How Everyone Else Sees America (with Gabriel Gatehouse)

you nodding away, Jerry. But in many cases these conspiracy theories are organic at least to begin with, and they grow out of the malaise of modern capitalism, the paranoid style in American politics, the great knack that you guys in America have for telling a story. You just you guys just love a story. And the weirder, even if it's especially if it's wrong, right, it's the weirder and more wonderful it is the more you like it. And that's why you gave the world Hollywood and all of

this amazing stuff. But you're now being eaten up by our own infotainment industry. Yes, I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, so Gab, I have to admit I am a sucker for a British accent, in fact, so much so that I'm marrying one.

on a whole hell of a lot. I don't believe in most of the things that you believe in, but I am interested in why you believe them and what might lie behind it, and I have an open mind, So why don't you just talk to me? And people just mostly very generous with their time and their insights. We British were constantly judging who we might be talking to and what their views might be, or what social strata they might come from, and we're fine tuning out.

America is not like that. They just go for it. I want to take a shot at the British though. It's please please do yes, it's a historical tradition.

that's just not a fair good narrative. You know, Trump has strong messaging, whatever you may think of him, he's got killer political instincts, and he's got a strong message defeat the deep state. You guys.

it anymore exactly. And you know, I as somebody who just graduated mid nineties with a degree in Russian, like nobody needed that anymore. But in another way, everything was just beginning right the Internet, that kind of the breakdown of the of consensus and the establishment fueled by tech. But the thing that Bill Clinton was so brilliant ad was he just occupied such a vast swathe of the center ground in politics that basically to oppose Clinton you

had to be on the fringes right. You either had to be on the far right. You know, Newt Gingrich kind of throwing out conspiracy theories as it were, Vince Foster and this White House lawyer who'd committed suicide, and all these kind of tales were being spun around him about how really he was having an affair with Hillary Clinton and she'd rolled him up at a carpet and left him at a safe house in Virginia and then

dumped him in a park and blah blah blah. So that was coming from the right or on the left. You basically had to go further and further left to oppose Bill Clinton. So what that set up was this this political dynamic which is now coming back to bite us, which is not the war between right and left, which is the paradigm that you guys grew up in and grew up fighting and that I was born into. But

it's the paradigm of the center versus the fringes. And I think what's happened in America and the polling bears this out. I remember there was one extraordinary bit of polling where they asked people about their views of the whole political and economic system in the United States. Did people a think it was doing just fine. Did they be think it was doing okay but maybe needed minor modifications.

They added up to about thirty eight percent. Then there were the people who said, no, the system is really in deep trouble and it needs root and branch reform. Or the people who said it's so screwed we should burn it all down and start from the beginning. And that lot of people added up to about sixty percent. Right now, it's very clear who is the burn it all down candidate here? Right. So when I saw that little bit of polling buried right at the bottom of

the pole, I was like, he's going to win. He's going to win again. And it's clear. And because the people who are now in power in your country are so certifiably bonkers. Often even though they quite often put their finger on the problems, they're very good at identifying

real problems. It's just their solutions are totally batshit. But what's happened is that the Democrats and what used to be called establishment Republicans but are now outcasts, have become the party of people who are saying, la la la la, la la la, we're not listening. Everything's fine, just stop tinkering with the system and that's not working.

House assistant, and she brought him his lunch. And in all the kind of hook plat around what had happened to Vince Foster, and there was a question of what had he eaten for his lunch, And in one account he'd eaten the hamburger with a side of Eminem's, and in another account there were no Eminems and it was

a cheeseburger and he'd removed the onions. And this was like the kind of beginnings of the inconsistencies of the account of Vince Foster's death that people started to pull out and to poke at until it grew into this monstrous conspiracy theory about how he'd been murdered because he

knew too much. Look, what happened in the nineties was that there were all these Batchett conspiracy theories, and there was also an actual conspiracy to create conspiracies called the Arkansas Project right, which was funded by a wealthy guy wealthy air called rich a Melonscape, and it was basically sending out people to dredge up the wildest stories from the swamps of Arkansas and put them into print, true or not, and then the White House obviously would rebut

these things, and most of them were kind of wild, but some of them were obviously quite true. And the thing was that the not only the White Houses you expect, but the establishment media for want of a better word, in the nineties also treated the stories about Bill Clinton and his philandering and sometimes worse right. Because let's not forget that there were worse stories than Monica Lewinski, which whatever you say about that relationship was consensual, There were

worse stories. There was Juernita Broadrick, who alleged that Bill Clinton had raped her violently in a hotel room in Arkansas in nineteen seventy eight, And the reason people found her account credible was because she never wanted to tell it and was forced under threat of perjury to tell it by the Star Inquiry and it then got completely

buried because it didn't fit the narrative. I spoke to Juanita and she said Starr and his lawyers kept asking her, did anyone ever threaten you to keep quiet about this? And she was like no. And then she then they were like, did anyone ever offer you any inducements, any money or jobs or anything to keep quiet about this? She was like no, no one spoke to me about it at all, and so then they were like, Oh, we can't do obstructural justice, so let's just forget about it.

The question of whether the president of the United States had violently raped a woman was secondary to the political considerations. And so my through line is that narrative about the Clinton's actually being people was pressed beneath the surface because some of the genuinely bad stuff that was credible and worthy of reporting on by serious journalists also wasn't touched because of all the batchit stuff right, and nobody wanted

to be associated with that. As somebody put it at the time, that story was fruit from a poison tree. Nobody wanted to touch it. But at the same time, technology was developing. First it was to a radio, and then it was the email newsletter, and then it was the kind of full blown Internet and these stories started breathing like bacteria and petridition, growing and multiplying and mutating. Fast forward twenty years and you've got a White House

reporter in twenty twenty asks President Trump. I think it's the first time that QAnon ever comes up at a White House briefing. It's a brilliant clip. If you could dig it out. It's amazing because you can see Donald Trump's political instincts kicking in. The reporter goes, mister President, this is this theory that you're secretly fighting a cabal of satanic pedophiles. Does that sound like something you might

be involved in? And you can see Donald Trump's eyes getting to and he's thinking, is this what is this?

have come down the tracks, AI, the gig economy, offshore taxing. Basically, they say, you know, the Internet basically had the click of a mouse button, you can move your money from one jurisdiction to the other. Cryptocurrencies they predict this is more than ten years before bitcoin. And they predict that all of this it's not a conspiracy theory, it's a

sort of exercise in crystal ballgazing and political analysis. They predict that all of these technological factors will lead to the collapse of the nation state and the dollar will collapse,

Crypto will replace it. States will lose their ability to basically carry out the basic functions of any government, which is collecting taxes and providing services, and in their stead will rise the sovereign individual, vastly wealthy and unimaginably powerful individuals whose power, in the words of the authors, will rival that of the Greek gods of Mount Olympus.

of the right. He was editor of the I think it's called the Stanford Review when he was at Stanford, which was this kind of right wing student newspaper, and he has, with his money and power, pursued that interest deep into the kind of meme warriors of the far right.

Around twenty sixteen, when he was one of the lone voices in Silicon Valley to come out and back Donald Trump, and was really hanging out with these strange characters creatures of the Internet, bloggers with names like Mensius Moldbug, whose real name is Curtis Jarvin and who is very, very influential in Trump circles. He's the sort of the inter sellectual backbone, if you like, of trump Ism and Dvancism.

He's dreampt up this idea of neo reactionary, this near reactionary movement where democracy in America is dead and what America needs is an American caesar to cross the Rubican with will to power and all this fuddy duddy nonsense about people having a say in things. Get rid of all of that and just dictatorship or as he likes

to call it, monarchy. And it's hard not to read that book and look at what's going on now and not conclude that what Peter Teel and others like about Donald Trump is not so much that he's a disruptor in the terms of in parlance of Silicon Valley, but

he's a racking ball, right. He's a bulldozer that you can drive through the whole establishment and accelerate your way into this bright or dark future of sovereign individuals where democracy is basically dead and power resides with these hugely wealthy tech barons.

called the network state movement. So they basically what they want to achieve is the kind of breakdown of the nation state and instead there'll be network states. A bit like, so you'd be able to choose your citizenship the same way as you choose a gym membership. You look at what they offer where they have their branches, and you go, this fits with my needs and values, and off you go. But they go a lot further than this. Where is

the new frontier. There is no more frontier. There's no more virgin land on the American continent other than Greenland. Of course, cyberspace is a frontier that they can control, but also the cosmos is a frontier that they can go out to. And a lot of the thinking behind the sovereign individual comes out of a movement that I think is very very little known and only ever had

a few hundred adherents. It's called the extrapy movement, the Extropians, and it was this sort of techno radical, techno optimist movement that flourished in California in the nineties.

cryonic preservation, and eventually conquering the cosmos. And I think when you speak to these people as I have done, and you hang out with them and you can get them to talk as they do when they're amongst themselves and not in a sort of combative interview situation, they will openly talk about how technology is going to lead in the next few years to a very they use the word Darwinistic moment, where basically the weak will be culled and pruned from the earth and the strong will

inherit it. It's a very to me, a very dark and bleak vision of the future, but these guys freacking love it. Well.

steal election. And I'm Stanley at and I spot this guy and he's draped in furs, he's got horns on his head, and he's carrying a sign that says c S. So I'm like, I'm going to talk to that guy. He looks brilliant, and he's very friendly. He's a thoroughly nice guy. But the story he's got in his head

is pretty bonkers, right. He believes that a cabal of satanic pedophiles, possibly led by Hillary Clinton, has captured the levers of power and are now running afraid of Don Trump, who threatens to expose them, and so they're stealing the election. It was like he'd eaten an encyclopedia of conspiracy theories for breakfast and was now gurgitating them in random order. So there was bits about JFK and tunnels under the desert, and just like a whole load of weird stuff. And

I must emphasize this. He was an absolutely lovely guy. He was not aggressive or mean in any way. He was genuinely open with me and telling me all about his really weird ideas. And I thought about it, and I thought, this guy does look fantastic, But how irresponsible would it be for an establishment journalist working for a serious news organization to give airtime to this nonsense. I draw the line. I have my principles and I will

stand on them. So I said, thank you, sir, and I did not film an interview with him, much to my absolute regret when two months later I was sitting in London and all the TV screens around the BBC headquarters were focused on one thing and one thing only, and it's the capital and the mob is storming it. And then we cut to the Senate Chamber and there he is the same guy with the horns and the furs, and my I remember my camera was there. He's like, that was that not the guy that you eat? Was that?

I was like, oh my god, it's that that guy. Did we didn't? Did we are?

one of missing the scoop. But I hadn't hadn't listened to this guy properly, I hadn't heard the story that he'd told me about the Cabbala Satanic pedophiles, and asked myself, now, why does that seem true to him, and why does it seem true to so many other people. We were talking about the horseshoe and how the left and right extremes had joined each other. A lot of what Jacob

Chanceley was talking about was extremely from the left. He talks a lot about how the zero point one percent have sewn up all the resources under global capitalism, and they're throwing crumbs and making all us little people, just turning us into mindless consumers and all this kind of quite left wing stuff, as well as these kind of

very right wing talking points about pedophiles and whatnot. But I think The kind of conclusion I came to about this particular conspiracy theory was that if you took it literally, which is that Hillary Clinton was leading a cabal of Satan worshiping pedophiles from the basement of a pizza restaurant in Washington, DC that didn't have a basement, then you're like,

it's obviously nonsense. But if you took it as a sort of parable or a metaphor, and you heard that story and you understood it to mean that people felt that their democracy had been hijacked by more powerful people whom they hadn't voted for, that the people that they could vote for every four years or two years weren't

necessarily the most powerful people. The more powerful people were people who were in the shadows, running big financial corporations or whatever, and they were taking decisions that weren't necessarily always to the benefit of the little people. Then you were thinking, Ah, okay, maybe they've got a point.

We know it's over. We know that the arrangement that lasted from nineteen forty five until twenty twenty five is

it's done. It's cooked. You can't like all you had to do was watch that scene in the Oval Office with Zelenski being pummeled and stabbed in the back and in the front by the country that they thought it was its ally, and the complete unpredictability of the Trump administration and those around him, and whatever your emotional attachment to America, and I think there is a deep love for America, certainly in Britain and many other European countries,

common sense says that you cannot rely on that as an ally, So you have to cut yourself loose. You've got to stand on your own two feet. Trump says, We've got to stand on our own two feet, and he's achieved that. We're going to do it, and I'm very sad about it. You guys have been not an unqualified force for good in the world over the past eighty years. You have been a force for good in the world. You've also been a force for a lot of funck wittery.

When I began my journalistic career in the BBC's Russian Service, where we broadcast the truth or propaganda in Russian to the former Soviet Union, and I remember thinking at around the time of the Iraq invasion and the kind of the fuck up over the weapons of mass destruction that weren't there, and when it became clear that no one really cared about the weapons of mass destruction, they were

just going to do it anyway. And I remember saying to a colleague back then I was a very green, genous I said, I think I think that the United States of America is going to become a rogue state in my lifetime. This was at the point where George Bush had coined the word rogue state and access of evil. I remember thinking, I think these guys are going to join them, and guys you have, oh.

whose basement the pedophile cabal was running the world. And the other one was something called Bridgegate, which was a very boring and complicated story about Governor Christie of New Jersey, whose people decided to create a massive traffic jam in order to get back at some political rival, but blamed it on something else. But it was an actual conspiracy to create a traffic jam. And you know, in a way, this is common sense. You don't really need AI for this.

But Tim Danglin, he basically said that if you take Pizzagate, and you take one element out of Pizzagate, which is that emails between John Podesta and his staff talking about pizza were in fact code for child sex abuse, if you took that away, the whole story made no sense at all, Like the whole thing collapsed like a house

of cards. Whereas with Bridgegate, like you could take away one element that like one source or element of it, and but the rest of the evidence would still be so overwhelming that the story was very hard to knock down because it was very robust. And that was the basis for his program. The reason I'd call him up was because I felt myself beginning to think like a

conspiracy theorist. I was putting post it notes up on my wall, little bits of string look exactly, and so I called up Tin Dangelini and I said, can you please pull me out of my rabbit hole? And so he said, okay, fine, just lay it all out for me, and I'll stick it through my machine and I'll tell you whether it's a conspiracy or a conspiracy theory. And he put it all through his machine and it went right, it's a conspiracy. So I was like, oh, fuck, now

I've got to go deeper. And so I started digging deeper. And I did feel for a while like I was turning into a conspiracy theorist. This is what the Trumpies call this, not QAnon, but bluing on right, And what are the conspiracy theories that blew and on? People believe in that Donald Trump was a Russian agent, for example, that there's a p tape, compromant Steele doc and all of that kind of stuff. So I was worried that

I was becoming blue and on. And at the end of the day, was there a conspiracy in the nineties to start seeding conspiracy theories about the Clintons with the aim that eventually, twenty five years later, it would lead to the storing of the Capitol and the downfall of the nation state and the collapse of the dollar. And the rise of crypto and the sovereign individuals. Of course not that's just.

and it looks like it comes together organically. But then there's a non organic piece where people like Jason Sullivan and other people see that it's a conspiracy theory then weaponize it through software to promote it on Twitter and other social media campaigns to help a political campaign. So there's a there's an organic piece that eventually has grabbed by others.

for the whole kind of Russia meddling thing. I know, both here in Britain over Brexit and in America over Trump's first election, there are a lot of people who are holding on very tightly by their fingertips to the idea that it was really all the Russians and everything was fine in the Land of Milk and honey, that is the United States of America until the Russians started coming in with their nonsense. Now, I spent a lot of time in Russia with Russians, and there are some

very clever people there. They're not that clever. And what happened in twenty sixteen was, yes, the Russians had the troll farm, and yes they were weaponizing divisions in American society and doing it quite effectively. But those divisions were there, and they were organic, and they were real divisions. They weren't they hadn't been plucked out of thin air by

the Kremlin. And my strong feeling is to keep HARKing back to the Russians is it means you don't look in the mirror and you don't go, why the fuck have we ended up in this place? You could just go us the Russians that did it. But one's responsibility is to look at yourself and your society in the mirror and try and figure out where you've gone so wrong, not to point the finger at somebody else. Fair enough, So what are you doing now to stay saying? Are you detoxing from?

I'm also and now you can see how badly I'm failing at getting away from conspiracy theories, super interested in UFOs. But this administration, for all its failings, does at least seem to have a sort of crazy drive towards radical transparency. They're just like declassifying everything. I don't know how you guys feel about that, but they're declassifying and amid all the kind of JFK files and RFK files and MLK files. They're also apparently drive to declassify the UFO files. But

it turns out that UFOs are real. There are there are Yeah, not everything is explicable. There are things that fly that are unidentified, otherwise known as unidentified flying objects. But anyway, it does turn out apparently that you, guys and the Pentagon various other agencies have been taking this ship seriously for quite a long time, while pretending that you weren't taking it seriously.

And we are naturally feeling very nervous about the crumbling stablishment and institutions and all the certainties that we've taken

for granted just crumbling all around us. So what I do in these moments of existential dread is I think myself into the mind of a fifteenth century German peasant who is tied to the land and sees the printing press coming out and Martin Luther nailing his things to the door jam, and he's wringing his hands over the death of the feudal order, and he's like, how is the world going to function once we're no longer tied to the land and the monasteries don't provide for all

of our arms, and what healthcare remains if you can figure out the four humors and all of that, And he's going, oh, whoa, no, please can it just all please just go back to how it was. But then they have a lot of wars and lots of people die and lots of witches get burnt, but they get the enlightenment and democracy and science and they go to space.

So I just think we're at the beginning of a very turbulent but also very interesting period that may, if we don't all kill each other, may lead to some unexpected and amazing developments. Will my children when they're my age still be living under the same system of parliamentary democracy that I grew up under? Or will their children? Probably? Not right, I just think nothing lasts forever. Is it

going to be bad? Probably? Is it also maybe going to be better in some unforseeable, unfathomable way that I can't even imagine. Probably?