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Oct. 12, 2023 - Conspirituality
01:28:20
175: Diagonalism (w/William Callison and Quinn Slobodian)

Quinn Slobodian teaches Modern German History at Wellesley and William Callison teaches Political Theory and Human Geography at Uppsala. We first came across their work via Naomi Klein’s examination of the clusterf&cked politics that dominate the movements we cover. We dug out their paper, and they had us at this: "At the extreme end, diagonal movements share a conviction that all power is conspiracy." There no clear left-right polarity in conspirituality. And Horseshoe Theory won’t cut it. We’re in the age of Diagonalism, and things are very, very weird.  Sign up today at butcherbox.com/CONSPIRITUALITY and use code CONSPIRITUALITY to receive ground beef for life plus $20 off your first order. Show Notes Coronapolitics from the Reichstag to the Capitol - Boston Review William Callison Quinn Slobodian Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Time Text
Hello, everyone.
Welcome to Conspirituality Podcast, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence.
Welcome to Quinn and William.
authoritarian extremism in all its forms.
I'm Matthew Remski.
I'm Julian Walker.
I'm Quinn Slobodian.
And I'm William Kallison.
Welcome to Quinn and William.
We'll get to your bios in a moment, but now we'd like to tell everybody
that we are on Instagram at ConspiratualityPod.
And you can access our Monday bonus episodes through Patreon or through the Apple subscription service.
And a little reminder for you that our book, Conspiratuality, How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat, is now out in print, e-book, and audiobook form, narrated by yours truly.
and if you've read it or listened to it and you feel so moved, please review it.
♪♪ Conspiratuality 175,
Diagonalism, with William Callison and Quinn Slobodian.
Thanks so much for joining us today, Quinn.
You're a professor of modern German history at Wellesley and William.
You're a political theorist and a researcher in human geography at Uppsala University.
Your work together has very interesting implications for how we think about the figures we study in this podcast.
I'm thinking about people like J.P.
Sears, who travels from being a very new-agey, pro-choice emotional healing coach to becoming a transphobic mugga gun nut.
And Christiane Northrup, who took this pandemic arc from Oprah-endorsed feminist doctor to becoming a QAnon booster who fantasizes about killing vaccine doctors.
You know, there's lots of characters that we cover, and, you know, we're going to be asking you about why you use the term diagonalism to describe their politics.
But just to go into a little bit more of a detail here with a portrait, we cover a guy named Mickey Willis.
He's kind of our New Age Zoolander.
He's the producer of the Plandemic series of doxploitation films.
He's also a major catalyst for our podcast project, and so this is all his fault, really.
He starts out in the 90s, he's in male modeling, he learned some AV chops, he gets familiar with the other side of the camera, and then he's in Manhattan by his own account on 9-11, and he has a mystical realization.
on that beautiful and terrible morning.
He recalls approaching Ground Zero and either helping or imagining himself helping the first responders.
And there's something about the smoke and dust and searchlights that fills him with a sense of spiritual purpose and urgency.
So, as far as we know at this point, he has no interest in politics whatsoever.
And then he settles in Ojai, California.
He crowdfunds a bunch of New Age films that never get made.
Then he goes viral, among progressives especially, with a selfie video in which he encourages his son to play with Barbies.
And then he hears Bernie on the stump in around 2015, and suddenly he's on a mission to support the first credible socialist candidate in 40 years.
And he follows Sanders on the trail, either we can't really figure out whether he's formally or informally filming for him.
We couldn't track any money or payments or contracts or anything like that.
And there's no footage that, you know, survives from that era.
And then years later at QAnon conferences, as a headliner, he'll go on to say that he was a darling of the left.
But we can't really figure out anybody who knew him.
But after Sanders bows out of the campaign, Willis shows up at Standing Rock crowdfunding for more camera equipment to film a politically-oriented spiritual awakening documentary.
Which also doesn't get made, so he's really like all hat, no cattle, all Palo Santo, like no soup kitchen or community service, right?
And then the world comes to know him as the most effective anti-vax propagandist after RFK Jr.
During COVID, he cycles through all of the standard theories.
But they're centered around a single pole star, which is that the virus is a globalist plot to destroy our natural will to love each other and transcend all polarities.
And then, on January 6th, 2021, he's there at the Capitol, cosplaying as a journalist.
And he produces this handheld footage from within the middle of a phalanx breaking down a door with a crowd chanting, hang Mike Pence.
And later he describes the insurrection as a loving gathering of freedom fighters yearning for their tender and downtrodden voices to be heard.
For anyone who doesn't know, that handheld footage that you described becomes part of the B-roll of all major news outlets, you know, that they play when they talk about the insurrection.
There's Mickey Willis with his camera and they pan over him as the crowd is yelling, hang Mike Pence, it's crazy.
Now, we don't expect you guys to have insights specifically into Mickey Willis, because that's our field, but he's such a good exemplar of what you talk about.
So, hypothetically, what the fuck is going on with this guy?
Yeah, I mean I guess he would fit in our kind of cast of characters that we describe in the German context, but in other ways he would be a bit less familiar.
I think that the people that we focus on in our piece and that I think served as the kind of kernel of the Anti-lockdown, anti-vaccination sort of shock troops of 2020 and 2021 tended not to be people who kind of came from the organized left in any way and then sort of had this transformation into
Anti-globalism.
I would say the more sort of prototypical character that we've found would be people who are coming either from the kind of entrepreneurial community, like people who are just kind of online hustlers, often coming somehow out of the tech world, who latched onto this as just like another way to make money and sell t-shirts and monetize.
Or, in many cases, people who would probably have seen themselves as quite apolitical in the sense of direct affiliations and were probably more kind of lifestyle leftists, if anything.
People who just focused on what would be seen as the kind of forms of individualized cultural expression around healthy eating, healthy living, had kind of taken the 1970s turn towards the individuality and the subjective and then just kind of rested there for several decades until the incursions of the state kind of made them find an enemy again in the
in the character of the regulations that were infringing now on their unfolding of their free
individual self-expression. So that kind of political operator of the kind you describe,
I think, was more in the minority. I don't know if you'd agree with that, Will.
I think that's right.
I think at the same time there's a way that he shares a lot of attributes with some of the people that we'll be talking about.
One of them being kind of one foot inside electoral politics very briefly, a kind of excitement about an anti-systemic, anti-establishment movement.
But then very quickly getting frustrated by the fact that, you know, my my movement, my guy didn't win.
So in the U.S.
case, that was obviously Bernie Sanders.
And so what do you what do you do with that at that moment?
Well, you kind of maybe revert back to your your origins in in kind of New Age spirituality.
You attempt to make money off of your your involvement in politics are still very much kind of Committed to something political in this case, but then it turns into a kind of grift and you land ultimately on the doorstep of the Capitol.
And yeah, the person who seems to mostly fit in the German context would be Ken Yepsen, who was kind of turned into a radio host.
We might talk about him later, but I'd say, yeah, there are family resemblances here.
Yeah, there's a lot of overlaps, and I think that's right on the money, Will.
For someone like Mickey Willis, the excursion into progressive politics was very dilettante-ish, I would say, and very new.
Like, oh, okay, politics, this is another way to sort of virtue-signal my spirituality.
And then, it's not that big of a leap for him and many others like him to say, the DNC rigged against Bernie. And so like this is politics is is is sort
of, you know, all corrupt anyway. And I believe that the election was stolen for Trump. And now I'm
putting my money behind Trump because he's a quote unquote populist, too, right? If you want to
understand, at least for me, the kind of the political composition of the people who
would have been gravitating towards things like the pandemic documentary
that you describe, there is on the one hand, I think those people who are in a kind of a time
in their life where they're maybe seeking meaning and maybe even seeking employment and seeking like
the application of their energies and emotions somehow.
But then I think, for some reason, I feel that the more important story is less those kind of movement entrepreneurs and more the kind of larger mass of sometimes kind of tacit support that those anti-lockdown people and anti-vax people were able to draw from.
And here's where I really felt a lot of sense of recognition when I was reading Naomi Klein's
account in Doppelganger because as it turns out she and I
were in the same part of the world. We were both on the edge of Western Canada in Western British Columbia
at the time that the pandemic broke out.
And so both witnessed the same thing, which was people who we had assumed to be kind of constitutionally left of center or progressive, suddenly transmuting into these really violently sort of misanthropic Not just anti-government, but kind of like anti-collectivist, and I would say kind of anti-human sort of proponents of social Darwinist logic.
And that, for me, remains the kind of abiding shock.
You know, like the guy you described will always exist, right?
I mean, whether he's hawking some new kind of coffee ersatz or reselling sneakers or hustling crypto, there's going to be just sort of douchebags like that around.
is interesting about this sort of most recent cycle of politics is how people who had uh... not scanned as political have sort of revealed themselves as having a kind of latent politics and in that sense the kind of movement hustler guys is interesting because he manages to see that too and sort of uses his dowsing rod to find that but ultimately you know he is just i think a symptom of a larger Kind of latent reservoir of discontentment, egotism, whatever it is.
And so how to figure that larger kind of, you know, dark pool out is what I find important or interesting in a way.
So for background context, Quinn, because you're already sort of gesturing towards this, I want to ask you first about your work on neoliberalism and especially your book titled Globalists, which previews some of this material.
You write that there's a politically left critique.
of globalism as a neoliberal economic principle that, as you say, serves to protect capitalism from democracy to create a kind of encasement around it.
But then you said that there's also this critique of globalism that we see more from the nativist, nationalist, often conspiratorial right.
So how are these two different?
Do they overlap in any important ways?
Well, I think there's kind of two ways of answering that question.
The one is to say that, yes, of course, there is a kind of critique of globalism from both the left and the right, for sure.
There's a kind of a one that might propose a different kind of internationalism or a different kind of socialism that would operate within, but also above and beyond states.
And then there is the kind of nationalist position that says that any draining of sovereignty from the national government is a kind of But the one that I focus on in more my recent work, and this is true of Will as well, is the way that kind of less intuitively certain people within the kind of neoliberal intellectual community have themselves kind of become anti-globalists.
So, this is a kind of something that happens over time, and my book that you just mentioned from 2018 describes a kind of a long, decades-long period within which people who were kind of finding themselves alienated by both fascists on the right and socialists on the left tried to figure out what set of institutions might serve to kind of keep mass democracy at bay, keep redistribution at bay, and lock in The rights of private property and the freedom of the movement of goods and money at a global level.
And so this is a story I tell from like the 1920s to the 1990s.
So a lot of people would look at the 1990s and say like, well, I guess they won.
You know, you've got the WTO, you've got liberalization of capital movements, you've got an EU that is largely structured towards competition and a kind of a battle to the bottom in many ways.
But paradoxically or surprisingly, those very neoliberals that have been pushing for that
kind of international encasement of capital at the national level started to turn on supranational
projects themselves.
So they started to see the EU, the WTO, the IMF, the UN as kind of Trojan horses for this
global project of socialism.
So this worry was, oh no, we've kind of cheer led this whole architecture and now the left is going to take it over and use it to carry out climate goals, to carry out feminist goals, to carry out goals of affirmative action, redistribution from richer countries to poorer countries.
All things that, you know, unfortunately are not actually happening.
But to their mind, the fact that globalism had now become a threat indeed turned people, in some cases frequently, who in their own biography had pushed for things like European integration, now flipped and said, no, we actually need to re-anchor politics in the nation, and that is the safest space to protect capitalism.
So the goal remains the same, but the scale at which it happens Switches.
And this, as I've described in work here and there, is really where you find the roots of something like the Alternative for Germany Party or the AFD.
It's a set of economics professors who think that Merkel has gone too far in bailing out Greece, that the EU has become this socialist beast and now needs to be seceded from and fought against.
This is where the Austrian Freedom Party has its roots, the Swiss People's Party as well.
So the fact that some of the people in the block of opposing lockdowns, opposing vaccination and so on, come from the kind of neoliberal camp itself can seem strange at first when you, if you think that neoliberalism is just sort of protecting the smooth flow of commerce and that, you know, Klaus Schwab is the only person who represents neoliberalism.
But if you follow a slightly more tangled genealogy, you find out something else.
Do the proponents ever reckon with this contradiction between, you know, the broad goal of the neoliberal free flow of goods and the desire for, you know, the retention of nativist sentiment and boundaries?
Do they ever speak directly to that conundrum?
Oh yeah.
No, absolutely.
I would say most of the time that's what they're talking about is how to kind of square this apparent tension.
And they answer the question in different ways.
So whether it's about immigration saying if you insert ideas of like human capital, then it doesn't matter if you're keeping out low wage laborers because you're preserving your Also, keeping out would-be parasites on the welfare state.
Therefore, that has an economic logic.
You know, arguing against certain kinds of monetary systems organized around the dollar or the gold standard can make sense if you think that national currency management is more rational.
So, yeah, working between those two scales is not something they kind of are repressing or some contradiction there.
You describe something that really intrigued me as well, Quinn, this narrative flip that happens politically in which the elites, who used to be perceived as capitalists exploiting the more socialist masses, becoming framed as being too socialist, with the populist masses now being the pro-capitalist ones.
How does that work?
And do you have some examples of this?
I mean, that was definitely the kind of, I would say, the big inversion that happens across the 20th century.
It's the beginning of the 20th century, you just assume that the masses are all kind of socialists in utero, and if given the vote, they're all going to sort of vote for communism, so to speak.
And by the end of the 20th century, a lot of these neoliberal intellectuals are saying, Actually, the very conditions under which people might believe in socialism have been either eroded or completely vaporized, meaning trade unions, mass industrial workforces in the global north.
Often forms of collective care, welfare states, mutual aid, the civil society that kept socialist communities afloat, whether it was playing sports together or having sewing circles or men's choirs and soccer games or whatever it was.
If all of that doesn't exist, then if you give the people the vote, they'll vote for themselves.
They'll vote for individualism and capitalism.
And in fact, as someone like Murray Rothbard said, maybe the only socialists left are these kind of eggheads and bureaucrats sitting in Brussels and Washington.
And according to him, the only reason they want socialism is so that they have more power to decide over the direction of other people's lives.
So their socialism is not genuine.
It's just another form of megalomania and kind of power grabbing.
And I think that is probably one of the most consistent through lines in the arguments of the kind of people
that Will and I have looked at is that the elite only say that they care about, let's say, people's health.
They only say that they care about the environment.
They only say they care about women's rights or the poverty of most of the world's population.
In fact, this is all just other different ways of describing their own hunger for individual power.
Everything can be translated into that single idiom if you look twice.
Yeah, and just to add to that arc.
That Quinn is drawing here about the long 20th century and the long march of different kinds of neoliberalism that develop over that period of time.
I think it's both important to understand that part of this is the result of kind of the changing political economy that we see in the 20th century and in the post-war period that he was describing, but it's also a very concerted effort of the neoliberals themselves to affect that inversion that you described in the first place, Julian, to say, well, it is, in fact, the desire of individuals to have free markets.
Is that not the case?
Right?
And so this Not only were there neoliberal individuals and collectives of neoliberals who were developing theories to this effect, but it was also politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
In Thatcher's case, Stuart Hall described her movement already as a form of neoliberal populism.
Right.
So the idea that all that individuals really want free markets, that that this is in the best interest of everyone.
And this is kind of this is the people's desire.
It's interpolating both the people, but the people as individuals and their families.
And so there's a kind of shift that's both material and discursive at the same time.
It's like a combination punch here where somebody like Thatcher does everything that she can to disassemble labor.
And then she has to sell, along with her inheritors, the idea that you didn't want that anyway.
You didn't want to work together.
You didn't want to... You didn't want to be part of a society, really.
It's like there's two things have to happen, and they have to happen within a couple of decades in order for that to be locked in.
What you really want is the freedom to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and compete with your peers.
Yeah, exactly.
I think, you know, you have to hate the socialists, but then also love capitalist individualism.
And if you ask for some concrete examples for how that's become people's reality, you know, let's say the fact that people's pensions are now mostly held as like 401ks that just rise and fall with the stock market.
And how much you will have when you retire depends on the daily movement, at least in your mind, of the stock prices of the country's biggest industries.
The fact that then, you know, things like the California Public Employees Union is investing in, like, mega projects in the Saudi Peninsula or, you know, projects to undercut unions in Explore processing zones across the world.
There's a structural way that even those institutions we have that are supposed to be based on social democracy are now captured by zero-sum competition.
And so when people are in situations of precarity, gobbling together work through gigs or doing their small private businesses, then when the government comes in and says, you can't have your business anymore, you can't leave your house, Then it feels like that specter of socialism has just raised its head, even if the government is making that case for capitalist, economically rational purposes, which is like, we don't want to have a sick or dying population because that's hard.
hard, you know, they can't be valuable workers.
That brings us to seminar time because we want to go through your 2021 piece for the
It's called Corona Politics from the Reichstag to the Capitol, section by section, okay?
Now, you say in your opening together that in contrast to the more mediagenic populism of a few years prior, The Diagonalist Movement is less a revolt of the masses and more the revolt of small business owners, as per your comments just now, freelancers and the self-employed.
You describe entrepreneurs of speculative and totalizing prophecies who are slipperier on the political spectrum.
This is the heart of it.
This is this is what you've been talking about in terms of the demographics, right?
Yeah, I'd say I'd say so.
I think that we all remember this period at the very beginning of the pandemic where we were kind of asking ourselves collectively, What will be the response to this very unique event, both from the state and from us as a society?
And some people said, this is very likely to engender a kind of a new era of collective solidarity, both on the part, hopefully, of states to secure the conditions of survival for all, but also to develop forms of solidarity.
And of course, In part, there were developments that conformed to some of that hope, but to a large extent, this was a kind of accelerant of certain dimensions that were already there pre-pandemic.
And so the fact that you have small business owners revolting or framing the state in exactly the way that Julian was describing before as a kind of Overbearing, authoritarian entity by its very nature that could not but want to harm individuals, to take away freedom, to arbitrarily impose measures from vaccines to lockdowns.
This kind of paranoia about freedom and having freedom taken away was almost at the tip of the tongue of certain segments Of society, including those that you just described.
And I think it's not just that sort of those people were predisposed to feeling that way, right?
I mean, if you think about just the conditions for economic survival in the first six months of the pandemic, then the closer you were to like a kind of collective status employment situation, The better your condition was.
So if you were a public servant, then you were in almost all cases kind of allowed to work from home or sort of furloughed given the, you know, the continued salary in your bank account.
If you were part of a large corporation that had that capacity as well, then often you were given the right to work at home unless you were someone who was on the assembly line or working in an Amazon warehouse.
But as you go down the scale of the size of business, whether it's public or private, once you get to people who did need to go and open up the nail salon or teach the yoga class, as the sort of prototypical examples went, give the tattoo, then you started to get to people that had no safety net, no ability to work from home.
They did work person-to-person, face-to-face.
That could not be replaced.
And their fear of, you know, economic ruin is a lot more understandable.
So, you know, I think that it's important to see that those kind of extreme emotional reactions or the jumps to political conclusions that some people came to, came out of the genuinely dire material everyday circumstances that some people found themselves in By virtue of, you know, living in the cracks of the kind of informalized post-Fordist economy that we all kind of inhabit.
You know, there was one business in my neighborhood here in Toronto, east end of Toronto, a barbershop that I used to go to that I loved going to.
And during one of the shutdown periods, They broke the bylaw repeatedly, and they got fined.
And then eventually, I think, they had to surrender their business license or... I can't remember what the outcome was.
But it was at that point that I started to have some real misgivings about the general feeling within center-left and sometimes progressive media about Blaming small business owners for their revolt.
These guys were barbers.
It's not like you could say to them, follow the science.
Or work from home.
Or work from home.
There was nothing on offer for these guys.
Their lives were built around the chairs and keeping the chair full.
And also speaking, you know, often intimately with their clientele on a daily basis, all of that's suddenly gone.
And somehow there was a lot of us who said, you should be less pissed about that or you should be less confused about it.
Yeah, I mean, I think that there, you know, it is important to keep in mind the way that much of the kind of contempt and scorn that That people that we know, and maybe even are, felt for the kind of anti-globalist conspiracies that people were entertaining, either at that time or later, is a kind of a classism.
And it was a kind of a classism that was made more obvious in these stark moments when all the lights were flipped on and people's working conditions were.
Made visible to all.
But I think that it also should make us see what we think of as neoliberalism differently.
So I think that one of the shoddiest understandings of what neoliberalism is, is that is the way that some people would conflate it with like the World Economic Forum and the idea of the Great Reset.
Yeah.
Which is obviously a An idea that floats around frequently with people who are also against the lockdown or vaccination being obligatory, that behind it all stood the diabolical figure of Klaus Schwab with his like 14 point plan to squish individual freedom.
And the idea that that is somehow the apotheosis of neoliberalism, which I've certainly read and seen people saying, is Ridiculous.
I mean, the apotheosis of neoliberalism is Milton Friedman in Free to Choose walking around and pointing at big companies and big corporations, even, and saying, look at this thing.
It's threatening us.
There's the government.
It's a big building.
It's full of people telling us what to do.
The heart of freedom is the individual, the work they do every day.
The enterprising spirit of going out and, you know, finding your own way in the world.
So the anti-lockdown stuff or the diagonalist stuff, as we describe it in the piece, is not a kind of resistance to neoliberalism or an opposition to neoliberalism.
It's quite clearly a continuation of the very sort of essence of self-making, atomistic, anti-collectivist, libertarian selfhood.
That sees all forms of expertise and sort of science backed by governments with a great deal of suspicion and sees them as simply camouflage for the expansion of the domain of administration against the individual.
So I think that for me is one of the points I would like to make, especially to people who are coming to this from a kind of a leftist perspective.
I mean, I have to say that I wrote a piece fairly early in the pandemic about the Great Reset conspiracy, and I think I lost more sympathy on the left with that one piece than anything I've ever done before or since.
I mean, there was a lot of people who had seemed to like me who didn't like me, and who saw that as a sign of my having been kind of co-opted by the Neoliberals themselves.
So I think that sorting that out is not just important sort of analytically, but it's important politically.
Like, I think that if you find collective action informed by some kind of constructive relationship with elected governments as being itself like always tainted, or always like the path to globalism, Then you've really painted yourself into a corner politically and it's hard to see how you could ever build kind of mass movements of a positive kind from that position out.
I mean for me it evokes an empathy for people who find themselves in that situation where they've bought into the idea of pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps and then the bootstraps are taken away.
And they have no social safety net to fall back into.
And so then what are they going to yank on?
You know, what, what, what are they going to get involved in?
I also, this may be naive, but I have to say, I had, I had a revelation hearing you speak a few minutes ago about the pension funds and the literal buy-in that happens sort of, you know, almost without knowing that it's happening where suddenly your, The money that you're going to use in your golden years is tied to the fates of the market.
And so like, and how does that then affect your, your tendency to vote for this policy or that policy?
It's just, that's extraordinary.
Right.
So if you're in the United States, 50% of this population is somehow invested in the stock market.
When you look at that business report at the end of the day, it's like, you know, checking your cholesterol level or your, you know, it's like you're looking at the vital signs of your own well-being in the world, which that kind of folk affects us with the economy in the abstract sense.
Makes you realize how kind of existential a lot of this stuff is for people.
And I think that goes for the other side, too, right?
That goes for the pro-lockdowners and the pro-vaxxers.
I mean, the idea that we need to do this stuff to save the American economy was also, of course, a big motivator for people who were supporting the kind of mainline recommendations of the Democrats and so on.
So, William, you're in Berlin, you're joining us from abroad, and this whole paper that has brought us together draws on your study together of a particular anti-quarantine and vaccine movement in Germany called Querdenken.
Am I saying that right?
Yeah, more or less, yeah.
More or less, yeah.
Not bad.
Yeah, so you write, taking a cue from Cordenken in Germany, we call the strategy behind the diverse movements diagonal thinking and the broader phenomenon they represent diagonalism.
Bridging the more familiar concept of querfront and the more recent term querdenken, the idea of diagonalism exceeds the German context of its coinage where it means something like out-of-the-box thinking.
So, can either of you just unpack the history of querdenken a bit?
Yeah, so in the German context, Querdenken largely became synonymous with anti-lockdown, anti-vax, social movements, or the online discourse as well.
It became so prominent eventually and it really was, in fact, I think some of the earliest street level protests were literally put together in terms of financially supported by the guy who was using this term.
He himself was an entrepreneur from Stuttgart, and he, like many others in the pandemic, People we've been talking about so far was a small business owner and entrepreneur had had a number of startups.
And the pandemic kind of was a was a trigger to not simply ensure the continuation of his businesses, but to kind of mold his businesses into Yeah, essentially vehicles for a new political movement that was against the state kind of to core against authoritarianism.
And he was kind of initially framing the movement as one of Civil liberties, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and so on.
And what happened kind of from that initial phase where you had early, early protests organized by this guy, his name's Michel Balvegue, And others like him were street protests where you saw on the one hand kind of very normie left liberal types who previously weren't extremely political.
You had the kind of stereotypical hippie types or new age types walking along them and at the same time in Germany you had neo-nazi groups at the same protests and so there was this big kind of question being raised about what's going on that your podcast has so excellently explained over the years.
But in this case, Querdenken was, I mean, a way of packaging it from the start as a movement that was, so what does Querdenken mean?
It means, as you mentioned before, a way of thinking outside of the box.
But it was also a term that in the German context came out of It's actually corporate speech and kind of 1990s, early 2000s groups that were very much committed to innovation, very much part of the same kind of business community, organizing conferences, doing, yeah, doing kind of weird things with just, if there were, if there was a political edge to them, it was very, very blunt.
And it mutated into this.
In the same way, move fast and break things was not intended as a kind of futurist manifesto.
You know, it's the same kind of strange morphing of like a piece of just kind of tech jargon into a piece of politics.
But I think if I could say something about why we found that a useful term to work with and where diagonalism becomes useful for us, And I think perhaps also why Naomi Klein also found it useful to adopt in her recent book is that it goes against, it's sort of an alternative to the horseshoe theory.
Yeah.
Right on!
The horseshoe theory for the 1.5 people out there listening who have never heard of it is the notion that the far left and the far right, you know, at some point become identical and that the extremes touch.
And usually when you see things like this, hippies and skinheads in the street together, people would be like, well, that's a great piece of evidence for the quote-unquote horseshoe theory.
But our argument is that, you know, actually if you look at the kind of the heart of this movement, it's not at the extremes, it's actually in the center.
So it's not taking truly anti-systemic or radical energies and redirecting them towards a new target.
It's actually taking things that we're all encouraged to feel by mainstream societies in which we live and then amplifying them.
So it's a kind of extreme version of the kind of personal branding that everyone does on social media.
It's kind of the extreme version of, you know, the primarily self-interested, you know, harnessing of one's resources and time and care and affect.
Not to an end of building a new society or towards a kind of agreed-upon end of the transformation of the collective conditions of everyday life, but really to just fight tooth and nail for that kind of individual space of autonomy that you feel like you're in the danger of losing.
So because the diagonal doesn't The diagonal doesn't start at two ends, but it goes straight through the heart of things.
It goes through the middle.
We feel like this is a kind of radicalized centrism more than it is a kind of meeting of two extremisms.
Just to add to that observation about a lot of this coming out of the quote-unquote middle of society, which is big, die Mitte der Gesellschaft in German, is a kind of almost a mantra that all political parties appeal to.
And so the idea that you would have a radical political movement or a conspiratorial social movement coming out of the middle of society is quite scary here above all.
There's a way that we very much are contrasting this account with horseshoe theory, but at the same time, I think some of what we're about to talk about is we're also observing that people within this movement can take kind of selectively from left-wing critiques or right-wing critiques and kind of piece them together with this kind of exercise in branding or the exercise and kind of conspiratorial or kind of hyper individualist ideologies to make something new.
And so there's ways that the left can be left discourses can be susceptible to, to movements of this sort.
On the theme of nomenclature and the types of groups who intersected through Querdenken, we first became aware of the name of the group because of a famous anti-lockdown event in 2021 in Berlin.
It was headlined by R.F.K.
Jr., who we've spent a long time covering.
Now, first of all, is he a lauded figure in that landscape?
And then, do you feel, as he does, that the Daily Beast writer who called Quirdenkin neo-Nazi, do you think that that is a step too far?
Or is it too simplistic?
I don't actually know much about the status of R.F.K.
Jr.
I suppose they all love him.
But I would actually...
I agree that seeing them as synonymous with neo-Nazis is actually pretty useless and definitely confuses more than it clarifies.
Nazis were statists.
It need not be sort of restated that the idea of fascism and Nazism was to concentrate power centrally towards sort of collectively transformative ends of a completely abhorrent and anti-humane variety and to precisely kind of remold Humanity into a new shape through mass action, through centralized coordination.
I think it's possible to think of bad politics that aren't necessarily helpfully understood through comparison to fascism.
I think that the Claire Dinkin and the Diagonalist movements we're looking at are dangerous and problematic, not because of their proximity to fascism, but because they represent something quite new.
They represent a kind of a hybrid form of resistance and de-socialization and creating like invidious distinctions among people who should be seeing their interests in common.
I'm realizing, listening to you, that there would be no Lenny Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will type film that could be made about the movements that we're talking about, right?
Because nobody would stand in straight lines.
or anything at that.
I'm realizing, listening to you, that there would be no Lenny Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will type film
that could be made about the movements that we're talking about, right?
Because nobody would stand in straight lines.
The staging wouldn't be right.
You know, it just wouldn't be tidy.
Well, there was, it wasn't plannedemic, but there wasn't, there was an attempt to do this
in the first months of the pandemic with a guy kind of walking through London
during lockdown with his mask off.
But it was, it was precisely like a heroic vision of the resistor.
Yeah, and was filmed with sort of aesthetics of somewhere between a fashion shoot and a music video.
Nice.
But specifically an individual, right?
So I think you're right that the idea of forming into fast coordinated patterns and so on is not very Querdenker-ish, but I'm sure they would aestheticize it in their own ways.
Just to pick up on the first part of your question about whether RFK Jr.
is a lauded figure in Germany, the Germans love John F. Kennedy because of his Ich bin ein Berliner speech at the Brandenburg Gate, and now there's the John F. Kennedy School at the Brandenburg Gate, and they love Obama oh so much here.
And so the idea of an American royalty or some type of fantasy about American benevolence, a very much liberal center-left style politics, In the United States and the Democratic Party is very much, yeah, a kind of obsession in Germany.
And so the idea of having RFK come to give a speech where then he's saying, no, look, I'll tell you what the real authoritarianism is just like the Soviet Union.
It's The German state.
It's the actual American state.
It's a very clever move on the part of Bollweg and Kroeding to invite him over.
And then the other thing that I'd add is just, I mean, as you have noted in the podcast many times, there's a way that RFK himself is a kind of perfect diagonalist figure because of One, how mutable many of his positions are, even though he's kind of this or kind of anti anti-vaxxer and and kind of new age type, he can piece together very different kind of views of of the environment and climate policy, where it seems like, oh, he's a real defender of the environment on the one hand.
And then a couple of weeks later, you hear him say climate denialist.
Type stuff, right?
Right.
And where on the one hand, it seems like he would be very much part of the Democratic Party.
And then on the other hand, he's hanging out with and borrowing right from the most radical libertarians in the U.S.
context.
So, yeah, I would say that he he both fits as this kind of a German, a German fantasy, and he fits the diagonalist description quite well.
Yeah, I think it's helpful also to think about the Querdenker and the Diagonalists in terms of a kind of genealogy of what has been called the digital party in the last decade or so.
There's a sociologist named Paolo Garibaldi who's written a really good book called The Digital Party, and it looks at things like the Pirate Party, the Five Star Movement, the Brexit Party.
And these are all kind of like insurgent political parties that went from being nowhere to suddenly,
in many cases, forming governments, having hundreds of thousands of members, all mediated
through online platforms and all making the same promise, which is like, we will be your
direct voice in government in a time when you feel ever more alienated and distanced
by corrupt politicians, the old familiar names, the old familiar parties.
We are something new.
We are actually like hacking the political system for your benefit.
And now, for once, you will be able to interact with government the same way you interact with everything else online.
In other words, at the click of a button, you can vote, you can see the speeches as they're happening, you can stream them and so on.
So they promise this radical horizontal relationship between members of the new insurgent political formation.
But as this sociologist Gerbauto shows us, in case after case, they end up producing the exact opposite, which is they produce a hyper-concentration of power in what he calls hyper-leaders, the sort of charismatic leaders, and each of these end up basically making all the decisions, despite the kind of trappings of sort of these quasi-immediate referenda or plebiscites, which end up not being really used, no matter how good the platforms are.
And most of the time, they're rather short-lived.
So they come, they seem to have transformed the political landscape, and then often, you
know, within a couple of years, they've totally vanished.
So I think that, you know, rather than the Nazi Party, I think it's helpful to think
about this new diagonalist sort of explosion after the coronavirus pandemic and the subsequent
attempts to contain it as being like another go-round of these digitally-mediated political
formations but now just ones that are sort of in search of a container.
Maybe these are now sort of digital parties without the hyperleader, and so they just
manifest as these sort of inchoate online expressions.
That's all I have for you this morning.
Well, I think that allows us to turn to some of the technological underpinnings of this because you write that born in part from transformations in technology and communication, diagonalists tend to contest conventional monikers of left and right.
While generally arcing towards far-right beliefs to express ambivalence, if not cynicism, towards parliamentary politics and to blend convictions about holism and even spirituality with a dogged discourse of individual liberties.
And Julian, did this sound a lot like the Californian ideology to you?
Yeah, absolutely.
This holistic back-to-nature appeal to sort of human potential as a libertarian dream that the newly emerging digital tools were going to set us all free for a participatory democracy that somehow would be at our fingertips, right?
Was there a connection here for you to going back to the work of Barbrook and Cameron?
Yeah, I'd say so.
I think that the idea, as Quinn was just saying, about organizing but also innovating from below, like around a kind of ideal of horizontalism, Where it's not just the kind of ideal of horizontalism being like the most democratic form of organization, but also the idea that technology, that this form of political organization will kind of latch on to technological developments and lead to kind of the ever-expanding arc of freedom into the future is
Vis-a-vis, well, through the miracle that is capitalism, in other words, is something that you find most of these, most of the Kverdeng and Michel Baalbek type figures, Yeah, and I think there's some similar blind spots too, right?
I mean, given that the kind of California ideology of decentralization is kind of belied by the fact that there's almost monopolistic control of the platforms on which people communicate and complete surveillance of their actions and the movement of their mouse and cursor and eyeballs as they interact with those platforms, I mean, it's hard to sustain that one.
That's true in the Ferdinand movement, too.
You just kind of have to pretend not to think about the fact that you are completely dependent on a private service provider that could at any point be watching your every move, and if not, openly, the way that non-encrypted platforms beyond Telegram do.
Then anyone who has been paying attention knows that the kind of the choke points of the information superhighway are pretty well surveilled by the American Intelligence Service.
And it's very hard to find a space online that is somehow genuinely open and free.
So I see that less as kind of like A way to do a kind of aha move and expose the hypocrisy of the diagonalists and more as like a genuinely anguished kind of sort of something that drives their radicalism on further, I think, is the fact that despite their desire to create sort of open spaces in which they are truly living like in unmediated lives, they still find themselves chained to these platforms of mediation.
I think that they know that and it It kind of is driving them, one of the things that's driving them crazy.
So the one thing that would actually work is the thing that none of them seem to be willing to do, which is to just like throw away their phones and unplug and like just actually go and live like a simple life in the countryside.
That doesn't seem to be, interestingly, a choice that very many from these people, this group is actually doing, which suggests that there's a kind of addictive Relationship that they have to the very thing that they're spending all of their time condemning and criticizing.
All right, we're going to keep quoting you back to yourselves.
At the extreme end, diagonal movements share a conviction that all power is conspiracy.
Public power cannot be legitimate, many believe, because the process of choosing governments is itself controlled by the powerful and is de facto illegitimate.
And this seems to me like one of those classic performative contradictions.
Once you've completely destabilized truth claims, be they journalistic or scientific, and you've delegitimized elections and all forms of institutionalized power, what are we left with?
And on what do these influencers base their claims of some special insight into what's really going on and what the way forward might be?
Yeah, I think that here, You see part of the borrowing from tradition of leftist critique.
So the idea that it doesn't matter which party you choose, because ultimately, the parties will be subject to the the interests and power of capital, right, that they will ultimately yield the same results is a critique that both often has merit and that we're familiar with.
And when it's being used for the ends of the diagonalist, this critique kind of takes on a new dimension because there's not the kind of background commitment to a common good that you have in the leftist critique, right?
So if there's no belief, no commitment to Producing something better to reforming the system to generate different outcomes, but it's really just burning it down, right, as you were describing in the quote.
None of these anti-corruptionists are actually, like, getting behind campaign finance reform or, you know, trying to figure out how to have transparency within, you know, where the black money is coming from, the dark money is coming from, like, none of that.
Yeah, and at the same time, the bit of the question about destabilized truth claims and where we go when there's not a kind of common or some level of trust in media or scientifically produced knowledge.
We kind of find ourselves in the situation that we're in now with Elon Musk's Twitter X, where, you know, he posts over and over, not simply criticism of the New York Times, but an appeal to citizen journalism as the as the kind of cutting edge of a world where we're going to be beyond falsehoods.
And we're only we're only going to live in the truth when when all reporting and all knowledge production is, quote, unquote, democratized.
Though you better purchase the blue check for 10 or 20 bucks, I forget, in order to
participate in this lofty endeavor.
I think the angle you're taking, Julian, is the right one there, which is about this question
of if all power corrupts, how do you live life?
I mean, how do you interact with others?
And I think that this is where it circles back to the Californian ideology in a way, which is like, if you believe all power corrupts, then you would rather have power gathering in private spaces than public spaces.
So you would rather have a monopolistic tech platform than a monopolistic state.
Because then you have, and this is the important thing, the chance to kind of opt in and opt out, at least theoretically, right?
So this is where I think this connects to some of the stuff that I write about in my newer book, Crack Up Capitalism, is there's a kind of affinity here with the libertarian model of the gated community, which is like, Redo the social contract, do it at a small scale and make it literal.
So you're actually signing a set of terms and conditions and saying, I agree to live this way.
And I understand there's only 25 other families who want to live that way.
But that's the only way that I see is being able to live kind of with the minimum level of coercion, and non aggression or whatever, right.
And confiscation of my personal liberties.
So I think that That's the only kind of direction that I can see this going in is towards more kind of smaller scale privatized opt-in forms of governance and communities where, as Will is saying, I mean that sort of
That Edenic post-revolutionary vision of the world transformed that animated so much of mass politics for the last 200 years is just left aside, right?
I mean, the idea of transforming the globe is itself been determined to be like a corrupt enterprise.
Therefore, all you can do is try to transform a small amount, a small number of kind of like-minded.
True believers.
And that seems to me the only kind of politics you can get out of this.
And it sits uneasily with the existing system of nation states we still have.
But you have hints of it, for example, in Germany with the Reichsbürger, you know, coalition, which is a very diagonalist one of kind of gold bugs, white supremacists, monarchists, small business people, hippies, all saying, We found a loophole.
The Federal Republic of Germany actually doesn't exist.
It was imposed by the edict of the Allied government.
Therefore, we can return back to pre-fascist imperial Germany and live in sort of legally pure circumstances and conditions.
We have to search for those loopholes and wormholes, I think, if you want to find a workable politics here.
Okay, one of the most interesting parts of this paper is that you attempt a typology of figures and influencers in diagonalism.
One term that you use is movement hustler, and you apply this to Michel Balveg, who, as we've said, played a key role in hosting RFK Jr.
in Berlin.
So he's one type, but then you have what you call the left-to-right ideologue.
Can you explain that particular Profile that hook to us.
Yeah, so in that case, just to give the one example that we focus on at the beginning is Ken Yepsen, who became very well known because of his social media presence, his presence on YouTube, and his show called Ken FM.
But he had previously kind of been almost like the Mickey character that we discussed at the beginning, had Had a foot in left politics previously, and then he got quote unquote canceled for anti-semitic remarks.
And so you kind of see this trajectory from the left to right where He's, he's pushing the boundaries, but he's a very kind of charismatic figure who's trying to bring all different kinds of people into the this big umbrella of, of anti authoritarian independent media.
And so I think in the US case, the kind of most similar kind of figure might be Jimmy Dore.
Oh, yeah.
I'm not sure whether Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi are our exact equivalents because those are people with, you know, with a journalistic background before they kind of enter the sphere of talking heads on YouTube and then moving over to Rumble and Just so that I'm not lost here, can you, do you have like a one or two sentence on what a movement hustler is?
kind of backdrop. But I think with through those figures you can kind of
understand the contours of Ken Yepsen.
Just so that I'm not lost here, can you do you have like a one or two sentence on what a movement hustler is?
Yeah, I mean I think those those are people who were previously basically apolitical or non-politicized.
We came more out of the entrepreneurial community and sort of hatched or latched onto this as a way to sell subscriptions, sell t-shirts.
Michel Balvec himself was not an active member of any political movement, so he didn't really move from left to right.
He just found this to be a good way to To have a successful business idea for a change.
Opportunistic.
Yeah.
They gamified politics, basically.
Okay, so with regard to the left-to-right ideologue, Klein, who quotes you, says that this figure is necessary in far-right or diagonalist politics because she says, a few prominent self-identified progressives and or liberals being involved is critical.
Importantly, the role of these progressives is not to renounce the goals of social justice and embrace a hard right worldview.
On the contrary, they must continue to identify as proud members of the left or devoted liberals while claiming that it is the movements and tendencies of which they were once part, that have betrayed their own
ideals, leaving these uniquely courageous individuals politically
homeless and in search of new alliances.
These exiles from progressivism package themselves not as defectors, but as loyalists,
because it's their former comrades and colleagues, they claim,
who are the impostors, the fakes.
So, does that sort of rationale for the left-to-right interloper, does that track with what you found?
I think that's a great passage and it makes me think about sort of true believer neoliberals like Milton Friedman,
who I would define by people who place economic freedom over political freedom.
The interesting thing about these left to right travelers is they tend to do something sort of a sleight of hand where they begin to put Civil freedom ahead of social justice.
So what should remain for them is a belief in the need for some kind of redistributive equality or some kind of end state where economic inequality has been has been ameliorated somehow, but that seems to fade deep
into the background, instead replaced by a kind of obsession about matters of
speech and platforming, which I would imagine for any good socialist would always
be subordinate to a kind of a larger question of political economy. So there's a kind of slate
of hand there. But I think I completely agree that for marketing purposes, it's absolutely
necessary to be able to sort of say, look who's Wow.
Could you ever have imagined that so-and-so, a former member of the left party, is now on stage with a member of the AFD?
That sort of left-right tie-up, which is well represented by the compact magazine, the German version, And published by someone named Jürgen Elsässer, who himself kind of traveled from the Marxist left to the right, is, I think it's really important as a magnet for people of a certain generation and a certain political disposition who want to still see themselves as, as you say, or as Klein says, having some fidelity to the sort of original leftist principles.
If we recall when there were all these alt platforms being launched, Parler offered $20,000 for a liberal, someone in the liberal or lefty sphere to join this new platform.
So this literal financial incentive to make sure that your ranks are wide enough and your ranks don't just include far right ideologues, but you have an array of characters.
How are they going to work that out?
Were they going to do a survey?
Were they just headhunting individuals?
Were they going to look at voting records or donations?
What was that going to be like?
I mean, one thing can I just say really quick, because I think it's important for the left division, is that this also needs to be understood in terms of the kind of class first versus identity politics divide that has emerged on the left and very much divides currently the German left and the left party in particular.
The people who think that there's Some people who put the concerns of immigrants and people of color and women and gender minorities ahead of class issues and their alienation from what they call identity politics has often led them to make strange badfellas.
Okay, so these typologies I think are really interesting and instructive.
politics, but they because they despise other members of the left so much, they're willing
to take up company with people from the other side of the spectrum.
Okay.
So these, these typologies, I think, are, are really interesting and instructive.
The last one we have here is the far right esoteric entrepreneur.
We know this type actually pretty darn well on the podcast.
How would you describe this character?
I mean, I guess as opposed to the movement hustler type, who is maybe, you know, someone
who is active in the tech or startup world.
This is the radicalized yoga instructor, the famous example, right, of someone who's... I mean, we're talking about Germany here, so, like, the well is deep and, you know, full of things from sort of turn-of-the-century life reform movements to Steiner schools and Steiner diets and all forms of esoteric practice that Live on in surprisingly mainstream ways sometimes, right?
You'd be surprised how many people think homeopathy is like a real thing.
So there is a lot of possibility there.
And that also is, I think, where there is a bit of a Venn diagram overlap with people that would be called fascist in the sense that there is some sense of rootedness to place and bloodline that often taps into kind of certain notions of pre-Christian pagan spirituality.
And this is the kind of so-called brown wing of the Alternative for Germany party that is mostly interested in sort of extra-economic ideas of belonging and community rather than just, you know, austerity and fiscal discipline.
Interestingly, the birthplace of the Waldorf School, I think the first Waldorf School was built in Stuttgart, which is the same place that Michelle Balweg comes from and Querdenken was born.
And so you have, I mean, it's very much rooted in that part, that southwestern part of Germany.
Also, interestingly, I mean, the idea that you would kind of arrive at truths through introspection that would have the same kind of validity as natural science.
arcs across from you could also say arcs across the ideological spectrum of creating but also the geography of the country to the east where as Quinn was describing you have this this really the really hard or the really brown part of the the far right and the off day That is now kind of very much building a new climate discourse that is, in many cases, quite eco-fascist in character.
And they're moving from positions that they previously were using that were just climate denialist to actually recognizing the climate science, but then giving a kind of Neo-Malthusian turn to the discourse to kind of embed it in certain Racist understandings of culture and nature and locality.
In Germany, the menu of things that you can draw from to be kind of anti-establishment is quite different than in North America.
So it is just the case that within this diagonalist world, you know, to invoke America is kind of anti-establishment.
like that hence the RFK thing, to invoke Christianity is kind of anti-establishment
because Christianity isn't supposed to be wrapped up in politics. So some of these esoteric
entrepreneurs we cite in the piece are coming from things like Seventh Day Adventism or the
Evangelical Church, which is considered very far out and in some cases even illegal in Germany.
It was only recently that Scientology was able to kind of operate openly.
Jehovah's Witnesses are considered to be a kind of security threat at some times.
So these things that in America would seem like the most mainstream possible kind of values in a country where the secular and the kind of Scientifically informed practice of government really governs the center of the mainstream.
It can produce all kinds of curious kind of hybrids and recombinations on the edges.
Now, with regard to political response, you note that Angela Merkel really walked into a trap with regard to diagonalist actors.
You write that in a moment reminiscent of the summer of 2016, When presidential candidate Hillary Clinton denounced the alt-right in a long speech, thus indirectly boosting public interest in the topic, Angela Merkel spoke to the topic of Covid-19 in mid-December with rare emotion.
Calling the movement an attack on our entire way of life, she said that since the Enlightenment, Europe has chosen the path of building our view of the world on the basis of facts.
Okay.
Confronting an anti-factual movement was very difficult, she said.
Perhaps it will be a task for the psychologists.
Then you write, Merkel's remarks were shared by Kruidenker on social media with glee because her attempt to brand them with the stigma of mental illness confirmed their belief.
That the mainstream could only respond to their provocations with censorship and diagnosis.
So, you know, from one point of view, Merkel's comments are obvious, if, you know, a little bit banal, and maybe they're historically revisionist.
But on the other, they're really tone deaf.
And I'm wondering if you think that politicians like that are going to learn from interactions like the one that you recount here.
And that question a bit pessimistic.
The parallel that we draw in the piece is between Hillary Clinton's labeling of Trump supporters as deplorables, and in this case, In the German case, there's an appeal to the enlightenment and a characterization of Verdenker or anti-lockdown types as not just psychologically deranged, but anti-enlightenment.
And in Germany, that's really out of bounds.
Real insult to say you're anti-enlightenment.
And so I think that it depends on Who your audience, your public is to say, ah, yes, that was tone deaf.
I think in the case of Hillary Clinton, there were some that resonated with a certain part of the country that did see anyone who would vote for Trump in that light.
But in terms of building a leftist politics.
Yeah, I think indeed, that's, that's, that's tone deaf.
And in the case in the German case, when our kind of critique of, of Merkel is not simply from a left point of view, where she should have, you know, framed her discourse in a better way.
But it's also kind of misunderstanding of the way in which People in this movement understood themselves and their own relationship to science and to the Enlightenment, which, as you described frequently on the podcast, the idea of doing your own research and the idea of being able to
Yeah, to fact check or to give the give the models on, you know, on the contagion of the virus a look yourself is very much part of the self understanding of the movement.
You know, ideally, if we could imagine sort of like a perfect outcome for all of this, would be that now that we're entering this era of kind of, as I think David Wallace-Wells recently talked about as pandemic revisionism, even where people are like walking back things that they thought before, and there's sort of second guessing of measures that were actually carried out.
I mean, it's a real opportunity, I think, right now.
If this could not be construed as such a partisan question.
And to be understood and said along the kind of axes we've been laying out here, which is like,
what was the actual exposure to risk of people based on where they were in terms of their occupation
and their class position?
You know, like what did a lockdown mean based on your line of work being this versus that?
What kind of risk tolerance do you have as a parent versus a person with preexisting conditions
I mean, there are like matrices of like danger and risk here where people all sit in different places and what the kind of pro-lockdown versus anti-lockdown argument did was it just cut like a very blunt line through what's actually a very, I think, you know, entangled and there's like complex embroidered landscape and To do science in public is always to kind of grope your way towards the next version of truth.
And the ideal version here, again, of like a public sphere is where we could do the same with policy, where we could sort of say, we don't know exactly what happened, whether or not we made the right choices.
Let's think about it together and talk about how we could all be less susceptible to levels of risk that are unacceptable to us in the future.
You know, we've been looking very closely for most of this conversation at your piece about Kier Dankin, and it's from a couple of years ago now.
In it, you outline three possible futures for diagonalist movements.
And very often when we talk to people, as we've experienced too with our writing, you know, how we're perceiving a situation evolves over time.
What's in your crystal ball right now in terms of possible futures for diagonalism?
Yeah, so in the piece, we talk about different ways that the movement might either be integrated into existing far-right parties, that the movement might produce new parties, which it did, but have not been very successful.
Well, the third option would also be to disperse into the broader arena of online political organizing and then also the online parties that Quinn was talking about before.
I'm not sure about the crystal ball prediction question, but I do think that What we're seeing is a mutation of political entrepreneurship and of these movements themselves into ever more extreme discourses and alliances.
One of the most worrisome, I think, is the transformation from anti-lockdown politics to anti-climate politics.
So we kind of flag this possibility in our piece that In a future where we're going to need to have collective action and state action on climate change, that kind of these bottom-up movements or sometimes top-down coordinated movements that are deeply rooted in conspiracy discourses can be quite disruptive to climate action.
I think we're seeing that in a piece I'm writing right now with Members of the Zetkin Collective, we're talking about how in the UK there's this group called the Blade Runners who are actively cutting down the infrastructure and cameras that are put in place to track people's license plate on their cars to enforce anti-emission rules.
And so there's a kind of bottom-up movement driven by online conspiracy theories to say this idea of 15-minute cities, or the idea that you would have kind of environmental regulations from the local level to the national level, is in fact another instance of the Great Reset, of the globalist elites taking away our freedom, in this case our freedom to To pollute.
I think that's one kind of recent transformation of these movements into the terrain of far-right politics and in this case, anti-climate populism.
Yeah, I think that the way that it has been channeled into existing political parties is maybe the one scenario we didn't expect as much.
I mean, I personally have been surprised by how quickly the air went out of concern for like the pandemic per se.
Right.
I mean, the pandemic, I think, is itself not That's a major day-to-day issue for average voters, either in Germany or North America.
But the ambient energy that was produced by the pandemic and its aftermath, I think, has pooled in existing political party systems.
So in Germany, you have the surprise victory since the pandemic of the Social Democrats, who were thought to be sort of down and out, no longer a big factor in politics.
They would be they received, I would say, the kind of the mainstream energy of the of the pandemic and its aftermath.
It's the opponents of the pandemic's measures have pulled very much in the Alternative for Germany party.
Right.
And the latest polls now show the hard right AFD polling ahead of the ruling Social Democratic Party, which is extremely troubling and a very stark shift from where we were at even three or four years ago.
And I think Will is right.
Climate politics is absolutely the thin edge of the wedge.
And there, I think to their own peril, the normie Social Democratic Party have ignored that kind of that y-axis of people's exposure to economic hardship and risk.
Because one thing that was probably will be seen as a great error now, retrospectively, is they pushed through a bill about needing to replace gas-powered boilers with heat pumps.
In the short term future, that was rightfully, as with the gilets jaunes carbon tax, understood as a kind of regressive tax on poor people.
So people, both for good reason and for not so good reason, revolted against what looked like the confirmation of their idea that climate transition was going to happen by diktat from above, all of a sudden, in ways that reach into the very most intimate parts of your life.
So that the way that that's been managed I think has been pretty catastrophic and to me it's a sign of having taken the message out of the pandemic as being one of opposition and kind of silencing like these people are just fools and they need to be led down the correct path instead of doing a good job of listening to what people's grievances actually are and then figuring out how you can Roll things out in a way that are phased in such a way that they don't hit more vulnerable people first.
Of course, all that stuff has happened, but somehow, you know, we have ended up, I think, in an even worse situation than we were in when this all started.
William, have you got a final word that will not be so blackpilled?
He was going to go harder.
Oh, no, I was going to go.
I was going to go even darker.
Yeah.
The note that I was going to add to Quinn's observation about the AFD growing in the polls ahead of elections in the coming years.
So it's polling in 30 percent to 40 percent, almost 40 percent in parts of the eastern part of the country.
And now it just broke the 20 percent polling mark in parts of The western part of the country recently.
So on that note, but also kind of just to widen the lens a little bit, I mean, to think about how in this era of pandemic politics is having potentially having it depends on how you interpret it, having long lasting effects.
I think that the way that we think about the middle of society or the or the mainstreaming of right wing positions It needs to be rethought.
So there's a survey that's done every single year in Germany.
It's called the Middle Study or the Study of the Middle of Society because of the obsession in Germany about there being this middle of society that protects against the extreme left and against the extreme right.
So like an entire political discourse built on horseshoe theory, right?
And what the study showed is that there's been this uptick in extreme right wing views from two to three percent in years past to eight percent.
And there's been an uptick from 12 percent to 20 percent of people just not rejecting.
So being saying, oh, there's you know, there's it's a little gray area.
Is this right wing belief true or not?
So there's kind of an increasing level of tolerance for these kinds of discourses.
And then more broadly, 51% of those surveyed said that they don't trust public institutions, and 40% feel politically powerless, 60% are worried about inflation.
So these are kind of like widespread fears.
And I think that on the one hand, the fact that the AfD has risen, Including in parts of the country where you had some some major mobilization of of creating is something that we need to be thinking about and and organizing around and struggling against.
But on the other hand, I think that I mean, the fact that there are these kinds of sentiments and these kinds of fears, including the fears of downward mobility, mobility, and the idea The felt need for state investment that just hasn't been that hasn't happened and that's been blocked by the free market liberals in the government in Germany, I think is something that the political left, both in this country and in the United States needs to grapple with because the these material conditions are very much linked to the
The realm of discourses and beliefs that we've been discussing.
Quinn Slobodian and William Callison, thank you so much for your time.
We'll have you back in a year, and we hope you bring some better news.
It's a real pleasure.
Thanks for your work.
Really high-powered, explanatory stuff.
It's a real pleasure.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
A real pleasure, and we really appreciate everything you're doing.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality Podcast.
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