Thread by @ggatehouse

For the past year I’ve been working on a huge project about what happened on Jan 6 last year. It’s a podcast series for @BBCRadio4 and @bbcworldservice called The Coming Storm and it lands tomorrow. You can listen to a trailer here bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/…

THREAD

When a crowd of angry Trump supporters invaded the US Capitol I saw someone I recognised

The man with the horns on his head was Jacob Chansley, aka the Q Shaman. I’d met him two months earlier in Arizona while covering the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. You can see a brief shot of him 45 secs into my @BBCNewsnight report here

The story he told seemed too niche, too crazy to put in a news report. He believed a cabal of satanic paedophiles had stolen the presidential election in a vast plot to deny Donald Trump a second term. So I didn’t bother interviewing him on camera. Big mistake

That story was the rocket fuel the propelled the crowd into the Capitol that day, as they attempted to overturn the results of a democratic election. I set out to uncover the tangled roots of this narrative.

I started out looking at this sprawling conspiracy theory-of-everything known as QAnon, whose adherents believe the 2020 election was a vast Deep State conspiracy to oust Donald Trump from the presidency. But then I realised I was chasing something bigger

It’s been a wild ride, from conspiracy-soaked barrooms in Arkansas in the 1990s to the dark chat rooms of the early internet, via a glitzy hotel room in Moscow in the shadow of the Kremlin. Was there really a plot? A plot within a plot…?

The Coming Storm is a quest to understand the power of story, and the fragility of American democracy.

January 6th wasn’t the culmination of the turbulent Trump years. It was just the beginning. I hope you’ll listen. bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/…