The coming storm, radio 4 - series 2

[WarriorN]

I've just heard that there's a new series of the coming storm.

This was the last one, mind boggling stuff around q anon. www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m001324r?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

However the new series is this:

The Mid-Terms 1. Groomers
The Coming Storm
A new diabolical enemy emerges as the mid-terms loom.

Show more
As America goes out to vote for the first time since the tumultuous aftermath of the 2020 election, Gabriel Gatehouse is back in the deep undergrowth of the US political scene, in a bid to understand where the dark energy underpinning the January 6 assault on the Capitol is going now.

One thing the QAnon conspiracy theory about a satanic cabal of paedophiles is morphing into is a grassroots political movement against ‘groomers’ – the idea that LGBTQI+ sex educators and trans healthcare advocates are indoctrinating young people into a sexualised culture.

The battleground is America’s school boards and the prize could be a galvanised Republican base with a new crusade. At a conference in Miami of thinkers shaping the future ideas of the right, Gabriel finds the issue top of the agenda, especially for Florida governor and presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis.

And across the country, a slate of candidates linked to QAnon is running for office – how will they fare?
Producer: Lucy Proctor

Why not? It's a fantastic post and should be quoted in its entirety as much as possible!

😄

Indeed. That Sidhbh Gallagher person boasts that her clinic does 500 double mastectomies per annum.

And if there are 400 clinics....well that figure looks daft.

I listened to the first series and found it very interesting as it related lots of occassions that hadn't made sense to me at the time, but thought overall it wasn't as good as it could have been because it was more about the reporter's journey than proper reporting.

And nearly laughed out loud at the end of the last series when they traced part of the influence of the "disrupters" back to a book written by Rees Moggs father "the Sovereign Individual". ie people who have enough money can operate outside of the system and exploit, particularly if they can break down the normally accept modes of civil behaviour, so exploiting QAnon, PizzaGate to the point where voters no long trust the voting system.

Listening to the 2nd series which started last week, was also interesting as again it showed how easy it is to disrupt the democratic process. Scary.

But what today's episode clearly showed is that those reporting (well it is the BBC) dont recognise or give credibility to those outside of the traditional male concept of society andpolitics. So by just launching into how the chritian right wing are responding to gender identity, without giving any air time to women's concerns is of course insulting.

Although on one level is true about society. How did trans identity take hold? By not listening to women.

But it is worth noting that this is also happening here. That women who raise concerns about Trans ideology being a form of conversion therapy, particularly for children who might be gay or lesbian, is what has led to so many, including other women who say they are feminists, to call gender critical women right wing christians. Because their model of politics is based on the traditional right / left divide. And they dont recognise that women's politics is outside of that.

(re. the figures from the states I thought that was because the only publicly available ones were through insurance companies. Didn't they mention they didn't know how many might have paid privately? even these figures that just report it as a growth industry dont give numbers, just how much money you can make www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/us-sex-reassignment-surgery-market )

I think this must be the source the programme used www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-transyouth-data/

I’ve submitted a complaint to Radio 4 and said that I want a response. It’s either deliberate twisting of the narrative or really sloppy, lazy journalism.

Please contact Radio 4's 'More or Less' too on these statistics. Oh, and Gatehouse et al may prefer fluffy nursery school euphemisms like 'top surgery' and 'bottom surgery' but Professor Robert Winston, the Labour peer, uses the term mutilation, because it is.

deadwildroses.com/2019/10/07/handy-venn-diagrams-the-radical-feminist-position-on-gender/

Believers in gender ideology have as much in common with the Christian right as feminists do. I'm getting utterly sick of academics and journalists that will not address this misogynist bias.

Does groomer always mean paedophile? Paedophiles will take advantage of the situation groomers create, but I think it’s a stretch to say all of the people promoting gender identity and inappropriate materials and therefore grooming are paedophiles. The problem is probably a chunk don’t realise what they are doing or enabling. They think they are being progressive and supportive. Some do, of course, but not all.

I feel that Biden should have got a he'll of a lot more flack for getting Sunak's name wrong.

This is a good point. Did Trevor Noah comment on this?

Oh crap, will listen later.

Does groomer always mean paedophile?

Groomers groom to exploit others. Not always paedophilia, men groom women to abuse or sexually traffic them, others groom to take financial advantage, drug dealers groom children to take drugs or for country lines.

Groomers also don’t just groom their intended victims, they also groom those around them. So paedophiles will groom the family of the child they are targeting, they will groom politicians who oversee safeguards, they will groom others to promote inappropriate sexual content in schools. Groomers might, for example, use a diversity award schemes to do groom, one which promotes an incorrect understanding of law and safeguarding but looks all shiny and colourful. That is why safeguarding is so important because people who seek to exploit others will go to great lengths to do so.

It was a little confusing as to what point they were making. They downplayed gender identity ideology in schools by calling it “stuff” and did the classic trick of referring to older children as “ young adults” in a context of a clearly inappropriate book in a school library.
And the gendered glacier paper that was the inspiration for one of the men to research gender ideology IS nonsense and it IS alarming that reputable science journals are publishing papers that claim glaciers have a gender and that penis’s are responsible for climate change conceptually and from what I am make out the Twitter account libsoftwitter ( or whatever it is called) uses genuine videos of genuine teachers and they do say ridiculous things and if I had a child in that school I would be concerned.
it was an unsatisfying listen overall and is making me question his approach and the accuracy of season 1 when he glosses over parents concerns as “moms” concerns.
I’ll listen to episode 2 to see where he goes with that.

Honestly, this kind of reporting is why people start to believe more radical conspiracy theories or at the least lose all trust in mainstream soources.

You have to wonder what kind of real research went into this. It seems like either a deliberate snow job or the ravings of a slightly thick person determined not to disturb his own worldview.

I suspect a lot of people might equate groomer to pedophile though.

I heard this on a long drive yesterday. It's a disgraceful piece of journalism that picks and chooses its 'facts' to suit the narrative. I was as stunned as others at what I was hearing. He was saying that opposition to GI and the mutilation of children is a far right conspiracy. In what way is GI theory is based in Marxism? I've no doubt that some far-right US groups are using fear of grooming to rouse support, but that's not the whole story.

I think it was the most irresponsible piece of 'journalism' I've heard on the BBC for a very long time. It separated the issue of children potentially being groomed from the whole misogynistic, homophobic, fetishistic mountain of GI nonsense that is opposed by most rational people, regardless of politics.

The 282 girls who'd had mastectomies were from the state of Florida alone and only included those who'd claimed on their health insurance for the operation. I suspect many, many more pay for it themselves: there have been thousands of crowdfunders for surgery. There are 50 US states. We could be talking about thousands of girls who've had surgery paid for by insurance companies alone. But it's a tiny number, according to Gatehouse and he said, the mastectomies are a therapeutic treatment for girls so tormented by dysphoria that the operation enables them to go on to live happy lives... No mention of autism, sexual abuse, homophobic parents, eating disorders and all the other co-morbidities that are now widely recognised.

I listened to some of The Coming Storm and thought on a couple of occasions he'd got too close to his subject and this just proved it. He doesn't want to tell the full story, just a simplified version that fits his agenda. The Stephen Nolan Stonewall podcast has been completely ignored.

I'm furious about this. On GoFundMe today, both the 'Top Surgery' and 'Bottom Surgery' pages are at their max - 1000 individuals, many very young looking at their photos (if you want to check what I'm posting, the green bar at the bottom of the GoFundMe page fills up at the 528 mark but keep clicking - there are many more pages).

On a lighter note, the man at the US conference with the idea of magic mushrooms for depression that Gatehouse includes as an amusing crank...er, this was a news story running on the BBC 10pm news this week as a major medical breakthrough.

That’s a good point re. Magic mushrooms! It was literally one of the leading stories on bbc news last week. Kings college london uni I think and other uni’s similar findings.
so not evidence of a conspiracy theory at all.
quite a few things wrong or just not getting (or not explaining for the listeners) the nuance so not great journalism.

Gatehouse is getting some pushback on Twitter, people pointing the inaccuracies.

I agree, I'm going to have to listen again. It felt sensible till a weird u turn.

While searching online to find out when or where this is on, this review by Miranda Sawyer in the Guardian popped up. It's from January 2022.

Interesting bit of context on how the series came about and reference to programmes covering some of the same ground previously by others.

www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/jan/08/the-coming-storm-review-gabriel-gatehouse-bbc-qanon-conspiracy-movement-now-where-were-we-podcast-barry-cryer-bob-gemma-cairney-gets-classical

Episode 2 has just started. It's on a different theme.

It’s about a laptop which Hunter Biden, the son of the Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, had supposedly left in a computer repair shop in Delaware. The laptop allegedly contains damning information about the Biden family. Gabriel thinks it’s fake news and ignores it at the time. But that is a mistake.

Blimey, to have dismissed that laptop is a major mis-step for a journalist.

It supports my conspiracy theory, that Gatehouse is not engaged in journalism but in narrative creation and does this by trimming his findings so they fit under a Right wing conspiracy theory umbrella.

Gatehouse points out that laptop man (the man who received Hunter Biden's laptop) only gives accounts of what happened to Right wing media.

Maybe that's because other parts of the media, including Gatehouse, spent years rubbishing the story.

I did get that impression from the first series.

Maybe we can suggest that in the name of balance, the Nolan stonewall documentary is given day time air time rather than hiding in the pod cast shadows.

At least Gatehouse did admit that the Hunter Biden laptop story was real and there was substantial content. And that FaceBook and twitter suppressed the story when it first broke, parts of the media labelled it as "Russian misinformation" and that their efforts in doing this effectively killed the story for years.

But while doing this, Gatehouse continued to throw shade on those who persisted in trying to get the story out.

The programme has good content but I now can't unsee the agenda in its presentation and that leaves a sour taste.