Gabriel Gatehouse The Coming Storm: A Journey into the Heart of the Conspiracy Machine

About

Is this how democracy dies?

This talk is based on the book The Coming Storm which is Gabriel Gatehouses brilliant exploration of how conspiracy theories are tearing America apart. Its a story that takes you down a rabbit hole - one that both the US as a nation and he as a journalist fell through - to unpack an epochal shift in political culture that starts in the earliest years of the Clinton administration and reached a crescendo on 6 January 2021 with the storming of the US Capitol. But that event wasnt the wild finale of a chaotic Trump presidency many hoped for - it was only the beginning.

This talk gets under the skin of these conspiracy theories to show us a radical new kind of politics emerging, a movement that has coalesced around a loose alliance of tech bros, internet trolls and white supremacists. At a perilous moment in the history of American democracy, Gatehouse tells us some dark truths about our present, and provides clues about our future. Louis Theroux describes Gabriel Gatehouse as a brilliant spelunker of the rabbit holes of American political culture. A spellbinding storyteller and reader of the runes of the strange times we live in.

Gabriel Gatehouse is a BBC journalist and broadcaster. He is the former International Editor of Newsnight, and co-host of Ukrainecast on BBC Sounds. Over the past decade and a half, he has reported from almost every conflict around the world, from Ukraine to Syria, Libya to Iraq. He has won numerous awards for his journalism, most recently the 2019 Prix Europa (for The Puppet Master, his five-part investigation into Vladislav Surkov, aka Putins Rasputin) and the 2020 Foreign Press Association award for his coverage of the Hong Kong protests. He has reported extensively from the United States on the rise of Donald Trump. He is the writer and presenter of the hit podcast The Coming Storm', which launched in January 2022 to critical acclaim. It was the most popular BBC podcast in the first quarter of 2022, with around 3 million downloads on BBC Sounds, and more on other platforms such as Spotify and iTunes. It was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2022.

A Q&A Session will follow.