Conspirituality

Methylene blue will give you more energy! It’s neuroprotective! Your skin will never look better! Your bunghole will never be bluer!

This week, Derek investigates one of biohacking’s hottest trends: a textile dye that does, in fact, have medical applications—just not the ones optimizers are promoting, and optimizing. He’ll look into this organic compound’s history, how it’s being marketed by the butter coffee guy, and finally, reading from Aubrey Marcus’s latest newsletter on blue buttholes.

Show Notes

So You Want to Pop Into a Hyperbaric Oxygen Chamber to Rid Yourself of Wrinkles?

Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy: Get the Facts

When Medicines Go Rogue, Part 1: Methylene Blue

-- -- --
Support us on Patreon

Pre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada

Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | Julian

Original music by EarthRise SoundSystem

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

There's no Teal Swan without the Satanic Panic. And there's no Satanic Panic without the 1980 publication of Michelle Remembers, by Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith.

In this first of three segments on this melted book, Matthew and Julian cover its historical, cultural, and mass media context. We start with a review of a 1985 20/20 episode called “The Devil Worshippers” for a taste of how mainstream outlets hosted cranks like Pazder, giving him a hall pass on evidence, and overlooking how his Catholic fetishes and paranoias played a huge role in the fictions he spun.

The post Vatican 2 context is crucial, especially as we bear witness to the current political triumphs of Trad-Cath propaganda and politics in our post-Roe, QAnon -fried world. For help, we look to an excellent essay by social historian Bernard Doherty about the genre and elements of the Catholic Horror Film, which begins with Rosemary's Baby in 1968. This reactionary genre attempted to respond to modernizing—or postmodernizing, as Jordan Peterson might say—changes in Church doctrine.

Bottom line? The Satanic Panic largely begins in and is sustained by Catholic-flavoured conspirituality anxiety about secularization, sex, babies, and abortion.

CORRECTIONS: My dad informs me that I've made some Pope mistakes! Pius X was the last legitimate Pope according to the sedavacantists, and John XXIII, not Paul XXIII, opened the Vatican 2 proceedings. Thx dad. MR

Show Notes

Michael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall cover Michelle Remembers with great skill.

"20/20" the Devil Worshippers - May 16, 1985

West of Memphis movie review & film summary

Mel Gibson: The man without a pope

The Smoke of Satan on the Silver Screen: The Catholic Horror Film, Vatican II, and the Revival of Demonology | Journal for the Academic Study of Religion

-- -- --
Support us on Patreon

Pre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada

Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | Julian

Original music by EarthRise SoundSystem

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

Mystery topic today. Emergency episode. Breaking story. Amazing if true! Totally transformative plot twist. You gotta listen through for the big reveal, and then hit smash for more.

Spoiler alert: QAnon was foreshadowed by Pizzagate, but Pizzagate was foreshadowed by a moral panic in London, England that was driven in part by someone the three of us are karmically bound to, for good or ill, forever.

But first, Derek’s got a This Week in Conspirituality segment on the boom times for pseudoscience telehealth. Psychic healing for Zoom, as he calls it.

Show Notes

Network of right-wing health care providers is making millions off hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, hacked data reveals

The Anti-vax founder of America’s Frontline Doctors now has a license to practice in Florida

US cardiologist makes false claims about Covid-19 vaccination

Hoaxed

Teal Swan allegations documents

Re P and Q (Children: Care Proceedings: Fact Finding)

Jacqui Farmer's "Hampstead Research"

Illuminati Party! - Reasons Not to Be Scared of the Illuminati.

Charlotte Ward’s conspirituality.org About page

Full article: The Emergence of Conspirituality

Hoaxtead Research

Charlotte writing as Jacqui on conspirituality.org

Charlotte Ward denounces ‘Hampstead psy op’ | HOAXTEAD RESEARCH

Charlotte Ward - Academia.edu

Ward cites Icke

-- -- --
Support us on Patreon

Pre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada

Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | Julian

Original music by EarthRise SoundSystem

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

Julian and Matthew take a long look at the 1999 film Teal Swan was reportedly obsessed with as a teen. Girl, Interrupted is a bold adaptation of a 1993 memoir by the writer Susanna Kaysen about the 18 months she spent undergoing treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder in a Massachusetts psychiatric facility in the late 1960s.

This study is provoked by a memory recounted by Swan's childhood friend, Diana Hansen Ribera, that Swan identified with the character of Lisa Rowe in the film. Angelina Jolie won an Oscar for her searing performance of Rowe, a sociopath.

Show Notes

Girl, Interrupted — Susanna Kaysen

1607: Growing up with Teal Swan - Diana Hansen Ribera

Mad, Bad, and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors by Lisa Appignanesi

Brittany Murphy: Inside Her Sudden Death at 32 That Still Confounds Hollywood

-- -- --
Support us on Patreon

Pre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada

Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | Julian

Original music by EarthRise SoundSystem

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

The book is filed. Our mental health is in check. And, as it turns out, Matthew found a new guru. We return to trio work by investigating his fellow Canadian's cure for, uh, anything, or maybe something, as well diving into two biohacking conferences and the conspiritualist's new favorite fascist on the block.

Show Notes

Tip of the iceberg: erectile dysfunction and COVID-19 | International Journal of Impotence Research

Will in the News, TV & Internet Culture

Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism | Open Culture

The Cruelty Is the Point 

Alessio Di Giulio's Racist Selfie With Roma Woman Enrages Italy

Meloni holding melons

CPAC: The Whole World is Watching - Giorgia Meloni

Dal rugby allo yoga, tutto lo sport di Giorgia Meloni

Pierre Poilievre rubs his old wood 

-- -- --
Support us on Patreon

Pre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada

Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | Julian

Original music by EarthRise SoundSystem

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

If you tune into your favorite Instagram wellness influencer or financial life coach, you’ll learn that money is really a state of mind—right? Thinking the right thoughts is the truest judge of character, and therefore indicative of your bottom line. This week Derek looks at research from behavioral economics, which found the perceived relationship between wealth and morality dates back to post-WWII America—and has damaged the poorest among us for generations. He weighs evidence from this field, which looks at the real societal and political causes of wealth disparity, against the metaphysical bullshit that proponents of the “mindset creates wealth” uber-text, A Course in Miracles, try to sell you.

Show Notes

Why we shouldn’t push a positive mindset on those in poverty

The Causal Effects of Place on Health and Longevity

-- -- --
Support us on Patreon

Pre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada

Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | Julian

Original music by EarthRise SoundSystem

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

Some of the most valuable material that come to us from Paula Marino's Open Shadow film of 2017 is an extended interview with Swan's parent's, the Bosworths. They speak about Swan's sensory sensitivity as a young child, and how that morphed into a staunchly independent but sometimes isolated social life. They describe Swan's secret runic writing, their belief in her capacities as a medical intuitive, and discuss the gaps in psychiatric care that failed them all when her mental health needed help. This episode examines this interview, and then cross-checks some aspects against the account of Swan's childhood friend, Diana Hansen Ribera.

Here we have the unique insight into parents speaking vulnerably and transparently about their baffling child—which means we can really lean into the primal material that pre-exists the charged questions about whether Teal Swan is  running a cult or encouraging suicide. What we find, between the accounts of the Bosworths and Ribera, is a collection of commonplace phenomena: high sensitivity, parents learning as they go, the intrusion of internet pornography, and a likely abusive figure who was too close to the family.

In this episode, Matthew and Julian discuss the mystery of familial memory, idealizing vs. pathologizing children, the appeals of fantasy as a mode of relief, whether the Satanic Panic was a collective cry for help to resolve commonplace domestic and community abuse, and the possibility that cult formation is a social form of post traumatic play.

Show Notes

Open Shadow — Paula Marino

Do You Cry Easily? You May Be a 'Highly Sensitive Person'

The science behind why some of us are shy

Study: Pornography does not cause violent sex crimes

When Children Act Out Sexually: A Guide for Parents and Teachers

1607: Growing up with Teal Swan - Diana Hansen Ribera

“Forbidden Games”: Post-Traumatic Child's Play — Lenore Terr

Valerie L. Dripchak (2007). Posttraumatic Play: Towards Acceptance and Resolution. , 35(2), 125–134. doi:10.1007/s10615-006-0068-y

-- -- --
Support us on Patreon

Pre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada

Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | Julian

Original music by EarthRise SoundSystem

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

Are you ready to biohack your brain with buttered coffee? How about going “within” at the Drybar of acupuncture? What if we told you that cannabis will catapult your chakras into higher consciousness—all it costs is a $5,000 retreat entry fee, not including airfare and hotel? In the $4.4 trillion wellness industry, is any cost really too expensive to achieve true self-care—even if it never really seems like you arrive anywhere at all?

Rina Raphael was getting burnt out as a millennial digital news producer at NBC News. And so she did what anyone would do: she moved to Los Angeles in search of that self-care. Yet she could never shake her journalistic chops, and so she ended up writing about the wellness industry for the NY Times, the LA Times, Fast Company, and other publications. Her skeptical eye and earnest curiosity lead her to write her brand new book, The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop, and the False Promise of Self-Care. And she’s here this week to talk to us this week about her adventures in modern spirituality—its teachings as well as its traps.

Show Notes

The Gospel of Wellness

Well To Do — Rina Raphael

-- -- --
Support us on Patreon

Pre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada

Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | Julian

Original music by EarthRise SoundSystem

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

Christina Flinders returns for the second of a two-part tour through her experience with cultic dynamics, conspirituality, and the long road towards finding her place in the world. 

Picking up where she left off, Flinders discusses breaking free of the sexually abusive cult of Eknath Easwaren, finding ambivalent agency as a stripper, and then graduating to yoga teaching—where she then had to dodge being redpilled.

Thanks again to Christina for her generosity and lucidity, and her family for their support.

If you'd like to share your story with us and our Patreon community of listeners, please get in touch.

-- -- --
Support us on Patreon

Pre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada

Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | Julian

Original music by EarthRise SoundSystem

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

Did you know that Joe Biden is a Satanic alien Nazi pedophile intent on bringing about the New World Order? Or that Donald Trump is the only thing that will save us from complete tyranny? How about the fact that COVID vaccines are bioweapons destroying the global population? But that’s okay, because colloidal silver is the magic bullet that will boost your immune system to help you fend off this scamdemic. Add that to your herbal stack alongside Lung Health Organic Herbal Spray which is definitively proven to boost your immunity even though it’s never been clinically tested.

Oh, and have we mentioned that chocolate is an octave of the sun?

Strap in, folks, because this week we’re finally looking at David “Avocado” Wolfe, whose paranoid Telegram channel boasts all of the above claims and much, much more. And we’re not just clipping recent podcast talks and driver’s seat rants. We’re joined by longtime journalist, health food marketing guru, and co-founder of the website, Ethos, Jill Ettinger, who worked side-by-side with David for many years. She’ll tell her side of it—and honestly, it’s not all bad, except for recent years. In effect, we’re looking at a conspiracy-prone health food guru turn full conspiritualist over the last two decades. Bonus: Jill brought Derek along to many events across the country in the aughts, and David was often there, so we’ll hear about this descent from people who watched it happen.

-- -- --
Support us on Patreon

Pre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada

Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | Julian

Original music by EarthRise SoundSystem

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