Conspirituality

Dr. Bradley Onishi, is the author of Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism - And What Comes Next. He is the co-host of the excellent Straight White American Jesus podcast. His work has appeared in the New York Times, NBC News, Politico, Rolling Stone, Huffpost, and many other outlets.  Bradley got personally drawn into evangelical Christianity as a teenager—and fr...

Are you ready to live your best life ever? Because if you’re not always on volume 10, eating the purest foods and shouting your truth at every turn, you’re certainly doing life wrong.  Derek looks at the ever-growing anxiety marketed as optimal health in wellness spaces, wondering when will enough be…enough? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Following up on our review and coverage of Satan Wants You, Matthew talks with Canadian filmmakers Sean Horlor and Steve Adams about how they excavated the origin story of the Satanic Panic movement. Show Notes 151: Satan Wants You Watch Party (Spoilers) Satan Wants You Conspirituality: UNLOCKED: Swan Song Series 4 | Michelle Remembers: Context & History Conspirituality: UNLOCKED: Swan Song Series...

In 2017, 4chan user "Q" started LARPing as a Deep State insider with predictions about Hillary Clinton and the pedophile cabal. 10 months later, the online antifascist world assembled its emergency podcast response team: three dubiously-credentialed shitposters( two using pseudonyms themselves) dedicated to covering “the best conspiracy theories of the post-truth era. Exploring online fever swamps...

Notes from Matthew in response to a great question from a listener: How do you keep from hating these people? The blasé unimaginative crackpots like Aubrey Marcus, the gaslighting meanderings of RFK Jr., the hordes of ignorant, ignorant, ignorant (trying to keep from saying st*pid) jackasses that follow in their wake, so desperately certain of their completely subjective fever dreams? It’s not eas...

Seven ex-staffers who worked on Marianne Williamson’s campaign have written an open letter describing her campaign as an “exercise in deception.” Matthew analyzes the open letter, and contextualizes its allegations within Williamson’s worldview and history.  Show Notes EXCLUSIVE: Seven Ex-Marianne Williamson Staffers Say Stop Supporting Her  148: Marianne Williamson and Asshole Jesus — Conspiritua...

GT Dave's kombucha origin story is the stuff of legend—at least how he frames it. But when the LA Times broke the story of a judge awarding workers nearly half a million dollars in back and overtime pay, citing GT's abuse of employees and contradictory evidence, a different story unfolds. Derek looks at this kombucha company's origins, unrealistic health claims, and the many troubles its endured o...

Tobias Rose-Stockwell is a media researcher, writer, designer, and author of the new book, Outrage Machine: How Tech Amplifies Discontent, Disrupts Democracy—And What We Can Do About It. The book deals with tough questions about who we are as individuals and a society, reminding us that we all help shape our surroundings by what we pay attention to, how we understand and process the information we...

Altered states exist on a spectrum, from enhancing human flourishing to perpetuating dangerous delusions. Daniel Pinchbeck’s recent comments on our book inspire Julian’s journey into psychedelics, the 2012 prophecy, the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, and the brain typologies that underlie visionary religious experience. Tune in for practical advice and guidelines about drugs, awareness prac...

Deep Cut pulls from our bonus episode archive to unearth previous ideas that remain relevant today. 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 thi...

We’ve been tracking Bobby’s misinformation, contradictions, and cursed networks for three years. And now he’s having his moment, and it’s anyone’s guess how far he’ll run. But why is he so appealing on the presidential stage? Why is he polling at 20%, with his favorability in double digits against Biden?  It’s not just that his endless rhetoric appeals to libertarians on the right and paranoiacs o...

Derek unpacks what’s really going on in conspiritualist messages about the "climate change narrative" and how they use an assault of varying degrees of credible information to conflate issues, some of which they then monetize. Then, he looks at how messages go horribly astray when the full context is missing—something quite common in social media, and which upcoming main episode guest, Tobias Rose...

A granular—let’s say quantum-sized—look at how RFK Jr.’s wealthiest and most influential New Age supporters are thinking about his candidacy. Aubrey Marcus and Charles Eisenstein disclosed it all on a two-hour podcast released on June 21, providing a nearly-perfect encapsulation of every theme of our beat. Their performance shows how dedicated conspiritualists keep the faith as they graduate out o...

Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman has become one of the most popular science podcasters in the world. His regular two- to four-hour episodes feature a dizzying assault of information on topics like physical and mental fitness, psychedelics, hair loss, brain optimization, and a host of other topics, sometimes with expert guests, while at other times he goes solo. And many of these episodes are super i...

Bobby provokes a “disorganized attachment” response in would-be followers. This is the emotional vortex that begins to churn when a charismatic leader draws followers into a vision of the world as irrevocably broken, poisoned, dangerous, full of lies and betrayal. But he doesn’t just scare them. Somehow, he also promises an island of salvation in their sea of doom. This is Bobby’s pattern.  It’s c...

Nazis loved yoga. Rudolf Steiner set the stage for COVID denialism. Modern social justice warriors have a fondness for Hindu nationalism. Antivax activists are stuck in 19th century Gothic novels. Yoga, as the religion of neoliberalism, has actively depoliticized large swaths of the white middle class, making yoga moms vulnerable to fascism. Who’s responsible for these outrages? Conspiritualists?...

What do we mean when we say that we believe something? When the QAnon Shaman got dressed on the morning of January 6, he put on his red, white, and blue face paint, his postmodern quasi-Native American horned fur hat, and grabbed the spear to which he had attached an American flag. In performance mode, this cosplay persona had already garnered him a taste of the attention that would soon increase...

On June 26, presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy, Jr hosted a "health policy roundtable" on Rumble. His guests included Joe Mercola, Sherri Tenpenny, Mikki Willis, and a host of other anti-vax luminaries. Very little policy was discussed, though RFK put forward plenty of ideas about executive orders, including blackballing scientists and researchers behind FDA-approved drugs and censoring scien...

Matthew narrates the first three sections of the audiobook, Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat. More information on our book here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Derek discusses the new Conspirituality book with filmmaker and podcaster Mike Hull at Powell's Books on June 26, 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Friend of the pod and historian of American fitness culture, Natalia Petrzela, joins Matthew to shed light on a new development in RFK Jr’s campaign to disrupt the Democratic Party: his recent workout campaign videos from the barbell patio of Gold’s Gym in Venice beach.  Topics include the iconic status of Gold’s, why Bobby Muscles is in Wranglers rather than lycra, how he’s both drawing on and di...

Chaos in Russia! Wagner’s pagan neo-Nazis. Is conspirituality unique to a failing American empire in the internet age? Does it require Californian New Age spirituality, with conspiracy theories that weave around alternative medicine, for-profit pharma with no social safety net, and the reactionary politics of White Christian Nationalism? This week, Julian explores a different version of Conspiritu...

Today in our Listeners’ Stories installment, Lynn Short joins her partner Justin to discuss how they met, grew up in, and grew out of a branch of “Gnosis,” a theosophical cult founded in the 1950s by Samael Aun Weor in Columbia. Weor was a classic old-school spiritual pervert, with 60-plus (likely ghostwritten) books to his name, and a passion for meddling in his followers’ sex lives. Lynn and Jus...

“It’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong," wrote Richard Feynman. But does curiosity end where awareness cuts off? Derek explores the positive and negative sides of the spiritual search, especially in light of the burgeoning eco-spiritual movement. Show Notes I’m “spiritual but not religious.” Here’s what that means for a physicist How to hold onto...

To celebrate book launch month, we started a little “takeaway” series two weeks ago. First, Derek led us through “Science and Sensibility,” in which he shared some really good practices for science literacy, along with examples of how conspirituality maximizes social stress and struggling medical systems to exploit wellness consumers. Last week, Julian addressed the aching questions asked by those...