9781785948176 by Smakprov Media AB

THE COMING STORM

‘A spellbinding storyteller and reader of the runes of the strange times we live in.’ LOUIS THEROUX Inside America’s Radical

New Politics of Paranoia

GABRIEL GATEHOUSE

THE COMING STORM

Inside America’s Radical New Politics of Paranoia

GABRIEL GATEHOUSE

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For Afsaneh Gray, who shines her light on the stories I tell, and on my life.

This book evolved out of a radio and podcast series I made for the BBC together with my colleague Lucy Proctor. The journalism we did for that series was a joint endeavour; she was present at many of the weird encounters you will read about, and we spent many fraught hours trying to wrangle the madness into a coherent set of programmes. The volume you are about to read would not exist without her insights, her deep dives into the darker corners of the internet, her camaraderie on the road, her rock-solid editorial nous, and above all her enduring faith in the pot of gold at the end of the rabbit hole.

PART I – FOLLOW THE WHITE RABBIT

II –

PART III – DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

PROLOGUE

CHARLESTON, WEST VIRGINIA, 8 MAY 2024

I pushed through the heavy doors of the campus building and climbed up the stairs. At the top of them was General Michael T. Flynn, a wiry ex-soldier with once-chiselled features and a manic energy. Flynn didn’t like me – I knew that much from our last encounter. He thought I was an agent of the Deep State.

The man who had brought me here was Derrick Evans. Evans had the air of a slightly naughty but good-natured puppy dog. He was also a ‘Jan-sixer’. He had served his time for that, and was now running for a seat in Congress – the very place he had helped overrun nearly four years previously. ‘A storm is coming,’ he had written on his Facebook page. A week later, he boarded a bus and travelled to Washington, DC. On 6 January 2021, as the mob scuﬄed with police outside the Capitol, Evans livestreamed himself shouting, ‘The cops are running, the cops are running!’ Then, as the doors of the Rotunda were prised open, he made his way inside. ‘We’re in! Derrick Evans is in the Capitol!’ he screamed.

Evans spent less than ten minutes inside the Capitol building. He didn’t attack anyone, he didn’t smash anything. In fact, on

the livestream he can be heard shouting, ‘Hey! No destruction of anything. No vandalising property!’ But when he got home, he realised he was probably in trouble. For one thing, he was an elected representative himself; he had only recently taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, as he was sworn in as a member of the West Virginia House of Delegates – a small cog in America’s vast apparatus of democracy. Now, thanks to his own livestream, he was all over social media, among the crowd of enraged Trump supporters trying to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. Also, Derrick had four young kids at home and was facing years behind bars. His wife was pretty furious.

‘I take full responsibility for my actions,’ Evans wrote when he resigned his seat two days later, ‘and deeply regret any hurt, pain or embarrassment I may have caused my family, my friends, constituents and fellow West Virginians.’ In court, he pleaded guilty; the judge, impressed by his contrition, gave him a relatively light sentence: three months in prison.

By the time I met him in Charleston, Derrick Evans was telling a very diﬀerent story – no more Mr Contrite Guy. He and the other Jan-sixers were ‘political prisoners’, he told me, hostages of the ‘Biden regime’. ‘We’re collateral damage to them,’ he said. ‘They’re using all of us to build a case to ultimately get to President Trump.’ Now he was running for US Congress himself. (His opponent in the West Virginia Republican primary had been inside the House on January 6th, among other lawmakers hiding in fear of their lives.)

I asked him what he wanted to do if he got elected. His answer wasn’t ‘build the wall’ or ‘tackle the debt’, or any of the standard responses trotted out by Republicans. Instead, he pledged to defund the FBI, the CIA and the DOJ (Department of Justice). ‘I want to completely abolish these unconstitutional three-letter agencies,’ he said. He wanted to get rid of the Federal Reserve and return the dollar to the gold standard. He wanted to put public health oﬃ cials on trial in military tribunals, a ‘Nuremberg 2.0’ for people he said were involved in deploying bioweapons that killed millions across the world (he was referring to COVID vaccines). ‘We’re living under tyranny,’ he said, ‘way more tyranny today than our Founding Fathers did in 1775.’

Really?

Derrick Evans was not joking. Nor did his ideas seem particularly fringe to me, at least not anymore. By now I’d spent enough time hanging out in the fevered conspiracy swamps of MAGA world to recognise what we were dealing with here. In the 2010s, America had been devastated by an opioid epidemic, as ruthless pharmaceutical companies bent on profit relentlessly pushed fentanyl on communities in pain; now Americans were in the grip of another drug, equally powerful and perhaps harder to kick: the red pill.

It had been a quarter of a century since a Hollywood blockbuster, The Matrix, had introduced this drug into the bloodstream. The red pill was a meme, a cultural virus. Once

you took it, there was no going back. It was a promise of revelation. It sent you down a series of labyrinthine rabbit holes, at the end of which you would see the world as it really is. Salvation. In reality, the eﬀect was the opposite. As America hurtled towards the 2024 election, with its very democracy at stake, it was in the grip of an epidemic of confusion, an eclipse of reason. Nearly half the country believed the 2020 election had been stolen in a vast conspiracy for which there was no evidence. And they believed that a convicted felon who openly threatened to dismantle the institutions of democracy was in fact the one to save it. (The producers of The Matrix could hardly have predicted how COVID and the internet would combine to unleash an unstoppable fi rehose of conspiratorial madness. Nevertheless, perhaps in hindsight it would have been better if Neo had taken the blue pill.)

‘You start doing some research and you start seeing truth and start seeing facts and you’re like: this is unbelievable,’ Derrick told me. Like millions of others, Evans believed that the instruments of the state – the courts, the judges, law enforcement, the media, most elected oﬃcials – were nothing more than a façade. America’s vaunted democracy had been hollowed out; in the language of Jean Baudrillard (whose book Simulacra and Simulation serves as hiding place for Neo’s thumb drive in The Matrix) it was a simulacrum, a representation of something that had once existed but was no longer there. Behind the scenes, hiding in the shadows, the Deep State was pulling the strings.

And I was part of the conspiracy.

I followed Evans up the stairs and into a long corridor leading to an auditorium. From behind a door oﬀ to the side I could hear snatches of General Flynn’s military staccato, lecturing an audience of ‘VIP’ ticket holders who had paid $200 each for the privilege. Flynn had come to West Virginia to endorse Derrick Evans as a candidate for Congress. Principally though, he was here as part of a nationwide tour to promote a self-produced documentary, modestly entitled Flynn – Deliver the Truth. Whatever the Cost.

Michael T. Flynn had had his own run-in with the ‘Deep State’. After a successful career as a battlefield commander, he rose to head of the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency – another three-letter agency) under Barack Obama. But he was ill-suited to the corridors of power. His abrasive style earned him enemies; colleagues spoke of ‘Flynn facts’, suggesting his grip on reality was not always what you might want in a head of military intelligence.1 He was ousted from his position in 2014 and fell in with Donald Trump, which is where his real troubles began.

It’s easy to forget now, after all that has passed, the crazed intensity of those fi rst few months of the Trump presidency. Ten days before his inauguration, a leaked intelligence dossier was published online that suggested the man who was about to become president of the United States was in fact a Kremlin agent. Mike Flynn lasted just 22 days as Trump’s national security advisor before being fi red (again) for lying about his

contacts with Russian oﬃcials. He was the fi rst casualty of the Russia furore.

As a BBC foreign correspondent with a specialisation in Russia, I spent much of the following year trying to uncover evidence that would support this extraordinary story. I pumped my contacts in Moscow; I travelled to former Soviet states to meet politicians and spies and even an eccentric arms dealer. Convincing proof never materialised. Donald Trump and his supporters suspected the whole story was cooked up by the intelligence agencies and the media in a coordinated attempt to delegitimise and possibly oust a duly elected president.

Mike Flynn’s experience in the eye of the legal and media fi restorm led him down a deep rabbit hole. He got mixed up in QAnon, a crazed movement whose members believed a cabal of satanic paedophiles was secretly running the world. By now he had disavowed Q and was travelling the country on a battle bus emblazoned with his own profi le, a retinue of acolytes in tow, preaching his own increasingly elaborate conspiracy theory to anyone who was willing to listen (and pay).

While Flynn held forth behind closed doors, a sidekick by the name of Ivan Raiklin was standing in the corridor in front of a giant board, six feet high and about thirty feet long, covered in names and dates, photographs and newspaper clippings, dotted with pins and crisscrossed by pieces of string. Short and bald with a pugnacious jaw, Raiklin looked like another military man. (I checked his Twitter – the bio said he was a former

Green Beret, a ‘Deep State marauder’ and the future ‘Secretary of Retribution’ – whatever that meant.)

Raiklin reeled oﬀ names of obscure FBI agents like a chef listing exotic ingredients in his spice cupboard. A small but earnest audience nodded along. It was clearly a well-practised shtick. Raiklin had his own vocabulary: there was the ‘FBLie’, the ‘CLieA’ and the ‘censorship industrial complex’; Barack Obama was ‘Hussein’; and January 6th was the ‘fedsurrection’, a false-ﬂ ag operation conceived by Nancy Pelosi and carried out by the FBI to ensure that Trump (and Flynn) never again got near the levers of power. If they did, he said, they would blow the whistle on a mind-bending string of cover-ups involving COVID lockdowns, Hunter Biden’s laptop, the Russia dossier and lots more.

If that all seems incoherent or confusing, don’t worry. Keep reading and you’ll soon get the hang of it. The point was, anyone could become a target of the Deep State, as Derrick Evans told the audience later that evening: ‘What they did to General Flynn, he was the fi rst. Then they came after myself and the other January 6th political prisoners. Now they’re going after President Trump. And – guess what – tomorrow, if they have their way, they’re going to go after every single person in this room.’

Sadly, I didn’t get to stay for the screening of Flynn’s documentary. After what seemed like hours taking selfies with the VIP ticket holders, the general emerged from the side room.

We crossed paths in the narrow corridor on the way to the auditorium. His eyes narrowed. Perhaps he recognised me from Dallas, where I had met him two years earlier, when he was headlining a QAnon convention. Suddenly, I was being ejected from the hall. Raiklin followed me towards the exit, his minions gleefully fi lming it all on their mobile phones, delighted at having unmasked an agent of the cabal.

What Flynn didn’t know was that, in a strange way, I was coming round to his way of seeing things. Not literally – I didn’t believe the election had been stolen or that January 6th was a false-ﬂag operation aimed at keeping Donald Trump out of the White House. That was nonsense. But there were things I’d discovered while researching this story that led me to believe that maybe there was a plot against America. It involved not a secret society of satanic paedophiles but a constellation of characters spanning decades. And I was beginning to wonder whether the wild fantasies of Mike Flynn and Derrick Evans, of QAnon and all the rest of it, were in fact a decoy, a conjuror’s trick of misdirection, designed to distract people from the real forces at work, forces of disruption powered by new technology, that were the real threat to democracy.

But perhaps I too had swallowed the red pill …

PART I FOLLOW THE WHITE RABBIT

THE ENEMY WITHIN

It was the night of Halloween, 2020, the height of the pandemic. I was supposed to be ﬂying to the US to cover the 2020 presidential election for BBC News. Donald Trump had been talking up the idea of voter fraud. If he lost, he said, it could only be because of cheating. Asked whether he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power, the president of the United States had answered, ‘We’re gonna have to see what happens.’ Even after four turbulent years, Trump still had an ability to shock, to break with the conventions of American democracy so profoundly that you really began to wonder: what might he do? If he lost, I was convinced there would be trouble. And if there was trouble, I wanted to be there. Instead, I was stuck on the wrong side of the Atlantic with a visa that had expired.

To take my mind off things, I signed up for an online drawing class. The session had a Halloween theme: Witches: Drawing and Storytelling. It was one of those spur-of-themoment things, a random decision. Drawing isn’t even a hobby of mine, nor did I have any particular interest in witches. Perhaps it was the word ‘storytelling’ that lured me to it. Whatever the reason, on the evening of 31 October 2020, I sat down, as per the instructions in the email I’d been sent, with some sheets of blank paper and an assortment of pencils and erasers, and clicked the Zoom link.

The class was run by three women, founders of a feminist collective called the London Drawing Group. Two of them took turns setting us exercises. They got us copying details from various works of art from the height of the European witch-craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, examining marks and brushstrokes up close, then zooming out to see how the separate elements made up the whole. I got going on a woodcut from 1510 entitled The Witches by the German artist Hans Baldung. It was a groundbreaking work for its time, using a pioneering technique that achieved the kind of dramatic chiaroscuro eﬀect usually associated with the great Renaissance painters. There’s a lot going on in the picture: out of an intricate mass of whorls and lines the figures of three women emerge, sitting naked in a wood, huddled around some kind of pot or cauldron out of which a powerful concoction is escaping. Above them, a fourth woman ﬂies through the air, riding backwards on a goat, a pitchfork held

erect between her legs. The ground is littered with the detritus of unholy ritual: animal bones, a pestle, a cat.

While I was scribbling away, the third member of the collective, Luisa-Maria MacCormack, gave a talk on the theme of witches in European art. Hans Baldung’s print depicted preparations for a ‘witches’ Sabbath’ – women gathered in a clearing in the forest, performing their satanic rites: off ering up human sacrifices, sometimes the flesh of their own children, before copulating with the Devil in animal form. Baldung was a pioneer not just technically, but conceptually as well. At the time that he made his woodcut, the image of the witch as an old hag who flew about on a broomstick and brewed noxious potions was not yet widespread. At the turn of the sixteenth century, people in Europe believed in magic in a broad and varied sense. They also believed in people who engaged in magic – witches – but these were generally tolerated as part of the tapestry of medieval life. They were seldom prosecuted, and might even be welcomed as purveyors of certain services: layers of charms, lifters of spells. But then, quite suddenly, something changed. The idea of the witch that Hans Baldung depicted, of a sexobsessed, child-murdering, Devil-worshipping incarnation of evil, an existential threat to all that is good and holy, had come from a book, recently published by an obscure German priest by the name of Heinrich Kramer. Kramer was born around 1430 in Schlettstadt, now Sélestat in Alsace, on the border between modern France and

Germany, in what was then the Holy Roman Empire. A studious boy, he was admitted into the Dominican order. By his mid-forties, he had been appointed by the Pope as an inquisitor. As such, Kramer was tasked with ensuring the Vatican’s ideological control in an age of rising political turbulence. The Reformation was on the horizon, dissenters were chafi ng at the writ of Rome, and Kramer’s job was to root them out. There existed various heretical sects that were fighting back against widespread corruption in the Catholic Church, movements that challenged both the ecclesiastical and secular order of the late feudal period. But Kramer focused his eﬀorts elsewhere, becoming increasingly obsessed with witches. Convinced there had been an outbreak of witchcraft along the Rhine Valley, he mounted a series of zealous prosecutions. The local authorities quickly concluded that Kramer was a crank and asked him to leave.

But Heinrich Kramer was not to be deterred. He obtained a papal bull, a note from the Pope, confi rming his authority to pursue witches. He headed to Innsbruck, in present-day Austria, where he hoped to put on a big show trial, a paradigm for other witch trials to come. His attention alighted upon a woman by the name of Helena Scheuberin, the wife of a prosperous local burgher, whom he accused of witchcraft. Why, exactly, he picked on her is a matter of some dispute, but the story goes that Kramer had made advances on her. Scheuberin rebuﬀed him, cursing and spitting at him in the street, embarrassing him in

public. The trial began in 1485. Kramer’s methods were brutal: witnesses were threatened, suspects tortured, their testimony twisted to suit his case. But in court, proceedings did not go well. Kramer focused heavily on speculative questions about Scheuberin’s sex life. The local bishop disapproved, telling him to stick to the facts. But Kramer ploughed on, interrogating more and more suspects. In 1486, the authorities decided enough was enough. The trial was declared void and Kramer was ordered to leave town.

Professionally defeated and personally rejected, Heinrich Kramer retreated to Cologne. For the next six months, he went dark. Did he rent rooms in the upper ﬂoors of a merchant’s house overlooking the city’s giant cathedral, then still under construction, crawling with craftsmen and surrounded by cranes? Or did he lodge at the university, his old alma mater, where a fellow inquisitor, Jacob Sprenger, was dean of the faculty of theology? We do not know the answers to these questions. We do know that Kramer wrote feverishly over the spring and summer of 1486, working from his notes from the Innsbruck trial and from previous prosecutions. He gathered them together with other inquisitors’ accounts as well as folktales he had collected on his travels; he scoured the canonical texts for references that would support his theory – Thomas Aquinas, St Augustine, Aristotle, and of course the Bible itself. Towards the end of the year, he emerged with a manuscript. He titled it Malleus Maleﬁ carum, or Hammer of Witches.

The Malleus Malefi carum tells a frightening story, a dark and twisted fantasy about vast numbers of women, old and young, who have sealed a pact with the Devil. Traversing vast distances on their flying objects, they raise storms and kill livestock, driving horses mad and making cows’ udders run dry. They devour babies at their satanic gatherings and off er up toddlers to the Devil in return for sex; they kill infants in the womb and cause impotence in men, keeping nests of penises in trees; they bewitch judges so that they may continue their crimes unmolested. The fact that you may not be able to fi nd evidence linking them to their crimes is but further proof of their diabolical abilities. And the scariest part of it is, they’re everywhere. They look just like your neighbour or the milkmaid or your landlord’s wife. They are hiding in plain sight, an enemy within, growing like a cancer, engaged in a vast conspiracy directed against all of Christian civilisation and good God-fearing folk like you. Having identified the powers and attributes of the witch, the Malleus Malefi carum stipulates how to capture, interrogate and torture her, how to proceed in her prosecution, and how she should be executed.

The clerical establishment, by and large, thought Kramer was mad. And his crazed screed might have vanished as quickly as it was written, were it not for a piece of historical serendipity. Four decades earlier, in the nearby town of Mainz, a goldsmith had come up with an invention that would revolutionise European society: the printing press. Johannes Gutenberg’s

invention radically changed not only what stories could be told, but who could tell them, and in what quantities those stories could be distributed. In the years since its invention, while Heinrich Kramer was building his career as an inquisitor, 20 million volumes were printed in Europe, most of them in Germany and Italy.1 Previously, production of the written word, painstakingly copied by hand, had been the preserve of the Church or legal authorities. Suddenly anyone could produce a book, as long as they could write and pay for it to be printed. Kramer’s book landed at a time of upheaval, a perfect storm of technological change and political uncertainty, I heard Luisa saying as I tried to focus on my drawing. The feudal system was breaking down, the old social safety nets were vanishing as common lands were expropriated. These were the beginnings of what we now know as capitalism, the dawn of the modern age. Power was shifting from feudal landlords to urban merchants. Europe was in flux. Towns and cities were flooded with vagrants, peasants who had once been tied to the land were now uprooted and homeless, the harsh but stable certainties of generations vanishing before their eyes. Amid all this turbulence, the Malleus Malefi carum travelled from town to town, from printing press to printing press, spreading like a virus along the major arteries of Western Europe. Over the next two centuries, dozens of editions were produced. 2 At some point Jacob Sprenger, Kramer’s colleague from the University of Cologne, was added as a co-author. It became one of the most

printed books in Europe, by some counts second only to the Bible itself. Of its impact, an English theologian wrote: ‘For nearly three centuries […] the Malleus lay on the bench of every judge, on the desk of every magistrate. It was the ultimate, irrefutable, unarguable authority’. 3 Kramer’s dark fantasy infected the minds of millions. Over the next two centuries, tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people – most of them women – were tortured and killed, as witch fever spread from the Old World to the New, borne across the Atlantic aboard colonists’ ships. At the dawn of the age of enlightenment, the Western world was in the grip of a diabolical delusion, an eclipse of reason. The opening chapter of the modern age was written in blood.

I looked down at my drawing. It bore little resemblance to the Hans Baldung woodcut I’d been working from. My sheet of paper was covered in dark scrawls and smudges, spirals and angry hatched lines. Distracted by the story of Heinrich Kramer, I’d lost sight of what I was supposed to be doing. Far from honing my skills, my ability to draw seemed to have suﬀered a catastrophic collapse.

The class ended. I shut my laptop; darkness ﬂ ooded the room. Sounds of revelry wafted in from outside. Somewhere out there people were celebrating Halloween, the day when we dress up as the things we fear most in order to exorcise their power for the year to come. How many, I wondered, now wearing pointy black hats and carrying broomsticks, knew the sinister origins of their outfits? The Malleus Maleﬁ carum had seeped into the

culture. Kramer’s dark fantasy had morphed into a murderous reality half a millennium ago, just as the old order was crumbling and a new one was taking shape. And it was still with us. • • •

A week later I was in Arizona, standing outside the Maricopa County vote tabulation centre in Phoenix, staring at a barechested man draped in furs, with horns on his head and a spear in his hand, holding a sign that read: Q SENT ME. It was 7 November 2020. I’d missed the election by a few days, but the fact that I was there at all felt like a small miracle. I’d prevailed upon the BBC’s management to put pressure on the US State Department to grant me an interview at the US embassy in London, which was eﬀectively closed due to COVID. I had persuaded them to issue me with a new visa and to waive travel restrictions. It had taken some convincing for my editors to send me out at all. With the voting done, wasn’t it just a question of waiting for the results? ‘Remember the principle of Chekhov’s gun,’ I’d said, thinking it sounded clever. If there’s a pistol on stage in Act I, it must go o before the end of the play. The gun in this case was the spectre of voter fraud, and I was convinced it had been placed there for a reason. In the run-up to polling day Donald Trump had focused on the postal vote, so-called ‘mailin ballots’, as the most likely way the Democrats would try to steal the vote. Amid the COVID pandemic, many states had made it easier for people to vote by post. The number of mail-in

ballots would be significantly higher than in previous years, and it was likely those ballots would favour the Democratic Party candidate. So, the stage was set. ‘If Trump loses,’ I told my editor, ‘there will be trouble.’

I stood outside the counting centre in Phoenix surrounded by a small group of protestors wearing MAGA caps and chanting slogans: Stop the Steal! and Where’s Our Votes? They were a mixed bunch. Apart from the eye-catching guy in the furs and horns, there were families with kids in tow mixing with men sporting Hawaiian shirts and big guns. A man dressed all in black had climbed up a lamp post and was shouting into a loudhailer. ‘They’re trying to suppress us. They’re trying to break us,’ he bellowed. Many waved yellow flags depicting a coiled rattlesnake over the words DON’T TREAD ON ME: the Gadsden flag, flown during the War of Independence against the British and now brandished as a symbol of resistance to their own government.

The votes were still being counted but Fox News had called Arizona for Joe Biden, and Donald Trump’s supporters sensed victory slipping away. They felt betrayed by a network they had thought was unshakably loyal to their man. Stories circulated among the crowd as if gospel, passed on by social media, gaining traction with every passing hour: ballots for Trump had been found dumped in the trash in Oklahoma; in Michigan and Wisconsin there had been sudden surges in the Biden vote in the dead of night; electronic vote-counting machines were deleting Trump votes; and in several battleground districts, thousands

of people had voted who were in fact dead. In Arizona itself, the biggest story was Sharpiegate – a theory that voters had been given a specific brand of black pen to mark their ballots that couldn’t be read by the electronic vote-counting machines. None of these tales of electoral black magic were fi rst-hand accounts. They came from Facebook and other platforms and had been picked up and then amplified by high-profi le Trump supporters, in some cases by the president himself. Most had been quickly investigated and debunked by reputable news outlets (including my own).

‘In one county in Michigan, six thousand votes were changed to Biden that voted for Trump,’ one man told me authoritatively, gesticulating with a chunky vape. This story did have some basis in fact: unofficial results in Antrim County, a small Republicanleaning county in northern Michigan, had initially reported a mini-landslide for Joe Biden. Local election officials had spotted the error, I pointed out, and corrected it before the fi nal results were announced. But facts didn’t cut much ice with the crowd. ‘You’re fucking full of shit,’ shouted a man who looked like he was auditioning for the part of Hunter S. Thompson in Terry Gilliam’s movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. ‘The queen of England,’ he added inexplicably, ‘has more dominion over this country right now than Joe Biden.’ I looked at the yellow Gadsden flags fluttering in the breeze, confused.

Beyond the specific, refutable allegations of systematic voter fraud, many in the crowd seemed to be experiencing profound

cognitive dissonance, a jarring sense of narrative disconnect. ‘Somewhere, something’s not right,’ explained a third man in wraparound shades and a Harley Davidson T-shirt. ‘There’s no way Trump lost Arizona. Here in Phoenix there was a 200-mile-long Trump train. It was crazy, like thousands and thousands of cars.’ For him, the idea that Biden could win here just didn’t add up. Trump’s supporters were so passionate, so fi red up, so engaged; Biden, by contrast, was low-energy: he wasn’t even holding rallies, and when he did, they were sparsely attended gatherings where everyone sat subdued in socially distanced rows wearing face masks. How could that guy win? Answer: he couldn’t, at least not honestly. It was a vast conspiracy by all the people who never liked Trump anyway: the lawyers, the lobbyists, the liberals, the mainstream media, the special-interest groups in the pay of global corporations, big tech, or China. In other words, the Swamp (which Trump had tried and so-far failed to drain). The establishment had been hell-bent on delegitimising his presidency from day one, with the Russiagate conspiracy crap, the phoney Steele dossier with its fantasy video of hookers peeing in a Moscow hotel room, the collusion delusion, the Mueller investigation that came to nothing, the impeachment that went nowhere. Trump himself had called it the ‘greatest witch-hunt in American history’. If Donald Trump ended up not being declared president, then it could only be because of fraud. Anyone who couldn’t see that was either deluded – or complicit.

I had been reporting from America for many years. It was a paradise for journalists, a land full of great stories and colourful characters who were often only too happy to tell them. But this felt diﬀerent. I was surrounded by paranoia and suspicion, and it quickly became clear that politely fact checking or rebutting their claims of voter fraud was not only pointless but counterproductive. Indeed, the fact that ‘mainstream media’ journalists like me and others were so keen to discredit the allegations seemed to them further proof of the Deep State at work.

I wandered over to the man in the horns with the Q sign. He was friendly enough and I thought of calling my cameraman over to fi lm an interview. Television journalism is as much about the visuals as anything else and he looked fantastic, his bare chest covered in tattoos, his face painted in the stars and stripes. But then he started talking: 5G vaccines human tra cking new world order look at the connections Hillary Clinton underground bunkers military industrial complex JFK top security clearance sealed indictments central banking system trail of breadcrumbs … It was as if he had eaten an encyclopaedia of conspiracy theories for breakfast and was now regurgitating the contents in a random order.

As far as I could make out, the story he was trying to tell was this: Hillary Clinton was, apparently, the central figure in a cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles. The cabal consisted of some of the most powerful people in America, with members in politics and the media, business and law enforcement.

Donald Trump, he believed, was fighting a secret campaign to expose them. There was a storm coming. Soon the cabal would be arrested and tried in military tribunals; the worst oﬀ enders would be executed. The attempt to steal the election was a desperate rear-guard action by the Deep State to protect the cabal and maintain their grip on power. He ﬂ ipped his sign around. HOLD THE LINE, PATRIOTS, it read, GOD WINS.

Unlike some of the other people at the protest, he wasn’t hostile. He seemed like a good-natured oddball. But his story was just too weird to put in a news report. It made no sense and seemed irrelevant to the matter in hand. Allegations of voter fraud were sweeping the country, and though they appeared spurious they nevertheless had the potential for far-reaching political ramifications. I was vaguely aware of a sprawling conspiracy theory called QAnon that was gaining popularity among some Trump supporters. Sticking an amiable weirdo on camera with a wild tale about a cabal of satanic paedophiles would undermine the seriousness of my reporting. Or so I thought. So I decided not to interview him.

Big mistake.

During those turbulent weeks following the election in November 2020, Trump and his team of advisors clung desperately to power. As the postal votes ﬂooded in and the president’s early lead evaporated, fierce battles were fought behind closed doors,

between the pragmatists in the administration who backed the president but drew the line at sacrificing American democracy to a second Trump term, and the nihilists, who were willing to see the White House go up in ﬂames – metaphorically speaking – rather than be evicted from it. The latter group included the disgraced former army general Michael Flynn; the ex-mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani; Sidney Powell, a once respected attorney from Texas who seemed to have fallen down a labyrinthine rabbit hole; and – bizarrely – a multi-millionaire pillow salesman by the name of Mike Lindell. These characters were putting forward increasingly outlandish theories about how the election had been stolen. Things were getting weirder by the day.

Meanwhile, I was travelling across the United States. I had promised my editor trouble and I was trying to figure out when and where Chekhov’s gun might go off. Guns were not hard to fi nd: Arizona is an ‘open carry’ state, which means it’s legal to turn up at a protest with an assault rifle strapped to your chest. Outside the voting centre in Phoenix they were almost as numerous as the yellow revolutionary rattlesnake fl ags. In Georgia, outside the state capitol building in Atlanta, an armoured Humvee painted with the logo of the far-right conspiracy website InfoWars rolled up to join a Stop the Steal caravan. It was headed to Washington for what was billed as a ‘Million MAGA March’, playing on the 1995 ‘Million Man March’ organised by the Black nationalist Louis Farrakhan. It was a weird reference, given that almost everyone there was white.

‘We’ve been robbed,’ said an older lady with a twinkle in her eye who looked like she would have invited me in for tea had there not been a revolution brewing. ‘We’re coming from the ditches,’ she warned, ‘we’re coming from the woods, we’re coming from Alabama!’ This felt like groundswell, the beginnings of a powerful movement. And among it all I kept coming across people holding homemade signs emblazoned with the letter Q. ‘The plan to save the world,’ one young woman told me when I asked her what it meant. ‘They’re just trying to get Trump out of oﬃce because they don’t want him exposing what the real endgame of the left wing is, and that’s to normalise paedophilia.’ She wasn’t the kind of person I’d typically expect at a pro-Trump event. She had voted for Obama in 2012 and Hillary Clinton in 2016, but had since become convinced of the existence of a wide-ranging child-traﬃcking conspiracy at the heart of the American establishment. Another woman held up a placard that read: THEY’RE KEEPING BABIES ALIVE AND STEALING THEIR BODY PARTS! A man stood by the side of the road with a crudely painted sign that said simply: THE STORM IS HERE. #FIGHTBACK.

In Georgia, I’d spoken by phone to members of several militia groups. Some talked about secession or armed resistance. Only one agreed to meet me, a man called Chris Hill, who also went by the nom de guerre ‘General Bloodagent’. He was the leader of a group called the ‘III% Security Force’ – so named because of their belief that only three per cent of the North American

colonists rose up against the British in the American Revolution. We met in a parking lot on the outskirts of Jonesboro, a small town south of Atlanta. I followed his pickup truck for half an hour as we headed east along the highway at dusk, stopping off briefly to pick up some ribs at a strip mall on the way. We arrived at his home after dark and he showed us into his garage. He’d converted the place into a kind of revolutionary HQ, with flags and banners, two laptops and a comfortable sofa. Before sitting down to talk he offered me, for some reason, a glass of Japanese sake. ‘Our country is falling apart,’ he told me, as he peered over the top of a pair of reading glasses. ‘We no longer have Democrats and Republicans.’ Like many others, Chris Hill had lost faith in the whole political system. ‘Either President Trump leads us, or We the People will lead ourselves.’ He talked about the Constitution. A lot. In fact, almost everyone I would meet over the next few years while reporting this story would turn out to be obsessed with the Constitution of the United States, as if somehow that document anchored them to a past they feared was slipping away.

Perhaps because he had agreed to talk to me on camera, I suspected Chris of being a blowhard, a self-publicist who was more interested in the media attention than anything else. But there was something interesting in the performative way he spoke. When I asked him whether there were any circumstances under which he would accept a Biden victory, he replied: ‘Verily I would say to you, I will not fucking accept it’. ‘Verily’?