‘There’s always been a kind of paranoid streak in American politics,” former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told Jennifer Senior at The Atlantic Festival recently. “But it never was given such voice, such a platform, or had so much money behind it until we saw the rise of the right-wing radio voices like Rush Limbaugh, and we saw the rise of Fox News. And then, of course, the Internet just put it on steroids.”
It’s true, no doubt, that democratized media exacerbates the worst (and best) of human tendencies. Yet, it is quite jarring to hear this complaint coming from a person whose operatives were likely involved in birtherism and later were the driving force behind the Russian “collusion” hoax — two of modern political history’s most corrosive conspiracy theories.
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