Conspirituality

Marianne Williamson—New Age matriarch and popularizer of A Course in Miracles—is polling at 9%. Muscular Catholic antivax entrepreneur Bobby Kennedy Jr is polling at 20% or more: Rasmussen has him in a dead heat with Biden. 

And Mr. “Coronavirus is a Coronation for all,” Charles Eisenstein, has just disclosed that he’s working on Bobby’s campaign as Director of Messaging. Holy shit.

It’s like our book is so accurate that Steve Bannon fed a digital ARC into a LLM to spit out AIs of all the characters in it so he could play them like chess pieces across the 2024 electoral map.

Matthew and Julian take stock of this new stage: the routinization and institutionalization of conspirituality.

Show notes available on Patreon.

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Another Kennedy is running for President. But discussion of his anti-vaccine activism often overlooks how it affects people with autism. Julian talks to Eric Michael Garcia, political correspondent for The Independent, and author of We're Not Broken: Changing The Autism Conversation, about the human cost.

Show Notes

We’re Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation — Eric Garcia

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What "really" happened during the pandemic? Conspiracists have decided to take a victory lap. They were right, you see? The vaccines failed, and besides, they were super dangerous. COVID obviously came out of a lab. Masks were useless, and the lock-downs were completely unnecessary forms of totalitarian oppression. The authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, who were censored on social media, were right all along.

Not so fast.

Our guest today is Dr. Jonathan Howard, who not only did grueling service at Bellevue Hospital in NYC (as the first wave raged, and corpses were stacked in meat trucks) but has put in the time to create a comprehensive document of how contrarian doctors shaped cultural perceptions during the pandemic. He takes the title of his new book, We Want Them Infected, from a quote found in a series of emails from July 2020.

Trump-appointed science-advisor to the HHS, Paul Alexander, urged officials there and at the FDA, and the CDC, to pursue a herd immunity strategy for COVID-19. "There is no other way," he wrote. "We need to establish herd, and it only comes about when we allow non-high-risk groups to expose themselves to the virus. PERIOD. Infants, kids, teens, young people, middle-aged with no conditions have zero to little risk. So we use them to develop herd. We want them infected."

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In 1970, farmer, writer, and environmental activist Wendell Berry published his essay, "Think Little." In it, he writes about the dangers of not making your public causes private causes as well, depending too much on outside organizations to make decisions, and—this is key—of how autonomy should lead to the greater good and the recognition of interdependence.

Many of these messages resonate in the conspirituality world. Derek frames the essay before reading it in full.

Show Notes

The World-Ending Fire — Wendell Berry

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In the post-truth world, journalists who report facts are disparaged as perpetuating the narrative while candidates who hold the appropriate qualifications are smeared as deep state operatives. Likewise, a career spent studying terrorism, online conspiracy theories, and digital propaganda becomes "evidence" of opposing free speech and the American way.

Our guest today became the "main character" on Twitter in April, subject to information requests from Congress and labeled the "leader of the Censorship Industrial Complex" from her perch at the center of a conspiracy web in which Big Tech, government intelligence agencies, and woke university think tanks secretly silenced free speech online.

Her name is Renée DiResta, and Julian talks to her about her extensive study of online propaganda. She tells us about the unfolding digital information crisis, of which the Twitter Files is just be the most recent example.

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What the hell happened between the Dalai Lama and that Indian boy? The internet served up a raft of painfully inflammatory takes, so I took a month to talk with Tibetologists and review the literature on sexual abuse in Tibetan Buddhist contexts. 

This is a deep, tangled dive. Content warnings apply. 

Chapters:

Full Show Notes on Patreon

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We've seen it over and over again: somehow, in some way, globalists are involved. George Soros is pulling the strings. Jews will replace us, with other minorities, or fund the interests that are against "us."

Derek talks with The Banter founder, Ben Cohen, about the modern state of antisemitism. They also discuss Russell Brand's meteoric rise into right-wing celebrity, as well as Aubrey Marcus's uninformed takes on vaccines and politics.

Show Notes

The Banter

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Did you know that it’s not the sun that causes cancer, but sunscreen? Or that sunscreen is actually a Big Pharma creation to keep you from receiving the sun’s magical healing properties? How about the fact that sunscreen molecules can be found in your brain 10 years after application? And don’t even get me started on the life-changing effects of exposing your asshole to direct sunshine. 

Ok, I promise that’s the last time I’m going to mention asshole sunning during this episode. As for the rest of those equally-absurd claims, I’ll be talking to cosmetic chemist, Michelle Wong, aka Lab Muffin Beauty Science, to dispose of the gibberish and give me a serious 101 on sunscreen. Before that, I’ll be talking to disinformation analyst Sara Aniano about the connection between the anti-sunscreen movement and antisemitism—because yes, that’s a thing, too.

Show Notes

Sara Aniano on Twitter

Michelle Wong on Instagram | TikTok

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Florida governor Ron DeSantis appointed right-wing propagandist, Christopher Rufo, along with other conservative Christian education-activists, to the board of the tiny, progressive New College in Sarasota, FL this past January.

They fired the president, installed prayer at the board meetings, forbade personal pronouns in faculty email signatures, and claimed DeSantis’s electoral victory gave them a constitutional mandate to make whatever changes they want.

The invaders frame this hostile take-over as a test-case model to “recapture” universities across the state and the country.

But who is Rufo really? He’s the guy behind the manufactured moral panic over Critical Race Theory that set conservative media, school boards and city council meetings ablaze with fear-mongering over “woke Marxism” in 2021.

New College is the latest conquest in his explicit long-game to remake the fabric of America, one sadistic lie at a time.

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Marianne Williamson? Inexperienced? Not at all.

In fact, she does have a ton of experience… in New Age, on-stage pseudotherapy, where she solves the problems of the troubled with memorized lines from A Course in Miracles. She’s been doing these sessions at workshops and retreats for decades, and the schtick is always the same: if only the person would change their minds about their problem, the world would be healed. 

While this may fly on the workshop circuit, if you listen carefully you’ll hear that she gives the same answer on the stump.

It comes through most clearly when she’s pressed on questions of strategy. She will instantly pivot to talking about the spirit and the soul. The effect is a disarming oscillation between the political and the personal. Are we talking about defeating fascists? No, no, that’s too worldly! We’re talking about opening our hearts. And if that feels good during a politically tense exchange, it’s because she changed the subject.

To see how this sleight-of-hand works, Matthew examines two classic Williamson encounters to show that the answers she gives on the stump aren’t much different from the answers she gives on her New Age retreats. 

Show Notes

That Time Byron Katie Gaslit a Follower about Trump | by Matthew Remski 

I'm Afraid of Trump—The Work of Byron Katie

Being Rejected for Your Spiritual Beliefs | Q&A With Marianne Williamson 

Mindfulness can make you selfish: A pioneering new study examines the social effects of mindfulness 

Marianne Williamson with TYT's John Iadarola & Francesca Fiorentini

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