Conspirituality

“Dad went to war last night” read Vance Boelter's text to his family in the early hours of June 14. This was sent after his shooting rampage aimed at Democratic lawmakers, which left two dead and two critically wounded.  Turns out Boelter is an ordained pastor in a church associated with the New Apostolic Reformation, which sees the world as a spiritual battlefield and whose leaders have preached...

He built a lucrative seminar empire in the 80s, owned an Italian Villa, founded a “spiritual university,” and travelled the world with a harem of handsome young initiates. Roger Hinkins claimed to be inhabited by another consciousness that he called “John the Beloved” and the “Mystical Traveller,” which taught the secrets of out-of-body experiences. As he copied those teachings from elsewhere, his...

What dangers does an RFK Jr HHS pose to Americans, really? Derek dives into science writer's Laurie Garrett's work, who spoke to the dangers we're facing today in 1994—and who has raised an alarm about the consequences of destroying public health ever since. Show Notes The Coming Plague — Laurie Garrett Betrayal of Trust — Laurie Garrett Laurie Garrett on This Week in Virology Learn more about you...

takeover—legacy media and Democratic strategists have the same question on their lips: What is going on with young men? Though Kamala Harris won the overall 18- to 29-year-old demographic, Trump improved his share by 9 points. Men in this age group voted for Trump by 16% more than women did. What explains this? Perhaps this is due to the right inflaming the anxieties and resentments of young men o...

In October 2020, three contrarian medical professionals published The Great Barrington Declaration to great applause by the pro-business, anti-closure crowd. One of them, Jay Bhattacharya, now runs the NIH. Things are not going well under his watch. Last week, he was grilled in front of Congress about the $18B in proposed cuts to NIH funding. This happened a day after over 300 people under his gua...

Cable travel channels are filled with haunted houses and other paranormal activity, beyond History Channel’s Ancient Aliens and cryptozoology content. The more radicalized Gaia TV has close to a million paid subscribers gobbling up content about yoga, meditation, and psychedelic consciousness alongside accounts of inter-dimensional cryptids, Q-adjacent vampire reptilians, and channeled messages fr...

From 1999-2002, VH1 ran a show called “Where Are They Now?” The irregularly produced series wondered aloud what happened to former cultural icons like eighties hair metal bands, kid actors, and one-hit wonders. While some people remained surprisingly relevant, most were confined to, at best, appearing at VFWs and regional summer festivals in parking lots or, tragically, gripped by an addiction and...

Matthew continues the Antifascist Woodshed series with a two-part analysis of an extraordinary cultural event: rebellions within rebellions—or how a ragtag band of writers and worldbuilders Trojan-horsed an antifascist masterpiece into the Empire of streaming content. Seven chapters:  (This past Saturday, main feed:) Space Wizards or Antifascism? Star Wars Culture Wars A Post-Fragmentary Left (Tod...

Matthew continues the Antifascist Woodshed series with a two-part analysis of an extraordinary cultural event: rebellions within rebellions—or how a ragtag band of writers and worldbuilders Trojan-horsed an antifascist masterpiece into the Empire of streaming content. Seven chapters:  Space Wizards or Antifascism? Star Wars Culture Wars A Post-Fragmentary Left (Monday on Patreon:) Hope and Love  ...

Megamillionaire supplements and New Age life coach tycoon Aubrey Marcus recently claimed the goddess Isis told him that he must impregnate both his wife and the third member of their throuple while doing spiritual tourism in Egypt. During a nearly three-hour podcast, the three explain their polygamous plans and heartaches while their on-call guru, Marc Gafni—an old-school spiritualist most famous...

Support Conspirituality on Patreon. Does the word protestor conjure a masked figure in black clothing smashing windows and lighting fires or a weekend liberal ineffectually following rules while sipping on a creamy latte along the state-permitted protest route? A popular media narrative is that peaceful protest works best, but has the power of nonviolent resistance been debunked?  Julian responds...

Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad claim they're going to open the "black box" at the FDA, an agency they're now both employed at. So they started a podcast. It's not the first official FDA podcast, but it certainly fits into the contrarian ethos both men have cultivated since 2020. Derek and Julian listen in to see how much of that box is actually being opened. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...

We’ve been talking about RFK Jr for years, and even dedicated an entire chapter to him in our 2023 book—and we’re going to keep covering him. Since his power and influence has only grown, and since he’s now in charge of America’s entire health apparatus, there’s no way to avoid it. This week we catch up on the last few months of MAHA. Derek looks into why he believes Kennedy’s apparatus, despite c...

Calley Means is one of RFK Jr’s top advisors. Alongside Tucker Carlson, Means has claimed responsibility for shepherding Kennedy into Trump’s camp. Does this former business school graduate Heritage Foundation intern and business school graduate really care about the nation’s health? Derek listens to a recent interview with Politico and finds the deregulatory ethos that underlies all of Project 20...

After being confirmed as Secretary of HHS, RFK Jr started installing his cabal of wellness influencers and contrarian doctors across the government's many public health agencies. And that means they have to apologize for their boss. Derek and Julian listen in on some of the most outrageous takes so far. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The most annoying convert TradCath in the world, JD Vance, whose cherubic face belies all his bootlicking aggression, gets his moment with Pope Bob. Usha stands behind him in a black mantilla. He hands the pontiff an oversized envelope: an invitation from Donald and Melania to a White House dinner. Bob smiles guardedly as he takes it and without looking at it, setting it on his desk. “I’ll read th...

Matthew is back today for more with Ben Case: profiling Gene Sharp and the (non)politics of strategic nonviolence, plus his strange funding sources. Also: why did Erica Chenoweth speak out against antifascist Trump protesters in January of 2017, and suggest their research proved that property damage and scuffles with the police would ruin any opposition movement to Trump? Also: where does the fund...

You may have grown up with the term “nonviolence” shining like a pole star over every discussion of how we accomplish socio-political change. But what does it really mean? And who defines violence for that matter—beyond the police, the courts, and others in power? Today, the theory of non-violence has grown beyond its Gandhian, spiritual aspiration roots, while retaining an irrational faith and of...

The chat bot flashes its elipsis at the bottom of the screen. What is it thinking, what does it want from you, what do you want from it? Beneath those pixels lies a sea of mined data and lightning storms of electricity heating up servers in barren deserts. What will it find for you in the past labor of the generations? According to a stunning new article in Rolling Stone, it will find whatever the...

It begins with a failed human sacrifice in Detroit in 1932. Some would say it actually starts with an evil god-scientist who created the first white people—white devils, really—some 6,000 years ago. Either way, the Nation of Islam has had an important cultural and political presence for almost a century in America. Today’s installment of Julian’s Roots of Conspirituality series covers the incredib...

In 2022, Oregonians passed Measure 111, which amends the state constitution to declare access to affordable healthcare a right for every citizen. As it happens, this was the first ballot Derek voted on when moving to the state. Now that the long journey to universal healthcare is a reality in Oregon, what does that actually entail? Derek is joined by two members of the nonprofit organization, Heal...

Cancer, as physician and author Siddhartha Mukherjee writes, is the emperor of all maladies. The disease—the over 200 different diseases all falling under this umbrella term—has been with us as long as we’ve been us. If anything is truly ancient, it is the cancer cells that are in all of our bodies, just waiting to be turned on if the conditions are right, or if our genes dictate the inevitability...

Gen X went from leaning slightly right in 2016 to become, as one analysis puts it, “the bedrock of Trumpism.” Derek meditates on what happened to his generation by reading from four different thought pieces on the topic. Show Notes Wait, What Is Really Up With Gen X’s Politics? Is Gen X a Bunch of Trumpers? Maybe That’s the Wrong Question. How Gen X Became the Trumpiest Generation How Gen X Went f...

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner was a little different this year. No president. No comedian. The event featured a mea culpa from an Axios journalist who discussed the media’s complicity in failing to expose Biden’s mental decline. Meanwhile, Substack promoted an alternative parallel event called “Not The White House Correspondents’ Dinner” with an email that announced, “a new media order is...

Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government in Ontario has leased the public space of OP to the Therme Spa company, which promises to bring wellness and democracy to the good citizens of Toronto, for a price. Bruce Van Dieten and Ann-Elizabeth Samson of Ontario Place for All join Matthew to discuss the history and possible future of Toronto's cherished public space. Bruce is "a retired busybod...