Conspirituality

Matthew responds to the robust feedback on the Sam-Harris-is-a-highbrow-conspiritualist bonus, and then stretches the terms around harm in the conspirituality sphere in another way, by looking at the spectrum of agency offered by different wellness/spirituality products. He interrogates the premise implicit in some of our reporting that the cognitive errors and magical thinking of alt-health and New Age paradigms are all on a slippery slope to ruin. TLDR: isn’t it always more about sociology than ideology?

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When Mike Flynn posted a video on July 4, 2020 in which his family recited QAnon slogans, it cemented the disgraced former National Security Advisor and U.S. Army lieutenant general as a MAGA patriot super-hero. On September 17, just 14 short months later, Flynn took the stage, bathed in light at the Lord of Hosts Church in Omaha, Nebraska to lead a political prayer that was a fiery angelic call-to-arms. But, oops! It turns out that this prayer traces back to New Age doomsday cult leader, Elizabeth Clare Prophet. Now the Q-faithful have turned on their hero, accusing him of being in league with the Satanic cabal. We’ll ask today’s guest host, Sean Prophet—who happens to be the eldest son of that cult leader—how he got out, and how we got here.

Show Notes

The Radical Secular podcast with Sean Prophet

Relevant episodes:

9: QAnon and Conspirituality: with Matthew Remski - 08.24.20

16: Before Q, There Was CUT: with Joe Szimhart - 10.19.20

22: Getting out of Cults and Harmful Religions - Bonus Episode

54: Blavatsky, the I Am, and The Summit Lighthouse - 07.19.21

Black Sun Journal » Happy Birthday, Mom!: 2006 Article by Sean Prophet on final interaction with Elizabeth Clare Prophet

Church Universal and Triumphant - Nightline - May 17th 1990

CUT/Summit Lighthouse on Oprah 5 with Streiker and Hassan

QAnon Fall Out from Mike Flynn using I Am Prayer

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Derek shares a story from his time as a Lululemon brand ambassador to highlight the toxic merging of spiritual practices and consumerism. Not only does he detail Lulu's post-Chip Wilson pivot in an attempt to "own yoga," he also explores the histories of branding, money, and markets in an attempt to understand how we arrived at the influencer culture that dominates social media today. 

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We've talked a lot on this podcast about the selfie sermon: the kind of iPhone video native to Instagram influencers. Easily weaponized by conspiritualists, this sermon is equal parts intimate confessional, prophecy download, and motivational coaching, directly transmitted from your favorite self-anointed maverick expert. Social media seems perfectly designed for such hypnotic performances and spiritual darshans. But in the brick-and-mortar world, yoga teachers have long blurred the line between acting and teaching, space holding and theater, and ritual ceremony and fitness. If all the world's a stage, as Shakespeare had it, the wooden planks of the yoga studio—and the digital platforms built in ether—demand that teachers embrace a role, adopt a script, and sell a story to their audience. What we want to know is: where does the performance end and yoga begin, or perhaps more to the point, is there even a difference?

Our guest host today is Jill Miller, who many listeners will know from her hugely influential body of work in yoga and movement as founder of Tune-Up Fitness. She's also a former actor, which played an important role in her transition to full-time yoga instructor. We're going to start today with an excerpt from her 2017 TED-style talk that she gave in Toronto titled, “Lights, Camera, Yoga."

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Kyle Rittenhouse walks away from the courthouse while Ahmaud Arbery's killers were found guilty and "QAnon Shaman," Jacob Chansley, was received significant jail time. Our opinions on each of these cases are likely determined by our political affiliations, which in turn are a reflection of how we think about morality, crime, and punishment.

Julian draws on scientific research into how genetics and the brain shape our politics, thought experiments in moral philosophy, and the work of moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

As he questions whether or not any of us have freely chosen to be the good ones, he wonders if a way out of our toxic polarization might be found through understanding the underlying  moral values and emotional reactions that drive one another's political beliefs.

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COVID has been a recruiting windfall for hate groups in Canada, with new alliances and networks forged between white supremacists, xenophobes, and ethnonationalists in the fire of accelerated conspiracism. Joining Matthew to map out this landscape are street-level anti-hate activists Elizabeth Simons, the deputy director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, Dan Collen, a researcher with the Neuberger Holocaust Education Center's Online Hate Education and Research Project, and Morgan Yew, a video journalist and DJ from Kamloops, whose coverage of Toronto's anti-lockdown protests has been rich and revealing.

We cover a lot in this one: the “irony poisoning” white nationalist recruiting tactics that target 14 year-old boys, the rogue’s gallery of extremists wreaking havoc at anti-lockdown rallies, racists trying on “sovereign citizen” pseudolaw in the courts, and their craven appropriation of Indigenous rights discourse when they lurch into “Pretendian” territory. We’ll also look at the People’s Party of Canada, and discuss why it is not very smart to write it off as QAnon foolishness.

Content Warning: analysis of hateful views, including notes from a white supremacist recruiting manual that is instructing followers on how to indoctrinate children.

Show Notes

Canadian Anti-Hate Network

Dan Collen’s fantastic articles on Medium: dancollen.medium.com

Morgan Yew’s awesome Twitter feed

Canadian Anti-Semites and Far-Right Conspiracy Theorists Try New Tactic: Aligning with Indigenous Communities

Mediasmarts

Learning for Justice | Education Resources

Wisdom2Action – Facilitate Change. Strengthen Communities.

The 519- nonprofit promoting 2SLGBTQ+ inclusion serving Toronto - The 519 - Space For Change - The519

Egale Canada - nonprofit promoting 2SLGBTQ+ inclusion serving Canada Home - Egale

CASSA - Council of Agencies Serving South Asians - http://cassa.on.ca/

The Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre - https://www.holocaustcentre.com/

Chinese Canadian National Council for Social Justice - https://ccncsj.ca/

Timeline cleanse. Some of Morgan’s video nurturance journalism.

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Bonus episode, piloted by Matthew.

There is a subtle form of conspirituality that rides on the familiar dialectic of political cynicism and spiritual promise—but it's dressed for a button-down salon dinner in Harvard Square. No crystals in sight, no essential oils wafting through the room.

Sam Harris isn’t sounding the alarm about the Cabal or the Illuminati: his bugaboos are Islam, or “wokeism,” or “cancel culture.”

And he isn’t saying that starseeds will save the day, or that a Great Awakening is upon us. He’s not so low-brow.

His salvation product is meditation, which he says can validate his political insights. And hey, there's an app for that!

Show Notes

Celebrity Crusaders For Empire

Towards a geopolitics of atheism

Why the arguments of the 'New Atheists' are often just as violent as religion

Harris daydreaming about a nuclear strike

Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web

Will the "University of Austin" ever actually exist?

Sam Harris & Charles Murray

Harris. “A Few Points of Confusion.”

Decoding the Gurus: Sam Harris & Meditation is all you need

Gurometer— Kavanaugh and Browne

Buddhist Studies Has a Whiteness Problem

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Conspiracy theories flourish during uncertain times. They're always with us, passed down through generations like alternate histories, yet they’re constantly reinvented when collective stress levels peak. Julian reports on the QAnon spin-off group that’s been camped out in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza for two weeks, hoping to catch a glimpse of a pantheon of resurrected dead celebrities. In light of the Astroworld concert tragedy, which killed 10 people, being interpreted as a ritual Satanic sacrifice on social media, Derek wonders if conspiracies are just how we process everything now. Matthew points out the legitimate reasons conspiracy theorists have for their paranoia while warning against the media's tendency to titillate by misusing the terminology of cult research. And he also reads a bit from Paradise Lost. A conversational recap week as we’re working on some Big Shows in the next few weeks.

Show Notes

Riots, deaths, sexual assault: Maybe Woodstock was always a nightmare

The Bizarre Travis Scott Claims Show That Conspiracies Are Just How We Process Things

TikTok and QAnon Panic Over ‘Satanism’ Conspiracies at Deadly Travis Scott Concert

QAnon’s Refuse to Leave Dallas After JFK Jr. Fails to Appear

Inside The QAnon Cult Waiting for JFK Jr.

On The Ground At Dealey Plaza

Twitter videos/thread on Michael Brian Protzman

What Biden is keeping secret in the JFK files

QAnon Influencer Recruiting Secretary of State Candidates

Academic Research on Conspiracy Theories in Times of Social Crisis

Karen Douglas PhD on The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories

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Privilege is often blind and rampant across societies. But is the term also overused?

Derek looks at two examples of privilege in wellness spaces, the danger of its overuse, and a possible reframing of how to approach the topic. 

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To prepare this curative episode, we listened carefully to alternative health consumers for many hours, taking an exhaustive history of life challenges on physical, mental, and emotional planes. We scanned the symptoms against our compendium of disease states and prescribed the precise substances that would mirror them.

Then, we took minuscule audio samples from our podcasting apothecary — skepticism, melancholy, and empathy. We mixed these, diluted them a thousand times, to the point at which they became completely inaudible. Then we shook them up and down while chanting the spell of this bespoke remedy: Conspiritualitis investigarium.

Please don’t try to turn up your volume on this episode. You can’t actually hear it, and that’s what makes it so powerful.

But seriously folks. Welcome to our long-awaited homeopathy show — and not a week too soon. NFL’s leading quarterback Aaron Rodgers has just admitted to endangering the entire league by opting to be “immunized” via homeopathy rather than complying with the league’s vaccination requirements. (He’s also a lying liar.) There are reports of homeopaths selling COVID19 remedies — through both small ops in the U.S., and federally-approved dispensers in India, where Narendra Modi’s Hindu Nationalists mingled sugar pills with astrology to help disguise their negligent pandemic response.

Derek takes us on a tour through the strange history of this medicine that isn’t there, and interviews Jonathan Jarry of the McGill Office for Science and Society on why it haunts us. Julian contextualizes homeopathy against the broader “Complementary and Alternative Medicine” landscape. And Matthew wonders about the uses of magic.

Show Notes

A brief history of homeopathy

Vaccines and Homeopath

Homeopathy: A History

Berlin Wall pills: a cure for emotional trauma – or royal-endorsed quackery

Jonathan Jarry's homeopathy video

Jonathan's articles for McGill University

Homeopathy And Its Founder: Views Of A British Researcher

MEASURING MYTHOLOGY: Startling Concepts in NCCAM Grant

$2.5 billion spent, no alternative cures found

Complementary And Alternative Medicine

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