After the End of the World: Killing Myths with Dr. Thomas Stanley

In this wide-ranging interview, Dr. Thomas Stanley reflects on the themes of his ASPECT plenary address, “America the Beautiful: Violence as Statecraft,” and elaborates on his call to confront the foundational myths that structure U.S. political consciousness. Linking contemporary state violence to longer histories of racial domination and imperial expansion, Stanley argues that myth-breaking is a transformative act that reshapes identity and expands the horizon of political possibility. In conversation with Elhom Gosink and Chris Thorne, he turns to Sun Ra, Afro-Futurism, and the temporalities of capitalist stagnation to consider how alternative imaginaries can disrupt the “temporal treadmill” of the present. Stanley emphasizes pedagogy as a frontline in the “war against myths,” advocating candor, critical rupture, and courage as necessary tools for collective reorientation. Through discussions of futurism, noetic transformation, Indigenous epistemologies, and the structural absurdities of contemporary U.S. politics, the interview frames the present moment as both catastrophic and generative; a time “after the end of the world” in which new forms of ethical, social, and planetary life must be imagined and enacted.