The Coming Storm
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.
Episodes
1. The Dead Body
QAnon and the plot to break reality...When a mob storms the Capitol in Washington DC, reporter and presenter Gabriel Gatehouse sees someone he recognises: a man draped in furs with horns on his head. He is known as the Q Shaman. Gabriel had met him at a Trump rally in Arizona, ranting about a conspiracy theory involving Hillary Clinton and a cabal of satanic paedophiles plotting to steal the 2020
2. Sex, Lies, and… a Videotape
QAnon and the plot to break reality...Gabriel Gatehouse discovers a real conspiracy called The Arkansas Project. The aim is to inject lurid tales about the Clintons into the mainstream American press in the 1990s. These stories spin off in different directions. Down one road lie sex scandals and eventually impeachment proceedings. But thanks to an Evangelical coalition the story goes off in anothe
3. The Basement
QAnon and the plot to break reality...A severely disabled boy from upstate New York is shocked when his online community of video game fans is flooded with porn. He gets sucked into a toxic world of mostly young men stuck in their parents’ basements, making memes out of snippets of popular culture and Nazi symbols. He becomes a major figure in a dark new counterculture germinating on a niche websi
4. Q Drops
QAnon and the plot to break reality...In Oct 2017 Donald Trump says something weird in a room full of military figures: “Maybe this is the calm before the storm.” A few weeks later a poster on 4chan who calls himself Q starts to tell a crazy story about a coming storm, in which Trump is engaged in an epic battle against a cabal of satanic paedophiles who have hijacked the American Republic. A grou
5. Blowback
QAnon and the plot to break reality...A British spy is hired to dig dirt on Donald Trump’s Russia connections. His sources tell him Trump is a Russian agent, a puppet of the Kremlin. America is gripped by this story. Half are convinced the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians in order to defeat Hillary Clinton. But the other half believes the investigations into Russian collusion are a hoax,
6. The Usual Suspects
QAnon and the plot to break reality...Donald Trump’s fantasy about a vast conspiracy to steal the 2020 election merges with the fantasy of QAnon, about a looming showdown against the deep state cabal of satanic paedophiles. After the storming of the Capitol in Washington DC, major figures from the QAnon movement gather in Dallas, Texas. Gabriel Gatehouse gets inside their conference to try to figu
7. Welcome to the Future
QAnon and the plot to break reality...The Q Shaman, the man with the furs and horns who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, is in jail. The movement he came to symbolise appears defeated. But in a small South Carolina seaside town, ‘establishment’ Republicans are fighting a losing battle for the soul of their party, after one of the bloggers who mainstreamed the QAnon conspiracy theory has bee
8. Epilogue
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 realit
The Mid-Terms: 1. Groomers
As America goes out to vote for the first time since the tumultuous aftermath of the 2020 election, Gabriel Gatehouse is back in the deep undergrowth of the US political scene, in a bid to understand where the dark energy underpinning the January 6 assault on the Capitol is going now.Some of the energy from the QAnon conspiracy theory about a satanic cabal of paedophiles is morphing into a grassro
The Mid-Terms: 2. The Regime
When Gabriel Gatehouse is reporting on the aftermath of the presidential election in 2020, and trying to understand the motivations behind QAnon, he comes across people who believe another conspiracy theory. It’s about a laptop which Hunter Biden, the son of the Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, had supposedly left in a computer repair shop in Delaware. The laptop allegedly contains dam
The Louis Theroux Interview
Louis Theroux interviews Gabriel Gatehouse about the aftermath of the 2021 Capitol riots, QAnon, and the latest twists in the plot to break reality.
Producer: Lucy Proctor
Welcome Back
A vast new conspiracy movement has gripped America. That weird story we were looking into last time - about Hillary Clinton and a cabal of satanic paedophiles – that’s morphed into something bigger and perhaps more consequential. Join us as we go through the looking glass, into a world where nothing is as it seems, where the storming of the Capitol on January 6 2021 was a piece of theatre, the ins
1. The Yogi
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 sin
2. Flight 007
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
3. The Enemy Within
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 peop
4. The Jump
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
5. The Photocopier
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 even
6. Kompromat
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
7. Wonderland
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
8. The Last Election…?
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 Vado
Inauguration Bonus
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.
Inauguration: Live Q&A
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.
Live at Hay Festival
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
Trailer
QAnon and the plot to break reality.A year on from the Capitol Insurrection in Washington DC on 6 January 2021, Gabriel Gatehouse journeys into the dark undergrowth of modern America. He's looking for the origins of the story that drove the crowds to storm the heart of US democracy. From conspiracy-soaked barrooms in 1990s Arkansas, via spies in hotel rooms in the shadow of the Kremlin, to anarchi
