Fringe politics today is highly diverse and dynamic, reflecting the rapid social, technological, and economic changes of the 21st century. While the term “fringe” suggests ideas or movements outside the political mainstream, many fringe ideologies have increasingly influenced, or even reshaped, national and global political landscapes.
Recorded on February 4, 2025, this panel brought together a group of UC Berkeley graduate students from the fields of geography, anthropology, and sociology for a discussion on politics on the fringe through the lens of such topics as QAnon, religious studies, and California secessionism.
The panel featured Josefina Valdes Lanas, PhD candidate in Anthropology at UC Berkeley; Alexis Wood, PhD student in Geography at UC Berkeley; and Peter Forberg, PhD student in Sociology at UC Berkeley. Paul Pierson, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, moderated.
The event was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Geography, the Department of Sociology, the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley, the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI), and the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies.
Podcast and Transcript
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WOMAN’S VOICE: The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.
CORI HAYDEN: Welcome, everyone. It’s great to see you on this rainy Thursday on a very exciting week on all matters related to our panel. My name is Cori Hayden. I am the interim director of Social Science Matrix, and really delighted to welcome you to this extremely timely panel. The panel is about fringe politics, which seems to be more and more a misnomer.
Fringe politics are no longer confined to the periphery, as we have seen. And this is the case from the rise of QAnon to debates over California secessionism, Catholic theologies that offer a window into the anxieties and aspirations of this very rapidly changing world that we are in.
So today we have gathered an extraordinary panel of UC Berkeley graduate students, our pride and joy on this campus. These are students from anthropology, geography, and sociology to explore the dynamic forces that are driving fringe politics today. Now, this event is part of our new directions series, which features the cutting edge research of Berkeley PhD students.
Today’s panel is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Departments of Geography, Political Science, and Sociology, the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative, and the Center for Right-Wing Studies. Now, before I turn it over to our moderator and the panelists, I do want to just give you a quick preview on some events that are coming up.
We have a full slate of really exciting events coming up at the Matrix in the next, well, this whole semester. Next week, a fantastic Author Meets Critic event on the book, Society Despite the State– reimagining geographies of order, a couple of matrix on point events three in a row on wildfires in LA, virtual realities, digital space, and mainstreaming psychedelics, and then some additional Author Meets Critics events, as you can see here.
So I do hope you will continue to join us for what looks to be an action packed semester at the matrix. Let me now introduce our moderator, Paul Pierson. Professor Pierson is the John Gross Distinguished Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley and the Director of the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative, also known to many of you as BESI.
He has written extensively on American politics, including his latest book, Let Them Eat Tweets– How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality, which examines how plutocrats and right-wing populists have shaped a party that undermines democracy. Without further ado, let me turn this panel over to Paul. And thanks very much. Looking forward to this.
PAUL PIERSON: Thanks a lot. Like you said, it’s very timely, this panel. I’ve been studying the political right for over 20 years, and watched as what started out as a fringy operation gradually marched its way into greater and greater control of the Republican Party. And there I’m thinking about the Koch brothers network and folks like that. And then the last few years, we’ve watched a new, even fringier set of actors, or what we’re seeing is even further on the fringe at the outset, pretty rapidly displace those folks.
And now they’re not only have displaced those folks, they’re displacing the people who work in USAID and the Office of Personnel Management. And they’ve moved in with their cots and everything. So I think the basic message is what starts on the fringe doesn’t necessarily stay on the fringe. So it’s very timely to be having this conversation. And it’s a very Social Science Matrix Event, I think, to have people from three different departments moderated by somebody from a fourth department.
And as you were saying, to have to really be celebrating our graduate students. So without any further from me, we’ll have presentations first by Josefina Valdes Lanas from the Anthropology Department, and then Alexis Wood from the Geography Department, and then Peter Forberg from the Sociology Department. And they’ll each talk for 12 or 15 minutes, and then we’ll open it up for discussion, open it up for questions. So, Josefina, the floor is yours.
JOSEFINA VALDES LANAS: OK, thank you, Paul. Can you hear me? Yeah. Thank you, Cori, to the organizers and, well, everyone who’s here, despite the rain. I want to show you a piece of my dissertation that is titled The Passion of the Exception– Ordinary Sacrifices and the Flexibility of Authoritarianism, in which I examine Opus Dei practices in neoliberal Chile.
Opus Dei is a movement, a congregation of the Catholic Church, a conservative branch of the Catholic Church. And all over the world, but in Chile in particular, they congregate a very conservative, traditional, wealthy elite. Yes. And my project so far is looking like what I’m calling a phenomenology of authority. I’m looking at the sacrificial imagination of these practitioners, my interlocutors.
The sacrificial imagination means basically to look at their practices, internal and invisible practices in which they frame their very ordinary actions, most times, trivial actions as a sacrifice, and actually, as a liturgical sacrifice. And in these practices, I’m seeing like a very profound encounter between neoliberal values and theology.
And I address that encounter happens very concretely in the notions that I encounter in the field of efficacious action or efficacy that are both present in the theology of the liturgical action and, of course, in neoliberalism. And in this combination, my argument is that they are actually because they have too much power, power is expanding on its own. So they are actually transforming the theopolitical substance of their authority.
And yes. And a few minutes before, this was my last slide. But I move it here just because I want to be able to show you– my main objective is to show you that through these practices, Opus Dei members are actually inhabiting an ethics, a differentiated ethics, an ethics that is different and that implies different temporal and therefore political horizons.
OK, and before starting, a very few words on why the neoliberal, even though I know it’s like a very unfashionable term these days, but I don’t want to– I’ll be happy to speak more about this if you’re interested. But I want to delve into the theology. But why neoliberalism? Just because I’m like, again, examining the conceptual congruence between economics and theology and its actual social effects.
Of course, because of the very exceptional history of neoliberalism in Chile, we have to remember a history of foreign intervention in which the US State Department crafted this Chile project and a project that could only be implemented through the means of a civic military dictatorship.
And it’s in this civic component of the dictatorship that allowed for it to last 17 years, that Opus Dei members are introduced both as supporters of the regime and as implementers of the neoliberal system, and also because Opus Dei in general, since its beginning in Spain, its project of aiming for sanctity, from perfection, from your own state could be certainly read as an anti-communist project.
OK, so we all know that the neoliberal model ended up producing very clear inequality even in Chile. And despite the fact that Milton Friedman called it the Chilean miracle, the inequality until it’s still ongoing. And I have figures, if you’re interested. But I wanted to say that it’s important neoliberalism because as a concept, and as an ideology was very prominent in the social revolts of 2019. And it’s also important because there was lots of public debate around neoliberalism in its specific relation with Opus Dei.
OK, so a few years forward, we are now enduring also in Chile, a conservative backlash after the social revolts and its failure into achieving structural transformation. This man was recently, well, not so recently, but was selected in the second project of the constitution.
And he is an honorary member of Opus Dei. That means he lives in chastity, lives in communal life, gives all of his salary to the congregation. OK, so this also meant that the public opinion had to learn what it means to follow the form of life of Opus Dei.
Now, let me radically shift gears and go into the more satirical parts that are my thing, the theology. I’m calling this section the tyranny of immanence, liturgical authority, or the ethics of action of Opus Dei member. This is a photo from the field that I love because it’s very imminent and has a lot of things, but I also really like that it has a bottle of mayonnaise, and we Chileans really love mayonnaise. We put it into everything. So it’s very characteristic.
So the life plan are the norms that Opus Dei people follow, and they are a lot of norms– very concrete, tangible norms, such as going to mass every day, corporal mortification, fasting, but also very abstract ones such as being joyful, smiling. But it’s overall it’s a lot. So I was very surprised in the first phase of my fieldwork. But when at the beginning, I met a senior member and she said, I am a member of Opus Dei because it is extremely easy.
They give you complete freedom. Nobody cares if you do this or that. OK, so this was in sharp contrast with what I knew from Opus Dei discipline and what is known from the outside. A very complete account of the influence of Opus Dei in Chile starts with the testimony of a former member who had left by saying it was simply too difficult for me. I couldn’t comply with all that was required.
OK, so just keep in mind this tension between too easy from the inside and too difficult from the outside to then go back to the ethics. OK, so I learned soon, during my two years of ethnographic fieldwork, that the life plan has a very flexible structure that is very important. People were very recurrent in repeating the metaphor that the founder, Escrivá de Balaguer, who is a saint of the church, used to say about the life plan having to fit like a glove into your own particular life, into your very different secular activities.
So how this flexible structure can be combined with a total regimentation of life, it is by finding the divine in the ordinary actions of your life. So the ever shifting focus of the sacred, that is moving all around, and also the leniency towards norms and the flexibility towards norms can be found in this quote by a young woman, mother of three.
She says, “When there are simply no more hours left in the day, and I can’t attend to daily mass, I don’t feel bad. I transform bath time with my kids into a liturgy. In those cases, bathing my children becomes my liturgy.” So OK, this quote could be read as an excuse, as a desire of being mindfulness, mindful, sorry, and present with your children. But these explanations wouldn’t illuminate what is actually happening, the practice that this woman is performing in her imagination.
She is referring to making an offering, which is not actually a rare practice in the Catholic Church. An offering is an event of the imagination, a practice of framing an action in alignment with the passion of Christ. It has a ritual effect, pleasing God or alleviating his pains. And any action can be aligned with the cross. A very common example that I encountered often was, for example, skipping dessert, or skipping a portion of your dessert that was like all over.
And everything can be aligned as a passion because the passion we shouldn’t imagine just the action of death of Christ in the cross, but as a whole complex apparatus of a narrative, a theological apparatus, normative, affective, dramaturgical, participatory that inhabits the imagination of my interlocutors.
And I really like the example of bathing children because of its corporeal intensity. I really think it illuminates the passion aspect because, well, everyone who has ever done this will know that cleaning up a toddler is both very exhausting. You have this woman is on her knees. It’s draining physically, emotionally, but it’s also so joyful and delicious. It’s a clean baby.
And so I want to invoke a choreography of also sensations, bubbles, smells, caresses that really bring the passion effect here. So what is particular of apostate? My argument is that when this woman says, this is my liturgy, she’s not using a metaphor, even if we take the metaphor very seriously.
She actually is invoking the theological framework of the liturgy. She’s framing her actions into the liturgical logic given by theology, which means that she assesses her actions within this framework. Because of this, when my interlocutors would offer daily actions, they never really doubted their efficacy. They never had doubts on their intentions, the earnestness of it, should I be offering something that is more relevant, more big, more important? No.
Ritual efficacy appeared to be completely secured, yes, completely guaranteed by a differentiated logic. So this meant that it was removed from features of interior features. And of course, this has to be a transformative device of subjectivity because if your quotidian actions are continuously embedded in this logic of complete ritual efficacy, this comes with power. But also it emerges from power. So keep that in mind.
So what is the differentiated logic that I’m referring to? I’m referring to the liturgical praxis that Giorgio Agamben explained. And this is basically a system that the church had to create to secure the continuity of its mystery, the death of Christ being repeated in the mass. So it’s this is very like cryptic, but bear with me. You need to have a mystery, that is, the passion, the liturgy, the sacrifice being if it’s what they believe it is.
The mystery is administered by a minister by virtue of a ministerium. This means that the mystery coincides with the minister through a ministerium. This means that the priest, when the priest is performing the Eucharist, he also partakes of the mystery.
And my argument, through examining their practices and watching the authority with which they perform these sacrifices, is that my informants place themselves in this analogical chain. And they, in fact, would participate of this paradoxical subjectivity, that is, the paradoxical subjectivity of the priest in which what you do, your action coincides with your being. So coming back, they are inhabiting an ethics of action that was created for a sacrament, and they are taking into their everyday lives.
And I made something to close with neoliberalism, but it’s not necessarily about efficacy. And yeah, we can talk about that later, but it’s related to the efficacy of the neoliberal with the efficacy of the theological. Sorry. OK, thank you. And my email, if you were to have any questions or suggestions, I love to talk about this. So please write to me. Thank you so much.
PAUL PIERSON: Thank you.
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ALEXIS WOOD: Hi. My name is Alexis Wood. I’m from the Department of Geography and the Berkeley Center of New Media. I work out of studio geo, an experimental cartography studio in the Geography Department. And thank you so much for the invitation to come speak today. And thank you so much for Peter for suggesting us all get together because it’s the right-wing studies thing. It’s not a big thing on campus, unsurprisingly.
So before we start off, I want to address this question right off the bat because I teach intro to geography, and this is the first question we try to address immediately, or else our work doesn’t really make too much sense or it’s confusing. So I wanted to give you three principles. Space– it is not just a surface where events take place. It’s a multiplicity of flows that are produced and reproduced by power relations.
And within this, there are power geometries imbued in space that produce and reproduce that space, influencing what sort of stories get told. And three, the stories, the stories that we choose to tell influence the production of power and space. If we find new ways to tell stories, we change the way power and space are produced. And this in turn changes what stories can be told. That sounds very roundabout, and it’s because it is.
Our favorite geography quote is from Ruth Wilson Gilmore. A student questioned why she would get a PhD in geography. I mean, like all of our parents do constantly. And she’s like, well, why would you study where Nebraska is? She’s like, I’m not studying where Nebraska is. I’m studying why Nebraska is. And if that didn’t confuse everybody so much more in my household.
Well, I study particularly the state secessionist movements and how digital space in a rapidly changing physical space come together to produce and reproduce what would be considered a fringe politic, a fringe geography, if you will. Today I’m going to focus on the geographies of Northern California in particular. And now, keeping in mind our three principles of geography, I want to bring you back to 2021, I’m so sorry, to an ultimately unsuccessful California Governor Gavin Newsom’s recall election.
When the petition was handed in and the signatures counted, there was a general shock that emerged in the news media that the petition number had actually been achieved. Even though that number is quite low in comparison to the general population of the state, this was only the second time in the state’s history that had been achieved. So in this sort of flurry, various maps flew around the internet trying to explain why this petition, out of the 100 that had circulated previously, was successful.
There were maps overlaying signature data with 2016 election data, population density, educational attainment, COVID 19 cases, trying to understand what it was about these counties that led to a successful petition. But here’s the thing about maps. They are very, very particular types of abstractions. They are very particular arguments which demonstrate a thing’s most quantifiable aspects. They are inherently limited by the types of data available. And then in data itself is limited by the world’s quantifiability because not everything is or should be quantified.
So if you make a map using that signature data provided by the Secretary of State, you will end up with something that looks similar to on the left. This is actually, the first map I ever made, and I keep it because it’s close to my heart. But because I lived in the far North of California, I know that these counties fall in the boundaries of the State of Jefferson, a 150-year-old state secessionist movement.
I also knew that the act of organization of the State of Jefferson had been aggressively leading that particular recall campaign in-person and on Facebook since 2019. But again, maps are limited by data. And what data is an imaginary state boundary to a state GIS office. And as some of my U reps in the room can attest to, they are not well organized either.
I argue that these boundaries, even though they are imagined, are exceptionally important in understanding deep and long standing socioeconomic and political fractures if one wants to use that word in the United States. And while Northern California and California more generally has always had a tendency towards breaking apart, the movement that we’re seeing today is directly descended from a movement that began in 1940, when Northern California and Southern Oregon tried to secede from their respective states.
In this image, supporters shut down Highway 99 every other Tuesday to hand out this proclamation of independence I’ve copied on the slide. At this point, the movement had elected a governor and had a capital city, Yreka. But this movement would be put on hold with the event of Pearl Harbor about a month later.
Today, the movement has remained quite consistent in their messaging. Their home is simultaneously an extraction site for the government, while suffering from a lack of investment in economy and infrastructure. These frustrations are further exacerbated by the idea that the interest of rural regions lack fair representation in the respective state governments and in the federal governments.
The result is an rural or rural urban divide, not being not only a political division, a geographical division, but an untranslatability between the two spaces. This was one of my favorite copypastas from that minute just because of that first sentence where it says, while I live in the same state as you, I feel a world away. And that’s geographical, folks.
So with this, I ask that we look at these regions as more than official boundaries delineated by the map, more than demographics, but rather as affective states, where power geometries present between rural and urban divide have produced and reproduced a space where feelings that accompany state secessionism proliferate.
So just to bring us back to geography, think of space in this context as layers of paint where actions, events, the general trajectory of an age, as Raymond Williams would say, lays down texture for the next layer that is being splattered plopped on the page. Space is constantly being reproduced, retextured, but what came before it is still there, in a way, is being constantly produced and reproduced.
It’s not about where the state of Jefferson, but why the State of Jefferson? With this question in mind, I’ve been hosting a project documenting the imagined states of the US alongside archival work to understand where, yes, sure, it is still a map, but importantly, why these state secessionist movements exist, what develops and sustains these spaces, and what do they look like? All boundaries are constructed, but it’s which one of these constructions we choose to tell stories about that matter in the creation of space, particularly, and in the continuation or disruption of power.
So back to maps. If we choose to only tell the stories that we’ve heard again and again, what are we aiming to understand, actually? Look at this map. It’s telling me, telling us something we all know. I ask you to propose questions that center around why and to be open to different stories. So why the State of Jefferson? Why is it that both a white supremacy group and a gay liberation movement tried to overtake Alpine County in the 1970s to institute a new community? Why the most rural County in California?
There’s something about that geography in particular. Why are stories about white settlers the loudest stories? Where are the agencies of diverse identities in the regions that we paint as white? Yes, colonialism and white supremacy. But there is more than just these structures which have shaped and continue to shape space. What are the geographies of Northern California, which have continued as an American frontier, where there is intense precarity, but also amazing possibility? California has always been the frontier, but Northern California has always been on the fringe.
I find it hard to believe that we can look at these images and not understand in some capacity why the state of Jefferson? And this that we can look at these images and not understand the ongoingness of space, the reproduction of space, which has been hijacked by colonialism, by neoliberalism, by capitalism to produce precarity and insecurity.
This image was posted on January 7, 2021. Insurrection seems outrageous. But when a region has required a life of insecurity, where do you put that anger and that grief? This is not solely a problem of politics, but one of economic insecurity and economic system which demands exploitation. If we’re told a different story about the State of Jefferson, what would it tell us about the rural urban divide in the US? If we took a step back and shifted to a conversation about class, about wealth and poverty, about race and settler colonialism, what could we address?
Thanks to my advisor, Clancy Wilmott, and my colleagues of the Department of Geography have so far endured almost three years of my rage. And thank you to the Berkeley Center of New Media, as well as the NSF, for as long as it exists for my funding. All right, thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
PETER FORBERG: All right, I’m going to stay sitting here, if that’s OK with everyone, because I do not have slides to present. At some point, I’ll ask you to imagine a slide, but we’ll get there. So first, thank you to the Social Science Matrix, to Cori and Ambrosia for organizing this, and to Paul for moderating and for my co-panelists for presenting their work up here.
So I’m going to go through three stages. I’m going to start in the very concrete and talk about some empirical work. And then I’m going to move into higher and higher levels of abstraction. At some point it may seem like I am speaking in tongues, but I promise I will then come back down and get real again.
So let’s start with the concrete. So my previous work has been on the conspiracy theory QAnon. I’ll do a very brief explainer, which is simply that QAnon was a conspiracy theory that began on Fortune. You might have heard of it. It is a well-known alt-right message board. It essentially alleged during Trump’s first presidency that there was a secret plot that was working to overthrow the “Deep state,” which was comprised of celebrities and bankers and intellectuals who actually run the United States government.
So QAnon alleged that there was an insider within the Trump administration, who was telling them all this information about how soon Hillary Clinton would be arrested, the United States would be liberated by perhaps the National Guard. Maybe it was the COVID vaccine was actually going to eliminate all the bad people.
The conspiracy theory came in many different flavors and forms, but ultimately, it was a conspiracy theory about a group of people, QAnon, who had secret access to information that would help them revolt against an evil, authoritarian United States government that we didn’t even know about because it lurked so far beneath the surface. It was not the people we voted for.
So I want to understand how people joined this movement. How did people come to believe the political reality of QAnon that I have just described to you. And I did this by conducting interviews, doing ethnographic work with QAnon followers, and doing some computational analysis of their Twitter bios and tweets. Some of the general takeaways is that QAnon acted as a place for emotional investment in an identity, as a response to particular political grievances.
What do I mean by that? Well, if I had a slide, it would be one of my many, many attempts to visualize QAnon Twitter bios. These are all incredibly difficult to visualize. Their language, language is messy, and I’ve tried a million strategies. I’m finally getting close to one, and I wish I had it prepared for today.
But you would see a big bubble that says QAnon, and then you’d see a million different lines heading out in different directions, going to disabled veteran or animal lover or Save the Children or anti-pedophilia, or sometimes gay liberation, Brazilian liberation. Portuguese liberation, QAnon Japan. It’s a raft of identities, all of which center around this thing called QAnon, which I explained to you. I told you what it was, but that’s really a misnomer.
I like to think of QAnon as a floating signifier. What I mean by that is that there is no thing that is QAnon. Qanon doesn’t represent any one ideology, any one belief. Instead, it’s a placeholder for a lot of different beliefs, a lot of different etiologies. It’s where people who were abused in the foster care system, or people who served in Vietnam, can project their anxieties about the current state of the United States and claim that they have agency and control over what’s going to happen because they have this secret knowledge about how they’re going to overthrow the US government.
So what does QAnon represent? What does it mean? It’s an identity. It’s an identity that people invest in because it makes them feel good, and it allows them to project political possibilities. It allows them to build a community. It allows a lot of people to make a lot of money by selling merch, by hosting podcasts, by making crypto coins. So there’s other reasons for investing in QAnon beyond the emotional, but the financial investment.
And it’s a way of converting apathy, of taking a lot of people, such as some of my interview subjects who said, I’d given up on politics. I hadn’t voted in years, and now here I am. And this is why QAnon resonated not just among Republicans, which was by far its largest demographic, but also among independents. What I really want to say QAnon allows, though, is a form of identity, which necessarily entails a vision of social reality. A vision of political reality is a counter epistemic discourse.
You learned that the Constitution worked from Schoolhouse Rock of writing a bill, and it goes and it’s contested and it’s made into a law. That’s not how the government works. There’s someone else pulling the strings who’s actually controlling the government. And this is what QAnon offers. It is a counter epistemic, a counter truth claim that gives people control over organizations that don’t really make sense to them, like Big Pharma or the government, or the finance industry, the banks, the hospitals.
So it held a theory of social reality. And with that it held a theory of political change. And this is why QAnon has been coined– it has been called participatory disinformation. Participatory disinformation, a term coined by Kate Starbird. It’s not disinformation coming from just the Russians broadcasting it into your brain. It is instead disinformation that you are actively creating with your friends. And QAnon would view it as a community of friends and a family working together to build this alternative truth.
And then they’ve built this alternative truth, and they stormed the capital. And they start running for boards of electors and school boards and house reps. And that’s where my research ended, right? Was right as QAnon was getting close to the sources of power. I left my undergraduate institution. I had to find a job. And I was left with this question, what happens when the dog catches the car?
What happens when these people who have an alternative vision of how the government works, are suddenly the people leading the government? I think we’re getting a good image of that right now. I think we’re getting a good image of what happens when the dog is driving the car if we look at what is going on in the United States.
And so what I’m interested in are two movements, not social movements, the way I’ve talked about QAnon, but two intellectual movements of where I think those of us studying fringe politics, those of us studying the right, should be looking. And the first one is I want us to think about these floating signifiers, things like QAnon, things like the anti-trans movement, things like the State of Jefferson, things like the new Christianity movement, whether that is the Opus Dei, whether that’s Evangelicalism, these identities that people have been able to latch onto, and invest their political ambitions in, and how they’ve become linked together.
Why are all of these people from disparate backgrounds attaching to something like QAnon? Why are there people from diverse political sects who have all come together to agree on this signifier of QAnon? And I think this has a lot to do with the way we talk about myths/disinformation. You might not have ever heard of myths/disinformation five, six years ago, but now it’s how we understand how everyone joins these political movements.
We think people must have had their brains hacked by YouTube. People must be so gullible as to believe in this misinformation. I like Kate Starbird’s version better. I like the idea that people are investing in this misinformation for a reason. They’re joining these movements because they believe in what’s going on, but also that there are media structures that are enabling them, such as social media, to create this kind of misinformation and that these media structures are really effective at grouping together disparate beliefs and creating new political contingencies that surprise us.
Some of the work on QAnon, I was surprised to see that a lot of people with left leaning critiques of Big Pharma or the mainstream media were suddenly like, I can deal with the White supremacists. They were able to use their position in digital space and media space to come together and create new political formations that we hadn’t seen before. And now those media elites, the people who have created these platforms, the people like Elon Musk, who has a wild political background, are now in the reins of government.
We’ve had more people from Fox News, from One America News in the Trump administration than we’ve ever seen someone from MSNBC or the Washington Post joining up in previous administrations or even Fox News in previous Republican administrations. What does it mean that these media elites, the people who have helped to construct signifiers like QAnon, are now part of this government coalition? So I want us to understand how these disparate groups come together.
The second movement that I want us to make, the second intellectual move I want us to make, is to understand what happens when the dog is driving the car. I think that is the big question. What happens when people like QAnon, who believe that the election was stolen, are suddenly in charge of boards of electors, and are trying to put their belief, which is often based on absolutely nothing. It’s completely fake. It’s completely fabricated. They’re trying to govern on the basis of an ideology that has no grounding in reality. What? These are the two kind of maneuvers that I’m very curious about studying.
So that was me getting more and more abstract. But now I want to bring it back down and talk about what would it look like to continue doing this kind of research, to start studying the political elites, to start studying the processes of the formation of something like QAnon? I will say the landscape has changed drastically. In the past two weeks, the landscape has changed.
I think we need to be very careful about how people who are studying the right-wing think about doing this kind of research. Is it possible that someone like me could just go out and interview a bunch of QAnons, again? Would I be able to do that? Would I be able to study State of Jefferson or white supremacists, or is this still possible, given the way that researchers have been exposed in recent weeks to more and more political threats? What does this mean for our disciplines, for our field studies, if researchers are increasingly being seen as the target by the administrative state.
So this is something I’ve been thinking a lot about. If anyone’s interested in this topic, I’m working on a paper on it with a professor in which we’re thinking about research because she’s a scholar of gender. She has a lot of students who come and say, I want to study the abortion providers who are defying Texas State law. I want to study the teachers who are still using pronouns when they shouldn’t. I want to study the children who are transitioning in states where it’s illegal.
And we say, why would you do that? Why would you open yourself up and open your research participants up to all of the dangers in this current moment? And so we need to think– and I’m not saying that kind of research can’t be done. I’m not saying it’s not important. I’m not saying there aren’t strategies for doing that. But I want to know, how are we working to make sure that researchers are safe and that we’re studying up, rather than just studying the people who are in danger?
How do we create research programs that are focused on studying the media elites, the administrative elites, the people who are taking away our funding, who are trying to shut down our schools, who are taking away course requirements in Florida. What does sociology, geography, anthropology, political science, anything do in this kind of research environment? And how do we do it ethically?
I think we also need to think about how– I’ve learned a lot about QAnon. I think I know quite a bit about how QAnon started and how it was formed. But in the midst of January 6, in the midst of the recent Trump election, I don’t know what to do about it. How do we also think about praxis? How do we think about taking our insights into these kinds of movements and using them to inform political organization counter movements that are addressing some of these concerns, that people in these movements have to try to undermine their power and authority within the US?
And my last note is when I first started studying QAnon, it felt surreal. I started studying QAnon before the COVID pandemic. At that time, it was still kind of a fringe thing on some message boards, and I was like, oh, this is just strange. It reminds me of some guys from high school I knew who would spend a lot of time on Fortune. It was odd that this thing was happening. I think a lot of political reality right now feels very surreal, and I think we should lean into that.
I think there is a tendency to just dismiss it, to call it misinformation, to call it disinformation, to call it fascism. And I it’s all of those things. But I think we should say, but then why is it here? Lean into that strangeness, try to understand why it feels strange to us and get inside of its head. And with that, I think this is a panel for scholars of the right-wing, scholars of fringe politics. And I guess my statement is, I think we’re all scholars of the right-wing and of fringe politics.
Now, I think if you’re studying medicine or finance or governance, if you’re studying politics, if you’re studying education, these forces are now determining, they are overdetermining, I think, the trajectory of a lot of our studies in the way that during the COVID 19 pandemic, everyone had to account for how COVID was changing, how we thought about our research. I think we all have to think about how the current political environment is changing, how we approach and think about our research.
And I think we’ve done ourselves a disservice by pretending in the past that we could study politics without addressing this– that you could study politics in the early 2000 without thinking about the Tea Party. You could study what was going on during COVID and the recent Trump election without thinking about QAnon or thinking about these kinds of movements. Yeah, so that’s my spiel. Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
PAUL PIERSON: All right, so we can open it up for questions. I have to just– I can’t resist before doing that to say, Peter, that when you said the dog is now driving the car, I kept waiting for you to say the DOGE is now driving the car.
[LAUGHTER]
PETER FORBERG: I missed it. Dang it.
PAUL PIERSON: Any questions? Yeah.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have a question for Peter. Oh, thanks. Really interesting presentation, all of you. And I guess this is a question for you, Peter, that I think ties into Josefina’s presentation, too. I’m curious how you think about and how you theorize the difference between– you said the elites that are sort of controlling the offices of government now, and they might be taking on the QAnon mythos without actually participating in the ritualistic practices that actually are understood in the same way that someone, a mother washing her child, is understanding that practice through the actual structure of a Christian understanding of the world. So I guess I’m wondering how you think about those two– the differentiation there.
PETER FORBERG: I could– yeah.
PAUL PIERSON: You can start.
PETER FORBERG: I’ll say, this is something I’ve been thinking about. I really like this question. I have this budding theory of things like Trump’s maneuvers around tariffs, or this whole DOGE, or whatever these kinds of political spectacles might be. I see them as being a way of– I mean, I think Paul’s book does a wonderful job of analyzing these kinds of forces of– I don’t want to say mystification, but there’s a reason why we talk about misinformation.
There’s a reason why we talk about there being a separation between what is going on in government and what is going on with the people on the ground. And I QAnon is a perfect example of this. In which people would say, oh, Trump is doing xyz thing. They would think he would use the right language. He would make symbolic gestures showing that he has taken up their beliefs, that he’s practicing their beliefs.
I think there’s a lot of people in the elite who are doing that, who know how to speak the language of the people who give them– supply them votes and supply them support, and then to do whatever they want behind the scenes. And I think that’s where studying power becomes really important. I’ll just quickly say, I think someone who had a really great understanding of this was Arlie Hochschild in her latest book, is talking about how there’s bifurcations of media and thus of understanding.
Such that Trump does something or xyz right wing figure does something, and the liberal media interprets it one way, and the right wing media interprets it another way. And then the people on the ground only see that slice of reality. And so we’re able to put together the logic that says, Trump didn’t actually get anything when he threatened Mexico with tariffs.
They did something that they already promised to do four years ago. But people aren’t seeing that half of the narrative. They’re seeing Trump threatened, and then he got a concession. And this kind of bifurcation of reality between what the elites know and what the people know allows them to fill that gap with the spectacle of the right language, of the right discourse. I hope that addresses what you were getting at.
JOSEFINA VALDES LANAS: Hello. I guess I would just add that in my case, because of scale, I’m very interested in your point and in the interaction and how authority acts between different elites. But in the case of my research, because of scale and numbers, is very different because Chile is a country of 20 million people. I think California only is like 70 or 40.
So the traditional elite dominates– the elite that I’m describing dominates the media. Of course, I’m there are intellectual elites that don’t participate of Opus Dei, but it’s– I have it easy in that way, I think. But what I wanted to add is that studying the right wing always will confront you with your own elite status as we in an intellectual elite. And this day and age, I think it becomes more tense, the relation that we get with it.
A few weeks ago, I was chewing on some words that I heard because, of course, we are all in shock. But a very intellectual person was asking, how immigrants can vote for someone that, of course, we’ve heard this a million times, for someone that is like going to impede their rights. But that has the presumption that immigrants are just immigrants and not they’re people with a vast variety of beliefs and an ideology, some cross by history. And so yeah. And in that sense, you get the overlapping power structures of elites working right in that comment, I would say. Like, reducing a subject into just this legal status. I don’t know if– yeah, that’s what I think [? I have. ?]
PAUL PIERSON: Any questions.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi. Thank you so much for your presentations. So my question is about the relationship between neoliberalism and right wing populism, like in QAnon, or intermingled with QAnon. So I’ve argued in my research that neoliberal economic policies propagated by both major political parties severely impacted many regions of the US, and that both major political parties had populist rebellions in 2016, resulting in Bernie Sanders movement in 2016 and Donald Trump’s movement in 2016.
And that the Republicans were– had their populist rebellion win out while the Democrats suppressed their– largely suppressed their populist rebellion, which is– and I’ve argued that that’s part of why we’re here, where we are today. So what do you all think that that might mean in the future for partisan politics being the way to maybe combat the rise of QAnon or push back against it in any way?
PETER FORBERG: Anyone else want to talk about neoliberalism? I think it applies to all of us. But yeah. I mean, I think you’re positioning the rise of QAnon and the right wing populist politics as emerging from neoliberal practices, I think, is– largely resonates with everything that I’ve come to understand about the political trajectories of a lot of these figures, how they’ve been able to tap into this discourse.
In terms of partisan politics, I mean, I think what we’re witnessing right now is that there’s this huge bifurcation within the Republican Party in which you’re able to have a party that holds people both like Steve Bannon and Elon Musk and Stephen Miller and however many– like, people who represent different economic factions, different class factions– as possible are all subsumed into this party, and they’re able to do this mystification strategy in which they can pretend that there are populist politics going on. They can talk about prices at the grocery store.
And I think what we witnessed with the campaign of Kamala Harris is really no concessions to a kind of a populist vision in that sense. It was about homeowners and the people who aren’t homeowners are like, I don’t know what– does that do for me? And so I think when we think about partisan politics, I mean, my take on it right now is the Democrats are failing deeply to show that there is a partisan way to integrate these kind of populist policies into their program.
And that they remain committed to, at best, a reactionary program against what is currently going on. But their responses to the takeover of USAID or any of the Treasury, so on and so forth, does not really suggest that they’re building a positive program, that they’re articulating a positive program that can address these concerns. Yeah. So that’s, I guess, where I’m at. Yeah.
JOSEFINA VALDES LANAS: In that sense, I would just add that neoliberalism is also, I would argue, an empty vessel signifier. Because when a party’s become under neoliberalism and they start making exceptions into integrating someone that, I don’t know, salted the capital and things like that, to accommodate– to have the flexibility to accommodate the exception is– well, from my department, famous anthropologist, Aihwa Ong– is not it’s not an exception of neoliberalism. It’s actually how it works. It has to work like that because it’s structurally inherently empty and it moves. So yeah, just I wanted to add that to your image that I think it’s great.
ALEXIS WOOD: Not explicitly related to my own research. But as somebody who grew up in the UK, which is only slightly less on fire than the US is on fire now, I think we’re seeing the Republican Party filling the vacuum for what would be a Labor Party. Because of increasing economic widening between classes, you see instability, you see a lot of desperation. I grew up with a– who is now a QAnon mother. And it was– a lot of it is charged by this, there is so much instability in my own life because there is nobody actually fighting for the working class, and now you just have two parties of elites bickering at each other. And who is there, really, except the Republican Party, which is now this face of instability and possible change, or you just have more of the same.
CORI HAYDEN: I think because I’m holding the mic, I become the eye contact person. So I have a cue here, there, here, here. I love it.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thanks for this panel. My question is for Josephine. So first, I loved your image of bathing the child. I can relate to the holiness and the hell of bathing a toddler, so that was very evocative. My question for you is about gender in Opus Dei. I’m not very knowledgeable about this movement. And if I’m understanding your presentation right, it sounds like there’s at least one individual in elected office from this movement. I’m assuming there’s maybe more. Is that right? Is it that one individual or are there more elected?
JOSEFINA VALDES LANAS: I know of one.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: One, OK.
JOSEFINA VALDES LANAS: I know it must be more. But there’s always someone important of Opus Dei in the history of Chile, I would say.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: OK. So my question is about, what is the role– what is the gender makeup of the followers of Opus Dei? Because it sounded like most of the quotes you had were from women. And I saw some parallels with the tradwives I follow, American tradwives, that I follow on social media, about sanctifying the domestic life. And so yeah, I’m just curious, what– and there’s women on social media play a big role in laundering white supremacist ideas here in the US. And so what role is the mother or women playing in widening the appeal of this movement?
JOSEFINA VALDES LANAS: Yeah, I appreciate that you’re bringing the tradwives because I think that they also– they inhabit a similar paradox than the women in Opus Dei. I’m thinking of a tradwife that supposedly sells like making everything from scratch and being submissive to the husband, but we also know that she’s the one earning the millions of dollars and there are plenty of domestic help. In the case of my [? interlocutors, ?] it’s the same.
They’re devoted to the domestic in this very affluent– so I’m very interested in what domestic then. And working with their ideology, their theology, as I said, is all about being efficient. So I’m just working now in a chapter that deals with those issues. And it’s, what is the efficiency of the domestic, which as a person that clean floor every day can imagine? But they don’t. So they would say, for them, the domestic is changing the water of the vessel.
And they actually think that that is effective because in their views, well, yeah, the role of women is about making atmospheres for others to thrive. And that gender model of efficiency and efficiency that is based on details. The productive efficacy of a detail, it’s very interesting because it has completely been integrated into the corporations and the institutions that Opus Dei lead.
For example, in a university that has– that is lead by Opus Dei, not directly, but people that are an Opus Dei and that work in a department of, let’s say, economists, they have a person that has a position of something administrative. But how people would frame it is, she’s like the housewife of the department. She is in charge of making everything nice.
And that nice is about productive for them, but it’s also a marker of class, of course. But yeah. And I didn’t mention, but because of the structure of Opus Dei, I only work with women. I knew that person, that guy, but just an interview. But I was bathing toddlers with women and attending to spiritual events. And thank you for your question.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Great panel. Just blown away by everybody’s research. One for the table, it’s a bit of a mouthful, but how do we reconcile a push for epistemic plurality, or recognizing that there are multiple ways of knowing and that some have been silenced by these legacies of slavery or colonialism, imperialism with the need to critically engage with fringe political discourses that challenge mainstream or orthodox truths. At what point does valuing diverse epistemologies risk legitimizing destructive, or at the very least, harmful ideologies?
JOSEFINA VALDES LANAS: No, I don’t know. That’s the most difficult question ever. I would say, like, where do you put your limit to engaging in dialogue with others? Is it fascism? But I think that line is very corrosive to me. And working with people that, yeah, still support a dictatorship that meant all sorts of atrocities, but also working in the scale of bathing children is always confronting me with that– because people are so layered, and that’s the beauty of anthropology, I would say. But I have no idea how to reply.
ALEXIS WOOD: This is actually a question that we think a lot about in my department in particular. One of the first things that we’re introduced to is, what would it mean to live in a flactoverse, basically, instead of a one-world world? And I think it really depends on what you think your contribution is, where you put your politics, and then how that translates into method.
So in my office, we do a lot of alternative cartographies. So right now, we were working with a Sogorea Te Land Trust to develop a cartography of the Bay Area that’s rooted in anti-colonial projection, working with them specifically to put their stories into a new cartography. And that in itself, producing that map, changes the story. And often, my students get very overwhelmed when I introduce them to the idea of epistemology. And they’re like, oh my god, so nothing actually means nothing.
And I’m like, no, no, no. You have to choose what means something to you in particular. And I remind them of the story that I try to tell them at the beginning of the semester that was a New York Times piece about somebody berating somebody else for being interested in anti-reflection glass on buildings to save birds. And he’s like, how could you care about this in a world that’s just falling apart? And he’s like, but how can any one person deal with a question of the world ending?
That’s just too much for any one person to deal with. You can only face the direction you can face, and then hopefully, enough of us face that direction, and we start moving in a better way. And seeing diverse stories as ways to re-world, basically. And I think my answer to the how do we risk engaging with damaging narratives, aren’t we already? So I think there’s more of a risk in not entertaining more diverse narratives.
PETER FORBERG: Yeah. I mean, this is the question. This is always the difficult one. I was reading Donna Haraway today. So my brain is not primed for this because I’m just thinking about situated knowledge. I think one thing– I mean, my kind of research program, if I’ve ever had one, is to say, I just– I want to take these beliefs seriously. And I think that there are a lot of people who, when I started doing this research, who said, I would never want to engage with this. I would never want to think about these things. I could never give an inch to any of these people.
And I think that’s a totally fair position, especially when some of the beliefs that you’re being exposed to strike so deeply at your core moral, ethical values. And so right now, I’m talking about it in the research ethics and the research practice framework. But I do want to say that that’s part of what I mean when I talk about the surrealism of doing this is. I mean, for this research, and I’m sure all of us have experienced this, it’s like bingeing content that makes me feel cognitive dissonance and deep anxiety about the nature of reality for hours and hours on end every single day.
And I think leaning into that anxiety and understanding, trying to understand the situated knowledge, a little bit of [INAUDIBLE], if you will, to get at why people believe in these epistemologies, these counter epistemologies is important so that when Curtis Yarvin or JD Vance goes on The New York Times there is an alternative that debunks that. And I’m against fact checking, debunking culture as a cure to democracy, but the practices that I’ve seen from research participants is, they’re so willing to look up alternative information.
But oftentimes, the kinds of– this is a tactic for conspiracy theory propagation, is that they’ll choose news stories or they’ll choose terms that are so specific to their conspiracy theory that when you look it up, you find yourself in a completely closed room. Such that you can’t find any– there’s nothing from the outside intervening on that epistemology. There would be times where I was deep into a three-hour documentary on some part of QAnon kind of mythos, and I would try to– I would be like, that can’t be true.
And I’d Google it, and all I would get would be references to this documentary. We can’t go out and fact checked everything. We can’t go out and do all of that. But to understand their language and how they present that language, I think, is important for developing an alternative discourse that both can provide a pathway for leaving that closed box, but that also addresses whether it’s the lack of a narrative for the working class.
Is like, OK, what are the kinds of questions that people in the working class are asking that lead them to this kind of epistemology? Literally, what are the things that they’re googling? What are the things that they’re checking on their news feed? And how can we understand that language and think about intervening in that language to put a different perspective in there? That’s a very– yeah, I think I have a lot of problems with what I’ve just said, and nobody should hold me to it, [LAUGHS] but that’s my initial thought.
CORI HAYDEN: We have a couple questions stacked up here. So I’m going to suggest [INAUDIBLE]. I’m going to suggest that we cluster the three remaining questions and put them to you all as a group. I have a question here, here, and in the back as well.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Sure. Thank you for such a rich panel. So I’ll try to be brief. Essentially, what role of history here? Because I think when we think about French politics, when we think about the surrealness of the dog driving the car, there’s this tendency to say this is either completely unprecedented or it’s totally isomorphic with 1930s Germany. And nothing in between.
So I wonder– this is not the first time that Christian cults or secession movements or fringe politics have had social movements and political rises. I mean, I just think about my own history, growing up in Mississippi, I went to two elementary schools. One was named Jefferson Davis, and the other was Beauvoir. The president of the Confederacy and the name of his White House. So I grew up around these things, and the US grew up around these things as well. So what role do we pull history out to understand that what’s new is, in a lot of ways, old as well.
CORI HAYDEN: Thank you.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thanks. Great panel, everyone. This was a question for Alexis, and I was really curious– you had this throwaway slide about arguing for affective states over imagined states or imagined communities riffing on Benedict Anderson, I assume. And I wanted you to unpack that a little bit, and to also think about, you’re using this in reference to geographically bounded secessionist movements, and I was wondering if you might be able to– could we think about the idea of affective states as a more dispersed kind of geographic imaginary? Does that make sense?
ALEXIS WOOD: Mhm.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yeah. OK.
CORI HAYDEN: Take notes on these questions.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thanks. Thanks for the panel. I’ll pose my question as maybe something you could drizzle over these other ones and just– you already commented on this a little bit. But I think when I think of the church and a rural secessionist movement and Fortran, I think of these things as very male-dominated patterns. And so I’m curious if all three of you could maybe comment again on the gender dynamics relevant in your movements, whether that’s the priests or the manosphere or and male female dynamics in rural America. Thanks.
PAUL PIERSON: And I can’t resist adding one more, because it’s all so interesting. And it’s probably not huge. And this is for Alexis as well. I’m wondering what happens to the state of Jefferson with the rise of Donald Trump and what we learned– so if they’re saying they have this really strong place-based attachment but then some national figure comes along who has nothing to do with that place, but who resonates for them, to what extent do they just like flip to now being MAGA?
To what extent– how do they reconcile their attachment to Jefferson and to being separate from the United States, or separate from the way that things are organized? But now, they’ve got a MAGA guy in control? I’d just be interested in what you learn when you drop Trump into that situation. So you guys can– I said before, it’s good to collect questions, because then you can pick and choose and bob and weave. If there are things you don’t want to talk about. But we’ve got we’ve got about 10 minutes, so you probably each have three.
JOSEFINA VALDES LANAS: Well, I don’t know. The women I work with are very much disputing the power of the priest. I would say Opus Dei as a whole. But in their daily interactions with the priest, they would refute the priest answer in the confessionary, like, at that level. If they feel that the priest is being lenient with something, they would be like, well, but then what do we believe? They are demanding from the priest is very structured. But then again, in their own– they have this flexibility with their own practices. Yeah. I was going to say something more to you, but I forgot. But it’s going to come back, so maybe you want to go?
ALEXIS WOOD: Oh, yeah. OK. So on the first question, I don’t believe in history nor time. They are all rewritten to serve the present. But within that, I do believe in space. And space is very bound up with narratives of history. I believe in patterns, because space is determined by power geometries, which fall along the same things, which they have since the closing of the Commons.
We’re going to see capitalism extract from people what it can until it’s done, and it’ll move on to something else, and again and again. But I think it’s more of a question of space than history. And then, I guess, that falls into affect. I want to go for affective states, precisely because it does account for, I think, dispersed geographies as well. I study what digital space is within the context of state secessionist movements as well because rural areas are dispersed geographically. Social media is a big part of this.
And these introduction of technologies, even though it’s a characteristic of dispersed spaces, what it’s doing is collapsing space. And so even though somebody, which I’ve seen before, on the East Coast, is a state of Jefferson supporter– and it’s random, but it happens all the time, because they believe in the anti-elite state, a new mission for what the US could be, what a state could be.
Gender dynamics, I find that the women in my group specifically in the state of Jefferson are in charge. They are in charge of the social media. They are in charge of organizing the events. They are in charge of making sure that everybody is where they’re supposed to be, and that is the same throughout Western society. We are in charge of timekeeping. But the face of the organization is a man. But women play a huge role in that organization. And what has happened SRJ in the face of trump, of course, they’ve adopted the MAGA rhetoric because it speaks to them. But I think because it is a place-based movement, it will exist after Trump, just as it existed before it. Speed run.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, I’ll start by addressing history. And I agree that there’s often this dichotomy that’s posed of– there’s a few– I’ve always worried that I’m just someone who’s– and now I’m the human chasing the dog driving the car. That I’m just like, whatever is the most present controversy, I’m there, I’m on it. And that I haven’t done a lot of historical work. But then the more that I’ve spent time thinking about QAnon, I’ve always thought, it’s interesting, why have we come up with these– we’ve got these neologisms for mis/disinformation.
And I’m like, well, propaganda was a thing. There were debates in the early 2000 about the rise of infotainment, and Fox News. And so some of the things that I’m looking at in media studies suggest to me that there’s– these are not either directly analogous to something that’s happened in the past. They’re not entirely new, but they seem to be part of an emergent pattern or a recurring pattern.
And it’s really hard to take in the whole of history and from that then say, oh, yeah, all– here’s a checklist of the political-economic media, cultural sphere, and how this 2020 is an exact replica of 1920, whatever it is. So for me, I think the project has been to think about how– what are the small pieces present that we can really hone in on, and just trace that.
And so I think that this is a way of opening into what is sometimes the complexity of history and of the nuance of discussing history and trying to avoid these simple analogies. Is to be like, let’s take one process. Let’s take a single process and see if this recurs as a pattern throughout history. And so now I’m like, OK, I’m studying media. Of course, I have to go back to Stuart Hall. And I have to go back to people who are writing about the printing press.
And if we’re talking about conspiracy theories being propagated over social media, let’s talk about conspiracy theories being propagated over the printing press. And that is a way of both destroying the analogs and being, like, [? press and ?] [? reformation ?] is not exactly like QAnon in 2020. But it gives us some small sliver of history that we can trace. And from that, start to build up a bit of a catalog of historical threads to hopefully arrive at– I’m a Gramscian at some conjunctural kind of analysis of the present. So that’s my piece on history.
And then the piece on gender. I’m very ambivalent about how to frame this, because I think it’s interesting to hear that state of Jefferson was is really dominated by women, because QAnon was often assumed to be dominated by women. It was often thought that it was a very feminist movement because of the whole save the children kind of faction of it. And because you had a lot of these mothers being the face of it.
And I often was like, this is fascinating because it is a big part of QAnon, is one of the identities that are helping construct this thing that is QAnon, but it’s also a way of really downplaying all the white nationalists in it. It was like the male politics of QAnon was sublimated to introduce the fanciful progressive politics of the mothers in the movement and how harmless they are. And it was not the save the children protesters that we saw being arrested on January 6 who had connections to the QAnon movement.
So I think there’s– we have to be very deliberate about how we study gender and how we use it to discuss these politics, which is not at all me questioning the role of women within QAnon, but just thinking about, how do we talk about gender when it comes to these movements? How do our own frames about gender and biases about gender start to bleed into our political analysis of what’s happening?
And how do we square the fact that something like QAnon was at once a deeply kind of– I hate to reify these binaries, but yeah, it’s like this maternal thing that’s about protecting the children. It’s also a big thing in the manosphere. It’s all about red pilling. That is the language. And that these two worlds are colliding and negotiating with one another. And there are women who are telling me that they’re choosing to ignore some of the other parts of the movement because that doesn’t represent them. Yet, they’re still part of the– I think it gets very, very complex for a movement like that. But that’s all to just say, I think gender is always a key thing to be talking about in these. Yeah.
PAUL PIERSON: OK. Do you want to say one more thing?
JOSEFINA VALDES LANAS: Yes. Yeah.
PAUL PIERSON: OK. Sure.
JOSEFINA VALDES LANAS: Speaking about space, I’m just thinking that all that we are referring to here is about a very self-contained space where really, at times, no air enters. And in my own research, I can think of one or two, maybe three moments in which the system that they have created for themselves really collapses. And these are very particular moments.
And I’m thinking with history on how to study those moments and what’s unprecedented of these times. For example, I was also, with gender, thinking about what technologies of IVF mean for women that want– that are called to have plenty of children, or the circulation of bodies and information. Like, how an elite that is so privileged to maintain itself bounded and all that applies for your cases as well. Just that.
PAUL PIERSON: OK. What a rich conversation. Thanks to everyone. Thanks to you guys for sharing your really wonderful research, and we’ll call it a day. Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]
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