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Conspirituality — Philosophy
Conspirituality

Dismantling New Age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy-mad yogis. At best, the conspirituality movement attacks public health efforts in times of crisis. At worst, it fronts and recruits for the fever-dream of QAnon. As the alt-right and New Age horseshoe toward each other in a blur of disinformation, clear discourse, and good intentions get smothered. Charismatic influencers exploit their followers by co-opting conspiracy theories on a spectrum of intensity ranging from vaccines to child trafficking. In the process, spiritual beliefs that have nurtured creativity and meaning are transforming into memes of a quickly-globalizing paranoia. Conspirituality Podcast attempts to bring understanding to this landscape. A journalist, a cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic discuss the stories, cognitive dissonances, and cultic dynamics tearing through the yoga, wellness, and new spirituality worlds. Mainstream outlets have noticed the problem. We crowd-source, research, analyze, and dream answers to it.

Copyright: © 2023 Conspirituality

Latest Episodes:

247: The Deeper State Mar 06, 2025

Show notes

This week we’re looking at how folks who associated themselves with the magical and morbid QAnon memes about the “coming storm” that would destroy the Deep State have become that storm, mainly by talking about it, and are now in the position to congeal an even Deeper State characterized by more repression and control. They’re doing it both as conspiracists and as conspiracy theorists would predict: as rich guys pretending to be oppressed.

This opens up the question of “Have we been here before in the US, and what happened?” The parallels are uncanny. In the late 1920s, Henry Ford had his car dealers stick copies of The Dearborn Independent newspaper in the glove compartments of new cars. That was the rag in which he published excerpts of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Today another auto baron, Elon Musk, busts out seigheils and posts Nazi memes whenever he likes. But only one of them got a White House office.

Show Notes

CDC Statement on Measles Outbreak

US Health Secretary Kennedy calls for end to deadly Texas measles outbreak

Copy of STORM is HERE Data

LIVE: Kash Patel’s confirmation hearing for FBI director

Kash Patel Wants to Work From Home for FBI. But Who Does He Live With? | The New Republic

Kash Patel privately agreed to hire an experienced deputy FBI director. Then Trump picked a loyalist | The Independent

How Dan Bongino Went From Infowars to FBI Deputy Director | WIRED

How Trump’s Justice Department has gutted the government’s ability to chase public corruption | CNN Politics

123: The Red-Pilled "Academic" Who Named Our Podcast — Conspirituality

Darkness Over All: John Robison and the Birth of the Illuminati Conspiracy — The Public Domain Review

Conspiracy Theories Abounded in 19th-Century American Politics | Smithsonian

Wealthy bankers and businessmen plotted to overthrow FDR. A retired general foiled it.

Medical Mystery: What killed ‘Red Scare’ Sen. Joseph McCarthy?

FBI director considering having UFC train agents in martial arts, say people familiar with plan | Reuters

What We Know About the CIA's Midcentury Mind-Control Project | Smithsonian

FBI Records: The Vault — COINTELPRO

On campaign trail, RFK Jr. pushes 'bonkers' theory about CIA's 'takeover of the American press' - ABC News

Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style” Can’t Help Us Now

Rehabilitating McCarthyism

JFK, Richard Hofstadter, and the ‘Paranoid Style in American Politics’

Ford's Anti-Semitism | American Experience | Official Site | PBS

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Bonus Sample: What’s a Nazi Salute, Really? Mar 03, 2025

Show notes

Former "race realist" Richard Hanania recently published an article on The Free Press claiming that all those Nazi salutes the right is waving high in the sky is really "just trolling." Derek disagrees.

Show Notes

Enough — John Ganz

I Can Explain Why the Nazi Salute Is Back — Richard Hanania

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Brief: Smooth-Talking Anti-Feminism Mar 01, 2025

Show notes

Is life worse for women now than in the 1950s? In a recent interview for The Free Press, author Louise Perry and journalist Bari Weiss muse on just how much women have lost since premarital sex was normalized, the pill reduced sex to consequence-free hedonism, and Roe v Wade rendered abortion as common as going to the dentist. Perry calls this “re-paganization,” delivering an eloquent longing for a lost golden age of female subservience as Weiss nods along and smiles. It’s all very heterodox.

Or is it? No mention of the impacts of Project 2025, the dangerous ascendancy of Christian Nationalism, or the deadly crisis of women’s health in full swing.

Julian analyses their conversation to pinpoint how digital new media dresses up traditionalist right-wing talking points as if they’re open-minded, edgy, and brave intellectual insights.

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246: Shock Doctrine of Discovery Feb 27, 2025

Show notes

Trump has decreed it’s the Gulf of America, and Google agrees, at least for US users. Rep Buddy Carter has introduced HR 1161, the Red White and Blueland Act of 2025 to rename Greenland. And then, of course, there's making Canada the 51st state.

Pay attention to shit like this: it's a magic spell.

Trump is speaking in the old language of the Discovery Doctrine. That’s what we’ll excavate today.

Show Notes

Zizian Killing Spree and Arrests

Zizian leader denied bail

Roko’s Basilisk and Zizian beliefs/practices

Feb 2023 Community Alert about Ziz on Less Wrong

Project 2025 Observer

Native America, Discovered and Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and Manifest Destiny — Richard J Miller

Trump calls Canada a 'very serious contender' to become 51st state

H.R.1161 - 119th Congress (2025-2026): Red, White, and Blueland Act of 2025

DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM Aime Cesaire Translated by Joan Pinkham

Biography - Burnum Burnum - Indigenous Australia

The fight to 'free' the Aboriginal flag

Common Methods of Annexation | Snohomish County, WA

Doctrine of Discovery: How the 500-year-old Catholic decree encouraged colonization

Speech Acts (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Mexico's President Sheinbaum threatens to take legal action over the Gulf name change : NPR

How Canada planned to invade the U.S. (and vice versa)

Poilievre says Canada is broken

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Bonus Sample: Manners, the Machine, and Malaparte’s Technique de Coup d’État Feb 24, 2025

Show notes

What do we worry more about: the far-right beliefs of trolls, or the coding skills of the trolls?

The split focus on Marco Elez and Elon Musk—are they Nazis, or hackers, or Nazi hackers?— highlight two prongs of emergent fascism. The ideological/aesthetic/psychological on one side, and the technocratic on the other. We can call them the manners and the machine.

First, Matthew unpacks a century-old thesis by an OG fascist that says totalitarian regimes take shape when both are working together, but that ultimately, the coup d’etat is about seizing control of the machine.

Then he rounds off with a rant about how easy it is liberal-centrist discourse about manners to distract from the reality of the machine. Why? It’s because in the absence of a clear analysis of how capital and power work—it’s in the sphere of manners—that liberals feel they have a fighting chance. But it’s also exactly where Musk and Elez and Vance and Trump can ignore them.

Show Notes

A Doomed Democracy | STANFORD magazine

The October Revolution - Introduction | Marx Memorial Library

Alexander Kerensky Dies Here at 89 - The New York Times

Curzio Malaparte | Italian Author, Journalist & Politician | Britannica

Reading the Eccentric Italian Writer Who Tried to Cover Up His Fascism ‹ Literary Hub

Curzio Malaparte: The Illusion of the Fascist Revolution

The Californian Ideology

The Californian Ideology Personified - Truthdig

Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology on JSTOR

175: Diagonalism (w/William Callison and Quinn Slobodian) — Conspirituality

Opinion | Don’t Believe Him - The New York Times

Welcome to Neokayfabe — Abraham Josephine Riesman // Writer

40 Ways to Fight Fascists: Street-Legal Tactics for Community Activists — Spencer Sunshine

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Brief: Antifascist Woodshed Feb 22, 2025

Show notes

Education / Public service alert:

Matthew critically reviews six books that define fascist eras and recount how they have been opposed. A kind of “here we are, now what?” episode that hopefully interrupts the doomscroll with the sobriety of some practical considerations.

Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (2017)
Robert Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism (2004)
Paul Mason, How to Fight Fascism (2018)
Mark Bray, Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook (2017)
Curzio Malaparte: Technique de Coup d’Etat (1931)
Spencer Sunshine: 40 Ways to Fight Fascists: Street-Legal Tactics for Community Activists (2021)

Formats range from popular nonfiction to academic history to pragmatic field guide. Politics range from liberal to anarchist. More feminist and non-white sources to be reviewed soon.

Show Notes

On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder

Timothy Snyder’s Bad History | City Journal

Robert O. Paxton - The Anatomy of Fascism

Is It Fascism? A Leading Historian Changes His Mind. - The New York Times

How to Stop Fascism

Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook

Curzio Malaparte - The Technique Of Revolution

40 Ways to Fight Fascists: Street-Legal Tactics for Community Activists — Spencer Sunshine

Joyful Militancy | The Anarchist Library

Let This Radicalize You | HaymarketBooks.org

Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life — Natasha Lennard

DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM Aime Cesaire Translated by Joan Pinkham

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245: Raw Dogging Wellness [feat Mallory DeMille] Feb 20, 2025

Show notes

Raw Milk. Raw Water. Raw Meat.

Mallory DeMille returns to break down the raw trend in wellness. We look at the science and cultural implications behind it.

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Relief Project #8: Blair Hodges Feb 18, 2025

Show notes

The eighth installment of Matthew’s Five Big Questions Posed to an Extremely Thoughtful Person.

Friend of the pod Blair Hodges joins Matthew to talk about how he’s transformed the teachings of his Mormon upbringing into inspiration for social justice, how he grapples with the limits of the nuclear family as he thinks about community building, and why James Baldwin is so important to him.

Blair has degrees in journalism, religious studies, and disability studies from the University of Utah and Georgetown University. He’s currently working on a research project on the history of intellectual disabilities in Mormon thought.

Show Notes

Relationscapes—with Blair Hodges

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Bonus Sample: Scientology’s Sci-Fi Religion Feb 17, 2025

Show notes

“You don’t get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, start a religion.” With those words, prolific sci-fi pulp fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard prophesied the course of his life’s work.

The 1950s saw the emergence of UFO- and alien channeling-based spiritual groups, as postmodern religious syncretism transformed supposedly ancient angels and demons into benevolent and/or terrifying aliens. No iteration of this fantasy has been more financially fruitful, culturally impactful, controversial, or bizarre than Hubbard’s brainchild: Scientology.

In the latest episode of Roots of Conspirituality, Julian digs into the fascinating backstory of this prolific author, revered as prophetic by thousands, pursued as a fraud by the IRS for decades, described as a cult leader by church escapees, and called an abusive madman by his ex-wives. Allegedly…

The religion is a complex blend of self-help psychology, elaborate pseudoscience, high-demand paranoia, and alien mythology that, at its height, commanded 100,000 members—and is still valued at roughly $2 billion.

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Brief: Make Apartheid Great Again Feb 15, 2025

Show notes

Given how much shit the zone is being flooded with right now, you might have missed Donald Trump screaming about the supposed mistreatment of white South Africans recently. Last week, he said “certain classes of people” were being treated “very badly.” The trigger was a bill signed by South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, a former anti-Apartheid activist, trade union leader, and successful businessman—three qualities Trump doesn’t really understand.

Like the Trump administration, we have our own South African on staff—and he’s legitimately employed here! Julian grew up under apartheid and left the country due to it. Derek chats with him about what life was like growing up there, and he explains the confusion that Trump is injecting into the body politic.

Show Notes

Trump vs. South Africa

South African president signs controversial land seizure law

No Proof Elon Musk's Grandparents Belonged to Nazi Party

Errol Musk Talks About Elon’s Maternal Grandparents

Understanding What the 2025 Expropriation Act Means

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