Sohrab Ahmari is the U.S. editor of UnHerd, from which this article was adapted.
Opinion
Trump is in power. Somehow, the wackos aren’t satisfied.
Even a populist presidency can’t stop the online right’s slide into irrationality.
October 9, 2025 The Washington Post
(Illustration
by Joan Wong/For The Washington Post; Jabin Botsford/The Washington
Post; Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images; Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/AP;
iStock)
10 min
By Sohrab Ahmari
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. Indeed, much of right-wing media now resembles star-child radio: a vast chamber of oft-malignant fantasies, where even once-reasonable minds go to get euthanized.
Each flick of the 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 other apparitions of their fever dreams.
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, 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 pundit Michael Shellenberger, who has 1.4 million followers on X. Reacting to a Tucker Carlson documentary about 9/11, Shellenberger said: “So now it appears … that the CIA was probably behind the 9/11 attacks.” Later, he softened the claim, suggesting that the CIA “didn’t stop or at least contributed to” the attacks. In the same interview, Shellenberger linked “a lot of the UFO stuff” to “the occult” and “occult behaviors within NASA.”
In 2020, while serving as 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 green insider criticizing his own movement is catnip to conservative publications (lefty outlets equally relish publishing the right’s internal critics.) What made Shellenberger especially attractive was how sensible he seemed. He didn’t deny man-made climate change. Rather, he marshaled fact and reason to show that it’s a “manageable” crisis, not a warrant for undoing industrial civilization.
The paper continued to publish Shellenberger after I left in 2021. Expanding his range, he took on Big Tech censorship as well as the crime 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 pandemic authoritarianism in those febrile years.
Shellenberger 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 existed in that era (and who could blame him?). Yet today’s Shellenberger blends legitimate critiques of the intelligence and security apparatus with 9/11 “troof” and occult hooey.
Others with even larger audiences have gone much further down the star-child-radio path — a reality driven home by the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. The alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, is entitled to his day in court. Yet if there ever were an open-and-shut case, it would appear to be his. The evidence against him piled up high and fast as federal and local investigators got to work: his clothing’s match with security images; bullet engravings; messages to a transgender friend (possibly his partner); confession on an online message board; family members’ recollection that he’d grown increasingly militant in defense of LGBT causes.
Nonetheless, authorities failed to persuade some of the online right’s biggest voices. Candace Owens and numerous lesser figures had their own theory of who’d killed Kirk: You know, they. “Turning Point will not release the footage,” Owens said, referring to the right-wing campus group founded by Kirk. Claiming that Turning Point staff had removed memory cards from cameras at the assassination site, she insinuated that maybe Kirk’s own organization was in on the killing. Owens’s theory also weaves in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin 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 the United States joining Israel’s assault on Iran’s nuclear program, and he declined to remove Carlson from Turning Point’s speaker lineup. Both steps probably irked some of his pro-Israel donors. Needless to say, it doesn’t follow that they or the Mossad or the U.S. “deep state” had him murdered.
Years ago, your average amateur broadcaster raving about alien babies could, at best, hope for a few thousand listeners. Today’s star-child anchors command enormous audiences. Carlson and Owens host the No. 1 and No. 3 news podcasts on Spotify (as of this writing). Rounding out the top five are podcasts from the New York Times, NPR and the Wall Street Journal. Liberal America still generally tunes into mainstream outlets while much of the right half of the electorate seems hooked on star-child radio. As UnHerd columnist Richard Hanania concluded, “the Right is in deep trouble.”
I have to agree. I have spent much of my career pointing out the ideological blind spots of center-left outlets: their near-total alienation from the Bible-believing sectors of society; their tendency to select and present stories in the light least likely to help the right.
But ultimately, the Times and NPR are not star-child radio. There is a difference between a progressive (or conservative) worldview coloring the framing of stories and the quest to “prove,” as the some on the right have, that the president of France’s wife is a man. 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 ability to discern reality.
One explanation is that what’s unfolding now isn’t an aberration, but a return to historical norm. As historian Christopher Lasch pointed out in his 1995 classic “Revolt of the Elites,” newspapers in the early 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 calumniating their political opponents.
The highly professionalized, supposedly objective journalism we now associate with the prestige papers didn’t emerge until the past century. These took the upper hand, thanks to a major shift in the industry 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 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.
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 not insane.
A better argument is that the establishment’s earlier failings — a relentless insistence on certain frames, 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. You can tolerate only 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 Big Tech to enforce a total information environment that sidelined countervailing views on everything from the coronavirus’s origins to the ethical probity of the Biden family.
In the case of Hunter Biden’s laptop, for example, the security apparatus said it had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” which justified social-media censorship that 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.
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 also positively promotes the crank right. That leaves a third hypothesis: that star-child accounts thrive because they console their audiences about the failures of the Trumpian right, seen most clearly in the arena of foreign policy.
For many of his most ardent supporters on the online right, one of President Donald 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 characterized post-Cold War U.S. strategy: The president backs Israel so staunchly that he deployed the U.S. military to join Israel’s attack on Iran’s nuclear program; with Ukraine-Russia negotiations stalled, he now envisions Kyiv retaking all its lost territory. 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. 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 such as 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 of this scale has many fathers — the potential effect is alarming. This media system promotes mental degeneration and a sense of learned helplessness that can only yield destructive politics. People convinced that an amorphous they controls 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.