Conspirituality

Sign up today at butcherbox.com/conspirituality and use code conspirituality to choose your free steak for a year and get $20 off. If you’ve never donated through GiveWell before, you can have your donation matched up to $100 before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. To claim, go to GIVEWELL.ORG and pick PODCAST and enter Conspirituality at checkout. Matthew reconsiders past cr...

Butcherbox promo: Sign up today at butcherbox.com/conspirituality and use code conspirituality to choose your free steak for a year and get $20 off. RKF Jr., who has campaigned as the peace candidate who will draw down the US military empire, has recently called Israel America’s “aircraft carrier” in the Middle East. When challenged to call for a ceasefire as the casualties rise in Gaza, the self-...

Iman Gadzhi is a rising YouTube superstar. A high school dropout and supposed self-made multimillionaire, the 23 year-old marketing guru started his YouTube channel at age 15 with weightlifting videos. He has since built a following of 3.7 million. His life and career path is symbiotic with the platform, mirroring, monetizing, and accelerating every self-help and get-rich trend that blows through...

Butcherbox promo: Sign up today at butcherbox.com/conspirituality and use code conspirituality to choose your free steak for a year and get $20 off. You’ve heard the names of our Deep State swamp creatures. But the details of their career histories, criminal indictments, and intersecting political activities paint a startling picture. Alt-right rabble-rouser and pseudo-intellectual, Steve Bannon,...

ButcherBox is offering our listeners turkey FREE in your first box plus $20 off your first order. Sign up at butcherbox.com/conspirituality and use code CONSPIRITUALITY. Support the pod and listen ad-free What happens when psychedelic therapy is introduced into a society in which both the set and setting is capitalism? Derek navigates the hope and hype of psychedelics in a for-profit healthcare sy...

Close your eyes and imagine exiting your front door. Within moments, everything necessary for your life is a few blocks away, except perhaps your job. Groceries, coffee, toiletries, your bank—if you’re still a physical bank-type person—auto shop, all within walking distance. You never have to commute too far to live your life. Sounds like quite a dystopian hellscape, doesn’t it?  Believe it or not...

Derek spent nearly a month trying to get a flu shot. During the same period, he has yet to secure an updated Covid booster. There are many problems with anti-vax propaganda. But there are also serious issues with America’s for-profit healthcare system. Derek shares his last few months navigating it, first with his wife’s breast cancer screenings (and the unexpected costs dumped on them) and then w...

Julian Brave NoiseCat is a writer and film doc maker, and a member of the Canim Lake Band, Tsq'escen. In May of 2022 he posted this Twitter thread. Matthew wanted to learn more: I'm struck by the similarity of right-wing conspiracy theories to actual policies towards Indigenous peoples.  'replacement theory' - Manifest Destiny  QAnon (mass institutionalized child abuse) - boarding and residential...

5 am. Day 4 of executive plant medicine retreat. The venture capital tech bro sits on a metaverse mountaintop, immersed in deep meditation. He hears a hum—a vibration from the great beyond. A mantra rises up like kundalini gas bubbles just in front of his spine: techno-capital machine. Today we dissect Marc Andreessen’s anarcho-capitalist attempt at a Silicon Valley religious doctrine, The Techno-...

Matthew’s essay about the transient, disorganized, purificatory pleasure of RFK Jr's campaign for his wellness/yoga/biohacker demographic.  A workshop breakthrough is not a strategy. The pleasure of deconstruction is not a theory of change. With reference to Vincent Bevins’s brilliant new book: If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. If you’ve never donated through GiveWell...

Bari Weiss recently held a "debate" about the failure of the sexual revolution. Expensive tickets to the Theater at the Ace Hotel in downtown LA allowed you to see Grimes and Sarah Haider talk about motherhood, porn, and woke culture with Anna Khachiyan and Louise Perry. And the results were...rather boring, says journalist Michelle Lhooq. Derek gets the lowdown from Lhooq, who wonders how the New...

Get full access to all of our episodes and listen ad-free on Patreon. Today’s profile by Julian is of a man who connects the dots between the gun-nut fifth column in American law enforcement, local school board and city council anti-woke mania, and grassroots Christian Nationalist/QAnon crossover. Like our other swamp creatures, his involvement in the chicanery around the last two elections make h...

Arizona’s recent increase in “sovereign citizen filings” connects to a New Age spiritual center called the Ultimate Light Mission. Julian talks to investigative reporter Isaac Stone Simonelli. Show Notes Sedona's wellness to radicalization pipeline Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Women journalists spend years meticulously investigating, corroborating and fact-checking allegations that Russell Brand is a serial sex offender. The result? A 6600-word masterpiece of survivor-centered concision, battle-tested by a legion of editors and lawyers. But the manosphere responds! With logorrheic defenses, conspiracy theories, and rationalizations. Peak posting through it. We look at c...

Four members of the Florida-based Grenon family were recently sentenced to between 5 and 12 years of prison for selling bleach. The problem? They claimed that bleach, known as Miracle Mineral Solution, cured Covid-19—as well as cancer, autism, AIDS, erectile dysfunction, and over 90% of the world's ailments. The elder Grenon, Mark, had founded the Genesis II Church of Health & Healing alongside of...

On October 9, RFK Jr. brought his three-podcast-bros-in-a-trench-coat campaign to Philadelphia. On a dias across from Independence Hall, he announced his anticipated departure from the Democratic party and his new status as an independent candidate. Matthew and Julian profile his conspirituality credentials, his diagonalist politics, and his incoherent positions: He attacks public health officials...

Quinn Slobodian teaches Modern German History at Wellesley and William Callison teaches Political Theory and Human Geography at Uppsala. We first came across their work via Naomi Klein’s examination of the clusterf&cked politics that dominate the movements we cover. We dug out their paper, and they had us at this: "At the extreme end, diagonal movements share a conviction that all power is conspir...

Our main character this week is the six-degrees of authoritarians—more like one or two degrees, in fact. He’s made millions playing footsie with most of the blood-thirsty kleptocrats of the last half-century. He embodies the corrupt and anti-democratic deep state history of Donald Trump’s inner circle, reaching back through the decades and across the globe. Julian’s colorful storytelling series se...

On October 14, Australians will vote in a referendum on a simple question: should Indigenous peoples be invited to form an advisory council—a Voice—to Parliament?  It seemed like a shoe-in “Yes”—before the issue was FUBARed by a coalition of antivax, anti lockdown, Q-adjacent white sovereign citizens who believe that they are the true victims of colonization.  Professor Tyson Yunkaporta of Apalech...

Butcherbox Deal! Sign up today at butcherbox.com/conspirituality and use code CONSPIRITUALITY to receive ground beef for life plus $20 off your first order. We love our scicomm episodes, because they really dig into the material heart of the conflicts this project tries to understand. What is this information chaos tearing apart public health? How do you push back against it? What does “follow the...

On September 19, Matt Christman was hospitalized with, in the words of his colleagues on the podcast Chapo Trap House: “a sudden, severe medical emergency that will require a significant period of recovery.” His wife was scheduled to deliver their first child a few days later. Baby arrived in good health. Christman is as of this moment still hospitalized, but making some progress. Matthew reflects...

Deep Cut pulls from our bonus episode archive to unearth previous ideas that remain relevant today. What the hell happened between the Dalai Lama and that Indian boy? The internet served up a raft of painfully inflammatory takes, so I took a month to talk with Tibetologists and review the literature on sexual abuse in Tibetan Buddhist contexts. This is a deep, tangled dive. Content warnings apply....

The market for psychedelics is projected to grow from $2 billion in 2020 to $10.75 billion by 2027—a growth rate that could outpace the legal US cannabis market. Many high-profile investors and celebrities are entering the space, often under the pretense of funding breakthrough mental health interventions. But…is that the real concern? Microdosing to help depression, anxiety, addiction, or suicida...

We’ve spent the last three-and-a-half years criticizing a range of wellness ideas, charismatic charlatans, abusive self-styled gurus, and conspiracy theories. We’ve also discussed our own beliefs and highlighted many people and ideas that we believe are getting it right. Derek has never really explored what motivates him on a physical and mental level despite having spent many years doing so insid...

In light of the recent allegations, Matthew offers a backgrounder on what we’ve learned about Brand through conspirituality and cultic studies and from his opportunistic relationships to wellness, self-help, and Kundalini Yoga. Ending with a focus on how his yoga world LARPing became a launch pad for his success as a spirituality-coded conspiracy theorist in the age of COVID. Go to HelloFresh.com/...