Conspirituality

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The Democratic Party is in free fall. Still suffering the aftershocks of the 2024 election, a civil war is brewing internally between those who want to build coalitions that can win elections and those who see radicalization as the only way forward.

In April, debate about whether Dems should embrace hugely popular leftist streamer Hasan Piker,or distance themselves from him dominated the discourse.

A week later, two popular online personalities of the left—acclaimed transgender video essayist, Contrapoints, and artist/author Josh Citarella—sat down for an episode of his Doomscroll podcast. Contrapoints made the case for coalition building and pragmatic Democratic electoral politics. Their frank mutual criticisms of the online left outraged some.

Meanwhile, NYT writer and podcaster, Ezra Klein's controversial comments on Charlie Kirk and highly-charged interviews with Ta Na-Hesi Coates and Sarah McBride (the first openly transgender person to serve in Congress) hovered in the background. 

Julian clips key moments from these interactions and offers his thoughts on a way forward for Democrats as we approach the midterms and looming presidential race in 2028.

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On the Whatever Podcast livestreams, alpha debate bros browbeat insecure betas and deride token guest female sex workers while possibly ignorant they're helping promote their OnlyFans accounts. But recently, three steely-eyed women have snuck in, decoded the matrix and fought their way up to stare down the ultimate boss—a chain-smoking, greasy-haired, foul-mouthed Christian nationalist named Andrew Wilson. 

Julian features and celebrates the insurgent grit and intelligence of these three women, who've gone into a hostile environment, and not only held their own, but handed this smug prick and his minions their asses in ways both undeniable and elegant. While it may not be possible to drive a stake completely through the heart of misogyny's zombie internet dragon, destroying the main characters at their own game in front of their own fans sure tastes sweet. Who knows, perhaps it might make some of the younger and more impressionable viewers think twice about the hateful and irrational slop they’re being fed.

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Two-thirds of the Conspirituality staff have new books out: Matthew's AntiFascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times and Derek's Well Enough:  Finding Health Despite the Wellness Industry. Julian "interviews" the co-hosts about themes of each book and their intersections with Conspirituality.

But first, Derek discusses Glucose Goddess's recent partnership with medical device company, Dexcom.

Show Notes

The Sweet Embellishments of the Glucose Goddess

Well Enough: Finding Health Despite the Wellness Industry

Antifascist Dad by Matthew Remski

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In April 2026, Pope Leo XIV, deep in a public feud with President Trump over the Iran war, made his first trip to Africa. He chose Algeria: the birthplace of Augustine, the spiritual founder of his order. Algeria is demanding reparations from France for 132 years of colonial rule and 1.5 million dead. It’s parliament declared French colonization a "state crime" just four months before Leo landed.

Before visiting with any Catholics, Leo laid a wreath at an anticolonial martyrs' monument, removed his shoes in one of the world's largest mosques, condemned "neocolonial tendencies" to the diplomatic corps, and honored 19 Catholic martyrs who stayed to serve Algerian Muslims through a civil war that killed 200,000. 

The right-wing press logged every stop as an outrage. The Arab press read it as vindication. And the old-school Algerian left noted that papal forgiveness might be easier for France to accept than a reparations bill.

Matthew reads the visit through Augustine, historical materialism, liberation theology, and the testament of Christian de Chergé, prior of Tibhirine, who in 1994 wrote about his immanent martyrdom as the insurgents drew near.

In his final testament, de Chergé wrote:

I well know the contempt with which the Algerians taken as a whole have come to be dismissed. I also know the caricature of Islam that a certain kind of Islamism encourages.

It is too easy to put one’s conscience at rest by identifying this religion with the forms of fundamentalism of its extremists.

Show Notes

New Advent — Church Fathers: Confessions, St. Augustine

NPR — Transcript of Cardinal Robert Prevost's first speech as Pope Leo XIV

Vatican.va — Greeting to Journalists during the Rome–Algiers flight

Vatican.va — Meeting with the Authorities, Civil Society and the Diplomatic Corps, Djamaa el Djazair Conference Cnter

Vatican.va — Visit to the Great Mosque of Algiers

Vatican.va — Meeting with the Algerian Catholic Community, Basilica of Our Lady of Africa

Al Jazeera — Algeria declares France's colonial rule a crime in new law

France 24 — French presidential hopeful Macron cealls colonisation a 'crime against humanity'

OCSO — Testament of Christian de Chergé

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Derek reads two chapters from his recently published memoir, Well Enough: Finding Health Despite the Wellness Industry. In Chapters 3 & 4, he discusses his work as a patient monitor looking after suicidal patients in an emergency room, then ending up in an emergency room himself after having a full-blown panic attack.

Show Notes

Well Enough: Finding Health Despite the Wellness Industry

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Ronan Farrow is at it again. The reporter has a new feature in The New Yorker, written alongside staff writer Andrew Marantz, about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. In many ways, the 16,000-word investigation is a meditation on the existential risks of AI being placed in the hands of a few powerful men, and in this case a possible sociopath.

Today we discuss the article and then zoom out on broader questions in AI: who is it for, how is it being used, and can it be reined in?

Show Notes

Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?

John Henry for the AI Era: Raging with the Machine

Alex Bores rolls out “AI dividend” plan to share AI wealth

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Derek looks into behavioral economics to better understand the fluidity of the "self," finding that recent research aligns with a very old Buddhist concept.

Show Notes

What Does Extreme Wealth Do To the Brain?

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Donald Trump's shitpost attack on Pope Leo XIV, followed within the hour by an AI slop icon of himself as Jesus, has cracked open the evangelical-Catholic coalition that has anchored American conservatism for fifty years. 

Matthew walks through Leo's escalating confrontation with Trump, from his November 2025 immigration remarks to his Palm Sunday Isaiah citation ("your hands are full of blood"), his Holy Thursday liberation theology thread on "imperialist occupation," and the Good Friday Stations of the Cross — in which Father Francesco Patton's meditations called out the passion of deportation, surveillance, and war atrocities. 

The backlash from MAGA Christians, including Marjorie Taylor Greene calling the AI image "an Antichrist spirit" and pastor Joel Webbon asking whether Trump is "demon possessed", reveals three deepening fissures: the Vatican-Trump feud over Iran and immigration, a theological split over Christian Zionism, and grassroots disillusionment over ICE enforcement near churches and schools, and blasphememes.

Show Notes

Pope Leo XIV's Palm Sunday homily, full text — Vatican.va

Pope Leo XIV's Holy Thursday homily, full text — OSV News

Good Friday Liturgy of the Lord's Passion, Vatican — EWTN News

Hegseth prays for "overwhelming violence" at Pentagon service — PBS NewsHour

Trump's Iran war is tearing apart his Catholic-evangelical coalition — Mother Jones

MAGA recoils at Trump cosplaying as Christ — The Daily Beast

List of conservatives rebuking Trump's Jesus image — Newsweek

AI Jesus might be the thing that finally breaks MAGA's faith — Gizmodo

Pope Leo responds to Trump: "I have no fear" — The New Republic

Military archbishop says Iran war hard to see as "sponsored by the Lord" — CBS News

Pentagon threatened Pope Leo's ambassador with Avignon Papacy — Letters from Leo

"When I Survey the Wondrous Cross," Isaac Watts (1707) — Hymnary.org

Trump faces "Leo Fever" backlash over Pope feud — The Daily Beast

Karoline Leavitt responds to Pope Leo's war prayer remarks — Newsweek

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Consider the bright-eyed students who signed up for tantric yoga and sacred sexuality courses through their local yoga studios, only to eventually find they were sending the guru photos of themselves in bikinis to see if they qualified for a private initiation ceremony.

What's unique about today's guru, Gregorian Bivolaru, is how his organization's in-depth courses reached into over 30 different countries, delivering a steady stream of young, starry-eyed women to be abused by him in Paris.

A new documentary series, Twisted Yoga, tells the story of the women who've come forward to expose what they allege are the criminal actions of the guru and his cult. Julian cover the nuts and bolts, Matthew digs into Bivolaru's Soviet-era Romanian background, and then Derek interviews director Rowan Deacon, who reveals some info not covered in the series, such as the “meditations for Trump” going on at some of Bivolaru’s yoga studios.

Show Notes

Gregorian Bivolaru official biography

POV Magazine: How Twisted Yoga Centres Care Amid a Web of Lies

Discourse Analysis of Public Communication Campaigns about Gregorian Bivolaru

ACT Database: "Sucker Love is Heaven Sent" — A Romanian Yoga Cult Under Investigation

NBC Bay Area: Romanian yoga leader Gregorian Bivolaru accused of sexual abuse

CNN: French police arrest yoga guru in connection with alleged rape, human trafficking and kidnapping scheme

Connexion France: 41 arrests over tantric yoga group accused of sex abuse in France

Marxists Internet Archive: Alexandra Kollontai, Theses on Communist Morality in the Sphere of Marital Relations (1921)

UPI (January 1990): Ceaușescu children lived it up while people suffered

Dispărut, dar cu conturile pline. Guru Bivolaru face milioane de dolari anual 

UPI (May 1990): Ceaușescu's playboy son on trial

UNADFI: Abus de faiblesse

Statute Law Review: Criminalizing Coercive Control — Cross-Jurisdictional Lessons

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When the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini received Western media in a small French village in 1978, he sat cross-legged in his robes and black turban under an apple tree in the garden. They described him as “on another planet,” with “eyes of steel,” and compared him to an Eastern sage or ascetic guru.

French philosopher Michel Foucault, most famous for his penetrating analysis of power, knowledge (and punitive coercion) was there as well. He called the holy man “an old saint in exile” who had no personal political ambitions. Visiting Iran during the revolution, the philosopher was captivated by what he called a new form of “spiritual politics” that he saw as “advancing toward a luminous and distant point.” Foucault dismissed Iranian feminists who warned of the true dangers of an Islamic state being established once the autocratic king—the Shah—had been overthrown.

Today, as the reckless and destructive American and Israeli war against the Iranian regime continues, Julian revisits the political history of Iran and the complex regional power struggles between nationalists, monarchists, communists, and Islamists that played out on the Cold War stage. He examines the connections between the controversial 1953 CIA coup d’etat and the hugely popular 1979 Islamic Revolution, which led to the one-party totalitarian theocracy that dominates the Iranian people to this day.

How did so many within Iran and in the West, including the most influential radical philosopher of his time, misperceive Khomeini and his ruthless intentions?

Show Notes

Foucault: What Are The Iranian’s Dreaming About

Did Foucault Disregard Iranian Feminists?

Dr. Taimur Rahman’s Red Star Lectures

The CIA Coup That Never Was

Iran’s Decade of Assassinations

Bayandor: Iran and The CIA

Foucault’s Iranian Folly

Foucault and the Question of Orientalism

The Shah, by Abbas Milani

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