Michael: P.T. Barnum, the original master of 'fake news,' built his empire on a lie. But his most profitable and damaging hoax wasn't a stitched-together mermaid. It was a 161-year-old Black woman. And that lie tells us everything about America. Kevin: Whoa, hold on. P.T. Barnum? I thought he was all about the circus, elephants, and good-natured 'humbug.' You're telling me his biggest trick was something much, much darker? Michael: That's the explosive argument at the heart of the book we're diving into today: Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News by Kevin Young. Kevin: Kevin Young... isn't he a celebrated poet and the director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture? That's a serious heavyweight. Michael: Exactly. And he brings that unique perspective—part historian, part poet—to argue that the great American tradition of the hoax has always been, at its core, about race. The book is so powerful it won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, which specifically recognizes works that confront racism and celebrate diversity. Kevin: Okay, so this isn't just a fun romp through history's greatest pranks. This sounds like it goes to a much deeper, more uncomfortable place. Where do we even start?

Michael: We have to start where Young starts, with a woman named Joice Heth. In 1835, a young, ambitious P.T. Barnum was looking for his first big break. And he found it by purchasing an elderly, blind, and almost completely paralyzed enslaved woman. Kevin: Wait, he purchased her? So this wasn't a business partnership or an act. This whole enterprise was literally built on the institution of slavery. Michael: It was. He then created a sensational backstory. He claimed Joice Heth was 161 years old and had been the personal nursemaid to baby George Washington. He printed fake posters, forged documents, and toured her up and down the East Coast. Kevin: But why would people even believe she was 161? That seems completely absurd. Michael: Barnum was a master of what we'd now call viral marketing. He planted anonymous letters in newspapers, some praising Heth as a national treasure, others denouncing her as a fraud—a "humbug." He knew that controversy created curiosity. People flocked to see her, to touch a piece of history, to gawk at this supposed marvel. They paid money to witness her frailty. Kevin: So he was manufacturing the debate himself. He was playing both sides to drive ticket sales. That feels unnervingly modern, like a 19th-century version of running a disinformation campaign on social media. Michael: Precisely. But the story gets much worse. After about a year of this grueling tour, Joice Heth died. For Barnum, this wasn't an end; it was another business opportunity. Kevin: Oh no. What did he do? Michael: He sold tickets to her public autopsy. He advertised it as the final reveal: was she real or a fake? Fifteen hundred people paid 50 cents each to watch a surgeon dissect her body in a New York saloon. Kevin: That is absolutely monstrous. It's beyond a hoax. That's a profound act of dehumanization, turning her life and her death into a cheap spectacle for profit. Michael: And that is the central, gut-punching argument of Kevin Young's book. The American hoax isn't just a clever lie. It's a lie that has historically relied on, and reinforced, the deepest forms of racism. The famous 'Feejee Mermaid'—that monkey-fish hybrid—is a funny little sideshow. The real hoax, the one that reveals the soul of the enterprise, was what Barnum and his audience were doing with Black bodies. They were consuming them as entertainment. Kevin: It reframes everything. The 'humbug' stops being a charming quirk of American history and starts looking like a tool of oppression. It's the spectacle used to mask brutality. Michael: Exactly. Young argues that this set the template. The American public developed an appetite for hoaxes that confirmed their biases, especially racial ones. It was entertainment that made them feel superior and justified the existing social order.

Kevin: Okay, so that's the 19th-century foundation. It's incredibly dark and powerful. How does Young connect this to the hoaxes we see today? It feels like a huge leap from a public autopsy to, say, a faked memoir getting on a bestseller list. Michael: The technology has changed, but Young argues the core psychology is exactly the same. We don't just believe lies; we believe the lies we want to be true. The lies that tell a story we're desperate to hear. Take the case of James Frey's memoir, A Million Little Pieces. Kevin: Oh, I remember that. The book about his incredible battle with addiction that Oprah picked for her book club, and then it all came crashing down. Michael: Right. And Young dissects why it was so popular. Frey presented himself as this hyper-masculine, tough-as-nails criminal addict who faced down the recovery establishment and healed himself through sheer willpower. He claimed he'd been in wild brawls and spent months in jail. It was a story of rugged individualism triumphing over chaos. Kevin: A story America loves to tell about itself. So people weren't just duped by the details, they were invested in the narrative. They wanted the story to be true more than they wanted the actual truth. Michael: That's the key. When the fabrications were exposed by an investigative website—showing he'd only spent a few hours in jail, not 87 days, and that many of the dramatic events never happened—the initial reaction from many, including Oprah at first, was to defend the book's "emotional truth." The feeling it gave them was more important than the facts. Kevin: That's a chilling phrase, 'emotional truth.' It's the ancestor of 'alternative facts.' It's the idea that if a story resonates with my worldview, it has a right to exist, regardless of reality. Michael: And this gets even more complicated and circles right back to race when the hoax is about identity itself. Young spends a lot of time on the case of Rachel Dolezal. Kevin: The white woman who was the president of an NAACP chapter and presented herself as a Black woman for years. Michael: Exactly. Young presents this as a bizarre, modern echo of the racial performances of the 19th century. It's a hoax of identity that is deeply, uncomfortably entangled with America's racial obsessions. Kevin: Wow. When you put it like that... in the 19th century, you have a white man, Barnum, profiting by faking the identity and story of a Black woman. In the 21st century, you have a white woman, Dolezal, attempting to gain social and cultural capital by faking a Black identity. It's still revolving around the performance and appropriation of race. Michael: You've nailed it. That's the thread that runs through the entire 400-plus pages of Bunk. For Young, all of these stories lead to one profound conclusion: race itself is the most insidious and enduring American hoax of all. It's a fiction, a 'bunk' story we made up, that has had the most real and devastating consequences imaginable. Kevin: That's a heavy, powerful idea. It explains why some readers find the book challenging or dense. It's not a light read because it's not about light subjects. It's using the history of fakery to perform a deep cultural critique. Michael: It is. It’s a demand that we stop seeing these as isolated incidents of deception and start seeing them as symptoms of a much deeper cultural illness.

Kevin: So this book, Bunk, is so much more than a list of fun hoaxes. It's a pretty damning and brilliant critique of American culture. It suggests our national love of 'humbug' and spectacle is deeply tied to our deepest social sins. Michael: Precisely. Kevin Young's ultimate argument is that from P.T. Barnum's sideshows to today's 'fake news,' the American hoax thrives by exploiting our existing biases, our anxieties, and our desires. It works not because we are stupid, but because we are so willing to believe in fictions that make us feel comfortable, superior, or entertained. Kevin: The book isn't just a history, then. It's a mirror. It's forcing us to look at our own gullibility and ask some really uncomfortable questions. Michael: Absolutely. It's a call to examine why we believe what we believe. The real danger isn't the lie itself, but our hunger for it. The hoaxer just serves the meal we were already craving. Kevin: That completely changes how I'll look at the next sensational headline or unbelievable story. It makes you ask not just 'is this true?' but 'why do I want it to be true?' And that is a much harder, and much more important, question. Michael: It really is. And it's a question we think everyone should be asking. We'd love to hear what our listeners think. What's a hoax you fell for, big or small, and looking back, why do you think you wanted to believe it? Let us know on our social channels; we're genuinely curious. Kevin: This is Aibrary, signing off.