A wart that grew a man, Morton Downey Jr. was his generation’s Joe Pyne, a fun-house mirror of a media personality, held up to the absolute worst in American culture. His show was a sick and violent sideshow but mostly a con, save the host’s outrage, which was real and came from some unknown personal wounds.

Every generation gets the Joe Pyne they deserve, and in our time it’s Alex Jones, who doesn’t offer carnival-ish physical violence from inside a confined studio but something worse: scary conspiracy theories, threats of violence and utter hatred sent out to the like-minded. It’s not a purging but a rallying cry.

It makes sense that as most of the culture improves and progresses, that a stubborn strain of it gets worse, becomes a raging illness.