6. The Usual Suspects
The Coming Storm
BBC
4.8 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 4 January 2022
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts. |
| 0:05.5 | Hi, welcome back. |
| 0:07.8 | I'm Gabriel Gatehouse and this is the coming storm. |
| 0:11.6 | And a warning, this episode contains some strong language. |
| 0:19.2 | Katie Harbeth wants to show me something. It's a diagram on a whiteboard in her study on the upper |
| 0:26.7 | floor of her flat in a leafy part of Washington, D.C. We navigate our way around the obstacle course of what passes post-pandemic for |
| 0:38.2 | office life. This whole puzzle I've been trying to piece together. It's about a story war, a battle for the narrative, |
| 0:47.0 | and Katie Harbeth was part of something that radically changed the shape of the battlefield. |
| 0:56.0 | 2021 was a big year for Katie. She turned 40. She had one of those, what am I doing with my life moments, and quit a high-powered job at Facebook. |
| 1:06.1 | She's still adjusting. Facebook moves at a speed that I've never seen any other company move in. |
| 1:12.4 | Move fast and break things. That was never seen any other company move in. |
| 1:12.6 | Move fast and break things. |
| 1:14.7 | That was Facebook's motto, |
| 1:16.4 | until they removed the break things bit |
| 1:18.6 | when they, you know, started breaking things. |
| 1:21.8 | And in fact, now that I'm two months out of Facebook and working with other organizations, |
| 1:26.4 | I have to keep myself in check for how fast I expect other people to move because I'm |
| 1:31.6 | Katie Harbeth was in charge of global elections. I didn't know that was a thing at |
| 1:37.0 | Facebook but it is and this is where Katie's whiteboard comes in. Since leaving she's had a bit of space to think and she's |
| 1:45.6 | drawn this timeline. It shows the arc of Big Tech's interaction with |
| 1:50.9 | American democracy going all the way back to 1996. |
| 1:55.0 | Which, you know, you got AOL, you know, AOL Google, |
... |
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