I don't know if you're old enough to remember a magazine called Weekly World News. These people have ALWAYS been around. It's only before the internet if you didn't know one of them personally than they only bothered people in their own orbit. Their craziness had no platform.

Although, it's not a uniquely American thing one instance made me think about American culture in a way I'd never really thought before. I was in college and met some girls from Puerto Rico. We would hang out and go places. Once we went grocery shopping and they had magazines in the checkout aisles. There was Weekly World News, along with the National Inquirer, and junk like that. One of my friends looks at me with a deeply puzzled expression and asks: Is this what Americas newspapers are like?

She was completely baffled at the stuff on the cover. Papers like that used to traffic in Bigfoot sightings, alligators in sewers, outrageous celebrity gossip, lizard people, and wild conspiracy theories. Basically, it was stuff the writers pulled out of their butts and put on the front page: crap! I had to explain real newspapers to her and tell her those papers were special. Hell even I was often shocked and surprised at some of the junk on those covers.

But they were also some of the best selling magazines in the store. WWN stayed in business for decades! Somebody was buying that junk. So I guess one of the side effects of the internet making most magazines extinct is thst the peopel who read that junk took their batshittery on the internet, started connecting up with one another, and they metastasized into a freakish combination of them, politics, and trump.

https://www.metv.com/stories/10-ridiculous-weekly-world-news-covers-that-made-us-do-a-double-take-in-1981