Anti-vaxxers select their next target
Covid activists fuel a moral panic over Drag Queen Story Hour
Dear subscribers — welcome to our latest edition of Scout. June has been a huge month for us. We’ve published articles we’re really proud of and our audience list keeps growing.
We’d like to keep expanding and covering important stories, so do share Scout with a few friends and ask them to sign up for free. And if there’s anything you’d like us to write about, hit reply to this email.
Today’s story explores the moral panic around drag queen events in the UK, and the anti-vaxxers who have bizarrely emerged as the main campaigners against them.
A visit from the resistance
Fears that a sinister gay agenda is grooming children has become one of the biggest talking points in the American right. It’s not just an extremist concern but a mainstream one, with TV news channels and popular websites claiming LGBT activists are trying to pervert and abuse kids. A particular focus of this moral panic has been events involving drag queens — especially those with children in the audience — with the result being that such events are now protested by the far-right.
Where America leads, Britain follows. Protesters are trying to cancel a tour of the Drag Queen Story Hour traveling across England and Wales this summer. The tour’s organiser says it is a fun way to promote literacy and LGBT acceptance, citing the government statistic that 65 percent of gay secondary school pupils are bullied. The event features the drag performer Sabastian Samuel, whose stage name is Aida H Dee, in costume, visiting libraries to read Guess How Much I Love You and We’re Going on a Bear Hunt.
Samuel did not respond to an interview request, so we don’t know the exact contents of the show, but I’m willing to bet any schedule that involves reading aloud the adventures of Little Nutbrown Hare won’t be especially damaging to children.
However, Samuel’s critics say the story hour is tantamount to child abuse. Plans to protest all 26 stops of the tour are underway, and if it’s surprising that such an event is being demonstrated, it is even more of a shock to learn who is doing the demonstrating.
In America, the agitators against drag story events have included far-right groups like the Proud Boys.
In the UK, they are anti-vaccine activists.
A group called Outreach WorldWide, which has campaigned against Covid jabs, has turned its attention to LGBT affairs. Based on Telegram, where it has 4,000 members, it has been instrumental in protesting against the story tour. It has encouraged members of its 37 regional teams to complain to their local library and contact their councillors and MPs to get the event cancelled.
Outreach WorldWide is run by Francesca Dill, a former school governor from south London. During the vaccine rollout, she stopped children on their way to school to tell them Covid jabs would make them infertile and even kill them. Dill, who goes by “Cheska” online, urged her followers to campaign against the Drag Queen Story Hour tour, saying it was an example of “paedophilia brought in by the arts”.
She said:
“We’ve got a chance to stop this. Drag queens have no place in libraries. This is our first step against a despicable agenda. It’s time to get active and stop these disgusting shows.”
I’m reminded of Martin Amis’s essay on attitudes to gay AIDS patients in the 1980s. “We don’t want to understand them,” he wrote. “We would rather fear them.”
A number of other groups have picked up Dill’s message, including Liverpool’s People’s Resistance, which harassed Merseyside headteachers last year. “This is pure filth and the normalisation of paedophilia,” said one of their administrators.
Michael Manuel Chaves, an anti-vaccine activist who has visited the homes of broadcasters to “serve” them with notices of liability for the vaccine programme, pledged to picket every single story event. He has encouraged his 17,000 followers to call the police and the NSPCC to complain about the tour, adding:
“Every single venue will be getting a visit from the resistance. I personally will be there. If the police are watching, and you’re looking for me, I’ll tell you where I’ll be. I’ll be where them fucking perverts are reading to our children, trying to corrupt them… They are criminals. They are grooming our children.”
Tommy Robinson’s Telegram channel of 153,000 followers also frequently features anti-drag material, although as far as I can see he has not posted about the story hour tour.
It is especially weird that anti-vaxx groups, which were set up with libertarian goals in mind, should be protesting drag shows. Dill said she created Outreach WorldWide to “highlight the erosion of freedoms”, such as mask mandates and the prospect of vaccine passports and digital IDs.
How times change. Dill and her fellow anti-vaxx activists are now working hard to erode the freedom of others. Drag Queen Story Hour is clearly not the same as a drag show. And it’s not like the event is being forced upon children. It’s ticketed and in libraries over the summer holidays, so unsuspecting children are unlikely to wander in. And even if they did, they are only likely to find a solitary drag queen reading the works of Michael Rosen. There are far worse things children could be watching.
On Scout we’ve looked at how some elements of the anti-vaxx world have become increasingly extreme, embracing far-right ideas. The campaign to free Simon Parry, the Covid activist sectioned under mental health laws, is run by people who praise Tommy Robinson and think Jews are kidnapping and torturing children to death. Piers Corbyn has shared a platform with Mark Collett, the “Nazi sympathiser” who runs a white nationalist organisation called Patriotic Alternative. Britain’s leading anti-vaxx newspaper prints articles by Anne Marie Waters, the leader of a far-right party who wants to reduce Muslim birthrates.
Members of Patriotic Alternative admitted trying to “make in-roads” into anti-vaxx groups last year, and far-right social media users flooded Covid conspiracy groups with extremist content. In Outreach WorldWide and Liverpool’s People’s Resistance, it’s common to see messages accusing Jews of manipulating global affairs and clips of speeches by Adolf Hitler. That’s not to say that hardcore anti-vaxxers and white nationalists are the same thing, but the instances in which they sometimes overlap are impossible to ignore.
Now that Covid restrictions have been lifted, anti-vaxx groups are looking for new issues to campaign on. And while opposing vaccine passports and drag queen story events might seem ideologically incoherent, hardcore anti-vaxxers believe that a small group of shadowy elites are conspiring to corrupt the masses — either by injecting them with lethal chemicals or, apparently, by trying to turn them gay.
Anti-vaxxers are sharing news stories of drag queens in the States who have been arrested or convicted of sex crimes as proof that library events are somehow part of an evil child-corrupting agenda.
The Covid pandemic might be drawing to a close, but for a committed group of anti-vaxxers, the fight isn’t over.
I asked my friend Lewis what he made of all this. Lewis used to run an anti-vaxx protest group called Merseyside Resistance, but took the brave decision to leave earlier this year after questioning his beliefs about Covid, vaccines and masks. One of his main concerns during his time as an activist was the increasing dominance of far-right campaigners in the anti-vaxx movement. He says it has only got worse since he quit activism.
Lewis wrote back:
“Not all conspiracy theorists harbour bigoted beliefs, I and my close former friends tried to stop the spread of this hatred. But I have seen some severely unwell people being exploited by reckless far-right figures and sociopathic grifters.
“It brought me a lot of grief to see some acquaintances, who in my mind were left-leaning hippies believing in holistic medicine and spirituality, start repeating the talking points and sharing the social conservatism of the far right. I believe that they are unwell and being taken advantage of by a predatory political agenda.
“There is no doubt that vulnerable people on Telegram are being targeted for radicalisation. The far right wants them to adopt a more hateful disposition to minority groups. Some of these are vulnerable people who have lost all grounding with reality and are then constantly subjected to videos churned out by Tommy Robinson’s news channel. These clips may be shown out of context or depict one example of an inappropriate act being done by a drag queen to then paint the entire community as Satanists and perverts.”
Scout stories from June
🕍 He was the far-right’s favourite author. Then they found out he’s Jewish.
🧘♂️ Nazi Buddhists: An introduction to the Spiritual Right
💥 A sleepy Yorkshire village becomes a far-right flashpoint
🐀 ‘Let’s go rat hunting’: Anti-vaxx campaigners search for my address