Fleapit revisited:A Storm Foretold.

"Fuck the voting. Let's get right to the violence" - Roger Stone, in the run up to the 2020 US election

Roger Stone, Republican strategist and friend and ally of Donald Trump for over thirty years, is not an easy man to warm to. He talks of shooting anti-fascists dead (on what he calls "shoot a liberal for Christ day"), he calls QAnon patriots, he doesn't like "commies" one little bit, and he's very fond of calling people "cocksuckers" and threatening to have them beaten up or murdered. Bill and Hillary Clinton, of course, are at the receiving end of some of Stone's most vicious lies.

He seems to exist in an almost permanent state of rage, constantly railing about his enemies who he regularly insists are cheats, liars, criminals, and pure evil. It seems to me that every horrific accusation he makes about his enemies seems to fit him, and his boy Trump, far better than it does them. Judge a man by the company he keeps and during Christopher Guldbrandsen's A Storm Foretold (shown recently on BBC4 and still available on iPlayer) we hear or see Stone mention the likes of Richard Nixon (whose face Stone has tattooed on his back), Steve Bannon, Matt Gaetz, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Rudy Giuliani (who Stone opines can't be fully trusted as he loves "booze and pussy" too much), Rand Paul, Lindsey Graham, and Kevin McCarthy.

Charmers all. Stone even chucks in some historical names in the shape of Reagan, Stalin, and Mussolini. No wonder he feels so comfortable with Trump (who, at one point, he bizarrely accuses of being obsessed with the film Sunset Boulevard, apropos of absolutely nothing). We also get to see Stone mixing up vodka martinis, smoking enormous cigars (he started smoking, he claims, when he was about seven years old), and making the claim that he's "saving western civilisation". At one point he even cuts off, and blanks, Guldbrandsen believing, wrongly, he's found another film crew who he can exploit more easily and earn more money from.

Guldbrandsen, perhaps related to the stress of it all, collapses in cardiac arrest and ends up in intensive care in a Copenhagen hospital. Causing Stone to make some pathetic remarks about Denmark having a "socialist" healthcare system. Apart from that spell in hospital, and the period when Stone was uncooperative, Guldbrandsen had access to Stone from 2018 to January 2021 - and we all know what happened in January 2021.

We soon Stone on InfoWars with the execrable Alex Jones and we see him joking that the name Guldbrandsen sounds like it has the "third reich written all over it". This at a time when many Trump associates have been arrested relating to the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. At a time when Stone himself looks likely to be next - and was next.

Facing years in prison, Stone campaigns for and stays fiercely loyal to Trump (even though it is widely believed that he could testify against Trump and save his own skin). The Proud Boys (a violent neo-fascist group), and their leader Enrique Tarrio, rally around Stone and raise funds for his trial but he's still found guilty of all seven charges and sentenced to forty months in prison.

A sentence that Trump, predictably and dishonourably, commuted. But as the 2020 election grows nearer, and Trump's woefully negligent mishandling of the covid pandemic causes death after death after death, Stone starts to air some doubts about Trump's chances of re-election. Stone had already been planning to accuse Democrats of stealing the election and soon he starts spreading 'Stop The Steal' conspiracy theories where the usual candidates, "the deep state", "the mainstream media", "the left", Black Lives Matter, and Antifa (all the leading coconuts at the alt-right shy) are seen as mysteriously all powerful forces behind the alleged stealing of the election.

Then Trump does lose the election. We all know that and we all know what happened next but what A Storm Foretold doesn't shy away from is showing us what a major role Roger Stone played in the denial, lying, criminality, and, ultimately, murderous violence that followed during the January 6th attempted insurrection.

We see Stone claiming, to gathered crowds, that America faces "a thousand years of darkness" if the Trump supporters don't fight, and we see him talk about how he thinks we may be in "the end of time" or in "the rapture". Another reason, of course, why those who believe him have to fight. And fight they did. Nine people lost their lives following the violence on January 6th and many many more were injured. They weren't the first to lose their lives due to Trump and Stone's incitement to violence and they almost certainly won't be the last.

It drains you of hope to see these terrible people prosper while, or even by, bringing so much division and hatred into the world but there was a glimmer of hope towards the end as we see Trump and Stone begin to turn on each other. These people always turn on each other. They have no friends and they have no loyalty and that is why, in the end, they always lose. Because love is a better story than hate.

But, in the meantime, before they inevitably lose, how much damage will they do? How many more families will be torn apart by the lies and conspiracy theories espoused by Stone and Trump? How many more people will die? Guldbrandsen, who spent nearly three years in the company of Roger Stone, believes the events he witnessed are "only the beginning, a warning of what's yet to come". A chilling thought but one that people can, if they wish, stop from happening.