Conspirituality

For 22 years, astrologers, channelers, and UFO enthusiasts have run booths next to crystal healers, purveyors of esoteric books and pseudoscience products, and paranormal enthusiasts at Los Angeles’s Airport Hilton. More recently, this event—the Conscious Life Expo—has increasingly featured speakers spouting red-pilled conspiracy theories about COVID, vaccines, and the Satanic alien reptilian cabal coming for your children.

To get an insider’s view, Julian donned his gray baseball camp and grabbed his recorder to do his own research on the latest iteration of conference room conspirituality.

Introduction to CymaTones cymatic sound therapy 

Activate your Pineal Gland: An introduction to your third eye and exercises to awaken the higher mind: Ruehlig, Bianca 

Shawn Buckley, Trucker Lawyer  

Ottawa's use of Emergencies Act against convoy protests was unreasonable, violated Charter, court rules

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This is a newly favorite mantra that RFK Jr is using on the presidential stump. 

The subtext, uttered in the shadow of a pandemic that this guy did what he could to minimize and bypass, carries a lot of American spiritual—or maybe pseudospiritual—baggage. 

Digging into what he means and what his demographic hears when he says “There are worse things than dying,” can tell us a lot about the status of Death, Grief and Belief in the American psyche—and even global capitalism—in this volatile time.

This episode is a recording of a talk Matthew gave at the 2024 Symposium on Death and Bereavement Studies in January, organized online by Terri Daniel of Portland, OR.

Show Notes

2024 Symposium - Death, Grief, and Belief

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Brad Onishi of Straight White American Jesus sits down with Matthew to analyze the debut of “America’s Bishop,” Joseph Strickland, on the CPAC stage, where he blessed MAGA Christian Nationalism with his purple finery and endless torrent of anti-choice bafflegab. 

Strickland—removed as Archbishop of Tyler, Texas in November by the ultra-woke Pope Francis—has hit the influencer circuit to firm up the sometimes-precarious Evangelical-Catholic alliance on the backs of women. His aw-shucks “humility” and East Texas drawl offers this reactionary movement genteel cover for its aggressive fever dreams. He is, as Onishi puts it, the Catholic Ned Flanders who conspires with Mr. Burns at night.

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Show Notes

Brad Onishi 

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

Weekly Roundup: Embryos are People Now? — Straight White American Jesus 

Nazis mingle openly at CPAC, spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories and finding allies 

Bishop Strickland at CPAC — LIfesite News (redpill site warning!)

The making of Bishop Strickland - Where Peter Is 

Strickland's Adventurous Online Legacy - Mike Lewis Extra 

Bishop Strickland's "Letter from a Friend" 

Twitter photo: Strickland with Fournier and Pavone

Catholic Priest Uses Aborted Fetus On Altar In Appeal For Donald Trump (Trigger warning. Image blurred, but still, JFC.) 

Fr. Frank Pavone uses aborted fetus in message for Election Day | National Catholic Reporter

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In the early days of the pandemic, most of the cultural focus was on the necessity of quarantine measures and the distinction between mild and severe COVID infections. Yet by May 2020, some were experiencing the phenomenon of long COVID. Now understood as a post-acute infection syndrome, patients suffering from it have endured mockery, stigmatization, and accusations of lying. Nonetheless, support and patient advocacy groups have led the way, first in demanding medical and social recognition, and now in consulting with receptive researchers on diagnosis and treatment.

We’re joined by science journalist Tara Haelle, whose work has appeared in Scientific American, NY Times, Washington Post, and more. She’s also the Infectious Disease Core Topic Leader at the Association of Health Journalists. Her work covering the pandemic, vaccines, and the Long COVID connection, which combines reporting on the latest science as well as writing from patients and patient advocates, has been indispensable in understanding this spectrum of diseases.

Show Notes

Possible contender for a Long COVID blood test 

RECOVER trial for Long COVID Treatments

New Yorker on the Yale LISTEN Study

LISTEN Study website

50% average lower prevalence in vaccinated people.

Tara Haelle’s Long COVID Connection project.

Opinion | Ed Yong: Reporting on Long Covid Taught Me to Be a Better Journalist - The New York Times

Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time | Disability Studies Quarterly 

COVERING LONG COVID | Lygia Navarro 

The Sick Times

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After going undercover at the Conscious Life Expo, Julian examines the weird synchronicities between himself and his mirror-world doppelganger, the eccentric Rhodesian conspiritualist, Sacha Stone. Close in age and born in the same African country, both white men got involved in New Age spirituality as aspiring rock musicians in their twenties. How then did their paths diverge so radically, even as they converged in Los Angeles?

Stone invokes a fantastical millenia-long cosmic holy war, claims the pyramids were charging stations for UFOs, and praises Vladamir Putin. Julian gives a brief real world history of the British Empire, South African Apartheid, and the legendary Zulu and Ndbele nations—and wonders, how much of Sacha’s macabre preoccupations are just white guilt?

Stay tuned for a cameo from Julian’s Dad.

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A contrarian doctor “just asking questions.” Super reasonable. Certainly not anti-vax, just a regular guy who grievance-mongers about quarantine measures and mocks people afraid of long Covid. Vinay Prasad cuts a different type of figure on the conspiracy-influencer stage. He fits right in with his pal, the charismatic guru-esque Dr. Zubin Damania, and might just pop up in your YouTube feed alongside Andrew Huberman and Peter Attia.

Prasad demands unrealistic randomized controlled trial data for everything on his podcast, including protecting ICU patients from Covid via visiting restrictions. Who’s volunteering for that control group?!

Julian sits down with returning guest, Dr. Jonathan Howard, the author of We Want Them Infected. They talk about Prasad (among others) who play a sensationalist science-distortion role in the digital economy and their connections to libertarian think tanks like AIER (architects of the Great Barrington Declaration) and Brownstone Institute—who’s founder, Jeffrey Tucker, wants to repeal laws around child labor and underage smoking.

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January 6, 2021. MAGA hats, tactical gear, American flags, poles turned into clubs. Another flag appears: white, with a blue corner square containing a red Latin cross. Another that proclaims “Jesus is King.”

If you’re agnostic or atheist, you might get that old familiar feeling. Horror at the irrational devotion, nausea at the toxic masculine violence that justifies itself as holy. 

But what if you recognize that Protestant flag from your own church sanctuary? What if you recognize in that mob people from your church choir? Will you wonder how their faith was replaced by conspiracy theories, and how their Jesus turned into Trump? 

That’s the question posed by “God & Country,” a new documentary by Dan Partland and produced by Rob Reiner, based on the book The Power Worshippers by Katherine Stewart. Stewart is an investigative reporter and author who has covered religious liberty, politics, policy, and education for over a decade. Her journalism appears in the NY Times, NBC, the New Republic, and the New York Review of Books. She joins us today to discuss the dangers of growing Christian Nationalism in America.

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The Cleveland Clinic's website states that leaky gut is a "hypothetical condition." Yet Cleveland Clinic physician, Mark Hyman, claims that leaky gut is at the foundation of autism, depression, cancer, diabetes, and much, much more—and has solutions to sell you.

Derek investigates the manipulative and contradictory world of functional medicine.

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An anti-vax, COVID-grievance, climate-science denying, communism panic-generating film by Mikki Willis just won “Best Documentary Feature” at the Santa Monica International Film Festival. 

Julian attended the festival in order to track how Willis’s latest paranoid pseudomentary, “Plandemic 3: The Great Awakening,” was platformed at this annual fete held in affluent Santa Monica alongside two other conspiracy films: “Shot Dead” and “We Will Not Be Silenced.” These three films include a who’s-who of conspiritualists: David Icke, JP Sears, Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, Brian Rose, Peter McCullough, and newer “medical whistle-blowers.”

This is the on-the-ground story about how a 30-year-old normie independent film festival got red-pilled into platforming such dangerous misinformation.

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When she’s not talking to her angel guides, Christiane Northrup says that taking Vitamin D is better than the HPV vaccine for preventing cervical cancer. When Kelly Brogan isn’t denying germ theory, she’s telling thousands of women in her online programmes to stop taking not only their SSRIs, but also birth control and Tylenol. When Naomi Wolf isn’t explaining to Steve Bannon where women’s liberation went wrong, she’s worried that vaccinated women are poisoning non-vaccinated women just by walking past them.

The train of messianic women wellness influencers rumbles on and on. But their pseudoscience claims and twisted forms of spiritualized feminism meet a brick wall in the work and advocacy of our guest today, Dr. Jen Gunter. Hailing from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Dr. Gunter is an OB/GYN who has been offering actual women’s health information through a solidly feminist lens for decades as the author of several books, including 2019’s The Vagina Bible, 2021’s The Menopause Manifesto, and her newest book, which dropped just 3 weeks ago: Blood: The science, medicine, and mythology of menstruation.

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