Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News

Summary of Bunk

1. 1

   When Truth Became Optional

   

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   What if I told you that America's relationship with lies didn't start with social media, but with a showman in the 1800s who exhibited human beings as curiosities? The thread connecting P.T. Barnum's "humbugs" to today's viral misinformation reveals something unsettling: we've always been willing to be fooled, as long as the show was good enough. But here's the twist-Barnum believed there was honor in entertaining deception, a line between harmless spectacle and dangerous fraud. That line has vanished. We now live in what could be called the "complete-hoax world," where the very concept of truth has become negotiable, and facts are treated like opinions you can simply choose not to believe. Nineteenth-century America didn't just tolerate deception-it celebrated it as entertainment. Barnum insisted his "humbugs" were morally acceptable because audiences got their money's worth, even if what they saw was fabricated. This philosophy allowed a young nation grappling with the contradiction of slavery in a land of freedom to "marvel at its mysteries" without confronting its hypocrisies directly. The penny press-essentially the internet of its day-prioritized sensation over substance, court scandals over political analysis. Writers like Poe and Twain wove confidence men into the fabric of American literature, recognizing that deception had become central to national identity.

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   Fabricating Worlds: From Lunar Hoaxes to Literary Deception

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   The 1835 Moon Hoax captured this perfectly. Richard Adams Locke's fabricated lunar discoveries-complete with bat-winged humanoids and blue unicorns-generated unprecedented excitement. But the descriptions revealed something darker: "yellowish flesh," copper-colored hair, faces compared to orangutans. The hoax recreated earthly racial hierarchies in space, with "superior" lighter-skinned lunar beings ruling darker subordinate creatures. Even fantasies about other worlds couldn't escape terrestrial prejudices. This tradition of identity theft runs deep. Grey Owl, born Archibald Belaney in England, became famous as a "Native" conservationist while concealing his origins. Tim Barrus reinvented himself as "Nasdijj," an imaginary Navajo, accepting prizes and publication. Native writers like Sherman Alexie warned publishers that Nasdijj was stealing their stories, but publishers ignored them. Even the famous "crying Indian" from the 1971 environmental campaign wasn't actually Native. The American tradition of "playing Indian" dates back to the Boston Tea Party-defining identity through appropriation, using masks "for good and evil."

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   Bodies as Spectacle: The Racialized Sideshow and Its Global Reach

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   Slavery's contradiction with American ideals was so profound the Constitution addressed it only through euphemism. This hypocrisy found cultural expression in exhibiting Black bodies as "freaks." William Henry Johnson, a Black man with microcephaly, was displayed as "What Is It?"-supposedly a "missing link" captured in Africa. Barnum weaponized evolutionary theory with pseudoscientific language to reinforce racist hierarchies. Yet Johnson maintained a fifty-year career, developing complex awareness of his role. His deathbed confession-"Well, we fooled 'em for a long time, didn't we?"-reveals agency within exploitation. Even progressive intellectuals participated. In 1910, Virginia Woolf and her Bloomsbury friends donned blackface to impersonate the emperor of Abyssinia, successfully boarding Britain's premier battleship while speaking gibberish they claimed was Swahili. Their invented phrase "Bunga-Bunga" became a popular catchphrase, demonstrating how hoax language spreads like contagion. The prank revealed theories positioning Blackness as disease-racial disguise served to define whiteness by contrast, signaling the hoaxers' own identity through what it was not.

4. Chapter 4

   Colonizing Heaven: Spiritualism and the Domestication of Death

   While Barnum debunked spirit photography in court, Spiritualism emerged as America's homegrown religion of fakery. Beginning in 1848 with the Fox sisters' "spirit rappings," the movement exploded during the Civil War's national grief. William Mumler's spirit photographs-charging $10 per supernatural portrait-captured Mary Todd Lincoln with the "spirits" of her assassinated husband and dead son. These images didn't reveal actual spirits; they "domesticated death," allowing the living to maintain property rights over the dead-a "retransfer of force from the living to the dead," particularly for white Americans seeking to "colonize heaven." Even Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the rational Sherlock Holmes, desperately wanted to believe after his son's World War I death. He championed the Cottingley fairy photographs, taken by two young cousins who had traced drawings from a children's book. Their working-class background was interpreted as evidence of honesty-they were deemed too simple for sophisticated deception. The girls didn't confess until 1982. When Margaret Fox admitted in 1888 that the sisters had simply been cracking their toes, believers refused to accept it. The need to believe had become more powerful than truth itself.

   Chapter 5

   Fabricating Lincoln and the Memoir Industrial Complex

   Americans' grief over their martyred president made them easy marks for deception. In 1928, Wilma Frances Minor sold The Atlantic Monthly intimate love letters between Lincoln and Ann Rutledge. Even Carl Sandburg praised how they "chime with all else known of Lincoln." The suspicious volume of letters, diaries, and memorabilia for a brief frontier romance should have raised alarms. When exposed, Minor claimed she and her mother had "channeled" Lincoln and Rutledge's voices spiritually. This trajectory from Barnum's spectacle to sophisticated fraud continues in today's memoir industrial complex. James Frey's *A Million Little Pieces* epitomizes memoir's slide into "truthiness"-what feels true over factual accuracy. Originally fiction but repackaged as memoir for sales, Frey invented prison scenes with racist tropes despite minimal jail time. Margaret Seltzer's *Love and Consequences* featured a white author posing as half-Native, raised by a Black foster family in South Central LA. These fabricated memoirs peddle extreme realities because plausibility might trigger reader skepticism.

   Chapter 6

   The Post-Truth Ecosystem: When Journalism Fabricates Itself

   Stephen Glass's fabricated stories for *The New Republic* reveal a fabulist's paradox-simultaneously evading detection while leaving clues to exposure. His article titles like "Hack Heaven" ironically foreshadowed his unmasking. Glass exploited journalism's fact-checking by fabricating entire source networks, creating feedback loops where unverifiable "facts" originated from reporters themselves. His novel *The Fabulist* reads as evasion rather than confession, portraying exposers as heartless while casting himself as repentant victim. Glass's article on Vernon Jordan exemplifies racial hoaxing-depicting the powerful Black attorney as both professional "phantom" and threatening physical presence. His broader significance lies in his "beseeching blandness"-cultivated banality that made wild fabrications believable. His stories predicted our post-factual world where reality has become "fractional, virtual, unreal," where writing is mere "content" and people are "consumers" rather than citizens. Glass's legacy mirrors how his fabrications anticipated our increasingly fictional existence where even human connections have become virtual and commodified.

   Chapter 7

   Living in the Complete-Hoax World

   We've entered an Age of Euphemism where hoaxes have become mainstream. The Ringling Bros. circus closed just as a reality TV showman took office-a poignant symbol of spectacle moving from margins to center. The most effective modern hoaxes disguise themselves as hoax exposures, creating recursive loops of distrust. Today's cons employ "ropers" who bring in marks, "inside men" who work them, and "the store"-semi-permanent displays mimicking legitimate establishments. Truth has become a skill-a muscle that atrophies without use. We must strengthen it daily through rigorous questioning, demanding evidence, and refusing to accept that all narratives are equally valid. Facts remain on our side, but only if we fight for them. The alternative isn't just misinformation-it's a world where reality itself becomes optional, where we can't agree on what's real enough to argue about. That world isn't coming. We're already living in it.

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