Conspirituality

We didn't have tracking BDSM Easter eggs in fashion shoots or Ye’s Jew-hating Christofascism on our bingo card. But here we are, covering a cluster of cursed images and hypomanic clips.

We’ll stare right at the train wreck this week, but we refuse to feel hopeless. Because we can always learn—in this case about how the psychic and bodily impacts of this churn of bizarre hatred relate to the function of propaganda. And we can always be inspired by people who slow down and do the hard work of understanding the spectacle.

From our side of the progressive aisle, it's easy to assume that consumers of Ye and conspiracy theories are gullible cultural dopes. But our guest today, sociologist and media scholar at UNC, Chapel Hill, Francesca Tripodi says "not so fast!" To understand how right-wing propaganda functions, she spent months consuming a conservative digital news-diet and went undercover in hard-right circles.

Show Notes

Kanye "Ye" West—The Emperor w/No Clothes (TimbahOnToast)

Balenciaga and the long history of "shockvertising"

Jewish Allies  Denounce Trump's Dinner w/Antisemites

Masked Ye West Praises Hitler on Alex Jones' InfoWars

Proud Boy Founder Gavin McInnes Hosts Ye West

QAA 210: Balenciaga, Ye, Club Q

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Those who fly high, fall hard. Pole dance company S-Factor crashed and burned in 2021 amidst a stack of complaints. Detractors said the company was conducting unlicensed group therapy, cosplaying enlightenment by co-opting the labour of sex workers, and whitewashing issues of racial equality.

Created by former actor Sheila Kelley, S-Factor monetized pole dancing as a path of feminist and spiritual awakening.

In this second installment of Listener Stories (part 2 next week), Matthew speaks to Jessica Hopper about her 13 years learning and teaching in the now-defunct company. Hopper paints a picture of a confusing, high-demand group, and tells us how she made her way out.

Show Notes

Stripped Down: The Undoing of Hollywood's Favorite Pole-Dancing Studio —Hollywood Reporter.

"Strip Down, Rise Up" | Official Trailer | Netflix

Faces of Fierce Femininity—online conference organized by Kelly Brogan

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema—Laura Mulvey, 1975

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Matthew checks in with investigative journalist Alexi Mostrous on his fantastic work digging up the Hampstead Hoax.

Show Notes

Hoaxed — Tortoise Media

Re P and Q (Children: Care Proceedings: Fact Finding)

Jacqui Farmer's "Hampstead Research"

Charlotte Ward’s conspirituality.org About page

Hoaxtead Research

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Did you know, right now, as you sit there listening to this, your body is filled with parasites that need to be cleansed? Of course, that’s if you live in America, since every other country on the planet cleanses four times a year. Seriously. We heard it on TikTok.

Scrolling through the gutters of TikTok is challenging for us Gen Xers, and so our TikTok correspondent, Mallory DeMille, has done the dirty work for us. After laying out an all-too-common supplement scam, she looks at the shitty world of parasite cleanses where budding influencers snap strange shots of their feces before scaring you into their downline. I’ll also preview a bit of my upcoming conversation with dietician Kevin Klatt, who’s been tracking this TikTok trend with dismay as well. He’ll bring the science while Mallory breaks down the techniques.

Show Notes

Mallory DeMille on Twitter

Kevin Klatt on Instagram

Parasite cleanses are ‘modern snake oil.’ Experts explain why.

Mason Kuhr on TikTok

Stampede Network on TikTok

Kim Rogers on TikTok

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Are you ready for the bestest, purest immunity-boosting supplement in the history of the world? No, not that one. Only I have discovered what really works, and I'll share it with you this week.

Ok, not quite, but Derek looks at a recent JAMA study that found many of the top 30 supplements sold on Amazon don't contain what they claim. He opens by looking at Mikki Willis's latest best supplement ever, as well as a naturopath and her binder filled with detoxing supplement protocols.

Show Notes

Wellness influencers don't understand history

Does Z-Stack multivitamin work to boost the immune system, and is it safe?

Analysis of Select Dietary Supplement Products Marketed to Support or Boost the Immune System 

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Well jeez. What can we say? We're totally honored to host and learn from Aubrey Gordon, author and co-host of Maintenance Phase. She gives us the rundown on anti-fat bias,  its links to racism, the soft eugenics of the BMI, the insincere "concern" of the slender, and the intellectual and moral dead end of "being fat is a choice." We also get into some psychothinalysis. Oh yes we do.

It's super inspiring to interview someone with a deep command of crucial material, plus the ability to pivot in startling directions, plus the skill to listen as fluently as they speak, plus all that warmth and welcome and empathy and accessibility. Thanks Aubrey!

Show Notes

Your Fat Friend website

What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“You Just Need to Lose Weight” AND 19 OTHER MYTHS ABOUT FAT PEOPLE—Preorder

Maintenance Phase

Correction section: The NHS was limiting care for fat people and smokers *before* the pandemic (The Guardian), but backed off of that stance *during* the pandemic (NYT) before naming weight loss as one of its primary COVID strategies (Time Magazine).

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Matthew and Julian sit down for the second of a two-part examination of the 1988 bestseller at the heart of the recovered memory movement.  This is episode 10 of the Swan Song Series.

Show Notes

Controversy Behind the False Memory Syndrome Foundation

The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

Truth and reconciliation

Cases That Have Resulted in Convictions

Why The Courage to Heal Isn't on My Recommended Reading List

Creating Hysteria

25 Years of Trauma Treatment Networker 2014

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The homestretch of our study of Michelle Remembers zeroes in on the literal symbols—and symbols gone literal—of the Satanic Panic. (This is episode 6 of  the Swan Song Series.)

Archetypes, gore, anxieties about sex and babies and filth: Lawrence Pazder mined it all, using modes of abstraction and dehumanization as old as religion itself to weave a story he claimed was all about Michelle—but was really an exercise of his own fetishes.

Michelle Smith could have received proper care for her understandable stresses. She could have offered up her feelings and sensations and images from dreams for discussion and contemplation, and an actual therapist would have held that material safely for her to explore. But in Pazder, Smith found someone who wasn’t interested in common human complexity. He was interested in cosmic warfare, and the role he could LARP within it.

But Pazder was so blind to his craven narcissism that he couldn’t help but tell on himself. In the final passage we analyze, Pazder records Smith demanding to end therapy. “If I could tear out my tongue,” she says, “I would never have to speak again.” But in the very next paragraph, the man who is forcing her to “remember” symbolically tears out her tongue, rejecting her plea to end the sessions, interpreting her demand as though it were coming from Satan himself.

She imagines herself getting in a car and driving and driving, anywhere. Away from this psychiatrist who wanted to be an exorcist, away from his story, perhaps to find her own.

Show Notes

HIGHEST GAME IN TOWN

‘I See His Blood Upon the Rose’

How to Lose Weight (Weight Loss and Obesity) - Teal Swan

The Cause of Obesity - Teal Swan Articles

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American-style white Christian Nationalism tells of a promised land given by God to the Puritan settlers. Their divine mandate for political dominance sanctifies a violent history that stretches from the 1690's all the way through to modern right-wing politics.

Our interview today is with sociologists, Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry, authors of The Flag and The Cross. We discuss their study of Christian Nationalism as a white supremacist phenomenon that has always leaned into conspiracism and a primordial obsession with blood purity and blood sacrifice.

With the dreaded midterm elections now in our rearview, Derek covers the Muscular Christian masturbation rules of bro-science influencer Ben Greenfield, while we reflect on the prophesied red wave that never crashed.

Show Notes

The Flag and the Cross—Gorski and Perry

Is Christian nationalism growing or declining? Both.

Most Republicans Support Declaring the United States a Christian Nation

Rally Urges US Midterm Voting Connected to Christianity

Ben Greefield: How I Practice The Spiritual Disciplines, Practical Ways To Build Your Spiritual Muscles, Listener Q&A On God, Religion, Reincarnation, Masturbation & Much More.

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Antisemitism is in the news again, as Candace Owens defends Kanye West and Kyrie Irving, while her boss, Ben Shapiro shakes his head in dismay. In this Bonus special report, Julian looks into the Assembly of Yahweh family, which funds conservative new media giants, The Daily Wire and PragerU.

How do we make sense of the racial and religious tensions created by the strange bedfellow alliances of right-wing propaganda?

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An ancient text at the root of the culture that gave birth to the yoga tradition says that if an outcaste person—a Dalit—dares to learn the holy language of Sanskrit, they must be tortured. Molten lead must be poured into their ears. Their tongue must be cut out.

In the Ramayana, a Shudra (caste oppressed) who dared to practice yoga was murdered so that the sickly child of a priestly family might regain his health. In the Mahabharata, an Adivasi (South Asian Indigenous) boy is commanded to cut off his own thumb for the sin of being self-taught and skilled above his station. The pious are told that these obscene retributions maintain the divine order.

Indian wisdom traditions have globalized to the extent that its evangelists have laundered the spiritualization of caste-based violence, and hidden its history from erstwhile progressives. Many of those evangelists have either been caste privileged, or caste apologists. The yoga they constructed for export has become a form of soft power, serving Hindu nationalist objectives.   

The Trauma of Caste: A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing, and Abolition by Thenmozhi Soundararajan puts this history under a microscope. It pulls back the curtain on the carceral impacts of terms like dharma and karma, and concepts like purity, pollution, and reincarnation.

In terms of our work here at Conspirituality, Soundararajan's text cuts through the romantic Orientalism used by influencers, cult leaders, and nationalists to exploit emotional vulnerabilities. It also points to—and updates—a vision of spiritual practice first articulated by the Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar, rooted in the ancient Buddhist call to compassion and equality.

Show Notes

The Trauma of Caste by Thenmozhi Soundararajan

Thenmozhi Soundararajan: Transmedia Artist, Theorist & Futurist

B. R. Ambedkar

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Matthew and Julian sit down for the first of a two-part examination of the 1988 bestseller at the heart of the recovered memory movement—which played a central role in validating Satanic Panic testimonials.

The basic premise of The Courage to Heal, by creative writing instructors Ellen Bass and Linda Davis,  is that memories of childhood abuse, especially child sexual abuse, can be recovered and articulated by survivors who are given the proper space, tools, and validation. The book explores how this be facilitated within the context of journaling, writing poetry, and writing memoir, and what the therapeutic benefits of full confessional articulation can be.

While countless people affirm that this book was a lifeline during a time in which recovery resources for child abuse survivors were rare,  there are substantial problems with the book's method, claims about memory, dodgy sources, and endorsement of outright Satanic Panic propaganda.

Show Notes

Controversy Behind the False Memory Syndrome Foundation

The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

Truth and reconciliation

Cases That Have Resulted in Convictions

Why The Courage to Heal Isn't on My Recommended Reading List | HealthyPlace
Creating Hysteria

25 Years of Trauma Treatment Networker 2014

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In the second of three episodes on Michelle Remembers, we recap its Catholic contexts, and Lawrence Pazder's quest to transcend the limitations of psychiatry through mystical nightmares. We then explore the front matter: how Pazder introduces his project (and himself), and the ambivalent endorsement of Remi de Roo, Archbishop of Victoria. In Pazder's many clerical alliances, a crucial theme is established: the rapprochement between psychiatry and the priesthood, in which the former submits to the latter to restore the reality of the supernatural.

We also look at the pre-emptively defensive  intro penned by the publisher, Thomas B. Congdon Jr. He claimed to have verified the substance of the book through interviews, and thought that Pazder and Smith were very earnest and forthcoming people when he hosted them for editorial meetings. Okay sure.

Show Notes

Remi De Roo

Thomas B. Congdon, Editor of Best Sellers Like 'Jaws,' Dies at 77

The Beginning of a Community

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Mark Roseman opens Lives Reclaimed, his compelling history of the “Bund”—a leftist communitarian group that resisted fascism and protected Jews during the Reich—with a quote from Michael Ondaatje’s novel The Cat’s Table: “That was a small lesson I learned on the journey. What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.” Roseman, a professor of Jewish and German Studies at University of Indiana at Bloomington, joins Matthew to paint a picture of methodical, relational, and spiritual resistance to the speed and terror of fascism. At the center of the conversation is the quandary of how the Bund made generative use of many of the same naturalistic and spiritualist ideals and practices that were central to the physical culture of fascism. Joining the panel are Peter Staudenmaier, professor of modern Germany history at Marquette, and Rebecca Carter-Chand, historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Peter and Rebecca add their expertise on the tangled ferment of religious and ideological passions in the background of Nazism, and how persistent, even through the worst of times, our flickers of altruism and empathy can be.

But before all that: we’ll cover the Q-pilled assassination attempt on Nancy Pelosi that has left Paul Pelosi in urgent care, and far-right media scrambling to overwrite the facts.

Show Notes

Lives Reclaimed — Roseman

Dr. Rebecca Carter-Chand — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Dr. Peter Staudenmaier - History 

The Futurist Manifesto Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

The Awful Truth: Paul Pelosi Was Drunk Again, And In a Dispute With a Male Prostitute Early Friday Morning.

Pelosi attack suspect David DePape shared conspiracy theories

Criminal complaint: David Depape

Depape’s archived site

Pelosi attacker was immersed in 2020 election conspiracies

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Imagine a technology so powerful it's been directly downloaded from spirit during a Scorpio eclipse. This revolutionary tool can cure burn victims, remove cysts from dogs, and endow you with ultimate productivity. Thanks to phase conjugation, this bioenhanced scalar tech will change the way you view medicine and healing forever—provided you don't have any expectations and remain open to source, that is. And whatever any of that means, Derek will try to decipher—and fail, though some other aspects become clearer in the process. 

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Listeners: today’s episode marks a turning point for us all here at Conspirituality HQ.

Humbled by a recent quantum download, we realize that we have for too long been relying on our critical faculties. For too long we have insisted that words mean things. Our poisoned irony has calcified our throat chakras and burned your ears to the point you may never trust a spiritual influencer again.

Today we release our addiction to meaning, our fetish for precision in words. We begin to trust the inner babbler of heart-language. We hearken to the oracles, the speakers in tongues, the oompa loompa doompety doos, the glossalalics who trimper the ainions with seedgly refurns. Our hope is that with their help, we can begin to scrize the colong of wolfile stenoses.

But we cannot enter this new world of activated communication alone. Our guide today is correspondent Mallory DeMille, who comes to us from the land of TikTok, where Light Language has gone viral, and is making bank, bank, bankity bing bong bank.

Show Notes

Mallory on Instagram | Twitter

Kundun - Nechung oracle

Blonk performs Ursonate with real-time typography

Sofia for anxiety: Reply to @jennam1127 anxiety relief

Sofia: “Removing Darkness”

Sofia helping with everyone’s kidneys

Sofia’s light language was “opened up” by ayahuasca

Sofia has her activations turned into tie dye wraps so awesome

“Become a Light Language Practitioner” with Sofia

Sofia provides light language for loneliness

Sheryl presents: Light Language Love

Sheryl needs you to sit TF down

Sheryl’s waiver

Lily on

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A departure today, as Matthew eulogizes his teacher and friend Luciano Iacobelli.

From the opening:

This story may be a little personal and indulgent, but I’ll take a risk on it because I think it hints at an answer to a question we often get on the podcast about our own beliefs in the existential or spiritual categories.

We spend a lot of time eviscerating bog-standard hypocrisy in the economy of spirituality. Listeners resonate with this, but the project is also depressing, and in the parasocial contract they form with us, finding out that we still believe in something, or that something still provides relief—this becomes important.

It’s never a comfortable question to answer in the abstract. It's a gift when something  comes along that shows instead of tells.

Show Notes

Conversation with Luciano Iacobelli

SEED Part One – Michael Barker

IN MEMORIAM: Remembering Luciano Iacobelli – Accenti Magazine

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What is the state  of the documentary film in the age of manipulative online propaganda? In the hands and eyes of a documentarian like Amy Berg we find a journalistic commitment to the truth combined with the artistry of compelling and intimate story-telling.  Along the way, her projects are guided by an obsession with  justice. In two cases—that of the West Memphis Three, and more recently the murder trial of Adnen Syed— her film-making played a role in changing the real-world narrative; leading to the release of those wrongfully convicted via cultural bias, moral panic, and conspiracy theories. In other instances Amy's work has embodied investigative journalism to show how real conspiracies hide the awful abuse of innocents, while protecting the powerful. We ask her how she measures her instincts against the evidence, how she gains the trust of people who have been ignored for decades, how she managed to log days of interview time with an abusive ex-priest, and how she keeps her mental health intact amidst all the uncertainty.

In This Week in Conspirituality, Matthew covers an example of the co-optation of trauma-informed jargon by women in the land of the Three Percenters.

Show Notes

Pro-Trump brand is fined by FTC for incorrect ‘Made in the USA’ labels

The Lion: Sean Whalen Is Empowering Thousands to Take Accountability for Their Lives

Aubrey Marcus's "Code of the Sentient Savage"

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The second part of Julian and Matthew's long look at the 1999 film Teal Swan was reportedly obsessed with as a teen. Girl, Interrupted is a freewheeling adaptation of a 1993 memoir by Susanna Kaysen about the 18 months she spent undergoing treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder in a Massachusetts psychiatric facility in the late 1960s.

This study is provoked by a memory recounted by Swan's childhood friend, Diana Hansen Ribera, that Swan identified with the character of Lisa Rowe in the film. Angelina Jolie won an Oscar for her searing performance of Rowe, a sociopath.

In this second episode, we explore several characters that Swan may have (and may yet) identify with, discuss the awkwardness of portraying mental health narratives on the big screen, and what it would really take for such an intense film to be digestible for typical teenagers. Matthew ends with a meditation on immersive/claustrophobic media—which Swan goes on to master—compared with the relief of developing a meta-view capable of inhabiting many stories, as opposed to imitating one.

Show Notes

SENECA THE YOUNGER, HERCULES FURENS - Theoi Classical Texts Library

Hercules (Seneca)

Girl, Interrupted — Susanna Kaysen

1607: Growing up with Teal Swan - Diana Hansen Ribera

Mad, Bad, and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors by Lisa Appignanesi

Brittany Murphy: Inside Her Sudden Death at 32 That Still Confounds Hollywood

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For the prophet and the revolutionary alike, the time is always now. Gird up your loins brave heroes, and show your true faith! The signs portend that The Last World Emperor is rising to do battle against the AntiChrist. The time is always now, but in that flat circle of iterative history, no bad idea is really new under the Black Sun—it's just been engineered to go more viral.

Our guest today is history professor Thomas Lecaque, who writes about how medieval ethnonationalist holy war is woven into hugely popular video games, right-wing political rhetoric, and even how assault weapons are marketed. Julian talks with him about the Hobbit-fetish of new Italian PM and heir to Mussolini, Giorgia Meloni, as well as the American right’s obsession with the Templar Knights, and the troubling midterm election trend of open White Christian Nationalism.

For TWIC, Matthew muses on the overlaps between conspirituality and neo-fascism, but first Derek reports on the battle between testicular cuisine and buttery coffee.

Show Notes

Manclan Episode 1: Liver King vs the Soy Boys

Cornell Expert Warns Against Megadosing Vitamins

Dietary Supplements Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report

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Methylene blue will give you more energy! It’s neuroprotective! Your skin will never look better! Your bunghole will never be bluer!

This week, Derek investigates one of biohacking’s hottest trends: a textile dye that does, in fact, have medical applications—just not the ones optimizers are promoting, and optimizing. He’ll look into this organic compound’s history, how it’s being marketed by the butter coffee guy, and finally, reading from Aubrey Marcus’s latest newsletter on blue buttholes.

Show Notes

So You Want to Pop Into a Hyperbaric Oxygen Chamber to Rid Yourself of Wrinkles?

Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy: Get the Facts

When Medicines Go Rogue, Part 1: Methylene Blue

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There's no Teal Swan without the Satanic Panic. And there's no Satanic Panic without the 1980 publication of Michelle Remembers, by Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith.

In this first of three segments on this melted book, Matthew and Julian cover its historical, cultural, and mass media context. We start with a review of a 1985 20/20 episode called “The Devil Worshippers” for a taste of how mainstream outlets hosted cranks like Pazder, giving him a hall pass on evidence, and overlooking how his Catholic fetishes and paranoias played a huge role in the fictions he spun.

The post Vatican 2 context is crucial, especially as we bear witness to the current political triumphs of Trad-Cath propaganda and politics in our post-Roe, QAnon -fried world. For help, we look to an excellent essay by social historian Bernard Doherty about the genre and elements of the Catholic Horror Film, which begins with Rosemary's Baby in 1968. This reactionary genre attempted to respond to modernizing—or postmodernizing, as Jordan Peterson might say—changes in Church doctrine.

Bottom line? The Satanic Panic largely begins in and is sustained by Catholic-flavoured conspirituality anxiety about secularization, sex, babies, and abortion.

CORRECTIONS: My dad informs me that I've made some Pope mistakes! Pius X was the last legitimate Pope according to the sedavacantists, and John XXIII, not Paul XXIII, opened the Vatican 2 proceedings. Thx dad. MR

Show Notes

Michael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall cover Michelle Remembers with great skill.

"20/20" the Devil Worshippers - May 16, 1985

West of Memphis movie review & film summary

Mel Gibson: The man without a pope

The Smoke of Satan on the Silver Screen: The Catholic Horror Film, Vatican II, and the Revival of Demonology | Journal for the Academic Study of Religion

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Mystery topic today. Emergency episode. Breaking story. Amazing if true! Totally transformative plot twist. You gotta listen through for the big reveal, and then hit smash for more.

Spoiler alert: QAnon was foreshadowed by Pizzagate, but Pizzagate was foreshadowed by a moral panic in London, England that was driven in part by someone the three of us are karmically bound to, for good or ill, forever.

But first, Derek’s got a This Week in Conspirituality segment on the boom times for pseudoscience telehealth. Psychic healing for Zoom, as he calls it.

Show Notes

Network of right-wing health care providers is making millions off hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, hacked data reveals

The Anti-vax founder of America’s Frontline Doctors now has a license to practice in Florida

US cardiologist makes false claims about Covid-19 vaccination

Hoaxed

Teal Swan allegations documents

Re P and Q (Children: Care Proceedings: Fact Finding)

Jacqui Farmer's "Hampstead Research"

Illuminati Party! - Reasons Not to Be Scared of the Illuminati.

Charlotte Ward’s conspirituality.org About page

Full article: The Emergence of Conspirituality

Hoaxtead Research

Charlotte writing as Jacqui on conspirituality.org

Charlotte Ward denounces ‘Hampstead psy op’ | HOAXTEAD RESEARCH

Charlotte Ward - Academia.edu

Ward cites Icke

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Julian and Matthew take a long look at the 1999 film Teal Swan was reportedly obsessed with as a teen. Girl, Interrupted is a bold adaptation of a 1993 memoir by the writer Susanna Kaysen about the 18 months she spent undergoing treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder in a Massachusetts psychiatric facility in the late 1960s.

This study is provoked by a memory recounted by Swan's childhood friend, Diana Hansen Ribera, that Swan identified with the character of Lisa Rowe in the film. Angelina Jolie won an Oscar for her searing performance of Rowe, a sociopath.

Show Notes

Girl, Interrupted — Susanna Kaysen

1607: Growing up with Teal Swan - Diana Hansen Ribera

Mad, Bad, and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors by Lisa Appignanesi

Brittany Murphy: Inside Her Sudden Death at 32 That Still Confounds Hollywood

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The book is filed. Our mental health is in check. And, as it turns out, Matthew found a new guru. We return to trio work by investigating his fellow Canadian's cure for, uh, anything, or maybe something, as well diving into two biohacking conferences and the conspiritualist's new favorite fascist on the block.

Show Notes

Tip of the iceberg: erectile dysfunction and COVID-19 | International Journal of Impotence Research

Will in the News, TV & Internet Culture

Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism | Open Culture

The Cruelty Is the Point 

Alessio Di Giulio's Racist Selfie With Roma Woman Enrages Italy

Meloni holding melons

CPAC: The Whole World is Watching - Giorgia Meloni

Dal rugby allo yoga, tutto lo sport di Giorgia Meloni

Pierre Poilievre rubs his old wood 

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If you tune into your favorite Instagram wellness influencer or financial life coach, you’ll learn that money is really a state of mind—right? Thinking the right thoughts is the truest judge of character, and therefore indicative of your bottom line. This week Derek looks at research from behavioral economics, which found the perceived relationship between wealth and morality dates back to post-WWII America—and has damaged the poorest among us for generations. He weighs evidence from this field, which looks at the real societal and political causes of wealth disparity, against the metaphysical bullshit that proponents of the “mindset creates wealth” uber-text, A Course in Miracles, try to sell you.

Show Notes

Why we shouldn’t push a positive mindset on those in poverty

The Causal Effects of Place on Health and Longevity

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Some of the most valuable material that come to us from Paula Marino's Open Shadow film of 2017 is an extended interview with Swan's parent's, the Bosworths. They speak about Swan's sensory sensitivity as a young child, and how that morphed into a staunchly independent but sometimes isolated social life. They describe Swan's secret runic writing, their belief in her capacities as a medical intuitive, and discuss the gaps in psychiatric care that failed them all when her mental health needed help. This episode examines this interview, and then cross-checks some aspects against the account of Swan's childhood friend, Diana Hansen Ribera.

Here we have the unique insight into parents speaking vulnerably and transparently about their baffling child—which means we can really lean into the primal material that pre-exists the charged questions about whether Teal Swan is  running a cult or encouraging suicide. What we find, between the accounts of the Bosworths and Ribera, is a collection of commonplace phenomena: high sensitivity, parents learning as they go, the intrusion of internet pornography, and a likely abusive figure who was too close to the family.

In this episode, Matthew and Julian discuss the mystery of familial memory, idealizing vs. pathologizing children, the appeals of fantasy as a mode of relief, whether the Satanic Panic was a collective cry for help to resolve commonplace domestic and community abuse, and the possibility that cult formation is a social form of post traumatic play.

Show Notes

Open Shadow — Paula Marino

Do You Cry Easily? You May Be a 'Highly Sensitive Person'

The science behind why some of us are shy

Study: Pornography does not cause violent sex crimes

When Children Act Out Sexually: A Guide for Parents and Teachers

1607: Growing up with Teal Swan - Diana Hansen Ribera

“Forbidden Games”: Post-Traumatic Child's Play — Lenore Terr

Valerie L. Dripchak (2007). Posttraumatic Play: Towards Acceptance and Resolution. , 35(2), 125–134. doi:10.1007/s10615-006-0068-y

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Are you ready to biohack your brain with buttered coffee? How about going “within” at the Drybar of acupuncture? What if we told you that cannabis will catapult your chakras into higher consciousness—all it costs is a $5,000 retreat entry fee, not including airfare and hotel? In the $4.4 trillion wellness industry, is any cost really too expensive to achieve true self-care—even if it never really seems like you arrive anywhere at all?

Rina Raphael was getting burnt out as a millennial digital news producer at NBC News. And so she did what anyone would do: she moved to Los Angeles in search of that self-care. Yet she could never shake her journalistic chops, and so she ended up writing about the wellness industry for the NY Times, the LA Times, Fast Company, and other publications. Her skeptical eye and earnest curiosity lead her to write her brand new book, The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop, and the False Promise of Self-Care. And she’s here this week to talk to us this week about her adventures in modern spirituality—its teachings as well as its traps.

Show Notes

The Gospel of Wellness

Well To Do — Rina Raphael

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Christina Flinders returns for the second of a two-part tour through her experience with cultic dynamics, conspirituality, and the long road towards finding her place in the world. 

Picking up where she left off, Flinders discusses breaking free of the sexually abusive cult of Eknath Easwaren, finding ambivalent agency as a stripper, and then graduating to yoga teaching—where she then had to dodge being redpilled.

Thanks again to Christina for her generosity and lucidity, and her family for their support.

If you'd like to share your story with us and our Patreon community of listeners, please get in touch.

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Did you know that Joe Biden is a Satanic alien Nazi pedophile intent on bringing about the New World Order? Or that Donald Trump is the only thing that will save us from complete tyranny? How about the fact that COVID vaccines are bioweapons destroying the global population? But that’s okay, because colloidal silver is the magic bullet that will boost your immune system to help you fend off this scamdemic. Add that to your herbal stack alongside Lung Health Organic Herbal Spray which is definitively proven to boost your immunity even though it’s never been clinically tested.

Oh, and have we mentioned that chocolate is an octave of the sun?

Strap in, folks, because this week we’re finally looking at David “Avocado” Wolfe, whose paranoid Telegram channel boasts all of the above claims and much, much more. And we’re not just clipping recent podcast talks and driver’s seat rants. We’re joined by longtime journalist, health food marketing guru, and co-founder of the website, Ethos, Jill Ettinger, who worked side-by-side with David for many years. She’ll tell her side of it—and honestly, it’s not all bad, except for recent years. In effect, we’re looking at a conspiracy-prone health food guru turn full conspiritualist over the last two decades. Bonus: Jill brought Derek along to many events across the country in the aughts, and David was often there, so we’ll hear about this descent from people who watched it happen.

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Christina Flinders is our honoured guest today for the first of a two-part tour through her  experience with cultic dynamics and conspirituality. Matthew and Julian learn about her family's enmeshment in the cult of Eknath Easwaren, and her subsequent journey through rebellion, self discovery, and political awakening.

We'd like to thank Christina for her generosity and lucidity, and her family for supporting her in this.

We hope that this will be the first in a series. If you'd like to share your story with us and the Patreon community of listeners here, please get in touch.

Show Notes

Comment from Pratik Joshi on Easwaren's abuse history in India

PEOPLE v. RUPPENTHAL

Eknath Easwaran on the Training of Attention

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On May 31st, 2014, Morgan Geyser stabbed her onetime best friend Bella Leutner nineteen times, while her new best friend, Anissa Weier, looked on. All three girls were twelve years old. 

Geyser was living with schizophrenia, and Weier had introduced her to the crowd-sourced internet phantasm known as Slenderman, who first appeared on Something Awful, the message board at the root of chan culture. Together, Geyser and Weier came to believe that Slenderman was demanding a sacrifice in exchange for his protection. Their crime,  at once naïve and brutal,  sparked a moral panic.

Author Kathleen Hale joins Matthew to discuss her reporting on this story in her riveting and compassionate new book, Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls.

Slenderman is brimming with tenderness for these girls, who are all creative, confused, scared, and ultimately bound to each other through social contagion and mental illness. Hale's writing is accessible but elliptical as it uncovers jagged details, but never easy answers, about a world that predicts our own. 

On this podcast we spend a lot of time on the virtual demons that animate conspirituality and QAnon, driving some devotees to violence. Hale's work is good medicine for those who know that internet chaos and mental precarity will remain locked in feedback loops for the foreseeable future. Her meticulous investigation—enriched by hours spent interviewing Morgan Geyser—shows that the road to understanding is always paved with empathy.

Show Notes

Slenderman — Kathleen Hale

Am I being catfished? An author confronts her number one online critic | Books | The Guardian

Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man: The Development of an Internet Mythology

The Slender Man Wiki | Fandom

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As we're all with family over the holiday weekend, here's a 2018 interview that Derek conducted with neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga after the publication of his last book, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind. Michael revolutionized the field of neuroscience in the 1960s with his work on split-brain patients and remains a towering figure in his field. 

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Do you ever stop to think about whether or not you can afford organic food—and then consider that many people don’t have such an option? Is Goop’s $295 incense holder a sign of feminine empowerment or merely another Gwneth Paltrow grift? Will that $32 spin class that features an endless litany of positive affirmations make you more likely to slip $5 to the homeless person camped outside of the studio—or does it increase your happiness or contentment levels at all, once the endorphins wear off?

These are just some of the questions posed by CTZNWELL founder, Kerri Kelly, in her new book, American Detox: The Myth of Wellness and How We Can Truly Heal. Beginning with her own transformational moment after 9/11, Kerri has long asked difficult questions of both herself and the industry she’s spent decades immersed in. In fact, while Derek and Julian were co-founding the Conspirituality pre-cursor, YogaBrains, over a decade ago, Kerri was an integral member of yoga-activist organization, Off the Mat, Into the World. She joins us this week as co-host to discuss her own origin myth and to tell us exactly how she’s detoxing from America these days.

Show Notes

American Detox: The Myth of Wellness and How We Can Truly Heal

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The homestretch of our study of Michelle Remembers zeroes in on the literal symbols—and symbols gone literal—of the Satanic Panic. Archetypes, gore, anxieties about sex and babies and filth: Lawrence Pazder mined it all, using modes of abstraction and dehumanization as old as religion itself to weave a story he claimed was all about Michelle—but was really an exercise of his own fetishes.

Michelle Smith could have received proper care for her understandable stresses. She could have offered up her feelings and sensations and images from dreams for discussion and contemplation, and an actual therapist would have held that material safely for her to explore. But in Pazder, Smith found someone who wasn’t interested in common human complexity. He was interested in cosmic warfare, and the role he could LARP within it.

But Pazder was so blind to his craven narcissism that he couldn’t help but tell on himself. In the final passage we analyze, Pazder records Smith demanding to end therapy. “If I could tear out my tongue,” she says, “I would never have to speak again.” But in the very next paragraph, the man who is forcing her to “remember” symbolically tears out her tongue, rejecting her plea to end the sessions, interpreting her demand as though it were coming from Satan himself.

She imagines herself getting in a car and driving and driving, anywhere. Away from this psychiatrist who wanted to be an exorcist, away from his story, perhaps to find her own.

Show Notes

HIGHEST GAME IN TOWN

‘I See His Blood Upon the Rose’ | Franciscan Media

How to Lose Weight (Weight Loss and Obesity) - Teal Swan

The Cause of Obesity - Teal Swan Articles 

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Fitness is the beating heart of America. No, wait, that’s opportunistic capitalism. But opportunistic capitalism, as it turns out, is the beating heart of fitness. Yet fitness has a soul too—in fact, mysticism, capitalism, and fitness have been dancing together for a very long time, while politics calls the tune, as historian and assistant professor at The New School, Natalia Petrzela, is here to tell us about today. We should also note that Natalia is our only four-time guest.

She’s also the author of an incredible new book, to be published this December by the University of Chicago Press, titled Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession. The book spans over a hundred years, chronicling shifting cultural attitudes, gendered expectations, political inflections, and jackpot innovations in how Americans have celebrated, reviled, bought, sold, and been turned-on or enlightened by rituals of exercise.

Like us, Natalia loves physical culture, but contradictions abound in the collisions between embodiment, politics, and commerce. If, as the marketing has told us over the years, recreational running is better for the mind than psychotherapy, moonlit naked hottubing at Esalen can save the world, women can simultaneously embrace dance studio fitness as a path of feminist liberation and a way to titilate the male gaze, and yoga can promise freedom from ever needing drugs or surgery, is it any wonder that a country so obsessed with exercise is so notoriously unhealthy?

Show Notes

Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession

From Performance to Participation: The Origins of the Fit Nation

Working On The Work of Working Out: A history of fitness in America

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JP Sears constantly refers to himself as a freethinker. His increasing religiosity is counter to critical thinking, however. Derek responds to two recent videos that detail his religious thinking and transphobia, showing how a specific strain of Christianity—and binary thinking—is not freethought, but propaganda.

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In this episode of the Swan Song Series, Matthew interviews Paola Marino about why she found Teal Swan a fascinating subject to film for 2018’s “Open Shadow.” They discuss aesthetics, the mystery of personality, why Swan’s parents agreed to sit down with her. Matthew also surprised her with the newly-revealed translations of Swan’s coded journal pages.

Prefacing the interview is a discussion between Julian and Matthew about art, artifice, the risks of doing and not doing hard journalism on the subjects we cover. They discuss James Joyce’s proverb about noble art, in which he describes “aesthetic arrest” as the middle way between propaganda and pornography.

Marino’s work attempts to find that path, while Jon Kasbe’s The Deep End falters to both sides. On one hand Kasbe’s film titillates viewers with high drama. On the other hand it tells viewers what they should think. And in both cases it creates a story where the truth would suffice.

The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing. —James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Show Notes

Open Shadow—Paola Marino

Gizmodo Launches 'The Gateway,' an Investigative Podcast About a Controversial Internet Spiritual Guru

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In the second of three episodes on Michelle Remembers, we recap its Catholic contexts, and Lawrence Pazder's quest to transcend the limitations of psychiatry through mystical nightmares. We then explore the front matter: how Pazder introduces his project (and himself), and the ambivalent endorsement of Remi de Roo, Archbishop of Victoria. In Pazder's many clerical alliances, a crucial theme is established: the rapprochement between psychiatry and the priesthood, in which the former submits to the latter to restore the reality of the supernatural.

We also look at the pre-emptively defensive  intro penned by the publisher, Thomas B. Congdon Jr. He claimed to have verified the substance of the book through interviews, and thought that Pazder and Smith were very earnest and forthcoming people when he hosted them for editorial meetings. Okay sure.

Show Notes

Remi De Roo - Wikipedia

Thomas B. Congdon, Editor of Best Sellers Like 'Jaws,' Dies at 77

The Beginning of a Community

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Traditional Chinese Medicine is an ancient medical system that has persisted in its homeland for countless generations before being exported to the rest of the world—right? Well, not exactly, but that doesn’t mean the varying sets of practices have not made an impact in China and abroad.

This week, historian Tamara Venit-Shelton joins the podcast to talk to Derek about the history of Chinese Medicine in America. The author of Herbs and Roots: A History of Chinese Doctors in the American Medical Marketplace, they discuss the xenophobia and racism that Chinese encountered in the 19th century West, how early Chinese doctors used the exoticism of their system to their advantage when advertising to disaffected Americans who were suspicious of the dominant health care system, the moment that these varying practices became unified by Chairman Mao in the middle of the 20th century, and how the acupuncture needles we use today are not actually Chinese in origin—we can thank the Japanese for the world’s recent widespread adoption of that practice.

Show Notes

Herbs and Roots: A History of Chinese Doctors in the American Medical Marketplace

Tamara Venit-Shelton gets to the roots of Chinese medicine in America

Evidence Map of Acupuncture review of systematic reviews on 1,500 RCT’s.

David Gorski “Acupuncture is a theatrical placebo, retconned beyond recognition.”

$2.5 Spent—No Alternative Cures Found by the NCCIH

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There's no Teal Swan without the Satanic Panic. And there's no Satanic Panic without the 1980 publication of Michelle Remembers, by Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith.

In this first of three segments on this melted book, Matthew and Julian cover its historical, cultural, and mass media context. We start with a review of a 1985 20/20 episode called “The Devil Worshippers” for a taste of how mainstream outlets hosted cranks like Pazder, giving him a hall pass on evidence, and overlooking how his Catholic fetishes and paranoias played a huge role in the fictions he spun.

The post Vatican 2 context is crucial, especially as we bear witness to the current political triumphs of Trad-Cath propaganda and politics in our post-Roe, QAnon -fried world. For help, we look to an excellent essay by social historian Bernard Doherty about the genre and elements of the Catholic Horror Film, which begins with Rosemary's Baby in 1968. This reactionary genre attempted to respond to modernizing—or postmodernizing, as Jordan Peterson might say—changes in Church doctrine.

Bottom line? The Satanic Panic largely begins in and is sustained by Catholic-flavoured conspirituality anxiety about secularization, sex, babies, and abortion.

Show Notes

Michael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall cover Michelle Remembers with great skill.

"20/20" the Devil Worshippers - May 16, 1985

West of Memphis movie review & film summary (2012) | Roger Ebert

Mel Gibson: The man without a pope - Where Peter Is

The Smoke of Satan on the Silver Screen: The Catholic Horror Film, Vatican II, and the Revival of Demonology | Journal for the Academic Study of Religion

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We can't understand Teal Swan without understanding the Satanic Panic. And we can't really understand that historical disaster with out feeling our way into the mysteries of memory, fantasy, shame, and terror.

Many of you will have heard about therapists interfering in a family constellation by insinuating the client has has memories of abuse to uncover, and that they can’t go forward in their lives without doing that work. This is the bread and butter of Swan's technique, with the result being that many of her close followers come to tell stories  about their childhoods that echo hers. Swan's own story of childhood abuse crystallized after she goes through treatment with a leading Satanic Panic therapist, Barbara Snow.

Those are stories on the page. But today, to kick off the Swan Song Series, Julian shares  the moment-by-moment mechanics of how this disastrous parody of therapy turned his own life inside out, and alienated him from his family for a decade.

Content warning for listeners: we’ll be talking about stories of child sexual abuse.

Show Notes

The Gateway

Michelle Remembers, covered by Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes

Forrest Yoga students ask A. Forrest to stop using the Zia Nation symbol

A. Forrest's ostensible mentor 

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Matthew sits down with ace journalist EJ Dickson to explore her deep archive of reporting on the policing of women's bodies, and how it reflects on her own experience of childbirth.

This episode opens and closes with reference to the essay that first introduced Matthew to this world, "Giving Birth in Yogaland," written by his partner Alix, after two C-section deliveries.

Show Notes

"Giving Birth in Yogaland" —Alix Cale

raggapunzel on Instagram —water birth on the beach

Covid-19 Vaccine: How Dommes Are Convincing Submissives to Get Jabs

Matt Gaetz, QAnon Followers, and the GOP Are Exploiting the #FreeBritney Movement

Are Sex-Negative 'Puriteens' Actually Taking Over the Internet?

'Pastel QAnon' Is Infiltrating the Natural Parenting Community

Princess Diana Struggled With Bulimia. Does 'The Crown' Do Her Justice?

The Baby-Formula Shortage Has Spawned a New Brand of Mom-Shamers

Roe v. Wade: Top Influencers Avoid Abortion Debate - Rolling Stone

Amber Heard, Johnny Depp: TikTok Reenactments of Testimony Goes Viral

Michelle Phan: How YouTube Beauty Guru Fell in With Bullshit Peddler

There Are a Million Reasons to Get An Abortion. This Was Mine.

Bentinho Massaro: Instagram Guru 'F-king' His Followers 'To Freedom'

In Minnie Mouse's D

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A recent review questioning the serotonin theory of depression has revived a generations-long debate over the very notion of "chemical imbalances." While there are plenty of important debates about the roles of pharmacology and psychotherapy in mental health disorders, conspiritualists from both wellness spaces and the far right have been using mental health to promote (and monetize) their own agendas. Derek investigates.

Show Notes

The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence

The New Study on Serotonin and Depression Isn’t About Antidepressants

Inside Kelly Brogan’s Covid-Denying, Vax-Resistant Conspiracy Machine

The Far Right’s Next Target for a Bullshit Moral Panic: Antidepressants

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Life is scary. Natural disasters, violent intruders, and deadly viruses threaten our survival and endanger our loved ones. When ordinary solutions and institutions are not trusted, we may reach for talismanic help; crystals, herbal remedies, ritual prayer and magical thinking, or we might consult the charismatic oracle who channels prophecies from the Great Beyond—right on your iPhone.

But what about weaponry? Even though guns exert devastating real-world impact, our guest argues that they also carry an important  symbolic power. While most may never use it, the knowledge that cold hard steel is nearby is one attempt at managing an anxiety that is all-too human. In fact, coping strategies both magical and militaristic are woven into the American political psyche—and as the pandemic has demonstrated, flare up dramatically during social crises; even at times becoming strange bedfellows.

Philosophy and religion professor Alan Levinovitz calls this "empowerment epistemology" and describes it as a connective tissue between the seemingly distant domains of gun culture and the wellness sphere. In both cases, this longing for empowerment in the face of helplessness motivates us to cleave to what we believe protects us, regardless of evidence to the contrary—or the tragic consequences in our middle schools and medical ICUs.

Show Notes

Oprah's 'happiness guru' designed apartments to maximize joy — and they start at $5 million

Killing does not come easy for soldiers - The Washington Post

Hanns Johst “Schlageter”

Quote/Counterquote: “Whenever I hear the word 'culture'…” 

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Some of the most valuable material that comes to us from Paula Marino's Open Shadow film of 2017 is an extended interview with Swan's parent's, the Bosworths. They speak about Swan's sensory sensitivity as a young child, and how that morphed into a staunchly independent but sometimes isolated social life. They describe Swan's secret runic writing, their belief in her capacities as a medical intuitive, and discuss the gaps in psychiatric care that failed them all when her mental health needed help. This episode examines this interview, and then cross-checks some aspects against the account of Swan's childhood friend, Diana Hansen Ribera.

Here we have the unique insight into parents speaking vulnerably and transparently about their baffling child—which means we can really lean into the primal material that pre-exists the charged questions about whether Teal Swan is  running a cult or encouraging suicide. What we find, between the accounts of the Bosworths and Ribera, is a collection of commonplace phenomena: high sensitivity, parents learning as they go, the intrusion of internet pornography, and a likely abusive figure who was too close to the family.

In this episode, Matthew and Julian discuss the mystery of familial memory,  idealizing vs. pathologizing children, the appeals of fantasy as a mode of relief, whether the Satanic Panic was a collective cry for help to resolve commonplace domestic and community abuse, and the possibility that cult formation is a social form of post traumatic play.

Show Notes

Open Shadow — Paula Marino

Do You Cry Easily? You May Be a 'Highly Sensitive Person'

The science behind why some of us are shy

Study: Pornography does not cause violent sex crimes

When Children Act Out Sexually: A Guide for Parents and Teachers

1607: Growing up with Teal Swan - Diana Hansen Ribera

“Forbidden Games”: Post-Traumatic Child's Play — Lenore Terr

Valerie L. Dripchak (2007). Posttraumatic Play: Towards Acceptance and Resolution. , 35(2), 125–134. doi:10.1007/s10615-006-0068-y

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We spend so much time on this podcast discussing the wellness industry’s paranoia around anything from the medical “establishment” or the Luciferean nature of “Big Pharma,” but there’s another devil that’s lurking around every corner: the Mainstream Media.

Derek has long argued that there’s no such thing. Media organizations are competing businesses, and while there can be sloppiness when trying to break a story or laziness when rewriting press releases for clicks, the notion of a media “Deep State” is usually part of the conspiritualist’s sales technique, not the reality of modern media.

Derek began his career as a religion journalist, and this week he interviews Sam Kestenbaum, who’s made a career in this field. Sam has written for the NY Times and the Washington Post, where he recently published an expose on Christiane Northrup. Derek asks him about this story in particular, as well as his process of reporting on religion, the differences between spirituality and religion, and the coming post-pandemic spirituality surge—and how conspiritualists are already monetizing it.

Show Notes

Christiane Northrup, once a New Age health guru, now spreads covid disinformation

Life After Proclaiming a Trump Re-election As Divinely Ordained

Godspeak Calvary Church Defies Quarantine, Attendance Soars

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In this episode of the Swan Song Series, Matthew interviews Paola Marino about why she found Teal Swan a fascinating subject to film for 2018’s “Open Shadow.” They discuss aesthetics, the mystery of personality, why Swan’s parents agreed to sit down with her. Matthew also surprised her with the newly-revealed translations of Swan’s coded journal pages.

Prefacing the interview is a discussion between Julian and Matthew about art, artifice, the risks of doing and not doing hard journalism on the subjects we cover. They discuss James Joyce’s proverb about  noble art, in which he describes “aesthetic arrest” as the middle way between propaganda and pornography.

Marino’s work attempts to find that path, while Jon Kasbe’s The Deep End falters to both sides. On one hand Kasbe’s film titillates viewers with high drama. On the other hand it tells viewers what they should think. And in both cases it creates a story where the truth would suffice.

The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing. — James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Show Notes

Open Shadow—Paola Marino

Gizmodo Launches 'The Gateway,' an Investigative Podcast About a Controversial Internet Spiritual Guru

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This podcast was born in response to COVID and vaccine disinformation that, while bubbling up for some time, flooded the population with the release of the pseudodocumentary, “Plandemic.” Ever since then, we’ve wondered how to combat the constant tides of pseudoscience masquerading as “natural remedies” that conspiritualists champion, then sell for a profit. 

One of our earliest champions was the Southern California-based cardiologist, Danielle Belardo, who built up a large social media following even before the pandemic ravaged the world. Not only was she on the actual frontlines of COVID wards, but she’s been leading the charge on providing evidence-based information on her social media feeds, as well as her excellent podcast, Wellness: Fact Vs Fiction.

Derek was recently a guest on that podcast, and now Danielle returns the favor, joining him to discuss her thoughts on being a science communicator and a female cardiologist in a male-dominated field, as well as many of the wellness myths circling around social media, including supplements, statins, sunscreen, veganism, organic foods, and GMOs. 

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Derek steps back from conspiracies and wellness this week to discuss something very healing and personal to him: music. Specifically, how music has shaped his career, as well as the story behind the music you hear every week on this podcast.

Show Notes

EarthRise SoundSystem on Spotify

Earthrise SoundSystem vs Nina Simone: Come Ye

Bole 2 Harlem

Pete Kuzma

Global Beat Fusion: The History of the Future of Music

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