"1843 Magazine" Profiles Graham Hancock, "Conspiracy Theorists' Favourite Historian"

​On Friday, 1843 Magazine, the longform arm of The Economist, published a lengthy profile of Graham Hancock, a onetime stringer for The Economist. Journalist Tomas Weber duly noted the darker parts of Hancock’s life story—his years cozying up to African dictators, his raging temper, and his lack of evidence for a lost civilization—but produced a biographical study that seemed intrigued by Hancock’s ability to spin fantasy into the only currency The Economist truly values: cash. After all, in the marketplace of ideas, what idea has value except the one that attracts money and power? Fortunately, Weber centers this in the context of far-right conspiracies, branding Hancock “conspiracy theorists’ favourite historian,” even if Hancock is no historian.

​Weber’s piece is formally evenhanded, and he carefully outlines Hancock’s ideas as well as the archaeological reaction to them, notably Flint Dibble’s criticisms of Hancock and the unsavory history of Atlantis-style pseudo-histories. But the trouble with evenhanded studies of outrageous figures is that balance, on balance, favors the crackpot because it places his work on even footing with science and casts the story as a clash of equals, not simply a kook who captured the public imagination with the same lies Ignatius Donnelly pedaled in the 1880s and Josiah Priest published in the 1830s and Arab historians in the 1000s and which we can trace back to George Syncellus in the 800s and John Malalas in the 500s and eventually back to the Book of Enoch. The practice of journalistic objectivity makes extremists seem like centrists and fringe thinkers seem like equally valid opponents to science.
 
Hancock told Weber that he is not racist, even if his early books identified the lost civilization as a white civilization that tutored the unlettered brown peoples of the world. And Hancock is of course right that he is not personally racist. It is, instead, his ideas that carry with them the stain of the racist eras in which they emerged. Ignatius Donnelly, Hancock’s early inspiration, was similarly an anti-racist by the standards of his day, but he still believed white people were genetically superior and wrote that they ruled over a multiracial Atlantis. Josiah Priest, writing still earlier, cast his search for a lost civilization explicitly as a hunt for a lost white race exterminated by Native “savages.” Even when stripped of their racist language, the ideas themselves bear the stigmata of their original sin. But Weber, duly noting the racist use of Atlantis myths in both American history and Nazi Germany, lets pass Hancock’s claim that he could easily sue Dibble for pointing out the connections between Hancock’s ideas and the racism of his sources. Specifically, Hancock claims that saying he and other fringe writers “centre white Europeans as able creators” is defamatory.
 
But perhaps the most interesting part of Weber’s article is the connections he points out between Hancock and the web of mostly right-wing conspiracy theorists that now make up the most powerful people in and around the U.S. government, stretching from Joe Rogan to Rep. Anna Paulina Luna to J.D. Vance’s mentor, the financier and self-professed genius Peter Thiel, whom we learn from Hancock is, as I had assumed, an ancient astronaut theorist:

Over their lunch in 2019 Hancock and Thiel discussed the possibility of the billionaire funding searches for traces of the lost civilisation. But the meeting went awry. Hancock said Thiel appeared more interested in the ideas of Erich von Däniken, a Swiss pseudo-archaeologist who believes that extraterrestrials might have influenced early human culture – a proposition which Hancock rejects as simply too far-fetched.

​At the end of piece, Weber notes Hancock’s new book (he has a book deal learn, something Hancock hadn’t shared online) and says that the author is exhausted from constantly being attacked for criticizing archaeology and being asked for evidence. “I’m tired of this,” he said. “The constant fighting, tired of the lies, tired of the smears.” That might have run more true had not just finished smearing archaeologists when he said it.


Correction: An earlier version of this blog post incorrectly stated that I had spoken with Weber about the article. I mixed up his piece with a different reporter from another publication who was also planning a Hancock profile. I had instead spoken with someone who had spoken to Weber, so I only knew of this piece secondhand prior to publication. I regret the confusion and the error.