Gabriel Gatehouse is a journalist and author. ‘The Coming Storm’, a podcast he co-created about America’s contemporary conspiracy theory culture, is on BBC Sounds; his book of the same name is published by Penguin.
Matthew Sweet is a journalist, historian and broadcaster. He contributed to the Antisemitism Policy Trust’s ‘Conspiracy Theories: A Guide for Members of Parliament and Candidates’.
Matthew Sweet: For the first time we have an incoming government in America, a large number of whose assumed personnel are fully paid-up members of conspiracy theory culture – what happens when that occurs? I think for a lot of the leaders of this insurgent culture being in power is going to be a difficult experience.
Gabriel Gatehouse: It will be, but I’m not surprised by the result. Conspiracy theories are a symptom of a radical loss of faith in the system in America. It’s more pronounced among Republicans, but it’s across the board.
A New York Times/Siena College poll that came out a couple of weeks before the election asked people what their attitudes towards the political and economic system in America was. The results were startling: 41 per cent of people said the system needs a bit of tweaking, but not much more – basically that was the Democrats’ offer in this election, to be stewards of the system – and 58 per cent said the system either needed major changes or to be torn down completely. Donald Trump has become their avatar.
MS: Conspiracy theories are not the reason Trump was elected. They are more like the oil that makes the process smoother or faster. What is really being described in the election result is not an electorate declaring it believes every line about theories of secret power structures running the world, but it is an expression of deep disillusionment: how it is to feel disenfranchised, to be poor, that the future is bleaker than the past.
GG: A major failing of the Democrats was that the mendaciousness and tear-it-all-down madness of the Trump campaign pushed them into a corner where they became defenders of the system.
In the run-up to the election, I was in America, and I repeatedly heard that prices have gone up and that they will be lower again if Donald Trump gets back in. A majority of Americans felt like the Democrats didn’t address this, and Trump will. Many also felt like any vote for the system means no change, that their democracy is a facade and that’s why they vote for the anti-system guy. It’s going to be very interesting to see what happens when the anti-system guy is in charge of the system.
MS: I think what will happen is that those actors themselves, once they are in the White House, will become incorporated into the conspiracy constellation. A few days after the election, I noticed a conspiracy influencer posting on X that Donald Trump was a ‘convincing … and charismatic actor’ and part of the psyop of a technocratic global cabal.
Anybody can be incorporated into the conspiracy, even people who have been seen to be its opponent. So this culture could be as big a problem for Trump as it might have been for Harris. The person we really should be watching is Bobby Kennedy Jr.
GG: He denies he has been anti-vaccinations, but the record says something else. But other stuff he says is reasonable and chimes with lots of reasonable Americans: how ultra-processed foods are bad for your health, which is objectively true. He says he’ll get rid of them in schools, for example.
But then he says he wants fluoride removed from American water systems and sounds like the crazy general in Dr Strangelove who thinks fluoridated water is a communist plot. So we need to be alive to people who are objectively conspiracy theorists but are saying some sensible stuff at the same time.
MS: If RFK does what he says he is going to do, we can say conspiracy culture will have a legible effect on human lives. We might emerge with data that lets us see it in the teeth of American children. And if he does what he wants to do with vaccines and America doesn’t vaccinate during the next pandemic, I would not want to be part of that experiment.
GG: By the way, when it quickly became clear Trump had won convincingly, I wondered what was going to happen to the conspiracy theory about the 2020 election being stolen, which is incredibly widespread. A quarter of all Americans believe that, much more so among Republicans than Democrats. People started quickly saying that Kamala Harris won 15-20 million fewer votes than Joe Biden did in 2020 which proved 2020 had been stolen – in fact, they just hadn’t finished counting.
At the same time Harris supporters were using these incomplete numbers to say the 2024 vote had been stolen. What we see is two sides of America that appear to inhabit entirely separate realities, but which are a mirror image of one another.
MS: That is true. In 2000, when George W Bush narrowly won, Democrats contested the result. But the difference is that conspiracy theories about this election being stolen from Harris are not going to gain any kind of traction. During the campaign, conspiracy theories about the assassination attempts on Donald Trump weirdly got no traction at all. So although they have no genuine political valency, it does seem that conspiracy theories on what you might call the left don’t seem to have the same power.
GG: A notable exception to that is the conspiracy theory that Trump was a Kremlin agent, which basically consumed his first presidency.
MS: I agree and the stories that circulated around the Cambridge Analytica data scandal in Britain amounted to very little. We are lucky that the vote for Trump was relatively decisive. Because all of that machinery that the Republican party prepared in case of a closer result seems to have been stood down. We also have a loser who conceded graciously.
GG: I agree. A few months ago, on a BBC panel I raised a few eyebrows when I said that the outcome that is most likely to lead to the survival of America’s democratic system is a decisive Trump victory, so you could try to lance the boil of distrust in the political and economic system. The decisiveness of Trump’s victory is a positive thing for faith in the conduct of US elections. The other question is whether America’s democratic institutions will survive the onslaught that people in Trump’s orbit, and Trump himself, would like to enact on them.
Elon Musk used some pretty outlandish conspiracy theories to try to help Trump. At one rally in Pennsylvania in October he said that Biden and Harris were puppets, not deciding their actions, and then he said wouldn’t it be interesting to compare their puppet-masters with Jeffrey Epstein’s client list? Musk is clever, I don’t think he believes this – it was a deliberate weaponization of a theory.
MS: Musk is a chaotic figure, and this is the epistemic grey area that he delights in occupying, which a lot of people are very attracted to – that zone where it doesn’t matter whether something is true or not, it’s just a vibe. But the important thing about Musk is that he thinks Earth is a failure that we need to escape from, and that people like him will escape to some new life among the stars.
Elon Musk with Donald Trump in the run up to the recent US presidential election. At a rally in October, the tech billionaire baselessly suggested that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden were in the control of ‘puppet-masters’. Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images.
GG: Another group who are very excited about Trump’s victory are the tech accelerationists. These guys think that Musk, JD Vance and Peter Thiel are going to use Trump as their wrecking ball through the regulations, to live on another planet, forget about human mortality, become machines.
This ‘transhumanist’ movement is allied with crypto and artificial intelligence, and it all comes out of this weird movement that was big in Silicon Valley in the late 80s, early 90s called extropianism, which few have heard of. But somehow it has taken over Silicon Valley, and now it seems to have taken over the White House.
MS: Conspiracy culture takes a pick-and-mix approach. It constructs its fantasies about Bill Gates wanting to chip people’s brains, and throws its weight behind Elon Musk, who is actually investing a lot of money in chipping people’s brains. That is one of the things that binds conspiracy theorists – the ability to turn a blind eye to anything that opposes their worldview. Undeniably, there’s an energy and excitement to being part of this conspiracy theory culture, but mainly it makes the people stuck in it really unhappy. It breaks up relationships, families.
One way out is building media literacy and teaching it as part the curriculum to show the history of these ideas. People like the idea that they have just discovered a conspiracy involving, say, Bill Gates and George Soros plotting to brainwash Americans and create a system of concentration camps. There’s not much point in just saying: you’re wrong about this. But you can demonstrate that 20 years ago this exact same idea was being said of John D Rockefeller and Richard Nixon, that the same ideas come back time and time again.
Some might reply that shows this conspiracy has been going on for thousands of years, but I think a lot of people might instead see that they are living in the ruins of other people’s fantasies.
GG: I agree that fact checking, though important, doesn’t really work. One’s perception of what the truth is should change as new facts come in. A conspiracy theorist is the opposite of that. They will take every bit of evidence that supports their theory and eliminate any facts that counteract it.
The Coming Storm traced the conspiracy theories gripping America today by putting them into a decades-long narrative – the podcast was structured like a conspiracy theory, in a way. But we were constantly coming up against things that disrupted our narrative, and we had to incorporate those.