Me: Ok, class. David Icke. Go. What did you think of the reading?
Student A: I don’t understand how 12-foot lizards can come from both the fifth dimension and from inside the Earth’s core.
Student B: Maybe they’re the same place?
Student A: Now that’s ridiculous.
And so begins another day in one of my sections of ENGL-1101, otherwise known as “The Rhetoric of Conspiracy: Narratives of Power and Secrecy in the Digital Age.” In this class, 24 young, brave souls (and myself) dive into a long-running paradialogue with which most of us possess at least a marginal amount of familiarity, namely, the discourse perpetuated via the transmission of conspiracy theories. You’ve probably heard snippets of tales about the man behind the curtain, or the man behind the man behind the curtain, or the alien behind the man behind the curtain, or the demon behind the alien behind the man…you get the idea. Whether it’s speculation about the political machinations behind Bristol Palin’s success (or ultimate failure) on Dancing with the Stars, that latest news report about a strange streak across the Los Angeles skyline, or Donald Trump’s resurrection of the birther movement, I’m betting that you’re familiar with the underlying concept. There are forces out there that govern your life, and you don’t even know about these forces. Or at least, you don’t fully know. You know that you don’t know. Only a select few know what’s really happening in the world. The New World Order. The Illuminati. The Annunaki. Skull & Bones. The gatherers at Bohemian Grove. And on, and on.
Instead of focusing on where and how such ideas generate (you’re welcome to email me for a syllabus), I’d like to address the use value of A) teaching these ideas, and b) encouraging students to mimic the strategies that inform conspiratorial rhetoric.
Let’s start with question A: Why teach this stuff? Why not instead devote my work at Georgia Tech’s to processes of ‘factual’ accumulation? Certainly, there is a vast difference between a more stand line of questioning the specific aims within, say, the history of science, and the opening of the classroom door to months-long discussions of pseudo-secretive cults, “occult religions,” militia groups, devil worshippers, holocaust deniers, and alien abductee support groups.
I’ll cobble together a brief defense. For starters, many perpetrators of fringe discourses are very good at what they do. Consider, for example, David Icke or Alex Jones. Both maintain considerable web presences and demonstrate a clear affinity (at least in terms of presentation) with what we might think of as mainstream news media outlets. Fox News, AM talk radio, NPR, and the Huffington Post all serve as stylistic models worthy of emulation.
Let’s focus on one of the conspiracy community’s more popular (and more controversial) figures: David Icke, who I mentioned in the above student dialogue. Icke first rose to prominence in England during the 1980s, where enjoyed a successful career as a BBC TV sports presenter and, I’m sorry to say, a spokesman for the Green Party. In 1990, however, Icke reportedly became convinced that he was receiving visions from an otherworldly and potentially divine force. He sought counsel from a professional psychic and ruined his mainstream career by announcing on a popular British talk show that he was the son of God.
Icke immediately became a laughing stock and went underground for several years, only to re-emerge as an international conspiracy theory investigator. Since the late ‘90s, Icke has published nearly a dozen books, given lectures in packed auditoriums all over the world, and is a regular mainstay within the discourse of conspiracy culture. He is best known for a book called The Biggest Secret, in which he outs the Bush family, the Rothschilds, the English Royals, the Clintons, Kris Kristofferson, and country music legend Boxcar Willie as part of a secret race of reptilian shapeshifters who seek to colonize this planet for their own insidious purposes. These malevolent creatures regularly engage in dark rituals that involve sexual abuse, satanic chanting, the eating of human flesh, and the drinking of human blood. (Icke calls these cannibalistic rituals, but they wouldn’t really be cannibals if they’re actually lizards, right?). In addition—these lizards—who are actually twelve feet tall—live off “life force” generated by the emission of human fear. So, the more discord they sow in the world, the more fearful we become, and the more powerful they grow. Got it? Ok. (It’s actually much more baroque, but I’m going for the broad strokes here.)
In engaging with Icke’s version of global terrorism, my 1101 students are encouraged to work through a three-step process. First, students will work through a range of Icke’s texts in several forms of media. They read selections from his books, watch a DVD of one his infamous PowerPoint presentations (which typically run from six to eight hours, thoughwe only watch ninety minutes), sift through his website, and watch a Jon Ronson documentary about Icke’s conflicts with the Anti-Defamation League (who have argued that Icke’s lizard-rhetoric is code for Anti-semitic propaganda). Then, students are asked to develop a critical analysis of the material. Disproving Icke's thesis is hardly the point, as that's too easy. Instead, we focus on what’s potentially convincing about Icke’s argument. At what point might an audience be swayed? And how? What makes certain examples work, even if they aren’t necessarily sound? Once these processes have been identified, students are ready for the next step: create their own propaganda. (I should note that student-created propaganda is not unleashed for public consumption. We keep these materials in-house and use them solely as pedagogical models.)
In creating disinfo of their own, students become hyper-aware of the ways in which digital information can be manipulated to produce specific effects. Students are encouraged to create arresting posters, short films, podcasts, and websites. In class, we create a list of rules to break. (For example, “take quotes out of context to unfairly strengthen your case”; “create an argument that relies on feeling as opposed to evidence”; “rely on outdated sources of information.”) At the same time, students are writing reflective responses about their rhetorical processes, in which they acknowledge the conventions they are breaking, and by extension, acknowledge their awareness of said conventions. By doing, students learn what not to do. Contrary to the axiom “learn the rules before you can break the rules,” students signing up for English 1101 learn the rules as they break them while also identifying their rule-breaking regimen.
In addition to its rhetorical use value, students—I like to think—learn the virtue of tolerance as they fall down the rabbit hole of conspiracism. The Rhetoric of Conspiracy is not a course in which students are encouraged to proselytize the idiocy of the conspiracy theorist. Leaping to an inverted position is, I find, not without its own dangers. Instead, the course aims to ask questions about the generation of conspiracist ideology. Such ideas are, of course, systemic. They point to growing distrust in government officials, a structural breakdown within mainstream theological institutions, the rise of the scientific metanarrative, and other dominant social forces. Just because we reject Icke does not mean we should implicitly trust Congress. It’s important to avoid either/or constructions of belief and practice, and the recognition of such alternatives is a strong secondary objective of the course.
I’d like to mention an example of first-day work from one of my students. After our introductory session, students were asked to go home and write about a particular conspiracy in an effort to explain why it isn’t true. (I wanted to get the “it’s not true” line of inquiry out of the way as quickly as possible.) As I sifted through the students’ responses, I randomly selected one to read first. It was about the Tuskeegee experiments, and the student in question explained how this shameful moment in American history (which the student had just discovered on an unnamed website) could not possibly be true. Websites about the experiments were another example of yet another ridiculous government coverup. For the student’s cultural analysis, a general distrust of the systems of white privilege explained the dissemination of the outlandish myth of medical experimentation on illiterate African-American farmworkers.
It’s easy to laugh at David Icke. But as part of a governmental system that did conduct the Tuskeegee experiments, that interred Japanese Americans during WWII, that funded programs to create psychic spies, it’s important for us not to get too cocky. In recent years, we’ve seen firsthand the domestic dangers of conspiratorial thinking—the siege at Ruby Ridge, the disaster at Waco, the anti-technology campaign of Kaczynski, and the Oklahoma bombing, just to name a few. Such cataclysmic events point to moments of governmental instability in which conspiratorial thinking bubble to the surface, and our culture demonstrates its inability to reconcile a dominant discourse with the emergence of a counterdiscourse. (The inability to understand ideological opposition is particularly relevant to any sincere examination of the US government’s handling of the Waco siege.) If we can maintain our critical faculties without dismissing those who exist outside our own realms of the real—or at least, not dismissing “them” out of hand—perhaps the next generation will be smarter than we have been and avoid a few of the dangerous cultural collisions that we have not. In the hopes of furthering that goal, I’m even willing to keep David Icke on the syllabus next year.
Tom Lolis is an Renaissance scholar and Marion L. Brittian Postdoctoral Fellow in the Writing and Communication Program at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, where he teaches writing and argument courses that draw on themes in the occult and extraordinary.