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 institutions of the state are a façade and behind the scenes, hidden hands are believed to be pulling the strings.

Listen to new episodes first on BBC Sounds from Tuesday 10 September 2024.

Producer: Lucy Proctor

Louis Theroux interviews Gabriel Gatehouse about the aftermath of the 2021 Capitol riots, QAnon, and the latest twists in the plot to break reality.

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 damning information about the Biden family. Gabriel thinks it’s fake news and ignores it at the time. But that is a mistake.

The laptop turns out to be real, even if some of the claims about its contents are not. Silicon Valley and perhaps even the FBI seem to have tried to suppress the story, while the mainstream media refused to run it. For some, it is now powerful evidence that the Biden administration, and the entire establishment, is a regime that must be toppled.

Producer: Lucy Proctor

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 grassroots political movement against ‘groomers’ – the idea that LGBTQI+ sex educators and trans healthcare advocates are indoctrinating young people into a sexualised culture.

The battleground is America’s school boards and the prize could be a galvanised Republican base with a new crusade. At a conference in Miami of thinkers shaping the future ideas of the right, Gabriel finds the issue top of the agenda.

And across the country, a slate of candidates linked to QAnon is running for office – how will they fare?

Producer: Lucy Proctor

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

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 been elected to a powerful local position.

Across America, people who believe Donald Trump’s parallel narrative about a stolen election are trying to take over the levers of democracy. Was this the plan all along?

Producer: Lucy Proctor

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 figure out who is now controlling this parallel reality. And he confronts General Flynn who is calling for his ‘digital soldiers’ to take over the country from the bottom up.

Producer: Lucy Proctor

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, a conspiracy by the establishment to unseat a democratically elected president.

The QAnon community takes up this second narrative, in which a renegade General becomes a martyr and a figurehead.

Producer: Lucy Proctor

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 group of bloggers mainstream the theory and it starts having a life of its own with real world consequences. Qanon is born. But who is directing it?

Producer: Lucy Proctor

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 website called 4chan.

As the 2016 Presidential election approaches, a story grows on 4chan about Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, paedophilia, and references to pizza. The story bursts out into the real world when a man walks into a pizza restaurant with a gun.

Producer: Lucy Proctor