Vince Foster, QAnon, and the right’s culture of conspiracy theory

The highbrow elements of the right-wing media complex like to tell a self-flattering story in which the modern American right is controlled by sophisticates such as themselves. The Republican Party’s extremists, in this version of reality, are mere rabble who provide the movement with manpower and votes but have little influence over the course of political events.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board offered up such a tale in its Saturday piece eulogizing former independent counsel Kenneth Starr. The board complained that “Starr’s critics” ignore his role in “putting to rest the conspiracy theories on the right about Vincent Foster,” a senior aide in President Bill Clinton’s White House who took his own life in 1993. “The Qanons of the era argued that the Clintons probably had something nefarious to do with it,” the board wrote. “Starr helped debunk that theory with an investigation concluding that Foster had killed himself.”

By tying together the Foster conspiracy theorists of the past with the QAnon fanatics of the present, the editorial board seeks to minimize the influence of both within the right. But in both cases, the conspiracy theory infested every element of the movement over which the Journal pretends to play a leading role.

Foster was the Seth Rich of the Clinton administration, someone whose tragic death was opportunistically seized by right-wing conspiracy theorists seeking partisan gain. And as with Rich, those conspiracy theories bubbled up to the heights of the right-wing press.

Indeed, the Journal editorial board itself stoked the Foster conspiracy theories at the time. After Foster took his own life in Virginia’s Fort Marcy Park – leaving behind a note stating that “the WSJ editors lie without consequence,” a reference to several Journal editorials attacking him – the board called for an independent counsel to investigate Foster’s death. “If he was driven to take his life by purely personal despair, a serious investigation should share this conclusion so that he can be appropriately mourned,” the board concluded in its July 22, 1993, piece.