Salvational Super-Agents and Conspiratorial Secret Agents: Conspiracy, Theory, and Fantasies of Control

Vaxxers, Chemtrails, Climate Change Hoax, Birtherism, Qanon, Pizzagate, Deep State, 9/11, Holocaust Denial, Immigrant Replacement, Incel, War Against Islam, Creeping Shariah. Conspiracy theories are everywhere. Their adherents are making headlines with mass shootings and determining elections with the support of reactionary populist politicians. According to a Cambridge University six-year international empirical study, "conspiracy theories are, nowadays, mainstream rather than marginal beliefs" (CRASSH News 2018). New and longstanding scholarship on conspiracy theory offers insights into the resurgence of white supremacy, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and authoritarian politics and identifications.

Donald Trump typifies the extent to which conspiracy theory is now mainstream. Trump launched his political career on the birther conspiracy and ran on anti-immigrant racial and religious replacement conspiracy—Latin Americans and Muslims are replacing white Christians from the nation. Trump propelled previously fringe conspiracy theorists such as Alex Jones into the mainstream and has propounded conspiracy theories of which he is the principle victim: a deep state witch hunt of his presidency, mainstream news conspiring to lie to the public with "fake news."

According to Richard J. Evans of the Conspiracy and Democracy project at Cambridge University,

A conspiracy theory is an attempt to explain an event, or a series of events, or a phenomenon of some sort, as the outcome of a secret plot aiming to deprive the people illegally of money, liberty, power, or knowledge. … Conspiracy theories are a form of alternative knowledge that regards knowledge produced by experts on events as unreliable; conspiracy theories posit an "establishment" that produces "official" knowledge, often with the ulterior motive of covering up the "real truth" about something.

(Evans 2018)

Conspiracy theorists find in conspiracies easy answers, certain knowledge in uncertain times, and feelings of agency. Conspiracies provide easy answers because they come ready-made and require neither evidence, the work of research, nor a broader interpretive theory that can explain patterns of social phenomena. Conspiracies appear to provide certain knowledge because they ground proof in the persons of discreet actors. They provide the conspiracy theorist with feelings (albeit false feelings) of agency by offering an explanation for inexplicable and uncertain conditions. Conspiracy theories appeal to those who experience powerlessness and evidence suggests that in turn exposure to conspiracy theory (such as a viewing of the Oliver Stone film JFK) results in reported increases in political cynicism and feelings of diminished political agency (Swami and Coles 2010, 561).

Conspiracy theory flourishes in contexts of inequality and political misrecognition. Evans claims, "More unequal countries with a lower quality of democracy tend to display higher levels of belief in the world cabal…" (2018). As economic inequality and social precarity has radically increased in the new gilded age, political power has become concentrated, and ecological precarity looms, conspiracy theory finds widespread use.

Conspiracy theories tend to be less attractive to those with higher levels of education.¹ As well, skepticism towards science, academics, journalists, and expert knowledge is growing. This is in part by design. Trump, Orban in Hungary, Duterte in the Philipines, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Erdogan in Turkey and other right-wing populists who trade in conspiracy theory actively seek to erode, destroy, or coopt knowledge-making institutions, including independent media, schools, and universities. By disseminating an abundance of lies they undermine confidence in the possibility of using knowledge and education to act on and shape the social world. Epistemologically, conspiracy theory works much like Donald Trump's yellow hair and speech: ersatz, outlandish, clownish, and dubious on the surface. The real function of persistent bullshit is to undermine confidence in the capacity of individuals to obtain knowledge and to act on that knowledge, as well as to discredit knowledge making institutions. As Jason Stanley points out, this is a standard move of fascist dictators to make the strongman's assertions the only ones that can be accepted as truth. Truth then is grounded in the body of the strongman (Stanley 2018, 71).

The commonly given reasons for the recent expansion of conspiracy theory include the proliferation of information on the internet, news provision coming from unedited social media sources such...