Matthew begins a two-part exploration of Simone Weil—French philosopher, mystic, and antifascist activist—through the lens of autism, embodiment, and political courage. Following the earlier Antifascist Christianity Woodshed series on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, this installment positions Weil as a kind of spiritual auntie to Greta Thunberg, whose uncompromising honesty, rooted in autistic perception, continues to disrupt fascist, capitalist, and liberal narrative.

Matthew traces Weil’s journey from childhood acts of solidarity, like giving up sugar during WW1, to her immersion in factory labor, revolutionary syndicalism, and frontline service in the Spanish Civil War. Weil’s refusal of privilege and their lifelong impulse to take on suffering emerge as core features of both her philosophy and her autistic experience. They also stood up to Leon Trotsky, calling out Soviet authoritarianism long before its collapse.

Weil can be understood not only through the posthumous notebooks and essays that editors and institutions reshaped into seventeen volumes, but through the lived reality of their embodied resistance. Their ideas remain striking: the notion of attention as the rarest form of generosity; the insistence that obligations come before rights; the practice of “decreation” as a release of ego in the service of love; and the “need for roots” as an antifascist alternative to blood-and-soil nationalism.

Part 2 of this series drops Monday on Patreon, where Matthew goes deeper into Weil’s autistic traits, their spiritual life, and how their philosophy continues to confront liberalism and fascism alike.

Support us on Patreon to access Part 2 and the full Antifascist Woodshed series.

Show NotesColes, Robert. Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage. Woodstock, VT: SkyLight Paths Publishing, 2001.

Fitzgerald, Michael. The Genesis of Artistic Creativity: Asperger's Syndrome and the Arts. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2006.

Gilman-Opalsky, Richard. The Communism of Love: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Exchange Value. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2020.

Lawson, Kathryn. Ecological Ethics and the Philosophy of Simone Weil. New York: Routledge, 2024. doi:10.4324/9781003449621.

McCullough, Lissa. The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil: An Introduction. London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2014.

Plant, Stephen. Simone Weil: A Brief Introduction. Revised and expanded edition. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008.

Song, Youming, Tingting Nie, Wendian Shi, Xudong Zhao, and Yongyong Yang. "Empathy Impairment in Individuals With Autism Spectrum Conditions From a Multidimensional Perspective: A Meta-Analysis." Frontiers in Psychology 10 (October 9, 2019): 01902. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01902.

Wallace, Cynthia R. The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil: Feminism, Justice, and the Challenge of Religion. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024.

Weil, Simone. The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind. Translated by Arthur Wills. With a preface by T. S. Eliot. Routledge Classics. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.

Weil, Simone. Modern Classics Simone Weil: An Anthology. Edited and Introduced by Siân Miles. London: Penguin Books, 2005.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Less than two weeks after a shooter unloaded 500 rounds at the CDC in Atlanta, RFK Jr gutted that agency's violence prevention research by firing 100 employees. Less than a month later, Charlie Kirk was shot in front of a crowd of 3K at a Utah university. Millions saw the graphic clip online, which ignited a propaganda and disinformation culture war. Meanwhile, yet another child shot his classmates at a Denver high school that same day.

It's not the guns though, say the GOP pundits and politicians, it's the violent rhetoric from the left, and those hateful transgender antifascists. Just ask RFK Jr. He'll confirm that it's not the guns, but all those kids overmedicated on dangerous antidepressants.

What are SSRIs anyway, do hurt people hurt people, and do gun laws have any effect?

Show Notes

No, Antidepressants Do Not Provoke Mass Shootings

Mental Illness and Lone Actor Terrorism

Is There a Link Between Mental Health and Mass Shootings? | Columbia University Department of Psychiatry

Politically-Motivated Violence is Rare in the US

No Statistical Support for SSRI-Mass Shooting Connection

Mass Shooters and Political Assassins Have Similar Profiles

The Violence Prevention Project

Characteristics of Lone Wolf Violent Offenders

Blackpill Aesthetics: A Crash Course in Meme Extremism 

62: Manifesting Something Awful (w/Dale Beran) — Conspirituality

Gun Purchases by Year

Correlation Between States with Weak Laws/High Ownership and Gun Deaths

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The events of September 11, 2001 changed the world. Julian reflects on several interpretations of what they meant, proposing that each is a kind of Rorschach-test result based on our own religious and political beliefs, backgrounds, and social conditioning. 

The conspiracy theorist simply can’t believe something like that could happen to America, going in search of complicated alternative explanations that exist outside of the “official narrative,” even of reality itself.

Where the Christian conservative might see a call to Holy War signaling that the End Times is near, Neocon warhawks surrounding Bush observe an opportunity to enact plans for maintaining economic and political power and security.

Meanwhile, many on the left see the attack as justifiable “blowback” against American imperialism, Cold War atrocities, and Western colonialism. Religion is merely an inflaming of a fundamentalist minority based on political injustices.

What about the Soviet Union? The history of political Islam and massive Muslim caliphates that ruled for nearly 1,300 years? The intractable sectarian conflicts and the multiple internal ideologies vying for control over the Middle East?

There may be no easy answers, but perhaps engaging with these different perspectives can allow us to name some of the many factors that got us to 9/11 and the seemingly unsolvable dilemmas of our world today.

Show Notes

Popular Mechanics on 911 conspiracies

Noam Chomsky on 911 conspiracies

Pilger on Project for A New American Century

NYT 2023 Piece on the Reasons for Iraq War

Saddam’s Ruthless Purge

CNN on Kabul attitudes after US Invasion

Polling of Iraqis

Mahmood Mamdani Good Muslim, Bad Muslim Interview

Human Rights Watch on Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan

Taimur Rahman’s Red Star History of Political Islam Lectures

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Derek worked for nearly 10 months on a NY Times opinions video, "You Might Have Already Fallen for MAHA’s Conspiracy Theories," which was published this week. He discusses what it took to produce this video with his collaborator, Alex Stockton, as well as the role journalism has to play in dispelling health misinformation.

Show Notes

You Might Have Already Fallen for MAHA’s Conspiracy Theories

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If it wasn't all so tragic, politics might seem like a bad joke. But how did comedy become so unfunny, so politically toxic? 

From his hideout in a remote mountain cabin, anonymous video collage artist and essayist The Elephant Graveyard has finally cracked the code. According to him, Joe Rogan has created a doomsday death cult that feeds the dad-shaped hole in the hearts of its followers. In this allegory, his Comedy Mothership theater in Austin is like the alien spacecraft zooming in from behind the Hale Bop comet to take the Heaven's Gate group suicide victims home, freed from their earth-suits. 

And it turns out tech oligarchs Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are really behind it all.

Show Notes

Vile Grifters Are Taking Over Establishment Media

How Comedy Was Destroyed by an Anti-Reality Doomsday Cult

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Biostatistician Halbert Dunn's 1961 book, High Level Wellness, set the stage for the modern wellness movement. Derek reads it alongside some of today's top conspiritualists, noticing the themes (and differences) that run throughout Dunn's work.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The recent killing of two police officers (and wounding of a third) in Porepunkah, Australia has highlighted the dangers of sovereign citizen-style conspiratorial beliefs. The alleged shooter is still at large, but his social media footprint shows anti-vaccine, COVID-contrarian, and even QAnon-aligned beliefs, as well as a long history of violent threats against police.

Julian talks to journalists Ariel Bogle and Cam Wilson, co-authors of an excellent new book, Conspiracy Nation: Exposing The Dangerous World of Australian Conspiracy Theories. As with everywhere else in the world, the pandemic poured gasoline on what would become a familiar set of incendiary false beliefs—but the sociopolitical and historical context down under has its own unique details.

The conversation spans claims of government false-flag operations, real legacies of institutional abuse, and Australia’s most famous conspiracy export and celebrity chef, Pete Evans.

Show Notes

Conspiracy Nation

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Trump is still alive, though a lot of folks are excited that won't last. Maybe it’s testimony to the allure of the fantasy that he really is powerful, that his strongman schtick has legs, that he really has cast some magical spell over everyone—and that if he drops dead we’ll all wake up to a different world…

Of course we won’t.

But we’ll go through the fantasies today: the wishes, the schadenfreude, the diagnosis-at-a-distance, and what it means to imagine the death of a king.

Show Notes

ŌURA Announces U.S. Manufacturing Operations in Support of Scaling Defense Business

Oura Ring makers working with military to open first U.S. factory in Fort Worth

What Does Palantir Actually Do?

Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel to lead 4-part series on the Antichrist

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Matthew recounts the story of a young, hoity-toity soft-nationalist German theologian named Dietrich Bonhoeffer who discovered the radical soul of antifascism by hanging out in a Black Baptist church in Harlem in 1930. He came to the US believing in the white Jesus of European empire, but left enthralled by the Black Jesus of the oppressed. Back in Germany, he played 78s of spirituals and gospel tunes for the students of his illegal seminaries as he and other members of the Confessing Church issued some of the earliest formal rebukes to the Reich. And then he joined a plot to assassinate Hitler. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Matthew recounts the story of a young, hoity-toity soft-nationalist German theologian named Dietrich Bonhoeffer who discovered the radical soul of antifascism by hanging out in a Black Baptist church in Harlem in 1930. He came to the US believing in the white Jesus of European empire, but left enthralled by the Black Jesus of the oppressed. Back in Germany, he played 78s of spirituals and gospel tunes for the students of his illegal seminaries as he and other members of the Confessing Church issued some of the earliest formal rebukes to the Reich. And then he joined a plot to assassinate Hitler. 

Show Notes

UCLA Fires Beloved Professor Over 2024 Encampment Arrest – Poppy Press 

NY Mayoral Candidates Address Sanctuary, Trump and Religious Hatred at Interfaith Forum 

Religion and Socialism Working Group - Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)  

Undersold and Oversold: Reinhold Neibuhr and Economic Justice 

Swing Low Sweet Chariot - Fisk Jubilee Singers (1909) 

St. James Missionary Baptist Church of Canton: Wade In the Water (1978) 

Evangelische Kirche Halle Westfalen

Bethge, Eberhard. Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography. Translated by Eric Mosbacher, Peter and Betty Ross, Frank Clarke, and William Glen-Doepel. Revised and edited by Victoria J. Barnett. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. The Cost of Discipleship. Translated by R. H. Fuller, revised by Irmgard Booth. New York: Touchstone, 2018.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison. Edited by Eberhard Bethge. Translated by Reginald Fuller, Frank Clark, and John Bowden. New York: Touchstone, 1997.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. The Bonhoeffer Reader. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013.

Marsh, Charles. Strange Glory. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.

Martin, Eric. The Writing on the Wall: Signs of Faith Against Fascism. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2022.

McNeil, Genna Rae, Houston Bryan Roberson, Quinton Hosford Dixie, and Kevin McGruder. Witness: Two Hundred Years of African-American Faith and Practice at the Abyssinian Baptist Church of Harlem, New York. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2014.

Tietz, Christiane. Theologian of Resistance: The Life and Thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Translated by Victoria J. Barnett. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016.

Weil, Simone. The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind. Translated by Arthur Wills. With a preface by T. S. Eliot. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Williams, Reggie L. Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2014.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices