One month before Robert Bowers murdered 11 Jewish congregants in Pittsburgh this past Saturday, an odd and seemingly unrelated hearing took place in Washington. A House Judiciary subcommittee heard testimony about “shadowbanning” from a group of conservative conspiracy theorists, including Boston Herald Columnist Adriana Cohen.

Shadowbanning, according to theory, is the practice social media companies are said to employ when they want to hide conservative posts. It’s said to be so seamless as to be secret. Since there is no evidence social media companies actively do this, the hearing — chaired by ultra-conservative Iowa congressman Steve King — is unlikely to pack real-world punch.

It did, however, offer a smidgen of legitimacy to Gab, an almost two-year-old social-media platform that appears to be especially welcoming to the alt-right. (Alleged synagogue slayer Bowers is reportedly a member.)

Gab launched in response to Twitter banning a handful of its most virulently racist and violent users. But to make money — mostly from paid “premium accounts” — it needs to attract more than hard-core haters.

So, it would be helpful for Gab if a broader swath of conservatives believe that they, or the people they want to follow, are being silenced on those mainstream sites. They then naturally would want to migrate to a service like Gab. Nothing like a dose of psychosomatic repression to foster solidarity.

The shadowbanning conspiracy theory started this July, with a misleading article in the often-unreliable VICE News. InfoWars and Breitbart picked up the story, and James O’Keefe’s sketchy Project Veritas released a video purporting to provide evidence.

“From there, the issue made a familiar journey through Fox News into Trump’s brain, and then onto his Twitter account,” Jason Wilson wrote in The Guardian. With Rep. King’s congressional hearing, the journey from paranoid rambling to legitimized issue was complete.

Gab has some half-million users; an academic study from Harvard concluded that it “resides on the border of mainstream social networks like Twitter and fringe Web communities like 4chan’s Politically Incorrect.”

Some of its most popular accounts are figures familiar in more mainstream right-wing forums: Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson of the InfoWars enterprises; O’Keefe; Milo Yiannopoulos, formerly of Breitbart News; Ricky Vaughn, Mike Cernovich, Ann Coulter, and others.

Unless you are yourself a right-wing nut, or follow their antics, you might not recognize some of those names. But they have marquee value to most conservative Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube users. They are linked and retweeted by other, more mainstream conservative figures and Republican activists. It’s Adam Smith-style economics in action: the invisible hand of the marketplace delivering ideas as it would goods or services.

The overlap, the interconnections, the synergy among these voices enables and facilitates the spread of much bad information up, down and sideways in conservative circles. The shadowbanning scare is only a recent example.

There is little to nothing to alert consumers when they pass from the world of legitimate conservative discourse and debate and pass into the alt world of wild speculation, irresponsible fear-mongering, outright lies, manifest hate, and pure propaganda. The membrane separating these spheres is so fine as to be invisible.

Market Forces

The rise of dire, conspiratorial fear-mongering on the right, since the 2016 election generally and in the weeks before the 2018 midterms specifically, was entirely predictable. This is simply market forces in action. Niche speaking to niche.

The multi-billion-dollar conservative marketplace has expanded its reach over the past quarter century along with changes in the media, technology, and regulatory landscapes: mail, conferences, national talk radio, cable television, email, Web sites, apps, and social media. The parts most people see — FOX News, Daily Caller, CPAC, Rush Limbaugh, NRA — are just the most mainstream tip of an iceberg that reaches ever-greater depths.

This marketplace thrives financially by stoking the fears of conservative consumers — and that’s easiest to do when Democrats hold power.

The modern conservative marketplace as we know it first matured during the Clinton presidency; flattened out during the George W. Bush years; and resumed its growth under Obama.

The inauguration of Donald Trump in 2017, along with majorities in Congress, state government, and, increasingly, the judiciary, virtually eliminated the government as a source of supposed tyranny and imminent threat to liberty. Another set of dangers needed to be manufactured.

Those threats have surfaced in two unsurprising categories: non-white people allegedly swarming the country from without and destroying white heritage from within; and lawless Democrats subverting the government from the “Deep State” and marauding as violent mobs on the streets.

The marketplace success of that pivot can be seen by turning on Fox News during prime time, reading the current best-sellers by Tucker Carlson, Michael Savage, and Jeanine Pirro, or scanning the posts in just about any conservative Facebook forum.

But without some new iteration of those threats, sales, ratings, and donations wane. This can be directly witnessed in action on Gab usage, as plotted in the Harvard study. Activity generally lulls, until something gets the alt-right’s blood moving. The study identifies four of these spikes, and their correlating causes: James Comey’s firing; June 2017 “March Against Sharia” demonstrations; Trump’s “both sides” response to the Charlottesville violence; and, tellingly, Twitter’s banning of abusive users.

Threat and Reward

When Fox Business News (FBN) announced Sunday that it was banning Judicial Watch director Chris Farrell from appearing as a guest in the future, it was a rare instance of a player in the conservative marketplace publicly ostracizing another as illegitimate.

Farrell, and others at Judicial Watch, are regulars on the conservative marketplace circuit — and make a good living out of it. The group took in $45 million of contributions and grants in 2016, off of $8.4 million spent on fundraising. After program expenses and salaries — including $250,000-plus for Farrell — the nonprofit pocketed $14,490,865 that year, bringing its net assets to an all-time high of more than $63 million.

Judicial Watch’s main activity is suing for government records in hopes of revealing nefarious misdeeds of Democrats. It was formed in 1994, and made its bones on high-profile pursuits of the Clinton administration. The Obama years, in which Judicial Watch led on multiple fronts, including Hillary Clinton’s email servers, were a financial boon for the group: its revenues steadily grew from $9 million in 2008 to $44 million in 2016 — while Farrell’s total compensation grew from $153,000 to $273,000.

Without Democrats in power, Judicial Watch has been swinging at everything from the Bob Mueller investigation to George Soros’ alleged nefarious influence. His banning came after Farrell went a bit too far on FBN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight in spreading the baseless speculation that George Soros is funding the “caravan” of refugees attempting to walk to America for asylum. Farrell tied the conspiracy to the Deep State with anti-Semitic language, declaring that they are “getting money from the Soros-occupied State Department.” The claim went unnoticed on Thursday, but drew attention and ire when it re-aired Saturday night, after the Tree Of Life shooting.

That shooter, reportedly, was infuriated by the belief that Soros was behind the caravan. And, the alleged pipe bomber was similarly obsessed with Soros, reportedly tweeting more than 400 times about him, including the last tweet sent from one of his accounts.

It is unsurprising, if insane and troubling, that the conservative marketplace has at all levels embraced the fear of those refugees, or that many have adopted the theory of Soros’ involvement.

That theory began, according to Jonathan Albright of the Columbia Journalism School, as seemingly random tweets from anonymous or phony accounts, during a similar refugee migration attempt in March.

The first article asserting the Soros funding appeared in a fringe right-wing site called The Goldwater, and was mentioned by Dobbs on his program a day later. It continued to get life from Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, popular right-wing conspiracy site WND, and a variety of others.

At the first reporting, in mid-October, of the new caravan, Albright writes, “almost immediately … right-wing outlets like Fox News saw their Twitter mentions flooded with replies blaming Soros.”

The caravan story is irresistible to Fox and other right-wing outlets — and so is Soros, who has long been the scary stand-in for a liberal Jewish globalist conspiracy. Any outlet in the conservative marketplace that didn’t treat the refugees as a dangerous “invasion” — as Fox News has called it dozens of times — and speculate about the nefarious lefties behind it would lose out to competitors willing to do so.

Similarly, Republican officials — including President Trump — understand that these same forces driving the conservative market are also what they need to rile up conservatives to come out to vote.

Thus we’ve seen the Soros-caravan conspiracy given credence by Trump, Senator Chuck Grassley, and others — which in turn legitimizes not only the conspiracy itself, but any fringe outlets or groups who have been promoting it.

Trump’s role in accelerating this cycle is undeniable. But it shouldn’t be over-emphasized. The market forces at work, and their hold over Republican voters and through them over Republican officials, is well-established and entrenched. It can be fought, but not untangled. The dynamics that keep bringing bad information up the chain of legitimacy, and conservative consumers down the chain into more propaganda and hate, will easily outlast the current president’s tenure.