Conspirituality

QAnon emerged out of a perfect storm of evolving technology, social psychology, and global crisis. But it exploited pre-existing neural architecture already easily hijacked by addictive drugs, junk food, porn, persuasive marketing, and cultish religions. It also relied on how mobile social media, running on cellular and wifi technology, amplifies and speeds up the algorithmic impact of hyper-contagious cultural memes on the material world. Maybe 5G was the real threat all along?

Julian explores our conspiritualist tendencies toward patternicity and apophenia, which can be super-stimulated by well-adapted memes, complex puzzles, and grandiose in-group purpose—and suggests a possible antidote.

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It takes patience, empathy, and a steady hand to paint a detailed landscape of the politics and culture that connect anti-feminism to ethnonationalism to the broader obsessions of conspirituality.

Dr. Annie Kelly’s scholarship in these spaces reveals a network of “subversion anxieties”: that patriarchy will be replaced by social justice autocrats, that the privileged will be brought low, that feminism will destroy hetero freedoms and pleasures, that human bodies will become cyborgs, that collectivism will replace capitalism. As our guest host this week, she’ll be our tour guide through the last decade of hot internet garbage, and explain how she’s kept her manners and wits intact enough to gain the trust of QAnon moms on the front lines of the U.K.’s anti-lockdown movement. We’ll also talk about her new brilliant podcast “Vaccine: The Human Story,” which takes the history of smallpox and its eradication as an object lesson for the COVID era.

On the vaccine tip, our brief Ticker will address how the yoga world showed its anti-vax ass by trolling a Yoga Journal writer who dared to argue that getting vaccinated was a practice of non-violence.

Show Notes

Wolf Terry: Getting the COVID-19 Vaccine Was My Act of Ahimsa

Matthew Remski: How Yoga Journal Set Off an Anti-Vax Backlash

Kelly: Opinion | The Housewives of White Supremacy

Kelly: The alt-right: Reactionary rehabilitation for white masculinity

QAA Episode 110: Mothers For QAnon w/ Annie Kelly by QAnon Anonymous

Kelly: Vaccine, the Human Story

Anti-Vaxxers Could Be Helping Create Deadlier Versions of Covid

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A closer look at the content and constellations of Josh Rainer Goldstein, who livestreams himself eating raw meat.

Presented in three parts:

1. An analysis of how the content is self-centered, ableist, misogynistic, and contribute to structural racism and epistemological confusion.
2. An exploration of the deeply Freudian aspects of Goldstein’s account: its frenzied death wish expressed in an oral/anal fetish of raw meat and body perfectionism. The larger psychoanalytic question is: why are these displays gratifying to his followers? What does Goldstein allow them to feel, without shame? Part of it giving absolution for reactionary behaviours that feel good: consuming huge quantities of meat, and fantasizing about being surrounded by dozen babies on a homestead. In this part we also meet Goldstein’s mom.
3. A letter that confesses how warmly I feel towards Goldstein: towards the understandable needs that get hijacked by the politics he’s gotten messed up in. How can we control what we’re exposed to, after all?

Show Notes

Eating Raw Meat, Dreaming of Fatherhood — Matthew Remski on Medium

Goldstein’s raw lamb mukbang.

“You own your land. You defend your land.”

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Are you crypto-curious? This past year has shown that an increasing number of people are dreaming of becoming crypto millionaires. But what is blockchain and this strange new digital currency and, more pertinent to this podcast, how are conspiritualists trying to exploit it, even when they don’t understand what “it” is?

Matthew drills Derek, who worked in blockchain for over two years with two different companies, on the basics, before Derek interviews David Morris, the Chief Insights Columnist at Coindesk who also just happens to have a longtime interest in MLMs and cults. Matthew also reviews the 1996 essay, “The Californian Ideology,” the famous 1995 study of the bizarre Silicon Valley-fueled fusion of cultural bohemianism and free-market utopia rhetoric.

In the Ticker, Julian reconsiders the definition of free speech in an age of digital misinformation through the lens of anti-vax champion RFK, Jr, Vandana Shiva, and returning Conspirituality champion, Russell Brand.

Show Notes

The Lesson of Bitconnect: Promoters Can Be Liable

China’s Anti-Crypto Crackdown Is Different This Time

Of Course China Is Anti-Bitcoin: Look What Happened to Jack Ma

Biden’s New FTC Chair Could Be a Big Web 3.0 Ally

23-year old who kept QAnon online

Italy’s Five Star Techno-Utopians

RFK’s Children’s Health Defense article on Brand and Shiva

Seeds of Doubt New Yorker article about Vandana Shiva

Stanford U. Letter on Shiva’s Anti-Science Rhetoric

“Bill Gates Agenda” viral article

Gates New Agriculture Non-Profit

Barbrooke and Cameron, 1995: THE CALIFORNIAN IDEOLOGY

Richard Brautigan, 1967: All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace

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Derek investigates a recent NY Times essay by Michael Pollan as an entry point to discuss big questions in psychedelics and conspirituality: How do we honor indigenous traditions as psychedelics are legalized (and monetized)? What dangers lie ahead as pharmaceutical companies and charismatic influencers exploit psychedelics for profit and power? How can we create psychedelic rituals that suit our current time and societal temperament?

Show Notes

How Should We Do Drugs Now?

Is This Peter Thiel–Backed Startup Trying to Monopolize the Astral Plane?

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What should a global network of popular and private schools do when faced with evidence that the foundation of their pedagogy was laid by a racist, proto-fascist pseudoscientist? What should they do when it becomes clear that they are evangelizing while pretending to teach secular humanism? These are the sticky questions raised by Dr. Jennifer Sapio in today’s interview with Matthew. Sapio taught for three years at the Austin Waldorf School. She was hired from her secular training, but gradually found herself drawn into what she calls an “inherently racist cult.” Her mentors pushed her towards accepting the 19th-century babblings of Rudolf Steiner, who, among other exploits, read the “Akashic Records” to learn why the spirit world disapproved of vaccines. They discuss the long shadows of racist and metaphysical nonsense that hang over the otherwise wholesome project of Waldorf education. 

In the Ticker, Derek and Julian review a recent episode of Ben Shapiro’s podcast, in which he mutually masturbates with Russell Brand to consummate their brands, but they don’t quite come together.

Show Notes

The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 116

The gun control debate is complex, but there are things we can do

Movement against critical race theory is deeply necessary

Dr. Thomas Cowan: Viral video claiming 5G caused pandemic easily debunked

Dr. Sapio’s Waldorf memoir: Waldorf Schools Are Inherently Racist Cults

Austin Waldorf School, Tuitions & Fees

Prof. Staudenmeier: “Anthroposophy and Ecofascism”

Protesting too much: Myths about Waldorf education

Matthew on: The “Akashic Records” to “Do Your Research” Pipeline

APTN: Residential Schools Archives

NYT: Unmarked Graves at Residential Schools in Canada: What to Know

Anishnabek.ca: An Overview of the Indian Residential School System

Woops.

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Julian reflects on unchosen racial complicity and how moments of moral courage in the face of oppressive power can reveal one’s true colors. He traces the history of Apartheid as it intersects with the stories of his youth in South Africa.

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How do we avoid being the subject of—and feeding the market for—trauma porn? If anyone knows, it’s India Oxenberg, who in less than two years (while under the unforgiving glare of a media firestorm) went from cult victim to survivor to anti-cult activist. Matthew sits down with her to discuss her recovery journey: learning to box, learning to love food, learning about “the strong yes” from her therapist. They also discuss the behind-the-scenes expertise that went into the documentary series India starred in and co-produced: Seduced. 

In the Ticker, Derek wonders why wellness influencers are falling back on bad habits as the world reopens while Julian tracks how Bret Weinstein’s cries of censorship exponentially boost the exposure of his anti-vax, pro-Ivermectin science hipsterism.

Show Notes

How Dangerous Is the Delta Variant, and Will It Cause a COVID Surge in the U.S.?

Sah D’Simone: Transmission Hotline

6 facts about economic inequality in the U.S.

The Pandemic Is Turning the Natural World Upside Down

With almost 50 million Americans traveling on July 4 weekend, you may need to pack your patience

June 28 Ivermectin Systemic Review and Meta-Analysis

Slavoj Zizek — Is Jordan Peterson the real Postmodernist?

SEDUCED: INSIDE THE NXIVM CULT

A Timeline of the Nxivm Sex Cult Case

Judge Says Allison Mack ‘Willingly Enslaved, Destabilized and Manipulated’ Women

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Matthew debriefs after the Mike Rothschild interview, looking at QAnon’s “Conspiracy Theory of Everything” as a hyperobject and spiritual dilemma.

Show Notes

‘A reckoning for our species’: the philosopher prophet of the Anthropocene

Conversations with Cornel West | Glenn Loury, Cornel West & Teodros Kiros | The Glenn Show

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It’s only been eight months since Q stopped posting, but Mike Rothschild has been able to corral the firehose of data into the first major journalistic study of the fever dream that has tortured millions since 2018. He joins us as co-host this week just as his new book, The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Cult, Movement and a Conspiracy Theory of Everything, drops. We’ll ask him about researching a “conspiracy of everything, what a leaderless cult means, how an online religion worships, and how, amidst catastrophic disconfirmation and deplatforming, we’re seeing new delta QAnon variants emerge.

Show Notes

The Storm Is Upon Us: How Qanon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything

QAnon Is Not Dead, It’s Evolving Into Something Far Worse

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The race to capitalize on the world’s wellness needs in a post-pandemic society—well, at “post” as we can pretend to be—was unavoidable. Derek reflects on the continually unrealistic marketing promises being offered by wellness influencers, discussing how we’d benefit from more honest ad copy than the hyperbole attempting to be passed off as destiny.

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In June 2020, equity consultant and journalist Dax-Devlon Ross—who you might remember from Conspirituality 4 that very same month—published an essay called “A Letter to My White Male Friends of a Certain Age.” In it, he applied his decades of experience as a nonprofit executive and program facilitator to have an honest discussion with, as the title suggests, his white male friends.

A year later and the book version of that essay, called “Letters to My White Male Friends,” has been published by St. Martin’s Press. There couldn’t be a better time for this conversation, given the heated skirmishes around the meaning and manipulation of Critical Race Theory in our politics. Dax joins this week as a co-host, nearly a year to the day since his last appearance, to discuss the topics in his book, including the many years of lived experiences that cut through the academic rhetoric and political posturing concerning race in America today.

Show Notes

A Letter to My White Male Friends of a Certain Age (the original essay)

Letters to My White Male Friends

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Humanity has an apocalypse fetish. But wrapped up In the doomsday death wish is a utopian fantasy of the ascension that comes after a fallen and sinful world is purified by cataclysmic fire. Whether the longed-for intervention is supernatural or extraterrestrial, spirituality porn hijacks our neurobiological wet-ware to bond cults together in a shared and singular climactic focus.

For this week’s Bonus, Julian traces the recurring themes between the 19th-century Great Awakening, the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide, the New Age fascination with 2012, and the QAnon fever dream.

Might our vulnerability to these narratives stem from evolutionary side-effects—which, like the space between medieval cathedral archways that are decorated with ornate trumpeting angels and burgeoning flowers, serve no structural purpose, but somehow draw a hyper-focused otherworldly fixation? 

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This episode is co-hosted by Dr. C. Thi Nguyen, a philosopher who teaches at the University of Utah. His breakthrough book is about agency in games, in which he shines a light on disquieting aspects of our gamified lives and the question of whether we’re still able to act on our own values. We’ll talk about Dr. Nguyen’s key ideas, all of which are super useful for navigating conspirituality: the gamification of Twitter and other systems of “value capture,” the feeling of knowing something really clearly can foreclose on the desire for nuance, and the pleasures and perils of “moral outrage porn.”

Show Notes

Polarization or Propaganda? (Boston Review)

Why We Call Things ‘Porn’ (New York Times)

Escape the Echo Chamber (Aeon Magazine)

Why Games are Good but Gamification is Terrible (Conceptual Foundations of Conflict lecture)

Who Trains the Machine Artist? (Daily Nous)

The Gamification of Public Discourse (Royal Institute of Philosophy lecture)

How We Can Understand Ourselves Through Games (OUP)

Group-Strapping, Bubble, or Echo Chamber? (SERRC)

Am I in an Echo Chamber? (Open for Debate)

On gurus and seductive clarity (Decoding the Gurus podcast)

What’s in a game? (Philosophy Talk radio show/podcast)

Games: Agency as Art (New Books in Philosophy podcast)

Cheap talk (Escape the Void podcast episode, talking about clarity porn)

Echoes in the void (Escape the Void podcast episode, talking about echo chambers)

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News from Alabama: after a 23-year ban on yoga in schools, generated by a Republican moral panic, Governor Kay Ivey signs a bill that lets kids do yoga again, but with some restrictions:

“All instruction in yoga shall be limited exclusively to poses, exercises, and stretching techniques. All poses shall be limited exclusively to sitting, standing, reclining, twisting, and balancing. All poses, exercises, and stretching techniques shall have exclusively English descriptive names. Chanting, mantras, mudras, use of mandalas, induction of hypnotic states, guided imagery, and namaste greetings shall be expressly prohibited.”

Those who promote yoga as a universal good will welcome this Indian art form being made more accessible for children in a State with terrible educational markers. Hindu nationalists, on the other hand, may be outraged at a secularized version of yoga, stripped not only of references to Hinduism, but of signs of any type of Indian spirituality. And a lot of white yoga progressives will look at this policy—mostly from the urban North— and worry about authenticity and appropriation.

How will the children feel?

In considering who wins and loses with this new development, Matthew reviews recent U.S. yoga-war history: battles between the Hindu American Foundation and Yoga Journal, the rise of Christian non-yoga-yoga “Praise Moves”, and Encinitas Union School District got sued for allegedly violating the Establishment Clause by contracting devotees of Pattabhi Jois to teach the kids yoga.

It’s not a stretch to see an overlap between this theme and the medical-moral panic over vaccines. In both cases, the focus is on the imagined corruption of children, whether by poison, politics, or inner quiet.

Show Notes

Alabama lifts three-decade-old ban on yoga in public schools—with a catch.

New study ranks Alabama as 43rd for student achievement, grade of D+

12 Reasons Why Yoga is NOT Good for Christians

Hindu Group Stirs Debate in Fight for Soul of Yoga

Hindu American Foundation: Hindu Roots of Yoga

Shukla’s letter: Is Hindu a bad word?

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Matthew sits down, across 9,000 miles of mostly ocean, with journalist Anke Richter and reporter and Māori rights activist Joe Trinder to discuss the mind-bending rise of Māori MAGA in the COVID-free sanctuary of Aoteoroa, aka New Zealand. Led by former blues musician Billy Te Kahika, conspirituality has seeped from music and cultural festivals and straight into national politics, where white supremacists manipulate Māori post-colonial distrust of settler governments to boost vaccine hesitancy and milk paranoia.

In the Ticker this week, Derek dunks on Deepak Chopra’s “Lovetuner” penny-whistle, which will change your DNA for $58 and a few toots. Julian reports on Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying as they drift farther into conspiratorial pseudoscience and advocate for whiz-bang COVID cure-alls over vaccines.

Show Notes

Exploring the Actual Science Behind Why Music Makes Us Feel Good

Anke Richter bio

Anke Richter on cults

Anke Richter on conspiracy theories in New Zealand

How alternative festivals became platforms for conspiracy theorists

Luminate Festival organisers criticised for promoting far-right conspiracy theorists

Anti-conspiracist campaigners take aim at ‘Mothers for Freedom’ event

The self-proclaimed ‘political prisoners’ in managed isolation

Anti-lockdown group of academics criticised for promoting conspiracy theorists

The scientist and the rabbit hole: How epidemiologist Simon Thornley became an outcast of his profession

E-Tangata The rise of Māori MAGA

Billy TK: False Profit

Sue Grey

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Derek looks back at three important historical figures with unsavory pasts to ask the question: who gets to decide who gets canceled, and why?

Show Notes

Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India

How would Gandhi’s celibacy tests with naked women be seen today?

John Muir Is Canceled. Who’s Next?

Don’t Cancel John Muir

I’m an MLK scholar – and I’ll never be able to view King in the same light

A judge gave a drug dealer a second chance. Sixteen years later, he swore him in as a lawyer.

Sponsored Content: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

The Unbearable Feelings of the Anti-Masker

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We’re extremely pleased that someone who isn’t a Boomer  — and is younger than us — is making a serious but accessible contribution to this golden age of cult literature. Linguist Amanda Montell joins Julian for an engaging interview about her new book, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, which examines the power of language in high-demand groups, from The People’s Temple to the local Young Living dinner party. In a debrief, we discuss not only Montell’s study, but also our own run-ins with spiritual mumbo-jumbo.

In the Ticker, Matthew wonders what Sayer Ji does when he loses his Facebook privileges and is relegated to the armpit of Telegram. Why, he goes full Satanic Panic, of course!

Show Notes

Deplatformed for Anti-Vax Propaganda, Sayer Ji Turns to Satanic Panic Content

Amanda Montell’s website

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Julian and Matthew discuss words, world views, and how productive disagreement can lead to mutual understanding. In today’s overheated discourse, social media posturing can make the culture wars feel like pro wrestling and political conversation like tip-toeing through a hair-trigger minefield. While these two co-hosts share a healthy skepticism for conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and New Age grift, some of their underlying philosophical and political beliefs hold interesting tensions. On the table this time: postmodernism, science, cultural sensitivity, Enlightenment values, social constructionism, and grand narratives about the arc of moral history.

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This week we learned that Melinda Gates was disturbed by Bill’s men’s-club relationship with Jeffrey Epstein all the way back in 2011. And for fuck sake: when Bill visited Epstein’s Manhattan lair, reports say, he counseled the predator on image rehab while Epstein counseled Bill on his loveless marriage. Are the conspiritualists right, and about what? Matthew will revisit an earlier essay on Gates, and fill in some blind spots.

Derek tackles the obscene co-optation of trans activism by anti-vaxxers who now pledge to lie about their status by “identifying as vaccinated.” In keeping with our musical theme, Julian reminisces about playing protest rock under an assumed name and the threat of a bomb under the stage during the Apartheid years in South Africa.

In our feature interview, world-weary rock star Alex Ebert—frontman for Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros—joins Derek to map out the late 20th-century slide into infinitely co-opted creativity and revolution. They discuss the reasons America could use death rituals, the rise of Trump as the ultimate New Ager, wellness influencers as “the clerical class of the right,” and to ask if critical thinking and open-eyed spirituality are the new punk rock—and for how long.

Show Notes

The NYT reported in the fall of 2019 that Gates was a frequent guest of Epstein in Manhattan

A description from Town and Country of Epstein’s mansion

Sources at many meetings describe the Gates-Epstein vibe

Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic

The Gene: An Intimate History | Siddhartha Mukherjee

Inside the Republican Anti-Transgender Machine

Gender-affirming surgery linked to better mental health, study finds

“Identify As” Twitter thread

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Matthew had a plan for this week — a 4K word essay on what could be learned from studying the content of an outrageously offensive conspiritualist… but then he shelved it. Why?

A last-minute, off-the-cuff discussion on what it means to indulge or not indulge moral outrage porn. What it means to punch up or down, and how we decide. How we might confront an influencer who has managed to monetize mental illness.

Produced with an enormous debt of gratitude to the work of C. Thi. Nguyen.

Show Notes

“Moral Outrage Porn“: Nguyen and Williams

Nguyen’s public scholarship on gamification, value capture, narrowed morality, and the seductions of certainty.

Nguyen on the gamification of public discourse

Aaron Rabinowitz on cheap talk

Matthew’s elegy for Michael Stone

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As our access to vaccines eases the pandemic in the Global North, U.S.-based conspiritualists keep riding the wave of covid-denial influence—all the way to the bank. This week, Julian reports that Gen-Z spiritual entrepreneur Jason Shurka has launched a new media hub, The Academy of Divine Knowledge, and affiliating with the predictable rogue’s gallery—Christiane Northrup, Del Bigree, Sayer Ji, David Icke, and Judy Mikovits among them. This confederacy of dunces charges a $33 monthly membership because “33 is a Master Number that holds many divine meanings” that leads to “infinite possibilities,” such as magically draining your bank account.

Of course, the pandemic is far from over. India is still going through the worst of it, and as Matthew discusses, one reason appears to be the influence of astrologers on Narendra Modi’s decision-making. Meanwhile, Derek unpacks the repeated fat-shaming being done by conspiritualists when boasting of their awesome immune systems.

In this week’s interview, Derek talks with Venezuelan-American singer/songwriter Devendra Banhart about global music, anti-vaxxers, conspiritualist ideology, and paying $24 for a smoothie in Malibu. Next week will continue the theme, as we look at music’s influence in cult worship and indoctrination, with Alex Ebert of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros joining the discussion.

Show Notes

The Racist and Problematic History of the Body Mass Index

Fat shaming, BMI and alienation: COVID-19 brought new stigma to large-sized people

Fat-shamers have felt enabled by Covid, and it’s hard to fight back

CDC: Obesity, Race/Ethnicity, and COVID-19

The Bizarre and Racist History of the BMI

Uncovering and Destigmatizing Male Body Dysmorphia in Popular Culture

Jewish Star article about Jason Shurka’s “miracle Torah”

Signature Investment Group team page w/Jason Shurka as VP

Matthew on Modi and the stars

The Indian government is cracking down on harrowing

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Derek discusses a forthcoming interview with Alex Ebert, which will be featured on Conspirituality 52. They discuss the dearth of death rituals in America. In this bonus episode, Derek meditates and, more to the point, our anxiety around aging, including a modern incarnation of that age-old fear: the quest for perpetual youth through wrinkle-free skin. 

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When the drones hum over the improvised cremation grounds of Delhi, what will the conspiritualist see in the livestream—if they even look? Will their Orientalist spell, fixated on fire ceremonies and mantras, finally be broken? In our interview this week, Matthew speaks with sociologist Sheena Sood about the hubris of Hindu nationalism as its yoga-boosting ministers show their pious ineptitude, telling their gasping citizens to stop being crybabies and consider drinking holy cow urine against COVID.

What about when other supposed zealots show their sell-out colors? Austin’s biohacking guru, Aubrey Marcus just sold his hipster supplement company to Unilever, of all companies. Derek breaks down the insanity of the COVID-contrarian set taking the buyout from the big-Ag, big-Pharm mack daddy. Julian looks at how, in the very same week, Marcus’s biz partner Joe Rogan, excuses his vax-hesitant comments by admitting he’s a moron. But isn’t the joke on us?

Priests and punks, preaching spirit and stockpiling cash. When will this be over?

Show Notes

Super-spreader events in India

Maha Kumbh Mela 2021

Oxygen express trains in India

Waiving Vaccine Patents at the WTO

Anti-Vax Firebombing in Italy

Aubrey Marcus announces Unilever sale

Art of Manliness Podcast #93: Total Human Optimization With Aubrey Marcus

A British Skin Care Brand Pressured Asian Influencers To Promote Its Skin Whiteners. They Fought Back.

Unilever South Africa to pull all TRESemmé products for 10 days over racist ad

World must tell India’s government to stop religious gatherings during COVID

Oxygen Express trains deliver supplies as India hit by covid-19 surge

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By the 1990s, the sadistic cult leader who claimed to be God on Earth had already fled the United States to avoid a stack of lawsuits and potential criminal charges. Even still, highly influential spiritual intellectual Ken Wilber was calling him the “greatest living realizer,” privately saying he was “happy about how many people had found their way to Adi Da through reading my books.”

Wilber later modified his model of stages of spiritual development to try to account for supposedly enlightened beings who were awful people. In this week’s Bonus episode, Julian recounts this story of a sociopathic holy man and his brilliantly naive enabler—which culminates in a wickedly illustrative thought experiment!

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On the road to the screen, a rich story can flatten into propaganda. On the road to the influencer economy, a complex teaching can degrade into a conspirituality meme. As the Oscar glitter fades, we look at how Amazon could never have signed off on a real nomadland story any more than Gaia TV could have ever done justice to the spiritualities it exploits.

In the Ticker, Julian looks at new research into correlations between huffing essential oils and seizures. Matthew looks at Miami’s Centner Academy’s announcement that they’ll fire vaccinated teachers—and wonders whether Kelly Brogan and Christiane Northrup sending kids and grandkids to this elite private school has something to do with it. In the Jab, Julian reviews the state of the nation re: vaccines, and offers three key principles to inject into conversations with the hesitant.

Our interview this week is with TikTok anti-disinformation activist Abbie Richards, whose “Conspiracy Pyramid” and tea-time QAnon explainers have gone viral on the next-gen platform. Matthew talks with Abbie about her process, challenges, why she hates golf, and what GenXers (and older cohorts) should keep in mind when they wonder if the kids are alright.

Show Notes

Jim DeFede breaks the Centner Academy story

Centner’s Medical Freedom from Mandated Vaccines (disinfo warning)

Biscayne Times profile of the Centner’s: The Privileged Class

Tour of the Centner’s Miami penthouse

Preethaji and Krishnaji, proprietors of O&O Academy

Krishnaji’s culty dad, Kalki Bhagavan: Mystic and the moolah

‘It’s Baffling’: Parents Confused After Centner Academy Announces They Won’t Employ People Who Have Been Vaccinated

The Case Against Nomadland

What Nomadland Gets Wrong About Gig Labor

Amazon’s Minimum Wage Hike Comes With Cuts To Other Compensation

“Strategic Transparency”: Ann Gleig. “From Sweeping Zen to Open Buddhism: Sex Scandals, Social Media, and Transparency in Western Buddhism” for Buddhism in the West Group. American Academy of Religion, Denver, November 17-20, 2018 (forthcoming)

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Survivor shame over what has been lost, and how one has been complicit.

Apologist shame: turned inside out and externalized as aggression.

Popular shaming, which tries to deflect attention from how close to home cultic dynamics really are.

In the cult landscape, shame is a common denominator. In this contemplation, Matthew unpacks various aspects, with help from the writing of cult theorists and recovery counselors Alexandra Stein, Daniel Shaw, and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi.

Show Notes

Music: Spiegel im Spiegel and Pari Intervallo: Pärt

Primo Levi: The Drowned and the Saved

The Relational System of the Traumatizing Narcissist — Shaw

Rachel Bernstein’s “One More Thing” at the end of Betrayal and Power w/ Nitai Joseph, former Hare Krishna — S4E5.

All of Rachel Bernstein’s IndoctriNation podcast.

What’s Behind the Blowback You’ll Get When You Engage Cult Members

“Deception, Dependence, Dread of Leaving” — Langone

“I Got Mine-ism”

Selected Bibliography:

Ainsworth, Mary D. Salter. Patterns of Attachment: a Psychological Study of the Strange Situation. Routledge, 2015.

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Penguin Classics, 2017.

Freyd, Jennifer J. Betrayal Trauma: the Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse. Harvard University Press, 1998.

Freyd, Jennifer J., and Pamela Birrell. Blind to Betrayal: Why We Fool Ourselves We Arent Being Fooled. Wiley, 2013.

Hassan, Steven. Combating Cult Mind Control: the #1 Best-Selling Guide to Protection, Rescue, and Recovery from Destructive Cults. Freedom of Mind Press, 2016.

Kramer, Joel, and Diana Alstad. The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power. North Atlantic Books/Frog, 1993.

Lalich, Janja, and Madeleine Landau. Tobias. Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships. Bay Tree Pub., 2006.

Lalich, Janja. Escaping Utopia: Growing up in a Cult, Getting out, and Starting Over. Routledge, 2018.

Langone, Michael D. Recovery from Cults: Help for Victims of Psychological and Spiritual Abuse. W.W. Norton, 1995.

Lifton, Robert Jay. Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: a Study of “Brainwashing” in China.W.W. Norton, 1961.

Miller, Alice

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Teal Swan’s suicide-teasing trauma pseudo-therapy has cast a spell over millions. Kaia Ra is an up-and-coming contender, selling divine jewelry and a channeled text about how to transcend QAnon-type nightmares. Both claim to be survivors of long-term Satanic Ritual Abuse and alien ambassadors. Both have capitalized on the chaos of 2020.

We discuss the trend of trauma exploitation, Satanic Panics throughout the decades, and social media entertainment finding cover through the pretense of therapy. Then we’ll hear from the pros: licensed psychologists Hala Khouri and Kyra Haglund join Julian to discuss the importance of trauma-informed yoga and cases of abuse in wellness spaces.

In the Ticker, Derek examines the snake oil of Luke Storey, Julian reviews the “Health and Freedom” conference recently held in a Bible college in Tulsa, and Matthew worries about QAnons in Toronto who have started speaking in tongues. We’ll also discuss a new phenomenon amongst anti-vaxxers: “Reverse Contagion Anxiety”, which leads them to believe that merely being around vaccinated people will make them infertile or re-organize their DNA. (We can only hope.)

CW: Audio clips from Lin Wood and Kaia Ra describing sexual / satanic ritual abuse of children in the context of QAnon mythology (Wood), and personal origin story (Ra).

Show Notes

Luke Storey wants to sell you a pyramid scheme

Electromagnetic Fields & Parental Panics: A case study in how science can bring comfort

Reporter Sean O’Shea gets yelled at in tongues

Sgt. Brown gets suspended for hugging anti-maskers

When QAnon Came to Canada

@selfhealingmama Chloe Angeline with a dire womb-warning

Christiane Northrup as Vaccine Lysistrata

Gizmodo investigative podcast series on Teal Swan

Backstory on Barbara Snow

Affidavit: Snow threatens family members, trashes house

Snow tes

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We don’t get “well” until everyone has an opportunity to tap into the resources needed to live. This week, Derek reads a 2006 essay from one of his closest friends, Dax-Devlon Ross, about being pulled over twice in the same stretch of NJ highway in a manner of minutes—all due to an air freshener dangling from his rearview mirror.

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How do we tease apart the gold from the dross? What can be salvaged from a subculture marred by charismatic con-artistry, power abuses, and the toxic ingredients that lead to conspirituality? Founder of the Flow Genome Project, Jamie Wheal joins Derek for a wide-ranging interview about his new book, Recapture the Rapture. Following up on his Pulitzer-nominated bestseller, Stealing Fire, Wheal makes an ambitious argument for a dazzling renewal of meaning and mystery through sacralized biohacking. Rapture can be recaptured, Wheal argues, through awe-thumping music, blessed sex, moderate psychedelic use, and conscious community, or as he puts it “ethical cults.”  After the interview, we’ll discuss.

In the Jab, Julian looks at clotting issues and emerging reports of vaccine impacts on women. In the Ticker, Matthew reviews the NY Times investigation of Alan Hofstetter’s wife and her January 6th adventure. Derek covers conspiritualism in fitness bro culture while Julian reports on Christiane Northrup’s latest junk science infomercial.

Show Notes

New Jersey gym owners offer free membership to those who don’t get COVID-19 vaccine

What We Know About Ian Smith, the New Jersey Gym Owner Defying Gov. Phil Murphy’s Executive Orders

Anti-mask gym fined

Fitness centers are struggling to rebound from the pandemic

A Teacher Marched to the Capitol. When She Got Home, the Fight Began.

White women’s role in white supremacy, explained

Recapture the Rapture — Jamie Wheal

Cult Dynamics 101: a primer

Hypnotic Da Free John — Svengali of the truth-seeking set (San Francisco Examiner, 1985)

Guru hit by sex-slave suit (San Francisco Examiner, 1985)

Original Oregonian investigation into Osho and R

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With over a half-million paying subscribers, Gaia is the world’s largest spiritual media streaming service. Have they have played a role in redpilling the Q-Age demographic? With a little help from Ken Wilber, Lewis Carrol, Jorge Luis Borges, and Jean Baudrillard, Julian maps out their landscape of ascension narratives, UFOs, cryptozoology, conspiracy theories, channelers, and yoga classes. He also tells the story of being part of the early LOHAS social media website they gobbled up in 2007.

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Our EP10 guest, Center for Countering Digital Hate founder, Imran Ahmed, has been bringing the heat. His “Disinformation Dozen” white paper made a huge splash, prompting a conference call with Nancy Pelosi’s team ahead of their biannual grilling of Zuckerberg and Dorsey. Ahmed’s paper spotlights the fact that 65% of anti-vax content originates from just 12 social media figures. Conspirituality superstars Sayer Ji, Kelly Brogan, and Christiane Northrup hold positions 8, 9, and 10. Ahmed wants them deplatformed—and he’s making it happen. In response, the Dozen are raising money and having themselves caricatured as superheroes.

Who have they been deceiving and emotionally abusing? This week Matthew interviews Heather Simpson and Lydia Greene from Back to the Vax, an anti-disinformation think-tank they founded after fleeing the online cult of anti-vax propaganda. In their first interview together, Simpson and Greene recount how mother-centered anti-vax social media spaces drew them in and exposed them to all manner of anxious conspiracism—and what it cost them to leave. They’ve got a very clear message about how public health communications can meet this entrenched challenge.

In the Ticker, Julian tracks the Dozen’s emerging strategy, Derek finally addresses the English elephant in the room, Russell Brand, and Matthew takes an early look at the big reveal of Cullen Hoback’s Q: Into the Storm on HBO.

Show Notes

What “Causes” Covid? The Virus or The System?

Decoding the Gurus: Russell Brand: Spiritual Transcendence and Anarchic Revolution is Praxis

Mike Rothschild on Hoback’s Q: Into the Storm

Episode 136: Into The Storm feat Cullen Hoback by QAnon Anonymous

I’m Cullen Hoback, the guy who made that QAnon series on HBO Max. AMA! : television

Rothschild on the HBO reveal: Ron Watkins QAnon: The Truth Has Always Been There

Back to the Vax

Lydia on NPR: She Resisted Getting Her Kids The Usual Vaccines. Then The Pandemic Hit

Heather on CNN: Why this former anti-vaxx influencer is getting the Covid vaccine

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Matthew offers a meditation on Brandolini’s Law — “the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it” — and accepting the hopelessness of altruistic reporting, whether on disinformation or climate change. With a haunting clip from ex-journalist Dahr Jamail. Also: a memory of visiting a Benedictine monastery, where there were no screens, and where the ancient rule understood that because work is never done, it only becomes sustainable through contemplating time itself.

Show Notes

Primer on Extra Corporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO)

Brandolini’s Law

Cuomo covers up nursing home deaths

Sexual harassment allegations against Cuomo

Dahr Jamail and Barbara Cecil on Last Born in the Wilderness

Abbaye de Saint-Benoît-du-Lac

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Conspiritualists hide their grifts in mantras. MLMs market themselves as communities, while cults preach freedom. When a research firm spotlights Sayer Ji as a disinformation super-spreader, he calls them a hate group. When Lil Nas X spins a catharsis of gay-goth dreams, he embodies MAGA disgust. It’s an age of misdirection.

It’s also an age of transference. Living and breathing people become memes. The impulse to communicate gets devoured by the need to perform. Drives to justice adopt dominant affects.  Real conspiracies get overshadowed by myths. We’re keeping ourselves very busy while the world burns,'

This week we’re releasing a bonus episode into the wild that speaks to a small wedge of the transference game. Matthew contemplates what it means, in both helpful and unhelpful ways, to be named as or reduced to “cis white men”, and how important issues can get lost in the dead zone between culture wars and cults.

Both conspirituality and social media influence are driven by the hot take, the keyword, the avatar, and the speed of emotional reactivity. And cults are glued together by intense, non-negotiable emotional demands on participants. So far we’ve shown how all of these elements degrade our chances to evaluate evidence and resist being conned by charismatics or cult leaders. Our hope is that we contribute to a slower and open-ended exploration of how to balance the rhetoric of social change with the nuance of interpersonal empathy.

In the Ticker, Derek looks at the retraction crisis plaguing scientific research. Julian watches Lil Nas X lap-dance through the MAGA homo-pocalypse. Matthew looks at a new cult scheme for recruiting anti-vaxxers, while the Jab examines the conspiritualist love of contrarian experts with scientific credentials but no evidence for their claims.

Show Notes

Lil Nas X’s ‘Satan Shoes’ trolled some Christians. But ‘Montero’ is about more than that.

Lil Nas X’s unofficial ‘Satan’ Nikes containing human blood sell out in under a minute

Long-retracted papers are still cited in major journals

Retracting publications doesn’t stop them from influencing science

The ex-Pfizer scientist who became an anti-vax hero

A rare clotting disorder may cloud the world’s hopes for AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine

Marketplace

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Social psychologists and evolutionary psychologists have been studying the origins, neural networks, and role of intuition for decades. Wellness influencers cling to the belief that intuition is a mystical force. Derek looks at the research while celebrating the importance of this hard-won skill.

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It was inevitable: QAnon has stormed HBO. Less inevitably, Conspirituality Podcast has been invited to an academic conference Down Under. In this episode, we’ll review how the first two episodes of Cullen Hoback’s “Into the Storm” lands, and wonder about what happens when conspiracy movements come under big-screen and academic scrutiny.

Cullen embedded within the labyrinthine Q-world for almost four years. He globetrotted, gaining incredible access to a network of social avoidants and keyboard warriors. His sympathy is both touching and problematic. Our own embedding in the wellness world — sixty years between the three of us — hasn’t been quite so weird or dangerous. But it does raise a similar question: how clearly can we see the conspirituality of the world we’ve worked in for so long? As Cullen tries to draw out the humanity and intentionality of the QAnons, how are we understanding — or missing — our own subjects? Then there’s the question of impact. Will America understand itself more clearly after Cullen’s work? And where will the scholarship on conspirituality go after we dump our research on that conference table?

In the Ticker this week, we review the new Lululemon mat, report on how Imran Ahmed’s team at the CCDH identified the social media Disinformation Dozen and succeeded in partially deplatforming conspiritualist power-couple Sayer Ji and Kelly Brogan. In the Jab, we’ll be looking at the woes of Astrazeneca Covid vaccine as they approach applying for FDA approval.

Show Notes

Lululemon gives the yoga mat a clever makeover

Lavrence and Lozanski on Lululemon’s neoliberal schtick

Workers making £88 Lululemon leggings claim they are beaten

CCDH’s “Disinformation Dozen” Report

Matthew’s thread on Zen and the Art of the Q-drop

On Psychological & Influence Ops in the Info Age: Q in the Crosshairs (CW: disinformation site)

Hyperobjects: ‘A reckoning for our species’: the philosopher prophet of the Anthropocene

First we take Deakin, then we take Berlin

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Julian recounts the wild and touching journey of four close friends in a self-directed spiritual group therapy session—super high on Ecstasy.

Content Warning: this story includes accounts of traumatic events.

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Back in December, a certified anesthesiologist named Dr. Madhava Setty posted a long critique of our podcast to the New Age website Collective Evolution. While cordial and apparently well-meaning, Setty’s essay failed to quote a single episode. Setty filled in his own blanks with outright misrepresentations, leading with: “Matthew, Derek and Julian… assume that there are no large conspiracies in play in our world at this time. To state it flatly, to them the idea of a large conspiracy is so preposterous that they cannot even see that they are making an assumption when dismissing the possibility.”

There’s no planet on which any of our episodes have said anything of the kind. In fact, we’ve repeatedly affirmed the opposite: that conspiracy theories and conspiritualists that monetize them exist because real conspiracies traumatize people. Tuskegee happened. MKUltra was real. #savethechildren took hold in part because Jeffery Epstein’s network has not yet been fully understood or prosecuted.

Setty is so well-mannered and convincing, however, that New Age influencers who might be feeling a little defensive about how the yoga and wellness world has shown its ass in 2020 have welcomed his dulcet tones with open arms. In one appearance, he guested on J. Brown’s Yoga Talks podcast, and provided a master class on how to lead an anxious and altruistic yoga devotee into conspirituality.

We didn’t respond to Setty’s initial essay because there was nothing to respond to: he didn’t offer any data. But now we think it’s worth examining in detail how, in real time — and before he winds up on Joe Rogan — he seductively spins together theories about divine consciousness, 9/11, COVID, and how everything is not as it seems.

In the Jab, Julian reviews the scare-mongering of the newest seemingly-qualified anti-vax doc, Geert Vanden Bossche. In the Ticker, Derek looks at the empty religions of Instagram and the truth seekers of tomorrow—and today.

Show Notes

Who is Geert Vanden Bossche?

Dr. Mobeen Syed on Vanden Bossche.

Dr. Zubin Damania on Vanden Bossche.

America Without God

The Empty Religions of Instagram

The Truth Seekers Are Coming

Madhava Setty distorts our podcast content

Madhava Setty redpills J Brown i

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This episode follows up on earlier discussions on the podcast about how we manage privilege. Our exploration of cancel culture — specifically that part of it that is really a form of horizontal violence — isn’t motivated by any shift to the right, but by a desire to unpack the rhetoric, jargon, and performative behaviours, that, so often in the reductive rhythm of social media, serve to shut down learning, and polarize progressives that might otherwise work together.

Here, Matthew focuses on how a rhetorical device in social justice relates to our project: what it means, in both helpful and unhelpful ways, to be named as or reduced to “cis white men”.

Reduction and essentialism are key aspects of the meme-ification of our politics, and potent weapons in the arsenal of conspirituality. None of the influencers we study on this podcast would have gained their social power without labelling and essentializing their opponents in black-and-white terms, without taking black-and-white positions on things like vaccines, big Pharma, and whether or not a person is “awake”.

Both conspirituality and social media influence are driven by the tag, the hot take, the keyword, the avatar, and the speed of emotional reactivity. And cults are glued together by intense, non-negotiable emotional demands on participants. So far we’ve shown how all of these elements degrade our chances to evaluate evidence and resist being conned by charismatics or cult leaders. Our hope is that we contribute to a slower and open-ended exploration of how to balance the rhetoric of crucial social change with the nuance of interpersonal empathy.

Show Notes

ContraPoints on Cancelling

Robin diAngelo defining “white fragility"

“Peggy McIntosh’s White Privilege Knapsack“

That time I didn’t get shot

Minimization as a patriarchal reflex

Cedric Michael Williams on DiAngelo

Daniel Bergner on DiAngelo

Tada Hozumi, Selfish Activist

Log the Fuck Off, Jacobin

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Imagine that you’re 25 years old. You grew up Irish, gay, and online. When the Orlando Pulse massacre explodes, you go to YouTube for the news. You watch Milo Yiannopolous and Gavin McInnes fake-kiss in front of the police-taped club and say that the Muslims are coming to kill all gay people. YouTube’s algorithm spins you downward into anti-Islamic content. Before long, you’ve left your marketing job with a mission: to make slick propaganda videos for some of the most despicable alt-right ghouls on the planet. You believe they’ll stand up for you.

How did you get here at such a young age? What does it feel like? If you have a change of heart, if you want to fight back against your old life and its consequences, who will believe you? Should they believe you? How will you help them believe you?

Today Matthew asks Caolan Robertson these difficult questions. After years of being the PR man for people like Tommy Robinson and Laura Southern, Robertson has shaken it off and started to collaborate with other ex-alt-right members on a deradicalization project called Future Freedom.

In the Ticker, Julian reports on the new QAnon variant infecting telegram, Sabmyk. Matthew reviews how Christiane Northrup and a Gen Z priestess in a Greek eco-fascist group flip their positive orientalism on its head to diss the Dalai Lama for getting vaccinated. Derek looks at one of the strangest grifts around: pet psychics.

Show Notes

What Do Dogs Really Think? Pet Psychics Are Standing By

The Sabmyk Network: How a mysterious disinformation network is hijacking QAnon – HOPE not hate

What is Sabmyk? QAnon Followers Targeted By New Messianic Mythology

Also: QAnon was big in Iran

The Dalai Lama Gets A COVID-19 Shot And Urges Others To Get Vaccinated

Aeifaron on Instagram

Sofia Katsaiti aka Sofia Tara on Instagram is very worried about the Dalai Lama’s vaccine

Aeifaron looks like a totally normal eco-fascist group

Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine neutralizes Brazil variant in lab study

Future Freedom project on

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Humans will never be cats. In his new book, Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life, the philosopher John Gray argues that we can learn a lot about how to live from them—namely, how to calm our anxiety around existential distress. In this sample of a Patreon bonus episode, Derek shares what he’s learned from his three cats, as well as how Gray’s advice applies to the conspiratorial-minded (i.e. metacognition gone awry).

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Two episodes in our catalog haunt this podcast. In episode 6, Steve Hassan advised listeners to treat people under the undue influence of QAnon and conspirituality with welcome and respect. Castigation won’t work. Shame will make things worse. He told this story about how his elderly neighbor brought him homemade cookies when he finally returned home after years in the cult of Rev. Moon. No questions asked—just cookies.

But in episode 10, Imran Ahmed pointed out that any engagement of disinformation peddlers is actually a win for them because it boosts their visibility. His strategy—and he has the data to prove it works—is to block, isolate, and clear the public space for content that is actually helpful. Where Hassan offers an open hand, Ahmed says, “Talk to the hand.”

We’re nine months on from those interviews. Are we living up to either of them? Are we isolating and deplatforming propagandists? Are we adding good vibes to the scene and leaving the door open for earnest people to be forgiven? Or does the frustration of the content trend us towards cynicism and snark? A recent Instagram thread by dedicated listeners really brought the point home for discussion.

In the Ticker, we cover the whitewashing of global cuisine by wellness influencers, bauhauswife’s upleveling of COVID denialism with yellow journalism, and Target-store QAnon vandal Melissa Lively trying to make amends-with-benefits for past outbursts. In the Jab, Julian looks at the facts around the PCR test. (Hint: it works.)

Show Notes

Lost in the Brine

A Death in Yolande Norris-Clarke’s Free Birth World

Kelly Brogan ditches her psychiatry cred with COVID-denialism

Who wants to eat magic dirt from a COVID minimizer?

Melissa Lively un-cancels herself from QAnon

Bauhauswife free births the news in Canada, from Costa Rica (video)

Bauhauswife free births the news in Canada, from Costa Rica

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One-hundred-and-twenty seekers filled the LA hotel ballroom. We sought the life-changing experience that could only happen by holding in our pee, being religiously on-time, and taking full responsibility for creating the lives we said we wanted, but hadn’t achieved… yet.

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Around 2015, the alt-right movement erupted online to both provoke and monetize MAGA momentum and distort and defame the real-world progress symbolized in Barack Obama and agitated by Black Lives Matter. Young white supremacist poster-boy Richard Spencer and edgy internet crypto-racists like Lauren Southern, Mark Cernovich, and Gavin McInnes led the viral charge, racking up subscribers while lining their pockets on the side. Daniel Lombroso of The Atlantic embedded with their ilk from 2016-18, collecting enough footage to release the award-winning documentary, White Noise. Julian sat down to talk with him about the movement, and about making this film while Jewish.

Was any of this a surprise to anti-oppression activists on the ground? Not according to Michelle Cassandra Johnson, author of Skill in Action: Radicalizing Your Yoga Practice to Create a Just World. While the white supremacy Lombroso whistleblows is spectacular and absurd, the white supremacy Johnson and other justice activists feel in their bones has been a centuries-long war of attrition against equality. Matthew sits down with Johnson to discuss how the yoga and wellness worlds in particular are (and are not) responding to the intensification of both calls to justice, as well as the blowback.

In the Ticker, we wonder if Gwyneth Paltrow’s new long-COVID Goop merch—and her “longer-term detox” that includes selling Goop-approved $500 blankets and $8,000 necklaces—heralds a dawning era in high-end disability consumerism.

Show Notes

It took a year, but Gwyneth Paltrow figured out how to exploit the pandemic

Gwyneth Paltrow Is Selling Vibrators

Healing My Body with a Longer-Term Detox

The NHS dings Gwyneth’s long COVID cures

Lauren Southern hides the face of her biracial baby

Daniel Lombroso’s White Noise

Southern Poverty Law on Cernovich

Southern Poverty Law on Southern

Richard Spencer, white subsidy sucker

Michelle Cassandra Johnson’s website

Michelle Cassandra Johnson’s

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One of the precious bright spots for our family in this long dark winter of COVID has been outdoor skating. Other than the walking trails, it’s the only thing that the city has kept open. I take our boys, 4 and 8, while my partner is working. The older one has developed a speed-skater’s stride. He’s not crossing over yet as he turns, but he’s close to it. The younger one has amazed us all with learning to glide easily in this, his first winter on skates…

As per the city regulations, we stay masked and distanced as we’re lacing up, and while skating. But two weeks ago, an anti-masker started showing up, and openly ignored the attendants who asked him to comply.

This audio essay is about all of the feelings that came up for me as I a watched this unfold, tried to intervene, and tried to make sense of it all for myself, and the boys.

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What are we learning about conspiracies, conspiracy theories, and those who hold them? How are we maintaining our optimism that facts are real, that they can be discovered, and shared? How will we continue to communicate with those who are confused? In this episode, we continue our rich conversation on the proximity of conspiracism and spiritual paths and the ways in which we fall into and climb out of fever dreams.

In the Jab, Julian looks at concerns about vaccines and pregnancy. In a Ticker segment, Matthew ponders the British Wheel of Yoga’s “neutral” stance towards the COVID vaccine, and how it unintentionally welcomes conspiratorial thinking.

Republic of Lies author Anna Merlan sits down with Derek to discuss the process of embedding with conspiracy consumers and peddlers, and the challenges faced when reporting on them. Discussing the interview, Julian uses the ideas of George Lakoff to think about containment and reframing. Matthew looks at how yoga and wellness influencers can play both sides of the consumer/peddler coin through the paradoxical private spectacle of social media.

Show Notes

‘I Miss My Mom’: Children Of QAnon Believers Are Desperately Trying To Deradicalize Their Own Parents

British Wheel of Yoga indulges vaccine “neutrality”

Dr. Victoria Male on vaccines and pregnancy

Anna Merlan on the Austin Influencer Movement

Anna Merlan on PBS’s Open Mind

Yoga podcaster J. Brown expresses doubts about COVID and the vaccines

Charles Eisenstein is turning to fiction

Abbie Richards and her Conspiracy Chart

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The medium of social media is both relatively new and socially challenging. But this doesn’t mean we can’t have healthy debates. In this sample from our Monday Patreon bonus episode, Derek investigates three areas of research about how—and why—we need robust and progressive debates on our platforms.

1. Your brain on political arguments.

2. How to become a master negotiator.

3. Can social media be fact-checked? A new study offers one way of doing so.

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Many of us came to yoga and wellness spaces to heal or flee from the alienation of modernity. We wanted something untouched by our cities and factories and labs; something that reminded us of a world we never really knew. “Nature” was in such short supply that we had to invent it to colonize it anew, in exotic lands and mystical beasts: the deer whose antler gave longevity, the cow whose milk strengthened our family bonds. How many of us knew that our fetish for the “natural” could lead towards a consumerist cul-de-sac or fascist ideology?

In this episode we contemplate the meaning, practice, delusions, and hypocrisies of the “natural.” Derek talks to “Sea of Shadows” director Richard Ladkani about how the hunt for Traditional Chinese Medicine remedies has devastated the ecology of Baja California. Julian thinks about the disenchantment of the lab coat and how it drives so many to the warm regard of the “natural healer.”

To find out more about how some practitioners of complementary medicine are attempting to bridge the evidence and ideological gap with conventional care, Matthew interviews Naturopathic Doctor Juniper Martin and fourth-year student Adriana Berusch Gerardino about their efforts with the Naturopathic Alliance to dispel COVID misinformation and to challenge racism in their profession.

Show Notes

Gina Carano fired by Lucasfilm (and publicist and agent) for antisemitic Q-Trump social activity

RFK finally gets deleted by IG

Turn Off Your Mind, Relax—and Float Right-Wing?

Chairman Mao Invented Traditional Chinese Medicine

QAA shines on with Episode 128

Dale Beran’s extraordinary book It Came from Something Awful

Decoding the Gurus launches the Gurometer

Shouting out to Katya Weiss-Anderson of Kumbaya Confessional

Chinese gov and state media boost TCM COVID treatments at home and abroad

Article: Acupuncture Doesn’t Work

Dr. Lad’s kindly but rather banal Ayurveda advice re: COVID (August)

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In this sample of our weekly Patreon bonus episode, Julian travels back in time to the 80s. He finds that when it comes to the fear of diabolical evil, the appeal of conspiracy patterns, and the missionary zeal of cults, everything old is new again. 

*Content Warning: Briefly contains one disturbing account of ritual abuse and one reference to suicide.

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Today we forge ahead with part 2 of Matthew’s interview with Kundalini Yoga scholar Philip Deslippe and journalist Stacie Stukin on the tragic past, chaotic present, and future relevance of the cult of Yogi Bhajan. Matthew looks at Guru Jagat’s (Katie Griggs’s) pseudo-Tibetan mystical poem dedicated to her ex-con mentor, Harijiwan (Stephen Hartzell), whose current wife, Mandev, is about 30 years his junior and makes RA MA propaganda films. Will RA MA survive lockdown with COVID-busting mantras? Will Yogi Bhajan’s crimes be washed away by the ringing of the RA MA gong?

We know by now that cults never let a good crisis go to waste. We’ll also examine how, when there are no global panics for cults to monetize, it’s up to the leader to create one. With RA MA we see the cycle go intergenerational as it cultjacks Yogi Bhajan’s legacy of fantasy and paranoia.

For the Ticker this week, Derek and Julian review Bill Maher’s platforming of Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying as they trot out vax-doubt and the Wuhan lab conspiracy. Julian will cover breaking vaccine news — especially on Phase III data! — to keep you inoculated against your alt-wellness news feed.

Show Notes

A Campus Argument Goes Viral. Now the College Is Under Siege

The Campus Mob Came for Me—and You, Professor, Could Be Next

Decoding Bret and Eric Weinstein via Decoding the Gurus

Moderna vaccine complications are rare

Astrazeneca Phase III looks good

Pfizer and BioNtech Phase III results

Adenoviral vectors

NYT on Astrozeneca

CDC Vaccine contrast/compare

The Pfizer recipe

AP on the “lab release” theory

Fauci dunks on Trump’s lab release babble

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