This paradox surfaced among Birch conspiracy theorists. Many early Birchers came out of the National Association of Manufacturing; one founder was named Milwaukee Sentinel’s Man of the Year and was a leader of the YMCA. Bircher conspiracists served in the U.S. military, held seats in Congress, taught in major colleges and universities, led some of the nation’s most successful industries and worked as doctors, novelists, actors, reverends and publishers.
Such theories also illustrate a kind of informal compact with America’s freewheeling capitalist economy, in which far-fetched notions gain cache because they are packaged, sellable and familiar. Conspiracy theorists, the historian Robert Goldberg said in 2010 in comments that are applicable to Fox’s stars and executives, are “entrepreneurs in search of customers. They live and die by the sale of their merchandise.”
An earlier generation of conspiratorial, affordable books — for example, “None Dare Call It Treason” and “None Dare Call It Conspiracy” — became best sellers, and the Birchers knew how to market them to a mass audience.
As Mr. Goldberg put it, “conspiracy entrepreneurs” have “well-tuned business skills and their presentations are carefully scripted rhetorically.” The Dominion revelations show how Fox’s top brass were sometimes playing that role.
A critical difference between the experience of the Birchers and Fox and its audience today is that the Republican Party, at times, was willing and able to push Birchers and their ideas to the margins, where they remained for years. Today, the party seems neither willing nor able to police the extremes: It cannot control a national megaphone for Bircher-esque views and, as important, the way companies like Fox monetize them.
Like many savvy entrepreneurs, Fox’s stars are selling a product to meet a demand — and have done it skillfully, and sometimes with apparently grave consequences, as we saw when the U.S. Capitol was stormed by proponents of far right conspiracy theories on Jan. 6, 2021. To an uncomfortable extent, its survival is intimately bound to its viewers’ wishes and beliefs.
Mr. Trump’s recent appearances on the Hannity and Carlson programs suggest as much. For a while, Fox hoped to banish Mr. Trump, or at least sideline him. But, following the indictment of Mr. Trump in Manhattan last month, Mr. Carlson, who once wrote in a text message that he hated Mr. Trump “passionately,” welcomed the former president back for a chummy interview.
