Save us from the crank Right Has Donald Trump let them down?

Not long ago, when people still listened to the radio in their cars, you could tune into some freaky talk while driving late at night. “We know a third of us are star children, implanted by the visitors,” the anchor might drawl matter-of-factly. “What we’re learning now is, there’s two groups of star children — two tribes of visitors — and they’re butting heads. And we’re in the middle of it, y’know? Iraq, Obama, recession, it all goes back to the star children…”

The writer Abe Greenwald dubs this genre of late-night crankery “star-child radio”. These days, you don’t need to take a long drive through the middle of nowhere to catch it. It is everywhere online, especially on the online Right. Indeed, much of Right-wing media now resembles star-child radio writ large: a vast chamber of oft-malignant fantasies, where even once-reasonable minds go to get euthanised.

Each flick of the news feed pulls up a paranoia-monger more wild-eyed than the previous, warning about the evil machinations of all-powerful pedophiles, Jews, Davos “Communists”, and Brigitte Macron (née Jean-Michel Trogneux).

The standard partisan explanation is that this is a pendulum-like reaction to the high-handed censorship and information-control strategies deployed by the establishment during “peak-woke”, from the mid-2010s to 2022 or so. The explosion of what Theodor Adorno called the “paranoid disposition”, however, increasingly defies this logic. The establishment has been largely dethroned, populists are in power, and still there seems to be no stopping the online Right’s slide into irrationality.

Consider the pundit Michael Shellenberger (1.4 million followers on X). Reacting to a Tucker Carlson documentary on 9/11 last week, Shellenberger said: “So now it appears … that the CIA was probably behind the 9/11 attacks.” Later, he softened the claim somewhat, suggesting that the CIA “didn’t stop or at least contributed to” 9/11. In the same interview, Shellenberger linked “a lot of the UFO stuff” to “the occult” and “occult behaviors within NASA”.

In the summer of 2020, while serving as the op-ed editor of the New York Post, I commissioned a column from Shellenberger, then known as an environmentalist author who’d wearied of the movement he once championed. In it, he denounced the “hysteria” that characterises much green activism — a pseudo-religion that “spreads anxiety” while justifying anti-growth, and downright anti-human, policies.

A green insider criticising his own movement — that’s catnip to conservative publications like the Post (Lefty outlets equally relish publishing the Right’s internal critics). What made Shellenberger especially attractive was how sensible he was. He didn’t deny manmade climate change. Rather, he marshaled fact and reason to show that it’s a “manageable” crisis, not a warrant for undoing industrial civilisation.

The Post continued to publish Shellenberger even after I left the paper in 2021. Expanding his range beyond environmental issues, he took on Big Tech censorship, as well as the crime and dysfunction that disfigured many blue cities; he even made a quixotic bid for governor of California. He became more explicitly identified with the Right in the bargain. That, too, was a reasonable response to the Left’s race-rioting and Covid authoritarianism in those febrile years.

Shellenberger, in short, was someone I knew, or thought I knew, and whose work I once promoted. By the standards of the post-2020 Right, he wasn’t even all that militant. He was more or less an old-school liberal repelled by liberalism as it actually existed in that era (and who could blame him?). Yet today’s Shellenberger blends legitimate critiques of the intelligence and security apparatus — CIA torture and Third World coups — with 9/11 troof and “occult” hooey.

Others with even bigger audiences have gone much further down the star-child-radio path — a reality driven home by the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk assassination.

The alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, is entitled to his day in court. Yet if there ever were an open-and-shut case, it’s his. The evidence against him piled up high and fast as federal and local investigators went to work: the matching outfit; the bullet engravings; his messages to a trans friend (possibly his partner); his confession on an online message board; his family members’ recollection that he’d grown increasingly militant in defense of LGBT causes. The Left, at first, was eager to deny affiliation with Robinson, but the Right should have jumped at the theory of his guilt.

Nonetheless, the authorities failed to persuade some of the online Right’s biggest voices. Candace Owens and numerous lesser figures just knew who’d killed Kirk. You know, they. “Turning Point will not release the footage,” Owens told her audience, referring to the Right-wing campus group founded by Kirk. Claiming that TPUSA team members had removed the memory cards from cameras at the assassination site, she insinuated that maybe Kirk’s own organisation was in on the killing. In addition to TPUSA, Owens’s theory weaves in Bibi Netanyahu and the pro-Israel billionaire Bill Ackman, who she claims threatened Kirk over his growing skepticism of the Jewish state.

As is often the case, the star-child anchors spin their nutty theories out of more innocuous fact patterns. Kirk had indeed expressed public and private skepticism about the wisdom of America joining Israel’s 12-Day War with Iran, and he declined to remove Carlson from the TPUSA speaker lineup. Both steps likely irked some of his pro-Israel donors. Needless to say, it doesn’t follow that they or the Mossad or the US deep state had him murdered.

Your average amateur broadcaster raving about alien babies late at night could, at best, hope for a few thousand listeners. Today’s star-child anchors, by contrast, command enormous audiences. Carlson and Owens host the No. 1 and No. 3 top news podcasts on Spotify (as of this writing). Rounding out the top-five are podcasts from The New York Times (No. 2), National Public Radio (No. 4), and The Wall Street Journal (No. 5). Setting the Journal aside as a center-Right organ, this means that liberal America still generally tunes into mainstream outlets, such as the Times and NPR, while the Right half of the electorate is hooked on star-child radio. As UnHerd columnist Richard Hanania concludes, “the Right is in deep trouble”.

I have to agree. I spent much of my career in conservative media pointing out the ideological blind spots of the center-Left outlets: their near-total alienation from the Bible-believing sectors of society; or their tendency to select and present stories not on their own terms, but in the light least likely to help the Right. (Some tricks include burying the lede, or sitting on stories embarrassing for Democrats long enough to permit “Republicans Pounce” headlines — as in, “Republicans Pounce on Minneapolis Riots” instead of “Riots Destroy Minneapolis Neighbourhood”.)

But ultimately, the Times and NPR are not star-child radio. There is a difference between a progressive (or conservative) worldview colouring the choice and framing of stories, on the one hand, and the quest to “prove” that Mrs. Macron was born with a penis, on the other. The first is just cause for anger and, in a competitive media environment, offers grist for daily partisan contestation. The second corrodes people’s sense-making capacities and their ability to discern reality.

What’s going on here?

One explanation is that what’s unfolding now isn’t a media aberration, but a return to historical norm. As the heterodox historian Christopher Lasch pointed out in his classic Revolt of the Elites, newspapers in the early American republic were financed by partisan factions and didn’t bother to hide their allegiances.

Their rhetoric was fierce, and they weren’t above disseminating rumors or even straight-up calumniating their political opponents. Conservative opponents of President Martin Van Buren, for example, accused the widower of being a lecherous old man, who’d bade the White House groundskeepers to carve him a giant female breast out of the shrubbery behind the executive mansion, complete with a nipple on top.

The highly professionalised, supposedly “objective” journalism we now associate with the prestige papers wouldn’t emerge until nearly a century later. These took the upper hand thanks to a major shift in the industry, from newspapers as an artisanal, independent, partisan trade, toward a business dominated by large and profitable monopolies. The advent of radio, television, and (later) cable news didn’t break up the pattern of a consolidated media sector.

The internet, especially web 2.0 and social media, shattered this incumbency. The return-to-norm argument suggests that the era of professional, “objective” news — bound to establishment interests but also to certain norms of fairness and accuracy — was merely a blip in media history, and we are now back to an age of partisan, independent, almost single-person operations. Mrs. Macron’s alleged penis is the 21st-century equivalent of Van Buren’s leafy boob.

While comforting, this account doesn’t quite withstand historical scrutiny. Yesteryear’s partisanship and occasional salaciousness aren’t the same as today’s systematically conspiratorial worldviews, in which no event transpires without the intervention of some hidden hand. Niles’ Register, the leading conservative paper in the first half of the 19th century, though intensely partisan, was finally not insane.

A better argument is that the establishment’s earlier failings — a relentless insistence on certain frames and biases, even when they were radically distant from reality — led millions of Americans (and Europeans) to lose trust and become susceptible to star-child radio. I see the appeal in this line of reasoning. You can only tolerate so many headlines referring to an obviously male criminal suspect as “she” and “her” before you lose it.

These trends reached their mad apotheosis in 2020 and 2021. That was when the establishment media joined hands with government agencies and the Big Tech to enforce a total information environment that sidelined or suppressed countervailing views on everything from Covid’s origins and pandemic measures to the ethical probity of the Biden family.

In the case of Hunter Biden’s laptop, for example, the security apparatus called it “a Russian information operation”, which justified social-media censorship, which was in turn cheered by the traditional media. The “anti-disinformation” cottage industry first launched in the mid-2010s in response to Trumpism and Brexit triggered an explosion of actual disinformation. It summoned the very monster it was supposed to combat.

I’ve long made variations of this second argument. Several years later, however, it begins to lose its salience. Thanks to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter (renamed X), the star-child podcasters can no longer complain of censorship. Judging by many anecdotal accounts, the new X algorithm not only doesn’t hinder, but positively promotes the crank Right. Meanwhile, even the mainstream media bends the knee to President Trump and the Right more broadly, partly as a result of ownership changes.

That leaves a third hypothesis — namely, that star-child podcasters and accounts thrive because they console their audiences about the failures of the Trumpian Right, seen nowhere more clearly than in the arena of foreign policy.

For many of his most ardent supporters on the online Right, one of Trump’s greatest appeals was his non-interventionism and professed desire for world peace. Yet so far, Trump II hasn’t strayed from the expansive vision that has characterised post-Cold War US strategy: the president continues to give Israel a blank check on Gaza; he joined the Jewish state’s invasion of Iran; and the Ukraine peace talks have stalled and Trump now envisions Kyiv retaking all of its lost territories. Domestically, meanwhile, the Trump administration has sought to severely restrict the range of acceptable speech on Israel and the Middle East, even placing entire departments under federal ideological supervision.

The likely explanation for this is that Trump is far more beholden to the traditional GOP agenda, especially rock-solid support for the Jewish state, than his online fans imagined. But that might be too painful to admit. Enter star-child radio: what if things aren’t going well for us because they are assassinating dissidents like Kirk? What if they have a mountain of kompromat material with which they blackmail Trump? What if they did 9/11? What if they control our minds through the occult?

Whatever the cause — an epistemic disaster on this scale has many fathers — we should be worried about the effect. A media system like this promotes mental degeneration and a sense of learned helplessness that can only yield destructive politics. People convinced that an amorphous they is in control of all events are unlikely to take political responsibility for the shape of our common life — and far more likely to fall in thrall to demagogues and dictators worse than any we can imagine today.

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