equipped to actually engage with her concerns because I'd just been speaking to everybody else. But what a close one. Were you worried about him? I can actually ask about that as well. How did she react to being in the same protest

with, like, the fucking, like, British National Party or Inheritor Organization? A national action, I think. You know, Patriot Front was there, right? How would someone like that react to being like, how come everyone here seems very right-wing? Yeah, I mean, once I realized what was going on, that she wasn't a conspiracy theorist.

I mean, you can hear our conversation. I should have mentioned this to begin with. Yeah, I've recorded an episode about this for QAnononymous, which will be up on our premium feed. So you can go and listen to our conversation there. But, yeah, I sort of wanted, I really wanted to suss out what she must be feeling about all of these signs, you know, saying stuff like,

we're not going to eat the bugs. You know, this is a communist ghetto or the rest of it. So I sort of said, oh, it must feel really, it must feel really nice how many people have come to support you from all over, from no one here is actually from Oxford, right? So I was like, that must feel nice. And she was like, oh, well, you know, they've all got their agendas, don't they?

Lots of people talking about the vaccine. Well, I've had my jabs. So, and I was, yeah, I said, you know, does this not concern you that the council will just turn around and say, well, a bunch of conspiracy theorists oppose it? But nobody with any actual complaint. And she sort of seemed a bit like non-plus by that. She was like, yeah, yeah, I suppose they could say that.

But then she brought up the fact that, of course, because as you might point out, Riley, there were, yeah, some pretty nasty far-right organisations there. I think I saw there was someone from a patriotic alternative and the Heritage Party, I believe, were there all in attendance. The Heritage Party were, actually, they were like stood right at the front when all the speeches were happening and talking with the organisers. So I kind of assumed they were going to do a speech, but they didn't.

It was all very weird. But yeah, this meant that there was a local anti-fascist presence. And so this woman was sort of saying, you know, and of course there's anarchists who are counter-protesting us and anti-fascists. And I don't really understand what their problem is with us and why they all wear masks and stuff. I kind of just felt like, yeah, this was just like this woman who genuinely had,

yeah, just one complaint about this specific bit of local politics who had been pulled into a culture war, which was entirely beyond her understanding, do you know? I feel quite bad for her just to be like, it's, you know, me and all of these Nazis against sort of Antifa were very keen on sort of like traffic calming measures. Yeah, exactly. They love the ring road.

They love the ring road. Yeah. Part of the like mini roundabout block. I've got a few other quotes here. So this is actually from Wired magazine talking about a local traffic calming activist in Haringey where I live, who's been advocating for better cycling infrastructure in the borough and as a cyclist in Haringey, thank you,

and received a torrent of vitriol when she just posted a thread and what she was doing to try to make Haringey more walkable. And this is not related to, I mean, it's the same movement as Oxford, but some of the stuff you said, I thought I'd bring this in now because some of the tweets that are reported or copied in this thread, on this thread are quite relevant. One user called PaulDUP8977540 said, that's not freedom, that's a socialist prison.

Insert Milo doing the Northern Irish accent now. However, my favorite one was a tweet from an account called atbusinesslioness. I want that name, I want that app. Atbusinesslioness, I am willing to pay you a reasonable sum for the atbusinesslioness. Sent the activist an image of the Warsaw ghetto with a message, there were already 15-minute cities in Poland

during the Nazi occupation. In 1941, the Nazis introduced the death penalty just for going out. Okay, there's two things that I want to really dig into here, right? The first one, the idea that the boundaries of the Warsaw ghetto were imposed in order to stop you from going to Big Tesco, right? And you have to stay within 15 minutes. The second thing, fucking the Fiat 500 Twitter Institute for Advanced Holocaust Studies saying that one of the Nazis'

greatest crimes, they actually made it illegal to go out. That actually one of the first things that the Nazis did was institute a series of laws that forbade you from wearing a nice top and some jeans and going out with your friends. And it's just like, yeah, that's what that was. Because one of the things that we talk about is this idea of the prison, but the idea is that you imagine yourself as persecuted as someone in the Warsaw ghetto in the 1930s,

like a Jew in 1930s Germany or Poland, right? You imagine yourself in that way because you've created an underdog story in which you're the hero and the stakes are going to Big Tesco, essentially. Well, we kind of like, we did live through that for a minute, right? And I always find it's very curious that, you know, all of these people hate Matt Hancock so much. And I don't feel bad for him because he has sort of made a rod for his own back.

You look at some of the texts that he's sending during the pandemic like we actually told the police to like get tough and stupid about this. And so as a result, like you saw, you know, people, you know, getting fined for going out on like second walks or like the police going to like Tesco to see if they're only selling essential items or whatever. And it was legitimately authoritarian. It was very weird.

It was surreal and it was like an overreach. And so all of these people have gone, oh, well, if they can do that, they're just going to do it again, but permanently for the sake of international socialism, I guess. Yeah. And I think like one thing just to kind of bear up, there's a lot of sort of like insanity or like just kind of bizarre things and also like lots of people exploiting that too. But I can totally understand like, you know, because I live around people who like have these sort of tendencies and part of that does come from the idea

that like, OK, well, when you live in like quite a remote area where there is no real public transport, where there's not really a lot of infrastructure, where there's not really a lot of stuff to do. There's nowhere to hang out with anyone. You're just trapped. Your ordinary way of living is being trapped in your house. Also just like the things that you can do, like my neighbor, for example, like the only thing that she ever really does is sort of like go out with her dog

to like the parks near the two parks near our house. And like when the when the first sort of lockdown happened, one of those parks was completely closed off with like, you know, standard like sort of weird police tape. And the other one, like the seats were like kind of wrapped up as well, right? And so you're suddenly like, you're someone who's kind of like used to a particular way of living, which, you know, doesn't really have a lot, but you've also sort of not, you're not really expecting that much.

And so when the few things that do kind of keep your life somewhat sane are then sort of taken away from you, it's very easy, I suppose, to then kind of it's very easy to log on the computer and be like, oh, by the way, they can do this, they can do all these other things. And like how then, especially with the Hancock stuff, how then can you kind of be like, well, 15 minute sissies that are all sort of conducted outlaw or being sort of designed by the EU, like it's not kind of the thing. They're not going to like shut down the Dartford Bridge, like, you know,

Bane from The Dark Knight Rises and stuff. They should, right? They should, that's all I'm saying. I just, I just, I wanted to bring Julian in because I feel like we've been having all this between ourselves, but we haven't heard from you on this subject that much. No, this is great. I'm learning about Middle Earth and all the different races that live there. This is so cool.

No, I mean, it's really funny because, you know, here there's just, you know, the concept of walkable anything is just not really a thing. But I think that what is kind of common between both the countries is that at this point, there's no vision for the future. Like, there's no common project and there's zero trust that the government can take care of anybody, basically. So the only thing that people are really adamant about is, you know, like we were mentioning earlier with the boats.

It's like, can you crack down on my enemies? Because I trust that you can be cruel, but I don't trust that you could take care of a city or, or, or us in any way. And also, you know, we've been building a sense of community around our hatred of like whatever it is, the vaccines or, or the lockdowns. And so now any, any kind of thing coming from above, from the government, is a form of lockdown. They're, they're looking for that, right?

That for, for like, OK, well, what, how are you trying to control me? And I think that that sense can be applied to anything. I mean, I think the 15 minute cities thing will come and go and there'll be something new and it'll be even more ridiculous. But the reality is, you know, that woman at the end that you spoke to Annie, who was from Oxford, you know, it's kind of a double-edged thing because I mean, there would be like 12 people and it wouldn't make the news if there wasn't this entire carnival procession of people talking about

Adrenochrome and the WF. So, yeah, I don't know. I mean, local politics not spicy enough and also no vision for future. And I think just in general, knee jerk, no government. We don't want government doing anything. And, you know, that, that includes telling me I can't use my car during this hour on Tuesday and Thursday, but totally unrelated. I mean, you know, I mean, when you hear people's discourse about this stuff,

it has zero to do with the actual filters and everything to do with enslavement and this idea that the government is bearing down on us and is like the biggest government we've ever had, right? Well, what we really is, and I think the thing that unites it all together is that all of the great reset conspiracies, in fact, a lot of conspiracies in general to me seem to be, especially the right-wing ones, seem to be almost like stochastic reactions to any collective action problem, right?

That's stochastic reactions to public health, stochastic reactions to climate management, where someone from the Heartland Institute will tweet the phrase climate lockdown in April 2020 and then that will just keep getting amplified and amplified and then other people paid by the Heartland Institute will keep saying, oh, climate lockdown, climate lockdown. And then that idea is just out there. And so what happens is someone who's like, again, a sort of radicalized middle-aged person who's constantly seeing ghosts

at the edge of their vision because we live in an insane information environment that they just are being driven crazy by when they're looking to sort of explain what the ghosts they keep seeing are. They reach for climate lockdown. And then it just so happens that fossil fuel-funded think tanks were the first people that created and promulgated this idea that, in fact, some of the bloggers who were talking, who then explicitly linking traffic calming measures

to 50-minute cities to eating the bugs and living in a gated zone like from science fiction or also have accepted Heartland Institute funding at some point in the past, Joanne Nova, right? All of these people have that in common. And so to me, it seems like a form of stochastic informational terrorism fighting a rearguard on behalf of the energy industry to forestall climate action just a little bit longer. What's wild is that they want to do return,

but then you don't even want to do any degrowth. You don't even want to have your car taken away for a tiny part of your week. What do you think we're going to return to? Yeah, exactly. If you're looking for the pastoral, fascist, perfect time of your, it's not going to involve you taking your car all day long and going to a big supermarket. I think that's true.

It's like really anti-modernity, but in this very specific way. I mean, one of the things that came up a lot when my interviews was, I think there were two, yeah, there were three sort of like points, I guess, general points of identity and general points of anxiety. The first, a lot of them brought up was like their disappointment that young people weren't involved with the movement, that they felt like young people didn't like particularly, that some of them had hoped that because they were in Oxford,

some students would come and join them, but instead students were standing on the sidelines and laughing at them. So lots of them felt quite, I think, yeah, generationally bereft. The New Bullington Club are very disappointed. Well, I mean, what is a campus? The campus is a 15-minute city. What the fuck are the students supposed to do? The Ford cars, like it doesn't make any, none of it connects for them.

Technology was the second one. There were, yeah, just, you know, so much kind of, yeah, anxiety and disgust around technology, around like microchipping, transhumanism. There was one woman who actually said, who actually gave me a really detailed explanation on how technology made humans sick, and not only had COVID been caused by 5G, but in fact every flu epidemic could be connected to the rollout of some new technology, going back as far as...

I get cars, which by the way, like there are now laws named for children who have died because they live on like ground floor flats that are poorly ventilated near main roads in south London. I inhaled fumes when I was a child and I'm doing fine. Didn't do anything. Yeah, the thing that always strikes me is how much of like an American culture or like a sort of import this is, right? And that like, if you want to be sort of a trad about this,

if you want to say like, technology has made everything terrible, right? But I want to sort of, I want to drive everywhere. That's the American kind of trad, the British kind of trad used to be, used to like bicycles. They used to imagine themselves sort of like cycling past the village green to go and see like a nice friendly sort of like local doctor and local shops where you know everyone and stuff like that. And that's all sort of like fallen by the wayside it seems.

And I think one of the reasons why is something that I kind of, I sort of joked about earlier that isn't really a joke, which is they want to make going out illegal. I think it's like a genuine crisis of like alienation and loneliness that has sort of driven these people into the arms of like really quite strange and quite foreign sort of influences. Yeah, no, I think that's right. And I think, I mean, it's also perfect.

They were talking about this the day that report happened, which that report was came out, which said that there had been like no mental health impact from the pandemic. Because, I mean, you know, I don't, I don't want to say like, you know, obviously, I don't want to say these people are crazy or irrational because I don't really think that's true. But almost every single person I spoke to,

I would ask them nearly all at the end, you know, how did you first find out about this? What woke you up to this? And every single one said it was overlocked down that they, yeah, that they had woken up to the mirage, to the lies that they were being told. And I think just like the most common, most common radicalization story is just,

you know, I didn't like being locked down and then I realized that COVID is fake and now I'm starting to realize the same about climate change. Just that is pretty much how you would sum up like 90% of the radicalization stories, I suppose. And that's one of the reasons also why a lot of the kinds of measures of mental health that would say that, you know,

there was no impact of mental health during COVID is because these people are full of energy and renewed purpose. They would say their mental health is great. That's true, yeah. There's another thing I wanted to add as well, right? We've talked a lot about going out and how they're worried about going out, but they're also worried about what happens inside the Big Tesco.

And this is, there was a video or post on Twitter earlier that maybe you can play a clip of, but it was, we'll play a clip over me explaining what's in it, but it is a woman walking around a store in London, Ontario, looking at, have noticed that there are little cameras over all of the freezer doors and then saying, well, obviously this is a facial identification camera and when it identifies you,

if you've gone over your carbon budget, if you've driven too much, it won't let you buy the meat, right? And this is one of the other things that I think about this is that I think this is actually people dealing with their repressed guilt and anxiety about the hyper-object, about the existential terror of climate change, because this is believing that climate change, ultimately, right? What you're believing in is an effective,

if quite draconian, solution to climate change. Yeah, climate Stalin. You understand that climate change is about to change your life drastically, but the only way you can interpret that happening is the government is going to force you to live differently rather than events forcing your hand, friends. What he didn't realize was actually those cameras are a training exercise that is set by Mr. Beast

and he's going to put them, he's monitoring his festivals and well, how they're being stacked. Mr. Beast has climate Stalin. Only he has the influence to decarbonize our economy. Let's go, YouTube, I've just decarbonized the entire economy. I have decarbonized 220 economies today. But I think there is something to be said about like how, because I think that you're right about the reaction to it,

but I think it also comes from what you were saying earlier about this hostility towards any type of collective solution, partly because I think for a lot of people, they just can't imagine what that really looks like, right? And when there was a semblance of that during COVID, it was not only managed like incredibly badly, but also there were definitely instances where it's like, well, yeah, if you were a rich person,

your experience of lockdown would be very, very different to if you were not. And if you were in a kind of like wealthy area, or if you were in like a very comfortable area, your experiences even of like when lockdown restrictions were lifted or your ability to sort of work at home, like all these types of things were very much stratified by class. And while they may not necessarily have the language to articulate that, I do think that feeling was very much present,

especially like in a lot of places in England where like for the most part, like again, unless you live in like a very wealthy area of the country, like that period was just very miserable and very lonely and very isolating and atomizing. And I think the idea that, you know, my sort of good faith interpretation is that I think for a lot of people, the idea of having to do that again, but for a longer period of time and to kind of achieve a collective goal

that may not even sort of like provide any benefits to you or your family, but will definitely benefit richer people more. You know, I can understand where the animosity then comes from. I have a very dumb policy prescription for this very quickly, which is you'll love this. It's the most Alice thing you could possibly think about this, which is people want a bit of sort of like emotional fucking support. They want a bit of coddling. They need it, right?

We all do. Do you remember that ad that came out? It was like the German public health authority at the start of the first lockdown. It was like, we like heroically did nothing. We like sat on our arses and stayed inside. I genuinely believe that if you gave everyone who like sat through lockdown without getting like a fine or something, a little medal, we would not be nearly as messed up about it.

But we just didn't. We just sort of like went, OK, it's over now. Back to back to normal, I guess. People want little treats and instead what they got was just like, OK, well, you're going to be miserable during lockdown, but also when restrictions are lifted, despite the fact that the virus is still around and it's still like causing people to die

and we basically did nothing to mitigate it, you're now going to have like a miserable time having to go back to work to like save the economy. Yeah. And also there might be like more lockdowns in future. We don't know. We're a bit confused about like there was no recognition. We barely recognized like people who actually did stuff like NHS workers,

let alone people who like did what they were supposed to do and like stayed home and sort of like absorbed it. That's not fair. We spun that boat around. All I'm saying is that perhaps the ordinary people had had a boat spin that would have helped sort of forestall a lot of this conspiracism. No, I genuinely think that might be spot on, Alice. I don't know.

There was no real kind of heroism, was there? There was no real like valour in much of this. And I think you're completely right that people instead have created a story which we keep on saying how science fiction it sounds, but there's a reason for that, right? And that's because that's a story of heroism that people can understand of going up against the dystopian system. I heard like lots of people talking about Klaus Schwab

and they would often like refer to him as they were talking. They're like, he's like a James Bond villain or he's like a comic book villain or something like that. And you're like, yeah, that's exactly right because this is the story you want to tell about yourselves. It's about like the underdog against, you know, the evil totalitarian system, which is, I mean, it's a cracking story. It's a reason we tell it over and over again, do you know?

And this is also why I think we get so many comparisons to the Nazis because Annie, I don't know if you ran across anything from... I would have fought in the war, but I wasn't, you know, instead of that, I got to like, I had my war which was against traffic calming measures. And I had my war which was where I fought the battle of going to the shops and then buying as much meat as I want, thank you very much. But to be honest, I also think... I think we forfeited so much.

We like forfeited a narrative on this, which like governments had the capacity like no one else to build of going. You know, this was a collective sacrifice that we all made, right? And we acted together in order to keep ourselves safe and by and large, we did a very good job. And instead, we just went back to work. You know, the commercial landlords are very worried about this, so back to work now, please.

Take ten pounds off at Nando's and get an extra Covid. You don't even get that anymore. That was even short lived. You don't even... The price has gone up for stuff. I went to Nando's the other day because I think we were... I was waiting for Milo and Phoebe's live show and I was like really hungry.

One of the only place that was open was Nando's. The price, fuck me, man. So before we end, I want to talk about... Want a medal for that? Yeah, we all get a medal for dealing with inflation. Before we end, I want to talk about one other character and this is why I talked about the Nazi comparison earlier, not just the ones that we saw from Business Lioness,

but Jeremy Mogford, the owner of the Old Bank Hotel in High Street and the Old Parsonage Hotel in Banbury Road, where I celebrated my graduation with my parents, has admitted that he was guilty of, quote, over-dramatizing the cause of Oxford traffic fillers after he sent the following email about Oxfordshire Green County Councillor Andrew Gant. Oh, God.

This man, Gant, along with his associates, are Joseph Mengele equivalent, experimenting with our people in our city knowing what the consequences might be, which could and probably will be terminal. It's... I mean, yeah, I... One thing when I was explaining the 15-minute cities

in Oxford to Julian and our other Q and non-anonymous hosts was I hadn't exactly realized this, but as far back as December last year, Oxford County Council were having to put out statements, joint statements with the county and the city council, saying, please stop sending us death threats. Do you know? Like, and yeah, they did a joint statement which said that...

I mean, it was probably like... It was a bit of a public relations nightmare, and it's exactly how you shouldn't actually respond to a conspiracy theory, where it's just two of them stood in front of the camera, like, we're not doing climate lockdowns. You're not going to be locked in your home. We're not going to build walls that segregate neighborhoods,

and you're like, oh, God, well, this will only kind of fuel it. But yeah, I hadn't really realized, I guess... Because I first heard about these lockdowns, I guess, happening. Oh, these protests happening a couple of months ago. I guess I hadn't really realized quite how long that rumor had been going around, and how long it had been being stoked by the likes of GB News as well. GB News, I mean, I guess it's a bit like what you were talking about

with the climate lockdowns being a concept in need of a policy, right? And so I guess this was just the first one that all of these pundits, saying climate lockdowns, climate lockdowns, would finally say this is it, this is what it is. But yeah, no, the poor council is. It's just, yeah, it's really not worth it. And we say a concept in need of a policy. Like, when I said earlier that it's a fossil fuel industry concept,

like, no, it literally is. Like, the people who came up with the climate lockdown idea and then kept going on Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingram and stuff to push it to create those clips that go on social media that then get fact-checked and responded to by, like, Snopes or the Guardian or whatever, saying there is not going to be a climate lockdown. All of that is just, it's all from people literally paid by the fossil fuel industry through the Heartland Institute to do this.

That's what you want to know where the idea comes from. It's not just, it's the idea doesn't come from the sort of, you know, radicalized middle-aged homeowner who sees ghosts in their vision and tells the fun story. It comes from the fossil fuel industry and then it's just there waiting to attach to something. Yeah, and it's sort of like, it's very useful to a lot of middlemen in a lot of ways. If you're, you know, you can do sort of very well off of this

if you're the admin of like a Facebook group where people can watch videos where it's like climate lockdown's in China and it's a video of a guy trying to buy a Twix from a vending machine and six guys in boiler suits like tackling through a plate glass window. That's sort of quite rewarding, both in terms of like clout and financially. So yeah, it's this whole like weird sort of sick ecosystem which has some very sort of like, goes to some very dark places.

All right, so I think that we're, it probably in a pretty good place. We've put a few interesting and horrifying buttons on this topic. Once again, Annie and Julian, you guys want to sort of provide us any final thoughts on the issue? I think one thing that is interesting to me is just, you know, in the same way that the whole NHS question has been progressing is that, you know, like you said, you have these kind of people who are beholden to private interests that want us to consume and want to deregulate all these things

and also want to gut and privatize, you know, the social safety net or any ability for the government to, you know, kind of serve and do good by their people. Then they get to turn around and say, look, you know, this is what happens when the government tries to do a collective action, right? I mean, and they're pointing to the damage they did, obviously. But it creates a feedback loop where then people are kind of correct in thinking, yeah, well, I mean, the government's useless, like the public services are useless and that's because of their degradation.

But I don't know, it just seems hard to get out of that loop. Yeah, no, I completely agree. I mean, yeah, I think this is, I think you were saying something very similar, Riley, but I guess the thing that kept on coming up to my mind while I was at this protest was it's really easy to laugh at just how silly some of this stuff is. It's so silly to say we're going to get this specific traffic filter means I'm going to get locked in my own home or these cameras in this supermarket mean that I'm going to be, yeah,

monitored for how much meat I consume in a week and stuff. But I guess what frightens me the most is that the anxiety at the heart of the Great Reset is fundamentally not, it's not totally wrong, which is that Western society and particularly, you know, middle class to upper class people in Western societies cannot keep consuming at the rate that they have been and expect the planet just to keep ticking along nicely, right? Like the demands of climate change do actually mean that we may have to see some like quite radical societal change, some societal restructuring.

And I'm not even particularly confident that is going to happen. I'm not really confident that anyone is actually going to make that demand, but it's almost as if we have apart from climate Stalin, otherwise known as Mr. Beast. But I guess that's what frightens me because nobody has made that demand. Nobody, you know, is even pointing in the direction. Anyone with any power isn't even pointing in the direction of that demand. And yet there is already a resistance movement, you know,

and it's already pretty confident, it's pretty well organized, and it can bring a couple of thousand people out to Oxford, you know, from all over the country before anything serious has actually happened. So, yeah, I guess it's easy to point at the silliness, the science fiction part of it, but ultimately what we are seeing is a revitalized, confident grassroots climate denial movement, I think. What seems to be happening is that like there's kind of a lot of people that are very vulnerable to exploitation. And because like with a lot of these things, and you know, not just on like this issue, but in when we talk about like conspiracy kind of movements generally,

and like the kind of like followers on what seems to be the cases that you have a lot of people who do feel that they've kind of like lost a lot, or they do feel like they kind of lack confidence, or like, you know, lack optimism, there's a lot of, you know, movement that is like motivated by an underlying sense of cynicism, the idea that nothing can get better, and like you should be suspicious of people who suggest that like that might be, especially if those people who are suggesting that things can get better kind of say that, well, in order to do so, we kind of need to do it collectively, and that also does involve a certain degree of sacrifice, you know. And so you're sort of like on the one hand, these types of conspiracy movements like play into those vulnerabilities,

but I was also kind of wondering about the ways in which you kind of combat, you know, what is effectively like quite demonstrably like harmful misinformation, because as Riley, as you mentioned, like you can have all your like snopes and fact checkers being like, you know, all the 15 minute city thing is like not real, and like obviously there is not going to be any sort of like, you know, we do not have the police structure to kind of prevent people from leaving like, you know, within like a 15 mile radius or whatever. You can have all of that stuff, but the problem is that like the rate of which like conspiratorial content is produced online, and the way in which was, which is circulated.

And I was thinking about like the 15 minute cities thing, and I was like looking at some of like local like Facebook groups and next door groups and stuff. What was really interesting is that you had a mixture of like things that were obviously just like, misinformation from bullshit websites, like right wing websites, but every so often you'd have like YouTube videos where you'd have someone from like, you know, you're not, what was it called? Not the Heritage Foundation, but... Artland Foundation. Yeah, like someone adjacent to that, or like an author who's kind of,

there was an author who published a book quite recently about like, in defense of fossil fuels, and he would kind of be on like your Rogans, and he would be on your sort of like seemingly kind of very professional podcasts, and they kind of work to reinforce each other. So I guess like my question is like, is this also like a rate of content type of thing, where ultimately like your kind of like fact-checking instruments are, you know, your fact, your ways in which you would sort of usually try to combat misinformation, just simply cannot work in an environment where the sort of,

on the other side, you'd have like this constant and very well funded production of like, material that works to counter that. What's the fucking, as much as I hate to quote him, what's the church online? You know, the lie is halfway around the world before the truth has even got its boots on, right? Like, you can crank out videos of, you know, the guy buying the Twix, getting rugby tackled through the play glass window so easily, so so easily, and like there's so many of them, and there's so many different like facets of conspiracy, you can like sort of like lead people on down to,

and so many different directions you can go with it, whereas you've only got one, you know, very relatively boring truth, which is traffic calming measures and Oxfordshire, you know? You can kind of select the thing that interests you out of the conspiracy stuff. You can be like arts because of, you know, this group of people, that group of people, and their secret agenda is to do this specific thing, as opposed to just like, you know, the council thinks that maybe they could make the traffic a bit better. Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, that's true, but I guess I've thought a lot about,

I mean, because even though the way that conspiracy politics can manifest themselves can feel very new, the truth is that actually not that new, there have been conspiracy movements before, many of which have, you know, may, you know, which have resulted in protests and things like that. And yeah, when I was doing my work on the History of the Vaccine podcast, I found out that, yeah, the smallpox vaccine, when that was first made mandatory, it like had such a huge backlash that basically Leicester City Centre was burned to the ground pretty much. No one can go to a store now. Yeah, so I guess, yeah, you know, this backlash to government measures like has happened before

and it's often revolved around, yeah, the idea they want us all killed, they want us all branded. And so even though I think misinformation is a problem, obviously in the digital environment, sometimes I think that politicians lean a bit too heavily on it because there's another side to the equation right, which is that this kind of bullshit and stuff has always been around, but it doesn't work unless people believe it about you specifically. And I think that a little bit about, I think, you know, the internet and social media has given our public institutions and our government something to point out where they can say, you know, this is misinformation is the problem because all these people are reading all of this nonsense online.

And while that's true, I sort of think, you know, looking at history, we can see that public trust in institutions goes up and down all the time. You know, but you have to build it back up and it's hard work and it's annoying and it's often not considered to be, you know, good, slick, efficient politics, but you can rebuild public trust to the point where this misinformation doesn't interest them and it doesn't seem plausible about you because they don't think they're all the same or they're all in it for themselves and all of that sort of stuff. But it is like, it's just hard, boring work.

And so I guess, yeah, I even though this is the subject that I study, this is obviously something that I have an interest in and I think is a problem. I sometimes can get a little bored of the conversation around misinformation as I think it's only half of the story. They've sort of squandered a lot of that trust. Absolutely. And one of the ways in which they've done that is by not giving me a medal for each time I got vaccinated.

They only gave me a cheap sticker. Where is my brave boy badge? I got a lollipop. I did actually get a lollipop because I was scared of needles. What the hell? I should have asked for a lollipop. We're all going to go get the lollipops that we get for being brave little podcasters. So I want to thank, first of all, Julian and Annie for coming on the show and talking to us today.

This has been extremely interesting. Thank you so much for having us. Our pleasure. Yeah, anytime. And I want to remind all of you out there in Radio Land that we have a Patreon. It's $5 a month. You can get more episodes, such as, for example, the bonus episodes, or you can get certain of the Britonology episodes,

or certain of an upcoming first episode already recorded, ready to be released book club episode with a certain of one familiar voice talking about books and let's say a new voice talking about books. Interesting. I'm debuting my new Serbian accent. It's going to be very uncontroversial. Yeah, that's right. And to say, also, our theme song is Here We Go by Jin Sang.

Listen to it early, listen to it often. Milo might have some dates, but he's not here to tell you. He's not here, so don't go to them. Anyway, we'll see you all on the bonus episode. Bye, everyone. Bye.