TRASHFUTURE - Bridgen the Gap feat. Annie Kelly

Episode Date: March 12, 2024

The gang catches up with QAA’s Annie Kelly to discuss the pilledness situation in Parliament, centrist radicalisation, and an MP who got so excited about being a soldier in the anti-vax army that he... left his family. 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 *LIVE SHOW ALERT* We still have tickets available for our live show in London on March 13! Get them here: https://backyardcomedyclub.co.uk/event/trashfuture-live-podcast/ *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s upcoming live shows here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *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/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to this free episode of... It's the free one. Milo is here saying his nonsense. I got through... I'm here most of the time. 30%. Like the vast majority of episodes. Of the sentence. You make it sound like it's an event. So being done for truancy for your own podcast.
Starting point is 00:00:30 Yeah, like the podcast that we started together and have been on almost every episode for the last 60 years. Yeah, you miss a couple of episodes. It's like, is everything okay at home? Yeah, Milo misses a couple of episodes. We're going through his bins to checking his boiler flu. See what's happening now. My boiler flu. Also, November, you're sounding very clear. Thank you. Yeah. The voice training has worked so well that it sounds almost as if I'm in studio with you guys. She's clarity and clear. Yeah. And I'm teaching you to throw your voice to London. And up in Glasgow, it's Hussein. Yeah, it's great. I actually wanted to go see the Willy Wonka experience myself. And yeah, I'm just in one room and one of the AI images are still
Starting point is 00:01:15 tacked onto the wall of masking tape. So things are going great. I'm working at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. I'm deep-frying Halal Mars bars for the patients, and my boss knows I'm doing it. But can you stop me? They'll say they're aces. Yeah. And we are joined, of course, by a repeat guest from both QAnon Anonymous and the Vaccine podcast, Vaccine the Human Story.
Starting point is 00:01:39 It is Annie Kelly who will be shilling for Big Pharma telling you to not get polio. Thank you. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. And thanks to my sponsors at the Bill Gates Foundation as well. Yeah, very generous people. And of course, the the vaccines, the indie band from the early 2010s. The big fans of your work. I'd love to go to the anti-vax meeting with one person who was just really into the razor light versus vaccines dispute. I kind of got confused. Yeah. Now.
Starting point is 00:02:10 Yeah, Bill Gates wants you to listen to the vaccine. I do love how this podcast has like essential pieces of literacy required, like half remembering an NME article from like 20 years ago. That's right. And also like what the Tarpean rock is. Yeah. Very niche, very small piece of Venn diagram overlap. Now, one of the reasons I wanted to have Annie on is we haven't talked about, I think it's worth talking about a kind of state of the union in terms of piledness in the UK.
Starting point is 00:02:37 Because our sort of extremism guest will be gratified to tell us that there is still extremism happening. Well, pills are fine. It's injections you don't want. So because the UK, as we know, is an extremely paranoid place, and it's also an extremely hierarchical place, and it's also an extremely dysfunctional place. And those three things together can produce a lot of great indie music. But also a lot of people taking various pills, red pills, orange pills, blue pills in some cases. As did the indie music scene. Yeah, that's right.
Starting point is 00:03:07 Yeah, vitamin D pills, really. The only thing you should be taking in the UK. Although I'd like to start though with some people who appear to have been, again, peeled by think tanks but into mainstream, yeah, political media discourse in the UK, which are the two baronesses who were both successfully sued for defamation by people they baselessly called Hamas supporters, which is actually a crime, which is, I've looked, an aggravating factor in the torsious liability for defamation.
Starting point is 00:03:39 Yeah. I think it's cool how we have a whole upper house of parliament that just exists to crank out weirdos who you have to call baroness. Yeah. Yeah. Jokes on you, I support Kataib Hezbollah. Technically, that's libelous and you will retract. This is a very Galloway move.
Starting point is 00:03:58 Yeah. Just thread that needle. And we're going to end today by talking about someone who's probably the most genuinely pilled member of the UK sort of government, which is Andrew Bridgen. I'm genuinely pilled. I just love being my authentic self. Yeah, the sincerity pill. Which is a person who Annie knows quite a bit about and sort of I think is a fascinating figure in the kind of UK pilledness history. But I want to start
Starting point is 00:04:23 with these two baronesses, right? And this is also same with like kind of similar to Lawrence Fox, right? Where you get so wrapped up in just, in reading like columnists, right? And you get so used to just being allowed to accuse someone of Hamas sympathy as a kind of matter of course, that I think just like mad conspiracy theorists, you get pushed so far away from reality that you forget how the law works. Well, I think also the pump has a lot to do with it, right? It's the same with Baroness. Baroness Nick was like a turf one, one of the turf ones. Being like sending mad letters to M&S being like, oh, it seems like your Christmas advert was quite woke. I think if people are obliged to call you, you know, fucking your
Starting point is 00:05:10 eminence or whatever, you get it into your head, well, this letter that I'm writing can't possibly be dangerously stupid and insane. LWJ Why is Percy Pig now friends with what is clearly some kind of non-binary bow-vine? I don't care for this new creature, it is not canon in the Percy Pig universe. Colin the caterpillar I will accept. As homosexual as he may be, he's not out. Yeah, Colin is like LGBT apart from the T. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Starting point is 00:05:40 But what I want to ask is, Annie, as someone who looks at conspiracy, right, how do you see the kind of process of radicalization that takes place among our like, again, like think tank political media elites, that they just forget this kind of thing entirely? Yeah. I mean, I think this speaks to a really interesting condition of the Western conception of conspiracy theories, which has only kind of
Starting point is 00:06:08 has only kind of existed for the last 50 years. But it was a very popular understanding essentially that conspiracy theories were points of view that were from outside the mainstream, from outside legitimate institutions that we rely on to assort our knowledge for us. And also typically, they were the last resort of the powerless, right? They were from people who were in marginalised situations seeking to understand their lack of power. Razerlight fans, for example. Or Tommy Lee Jones covered in gold body paint having just shot JFK.
Starting point is 00:06:46 Exactly, yeah. So, please carry on. You know, this isn't a historical norm and it's actually only really been the norm in the West for about 50 years or so. In other parts of the world, government figures, very powerful people are perfectly happy using conspiracy theories to legitimise their own rule, to shore up their own power. This has been stigmatised essentially over the course of the Cold War and things like that, but it's not the norm. I wonder how effective we are
Starting point is 00:07:19 returning essentially to a world mean where our politicians are just as build and are just as happy to use conspiracy theories. And the institutions, the kind of legitimizing institutions are doing very much the same thing. Mason We've got a lot of questions about the future of the political world. Mason In the long run, it is Vladimir Zhirinovsky's world. We're all just living it. Lysa That's right. Lysa Exactly. Mason Yeah. Well, Slutsky took over, you know.
Starting point is 00:07:42 Mason Yeah. Lysa Yeah. But the matter of Zhirinovsky is not over. And I quote from Slutsky took over, you know? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the matter of Jeroenowski is not over. And I quote from Slutsky directly. I think it's also worth being specific, right? It's not just one sort of baroness libel action. It's actually two that came out on the same day. Yeah, there was the baroness live.
Starting point is 00:08:00 There was the baroness who said that like two scientists were her mass supporters because one of them had tweeted like a Guardian article with the word like concerning. And the other was the Baroness who claimed that the university challenge student who had a like octopus cuddly toy mascot was like secretly signaling support for Hamas. On university challenge. On university challenge. Yeah. Which is confusing because do you remember
Starting point is 00:08:25 when they had that Austrian octopus that was predicting the World Cup results? That octopus actually did support Hamas. But the Cudley Toy Octopus on university challenge didn't. Yeah, Mossad took out Paul the Octopus. You know, the last thing they did. They were so distracted on that. You didn't see that coming, did you? Egg-legged prick. But. So the butt, right? Back to the cab driver, Couchy's like, yeah, pull the octopus. He was taken out by the bee. Yeah, from before we were recording.
Starting point is 00:08:53 Yeah. We were recording. Oh, right. Okay. All right. All right. But, right, I think that usually, like, the idea that, you know, there are not just like people sympathetic with Palestine, but like latent terrorists
Starting point is 00:09:07 everywhere in society infiltrating institutions on TV, to see the TV telling you someone's a secret terrorist. And sending secret messages with what they're wearing and their totems that they bring on and stuff like that. I mean, that's pure. We understand that that's a conspiracy theory when QAnon uses do it. It's just unusual that it was a literal baroness. Mason We've been sending me some secret messages such as,
Starting point is 00:09:31 a man holding looking pretty good right now. I suppose we're going back to a time of what, you know, like, baroness is used to be, which is being driven mad by lead based makeup. Mason Yeah, cool. Mason Yeah, baroness lead makeup. Mason Yeah. Mason-based makeup. Yeah, cool. Yeah, Baroness lead makeup. Yeah, she's Lib Dem, weirdly. Yeah. But I think this comes back to the issue with building...
Starting point is 00:09:53 The issue with a culture war-based epistemology. I find it extremely cringe. Is that it always leads you into being a conspiracy theorist because you just, you have, you look at normal people doing normal things and because you can only see the world through the lens of culture war, right? Or in this case, like a moral panic about Palestinian sympathy that has been forced into our pretty standard culture war that everything gets fed into in the UK, right? Is all of a sudden the octopus becomes a secret message or the like the... This woman who is drying her hands next to me in this pub toilet has just mentioned her penis to me for some reason.
Starting point is 00:10:32 Things of this nature, you know, just very strange. Well, because everything has to be in the same category. It's like either you support Israel straight or Palestine gay. Like that. But it's also, but you're also gay in like a homophobic way. It's not clear how that works. Yeah, exactly. He's like one of those old queens, you know. He doesn't, oh, I just don't get what they're like. It's kind of like a Lawrence of Arabia type. Yeah, Quentin Crisp vibe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, anyway. But before we're going to talk a little more about Quentin Crisp is the British Tattoo Man. Fuck off.
Starting point is 00:11:05 I can tell you've already done two podcasts here. Come on, that's good. The Irish listeners would appreciate that. It's not that it's not good. It's just that you're harder to keep under control than usual. That's right. I'm a scapegatainer. The Irish listeners are kind of like higher level tribunal of what's funny.
Starting point is 00:11:25 The provisional listeners. Yeah. The real listeners. Hmm. Anyway, I've got a couple of news items though to get to before we go through our main topic, which is that Andrew Bridgen article where he got so radicalized by the internet that he did a reverse Ackman. Yeah. Oh no. Whatever happens, if you become radicalized on the internet, it changes your relationship with your wife. Yes. It either gets better sort of as with Ackman or much worse.
Starting point is 00:11:59 Oh, Linahan. Yes. Yeah. The Ackman-Linahan spectrum. Yeah. Ackman turner overdrive. Yes, yeah, the Ackman-Linahan spectrum. Yeah, Ackman-Turner overdrive. Yeah. So, we're going to learn all about, of course, Andrew Bridgen and exactly what happened to him. But there were a couple of items I wanted to discuss first. Firstly, I wanted to talk about, of course, the budget. Now, the budget has very little in it.
Starting point is 00:12:22 There is a cut to national insurance. That's just a bunch of numbers, really. Yeah, it's just a bunch of numbers. Who cares? The budget has very little in it. There is a cut to national insurance. That's just a bunch of numbers really. Yeah, it's just a bunch of numbers. Who cares? There is a cut to national insurance to be paid for notionally by, I think, £20 billion of spending reductions across education. You do some more austerity and you grab the economy by the lapels and you'd be like, show growth you fucker.
Starting point is 00:12:42 Yeah, who needs education? That certainly has never provoked growth on an economy. Now, this is also with the caveat that most budgets are fake, because usually what happens is they will get overtaken by events within three months of their being announced. They're basically just jingling keys for columns. Shut up before I come back there and slap your interest rates. Fake budget.
Starting point is 00:13:02 With the exception of the trust-quartering budget, which was a dead letter within a day. Yeah, exactly. Three hours. But also it was a lot more consequential than the average budget. Yeah. Now, I think there is not much to say on it specifically because it is so, except for, again, like promising more and deeper austerity into areas of the country that can't use
Starting point is 00:13:23 it. I tend to view it, and I'm not an economist, I'm not a mathematician, I don't actually know how to count, but like, I tend to view it as complete kind of incoherence, right? Like, no one can actually give you a straight answer on whether taxes are going up or down, because, you know, we're at this point where anyone who is in the Exchequer is like pulling levers and pushing things and twisting things and turning things. And just in the desperate hope of trying to get the economy growing and doing everything except pushing directly next to the stop racism button, the stop Brexit button. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:13:58 The public investment button. Oh. So long as they never push that, it's all just very strange. It's over great. There's brand bulls out there. Exactly. It's all just kind of symptomatic. And I think that there are a couple of sort of individual line items I want to discuss, but just generally...
Starting point is 00:14:13 Get a tax on vapes. Yeah. Well, yeah, there is a tax on vapes. They're part... Tanks on labor's lawn. They're taxing vapes. Oh, no. They're also...
Starting point is 00:14:21 Tanks on... Like, more literally, they're like all of these sort of fake tax cuts, like removing the non-dom tax loophole They're also doing because that's like not tax. Sorry grabs rather. That's not a real thing Right, but it's something that labor said they would do something that sounded like now the but the thing I sort of want to want to address before we go into it in more depth, right? Is we know one we are at least one of, we think, like it's a pretty good theory, one that's worth taking seriously, that one of the things, in addition to everyone went on the computer a lot, especially for two years, one of the drivers of like,
Starting point is 00:14:55 you know, radicalization. And I think radicalization of people further from reality has been that the state has stopped working around them. And I mean, I think, yeah, so like, this is why I turned back to Annie, right? When you see a budget that says, we're going to get rid of a lot of spending in education, we're going to get rid of a lot of spending in like, or even just in DWP, making like the machinery of the state work as someone who studies and looks at like radicalization, especially right wing radicalization. What do you see? I think sometimes that we do have a tendency to get a little bit simplistic
Starting point is 00:15:31 with this and sort of saying, you know, radicalization is just kind of simply a result of lack of investment in these areas. And I don't know, I think- We didn't teach the kids not to be conspiracy theorists. I think, you know, in particularly when it comes to education and stuff like that, from the people I've spoken to who work in education and yeah, are very much, I think on the, it's one of the front lines essentially for bearing witness, I think, to the impact that this stuff is having, particularly on young people. And it could not be clearer, essentially, that teachers essentially just being asked to, with very little funding, with very little
Starting point is 00:16:11 investment, the actual interest from the supposed institutions that we have for tackling radicalization, things like prevent and things like this, sort of just being asked to kind of take on, take on this role, essentially, as kind of deprogrammer on top of, essentially, all of the other jobs that they're being asked to do. Mason That, make breakfast. Mason Well, I mean, it's fine though, because we have this whole prevent counter-radicalization infrastructure, which is definitely good and works, right? Lysa Yeah, and it continues to basically lump all of the stuff that we're talking about today in as kind of nebulous
Starting point is 00:16:46 ideology because it's actually still not really even set up for, I guess, what we're kind of seeing is this sort of right wing, mannisfair, anti-vax freedom movement nexus. So it's kind of, I still keep on referring to it as an online soup, essentially. That's the only word I can think of for it. A delicious toxic stew. Yeah, all of this is kind of, yeah, still categorized as miscellaneous, essentially. Oh, that's good. The more, though, that I think like the state just sort of withers away, right? The fewer services it's able to provide, it's not even saying that, oh, people, when you
Starting point is 00:17:24 withdraw services from people, they, you know, they immediately become very radical. But rather just that, I think that it's not, it's a little more complex than that. Like people get radicalized against 15 minute cities, not because of like cuts to education or whatever, people get radicalized against 15 minute cities because they're just generally worried that things are slipping out of control and things are flying away from them. Mason We had displaced stuff. People get a kind of innovated sense that things aren't working and are shit. I want to do the kind of simplistic
Starting point is 00:17:57 thing. I want to believe that people see like, you know, council budgets fall by like x tenth of a percent and their arm extends into the Hitler salute, you know, involuntarily. But yeah, no, I think there's a place for like the vibe here and the vibe in Britain is fucking terrible. Yeah, I think on the 15 minute cities point, I think one thing I was really struck by, and I have been struck by in all of my interviews with the freedom movement, which basically was born out of anti-COVID legislation stuff, but now has very much moved on to traffic policies and 15 minute cities is how few people I spoke to could kind of conceive of the state as anything other than an essentially punitive force. It's either kind of completely detached
Starting point is 00:18:43 from their lives or it's an authoritarian police state. Do you know? Mason Thank you, new labour for that. Loretta It's hard to blame them for that conception specifically. I mean, in many ways, I often think some of the issues that they talk about, you know, kind of hyper-surveillance, hyper-technology, they're not necessarily wrong. They're kind of just looking at the wrong direction. They think all of this stuff is happening from the government, whereas actually it's kind of just the fact that we kind of have integrated this technology into our lives. We all accept cookies in every website we go to. They're right that we are being watched and monitored,
Starting point is 00:19:19 but it's through, you know, they've all signed up to Facebook as well. Like it's not happening from... That's not the kind of big brother state that they're imagining, do you know? Mason Yeah. It's kind of... Yeah, like, because with the British state, when you live in Britain for the last 20 years, like, whenever the British state gets involved in your life, especially at like a local government level, it's almost always to make your life worse in some way, which is not a function of states, it's a function of the British state specifically. It's like if your only contact with game show hosts had been Michael Barrymore. And you're like, oh, my, oh, you game show hosts, what, the people who always drown people in their swimming pool?
Starting point is 00:19:55 And then they're like, no, no, that, that was, I mean, that was only allegedly, but that was... It's an extreme example, yeah. That's like not really, that's not really like inherent to the vibe of a game show host. Sort of a few bad apples situation there, you know, but really. All Barrymore's are bastards. Yeah, just a guy who assumes that Chris Tarrant also had a guy dying in his swimming pool. But right, if the state exists in the minds of people who are increasingly right that it is not there to do anything for you, it is just there.
Starting point is 00:20:30 It is the only powers it has left as the budgets get cut further and further and further and further and further. Again, in theory, all of these, this is probably, these don't tend to get, these tend to get overtaken by events. But in theory, right? Budgets get cut further and further and further and further. More people will look at that and be like, ah, that's basically right. And... Mason We've been losing some of the disciplinary powers, and yet that doesn't seem to stop people
Starting point is 00:20:55 from believing in them. And it's strange, because so many of these things were born out of COVID, right? I think it was a lot more... not sensible exactly, it was a lot more understandable for people to do the 1984 Big Brother thing when it was illegal to go outside for a second walk, right? Now it's not, and there's three cops left, and people are still like, I am moments away from black helicopters landing on my lawn. It's like the British government can't afford a fucking helicopter. I retweeted vaccine truth slash virus.
Starting point is 00:21:28 And now I'm going to be taken away to a black side in Swindon. Yeah, the sole remaining RAF pilot has crashed a helicopter onto your front lawn. Yeah. The black side in Swindon is truly the blackest side of all. Can you imagine? Like there's, you know, like violations of the Geneva Convention and then there's expecting people to go like violations of the Geneva Convention and then there's expecting people to go to Swindon.
Starting point is 00:21:46 Yeah, it's like, sort of in the black site. Like could this be worse? And then you're just aware that there's black mold in the air and just like, yeah. Now, this is of course, we know, Labour has looked at this budget and said, we will honour it but punish the sick more. Cool. Yeah, Rachel Reeves has done another unnerving photo shoot, where she looms out at the camera looking like a fucked Noel Fielding to be like, actually, the problem here is people on benefits.
Starting point is 00:22:15 So we're going to not let them be that anymore. Look, after we've been doing that for 30 to 40 years, we just have to do a little more benefits crackdowns. Just one more. Yeah. One more crackdown on benefits. It's sort of like the reflex when the doctor hits your knee with the hammer kind of thing, but the labor right, you know? I think if we, but if we want to talk about the state as sort of Annie describes it in
Starting point is 00:22:39 the view of someone who is a broad sort of consumer of the internet soup of the anti-vax freedom movement, etc. You could do worse than my next news item. Allegations that have been made about a certain Academy in Doncaster. Yes. This was a phrase that really compelled me. Do you have the headline there? Academy Doncaster. Is this like a school of thought? Yeah, the Don Caster Academy. The Frankfurt School, the Don Caster Academy. It was a Don Caster School branded snoops for checking on absent pupils bins.
Starting point is 00:23:16 Don Caster School branded snoops for checking on absent pupils bins. It's like cellar door, you know, it's very, very beautiful use of the English language. So they, they, so a school in Doncaster branded Snoopy because he was looking in their pupils binned. Uh-huh. Yeah. They, they said, yeah. They branded a big bin snooper. Yeah. The Scarlet Letter. What did you expect?
Starting point is 00:23:39 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. So this is Astrea Academy in Doncaster. Why are they all fucking named like this? Well, I mean, yeah, it's like that is if you want a picture of UK education after privatization. It's a very like drag queen name. I was thinking more like hatchback, you know, like driving a Voxel Astrea.
Starting point is 00:23:56 Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's close. But not quite Latin. If you want to understand sort of the UK education after like Michael Gove got his hands on it and turbocharged the Academy movement. It is chains of schools with names like antidepressant pills where they line up the students and do fights like Starship Troopers. I don't think it was good to let various Catherine Burble things do the human centipede to on
Starting point is 00:24:22 all children in the country. Catherine's Burble. Yeah, the compound plural. Now, in this case, the article says, Principal David Scales said the visits were conducted out of safety concerns for absent children and that during visits staff would check for post on doorsteps, bins on bin days, cars and driveways or whether steam was being released in the boiler flue. What we have is we have the B plot of the movie Ferris
Starting point is 00:24:45 Bueller's Day on happening in Britain. The only cops left are the truancy officers. Yeah. Yeah. No, they just like your house gets burgled and you have to like call in and say, I have a kid and they're not coming to school. So someone shows up and investigates. No, I mean, if these guys jobs are getting cut then with the new budget cuts, then maybe I do approve actually.
Starting point is 00:25:07 A geography teacher in like a badly fitting next suit with like a high-viz vest on over the top that says, Truant Detection Team. The Bin Blue Lion. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. Can't put yoga pots in there, mate. You know, but then, you know, about the same sort of chain of academies, more, a resigning teacher, sort of, and this is an education uncovered article, said that, you know, Astrea, students at Astrea are given, basically, are given sort of, again, the usual sort of academy song and dance, which is no song, no dance, no talking, straight line, eyes forward.
Starting point is 00:25:44 Yeah. You know, which is, that's the dance, no talking, straight line, eyes forward. Which is the education you can expect to get in Britain now if you're not going to a private school or a grammar and Sussex. F*** me, one of the little busts is like Andrew Tate so much, at least he's not telling them they can't blink. But then that's also a private school. So we're basically narrating down to like, you're just getting like a really like, pared down version of what's happening at like,
Starting point is 00:26:05 eat fewer like sort of psychosexual traumas. Yeah. Yeah. Where basically this is, I get much like other academies we've talked about, right? Is that the massive amount of control being exerted on students and teachers because teachers then said, if a student asks a question, take no more than two sentences to answer it. You must say this at this time.
Starting point is 00:26:26 You must say, books flat, pencils down at this time. Minute by minute, word by word, huge amounts of interference, of direct control, of like, again, I don't like to overuse the phrase Orwellian, but because Orwellian gets thrown around when you're talking about like, piledness and government control and stuff. Yeah. This is where the call is coming from. This is where like the sort of let's say extreme order is enforced. Yeah, it's fascist pedagogy, sure. You know, and so this goes back to again, I think what you were saying earlier, Andy, right?
Starting point is 00:26:58 I don't have any pedagogy in Moscow, fucking nonsense. This goes back to I think what something Annie was mentioning earlier, which is there is an increasing surveillance and control, whether it comes from smartphones or whether it comes from privatized or semi-privatized education rather than where these people think it's coming from, which is teachers unions and overreaching state and so on and so forth. Yeah. So I want to move on now though from the state of the state to the state of the Pilled. We've talked a little bit about the suppers of the soup,
Starting point is 00:27:34 the freedom movement soup. By suppers you mean people, agents. Those who's suppers. Those whomps sup. Yes, those whomps sup on the soup. Right. Last time we talked to you, Annie, the main thing was 15 minute cities. And 15 minute cities seem to be a kind of combination of the extension of COVID lockdown reaction with a kind of global weft plot combined with...
Starting point is 00:28:01 Because you never hear about vaccine passports anymore because you don't need one. So they just moved on to the next thing. So what's the soup up to? What are they doing right now? The pro-par culture, I think, is probably still the strongest element of it that's going. Yeah, understanding that, honestly, very tedious traffic regulations in various cities are all part of an orchestrated global plot headed by Clow Schwab to...
Starting point is 00:28:30 It's a busy man. He's very invested in the Eulairs, Oxford Cities Park and Ride system. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I saw everyone was, that kind of like fascinating way that Jordan Peterson can kind of just tweet something that seems completely out of pocket. He seems to be very on board with this understanding of the world where he quote, tweeted in an associated press article which pointed out, I think that, yeah, forget exactly what the traffic regulation was because if I'd known that when I started researching conspiracy theories, this would have to be something that I would get up on. It's just like various cities and what they're
Starting point is 00:29:09 doing about traffic, I probably would have thought twice. You can't park in this and microns and chiles anymore. Well, you want to destroy our way of life. That's not so far from what he actually did say. Yeah. So anyway, they had line pointed out that there had been a great reduction in traffic deaths in this American city, which had trialled this. And John Peterson had quote-tweeted it saying that the woke death was coming for the associated press.
Starting point is 00:29:35 Not the woke death. The woke death. Yeah. Yeah. Spread by rats. Is woke death like Korean fan death? I was thinking more like final death. You know, you die in woke, you die in real life. That's right. You can't die until you give your pronouns.
Starting point is 00:29:51 You leave your woke running overnight. Well, we know that if you die by getting hit by a car needlessly, because of everyone's right to drive at 50 miles per hour on a country road, that's the most glorious form of death. And what he's actually saying- Yeah, because you got isochide. You will enter, Marta. miles per hour on a country road. That's the most glorious form of death. And what he's actually saying is that it's further proof of descending into a more and more godless society by not allowing people to have noble deaths, by being struck by machines, but also you're not giving them the chance to survive and therefore defeat the machine. You know what we're saying is that if you are a dishonored wandering Ronan who allowed your Lord to be killed or otherwise dishonored him. I perceive all of our listeners that way.
Starting point is 00:30:34 Is what you want to do is wander around country lanes on Sussex hoping to be redeemed by like a drunk lady in a Range Rover. Yeah, draw the katana on the Range Rover, Mum. redeemed by like a drunk lady in a Range Rover. Yeah, draw the katana on the Range Rover, Mum. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why I drive a Kia Dime, yo. Yeah, yeah. Mitsubishi Shokun. Yeah, that's right.
Starting point is 00:30:51 It is interesting that when you talk about right wing conspiracy theories specifically, right, the story that you often get is these escalating mutual affirmation. And it has, it's a bit like a fractal fern. It can go in some strange places where you end up with people who were, again, like, writing best-selling books and being taken seriously some years ago. They just keep getting gassed up by people around them. And everybody agrees, and they tell the story that always have to have escalating stakes, but about just whatever's around them. Yeah. And so I guess our beloved radicalization. Yeah. And so they're and so just like, you know, British legislators are getting stuck
Starting point is 00:31:36 into the idea that like Hamas support is everywhere in Britain and forget that it's not actually right. A lot of us support Qatar and Hezesbala as I said earlier, right? We find Hamas a little gauche, but you know what I mean? Like specific prescribed by the law Hamas support, right? Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, actually. Legally you're allowed to do that if it's a joke.
Starting point is 00:31:58 Yeah. Yeah, that's right. I was joking. Yeah. Which to be fair would be a pretty good defense. Yeah. Like listen to everything else I've said on this podcast and tell me I'm not joking. Which to be fair would be a pretty good defence. Like listen to everything else I've said on this podcast and tell me I'm not joking.
Starting point is 00:32:07 Yeah. If you've got a total list of groups you've endorsed on this podcast. Father McMurphy. Every Russian political party at different times. That's actually a very Russian energy. So has endorsing Kutav Haspelat. Anyway, it's unsurprising that they would get onto something so weird and low stakes as local traffic regulation that they would turn into a global issue. They're thinking local and acting global, essentially.
Starting point is 00:32:36 But also what I find interesting is that they're still on the vaccinated people are going to drop dead at any given time thing. Probably when they see the prices of parking in central Oxford. Yeah. So how central is the kind of general vaccine skepticism to like this same soup as well? Yeah. I mean, it's really central. I think one thing I've been researching recently because it just really reminded me more of this phenomenon than what we might call historically conspiracy theories is Christian
Starting point is 00:33:12 millenarianism and the kind of understanding that the rapture or this kind of event, this great kind of cataclysmic event is about to happen. And you specifically can pinpoint the signs through reading scripture, but then also kind of matching that up to news headlines from around the world. And in a way, I think this, I'm going to use the word again, soup, has a really similar energy to that, as opposed to, I guess, what we might think of as the classic conspiracy theories, if you know the 80s and 90s, things like, you know, explaining the JFK assassination, Princess Diana dying, moon landing, things like this,
Starting point is 00:33:55 where you're all just kind of like, essentially doing a deep dive into one event in the past and saying, okay, we can explain this. What more seems to be the case now is, I guess, this kind of news junkie conspiracism where you have your ploder, you kind of have your key, which means that you can essentially unlock all of these seemingly unrelated headlines, these seemingly unrelated events that are going on around the world. Traffic regulations in Oxford, but also vaccine recall over here, the war in Ukraine. Ginsters pasty bulb, my bell and so on.
Starting point is 00:34:31 10,000 sex arses stuck in Cali. Yeah. Joe Biden saying something weird, Sydney Sweeney's boobs. You know, if you have the code, if you have the key, you can kind of unlock all of this while it happens and understand what the connection is there. And so I guess in a way it kind of strikes me as a slightly like secular
Starting point is 00:34:52 millenarianism. And that becomes particularly clear, I think, when you get this understanding that there will be this one moment of a total kind of, you know, destruction, total kind of destruction, total kind of apocalypse. Everybody has been vaccinated, starts dying. But also vindication. This is something that actually I know we're going to go on to talk about Andrew Bridgen. This is something that Andrew Bridgen will discuss a lot in interviews, the growing, the moment that's coming up when he will be kind of revealed to not have been crazy all along and have been sort
Starting point is 00:35:24 of a hubbinger of what's to come. So yeah, in a way, I think this kind of phenomenon, this kind of freedom movement phenomenon is more an inheritor, strangely, of that religious tradition than conspiracy culture in the sense of the kind of, in the classic, in the sense we understand it, kind of JFK and the ex files and what have you. Also something born of like huge collective trauma, I guess. Yeah, because like the mundanity of it really puts me in mind of, you know, like, years ago, I remember someone observing that like whenever people like are convinced they had a past life, like they were never a Chinese peasant, they were always like a pharaoh or Henry VIII or something.
Starting point is 00:36:04 And it's similar to this, like, isn't it coincidental that like, you a man who lives in Oxford and hates the Oxford Park and Ride system have discovered that the centre of the global, like, you know, the free market economic forum, whatever, conspiracy happens to be the Oxford Park and Ride system. What a massive coincidence. But the funny thing is, right, that all the people online who like you, who've never been to Oxford, who might live in, I don't know, Pennsylvania or whatever, they will join that together with a new story about something that they find upsetting and then find it's the same thing. Yeah, it's all common cause, it turns out. There's Klaus Schwab again.
Starting point is 00:36:46 How much of this is also just about like the ways in which this is sort of experienced as like sort of an online phenomena in the sense that like, as you're sort of spending more time online, well, I mean, every sort of aspect of being online is very much individuated, is very much about yourself and how you exist in relation to like other things that you come across. And like the more time you spend online, and I think this is something that is a much broader phenomenon, you are encouraged to think about everything in relation to yourself. And so, if you're someone who is not aware of that, but suddenly you're spending all
Starting point is 00:37:18 this time online and you don't really know what is happening to you in the process of doing so, and you haven't reached that stage of being introspective as to, oh, why am I relationship suddenly decaying or dilapidating? Maybe the computer or maybe all this time I'm spending on my phone might be in relation to that. But if you haven't got to that stage yet, then I guess it does become a bit more natural, I suppose, that you are going to try to understand the things that are happening around you. And as you mentioned, things that you can see, your local community becoming a lot worse, things sort of decaying, these kind of inconveniences that feed all these broad aggrievances. And if your only place to look at is on the internet,
Starting point is 00:38:00 where everything is sort of encouraged, where everything you experience is about, this is how it affects me. How far does that go in terms of explaining why this type of conspiratorial thinking is more dominant? Or does that go to explain how it has become a political, or how it reached mainstream politics so quickly? CELESTE Yeah, no, I definitely think that's the case. I think something about the format and the structure of social media, to me, seems to have really shaped the way that these conspiracy theories move as well. They're always looking forward. They have this prophetic quality that I was talking about before. But yeah, they're also kind of, I spoke to the media theorist, Douglas Rushkoff, a while back, and he kind of referred to it as Pontilist in a way, where it's like,
Starting point is 00:38:56 sort of kind of completely incomprehensible when you're kind of like looking, looking just kind of close up at one event, but sort of is like being kind of meshed into a larger image where each little point connects to the other. But there's no, I guess, satisfying narrative conclusion was his point. It's just this connects to that, which connects to that, which connects to that. It's stochastic and individualized. Everyone gets to be the protagonist investigating this huge conspiracy. And we're going to talk about one protagonist now, Andrew Bridgen. Britain's most special boy.
Starting point is 00:39:31 Britain's protagonist. Yeah, he's the guy it's all for. If you look at something in Britain, you wonder why is it like that? It's because of him, Andrew Bridgen. It's got a brand new Bridgen here. This is our new podcast, Bridgen the Gap. We talk exclusively about Andrew Bridgen. No. Andrew Bridgen is, was formerly a Tory MP. He was someone who I think we've talked
Starting point is 00:39:53 about briefly in the past. Yeah. And they finally got one is the thing. Like the thing about radicalization, it's kind of right wing radicalization, right? They go for like high value targets as much as they can. Elon Musk, Bill Ackman. And they got a Tory MP, not a hugely important one, but he is an MP still as an independent and he's radicalized, he's piled. And he has recently written a letter. Why do MPs do this?
Starting point is 00:40:23 Sir Mark Rowley, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, saying, I'm contacting you as a serving MP, seeking an urgent meeting to discuss some very serious and concerning issues. Most of the things in Mark Rowley's office right now are on, like, various stages of being on fire. And on top of this, just like landing softly on top of the entry is this single sheet of, like, closely typed A4 that's like, what about the woke? Well, in this case, it's what about the vaccine?
Starting point is 00:40:52 Yo, fuck. How many Met officers have been vaccinated making them woke? This is a matter of paramount importance for the well-being and safety of the British public. I and others deem this to be a national emergency. The usual routes by the Standards Committee, government departments, regulators and civil service have all been dismissed or ignored. Everyone else says I'm stupid, but you have to listen to me. Well, it's a conspiracy.
Starting point is 00:41:14 Yeah. It's like that whole thing about the right-wing students getting bad grades on their essays because of the left-wing conspiracy. Yeah. Very serious criminal offenses to name a few. Mconduct in public office, misfeasants in public goods, negligent manslaughter, fraud, murder, manslaughter, grievous bodily harm have been identified as long as well as a conspiracy to commit an aiding and abetting the aforementioned crimes. Negligent manslaughter where you do manslaughter but in a really sloppy way.
Starting point is 00:41:39 And he basically is said, he's basically said right, we want to charge everybody involved with the vaccine rollout and COVID response with murder. Uh-huh. In fact, not in so many words, right? But like not in the cool way. No. Not in like the actual, all the people that they killed, but the stuff that they didn't do, rather than the stuff that they did do.
Starting point is 00:42:01 Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's so funny how with a lot of this stuff, you're like, oh, brother, you're so close. You're so close to seeing what actually went on. Matt Hancock killed everyone's Nans. Yeah, exactly. They want to get the vaccine guy.
Starting point is 00:42:14 Yeah, but do we want to charge Matt Hancock for that? No, we want to charge Matt Hancock for saving people's Nans. It's like Matt Hancock is like Batman. And for getting him to the good stuff he did instead of the bad stuff. Yeah, that's right. Now, this is what Bridgen has come out with. Mattman. Recently.
Starting point is 00:42:33 Yeah. But he's also come out of his marriage to his ex-wife now. I don't think you can be phrasing it like that. Yeah. Parallelism, not worth it. No, it was funny. Parallel phrasing. Now, so how did, just in brief, right, how did Andrew Bridgen get to the point of writing
Starting point is 00:42:50 a, writing an I am not a crackpot letter to Mark Rowley? It's an interesting story, Andrew Bridgen, his, he was always pretty right even on the Conservative Party's self-described that to write. He was pro-Brexit, basically not someone who I politically share much in common with. But you know, when I was researching him, but I want to count, he seemed to be like a pretty decent local MP. He wasn't particularly ambitious in the sense that he kind of wasn't like a real schmoozer. And I think that actually tends to, in terms of MPs, it actually tends to make you pretty good at your job. You kind of just focus on your constituents. I think it's one of the, you know,
Starting point is 00:43:31 because he didn't make many waves before all of this COVID stuff, but one place that he did get written up about was during the Horizon Post Office scandal, where he was supposedly quite tenacious with a local constituents case who turned out to have been one of the many, many people falsely accused, essentially, as a result of the computer error that happened there. And lots of MPs actually really didn't want to touch that stuff. They were sort of kind of hedging their bets with it. And Bridgen, to his credit, really took up the cause.
Starting point is 00:44:04 And this has kind of been written about by journalists who were covering the scandal. So it's kind of funny to me because in a way that seems to me like a personality type where someone who's less concerned about their career, less concerned about saying the wrong thing, can actually be, it's an example of how it can be a strength as a politician. In Bridgen's case, that was maybe the only case it can be a strength as a politician. In Bridgerton's case, that was maybe the only case I could find where it was a strength. And a lot of it was also him kind of saying outrageous or sexist or homophobic stuff. But I think it's important to humanize the... Yeah, something you can say for the conspiracy theorist, they do have a tendency towards
Starting point is 00:44:41 intransigence, which can be useful. Yeah. And. And I think this personality trait of his, perhaps, not being afraid to be a bit outspoken, not being afraid to be a bit tenacious, not being afraid to question authority combined with what I guess we'll go into a little bit more, which is clear problems in his personal life. And it wasn't just his wife, I think he went through some nasty acrimony with his brother as well, who he owned a company with and they ended up suing each other, I think. Mason Oh, would this be the vegetable company? Because … I'm just sort of lightly scrolling the Wikipedia page. In 2014, AB Produce, of which
Starting point is 00:45:21 Britain was directed, was warned by the Environment Agency that it could lose its licence if if it did not remove a urine like smell from two lagoons of putrid vegetable mass on the site. A urine like smell? Yeah. Just remove the smell. We don't have any issue with the putrid matter. Please stop pissing in the putrid vegetable mass pond. No, I will not.
Starting point is 00:45:42 This guy's apparently rotting fruit company. Yeah. You're telling me Charles Schwab wants me to stop pissing in my rotting vegetable pit? No. Yeah, but they want you to like, they're insisting that everyone uses fertilizers instead of the most natural fertilizer of all, which is your own. Yeah, they do it to demoralize you. Yeah. Andrew Burgheim.
Starting point is 00:46:02 Andrew Burgheim? Yeah, that's it. That's where the joke was going. But I accidentally used the wrong word at the wrong time. Sorry, sorry. Yeah, Andrew Burgheim's brother went to live in Burgheim. He went to live in Bridgen. Bridgen.
Starting point is 00:46:15 There we go. Bridgen piss guy. What a stroke ass sentence. So, this is the article in The Times, which was sort of written sympathetically to his wife, who by the way, like, also kind of a wing nut. Yeah, but she, you know, got a sympathetic piece published in The Times and he didn't, so.
Starting point is 00:46:36 Andrew Bridgen was in Sweden speaking in an event hosted by RFK Junior's anti-vax group, was young, some was at home facing a medical crisis. Just with the 50 normalist Swedish dudes. Yeah. Former conservative MP who's been a leading voice in the global campaign against vaccinations ignored frantic calls from his wife, Serbian opera singer, uh, Naveena Bridgen, who was alone with Serbian opera singer.
Starting point is 00:46:58 It's just like a great title for this man's wife's old. Yeah. As the five year old's health deteriorated. So her husband basically, she says, well, while this was happening, her husband was on the streets of Sweden, quote, acting as an anti-vax revolutionary and neglecting his son during a health emergency.
Starting point is 00:47:14 It was at that moment that she finally concluded her husband had been captured by what she considers a cult. And what I find interesting about this article, right, is that she also says, she criticizes the conservative party for failing to protect him from radicalization, to which I'd have to ask, how?
Starting point is 00:47:31 How would you protect someone from radicalization when your stock in trade is, like we've talked about I think recently, your stock in trade is winking and nudging at these kinds of things. That's supposed to be the officer class of us, I feel. And he's being, you know, pressed for a common sailor, if you like. I read Master and Commander in it,
Starting point is 00:47:50 infiltrate my brain, I just talk like that. He's windmilling his cock in the barracks. Exactly. And the Colossageant is very angry. Exactly. Exactly. You pull yourself together, you're a lieutenant. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's worth saying, I think, I don't know if the article, I can't remember if the article mentioned this, that there was very much a organisation set up with,
Starting point is 00:48:11 I think, the, yeah, with what I would describe as the explicit intention of red-pilling MPs on COVID and vaccines. They're called the Health Advisory and Recovery Team. And they kind of specifically, yeah, had some of, I guess, two tears on this where, you know, part of it was looking like a kind of think tank that was, you know, simply kind of questioning the the the legislative orthodoxy on what to do about COVID. But there were some quite dramatic leaks of their internal chat logs, which showed that pretty much everyone involved was actually much more piled than they were letting on. And Bridgen, along with some other Tory MPs, I think Desmond Swain might have been one of them. Mason Rees-Miner Bond villain type name.
Starting point is 00:49:00 Sarah Jones-Wilhelm Well, in these chat logs, it was revealed that they were all talking to these conservative MPs. But I'm not sure about Desmond Swain. Bridgen was definitely one of them. And yeah, I think this was quite early on as well. And so I don't, yeah, I think it does seem that, yeah, he was, I mean, one thing I found interesting when I was like looking at Bridgen's social media activities, kind of, I went right back to his very first ever tweet about the COVID vaccine. The first one kind of suggesting something might be wrong and it's much milder than the tone of that letter, for instance,
Starting point is 00:49:37 the crimes against humanity stuff, the conspiracy to commit. But it's just kind of questioning some kind of efficacy. And I think it has like 900 re-dweets compared to when he's talking about other topics where it's like 10 or 15. So there's clearly kind of like a big instant social media excitement, oh my god, we've got an MP. And this kind of very quickly takes hold in the freedom movement. But there's also like a two-tier kind of targeting going on here. It's not just on social media. It was also, yeah, he was one of a group number of Tory MPs who were quite clearly targeted by this organization. Well, and you know, this is, we talk about like what happens on social media to radicalize powerful people. We've seen it a million times is basically lovebomb, right? Where you will be inundated with messages of support. So the article says... AI, art of yourself as some kind of crusader knight.
Starting point is 00:50:33 Speaking in a hotel to the paper, Naveena said, the anti-vax conspiracy movement destroyed my life when Andrew became their foot soldier. He's building Andrew's army to mobilize support for him and his views before the general election, launching a website next week, urging people to become his foot soldiers to help him overturn the old political order. How likely is he to lose his seat? I mean, how many anti-vaxx people live specifically in his area and how many of them would be willing to travel to like go doorknock and be and have be the most annoying person to ever come to your door. I just think it's very funny if the tide of big,
Starting point is 00:51:08 Keir sweeps over like Northwest and Leicestershire and none of this ends up massoring at all. Yeah, it would be funnier if it had like really like unexpected second order effects. Like they had so many insane anti-vax people doing door knocking that everyone in this county mysteriously became a Jehovah's Witness because they were such a high threshold had been set for door knocking annoyance that they were much more open to... It's probably quite... Because I didn't have something to this extreme, but we have Tory councillors in the area that we live in and they're obviously doing electioneering. It's very strange talking to them because it's like, well, if you're a local counsellor, then I'm going to talk to you about
Starting point is 00:51:49 local issues if you do shop on my door. And they're so insistent that the only thing they want to talk about is ULAS, right? All they want to do is talk about ULAS. But it's sort of like, yeah, but I want to talk about the bins. I want to talk about why my bins. Like genuinely, I have a lot of concerns about... L. Teacher's keep snooping through this. C concerns about... Because your bin men might have been vaccinated. No, but the problem is, even if you want to snoop with them, the way that the system works, is that it's incredibly difficult to do so. So in many cases, I want it to be easier to snoop through my bins, personally speaking. But when I was trying to talk to them just about this stuff,
Starting point is 00:52:22 because they had just shown up at my door, you could just sort of see that the moment you kind of bring up back to them, they're like looking for the exit faster than you are. And I can only imagine that this is probably going to go the same way, because in the same way that like turf shit, I feel like the sort of anti-vax stuff, and obviously like there are lots of overlaps in it, the anti-vax stuff is very much follows that trajectory of like, once you're in it, you sort of become obsessed by it and you can't think of anything else. And your references and like... Like master and commander.
Starting point is 00:52:50 Yeah. The ability for you to hold like more than one idea in your like in your head just becomes impossible, which also means that when you have to interact with someone who doesn't have that deliberation, who like can like think about multiple things at once. You just genuinely don't know what to do. I think that you can see this. This even goes back to what we were talking about at the very beginning, right? That across a lot of different segments of the right, whether it's mainstream or sort
Starting point is 00:53:18 of more fringe-like region, the obsessions are becoming more difficult to get out of. And I think the broader trend, we can talk about the steadfast refusal out of political principle to ever be normal about anything. I will not be normal about like the university student on the game show. I will not be normal about the panel of academics I'm overseeing. I will not be normal to the person who I'm
Starting point is 00:53:45 door knocking because they won't stop, because they won't listen to what I have to say about like the Bilderberg group and the vaccine. I've said, I will not be normal about like this week's host of SNL. I will never be normal. And it's refusing to have the veneer of normalcy, right? Like we've gone from like, it's always been possible. Like if people say we're protesting for Palestine 15 years ago, to say like, oh, well, you know, what they're doing is they're enabling Hamas with this support. Like this is what Hamas wants and Hamas are bad. Like you could always say stuff like that. But to take it a step further and go, no, everyone there supports Hamas and they think it's good that Hamas kill children or whatever. It's a level of obviously
Starting point is 00:54:25 not true insanity that you just didn't really have before, or at least not in any kind of mainstream political discourse. But at the same time, and I'll make this very quick, you kind of have to, and I'd be interested in your thoughts on this, Annie, but it almost feels as if even if you know that that's not the case, and obviously people who are marching for like pallet like Palestine at the moment are not a mass supporter. And it's very evident, even like, there are like right-wing sort of YouTubers who have sort of gone down to these protests and they've had to sort of make admissions to that. But in order for you to sort of... Because you've sort of gone
Starting point is 00:54:58 down the hole so much, and in order to sort of justify these very extreme ideas that really motivate your way of thinking, or at least sort of direct your way of thinking. The other side has to be portrayed as just as extreme, even if they're not. And so, it doesn't really matter. The sort of opponents in this exist in a way that really... Again, it's all kind of reactionary, but it's all sort of in reference to yourself. And so, to justify your shitty behavior, the only way that you can do that, or the only way you can justify it is by saying, well, my opponents, my enemies are sort of acting just as harshly, acting just as sort of cruelly. And so I have to almost as like a form of defense.
Starting point is 00:55:37 Mason I think that's true as well, whether you're talking about like, again, mainstream radicalization or far right radicalization. Yeah, they're never ever going to forgive us for making them in their minds be this weird. So being a phone soldier in Andrew's army, he says, will require courage. It will phone soldier. Yeah, phone soldier. Yeah, the rise of the phone soldier. It will not be for the faint hearted.
Starting point is 00:56:03 But if you share my convictions about this issue, that's issues I raise and want to ensure that I can get through to my constituents, despite the ever-intensifying attempts to cancel me, become a phone soldier in Andrew's army today. So basically, the people in Andrew Bridgen's constituency are about to get inundated with calls from like a global network of people who also think that Mark Roli needs to investigate crimes against humanity committed by like British civil servants. Bridgen phone soldier, watch news from America. There we go.
Starting point is 00:56:36 Right. It's like, are you willing to be the most annoying person anyone has ever heard? Have you tried to pay in pennies at a petrol station to make a point? No. Come and be, join Andrew's phone army. And it's also embarrassing. It's also American. Yeah. Why are we... Get your own conspiracy theory.
Starting point is 00:56:54 Yeah. Back in the day, it used to be Tim Farron talking about the chemicals, but now... Yeah. So, just before we end, right? There's a few more things in this article about Bridget. So last February, he hosted a dinner at the Carlton Club, where he's allegedly now banned. What you have to do to get banned from the Carlton Club? Well, you've got to piss on the photo of Margaret Thatcher. It's around. It looks like Dorian Gray now. Looking at the sort of Thatcher memoir and being like, vaxxed.
Starting point is 00:57:23 They included, I guess included John Mappin, a hotelier from Cornwall, who said that mask mask wearing was a holocaust of the mind. Uh, yeah. He also hard to hear this from the inventor of maps. He also, um, he owns a castle in Cornwall called Camelot and flew a QAnon flag from it at one point. John Mappin. Oh, good. Yeah. Mappin also claimed that the Duke of Edinburgh died as a result of being vaccinated. Now that is true. Q and on flag from it at one point. I'm mapping. Oh, good. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:57:45 Mappen also claimed that the Duke of Edinburgh died as a result of being vaccinated. Now, that is true. Okay, sure. That is 100%. I mean, the vaccine, the benefits of the vaccines, they really just keep stacking up. 97 year old men don't just die. They don't. No.
Starting point is 00:58:00 I mean, first, like, it stops you from, like, getting COVID as badly, maybe stops you getting COVID at all, and stops you from getting COVID at all, and it kills the Duke of Edinburgh. What's not to love? They give it to you free. Our taxes at work paid for killing the Duke of Edinburgh. The first red flag for Naveena came when she heard him speaking to a group on a Zoom call while at her sister's flat in DC during Christmas 2022.
Starting point is 00:58:22 She said, it was crazy. They were all talking about crimes against humanity and someone saying that this was all done to eradicate the population. They went on to say something along the lines of, you have to do your job and call out the mainstream media and tell people the truth. This is your mission. The person spoke of a global military alliance and they were basically saying that the military should take this into their own hands.
Starting point is 00:58:41 Days later, Bridgen then went to parliament and said, as one consultant said to me, the vaccination is the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust. Yeah, which is the thing that got the whip suspended from him. Yes, indeed. Justly. It's genuinely interesting because it's something I just noticed on Bridgen's social media activity too. I don't quite know who he spoke to when he was out there in the United States. Oh, like what happened? But basically there is a big switch during that time, during that from before that trip in December 2022 or winter 2022, from before that and after,
Starting point is 00:59:15 where he looks before seems to be kind of implying that he thinks that it's being overlooked, essentially, there is a mistake is happening when it comes to the vaccines. And what comes after where it's very much, this has been planned, this has been orchestrated, he starts coming up with stuff like COVID was cooked up in an American lab and things like this. It just becomes much more piled, I guess. Yeah, it is the word. And what strikes me about how this call is being reported is it was being reported as something fun and action packed and high stakes, something where, again, he gets to be the hero.
Starting point is 00:59:55 And I guess with one of the three reasons is I think he's an interesting character as a conspiracy theorist and why, again, in like sort of conspiracy theorist politicians are not a new phenomenon, certainly, right? But it's interesting to see them not being a conspiracy theorist about something in particular, but just having a kind of news conspiracy brain, right? Is that someone will say to them, you need to do something about this, you need to get the army in and sort all this stuff out. And this is someone who has like one six hundred and something of the power to call in the army. You know, this is certainly not enough to do anything by himself, right?
Starting point is 01:00:33 But this is someone who can who can hear that that call to action and say, okay, I'll give it a back. I mean, like if Mark really had been like, of mine to take that lesser seriously, that's the like makings of a judicial coup. It's just that he wasn't because it's one guy who doesn't really matter and who we can laugh at on a podcast. You know? And so it just, I think it just, it's an interesting new, interesting. It is definitely a new dynamic, right?
Starting point is 01:01:01 Yeah, it's cool. It's based, we think it's epic actually. It's all very good stuff. It is a new dynamic to see, like, the soup take in different kinds of people, and I think most people expect it to take. Weird are ingredients in the soup all the time. Yeah, I think it's worth saying as well. I think that there are other conservative MPs who share Bridgians beliefs, but are just a bit more career savvy with it. Basically, what made him unignorable was the tweet comparing it to the Holocaust. Before that, he was being annoying, but on the annoying level as a few other MPs who were making anti-vex noises, meeting with anti-vex groups. But yeah, I do think it's a
Starting point is 01:01:48 silly counterfactual, really. But I do think, you know, if COVID had happened during a Labour government, we would have seen actually way more Andrew Bridgens in the Conservative Party. And this is the other thing too, like very quickly, just, you know, the ones, once, once, once the, once the election is called and once like, like so many of these Tories, like no longer occupy, like political power, they have a lot more freedom to basically like indulge in the soup, right? And so, you know, right now, like, this is sort of the quiet before the storm, and we're sort of expecting and well, we should expect much weirder things to happen once labor come in and have no intention to do anything about it.
Starting point is 01:02:28 CORE Great. For a second course, more soup. That's worse. LES GENERAL I think tank full of soup. Waiter, there appears to be some ideology in my soup. You can say. That was all ideology, mate. CORE Waiter, there appears to be some ideology and my soup was the title of the 1930s trash
Starting point is 01:02:48 future. It did not go over very well. It was largely like hold over from musical stuff. Yeah. But no pedagogy because we're not nonsense. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. Anyway, anyway, Annie, thank you very much for coming on and talking to us today about this delicious soup that we're all being served every day. Hmm. Thanks so much for having me.
Starting point is 01:03:07 And also, don't forget to check out your podcast. Where can people find them? Yeah, so you can find me on QAnon Anonymous. I usually produce an episode for them once a month. Having said that, I'm actually just on maternity leave this week, so I won't be for a while, but you can go and check. If you wanted any, this is your last dose of any for a while. Yeah, you can go back and check other episodes I've done for them. And yeah, also, if you want to hear me be a big farmer shill, you can go and listen to me talk about the first ever vaccine, the smallpox vaccine, vaccine, the human story,
Starting point is 01:03:47 which is just a little six-part mini series. Let's be talking about, yeah, the smallpox vaccine and the first ever anti-vax movement. Also, the usual outro material. There is a live show. If you're listening to this the day it comes out tomorrow in London. Yeah. Sprint towards London.
Starting point is 01:04:03 Yes. Backyard comedy club. From wherever you are. Yeah. Just begin sprinting like the T1000. Start from San Jose, California. Just see if you can make it in time. Yes.
Starting point is 01:04:11 Probably you can't. But if you can, be very surprised. You can, we'll let you in for free. We will. We can't promise that. We not promise. Nor do we. And also, there is, of course, the bonus episodes
Starting point is 01:04:23 for $5 a month. There are the $10 Britonologies left on red. If you're wondering why November is talking a lot about sales and sheets and ropes and boats, it's because we did Master and Commander. It's called cross promotion. And it's also called having your brain rewired by a book you read. Yeah. Rewired or would we say re-rigged?
Starting point is 01:04:40 We would say re-rigged. They just ocean pilled. Yes. Yes. All right. All right. That's that's all we've got time for. Once again, thank-pilled. Yes. Yes. All right. All right. All right That's that's all we've got time for once again. Thank you. Eddie once again Thank you for listening and we will see you on the bonus episode a few days. Bye everyone. See me in Australia. Bye. Bye

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