To millions of people across America, Hillary Clinton sits atop a global network of satanic child-traffickers and is battling an underground resistance led by Donald Trump to maintain her malign influence. That is the core tenet of the QAnon movement, a conspiracy theory that originated in obscure corners of the internet before being seized upon by members of the Republican elite for their political advantage.
Did the Clintons get rich while undertaking a life of public service? Absolutely
QAnon is at the heart of Gabriel Gatehouse’s The Coming Storm. But the book begins with a conspiracy theory from centuries earlier, about witches in medieval Europe. The scrawls of the German inquisitor Heinrich Kramer became the book Malleus Maleficarum because its author happened to live near the inventors of the earliest printing presses. The text would form the basis of the persecution of women for centuries. The technology of printing, Gatehouse writes, disrupted the power structures of feudalism and brought about its end.
Something akin to the same thing is happening today, he argues, demonstrating how easily lines can blur between real-life conspiracies and the frenetic joining-of-dots that marks conspiracy theories. Gatehouse does this most deftly when he chronicles the Clintons’ rise to power, from the murky milieu of Arkansas politics to the often equally suspect world of operating a global foundation while being paid for speaking engagements and consultancy. Did the couple get rich while undertaking a life of public service? Absolutely. Were favours done for major donors? Almost certainly. And there are, of course, credible accusations of sexual assault and harassment by Bill.
None of this means that allegations that the Clintons have murdered dozens of potential enemies or whistleblowers escape the realms of the conspiracy theorist – but by following some of the characters from the 1990s down the rabbit hole, we can see how it might. Pulling at threads can lead you to the truth, but it can just as easily tangle you up in elaborate conspiracism.
Gatehouse is not immune to that conspiracism, and nor does he claim to be. At one point he writes:
Perhaps I had spent too much time down the rabbit hole. I believed a small group of people were plotting to overthrow the Republic… Was this the real conspiracy? If so, it was the biggest of them all.
Most seasoned observers of QAnon and its ancillary conspiracy movements would describe them as a chaotic, almost anarchic snarl of often contradictory beliefs, flaring up in unpredictable places and ways – as unpredictable as the weather.
Gatehouse offers a rival theory: that small groups of Republican elites are orchestrating the events, not just opportunistically exploiting an ungovernable group that is nonetheless useful to their political interests but instead helping form it, steer it and even control it. On multiple occasions, Gatehouse questions whether his thesis is just another conspiracy theory, but assures us that unlike the other conspiracy theories, his is backed by evidence. How convincing that supposed evidence is, though, might vary from reader to reader.
The book’s final third certainly picks up the energy of someone who has uncovered a grand theory of everything, something which ties together apparently unconnected events. Most of the last 50 pages are akin to experiencing a Billy Joel song while on an acid trip, whirling the reader past an endless flurry of world events.
We start with a plot to depose FDR as president in the middle of the 20th century, then leap to the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop. After a short detour around the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr, we are discussing the conspiracy around US biolabs in Ukraine, before we’re at a standoff in Nevada between ranchers and the FBI. To round off our rapid-fire adventure we visit the attempt to oust CEO Sam Altman from OpenAI and a discussion of The Matrix before we’re witnessing a hipster party on New York’s Lower East Side for a dubious startup company.
The message we are intended to take from this blur is that the centre cannot hold. Just as the printing press spelt the end for feudalism, the internet will spell the end of capitalist democracy – what will replace it is unknown, but that is the storm that is coming. It makes for a compelling story.
Except… that story is too cute by far. Ask any scholar of the era what ended feudalism and they’re much more likely to point to the Black Death and the subsequent peasants’ revolts that followed, alongside changes in the technology of warfare. Most of these happened decades before the printing press was developed, and with literacy rates hardly hitting the roof, it was not books that motivated workers’ uprisings. The story might be compelling, but the history is far messier than its narrative.
So it is with storms. We put some of the most advanced technology we have into predicting storms, into seeing when and where they might come, and yet we still often get it wrong. They are far fiercer than we expect, they suddenly change direction, or they fizzle out without warning.
We can barely predict them, and we can do nothing to control them. That’s what makes them so compelling to watch. It’s also what makes it so tempting to see patterns in the chaos, to see reason where there is none. The book’s central metaphor is fitting in more ways than one.
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