Join us January 30 at 7pm at the Tyrrell Hall Auditorium!
The Conspiracy Singularity is the second event in a series that highlights Tara Westover’s Educated, TU’s 2023-24 Common Read. Click the link here to learn more.
The Oklahoma Center for the Humanities is thrilled to welcome Anna Merlan to campus. Merlan is a journalist and author who writes for Motherboard, a division of VICE. She was previously a reporter at the Special Projects Desk, an investigative division within Gizmodo Media Group, a senior reporter at Jezebel, and a staff writer at the Village Voice and the Dallas Observer. Her work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, BBC Travel, Topic, and on the op-ed page of the New York Times. Merlan will discuss communities of suspicion, like QAnon, and their rise in the wake of COVID.
Merlan’s work connects powerfully with this year’s Common Read. In Educated, Westover narrates her experiences growing up in a survivalist, off-the-grid, prepper household in Idaho. Her father pores over events that he believes exemplify the inherent corruption in government, such as the Ruby Ridge standoff in 1992. This event and others like it entrench his beliefs about governmental abuses of systematic power and act as the ideological mold of Tara’s upbringing. Recalling her father’s description of the Ruby Ridge event at a family meeting, Westover writes, “‘There’s a family not far from here,’ Dad said. ‘They’re freedom fighters. They wouldn’t let the Government brainwash their kids in them public schools, so the Feds came after them'” (8). After her father finishes the recount, he compels his children to prepare “head for the hills” bags, telling them that “next time, it could be us” (11).
The Westovers do not attend schools, carry driving licenses nor own insurance. They reject hospital visits, preferring instead to rely on herbs and other natural home remedies for healthcare. Even after his family (and he himself) sustains gruesome injuries, Tara’s father remains firm in his resistance to organized corporate and governmental systems of record keeping that he associates with governmental overreach and “brainwashing.” Westover depicts its endangerment to her family’s livelihood, and she ascribes this off-the-grid worldview to a blend of her father’s religious and political beliefs.
Merlan wrote Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power (2019). Her insights into the allure of conspiratorial thinking in the United States inform our understanding of the motivations and dangers that shape the lives of the Westover family in Educated.
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