You will remember him from the storming of The Capitol on 6 January 2021: draped in furs, horns on his head, and carrying a spear flying the United States flag.
The world later came to know him as Jake Angeli aka the ’Q Shaman’, a devotee to the conspiracy theory QAnon, which believes Hillary Clinton to be part of a cabal of satanic paedophiles that Donald Trump is battling to defeat.
When BBC journalist Gabriel Gatehouse saw coverage of the attack he realised he’d met Angeli two months earlier while covering the presidential election.
Photo: Getty Images via AFP
So begins Gatehouse’s BBC podcast series The Coming Storm, which not only delves into QAnon's origins but how it remains a major force within the Republican party.
Such conspiratorial thinking is now part of the mainstream, he says.
“When I was writing my script back in December, I think it was 25 percent of Republicans who believed this about a cabal of satanic paedophiles and that this this cabal has brought America into such a pickle that violence might be necessary to sort it out.
“This is not just a group of eccentrics as we saw on January 6, but this is, I think, a genuine threat to American democracy.”
QAnon started life on the message board 4Chan, Gatehouse told Kim Hill.
This person posts a message in October 2017, basically saying that Hillary Clinton will soon be arrested, and goes on to talk about this conspiracy among the elites, across politics, big tech, and Hollywood and all this kind of stuff.
“And that Donald Trump essentially will soon reveal his hand as the secret person who's been fighting this all along and, the quote unquote traitors will be arrested and executed.”
The person posting claimed to have ‘Q’ security clearance, he says
“It’s a high level of security clearance in the Department of Energy. And because everyone who's posting is anonymous, he became therefore Q Anon.
“Here is somebody who says that they're a high level insider posting deep secrets about a giant web of malfeasance at the heart of US government.
“And the only thing he’s doing about it is posting about it on a niche website.”
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“There were some people who very deliberately tried to move it off this niche website and onto the mainstream internet, through forums on Reddit and YouTube and Facebook.”
Certain Republican operatives saw an opportunity in disseminating such fringe beliefs, he says.
“They did that quite deliberately. And so, when it came to the election in 2020 and Donald Trump came out and said this is a fraud that's been committed on the American public etc, etc, the QAnon community and the Trumpistas they kind of merged and this became one movement.”
So-called ‘Pizzagate’, another bizarre conspiracy theory, pre-dates QAnon, he says.
When Hillary Clinton’s emails were leaked by Wikileaks 4Chan people started trawling though them, particularly those of campaign manager John Podesta.
For some reason they picked up on references to a pizza restaurant he often visited.
“In this world, apparently, cheese pizza CP was slang for child porn.
“So, they picked up on references to pizza in John Podesta's emails. John Podesta used to go to this particular restaurant, and they constructed this elaborate theory about how it was all code and how the different toppings meant different …I mean really dark, but really crazy stuff that you could order various kinds of child sexual abuse through coded pizza orders.”
“And this again was boosted by various people in the Trump orbit. But Pizzagate remained pretty niche. It made some small ripples on the surface of American political culture, and then dived back underneath it again, but it was the precursor to Q Anon.
“And really then it folded into Q Anon lore and sprung up onto the surface of mainstream politics in late 2020.”
It’s not just the political right that were lured down conspiracy rabbit holes, he says, the idea that Donald Trump was an active Russian asset took hold among the left.
“Now, he wasn't right? This was massively extrapolated from a medium-sized dollop of truth about the Russians kind of stirring the pot a bit during the election.
“But the point is conspiracy theories are designed to help you make sense of a confusing world. And back in November 2016, there was nothing more confusing to the liberal world, the kind of establishment journalism that I inhabit, than the fact that Donald Trump had won the election.
“Everyone had said it's never going to happen. It can't happen. Hillary Clinton was 95 percent, they thought, certain to win it.
“So why had this apparently impossible thing happened? Well, there had to be a reason. So, the Russians have done it. Rather than looking at some kind of very real social issues going on in the United States itself, you look outside, and you construct a narrative.”
The truth is that more people than we think believe in these conspiracies, Gatehouse says. But if you look at QAnon as a metaphor, perhaps it makes more sense.
“If you don't take it literally, people believe that there's a small group of people who are mostly unelected, who've got disproportionate power and wealth and who are steering the world, running the world in ways that we can't really see or understand, that we don't think are necessarily in our best interests, then you kind of pause for a second and you go, OK well, maybe they're onto something.
“So, in other words, if you take QAnon as a metaphor, then there's some truth to it, and perhaps even an important truth that goes to the heart of this question of the power dynamics during a period of great change.”
An influential book The Sovereign Individual, by William Rees Mogg and James Dale Davidson, published 30 years’ ago has proven to be extraordinarily prescient, he says.
“They predict Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, internet trolls and bots, and all this kind of stuff. And what they basically say is that the internet will kill democracy.
“The decentralization created by the Internet will mean that nation states basically will lose all of their power. And the book’s a sort of handbook for how to profit in this kind of brave new world of offshoring and sovereign individuals.”
A few sovereign individuals will have such power and wealth they replace the nation states, the book, much admired by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, theorises.
“Everyone else will live in cyber serfdom.”
So how likely is it that the nation state and democracy will collapse?
“Democracy is about forfeiting some of your individual liberties, your individual sovereignty, if you like, and pooling it as a community.
“The internet basically hyper-charged our sense of power as individuals. Once upon a time the likes of you and me in the media we had the power to dictate or control or decide what the national conversation was going to be.
“We would get together in our morning editorial meetings and go right ‘what's the important stuff that people need to know about today?”
That world has gone, Gatehouse says.
“The internet has blown that out of the water. We can decide not to cover something because it's crazy, we can decide we're not going to talk about how Covid is a is a figment of Bill Gates's imagination … because it's nonsense. We can say we're not going to talk about it, but people will still be able to see that on their YouTube algorithms.
“We don't have control over what the societal conversation is anymore. So, there's a much stronger sense of people's individual freedoms.
“And this is why freedom of speech and censorship is such a live issue now.”
"Maybe The Sovereign Individual is right, maybe the internet is going to break democracy, nothing lasts forever right?”
Previously a BBC foreign correspondent, Gabriel Gatehouse is international editor of Newsnight and co-host of daily BBC podcast Ukrainecast.
