The truth behind QAnon’s lies
This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: ‘The truth behind QAnon’s lies’
Gideon Rachman
Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times. This week’s podcast is about conspiracy theories and American politics. My guest is Gabriel Gatehouse, author of a new book, The Coming Storm: A Journey into the Heart of the Conspiracy Machine. Anyone who follows American politics will be familiar with a vast number of conspiracy theories floating around on a range of subjects like election fraud, Covid-19 or illegal immigration. But could those conspiracy theories actually affect the outcome of the presidential election and its aftermath?
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Donald Trump voice clip
Well, I don’t know much about the movement other than I understand they like me very much.
News clip
Former President Trump has long flirted with QAnon, but this illustrated meme he reshared last week with QAnon slogans and QAnon on his lapel is one of his most brazen endorsement of the conspiracy theory.
Gideon Rachman
When Donald Trump wore a Q lapel pin last year and shared a meme with the slogan the storm is coming, he was clearly reaching out to the adherents of America’s strangest and most influential conspiracy theory, QAnon. The core beliefs of QAnon seem to be that Trump is waging a secret war against elite, Satan-worshipping paedophiles in government, business and the media. Believers in the theory have spread the idea that there will be a day of reckoning when prominent people such as Hillary Clinton will be arrested and executed. It’s bizarre stuff. So I began my conversation with Gabriel Gatehouse by asking him if these strange conspiracy theories actually matter.
Gabriel Gatehouse
They certainly matter. I mean, my view of conspiracy theories is that you want to take them in that famous thing that we used to say about Trump — you take them seriously, but not literally. Because what I think a conspiracy theory is, it’s a little bit of cultural DNA. It’s this little kind of cultural virus, a capsule of information about where we are as a society that multiplies and replicates, sometimes online, sometimes by word of mouth, sometimes through other media now. And if you look at it and you look at where it comes from, you quite often reveal something quite interesting and quite fundamental about where we are as a society.
Gideon Rachman
And I think one of the phrases you used in the book is that you were looking for the deep roots of January the 6th, the storming of the Capitol. And that you, I think, demonstrate fairly convincingly, is linked to a lot of these conspiracy theories about what’s going on in America that motivates, you know, thousands of people to stand up in Washington and eventually stormed the Capitol.
Gabriel Gatehouse
Yes. So my inciting incident, as it were, my route into all of this was that two months before the storming of the Capitol, just after the election in 2020, I was in Phoenix, Arizona, where the votes were still being counted even though the election was over. And I meet this guy and he’s draped in furs and he’s got horns on his head, and I get talking to him because, you know, like so many of these people in America, they’re very friendly and very open about some of their really weird beliefs. And he starts telling me this story about how Hillary Clinton leads a cabal of satanic paedophiles that’s trying to steal the election. And I just think: this guy’s too weird to put on. I was working for Newsnight at the time, serious news television program on the BBC, and I thought, this guy’s too weird to put on TV, so I ignored him. Two months later, there he is in the Senate chamber. The same horns, same furs. And he’s kind of leading this, you know.
Gideon Rachman
He’s become the face of it.
Gabriel Gatehouse
Yeah, by virtue of his iconic garb, the face of this movement. And I realised that by ignoring the conspiracy theory that he was putting forward to me, I had missed a big trick. Right? I had missed an opportunity to go, hold on a second. There’s something going on here. There are large numbers of Americans who believe that their government is in thrall to evil forces. They have cloaked this in the garb of Satan-worshipping paedophiles. They’ve located it in the person of Hillary Clinton, if you like. But it speaks to something wider. It speaks to a sense of distrust that Americans have, I think, quite widely, not just on the right, of their politicians, of their institutions. I tried to look for the roots. Where did it come from? And obviously that led us to the Clintons in the 90s a lot. But also why and what is it telling us about America today?
Gideon Rachman
And when you say these theories are quite widely believed, that it’s not just a few crazies who turn up in Washington, the polls, evidence suggests that they are really, very widely believed.
Gabriel Gatehouse
Really very widely believed. So there was a YouGov poll that came out at the end of last year, series poll. They asked a sample of over 1000 Americans whether they agreed with the following statement. And it’s something like, no matter who is officially in charge of the government and other organisations, a single group of people control world events and make things happen. Guess how many people agreed with that? Forty-one per cent, getting on for half of all Americans. This is across the board. It skews slightly more heavily in Republican voters, Trump voters, but not exclusively. It’s very widespread.
Gideon Rachman
So Trump knows what he’s doing when he reaches out quite explicitly to QAnon by wearing the Q badge and using their slogan.
Gabriel Gatehouse
Tweeting the storm is coming. Well, either he’s winking to QAnon or he’s promoting my book. I don’t know what is. I hope it’s the latter. I think he knows exactly what he’s doing now. There’s a brilliant clip of the first time that a journalist asks him about QAnon, and the reporter says — he’s still president at this time, so mid-2020 — the reporter says something like, Mr President, you know, there’s this theory that you’re saving the world from a cabal of satanic paedophiles. Is this something that you’re a part of? And he says, well, I haven’t heard that but is that supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing? Yeah. So he realises that this is potentially an electoral asset to him.
One of the origin stories of this idea that the Clintons are evil is the story of Vince Foster, who is this loyal friend from Arkansas who goes off with the Clintons when Bill becomes president and becomes deputy White House counsel, a powerful position. Second most senior lawyer in the White House. And he winds up dead in the first summer of Bill Clinton’s first term. He’s committed suicide, but there are all kinds of questions around it. And he becomes part of what is known as the Clinton body count in conspiracy circles, which is this idea that there are dozens, perhaps more than 100 people that the Clintons have had murdered in their kind of ascent to power, none of it provable or true or, you know, but this is the conspiracy theory.
And you saw when Trump was running in 2016, he nodded to that. He mentioned Vince Foster.
Gideon Rachman
And indeed the whole slogan, lock her up, about Hillary Clinton.
Gabriel Gatehouse
Lock her up was tapping into that deep, deep vein of conspiracy thinking which does centre in part around the Clintons.
Gideon Rachman
Now let’s get back to QAnon, though, because how does something that is, you know, to me at least, so bizarre, this idea that there’s a cabal of paedophiles running the United States. How does a theory like that originate and then take off? I mean, you trace it quite interestingly and suggest even that at one point that Q, the person dropping these ideas into the internet, is based not even in the United States; he’s in Johannesburg.
Gabriel Gatehouse
Right. So first of all, I should say that Q, this sort of anonymous figure that was pretending to be a high-level government insider and dropping bits of information on a niche website called 4chan about this operation, basically, to expose the paedophiles controlling America, this person has been silent for years now. So QAnon is kind of dead as it were. But the idea that it put forward has completely seeped into the mainstream of certainly Republican politics. I’ll give you another stat, which is that something like 25 per cent of all Americans, Republicans and Democrats believe that high-level politicians are involved in child sex trafficking rings. Right? So that’s a quarter of all Americans. The core tenets of QAnon has entirely seeped into the mainstream of American politics. But where does it come from? Well, if you take the Clintons as being evil, power hungry and of course, sex is central to the whole Bill Clinton presidency, right? There was the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But there were other scandals as well. And there were allegations of rape. And there was this allegation that Bill Clinton had raped a woman, Juanita Broaddrick, in a hotel room in Arkansas in 1978.
Gideon Rachman
Which you, I think, find credible.
Gabriel Gatehouse
To the extent that, number one, she told several people at the time who corroborated her story. Number two, she didn’t want to tell the story in public and was forced to by the Ken Starr inquiry during the first impeachment process. And number three, her story has never changed. And number four, in fact, that when she told her story to Ken Starr, they kept asking her one thing: Did anyone, on behalf of the Clintons, ever threaten you or try to persuade you not to tell your story, ie obstruction of justice? Because that’s what they were going for in an impeachment? And Juanita Broaddrick said, no, nobody did. So having told her story when she was given the opportunity to make it count when impeachment was coming, she didn’t. So I find it credible. I should say, for reasons of fairness, that his spokesman denied it, of course, at the time. And obviously he has never been charged or convicted of any . . .
Gideon Rachman
Yeah, I mean, it’s a side trail, but it’s what I was mentioning, because I think often at the heart of these conspiracy theories, there is a grain of something that’s true. But back to QAnon. So how does it go viral?
Gabriel Gatehouse
There had been this precursor to QAnon, which was Pizzagate, which started just before the 2016 election and really exploded out into the open just afterwards, which was this theory that John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, was running a paedophile ring out of a pizza restaurant in Washington, DC, a place called Comet Ping Pong. I’ve been there. The one main flaw in this theory is the place didn’t have a basement. So you can see base-level what kind of veracity we’re talking about here. But this conspiracy theory started on 4chan, which is this kind of niche, conspiratorial website, then kind of jumped on to Facebook, Reddit and then Facebook.
You know, on 4chan, this very weird internet message board populated by very young people, lots of incels, you know, young men who are kind of sitting in their parents’ basements and, you know, spending all their time online, these people understand the role-play element of this, right? So when somebody says, I am a high-level insider and I can tell you that there’s an investigation into John Podesta and his paedophile ring in this pizzeria, they understand that there’s a role-play element to this. It’s like Dungeons & Dragons, if that means anything to you.
Gideon Rachman
It’s a game.
Gabriel Gatehouse
It’s a game. It’s a role-play game. But when it jumps on to Facebook, it’s hitting a different audience. It’s hitting people more of our generation, you know, boomer audience who are not au fait with this internet culture. And people start taking it literally. And that’s kind of what happened with QAnon. We don’t know who exactly the original writer of the Q drops was, the person who first started this conspiracy theory. We’re pretty sure that various people were involved. There was a coder from South Africa, as you mentioned, a man by the name of Paul Furber. There were this weird Watkins father-and-son duo who ended up kind of being in control of it, Jim and Ron Watkins.
Gideon Rachman
And they’re based in Manila.
Gabriel Gatehouse
They were. They were based in Manila at the time. Ron Watkins’s son eventually ended up being quite closely involved in the narrative around the 2020 stolen election story, the Stop the Steal thing. But we know that in between there were online trolls who were working at not much of an arm’s length distance from the Trump campaign — from the 2016 and then 2020 Trump campaign — who were involved in pushing it. Right? And that’s what comes out in the research I did for the book, which was that there were people associated with the Trump campaign who were very deliberately pushing this theory because, as one person put it to me, they didn’t really understand where it was coming from or what it was all about, but they understood that it was helpful to Trump. They understood that this narrative of a malignant, hidden force behind government was essentially helpful to Trump, and that’s why they helped supercharge it.
Gideon Rachman
And one of the things I think that you suggest, which struck me as quite convincing, is that one of the reasons people get into QAnon is it’s participatory. It’s a game you can play in by giving your own information.
Gabriel Gatehouse
It’s the plan to save the world. That’s how it was described to me by one QAnon adherent. So if you have a theory about 9/11 or the JFK assassination, you know, you think it was the mafia or the CIA or whatever, OK, you’ve got a bit of secret information that can make you feel clever or maybe a bit more powerful or something. But QAnon is different. It’s qualitatively different as a conspiracy theory, because Q was constantly telling the anons, the quote unquote anonymous people, to do their research, which meant, you know, spending 20 hours a day on the internet trying to find verification and corroboration for all of these kind of outlandish ideas. And that by doing their research, they would help bring about the great awakening. They would help bring down this cabal of evil paedophiles.
And also remember that this really gained its power during Covid when people were out of a job, a lot of them spending a lot of time at home, spending a lot of time on the internet. It gave them a sense of purpose and a sense of mission in a confusing world. You know, why do we believe in conspiracy theories? We believe in conspiracy theories because they help explain a confusing world. And this one not only helped explain it, but it gave you the opportunity to be part of solving it. It’s genius, really.
Gideon Rachman
And then it ends up partly driving what happens at the Capitol. But coming more up to date, Trump is clearly very upset that Biden has dropped out because he was obsessed with Hunter Biden’s laptop and he’s still talking about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Gabriel Gatehouse
He finds it hard to recalibrate, yes.
Gideon Rachman
Let’s talk a bit about that story, too, because I think it’s another illustration of one of the things you come back to that sometimes there is something at the beginning, but then it sort of metastasises. So what happened with Hunter Biden’s laptop and why did people believe there was a conspiracy?
Gabriel Gatehouse
OK, so two weeks out from the 2020 election — I think it was two weeks out, a few weeks out — a story appeared in the New York Post that Hunter Biden, who famously has struggled with drug addiction, his marriage was breaking up, you know, he was in all sorts of trouble at various points during the 2010s, this story said that Hunter Biden had left a laptop in a laptop repair shop in Delaware and never picked it up, and the New York Post got hold of this laptop, and they’d looked inside it and they’d found all sorts of stuff, stuff relating to his business dealings in Ukraine, stuff relating to his business dealings in China. It was, I have to say, solid journalism on the part of the New York Post. But they were asking the question: was Joe Biden, Barack Obama’s vice-president and now the president, involved in any of those financial dealings? And if so, should questions be asked?
Now, this story lands two weeks out from the 2020 presidential election, and as soon as it lands, stuff starts happening, right? Facebook throttles its reach. Twitter locks the New York Post out of its Twitter account. They say it’s fake news. Five days after the New York Post story comes out, 50 odd former senior American intelligence officials write a letter to Politico, and they say this laptop story has all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation operation. And, of course, all of the major media outlets, remembering all the Russian disinformation that happened in the 2016 election, put the dampeners on this. They say this is fake news. So that’s the story going into the election. About a year or year and a half later, it comes out and I managed to get hold of a copy of this laptop and I did a bit digging into its provenance.
Anyway, it turns out the laptop was real. The FBI knew it was real because they had a copy of it. And so the question then became: why did this story, which was potentially a consequential October surprise about the son of the candidate for president, son of a former vice-president, why was this story essentially squashed in the media? And this has become a huge conspiracy theory in Trump world. So almost any Trump supporter you will care to speak to will tell you that, quote unquote, the regime, which is the kind of conspiracy, they say, between politicians, the media, Hollywood, this kind of big cabal suppressed the Hunter Biden.
Gideon Rachman
So that’s the kernel of truth in the sense that there was a legit story out there and it was downplayed. But where, in your view, does the Hunter Biden laptop story go off the rails?
Gabriel Gatehouse
Well, it goes off the rails in several directions. Right? So there’s one part of the story. If you Google it, you’ll find suggestions that there’s images of child sex abuse on the laptop. Well, I look through the laptop. I can tell you I looked through it very comprehensively and those images are not there. So that’s just fake news. Invented. The other part of where it goes off the rails is the question of what the laptop actually tells you. The laptop is not a smoking gun that tells you that Hunter Biden — and this is the way they would describe it in Trump world — is a crime family that’s making millions illegally out of secret deals with the Communist party of China and dodgy deals with Ukrainian gas oligarchs, right? The laptop does not show that. The laptop does show, and if you want to see what the laptop shows, go and read the New York Post stories, because it’s good journalism.
The laptop shows that Hunter Biden, number one, was absolutely leveraging his father’s influence as vice-president by flying around the world, including to China on Air Force Two. And when the mandarins in Beijing who make the decisions on which businesses to support and not see, you know, the son of the vice-president exiting from Air Force Two behind his dad, they understand what that means. Now, this is, in my view, a fascinating insight into the kind of nexus of power and business at a high level that you hardly ever get insight into. You know, looking through the laptop was fascinating in that respect.
What was so interesting was the extent to which, in my view, and understandably so, the American establishment was interested in playing it down because, quite reasonably, they thought it might be Russian disinformation. But also, I think, partly because they knew how it would be weaponised with half-truths and outright falsehoods by the other side. But as a result of that, I feel they kind of played into the conspiracy theorists’ hands by doing the thing that they shouldn’t have done, dismissing this story.
Gideon Rachman
So Hunter Biden’s laptop has much that Trump should now be taken off the table, so to speak. But a more recent development is that Robert F Kennedy has ditched his own campaign and endorsed Trump. And Kennedy is, in your view, and I guess mine, a conspiracy theorist. How much significance do you think his endorsement of Trump will have?
Gabriel Gatehouse
I actually think it will have a lot of influence. I mean, I went to a Bobby Kennedy rally. The people there, you know, these are not conspiracy theorists frothing at the mouth, kind of going crazy. These are people who, by and large, mistrust both of the major parties. They disliked both the candidates, so they dislike Trump and they disliked Biden. And there are quite a lot of those people. So many people are hurtling, I just don’t want to see a rerun of the 2020 election between these two old guys. We’re sick of it, and they’re sick of the really polarising division that was coming out of both sides, not just from the Trump side, but Joe Biden was going very big on democracy is under threat. And if Trump gets in this election, maybe all is lost, et cetera, et cetera. And so the people at the Kennedy rallies were sick of the pair of them.
And I think for Robert F Kennedy Jr to throw his weight behind Trump as the man who’s going to bring down this system, the big conspiracy theory now in the US is really kind of transcended this idea of a cabal of satanic paedophiles. I think this election really is not about, you know, the left and right of a functional political system. It’s about one lot who want to conserve the political system, which is now basically the Democrats. And it’s about another lot who basically want to bring the system down. I mean, if you look at the content of Project 2025, which of course Trump has disavowed, but actually it’s essentially authored by people in his circle and the people who support him believe this stuff, what they want to do is get rid of the federal government. They believe the federal government is irredeemably corrupt.
So that essentially is the divide in this election. And Bobby Kennedy Jr, his supporters were the people who mistrust the system, the anti-vaxxers, the people who just suspect everything. And he has said, OK, Trump’s the man who can lead this charge. So it’s not to say that I think Trump’s going to win. He might win. He might not, I don’t know. But I do think it’s significant because of course this election is going to be decided by the quote unquote, undecided.
Gideon Rachman
Yeah, and by a very, very tight margin so that even though Bobby Kennedy Jr was only at five per cent, if he can tip three of that five per cent towards Trump, that could be important. So do you think that as well as disrupting Trump’s narrative about the Hunter Biden laptop, Kamala Harris’s entry into the race also could disrupt the idea that there’s this fixed deep state centred around the Bidens and the Clintons, because she can at least claim to represent something new. Or do you think, given she’s Biden’s vice-president, that’s not gonna work?
Gabriel Gatehouse
I think in a way, you’re right. It’s problematic. There are no ready-made conspiracy theories around Kamala Harris. They’re trying to say she used sex to get to the top, quoting a former partner who’s the mayor of San Francisco and all of this kind of stuff. But yeah, you’re right. It’s taken away this attack line that the Maga Republicans had of the Biden crime family and the deep state. On the other hand, what they are making hay with is the kind of lack of process around which Kamala Harris assumed the nomination, the speed with which it happened, the fact that she was waiting in the wings. So the conspiracy theory, if you like, around Kamala Harris, is that she is just the next implant by the deep state.
Gideon Rachman
So just ending, I know neither of us want to predict the results of the election. But, you know, looking forward to November. Normally when the election happens, you get the result and then it’s over. We discovered last time around that wasn’t the case. And there was, you know, a whole bunch of theories fed by Trump that the election had been stolen. Do you think if Trump were to lose that you’d have a similar backlash, again fed by a lot of these conspiracy theories, which, as you say, have very, very wide purchase?
Gabriel Gatehouse
Yes. That’s not a matter of prediction. I would bet on it. Trump loses, the same narrative will come out. It was stolen. And of course, while there’s no evidence the election was stolen, this is widely, widely believed. So then you have a situation where you have a bunch of people who already suspect that the system is screwing them in some way or another. But now their democracy has really been taken from them. And so in a way, you know, one story that we hear quite a lot about this election is democracy is on the ballot. This is make or break, Trump will try to dismantle it. But the other lot, they believe that democracy has already been stolen. It was stolen in 2020. That’s what they believe. So if it happens again, I will confidently predict that people will start to lose faith in the idea that in America, you can change your leaders at the ballot box.
Gideon Rachman
Which would be very dangerous. But last question then, given that everybody has seen 2020, the operatives in both parties preparing for a rerun of a disputed election, the Republicans have been trying to gain control of the crucial state secretary positions in states.
Gabriel Gatehouse
They haven’t really succeeded. There’s some question mark over Georgia. But the system, I think, is more robust than we sometimes give it credit for, or that we fear the system is quite robust. I mean, the way I look at it, back when Trump was still just one of the candidates for the Republican nomination, there was all kinds of questions about whether he would be allowed on the ballot, full stop. I thought there were three possible scenarios.
One is Trump would be stopped from running. Two, Trump would run and lose. Or three, Trump would run and win. And which of those scenarios was it more likely that American democracy would survive more or less intact? And I wondered whether the third scenario, a Trump running and winning and hoping that the institutions of America was strong enough to resist whatever onslaught might be coming, was the most likely scenario for the health of American democracy. I don’t know, it’s a question, but, you know, Trump runs and he loses, they don’t accept it.
Millions of Americans believe that the election has been stolen for a second time. Plus, this is generally the demographic. This is where you start predicting trouble. And I don’t want to, but this is generally the demographic that likes their guns, right? Let’s not forget that. So in a way, the election is not so much the important thing. It’s what happens after.
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Gideon Rachman
That was Gabriel Gatehouse, host of the podcast The Coming Storm and author of a book of the same name ending this edition of the Rachman Review. Thanks for listening. Please join me again next week.
