Racket To Go New Podcast: Today's News, With Michael Tracey. Episode One, "Conspiretardation."
Welcome to Today’s News, the new Racket podcast with Michael Tracey and me. It’s a current events show, where we talk about everything from the war in Iran to sports to our favorite snack foods.
There’s no truth to the rumor that the show was originally called “Private Pedo Party” or “The Pedophile Report,” or that we had art mocked up for those eventualities:
Nor did we force our beleaguered cartoonist to make a Breaking Points-style screen logo. That would be in bad taste, and abusive to staff:
Michael and I have differing views on ranges of things, from Donald Trump to the responsibilities of journalists to the nature of the “deep state.” We argue in the above episode and probably will argue more if we’re ever fortunate enough to be able to talk about politics instead of conspiracies and the end of the world. We’re doing this to leave a message in a bottle for future historians, documenting a world gone bananas.
Every podcast I’ve ever been on has become a medical horror movie, with hosts I used to think of as sort-of friends stuffing maggots in their ears to let their brains be devoured on camera. Here, Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti thank “Professor” Xueqin Jiang for an informative lecture on the secret control of Earth by Freemasons and Illuminati:
Bret Weinstein tells Tucker Carlson that Israel’s gift of a golden pager to Donald Trump was, like Bibi Netanyahu’s denial of responsibility for killing Charlie Kirk, a threat:
Old pal Bill Maher won applause from his studio audience for meeting Lauren Boebert “halfway” on the whole international elite child trafficking ring/QAnon thing:
Jimmy Dore first listened to an Alex Jones rant about a “Satanic nest” among elites, where the “rite of passage” is you have to “rape a kid and carve a Pentagram in ‘em.” He had no objections to that, but when Jones evinced mild disagreement with Candace Owens’ crazy-ass theory about Erica Kirk murdering her husband for Israel, Jimmy responded by generously offering the Infowars host an opportunity to deny he’s selling his opinions to cover a $1.5 billion legal debt. Are you sure you don’t just want to jump in the water, so we can see if you float?
All those shows speak the same language now about the Satanic “Epstein class” and secret pedophilic sex rings. Joe Rogan says it’s “clearly demonic,” The Grayzone clamors to take credit for the phrase “Operation Epstein Fury,” and Drop Site gleefully ran a poll showing over half the country agrees Trump was at least partly motivated to start a war with Iran “in order to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.”
This moment is unique because right-wing populist fears of elite deep-state kid-diddlers have merged with left-wing theories of ubiquitous political and sexual violence, committed by powerful white men against the marginalized (Palestinians, teenage girls), to create the Mother of All Moral Panics.
School boards all over the country canceled picture day because a photo firm, Lifetouch, is owned by a company owned by a private equity firm, Apollo Global Management, whose former CEO is Epstein associate/Canadian billionaire Leon Black. You’ll hear us in the show above listening to the testimonials. “I would rather [my kids] be more safe than sorry,” a parent in the West Clermont, Ohio school district told WKRC-TV in Cincinnati. “The waters are so muddy,” added another in Wake County, North Carolina.
Black’s ties to Epstein are long known — he was publicly sued in 2023 by a Jane Doe with Mosaic Down’s Syndrome in a case about sex abuse by a “web” of “powerful and influential men” that settled without admission of wrongdoing — but parents everywhere are drawing the line at Lifetouch now that Black is no longer tied to it. There are even social media groups wondering retroactively if they were victimized by the firm in previous decades.
It won’t be long before the “Epstein class” is used to reinvigorate the forgotten mania that ate up much of the eighties and nineties, the Satanic Panic. That period, too, was driven in part by conservative/evangelical fears of Satanism, and in part by a liberal/cosmopolitan recovered-memory fad, creating a joint left-right paranoia that left people all over the country wrongly imprisoned, in some cases for decades. That was bad, and this media environment is a thousand times more intense.
Anyone who tries to push back on any part of the basic framework (secret Israel-controlled international child trafficking ring) is denounced and deemed “Epstein-adjacent,” as Claire Lehman from Quillette put it. Lehmann’s Twitter account was suspended after she called the Epstein story boring. (I retweeted, half as a joke, and thankfully avoided punishment.) Even people who are otherwise on board get blasted, like Megyn Kelly, who earned universal scorn for saying Epstein “wasn’t into, like, eight-year-olds.” That’s true, but in America, when does that matter? Christina Ricci called her a “danger to women,” Valerie Bertinelli called for mass action, and NPR responded by quoting a 14-year-old TikTok user:
The minute adults start defending predators by debating the age of a child, you’re not protecting the truth.
If “debating the age” of Epstein victims is out, so is having the wrong opinion about how Epstein died, as former Twitter Files colleague Michael Shellenberger found out when he was slapped down by Joe Rogan. Shellenberger said he originally thought Epstein was murdered, but when he looked into it, he wasn’t so sure anymore, noting among other things, a previous suicide attempt.
“Why are you dismissing this? I don’t understand why you’re dismissing this,” chided Joe, and Shellenberger became Internet-famous in the bad way within ten seconds.
I wrote about it in Hate Inc., but when media outlets become idea cops, pouncing on people for questioning even small popular fixations, that’s a textbook symptom of mania. South African sociologist Stanley Cohen, the man who coined the term “moral panic,” wrote about how the press is prone, in these episodes, to “over-reporting” and exchanges analytical language for “emotive” appeals. It also has a tendency to repeat falsehoods without embarrassment.
Ironically, podcasts were once where people fled when the old mainstream press became too punitive and replete with mandatory opinion. As CNN narrowed its pool of bookable guests, the Joe Rogan Experience was the oasis where you could hear just about anyone talk for hours, about almost anything. Jimmy Dore was the “jagoff comedian” who said all the things you could never hear on NPR, and the original idea behind Breaking Points — it seems like a century ago when this idea was launched to “heterodox” applause — was to legitimize disagreement. Now the set of Breaking Points is more violently in agreement with itself than the MSNBC panels Krystal used to anchor.
Meanwhile, Michael just wrote about Tucker Carlson’s transformation here, in a piece Mediaite said is “the most coherent diagnosis of what’s actually happening on the right: the influencers who built their brands on ‘anti-establishment’ iconoclasm are now the establishment, protecting a president whose war they can’t honestly cover.”
I don’t think the thing Michael calls “conspiritardation” — the witches’ brew of Larouchian secret society theory and #MeToo panic that’s sweeping the podcast terrain — is expanding at light speed because people like Tucker are boxed in by previous Trump takes. To me it’s dumber than that. This is the “Deviancy Amplification Spiral” sociologists wrote about decades ago, turbo-charged by Internet algorithms:
Neither of us thinks Jeffrey Epstein was innocent of serious sex crimes. Nor is Epstein going to be all or even most of what we talk about. In place of America This Week-style avuncular literary discussions, there will be gallows humor, mixed with an as much real-time review of America’s snowballing performative insanity problem (which includes people in government, the Pentagon, in both parties in Congress, etc.) as we can manage.
Michael reminds me of people I was seated next to in newsrooms early in my career, who used to correct my copy or leave prank messages on my keyboard. A pain in the ass, in other words, but in a good way. We expect people to hate-watch and we’ll likely have at least one live show a week, to give people a chance to vent. New elements will be added in the next weeks, including possibly an actual “Today’s News” rundown.
In the meantime, enjoy episode one, watch this space for next week’s schedule, and if you hate this show, by all means, say so. That’s what we’re here for.