Am I paranoid or this BBC conspiracy theory podcast pulling the wool over my eyes?
Gabriel Gatehouse is a magnificent storyteller. The former BBC foreign correspondent joined the ranks of Britain’s pre-eminent podcasters in 2022 with his enthralling series The Coming Storm, which explored the origins of the QAnon conspiracy web, which in turn helped bring about the Capitol riots of January 6, 2021. It’s a riveting listen, with Gatehouse’s wry, urgent whisper guiding you down dark corridors and shady rabbit holes of deep-state meddling and establishment cover-ups. The truth is out there.
In a nutshell: millions of Americans believe that their democracy is a facade and that their freedoms are being stolen by a secret cabal, who could be Communists, capitalists or paedophiles – or, more likely, all three. What was once a lunatic fringe opinion is now playing out in the corridors of power in Washington DC. With Donald Trump’s re-election looming large, now is the perfect time for Gatehouse to return to the US and try to take on a conspiracy hydra that has only grown more monstrous since January 6.
The first two episodes of the new series of The Coming Storm appeared on BBC Sounds yesterday, and they are moreish, tantalising snippets of a country driven mad by a conspiracy theory hall of mirrors. Episode one introduced us to a police chief turned yoga instructor turned freedom fighter, episode two to a 1970s congressman at the heart of a movement to expose the Marxist plot inside the Federal Reserve. Gatehouse pulls at these threads with a butter-wouldn’t-melt insouciance reminiscent of Louis Theroux. All roads lead to Hillary and Bill. To Donald and Kamala.
There is, however, something we cannot ignore. In the very first episode of series one, Gatehouse looked at the death by suicide of Vince Foster in 1993, a White House counsel who served under Bill Clinton. A popular conspiracy theory is that those mendacious Clintons had Foster killed, and Gatehouse lands the main blame for that theory at the door of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, this newspaper’s World Economy Editor.
My colleague wrote a book in 1997, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, which, according to one contributor to the podcast, “was a militiaman’s wet dream… writing this book is the equivalent to leaving a loaded revolver in a psychiatric ward”. In the 1990s, Ambrose did what almost no one in the American media did – he investigated the death of Foster. He found inconsistencies, holes, questions, amended witness statements. Gatehouse admits that had he been in Ambrose’s shoes, he would have pulled at these threads too. Yet Ambrose and his sources are gently nudged into the conspiracy wingnut bracket, and the book is held up as a manual for red-pill devotees. Hillary killed Vince. The establishment is a rotten trick. The Commies are coming.
This is not to dismiss Gatehouse or The Coming Storm, but a reminder that the podcast, as compelling and persuasive as it is, is also part of the conspiracy machine. Gatehouse, quite reasonably, decries the conspiracy theorists who cherry-pick the evidence to suit their worldview, but is he not also doing that? To alight on one British journalist’s book from 1997 as the “loaded revolver” of Jan 6 is a juicy story, but not the complete picture.
As such, I listened to the new episodes with new ears – not sceptical as such, but retuned, thinking of Gatehouse as a terrific yarn-spinner akin to his BBC podcast stablemate Jon Ronson. And I noticed Gatehouse’s book quirk – along with The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, the first episode highlighted The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg as a potential weapon for would-be anti-establishment insurrectionists.
The new series introduces us to the 1994 work The Creature from Jekyll Island by G Edward Griffin, which describes the 1910 meeting that would eventually create the Federal Reserve (one of the most hated institutions by the QAnon red-pillers). Griffin had a coincidental link to the Marxist-hating congressman. Gatehouse gently pulled that thread. It was very satisfying.
It also began with Gatehouse belatedly watching The Matrix – where we get the language of red pills from in the first place – and, of course, noticed a book. Keanu Reeves’s hero, Neo, hides some money in a copy of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. The gist of the book, explained Gatehouse, was that the world would become so saturated by media, that you could no longer trust the things you saw and heard around you: “Fantasy would replace reality.”
The Coming Storm is not fantasy – it is an engrossing adventure through the swamps of US conspiracy and insurrection – but neither is it reality in its entirety. Gabriel Gatehouse is a magnificent storyteller.
The Coming Storm is available on BBC Sounds
