Welcome to the bully pulpit from the University of Southern California Center for the Political Future.

Our podcast brings together America's top politicians, journalists, academics, and strategists from across the political spectrum for discussions on hot-button issues where we

respect each other and respect the truth. We hope you enjoy these conversations.

Good morning. My name is Jay Rubenstein and I am director of USC Dornseif Center for the

pre-modern world. I'd like to welcome you to our two-day symposium, conspiracies then and now.

One of the goals of the center I direct is to look into the distant past as a way to try to

understand what's going on in our modern world, to try to see it in a new light.

And as such, I'm delighted to be able to partner with

the Center for the Political Future to bring you this event. On behalf of both centers, I would also

like to thank the Rancho Mirage Writers Festival without whom this event would not have been possible

in its current form. Today, we are going to talk about conspiracies and conspiracy theories in the Middle Ages and the modern world.

As a historian, I've learned that when you put two ideas together, two similar and similarly fascinating ideas and look at them really closely, you see a lot more than if you just focus on one thing.

And for me, the moment when I thought of putting these two things together, the crystallizing moment came when I started reading some of the literature produced by the conspirators of the moment, which is to say the Q&ONM movement.

A lot of the intellectual moves they were making as such could have been taken straight out of the medieval playbook, whether it was anti-Semitism, a belief in bizarre, blood and sex rituals,

secret coded communications, or the fevered embrace of apocalyptic fantasies.

And then January 6th happened, and this event seemed not only possible, but essential, even urgent.

Before we begin, though, let me ask a basic question to set the tone. What's the

difference between conspiracies and conspiracy theories? A recent book defines a conspiracy,

and I'm reading here, as a small group of powerful individuals who act in secret for their

own benefit against the common good in a way that undermines rules, norms, or institutions.

It's a perfectly fine definition as far as it goes, but I think already we have to make a couple of revisions.

One is conspiracies don't have to be small, as we saw on January 6th, and they don't necessarily need to be composed entirely of the powerful.

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