3. The Basement
The Coming Storm
BBC
4.8 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 4 January 2022
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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 Presenter: Gabriel Gatehouse
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts. |
| 0:05.0 | Hi, welcome back. |
| 0:08.0 | I'm Gabriel Gatehouse, and this is the coming storm. Let me arrange it here like this. |
| 0:15.0 | Yeah, so... |
| 0:16.0 | So there's this guy called Dale Burran. |
| 0:18.0 | I had a pumpkin donut. |
| 0:20.0 | I spoke to him in the autumn. |
| 0:22.0 | That's why he's going on about pumpkins because it's |
| 0:23.5 | pumpkin season here in the US that's when everything is pumpkin flavored for one |
| 0:29.9 | month this is not a story about pumpkins. It's a story about a journalist, that's Dale, who gets on a subway train one winter's morning in New York. |
| 0:40.0 | It was very cold. It was February, so it was frigid cold in Manhattan. |
| 0:45.8 | I say he's a journalist. He is now, but he wasn't then. This is 2008. He's just out of college. He's been hanging out online a lot, making comics, trying to find his feet in life. |
| 0:58.0 | And he's on his way to the headquarters of the Church of Scientology. He's not a Scientologist, but in a dark corner of the |
| 1:06.4 | Internet he's found out that something's about to happen there. |
| 1:10.5 | I wanted to kind of report on it. I just didn't know quite how. I wasn't really a |
| 1:16.1 | reporter, but I had a notebook that my real reporter friend had given me that |
| 1:20.1 | said, reporters notebook on it. |
| 1:23.1 | So I thought well this is enough of a prop |
| 1:25.3 | I'll just start my business of reporting. |
| 1:27.9 | A few weeks earlier a weird and menacing video had appeared online. |
| 1:33.0 | Hello, leaders of Scientology. |
| 1:35.3 | We are anonymous. |
... |
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