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Will Mittendorf on Racist and Anti-Racist Conspiracy Theories
50 Plays1 year ago
M chats with Will Mittendorf about his paper at the 2nd International Conference of the Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories, which concerns racist and anti-racist conspiracy theories.
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Transcript
Acknowledging Patrons and Inside Jokes
00:00:00
Speaker
So, Josh, we have a bit of a problem. Yes, we certainly do, but I'm not sure if robbing the Reserve Bank's going to cut it this time. W-w-what? No, no, no, no. We've forgotten to mention a new patron in one of these openings. Also, what were you referring to? Me? Nothing. Not a thing. Not any sort of a thing. You can't trick me into revealing what's been happening with that Sisters of Mercy problem we've been having.
00:00:24
Speaker
I honestly have no idea what you're talking about and it also seems very much like a you problem. No, we need to acknowledge a new patron and do its stats. They started paying us the big monies before I went on my EU jaunt and, well, somehow acknowledging them fell through the cracks, probably when I was doing crack in Amsterdam. Okay, let me look at the emails.
00:00:49
Speaker
Okay, yes, I see the problem. You do? Yes. How do we say their name? Nettle Joff Ninsintoff Nialathitep? We could just go with the old mononym of N. Yeah, but we always do that. It just seems very impersonal. Especially when I have this dossier of Inside Goss on our N and off or whoever it sounds. Hold on. A few minutes ago, you didn't even know what the issue of the day was. And now you have a dossier?
00:01:19
Speaker
I always have a dossier. Plus, it turns out Nazbin Sloth is the orchestrator of our Sisters of Mercy problems. One dossier, two situations. Query. Sisters of Mercy as in the band? Or the Catholic Order? Both. See, our new patron is not just any patron, but a patron pi excellence. See, our patron is the Red Pope, Gregory the 17th. He's been sending the Sisters of Mercy after us to close us down. But like Alex Jones with a minuteable horn, we cannot be stopped.
00:01:46
Speaker
That explains the bullhorn, but not the baguette and a sheath. We'll be clear with time. And money.
Recording Logistics and Humor
00:01:53
Speaker
Is this a gambit to get patrons to give us more money so we can investigate these claims in further detail? It is. And the Sisters of Mercy problem? They'll be kissing the carpet by morning. A deep cut. Roll that thing.
00:02:13
Speaker
The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Edison and Em Dintus.
00:02:24
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy in Auckland, New Zealand. I am Josh Edison. They are Imdentith, but we are far, far apart from one another. It's just one of those things. I'm assuming because we want to commit crimes. Probably. We want to commit crimes, right? We're keeping ourselves separate so we cannot be charged with collusion. Right, but then we'll end up in the prisoner's dilemma.
00:02:48
Speaker
And we need to have some sort of a signal worked out for that situation. But anyway, that's that's probably probably not the most pressing issue with an appendage that goes up or down. I can think of no such thing, though, unfortunately.
00:02:59
Speaker
the eyes making reference to the critic. Oh, right. I mean, you mean thumbs up, thumbs down? Oh yes, that would also do. No, yes. So we're recording this remotely because we don't actually have a lot of recording to do this particular evening because we have another interview that Ian has already thoughtfully prerecorded. It's true. Rather than get just to an intro to an interview and ask for his comments on the interview before the interview has been recorded, what I did was I recorded the interview in the past
00:03:28
Speaker
got Josh to listen to it in the near past and in the present, Josh is going to provide colour commentary to this interview in what is going to be the future after we've recorded this segment of the preamble of the podcast in real time.
00:03:46
Speaker
It makes a lot of sense. It's all thanks to the linear nature of time. So this particular- Well, all the problem of the linear nature of time. I mean, life would be a lot easier if time wasn't linear. It would.
00:04:00
Speaker
In a sense, I suppose. Maybe we need some seven Lind octopus aliens to come down and squirting at us so we can do that. Have you seen Arrival? It's very good. You should see Arrival. I've seen Arrival. And I can't remember what is the name of the hypothesis that that film rifts upon? The... Yeah, that one. Sapir Wharf hypothesis. Which many linguists now go is a load of rubbish. And so I spent the entire time watching that film going.
00:04:29
Speaker
Well this is junk science. Well this is junk science. This is junk science too.
00:04:34
Speaker
Well, I'm an actual linguist and I didn't care, so therefore I win. Anyway. If that's your little victory, then you get that little victory. But enough? Yes, I do. Enough. Enough. We are not a we are not a podcast that likes to deal in pop culture. We're a podcast that deals with conspiracy theories.
Introduction to Will Mittendorf's Research
00:04:53
Speaker
And we have an interview this week with one Will Mittendorf. Josh, who is Will Mittendorf?
00:05:00
Speaker
Well, I mean, I don't really know since I've never actually met them in person, but I do know that they presented at your conference on all of these things. Where am I just as particularly dodgy? I do know that they presented a talk racist and anti-racist conspiracy theories at your recent conference. And that's largely what the two of you talk about in the interview that we're just about to listen to.
00:05:22
Speaker
Yeah, so Will is actually a former student of Brian Keighley, friend of the show, patron of the show, occasional interviewee of the show, and someone that Josh has never met. Man, I have never met. In any way, shape or form. Saddens me greatly.
00:05:37
Speaker
So he did his PhD at the Claremont Graduate University where, which is attached to, well, Pitzer College is attached to the Claremont Graduate University because Pitzer College is part of the Claremont Consortium. And so Will did his PhD under the auspices in part of Bryan. There were, of course, other people involved as well, including Will himself was involved in writing his own PhD. Scandalous, I know, but crazy things do happen. What will they think of?
00:06:07
Speaker
He's a, I'm about to say, a pizza boy going way back, but that sounds ever so slightly new. It's a little bit weird. I don't really mean to imply anything, but you know, he's been around Clermont for a while, even though he's actually from the South Side. That's a terrible, terrible phrase.
00:06:26
Speaker
someone's speech disfluency, south side of Chicago originally, and now he works at Cerritos College in California, where he's head of the philosophy department and has a quite stupendous teaching load.
00:06:44
Speaker
Excellent. Well, lucky for us then that he was able to take time out to both go to your conference and then talk to you about it afterwards. Shall we listen to that now? Well, let's pretend to listen to it now, even though actually what's going to happen? Well, let everyone else listen to it now. 44 minutes or so of us pretending time is passing when actually we're just going to record our comments after this thing.
00:07:14
Speaker
So Will, you've just returned back from Amsterdam in the second international conference on the philosophy of conspiracy theories. How was it? It was a wonderful experience. Because you're talking with the organiser, I'm assuming. You're trying to butter my bread here. Please, flattery will get you everywhere.
00:07:34
Speaker
You did a good job. I would say Julia and Melina also did a wonderful job planning the events kind of I did a good job. They did a wonderful job already. You're back tracking on the flattery here
00:07:50
Speaker
Well, yeah, I mean, Julia, I think was like our tour guide with like the little flag, pretty much taking us from one spot to another, entertaining us throughout the experience before and after the conference. To the point that she had lost her voice by Sunday.
00:08:07
Speaker
Oh, I'm not surprised. Yeah, I think every night we stayed out very late and there were a lot of good conversations and not a lot of sleep, I think, for everyone and I know especially for Julie. Yes. Conferences are not really designed to be riskful experiences as far as I can tell, in part because most of these, as you say, the decent conversations occur after the conference ends and the drinking begins.
00:08:32
Speaker
I mean, maybe Socrates was right to say in that, you know, in vino veritas and wine there is truth. There was a lot of truth at this conference, that's for sure. Although not any 9-11 truth that ism, which was interesting, was a comment that was made by Steve Clark, one of our keynote speakers, that there were, in his words, no loonies or weirdos presenting papers at the conference. It was all, in many respects, exciting, but also quite staid academic work.
00:09:01
Speaker
Yeah, I would agree with that. That's true. I mean, I think we're all a little bit more conspiracy minded, but generally, yeah, that's true. It was pretty tame. I think what's interesting about what happened in the philosophy of conspiracy theory is that we're very sympathetic towards conspiracy theorizing as an intellectual activity without necessarily being people who engage in excessive conspiracy theorizing ourselves.
00:09:28
Speaker
Yeah, or the conspiracy theorizing we engage in, we think is much more normal, right? I mean, we seem to think it's happening all the time everywhere. So we don't necessarily need to go to the extraordinary examples to prove the point. Although the examples you were talking about in your paper, racist and anti-racist conspiracy theories, those were interesting examples. Tell us about the paper that you presented.
00:09:55
Speaker
Well, ultimately it was a response to Kasam, although sort of in general to a lot of the generalists that are making this claim that conspiracy theories are really about racist propaganda, which I fully agree with. I mean, that's clearly one of the uses of conspiracy theories, one of the ways that people engage in conspiracy theorizing.
00:10:17
Speaker
I don't think that's the only function of those conspiracy theories or conspiracy theories in general, I should say. Kasam makes a couple of points that the right that the only function of conspiracy theories is to promote racist propaganda and that racist conspiracy theories ought to be dismissed entirely as a class.
00:10:40
Speaker
I disagree with those two points in my paper. So first I go through different sorts of ways in which conspiracy theories can be racist. And clearly they can. And I agree with Kasam on his point in general. I just don't agree that all conspiracy theories do this.
00:10:58
Speaker
But I found that there were at least a couple of three different varieties of types of racist conspiracy theories, sort of overtly racist conspiracy theories, dog whistle conspiracy theories that function to promote racism, and then just racial conspiracies, conspiracy theories that involve race in some way or another.
00:11:21
Speaker
And surprisingly, I didn't find that any of these categories, you could just simply dismiss a theory because they were part of the category, which was surprising to me, because I thought it would be pretty easy to dismiss racist conspiracies, right? But the challenge is that racism is very hard to define. Philosophers just completely disagree about what counts as racism, what makes something racist. And that problem is called the location problem.
00:11:48
Speaker
Where is racism located? So is it in someone's belief? Is it in their unconscious attitudes or behaviors? Is it in
Racist and Anti-racist Conspiracy Theories
00:12:00
Speaker
actions? Is it in systems and institutions?
00:12:05
Speaker
And I found that another problem that we have here is the location problem in conspiracy theory, which is where do we locate the theory itself? Because conspiracy theories, there are so many different types and versions and individual instances of them from reports to individual sentences to posts and memes and likes and things like that.
00:12:27
Speaker
And so it's very hard to say that a conspiracy theory is racist because we need to look at the individual instance of that theory, because in some instances it's clearly racist, but in other instances it might not be. And so it's hard to dismiss an entire theory as racist simply because one instance of the theory is racist, even though other instances might not be.
00:12:51
Speaker
And there's also the issue that there might be truth to the theory and somebody is offering a version of the theory that's racist. And so if we throw out the whole thing, we may be throwing out the truthful aspect of the theory just because somebody has sort of added this racist dimension to it.
00:13:08
Speaker
So that was sort of the surprising part of my research into this was that it wasn't so easy to just get rid of a theory because it was racist because it's hard to define that. But the second part, which I think is maybe more interesting is that
00:13:24
Speaker
the function of anti-racist conspiracy theories. And so I found that when we normally talk about conspiracy theories, there are these very extraordinary examples like Watergate, right? Like this extraordinary thing happens where a president ends up resigning. I mean, this is an extraordinary example of a conspiracy theory, but the kind of
00:13:48
Speaker
banality of racist conspiracy theories, right? They're kind of everywhere. And in some sense, they're very easy to overlook or, you know, very easy to ignore, to some extent, I think, based on your standpoint.
00:14:02
Speaker
But yeah, racist conspiracies happen all the time and the whole history of the United States is littered with racist conspiracies. And I think everything from the KKK, Jim Crow laws, what Michelle Alexander is calling the new Jim Crow with drug laws and mass incarceration. I mean, I think that white supremacy in the United States is really upheld in part by a series of conspiracies.
00:14:29
Speaker
And I just felt like this hasn't really been discussed in the literature. And I think if we use these examples a little bit more often, it might be a better response to the generalist claim that conspiracies don't really happen very frequently.
00:14:44
Speaker
Yeah, there's something to be said here about Matt Shields' discussion of conceptual domination and the idea that people like Kasam are kind of focusing on the wrong kinds of conspiracies. If you're concerned about conspiracies functioning as political propaganda,
00:15:03
Speaker
then surely you should be looking at the examples of conspiracy theories promoted by politicians. If political propaganda is an issue, then people in positions of power using the language of conspiracy theory, that's going to be the real location of the issue. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, because, yeah, I mean, Kasam definitely is worried about the amateur nature of conspiracy theories and
00:15:26
Speaker
It seems like the professional conspiracy theorists are the ones that we really ought to worry about, the political actors. Yeah, that's a good point. So let's go back to your, and I'm doing scare quotes here. I realize this is a podcast, so there's no visual element here. So I'm just going to signal the scare quotes. Let's talk about your defense of racist conspiracy theorizing. So you point out there are kind of three categories of racist conspiracy theory.
00:15:54
Speaker
There's the overtly racist conspiracy theories, the covert or dog whistle racist conspiracy theories, and then there are conspiracy theories which have a racial element to them. So let's start with what I'm assuming is going to be the easiest one to kind of give a codified defense of.
00:16:14
Speaker
which are conspiracy theories with a racial element to them. So what kind of examples are you thinking of when you think of a conspiracy theory which implicates race, but is it actually necessarily racist? Well, this is, yeah, so I mean, this third category of just racial conspiracy theories is really broad, and it really depends on your approach to what you consider to be racist, right, and racism.
00:16:42
Speaker
So for example, there are conspiracy theories that white people are racially inferior because they do not have as much melanin in their skin. So this is melanin theory. Now, it depends on your definition of racism as to whether or not that's a racist theory.
00:17:06
Speaker
because like one version, one approach to racism, which is power plus prejudice would argue that only racial groups, members of racial groups that are dominant can do racist things or say racist things or be racist, right? So in this case, essentially that argument is that only white people can be racist because they have more power in society. And then when you add this prejudicial aspect to it, then you get a racist event.
00:17:35
Speaker
And so by the power plus prejudice account, the melanin theory wouldn't be racist. It might be racially prejudiced, but it wouldn't be racist. And so, I mean, I think there's a way that we could look at that type of conspiracy theory as being anti-racist in the sense that it is challenging white supremacy
00:17:57
Speaker
but it's also doing so on a biologically incorrect basis. So that's why I would put this into a category of a racial conspiracy theory.
00:18:08
Speaker
which may or may not be racist. And again, that depends on what you're looking at. But another much more obviously defensible version of this would be anti-racist conspiracy theories that point out the existence of racist conspiracies, right? So when you have like an example I gave was Laquan McDonald was this kid that was murdered in Chicago by a police officer.
00:18:30
Speaker
And the people in the community theorized that the police had done something immoral, that they had done something wrong, and they were covering it up. One of the claims specifically was that there was like security cam footage in a local restaurant that was erased by the police.
00:18:49
Speaker
And I think that that conspiracy theory fits, for example, Kasam's definition exactly. It's done by amateurs. It's done by people who are not willing to accept that maybe there wasn't some wrongdoing. These are amateurs that are speculating without enough evidence. But I think that that should be considered an anti-racist conspiracy theory.
00:19:11
Speaker
insofar as it's challenging a racist system, right? I mean, we know that even if there isn't conscious racism in law enforcement, there certainly seems to be a lot of unconscious racism based on disparities in police shootings, based on race, for example.
00:19:28
Speaker
So within this category of racial conspiracy theories, I think you've got everything from warranted anti-racist conspiracy theories to maybe unwarranted and even as far as to say, maybe racist conspiracy theories as well based on race. But again, that sort of depends on your definition of racism. I think that covers the gamut of the racial conspiracy theory.
00:19:52
Speaker
Okay, so let's move on to the more tricky examples, which are the overtly racist conspiracy theories and the dog whistle racist conspiracy theories, which, as you say, you don't seem to find a way to be able to dismiss them as a class. We'd have to assess them on the kind of particulars of the evidence.
00:20:13
Speaker
So thinking about overt versus covert racist conspiracy theories, what kind of examples are you thinking of which allow us to kind of tease out the difficulty of dismissing them as a class and having to assess them case by case?
00:20:27
Speaker
Well, yeah, I mean, so like with overt racist conspiracy theories, I mean, those are the ones I think that people are mostly worried about in social science and in pop culture, right? Blatant claims about biological race and inferiority or just clear cut cases of racial antipathy within the theories.
00:20:50
Speaker
I think those are easier to dismiss out of hand in their individual instances because obviously race science has been pretty well debunked. So I made the comparison that this is kind of like what Brian Keeley calls mature conspiracy theories that
00:21:10
Speaker
We can approach these with a very high degree of skepticism because they've been addressed and no new evidence seems to be coming out for them. So I think when you've got a conspiracy theory that makes clear biological racist claims, it's pretty easy to dismiss those right out of hand. But my point of why they're tricky
00:21:32
Speaker
is not because of those individual instances. It's because the theory is made up of a lot, like what we call the theory might be made up of a lot of those different sorts of instances. Like I think the COVID lab leak is a good example of this where we saw a major rise in anti-Asian hate crimes that seemingly are stemming from a lot of the
00:22:01
Speaker
anti-China rhetoric that was being used in relation to, you know, the COVID origin. And so that theory that COVID came out of a lab or it was created, I mean, there are ways in which that can be presented in overtly racist ways, right? And ways that it could be presented in covertly racist ways. But
00:22:23
Speaker
The problem is that in those individual instances of racism, those might be racist and those might be able to be dismissed pretty straightforwardly out of hand. But that doesn't mean that there are other instances of sort of the larger, more general version of the theory that might be true, right? Like it certainly isn't out of the realm of possibility that the COVID disease came from the COVID lab.
00:22:45
Speaker
in Wuhan, China. So that's the challenge is the instances. So I think that you can find an overtly racist instance of a theory that you can dismiss out of hand, but the other versions of the theory, the non overtly racist versions of the theory, you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater in those cases as well, which is why I don't think you can dismiss a whole theory because maybe one instance is a member of this racist class.
00:23:14
Speaker
There's something interesting about the way in which racial animus plays a role in different theories, because when you're talking about the COVID-like conspiracy theories, as I was thinking about that example, I was thinking about the BMW emission scandal from a few years ago. And because there really isn't any kind of racial animus towards Germans, we didn't engage in, oh,
00:23:40
Speaker
Look at those dodgy Germans once again just covering up all the things they do. There's no kind of pre-existing animus there. And so it is interesting that with the BMW emission scandal, there was no racial animus there. And so you could just engage in conspiracy theorizing about what employees at BMW were engaged in.
00:24:01
Speaker
But when it comes to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that discussion is always going to be tinged with some degree of, are you really just legitimately theorizing about a conspiracy here? Or are white people engaging in anti-Chinese sentiment when talking about this particular issue?
00:24:24
Speaker
Yeah, precisely, right? I mean, and this is, I think, a point that Charles picked and brought up in one of the comments to my paper was, you know, you can pretty much take any theory and turn it into some political issue, right? I mean, you can weaponize anything. Actually, I was corresponding with Curtis Hagen about this exact same example, because I used the COVID lab leak as an example of a racist
00:24:47
Speaker
conspiracy in a previous paper and he said, well, why did you use that example? And ultimately he said, you know, even the other version, the official version that was naturally derived out of a meat market, that's been used for racist purposes too. So whether it's the official story or it's the conspiracy theory, both of them have been used for racist purposes.
00:25:13
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's part of the challenge here is that if you use the racist label on a theory,
00:25:22
Speaker
you're trying to, well, in one sense, you could be using it for your own purposes to forward racism, but on the other hand, you call the theory racist to dismiss it. I mean, like what's been going on in Florida, calling critical race theory and any discussions of race and African-American AP studies, calling it racist because it talks about race. I mean, that's a political move, right? And that's kind of what I'm worried about with Kasam is that if you just, if we dismiss anything that's called racist
00:25:50
Speaker
You know, anything racist, we put the label on it and then dismiss it because it's racist. Now you've got people putting that label on stuff that maybe we wouldn't agree with, right? Like some of the examples I'm giving about anti-racist conspiracy theories, people on the other side of the spectrum, political spectrum would say, but those are racist. Those aren't anti-racist. Those are racist. Well, if they're racist, then we shouldn't take them seriously, right?
00:26:12
Speaker
Once you put that label on something, it's a conversation stopper. It's a way of dismissing what people are concerned about. And that can be used for political purposes for better or worse, which is obviously problematic.
00:26:25
Speaker
This gets us back to the age-old discussion that's been going on in sociology, which for some reason philosophers seem to be blithely ignorant of, which is that labelling practices in society come with power attachments. Only certain people get to label theories or views in a particular way and have that label stick. And that's something which Kasam doesn't seem to grapple with.
00:26:51
Speaker
which is the people who call things conspiracy theories in the pejorative sense don't tend to be the folk or the hoi polloi. They tend to be people with existing positions of power. Yeah, and a lot of the discussion in philosophy of race is also about this political use of labeling something racist. Should we use a much more narrow definition of racist
00:27:21
Speaker
because the broader definition will wash out the term and then suddenly it's not so meaningful. And so there is this sort of political issue in how we ought to define the term racist. And I think we're seeing that a lot in pop culture today, where a lot of people, the alt-right people are saying, well, if that's what racist is, then I'm a racist. And that's not, I mean, you know, five or 10 years ago being, no one wants to self identify as a racist. And now because the term,
00:27:49
Speaker
has been used so frequently and in such a broad way, some people are a little bit more willing to embrace the term because they think it's sort of meaningless. So that's a problem in and of itself.
00:28:00
Speaker
I think that brings us into the discussion of racism itself, which is to say, philosophers have a huge debate as to exactly what counts as racist or not racist. And I'm always reminded of in the early days of my time on the internet, people would defend their structural racism by going, look,
00:28:20
Speaker
the dictionary definition of racism says and then they would point to that saying well look the thing which i'm engaging in isn't racist because it doesn't fit the dictionary the dictionary definition which is where a lot of the debate about structural racism kind of comes into play here the idea that there are forms of racism which aren't necessarily explicit
00:28:46
Speaker
but they emerge from the operation or functioning of systems within our society, making it difficult to identify overt racism, but easier to identify structures of racism operating at deepest levels.
00:29:01
Speaker
Yeah, and that actually goes back to what I was saying a minute ago about the political aspect of defining racism, right? So one issue is should we define it narrowly or broadly? But the other issue, as you bring up, is should we define it as an individual issue or an institutional issue? And from a sort of social political point of view, it's better for white people if we define racism as an individual thing.
00:29:31
Speaker
Because then all we have to do is get rid of all the racist. And since, you know, there aren't any because no one identifies really other than the example I gave a minute ago, no one really identifies as a racist or racist, racist for those people that you can point to because they're carrying signs and wearing hoods and things like that. If we can eliminate that.
00:29:51
Speaker
And then there's no more racism, right? But structural racism, and if we look at racism as something that is inherently about structures and systems, that's a lot harder to fix.
00:30:08
Speaker
If we look at racism in those senses, then that's not good for white people because that indicates that white people are benefiting from a racist system and that to fix that system, they will have to give up some power, which obviously no one wants to ever have to do.
00:30:27
Speaker
So yeah, I mean, so even just figuring out how to define racist is a very political move. Yeah, I'm always reminded of the New Zealand police who claim that, look, the New Zealand police is not a racist organisation. The problem is simply that there are a lot of racist work for the New Zealand police. So if we just eradicate the racist police officers,
00:30:48
Speaker
the New Zealand police will be fine. And most people respond to that with, but the organization seems to be selecting for racist police officers, which kind of indicates the organization itself must be a little bit racist if that's what attracts those people to the organization in the first place.
00:31:07
Speaker
Right. Yeah. So, I mean, in these theories that focus on institutions as racist, then we get into another question about is the institution racist because it was created by racist people who were racist, right? Either
00:31:24
Speaker
obviously and consciously or subconsciously, is it racist because people are still racist in those institutions or are institutions racist because of the function that they engage in, right? The outcomes of that institution. So even within institutional accounts of racism, you still have this debate about which is primary. Is it about individuals in the institutions or is it about the function of the institution?
00:31:51
Speaker
Yeah, it gets us into a kind of genealogical question, as you say, was it set up to be racist and it's just perpetuating racism without there being any kind of head that's directing it?
Political Motivations and Racial Labeling
00:32:03
Speaker
Or is it, you know, is it still actually run by racists to this day? Yeah, and I think that's part of the point of a lot of anti-racist work is that, you know,
00:32:14
Speaker
even imagine that we can we could rid the institutions of the racist people, right? We get rid of all the racist police officers, but if the institution is still functionally upholding, you know, racial disparities,
00:32:31
Speaker
then it's not enough that we're just not racist. We need to actively be anti-racist. We need to figure out why these institutions are upholding racial disparities and really get to the bottom of it. And some of it, like when we're talking about abolitionists, like law enforcement abolitionists, prison abolitionists, the argument there is that the institution cannot be saved. We need to abolish the institution itself and come up with a different way of
00:33:01
Speaker
of community policing and rehabilitation. You can't rebuild the racist boat in the middle of the racist river. You have to beach the boat, destroy the boat, and build a brand new boat, and possibly put it on a completely different river to begin with. So let's talk a little bit about the anti-racist conspiracy theory. You've already given one with respect to policing, but what about other anti-racist conspiracy theories?
00:33:29
Speaker
Well, that's a good question. I mean, I think for me, I've been thinking a lot about law enforcement, because that seems to be where a lot of anti-racist conspiracy theory happens. But I think it's also in, I guess in political situations, like what is the
00:33:49
Speaker
What is the real intention of somebody like the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis? What's his intention when he's trying to rewrite textbooks and get rid of African-American AP studies and things like that? It seems like
00:34:05
Speaker
that there are racist intentions there, maybe more politically motivated than personally motivated, but I mean, how do we know? And maybe it's the function that really matters anyway for whether or not those intentions are racist or those actions are racist.
00:34:23
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good question. I think there are so many different types of racist conspiracies that exist. I think anytime we're trying to get to the bottom of why this racial disparity is happening, I think in some sense we're engaging in anti-racist conspiracy theorizing, as long as we're challenging institutions and other forms of white supremacy.
00:34:43
Speaker
Now, there's a kind of interesting issue with anti-racist conspiracy theories, because some of them might not be conspiracy theories per se, in that they're not actually alleging an actual conspiracy. They might be more performative. There's an existing injustice within the world. The people who are marginalised or oppressed want to kind of stress the fact that they are marginalised and oppressed.
00:35:08
Speaker
So they put forward the notion of there being this overt conspiracy being operated by people operating at the high echelon of power. But they don't necessarily believe there is a conspiracy here. It's simply a way of litigating the look we're being oppressed and someone needs to do something about it.
00:35:27
Speaker
So are all anti-racist conspiracy theories going to actually be actual conspiracy theories or are some of them simply going to be using the rhetoric of conspiracy to kind of make explicit existing structural issues in our society? Yeah, I think, I mean, I think this is an issue just with conspiracy theories in general, right? Like some of them are positing actual conspiracies or trying to identify actual conspiracies and some of them might
00:35:56
Speaker
be more about entertainment or expressing some kind of viewpoints. And I think that exists in the same way with anti-racist conspiracy theorizing. Like in the paper I've cited a couple of sociologists who talk about how sometimes these conspiracy theories that I'm calling anti-racist
00:36:18
Speaker
are expressions of disaffection with society, right? Or they're used to sort of use this like a lightning rod to politicize, you know, the youth or something like that. Sometimes these are, you know, examples of like a sort of like oral tradition of legends and myth and create social cohesion, creates group solidarity.
00:36:47
Speaker
So yeah, I think that there are lots of cases of conspiracy and what I'm calling anti-racist conspiracy theorizing that may be more performative than literal, but still perform an anti-racist function of challenging white supremacy.
00:37:07
Speaker
It's kind of an interesting situation to try and work out when a conspiracy theorist is being sincere. When a conspiracy theorist is actually being a conspiracy theorist and simply someone using the language of conspiracy to litigate an issue. And that's going to occur on both sides of the divide.
00:37:27
Speaker
Most people like to point out that Viktor Orban talks an awful lot about the threat of Muslim immigration into Hungary, which he kind of puts forward as this giant conspiracy by the EU to force Hungarian society to change. And then people point out, you know, one of the smallest immigrant groups in Hungary happens to be Muslims. So Orban is engaging in performative conspiracy theorizing
00:37:54
Speaker
about a group that he's got an animus towards, but is no real threat towards Hungary in any way, shape or form. Yeah, sure. I mean, that's, I think those are the same issues that we're having here in the US with issues of gender identity in bathrooms or pedophilia or something like that, right?
00:38:14
Speaker
there are these sort of non-existent threats that are somehow driving the political debate right now and getting people to the polls, even though there really isn't any sort of issue like that that's in existence. So, yeah, I mean, I think that's part of the point here is that these conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorizing can be used for good or bad purposes. They can forward racist ideology and they can forward, I think, anti-racist ideology in the same way.
00:38:41
Speaker
even if it's more of one than the other or, yeah. Once again, it's all about a question of emphasis. So Kasam places the emphasis on non-dominant institution or actors engaging in racist conspiracy theorizing. And yet he kind of ignores or downplays the existence of it happening from the other direction as well. Yeah, and I don't even know if he downplays it. I mean, definitely,
00:39:11
Speaker
Like, yeah, it's his work can be so frustrating because he admits that there are all sorts of different types of conspiracy theories that are ubiquitous or happen all the time.
00:39:22
Speaker
But only this type of theory of conspiracy theorizing. This is what is definitive of conspiracy theorizing, right? And so I just don't agree with that. I don't really see the line that he's drawing. I don't see that line existing. And it seems pretty easy to offer counter examples that do the exact opposite of what he's suggesting. And that's what I was trying to do in my paper.
00:39:43
Speaker
There seems to be a overly broad generalization going on in Qassam's work, but that is, of course, the problem with generalism in, let's say, generalism in general. It's one of those weird things. That's the problem of generalism in a nutshell. It's probably a better way of putting it, which is it tends towards these generalizations which don't admit to the kind of exceptions which actually might not even be exceptional. They actually might even be the norm.
00:40:13
Speaker
So with racist and anti-racist conspiracy theories out of the way, what's next on your agenda for conspiracy theory theory?
The Nature of Conspiracy Theories
00:40:22
Speaker
Well, you know, so what got me interested in conspiracy theory theory is my background in religion and this sort of comparison between the way that philosophers will sometimes talk about religious reasons being irrational and the way that generalists talk about conspiracy theory theories being irrational and their
00:40:44
Speaker
some kind of epistemic vice going on there in both cases. And I think that these are very similar phenomenon because one of the reasons that philosophers especially don't like religious reasons to me, it seems like the loud religious contingency, right? The loudest religious voices are sometimes, you know,
00:41:09
Speaker
very frequently the ones that are saying things that are sort of irrational or objectionable. But once you start pressing people, the philosophers on the rationality of other types of religious believing, then they're more open to that, right? I mean, yes, when we start talking about the Earth is 6,000 years old,
00:41:31
Speaker
philosophers say religious beliefs are irrational, but if you start talking about, you know, religious believing where, you know, pantheistic, you know, conceptions of God or something like that, or the rationality of spirituality or something like that, then suddenly philosophers are much more open to that kind of believing as rational.
00:41:55
Speaker
And I feel like it's the same sort of thing with conspiracy theories, right? Like the loudest conspiracy theories are the ones that are clearly giving us some pretty irrational beliefs. But in general, lots of conspiracy theorizing is perfectly rational and something that everybody does. So that got me interested in this topic. And so I'm trying to figure out a way to make a little bit more of a direct comparison with religion
00:42:23
Speaker
And actually religion has a category. And so there's this approach to religious studies now that's called critical religion. That's critical of the category of religion. So religion comes in so many different forms. It's very difficult to put your finger on what makes all religion the same, right? Like, is it that all religions believe in God and that's not quite it? Or is it that religion needs to be organized and that's not quite it?
00:42:53
Speaker
And so ultimately, I think what religious studies scholars have come across more recently, especially through the work of like Talal Asad and Tomoko Masuzawa, is that the category of religion is really a very sort of Western European construction. And it gets applied to systems of beliefs and cultures that otherwise wouldn't
00:43:21
Speaker
make this distinction between the religious and the secular that Westerners are willing, Western traditions, European traditions are willing to do. And so the question now is like, what is religion after religion, right? And I'm wondering about the same sort of thing with conspiracy theories that like, what if we come to this conclusion as particular is that there are so many different types of conspiracy theorizing that it's really hard to put
00:43:50
Speaker
any of it under the same umbrella, what is conspiracy theory after conspiracy theories? I'm pretty early, I'm in the early stages of this thinking, but I think that there's something going on there that might be interesting. I mean, if conspiracy theorizing is so broad, like Melina Sapos writes about this in that recent paper, of the dilemma of defining conspiracy theories, that if we define it so broadly,
00:44:21
Speaker
that we can't really study it, is it a useful category at all? And I think that's the problem that religious studies is happening right now.
00:44:30
Speaker
So I think that's an interesting comparison. I'm not sure what to do with it, but that's what I've been kicking around right now. No, I think that takes a really interesting research opportunity there, because I think there is something interesting about the secular turn that's going on in a lot of Western nations, more so Aotearoa, New Zealand than the United States of America, admittedly.
00:44:52
Speaker
But one of the things we're getting with the secular term is this kind of dismissal of any kind of religious belief, but often through the lens of what we take to be Christian belief. And it doesn't really admit to the fact that there are religious-like beliefs or religious beliefs in other cultures which aren't Christian.
00:45:13
Speaker
don't have the same kind of ontology or epistemology that Christianity functioned as but are being dismissed because of the secular term is basically orientated towards the dominant religion in the western sphere and is then being kind of grossly applied to all other religious or religious-like beliefs in cultures that westerners happen to be in which spoilers is almost the entire world.
00:45:39
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really good way of explaining it is, yeah, what do we do with religions on the margins, I guess, of monotheistic belief, right? Of Christianity, for example. Like, you know, when something gets labeled as religion, then it either gets contained or protected.
00:46:03
Speaker
right in kind of a double edged sword kind of way, right if it's religion it's protected if it's not religious, it doesn't get that at least in the US it doesn't get that First Amendment protection, right. And so there are lots of ways that religion gets
00:46:17
Speaker
protections that other similar kind of beliefs don't get, right? But also it's a way of excluding something as not religious, right? If it's not religious, it also doesn't get that protection. But maybe it should be counted as religion. And a lot of cases where something is like
00:46:36
Speaker
Is it religious or is it not the problem is that we think it gets put in this not religion category, because it doesn't look like Christian religion, right. Like, we look at, you know, a Catholic mass and we can't think of anything really that's more religious than that I mean that's the epitome of religion.
00:46:53
Speaker
But there's this case that happened a few years ago in Oklahoma of a man, a religious Christian, who had to put this license plate of a man, a Native American man, shooting an arrow into the sky. It's called the sacred rain arrow. And it's a depiction of a person who's praying for rain. But the judge in this case ultimately said that no one would recognize that as religion
00:47:23
Speaker
And so it doesn't count as a question on this man's religious freedom, right? It's not a religious symbol. And so he has to put it on his car. I just think that's a really interesting example of like what gets viewed as religion is really done through this Western Christian lens, right? And so non-Western religions don't get that protection of religion.
00:47:45
Speaker
or in some cases, non-Western thought systems get classified as religion because they don't fit a secular epistemology. So I'm thinking here about Richard Dawkins and his wading into the debate in Aotearoa, New Zealand about the fact that we're bringing in more Mataranga and to our Maori into our education system.
00:48:09
Speaker
Dawkins going, oh, you know, but it's not Western science, ipso facto, it must be religious belief ipso facto, New Zealanders are now teaching religion in schools under the guise of science. So if it doesn't fit Western secularism, then by default, it ends up being a kind of religious or quasi religious belief. And with the secular turn, you're well, so those things are bad. Yeah, that's, that's what I'm thinking is making that kind of comparison. I think there's, there's a lot to work with there.
00:48:36
Speaker
I think one thing that people have sort of overlooked is Brian Keeley has obviously written this really important paper on conspiracy theories in 1999, but almost all of his writing about conspiracy theories involve philosophy of religion. And so there's this through line between religious belief and conspiracy theory beliefs that goes all the way back to Brian's original paper. And I think there's something
00:49:04
Speaker
there's something there in that comparison that's really interesting and I'm trying to figure out the best way to do that. See, I've actually already come up with the name for the paper you're going to write. We just need to find a Catholic journal of the philosophy of religion and then you write a paper called Bringing Particularism to the Masses. Very good, I like that. Yeah, that's all I've got so far but I think it's a pretty good start.
00:49:30
Speaker
Alright, I'll sate you on that. Yeah, I'll even take a minor co-author role for that title alone, Comedy Gold. Well thank you Will, that has been a most heartening discussion about racism and religion.
00:49:46
Speaker
which is not the sentence I thought I was going to say at the beginning of this discussion, but it is where we've got to buy the end. Hopefully you'll recover from your jet lag from your trip to Amsterdam. I know I'm still suffering from jet lag on my end. The older you get, the longer it takes to recover, I find. Well, yeah, it was a wonderful conference. I'm happy to be jet lagged as a result of it. So thanks all for all of your hard work. You did do a great job and so did your co-organizers.
00:50:15
Speaker
Yes, I did a good job. They did a wonderful job. I think they actually probably did a wonderful job because I was really more the figurehead. They were the actual people with X's to the purse strings. Right, well we will... Thanks so much for this opportunity. That's right, we will talk again soon.
00:50:34
Speaker
Well, for all our talk about the linear nature of time, here we are pretending time has elapsed when, for us, it's been but a moment, and yet you, the listener, have experienced, oh, I can't possibly imagine, in the meantime. I mean, mostly an interview between him and Will, but who knows what that stirred amongst you.
00:50:52
Speaker
So, yeah, I haven't actually listened to Will's actual racist and anti-racist conspiracy theories talk as yet, although I feel like I've got a fairly good handle on it now, from listening to the two of you discuss it. Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting thing in that, like we talk about anti-Semitic conspiracy theories all the time, because there seem to be quite a lot of them,
00:51:16
Speaker
Which is a form of racist conspiracy theory. Yeah, so it was interesting to see that being sort of focused on, in particular, yeah, I was interested in that, in the distinction between the different kinds of conspiracy theories that are to do with race and conspiracy theories that are actually racist, and stuff like that.
00:51:38
Speaker
Yeah, and the talk of anti-racist conspiracy theories, I think, is really an interesting topic to kind of dissect, because as we got into in the interview, most of the time when we're talking about conspiracy theories with racial characteristics, we are often focusing on anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, we're talking about yellow peril conspiracy theories, but of course,
00:52:04
Speaker
There's a lot of warranted conspiracy theorising going on about race, but in the other direction. People talking about these. So when these people deny racist institutions, are they actually covering up the fact that racism still plays a role
00:52:23
Speaker
in those institutions. So those anti-racist conspiracy theories which often come from a kind of bottom-up or people with not much in the way of power or privilege expressing them are really really interesting cases of conspiracy theorizing with racial characteristics which just aren't captured by most theories of racist conspiracy theorizing.
00:52:47
Speaker
Now look, I have to be honest, the interview was very interesting and did raise some quite compelling points, but the thing that interested me the most was your brief comment at the start about how you were interested that there were no particularly crazy loopy talks given at this conference. Is that something that happens a bit? It's something which you think is going to happen a lot.
00:53:12
Speaker
and from my experience doesn't happen as much as people think it's going to so people will be aware that in the early days of the podcast we interviewed one Jim Tracy
00:53:28
Speaker
And Jim Tracy became rather famous for being a strident proponent of the Sandy Hook false flag conspiracy theory. He sure did. But I met him at Judy Sinski's first Miami conference, where Jim was mostly talking about the idea of smart meters and homes
00:53:48
Speaker
being a form of corporate surveillance, the idea that people buy into, oh, I'll buy a smart meter, I'll buy a smart appliance, it'll make my life easier. And he was going, well, the real threat or worry here is that then there's a kind of covert surveillance of people going on here, some of which we knew was going on because we knew they were collecting information to make our lives better. But the worry was, what else were they potentially
00:54:18
Speaker
keeping tabs on, especially given how many of these smart appliances were voice activated and thus had active mics recording things all the time. And at the time that talk was given, some of the people in the audience thought he was going just a little bit too conspiratorial with his worry about smart appliances and smart meters.
00:54:42
Speaker
And from my experience, that's been as bad as it's got at academic conferences on conspiracy theories. But we're always kind of on tenterhooks as soon as someone starts making an example in a conference to go, are they about to assert something really outrageous as being true?
00:55:10
Speaker
And of course, you also find out that people may not express those viewpoints in the talks they give, but after a few rounds of beer or wine after the conference is finished, sometimes you discover that there are, say, COVID deniers attending your conference, or if not COVID deniers, COVID minimizes. Yes, and we've seen a little bit of 9-11 trutherism in some of the papers that we've looked at in the past as well.
00:55:39
Speaker
Seems to be a small amount of that. Not actual assertions. A couple of them got close. Oh, say, deliences. Yeah. Anyway, a very interesting interview. I really should go back and listen to his or watch his full presentation as well. This is a terrific time to say the playlist.
Conference Highlights and Upcoming Content
00:56:00
Speaker
for all of the talks at the conference is now publicly available via my YouTube channel, Conspiracism, which is actually the username is Conspiracist because due to the way that YouTube released names over time, I didn't get to claim my Conspiracism handle before someone else did. But the playlist of all the available talks up
00:56:23
Speaker
two talks are missing because two people said no not really quite happy having the talks up one person didn't want their talk up because they just don't like having recordings of their talks up another person didn't want their talk up for reasons were not disclosed but didn't want the talk to be put online so most of them are available to watch the audio not always great the video sometimes a bit confronting
00:56:50
Speaker
But all the talks are available if people want to kind of try to relive the experience of going to Amsterdam and then sitting in a room for two and a half days.
00:57:01
Speaker
Hmm, fun for all the family. Well, that's it for this episode then. How many, can you give us an idea of how many more interviews you might have stuffed in your britches? Well, as you know, so there are none stuffed in britches. There's at least one coming up, which will be recorded sometime next week. And then there might be one or two more in the month to come.
00:57:27
Speaker
Well, until we see the next one, we'll just have to content ourselves by browsing through your YouTube channel, I suppose. For that is the end, the end of this episode. We'll have something next week. It probably won't be an interview. We haven't decided yet. Such as the carefree devil-made...
00:57:49
Speaker
Mm, laugh a minute life we live. We do, of course, have a bonus episode coming to our bonus, beloved bonus patrons bonus. If you want to become a patron, you can simply go to Betrayal.com and look for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy and sign yourself up and then you'll get access to all of our backlog.
00:58:10
Speaker
of bonus episodes, including the one that will accompany this episode, which in a shocking break with tradition is not going to be about sort of current events, much as last week's bonus episode wasn't really about current events, because there hadn't been any decently conspiratorial current events in the last week, and there haven't really been any this week either. So we've got an actual topic.
00:58:31
Speaker
a little a little mini topic that only our patrons will get to partake in. It is somewhat related to Will's talk. Because one of the big features of Will's talk was his assertion that we're focusing on the wrong kinds of examples. When we're talking about political conspiracy theories, to go say people focus on 911 conspiracy theories,
00:58:57
Speaker
they don't focus on the war on drug conspiracy theory, which we now know, the Nixon White House, when, how do we, how do we imprison more hippies, more African Americans and more poor people?
00:59:12
Speaker
What is the war on drugs? You go from a prison master of 200,000 to 2.2 million. And how will we do that? Well, we've got an excuse to predate upon particular people. And this relates to the topic this week, which is do drug cartels in Mexico really exist?
00:59:34
Speaker
And if you'd like to know the answer to that question, tune into our bonus episode. Or you can just assume that if an article has a question mark at the end, you know what the answer is going to be. Well, yes, there is a bit of that. But it's not quite as simple rather as that. The answer is a little more complicated. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. We're going to go off and talk about that exact topic. But for right now, it's time to call this particular episode to an end, which I will do in the traditional manner of saying,
01:00:04
Speaker
Alpha and Omega, Omega Activate. The podcast is Guide to the Conspiracy, stars Josh Addison and myself, associate professor M.R.X. Denton. Our show's cons... sorry, producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com and please do consider joining our Patreon.
01:00:35
Speaker
And remember, nothing is real, everything is permitted, but conditions apply.