A Post-truth crisis? Researching conspiracism in the present political conjuncture

Abstract

In response to the three commentaries, I emphasize the importance of distinguishing the three approaches to conspiracism identified in my original article (pathologization, normalization, and problematization). My discussion centers on the commentaries of Tristan Sturm and Leila Dawney, whose perspectives resonate with the normalization paradigm. I use these interventions to reflect on the ethicopolitical relevance of the ‘normalizing’ approach in the present moment. I find that this approach's focus on the economic context in which conspiracism supposedly takes root traps this phenomenon in stories of warranted responses to economic disenfranchisement. I highlight the politics risks these stories pose as they repeat assumptions about who constitutes ‘the people’, and solutions rooted in economic leveling and ideological realignment. I restate my commitment to an approach which problematizes conspiracism with the aim of understanding the conjuncture in which it becomes an object for thought. I emphasize the relevance of this approach in a contemporary political conjuncture which seems uniquely characterized by the sense that Truth is in danger. As an object which is taken to symptomatize the eruption of this crisis of Truth, our choices of frameworks to research conspiracism delineate positions that can validate or unsettle the diagnosis of crisis.

‘Conspiracy theory and geography: who gets to say where is power’ identified and described, through a review of existing work on conspiracism, three broad tendencies which orient research on conspiracism. The first one (pathologization) considers conspiracism as a deviant mode of thinking and focuses on individual biases and faulty reasoning to account for its existence. A second one (normalization) inscribes conspiracism in the broader politicocultural context in which it takes shape, and as such, normalizes its existence, often with the aim of emphasizing its political potential. A third tendency (problematization) draws from the Foucauldian tradition of problematization to understand how conspiracism, as a category of thought and subjectivity, becomes thinkable, identified, and resolved as a ‘knowable’ object associated with specific problems. These remain, naturally, tendencies with many intermediate and entangled forms between them. In this commentary, however, I emphasize the importance of making distinctions between these different tendencies, especially as they demarcate and sustain different political sensibilities and aims. This is a necessary task, if geographers are to remain open to discussing what kind of object conspiracism can be for the discipline. To do so I engage with three commentaries provided by Christopher Lizotte, Tristan Sturm, and Leila Dawney. I am grateful for the opportunity afforded by these commentaries to further refine my thinking.

In his commentary, Lizotte finds that the contemporary academy can be the site of emotional dismissals of ‘alternative knowledges’ (Lizotte, 2025: 3). Lizotte goes on to propose ‘methodological empathy’, as a way to stay with and understand the internal logic of truth-claims that may sit uncomfortably with the political and ethical commitments which underscore researchers’ field of affectability. I would be curious to hear more about how Lizotte conceptualizes the analytical value and political purpose of this methodological tool. What would be the purpose of extending our capacities to listen, or as stated more directly by Lizotte, (2025: 3), to ‘minimize epistemological boundary work’? How might this methodological tool be put into practice? In this commentary, Lizotte therefore initiates a generative line of inquiry that I would be interested to see further developed.

In the rest of this commentary, I focus on Dawney and Strum's interventions that seem to articulate, in my reading, a position which aligns more clearly and closely with the normalization paradigm.

Dawney advances a position that advocates for the importance of understanding the context in which conspiracism takes root and flourishes. It is specifically the analytical frame of authority that could, according to Dawney, provide the key to understand and unsettle the propagation of conspiracism. The context Dawney (2025: 4) uncovers is one of disenfranchisement and left-behindness: suburbs deprived of amenities and transportation; and disoriented contemporary masculinities. This is the context where Dawney inscribes a subject – prone to conspiratorial thinking – who has been unfairly cast aside by critical geography. For Dawney, responsibility for geographer's lack of engagement with this subject lies in poststructuralist theories and a ‘new’ geography whose embrace of ‘identitarian politics’ (Dawney: 2) guides its unequal engagements with different subjects.

Here I disagree with Dawney. First because I interpret post-structuralist theories as explicitly resisting essentialisation – and therefore could hardly be blamed for what Dawney names ‘identitarian politics’. Second because I read in Dawney's (p. 1) opposition between ‘subalterns’ and consumers of conspiracy theories the risk of an implicit racialization of the ‘conspiracy theorist’ as white, which could thereby position whiteness as a marginalized subject position – a framing that would be both inaccurate and politically harmful. And thirdly because I primarily perceive in geographers’ selection of research subjects a necessary commitment to justice – and not ‘identitarian politics’. In my article, I do note geography's lack of engagement with conspiracism. But I relate this absence to an ethos of affirmation that underpins a disciplinary habit of generous engagement with our objects of critique (see Dekeyser and Jellis, 2021). In this context, I point out how the category of conspiracism – by naming an uncertain and politically ambiguous form of dissent – provides the possibility to reevaluate the hollowness of such calls for generosity that can routinely roam free of concrete political obligations in geographical scholarship. ¹ This is because engaging seriously with conspiracism – as an uncertain object – can provide the opportunity to occupy a position of radical uncertainty to our object of critique. This proposition therefore does not mark a turn away from post-structuralism's theoretical, ethical and political commitments. On the contrary, radical uncertainty – that I link in my article to Deleuzian theories of difference and Derrida's conceptualization of hospitality – forces the careful reevaluation of representations. I embrace this poststructuralist position because I believe that it is necessary to engage in meaningful and radical political judgments – an experimental practice that can nonetheless never fully detach from normative principles of justice and equity.

Sturm states a position which rearticulates much of the normalizing tendency already present in conspiracism scholarship. As work grounded in this tendency argues, conspiracy theories must be understood within the structural, affective, and cultural context, which reveals them to be warranted emotional responses to destabilizing conditions of the present. For Sturm (2025: 4): ‘their narratives of hidden elites, systemic deception, and alienated sovereignty signal, however, mis-directed, a profound dissatisfaction with contemporary capitalist governance and its attendant crises of representation, inequality, and technocratic rule’. From here, the argument goes: ‘we’ should be able to hear conspiracy theories to translate and redirect their potential anticapitalist energies, while still engaging in an ideological struggle which can safeguard ‘us’ from ‘racism, misogyny, and fascist nostalgia’ (Sturm, 2025: 4).

For these two interventions, context matters. The effect is ‘normalizing’ because this paradigm reveals conspiracy theories to be reactions that can be justified and explained by underlying circumstances. Politically, this tendency of work on conspiracy theories considers that understanding the context where conspiracy theories take root can illuminate dissatisfactions with these contexts. In my reading, these interventions align with a project – most explicitly articulated for example by Sturm in this forum – which therefore seeks to translate and rewire conspiracy theories toward the articulation of political aims centered on shared economic interests. As they seem to focus on the problem of translation, I understand these interventions as foregrounding ideological struggle as the road to build a new political consciousness.

As an analytical framework I am not against ‘normalization’. I agree, context does matter. If context includes not only the economic and structural, but also the libidinal, the historical, the ideological, and the affective, then this tendency of work can offer important insights into the internal logic of conspiracy theories and the environment in which they take shape. But I remain cautiously aware of the political sensibilities and assumptions that this tendency of work both implicitly and explicitly builds upon and extends.

First, ideological struggle – which seems to me to be the primary concerns of the commentators – is important, but unless it is merged with interventions into people's material conditions of existence and libidinal attachments, I do not believe that it can lead anyone very far. Second, I perceive in this paradigm some key dimensions of contemporary political and analytical propositions which seek to address the resentments of our ‘populist moment’. The argument goes: we should put our judgements to the side to be able to hear these resentments as the expression of economic disenfranchisement and channel them into a politics based on shared economic interests (e.g. Hochschild, 2016). With this in mind, the ‘line which must be drawn at racism, misogyny and fascist nostalgia’ (Sturm, 2025: 4) can come across as an afterthought; something which must be filtered by our ‘ideological clarity and strategic rigour’ (Strum: 4). This may seem like a small detail, but it is one which, to me, divides distinct political projects: one that softens – and betrays – its commitment to equality to sustain its dream of uniting ‘the people’ – primarily imagined as white (see Mondon and Winter, 2019) – around its shared economic interests, and one which believes that a political project for the present can only succeed if it unapologetically leads and builds solidarity from its revolutionary purpose and commitment to equality. ² This is especially important as no matter how intensely the ideological struggle to unite people around their shared economic interests may be led, people who are profoundly animated by resentment toward those who are believed to steal their enjoyment will always happily betray their economic interests to secure their place in the social hierarchies which structure and reproduce our world.

These are some of the key political issues of our present political impasse. I do not pretend to know them or their solution better than the activists and political actors who concretely seek to intervene in these situations of heightened and instrumentalized resentments. And this is perhaps the final point that troubles me with this tendency of work; it already seems to know the contours of the problem (the duped masses), its solutions (correct ideological alignment), and confidently states a program for intervention (ideology critique). This is why it seems to me that an academic voice may be more useful for understanding this situation than for articulating a political strategy, which by necessity must remain flexible.

Most of the time I don’t even know what we’re talking about. Conspiracy theories, Sturm tells us, following Joseph Uscinski (2019: 48), are defined as ‘an explanation of past, ongoing, or future events or circumstances that cites as a main causal factor a small group of powerful persons … acting in secret for their own benefit and against the common good’. And yet, each intervention present in this forum also seem to reveal the implicit amalgamations that shape conspiracism as a matter of concern in the present conjuncture of North American and Western European liberal democracies: the political consciousness of the masses, carrying the potential threat of white, heterosexual, and masculine resentments (Sturm, 2025), with its irrational desire to transgress any form of authority evidenced by its embrace of mysticism and medical heresies (Dawney, 2025), but still, always holding the possibility of our collective emancipation if ‘we’ only learn to listen (Lizotte, 2025). In sum, it seems that if populism names the narrative device that puts in motion the masses as a coherent political congregate – ‘people vote wrong’ – then conspiracism names its resentful and paranoid political consciousness – ‘people think wrong’. So, it really never seems to be simply about theories of secrecy and gleeful elites. But this is not just to make a point about vocabulary choice; that ‘conspiracism’ is doing its job badly, that there would be a better, fairer, nicer word to use in its instance. My point – problematization – is about the necessity to understand this fracture of meaning and the effervescence that surrounds it.

Problematization offers a distinct analytical framework from approaches that focus solely on the objective reality of conspiracism, as it also attends to the discourse which offers ‘conspiracism’ as an object of thought. Work that I inscribe under this tendency recognizes that conspiracism, as a category of thought and subjectivity, is a term which carries a social, political and affective weight that extends its meaning beyond its logical definition. Drawing from a Foucauldian tradition, problematization is concerned with the spatial and historical grounds within which an object enters the domain of collective knowledge. Problematization does not ask what conspiracy theories are or why people believe them, but under what historical, affective, structural and ideological conditions conspiracism becomes an object that can be known. This never means that conspiracism has no objective reality, but the focus of this approach is to foreground how this phenomenon is rendered intelligible, recognizable, and solvable.

The aim here is less programmatic than it is exploratory. I perceive in the trajectory opened by this tendency of work the possibility to understand a political conjuncture where Truth is felt to be in crisis. The issue then is one where the sense of the time is felt, partly, through the crisis of (post-)Truth. This is evidenced in the way that conspiracism, as a floating signifier, names an unlocatable and indefinable threat to Truth, against which the dominant modalities of knowledge production must be secured and affirmed. But also, in the way that conspiracism – its ‘objective reality’ this time – intensely attaches itself to the hope of rescuing truth from the perceived cruelty and stupidity of the elite. In a time of shifting political hegemonies, Truth becomes an object in need of salvation and protection for claims competing to (re)establish their common sense as the new horizon of intelligibility.

The political pay-off of this paradigm is a gamble. After combing through every other proposition's political stake and pitfall how unfair it is to leave without a clear alternative. But refusing the problematizations of the present, and their catalogue of already-selected solutions, is a political choice. The alternative, then, is to remain in uncertainty long enough to understand what the emergence of specific problems reveals about the historical, ideological, and affective attachments that seem to lock us into particular political dramas (e.g. punition vs. absolution of the resentful). Behind the immediate problem of conspiracism, the challenge for Geography is to position itself in the fray of the struggle over common sense. Do new objects which enter the play of the political present get thrown into the background of our geographies of the present-as-crisis, or do they become carefully examined to unsettle the ground in which these problems take root and foreclose our political horizon?