← Dan Snow's History Hit
Dan Snow's History Hit
The Clinton Body Count to the QAnon Shaman: Conspiracy Theories in American Politics
00:36:34
How conspiracy beliefs have embedded themselves in American culture and the deeper reasons these stories hold such power.
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Gabriel Gatehouse
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Monday.com Representative
Are you a professional pillow fighter? Or a 9 to 5 low cost time travel agent? Or maybe real estate sales on Mars is your profession? It doesn't matter. Whatever it is you do, however Complexplex or intricate, Monday.com can help you organize, orchestrate and make it more efficient. Monday.com is the 1 centralized platform for everything work related and with Monday.com work is just easier. Monday.com for whatever you run. Go to Monday.com to learn more.
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- [01:34]
Dan Snow
Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's history Hit. We are living in the age of conspiracy theories. Whether it's the moon landings, the death of Jeffrey Epstein, Covid Trump and the various assassination attempts made against him. Pizzagate, P. Diddy, the Cambridges, you name it. People have just lost trust in the media, traditional institutions of education, the government, experts, and yes, even podcasts. In 2023 there was a YouGov poll and it showed that a staggering 41% of Americans agreed that there is, quote, a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together. Frankly folks, I wish that was true. I think we'd be a lot less like to stumble into nuclear oblivion or climate breakdown if that was in fact true. We should be so lucky to have a single group of people ruling the world together. Anyway, conspiracy theories have thrived in the post Internet environment and we're all familiar with things like QAnon and the role that conspiracy theories are playing in the build up to the American election. One of the reasons we're so familiar with it is because the wonderful Gabriel Gatehouse, he is a BBC journalist. He is responsible for the smash hit podcast series the Coming Storm. He's got a new series of that out now. He's got a book out of the same name. He is the man we need to help us navigate through this new world that we find ourselves living in. There is no one better to chronicle this era, this era of conspiracy theorizing that we live in now. Enjoy.
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Gabriel Gatehouse
T minus 10.
- [03:11]
Ryan Reynolds
Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king.
- [03:15]
Gabriel Gatehouse
No black white unity till their dispersed and black unit never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower.
- [03:29]
Dan Snow
Gabriel Gatehouse, welcome to the podcast.
- [03:32]
Gabriel Gatehouse
I'm very excited to be here. Thank you, Dan.
- [03:35]
Dan Snow
I think unfortunately for people, even though you and I are in the prime of life, we do have to accept the 1990s is kind of history. So it is worth talking about on this podcast. I'm fascinated by the 90s. Not just because I was young and my knees didn't hurt then, but because different versions of the future seemed. Well, one version of the future seemed like the one we were heading to. But in retrospect, things started to diverge in the 90s, didn't they?
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Gabriel Gatehouse
They diverged and they diverged beneath the surface because we all thought.
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Dan Snow
I didn't notice.
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Gabriel Gatehouse
Yeah, we all thought it was the triumph of liberalism, it was the end of history. It was the decade where nothing happened, but everything happened.
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Dan Snow
And the Internet would be this great, sort of. The only interesting thing going on was the Internet. That seems useful. And it will be this gigantic engine of democracy and enlightenment for people.
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Gabriel Gatehouse
Right. The great leveler. And everyone would have all information at their fingertips. And what we discovered was that they did have all information at their fingertips, but very little understanding or knowledge. It's like information has exploded but knowledge has diminished.
- [04:42]
Dan Snow
That's a nice way of looking at it. And what do you identify? What should we be looking at in the 90s?
- [04:48]
Gabriel Gatehouse
So as part of this book and podcast, the Coming Storm, I started. I started to dig into the craziness that is current American politics, which, you know, we saw on January 6, 2021, we saw a mob storm the capital who were at least in part motivated by this idea that American power had been captured by a cabal of Satan worshipping pedophiles. And now, if anything, things have Gone even crazier. And something like 41% of Americans believe that the people who are supposedly in charge of their government are not really in charge. And behind the scenes, shadowy figures are pulling the strings. So I started trying to dig into this and trying to find, if you like, a ground zero moment. Where did this come from? And I alighted on this one character in the 90s, 1993, a guy called Vince Foster, Vincent J. Foster. He's a lawyer from Arkansas. He's an old friend of Bill Clinton's. He and Bill went to the same kindergarten they went to. I need to get the name right. They went to Marie Perkins School for Little Folks in Hope, Arkansas. And in fact, Bill Clinton's later chief of staff in the White House, Mac McClarty, also went to this same kindergarten. So it's probably the most powerful kindergarten in all of American history.
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Dan Snow
The Eton of America.
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Gabriel Gatehouse
Exactly. And so he's an Arkansas lawyer. And when Bill Clinton goes to the White House in 1993, Bill takes a bunch of his old Arkansas buddies with him, and Vince Foster is one of them. Now, Vince has been working with the Clintons for decades. He, in fact, worked with Hillary Clinton at the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas, which was this big institution in Little Rock. So he's kind of woven into the fabric of the Clintons. And in the summer of 1993, so midway through the first year of Bill Clinton's term, everything is rosy. History has come to an end. The triumph of liberalism, this new administration. Vince Foster's body is found dead in a park just outside Washington, D.C. inside the administration. You know, it's a big blow. It's a painful moment for the Clintons, For Bill and Hillary, he's a personal friend. Nobody can understand it. Nobody saw it coming, as so often with suicides, and nobody can quite understand why he did it. But, you know, it's ruled a suicide, and people move on. That's on the surface, beneath the surface, these conspiracy theories start germinating. People start talking about how Vince Foster was seen in this place or that place, how he was actually killed in a safe house belonging to Hillary Clinton somewhere in Virginia, rolled up in a carpet and dumped in the park. The investigators, to be fair to them, there's all sorts of inconsistencies in the accounts. Either he was found with a gun or he wasn't found with a gun. You know, there are things to go at, but these conspiracy theories germinate, and they really take hold. And it's the beginning of what? If you spend any time on the sort of more conspiratorial end of the American political spectrum, you will inevitably hear mention of something called the Clinton body count. And it's this theory that the Clintons, Bill and Hillary, in their meteoric and unstoppable rise to power, have climbed over a mountain of dead bodies. And Vince Foster's not chronologically the first, but he's kind of the most important.
- [08:09]
Dan Snow
And you point out in the book and the podcast that actually there have been several investigations, and they have all, including the independent counsel, Kenneth Starr, who we might come to later on, but they all have ruled that it was suicide. You're not suggesting foul play with you?
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Gabriel Gatehouse
Yeah, I'm not suggesting for one minute. I mean, there are all sorts of inconsistencies in the investigation, but there is no evidence that anyone killed him. Right. The most likely explanation for these inconsistencies are that the people who first investigated it with the parks police, because he was found in a national park, they're not really used to investigating murders or dead bodies, let alone those belonging to high powered White House lawyers. So, you know, maybe they. They touched the body, moved it before the people with the cameras could arrive, and then they tried to. Oh, they realized they'd messed up and they tried to. So that's the most likely explanation for these inconsistencies. There is no evidence that he was murdered.
- [09:00]
Dan Snow
Why the Clintons? Was there something particular about them that just got the hackles up of their political opponents, or were they just in power? After the Cold War, people in America were looking for a fight. Consensus was breaking down. The generation of largely men who'd served alongside each other on the battlefields of World War II was sort of leaving politics younger, hungrier people coming in. The Internet was starting to land like, what is going on and why this kind of frenzy about the Clintons?
- [09:28]
Gabriel Gatehouse
I mean, I think in a way, those two things are the same, right? They were in the right place at the right time. They were there at this turning point in history. Hillary Clinton was this strong, powerful woman. When she moves into the White House, she's definitely not content with, you know, picking out new curtains for the East Wing. She makes herself an office in the West Wing, the political heart of the White House, and she is there to make policy. She starts getting involved in healthcare policy, remember, in this kind of disastrous effort to try to sort out American health care. And so immediately, she starts making enemies. And it's quite clear from early on that actually a lot of the focus of the ire of the discombobulation of the conspiracies is Hillary, not Bill.
- [10:12]
Dan Snow
And is the world of broadcast changing? I mean, we've got sort of the precursor to the Internet, if you like, is sort of radio.
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Gabriel Gatehouse
Talk radio is huge.
- [10:21]
Dan Snow
Yeah. Is there now a platform for these ideas to spread?
- [10:25]
Gabriel Gatehouse
Right. So you've got talk radio and you've got figures like Rush Limbaugh and people like that who were instrumental in spreading the Vince Foster conspiracy theory. But at the same time you have got the actual Internet. Remember that? 1993, it's literally just beginning. By about 1995, you've got chat rooms. And all of this is. I spoke to a guy who worked in the White House at this time, and he said there were only about half a dozen computers in the whole of the White House complex, which is massive, that were actually connected to the World Wide Web. And he had this suspicion that there was something going on there, something he couldn't see. He recalls going one Saturday afternoon into the Old Executive Office Building, which is part of the White House administration, but not actually in that building, and he goes up to this tiny little windowless room, like a broom cupboard, more or less, where there's a handful of computers that are plugged into this thing called the World Wide Web. And he, he descend into this kind of labyrinthine rabbit warren of chat rooms where they're discussing the Clinton body count, these alleged murders. It's not just Vince Foster. Now there are stories about some young boys who were found dead on the railway tracks in the 80s in Arkansas and how this proved that Bill Clinton was involved in drug running to Central America and wrapped up in Iran Contra. And like everything just spreads, right? Everything is connected. And he comes out of this room into the kind of sunlight, a Washington Saturday afternoon, and he's blinking and he realizes everything is changing, right? This whole kind of top down method of communication that we've had, the White House press corps, where, you know, briefings will be given and information will be disseminated, will then be printed in the New York Times and the Washington Post. And that is coming to an end. And in a way, the people out there beneath the surface who've been talking about all this stuff and listening to talk radio, they are taking control of the means of production of of story, right? They can start creating their own stories. This is the whirlwind we're all in today.
- [12:31]
Dan Snow
This is the start of that whirlwind. Funny if I had a similar experience, my first experience of using chat rooms, I had the same thing. I suddenly was sort of hit by this tidal wave of. I sort of typed in Napoleon or something very innocent. And I was suddenly this door opened a crack and then I, I closed it and went to the pub. I think.
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Gabriel Gatehouse
Where did you get. Because you could probably quite quickly end up in like Napoleon, Nietzsche and end up in some kind of pretty ra called far right spaces, I would imagine.
- [12:58]
Dan Snow
Yes, it was definitely about the great man, the Superman, his role in bending history with his will. And people either will have heard this through your brilliant pods or they may have heard Donald Trump referred to this in 2016, 2017 as well. So this is something that in that ecosystem, that conspiracy theory is still of great relevance.
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Gabriel Gatehouse
Yes, yes. Donald Trump referenced it in 2016. I mean, he didn't go all out, but it was certainly all over the Internet. It sort of seemed like the origin story. If you think, how is it that that there is this crazy narrative that has taken hold of America, that Hillary Clinton is at the head of a cabal of satanic pedophiles that is secretly ruling America. And in that narrative, the Vince Foster story was kind of like ground zero, was the origin story of how, of how you get to this idea that the Clintons are criminals, that they're violent. And of course, everything with Bill Clinton said certainly was very deeply connected to sex because of the very well publicized sex scandals that took hold later in his administration. Most famously, of course, Monica Lewinsky, which whatever you say about the Monica Lewinsky story was on both counts a consensual sexual affair. But there were other stories which Bill Clinton has always denied, but which nevertheless are out there in the ether of sexual harassment. Paula Jones, who accused him of sexual harassment, he settled that for $800,000 without admitting liability. And then of course, there's Juanita Broderick, who accused him of raping her in an Arkansas hotel room in 1978, didn't want to tell her story, but was forced to by the Kenneth Starr inquiry. And then that story was kind of buried because it didn't fit the narrative. What as Juanita told me, this is during the impeachment at the end of the Clinton presidency and Ken Starr was looking for obstruction of justice. Had Bill Clinton lied or offered anyone else any kind of inducement to lie on his behalf over the Lewinsky affair. And Juanita said, no, they didn't. So, so her story kind of got buried. But this idea of kind of sexual violence attached itself to the clintons in the 90s.
- [15:17]
Dan Snow
And then tell me about making documentary, so called documentary about this. And Cliff Jackson because this link is so fascinating, I find.
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Gabriel Gatehouse
So while I was out in Arkansas, people kept telling me, you've got to go and find this guy, Cliff Jackson. It was a small town personal injury attorney. I tried calling him on the number that was listed on Google. It just kept going to answer phone. I drove to the address that was given online. It was a sort of shuttered lawyer's office on the outskirts of Hot Springs, Arkansas, on the shores of Lake Catherine or Lake Hamilton. Anyway, you can picture it, this sort of hot, steamy southern place, a sort of a holiday resort, but in Arkansas. Somebody once described Arkansas to me as it's the south, but without the charm. So. So I go there and I finally find Cliff Jackson. He really doesn't want to talk because he's known as Bill Clinton's best friend who stabbed him in the back. Anyway, I twist his arm. I say, I've come all the way from England to talk to you. And I twist his arm and we end up in rib joint on a strip mall on the outskirts of town. And he tells me this story about how he and Bill Clinton met at Oxford in 1968. Right? So the height of the Vietnam War. They're both scholarship boys, they love playing basketball and they love politics. Bill's a Democrat, Cliff is a Republican, but it doesn't matter, you know, there they are in England at this very heightened political time, and they bond. And at this time, Bill Clinton gets a draft notice for the Vietnam War. And of course he doesn't want to serve, he's very against the Vietnam War. But also, you know, he's got his life to live. And so Cliff Jackson helps him get round it, you know, in a legal way. You know, hundreds of thousands of American men got round the draft through various connections or schemes or whatever. Anyway, Cliff helps him to avoid it. And then when Bill is running for the presidency, he's asked about this draft notice. And Cliff sees his friend Bill saying, oh, I never got the draft. I never got a draft notice. And Cliff's like, hold on, that's not quite right. I remember you got the draft, I helped you. I wrote letters to, you know, a family friend who was in the military in Arkansas. And we kind of figured it out for you. I got the sense there was definitely a sort of an element of jealousy and rivalry going here. You know, here's a guy who's been relatively successful as a lawyer, but his friend is running for the President of the United States. And he's only in his 40s still, so, you know, there's an imbalance of power. There's. And Cliff, he called it crossing the Rubicon. He said I had to decide whether or not I was going to betray my friend Bill Clinton and go public with what I knew. He had letters and he said he knew he would be crossing the Rubicon just like Julius Caesar, and that there would be no going back. So he sleeps on it and the next morning he wakes up and he decides to tell his story. So he tells his story about how Bill Clinton actually did get the draft and avoided it. And it's a minor thing and it doesn't affect Bill's campaign. Bill gets elected and it's all fine. But from that moment on, Cliff Jackson becomes the go to guy for all of the Clintons enemies who want to find dirt on him in Arkansas. And what neither Bill nor Cliff know at the time is that there is a project going on at the time, well funded by Clinton's enemies, by this heir, Richard Mellon Scaife, who's a sort of heir to an oil and banking fortune. And he's funding something called, called the Arkansas Project. And it is basically a project specifically dedicated to digging up dirt on Bill Clinton. Sending reporters into Arkansas and digging up stories, true or false doesn't really matter. And putting them out into this new media ecosystem, the talk radio stations, the Internet, wherever, it'll stick to the wall. And so Cliff Jackson becomes the guy who introduces reporters to some Arkansas state troopers who tell all of these kind of very lurid tales about Bill Clinton's sexual adventures. And eventually these stories start getting wrapped in. Some of these stories are, you know, they're not fantasies, right? They're true. Bill Clinton was up to all sorts of sexual shenanigans. But they get mixed in through Cliff, who's kind of purveying these stories to journalists. They get mixed in with the wild conspiracy theories about the murders, about Vince Foster, about the boys on the train track, about the drugs running through an airport in Mena, Arkansas. And by about the mid-90s, 95, 96, there's a VHS tape doing the rounds in the country. It's almost like this quote unquote documentary that has smushed all of these stories together into this kind of crazy conspiracy theory story about how the Clintons are this crime family leaving a trail of dead bodies in their wake, you know, high on power and sex and corruption. This videotape is doing the rounds and, and people are copying it and it's going from VHS player to VHS player. And this narrative is implanting itself beneath the surface of America. This is all pretty much invisible to the people in Washington on the coast, the people who read the New York Times or the Washington Post or the LA Times and get those delivered to their door every morning. Nobody knows about this, but in between, this narrative is doing the rounds and it really takes hold. It sort of sits there beneath the surface and festers and then explodes back up into the open again. When Hillary Clinton starts running for president in 2016.
- [20:51]
Dan Snow
Listen to Dan Snow's history. We're talking about conspiracy theories More Coming up.
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Dan Snow
Yeah.
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Gabriel Gatehouse
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Monday.com Representative
Are you a professional pillow fighter or a 9 to 5 low cost time travel agent? Or maybe real estate sales on Mars is your profession? It doesn't matter whatever it is you do, however Complexplex or intricate, Monday.com can help you organize, orchestrate and make it more efficient. Monday.com is the 1 centralized platform for everything work related and with Monday.com work is just easier. Monday.com for whatever you run. Go to Monday.com to learn more.
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- [23:10]
Dan Snow
And you've traveled across America, You've looked into these conspiracy theories. You've hunted down the people at their center. Why are we so happy to believe them? Sorry to keep going back to technology, but is it because our brains are so naive? I've watched members of my family, indeed, I've had this experience myself. If you're trained to sort of see a well printed and formatted piece of paper and a book has come from a publishing house or a newspaper, you're tempted to believe what it says. It carries authority did the Internet and the ability of just anyone who is anybody to sort of format and make things and give them grand titles like Breaking News Daily. Were our brains naive to it? Or is there something deeper here that we are just drawn to conspiracy because we like to think that the world is. I sometimes think it's because the unbearable truth is that if no one's in charge and everyone's just sort of chaotically hurtling around the sun on this bit of dust, that it's rather more scary than Rupert Murdoch being in charge.
- [24:06]
Gabriel Gatehouse
Absolutely. Absolutely. I think both of those things are true, right? Especially for the boomer generation, maybe the generation that's one generation older than us. Dan, these are people who grew up, as you say, if something was published, then it had the imprimatur of authority, right? And suddenly all kinds of nonsense is being published on the Internet. You know, I've noticed this with my parents sometimes, like during COVID they'd be like, but there's this doctor, I found him on Facebook, he says that X, Y and Z, and it's like, yeah, but is he. What's he a doctor of? And so our generation above are naturally inclined to believe things, as you say, that are published. I think the young generation, Dan, and this should give us hope, are frankly a lot more savvy about this stuff. But I think the wider thing that you point out and that you allude to is definitely true. We seek to understand the world around us. And especially in confusing and chaotic and uncertain times, we seek even more to understand it. Because if we can understand why things are happening, it gives us a sense of agency. And sometimes, frankly, things are just not explicable. Right. We don't know why things are happening. I mean, this was definitely the case with Vince Foster, right? I broke my head on that story because I. I did want to give them the time of day, you know, so there's this conspiracy theory. He was murdered, okay? Let me look into it. Right? And you start looking and there are so many contradictory things that if you were that way inclined, you would be inclined to believe that there was some kind of dodgy shenanigans because you want an explanation, right? And so you have to be careful not to grasp on things for which there is no evidence in order to try to make things make sense.
- [25:48]
Dan Snow
Listen to that, kids. From your mouth, from your lips to God's ears, or whatever the expression is. But it's the confidence in a way, isn't it? Sort of knowing the inside.
- [25:56]
Gabriel Gatehouse
That's right.
- [25:56]
Dan Snow
And then making other people feel a bit naive in some ways.
- [25:59]
Gabriel Gatehouse
Knowledge is power. Knowledge is power and knowledge is control. And you can control your life in uncertain times. I spoke to this old grizzled, gray haired, long in the tooth FBI agent who'd investigated the satanic panic back in the 80s 80s, which was this narrative that swept America, that satanic ritual abuse was going on everywhere, especially in daycare centers. And he had figured out from just looking at a lot of these cases, he said, that there is a tendency to grasp for explanations when your life feels out of control. And he had this phrase, I'll never forget it. He said, the greater the need, the greater the tendency. And you know, there is a great need right now. And so a great tendency.
- [26:49]
Dan Snow
You extraordinarily met the. We can come onto Qanon and the Qanon shaman who you met, tell me all about him. People remember him as being one of the most visible icons of the January 6th insurrection storming of the capital. You actually met him before and after.
- [27:06]
Gabriel Gatehouse
I met him before, sadly, he didn't want to meet with me after. He was the inciting incident for this whole journey that I've been on. So this was a couple of days after the 2020 presidential election. I was in Phoenix, Arizona, outside the counting center. The voting was done, but they hadn't called it yet. They were still counting the votes. It was complicated, it was tense, it was close. And there were these protests across the country, but in Arizona, particularly acute. And I saw go to this protest. I'm reporting for News Night. I'm a news reporter, a TV news reporter. So it's all about the pictures. And it's very colorful, as America usually is. You know, you've got colorful people with great stories to tell who are good at telling them and not shy about it. I love America, absolutely love it. And I'm there outside the counting house and there's this guy with horns on his head and furs draped around his shoulders and kind of tattooed chest and stars and stripes painted on his face. And I think this guy looks great. I go over and talk to him. So I have a chat with him and it quite quickly becomes clear that he has basically, it felt like he'd eaten an encyclopedia of conspiracy theories for breakfast and was regurgitating them in a random order at around brunch time. So, you know, there was everything there, but somewhere in the mix was this story about how Hillary Clinton and her cabal of satanic pedophiles had taken over America and were trying to steal the election, which it turned out was QAnon, which I didn't really know much about. And he had this spear with him with a sign on it that on one side read hold the Line Patriots. And then he flipped it around and it said, Q sent me. I don't really know what this QAnon stuff was. And I remember saying to my cameraman, look, this guy looks fantastic. He's going to make great telly. But it's irresponsible to stick this guy on tv. He's obviously a fringe character. His views are fringed. It wouldn't be responsible. It wouldn't be right to put this guy on Newsnight. Right? You know, we're a serious news organization here. So I didn't film an interview with him. Two months later, I'm back in London watching this incredible world changing event as a mob storms the Capitol trying to overturn a Democratic election in the United States. And I see him. There he is, the same guy with the same horns, the same furs, the same spear. He's in the Capitol, he's in the Senate chamber. He's got himself behind the desk that was until minutes earlier occupied by the Vice President who's just fled in fear of his life. And he's writing a note on it and it says, it's only a matter of time. Justice is coming. Right? So this guy, I completely underestimated the extent to which this guy's narrative, the narrative that had captured his mind, had also captured the rest of America. And in a sense, this whole book, the Coming Storm, this whole podcast, was an attempt to make up for that incredible journalistic fail.
- [30:05]
Dan Snow
What took him there. Having deconstructed that, why was he there wearing that, writing that on that day?
- [30:13]
Gabriel Gatehouse
I would like to just make a quick detour. This guy, his name is Jacob Chansley. Jake Angeli. Jake Chansley was actually a really nice guy. He went to the Capitol on January 6th. He wasn't violent. He didn't, he didn't hit anyone. In fact, there's video of him telling other insurrectionists or members of the mob or whatever you want to call them not to steal a congressional muffin from a kitchenette. You know, so he's like, he's a law and order guy. He's a gentle guy. He's obviously got a lot of kind of strange ideas, but he's not a bad man. And he went to jail for like two and a half years. So that's like one thing to say is that, you know, in this narrative in America that's taken hold now where, where these Jan Sixers, quote, unquote, are political prisoners, quote unquote, part of the D.C. gulag, which, if you spend any time in Magaworld, you'll hear that narrative a lot. This is the kind of thing they're talking about. People like Jake Chansley, the QAnon Shaman who went to jail for quite a long time for not being violent and actually doing something that their president had told them to do. Right. Their commander in chief, Donald Trump had said, it's been stolen. We're going to walk to the Capitol and we're going to fight like hell. You know, so in a way, I kind of, I sympathize. Obviously there were some people who planned this and were violent and there are some people who, you know, really didn't do very much. And I kind of feel like some of them did get a bit of a bad rap. These people are often known as truth seekers and they, they spend time on the Internet, quote, unquote, doing their research, you'll be able to find all kinds. You can go down the rabbit hole and if you're naturally inclined to mistrust authority as Jacob Chansley was, the Q shame, as for example, Bobby Kennedy Jr. Is like, if you look at Bobby Kennedy Jr. Who was, for want of a better word, the conspiracy theory candidate in this upcoming president presidential election, here's a guy who saw his uncle murdered in murky circumstances in 1963 when he was nine, his father murdered in murky circumstances in 1968 when he was 14, and rightly believes that the government isn't telling him the whole truth about it. So here's another person who has good reason to believe that everything he's being told is a lie, right? So you could psychologically understand where these people are coming trouble.
- [32:24]
Dan Snow
You listen to Dan Snow's history more after this.
- [32:33]
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- [33:03]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [33:43]
Dan Snow
Where are we going with all this? As you said, the younger generation are more savvy. Is this just the gigantic convulsions of the boomers and Gen Xers who were given this, the most powerful communication tool in the history of the universe, and it's been a few little bumps in the road. Are things going to smooth out or is this our future?
- [34:03]
Gabriel Gatehouse
I am deeply pessimistic.
- [34:05]
Dan Snow
Great.
- [34:05]
Gabriel Gatehouse
But I'm also wary of imposing my deep pessimism on everybody else because I have spent so much time in this kind of weird world of conspiracy theories that it's quite hard for me to feel sunny about the future because I feel like this stuff has taken hold. It's not a blip. It's getting deeper and it's getting more entrenched now. And I don't think it is just the boomers and the Gen Xers. I think lots of young people. At a Bobby Kennedy rally, for example, this past May, I got speaking to a guy who said, oh, you do know about the Titanic, don't you? I was like, oh God, what now? And he told me that the Titanic was sunk by. I think he said it was J.P. morgan. This is his story, right? J.P. morgan was supposed to be on the Titanic but canceled at the last minute. It was his own ship. He had sunk his own ship because three people who were against the establishment of the Federal Reserve, which he wanted established were on that boat. So he sunk his ship. This is a young guy, youngish couple.
- [35:10]
Dan Snow
Ah, yes. Killing Astor and Guggenheim and stuff.
- [35:13]
Gabriel Gatehouse
Right?
- [35:14]
Dan Snow
Exactly. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I have come across that have you come across?
- [35:16]
Gabriel Gatehouse
I'd never come across. I was like. My jaw was on the floor. I was like, this is a brilliant theory.
- [35:21]
Dan Snow
Well, listen, if you ever want to do a podcast series on the various conspiracies around the Titanic, there's some absolute bangers out there.
- [35:27]
Gabriel Gatehouse
Yeah, there's an idea. Then maybe I'll do that. Anyway, my feeling is that if you boil down QAnon to its basic components, like if you take it literally, a cabal of satanic paedophiles led by Hillary Clinton is running America, secretly running America, it's obviously nonsense, right? But if you boil it down to its sort of essential elements, what people who believe in QAnon are essentially saying is that the people who really run the world, the people with the real power, are possibly not the ones that I vote for every four or five years. They might be people that. Whose names aren't that familiar to us. Maybe they are familiar. Maybe they're like Elon Musk. But maybe they're like people who, you know, are very powerful in the financial system and run the world, but we don't know who they are, and we certainly can't vote for them or elect them. Right. So this narrative has really, really taken hold now. Now that QAnon is sort of receding into the distance, this is basically the narrative that is taking hold, that it's a cabal of politicians from both sides of the aisle, Democrats and Republicans are colluding with people in big business, finance, and big tech to basically run the world and screw the little people. And, you know, in a way, they're kind of right. And hence this idea that all is not as it seems, which is what the second series of the. Of the Coming Storm is really digging into. So I think this is getting deeper and more entrenched. And I think there are genuinely a bunch of people, some of them in big tech, who are on record as saying that they don't think democracy is a very good system and that we could get a lot more done if we just scrap democracy. And so this is true. There's this character called Peter thiel, who founded PayPal with Elon Musk, set up Palantir, this kind of big data surveillance organization. First person to invest in Facebook. He's on record as saying, the great thing about technology is that when it's done well, technology is anti democratic. You don't have to sit around waiting for somebody to give you permission to change the world. You could just go and change it. And that's what these Silicon Valley Guys really want to do some of them. So I think this is where we're heading. But maybe I'm down my own rabbit hole, Dan. I don't know. Pull me out.
- [37:39]
Dan Snow
What's it like being constantly or constantly swimming in those waters?
- [37:43]
Gabriel Gatehouse
I have two kids, I have a six year old and a two year old who pull me out of the rabbit hole at regular moments of the day when they need feeding and bathing and just general attention.
- [37:53]
Dan Snow
So Julia Donaldson Books is what keeps you pointing to true north.
- [37:57]
Gabriel Gatehouse
Exactly. I turn away from Vince Foster and get onto AA Milne. I mean, that pulls me into the real world. My mental health is fine. I am genuinely fascinated by this and I'm genuinely interested in speaking to all these people. And I would just like to say again that the people who often are the conveyors of these conspiracy theories often genuinely believe in themselves. Right. Some of them are total troublemakers. Right. And I think some of the people who pushed QAnon and created it were real troublemakers and they were trying to do what they called meme warfare. But a lot of the people who believe it, they are genuine and decent and good people.
- [38:36]
Dan Snow
Well, listen, we have them in our family and our extended networks.
- [38:39]
Gabriel Gatehouse
Exactly. And we've got to be careful not to get sucked into the culture wars around this. You know, since COVID there's been so much kind of judgmentalism about people who don't believe the same things as we do. And I think, you know, we need to be a bit careful about that and a bit understanding about people and also recognize the fallibility of our own assumptions. I think that's always very important. I like to sometimes project myself 500 years into the future and wonder which of the certainties that I live with now that I base my life on are going to turn out to be total nonsense.
- [39:12]
Dan Snow
Yeah. That is the strange area in which we find ourselves. You mentioned that expression, do your own research. That's become. Well, it's become a sort of a slur. And yet in the 90s, that's what we all told ourselves was so great about the Internet, it would allow us all to do our own research, to learn as if we were all undergraduates or studying arts and humanities the rest of our lives. And there is something in that that is important. You don't want to take your political opinions from the editorial page of a tabloid or a paper. And yet it's also kind of metastasized into something else. It's so difficult.
- [39:44]
Gabriel Gatehouse
The common touchstones of our information ecosystem have become so diversified 2030 years ago, as you said, the common touchstones of our information ecosystem were either what we could see in our daily lives. So the experience of ourselves and our friends or the editorials of the newspaper or whatever was on the BBC News at 10. And you know, these people who decided what the national conversation was, that's all out the window. Window. It's been broken open for good and for ill. Yeah.
- [40:13]
Dan Snow
Well, that is where we have to leave it. For good and for ill. The pieces are still flying through the air. Who knows when and if they'll assemble themselves in a different pattern, a different shape. Gabriel Geos, thank you very much. Everyone knows what your brilliant podcast called, but tell everyone what the pod is called and the book and all that kind of thing.
- [40:29]
Gabriel Gatehouse
So the pod and the book are called the same thing and it's called the Coming Storm. It's still coming. They're both out, basically. Yeah. You can read them, you can listen to them and enjoy them.
- [40:38]
Dan Snow
Immerse yourself in it, if you dare. You know what? I hope in 15 years time you're still flogging the Coming Storm franchise. Because then I can say to you, well, when is that storm coming?
- [40:46]
Gabriel Gatehouse
The storm won't have come, right? And we'll all still be here.
- [40:49]
Dan Snow
Well, I know, but I can say, well, maybe Gabriel Gate House, maybe we can surmise the storm isn't coming. We can just calm the hell down.
- [40:56]
Gabriel Gatehouse
Maybe I was wrong. Wouldn't that be great?
- [40:59]
Dan Snow
Well, no, I think so far most you've been saying has come to pass, that's for sure. Thank you very much for all the amazing work you do and the humor and the insight with which you executed. It's wonderful.
- [41:10]
Gabriel Gatehouse
It's been a delight. Thanks, Dan.
- [41:20]
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Gabriel Gatehouse
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Ryan Reynolds
Do you wonder about what's next in tech? Join us on Conversations with Leaders, a podcast from Amazon Web Services, and hear predictions from top minds in the industry like Vijay Chatur, co founder and CEO.
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Gabriel Gatehouse
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Ryan Reynolds
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