‘Sustainability’ Festival Cancelled After Being Unmasked as a Conspiracy Theorist Event

An Irish conspiracy theorist festival purporting to be a family-friendly event celebrating sustainability and rural life has been cancelled, after left-wing activists tipped off venues that its organisers were behind recent high-profile anti-LGBTQ protests.

The Think Local Festival, which promised attendees the chance to “discover the roots and taste of tradition,” was due to be held on Wednesday and Thursday near Mullingar, Ireland, this week, with tickets selling for €150 (£130) for the two-day programme. 

Posters for the event showed an illustration of an idyllic rural scene, offering festivalgoers the chance to “immerse yourself in the rich cultural heritage of Ireland,” by participating in panel discussions, live music, dance and storytelling, facepainting and food-growing workshops. 

“We are bringing people together including small suppliers, producers and independent farmers… to build strong, resilient communities,” read a statement from the organisers on social media.

But on Wednesday, just hours before the opening night’s “feast” night was due to be held, the event’s website announced that the event had been cancelled.

The statement gave no reason for the event’s cancellation. But an Irish anti-fascist activist told VICE News that the cancellation was a direct result of their appeals to two successive venues which had been due to host the event. 

The activist, who did not want to be named due to previous threats and intimidation by the far-right, said that the venue managers had been under the impression that the festival was focused on sustainability and rural business and culture. 

“The organisers were disguising it as being about sustainability and supporting local businesses,” she said, adding that the proposed venue for the festival had not been publicised to avoid protesters disrupting the event. 

But she said the venue managers had cancelled the booking once they learned the organisers were behind a high-profile national anti-”groomer” campaign targeting LGBTQ content in libraries.

The website for the festival doesn’t identify the organisers of the event, and VICE News’ emailed requests for comment went unanswered. But VICE News can reveal one of the organisers is Jana Lunden, a prominent Irish anti-trans activist known for her high-profile campaigning against LGBTQ books in libraries, which has seen groups storm libraries and accuse their enemies of “grooming.” The campaign has been a focal point of far-right and conspiracist groups, and Lunden has been seen at library protests and appeared on podcasts with prominent far-right figures who have been involved in library stormings and violent anti-lockdown protests.

Another organiser is Lunden’s associate Sara Haboubi, who lists herself on her Twitter page as being the MC for the festival, and whose social media output is a mix of conspiracist, anti-COVID vaccine, and anti-trans content.

The organisers posted a 14-minute video on the Think Local Twitter account on Friday, in which Haboubi, flanked by some of the scheduled speakers at the festival, railed against the left-wing activists who had led to the event’s cancellation.

She described their activity as “criminal,” and urged others targeted in this way to contact police. She said there was outrage among supporters of the event over the cancellation, and claimed many ticket-holders had “donated” the cost of the ticket to offset the event’s losses.

Both Lunden and Haboubi, who also host a podcast together called Wonder Women, present themselves as reasonable-minded opponents of “gender ideology” and the sexualisation of children. But critics say they are at the heart of a dangerous far-right movement pushing radical conspiracist content in Ireland.

Lunden has promoted the festival on a right-wing extremist Telegram group, where other users post openly antisemitic content with delusional statements that “crisis actors” are promoting coronavirus vaccines “to kill Goyim with the injection [and] collect… their shekels.” 

In February, Lunden identified herself as one of the organisers of the Think Local Festival on a podcast associated with the right-wing extremist Telegram channel.

Her appearance, promoting her campaign against LGBTQ books for 12-15 year olds in libraries, began with standard criticisms of gender ideology, before lurching into familiar conspiracy theorist territory when she argued that the rise of transgender identity was a symptom of globalist “control.”

“We all know what the… globalists are up to with wanting to control us, they did the COVID as the compliance and intelligence test,” she said. “There’s also the transhumanism aspect and the depopulation agenda. So we’re going to start hearing a lot about climate and climate lockdowns, we’re already seeing these 15-minute smart cities, plug in your car, gosh you’ve eaten too much meat so you’re going to be eating crickets this week… Really, I believe we are the carbon that they want to reduce.”

She then promoted the first installation of the Think Local event, which was held in February, pitching it as “really about helping people break free from the society that is as crazy as it is.”

“It’s about giving us solutions,” she said. “The way to build strong communities is to break free from the insanity happening around us.”

Similarly, Haboubi also has a track record of promoting conspiracist content, said Ciarán O'Connor, a senior analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a counter extremism think-tank. These included anti-immigration tweets using the hashtag #IrelandIsFull, calling climate change a “scam” and labelling Ireland’s Minister for Children as a groomer.

Despite the event’s advertising focusing on buzzwords like sustainability and resilience, critics said that was actually going to be on the menu at the festival was a hodge-podge of radical conspiracist beliefs about “globalist” agendas to control and subjugate the masses, with the organisers’ implicit solution being to go off-the-grid and establish own communities untethered from what they saw as a failing world.

O’Connor said the one-day version of the festival that had previously been held in February had drawn a line-up of speakers drawn from conspiracy and far-right movements.

“The marketing and promotion of this festival certainly portrays the event as a community-led, family-friendly, wholesome event but it appears this is no more than a cover for creating a space that will host and promote false, misleading and potentially harmful claims and conspiracy theories about a range of topics,” he said.

O’Connor said the event ran the risk of being a gateway into conspiracy ideology.

“The event might attract people who are genuinely interested in learning about sustainability, vegetable production and environmental issues, but …will be at risk of being exposed to baseless and unsubstantiated claims.”

He said the event was an example of the increasing convergence of various communities – from crunchy “sustainability” and “wellness”-focused subcultures, anti-vaxxers, sovereign citizens and more traditional far-right groups – into a radical conspiracist milieu, which had become more pronounced since the pandemic.

“Online conspiracy theory proliferation has brought together traditionally disparate communities so now, far-right figures are increasingly interacting with alternative health proponents, climate change deniers and others,” he said.