Conspirituality

Julian recounts the wild and touching journey of four close friends in a self-directed spiritual group therapy session—super high on Ecstasy.Content Warning: this story includes accounts of traumatic events.-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Back in December, a certified anesthesiologist named Dr. Madhava Setty posted a long critique of our podcast to the New Age website Collective Evolution. While cordial and apparently well-meaning, Setty’s essay failed to quote a single episode. Setty filled in his own blanks with outright misrepresentations, leading with: “Matthew, Derek and Julian… assume that there are no large conspiracies in play in our world at this time. To state it flatly, to them the idea of a large conspiracy is so preposterous that they cannot even see that they are making an assumption when dismissing the possibility.”There’s no planet on which any of our episodes have said anything of the kind. In fact, we’ve repeatedly affirmed the opposite: that conspiracy theories and conspiritualists that monetize them exist because real conspiracies traumatize people. Tuskegee happened. MKUltra was real. #savethechildren took hold in part because Jeffery Epstein’s network has not yet been fully understood or prosecuted.Setty is so well-mannered and convincing, however, that New Age influencers who might be feeling a little defensive about how the yoga and wellness world has shown its ass in 2020 have welcomed his dulcet tones with open arms. In one appearance, he guested on J. Brown’s Yoga Talks podcast, and provided a master class on how to lead an anxious and altruistic yoga devotee into conspirituality. We didn’t respond to Setty’s initial essay because there was nothing to respond to: he didn’t offer any data. But now we think it’s worth examining in detail how, in real time — and before he winds up on Joe Rogan — he seductively spins together theories about divine consciousness, 9/11, COVID, and how everything is not as it seems.In the Jab, Julian reviews the scare-mongering of the newest seemingly-qualified anti-vax doc, Geert Vanden Bossche. In the Ticker, Derek looks at the empty religions of Instagram and the truth seekers of tomorrow—and today.Show NotesWho is Geert Vanden Bossche?Dr. Mobeen Syed on Vanden Bossche.Dr. Zubin Damania on Vanden Bossche.America Without GodThe Empty Religions of InstagramThe Truth Seekers Are ComingMadhava Setty distorts our podcast contentMadhava Setty redpills J Brown i-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode follows up on earlier discussions on the podcast about how we manage privilege. Our exploration of cancel culture — specifically that part of it that is really a form of horizontal violence — isn’t motivated by any shift to the right, but by a desire to unpack the rhetoric, jargon, and performative behaviours, that, so often in the reductive rhythm of social media, serve to shut down learning, and polarize progressives that might otherwise work together.Here, Matthew focuses on how a rhetorical device in social justice relates to our project: what it means, in both helpful and unhelpful ways, to be named as or reduced to “cis white men”.Reduction and essentialism are key aspects of the meme-ification of our politics, and potent weapons in the arsenal of conspirituality. None of the influencers we study on this podcast would have gained their social power without labelling and essentializing their opponents in black-and-white terms, without taking black-and-white positions on things like vaccines, big Pharma, and whether or not a person is “awake”.Both conspirituality and social media influence are driven by the tag, the hot take, the keyword, the avatar, and the speed of emotional reactivity. And cults are glued together by intense, non-negotiable emotional demands on participants. So far we’ve shown how all of these elements degrade our chances to evaluate evidence and resist being conned by charismatics or cult leaders. Our hope is that we contribute to a slower and open-ended exploration of how to balance the rhetoric of crucial social change with the nuance of interpersonal empathy.Show NotesContraPoints on Cancelling Robin diAngelo defining “white fragility"“Peggy McIntosh’s White Privilege Knapsack“That time I didn’t get shotMinimization as a patriarchal reflexCedric Michael Williams on DiAngelo Daniel Bergner on DiAngelo Tada Hozumi, Selfish ActivistLog the Fuck Off, Jacobin-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Imagine that you’re 25 years old. You grew up Irish, gay, and online. When the Orlando Pulse massacre explodes, you go to YouTube for the news. You watch Milo Yiannopolous and Gavin McInnes fake-kiss in front of the police-taped club and say that the Muslims are coming to kill all gay people. YouTube’s algorithm spins you downward into anti-Islamic content. Before long, you’ve left your marketing job with a mission: to make slick propaganda videos for some of the most despicable alt-right ghouls on the planet. You believe they’ll stand up for you.How did you get here at such a young age? What does it feel like? If you have a change of heart, if you want to fight back against your old life and its consequences, who will believe you? Should they believe you? How will you help them believe you?Today Matthew asks Caolan Robertson these difficult questions. After years of being the PR man for people like Tommy Robinson and Laura Southern, Robertson has shaken it off and started to collaborate with other ex-alt-right members on a deradicalization project called Future Freedom.In the Ticker, Julian reports on the new QAnon variant infecting telegram, Sabmyk. Matthew reviews how Christiane Northrup and a Gen Z priestess in a Greek eco-fascist group flip their positive orientalism on its head to diss the Dalai Lama for getting vaccinated. Derek looks at one of the strangest grifts around: pet psychics.Show NotesWhat Do Dogs Really Think? Pet Psychics Are Standing ByThe Sabmyk Network: How a mysterious disinformation network is hijacking QAnon – HOPE not hateWhat is Sabmyk? QAnon Followers Targeted By New Messianic MythologyAlso: QAnon was big in IranThe Dalai Lama Gets A COVID-19 Shot And Urges Others To Get VaccinatedAeifaron on InstagramSofia Katsaiti aka Sofia Tara on Instagram is very worried about the Dalai Lama’s vaccineAeifaron looks like a totally normal eco-fascist groupPfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine neutralizes Brazil variant in lab studyFuture Freedom project on -- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Humans will never be cats. In his new book, Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life, the philosopher John Gray argues that we can learn a lot about how to live from them—namely, how to calm our anxiety around existential distress. In this sample of a Patreon bonus episode, Derek shares what he’s learned from his three cats, as well as how Gray’s advice applies to the conspiratorial-minded (i.e. metacognition gone awry).-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Two episodes in our catalog haunt this podcast. In episode 6, Steve Hassan advised listeners to treat people under the undue influence of QAnon and conspirituality with welcome and respect. Castigation won’t work. Shame will make things worse. He told this story about how his elderly neighbor brought him homemade cookies when he finally returned home after years in the cult of Rev. Moon. No questions asked—just cookies.But in episode 10, Imran Ahmed pointed out that any engagement of disinformation peddlers is actually a win for them because it boosts their visibility. His strategy—and he has the data to prove it works—is to block, isolate, and clear the public space for content that is actually helpful. Where Hassan offers an open hand, Ahmed says, “Talk to the hand.”We’re nine months on from those interviews. Are we living up to either of them? Are we isolating and deplatforming propagandists? Are we adding good vibes to the scene and leaving the door open for earnest people to be forgiven? Or does the frustration of the content trend us towards cynicism and snark? A recent Instagram thread by dedicated listeners really brought the point home for discussion.In the Ticker, we cover the whitewashing of global cuisine by wellness influencers, bauhauswife’s upleveling of COVID denialism with yellow journalism, and Target-store QAnon vandal Melissa Lively trying to make amends-with-benefits for past outbursts. In the Jab, Julian looks at the facts around the PCR test. (Hint: it works.)Show NotesLost in the BrineA Death in Yolande Norris-Clarke’s Free Birth WorldKelly Brogan ditches her psychiatry cred with COVID-denialismWho wants to eat magic dirt from a COVID minimizer?Melissa Lively un-cancels herself from QAnonBauhauswife free births the news in Canada, from Costa Rica (video)Bauhauswife free births the news in Canada, from Costa Rica-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One-hundred-and-twenty seekers filled the LA hotel ballroom. We sought the life-changing experience that could only happen by holding in our pee, being religiously on-time, and taking full responsibility for creating the lives we said we wanted, but hadn’t achieved… yet.-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Around 2015, the alt-right movement erupted online to both provoke and monetize MAGA momentum and distort and defame the real-world progress symbolized in Barack Obama and agitated by Black Lives Matter. Young white supremacist poster-boy Richard Spencer and edgy internet crypto-racists like Lauren Southern, Mark Cernovich, and Gavin McInnes led the viral charge, racking up subscribers while lining their pockets on the side. Daniel Lombroso of The Atlantic embedded with their ilk from 2016-18, collecting enough footage to release the award-winning documentary, White Noise. Julian sat down to talk with him about the movement, and about making this film while Jewish.Was any of this a surprise to anti-oppression activists on the ground? Not according to Michelle Cassandra Johnson, author of Skill in Action: Radicalizing Your Yoga Practice to Create a Just World. While the white supremacy Lombroso whistleblows is spectacular and absurd, the white supremacy Johnson and other justice activists feel in their bones has been a centuries-long war of attrition against equality. Matthew sits down with Johnson to discuss how the yoga and wellness worlds in particular are (and are not) responding to the intensification of both calls to justice, as well as the blowback.In the Ticker, we wonder if Gwyneth Paltrow’s new long-COVID Goop merch—and her “longer-term detox” that includes selling Goop-approved $500 blankets and $8,000 necklaces—heralds a dawning era in high-end disability consumerism.Show NotesIt took a year, but Gwyneth Paltrow figured out how to exploit the pandemicGwyneth Paltrow Is Selling VibratorsHealing My Body with a Longer-Term DetoxThe NHS dings Gwyneth’s long COVID curesLauren Southern hides the face of her biracial babyDaniel Lombroso’s White NoiseSouthern Poverty Law on CernovichSouthern Poverty Law on SouthernRichard Spencer, white subsidy suckerMichelle Cassandra Johnson’s websiteMichelle Cassandra Johnson’s -- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the precious bright spots for our family in this long dark winter of COVID has been outdoor skating. Other than the walking trails, it’s the only thing that the city has kept open. I take our boys, 4 and 8, while my partner is working. The older one has developed a speed-skater’s stride. He’s not crossing over yet as he turns, but he’s close to it. The younger one has amazed us all with learning to glide easily in this, his first winter on skates…As per the city regulations, we stay masked and distanced as we’re lacing up, and while skating. But two weeks ago, an anti-masker started showing up, and openly ignored the attendants who asked him to comply.This audio essay is about all of the feelings that came up for me as I a watched this unfold, tried to intervene, and tried to make sense of it all for myself, and the boys.-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What are we learning about conspiracies, conspiracy theories, and those who hold them? How are we maintaining our optimism that facts are real, that they can be discovered, and shared? How will we continue to communicate with those who are confused? In this episode, we continue our rich conversation on the proximity of conspiracism and spiritual paths and the ways in which we fall into and climb out of fever dreams. In the Jab, Julian looks at concerns about vaccines and pregnancy. In a Ticker segment, Matthew ponders the British Wheel of Yoga’s “neutral” stance towards the COVID vaccine, and how it unintentionally welcomes conspiratorial thinking. Republic of Lies author Anna Merlan sits down with Derek to discuss the process of embedding with conspiracy consumers and peddlers, and the challenges faced when reporting on them. Discussing the interview, Julian uses the ideas of George Lakoff to think about containment and reframing. Matthew looks at how yoga and wellness influencers can play both sides of the consumer/peddler coin through the paradoxical private spectacle of social media.Show Notes‘I Miss My Mom’: Children Of QAnon Believers Are Desperately Trying To Deradicalize Their Own ParentsBritish Wheel of Yoga indulges vaccine “neutrality”Dr. Victoria Male on vaccines and pregnancyAnna Merlan on the Austin Influencer MovementAnna Merlan on PBS’s Open MindYoga podcaster J. Brown expresses doubts about COVID and the vaccinesCharles Eisenstein is turning to fictionAbbie Richards and her Conspiracy Chart-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices