Dartmouth philosophy department hosts tin-foil hat conspiracy theorist

Paranoia strikes deep

Last month, Dartmouth’s philosophy department sponsored a lecture by Catherine Clune-Taylor, a professor at San Diego State with a PhD in philosophy from Princeton. The lecture was called “Covid-19 Anti-Vaxxers, White Supremacist Suicidality and Racialized Risk.” The Dartmouth Review covered the talk.

According to its reporter, J.J. Radetzky:

Clune-Taylor’s basic thesis was that vaccine refusal among white Americans is driven by racial resentment against black people. By refusing the vaccine, white people can continue to make themselves sick, and thereby further spread the disease to others, including black people.

The cost of sickness is worth the potential “reward” of harming black individuals. Furthermore, according to Clune-Taylor, a huge proportion of white Americans possess this profoundly twisted mindset.

Radetzky was not impressed:

Every other word in the talk was indecipherable jargon such as “thanatopolitics,” “hyperheteropatriarchal,” and “virus qua virus,” on top of the typical repertoire of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) puritans like “heteronormative,” “transphobia,” and “BIPOC [black, indigenous, or people of color].” Worse still, Clune-Taylor’s basic ideas were poorly organized and presented, with little effort given to minor details such as coherence or logical presentation. 

I can’t vouch for this aspect of the report, but it rings true. In any case, Clune-Taylor’s lecture had nothing to do with philosophy and the conspiracy theory she espoused is ludicrous.

The claim that “white supremacists” are trying to kill black people by coning down with covid is no more a philosophical proposition than any of the following: the CIA assassinated JFK, the 1969 moon landing was fake, the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center was an inside job. Like these claims, Clune-Taylor’s is a far-fetched assertion of fact.

Were it more plausible, her claim might be grist for a black studies, history, or sociology department. As it is, only a psychology department should have interest. A department of philosophy should not.

Dartmouth’s philosophy department aired Clune-Taylor’s conspiracy theory “as part of… [its] commitment to social justice,” pursuant to which the department “is developing a 5-year series of public lectures on Race, Gender and Justice.” Funding came from the Mark J. Byrne 1985 Fund in Philosophy.

Philosophy, not “social justice.”

This objection aside, it’s fair to ask how social justice is advanced by presenting a crack-pot theory that accuses white Americans of being so genocidal as to be willing to risk their own deaths, and those of their loved ones, on the off-chance that some blacks will die, as well.

Tragically, once in a great while some mentally unstable white guy goes on a shooting spree against blacks. It happened in Charleston, South Carolina years ago and it just happened in Buffalo, New York. These shooters probably understand that they are putting their lives at risk, but presumably feel it’s worth that price to massacre dozens of blacks.

But in these rare instances, the killer knows with near certainty that his actions (1) will kill multiple blacks and (2) will not endanger friends (if he has any) and family members. By contrast, catching covid when unvaccinated endangers not only one’s self but also one’s unvaccinated friends and family members, and does so to a far greater degree than it endangers random blacks.

An infinitesimally small number of whites are willing to risk their lives in exchange for the certainty of killing blacks. I doubt there is a single white American willing to risk the death or serious illness of himself, his family members, his friends and white neighbors in order to create a much smaller risk of death or serious illness among blacks.

Yet, according to the Review’s account, Clune-Taylor attributes this willingness to large swaths of white America. She even attributes it to the U.S. government. Her evidence? The fact that U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams came out against a federal nationwide mask mandate.

Adams, who by the way is black, said it should be up to the states to decide the matter. But his real motive, according to Clune-Taylor, was that the U.S. government would collapse were it not constantly killing blacks in one way or another.

I’ve only scratched the surface of the absurdities to which Dartmouth’s philosophy department, though Clune-Taylor, subjected members of the Dartmouth community. Radetzky does a good job of pointing to others.

Unfortunately, I must add that a similar and almost equally absurd conspiracy theory is circulating on the right. And not just on the fringe.

J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Ohio says:

If you wanted to kill a bunch of MAGA voters in the middle of the heartland, how better than to target them and their kids with this deadly fentanyl?. . .It does look intentional. It’s like Joe Biden wants to punish the people who didn’t vote for him and opening up the floodgates to the border is one way to do it.

Even if it were the case that MAGA voters in the heartland and their kids are the demographic most adversely affected by fentanyl, Vance’s claim would be a wildly implausible explanation for Joe Biden’s immigration policies. It’s far more plausible to suppose that lax immigration enforcement stems from a desire, eventually, to increase the size of the Latino electorate or from misguided humanitarian concerns, among other possible motivations.

But the evidence indicates that MAGA voters in the heartland are not the demographic most harmed by the opioid crisis. According to Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post, citing data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, the opioid overdose death rate is higher for blacks than for whites, both nationwide and in Ohio. (Please don’t tell Clune-Taylor.) Surely, Team Biden isn’t trying to kill off black voters.

Kessler also says that government seizures of fentanyl have increased under the Biden administration and that drug overdoses rose more sharply during the Trump administration than they have under Biden. If so, this too tends to undermine Vance’s suggestion that the Biden administration is trying to kill off MAGA voters.

It is sometimes said that America is in the midst of a “cold civil war.” Baseless assertions that one political faction or racial group is trying, literally, to kill off members of another faction or group through narcotics or a virus can only heat up such a war.