Conspirituality

After being confirmed as Secretary of HHS, RFK Jr started installing his cabal of wellness influencers and contrarian doctors across the government's many public health agencies. And that means they have to apologize for their boss. Derek and Julian listen in on some of the most outrageous takes so far.

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

The most annoying convert TradCath in the world, JD Vance, whose cherubic face belies all his bootlicking aggression, gets his moment with Pope Bob. Usha stands behind him in a black mantilla. He hands the pontiff an oversized envelope: an invitation from Donald and Melania to a White House dinner. Bob smiles guardedly as he takes it and without looking at it, setting it on his desk. “I’ll read that at some point,” Vance sputters, “of course, of course.” 

The scene is set for the Church-State tension of whatever phase of global fascism we’re now entering. These ghouls who jail students, disappear immigrants, and lobby for the Trump Gaza resort, shuffle into the Vatican with hats in hand to meet a fellow American who is nothing like their boss, asking for pats on the head, wondering what kind of alliance they can forge, perhaps through anti-wokeness discourse.

The enigmatic response from Pope Bob sums up where we all are as we read the incense swirls for whether he’s going to keep steering the world’s 1.4B Catholics against the tides of late-stage capitalism and environmental disaster, Francis-style. 

Show Notes

Michelle Remembers | Satanic Panic Patreon Collection 

Brief: Deep Church Conspiracy (w/David Lafferty) 

Brief: The CPAC Pope and the Icicle Babies (w/ Brad Onishi)

183: Woke Pope Cancels America's Bishop (w/Mike Lewis)

Sisters of the Little Way

Vatican’s financial watchdog reports decrease in suspicious activities reports in 2024

Why the next Pope faces major money challenges

Pope warns the Vatican pension fund needs urgent reform as employees demand transparency

Cardinal convicted of embezzlement won't participate in conclave for Pope Francis's successor

A cardinal is convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to 5 1/2 years in Vatican trial 

Church defends Indigenous peoples: ‘Doctrine of Discovery’ was never Catholic

Vatican Denounces ‘International Law of Colonization’

Reparations for empire: What the new pope owes to Africa | Slavery

Catholic Order Pledges $100 Million to Atone for Slave Labor and Sales

The Dark History of How the Catholic Church Built Its Massive Wealth

The Vatican—Bulwark of Imperialism

Indigenous leaders hope Vatican's repudiation of oppressive colonial concepts leads to real change

The Man Who Took On Pope Francis: The Story Behind the Viganò Letter

The Excommunication of Archbishop Viganò - Crisis 

Bishop Strickland removed from diocese after accusing pope of backing 'attack on the sacred'

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

Matthew is back today for more with Ben Case: profiling Gene Sharp and the (non)politics of strategic nonviolence, plus his strange funding sources. Also: why did Erica Chenoweth speak out against antifascist Trump protesters in January of 2017, and suggest their research proved that property damage and scuffles with the police would ruin any opposition movement to Trump? Also: where does the funding come from for all this bad research? Gene Sharp worked for the Department of Defense, and today, Bill Ackerman is a top funder of strategic nonviolence research. 

Case is a retired professional Muaythai fighter, an organizer, educator, and writer. He is a researcher at the Center for Work and Democracy and a fellow at the Resistance Studies Initiative. 

Show Notes

Street Rebellion: Resistance Beyond Violence and Nonviolence | Case

Why Civil Resistance Works | Columbia University Press 

Why Not Riot? Interview with Author Ben Case - CounterPunch.org  

Change Agent: Gene Sharp’s Neoliberal Nonviolence (Part One) – Nonsite.org 

Have Repertoire, Will Travel: Nonviolence as Global Contentious Performance 

Violence Will Only Hurt the Trump Resistance | The New Republic

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

You may have grown up with the term “nonviolence” shining like a pole star over every discussion of how we accomplish socio-political change. But what does it really mean? And who defines violence for that matter—beyond the police, the courts, and others in power?

Today, the theory of non-violence has grown beyond its Gandhian, spiritual aspiration roots, while retaining an irrational faith and offering a distorted view of resistance history. It is now a think-tank-approved, purportedly evidence-based method that guarantees movement success. 

That reasoning comes from the pioneering scholarship of the pacifist Gene Sharp in the 1960s, and his inheritors in strategic nonviolence discourse, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan. They argue that Gandhi’s sacred ideal of satyagraha also happens to be the only successful pathway to lasting change—and they have the data to prove it. 

But do they? Nope. Matthew’s guest today persuasively shows that the movements we think of as “nonviolent” never really are. Why don’t we know this? Through a tangle of academic malpractice, spiritual bypassing, liberal wish fulfillment, and erasing anticolonial voices. Oh, and Gene Sharp also got a lot of funding from the Department of Defense.

Benjamin S. Case is a retired professional Muaythai fighter, an organizer, educator, and writer. He is a researcher at the Center for Work and Democracy and a fellow at the Resistance Studies Initiative. 

P.S.: During our conversation, Ben mentioned that there are antifascist fighting clubs out there. Here are a few to look into:

Haymaker in Chicago.

SKN Muay Thai in Pittsburgh, PA.

Balagoon Boxing Club in Philly, PA.

Show Notes

Street Rebellion: Resistance Beyond Violence and Nonviolence | Case

Why Civil Resistance Works | Columbia University Press 

Why Not Riot? Interview with Author Ben Case - CounterPunch.org  

Change Agent: Gene Sharp’s Neoliberal Nonviolence (Part One) – Nonsite.org 

Have Repertoire, Will Travel: Nonviolence as Global Contentious Performance 

Violence Will Only Hurt the Trump Resistance | The New Republic

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

The chat bot flashes its elipsis at the bottom of the screen. What is it thinking, what does it want from you, what do you want from it? Beneath those pixels lies a sea of mined data and lightning storms of electricity heating up servers in barren deserts. What will it find for you in the past labor of the generations?

According to a stunning new article in Rolling Stone, it will find whatever the fuck makes you feel like a god—incuding all the NewAge pablum it has scarfed down—because oops, ChatGPT released a model that is just too sycophantic.

But as we break down today, the AI nonsensient flattery machine is designed to hook you into the regurgitative process of self-seduction. Is this a new spiritual delusion, or more of the same? And what does that kind and agreeable bot conceal?

Show Notes

People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies

Chatgpt induced psychosis

ChatGPT And Generative AI Innovations Are Creating Sustainability Havoc 

LLM Can Be A Dangerous Persuader

You'll Be Astonished How Much Power It Takes to Generate a Single AI Image 

A bottle of water per email: the hidden environmental costs of using AI chatbots

Intelligent Computing: The Latest Advances, Challenges, and Future 

AI Data Centers Pose Regulatory Challenge, Jeopardizing Climate Goals

AI, Climate, and Regulation: From Data Centers to the AI Act 

AI could impact 40 per cent of jobs worldwide in the next decade, UN agency warns

The Future of Jobs Report 2025

History’s Magic Mirror: America’s Economic Crisis and the Weimar Republic of Pre-Nazi Germany

The Great Filter: A possible solution to the Fermi Paradox 

Academic Publisher Sells Authors’ Work to Microsoft for AI Training

Address of the Holy Father to the College of Cardinals (10 May 2025) | LEO XIV 

Capitalism's Fascistic Tendencies — McGowan 

McGowan, Todd. 2016. Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets. Columbia University Press.

Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. 1997. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Verso.

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

It begins with a failed human sacrifice in Detroit in 1932. Some would say it actually starts with an evil god-scientist who created the first white people—white devils, really—some 6,000 years ago. Either way, the Nation of Islam has had an important cultural and political presence for almost a century in America.

Today’s installment of Julian’s Roots of Conspirituality series covers the incredible real world history of this extremist new religious movement, as well as its outlandish sci-fi mythological theology.

Show Notes

UAP in Nation of Islam?

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

In 2022, Oregonians passed Measure 111, which amends the state constitution to declare access to affordable healthcare a right for every citizen. As it happens, this was the first ballot Derek voted on when moving to the state.

Now that the long journey to universal healthcare is a reality in Oregon, what does that actually entail? Derek is joined by two members of the nonprofit organization, Health Care for All Oregon: Collin Stackhouse, the Social Media Coordinator, and Rebecca Schoon, an Associate Professor of Public Health at Pacific University, who’s on the board. Together, they map out the journey ahead.

Health Care for All Oregon

Measure 111 passes, giving Oregonians a constitutional right to access affordable health care

Maga’s era of ‘soft eugenics’: let the weak get sick, help the clever breed

Show Notes

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

Cancer, as physician and author Siddhartha Mukherjee writes, is the emperor of all maladies. The disease—the over 200 different diseases all falling under this umbrella term—has been with us as long as we’ve been us. If anything is truly ancient, it is the cancer cells that are in all of our bodies, just waiting to be turned on if the conditions are right, or if our genes dictate the inevitability.

Deep in wellness land, cancer is something entirely different. It’s avoidable if you stop consuming seed oils, stop using 5G, stop thinking negative thoughts, and by god, stop taking those jabs that cause all the turbo cancers going around. And with every wellness warning comes a wellness solution. Today our correspondent, Mallory DeMille, returns for a deep dive into the treacherous depths of one of the more insidious grifts: treating cancer with the power of…water.

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

Gen X went from leaning slightly right in 2016 to become, as one analysis puts it, “the bedrock of Trumpism.” Derek meditates on what happened to his generation by reading from four different thought pieces on the topic.

Show Notes

Wait, What Is Really Up With Gen X’s Politics?

Is Gen X a Bunch of Trumpers? Maybe That’s the Wrong Question.

How Gen X Became the Trumpiest Generation

How Gen X Went from Raging Against the Machine to Swallowing Misinformation While “Doing Their Own Research”

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

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner was a little different this year. No president. No comedian. The event featured a mea culpa from an Axios journalist who discussed the media’s complicity in failing to expose Biden’s mental decline. Meanwhile, Substack promoted an alternative parallel event called “Not The White House Correspondents’ Dinner” with an email that announced, “a new media order is emerging.” Legit—or just another conspiracy touting MAGA sham?

Julian reports on the proceedings of both events, as well as how the media landscape is shifting in ways that render the definitions of terms like “independent,” “journalism,” and “unbiased” hard to pin down. Digging beneath the surface on Substack, and outlets like The Free Press, and the increasingly mainstreamed far right cult-rag the Epoch Times, all of which claim in some way to represent this emergent new media order, leads him to ask: where is the real home of fact-based independent journalism?

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