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

James Lindsay did go OTT, not least with his support for Trump as a bulwark against "Wokeism", but his Grievance Studies hoax (with Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
) exposed some serious failings in the world of academic publishing and research in some fields. And Lindsay's
book (also with Helen Pluckrose) Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity - and Why This Harms Everybody is an interesting and insightful exploration of post-modernism's contamination of branches of academia.

Gatehouse seemed to shy away from any acknowledgment of this; and the portrayal of anyone concerned about the spread of gender ideology in schools or the huge increase in the "gender-affirmed" medicalisation of young people as MAGA-hatted conspiracy loons was extremely disappointing.

Absolutely this! It's disgraceful that the Nolan Investigates series still hasn't been broadcast on R4.

Epiosde 3 broadcast on Sunday www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001fq60 focused on Hunter Biden's laptop and the main message was that the progressive media, the government, the intelligence community, and the FBI all worked to suppress/discredit the story, and it's quite reasonable to assume that had the story been given the prominence that it deserved, eg imagine if there had been a similar laptop from one of the Trump children, then it's quite possible Trump would have won the 2020 election. There was some collusion although the degree isn't clear. The claims made by the Right about the contents of the laptop were overstated, although there was sufficient material there to have generated considerable public interest had the story not been suppressed/discredited.

There's a bonus episode this morning, at 11.30 in which Louis Theroux interviews Gabriel Gatehouse www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001fcgx. I don't expect much but I'll be pleased to be surprised.

It wasn't very interesting since it skimmed over what had been done in previous episodes in more detail. There was no discussion of the narrative that child safeguarding is a conspiracy-minded project. One interesting thing was that Gatehouse said that much of what has been going on isn't a Left vs Right battle but is the fringes against the centre.