Conspirituality

RFK Jr has dropped out of the presidential race and thrown his weight behind Trump. In our 10th episode on the man in the last year-and-a-half, we look at the potential dangers of this unholy alliance, and what it means for America. Show notes are extensive, visit patreon.com/conspirituality or conspirituality.net for more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Born in 1831, Helena “Madame” Blavatsky pioneered the New Age grift. The Russian aristocrat plagiarized her books while claiming to be channeling the “Masters of Ancient Wisdom” to tell a dodgy heroic back-story. She founded the Theosophical Society in New York, claimed to have learned a secret Tibetan language, and laid the foundation for alien channelers and Woo-Anon. She also inspired the Nazis...

Dems are laughing about Donny Dentures or #TrumpisDone, but the reality inside his head, and Mar a Lago, will be very grim, and there will be a lot of collateral damage. Mental health titans like Robert Lifton have reached the consensus that Trump has been mentally ill for a long time. They’ve diagnosed him with “narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, paranoid personal...

In one survey, 82% of young people aged 18-25 searched the internet for mental health advice. Another survey of university students found that 44% report using the internet to learn about sadness, anxiety, or confusion. Regardless of what mental health experts advise, people of all age groups are turning to the internet and social media for help. What are the potential risks and rewards of using t...

Peter McCullough recently shared a ton of misinformation about mpox while speaking to Drew Pinsky; both men work for The Wellness Company, a supplements company that weaponizes anti-vax misinformation to sell products. Mikki Willis uses the Hero's Journey as a guide to dealing with mpox—and falsely represents Joseph Campbell's work. Russell Brand and Bret Weinstein claim mpox is a government psyop...

ProPublica recently got a hold of 25 Project 2025 training videos—over 14 hours worth of content revealing the policies the Heritage Foundation would like to see implemented if Donald Trump regains the White House. Derek and Julian break down one of the most egregious. Show Notes Inside Project 2025’s Secret Training Videos Undercover in Project 2025 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megapho...

Did you hear that Taylor Swift is supporting Donald Trump for president? That’s right: last week, the former president shared photos of fans rocking “Swifties for Trump” t-shirts on Truth Social. Trump seemed pleased, replying to his online following of 24 billion people: “I accept.” Yet something seemed off. Just like photos of Trump surrounded by seven-fingered Black Americans smiling on city st...

A short break-the-fourth-wall reflection from Matthew on his new regular series for our main feed, starting in September.  The Conspirituality Relief Project will provide regular timeline-cleanser interviews in which super interesting guests reflect on hope, faith, resilience, and building community in hard times.  You know, all of the things that conspirituality itself promises to do, but can’t,...

An unexpectedly cheerful followup to “JD Vance Taps into Parental Rage.” The alt titles today could be: “Tim Walz Taps into Parental Goals,” or “Disarming the Disinfo of the Right is Great, But Have You Tried Dad Jokes?”  Across social media, liberal millennial women are tagging Tim Walz as the return of the dad they lost to Fox News. Matthew digs into that graveyard with a survey of the tools tha...

Eight years ago, they called us cucks, libtards, and globalists. We were corrupted by cultural Marxism, teaching our kids to hate themselves. Four years ago they gloated over drinking liberal tears. They called us sheeple, groomers, vampires, pedos. We made up a pandemic so that we could brew up a kill shot, and force it on everyone after making ourselves soy-boy sick. We were exposing our kids to...

Tech billionaire Peter Thiel claims “freedom and democracy are incompatible.” Mentor and $15M donor behind JD Vance’s political career, Peter Thiel also has an influence: Mencius Moldbug, computer programmer and lead philosopher of the “Dark Enlightenment,” or “neoreactionary” movement.  Moldburg says, “if Americans want their government to change, they’re going to have to get over their dictator...

Ziklag’s ultra-wealthy network of Christian donors is spending nearly $12M to mobilize Republican voters in order to secure a Trump victory this November. ProPublica found that their plan involves purging 1M+ people from the voter rolls in key swing states. Unsurprisingly, this is yet another Christian nationalist group with ties to Project 2025. Here’s the thing: Ziklag is classified as a 501c3 c...

You’re an eight year-old girl. The purity culture of your evangelical church, ruled by men but policed by women, has you worried that the spaghetti straps on your summer top might be sinful. You learn from the women around you how to defer, serve, please, keep your voice girl-like forever, and use it to both signal obedience but also piously request relief from sexual aggression.  You’re a seven y...

Scroll through masculinity influencer social media feeds and you're constantly told there's a "crisis of meaning." But is that really true? Has a shared meaning ever reflected the totality of any population? Derek turns this idea over in his head by looking at the mythology of the hero's journey. But first, he provides some inspirational messages from the White Dudes for Harris call last week, whe...

The “childless cat lady” thing is as ridiculous as JD Vance is. But it’s not stupid. It’s tapping into something powerful, because it’s shameful. Vance’s fantasy that childless cat ladies are miserable in their lives is another case of every accusation being a projection. In actuality, he’s speaking to that swath of parents out there in general—and particularly on the right—who are actually misera...

If something real occurs in this timeline, but no conspiracy theorist is there to FUBAR it, does it actually happen? An old man, weakened by COVID, picks up an old-timey phone handset on a Delaware Saturday to tell a childless cat lady that the reins of destiny are now in her hands. A staffer clicks “post” at 1:46pm, and X lights up with something real… that throws an instant shadow of insanity. B...

This is the second episode in “Conspirituality and the Imaginary Children,” an occasional series on how children, as symbols (but not persons with their own internal lives) are at the center of conspirituality anxiety and discourse.  The title is taken from a pamphlet published by Ralph Drollinger, a former professional basketball player from San Diego who founded a 501c3 called Capitol Ministries...

A tale of two tweets: Dark Horse podcast cohost and “conspiracy hypothesizer” Bret Weinstein took to Twitter twice this month, first dropping a video claiming that RFK Jr becoming Donald Trump’s running mate would make them “assassination proof,” then later floating the idea that an AI Joe Biden really phoned into Kamala Harris’s first conference as the presumptive presidential nominee. Or…is Bide...

Just two days after surviving an assassination attempt, Donald Trump announced JD Vance as his VP pick. Vance has made a dramatic U-turn from calling Trump a "reprehensible idiot" and "America's Hitler" in 2016. But who is this 39 year old, really—who after less than two years of on-the-job experience, is now almost a heartbeat away from leading the free world? Well, not unlike other right-wing po...

Project 2025's plan for workers is clear: crush unions, eliminate minority protections, curtail reproductive health care benefits, and make the workplace biblical again. Derek and Julian unpack the details of another insane chapter from Project 2025's 920-page manifesto that describes their vision for the reduced rights of the working class. According to their own statements, a Trump presidency wo...

We cover conspiracy theories, spiritual abuse, and religious and right-wing extremism. We cover showmen and charismatics suffering from King Victim Complex. Last week we had to study a goddam assassination attempt.  But sometimes we get to peek into the worlds that younger people are making within our cursed digital environments, and we realize they might be laughing at some of the problems that f...

Two landmark Supreme Court decisions—the Trump immunity case and the overturning of the Chevron doctrine—represent the legal institutionalization of the core values of conspirituality: self-sovereignty, natural immunity or divine protection, and “doing your own research.”  The attempted assassination on the former president forged the essence of these two rulings into a stunning still life of Trum...

Project 2025's approach to environmental issues is pretty straightforward: deny climate science, dismantle the EPA, clear a path that prioritizes corporate profits, and let the world burn. Derek and Julian unpack the details on the chilling chapter from Project 2025's 920-page manifesto that outlines their plans for the Environmental Protection Agency. According to their own statements, a Trump pr...

While speaking on Steve Bannon’s podcast, The War Room, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts recently stated, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless—if the left allows it to be.”  Roberts is the mastermind behind Project 2025, Heritage’s 920-page “presidential transition” agenda that seeks to implement authoritarian power in America. The text c...

Today we’re looking at a lavish infomercial put out by New Age oligarch and RFK Jr superfan Aubrey Marcus, in which he tries to show the world that his very expensive encounter group, Fit For Service, is definitely not a cult. And at how Matthew got quoted in the opening montage as though he endorsed FFS as an “anti-cult.” He hasn’t. Marcus might be protesting too much. Because no one with any cre...