episode 1: She Started It

[00:00:00] CRISTEN CONGER:
Welcome to Conspiracy She Wrote. I'm your host, Cristen Conger. On this podcast, we're unraveling the overlooked relationships between women and conspiracy theories. And yes, things will get weird. But don't worry, I'm not here to brainwash you. I promise. 

Women are my specialty. I'm the creator and host of the feminist lifestyle podcast on Unladylike.

I've built my podcasting and writing career by following my own curiosity, a low-key obsession with why things are the way they are when it comes to women, girls, and gender. 

And when it comes to conspiracy theories, even though it's largely overlooked, women are all over the place. 

Grab your red string and follow along.

First, let's get a lay of the land. Broadly speaking, conspiracy theories are ways of explaining things that don't make sense to us, which is a very human impulse. There's no official definition, but conspiracy theories derive from the same basic premise: people, usually rich and powerful people, are secretly plotting to achieve some kind of nefarious outcome.

Cultural historian Michael Barkun also identified three fundamental ingredients of conspiracy thinking:

• Accidents don't happen.

• Nothing is as it seems.

• Everything is connected.

And for our podcast purposes, we're adding a fourth ingredient to that conspiracy cocktail: Women. 

They're monetized influencers.

[00:02:22] ANNIE KELLY:
Even these more mainstream, more palatable tradwives often discuss how there is a conspiracy to attract women away from this role, which is so obviously the natural and better way for women to be. 

CRISTEN CONGER: They’re stans.

[00:02:] CRISTEN CONGER:
They’re stans. 

[00:02:42] TESS BARKER:
The truth kind of operated on this really weird gray line where it's like if that's how your mind works anyway, there's so much there to validate that.

[00:02:54] CRISTEN CONGER:
They're celebrity avatars.

[00:02:56] MOYA BAILEY:
Conspiracy theorists are hitting on something. The way that people assume that that means she's doing something nefarious, that there is this Illuminati way of running the government, running the world.

[00:03:15] CRISTEN CONGER:
Ah yes, the Illuminati. Whether we're talking about alleged deep state plots or the cultural power of Beyoncé, conspiracy red strings almost inevitably lead back to the Illuminati and a British conspiracy theorist named Nesta Webster.

[00:03:43] LINDSAY PORTER:
When we get into the nitty gritty of her, she is really, you know, to a woman, she resurrected it, she ran with it, and she is responsible for where we are today. Not many historians can say that. Dr. Lindsay Porter is a writer and cultural historian who specializes in rumors and conspiracy theories of the 18th century. She's also the author of the book Who Are the Illuminati?

[00:04:15] LINDSAY PORTER:
I don't know if you know the novel Alice Through the Looking Glass, but Humpty Dumpty says at one point, "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less." And that's where I feel like we are with the Illuminati.

[00:04:29] CRISTEN CONGER:
To better understand today's not-so-golden era of misinformation and what women have to do with it, we need to know how we got here and the kernel of fact that started it all nearly 250 years ago. Because yes, in the beginning, there were women. The Illuminati were real.

[00:04:55] LINDSAY PORTER:
So, the actual Illuminati were a very short-lived secret society founded in Bavaria in 1776. Coincidence, but you know, an auspicious year.

[00:05:11] CRISTEN CONGER:
This was the tail end of the Enlightenment, and a massive power shift was underway across Western Europe. Instead of leaving everything up to the church and its god, people really started to question all that divine absolute authority. What about life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness? It was the talk of London coffee houses, Paris salons, and all the intellectual pamphlets and books flying off the presses faster than ever.

In 1776, while the ink was still drying on the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, USA, the Illuminati's founding father was launching his new secret society in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, Germany. Adam Weishaupt was a law professor there with a dream. He wanted to become an Enlightenment influencer for reason and self-government. So, Weishaupt started his own intellectual club and called it the Illuminati, and it had to be secret.

[00:06:19] LINDSAY PORTER:
Bavaria was a very strictly Catholic country, and they did not want these Enlightenment texts available. They were very threatening to the status quo. So, one of Adam Weishaupt's motives was to get access to these texts, literally have them smuggled in, and then share them with like-minded people. In that way, he was following a model that was all over Europe. It was a golden age of the secret society. Freemasonry really flourished in the late 18th century. And that was something that Adam Weishaupt thought, "Right, I will create my own version of the Freemasons."

[00:07:02] CRISTEN CONGER:
The Freemasons were the aspirational membership for elite men who apparently liked masonry metaphors and hanging out in lodges. So, why didn't Weishaupt just join the Freemasons? Lindsay Porter said he tried, got rejected, and moved on to plan B: Illuminati.

[00:07:26] LINDSAY PORTER:
He took the secrecy, which was important because the texts were not legal. He also took elements of ritual and hierarchy, which were really part and parcel of how secret societies were set up in those days. At its height, it is estimated that there were about 2,500 members stretched all over Europe, and they came from different members of the society and the aristocracy. By the time they were discovered by the Bavarian authorities in 1788, they were outlawed and their founder was sent into exile. That was really the end of them.

[00:08:07] CRISTEN CONGER:
Aside from a few final Illuminati writings that Weishaupt published after he was kicked out of Bavaria, his secret society was done and dusted. The group was already fracturing when it got shut down, and its former members swiftly moved on. Here's where things go conspiracy. When the real Illuminati disbanded, an imaginary and menacing Illuminati soon took its place. Less than a year later, along came the French Revolution. Monarchists, aristocrats, and religious faithfuls who survived all of the guillotining could barely fathom what had just happened. How was it even possible? A former Jesuit priest from France named Abbey Augustine Barruel decided the only explanation was conspiracy. So, he wrote all about that in a four-volume "History of the French Revolution." And who were the evil culprits he came up with? Enlightenment philosophers, Freemasons, and the Illuminati, whom Barruel was convinced had not actually disbanded but merely gone underground. Of course, Barruel had no real evidence to go on that the Illuminati still existed, but that's the thing with conspiracy theories. If nothing is as it seems, then a lack of evidence is seen as proof of a cover-up.

Meanwhile, a Scottish scientist named John Robison was also freaked out by the French Revolution, and he too wrote a book blaming secret societies and their enlightened rabble-rousers for essentially brainwashing the masses into a bloody uprising.

[00:10:13] LINDSAY PORTER:
Robison allowed for a greater readership because he also then brought in the English-speaking world. At the end of the 18th century, so again 1798, the ideas of Barruel and Robison made their way across the Atlantic. And for a springtime in 1798, the pulpits of the New England churches were just ringing out with warnings about the Illuminati. The idea was that whatever fiends from hell set off this revolution that then turned into anarchy in France were in danger of arriving in the U.S. At its height, George Washington took it seriously. There was a letter in which he said, "I hadn't appreciated just what a threat the Illuminati was, but I am now convinced of it."

[00:11:10] CRISTEN CONGER:
By the early 1800s, the panic subsided. More than a century passed without a peep about the Illuminati conspiracy. And you'd think that would be the end of it.

[00:11:23] LINDSAY PORTER:
That was very short-lived. It really died down within the year. And I really wonder, were it not for Nesta Webster, whether the Illuminati would have just been completely forgotten because there were so many other threats.

[00:11:42] CRISTEN CONGER:
Nesta, Nesta, Nesta. Ready or not, here she comes. After the break.

[00:11:51] AD BREAK 1

[00:11:51] CRISTEN CONGER:
Nesta Webster was one of the most influential conspiracy theorists you've never heard of. A lady trailblazer that you really don't want to discover, but discover her we must. Nesta Webster was born into wealth in the late 1880s. She grew up ping-ponging between the family's countryside estate, their London house overlooking Hyde Park, and their villa in Cannes, France. Despite the chic addresses, Nesta had a religious and sheltered upbringing. For college, though, Nesta wanted to go to either Oxford or Cambridge University, but Nesta's mother insisted they were way too liberal and sent her to a Christian women's college instead. By 21, Nesta had reached a crossroads. She graduated college and wanted to find what she called a useful career. Except the only useful careers for women back then were school teacher, nurse, or volunteer. So, in a very Eat, Pray, Love move, Nesta chose to travel instead. Egypt, India, Sri Lanka, Japan. I don't know about eating or loving, but there was definitely a lot of praying along the way. The trip was a kind of spiritual awakening for Nesta, who again was raised strictly Christian, and yet Buddhism intrigued her most of all.

[00:13:43] LINDSAY PORTER:
That's the point at which I think, perhaps in a different time and place, she could have been some sort of upper-class lady hippie, talking about spiritualism and maybe selling nutritional supplements or something. She could have gone that way.

[00:14:00] CRISTEN CONGER:
The way Nesta went next instead was down the wedding aisle. She then had two daughters. It was the early 1910s, and Nesta had a lot on her mind. She was writing her first novel, and England's suffrage movement was in full swing. Nesta supported it on principle, but she was hardly a radical. World War I was just around the corner when Nesta took the kids on an extended vacation in Switzerland. One day, Nesta was perusing the library of whatever mansion they were staying in, and lo and behold, she

[00:14:46] LINDSAY PORTER:
came across some letters between two pre-revolutionary aristocrats. She was so taken with them and identified with them so much that she began to believe she was actually a reincarnation of a French aristocrat and had a sensation when she was in Paris of the streets running with blood.

[00:15:10] CRISTEN CONGER:
Nesta began obsessively researching those aristocratic lovers. She wrote her next book about them and the book after that about the French Revolution. And surprise, surprise, both were popular with readers and critics alike. But Nesta's French Revolution fever dream took a drastic turn. She was convinced that its true origins were far more sinister than the story told in history books. And what convinced her of that? Well, that terrifying old four-volume history by Jesuit priest Abbey Barruel. Nesta Webster was fully Illuminati-pilled, and that's not the worst part.

[00:16:03] LINDSAY PORTER:
I think it's really this sense that she lived through the revolution that she begins to dig and try to work out. So what were the causes? And there is another document that has been circulating since the beginning of the 20th century. A very, very ugly, fraudulent document which is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It purports to be almost like the minutes of a ritual of 12 leading Jewish figures who have met in a cemetery and are plotting world domination. And this is what she kind of adds to the Illuminati mix.

[00:16:47] CRISTEN CONGER:
That fraudulent document is the cornerstone of the violently anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Jews control the world. According to historian Michael Barkin, the Protocols were originally fabricated by Russian Tsar Nicholas's secret police. It was published in Russian in 1905, and by the early 1920s, it was circulating across the West, especially within the fascist circles that Nesta Webster had become active in after World War I.

[00:17:28] LINDSAY PORTER:
So this made its way crisscrossing across Europe and really just added to the anti-Semitic fire of the West. She takes the Protocols, she takes the Illuminati, and she takes the fear of Bolshevism in the wake of the Russian Revolution, and she combines them all into this great toxic mix.

[00:17:50] CRISTEN CONGER:
That great toxic mix is most on display in Nesta's 1924 book Secret Societies and Subversive Movements. And no, this is not a book recommendation. The conspiratorial worldview she laid out probably sounds familiar a hundred years later. According to Nesta, a secret satanic cabal of elites was puppet mastering the destruction of white Christian civilization. Their ultimate goal? One world government. Nesta's proclamations of occult secret societies were too extreme for the general public, and her literary credibility swiftly soured. It's too bad podcasts weren't around because lord knows she probably would have built an empire from there.

[00:18:49] LINDSAY PORTER:
I just want to make it very clear I am in no way an apologist. We have to say straight out and continue to say her ideas were abhorrent, she was literally a fascist, and she has introduced some of the most long-running and hateful ideas into the English-speaking world. So we have nothing good to say about her.

[00:19:15] CRISTEN CONGER:
And Nesta wasn't the only woman spreading fascist Illuminati conspiracy theories.

[00:19:22] LINDSAY PORTER:
Well, there were a pair of women who were pretty much her contemporaries and again very, very privileged women.

[00:19:32] CRISTEN CONGER:
One was Edith Starr Miller. Edith grew up in a Fifth Avenue mansion, married a British politician in the early 1920s, moved abroad to the London countryside, and had a few kids. During that time, Edith, now Lady Queensborough, fell deep down the conspiracy rabbit hole. She'd read a book that purported to expose the satanic underbelly of secret societies like the Freemasons. And even though that book was a proven hoax and the author himself publicly confessed to making it up, Edith either didn't know or just didn't care. She'd also made friends with the wealthy widow of a Russian imperial officer named Paquita Louise de Shishmarev. Paquita was active in fascist political circles, adamantly anti-Semitic, and like Edith, very much believed that an evil cabal was secretly orchestrating worldwide chaos.

[00:20:58] LINDSAY PORTER:
The pair of them self-published a book in 1933 called The Occult Theocracy. And between the pair of them, they spent 10 years working out every single religious sect and secret society, stretching back to the Knights Templar and the Rosicrucians and even beyond. They did not have the reach that Nesta had because this was a self-published book, and in fact, it came out after Edith Starr Miller's death. But Paquita, for her sins, did a very elaborate chart, two-sided, two feet wide and a foot deep, which she called the Politico Occult Judeo-Masonry.

[00:21:52] CRISTEN CONGER:
Paquita's unhinged chart implicated the usual Illuminati conspiracy suspects, secret societies, and just, you know, the entire Jewish population. It also roped in everything from the Italian mafia to yoga and, of course, Mr. Illuminati himself, Adam Weishaupt.

[00:22:18] LINDSAY PORTER:
And she actually introduced that to Henry Ford. Henry Ford, who was a raving anti-Semite, and Paquita was also very active in the United States, trying to encourage Nazism. So, Nesta was not alone in being a very privileged woman, just asking questions. They seem to come from the same position and end with the same results. I'm sure there are more. I'm sure there are more.

[00:22:49] CRISTEN CONGER:
So what ultimately happened to Nesta?

[00:22:54] LINDSAY PORTER:
After the war, when obviously she's on the wrong side, and her husband dies, the last thing she writes is her autobiography, Spacious Days, which she publishes in 1950. Then she dies in 1960. She's really, certainly, if not a forgotten figure, an entirely discredited figure. Her Secret Societies and Subversive Movements is reprinted in 1964, which is the year the John Birch Society gets hold of it.

[00:23:29] CRISTEN CONGER:
Is Nesta Webster then more influential today than she was when she was alive?

[00:23:36] LINDSAY PORTER:
Without a doubt in my mind, she is absolutely more influential. Whether or not people know where those ideas came from, as far as I'm concerned, if she had not written about the Illuminati and that hadn't been picked up by the John Birch Society, we wouldn't be having this conversation. It's not to say that we would not be riddled with conspiracy theorists, but we wouldn't be calling them the Illuminati.

[00:24:18] AD BREAK 2

[00:24:23] CRISTEN CONGER:
When we left off, Conspiracist Nesta Webster was about to have a posthumous comeback. In the 1960s, a far-right publisher in the U.S. started printing bootleg copies of Nesta's Illuminati books. That's how she became a must-read within the John Birch Society. The John Birch Society was founded in the U.S. in the late 1950s out of peak anti-communist paranoia, an extreme harbinger of today's conspiracy-pilled MAGA right wing. Birchers made early enemies of big government and coastal elites. They perceived institutions like the United Nations as proxies for a one-world government takeover. By the mid-60s, John Birch publications were also heralding none other than Nesta Webster. Communism, Birchers were taught, was only one part of a massive Illuminati collusion out to destroy white Christian society, and it was their duty to stop it. Women too. Even though the organization leadership was all men, their wives played significant roles, like waging Red Scare culture wars over public schooling and library books. Is any of this sounding familiar?

[00:26:06] LINDSAY PORTER:
Again, this is very interesting because, in terms of conspiracy theories, as far as I am aware, the Illuminati is the only one that you can literally trace a connection. By the time the John Birch Society has picked up the Illuminati and then it's been caught up in the whole McCarthyite Reds Under the Bed scare, by the time that has been discredited in the late 1960s, there is an underground counter-cultural newspaper in Greenwich Village, and there are two friends who are both actually editors at Playboy. For fun satire, they create almost like a fold-out, cut-out-and-keep vast conspiracy network that they've just made up for the fun of it.

[00:26:59] CRISTEN CONGER:
The spoof chart was such a hit, the Playboy editors ran with it. In 1975, they published a satirical trilogy called Illuminatus!. The books were sci-fi bestsellers. They even inspired a stage production, card games, and role-playing games. And this was how the Illuminati myth spread from fringe right-wing politics to the left-wing counterculture to more mainstream entertainment.

[00:27:35] LINDSAY PORTER:
What I find very interesting about Nesta Webster is it took her many years to reach her Illuminati conspiracy, whereas studies have been done about people's exposure to Fox News and they'll become conspiracy theorists in a matter of months.

[00:27:59] CRISTEN CONGER:
When we are thinking about today's kind of pop culture and celebrity Illuminati conspiracy theories, can we then say that ultimately they do also trace back to Nesta?

[00:28:13] LINDSAY PORTER:
I think yes. I genuinely think that all, I mean obviously it's not the Illuminati that she described, but without her, we don't have that sort of beginning point.

[00:28:24] CRISTEN CONGER:
I mean, you got to hand it back to Adam in Bavaria. He was great with branding.

[00:28:30] LINDSAY PORTER:
He absolutely was. He had other names. He thought of calling his group other things, and they weren't nearly as catchy as Illuminati. Look at him, I know he's probably laughing, laughing at us all.

[00:28:49] CRISTEN CONGER:
Nesta, though, might be cackling even louder. Fast forward to Pizzagate, Proud Boys, QAnon, Nesta Webster's worldview reverberates through it all. Why do you think that women in particular and their roles have really flown under the radar so much in conspiracy culture and history?

[00:29:21] LINDSAY PORTER:
I love that question, and I love the fact you're addressing it because I think it really needs to be addressed. Quite a short and maybe superficial answer is that women's history is often overlooked and underrepresented. If you are a women's historian, you might prefer to look at positive contributions. That's really, perhaps, too simplistic an answer, but it feels to me like a possible answer.

[00:29:53] CRISTEN CONGER:
Did you ever imagine that your interest in the 18th century and all of this would become so relevant to today's current landscape?

[00:30:02] LINDSAY PORTER:
I promise you I absolutely did not. But there is something about the past that feels like it allows you to slightly step back from the present. Yet there are always ripples and currents that feed back into one another. When I was looking at material to do with rumor during the French Revolution, one of the reasons why rumors spread quickly and so perniciously was that there was a completely unregulated burst in newsprint. With events happening so quickly, it was very hard for people to establish what had actually happened and when and who was responsible. While I was working on that, it was as though the internet and social media had gone from something that we sort of felt like we knew how to use to just a wild west. So that was a parallel that I hadn't really expected.

[00:31:06] CRISTEN CONGER:
Thank you so much to Dr. Lindsay Porter. You can read her fascinating history Who Are the Illuminati?, which I read and highly recommend. You can also read Assassination: A Political History and Popular Rumor in Revolutionary Paris.

[00:31:28] ANNIE KELLY:
Particularly in recent conspiracy movements, there has been a really strong positive self-identity for women involved in them, as a kind of warrior mother who was protecting her family, shielding them from these poisonous and very dark malevolent forces that were trying to penetrate not just the family unit but their very bodies.

[00:31:53] CRISTEN CONGER:
Conspiracy She Wrote is an Unladylike Media production created, hosted, and executive produced by me, Cristen Conger. Lushik Lotus-Lee is our producer, Ameeta Ganatra is our engineer, and music is from Blue Dot Sessions.

[00:32:22] CRISTEN CONGER:
Well, is there anything else that we have not covered about Nesta or the Illuminati or your work that you want to make sure that listeners know?

[00:32:22] LINDSAY PORTER:
No, we're done. In fact, it's the last word on the Illuminati. No one has to talk about it ever again. Yeah. Well, I'm glad we solved it. That's it. That's it. Next!