Conspirituality

Humans will never be cats. In his new book, Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life, the philosopher John Gray argues that we can learn a lot about how to live from them—namely, how to calm our anxiety around existential distress. In this sample of a Patreon bonus episode, Derek shares what he’s learned from his three cats, as well as how Gray’s advice applies to the conspiratorial-minded (i.e. metacognition gone awry).

-- -- --
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

Two episodes in our catalog haunt this podcast. In episode 6, Steve Hassan advised listeners to treat people under the undue influence of QAnon and conspirituality with welcome and respect. Castigation won’t work. Shame will make things worse. He told this story about how his elderly neighbor brought him homemade cookies when he finally returned home after years in the cult of Rev. Moon. No questions asked—just cookies.

But in episode 10, Imran Ahmed pointed out that any engagement of disinformation peddlers is actually a win for them because it boosts their visibility. His strategy—and he has the data to prove it works—is to block, isolate, and clear the public space for content that is actually helpful. Where Hassan offers an open hand, Ahmed says, “Talk to the hand.”

We’re nine months on from those interviews. Are we living up to either of them? Are we isolating and deplatforming propagandists? Are we adding good vibes to the scene and leaving the door open for earnest people to be forgiven? Or does the frustration of the content trend us towards cynicism and snark? A recent Instagram thread by dedicated listeners really brought the point home for discussion.

In the Ticker, we cover the whitewashing of global cuisine by wellness influencers, bauhauswife’s upleveling of COVID denialism with yellow journalism, and Target-store QAnon vandal Melissa Lively trying to make amends-with-benefits for past outbursts. In the Jab, Julian looks at the facts around the PCR test. (Hint: it works.)

Show Notes

Lost in the Brine

A Death in Yolande Norris-Clarke’s Free Birth World

Kelly Brogan ditches her psychiatry cred with COVID-denialism

Who wants to eat magic dirt from a COVID minimizer?

Melissa Lively un-cancels herself from QAnon

Bauhauswife free births the news in Canada, from Costa Rica (video)

Bauhauswife free births the news in Canada, from Costa Rica

-- -- --
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

One-hundred-and-twenty seekers filled the LA hotel ballroom. We sought the life-changing experience that could only happen by holding in our pee, being religiously on-time, and taking full responsibility for creating the lives we said we wanted, but hadn’t achieved… yet.

-- -- --
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

Around 2015, the alt-right movement erupted online to both provoke and monetize MAGA momentum and distort and defame the real-world progress symbolized in Barack Obama and agitated by Black Lives Matter. Young white supremacist poster-boy Richard Spencer and edgy internet crypto-racists like Lauren Southern, Mark Cernovich, and Gavin McInnes led the viral charge, racking up subscribers while lining their pockets on the side. Daniel Lombroso of The Atlantic embedded with their ilk from 2016-18, collecting enough footage to release the award-winning documentary, White Noise. Julian sat down to talk with him about the movement, and about making this film while Jewish.

Was any of this a surprise to anti-oppression activists on the ground? Not according to Michelle Cassandra Johnson, author of Skill in Action: Radicalizing Your Yoga Practice to Create a Just World. While the white supremacy Lombroso whistleblows is spectacular and absurd, the white supremacy Johnson and other justice activists feel in their bones has been a centuries-long war of attrition against equality. Matthew sits down with Johnson to discuss how the yoga and wellness worlds in particular are (and are not) responding to the intensification of both calls to justice, as well as the blowback.

In the Ticker, we wonder if Gwyneth Paltrow’s new long-COVID Goop merch—and her “longer-term detox” that includes selling Goop-approved $500 blankets and $8,000 necklaces—heralds a dawning era in high-end disability consumerism.

Show Notes

It took a year, but Gwyneth Paltrow figured out how to exploit the pandemic

Gwyneth Paltrow Is Selling Vibrators

Healing My Body with a Longer-Term Detox

The NHS dings Gwyneth’s long COVID cures

Lauren Southern hides the face of her biracial baby

Daniel Lombroso’s White Noise

Southern Poverty Law on Cernovich

Southern Poverty Law on Southern

Richard Spencer, white subsidy sucker

Michelle Cassandra Johnson’s website

Michelle Cassandra Johnson’s

-- -- --
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

One of the precious bright spots for our family in this long dark winter of COVID has been outdoor skating. Other than the walking trails, it’s the only thing that the city has kept open. I take our boys, 4 and 8, while my partner is working. The older one has developed a speed-skater’s stride. He’s not crossing over yet as he turns, but he’s close to it. The younger one has amazed us all with learning to glide easily in this, his first winter on skates…

As per the city regulations, we stay masked and distanced as we’re lacing up, and while skating. But two weeks ago, an anti-masker started showing up, and openly ignored the attendants who asked him to comply.

This audio essay is about all of the feelings that came up for me as I a watched this unfold, tried to intervene, and tried to make sense of it all for myself, and the boys.

-- -- --
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

What are we learning about conspiracies, conspiracy theories, and those who hold them? How are we maintaining our optimism that facts are real, that they can be discovered, and shared? How will we continue to communicate with those who are confused? In this episode, we continue our rich conversation on the proximity of conspiracism and spiritual paths and the ways in which we fall into and climb out of fever dreams.

In the Jab, Julian looks at concerns about vaccines and pregnancy. In a Ticker segment, Matthew ponders the British Wheel of Yoga’s “neutral” stance towards the COVID vaccine, and how it unintentionally welcomes conspiratorial thinking.

Republic of Lies author Anna Merlan sits down with Derek to discuss the process of embedding with conspiracy consumers and peddlers, and the challenges faced when reporting on them. Discussing the interview, Julian uses the ideas of George Lakoff to think about containment and reframing. Matthew looks at how yoga and wellness influencers can play both sides of the consumer/peddler coin through the paradoxical private spectacle of social media.

Show Notes

‘I Miss My Mom’: Children Of QAnon Believers Are Desperately Trying To Deradicalize Their Own Parents

British Wheel of Yoga indulges vaccine “neutrality”

Dr. Victoria Male on vaccines and pregnancy

Anna Merlan on the Austin Influencer Movement

Anna Merlan on PBS’s Open Mind

Yoga podcaster J. Brown expresses doubts about COVID and the vaccines

Charles Eisenstein is turning to fiction

Abbie Richards and her Conspiracy Chart

-- -- --
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 medium of social media is both relatively new and socially challenging. But this doesn’t mean we can’t have healthy debates. In this sample from our Monday Patreon bonus episode, Derek investigates three areas of research about how—and why—we need robust and progressive debates on our platforms.

1. Your brain on political arguments.

2. How to become a master negotiator.

3. Can social media be fact-checked? A new study offers one way of doing so.

-- -- --
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

Many of us came to yoga and wellness spaces to heal or flee from the alienation of modernity. We wanted something untouched by our cities and factories and labs; something that reminded us of a world we never really knew. “Nature” was in such short supply that we had to invent it to colonize it anew, in exotic lands and mystical beasts: the deer whose antler gave longevity, the cow whose milk strengthened our family bonds. How many of us knew that our fetish for the “natural” could lead towards a consumerist cul-de-sac or fascist ideology?

In this episode we contemplate the meaning, practice, delusions, and hypocrisies of the “natural.” Derek talks to “Sea of Shadows” director Richard Ladkani about how the hunt for Traditional Chinese Medicine remedies has devastated the ecology of Baja California. Julian thinks about the disenchantment of the lab coat and how it drives so many to the warm regard of the “natural healer.”

To find out more about how some practitioners of complementary medicine are attempting to bridge the evidence and ideological gap with conventional care, Matthew interviews Naturopathic Doctor Juniper Martin and fourth-year student Adriana Berusch Gerardino about their efforts with the Naturopathic Alliance to dispel COVID misinformation and to challenge racism in their profession.

Show Notes

Gina Carano fired by Lucasfilm (and publicist and agent) for antisemitic Q-Trump social activity

RFK finally gets deleted by IG

Turn Off Your Mind, Relax—and Float Right-Wing?

Chairman Mao Invented Traditional Chinese Medicine

QAA shines on with Episode 128

Dale Beran’s extraordinary book It Came from Something Awful

Decoding the Gurus launches the Gurometer

Shouting out to Katya Weiss-Anderson of Kumbaya Confessional

Chinese gov and state media boost TCM COVID treatments at home and abroad

Article: Acupuncture Doesn’t Work

Dr. Lad’s kindly but rather banal Ayurveda advice re: COVID (August)

-- -- --
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

In this sample of our weekly Patreon bonus episode, Julian travels back in time to the 80s. He finds that when it comes to the fear of diabolical evil, the appeal of conspiracy patterns, and the missionary zeal of cults, everything old is new again. 

*Content Warning: Briefly contains one disturbing account of ritual abuse and one reference to suicide.

-- -- --
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

Today we forge ahead with part 2 of Matthew’s interview with Kundalini Yoga scholar Philip Deslippe and journalist Stacie Stukin on the tragic past, chaotic present, and future relevance of the cult of Yogi Bhajan. Matthew looks at Guru Jagat’s (Katie Griggs’s) pseudo-Tibetan mystical poem dedicated to her ex-con mentor, Harijiwan (Stephen Hartzell), whose current wife, Mandev, is about 30 years his junior and makes RA MA propaganda films. Will RA MA survive lockdown with COVID-busting mantras? Will Yogi Bhajan’s crimes be washed away by the ringing of the RA MA gong?

We know by now that cults never let a good crisis go to waste. We’ll also examine how, when there are no global panics for cults to monetize, it’s up to the leader to create one. With RA MA we see the cycle go intergenerational as it cultjacks Yogi Bhajan’s legacy of fantasy and paranoia.

For the Ticker this week, Derek and Julian review Bill Maher’s platforming of Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying as they trot out vax-doubt and the Wuhan lab conspiracy. Julian will cover breaking vaccine news — especially on Phase III data! — to keep you inoculated against your alt-wellness news feed.

Show Notes

A Campus Argument Goes Viral. Now the College Is Under Siege

The Campus Mob Came for Me—and You, Professor, Could Be Next

Decoding Bret and Eric Weinstein via Decoding the Gurus

Moderna vaccine complications are rare

Astrazeneca Phase III looks good

Pfizer and BioNtech Phase III results

Adenoviral vectors

NYT on Astrozeneca

CDC Vaccine contrast/compare

The Pfizer recipe

AP on the “lab release” theory

Fauci dunks on Trump’s lab release babble

-- -- --
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