monky poop

Ethnopopulist conspiracy theory

o   Populism – people vs. elites; us vs. them

o   Ethnopopulism – “real” people of a nation vs. elites who support harmful outsiders, like immigrants and ethnic minorities

o   Conspiracy – alleges that elites are secretly aiming to destroy the “nation” by infiltrating it with “outsiders”, either for profit or power

§  Rooted from anxieties and fears about immigration

Deep State conspiracy theory

o   There are two governments in the United States today. One is visible. The

o   other is invisible.” - David Wise and Thomas Ross, The Invisible Government (1964)

o   Network of unseen, unchecked conspirators within the federal government

o   Related to the rise of US state during Cold War

o   Related to loss of trust in US state and revelations by professional journalists and amateur researchers in the 1960s and 70s about secret state, especially CIA and FBI, actions.

o   Increase in federal employees, New Deal, expansion of FBI and CIA, Johnson’s “Great Society”

o   Questioning US involvement in Vietnam War, 1955-1975. Cold War conformism, mobilization. Rise of protest movements – antiwar, civil rights, women’s rights,

“Guest worker” program

o   Decolonization and economic boom post WW2. Guest worker program in West Germany and Turkey, 1961-1973. Migrants remained in European nations. 1973 OPEC oil crisis, economic precarity, fears of population decline and fate of “the nation”. Rise of neo-Nazism and right-wing extremism in the 1980s and 90s.

o   Lecture 15.

§  OPEC: rise of oil prices on Western nations due to support for Israel in Yom Kippur War. Decline of manufacturing jobs; steel in rust belt, auto industry, textile industry in the Carolinas, cheaper labor sources elsewhere

European Union

o   EU: Free trade zone. Collective laws, regulations, currency. European parliament and European Commission. Schengen Zone determines admission into this, freedom of movement, etc.

“Competitive authoritarianism”

o   Political systems that remain essentially authoritarian despite allowing meaningful electoral competition. – Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way

o   Orban and Fidesz single-party rule since 2010 elections

§  Rewrote constitution; fewer checks on executive branch; massive corruption and purchasing of political support

§  Rigged election laws; fewer checks on executive branch; massive corruption and purchasing of political support

§  Nearly all media state-owned or state-controlled

§  Intimidates critics and opposition party members; bureaucracy and universities

§  Elections are “free but not fair”

·       Still need to win, though

European migrant crisis of 2015

o   Syrian Civil War, 2015

§  Population of 22 million; 250,000 killed

§  10.6 million still lived in their homes

§  7.6 internally displaced

§  4 million left the country

§  Most escaped to Turkey, where the majority remained. Some aimed to get to an EU member state; primarily Germany

o   Hungary required by law to process asylum claims. By August 2015, Hungary housed 150,000 refugees. Almost all then moved to Germany.

o   Previous rules about asylum seekers in the EU called the Dublin Regulations: required that asylum seekers remain in country where they entered and applied for asylum.

o   August 2015: Germany’s Angela Merkel suspends the Dublin Regulations in Germany – “We have managed so many things – we can handle this.”

o   September 2015 – Hungary closes its border to refugees

§  Viktor Orban and the 2015 Syrian war – “defender of Christian Europe” against Muslim/non-European migrants and the European Union. Spreading disinformation about “Muslim” emigrants in Western Europe and high crime rates. Hungary refuses asylum-seekers entry, August 2015.

“Anti-Soros” laws and elections of 2018

o   Born in Budapest; survived Holocaust, emigrated to US

o   1970s becomes hedge fund billionaire

o   1980s-present – philanthropist aiding pro-democracy movements around the world, beginning in Communist Eastern Europe (communism fell in 1989)

§  Open society fund supports journalists, nongovernmental organizations, and other efforts “working for justice, democratic governance, and human rights”

§  As a college student, Orban had received $10,000 scholarship to study at Oxford

§  Founded Central European University, most of which was forced to leave Hungary

o   2018 Anti-Soros Laws

§  Required organizations who work with migrants to register with Ministry of Interior; could be rejected for “national security reasons”; 25% tax

§  2018 Open Society Fund forced to leave the country; CEU leaves years later

Vietnam War (as it relates to that lecture’s argument)

o   US began to question involvement in Vietnam, 1955-1975. Rise of antiwar movements.

Assassination of John F. Kennedy

o   1963, JFK Assassination

o   Questions about Lee Harvey Oswald and single shooter

o   “Magic bullet” theory and Warren Commission, 1964

§  Sylvia Meagher, organized out of her Manhattan apartment. Had been a target of McCarthyism in 1953. Wrote a book about JFK Assassination, a skeptic.

o   Hurried investigation; fear of inflaming Cold War tensions

o   Rise of amateur skeptics

o   1966 – Freeodm of Information Act

o   1967 publication, Soviet Propaganda

o   1976 Gallup: 5% of Americans believe government’s version of JFK and MLK’s assassinations

Amateur investigators (as it relates to that lecture’s argument)

o   Sylvia Meagher, as written above. Warrenologists, critics and analysts of Warren Commission.

Investigative journalism (as it relates to that lecture’s argument)

o   COINTELPRO – Washington Post, March 1971

o   Pentagon Papers – New York Times, June 1971

o   Tuskegee experiments – Associated Press, July 1972

o   Watergate – Washington Post, 1972-1974

o   MKULTRA – Rockefeller Commission, 1975, in response to 1974 article in NYT

William L. Moore and Charles Berlitz, The Roswell Incident

o   Roswell, New Mexico Incident (1947) – Army first claims to find “flying saucer”; then says it was a weather balloon

o   Creation of the Air Technical Intelligence Center (1947)

o   William L. Moore and Charles Berlitz, The Roswell Incident, 1980

§  Basically researches the Roswell Incident with “witnesses” stating it was a real UFO and there were alien bodies aboard.

Participatory Culture

o   Internet allows for active participation in media rather than passive consumption

o   Democratic; anyone can do it

o   Creative work and civic engagement with media that is part of a wider community

o   Creation of affinity spaces

§  Different from traditional newspapers and academia

o   1995 – GeoCities – spaces and neighborhoods where people could create their own pages that were organized into neighborhoods

§  Third most visit site online by 1999

§  1999, GeoCities purchased by Yahoo and then fell off in 2009

o   Fandoms as participatory culture

§  Authority comes from expertise in a particular area – and the number of followers you have

o   Myspace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok

Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act

o   “No provider of user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

o   Platforms may moderate content according to own standards

o   Platforms not liable for posts by their users

QAnon

o   October 28th, 2017, post on 4chan’s profoundly racist, sexist and xenophobic /pol forum by someone who later went by Q

o   Spoke of vast conspiracy within government, Democratic Party, and elites around the world

o   October 29th, “Priority to clean out the bad actors to unite people behind the America First agenda. Many in our government worship Satan,” which picked up on #Pizzagate conspiracy theory already in circulation

o   Followers came to believe that capital Q was someone highly placed in the government (the deep state) seeking help to expose this conspiracy

o   Believed that president trump was doing the same

o   Went viral on Reddit, then Facebook Twitter and YouTube

o   “The government, media, and financial worlds in the US are controlled by a group of Satan worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.” 5% Agree, 11% Mostly Agree

§  Q Anon as epistemology

·       Q Anon created its own form of knowledge, using techniques and methods different than academic institutions and journalism

·       In dismissing these institutions and implicating them in this worldwide conspiracy, they create their own knowledge world

·       And reinforce among each other; Knowledge is obtained through research, tested and verified by others, and then accepted by community

·       Core assumptions act unquestioned premise; Full evidence of core assumption never fully discovered which fuels the effort further

Gordon Wood’s “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century”

o   Woods argument is critical of Hofstadter and psychological approaches to history

§  conspiratorial thinking, a ubiquitous mode of thinking among educated elites in Atlantic world, including many American revolutionaries

§  Events flowed from human actions, cause and effect, this could and must be understood through reason

o   Before the latter half of the 18th century, politics and power wielded by a small number of men. Larger events and human affairs seemingly incomprehensible; Fate, chance, divine will or punishment

o   In the 17th century, there was a shift in modes of thinking.

§  Isaac Newton and scientific revolution: physical world guided by laws that can be understood through reason; Cause and effect. Principia, 1684

§  John Locke, late 17th century: society, while ordained by God, was man's creation, and was continually being formed and reformed by people; Understand natural order that God had made; Laws by which it operated

·       Chance, fate, divine intervention gone; Cause and effect linked to human actions indent

·       with reason, could understand the course of events

§  Edward Gibbon, 1796: history is the science of causes and effects

o   But at that very moment, politics and events become increasingly complex. Rise of the modern state; Growing bureaucracies, army. Growing British Empire and various complicated forms of rule. Embraced varied ideas and emergence of groups of people with complex economic and political motivations. Agricultural and industrial revolutions

o   Woods argument: “yet at this very moment when the world was outrunning man's capacity to explain it in personal terms, and terms of passions and schemes of individuals, the most enlightened of the age were priding themselves on their ability to do just that. The widespread resort to conspiratorial interpretations grew out of this contradiction.” Page 411

o   South Carolina merchant Henry Lauren in 1765 “a malicious villain acting behind the curtain... could only be reached by suspicion.” Page 428

o   Wood’s argument on illuminati

§  all of this was happening, move towards seeing history differently; “invisible hand”; History as stream/ process

§  We in our postindustrial, scientifically saturated society, tend to marginalize those who continue to attribute combinations of events to deliberate human design, calling them removed from the centers of power and unable to grasp the concept of complicated causal linkages offered by sophisticated social scientists, and unwilling to abandon the desire to make simple and clear moral judgments of events. But people with such conspiratorial beliefs have not always been either marginal or irrational. Living in this complicated modern world, where the very notion of causality is in doubt, should not prevent us from seeing that at another time and in another culture of most enlightened people accounted for events in just his particular way.

·       Wood, page 441

Declaration of Independence

o   anti monarchy, othering the British, etcetera

o   formed from “Draft of Instructions to the Virginia Delegates in the Continental Congress”

French Revolution

o   1789 to 1799

o   Declaration of rights of man; National Assembly, 1789

o   Reign of terror; Jacobins, 1793 to 1794

o   “300,000 suspects were arrested; 17,000 were officially executed, and perhaps 10,000 died in prison or without trial.”

o   Directory and then Napoleon Bonaparte, 1799

Illuminati

o   Conspiracy theories as another way of explaining the disorder and chaos of modernity

o   Bavarian illuminati

§  secret society in Germany 1776 to 1885; For democracy and science; Anti church and anti-monarch

§  Secret rituals and hierarchies; Never more than 2500 members; Banned and arrested in 1785

§  But imagined as a conspiracy theory that its members controlled governments and industry throughout 19th century as part of plot for world domination

§  Had allegedly infiltrated Freemasons in France were responsible for revolution, overthrow of monarchy, and terror

§  John Robinson, proofs of a conspiracy against all the religions and governments of Europe, carried on in the secret carried on the secret meetings of illuminati, Freemasons, and reading societies, 1798

·       the illuminati were formed “for the express purpose of rooting out all of the religious establishments, and overturning all the existing governments of Europe” this was embraced by some British conservatives

Viktor Orbán

-       Lecture 14.

o   Prime Minister of Hungary

o   State of the Nation address, 2019: othering the EU, fearmongering, anti-globalism, warns against immigration and native displacement,  

-       Lecture 15.

o   Anti-Communist dissident; role in fall of Communism in country in 1989

o   Leader of conservative Fidesz party

o   Prime minister from 1998-2002 during Hungary’s transition to capitalism and democracy; Hungary gains EU membership in 2004.

o   Financial crisis in 2009; wins overwhelming victory running on a populist platform against the ruling Socialist party

o   Became Prime Minister again in 2010, remains ever since

Angela Merkel         

o   In August 2015, Germany’s Angela Merkel suspended the Dublin regulation in Germany

§  German Chancellor Merkel declares:

·       we have managed so many things, we can handle this

o   Dublin regulations required that asylum seekers remain in country where they entered and applied for asylum

George Soros

o   George Soros, Hungarian philanthropist

o   Born in Budapest; Survived Holocaust, emigrated to US

o   1970s, became hedge fund billionaire

o   1980s to present, philanthropist leading pro democracy movements around the world, beginning in communist Eastern Europe (communism fell in 1989 )

§  open society fund supports journalists, non governmental organizations, and other efforts “working for justice, democratic governance, and human rights”

§  As a college student, Orban had received $10,000 scholarship to study at oxford – funded by Soros’ foundation

§  Founded central European university, most of which was forced to leave Hungary

o   Soros was targeted by victor Orban

§  2018 anti Soros laws: laws that required organizations who work with migrants to register with Ministry of Interior; Could be rejected for national security reasons; 25% tax

§  2018 open society fund forced to leave the country; CEU leaves years later

§  Victor Orban speech, March 15, 2018: “let's not distract ourselves: we do not need to fight the anemic little opposition parties, but an international network which is organized into an empire. We are up against media outlets maintained by foreign concerns and domestic oligarchs, professionally hired activists, troublemaking protest organizers, and a chain of NGO's financed by an international speculator, summed up by an embodied in the name “George Soros”. This is the world we must fight in order to defend that which is ours. The good soldier does not fight because he hates that which is facing him, but because he loves that which is behind him. He loves Hungary and Hungarians.”

Sylvia Meagher

o   Sylvia Meagher, organized out of her Manhattan apartment

o   Had been a target of McCarthyism in 1953

o   Led personal research into the Warren Commission, doubting the events

Thomas Jefferson’s “Draft of Instructions to the Virginia Delegates in the Continental Congress”

o   Thomas Jefferson in 1774 tweaks out over the British attempting to tyrannize and enslave the American people through a deliberate and systematical plan.

o   The context for Jeffersons “instructions” is: may 1774, closing of the Boston harbor following Boston Tea Party;

§  Virginia's Burgess dissolved by monarchies appointed governor, calls to end trade with Great Britain;

§  Planning for Virginia convention and August 1774, composed of elected delegates;

§  Continental Congress was September to October 1774;

§  Letter is a draft of Summary View of the Rights of British America, published in 1774, which became a starting point for Declaration of Independence

Key events related to European migration and fears and anxieties about migration to Europe after World War II until 2015, as discussed in lecture

-       Post World War 2 decolonization and economic boom in Europe created labor demands.

-       Guest worker programs in West Germany and Turkey ( 1961 through 1973 closed parentheses brought migrants who often stayed permanently

-       1973 OPEC oil crisis led to economic precarity decline of manufacturing jobs and increased fears about the fate of the nation

-       Rise of neo Nazism and right wing extremism in Europe in the 1980s and 1990s

-       Concerns over population decline and the integration of ethnic minorities fuelled anxieties about immigration

Key events from the European migrant crisis that culminated in Viktor Orbán’s decision to refuse asylum-seekers entry into Hungary

-       Syrian civil war in 2015 displaced millions; Some aimed for EU countries, primarily germany

-       Hungary by law required to process asylum claims; Housed 1500 refugees by August 2015 most moved on to Germany

-       Dublin regulations initially required asylum seekers to remain in the country of entry; Merkel suspends this in Germany in August 2015

-       Hungary closes its borders to refugees in September 2015

-       Orban frames himself as the defender of Christian Europe against Muslim migrants and portrays EU and philanthropist George Soros as part of a conspiracy to undermine hungary

-       Anti Soros laws in 2018: NGO's working with migrants required to register and were taxed; Open society fund forced to leave Hungary; CEU relocated abroad

Key events that led to the rise of Deep State conspiracy theories, as argued in lecture

-       David wise and Thomas Ross, the invisible government (1964) introduced idea of two governments: invisible and invisible

-       Expansion of us during Cold War: growth of federal employees, new deal, FBI, CIA, and Johnson's great society

-       Loss of trust in government due to Vietnam War from 1955 the 1975, anti war and civil rights movement, and Cold War conformism

-       Investigative journalism exposing secretive government programs: Cointelpro in 1971, Pentagon Papers in 1971, Tuskegee experiments in 1972, Watergate from 1972 to 1974, MK ultra 1975

-       Jfk assassination (1963) and subsequent skepticism of the warren commission fueled amateur investigation and public suspicion

Key events that created the conditions for the emergence of Qanon

-       2017: Q posts on 4 Chan claiming a vast conspiracy within U.S. government and democratic party

-       Followers believe Q is a high level government insider exposing a deep state conspiracy

-       Ties to preexisting conspiracies like pizzagate

-       Social media amplification on Reddit Facebook Twitter and YouTube

-       Q Anon develops its own epistemology: knowledge created, verified, and circulated within the community bypassing traditional institutions

-       Core assumptions remain unquestioned; lack of full evidence fuels further investigation by followers

Key events in Wood’s argument about conspiratorial thinking

-       Conspiratorial thinking was common among educated elites in the 18th century; Not necessarily irrational or marginal

-       Shift in 17th to 18th century thought: scientific revolution from Newton, political philosophy from Locke, history as a cause and effect from Gibbon

-       Politics and society became increasingly complex like with the modern state, bureaucracy, industrial and agricultural revolutions

-       This complexity exceeded human capacity to understand, yet elites still prided themselves on explaining events through human design

-       Conspiratorial interpretations arose as a response to this contradiction: trying to make sense of events by attributing them to deliberate schemes

-       Example: fear of the illuminati controlling governments and industry, influencing revolutions, and overturning social order