BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts

Hello, grounded listeners. I'm Louis Theroux and you're about to hear part of an interview

I did with Gabriel Gatehouse, presenter of the coming storm, the Radio 4 and World

Service podcast about...

A crazy conspiracy theory about a cabal of satanic pedophiles who may or may not have tried

to steal an election. The thing that was different about Q&N from, I think, all of the big

previous conspiracy theories was that it was a participatory thing. So you didn't just

kind of sit there on the internet and passively receive this secret knowledge that would make

you feel powerful. That's kind of one of the drivers of why people believe in conspiracy

theories because they have access to secret knowledge. So in a world where they feel disempowered,

their access to the secret knowledge gives them power. But Q&N was a bit different because

you weren't just receiving the secret knowledge. The Q drops that were being left by, as it

turns out, this eccentric American pig farmer in the Philippines, but who was pretending

to be a person in the Pentagon with access to high-resolution.

Is that Ron Watkins?

Ron and Jim Watkins. They denied, we should say.

Ron Watkins was the son, Jim is the dad.

Jim's the dad. Were they both writing them, do you think?

The people who have kind of studied this and the lexicon think that Jim did most of the

writing. You can Google him and you'll find his very eccentric fountain pen unboxing videos

and just weird stuff. Ron was the techie guy who was kind of running H-Koon, this message

board where it was all happening. But they were dropping cryptic clues. So your job as a Q&N

...