Hosted by Faisal Al Yafai
Featuring Gabriel Gatehouse
Produced by Finbar Anderson
Listen to and follow The Lede
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Podbean
Gabriel Gatehouse’s pet peeve, he tells New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai, is the oversimplification of American politics into “the MAGA lot are mad and the Democrats are sane. … That kind of binary way of looking at things ignores so many of the nuances of what is really going on inside America right now and is a total barrier to understanding.”
Since his last appearance on The Lede, Gatehouse has been busy, having brought out a second season of his podcast on conspiracy theories in the United States, The Coming Storm, as well as a new documentary, “Seeking Satoshi: The Mystery Bitcoin Creator,” which explores the identity of the mysterious person, or people, behind the now hugely valuable cryptocurrency.
“The only way to survive this new period is to rip yourself out of your own information silo and dip a toe into some of the other information silos.”
His many years of reporting on America’s fringes have brought him to a conclusion. “One of America’s big problems right now is that there is no shared factual frame of reference,” he tells Al Yafai. “One half of the country believes that the other half is dismantling democracy as we speak, and the other half of the country believes that they’ve just taken power and have narrowly averted the dismantling of democracy.”
Fortunately, Gatehouse has a solution. “The only way to survive this new period is to rip yourself out of your own information silo and dip a toe into some of the other information silos,” he says. “Then it’s all right, you can come back home afterwards to your comfortable place.”
Over his many years reporting in the U.S., Gatehouse has also witnessed the movements he initially reported on at the fringes of American society move right to the centers of power. On the American “experiment,” Gatehouse reflects: “It is an experiment, right? It’s just a different sort of experiment from the one we thought.”
Further listening:
America’s Era of the Entrepreneur — with Erik Baker and Faisal Al Yafai
The Decline of the American Empire — with Robert Kaplan and Faisal Al Yafai
The American Experiment From Outside and Within — with Hari Kunzru and Faisal Al Yafai