Info anarchy comes for the Left Fake news is too popular to resist

On Sept. 14, the Substack writer Heather Cox Richardson claimed in her daily missive that “the radical Right is working to distort the country’s understanding” of Charlie Kirk’s murder. The alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, wasn’t on the Left, she wrote. Rather, he was “a young white man from a Republican, gun-enthusiast family, who appears to have embraced the far Right.”

It seems that Richardson bought into the theory circulating on the Left that Robinson was a Groyper — that is, a devotee of the far-Right provocateur Nick Fuentes — who killed Kirk for the sin of insufficient reactionary radicalism. Even in the fog of speculation and conjecture that necessarily follows such a shocking event, informed observers recognized that this theory was, generously, bereft of evidence. At the same time, evidence was already accumulating that Robinson had Left-wing motivations.

The evidence became too clear to deny after the release of court documents spelling out the broad contours of Robinson’s rationale, with his mother telling police that he had become “more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented” over the last year. But Richardson, rather than admitting she had misjudged, remained defiant, writing the day after the documents were released that Robinson’s motive “remains unclear.”

It may seem unfair to pick on a single blogger who twists the truth when American politicians and professional pundits crank out countless lies and distortions daily. But if you aren’t familiar with Richardson, you might know someone who is. Her Substack newsletter, Letters from an American, is the world’s most popular, boasting more than 2.6 million followers as of September 2025. That’s the equivalent of nearly a quarter of The New York Times’s combined digital and print subscribers — for a single person. There may be few other media outlets with more influence on liberal-leaning Americans.

Letters from an American is difficult to place on the traditional establishment-anti-establishment axis, though. On the one hand, Richardson is a professor of history at Boston College with an enviable record of academic publications that receive laudatory coverage in legacy media outlets. On the other hand, the nature of Substack means that she is only accountable to her audience, not peers, fact-checkers, or big-money supporters. She’s a credentialed expert, yes, but she’s also a free agent.

In his 2021 book The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch portrayed institutions like academia and mass media as epistemic (knowledge-generating) machines. At their best, such institutions use checks and balances to keep their participants honest and trustworthy. Yet public confidence in these systems continues to wane, with many believing their self-regulatory mechanisms have broken down.

“Liberals read, conservatives watch TV,” asserted the UnHerd columnist Richard Hanania in an influential 2021 essay that explores why, in his view, Democrats are more resistant to mendacity and petty misinformation than Republicans. Conservatives in the MAGA era derive their beliefs directly from President Trump or grassroots sources, while liberal opinion comes from “an intermediate class of activists, lawyers, journalists, professors, and bureaucrats,” avers Hanania.

This intermediate class, which in many cases is synonymous with “the experts,” is epistemically regulated by institutions, and operates with an institutional halo, even if it also propagates its own crop of partisan distortions. At their best, mediating institutions on the Left suppress the spread of misinformation among the grassroots of their own side; at their worst, they legitimize unfounded rumors and conspiracies. One of numerous examples: the notion, promoted by some 50 former intelligence officials and parroted uncritically by mainstream outlets, that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation.

For years and even decades, such incidents have led most Republicans to conclude that “expert” regulatory mechanisms are hopelessly broken. Now, some Democrats are now joining forces with them. Before Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race in 2024, many Democratic partisans claimed that The New York Times and other mainstream organs were waging a vindictive campaign against him, sabotaging the party’s chances by insufficiently lauding the strength of the economy or reporting on allegations that the 46th president was in mental decline. If in 2020 the calls for “moral clarity” in journalism (that is, explicitly biased reporting) failed to take full root, the demand for institutions to cater directly to progressive biases remains persistent among many of the most avid consumers of Left news media.

For some time, the centrifugal force of audience preference on the Left has been counteracted by inertia and the deference given to those with legacy credentials. But with the rise of Substack and Bluesky, Left-wing partisans have more tools than ever to isolate themselves in like-minded informational bubbles. This means that the same forces that have turned many Right-wing institutions into obsequious Trumpist organs over the last decade are now working their evil magic on the Left.

Some traditional informational gatekeepers have also spread misinformation about Kirk’s assassin. Joan Donovan, a professor at Boston University and “nationally recognized online disinformation researcher,” told a reporter for the Los Angeles Times that the messages Robinson carved into the bullets indicated he was a Groyper. Even more ludicrously, an article in the Left-wing Byline Times claimed that the “Slav squat” costume Robinson donned for Halloween in 2018 indicated he had been “radicalized by far-Right online movements,” an insight probably derived from a now partially-deleted Twitter thread written by a random video editor. As someone who was, like Robinson, a 15-year-old boy immersed in online culture in 2018, the “Slav squat” is  instantly recognizable as a wildly popular apolitical meme. But most have stuck — perhaps grudgingly — to the facts of the case.

In this context, it becomes easier to understand the role that Richardson’s Substack is playing. Avid consumers of political news may playfully characterize themselves as masochists, but they also fall victim to the powerful lure of reinforcing one’s own beliefs. Where The New York Times hesitates because of its reporters’ adherence to institutional standards, a dozen independent outlets will compete to capitalize on the gap in demand for affirmative party-line narratives. Richardson has seen the most success among the lot by combining her legitimate credentials and level-headed language with a post-truth appreciation for catharsis over factuality.

But it’s not just Richardson who has worked to subvert the authority of traditional informational gatekeepers on the Left in the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination. On Bluesky, where many influential progressive commentators now make their home, friendly pushback against the Groyper theory by the intellectually honest is greeted with derision. And the fallacies of online bullshitters have already “trickled up” to infotainment purveyors like Jimmy Kimmel, who asserted in a Sept. 15 monologue that “the MAGA gang” is “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.”

According to a Sept. 14 poll from YouGov, 40% of Democrats believe that Tyler Robinson was a Republican. Hopefully, this number will decrease as information about the case disseminates more widely, and the American Left will avert, at least for now, the great informational crack-up that has already struck the Right. But there is no guarantee the faltering influence of fact-based institutions will hold forever. While ABC suspended Kimmel’s show in response to his remarks and pressure from the Trump administration, such coercion will only help to build his image as a martyr for the truth.

So, a cautionary word to conservatives: if you dislike the liberal mainstream media, just wait until you meet the liberal post-mainstream media.

 

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