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BBC Radio 4

America through the looking glass - enter a world where nothing is as it seems.

As America heads into a presidential election, Gabriel Gatehouse dives back into the labyrinthine rabbit warren of American conspiracy culture. Whilst liberals across the world worry about a possible return of Donald Trump, millions of Americans are convinced that their democracy has already been highjacked - by a sinister Deep State cabal. How did this happen? And who is behind it? That's the story that Gabriel Gatehouse is investigating in this series of The Coming Storm.

The search for the origins of this story takes Gabriel inside a paranoid political group that tried to build its own Deep State during the Cold War, now back in fashion in the conservative backwaters of western mountain states. Gabriel meets the January 6 rioters running for office who see their detention as political imprisonment in gulags, and the militia men convinced the CIA and FBI are working against the American people. In the background lurk the tech utopian ideologues, using their vast wealth and power to fund conspiracy flavoured content as they work to create sovereign states free of all government control. And online, amateur finance bros foment distrust of government, central banks and giant financial institutions to millions of followers.

What were once fringe ideas have burst into the mainstream. Conspiracy theories have become central planks of Trump's Republican Party, while 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?

The Coming Storm

Gabriel Gatehouse and producer Lucy Proctor were on stage at the Hay Festival in May 2025. They discuss the second Trump administration, making the second series and how the storm seems to be progressing in 2025. Chaired by Horatio Clare.
 
Editor: Richard Vadon
Mix: Neil Churchill

Live at Hay Festival

Gabriel Gatehouse is joined by the BBC’s US Digital reporter Mike Wendling to answer listener questions.

Has the storm finally come?

What do listeners want to know about the incoming Trump administration?

Gabriel Gatehouse is joined by US-based BBC journalist Mike Wendling to answer listener questions about Donald Trump's picks for influential positions and about how to report on conspiracy culture. This live recording happened on the Live News stream on BBC Sounds the day before President Trump was inaugurated.

Producers: Lucy Proctor and Charlotte McDonald

Inauguration: Live Q&A

Over two series this podcast has followed a cast of characters who propelled Trump into the White House – twice. Many of them are now likely to take power and inject their reality-bending world views into America’s health, security and intelligence infrastructure. Who are they and what do they believe?

There's Kash Patel, Trump's pick for FBI director. He was deeply embedded in the Russiagate saga. Several bit-part players in our episodes who've now been promised influence. Elon Musk of course.

And then there's Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Son of a murdered Senator, nephew of a murdered president, he believes many of America's three-letter agencies represent a threat to national health and security. 

Presenter: Gabriel Gatehouse
Producer: Lucy Proctor

Inauguration Bonus

Gabriel Gatehouse, producer Lucy Proctor and Ben Ansell, Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at Oxford University, in front of a live audience at the BBC’s Radio Theatre.

As the team emerges from series 2, what have we learned about the future of democracy in an age of technological change and split realities?

Producer: Lucy Proctor
Sound design and mix: James Beard
Editor: Richard Vadon
Script consultants: Richard Fenton-Smith and Afsaneh Gray
Commissioning editor: Dan Clarke
Original music: Pete Cunningham

8. The Last Election…?

In the 1990s a group of futurist thinkers meet on one of the world’s first email lists. The Extropians imagine a world of augmented human bodies, nanotechnology, cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence. 

Now, some of the thinkers on that email list are turning that AI future into a reality. But others are now worried - what if the AI ends up in charge of us all?

As we head into an epochal shift for humanity, questions about democracy and tyranny run through the debates about how fast or slow to move forward. Because we don’t want to end up living in the Matrix…

Producer: Lucy Proctor
Sound design and mix: James Beard
Editor: Richard Vadon
Script consultants: Richard Fenton-Smith and Afsaneh Gray
Commissioning editor: Dan Clarke
Original music: Pete Cunningham

CREDITS:
Timothy Leary 1992 half-hour appearance with cable TV host Skip E Lowe, copyright unknown, Alan Eichler, YouTube

After all, the body is an extension of fashion, Natasha Vita More, YouTube

7. Wonderland

In series one of this podcast we spent months investigating QAnon, a crazy conspiracy theory involving an elite cabal of paedophiles and child sex traffickers. And we never really grappled with… this actual convicted paedophile and sex trafficker, who was at the centre of a network of global financial cultural and political elites.

But the story of Jeffrey Epstein is more than a kernel of truth at the heart of Qanon. It connects the idea of a cabal of elite paedophiles to the wider conspiracy theory we’re looking into for series two, one that millions of Americans believe: that democracy is a facade, and that the institutions of America, from politics to finance, from Hollywood to the secret intelligence agencies, are controlled by hidden hands. 

Producer: Lucy Proctor
Sound design and mix: James Beard
Editor: Richard Vadon
Script consultants: Richard Fenton-Smith and Afsaneh Gray
Commissioning editor: Dan Clarke
Original music: Pete Cunningham

CREDITS:
Stephen Hawking clip from goal.cast, TikTok

Jeffrey Epstein reporting in Florida, 2008-2011 from WPBF, Palm Beach Post, WBTV, Miami Herald

G Edward Griffin clip from The Subversion Factor, Knowledge 2020 Media, 1983

Gamestop archive from CNBC

Ian Carrol's videos: Cancelthisclothingco on TikTok

Peter Thiel on The Joe Rogan Experience

6. Kompromat

Gabriel Gatehouse is on holiday with his family when he gets an invitation to an exclusive party in New York City from a group called Praxis. The tech start-up plans to create a new sovereign state somewhere on the Mediterranean coast, part of a new tech movement called ‘the network state’. The idea is that these statelets, governed not by a giant state bureaucracy but on the blockchain, will eventually replace the nation state. Gabriel meets crypto cowboys cheering on the end of democracy and tech bros hoping to replace the dollar with meme coins. It looks like kids playing around, larping as revolutionaries. But kids playing around with memes gave rise to Pizzagate, Qanon and Jan 6…

Producer: Lucy Proctor
Sound design and mix: James Beard
Editor: Richard Vadon
Script consultants: Richard Fenton-Smith and Afsaneh Gray
Commissioning editor: Dan Clarke
Original music: Pete Cunningham

CREDITS:
The Network State Conference 2023 - Livestream, The Network State Podcast, Youtube
JD Vance: The US is being run by 'childless cat ladies', Fox News
EVERY ANGEL IS TERRIFYING, Praxis_tv, Youtube

5. The Photocopier

In the summer of 2023 a small budget thriller becomes a smash hit. Sound of Freedom is based on the true story of Tim Ballard, a former officer at the Department for Homeland Security, who spent years undercover busting child sex trafficking rings before he quit and set up his own organisation.

The film was linked to QAnon, the conspiracy theory about a satanic cabal of paedophiles secretly running America. Q, the anonymous figure who posted cryptic messages in online forums, isn’t mentioned in the film. He’s stopped posting and the movement has withered. But Q’s ideas have seeped into the mainstream. Now they’ve merged with a bigger story about dark forces that have captured the institutions of America - the Federal Reserve, the FBI, and…. Hollywood. 

Producer: Lucy Proctor
Sound design and mix: James Beard
Editor: Richard Vadon
Script consultants: Richard Fenton-Smith and Afsaneh Gray
Commissioning editor: Dan Clarke
Original music: Pete Cunningham

Credits:

Opening sequence includes sound from from:

Sound of Freedom, Official Trailer, Angel Studios
Jim Caviezel on Bannon’s War Room, Rumble
Woke Hollywood FURIOUS Over Sound Of Freedom HUGE Box Office Success! | They CAN'T STOP This Movie! Ryan Kinel, Youtube
Controversial movie becomes a surprise summer hit, CNN
How 'Sound of Freedom,' controversial child sex trafficking film, became a hit in theaters, USA today

O.U.R documentary audio from The Abolitionists, FletChet Entertainment

4. The Jump

A prank about pizza is the moment members of the Republican Party in Idaho realise the conspiratorial John Birch Society has burrowed into mainstream politics. These people are dredging up ideas from the past, about communist plots and hidden hands, and repurposing them for the 21st Century.
 
An alliance is forming in the Pacific Northwest state between the John Birchers and another group of people who never trusted the federal government of America. Gabriel Gatehouse meets the leader of The Real 3%’ers of Idaho, anti-government activists who are part of the militia movement. He hears how a stand-off in the desert a decade ago between government bureaucrats and cowboys became a defining moment, for those who don’t trust the institutions of the state, and also for the FBI, as everyone looks at the January 6 Capitol riot as evidence of the enemy within.

Producer: Lucy Proctor
Sound design and mix: James Beard
Editor: Richard Vadon
Script consultants: Richard Fenton-Smith and Afsaneh Gray
Commissioning editor: Dan Clarke
Original music: Pete Cunningham

Credits:

Dorothy Moon speaking at the Kootenai County Republican Women Federated’s fundraiser

Idaho Freedom Foundation Investigation by KTVB

Dorothy Moon introducing Eric Parker of Hailey during the Idaho House session on Jan. 16, 2018.

Leaked bodycam footage of the Bundy Ranch stand-off fromThe Pete Santilli Show, Rumble - original owner unknown

3. The Enemy Within

America through the looking glass - enter a world where nothing is as it seems.
 
As Gabriel Gatehouse travels around America in the run-up to the 2024 Presidential election, he keeps hearing about the Federal Reserve. Many people think the Fed is a central cog in a grand conspiracy to impose a sinister ‘New World Order’ and control the supply of money.
 
These dark fears about the Federal Reserve are bound up with the fear of communism. And they go back to the Cold War… to a fringe group called The John Birch Society, and one of its leaders, Congressman Larry McDonald, who lived his life as if in the crosshairs of a terrifying communist conspiracy.

Producer: Lucy Proctor
Sound design and mix: James Beard
Editor: Richard Vadon
Script consultants: Richard Fenton-Smith and Afsaneh Gray
Commissioning editor: Dan Clarke
Original music: Pete Cunningham

CREDITS:

U.S. Stock Market Crash - 1929 | Today in History | 29 Oct 16, AP Archive

Clips of Larry McDonald and Robert Welch from Education Is the Key (by Larry McDonald) 1980, John Birch Society and 1958 Robert Welch Speech - Insiders Plan To Take Over America (copyright unknown)

Audio of G Edward Griffin presentation from The Creature From Jekyll Island (by G. Edward Griffin), recorded 1994

Western Goals film, The Subversion Factor, Knowledge 2020 Media, 1983

2. Flight 007

QAnon and the plot to break reality...

Gabriel Gatehouse has something to confess. Throughout the making of the series he’s been developing his own conspiracy theory. It’s about a book, called The Sovereign Individual, written by two men who were also pushing stories about the Clintons in the 1990s. 

Were the people who seeded the myths that led to QAnon involved in a vast conspiracy to break reality, to divide and conquer and divvy up the spoils? 

Gabriel seeks to understand the book, a favourite amongst the tech billionaires of Silicon Valley. They think a new version of the web, based on crypto and blockchain, will bring about the next step in the societal shift driven by the internet. What would that mean for democracy?

Producer: Lucy Proctor

8. Epilogue

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