Conspirituality

In the spring of 2017, Jordan Peterson first went viral by writing this in Canada’s National Post:  I will never use words I hate, like the trendy and artificially constructed words “zhe” and “zher.” These words are at the vanguard of a post-modern, radical leftist ideology that I detest, and which is, in my professional opinion, frighteningly similar to the Marxist doctrines that killed at least...

Edward Snowden is largely only a public name thanks to Glenn Greenwald’s reporting, for which he was one of the contributors to a Pulitzer Prize-winning series for The Guardian in 2014. For a while, Matt Taibbi was considered the heir to Hunter Thompson when his gonzo journalism tore open the 2008 financial crisis and gave the public the term “vampire squids.”  Yet in more recent years, both men h...

Part 2 of Matthew’s sit down with sex-work veteran and social justice advocate Esme Providence Brown to discuss New Age / wellness antifeminist, Kelly Brogan, and how her craven politics bolster the permission structure for Trumpian misogyny. They track her political and aesthetic journey from labcoat wearer to wellness pole dancer to BDSM cosplayer—a spiral through deepening layers of appropriati...

When asked if he thought Mark Zuckerberg’s effective ending of fact checking was in response to threats that he would “put him in jail for a very long time,” Trump replied, “Probably. Yeah, probably.” A week later, TikTok voluntarily disabled their app for users, then put up an announcement saying that Trump was going to bring them back.  Julian talks to digital disinformation expert Renee Diresta...

What the ever loving fuck. That’s our intro today. But we do have a structure. Julian’s going to review the Executive Order chaos, including the pardoning and deputizing of fascist street gangs. Derek’s going to explain what the ever loving fuck it means for health agencies to turn off access to health data. And I’ll look at two Xtian responses to fascism: one hypocritical and one poetic… but mayb...

Full episode available here. The alien from Venus in George King’s head said: “Prepare yourself. You are to be the voice of interplanetary parliament.” It’s 1952 and the Englishman has been meditating deeply. Eight days later, a famous yogi from India materializes to explain what’s going on. These experiences became the basis for the Aetherius Society—an organization that still has 35 chapters aro...

On Jan 10, the Oregon Nurses Association launched the largest healthcare strike in Oregon state history. Some 5k frontline caregivers from 8 Providence hospitals and 6 clinics have been holding the line in freezing temperatures as they fight for basic rights that their employer—a Catholic nonprofit healthcare system whose C Suite members make millions of dollars every year—refuses to give them. De...

One of the top podcasts in the world—even beating out Rogan for a few hours—is popularizing a well-meaning intervention for non-speaking autistic people. Unfortunately, that intervention happens to be a proven failure, and may set autistic and disability rights discourse back by decades.  Filmmaker Ky Dicken’s The Telepathy Tapes podcast delves into the world of Facilitated Communication, in which...

The seventh installment of Matthew’s Five Big Questions Posed to an Extremely Thoughtful Person.  Sam Adler-Bell is a journalist, political theorist, and co-host of one of Matthew’s favourite podcasts, Know Your Enemy—a show about the American right. They discuss the normalization of genocide, the stark comforts of Freud and Janet Malcolm, the relief of DW Winnicott, how we can’t avoid playing the...

Twitter Files journalist Alex Berenson recently published two articles claiming that Moderna covered up a child's death from a Moderna Covid booster trial—and the FDA is complicit. Children’s Health Defense then hosted him on their TV program to learn more about this outrageous scandal. Do Berenson's claims hold up? All Derek did was click on the links in his own article to discover the "truth." H...

We know Bryan Johnson gobbles 100 pills a day. He pumps his son’s plasma through his veins. He does light therapy on his junk and wants to live forever. But do we understand how Johnson’s fascinations reflect his Mormon heritage? No. No we don’t.  That’s why we called our very own Salt Lake City expert, Blair Hodges, host of the Relationscapes podcast.  Blair joins Matthew to discuss Johnson’s tra...

In January, 2023, Bloomberg published an article about how tech entrepreneur turned longevity stan, Bryan Johnson, spends $2 million a year in an attempt to live forever—or at least until age 200, as the goalposts shift. Then a Netflix documentary, Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever, dropped on January 1, taking a deep dive into Johnson’s quest and complex personal life. A strange thing...

A one-time drop of Derek's new podcast, Clarity Lab, the official podcast of Siris Health, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit building a free educational platform and curating social media channels that feature experts presenting health and science in a clear, compelling manner. Celery juice. Coffee enemas. Ozone therapy. The list of pseudoscientific cancer "treatments" is endless. Yet they all risk pushing pe...

Matthew sits down with sex-work veteran and social justice advocate Esme Providence Brown for the first of two chinwags about our famous New Age / wellness antifeminist, Kelly Brogan, and how her craven politics bolster the permission structure for Trumpian misogyny. They track her political and aesthetic journey from labcoat-wearer to wellness pole dancer to BDSM cosplayer—a spiral through deepen...

UCSF epidemiology and biostatistics professor Vinay Prasad's star rose when he compared the US response to Covid-19 to the beginnings of the Third Reich in October, 2021. Though a less famous contrarian than others in the MAHA sphere, the hematologist-oncologist has honed his social media trolling over the past few years, always ready for a fight, evidence be damned. Derek and Julian look at two r...

Like it or not, 2025 is here. What happens in post-truth America when formerly fringe conspiracy theorists, religious extremists, pseudoscience-peddlers, and wannabe authoritarians become a government—now weaponized against their personal enemies, both foreign and domestic? Should political analysis take a page from academics who study professional wrestling? We each offer our views on what's ahea...

George van Tassel was the original UFO contactee. He claimed to have been visited by aliens from Venus in 1953, which led to him hosting thousands of people at the annual Interplanetary Spacecraft Convention for almost 20 years. He channeled “Ashtar, ”a figure still popular in “Galactic Federation” conspiritualist circles today, and spent 25 years building a time machine based on telepathic commun...

Journalist and author Josie Reisman says we can’t understand the Trump era without understanding his life-long pro-wrestling fandom, and his bonds with one of his closest friends, WWE tycoon Vince McMahon.  Reisman argues that McMahon’s invention of “neokayfabe,” in which storylines and real life are purposefully and artfully confused, blurs the distinction between fact and fiction. It makes consu...

British entrepreneur and investor Steven Bartlett launched his podcast, Diary of a CEO, in 2017. He quickly found an audience in the tech world, which gave him access to a wide range of celebrities and businesspeople from various domains. By 2024, the podcast became one of the top 5 in the world, netting Bartlett and his team a reported $25M this year alone. Yet as Bartlett’s star rose, his guest...

Happy New Year’s Eve! The sixth installment of Matthew’s Five Big Questions Posed to an Extremely Thoughtful Person.  Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than 20 books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering  and walking, hope and disaster. Show Notes Rebecca Solnit Learn more about your ad choices. Visi...

Ozempic might be all the rage among people who want to lose weight, but wellness influencers and MAHA acolytes are raging against the antidiabetic medication. Derek investigates recent statements by RFK Jr and Calley Means and holds up their claims to the data we can all see online. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We've been highly critical of The Free Press in the past, but a recent memoir-article about grappling with a familial history of polio by Jana Kozlowski stood out. Derek and Julian take no issue with the piece, which was an emotional plea to understand the ravages of polio and the efficacy of vaccines. The comment section is another thing. Show Notes Polio Ravaged My Family. Forget Its Horror at Y...

A special Patreon bonus unlocked episode as we enjoy the holidays with our families and friends. Matthew got The Question on the morning after the election. At that moment, he came up with nothing but a hug. But then he chewed on it for days, and came up with eleven things to consider.  So here are some notes for possible conversations with tweens about anxiety, bullies, fascism, friends, mutual a...

“If you grow up with it, religion is real until you realize it is also imagined. And after a period of disenchantment or even depression that associates imagination with lies, you might then sense that the imagined part was also real, but because it’s imagined, you know you can change it.” Matthew reflects on how Santa becomes more real in the home after the kids know he’s just a story, but a stor...

Jeffery Tucker is the founder of the MAGA thinktank Brownstone Institute. In 2020, Brownstone published The Great Barrington Declaration, with lead author Jay Bhattacharya—now the nominee for head of the NIH.  Jeffrey’s daughter, Julia, joins Matthew to discuss her dad’s rise through the punditocracy, through decades of fringe libertarian publishing, working for Ron Paul, boosting anarcho-capitali...