Following the award-winning hit first series, The Coming Storm with Gabriel Gatehouse returns next month to BBC Radio 4…
As America heads into a presidential election, Gabriel Gatehouse returns for a second series of The Coming Storm. The first series explored the deep roots of the January 6 attacks on the Capitol and how they were fuelled by the QAnon conspiracy theory.
In series two, Gabriel and team step back into the American political undergrowth to discover how remarkably mainstream conspiracy thinking has become and how, as millions wait in trepidation at the prospect of Donald Trump being re-elected, fearful of his threat to America’s democracy, millions of other Americans have become convinced that their democracy has already been highjacked by a sinister deep state cabal, and that Trump is the man to rescue them from it.
Gabriel Gatehouse:
“In series one we examined this sprawling conspiracy theory, QAnon, whose adherents believed America was secretly ruled by a cabal of satanic paedophiles. This strange belief helped drive the mob into the Capitol on January 6 2021, but when producer Lucy Proctor and I went back to America in the run up to the 2024 presidential election, things had got even weirder.”
Gabriel meets the yoga teacher turned January 6 rioter who now believes that the storming of the US Capitol itself was staged by the deep state, and who sees his detention as political imprisonment. He hears from the militia men convinced the CIA and FBI themselves are working against the American people. And all the time, in the background, lurk the tech utopian ideologists, using their vast wealth and power to fund conspiracy flavoured content as they work to create sovereign states free of all government control.
What were once fringe ideas have burst into the mainstream. Conspiracy theories have become central planks in the Trump campaign, while the Democrats run on dark warnings about the end of democracy. With both sides convinced the other is an existential threat, what are the prospects for the survival of the American political system?
Gabriel Gatehouse:
“Millions of Americans seemed to believe their vaunted democracy was a sham, the institutions of the state a mere facade. Series two is another deeply reported examination of the ways that US politics has been captured by conspiracy theories, and explores what this will mean for democracy, not just in America, but everywhere.”
The eight-part series, The Coming Storm, begins at 9.30am on BBC Radio 4 from September 11th.
