BBC’s Coming Storm podcast delves into QAnon’s origins
Few fringe movements have captured the imagination of podcast-makers as much as QAnon, the online gathering of conspiracy theorists that has inched dangerously towards the mainstream. Following a glut of series in both the US and UK, the BBC has now got in on the act with The Coming Storm, in which journalist Gabriel Gatehouse attempts to uncover “the hidden forces that are shaping and misshaping our reality”. The title alludes to QAnon followers’ claims of an impending reckoning in the US that will expose a “deep state” cabal made up of senior Democrats who, they allege, worship Satan and engage in paedophilia and cannibalism.
I was initially sceptical about the series, expecting it to be another QAnon refresher course, but it tells the story well and makes unexpected connections, even if some pieces of the jigsaw take a while to slot into place.
The starting point is a missed interview: reporting on the aftermath of the 2020 election, Gatehouse was in Phoenix, Arizona, where supporters of President Donald Trump had gathered and were claiming foul play. There he saw militiamen with assault rifles mingling with parents pushing prams. He also met a man called Jake Angeli, who was draped in fur, wearing Viking horns and carrying a sign that said “Q Sent Me”. “In what would later turn out to be a massive journalistic fail, I didn’t bother filming an interview,” admits Gatehouse, who wrote off Angeli’s conspiracy theories as too outré for broadcast. A few weeks later, he watched the same man storming the Capitol on television.
Gatehouse is a calm and thoughtful host who uses the series to dig deep into the roots of QAnon. In the opening episode, he takes us back to 1993 and the suicide of Vince Foster, an attorney who served as adviser to the Clinton administration. Theories about the circumstances of his death were disseminated in nascent internet chat rooms, many involving wild stories about the Clintons. These persisted all the way to 2016, when Hillary Clinton ran for president.
Elsewhere, more familiar parts of the story are covered — 4chan, 8chan, Pizzagate and so on. Some context is necessary, but we have heard a lot of this before. Yet where other series have tended to present QAnon followers as crackpots with a tenuous grip on reality, Gatehouse is respectful and maintains a curious rather than condescending tone. He states that the claims of QAnon are “preposterous”, but is keen to look at the bigger picture and the circumstances that can lead to such beliefs taking hold.
There are similarities here to Jon Ronson’s Things Fell Apart, a series that delves into the roots of today’s culture wars. Like Ronson, Gatehouse is less interested in the sensationalist aspects of his subject than in showing how we got here and the ways the present is foreshadowed by the past.
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