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 jour 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.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner speaks to voters at a town hall at the Elks Lodge 188 on June 7, 2026, in Portland, Maine.
McConnell and Platner both feel entitled
The two men could not be more different. One, a Republican, octogenarian, seven-term Southern senator, the other a progressive, millennial Maine oysterman who’s never spent a day in elected office.
But Mitch McConnell, the senior senator from Kentucky who’s been MIA for the past few weeks and Graham Platner, the Maine Senate candidate who’s facing calls to drop out of his race against Sen. Susan Collins, apparently do have something in common: an outsized sense of entitlement.
McConnell, who is 84 and not running for reelection, has been hospitalized for three weeks, and yet we still don’t fully know what he was admitted for or what his condition is. Per CNN, “his office has not disclosed a medical reason for the hospitalization or provided specifics on his health status beyond saying last week that he ‘continues to improve’ and ‘is working closely with his staff on Kentucky and Senate matters.’ ”
While several legislators have said they’ve talked to him and insist he sounds strong, others have said they are completely in the dark. One MAGA influencer, Laura Loomer, posted ”High level source close to the White House tells me ‘Mitch McConnell is officially brain dead. He’s not coming back.’ ”
Meanwhile, up in Maine, Platner has been artfully dodging calls from his own party to drop out of his race after several allegations of misconduct from women, including a sexual assault allegation from a former girlfriend, came to light. While Platner, who has managed to survive a Nazi-tattoo scandal, a sexting scandal, and several old tweets scandals, denies the allegations, he has not quit.
High-profile Democrats including Sens. Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer, the latter of whom had unsuccessfully hand-selected Maine Gov. Janet Mills to face Collins instead of Platner, have urged Platner to drop out, while other Dems have accused him of trying to influence the picking of his replacement.
Maine Democratic Party Executive Director Devon Murphy-Anderson released a statement Tuesday, which said in part:
“Unfortunately, Graham Platner’s team has repeatedly reached out to us in an attempt to put their thumb on the scale of what this process looks like. We have repeatedly reiterated to Graham Platner’s team that they have no role in determining our next Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate nor in determining what this process looks like.”
Both incidents show a deep lack of accountability to voters, who in one case deserve to know whether their senator is capable of performing his duties, and in another deserve a candidate who isn’t being accused of crimes, bigotry and deception.
The offensive and odious entitlement of both McConnell and Platner stands out not because it is particularly unique among today’s political class. Tom Kean, the New Jersey GOP congressman, missed more than 100 votes, only sharing after a three-month mystery absence that he was dealing with depression.
Former President Joe Biden’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin failed to disclose a hospitalization for prostate cancer surgery, flouting the established rules for Cabinet members and senior U.S. officials.
From Biden’s insistence on running for reelection despite his obvious cognitive and political weaknesses to Trump’s brazen flouting of laws and norms, few politicians seem to appreciate that their public service job comes with responsibilities to constituents, including transparency and honesty.
But both parties increasingly justify the chicanery, because the stakes of winning elections and keeping power are simply too high. But that’s no excuse. If we’ve learned anything over the past decade, it’s that character and accountability do, in fact, matter. And when we, the voters, stop caring about it, well, so do they.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.