How conspiracy entertainment took over the American right

Hi, and welcome back to The Karol Markowicz Show on iHeartRadio. My guest today is David Reaboi. David is working on a book called Viral Libels. Hi, David. So nice to have you on.

Great to be with you.

So you’ve been on before, and you’re a rare repeating guest. The last time you were on was May 2024. We talked largely about Florida, how New York was best in 1997, art, music. Things have changed a little bit since then. And I brought you on today because I want the David Reaboi plan for the conservative right. I make the joke to you all the time: I am on 27 group chats with you. You have a lot of, I don’t want to say takes, because that sounds cheap. You have a lot of thoughts about where we should go. And I kind of wanted to just have them all in one place. It’s a little bit different than the normal show I do, but I really like hearing from you. So tell me about it. Where should the conservative movement go, starting today, and how?

Well, I appreciate that, and I appreciate you having me back. I guess the easy way to begin this is that I just hope the conservative movement gets back to being smart, period. And what we’ve seen in the last several years is really an unfortunate degradation in terms of the content that people are accessing. Let’s say the content that people are accessing that is transforming the way they think and transforming the way they understand the world, frankly, in a negative way. It’s been a little ridiculous to watch, because, look, I’ve never seen an example where a population just decides to get together and all kind of raises their IQs at the same time, once they’ve been systematically lowered. And for that reason, I’m kind of a pessimist about this.

But look, to rewind, I think the question is how we got here. For your listeners, or for a lot of people who I suspect are your listeners, they will be familiar with the podcastification, the retardification and the podcastification that kind of come very much together, of the American right, specifically the folks who constitute the online activist branch of the American right. And we know it’s a problem. I always say this: it’s a problem not because people are saying things that are mean and rude and whatever. It’s not a food fight. I don’t mind a food fight. What we have now is people who, at a mass scale, are believing things that are just not true. And their ability to decipher what is true from what isn’t seems to be in remission, or sabotaged, or whatever.

And I have to say, look, a lot of this is technological. What I say all the time is that we involved ourselves in a kind of experiment with social media in a way that no civilization had ever done before. And we said, hey, what’s the worst that can happen if we play with matches? And here we are, burning the house down. It turns out that this is a serious problem. I don’t know when this is going to air, but just yesterday, the vice president suggested that young conservatives listen to Theo Von’s podcast, which is insane. It’s completely insane.

Was that him trying to be hip with the kids? Like, what do you think of that? Do you think he listens to Theo Von?

Look, I don’t know. But if he was trying to be hip with the kids, maybe he was trying to be hip with the kids. But I don’t think that’s particularly a selling point. I don’t want my politicians to be hip with the kids.

I agree. But I’m just wondering, I guess it’s the line of, is it real, or is he just saying that? And as I joke, trying to be hip with the kids, Theo Von’s pushing 50. He’s not some young, cool, hip kid. He’s actually old also.

But what I don’t understand about it is, yes, someone like Theo Von is completely fact-free. I understand if you think he’s funny; okay, listen to the jokes.

But he was specifically asked about political podcasts. And to me, that’s insane.

And it’s also insane that if the vice president believes that the young people are out listening to Theo Von, then presumably he wouldn’t have to tell them to listen to Theo Von.

He wouldn’t have to recommend it.

So it’s that kind of thing. And look, one of the things I’m writing about in the book is how in America we’ve always had a very strong conspiratorial undercurrent running through this country for hundreds of years, really since the beginning. But up until recently, there was a divide between the conspiracy media ecosystem, which was understood to be entertainment by most people, and the political media ecosystem, which was supposed to be serious people talking about serious political things. When I was young, I listened to Art Bell all the time, and George Noory, and Coast to Coast AM. I didn’t think it was real. I thought it was funny; I thought it was entertaining. And when Alex Jones first came on the scene, he was very much in that same vein. I think it was significant when Tucker Carlson had Alex Jones on his show and called him a prophet and basically gave him a blessing.

That was already post-Fox, right?

Yes.

That was one of his first post-Fox shows.

And then really after that, we saw the collapse. But I don’t want to pin this all on Carlson. Joe Rogan has been a huge issue here. Here’s a guy who interviews crank conspiracy theorists talking about ancient aliens on one hand, and on the other hand, he’s interviewing politicians and policymakers and serious people about supposedly serious things. So it ends up making everything dumb.

Do you have a point where you see this begin? Because as you’re talking about this, it actually reminds me a lot of Jon Stewart: clown nose on, clown nose off kind of thing. Do you have a moment where you feel like this started?

I’m sure you can find all kinds of precedents, but I think the two big factors that I talk about are Rogan specifically, and then Tucker Carlson with Alex Jones, bringing him away from conspiracy entertainment into political podcasting. And you could say that this happened during COVID too, and I write about that as well, which also kind of scrambled people’s brains and made them a lot more susceptible to conspiracism.

And it’s a really hard issue, because on one hand, if you come, like I do, and say, look, conspiracism is a thing. It’s a way of thinking. It’s a way of understanding the world and putting facts together, or not. And then people will come back to you and they’ll say, well, haven’t these conspiracy theories turned out to be true? Or they’ll say, well, obviously people conspire together to do bad things; isn’t that a conspiracy? And really, the way I like to think about it is, conspiracism is this way of thinking. It’s this way of assembling facts that don’t necessarily add up. And look, I don’t think there’s an easy way out of this.

And that’s the problem. That’s the question here. If we follow the David Reaboi plan, what is that plan to get us out of this?

Well, the first thing, I think, is, people used to say in the old days that if all Americans were forced to take one economics class, there would be no more Democratic Party. And I think there’s a lot of truth to that. I think if everyone was forced to really think about logic and rules of evidence, and, why is it that I believe this thing that I just heard?

But forcing people to think can’t work, right? So what do we do as conservatives to move it in the direction of sanity? I guess I’m not looking for you to have the answer here today, but I just think you’ve produced a lot of answers over the years, and I wonder if you have an overarching thought on this. What do we do? Where do we go? And also, I would say that a lot of people trace this to Israel, or it involves Israel. I think you’ve been talking about the, I don’t really use the R-word, I’ll say idiotification of the right for a long time. So where do you think we should go?

And it just keeps getting worse.

Well, I know you say that. I know. I think on every chat we’re on, I’m the optimist, you’re the pessimist. I still respect what you’re saying, but in general, I think it all works out in the end. I just don’t know the path there yet.

Well, I’m not an across-the-board black-pill person.

No, no, no.

Really, I’m not. I’m white-pilled about a lot of things. But then on the other hand, I’m Hungarian. What do you expect? This is very much a cultural artifact. So the question is, what do you do about this? And I think the only thing you can do, really, is, what did Jordan Peterson say? Stand up straight with your shoulders back. And to just keep repeating the thing over and over, and to challenge people, and really to not accept it. When people are saying ridiculous things, and we haven’t even gotten into the specifics about some of the things people are saying, but I’ll just take an example to make things concrete: the Candace Owens conspiracy theories.

Yeah. “Charlie wasn’t really shot” is a conspiracy theory that I see circulating among, I don’t want to call them normies anymore, but I’m talking about my non-political friends, who are like, bullets don’t do that when they hit the neck. And I’m like, what in the world do you know about bullets? Bullets do lots of things. And all these people, they’ll have hunters and et cetera in their comment sections being like, well, actually, bullets do a lot of crazy things when they make contact. But the idea that he wasn’t shot, that he had a bomb planted or something on him, the idea that his wife was involved in it, the idea that his co-workers were involved in it: all of this seems so batshit that I don’t understand how people buy it.

Well, the specifics about each allegation are less important than the batshitness of this way of thinking. And you turn around to these people and you say, like, what? If you think that could have happened, you could basically argue that anything could have happened. It was aliens.

Don’t give Candace any ideas.

Right.

Definitely could have been Jewish aliens.

Right. And look, I think it’s important to point out that if people lived their lives based on this standard of evidence, they would not be able to function. One example I use in the book: if you come downstairs in the morning and go to the kitchen, and you see that there were cookies there last night and the cookies are no longer there in the morning, it’s a safe bet that someone in your house ate the cookies while you were asleep. You don’t immediately think that it was Mossad and CIA that came together, or some other hypothetical construction, and they did this. That doesn’t even enter your brain. And if someone would suggest that that happened, you would look and you would say, you’re crazy. What would be the basis of this? And so I think people in their ordinary lives understand that.

I just know Tucker would be like, well, everybody knows Mossad eats all the cookies.

Right, right. So I think it’s really important to push back on this, specifically with that angle. And at the end of the day, we don’t get out of this by trying as hard as we can to raise a standard of thinking, standard of processing evidence.

The other thing that we can do, and I don’t say “we” like you and I, I do think that there is a large government role here, really. There’s a lot that the government can do, specifically when it comes to dealing with hostile foreign information campaigns that are waged via social media. We are completely naked. We are the most vulnerable to foreign enemy nations that want to destroy our ability to think and to process information and to understand reality.

Is it just using our freedom against us? Is that what’s going on?

No, it’s using technology. I mean, it’s using our freedom against us, but really it’s using technology against us. And I think that we despair when we see what’s happening and we say, oh my God, this is so terrible, and we discount what foreigners are doing to sort of goose this process along. For example, the Russians have long understood that promoting any kind of conspiracism in the United States is good for them. Why? Because it breaks brains. They know that it breaks brains. Our enemies understand that it breaks brains. The Chinese understand that more people believing in Bigfoot or JFK or whatever conspiracy theories helps them and benefits them at the end of the day, because every conspiracy theory chips away at our faith in our country, number one, and number two, in logic and reason and our ability to function.

And when this type of thing proliferates, you get a whole bunch of nonsense, and you get people who are not capable of dealing with reality. And that is going to harm us terribly when something goes wrong. I always say the same thing: God forbid there’s a 9/11-style attack tomorrow. Half this country says it’s Israel. The other half of the country says it’s Donald Trump. And some section of both says it didn’t actually happen. And you have this big food fight, and it’s like, okay, well, how are you going to get policy done? How are you going to deal with this very important issue if you have this type of cognitive chaos happening in the country?

So the first thing I would do, as far as the government goes: the government can, through its resources and capabilities, go and try the best that they can to track and put a stop to the foreign influence stuff. If it’s coming from Americans, okay, it’s coming from Americans; we’ll have to deal with it that way. But for sure, top line, the chaos agents from abroad who are doing this to screw with the American people’s brains, that’s got to go. And it can go.

It’s interesting, because I said, are they using our freedom against us? They kind of are, because isn’t the argument going to be, well, this is my freedom of speech, I can say whatever I want? Isn’t that the way that Americans do it? And it’s like, are we going to end up saying, well, no, you’re not American, so you’re not privy to that? No, I think we should. I’m telling you, that’s where this argument is going to go: everyone should be able to say everything, because that’s what America is based on.

Again, these are the conversations and the arguments that we used to have back in the 2000s, when it came to the relationship between security and liberty and things like that. I think this is a lot easier, because I’m like, okay, so don’t ban someone in Arkansas for saying something online. But you can sure as heck go after the people who are running bot farms out of Pakistan.

Think about what we’re doing. We say, hey, this is the global town hall, and then we allow it to be completely proliferated by bots and agents of influence. It’s as if you have a town hall somewhere in a small town in West Virginia or whatever, and it’s a town of a thousand people, and at the town meeting that month, someone decides to show up with 30,000 folks from Kenya. And all of a sudden, the conversation about local issues is taken over by a bunch of people who live in Kenya, who have no relationship to anything, who are just talking. And they should not be there, and we should not pretend that they have a right to be there. Frankly, I think it’s an absolute misuse of our understanding of our rights and our liberties to say that bot farmers from Pakistan have just as much First Amendment as you or I. But I think that would really go a long way in solving this issue. I really do.

When could we expect to see Viral Libels published?

Definitely this year. I want to do it as fast as possible. But it’s huge, and it keeps growing.

I was going to say, you’re going to have to eventually draw the line, because you can make an encyclopedia of all the different viral libels.

In a way, that’s kind of how it started. It started as a book that would help debunk, let’s say authoritatively debunk, the most prominent 20 or 30 viral antisemitic conspiracy theories that are floating around on the American right today. And there’s nothing else that’s doing that, that’s specifically tailored to what’s happening on the right. But as I started to do it, I started to realize that it’s actually bigger than that. The book is really about antisemitism as information warfare, and each one of the viral libels is really just a front, or a skirmish, a battle in this information war. And our enemies have realized that antisemitism is a very potent tool. It’s a potent weapon to be used. It should be to no one’s surprise; this is many thousands of years old at this point. And in modern parlance, it’s at least 200 years old in the way people are using it, since the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It’s basically the same script over and over again. It’s new bottle, old wine. So unfortunately, it’s very au courant.

And I think it will be.

And I’d like to get it out.

Forever. David, what are you most proud of in your life?

It’s hard, because I feel like the things that I really wanted to do, I have not done yet, if that makes sense. And what are the things I’m proud of? I’m proud that I had the chutzpah to say, you know what, I’m going to go and be a jazz musician in New York for a while. And then I woke up one morning and I said, I need to be involved in politics and national security. And I did that. And I feel like, what am I proud of?

You blaze your own path. That’s something to be proud of.

Look, it is what it is. What I’ve been able to do in life has been a blessing. It’s been great. And I was kind of lucky to do what I’ve always wanted to do, which is, I wake up one morning and it hits me, and I just have to kind of follow that thing. I was just listening to someone talking about how, for a lot of Jews after October 7, they felt this thing which was kind of hard to explain, which is like, I don’t know what I need to do, but I need to do something, and whatever it is, it needs to be meaningful. It needs to be what the moment requires, if that makes sense. And I felt that right away after October 7, and I kind of still feel that way. And I feel like, okay, whatever I’m going to do now, and I can do a lot of different things, the most important thing is not self-aggrandizement. The most important thing is not, how can I do a book and go on a book tour and become a big personality and go on all the podcasts and blah, blah, blah. Honestly, I could not possibly care less about that. What I want to do is the book that the moment needs.

Yeah, I love that.

And if I think about it, I’ve always kind of done that.

That’s something so huge to be proud of. That is a great answer. I don’t think that you could give a better answer than that. All right, there you go. Give us a five-year-out prediction, and it could be about anything at all. Come on, you got lots of predictions. I hear these predictions all the time.

Yeah, I know, but they’re usually too depressing to air.

Oh, so we admit we’re too depressing on a podcast.

No, look, what I see coming down the pike is very, very dark, on one hand. But I remember arguing with friends who used to see similar very, very dark things years ago. They would always say, “If we continue on the same trajectory, then…” Okay, well, “if we continue on the same trajectory” is the same argument that the leftists make when they talk about climate. If we keep mindlessly adding another couple of degrees every single year, as if we’re in a computer simulation, then of course we’re going to have a disaster. But things don’t work out that way, for any number of reasons. That’s not how it goes. And so I think it’s really important to think about predictions that way, and to realize that we can never predict the future. The only thing we can do is kind of think forward based on patterns that we already see.

So, the most optimistic thing I’ve ever heard you say.

Right, right. I’m trying. No, but I really do believe this. I think anytime anyone makes a prediction, there should be an asterisk, and it should say, based on current observable trends or patterns or something like that, because we really don’t know what would happen. I don’t think anybody knew that Donald Trump would show up in 2013 or 2014.

No, for sure. I did not know. That was a shock. When he showed up in 2015, I was shocked. And even 2016. And he came back in 2024; I was pretty surprised.

Exactly. So I think that should temper people’s enthusiasms and their negativity. But that said…

I’m going to remind you of this on various group chats.

No, please do, because I can use it. But what I said earlier kind of still stands, which is the thing that I come back to all the time. I’m like, how do you get people to not be stupid? How do you get people to say, okay, yeah? And I have to tell you, one of the most disturbing phenomenon, phenomena, that I’ve encountered… Well, I hit them both, so I know I got one or the other. It’s when people who know better, all of a sudden, it’s like there’s a lobotomy. People who, for example, know the history of how brutal warfare is throughout the centuries, people who’ve read all the books and studied and were smart about these things, one day wake up and they say things that are completely the opposite of reality.

And that’s when I scratch my head and I’m like, okay, this is not a change-my-mind-about-something. I’ve had things where it’s like, okay, you know what? I didn’t think about this other facet of the issue; maybe I changed my mind. But in order to change my mind that way, I need to bleach my brain in certain respects. And that’s a phenomenon that I really haven’t seen before, and I don’t think it’s comparable to other types of, let’s say, political evolutions. And I came up with a little catchphrase, which is “rapid-onset elite right-wing social media retardation.”

It’s good.

And it rolls right off.

Does it have an acronym?

No, it doesn’t have an acronym yet. But we have the lab going, and there are tests for that. But I think it’s true, because it’s something that I noticed. It’s definitely a thing that I noticed, which is, a lot of folks on the right, they got into their little bubble, and their bubble is social media plus group chats. And now we know, okay, everybody’s in a group chat, but you have to realize it’s very easy to get radicalized while you’re in a group chat, because everyone kind of thinks the same thing. Everyone is sending news items to the chat that confirm and reinforce the particular position. And the next thing you know, you feel like you’re under siege and the sky is falling.

For sure, yeah.

And I think many of us have been there. I know I have been in these things where it’s like, okay. And then if you leave for a week or something like that, or you put down the phone, and you come back to it, you’re like, wait a minute. And I think some of these people, while they mean well and they’re decent people, they may be a little bit out of touch, and they may be catastrophizing a little bit.

Yes. Who does that? Who is that? Who is that for me? I can’t think of the name right now.

If you come up with a name, I can tell you yes or no.

You are a super interesting person, and I can’t wait to read your book. Leave us here with your best tip for my listeners on how they can improve their lives. And let me know if you remember what you said the last time you were on, in May 2024.

Do I remember? I don’t remember.

All right, I’ll tell you. You said more people should have a personal relationship with art and the creative process.

Yes.

All right. Do you have a new one for us?

Well, I’ll stick with that and then add on another one, which is: try to listen to music and be challenged, or read a book and be challenged, or see a movie and be challenged. I think the way we think about entertainment, or the way we think about art as something that needs to provide entertainment and sort of background noise, escapism, is really bad, because it sells short what art is capable of and what creativity is capable of. And I think when people can be shocked and challenged and really instigated in some way, moved in some way by art, I think it’s a really wonderful thing. Now you have a phenomenon, and look, I do this too, where it’s the end of the day, it’s a hard day, and there’s nothing I want to do. I just want to put on something mindless. I mean, I have standards, so it’s not going to be mindless mindless. But sometimes it’s like, okay, I don’t feel like watching the six-hour silent Russian film about…

No, I feel like I always picture you watching the six-hour silent Russian film.

Yeah. No, sometimes you just don’t want to do that. But I think most people now, their relationship with art, or let’s say creative endeavors, is like that. They just want something nice and easy and kind of background stuff to not think about. Or, hey, this is music that reminds me of my childhood. That’s great. And look, that’s essential and wonderful. But I think there’s the possibility for more. And there’s definitely the possibility of really amazing, I don’t want to necessarily say spiritual, because that’s a whole other category that means different things to different people. But I’ll say it’s kind of deeply meaningful in a way that, really, I think nothing else can be. And frankly, it’s free, especially with how much is available on YouTube. And there are books out there on PDF. So that’s what I recommend.

Love that. Challenge yourself through art, music. Do it. I love it. He is David Reaboi. Check out his upcoming book, Viral Libels. Thank you so much for coming on, David.

Great to be here. Thank you.