Science Fiction and the Alt-Right

The first major neo-Nazi party in the US was led by a science fiction fan. So opens Jordan S. Carroll’s Speculative Whiteness, a book that traces ideas about white nationalism through the entangled histories of science fiction culture and white supremacist politics, showing that debates about representation in science fiction films and literature are struggles over who has the right to imagine and inhabit the future. Here, Carroll is joined in conversation with David M. Higgins.

Jordan S. Carroll is the author of Reading the Obscene: Transgressive Editors and the Class Politics of US Literature (Stanford University Press, 2021) and Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). He received his PhD in English literature from the University of California, Davis. He was awarded the David G. Hartwell Emerging Scholar Award by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, and his first book won the MLA Prize for Independent Scholars. Carroll’s writing has appeared in American Literature, Post45, Twentieth-Century Literature, the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, and The Nation. He works as a writer and educator in the Pacific Northwest.

David M. Higgins (he/they) is associate professor of English and chair of the Department of Humanities and Communication at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Worldwide, and a senior editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books. David is the author of Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt-Victimhood, which won the 2022 Science Fiction Research Association Book Award. He has also published a critical monograph examining Ann Leckie’s SF masterwork Ancillary Justice (2013), and his research has been published in journals such as American Literature, Science Fiction Studies, Paradoxa, and Extrapolation. In the public sphere, David has been a featured speaker on NPR’s radio show On Point, and his literary journalism has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Guardian. David serves as the second vice president for the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA).

EPISODE REFERENCES:
James H. Madole

Richard B. Spencer

Dune (Frank Herbert)

The Iron Dream (Norman Spinrad)

Samuel Delany

Alain Badiou

Francis Parker Yockey / “destiny thinking”

“Is It Fascism? A Leading Historian Changes His Mind” by Elisabeth Zerofsky, on Robert Paxton. New York Times Magazine.

Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky)

Fredric Jameson

Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right by Jordan S. Carroll is available from University of Minnesota Press. This book is part of the Forerunners series, and an open-access edition is available to read free online at manifold.umn.edu.

“Carroll reminds us that our future is contingent. Fascists have a vision for the future that excludes most of humanity, but fascists can be defeated. Th

Episode Transcript

David M. Higgins (00:05):
I'm always trying to encourage students to
look at things historically andbe like, there's so much more
here than you might have thoughtat first. The more we dig at
historical detail, the more wediscover that history is always
richer and more complicated,more endlessly verdant, in its
complexity than we can evergrasp.

Jordan S. Carroll (00:24):
White nationalists suggest that white
people and especially white men,aren't going to become who they
are unless they have a high-techfascist utopia in their eyes to
help them realize this.

David M. Higgins (00:43):
Okay. So hello. My name is David M.
Higgins. A little bit about meto kick off.
I'm an associate professor andchair at Embry Riddle
Aeronautical Universityworldwide, where, I'm in the
humanities and communicationdepartment. I'm also a senior
editor for the Los AngelesReview of Books. I'm an author.
My, book is called ScienceFiction, Imperial Fantasy, and

(01:06):
Alt Victimhood. And my researchexamines how reactionary groups
use science fiction in theirconstruction of victimhood
identity.
So I'm here today with Jordan SCarroll who is the author of two
books Reading the TransgressiveEditors and the Class Politics
of US Literature, and the bookthat we'll be talking about

(01:26):
today, Science Fiction and theAlt Right. Jordan received his
PhD in English literature fromUC Davis. He was awarded the
David g Hartwell EmergingScholar Award by the
International Association forthe Fantastic in the Arts. And
his first book, Reading theObscene, won the MLA Prize for
Independent Scholars. Jordan'swriting has appeared in American

(01:47):
literature, post 45, twentiethcentury literature, and the
Journal of the Fantastic in theArts as well as in The Nation.
He works as a writer andeducator in the Pacific
Northwest. So, Jordan, thanks somuch. It's great to be here to
do an interview with you forUniversity of Minnesota Press.
How are you?

Jordan S. Carroll (02:05):
Thanks for being here. Yeah. I'm really
looking forward to this.

David M. Higgins (02:07):
Awesome. Well, so let's dig right in with
speculative whiteness. So youdescribe speculative whiteness
as the idea that white men arethe future, and in your book you
suggest that speculativewhiteness continues to be a
pervasive idea in many far rightcircles. To begin, can you just

(02:29):
tell us a little bit more aboutwhat you mean by speculative
whiteness? Give us somebackground on this key idea that
you explore in the book.

Jordan S. Carroll (02:35):
Sure. Speculative whiteness is a
racist ideology that holds thatonly white men are capable of
imagining and ultimatelyexisting in the future. So in
the project, I I look at anumber of different ways that
this has played out in thehistory of science fiction, but
also in the history of whitenationalism. So, for example,
there is a long tradition ofthinking of white men as somehow

(03:00):
being uniquely rational plannersfor the future. There are all
these sort of racist myths thatthe Europeans lived in the cold,
and so they provided for thenext winter, and that somehow
caused them to evolve a kind offuture orientation.
Another aspect of speculativewhiteness though is this fascist
belief that white men arecapable of intuitive or

(03:24):
imaginative leaps into anunforeseen future. So there's a
dimension of speculation orgambling to this as well, that
white men are uniquely suitedfor entrepreneurial risk,
essentially. And I trace thisthrough a variety of different
places. But what I find is thatthis belief system appears among

(03:45):
white nationalists, but it alsoappears quite a bit in the
history of science fiction andscience fiction fandom as well.

David M. Higgins (03:52):
Got it. So where do you see this? Can you
tell us some about where you seethis in the history of science
fiction fandom? I mean, I knowthat from a kind of contemporary
perspective, I think that theoverwhelming sense of science
fiction fandom is that it's veryleft leaning, very liberal, very
progressive. This is why RonDeSantis is trying to, you you
know, attack woke Disney and allthat.

(04:14):
So at least within a lot ofscience fiction communities, I
guess this is part of things alot of different science fiction
communities, right? Like, wherewhere do you see those fandoms,
right, that that you talk aboutin the book?

Jordan S. Carroll (04:24):
I think you're right. Now we think of
science fiction as OctaviaButler and Ursula k Le Guin, but
I think that is a hard wonstruggle for the definition of
science fiction. If we look tothe past, there have been a
number of instances wherefascists and white nationalists

(04:44):
emerged out of science fictionfandom. For example, the first
neo Nazi was a man named James hMadel who got his start in
science fiction fandom. He wroteinto a science fiction magazine
to try to recruit.
And when he presented his visionfor the future, he very clearly
drawed on imagery from classicscience fiction. So he imagined

(05:08):
that after white peoplebasically committed a global
genocide, they would build a newworld that he called the New
Atlantis, and they would evolveinto these kind of posthuman
mutants eventually that wouldultimately colonize the stars.
And so he very much drew on along tradition in science

(05:30):
fiction of imagining a superiorrace, but also imagining space
colonization as an act ofsettler colonialism. One of the
things that I suggest in thisbook is that we can't simply
think of people like James hMadall as outside agitators who
are coming in and messing upscience fiction, but rather we

(05:50):
have to think of a kind offascist tendency within the
genre that's always incompetition with the more
progressive or left leaningtendencies within the genre.

David M. Higgins (06:01):
You mentioned in your book, the sad puppies
and the rabid puppies and all ofthat. So would you say that you
continue to see those tendenciestoday? I guess there are fan
cultures that are reactionaryspeculative fiction fan
cultures, and you point towardssome of those today. Do you
think that they're becomingmarginalized within the sort of
fan communities? Or we're we'rein a moment where there's a lot

(06:23):
of different kinds of communityspaces that are occurring that
are not in relationship to oneanother.
How big are right wingspeculative fan communities in
your estimation?

Jordan S. Carroll (06:32):
I think that, you know, the example of the
Hugo Awards controversy where abunch of right wing fans tried
to to sweep the awards is isindicative of the size of some
of these groups. On one hand, itwas big enough that due in part
to the way that voting works forthe Hugo Awards, they were able
to get a lot of nominations, butthey weren't able to ultimately

(06:53):
succeed in winning all theawards. And so it it goes to
show that these right winggroups, although significant and
very much real, I don't know ifthey're the dominant group in
science fiction in the present.But, I mean, we see, like,
whenever there is, you know, atrailer, for Star Wars with a
black stormtrooper or somethinglike that, there's always this

(07:17):
extremely online group of rightwing fans who are gonna object
to the idea that people of colorhave a future, or that the
future might not be exclusivelywhite.

David M. Higgins (07:28):
So in terms of intellectual genealogy, right,
like, I I see what you meanabout early science fiction
fandom, certain early sciencefiction fans or contemporary
science fiction fans likeRichard Spencer, right, like
using science fiction in the waythat they are thinking about
things. Would you say that youthink in terms of the sort of
intellectual genealogy of whitesupremacy that science fiction

(07:51):
is implicated, is incidental?Like, what's the role
historically, right, betweenscience fiction and, you know,
white nationalist, whiteidentitarian, white supremacist
sort of forms of thinking?

Jordan S. Carroll (08:03):
Yeah. I mean, it seems like there are two
strands maybe to the book thatthat are related and
overlapping. One is speculation,which I think is very much has a
history of being bound up inwhite supremacy. And the other,
I think, is science fiction. Ithink that we see science
fiction coming up again andagain in the history of white
nationalism when, you know, asyou point out, Richard Spencer

(08:25):
is a huge fan in particular ofscience fiction film.
He also loves Frank Herbert'sDune. And a lot of his podcasts
are not devoted to politics ingeneral, but rather these
tendentious readings of sciencefiction texts in order to
unearth white nationalistreadings. And so there, you

(08:46):
know, there are a couple ways ofreading that. One is that he's
just simply projecting ontoscience fiction. But the other,
I think, is that he's seeingsomething that's really there.
Often, the the alt right andwhite nationalists are reading
critiques of fascism and thenleaving off the part where it
negates fascism. So often thesetexts are sort of, like, about

(09:08):
locating a moment of fascistenjoyment in the science fiction
field. Like, we see Dune is verymuch a book about the ways that
in in a certain, you know, theCampbell era of science fiction,
there was this vision of theheroic Superman. And it's very
much about looking at the thedangers of that and where it can

(09:30):
go awry. But what somebody likeSpencer does is they see, oh,
here is the god emperor.
Here is the heroic Superman, andthen they leave off that moment
of, well, wait. Maybe we shouldthink about this. Maybe we
should critique this. It's thesame thing with Starship
Troopers, like the Verhoevenversion, Watchmen. They see the
kind of critique of fascisminternal to science fiction, and

(09:53):
then they ignore the criticaldimension to it or the negative
dimension that says, no.
We have to watch for this andmake sure that it doesn't take
further root. But at the sametime, it was there in the first
place. Like, people like FrankHerbert or Alan Moore had a
reason to worry about thesetendencies. We see this, for
example, Norman Spinrad'swonderful book, The Iron Dream,

(10:16):
was, imagining the sciencefiction that Adolf Hitler would
have wrote in an alternateworld. And a lot of it is a send
up of these kind of violentreactionary tendencies within
science fiction.
But when it came out, whitenationalists wrote back and
said, oh, this is great. And sowe can kind of see that this is
a tendency that that runsthroughout science fiction even

(10:38):
if it's been marginalized inmore recent years.

David M. Higgins (10:41):
Yeah. You make me think about, you know, after
Grant Morrison's run on X Men,there was a whole Magneto is
right, movement, which I thinkis the sort of, like, missing
the irony of the way that thatwas occurring in the comics
during that time. You know,Magneto being another one of
these pop cultural figures ofI'm oppressed, but I'm going to
become the supreme, the Pariahelite, right? You know, I'm
better than the, puny humans whoare oppressing me, right? You

(11:04):
know, I was thinking about the XMen a lot actually, when I was
reading, your description.
The tension between the sort ofX Men and the brotherhood under
under Magneto seems to be a kindof popular representation of
those tensions.

Jordan S. Carroll (11:15):
Yeah. I mean, I think that's that's an
interesting observation. Becausein the book, I think I touched
briefly on the way that thatJason Reza Giorgiani kind of
looks at X Men and imagineshimself in the position of that
superhero elite or imaginespeople like him in that
position. But then on the otherhand, you have people like
Richard Spencer who read it in avery antisemitic way and

(11:38):
highlight the ethnic andreligious background of the
creators of comic books like XMen to suggest that they're
somehow subversive. Like, theirmessage of tolerance and
inclusion is, in people like hismind, a kind of way of attacking
the white race.

David M. Higgins (11:54):
So that covers your second part, right, talking
about the science fiction side.What's the speculation part of,
of speculative whiteness, inyour view? You mentioned just a
moment ago, you said there'ssomething central about
speculation to white supremacy.What what do you mean by that?

Jordan S. Carroll (12:10):
Yeah. I mean, I think that this is true in two
ways. One is that as long aswhite supremacy and modernity
have been valued or have beenupheld together, we've seen
attempts to suggest that whitemen are the future, that white
men are future oriented. One ofthe things that as I worked on
this that I discovered was youcould take this idea further and

(12:32):
further and further into thepast. There are antebellum, anti
abolitionists, and socialDarwinists making this case.
And there are enlightenment erathinkers from the eighteenth
century who are also suggestingthat Europeans are uniquely
suited towards scientificinnovations, or thinking about
the future. So that's oneaspect. Another is though that

(12:54):
whiteness itself is in somesense speculative in the eyes of
fascists. They believe thatwhiteness is not a possession.
It's not something that's actualthat already exists right now.
Instead, they think thatwhiteness is promissory, that
there is this potential towhiteness that only exists in
the future, and it has to to berealized at some point in the

(13:16):
future. White nationalistssuggest that white people, and
especially white men, aren'tgoing to become who they are
unless they have a high-techfascist utopia in their eyes to
help them realize this. And sopeople like Richard Spencer will
will suggest that white mencould be astronauts out

(13:37):
exploring the cosmos right now.But because of multicultural
society or multiracial society,they're stuck here on Earth. And
so there's this idea thatwhiteness doesn't exist in the
here and now.
It's something that's alwaysbeyond the present, something
that is a potential, somethingthat is yet to be realized and
requires an ethnostate or awhite imperium to fulfill.

David M. Higgins (14:01):
Yeah. That's great. You're kind of going
right into sort of my train ofthinking, this sort of notion of
these sort of white masculinefigures being oppressed or held
back from their potential.Right? I talk about this in
terms of the the fantasy ofreverse colonization, the way
that, you know, someone likeSpencer and a number of
different incels, whitesupremacists, you know, anti

(14:22):
feminists imagine themselves tobe sort of under attack by an
establishment.
You get your cathedral, darkenlightenment, kind of, you
know, all these sorts of things.And I wanted to ask you about
this. I tend to focus on the waythat speculative fiction enables
reactionaries to sort of reallydig into that imaginary
victimhood. We are the ones whoare being oppressed and held
back by, these vast colonizingforces. Whereas you are drawing

(14:46):
a lot more attention, I thinkvery importantly, to these
fantasies, or dreams ofsupremacy.
In your book, I really love theway that you approach this by
looking at things like geeksupremacy, fan identification
with, slans, right, the sciencefictional trope of the Pariah
elite. So I've been lookingforward to talking with you
about your sense of therelationship between fantasies

(15:08):
of victimhood and fantasies ofsupremacy. You know, how would
you describe that? Right? Iwonder if it seems as though
there are certainly people likeSpencer who are unabashed about,
you know, being supremacist, buta lot of mom and pop who are
others, in my experience, abroader middle of the road fan
base that doesn't imagine theydon't want to be on Magneto's

(15:31):
side.
Right? But they're I don't know.What what do you make of the
relationship between victimhoodand supremacy within these kinds
of fan cultures, within thissort of imaginative matrix?

Jordan S. Carroll (15:42):
I think there's there yeah. There's
definitely overlap. I mean, onone hand, you have
victimization, which is the ideaof being oppressed. On the other
hand, you have this idea thatyou haven't ascended to your
place in natural hierarchy, thatyou're being kept out of the
place where you're supposed tobe by the oppressor. It seems
like these are related, althoughobviously not exactly the same
thing.
And we often see a fantasy ofstolen potential. The the way

(16:06):
that this oppression ismanifesting is not just that
you're causing me to suffer, butyou're preventing me from
fulfilling my destiny orfulfilling some kind of
biological or genetic propensitythat's in me, and that's part of
my identity. And so that'sdamaging to who I am because I'm
in this position. I recentlystumbled on an Alex Jones video,

(16:28):
the the conspiracy theorist, Andhe was saying exactly this, that
his audience has all this humanpotential. They could be the
next Magellan.
They could be out exploring theworld, exploring the universe.
And yet the globalists havestolen that future from them
essentially and put them in intheir place, a place of
subordination and a place offrustration. It's a kind of

(16:51):
victimhood, but it's also avictimhood that's imagined not
as I'm suffering in the here andnow so much, but I could have
been something much greater andnow I'm not.

David M. Higgins (17:01):
I wonder and I haven't thought about this as
much, I think, as you have. I Iwonder if victimhood
identification or interpolation,reaching out, like, look at this
potential that's being held backfrom you. Right? Becomes kind of
a rhetorical way of enlistingpeople who otherwise wouldn't
feel comfortable identifying ina supremacist way with I'm

(17:26):
thinking like the shift fromwhite nationalism to white
identitarianism, which is sortof like a watered down language
for the kinds of things that youwould see in the white
supremacist movement. And we'vehad we've had Richard Spencer
types who are like, yeah.
We need to get away from Naziimagery sometimes. We need to
put a softer public face onthis. So identitarianism. Oh,
we're not we're not saying weneed to be supremacists. We just

(17:48):
need to embrace our identity inthe same way that everyone is
being told that they cancelebrate their identities.
I find myself wondering ifvictimhood identification sort
of, like, is a way of softeningup or enrolling people in, like
but then, actually, yourpotential is being taken away
from you and, you're commit youknow, you you get straight into
sort of anti immigrant sentimentand all the rest here. Right?

Jordan S. Carroll (18:09):
Yeah. I mean, we definitely see this with the
intellectual history of the altright, a movement away from,
say, the white power movement,which is overtly supremacist,
towards an idea of, yeah, whiteidentitarianism as somehow a new
multiculturalism. This idea thateach nation or each race, each

(18:31):
civilization will be free tolive up to its own potential
without the interference ofother ethnic, cultural, or
racial groups. And yet, thisclearly devolves rather quickly
back into a supremacistdiscourse. People will often
say, oh, I just want everybodyto have their own ethno state.

(18:52):
But often, there's not so subtleundercurrent of genocidal or
exterminationist ideology thatalways is waiting in the wings
there, where the only way tohave that ethnic state always
involves dominating,exterminating, oppressing, and
otherwise liquidating otherpopulations in the nation. So,

(19:13):
yeah, I think that victimhood isdefinitely part of the, arsenal
of strategies that fascists andwhite nationalists and
identitarians use. But often, itkind of feels like special
pleading, and it's a a cover upfor what they really want in the
end.

David M. Higgins (19:31):
Yeah. I guess I'm thinking more about I feel
like in science fiction beforeWorld War two, for example, it's
much more possible to see allthroughout cultural production
supremacist fantasies. But afterWorld War II, I think this might
be the limitations of myreading, but after World War II
and particularly after theHolocaust, right, like it just

(19:52):
becomes in mainstream sciencefiction less cool to be on the
side of the supremacists or thecolonizers or the people who are
trying to, you know, build theEugenicist empire or whatever.
That doesn't mean it's notthere, but it's like it it has
to sort of go underground, butnot that far underground, which
is I think what you're whatyou're sort of gesturing to.

Jordan S. Carroll (20:13):
Yeah. I mean, I think you're right. I think
within mainstream sciencefiction, the idea that fans are
slans, fans are superhumanmutants who need to go off to
start their own colony of fellowslans, that obviously goes away
rather quickly. And I thinkthat's in part why white
nationalists have to often readscience fiction against the

(20:34):
grain. So we see, for example,the figure of Khan in Star Trek
as a kind of repudiation of the,eugenics project and the idea of
a superhuman.
And yet when Richard Spencerturns to Star Trek, he sees
mister Spock and the rest of thecrew as Jewish Marxists, but he

(20:55):
sees Khan despite the ambiguousethnicity of this character, as
the the figure that he wants toidentify with, as the superhuman
who's gonna impose his will uponthe world and is going to
overthrow a tolerant, inclusive,socialistic, and democratic
federation.

David M. Higgins (21:15):
Yeah. So I I think this gets to something
really fascinating in your, inyour work. What you're just
talking about, that reading ofKhan in speculative whiteness,
you kind of talk about an ironybypass, right, or a kind of
hermeneutics of obtuseness thatreaders like Spencer bring to
bear, which is to say everybodyknows or or it's fairly obvious
that this was meant to be acritique, but I'm going to read

(21:37):
it as though I'm going to readit straight, right, in a certain
kind of a way. You wanna talk alittle bit about how you see the
right wing figures and rightwing fan cultures bypassing
irony or being obtuse abouttheir hermeneutics in that way?
Because I think it's a reallyimportant observation about
about the way that sciencefiction is being read.

Jordan S. Carroll (21:56):
Yeah. I mean, part of it is that some of these
critics are either bad readersor are reading in a very
interested way rather thannecessarily unfolding what the
text actually says. But some ofit does feel a bit like the
kinds of moves that, say,cultural studies has done. We've

(22:16):
seen in recent decades this ideathat texts often include
subversive or counterculturalelements even as they're being
disavowed. And so frequently inthe alt right and, associated
white nationalist circles,there's this idea of
recuperating the disavowedfascist figure.

(22:38):
It might be the villain, or itmight be some aspect of the
antihero fantasies about Batman,for example, as this superior,
aristocratic, but lawless figurethat they want to to make their
own. And so there's a a tendencyamong the alt right to try to
find the submerged or suppressedfascist dimensions of all of

(23:01):
these texts. But part of whatthey end up doing is, I think,
changing science fictional orspeculative texts in a
fundamental way. I think thatthey're not only reading
something into it or ordiscovering a hidden meaning,
They're also approaching it, Ithink, differently than most
science fiction critics would.We think of science fiction

(23:22):
following Samuel Delaney assubjunctive, as an exploration
of possible worlds, whereas thealt right often thinks of
science fiction as imperative.
It's a command. It's somethingthat we need to fulfill. When
they see a dystopia, they don'talways see a critique of the
present, a possible future thatwe should warn against, but

(23:43):
rather they often see it as,well, let's go build the the
future from Warhammer 40 k.Let's go build the kind of
fascist or authoritarian futurethat science fiction often
presents, but only in order tonegate or deny?

David M. Higgins (24:00):
Yeah. I think you get to a really interesting
question about genre andspeculation and futurity here.
In speculative whiteness, yousay, I think following a lot of
science fiction critics,Delaney, Souven, and others,
right, that science fiction hasthis potential, right? Science
fiction is, at least within ourkind of critical worlds, the

(24:21):
argument is that sciencefiction, speculative fiction can
promote radical change at itsbest. It can offer a radically
historicizing gesture thatreveals the present as
contingent while allowing us toimagine how things might be
otherwise.
So that is to say speculativefiction, science fiction
gestures out towards somethingthat we don't know, right, or

(24:42):
that we haven't imagined, asbeing possible yet. And then you
note that there's somethingreactionary speculative fiction
critics, right, to do somethingfundamentally different. In your
book, you draw on, Badiou to saythat, the product of reactionary
science fiction instead ispseudo rupture, a kind of
solipsistic speculation thatcan't imagine anything outside

(25:06):
or after itself. And I'm reallycurious about this because I've
been wondering if, you know,Mike Cernovich, the Pizzagate
guy, would say that it's allpostmodernism. You are imposing
your narrative.
We're imposing our narratives.It's just a battle. It's a war
of all against all in terms ofwhose narrative is gonna win.
And so I'm gonna get my readingcommunity together, and we're
gonna read Dune this way. And ifwe get enough likes and shares,

(25:28):
then we beat your reading ofDune.
Right? And so there's nothingformally different. It's just
really a struggle within thesereading communities and
interpretive communities. Butyou, I think, are saying
something different, and I likeit. I think you're saying that
there's, like, a fundamentallydifferent approach to science
fiction here, something thatgestures outward versus
something that's, like,narcissistic or solipsistic.

(25:49):
Would you agree with that? Am Icharacterizing you correctly?

Jordan S. Carroll (25:51):
I think so. Yeah. They have fundamentally
different reading protocols thanwhat we might think of as
critical science fiction. Partof that comes down to, as you
point out, their inability tograpple with history. They have
a profoundly anti historicistway of reading, and it often
embodies what might be calleddestiny thinking, which is a
term that Francis Parker Yockeyuses, I think, where, you know,

(26:14):
they talk about the future, butthey always see the future as,
in some sense, already here, asalready embodied in the white
race or the or already insidewhite culture or white
civilization, and it just has tokind of be manifested.
And so it's, I think, a veryimpoverished way of thinking
about the future. And what wemight call critical science

(26:37):
fiction, we can imagine all ofthese different futures. Like,
what if a Nigerian space agencywins the race to Mars? Or what
if in the late eighteenthcentury, India or China
industrialized faster before,say, England? We can imagine all
of these possibilities, none ofwhich actually have to be

(26:57):
realized.
These are just sort ofconjectures about what could be.
So there's a multiplicity ofpossible futures, I think, for
most critical science fictionreaders. For the alt right, I
think it's either a future inwhich white men realize their
destiny, which already existed athousand years ago, or white men

(27:18):
failed to do this and theydegenerate, and, ultimately,
their civilization is doomed.There's, I think, a kind of,
like, very one track idea of thefuture or maybe even a maybe a
binary idea of the future.Either the destiny is realized
or it's thwarted by racialoutsiders who are going to try
to stop white men from becomingwho they are, essentially.

David M. Higgins (27:41):
Yeah. The way you talk about that in
relationship to historyparticularly resonates with me.
Like, I find I'm always tryingto encourage students to look at
things historically and be like,there's so much more here than
you might have thought at first.The more we dig at historical
detail, the more we discoverthat the map is never the
territory. We, right, there'sthere's so much more than your

(28:02):
representation of history willever capture.
History is always richer andmore complicated, more endlessly
verdant, in its complexity thanwe can ever grasp. Whereas I
think you're saying in the handsof white nationalists with that
destiny thinking, they mightstart off and say, Oh, history
is more complicated than youthink, but it's always the same
story deeper down, Right? It'salways about the struggle

(28:23):
between races or this questionof destiny or something like
that.

Jordan S. Carroll (28:27):
Yeah. I think that's getting towards the big
contradiction that makes thisway of thinking and really makes
all of speculative whitenessincoherent. Because on the
fundamental level, it'sidentity. Things will always be
the same forever. But then theyalso wanna have historical
difference and rupture andchange.

(28:47):
So white people will always bethe same, and yet they'll
somehow make a new history andmake you know, invent a Dyson
sphere that will encapsulate thesun and upgrade their IQs until
they're super smart and andbuild the face tentacles for
themselves. And yet somehow,like, everything will remain
exactly the same. So there'salways this push and pull

(29:09):
between historical rupture anddifference, like, oh, the
modernistic future that they'regoing to create. But then this
idea that nothing really canchange for white people. They're
they have the same DNA,basically, or the same spirit or
whatever they wanna call it, thesame identity that they've
always had.

David M. Higgins (29:28):
You know, I absolutely see that, and I see
that you focus in this book andin in your comment just now
around whiteness and whiteidentity. As I read speculative
whiteness, it seems also veryclear, that this is about
masculinity. When reading youraccount of this, it quickly
becomes clear that we're talkingabout not just white identity

(29:50):
but in almost all the examplesthat I see that you talk about
like white masculine supremacy.I wanted to give you an opening
to kind of talk more about thatto what extent is masculinity
and gender a part of thispicture? Obviously, these things
are entwined.
How do you see them asinterconnected in the figures
that you're looking at?

Jordan S. Carroll (30:07):
I think it's a yeah. It's a big part of
specula of whiteness. When wesee somebody like Richard
Spencer, he just takes forgranted that he's primarily
talking about white men. And heoften will tap into a settler
colonial mentality, imaginingspace as a kind of frontier that
will allow rugged, masculinewhite men to face danger, to

(30:32):
find themselves among the stars,and especially to handle risks.
He suggests that white men aretoo secure.
They're too cloistered. They'retoo pampered. That they need
space exploration as a way ofreclaiming their masculinity.
And this, in in a lot of ways,is just it feels like a

(30:54):
throwback to the eighteennineties and mists of the
frontier, but transposed ontothe moons of Jupiter,
essentially.

David M. Higgins (31:01):
Mhmm. I know that among women who support
white nationalist movements.Right? Do you see similarities,
differences, different ways thatthese kinds of ideologies and
speculations are embraced orresisted, right, within I'm
thinking of Sabour Darby's book,right, if I remember correctly.
How do you see differencesbetween how this plays out in
different gendered spaces orcommunities among white

(31:24):
nationalists?

Jordan S. Carroll (31:25):
Yeah. I think that that in those cases, what
we're talking about isreproductive futurity. A lot of
the discourse around femininityand around gender and sexuality
in the alt right is very muchabout preserving white birth
rates, building a future forwhite children, imagining a kind

(31:48):
of pastoral future filled withtrad wives, these kind of
imagined traditionalisthousewives who are going to
build up the white populationand thereby usher in a better
world. In some ways, I feel likethat that there might be a
tension there between that kindof fantasy of the pastoral
future and some of the morestrange fantasies of what future

(32:14):
reproduction might look like forwhite people or what the world
will look like. But we do seethem overlap.
I have one example in my text ofsomebody imagining the future of
space colonization that alsolooks a lot like this sanitized
and really falsified vision ofnineteen fifties domesticity.
So, yeah, I think thatreproductive futurity in some

(32:37):
ways is related to speculativewhiteness, although often it
takes that in a differentdirection using different kinds
of genre conventions, moreabout, again, the pastoral, but
but also a kind ofsentimentalism that we see
resisted on the alt right,which, as I pointed out, is
often more about risk, selfovercoming, and a kind of manly

(33:02):
refusal to care about theconsequences of one's actions.

David M. Higgins (33:06):
Yeah. In terms of the reproductive piece of
this, it seems so profoundly theway that you talk about this in
the book and the the examplethat you gesture towards are so
profoundly sexualized in someways. There's this focus on,
delayed gratification, selfdenial, like white men are the
future because they're notcompletely overwhelmed by their

(33:27):
id and their urges in the waythat all other people are, and
thus they can buildcivilization. You're kind of
talking about this with the sortof cold climate theory and all
the rest of that. This is on mymind because a friend recently
shared with me a Disneyeducational film from 1967
called Family Planning.
It was released around the sametime as the Population Bomb book
was released in 1968, and it'sbasically Disney showing this

(33:51):
movie basically like the shorteducational film. It's basically
like we we have this populationproblem, so you it's and it's
all people of color need to stopreproducing so fast. And here's
this educational video that isgoing to help you learn to have
some self control, right, as thesort of like like gesture of
this. And I see like whenlooking at a video like that, I

(34:11):
see what you are pointing towardin this one must be able to
write the the sort of Spenceriankind of fantasy, like, control
one's urges or all those kindsof things. Right?

Jordan S. Carroll (34:21):
Yeah. I mean, there's definitely some level of
this that is about all kinds ofsexual anxieties. When we look
at the scientific racistdiscourse, it rather quickly
becomes pornographic. Like, infact, one of the major
scientific racists was caughtout for using, I think it was,

(34:43):
like, nineteenth centurypornography to establish some of
his main claims. So on one hand,there is this idea that white
men are in control ofthemselves, that they plan for
the future, so they have alimited number of children, and
they exercise family planning,and they provide.
And then there's always theracial other that is presented

(35:06):
as somehow impulsive, out ofcontrol, hypersexual, and
therefore as threatening towhite hetero masculinity
essentially. But there's also,as you point out, I think, a
level of this that is maybe a acompensatory fantasy. I mean,
it's like the old meme, youknow, while you were out out
partying, I studied the blade.Like, this idea of, like, you

(35:28):
all are having such a greattime. I am saving myself for a
future in which I can use myenergies in order to build the
white ethno state.
And so it is really, again,like, making sense, I think, in
some cases of disappointment.It's a kind of geek of like,

(35:50):
well, you know, maybe I don'thave all these pleasures, but
I'm really smart and gifted, andI have all this potential. And
someday, it's gonna pay off, I'msure. It it seems like some of
the undercurrent of some ofthese discourses.

David M. Higgins (36:05):
You know, the other thing I was thinking when
I was reading your book is, man,for decades now in fan studies,
the work from Constance, Penleyand Jenkins into transformative
works and cultures has beentrying to elevate the fan, has
been trying to say what fans aredoing is so much more and
shouldn't be dismissed astrollish, awful, backwards, and

(36:30):
all of that. And here's yourbook and fan culture comes out
rough here. Do you have anythoughts about that? I mean I
noticed that you don'tnecessarily dive into the fan
culture, fan study sort ofcurrent here, right? How do you
feel about, like, how fanstudies people will respond to
the the rough treatment of fanshere, even though obviously

(36:50):
these fans may be need roughtreatment?

Jordan S. Carroll (36:53):
Yeah. I mean, I think I, you know, I should
say I I'm a fan.

David M. Higgins (36:56):
Yeah.

Jordan S. Carroll (36:56):
I'm a science fiction fan. I'm I'm a geek. I'm
a nerd. And so in some ways,that that makes me want to be
more critical. I mean, I reallydo value fan studies.
I do really think that they areabsolutely correct that we have
to think of fans as not justeither backwards weirdos or
dupes of mass culture. Fans areclearly creative, and fan

(37:20):
practices can be reallyliberatory. But I think it's a
matter of of history. When fanstudies emerged, we were at a
very different moment where itdid feel like fans were being
depicted on Saturday Night Liveas these strange people, and
they were perceived as somehowmarginal and stunted. And fan

(37:42):
studies allowed us to see thatactually so many great things
are happening in fancommunities.
But over the past, let's say,decade and a half, it feels like
fandom has gone from being theniche subculture of the
twentieth century to being thecultural dominant, especially
with the rise of Silicon Valleyand the Marvel Cinematic

(38:04):
Universe and just the largermainstreaming of fan culture. I
think it's a moment in which wejust need to come to terms with
the fact that fandom can beemancipatory. It can also be
reactionary. I think the samething with science fiction.
Like, for so long, a lot ofscience fiction studies, and
rightly so, was about showingthat science fiction can do

(38:28):
really progressive, formallyinteresting, and ultimately
radical things.
And that was as in part as amaneuver within science fiction
culture to try to win out overmaybe the more right leaning or
backwards looking aspects of,science fiction culture. But,
also, it was clearly part of apush for academic legitimacy,

(38:51):
critical legitimacy, andultimately canonization. But
now, like, most universitieshave a science fiction
literature class. And so I feellike we're at a moment where
we're strong enough, we beingscience fiction critics, strong
enough to kind of say, let'stake stock. And I think we
should hold fast to thatcritical dimension, but also
recognize, and many critics andscholars have done this, that

(39:13):
there is an uglier side toscience fiction that we need to
come to terms with now that werecognize the utopian dimensions
of science

David M. Higgins (39:22):
fiction. And thus something similar perhaps
in fan studies, right, where andand there are scholars in fan
studies who have done some ofthis work already, of course,
but as a whole, moving away fromcarving out a space for
legitimacy to saying, oh, wow,fan practices are powerful and
not all powerful fan practicesare good. Right? Sometimes that
that very power, I think you'resaying, that very power of, fan

(39:44):
practice in the hands ofreactionary fans is also
powerful, right, and can do adifferent kind of transformative
work.

Jordan S. Carroll (39:50):
Yeah. I mean, the other thing I think is that
the the presence of the Internethas changed a lot of this. I
mean, it it records so many fanpractices, including the worst
kinds. And so it's just becomeunavoidable to see some people
who are genuine fans ofdifferent media properties
acting in the worst waypossible.

David M. Higgins (40:12):
You don't ever mention Elon Musk here, but I
couldn't help myself butthinking about him at several
different points. Were youthinking about him also at
various points when when writingthis? I mean, when you're
talking about tech bro pariahelites and victim supremacists.
Right? Like, one one can't readthis in the current moment
without, without certain figurescoming to mind.
Were you thinking about Elonmuch at all in in your process

(40:34):
here?

Jordan S. Carroll: Unfortunately, yes. So I think (40:38):
undefined
that speculative whiteness hasmutated in different directions,
and one of them is this tech broculture. And in particular,
ideas like long termism, whichis the idea that we should make
ethical choices in the presentbased on the next thousand or
million years. And part of thatis often an obsession with

(40:59):
population growth, and inparticular, the maximization of
smart babies. And so I feel likeElon Musk's obsession with smart
people, including himself, and Ishould maybe put that in air
quotes, having as many babies aspossible seems deeply implicated
in a kind of eugenicist logic.

(41:21):
And the idea that the futureprogress of technology and and
science is contingent on havingthis particular population, this
particular biogenetic potentialthat we need a lot of high IQ
people to innovate in thefuture, and that's the only way
we're going to colonize Mars orbuild our robot overlords as

(41:45):
Elon Musk fantasizes about. Imean, we could talk about this,
like, the where's my flying carfantasy on on the right that,
you know, we should be so muchfurther in the future. And yet,
we've elected all these liberalsand progressives, and that has
resulted in the supposedlyinevitable progress of history

(42:05):
slowing down or halting. And ifonly the civil rights
legislation of the nineteensixties or whatever hadn't been
passed, we'd be much furtheralong. This is sort of a fantasy
that they often have.

David M. Higgins (42:18):
You put me in mind of, like, in science
fiction fandoms, there can be athe Empire is sexy sort of,
tendency around in Star Wars.Like, I'm not really into the
Empire, but those stormtrooperuniforms and those crisp cut.
You know, there's something verysexy about the Empire and the
dark side, right? And so whatwhat you're sort of pointing to
here is that like in terms ofthe compensatory fantasy, in

(42:39):
terms of the aesthetics, there'ssomething that cuts straight
into making fascism kind oflibidinally appealing here,
Right? I don't know what if ifyou if I if I'm over reading
star the the appeal of Star WarsImperials there.

Jordan S. Carroll (42:52):
Yeah. No. I I think you're right. I mean, a
lot of it is investing in thisaesthetic and eroticizing this
aesthetic, And it's it's hardnot to see them as caught up in
the uniforms, but also thiserotic fantasy of domination and
transgression that a lot of themhave as well. Yeah.
I think that there's definitelythat kind of psychosexual

(43:13):
undercurrent running through alot of

David M. Higgins (43:15):
this. Well, so that gets to one of my other
questions, you know, thequestion of fascism. You pull no
punches in your book, when itcomes to describing these
various reactionary figures andgroups as fascists. You use the
term alt right and fascist andfascism fairly interchangeably
throughout the book. There'sbeen a lot of conversation

(43:38):
lately, so we're recording priorto the election.
By the time this comes out, theelection will have occurred, but
we're in a cultural momentwhere, it's very tempting to
refer to others in the politicalspectrum as fascist, and this
kind of goes back and forth.People on the right call people
on the left fascist, People onthe left call people on the
right fascist. And there's beena lot of discussion about this,

(44:01):
right? Just, last week fromwhere I'm sitting, there was the
New York Magazine ran a pieceexploring, historian Robert
Paxton's initial hesitation todescribing Trumpism as fascist,
initial hesitation to describingTrumpism as fascism and his
later conversion. He changed hismind after January 6, and said,
no.
I think the label does in factfit even though, I don't think
it's necessarily useful in thelarger kind of cultural

(44:23):
conversation. But you you take avery clear stand here.

Jordan S. Carroll (44:25):
You're like, this is fact

David M. Higgins (44:26):
what we are looking at here is fascism. And
I'd love to hear you talk moreabout that, your commitment to
that specific term, which seems,I think, very thoughtful. You're
not just knee jerking that.What's your thinking behind that
term here?

Jordan S. Carroll (44:39):
Yeah. I mean, I think it's complicated insofar
as I've always wondered whydefinitions seem to be the
center of these conversationsabout fascism. But I think that
it's useful to think about thesecategories and why we use them.
I mean, for me, a fascist isanyone who wants to overthrow

(45:00):
the state or start a revolutionin order to maintain what is
perceived as a naturalhierarchy, especially a racial
hierarchy or a genderedhierarchy or a hierarchy of
cultures and civilizations, andto purify the nation. And so in
that regard, I think phenomenalike QAnon or January 6 must be

(45:22):
understood as fascist.
On the other hand, though, I dothink that we need to be mindful
of the fact that the the liberaldemocratic state that many
fascists wanna overthrow is alsothoroughly implicated in white
supremacy and has always beenessentially. So I think it's
important to point out thefascist exception, to point out

(45:45):
the moment in which these rightwing politics move towards
something that's not justreactionary but is out and out
fascist. But I also think thatwe need to try not to pretend as
if white supremacy is alwayssomething that happens over
there and that isn't just asmuch bound up in law and order,

(46:07):
maintenance of the state, andmaintenance of the nation as it
already exists.

David M. Higgins (46:12):
Yeah. It's interesting. You you get to a
double valence of the notion ofrevolution there that kind of
mirrors what we were talkingabout about history and, reading
protocols, right? A kind ofrevolution that is about
overthrowing things so that wecan always get to the building
of the supremacy that we want,right? It's always the sort of

(46:34):
same story, the purification,the national purity, these kinds
of things versus, you know, it'slike there's a party that wants
to hold some space for a type ofmore authentic revolution, a
revolution that gestures towardthe thing that lies beyond the
horizon that we can't see yet.
Right? But I also take yourpoint that, there are fascisms
everywhere within this sort ofterrain that need to be kept,

(46:56):
you know, kept in mind.

Jordan S. Carroll (46:58):
Yeah. I mean, I think that maybe this this
gets back to your earlier pointabout narcissism where the the
rupture that the, outrightimagines or the rupture that
fascists imagine is not really arupture. It's a pseudo rupture.
It's the continuing continuationof one's own identity that, you
know, we're going to become whowe are is what Richard Spencer

(47:21):
will say, for example. And thatmeans that in terms of science
fiction, they can't imagine afuture that's gonna be alien to
them, and they certainly can'timagine any encounter that
doesn't end in bloodshed there'sthis reading that, Richard
Spencer does of of Solaris, andin particular, the film version,

(47:41):
the Tarkovsky version ofSolaris, where he, you know,
describes this narrative that'sabout going to another planet
and encountering a radicallydifferent alien being.
It's like a planet sized I don'teven wanna call it intelligence.
We don't know if it'sintelligent, but a planet sized
being that's fundamentallydifferent from the humans. But
he reads this as white men gointo space and they they find

(48:03):
themselves. And so he can'timagine a future in which we
might encounter something verydifferent. And he also can't
imagine that the protagonist ofthe future might not look and
feel like us.
So much of science fiction isabout suggesting that we are
going to maybe not besuperseded, but followed by new

(48:24):
kinds of human beings or newkinds of beings in general that
have very different capacities,very different ways of
interacting in the world. And Ithink the alt right can't really
imagine that. They believe thatthe the protagonists of the
future are gonna be the sameones that dominate the world
today, which is white westernmen.

David M. Higgins (48:42):
So So how do you break through that? Right? I
guess would be my question. Whatadvice would you give for
creators? I mean, I talk with alot of authors.
Or for teachers and scholars whowork in this area? I mean, it it
seems like, alright. You canwrite a work of science fiction
and it can either be taken youcould like something like
Solaris could either be taken aswhite men go out into space and

(49:02):
find themselves or, you go outin space and actually have to
come to a hard encounter withsomething that is not you,
right? It's like are you are wealways looking in the mirror or
are we looking beyondencountering something right
like outside of that? I mean alot of work in the sort of
industry right now is,representational work, right, in

(49:23):
terms of inclusion, voices, whois portrayed, who is
contributing, who's being heard,who's not being heard.
Like, what would you say, youknow, like in looking at the way
that that right wing fancultures are working and the way
that people like Spencer areappropriating these sorts of
texts. I mean, I know it'sridiculous. We can't say, can we
inoculate science fictionagainst reactionary temps? No.

(49:43):
But I mean, what do you where doyou think the the the where do
you think the fight is here interms of making a difference?

Jordan S. Carroll (49:50):
I feel like that there are two strategies
that one can use, and I I'm notsure. I think they they might
have to be used in tandem. Imean, one is and the one that I
kind of end the book with isthis idea that tomorrow belongs
to everybody. That the future issomething that we all
collectively create and thateverybody will, at least in the
utopian world, take part in thecreation of that shared future,

(50:13):
that shared world. Part of thatis creating science fiction
texts that are more diverse,that are more inclusive, and
that have no part of the whitesupremacist fantasies that
people like Richard Spencer tryto peddle.
But part of that is obviouslyexpanding the fan community to

(50:35):
include other voices and otherperspectives that particularly
in the early to mid twentiethcentury, were often excluded. On
the other hand, though, I wonderif some of Fredric Jameson's
thoughts on science fiction andutopia are also useful here. For
Jameson, we have to, in someways, think the unthinkable. We

(50:57):
have to imagine the futurethat's beyond a break that we
can't fully comprehend and fullyknow. And so I think that there
is something about uncertaintyand something about
unknowability, something aboutnot being able to fully
represent utopia that might alsobe useful here because it

(51:18):
prevents us from simply copypasting the identity of a
particular group into thefuture.
It forces us to come to termswith the fact that the future is
open ended. The future is notgonna be as simply a
continuation of what's comebefore. And that means that the
future is definitely not goingto be white supremacist destiny
thinking, just the realizationof an already existing

(51:40):
potential. There's a level ofunknowability to the future that
we need to come to terms withand not imagine that whiteness
in the hierarchies thatsubtended will will exist
forever.

David M. Higgins (51:53):
Jordan, I don't think we could have
scripted better closingcomments, right, to, to cut to
cap off, the, the interview. So,I think that, I'm going to
applaud there. Thank you so, somuch. That's a great, a great
set of reflections. So just torecap again, this is David
Higgins.
I've been talking with Jordan S.Carroll about his brilliant book

(52:14):
Speculative Whiteness, ScienceFiction and the Alt Right.
You've really influenced mythinking, right, quite a bit on,
on a lot of these these topics.So I really, I really appreciate
this book, and I appreciate youinviting me to be the one to do
the interview. Thank you.

Jordan S. Carroll (52:28):
And I should say reverse colonization was a
huge influence on this project,so it's it's great that we could
have this conversation. Thankyou so much.

David M. Higgins (52:35):
Great. Well, thanks so much.