Conspirituality

In 2017, 4chan user "Q" started LARPing as a Deep State insider with predictions about Hillary Clinton and the pedophile cabal. 10 months later, the online antifascist world assembled its emergency podcast response team: three dubiously-credentialed shitposters( two using pseudonyms themselves) dedicated to covering “the best conspiracy theories of the post-truth era. Exploring online fever swamps and tripping over deranged historical facts that make conspiracy theories sound sane.”

The digital soldiers of QAnonAnonymous Podcast subjected themselves to the most cursed content the internet has to offer. But the real world they traveled through was just as smelly. They went to live QAnon protests, parades, and conferences. They conducted the first interviews with the QAnon Shaman. They attended ball-slapping workshops to raise their testosterone for the Great Awakening. They caught COVID many, many times, all for the cause. And now, as their reward, they get to see their favorite redpilled celebrity, and Mel Gibson's favorite Jesus, Jim Caviezel, star in the fake-u-mentary, "Sound of Freedom."

It’s been a long road to Hollywood for our guests Travis View and Jake Rockatansky, but this is their red-carpet moment where we get to ask them: How did they like working on this show?

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

Notes from Matthew in response to a great question from a listener:

How do you keep from hating these people? The blasé unimaginative crackpots like Aubrey Marcus, the gaslighting meanderings of RFK Jr., the hordes of ignorant, ignorant, ignorant (trying to keep from saying st*pid) jackasses that follow in their wake, so desperately certain of their completely subjective fever dreams?

It’s not easy, but there are some ways of avoiding hatred and disgust, and it’s important to lean into them.

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

Seven ex-staffers who worked on Marianne Williamson’s campaign have written an open letter describing her campaign as an “exercise in deception.”

Matthew analyzes the open letter, and contextualizes its allegations within Williamson’s worldview and history. 

Show Notes

EXCLUSIVE: Seven Ex-Marianne Williamson Staffers Say Stop Supporting Her 

148: Marianne Williamson and Asshole Jesus — Conspirituality

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

GT Dave's kombucha origin story is the stuff of legend—at least how he frames it. But when the LA Times broke the story of a judge awarding workers nearly half a million dollars in back and overtime pay, citing GT's abuse of employees and contradictory evidence, a different story unfolds.

Derek looks at this kombucha company's origins, unrealistic health claims, and the many troubles its endured over the decades, and how GT's response aligns with the conspiritualist playbook.

L.A.’s kombucha empire exploited workers for years

Meet the King of Kombucha

What Science Says About the Potential Health Benefits of Kombucha

The Disinformation Dozen

Toxic Twitter

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

Tobias Rose-Stockwell is a media researcher, writer, designer, and author of the new book, Outrage Machine: How Tech Amplifies Discontent, Disrupts Democracy—And What We Can Do About It. The book deals with tough questions about who we are as individuals and a society, reminding us that we all help shape our surroundings by what we pay attention to, how we understand and process the information we ingest, and perhaps most importantly, what we do with it.

Tobias joins Derek for an in-depth conversation about the history of news and the future of media literacy.

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

Altered states exist on a spectrum, from enhancing human flourishing to perpetuating dangerous delusions. Daniel Pinchbeck’s recent comments on our book inspire Julian’s journey into psychedelics, the 2012 prophecy, the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, and the brain typologies that underlie visionary religious experience. Tune in for practical advice and guidelines about drugs, awareness practice, cults, and staying sane.

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

Deep Cut pulls from our bonus episode archive to unearth previous ideas that remain relevant today.

Survivor shame over what has been lost, and how one has been complicit.

Apologist shame: turned inside out and externalized as aggression.

Popular shaming, which tries to deflect attention from how close to home cultic dynamics really are.

In the cult landscape, shame is a common denominator. In this contemplation, Matthew unpacks various aspects, with help from the writing of cult theorists and recovery counselors Alexandra Stein, Daniel Shaw, and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi.

Deep Cut Intro Music

Single Origins — Pete Kuzma

Show Notes

Primo Levi: The Drowned and the Saved

The Relational System of the Traumatizing Narcissist — Shaw

Rachel Bernstein's “One More Thing” at the end of Betrayal and Power w/ Nitai Joseph, former Hare Krishna — S4E5.

All of Rachel Bernstein’s IndoctriNation podcast.

What’s Behind the Blowback You’ll Get When You Engage Cult Members

"Deception, Dependence, Dread of Leaving" — Langone

"I Got Mine-ism"

Selected Bibliography:

Ainsworth, Mary D. Salter. Patterns of Attachment: a Psychological Study of the Strange Situation. Routledge, 2015.

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Penguin Classics, 2017.

Freyd, Jennifer J. Betrayal Trauma: the Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse. Harvard University Press, 1998.

Freyd, Jennifer J., and Pamela Birrell. Blind to Betrayal: Why We Fool Ourselves We Arent Being Fooled. Wiley, 2013.

Hassan, Steven. Combating Cult Mind Control: the #1 Best-Selling Guide to Protection, Rescue, and Recovery from Destructive Cults. Freedom of Mind Press, 2016.

Kramer, Joel, and Diana Alstad. The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power. North Atlantic Books/Frog, 1993.

Lalich, Janja, and Madeleine Landau. Tobias. Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships. Bay Tree Pub., 2006.

Lalich, Janja. Escaping Utopia: Growing up in a Cult, Getting out, and Starting Over. Routledge, 2018.

Langone, Michael D. Recovery from Cults: Help for Victims of Psychological and Spiritual Abuse. W.W. Norton, 1995.

Lifton, Robert Jay. Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: a Study of “Brainwashing” in China.W.W. Norton, 1961.

Miller, Alice, et al. For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2002.

Oakes, Len. Prophetic Charisma: the Psychology of Revolutionary Religious Personalities. Syracuse University Press, 1997.

Shaw, Daniel. Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014.

Stein, Alexandra. Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017.

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

We’ve been tracking Bobby’s misinformation, contradictions, and cursed networks for three years. And now he’s having his moment, and it’s anyone’s guess how far he’ll run. But why is he so appealing on the presidential stage? Why is he polling at 20%, with his favorability in double digits against Biden? 

It’s not just that his endless rhetoric appeals to libertarians on the right and paranoiacs on the left. It’s that he casts a charismatic spell that echoes, exacerbates, and amplifies some of the deepest conflicts in the American psyche—between tradition and rebellion, nostalgia and grievance, idealism and paranoia.

Bobby, you see, is never quite who he seems to be. In one moment he’s the prodigal prince of Camelot, seen through a sepia lens. In the next he’s a tortured and braying conspiracy theorist, lit by the blue light of countless screens.

Show Notes

RFK Jr. says COVID may have been 'ethnically targeted' to spare Jews 

A Kennedy and His Mentor Part Ways Over River Group - The New York Times 

Robert F Kennedy Jr says he has ‘conversations with dead people’ | Democrats | The Guardian 

Transcript for Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #388

Beware: we ignore Robert F Kennedy Jr’s candidacy at our peril | Naomi Klein | The Guardian 

Most People Believe In JFK Conspiracy Theories | FiveThirtyEight

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

Derek unpacks what’s really going on in conspiritualist messages about the "climate change narrative" and how they use an assault of varying degrees of credible information to conflate issues, some of which they then monetize.

Then, he looks at how messages go horribly astray when the full context is missing—something quite common in social media, and which upcoming main episode guest, Tobias Rose-Stockwell, calls “context creep.”

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

A granular—let’s say quantum-sized—look at how RFK Jr.’s wealthiest and most influential New Age supporters are thinking about his candidacy. Aubrey Marcus and Charles Eisenstein disclosed it all on a two-hour podcast released on June 21, providing a nearly-perfect encapsulation of every theme of our beat. Their performance shows how dedicated conspiritualists keep the faith as they graduate out of the group-encounter retreat economy and into the mainstream political arena.

Show Notes

The Future Of The World Depends On Us w/ Charles Eisenstein 

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