In a 2022 poll a majority of Americans said they believed their government was corrupt and rigged, and more than a quarter believed it might soon be necessary to take up arms against it.
Conspiracy theories have ripped across America’s political landscape for decades, but in the last ten years the divide between fact and fiction has become almost indistinguishable at times. So how did we get here?
Gabriel Gatehouse is the author of “The Coming Storm: A Journey into the Heart of the Conspiracy Machine”, which accompanies the award-winning BBC podcast series, produced by Lucy Proctor.
Listen to the full interview on the New Statesman podcast
Hannah: The title, the The Coming Storm – what does it mean?
Gabriel: There are two storms, basically. The storm was this idea in QAnon – this crazy conspiracy theory that gripped American politics in the run-up to the last presidential election – about a cabal of satanic paedophiles (who may or may not have been led by Hillary Clinton), who were secretly controlling America and stealing the 2020 election.
This anonymous figure, Q, was posting on this niche website called 4chan, and kept talking about a coming storm. And the storm, in this narrative, was the moment when the cabal would be exposed, the deep-state traitors would be tried, and some of them executed.
And when they saw 6 January, they thought: “This is it. This is the storm.”
But there’s another coming storm, which begins after 6 January. And it is this wider conspiracy theory that has gripped America: that the institutions of the state have been captured by a malign force that crosses politics, finance, banking, tech, entertainment.
We hear this narrative all the time about if Trump wins this election, democracy is in trouble. But these guys think (and there are tens of millions of them) that democracy has already been subverted by this deep state. So, the second storm I’m talking about is: when we get to the election in November there are two possible options. Either Trump wins, and he does try to dismantle some of the institutions of democracy – and we will see whether those institutions are robust enough to withstand it. Or, Kamala Harris wins, and this significant chunk of the electorate believes their election has been stolen again (because, for sure, Trump’s not going to admit defeat). What then happens to American democracy?
Hannah: I want to talk about what it was like for you and Lucy [The Coming Storm’s producer] over the last few years, throwing yourselves into this mad world. As a journalist, time and time and again you’re viewed with suspicion because you are, by their definition, part of the “Deep State”. Capital “D”, capital “S”.
Gabriel: I’m not, for the record.
Hannah: Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?!
Gabriel: I would say that.
Hannah: But how do you convince people that you are not part of the conspiracy, or is it just impossible?
Gabriel: It’s kind of impossible. We ended up at this QAnon conference in the spring of 2021. The evening before, I remember me and Lucy sitting at a hotel in Dallas, trying to figure out how should we approach this? Should we go in and just pretend we’re punters, QAnoners from England? And we were just like, that’s never going to work. We’re going to get rumbled in two seconds. So, we decided on a policy of maximum openness.
[We said], “We bought tickets, but we’re here from the BBC. We don’t believe in any of the crazy stuff that you believe in, but we have come with an open mind because we think it’s significant. So, we’d like to come and cover your conference.”
At first, they were very suspicious and they were not going to let us in. But, weirdly, the more I kept saying, “I don’t believe the election was stolen, let alone by a cabal of satanic paedophiles, but I’m really interested to hear what you’ve got to say,” the more reassured they became.
Hannah: Although you didn’t buy the overarching conspiracy, is there anything you thought was true that turned out not to be, or vice versa?
Gabriel: Well, there was the Hunter Biden laptop case which occurred at the same time as I was first starting to look into QAnon – just before the election in 2020. At the same time as I was hearing all these people going on about Q and the cabal of satanic paedophiles, they were also talking to me about Hunter Biden’s laptop and how it exposed the “Biden crime family”. And when I heard about that, I just thought, “Oh God, I can’t. I haven’t got the bandwidth for this.”
A few years later, I ended up digging into it. I got hold of a copy of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Turned out the whole thing was real. And what had happened in the run-up to the 2020 election was that when that story came out, it came out in the New York Post – a tabloid newspaper, Murdoch-run. The social media platforms – Facebook and Twitter – censored it. Twitter actually locked the New York Post out of their Twitter account for spreading fake news. The FBI had gone to [the social media giants] and said to be on the lookout for fake news. They thought that was it. So, the whole thing was kind of stamped on. Turned out, not only was it true, but the FBI knew it was true because they had the laptop and they were using it in their investigations. So, then you start thinking, “Well, what else is true?” Now, the most obvious explanation for any conspiracy theory is always, can I say, f***-up?
Hannah: It’s cock-up, isn’t it? But yeah, you can say f***-up.
Gabriel: Cock-up is always the more likely explanation. The much more likely explanation is that the people in the FBI who were going to Facebook and Twitter and warning them about Hunter Biden’s laptop being disinformation, they didn’t know that their colleagues three doors down the corridor had Hunter Biden’s laptop in their drawer. That’s a much more likely explanation. But you can see how people construct out of that a narrative of the deep state.
I also think that in the face of overwhelming craziness, mendaciousness from the Trump camp, there has been a tendency to batten down the hatches on the opposite side to say, “Everything you say is nonsense,” for fear of being duped. “I’m tired with the conspiracy theorists. And also, by the way, everything is fine.”
[But] what conspiracy theories tell us is that everything is not fine; that the system is in deep trouble. That tens, maybe hundreds of millions of people don’t believe it works for them any more. And they have good reasons for not believing it works for them.
Hannah: Towards the end of the book, you write that 6 January failed. And therefore another attempt is likely going to be made around the next election. Is that a prediction of yours, if Trump doesn’t win?
Gabriel: I don’t want to be in the position of predicting trouble. I think that’s a bad idea. But I do think that it is fairly reasonable to assume that if Trump loses, he’s not going to accept it. Then you have to ask the question, what are his supporters going to do? The people who genuinely believe that the last election was stolen – they are going to believe their democracy is well and truly captured. By the deep state.
Hannah: I think it’s worth like fleshing out the numbers here because they are staggering, aren’t they?
Gabriel: Yeah. So, December last year, there was a YouGov poll, where they posed the following question or statement to Americans: “No matter who is officially in charge of the government or other institutions, a single group of people secretly control events and rule the world together.” What percentage do you think [agreed]?
Hannah: Twenty-five per cent.
Gabriel: Forty-one per cent! That’s getting on for half of all Americans
Hannah: This is not a niche problem.
Gabriel: And 25 per cent, roughly, of Americans believe that politicians, senior politicians from both parties were involved in child sex trafficking. This is not just a Republican problem. Conspiracy theories are everywhere. And you obviously don’t want to take them literally, but you do want to take them seriously. And what they tell you is that the system is in trouble.
Hannah: You’re absolutely right that this is not just a Republican problem, because as we’ve seen during this [US] election campaign and the assassination attempts on Trump, there have been some conspiracies on the left, haven’t there? From Democrat supporters around the idea that Trump has staged his own assassination.
Gabriel: I think we are all open to conspiracy theories. I mean, remember when Donald Trump was a Kremlin agent? That was a conspiracy theory. There were grains of truth, but he wasn’t a Kremlin agent. And the whole liberal media bought in to that, including myself. I tried to find out whether it’s true. I expended a lot of energy trying to find that “pee tape”. Spoiler alert: I didn’t find it. And nor did anyone else. And nor did it exist, as far as we know.
Hannah: But if we must take these seriously, what do you see as being a part of [the solution]?
Gabriel: I genuinely don’t have solutions. This is a very real problem for people who’ve lost friends and family members to the conspiracy theory rabbithole. All I know is that fact checking is not helpful. It doesn’t work. It’s counterproductive. Obviously, we should fact check stuff as journalists, but confronting somebody who’s gone down the rabbithole with facts doesn’t work. It just doesn’t. It’d be nice if it did, but it doesn’t.
The fact that the overarching narrative of all of these conspiracy theories is that the system is rotten: that’s the metaphor, and the metaphor is important, and we need to listen to it. We need to not pretend it was the Russians what done it, whether it’s electing Trump or getting Brexit, you know. It’s not the Russians.
Yes, the Russians were stirring the pot, but by saying “It’s the Russians”, you negate your duty or obligation as a society to look in the mirror and say, “Why is it that so many people have lost faith in this system that apparently is making everyone so much better off?”
Clearly, something is not working. And I think giving believers in conspiracy theories the respect to listen to what they have to say, not take them literally, but seriously – I think that’s part of a solution. But there might not be a solution.
Hannah: What does that mean?
Gabriel: This is where I end up with the book. We start the book with this strange encounter at a drawing class with a story about a book that was published 500 years ago by a crazed guy who was just obsessed with witches. And until he wrote this book, no one was really obsessed with witches in Europe.
And then this guy writes this book and he’s bonkers, and he thinks that there’s satanic evil witches everywhere. And everyone thinks he’s mad. But… the printing press. This book spreads, and suddenly witch fever, right? And it’s hundreds of years of upheaval, driven by new technology. I think we’re in another period of that right now. Social media was the start. Wait till AI starts obliterating millions of jobs and making millions of people’s existences in society redundant.
What happens then? I think we are going to have this huge turbulence.
Hannah: And when you say that there’s trouble coming, presumably that’s not confined to the United States of America?
Gabriel: No. I don’t think it is. The United States, for better or for worse, sort of controls a lot of what happens in the rest of the world. When it grips America, it’ll grip things here, and we’ve seen a lot of that. We saw that with the riots recently, right?
Hannah: There’s a passage in the book that really stood out to me, and I wonder if you think there’s any time for Britain to learn some lessons from this. You talk about the diminishment of local news. And we have seen that here, very sadly, as well. And you’re talking about millions and millions of Americans who essentially switch on their televisions or read their newspapers, and they don’t recognise what they see. And you write:
“Many of the stories that made up the rich and varied tapestry of American life existed out of sight of the people who decided what passed for news, either because they didn’t know about them or because they didn’t fit the bigger national narrative.
These stories told of an America slowly sinking in terminal decline. Many who lived that reality were experiencing a jarring sense of cognitive dissonance.”
I wonder to what extent you think the riots this summer were a bit of that? And whether you think it’s possible for us here in the UK to get hold of that.
Gabriel: That passage you read out, I was describing the Nineties. And things have only got a lot worse in terms of local-news provision, which is such an important part of democracy. You cannot have a healthy, flourishing democracy without an informed populace. And you can’t have an informed populace if nobody is reporting the stuff that’s going on around them. If they’re just reporting what’s happening in Westminster, or the White House, or Hollywood, the centres of power, inevitably different things will be going on there and people will start not recognising what they see.
And then once they don’t recognise it, then they don’t believe it. Then it’s fake news. Then you’re all in on the cabal and here we are. Was there a moment in the Nineties and early Noughties where the internet was going to step in and democratise news and give everybody a voice to be able to tell and read and see the stories from their local community and weave them in with the larger tapestry of a national life and bring people closer together? There was a moment where we believed that would happen, but it didn’t happen. The opposite happened. We got three, four, five massive conglomerates who monopolised everything.
So, that ship has sailed. The internet is no longer the democratising force we thought it was. I don’t see any big drive towards somebody putting money and resources and care into rejuvenating reliable, good local journalism.
Hannah: Gabriel Gatehouse, I hope that you are wrong. I fear that you are right. Thank you so much.
Gabriel: Thanks for having me.
This has been edited for clarity. The full interview can be heard on the New Statesman podcast.
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