Gabriel Gatehouse solely acquired again from Florida a couple of minutes in the past. His wheeled suitcase remains to be within the hallway of his London house. He was on the market protecting the US election for Channel 4 Information and has had little or no sleep, he says, however you’d by no means guess it from his twinkle-eyed sprightliness. His unique plan was to attempt to get into Donald Trump’s election get together at Mar-a-Lago, he tells me as he makes us every an espresso, however his contact instructed him to overlook it; it was full, “and also you don’t blag your method in when the man’s survived two assassination makes an attempt”.
So as a substitute, Gatehouse headed to Little Havana in Miami, which has a sizeable Cuban American inhabitants. No Republican nominee has received Miami-Dade county since 1988, however “the swing to Trump was very seen”, he says. “Folks have been simply having an enormous outdated Cuban get together, actually, in celebration.” These have been unusual residents, he says, not “the marginally sinister, Maga, nod-and-a-wink at ‘alt-right’, white supremacy, dictatorship” crowd. However he didn’t spot any upset Democrat voters. “I noticed nothing however pleasure and happiness, and [the election] hadn’t been referred to as for Trump at that time, however they may type of sense it, they may really feel the momentum, they usually have been proper.”
For months, Gatehouse had additionally had that feeling – that Trump was going to win. However then prophesying turbulent occasions forward has nearly change into Gatehouse’s model: his BBC podcast sequence, and the brand new e book tailored from it, are referred to as The Coming Storm. For the previous 4 years, Gatehouse has been happening a complete warren of rabbit holes, investigating, surveying and looking for to clarify the tangled internet of conspiracy theories that acquired the US to the place it’s now. His journey goes far and large, from QAnon and the 6 January Capitol riot, to on-line disinformation networks, synthetic intelligence and the libertarians of Silicon Valley, and additional again to the buried roots of contemporary conspiracy theorism: the New Deal within the 30s, the Clintons within the 90s, even a prophetic e book co-authored by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s dad, extra of which later.
When it comes to this election, Gatehouse suggests two components why Trump received. The primary and most blatant, chatting with the Cuban People in Little Havana, was the price of residing. “Loads of them instructed me, ‘My grocery payments have gone up exponentially.’ It’s not clear to me what insurance policies Donald Trump provides that may resolve that, but it surely’s fairly clear that it is a downside the Democrats haven’t adequately addressed.”
For the opposite cause, he factors to the New York Occasions/Siena Faculty ballot of doubtless voters in late October. Its high line was that Trump and Harris have been neck and neck within the race, however someplace close to the underside got here the query: “Which comes closest to your view concerning the political and financial system in America?” Solely 3% thought the system was working high-quality and 38% thought it wanted “minor modifications”, however 51% thought the system wanted “main modifications” and seven% thought that “the system must be torn down totally”. “So that you’ve acquired a virtually 60% block who’re like, ‘The system sucks, it’s fucked,’ and Trump is attracting these voters. As a result of, for higher or for worse – nicely, for worse, really – the Democrats have type of change into the get together that defends the system.” The phrases “left” and “proper” not apply in US politics, he says. “I body it as pro-system and anti-system.”
That is what unites the coalition round Trump, from the ostensibly Democratic anti-vaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jr, to the anti-“legacy information” crusader Elon Musk, to edgelord manosphere podcasters and rich politicians smashing it to “the elites” – they’re the anti-system possibility. That is additionally the place conspiracy idea is available in, says Gatehouse: “Conspiracy theories are, by definition, anti-system.”
Gatehouse’s perspective to conspiracy theories is “you don’t take them actually, however you’re taking them critically”, he says. “A conspiracy idea tells you one thing about society, and the truth that so many People imagine that the individuals they elect usually are not actually in cost: hidden arms pulling the strings behind the scenes, all this type of meta, QAnon stuff about elite cabals. It’s telling you a similar factor as that Siena Faculty ballot was telling you: perception within the system is catastrophically draining away. And Trump is the man who guarantees to tear all of it aside, to tear it up, to ‘make America nice once more’.”
None of that is to say that Gatehouse ascribes to the conspiracist mindset. In distinction to the outlandish and paranoid narratives it lays out, The Coming Storm is level-headed, even-handed and nicely researched – albeit augmented with just a few stirring musical cues, together with Gatehouse’s personal piano-playing. It’s in an analogous ballpark to the work of Jon Ronson or Adam Curtis, you may say, however tempered by the sensibility of a veteran BBC journalist. As Newsnight’s worldwide editor, Gatehouse has reported from warfare zones and hotspots across the globe: Ukraine, Iraq, Yemen, Russia, Hong Kong. “I had principally the perfect job in tv information,” he says.
It was nearly precisely 4 years in the past – Phoenix, Arizona, within the aftermath of the 2020 election – that he fell down his first rabbit gap. “It was Covid. I’d missed the election as a result of my visa had run out.” The state and the election had been referred to as for Joe Biden however he managed to persuade his editors that he wanted to go to the US nonetheless – to report on the Cease the Steal protest exterior the vote-counting centre in Maricopa county, which supported Trump’s baseless allegations that the election was rigged towards him. “There are perhaps 100 or so individuals there, vibrant characters as ever in America: males with weapons; households with infants; and this man, bare-chested, horns on his head, draped in furs, with an indication that claims ‘Q despatched me’.” This was Jacob Chansley, quickly to attain international notoriety as “the QAnon Shaman” – the enduring image of the storming of the Capitol constructing. “I had vaguely heard about QAnon, but it surely was actually not on my radar in any respect,” Gatehouse says. He spoke to Chansley – “he was very pleasant” – and listened incredulously to his yarn about an nameless authorities official, code-named “Q”, revealing on web chatrooms that Trump was about to conquer a cabal of satanic paedophiles led by Hillary Clinton.
Two months later, Gatehouse was again on the BBC headquarters in London, placing collectively a report on the pro-democracy motion in Hong Kong, “and immediately all of the TV screens in the entire constructing are on the US Capitol. There’s a mob storming it. After which we minimize contained in the Senate chamber, and there he’s, my buddy with the horns and the furs.” He kicked himself for not having recorded an interview with Chansley again in Arizona, “however then additionally I realised that really this type of loopy conspiracy idea that I’d dismissed as too area of interest to place in a critical information programme was really fairly essential”.
Over the course of two seasons of The Coming Storm, Gatehouse and his producer, Lucy Proctor, examine the dynamics of modern-day, information-age conspiracy theorism: the place it got here from, how it’s manufactured and the way it has fed into mainstream politics. Fredrick Brennan, the creator of 8chan, the message board the place the QAnon conspiracy first took maintain, instructed him: “Search for who was utilizing Q and what they have been attempting to do with it,” says Gatehouse. “In order that led me to take a look at the individuals within the Trump orbit, earlier than and after QAnon arrived.” It additionally led him again to the US politics of the early web period. “Names that popped up within the 90s that have been pushing conspiracy theories concerning the Clintons would then pop up once more in connection to pushing Q-adjacent conspiracy theories across the stolen election, and so on. So then that is what you do as a journalist. You make a connection, proper?” He ended up making numerous connections, and weaving collectively a grand and considerably terrifying narrative of misfits, misinformation and manipulation.
Did he actually map out the grand plot at any stage? With pink string on a pinboard, for instance? “I did at one level. However there was a lot of it – I mapped out bits of it,” he says, “in an A4 notepad with, like, spider diagrams. Mainly, I’ve these pencils which are black on one finish and pink on the opposite. So I used to be type of scribbling with my black-and-red pencil.”
Gatehouse is nicely conscious of the pitfalls of such a seductively satisfying train. “At what level are you being an investigative journalist, and at what level are you tipping over into conspiracy idea?”
To make certain, he despatched his spider diagrams to Timothy Tangherlini, a professor of folklore on the College of California, who had created an AI machine-learning program that he claimed may inform the distinction between a conspiracy idea and an precise conspiracy. “As a result of, after all, conspiracies do exist, proper? And so I despatched him my idea, type of hoping that he would say, ‘That you must step again from the rabbit gap, my buddy.’” However as a substitute, to his shock, Prof Tangherlini instructed him to maintain digging.
The parallels between media reporting and conspiracy idea manufacturing are uncomfortably shut, particularly now that “the media” is itself fragmented into totally different camps, every pushing its personal conflicting model of actuality. “If some individuals take this sequence as a type of critique of firm media, then we’ll be glad about that,” he says. Bias is unavoidable: “You’re not simply placing info in there in a random order; you might be crafting a story, so clearly you might be selecting what to incorporate and what to go away out.” As a conspiracist, you will be extra cavalier, however as a journalist, “You’ve acquired to try this in as sincere a method as potential, however you may’t assist however go right into a story with some type of preconceived thought of what the story is.”
Gatehouse fell into journalism nearly by chance. The son of an orchestra conductor, he was born in London however grew up in Amsterdam till he returned to the UK at 14. “I’ve at all times had this slight outsider self-identity, which has been actually helpful by way of journalism.” He studied Russian at college, and had ambitions to be a jazz pianist, however in 2001 he acquired a job on the BBC World Service’s central Asia service, modifying experiences (on old school reel-to-reel tape) in Russian, in addition to Kyrgyz, Uzbek and different languages he didn’t perceive – “I used to be taking out the ‘ums’”, he says. That led to a bit of little bit of reporting for the Russian service, after which he was up and operating. He turned worldwide editor of Newsnight in 2014 and left the BBC in 2022 to go freelance.
Gatehouse does come near positing a conspiracy idea of his personal in The Coming Storm, and it’s a terrifying one. It stems from a e book referred to as The Sovereign Particular person, written in 1997 by the American investor James Dale Davidson and the previous Occasions editor William Rees-Mogg – sure, Jacob’s dad. The e book is uncannily prescient concerning the rising web age: cryptocurrency, disinformation, nationalism, the gig financial system and rich people free from the authority (and tax legal guidelines) of nation states. Their imaginative and prescient of the long run, says Gatehouse, is “a post-nation-state world by which just a few people – sovereign people – have change into so highly effective that they rival the gods of Greek fantasy”. Sure sections of huge tech noticed the e book nearly as a route map; it was reprinted in 2020 with a brand new preface by the billionaire enterprise capitalist Peter Thiel.
“He was positively on the centre of certainly one of my spider diagrams,” says Gatehouse. Thiel was an early investor within the likes of Fb, PayPal, the information evaluation firm Palantir and OpenAI, amongst others, which connects him to Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman and Elon Musk. He has already helped arrange a proto-“community state”: an autonomous financial zone referred to as Próspera, on the Honduran island of Roatán. Thiel additionally has connections with Trump-world: JD Vance was a protege.
Thiel and Musk could possibly be described as “accelerationist” of their pondering, which implies they’re eager to hurry up the tempo of technological change and get to the following stage, or planet, or no matter – whatever the penalties. The place some see local weather breakdown, civil dysfunction and societal collapse as disasters, they see alternative. All of which leads Gatehouse to ask: “Are massive tech billionaires utilizing the Maga motion as a automobile for his or her accelerationist trigger?”
He follows lots of people from this group on-line, he says. “They have been leaping up and down with glee on the evening of the election.” He reads me a line from certainly one of their posts: “Techno kings about to rule the free world. Large wave of acceleration incoming.”
The approaching storm certainly. However not even Gatehouse is making predictions about what a second Trump presidency may carry. “We simply don’t know what’s across the nook,” he says. “My youngsters are six and two. Once they’re my age – I’m 47 – are they nonetheless going to be residing below the identical system of presidency and societal constructions that I grew up in, and my mother and father grew up in and, to an extent, my grandparents grew up in? I believe that’s an open query.”
Is he optimistic? “My glass is fairly half-empty at this level,” he admits. “I’ve an optimistic disposition usually, so I type of really feel like what will probably be, will probably be, however I believe there’s going to be massive modifications coming down the monitor. And a few of it is perhaps good. The present system is certainly not excellent, proper? There are many issues. Is the answer to tear all of it down and construct it up once more from scratch? I believe not.”
However tearing issues down, being “anti-system”, seems to be to be on the agenda, between the accelerationists, Musk’s “authorities effectivity” ambitions and the infamous Venture 2025 agenda, which, amongst different issues, consists of dismantling key departments corresponding to training and homeland safety. “I don’t know whether or not Trump has the temperament to construct new establishments. I believe not.”
There may be loads of materials for extra instalments of The Coming Storm, it appears, however Gatehouse is finished with this world, he says. “I want to provide my mind a break from conspiracy theories. It does drive you a bit of bit nuts.” He already has different tasks within the pipeline on fully totally different subjects. He doesn’t need to change into Mr Conspiracy, he says. “However you recognize, it’s illuminating, and it’s rewarding and it’s attention-grabbing – and it’s positively modified my view of the world.”
Supply hyperlink
