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 euthanized.

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 characterizes much green activism — a pseudo-religion that “spreads anxiety” while justifying anti-growth, and downright anti-human, policies.

A green insider criticizing 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 civilization.

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 organization 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.

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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 Neighborhood”.)

But ultimately, the Times and NPR are not star-child radio. There is a difference between a progressive (or conservative) worldview coloring 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.

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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 professionalized, 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 characterized 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.

Sometime around the end of the second Obama term, people started to discover that Dr. Seuss — Theodor Seuss Geisel — had drawn crude images of Asian, black, and Jewish people. Those images had been there all along, sitting uneasily with his famous books, which consistently champion liberal and environmentalist values. Only now, the “problematic” drawings started to overshadow the good doctor’s achievements.

When First Lady Melania Trump sent a collection of 10 Dr. Seuss books to a Massachusetts library in 2017, she received a furious response. “You may not be aware of this, but Dr. Seuss is a bit of a cliché, a tired and worn ambassador for children’s literature”, the recipient of the books, librarian Liz Phipps-Soeiro, lectured in a blog post. “Another fact that many people are unaware of is that Dr. Seuss’s illustrations are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes.”

That was hardly the end of it. The NAACP called for “censorship” of all Dr. Seuss books (yes, the organization unabashedly used the “c” word). Dr. Seuss Enterprises, which publishes his works, pledged to remove six of the author’s most offensive titles from future publication.

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But the real scandal came when, a little more than a month into his first term, President Joe Biden failed to mention Dr. Seuss in his announcement for Read Across America Day, which customarily involves a president and/or first lady reading a Dr. Seuss book to schoolchildren. The outrage was instant: “Dr. Seuss Is Canceled”, went one headline at the libertarian Reason magazine. 

Spoiler alert: Dr. Seuss wasn’t canceled. His books have spent so much time on the Amazon bestseller list, the Atomic Habits guy is jealous. But Biden’s opponents saw it as an attempt to move the culture to the Left, the first of many. They seethed as he invited transgender influencers to the White House, showered accolades on progressive icons like Bruce Springsteen and George Soros. They vowed to restore sanctity to American culture once they had a chance.

Well, how’s that working out?

We now have the Gulf of America, while the US taxpayer has clawed back the $47,000 that United States Agency for International Development splurged on a Colombian “trans opera”. Inveterate Twitter troll-cum-diplomat Ric Grenell has been appointed the president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a position for which he is as suited as I am to translate Dr. Seuss into Bulgarian.

I am not saying that the supposed cancellation of Dr. Seuss is why we have a second Trump term. Nor is that controversy congruent to the consequences of four more years of MAGA. But minor as that affair may seem, it is a neat microcosm of our ineffective, herky-jerky politics, the main goal of which is increasingly only to undo whatever the other side has been doing.

Constant whiplash between political and cultural extremes isn’t what people signed up for. You could certainly argue that the Biden administration went too far in some of its diversity initiatives, but the branding of every black person in any position of institutional power as a “DEI hire” is a MAGA tic most people don’t endorse, as River Page pointed out in The Free Press.

People wanted normal, which shouldn’t be surprising, since Americans have for centuries been a pragmatic people. Even today, we are actually far less polarized then news reports would have you believe. It’s rather that the activists at the poles have megaphones the size of Kansas, which they buy with the cash raised from ideologically motivated billionaires (Soros, the Koch Brothers, Bill Gates, Elon Musk — take your pick). Those groups can then boost candidates who need both publicity and cash. The rest of us are like the archetypal guard in a bank-heist movie, bound and gagged with masking tape, helplessly watching the scene unfold.

When he was attorney general of the United States under George W. Bush, the dour John Ashcroft covered up the Spirit of Justice statue because its naked breast offended his evangelical sensibilities. In which case, he should have quit. We don’t elect censors or moralizers. To their credit, the new Trump people don’t share Ashcroft’s moralizing spirit. Their supposed enemy is wokeness, a term that could mean anything from cringeworthy shows of political posturing to worthwhile efforts to acknowledge past injustices.

The Trumpians seem to genuinely believe that the country is in the grip of a Leftist cultural revolution. In their fervor, they forget that at least half of Americans — the ones who vote for Democrats — flatly reject that view. And that, wide-eyed activists excepted, most liberals simply seek after a decent life: a measure of financial stability, happy and healthy kids, and, yes, the fundamental American right to worship as they please (or not at all) and to speak their minds.

Trump’s counterreaction has itself been immoderate, as evidenced by the harsh language of the new administration’s executive orders targeting transgender protections. Just as most Americans were never going to burn their Dr. Seuss books, most also are perfectly capable of living and working alongside people who hold different beliefs and espouse different values. We’ve never wanted anything but normal, but normal seems to be increasingly elusive in American politics.

So far, Trump 2.0 has shown himself to be just as obsessed with race and gender as the wokest junior staffer in the Biden administration. “Like its antithesis on the Left, the woke Right places identity grievance, ethnic consciousness, and tribal striving at the center of its behavior and thought,” Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote in an insightful essay for The Atlantic. Fort Liberty is Fort Bragg again, though its namesake this time around is World War II hero Roland L. Bragg, not the Confederate general Braxton Bragg. The move will cost several million dollars and will do absolutely nothing to help ordinary Americans with egg prices or medical bills.

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You don’t have to be a genius to see how all this turns out. After four more years of Trump, people will be exhausted, as Trump is an exhausting character. They will want something entirely different (sorry, Vice President Vance). The answer will probably come in the form of a moderate Democrat who shuns the language of the academic and activist Left: someone like Josh Shapiro or Wes Moore or Jared Polis.

Of course, that nominee will still need support from the Left, possibly in the primary, definitely in the general election. Promises and assurances will be made. Once in office, the new Democratic president will placate those liberal groups by reversing many of the policies that Trump is implementing today: pronouns back in email signatures, DEI trainings restored across the federal bureaucracy, no more country music at the Kennedy Center, no more Dr. Seuss. All of which will make the Right seethe once more, preparing us for the next cycle of our reaction-counterreaction politics.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Moderate politics is not only attractive because it accurately describes where most Americans stand on most issues. The more a politician tacks away from the extremes, the less likely he or she is to engender a strong political opposition.

Trolling takes a toll. At first, it seemed like Trump might begin his second term with a measure of popular support, but his early moves have been so sweeping, so striking, that people are protesting again, as they did in 2017. To be sure, many people do support cutting the federal government and making merit the basis of hiring, but unaccountably blaming a plane crash on “DEI” and humiliating the hundreds of thousands of men and women who have chosen to work for the federal government was bound to have major blowback. Already, according to The Bulwark, “Trump’s approval rating is falling fast.” And his second term is barely a month old.

Who will have the courage to change this state of affairs, the courage to be moderate? To borrow from the poor fish in The Cat in the Hat, “this is no fun at all”.