Distinct racial conspiracy movements merge when a shared adversary framework emerges

Evidence

In 2015, the NOI teamed up with the larger, mostly white anti-vaccine movement to encourage black families to refuse to vaccinate their children. One California NOI leader, Tony Muhammad, was convinced there is a CDC cover-up of the vaccine-autism connection after meeting with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Vaccines are a depopulation scheme, he believes, both in the United States and in African countries. “We are a target,” he told me. “The world can go to hell. Black people are a target and it’s a shame nobody wants to admit it.” — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 174

Categorization

• XREF: The NOI-white anti-vax coalition is a concrete case of conspiracy movements integrating across racial lines via overlapping ‘targeted by elites’ claims, feeding the vault’s picture of coalitional conspiracy politics. — connects to: White conspiracists amplify black-targeting narratives to recruit black audiences to their cause — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 176; Conspiracy movements recruit across divergent groups by serving different emotional needs — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 271; Comparative racialization conflates distinct groups into one fungible suspect figure — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in…, 235 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Distinct racist systems fuse by cross-codifying their targets. #expands (0.85) — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 568
• Conspiracy movements recruit across divergent groups by serving different emotional needs #corroborates (0.75) — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 271
• The shared underlying logic of racialization persists across Jew and Muslim targets #complicates (0.75) — Nasar Meer, Racialization and Religion, 40
• Comparative racialization conflates distinct groups into one fungible suspect figure #exemplifies (0.72) — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 235