Conspiracy theories are a pervasive and powerful force in contemporary society, shaping public discourse and influencing real-world events. Understanding their origins, spread, and impact is crucial in navigating today’s information landscape.

Recorded on October 27, 2025, this panel brought together experts to delve into the multifaceted world of conspiracy theories. Drawing on diverse academic perspectives, the discussion explored the nature of conspiracy theories, their societal implications, and how they are understood and addressed.

The panel featured Michael M. Cohen, Associate Professor of American Studies and African American Studies at UC Berkeley, and Tim Tangherlini, Professor in the Department of Scandinavian and the School of Information at UC Berkeley. Lakshmi Sarah, journalist and lecturer at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, moderated.

Matrix On Point is a discussion series promoting focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation. These thought-provoking events are free and open to the public.

This panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Scandinavian, African American Studies, and the Program in Critical Theory.

Watch the panel above or on YouTube. Or listen to the audio recording via the Matrix Podcast below (or on Apple Podcasts).

Podcast and Transcript

(upbeat instrumental music)

[MARION FOURCADE]
Hello, everyone. So my name is Marion Fourcade. I’m the director of Social Science Matrix.

So I’ll give a short introduction to this, to this panel. We live in a golden age, really, of conspiracy theories. They’ve moved from the margins to the mainstream.

They drive political movements. They undermine public health efforts. They occasionally trigger violence, including political violence.

So they now command massive audiences, influence policy debates, they challenge our sense of reality. So, how did we get here? What is it about our current moment, our technologies, our institutions, and our anxieties that make conspiracy theories seem so potent?

And so today’s panel will explore what they are, why they flourish now, and what their ascendance means for democracy, truth, and social cohesion. This is a panel that is co-sponsored by the UC Departments of Scandinavian Studies, African-American Studies, and the Program in Critical Theory. Before I turn it over to the panelists, let me just briefly mention a few of our upcoming events this semester.

We have a whole set of events. So next week, we have another Matrix on Point on Spaces of Thriving. A little bit after, we’ll talk about the insurance crisis that, you know, has come to us as a result of the climate crisis.

On December 2nd, we have Maximillian Casey, an, an economics PhD from Berkeley who has just published a book on the means of production. This is part of our program on critical empirical legal studies. And then we have a Matrix on Point event, oh, sorry, Matrix Lecture event, Alexis Madrigal on December 4th and the title of that event is “To Know A Place.”

Let me now introduce our moderator, Lakshmi Sarah. Uh, Lakshmi Sarah is an educator and journalist with a focus on experimental storytelling. Uh, she has produced content for newspapers, radio and magazines from Ahmedabad, India to Los Angeles, California, including AJ+, Die Zeit Online, and The New York Times.

She was a digital producer and reporter for KQED News until The Great Journalism Reckoning in the summer of 2025. She’s now an on-call producer and a lecturer in the UC Berkeley Geography Department. She has developed curriculum training for journalists in video and immersive storytelling skills in the US, India, and around the world.

Previously, as a lecturer at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and also at Berkeley’s Advanced Media Institute, she taught multimedia and VR workshops. Her teaching and reporting have brought her to Hamburg, Germany as a Fulbright Fellow, Berlin as an Arthur F. Burns Fellow with Die Zeit, and to India to report on ethnic violence in the northeastern state of Manipur as a Pulitzer Center Grant recipient. So without further ado, let me turn it over to Lakshmi and I look forward to this panel enormously.

Thank you.

[LAKSHMI SARAH]
Thank you so much.

(applause)

Okay. Thank you so much. Thank you, once again, to all the organizers for putting this on.

I’ll be moderating today’s event, and as a journalist, I try to do a few main things. Um, taking big, complicated topics and making them more easily digestible more easily to under, more easy to understand for audiences, from everything from ethnic violence in India’s northeastern state of Manipur to reparations in the State of California. Another thing I try to do is to understand multiple perspectives on the same issue, how and why people do, believe what they do, and when and how and why people believe what they do and oftentimes I’m doing that by interviewing people on one topic.

Um, when I interviewed asylum seekers traveling to Germany in 2015, the assumption was that we would be talking to Syrian refugees. We ended up interviewing people from all different countries, from multiple different countries, and each person had their own story of both departure and arrival. In this effort to grasp different perspectives, I’m currently working on research about a cult-like community in California, and in the process, I’m in the process of listening to many different people and interviewing and really trying to understand people are– where people are coming from, and then I find that sometimes I take on their concerns.

After speaking to members about black magic, I too wonder if I will be subject to black magic, and then I wonder if it’s a conspiracy or if it is actually reality. And now, more recently, I find myself on social media attempting to verify and debunk threats of ICE and the actions of the federal government. When reality feels increasingly like a conspiracy then I begin to wonder how do we live in the world in a way that makes any sense to anybody and hopefully to multiple people trying to think about the same things at the same time.

Um, and I’m hoping that our panelists will unpack a bit of this for us. So without further ado, let me introduce our panelists and get started. So Michael M. Cohen was born in Denver, Colorado, the child of two public school teachers.

He holds a BA in history from the University of Colorado and a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. He is currently an associate teaching professor, here, with a joint appointment in American Studies and African American Studies. He’s the author of The Conspiracy of Capital, Law, Violence, and American Popular Radicalism in the Age of Monopoly.

His general research and teaching areas cover the cultural and political history of the United States from the Civil War to the present. Areas of emphasis include, racial capitalism and racial formations in the United States; labor, work, and radical social movements; Marx and the Marxist tradition in world history and theory; cultural studies, popular culture, and US film and literature; theories of conspiracy and conspiracy theories; political cartooning and comic books; race and drugs in the US; and US history and contemporary US politics and social change. Tim Tangherlini is the Elizabeth H. And Eugene A.

(unintelligible)

— sorry, Chair–

(unintelligible)

(panelists laughing)

–chair in Undergraduate Education. He is Professor in the Department of Scandinavian and in the School of Information. A folklorist and ethnographer by training, he is the author of Danish Folktales, Legends, and Other Stories, Talking Trauma, and Interpreting Legend.

He has also published widely in academic journals. He is interested in the circulation of stories on and across social networks and the ways in which stories are used by individuals in their ongoing negotiation of ideology with the groups to which they belong. In general, his work focuses on computational approaches to problems in the study of folklore, literature, and culture.

Without further ado, Tim, please kick us off.

[TIM TANGHERLINI]
All right. Thanks so much, Lakshmi, and, and thanks so much, Marion, for hosting this event. I wasn’t really sure how to, how to get into this, but yes, you should be worried about the black magic.

And, and that is going to make you even more worried. So one of the things that’s very interesting is what she just kind of expressed is how you get inoculated to ideas, and not against them, but you actually get inoculated with ideas. And then once you have an idea, it’s very hard to unhear that idea and you start to negotiate your own stance on that.

And so, I’m very interested in, in storytelling and storytelling environments. And one of the great advantages of working now is that social media is, in some ways, a giant natural experiment in storytelling. And we also have computational power to try and understand the latent narrative spaces that seem to be driving these conversations.

And so we are, as Marion pointed out, in this moment of great acceleration of this kind of storytelling. So, pretty much my entire life, I’ve been very interested in stories told as true. The stories that we tell each other that, about things that have happened and things that are important to us.

Things that rise above the level of reportability so that we remember them. I think those things encapsulate, in many ways, the norms, beliefs, and values of those groups that we belong to. And so, when we tell a story, we’re in part signaling at least some aspect of those norms, beliefs, and values that we’re constantly negotiating with the people who we interact with.

Now, legends, rumors, these are sources of information that thrive in low-trust or low-information environments, or both. So if we have low trust in our sources of information or if we have low access to information, we’re gonna turn to each other to ask, “What’s going on?” And this is where storytelling can be incredibly helpful.

We are information-seeking organisms. It’s something that we do, and we use that to create ideas of socialization. So in the past few months, really the reemergence of the Epstein rumors and conspiracy theories has been ongoing.

And of course, might be driving in part some of the government shutdown. What is legend? You’re thinking of sports legends perhaps, but really, legend is a genre, we’re using this ethically short, believable, mono-episodic narratives told as true in an informal setting, often conversationally.

And in that case, rumor is simply a hyperactive transmission state of legend where a lot of times the legend tells the story retrospectively, whereas the rumor stops at that moment where there is some sort of threat to the community. And at that moment, the rumor basically says, “Hey, this is a threat. What should we do about it?”

And that can move action in real life action. So it says, “Here’s a threat. What are you gonna do about it?”

And then over the course of some short period of time, we can maybe perhaps decide on a reaction to that threat. So, the complicating action of these stories often proposes that there’s a threat or disruption. So this is why I use Ghostbusters.

Ghostbusters is perhaps the most profound movie of the– Well, ever, actually, because it asks that question, “When ghosts appear in the neighborhood, who are you gonna call?” And the answer to that is always ideological, right?

So when there’s a threat to our community, what should we do about it? And when you answer that, right? When you negotiate the answer to that, you’ve made an ideological decision.

So you come up with a strategy. And so what we can do now with social media, is we can look at all of these different threat narratives. Who we are, how do we construct an us?

How do we construct an inside? And then what are the strategies we propose for dealing with any type of threat or disruption? And we can then catalog and rank the various sources of threat or disruption, the various strategies that are being proposed, and if it’s told retrospectively, the eventual outcomes.

And we can see that– I’ll show you very quickly in the context of Parler, one of these social media sites in January 6th, what we wound up with was a conspiracy to create what– And I’ll tell you what the difference is between conspiracy and conspiracy theory, a conspiracy to take over the Capitol based on a conspiracy theory that was being uh collectively negotiated on the pro– platform itself.

When we do this type of analysis, we learn a great deal about the group in which those stories circulate. So, the difference between conspiracy theory and conspiracy, at least in my model, is that conspiracy exists in the real world, and it actually provides support for conspiracy theories. A conspiracy is some small, maligned group of actors working clandestinely to affect some outcome, usually in their own self-interest and against the interest of the broader public.

We can think of Bridgegate, if you remember when the George Washington Bridge was shut down for a week. That was an actual conspiracy, right? There were people working together to shut down the bridge as a political payback operation.

Did it help anybody? Not really. Uh, there, there were people stuck on the Wa– George Washington Bridge for a week.

Conspiracy theories, in contrast, exist only in narrative. They propose low probability links based on esoteric knowledge that the storyteller or storytellers have access to between otherwise distinct domains. It might be nature, governments, and tech industry to make some causal claim about the order of the world.

Birds aren’t real. They aren’t. Um, no, I’m just saying that just as an add-in.

Birds aren’t real. No, but that kind of illustrates this kind of thing. They often include one or more domains that are either poorly documented or hypothetical, or otherwise secret or hidden hence the Illuminati.

A lot of times, you’re gonna get threats from different directions. They could be threats from inside, witches, black magic. They could be from outside, some other group, us versus them.

They could be from above, the government. They could be from below, the poor people coming across our borders, or some combination of these. What’s interesting, we discovered is that conspiracy theories aren’t robust.

People say, “Well, why don’t you just point out that these are not true?” They depend on these low-probability links between different narrative domains. Why not just attack those low-probability links?

Yes, but it’s like Terminator 2, right? You can knock it out, so it’s not robust, but it’s resilient. It comes right back.

So, conspiracy theories are not robust, but they’re resilient. That’s why we are not really able to address them. One of the questions we also had, “Is the real world messier than fiction?”

So we derived these basically walls of crazy for different types of narrative domains, often based on social media forums. So, here is an early wall of crazy for all entities in Pizzagate from Reddit. And that looks pretty complicated, and I’ve weighted the edges and stuff like that.

And we’ve got, you know, we’ve got the Central Intelligence Agency and the Clinton Foundation, and we’ve got Haiti in there. I’m not sure why. Uh, actually, I do know why, but I’m not gonna go into it.

Um, we’ve got Jesuits in there we’ve got Y Combinator and we’ve got Belgium, of course. Whenever you see Belgium, you know you’re dealing– No, no, no.

Uh, whenever you see the Illuminati using it, you know you’re dealing with a conspiracy theory. Some are like, “Wow, that’s really complicated.” Then we did the same type of modeling for Bridgegate.

That’s the wall of crazy for Bridgegate. That’s all of New York/New Jersey poli– uh, politics, and it’s only in one domain. You could delete all of the actors and their relationships from this network, and the network would continue on without any sort of hiccup at all.

So, real conspiracies tend to hide in the thicket of real life, right? New Jersey/New York politics just keeps going along, even if you deleted Bridgegate. Not the case in conspiracy theories.

At the same time as Bridgegate, we had Pizzagate, and you can see here, if you re– remember Pizzagate, it really was about, on one level, Democratic politics, and here we found a nice little network of Democratic politics, and then we found a network of the Podesta brothers, and we found a network about casual dining in Washington, DC. Uh, and then we also found an interesting conversation about Satanism. You don’t usually need to talk about all of these together when you’re talk– you know, if you’re talking about Satanism, as you do with your friends, you know, you’re probably not also gonna talk about Democratic politics until the WikiLeaks dump comes in.

And you can see here, we’ve got a series of disconnected components narratively, and then when we bring in the interpretation, that esoteric knowledge of interpreting the WikiLeaks dump all of a sudden, I can create a unified narrative space in the aggregate. I can delete the WikiLeaks edges, and it’ll fall apart. I just put them back in, and we’ve got Pizzagate again, and that becomes the basis for QAnon.

We also looked at January 6 and Parler, and this was really where we found out it was a conspiracy to combat a conspiracy theory. We did some analysis on the platform, and we did our narrative extraction, and we discovered, you know, the actants and their relationships, their semantic roles, and modeled some of the edges, and it allowed us to detect the different narrative communities. What was really interesting here I’ll skip over that, was that there were several narrative connected computing communities, but there was a single giant connected component, suggesting a consistent discursive space.

And in these spaces, we got these very clear narrative space that was redolent of conspiracy theory structure, right? So, the topography of the graph was one of those where we could find some small separating set, and the narrative graph would fall apart. Um, and yet, there was also a conspiracy sitting on top of that of people suggesting that they should all, as a strategy to combat, this conspiracy theory that they should all converge on the Capitol on January 6th.

And that goes back pretty early. Uh, there was unbelievable semantic consistency in these in these in these graphs with Trump often in the, in the center, closely aligned with truth, and everybody else on the fringes being corrupt. We’ve also found that social media is accelerating conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy theorizing has become socialized, where the tinfoil hat-wearing wall of crazy drawing lone wolf is perhaps no longer the proper model, but rather social groups reaching consensus where there’s a motivation to propose and prove new nodes and edges, however low their probability in the narrative framework graph. These become refined, and the overarching concept space can become monolithic and totalizing, as in QAnon. We risk a great deal, I think, if we simply dismiss these low probability narratives and high velocity narrative communities as simply sort of, I lost the thread here.

The, there is actually, I finished my thought on my version of these slides. As simply fringe. Rather, these are actually common and pervasive.

So we have to be aware of that. So we know this knowledge that we’ve derived, we can use it for bad, right? We can take ChatGPT.

We can do a sampling over the graph. We can make valid posts. We can control a little army of robots.

And we might lead to, at least, if not the end of the world, the end of democracy, which is what we might be living through right now. A great deal of attention has been focused on these improbable connections and misinformation. Might it be possible to focus on strategies results and outcomes?

Is that where we might be able to make some sort of ongoing low-level interaction with communities that might have come to a point where they’re willing to take violent real-world action that undermines democratic institutions? What would this look like? I’m not sure what it would look like.

And that’s sort of the end of my presentation. I went a little bit fast because I want to save time for your much more interesting questions. So, thank you.

(applause)

[MICHAEL MARK COHEN]
Yes, thank you all for coming, for The Matrix for organizing this for my fellow panelists. And I just want to evoke, like the origins of the term conspiracy comes from the Latinate “conspirare,” meaning to breathe together, which is, in fact, what we’re doing right now. So thank you for being a part of that.

I’m gonna try and not spend the entire time talking about Thomas Pynchon, but I can’t resist. And here a quote from the new novel, “They”. “The federals who had you in are likely just a front, okay?

It’s the outfit that’s behind them, a nationwide syndicate of financial tycoons, all organized in constant touch against the forces of evil, namely everything to the left of Herbert Hoover.” I’ll just let that sit there. And yes, you should read it.

It’s great. It’s a lesser, Pynchon, but worth reading. On July 18th, 2024, on the same day of the Republican National Convention, the last day of the final, the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, just five days after the failed assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, a retired professional wrestling champion named Hulk Hogan took the stage in character to introduce his friend and fan, Donald Trump.

With a red headband, a large silver crucifix, and a blue blazer, Hogan’s hype man growl greeted the delegates as, quote, “A room full of real Americans, brother.” In a well-rehearsed windup, Hogan began to remove his blazer revealing a trademark bronzed and bulked arms, and a T-shirt bearing an image of himself waving the American flag. Soon he was shouting, “But when they took a shot at my hero and they tried to kill the next President of the United States, the ecstasy induced by this pronoun-driven conspiracy fed Hogan’s trademark striptease.

As he wrote, he tore the T-shirt bearing his own image in two to reveal another T-shirt with the Trump-Vance logo.” “enough was enough.” He shook to rapturous cheers from the delegates and I said, “Let Trumpamania run wild.”

Hogan’s reference to they, the third person pronoun offering a syntactical ambiguity of both agency and gender in the accusation of conspiracy lies at the center of the MAGA movement’s ideological cohesion. The evil conspiratorial and gender non-binary they evoked by the spray tanned septuagenarian masculinity shared by both Trump and Hogan serves MAGA as what Judith Butler has described as a phantasm. For Butler, the phantasm is, quote, “A way of ordering the world that absorbs and reproduces anxieties and fears about permeability, precarity, displacement and replacement, a loss of patriarchal power in both the family and state, a loss of white supremacy and national purity.”

“the contradictory character of the phantasm,” continues Butler, “allows it to contain whatever anxiety or fear without having to make it cohere. Indeed, the liberation from historical documentation and coherent logic is part of an escalating exhilaration that feeds a fascist frenzy and shores up forms of authoritarianism.” In other words, the hypocrisy is the point.

Indeed, the fusion of the conspiratorial they and the transgender non-binary they was made explicit shortly after the RNC when the Trump campaign began running a series of TV spots during the World Series accusing Kamala Harris of promising, “Taxpayer-funded sex change operations for prisoners and illegal aliens.” These ads ended with the campaign slogan, “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

This Phantasm, MAGA’s they, is a reactionary psychosocial fantasy that derives its explanatory power from an explicitly incoherent blending of fact and fiction that is innate in most conspiracy theories. It is a formidable ideological project that has enabled the richest and most powerful white men in the country to overthrow multi-racial democracy by scapegoating one of the nation’s most vulnerable minorities, namely trans and non-binary youth, all by evoking what Daffy Duck and Professor Butler might recognize as pronoun trouble. Of course, Trump’s failed assassin was no they.

The shooter’s name was Thomas Crooks, a 20-year-old white man with no overt political ideology and little in the way of social connections. On July 19th, the day after Hogan’s speech, the New York Times reported that Crooks lived in, quote, “A solitary corner of a nearly invisible life.” And what Cro– and that Crooks was, quote, “More like a 21st-century school shooter than John Wilkes Booth.”

This reconfirmation of the terrifyingly ordinary place of mass shootings in America was quickly drowned out of the news cycle. And a year later, further investigations offered no revision to this initial assessment of Crooks’ motivation, other than to turn up the fact that he’d asked Google six days before the shooting, quote, “How far was Oswald from Kennedy?” This dynamic escalated dramatically with the murder of Charlie Kirk, in which the accused lone gunman, a white Mormon with no known political affiliations, has now been framed up as both trans-adjacent and overtly leftist.

Though no co-conspirator has ever been charged in the Kirk case, this new they has been exploited by the MAGA FBI and Justice Department into a counter-subversive crusade that seeks to declare every center-left social movement from No Kings to Antifa, from BLM to bla– naked black excuse me, naked bike parades, not to mention declaring the mere existence of trans and non-binary people as a criminal, if not terrorist, conspiracy. Maga’s conspiratorial inclination has been there from the start. Nearly 15 years ago, Donald Trump’s first stirrings of presidential ambition led with birtherism.

By July of 2016, on the verge of winning his first term, polls indicated that Trump’s GOP base included nearly 71% who doubted the current president was born in America, with 41% flatly denying Obama’s legitimacy to be president. Indeed, the leading demographic indicator of a Trump voter in 2016 was not race, age, economics, or geography, but a belief that Obama was, quote, “A secret Muslim.” This trajectory, riding a once fringe conspiracy theory into the White House, marks MAGA as a unique example of what the historian Richard Hofstadter described in his now classic 1963 essay, The Paranoid Style of American Politics.

For Hofstadter, the paranoid style evidenced what he called a style of mind found in social movements throughout US history evoking, quote, “The qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and con– conspiratorial fantasy.” The political paranoid believes in, quote, “A vast or gigantic conspiracy is the motive force in historical events.” “History is a conspiracy,” writes Hofstadter, “Sat in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendental power.”

Yet writing at the high water mark of mid-century consensus liberalism, Hofstadter argued that tolerating political paranoia while keeping it confined to the fringes was the necessary price to pay to preserve what he called the vital center. Yet, as the MAGA example demonstrates, the greatest flaw in Hofstadter’s argument provides one of its deepest insights. Namely, that conspiracy theories are not a fringe phenomenon.

Rather, the most dangerous conspiracy theories in American history, anti-communism or the war on terror, for example, have always emerged from the very center of political power. This contradiction was theorized in the 1980s by Berkeley’s own political scientist, Michael Paul Rogin, as the counter-subversive tradition. Rogin, not unlike Butler, offers a political demonology to call attention to what he described as, quote, “The creation of monsters is a continuing feature of American politics by the inflation, stigmatization, and dehumanation– dehumanization of political foes.”

These demonized enemies are easily listed as they shape our national identity, periodize our history, and animate the repressive state apparatus. The subversive, the, and they are things like the savage, the native savage, the rebellious slave, the bomb throwing anarchist, the subversive communist, the foreign terrorist, and now the woke they/them. Such fears are not promulgated by extremists, but by politicians, opinion writers, business leaders, and police who name the subversive enemy and attach personal anxieties to violent political projects.

Quote, “Fearing chaos and secret penetration, the counter-subversive interprets local initiatives as signs of alien power,” writes Rogin. The counter-subversive needs monsters to give shape to his anxieties and to permit him to indulge his forbidden desires. Demonization allows the counter-subversive, in the name of battling the subversive, to imitate his enemy.”

In other words, as with MAGA, every accusation is confession. But there’s also another meaning of conspiracy that MAGA also embodies. Returning to Hulk Hogan’s appearance in the RNC, behind the conspiratorial accusation, one finds the definitive network of real capitalist conspiracies that mark this moment.

We can begin with the almost quaint traditional forms of corruption linking Trump and Hogan via their longtime business partners in the WWE, namely Vince and Linda McMahon, who is now, and for as long as the agency survives, the Secretary of Education. But more importantly, the wrestler’s sexual projection evoked a secret relationship between Hogan and the ultra-wealthy, ultra-conservative, Stanford-educated, and Antichrist-oriented obsessed venture and surveillance capitalist, Peter Thiel. Not only purchased J. D. Vance and, I mean, in a full se– You know, that, that is the sentence.

Thiel not only purchased J. D. Vance and pr– secured his place in the, the 2024 ticket, solidifying reactionary Tex ascension to state power, but as he was first forging this alliance with Trump in 2016, Thiel secretly bankrolled a lawsuit on Hogan’s behalf to destroy their common enemy at Gawker Media. In 2012, Gawker Media published a leaked tape of Hulk Hogan having sex with the wife of his best friend. Hogan called it a violation of his privacy.

Gawker said it was news. Hogan sued Gawker, and in 2016, a Florida jury awarded Hogan, whose real name is Terry Bollea, $140 million in damages, a sum that drove the once sprawling media empire into bankruptcy. Shortly after the verdict, financial journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin revealed that the lawsuit had been bankrolled by Thiel to avenge an article published in Valleywag, Gawker Media’s Silicon Valley gossip site that outed Thiel as gay back in 2007.

Valleywag was feared by the increasingly imperial tycoons of The Valley, with Thiel calling the outlet, quote, “The Silicon Valley equivalent of Al-Qaeda.” Thiel’s successful conspiracy against Gawker is just one among many myriad examples of the billionaire class secretly trying and largely succeeding to manipulate, if not outright purchase, the news media that critically covers them. In forging this alliance between Hogan, Thiel, and Trump, we find perhaps our era’s definitive expression of what Karl Marx, and Emma Goldman once called the conspiracy of capital.

An openly authoritarian ruling class plot against the free press, the rule of law, popular democracy, and consensus reality. Quote, “Those who persistently blame others for indulging in conspiracies,” wrote the German critical theorist Theodor Adorno, “have a strong tendency to engage in plots themselves.” This may have never been more true about any American political figure than it is for Donald Trump.

Indeed, it is worth remembering– Oh, and this is my book of the same title, but we’ll, you know, self-promotional. Indeed, it is worth remembering that one of the oldest definitions of conspiracy comes from the common law, where conspiracy is first and foremost a criminal agreement.

Conspiracy is a crime, first and foremost. A crime that the current President of the United States has been convicted of 34 times, stemming from yet another sexual cover-up that the Manhattan District Attorney charging documents described as, quote, “A conspiracy to undermine the integrity of the 2016 election.” So, while a counter-subversive phantasm animates much of what MAGA believes, my effort here to include the history of conspiracy laws in an argument about conspiracy theory enables us to take a wider view of the, the role of conspiracy in American political life.

In general, the concept of conspiracy contains three interrelated horizons, wherein a conspiracy is a criminal act, a political plot, and a theory of history. Each horizon offers its own scale of action, level of abstraction, and narrative form, from a plan to rob a bank, to a plot to overthrow the government, to a secret society that seeks to control the world. Real conspiracies like Nat Turner’s Rebellion, La Cosa Nostra, Watergate, Al-Qaeda, the Christmas Adventurers’ Club, the Illuminati, or Donald Trump’s plots to blackmail universities, privatize the military, and immigration enforcement, steal $230 million from the Justice Department, re-segregate the federal workforce, or hire T– Or hire Peter Thiel’s company Palantir to spy on all Americans.

Each emerges from one horizon while bleeding out into the other two. And in narrating these plots through the lens of conspiracy theory, we see what Fredric Jameson once described conspiracy theory as, quote, “A poor person’s cognitive mapping.” This movement between the criminal to the political to the theoretical horizons, both on the level of narrative and methodology, becomes the work of conspiracy theory.

Conspiracy theories then, in their explicitly prosecutorial and accusatory forms, are simply the speculative stories we tell each other about what are, or were, real conspiracies, ranging from the Kennedy assassination, to the mafia, to QAnon and back again. The mode of detective fiction, a la Dashiell Hammett or Chester Himes, is typical of left-wing approaches to this, in which we begin with the investigation of a crime, which leads up the social ladder to narrate a world of political corruption and manipulation before revealing just a glimpse of the true source of power that the hiring preterite gumshoe can never hope to touch. And this is, of course, the plot of every Pynchon novel.

Whereas from the phanta– from within the phantasm, the far right of QAnon believes that the grand conspiracy metanarrative that spawns myriad imaginary political plots of the Deep State and the woke agenda and Pizzagate and the like, and that animates self-anointed saviors who go looking for conspiratorial crimes to thwart, like the young man who attacked Comet Ping Pong in Washington, DC looking for a Democrat-run child rape dungeon, or the mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6th,2021, to stop the steal, right, as we already heard. Let me just leave it here. As such, the power to define what is and is not a conspiracy and what is and is not a conspiracy theory is a jealously guarded political privilege.

And there is a lot at stake in this question. After all, this is what happens when the police declare a march or a demonstration to be a an unlawful assembly before the truncheons and gas comes out, or when the President declares anti-fascism to be domestic terrorism, or when a professional wrestler evokes an assassination conspiracy to unleash the lawlessness of Trumpamania. We find in the politics of conspiracy, set between the accuser and the enemy, the legal doctrine and the ideological representation, is a distinctive political and historical dynamic, whereby conspiracy begets conspiracy in an escalating dialectics of conspiracy, in which the stakes are both all too material and dangerously ideological.

This is why conspiracy theory remains an explicitly extensive divisive terrain in US history, fractured indelibly along lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality, they, them being the primary axis of the moment, and why it may be in this era of shattered consensus, the central point of contestation between the social movements for justice and the fascist state is the battle of the future. Thank you.

(audience applauding)

Do you want to leave this up, or? All right, excuse me.

[LAKSHMI SARAH]
Okay. I don’t know where to go from there. So right now, we have discussion and then we’ll open it up for questions, so as we’re starting to speak if you start to think of questions. I did wanna, I was curious if either of you have questions for each other after listening.

[MICHAEL MARK COHEN]
Yeah, I loved the data charts. I mean, they look like some of the art that I put up there, the Mark Lombardi and the–

[TIM TANGHERLINI]
Oh, Mark Lombardi was one of the–

[MICHAEL MARK COHEN]
Yeah, exactly.

[TIM TANGHERLINI]
Yeah, I saw that.

[MICHAEL MARK COHEN]
And I always have like collect wobbly cartoons in which spiders and marionettes are sort of key figures. And so there’s an aesthetic history to this kind of stuff. But I guess my question is like, how we think about, you know, what happens when these things leap off of social media and into the streets?

Like how you can kind of think about that, ’cause I think this is what Unite the Right was, right? And they were very clearly like, the alt-right is coming off the internet and into the streets, and so there was this sort of fascist coming out party. And I’m just wondering how, like–

[TIM TANGHERLINI]
Yeah, it’s a great question and one that we, you know, think about a great deal. When I first started storytelling, studying storytelling way back when, people were like, “Why are you studying stories? They’re not important.”

(panelist one laughing)

And I thought, “Well, actually, I think they’re kind of important.” I think a lot of people make decisions based on stories. I think a lot of people take action based on stories, worries, concerns, fears that they’ve negotiated in groups.

I think interestingly, with the rise of social media, we’ve been able to almost witness a natural experiment where we can see these things playing out in real time and seeing how stories are negotiated in a very noisy fashion. And so it doesn’t surprise me that somebody picks up a gun and drives through the night from North Carolina to Washington, DC, to confront the people in, in Comet Ping Pong, to be given access to non-existent underground tunnels. I mean, the people in the restaurant were absolutely baffled.

They’re like, “It’s built on concrete slab.” You know, “We will let you into our walk-in freezer.” And so I think there are a lot of these things where people, now we can watch in real time, but at much larger scale, large groups of people without social breaks, negotiating strategies for dealing with these types of threats.

And so once you construct and reach an idea of who we are, who is us, and then who is them? Where are these potential threats coming from? What are those threats?

Is this really a threat? And you agree, this is a threat. This is a threat to our way of life.

It’s an existential threat. And the story does ask, really, “So what should we do about it?” So in some ways you could, say, “Well, let’s keep it in the storytelling realm.

They didn’t do anything, and this is what happened.” Or you can push it like a lot of rumor does into the realm of action. So I think that’s what we’re now witnessing.

What’s interesting about the social media environment, it doesn’t have the social breaks that we had earlier. If I went out with friends for beer and pizza, and I started talking about threat A

And they thought it wasn’t, even legitimate, right? Because I’m a social being, I would probably pull back, right? And so we’d have this negotiation.

I want to continue interacting with my friends. That’s the whole premise of having friends, I’ve been told, right?

[MICHAEL MARK COHEN]
–So we’re told.

[TIM TANGHERLINI]
Yeah, yeah. And so if I want continued interaction, I’ve got to adjust perhaps my more extreme ideas, right? Otherwise, you do wind up in a situation where you are isolated, and nobody likes to be isolated.

But on social media, those breaks aren’t there. It’s no longer these low-level face-to-face interaction settings. It’s one to many or many to many, but you’re not even sure if those many are– How many of those many are actually robots, you know?

There are a lot of bots on these sites. And so there’s also platform affordances that give you a little dopamine rush when somebody gives you a thumbs up, or something gives you a thumbs up, right? So there’s a reinforcement mechanism.

So you’re getting much greater speed, and you’re getting also greater directionality. You get velocity in social media and that can lead to a feeling that this is critical, right? That taking action is now urgent, right?

And so then you can trigger this cascade into real-world action.

[LAKSHMI SARAH]
I think the Parler example is really interesting one. Does your research also look at, so when something is looking like it’s going to happen, what are the ways that people can stop it? Or is that–

[TIM TANGHERLINI]
Yeah.

[LAKSHMI SARAH]
how–

[TIM TANGHERLINI]
I mean, there are some thorny, ethical concerns that you then raise there. You know, as researchers, it’s already hard enough, you know, the observational element of it.

[LAKSHMI SARAH]
Mm-hmm.

[TIM TANGHERLINI]
With Parler, we basically did not work with user IDs and things like that. Even though it’s, they were accessible to us, we just decided to work with the text. But I think, you know, you wind up in a very difficult position.

Do I want to make some sort of intervention that could prevent some downstream action that I find objectionable, right?

[LAKSHMI SARAH]
Mm-hmm.

[TIM TANGHERLINI]
Who is making those decisions? So now we’re getting back into the realm of these power dynamics. You do wind up chasing your tail a little bit, right? Because you wind up thinking conspiratorially about exactly the object of study.

[LAKSHMI SARAH]
Hmmm.

[TIM TANGHERLINI]
Yeah. So who’s behind this, and why are they behind it? That’s not really answering your question, but it’s raising some concerns.

[LAKSHMI SARAH]
Another question that I had, maybe for both of you, it feels as though we’re in this moment where there are more conspiracy theories, or more people are susceptible to conspiracy theories. Is that accurate, and why is that?

[MICHAEL MARK COHEN]
It’s very hard to determine. I mean, like, there’s, no data equivalent to this from the 1950s, you know, but it’s hard to say, looking at the ubiquity of McCarthyism, or you know, go back to the 1830s in which Know Nothing parties and Nativist parties, you know, were running the US government, that were in the 1920s when the Ku Klux Klan ran entire states. That somehow like we’re in a more expansive phase of it.

Um, I do think the Trump moment is exceptional, at least in terms of within living memory of recent history. Um, you know, Joe McCarthy was not President of the United States. Um, he didn’t actually control the Justice Department of the FBI.

He couldn’t, like, weaponize the law and conspiracy laws against social movements in the same sort of way. But I, I do think that there’s, you know, I– I– amongst slaveholders in the Antebellum South, they lived in constant fear of Nat Turner and Frederick Douglass, as well, they should. You know, holding people in slavery produces a culture of conspiracy, an entire society living on the edge of fear of subaltern insurrection.

So you know, I mean, the entire Caribbean after Haiti, I mean, it’s like, it’s sort of hard to, sort of to argue that this hasn’t actually– I mean, you can go, you know, on the level of political theory, go far enough back to where, you know, and read Machiavelli’s Discourses where, you know, in Florentine Europe, all politics is essentially conspiracy of one form or another, right? It’s either a plot against the king or a plebeian uprising. Either way, it’s an illegitimate expression of political movement.

So it’s hard to say that, like, you know, the history of conspiracy theories is very thick. We have had it a long time, but we do have new ways of thinking about it.

[TIM TANGHERLINI]
Yeah. And we’ve got access to it, and we’ve got the data, but I mean, if we think about witchcraft and trials about witchcraft going all the way back, you know, 16th century we’ve got very clearly sort of both conspiracy theories and conspiratorial machinations. Um, go back to stories that were circulating in the aftermath of huge epidemics that, that raged through Europe in the 14th century, right?

So it’s not really that we don’t have historical examples of this. So I think people are storytelling animals and we use stories as a way to negotiate this consensus of who we are as a group and what we feel threatened by, and also what solutions would be for dealing with that threat. And it could be on a micro scale, it could be as little as, has anybody ever been on Nextdoor?

Anybody been on it? Oh my God, this place is fantastic. Because it’s–.

[LAKSHMI SARAH]
Wait, why?

[TIM TANGHERLINI]
Why? Because it’s all of these sort of like tiny little–.

[MICHAEL MARK COHEN]
Look how racist your neighbors are?

[TIM TANGHERLINI]
You know, when you find the little micro, micro communities and the threats these micro communities see, right? The pickleball court and what should we do about it and all of the different strategies for dealing with that.

[MICHAEL MARK COHEN]
Or there’s a Black person in my neighborhood, what is he doing here?

[TIM TANGHERLINI]
Yeah. And then all the way up to social media, that’s dealing with both global and national phenomena. So the speed I think of this communication, what I actually call velocity, because of directionality, we can really focus on it.

And the idea that these discussions are siloed, right? There isn’t necessarily the type of interpenetration of different concerns in groups that we feel in our everyday life. Right, we’re all parts of many different groups, and we’re constantly adjusting according to the demands of those sort of complex interdependencies.

[LAKSHMI SARAH]
I’m kind of curious do either of you have examples of either recent conspiracy theories and, well, I’m curious about ones that you were like either like, ‘Oh wow, this is a really, like, fascinating one.’ Or ‘Ooh, maybe I believe this one.’ Or are there ones that you, I mean, you study it, so I–

[TIM TANGHERLINI]
They’re all my children. They’re all equally, I love them all the same.

[LAKSHMI SARAH]
So you don’t have a favorite, okay? Okay. Then never mind. But I’m just curious about–

[TIM TANGHERLINI]
I do like the one that came up recently was the MedBeds.

[LAKSHMI SARAH]
I don’t know about that one.

[TIM TANGHERLINI]
Whoa. Oh, you don’t know about MedBeds? I’ve got something to sell you after, after we meet here.

[LAKSHMI SARAH]
Oh, okay.

[TIM TANGHERLINI]
But the MedBed actually is a technology. It’s only really available to the billionaires. But through an arrangement that I have, I can actually get you one. And it’s a bed.

[LAKSHMI SARAH]
So this is not a multi-level marketing scheme?

[TIM TANGHERLINI]
No. [LAKSHMI SARAH] Just a Bed? It’s just a bed.

[MICHAEL MARK COHEN]
It’s an AI video that Trump circulated.

[LAKSHMI SARAH]
Oh, okay, got it.

[TIM TANGHERLINI]
Yeah, but it’s also in, it’s sort of lots and lots of conversations about these.

[LAKSHMI SARAH]
Okay.

[TIM TANGHERLINI]
That kind of a cure-all, right? And will rejuvenate you. And it’s part of this whole sort of, yeah, so that one I found really interesting, because it ties in with all of these ideas of living forever.

And then some of the other institutions that are kind of involved in living forever, Buck Institute, for example, people are curious about that because it looks sort of so isolated and nefarious sitting up there on its mountain redoubt. It’s actually a very good institute doing good science, but people– when you don’t know something about something, you can backfill these stories. But the MedBed is like a big one.

[MICHAEL MARK COHEN]
Yeah, I mean–

[LAKSHMI SARAH]
A favorite or–

[MICHAEL MARK COHEN]
Well, I wouldn’t call it a favorite.

[LAKSHMI SARAH]
Probably not– [MICHAEL MARK COHEN] –But it’s– –a favorite.

[MICHAEL MARK COHEN]
–it’s like watching the Charlie Kirk thing unfold in real time is utterly fascinating. I mean, first of all, who knew that there were this many former Special Forces bros with podcasts? Like who–

[LAKSHMI SARAH]
Do you listen to them?

[MICHAEL MARK COHEN]
No. I wouldn’t say them. I mean, because that’s my–

[LAKSHMI SARAH]
Fine.

[MICHAEL MARK COHEN]
But I have. I mean, I watched– You do watch them, and if you get far–

[LAKSHMI SARAH]
Very much. [MICHAEL MARK COHEN] –enough into TikTok– No, it’s fine. Whatever.

You’ll get enough into TikTok because they are, they aren’t just podcasts, they’re video. TikTok– [MICHAEL MARK COHEN]

It’s all on– –YouTube. [MICHAEL MARK COHEN] — YouTube and like- So to watch the Kennedy-

This sort of ideas around the Kennedy assassination just sort of reproduced themselves, magic bullet theories, the lack of autopsy footage, the fact that the investigation was closed before it really even effectively began, people parsing the videotape of that dude running across the rooftop like– It gets very deep very fast. And it has this really extraordinary capacity to render the official narrative, which is nuts. If you really break it down, it has the shooter changing clothes three times in under an hour assembling a gun, dissembling a gun, reassembling the gun like with something that takes like 15, 20 minutes given the size of the rifle, in less than 30 seconds each time.

I mean, I went to all of my– I went to my son, my Gen Z son, and was like, “What are these memes that they wrote on the bullets?” Like, “What does this mean?” And he very embarrassingly explained it all to me just cringe-dad moment, but it was necessary.

And these kinds of– The ways in which this stuff floats around, I mean, in addition to maybe the most delightful fake thing I’ve seen come out of the government since maybe the MedBed videos which is that reported transcript of the conversation between the shooter and his like femboy partner, which is just literally the fakest thing I have ever seen. Look, there is nobody in this planet younger than me that has referred to a police car as a squad car.

(audience laughing)

Just the language itself literally makes no sense. And so watching this thing kind of unfold and yet how profound the martyrology around Kirk, the incredibly widespread cancellation, the destruction of anybody that says anything about critical of Kirk, or someone fired from The Washington Post simply for quoting Kirk– For saying unimaginably awful and fascist things, right? So there, I think this is, but these, this is really consequential.

There is going to be a trial whoever these kinds of nonexistent co-conspirators are, this romantic partner, whoever they are and I, I mean, I feel for them, like being in the clutches of the FBI and the Justice Department and what kind of pressure is being brought to bear on them to get this to conform to some kind of narrative is, this is going to, this is going to trial. Like Crooks, Thomas Crooks is dead, he was killed within eight seconds of firing multiple shots at the president, right? He’s dead, no trial.

This guy this, who killed Charlie Kirk is going to trial and this is gonna be a very big deal. Questions from the audience?

(panelists laughing)

Okay, I saw the hand over here first.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
I just wanted to ask about Where in conspiracy theories do you think satanic ritual abuse fits and like the McMartin Day Care scandal, if you remember that, and then what do you think of anti-vaxxers who call them self vaccine skeptics, like are those conspiracy theories?

[TIM TANGHERLINI]
I, you’re looking at me. Whenever people talk about vax Satan, they always look at me.

(all laughing)

I’m wondering about that.

[LAKSHMI SARAH]
And maybe Just for, so everybody’s on the same page if there’s a conspiracy theory you don’t know if everybody knows, if you can just break it down, yeah.

[TIM TANGHERLINI]
Right, okay. So I mean, why Satanism? I mean, Satanism is really, it’s kind of a catchall outside threat, right?

So if you are a Christian community and going all the way back to, certainly all of the folklore that I’ve studied from the 18th 19th century, right? One of the things that distinguished us versus them is that they were not Christian, right? So it’s Christian, not Christian who is the who is the person who’s got control of all of the the non-Christian realm, that would be Satan.

in my folklore class I just tell the students, “Look, if we’ve got some sort of outside creature in 19th century Scandinavian folklore, the answer’s probably gonna to be at some point it goes back to Satan, who are they aligned with.” So it’s a very good and useful construct in the context of what I would kind of call vernacular Christian belief, if that is one of the elements of defining the community. And so, Satanism being related to some sort of ritualistic eating, particularly of children has a very longstanding sort of backstory.

There’s a reservoir of motifs. We can think of blood libel in the context of antisemitic narratives, but we can also think of it in the most contemporary of ways. One of the things that is most precious to us as a community is our children, so what would be the worst thing that could happen to our children?

That they could be abused in all sorts of ways and that they could be eaten. So now you’re in ritual cannibalistic child abuse. Who is most likely to be behind that?

Well, Satan. So that’s how we get to satanic ritualistic cannibalistic, wherever we are. Wherever we are, I don’t want to be there, but that’s how we wind up there.

And this is heartbreak. Now let’s talk about vaccine, what is now referred to as vaccine hesitancy. We did a lot of studies early on mommy blogs.

I don’t know if you’ve, if you have children, you know that you have, when you get to the hospital you have your baby, everybody’s very happy, extremely tired. And when you leave the hospital, they give you a squirming little baby and they basically say, ‘Don’t kill it.’ I mean, that’s generally the instruction manual.

And so you’re sitting there looking at this thing like, ‘I’m so tired, did I miss, the instructions? Because I don’t know what to do.’ So you go onto mommy blogs, right?

You start saying, ‘Hey, how are you guys keeping yours alive?’

(audience laughing)

And there are a lot of discussions and one of them is, like, ‘They wanna give them a lot of vaccines,’ and people are like, “Oh, yeah. No, vaccine preventable diseases could be terrible, but you gotta be careful. A lot of these vaccines,” And then some arbitrarily long list of potential effects.

So in these blogs, we discovered that the vaccines themselves were the threat agent, not the vaccine preventable diseases. Nobody was talking about how bad Polio or Measles or Pertussis or Diptheria. That wasn’t what was being talked about.

What was being talked about as potentially threatening was the vaccines, and so the conversations turned very quickly to exemption seeking behavior, right? So how do we get exemptions? Because the best strategy, if the vaccines are the threat, the strategy is, don’t vaccinate, right?

What was interesting was to see that over the nine year, we retrospectively studied this over nine years and discovered that there was more than 100% churn in the people in these communities, right? The people at the beginning were nowhere near the same as the people at the end, but these discussions about exemption seeking were constant, right? And so this is, when you’re inoculated to an idea, you basically wind up taking a stance on it.

And when the consensus is hesitate, perhaps don’t vaccinate, um, oh, God, that sounded like a, like a slogan. But rather seek exemptions that’s what we saw. And so that led to a diminution, diminution high enough in herd immunity that we could get measles outbreaks in, in California where before it had been eradicated.

So that’s a very long answer to a very straightforward question. I apologize.

[LAKSHMI SARAH]
In the back.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
Hi. Thank you both for your wonderful presentations. Um, so I have a question probably more for Michael, but I guess applies for both.

Um, I was wondering how important is the American state in the context of modern day production and consumption of conspiracy theories in the United States. Um, so I know from my research that in certain places of the world, like in Russia, for instance, right, state is definitely a crucial institution around which the nexus of conspiracy theorizing kind of revolves. But in that society, one might say the state is more important in general.

And then in the US, right, you have all the deep state conspiracy theorists, right? They’re pretty popular and are used by Trump and, I don’t know, right-wing politicians to um, kind of delegitimate the federal bureaucracy and all those decisions.

And on the one hand, you might say that it’s just the result of the instrumentalization, politics, or maybe market commodification, but then you also think about the question of the government transparency and validity of its certain actions, right? And so more broadly the question is how important the state is and how deep you think are conspiracy theories rooted in state and legal institutions in the US? Thank you.

[MICHAEL MARK COHEN]
Yeah. Thank you for the question. It’s a very good one.

I mean, yes, obviously the state sits at the center historically. I mean, I think we begin the first sort of you can dig deep into the literature in terms of thinking about conspiracy as a real entity. It is always a struggle over state power itself, whether it’s the conspiracy of Catiline or it is Machiavelli’s Discourses on Levi that is about the state as both conspirator and conspired against, right?

And that those two are always working in conjunction, that there are conspiracies against the state. Rogan talks about the king’s two bodies, right? There’s a conspiracy against the body of the king and then the body of the king as conspirator.

And so that it works in both directions. Counter-subversion is an important way of thinking about this particularly in the US and democratic states in which, you have these democratic state apparatuses that nonetheless harbor deep within them these incredibly violent reactionary institutions. The FBI, the CIA, the US military, police, and prisons, that under neoliberalism in particular have really risen to the surface as the primary function of state behavior in general, right?

The only thing that’s really left of the state is prisons, borders, and police, and, prisons, police, boarders, and the military. And so as a result there is this kind of increasing centralization of these ideas around the state. Now, one of the things though that remains about the state in the US, it’s one singular flaw, according to certain forms of fascist theory is that it is potentially democratic, and that’s what’s got to stop, right?

And so these versions of the conspiracy theories that bless Trump as dictator, that see him as divinely ordained, all these various things, so that Trump can come in and use the mechanisms of democracy, conspire against the democratic mechanisms of the state to provoke or to produce this sort of pure, purified revived MAGA, to Make America Great Again. And so the narrative form here is to say, And I think that. Yes, I will keep coming back to Hulk Hogan, but it is this kind of version.

I mean, I think to me that line about that once they, them have been defeated, and they, them is civil society, right? It is this sort of liberal project of civil society. It is these trans and non-binary minorities and youth that somehow represent this fundamental threat to American greatness, American stability once they have been vanquished, then Trumpamania will run wild.

Or perhaps it is that simply once we have gotten past this necessary but unwanted threshold of an actual election, Trumpamania will effectively run wild by eradicating they, them. And so I think that this kind of, yes, it is always about state formations, but, like, the problem that we have, of course, is, like, the proper political scientist knows that the state is never a single entity. It’s always multiple, overlapping, competing interests.

It’s never a single entity. Conspiracy always, often, right, reduces it to this kind of singular entity, but, like, even within state formations, there are the repressive apparatus, the secret government, such as the, you know, you get into the histories of the COINTELPROs, anti-communisms, all of these kinds of things that are very real conspiracies that have real political outcomes, that the bill, the conspiracy theories float around, so. Yeah, thank you.

It was a good question.

[LAKSHMI SARAH]
Another question in the back, and then we’ll come to the front. Oh, sorry. Right in front. Yeah, right here.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
My name is Lynn. Hello. Thank you so much for this presentation.

I’m a sociocultural anthropologist, pretty new to computational text analysis. So I’m wondering a little bit about the context of, you know, how much of a corpus you take, and to draw kind of conclusions about appropriate interventions for us as educators and researchers working with some people who might very much believe in aspects of this, or confronting media in terms of being really irresponsible and propagating stuff in work way. I am really interested in zones of intervention.

I am interested, too, in the aspect of doing the research and not actually identifying the agent who perpetuates a certain narrative or contributes to the conversation going on online, because my idea is that sometimes there are a few people who are the loudest in the room and with bots, it’s hard to figure how to tackle it research-wise. But I primarily work in WhatsApp spaces with people ’cause I work with a couple of public universities in Haiti, and there’s a lot of stuff that happens lost in translation as well when information circulates in the diaspora and people aren’t first speakers of English, and how that gets passed along, and the misunderstandings that happen there. So my limited role as an educator, a white foreigner who’s spent a lot of time in Haiti, I try to be very careful about it and very respectful, and I also see really interesting kernels of, I don’t know, values and stuff like that that are expressed in the creation and propagation of certain narratives.

So I was wondering if you could talk about the agents, talking about the kind of appropriate corpus to be able to draw conclusions and our roles as educators with students, peers, and the media.

[TIM TANGHERLINI]
Wow. That’s a hard question. It’s a really good one.

It’s one I struggle with a lot. So when we’re doing our corpus sort of formation a lot of times, social media is extremely noisy, so we might be working with tens of millions of posts and then filtering that for certain types of noise. So to give you an idea, I think for Parler, for Parler, we were sampling somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000 posts a day because computationally we ran into a barrier.

With the Mommy Blogs, it was somewhere around, I think, the scale of about 81 million posts to these things. Qanon is so big but we were sort of letting that sort of wash over us with a real-time method. But it took us 24 hours to process a day’s worth of input, so we wound up sort of, hitting a time barrier.

And then on COVID-19, that was one of the ones where we actually saw in real time the Film Your Hospital hashtag not only gaining prominence, but connecting to some of the other narrative communities that surround basically that were part of the whole QAnon, sphere. And so there, that was one where we thought, “Oh, this is gonna get pretty bad, pretty quickly.” And we were right.

Then that goes to the questions of intervention. Who do you alert? You could say, “We think that this is going to happen.”

We worked a bit with public health agencies in the context of vaccine messaging and worked with them a little bit because we knew that the message that was getting out was a one message fits all. That was the way they were doing vaccine messaging, and the recognition that as your cultural anthropologist, so you know that different messages work differently. They sound different in different communities.

And you have to have sort of a thick contextual knowledge of the groups to understand those you talk about kernels of values. I really say this is, the cultural ideology is always gonna be negotiated in storytelling environments. And so figuring out how to come up with messages that are respectful of the group and yet allow for a way to understand that the strategy of, in this case, vaccinating your children, makes a hell of a lot of sense.

And so those are kind of strategic interventions. So you don’t challenge, these low probability links. They’re eating the dogs and cats in Springfield.

No, they aren’t. And what I thought was great was that the mayor came out and said, “Well these are all people of Springfield.” And they had, they actually had, a celebration that was, all and these were largely Haitian immigrants.

And they were embracing not only them as part of the community, but also the food ways, right? So that it wasn’t, you know, you were eating dogs and cats, which is you know, an accusation that you can make to really other or someone. And it’s been used in, for example, Europe, in some xenophobic storytelling.

I’d written in 1992 an article about rumors circulating about immigrants eating dogs and cats in neighborhoods of Copenhagen, 1992. And that was being leveraged for right-wing political candidates. So we tend to work with pretty large-scale corpora, and our methods, I think are getting better.

Several of the people who are working with us on the methods are in the room, so I hope they’re getting better. And these interventions, these are challenging areas. So, you know, that’s where you work with communities to try and understand their values and what would work best.

And then you’ve gotta figure out the narrative interventions. A lot of these things are getting really manipulated. It’s not just bots like sending out spam.

The bots have gotten very sophisticated. It’s a great thing called the Observatory on Social Media at Indiana University, OSoMe, Observatory on Social Media. They do a lot of work on this.

There’s a guy also at USC, Emilio Ferrara, who does a lot of work on Twitter and Twitter communities. So those were people’s work I’d look at in this context.

[LAKSHMI SARAH]
Thank you. I think we had a couple questions in the front. One right here.

[MICHAEL MARK COHEN]
Can I ask you a question?

(moderator laughing)

[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
Thanks. I think I have a question for each, but I’ll be short, I hope. I guess, for Michael, I’d ask the question of what the difference between a plan is and a conspiracy.

So I was thinking about contrasting maybe Project 2025, which was pretty out in the open, I suppose, or, and versus, like, when the Allies were trying to convince that they were going to invade France at Calais, rather than Normandy where they did. And I guess a question for Tim, I just had a factual one. I seem to recall that there was a video of Kamala Harris being asked if she would support prisons.

[MICHAEL MARK COHEN]
It’s in the video. Yeah, it’s in the ad.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
So, that’s a true thing?

[MICHAEL MARK COHEN]
Yeah.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
Okay. All right then, I guess the remaining question is contrasting Project 2025 versus the D-Day. How do plans differ from conspiracies?

[MICHAEL MARK COHEN]
Yes, these might be conspiracies, like deception, espionage, all of that stuff involves, ’cause I evoked detective fiction earlier, you can invoke espionage literature in the same sort of vein. Deception and these sort of, these are essential components. The thing about a conspiracy though I do think that, and I wrote a whole book on the history of conspiracy theories and conspiracy law in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Conspiracy laws go back to the 13th century, and they are criminalized agreements. So, if you and I make a plan to rob one of you but don’t do it, we’ve com, exactly, We’ve committed a felony. In fact, in a certain case, something that carries a greater penalty than the actual assault or robbery in the first place.

So, conspiracy laws criminalize collective action in a way that corporate law insulates corporations from. So, corporations are private individuals, thus they have the rights of individuals. So, they can conspire in all sorts of ways and not be subjected to criminal agreements.

Whereas social movements and ordinary people, when they agree to do something like, I don’t know, be anarchists or join the Communist Party are, all of sudden now, engaged in a criminal conspiracy. Crimes for which, in the 19th century, particularly after the Haymarket bombing of 1886, people were executed for. So, this is not a game.

There are very real consequences of what is and is not a conspiracy. And so, the conspiracy laws had been used to the first use of the conspiracy law in the United States is the 1805 Philadelphia Cordwainers’ case, which criminalized labor unions. The first use of the conspiracy law in American history was to ban labor unions.

Now, organizations of masters, they’re cordwainers, other words, shoemakers. The workers tried to organize to raise wages. The shop masters organized to suppress wages.

The courts in Philadelphia said that workers trying to raise wages was against the common interest, and thus a criminal conspiracy, and that the masters attempt to suppress wages was in the public interest, and thus not a conspiracy. And so, these kinds of things, like, play themselves out through 19th-century labor law. They work all–

I mean, really, you, you didn’t have a right to strike in the United States, or a right to picket, or even a right to boycott until the 1930s. And in many places, those rights have been since stripped, right? So, rights to strike, rights picket, rights, all these things are highly contested and often have successfully been undermined.

So, there is a sense in which, right on the one hand, there is a kind of crime. Trump was convicted of these financial manipulations and it was all, the conspiracy is against election integrity, but what did he do? He forged documents, he made an agreement with Michael Cohen and they made–

You know, no, no relation. And they made, you know? And so, there is this kind of process by which whatever the state decides to, whatever prosecutors decide is somehow a kind of criminal conspiracy, then finds it’s, well, it’s self-persecuting.

Now, you know, the example of D-Day is one thing, right? But, like, keep in mind that the, you know, the Nazi high command in Nuremberg, what were the charges against them? They were all conspiracy charges, right?

Conspiracy to commit aggressive war, conspiracy to commit violations of human rights. They were, like, the entire panoply of crimes that you know, that they were executed for were conspiracy charges. So, it plays, like, in this, this kind of profound way, but they, again, like, the right, the– And the conspiracy law is this very hard block that sits– Clarence Darrow is, like, the great American theoretician of the conspiracy laws, the great enemy of conspiracy laws, and generally spent his early career fighting them.

And it’s a lot of what my book is about. But, like, in the end, the conspiracy, you know, is o– It, the right to decide what is and is not a conspiracy theory. And we, as traditional intellectuals in the academy, also choose for ourselves the right to decide what is a legitimate form of social theory, and what is a conspiracy theory, right?

You can’t be a conspiracy theorist in the academy, right? You have to use legitimate forms of social theory of one kind or another, right? And there’s always an attempt to discredit or undermine certain kinds of thinking as conspiracy theories.

The the cultural Marxist types will tell you that Marxism is a conspiracy theory when it couldn’t possibly be farther from it, right? And so there’s all of these sorts of ways. But the, who gets to decide what is and is not is an exercise of power with tremendous social and political consequence.

[LAKSHMI SARAH]
I think we have time for one more quick question. Right here.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
Yeah, thank you so much for this panel. And, actually what you were just saying kind of helped cue up part of what I’m gonna ask about, which is, are we losing something analytically when we talk about conspiracy theories in this way? ‘Cause in this talk, when you were asked the initial question of, “Have conspiracy theories increased over time?”

And there was kind of a deflection to, “Well, there’s always been things like witchcraft, or we can look to kind of slave rebellions, right?” We can talk about this longstanding fear of insurrection, questions about power, questions of who’s actually in control, right? And then, now, in contemporary times, we see a lot of contestation.

The Right calls a lot of what the Left does conspiracy theories. The left calls the right conspiracy theories. There’s kind of this at once conspiracy theories are this trans-historical, enough sense.

[MICHAEL MARK COHEN]
I can be very brief, and I’ll let you, Trent. But, like, I think that on the one hand, this is why I’m particularly interested in grounding this in legal questions. The conspiracy law becomes a very effective way of grounding this, so that it’s not just crazy ideas that people have, but there are court transcripts.

If people go to prison, they’re executed, right? The other is to sort of think about the distinction, right? And you make the distinction, but between conspiracy and conspiracy theories.

And so my thing is very much a version that says conspiracy theory is the general discourse we have about the presence of actual conspiracies. And so that kind of question, right, I do think it does become dangerously vague. That’s always a danger.

That is a challenge. But there are a few ways to conceptually anchor these things that often does require archival historical research, that require a much criminal forensic investigation. Things like that actually can then go about determining these kinds of things.

There is an epistemology that sits behind all of this, that, literature, that criminal investigation, that, that podcasts, things like journalists, like, do, so.

[TIM TANGHERLINI]
Yeah. I mean, I, as you know, I work about, with this, both narratively, but also sort of in the context of historical sort of scope. And, you know, I, there was a, there was an unfortunate period at one point where we started talking about things like urban legends, and there was really nothing urban about them.

It was just they were contemporary, contemporaneous versions of stories that we had seen circulating in other contexts. I think, really, the big change here is the performance context in which these are emerging and the reach and the scope. And that might be something that we have to take into account when we’re thinking about the impact of this kind of storytelling that has, of course, as we’ve been talking about, real-world effects, right?

It’s not like when people were criticizing me for studying stories, like, they’re not really that important. You know, we both know that these are extremely important and that there are certain affordances that actually might, and probably are, we know, be, are being manipulated and that has changed what I would call the ecology of storytelling. And so conspiracy theory might actually be sort of evolutionarily adopted to optimize for the new affordances of this communication ecology.

Yeah.

[LAKSHMI SARAH]
Thank you.

[TIM TANGHERLINI]
Thank you, yeah.

[LAKSHMI SARAH]
Are you guys teaching any classes in the spring that the people should know about?

[TIM TANGHERLINI]
I’m teaching a course in information called Information 230, Cultural Analytics. So, we’ll be working with data-driven analysis of cultural phenomena.

[MICHAEL MARK COHEN]
I get a bit of a break next semester, but I’m just teaching one, an honors seminar in American studies that that I call The Secret History of America. I don’t know what that means, but it’s a great sort of title to just explore certain things. And then we have students, like, we workshop, and students write and publish essays on the internet, so.

[LAKSHMI SARAH]
Okay, great.

[TIM TANGHERLINI]
But all the reading is secret, and they have to –.

[MICHAEL MARK COHEN]
Well, I mean, not for nothing, but like the first time I taught the class, like half the books were like, ‘The Secret History of Wonder Woman’, and ‘The Secret History of The Office’, The Secret, and it’s like it’s a terrible publishing trope. We learned that in the course of the semester. This is a bad publishing trope.

You don’t ever wanna write a book that is the secret history of anything, because. Because it’s not a secret, and it never was. But like, anyways, but thank you.

[LAKSHMI SARAH]
Yep, thank you. Thank you all for coming.

(audience clapping)

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