“Fears of a ‘world government’ or ‘new world order’ have been bubbling under the American cultural surface for a very long time,” writes Hari Kunzru in an essay on conspiratorial thinking in US politics for the May 26, 2025, issue of The New York Review. Suspicions that everything is connected and that someone is pulling the strings—be it satanic child abusers, the CDC, or aliens—are to be found, Kunzru writes, in both “the conspiracy cultures of the Christian right and the countercultural left” and have brought together an unexpected coalition of voters, “fueling the populism that has brought Donald Trump to power for a second time.”
Many of these truth seekers met one another in the Internet’s murky depths, which Kunzru has been illuminating for our readers, alongside other repressed currents flowing through British and American politics, for years. Kunzru, a columnist for Harper’s Magazine and a professor in New York University’s creative writing program, has written a number of acclaimed novels, often about political forces—race, inequality, migration—bearing down on individual psyches, which tend to collapse into paranoia or obsession. Occasionally, a UFO shows up. I e-mailed with Kunzru this week about RFK Jr., “chan culture,” and magical thinking.
Willa Glickman: In your essay you write that “With [Kennedy’s] elevation, conspiracy—which usually presents the government as a distant object of obsession or fantasy—has become governmental logic.” Scholars like Quinn Slobodian and William Callison have argued that a hallmark of many of these recent politically ambiguous populist movements has been the “conviction that all power is conspiracy.” Do you think the current administration will be able to retain this base now that they are in positions of power?
Hari Kunzru: When you’re in power, it becomes harder to present yourself as a truth-telling insurgent. There is a great deal of communications work being done to produce a picture of a “liberal” behemoth that has control over the media, law, and civil society, and must be destroyed in order for a good world to be built. The DOGE playbook is typical of this. Their preferred narrative is of a plucky band of brave outsiders rooting out corruption, but many are anonymous servants of the world’s richest man working with no oversight. Some of what they’re doing is illegal, and there are indications that they are exfiltrating public data and transferring it to private entities. The agenda is to delegitimize government and facilitate the transfer of public goods to private interests. This is the very definition of a conspiracy, in that it’s the secret work of a small group, but it’s presented as a public service.
Other than RFK Jr., which figures in the administration seem most under the sway of conspiratorial thinking? In your 2020 essay on 4chan you describe Stephen Miller as “clearly a product of chan culture.”
When I saw a photo of Stephen Miller early during the first Trump administration, he was holding his jacket in a peculiar way that resembled an “OK” sign. At the time this was an alt-right dogwhistle, with enough plausible deniability to ensure that anyone pointing it out could be smeared as paranoid. I suspected then that he was deep inside that culture—to be honest, it would have been unlikely for a young right-wing man of his generation not to have at least some contact with it. Also, by temperament he’s a troll, brimming with resentment. He’s basically a very high-functioning version of the social type that drives that kind of online discourse.
It’s hard to say how much Kash Patel really believes the QAnon material he has promoted in the past. He’s an opportunist, and his main interest seems to be in attaining power. Tulsi Gabbard grew up in a religious sect called the Science of Identity Foundation that some former followers have described as a cult, and spent two years in the Philippines in schools associated with the group. She received substantial campaign donations from SIF members, and SIF members have served on her congressional staff. She has called SIF’s leader, Chris Butler, a surfer who remade himself as a New Age guru, her “Guru Dev” as recently as 2015. The whole structure of that kind of community lends itself to conspiracism. She also seems to have a taste for conspiracy narratives about, for example, chemical attacks in Syria being staged. I think if you scratch the surface, you’d find a lot of other stuff going on there.
What we’ve come to call “election denial” is, of course, a conspiracy theory, and support for that is an article of faith for many Trumpists who want to work in the administration, so to a greater or lesser extent, they’re all under the spell of conspiratorial thinking. It’s regime orthodoxy.
In your May 29 essay you describe how “magical thinking” and belief in a coming “paradigm shift” are common to both traditionally left-wing New Age and traditionally right-wing Christian thought. What forces once kept these groups relatively separate in the past?
I think there was a period when external signifiers of dissent (long hair, not wearing a tie) were much clearer than now, and that made it harder for ideas to cross from one milieu into another. That said, there has always been crossover, since the underlying structures of thinking are very similar.
You worked as an editor at Wired in the late 1990s. What was that experience like?
I went to Wired not really understanding the West Coast libertarian culture it had emerged from. To me, as a young person living in London, it appeared “countercultural,” which at the time I thought was left- or liberal-coded. The founder, Louis Rossetto, had a very clear libertarian agenda. It took a while for the penny to drop, but the eighteen months or so when I was on staff were an important part of my political education.
Your 2020 novel, Red Pill, describes the disintegration of a literary type who falls under the spell of a neo-Nazi, posthumanist TV writer. What ideologies did you spend the most time researching while working on that book?
The resurgence of biological racism is one cluster of ideas that I’ve spent a lot of time looking at. It’s easy to discount crude racist ideas. More insidious are the “soft,” media-friendly versions; there are many people online who like to point out the deficiencies in social constructionism or the idea that the mind is a “blank slate,” and then use this position to move forward into more tendentious assertions about group differences in intelligence or propensity for violence, and from there to proposing that members of out-groups should be denied political and civil rights. You only have to google something like “heritability of IQ,” and you become aware that there’s a deep desire out there to reassert the racial hierarchies of the nineteenth century.
Another area that fascinates me is millenarianism, the belief that the world is imminently about to come to an end or go through a total transformation. Throughout history people have looked at the state of the world and fantasized about an absolute transformation. There are left- and right-coded versions of this—one person’s world revolution is another person’s rapture or technological singularity. When you think the world as we experience it is about to be swept away, the boring work of ameliorating suffering or managing resources can be shelved in favor of exciting fantasies about transcendence. This is what drives much of the carelessness of the Silicon Valley oligarchy. Many of them think that we’re a few years away from the advent of an AI god or Daddy that will solve everything.
Red Pill considers the difficulty of studying these sorts of ideas while remaining totally aloof from them. Have you ever found yourself being drawn in by any aspects of the ideas you’ve spent time immersed in?
I think this kind of research—and the intellectual exercise of taking seriously views you find challenging or even abhorrent—is a very good way to see the blind spots in any kind of received wisdom. I’ve become intolerant of liberal groupthink, but a lot of right-wingers lack even the desire to challenge their prejudices. They’re in it just for the libidinal satisfactions of visiting trauma or punishment on their enemies.
English (US) · 