Candace Owens has a very popular internet show in which she trots out deranged conspiracies about, among other things, the demonic nature of Jews, the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk (probably by Jews and their pawns, in her estimation) and the allegation that French President Emmanuel Macron’s wife is really a man.
Owens is hardly alone. There’s an entire ecosystem of right-wing “influencers” who peddle conspiracy theories brimming with racism, antisemitism, demonology, pseudoscience and general crackpottery in regular installments. There’s an even larger constellation of media outlets and personalities who feed on controversy without ever quite condemning the outrages that cause it.
It’s appalling and reprehensible. But this isn’t really a column about all of that.
A foundational small-c conservative insight is, “there’s nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9). In a time of relentless technological change, it’s understandable to think the utility of biblical wisdom has expired. But the point wasn’t about new things. It’s that human nature doesn’t change.
In 1909, the Philadelphia Inquirer helped launch a regional panic with a “news” series on the New Jersey Devil. The Jan. 21 front-page headline blared, “WHAT-IS-IT VISITS ALL SOUTH JERSEY” alongside a photo of “actual proof-prints of the strange creature.” The Inquirer and competing papers hyped the bogus story relentlessly, with reports of sightings, animal mutilations, etc. Decades later, former newspaperman Norman Jeffries admitted to being the mastermind of the hoax.
In a sense, Tucker Carlson — demon attack survivor and journalistic sleuth of cattle mutilations — is part of a long American tradition.
In 1910, newspapers floated the theory that the tail of the then-returning Halley’s Comet might release a kind of cyanide that, as French sci-fi writer and astronomer Camille Flammarion told the New York Times, could “impregnate the atmosphere and possibly snuff out all life on the planet.”
The ensuing Comet Panic of 1910 sold a lot of newspapers, snake oil “comet pills” and even “comet insurance.”
The parallels with pandemic era cure-alls, phobias about “chemtrails” — which may destroy the cloud-seeding industry — and even the Y2K panic a quarter century ago should be fairly obvious.
In 1920, Henry Ford’s newspaper (nationally distributed through his car dealerships), the Dearborn Independent, launched its series on “the International Jew.” Ford adapted “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” forgeries first published in 1903 in a Russian newspaper. In 1936, Father Charles Coughlin launched his magazine Social Justice, picking up where Ford left off. It rehashed “The Protocols” and other bogus propaganda, including the work of deranged Jew-hater August Rohling, the intellectual lodestar for Julius Streicher, the first Nazi to be hanged at Nuremberg for inciting genocide.
Owens, like Streicher, considers Rohling a primary scholarly source.
This stuff seems unprecedented thanks to a cocktail of historical ignorance, recency bias and widespread distrust of elite media. But it’s also a function of technological change.
Monster sightings, baseless gossip, silly or sinister speculation and, of course, antisemitism never disappeared. The more harmless versions of this fare could be found in the checkout aisles of supermarkets for generations. The nastier stuff was relegated to obscure newsletters, AM radio and hard-to-find magazines.
The internet and social media changed all that.
In the 19th century, when newspapers and mass literacy converged, the “media” was an anything goes Wild West, with even respectable publications feeding readers sheer nonsense and literal fake news. (The Rest is History podcast has a wonderful series partly dedicated to how the British press helped fuel the panic over, and the legend of, “Jack the Ripper.”)
It took decades for professional standards and consumer expectations to reach a consensus about what was respectable and legitimate and what wasn’t. The new media landscape is a new Wild West.
A century ago, a primary journalistic-marketing technique was to seduce readers by releasing information — and baseless allegations — piecemeal, in installments. Come back tomorrow for the next shocking development.
This is the modern podcasters’ M.O. Sometimes it’s straightforward and episodic “true crime” style stuff. Other times it’s deranged hogwash, promising the real evidence (about Kirk, Jeffrey Epstein, Mrs. Macron, etc.) is coming — if the Deep State or the Jews don’t get to them first.
They feed the audience just enough to get hooked in pursuit of the big reveal that is never quite revealed. Mixed in is relentless gossip about how other personalities are responding to the allegation du jure or each other. It’s equal parts soap opera, conspiracy, gossip, taboo violation and fearmongering.
The market for such titillation and tripe never went away. What vanished were the post-WWII technological and institutional roadblocks to providing it at scale. Also vanished: the willingness of enough responsible people to condemn it.
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