Conspirituality

American-style white Christian Nationalism tells of a promised land given by God to the Puritan settlers. Their divine mandate for political dominance sanctifies a violent history that stretches from the 1690's all the way through to modern right-wing politics. Our interview today is with sociologists, Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry, authors of The Flag and The Cross. We discuss their study of Chr...

Antisemitism is in the news again, as Candace Owens defends Kanye West and Kyrie Irving, while her boss, Ben Shapiro shakes his head in dismay. In this Bonus special report, Julian looks into the Assembly of Yahweh family, which funds conservative new media giants, The Daily Wire and PragerU.How do we make sense of the racial and religious tensions created by the strange bedfellow alliances of rig...

An ancient text at the root of the culture that gave birth to the yoga tradition says that if an outcaste person—a Dalit—dares to learn the holy language of Sanskrit, they must be tortured. Molten lead must be poured into their ears. Their tongue must be cut out. In the Ramayana, a Shudra (caste oppressed) who dared to practice yoga was murdered so that the sickly child of a priestly family might...

Matthew and Julian sit down for the first of a two-part examination of the 1988 bestseller at the heart of the recovered memory movement—which played a central role in validating Satanic Panic testimonials. The basic premise of The Courage to Heal, by creative writing instructors Ellen Bass and Linda Davis,  is that memories of childhood abuse, especially child sexual abuse, can be recovered and a...

In the second of three episodes on Michelle Remembers, we recap its Catholic contexts, and Lawrence Pazder's quest to transcend the limitations of psychiatry through mystical nightmares. We then explore the front matter: how Pazder introduces his project (and himself), and the ambivalent endorsement of Remi de Roo, Archbishop of Victoria. In Pazder's many clerical alliances, a crucial theme is est...

Mark Roseman opens Lives Reclaimed, his compelling history of the “Bund”—a leftist communitarian group that resisted fascism and protected Jews during the Reich—with a quote from Michael Ondaatje’s novel The Cat’s Table: “That was a small lesson I learned on the journey. What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.” Roseman, a professor of Jewish a...

Imagine a technology so powerful it's been directly downloaded from spirit during a Scorpio eclipse. This revolutionary tool can cure burn victims, remove cysts from dogs, and endow you with ultimate productivity. Thanks to phase conjugation, this bioenhanced scalar tech will change the way you view medicine and healing forever—provided you don't have any expectations and remain open to source, th...

Listeners: today’s episode marks a turning point for us all here at Conspirituality HQ. Humbled by a recent quantum download, we realize that we have for too long been relying on our critical faculties. For too long we have insisted that words mean things. Our poisoned irony has calcified our throat chakras and burned your ears to the point you may never trust a spiritual influencer again. Today w...

A departure today, as Matthew eulogizes his teacher and friend Luciano Iacobelli. From the opening:This story may be a little personal and indulgent, but I’ll take a risk on it because I think it hints at an answer to a question we often get on the podcast about our own beliefs in the existential or spiritual categories. We spend a lot of time eviscerating bog-standard hypocrisy in the economy of...

What is the state  of the documentary film in the age of manipulative online propaganda? In the hands and eyes of a documentarian like Amy Berg we find a journalistic commitment to the truth combined with the artistry of compelling and intimate story-telling.  Along the way, her projects are guided by an obsession with  justice. In two cases—that of the West Memphis Three, and more recently the mu...

The second part of Julian and Matthew's long look at the 1999 film Teal Swan was reportedly obsessed with as a teen. Girl, Interrupted is a freewheeling adaptation of a 1993 memoir by Susanna Kaysen about the 18 months she spent undergoing treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder in a Massachusetts psychiatric facility in the late 1960s. This study is provoked by a memory recounted by Swan's...

For the prophet and the revolutionary alike, the time is always now. Gird up your loins brave heroes, and show your true faith! The signs portend that The Last World Emperor is rising to do battle against the AntiChrist. The time is always now, but in that flat circle of iterative history, no bad idea is really new under the Black Sun—it's just been engineered to go more viral. Our guest today is...

Methylene blue will give you more energy! It’s neuroprotective! Your skin will never look better! Your bunghole will never be bluer! This week, Derek investigates one of biohacking’s hottest trends: a textile dye that does, in fact, have medical applications—just not the ones optimizers are promoting, and optimizing. He’ll look into this organic compound’s history, how it’s being marketed by the b...

There's no Teal Swan without the Satanic Panic. And there's no Satanic Panic without the 1980 publication of Michelle Remembers, by Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith. In this first of three segments on this melted book, Matthew and Julian cover its historical, cultural, and mass media context. We start with a review of a 1985 20/20 episode called “The Devil Worshippers” for a taste of how mainstr...

Mystery topic today. Emergency episode. Breaking story. Amazing if true! Totally transformative plot twist. You gotta listen through for the big reveal, and then hit smash for more. Spoiler alert: QAnon was foreshadowed by Pizzagate, but Pizzagate was foreshadowed by a moral panic in London, England that was driven in part by someone the three of us are karmically bound to, for good or ill, foreve...

Julian and Matthew take a long look at the 1999 film Teal Swan was reportedly obsessed with as a teen. Girl, Interrupted is a bold adaptation of a 1993 memoir by the writer Susanna Kaysen about the 18 months she spent undergoing treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder in a Massachusetts psychiatric facility in the late 1960s. This study is provoked by a memory recounted by Swan's childhood f...

The book is filed. Our mental health is in check. And, as it turns out, Matthew found a new guru. We return to trio work by investigating his fellow Canadian's cure for, uh, anything, or maybe something, as well diving into two biohacking conferences and the conspiritualist's new favorite fascist on the block. Show NotesTip of the iceberg: erectile dysfunction and COVID-19 | International Journal...

If you tune into your favorite Instagram wellness influencer or financial life coach, you’ll learn that money is really a state of mind—right? Thinking the right thoughts is the truest judge of character, and therefore indicative of your bottom line. This week Derek looks at research from behavioral economics, which found the perceived relationship between wealth and morality dates back to post-WW...

Some of the most valuable material that come to us from Paula Marino's Open Shadow film of 2017 is an extended interview with Swan's parent's, the Bosworths. They speak about Swan's sensory sensitivity as a young child, and how that morphed into a staunchly independent but sometimes isolated social life. They describe Swan's secret runic writing, their belief in her capacities as a medical intuiti...

Are you ready to biohack your brain with buttered coffee? How about going “within” at the Drybar of acupuncture? What if we told you that cannabis will catapult your chakras into higher consciousness—all it costs is a $5,000 retreat entry fee, not including airfare and hotel? In the $4.4 trillion wellness industry, is any cost really too expensive to achieve true self-care—even if it never really...

Christina Flinders returns for the second of a two-part tour through her experience with cultic dynamics, conspirituality, and the long road towards finding her place in the world. Picking up where she left off, Flinders discusses breaking free of the sexually abusive cult of Eknath Easwaren, finding ambivalent agency as a stripper, and then graduating to yoga teaching—where she then had to dodge...

Did you know that Joe Biden is a Satanic alien Nazi pedophile intent on bringing about the New World Order? Or that Donald Trump is the only thing that will save us from complete tyranny? How about the fact that COVID vaccines are bioweapons destroying the global population? But that’s okay, because colloidal silver is the magic bullet that will boost your immune system to help you fend off this s...

Christina Flinders is our honoured guest today for the first of a two-part tour through her  experience with cultic dynamics and conspirituality. Matthew and Julian learn about her family's enmeshment in the cult of Eknath Easwaren, and her subsequent journey through rebellion, self discovery, and political awakening. We'd like to thank Christina for her generosity and lucidity, and her family for...

On May 31st, 2014, Morgan Geyser stabbed her onetime best friend Bella Leutner nineteen times, while her new best friend, Anissa Weier, looked on. All three girls were twelve years old.  Geyser was living with schizophrenia, and Weier had introduced her to the crowd-sourced internet phantasm known as Slenderman, who first appeared on Something Awful, the message board at the root of chan culture....

As we're all with family over the holiday weekend, here's a 2018 interview that Derek conducted with neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga after the publication of his last book, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind. Michael revolutionized the field of neuroscience in the 1960s with his work on split-brain patients and remains a towering figure in his field...