"Extremism and the Allure of Science": A Conversation with Tracy Llanera and Louise Richardson-Self (Keywords: White Supremacy; Conspiracy Theories; Nationalism; Gender; Essentialism; Objectivity)

This conversation was taken from our recent book, Science, Anti-Science, Pseudoscience, Truth, edited by Anthony Morgan. If you enjoy reading this, please consider becoming a patron or making a small donation. We are unfunded and your support is greatly appreciated.

Defining extremism turns out to be a tricky business. There are a host of traits associated with extremism, e.g., intolerance, rigidity and inflexibility, feelings of victimization, hate and anger towards particular outgroups, displeasure and fear about the state of the world or the direction it is headed, willingness to sacrifice oneself or others in the name of one’s ideals. Definitional problems aside, one notable feature of many extremist groups – from white supremacists to the alt-right – is the allure of scientific explanations in reinforcing their views. From biological essentialism to “natural” hierarchies, scientific findings are sought out to add substance to extremist arguments. In this conversation, Tracy Llanera and Louise Richardson-Self help us explore the boundaries between fact and fiction, science and pseudoscience.

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Anthony Morgan (AM):  Tracy, extremism is a central topic for you. Please can you situate your own thinking and research in relation to extremism?

Tracy Llanera (TL): I am a philosopher of extremism. My approach looks at the social practises that extremist cultures engage in. My goal is to make sense of social phenomena in extremist cultures and movements that at first glance do not appear to make sense, but with further investigation actually do. Then I formulate philosophical concepts that can better capture and explain what I’m investigating. For example, I became curious about the role of women in white extremist groups, like the “tradwives” and “white power barbies” you see in politics and social media, as well as other kinds of female propagandists who support racist and anti-feminist ideas. I was curious about the misogyny that they promote online and the misogyny that they experience themselves by virtue of being extremists. I have referred to this issue in my writings as “the misogyny paradox” of the alt-right.

AM:  Louise, what role does extremism play in your research?

Louise Richardson-Self (LR-S): The thing that really motivates my research in general is the search for the social imaginaries that underscore the things that make people feel strongly about topics, what makes the world meaningful for them in the particular way that it does, what makes some norms seem absolutely incontrovertible and others challengeable. While my research is less explicitly focused on extremism compared to Tracy’s, it has been impossible to ignore how polarised the issue of trans identity has become in contemporary western societies, particularly in the US, the UK, and Australia. What I’m interested in is understanding the narratives that convince people (seemingly without any kind of wiggle room for thought, critique or reconsideration) that either trans and gender diversity is a real, genuine phenomenon that needs to be supported in a particular sort of way, or it’s a “mental illness”, or the effects of a dangerous ideology that is changing the world in ways that are both scary and unimaginable. And what is really interesting is the way in which science is being used as a master narrative in both directions – both to justify trans and gender healthcare, but also to undercut the models for trans and gender healthcare that we have now. And, of course, both sides believe they’re following the science! So how we do make sense of this to a very fearful public?

AM: What are your thoughts on how we differentiate one from the other? I have come across numerous examples on both sides of the gender debate accusing the other side of manipulating the science, using the science for their own ends, peddling pseudoscience, being lost in ideology, and so on. For people who may not be skilled in interpreting science, what are the things we can look out for, either in this debate specifically or more generally in the areas where extremist pseudoscience may be at play?

LR-S: This kind of worry is not just tied to the issue of trans and gender diversity; rather, it is true for any social situation where science is positioned as the determining factor of what is right and what is wrong. So, we’ve seen this with climate science, for example, and fortunately both science and public opinion have largely gone in the direction of believing that climate change is a real phenomenon. But the same types of argument were playing out in this discourse as well. Something that’s interesting to consider is the extent to which we would see such emphatic discussion of “the science” if gender fluidity was not as scary as it is – if it didn’t capture the imaginations of some members of society in ways that spell out the complete denial of the natural world as it exists, or complete denial of some sort of God’s plan for how humanity ought to be engaged with one another. So, I think that dealing with both emotions and impressions is really important here, as this might change people’s willingness to see whether or not what is being presented to them as “scientific” and therefore irrefutable (e.g. the Truth of sexual dimorphism) can be interpreted in a different way.

TL: The idea of gender strikes at the heart of how we have organised our world for a long time. For people who believe that sex and gender are biological and fixed, it can be destabilizing to witness these categories being pervasively questioned or reoriented. Many white extremist groups want to preserve a biological and essentialist understanding of gender. They use science to lend an objective and rationalist backbone to their extremist beliefs about gender and race. White extremists both have a short-term political agenda of, say, limiting immigration or reproductive rights, as well as long-term visions of white utopias. For instance, white women extremists want communities with white nuclear families that follow the gender hierarchy; violent white extremists want a white paramilitary ethno-state; anti-Semitic, Christian racist hate groups want everyone in their community to be white Christians; and white eco fascists are obsessed about communing with nature, but only if the other people communing with nature are their fellow Aryans. The long-term agendas of various stakeholders of white extremism skew the way that research data is interpreted and engaged.

AM: Would it be possible to provide a specific example of where pseudoscience has been used to validate an extremist position.

TL: A memorable example is the work of the conspiracy theorist David Irving, a Holocaust denier. Irving used the Leuchter report, commissioned by anti-Semitic Ernst Zündel for his defence in a trial against him in Canada, in his writings. Even though it was proven that Fred Leuchter wasn’t qualified to do that kind of research, David Irving continued to pass off the report as legitimate scientific research to prove that the Holocaust didn’t happen. In Hate in the Homeland, Cynthia Miller-Idriss argues that despite the strong evidence that race has little biological basis, and that 99.9% of the human genome is identical across races, race science remains a hot topic in the far right. Mankind Quarterly and American Renaissance promote pseudoscientific research and eugenicist arguments; funding bodies such as the Pioneer Fund continue to fund institutes that promote research that highlight racial differences in terms of IQ, sporting abilities, and strength according to Miller-Idriss. These are just a few examples of pseudoscientific arguments, institutions, and publications that exist today and are being financially supported by the far right.

AM: To continue with the gender thread, Judith Butler recently wrote a book called Who’s Afraid of Gender? I haven’t read it, but the impression I got from a few reviews I read is that Butler is increasingly making a link between gender critical stances and extremist organisations, especially fascist governments. Louise, can you try and flesh out this more extremist trajectory that Butler is trying to draw our attention to?

LR-S: For our purposes, the key argument that Butler makes in this book is to link together certain governments, conservative religious ideologies, particular think groups and organisations, and also trans exclusionary radical feminists or gender critical feminists, to say that, while these bodies come apart with respect to some of their beliefs, ultimately what underscores all of them is a conservative ideology that’s based in sexual dimorphism. This denies that people have agency in determining who they are, and invisiblises intersex people whose bodies don’t fit the model of the dimorphic sex division. For Butler, those who are “anti-gender ideology” (as they term it) want to deny the agency trans and gender diverse people demonstrate when they choose to live with a different gender assignment, they want to eradicate the existence of trans and gender diverse people (who are “sick”, “sinful” etc.), they want everybody to conform within this neat little “natural” box. We may be comfortable describing this movement as reactionary, but Butler goes further by equating it with a fascist mindset. In order to oppose fascism, Butler feels that we need to be on board with trans and gender diversity. I can see Butler’s logic, because they link, in Butler’s view, to things like the colonial project, capitalism, and so on. But I think it’s not necessarily helpful to be describing the whole situation as a fascist situation. People will likely see this as hyperbole, and I think many people would not want to go so far as to say that this ideological position is extremist in the same way we would describe, say, white nationalism as extremist.

AM: In one of your papers, you refer to “meaning vertigo” which you describe as “a vertiginous and unsettling emptiness at the level of social meaning”. There’s a sense in which when neat, clear, binary pictures are not offered (which is characteristic of Butler’s work!), this vertigo sets in and the extremist reaction comes out of this panic at a felt sense of emptiness in social meaning. Could you say a little bit more about that phrase and how widespread you see that phenomenon as being?

LR-S: The term itself was coined by Filipa Melo Lopes, an academic based at the University of Edinburgh. She did some interesting work about post-feminist backlash and created this concept to describe what happened following the second wave feminist liberation movement. There was a feminist critique of all of the things that were wrong, but there was not a ready replacement for how we could (or should) understand “men”, “women”, and the appropriate social relationship between them. So, some people found themselves reinscribing the norms that had previously been functional in terms of, say, women’s sexual “liberation” looking very much like women’s sexual objectification. And I think that it’s a useful concept because it really speaks to the need for our sense-making narratives to be ready in place and to be resonant enough to make new sense out of the world in a way that’s consistent with the old sense of the world. If there isn’t enough resonance overlapping the two ways of understanding what the world is like, then that’s where you get this gap, where meaning completely collapses, and in this situation people stabilize themselves by emphasizing exactly what it is they take to be True. I think that you see this when some people respond to the suggestion that sex itself could be a social construction (as opposed to just gender being a social construction). For some, probably for many, it just seems obviously and incontrovertibly True that men are men, women are women, and that’s the way the world naturally is. When faced with a narrative that denies sexual dimorphism and suggests that both sex and gender are fluid (or at least changeable), there’s just not enough resonance or overlap with the traditional view. And what we’re missing is the ability to create that space for resonance and overlap as a consequence of meaning vertigo: people are just digging their heels in harder, being more resistant to one another, rather than trying to make sex and gender meaningful together.

AM: We have been talking about ways in which certain extremist groups may engage with ideas around science. They may, for example, have their own way of operationalizing ideas around objectivity or truth towards their own ends. But you were talking just now about equality in relation to hierarchy, and in your work you describe a number of other “Enlightenment values”, such as autonomy and freedom, that are being twisted or reappropriated to suit the ends of extremists. Could you say something about the ways in which these values are being reshaped or remoulded. And a further question would be: isn’t this unavoidable in a pluralistic society in which people have the right to turn conventional notions of freedom on its head and say that they are the true defenders of freedom?

TL: Right now, I live in the United States, where the language of rights, liberty, and freedom dominates all public discourses. The white extremist groups I study have this firm belief that Enlightenment values like freedom and autonomy were brought to life by Western civilization. So, the idea of freedom for them is a uniquely Western achievement. Consequently, they consider themselves as having a legitimate claim towards the interpretation and expression of these freedoms, especially when they are backed up by constitutional guarantees (no matter how unjust or socially irrelevant the law). Since we are living in a more globalised world where different cultures interact on a day-to-day basis, they also perceive these Enlightenment achievements as being challenged or threatened by what in their books are inferior, non-Western cultures. So, it’s no coincidence that the white power movement champions these notions that to some extent were articulated by the Enlightenment movement, as white and Western values that need defending.

AM: How do you bring people of various and opposing views to coexist in a harmonious society? Do you have any thoughts on how we could at least try and do a little bit better?

LR-S: I think I would revert back to this idea of resonance that I was talking about before. All social change requires a bit of push and pull, so there needs to be some resonance, but there also needs to be some critique. Finding the balance of those two things in ways that can generate shifts in social meaning for a large amount of people very quickly is quite challenging. When I think about this challenge, I try to be cognizant both of the ways that I can make something resonant for someone who disagrees with me and where within this more resonant story I can introduce the critique as a different way of thinking about the issue.

TL: One of the philosophers I read often is Richard Rorty. He admires Judith Shklar’s concept of political liberalism, the basis of which is the idea that cruelty is the worst thing we do as human beings. This view puts a spotlight on our everyday social practises in the public sphere: how behaviours such as mean spiritedness, nastiness, combativeness, and aggression are prized over warm and fuzzy conversational traits, like compassion, kindness, understanding, and the ability to listen with empathy and care. Why aren’t those ordinary and kind social practises being endorsed as the primary guiding norms of public discourse? There’s so much negativity, egotism, and anger in our political discourses, and the goal of winning a point always comes at the expense of the attitudes and behaviours that help people open themselves up to new perspectives and feel good about being part of a community. If we could find a way of championing those attitudes in public discourse, then I think we might have a stab at getting a bit more harmonious as a society, or at least more civil and friendly to each other.

Further Resources:

Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender? Allen Lane, 2024

Tracy Llanera, “The Misogyny Paradox and the Alt-Right”. Hypatia 38:1 (2023)

Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right. Princeton University Press, 2020

Louise Richardson-Self, “The Vatican says gender theory threatens human dignity – but Judith Butler believes the ‘threat’ is social change”. The Conversation (2024)

Published online: Friday 14th March 2025

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