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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:

244: Battle for the Onesies Feb 13, 2025

Show notes

As of recording time, RFK Jr has not yet been confirmed to the HHS Secretary position by the Senate. That might change by publication date. But if we were setting odds on this confirmation, we’d say put your money on Bobby.

So, WTF. Bobby Brainworms will be in charge of US public health, and its influence around the world. Our years of reporting on him have been defeated by the influencer noise of the MAHA Mamas. But we. Will. Carry. On.

Julian reviews the misinfo docket. Derek runs down the bureaucratic implications. And Matthew speculates on just how perfect someone like RFK Jr would be as the domestic health figurehead of a fascist movement, if, you know, that were ever to be possible.

Show Notes

Some Cancers Rising Amongst Younger people

Increased Lung Cancer from the 1960s to 80s.

Lung Cancer Rates Today

Smoking Suppresses Appetite and Results in Lower BMI for Some

64% of Adults in UK Overweight

65% of Australians Overweight

Diabetes Was 1.8% in the US in 1960

11.6% of US Population Has Diabetes

Risk of Alzheimer’s Doubles Every 5 Years After 65

30% of Smokers are Overweight or Obese

A recent study did NOT show vaccines cause autism, but RFK Jr. keeps pushing the lie.

“A New Academic Publishing Model”: Right-Wing Dark Money Group Launches Fringe Medical Journal

Judge Orders White House to Unblock Funding for NIH, Others

RFK Jr.'s financial disclosures reveal millions in both debt and income as he awaits HHS confirmation

Racial ‘Sterility’ and ‘Hyperfecundity’ in Fascist Italy. Biological Politics of Sex and Reproduction in

History of fascism, reproductive rights offers lessons for today

Are tyrants good for your health?

When the leader is ill—or addicted to cocaine, meth, steroids, or hormones

Five Pseudosciences That Fueled the Nazis

‘Hitler Was Centre of Our Lives’: Confessions of Nazi Criminals’ Wives | History | Nuremberg. Casus pacis

Theodor Morell: Hitler’s Particularly Odious Physician

Public Health Under the Third Reich

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Bonus Sample: What We're Facing Feb 10, 2025

Show notes

Derek meditates on a recent conversation about the left-right divide between Ezra Klein and James Pogue.

Show Notes

MAGA’s Big Tech Divide: Ezra Klein Show

Going Back to Cincinnati — James Pogue

Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets — James Pogue

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Brief: Why Didn’t I Yell STFU at Jordan Peterson in 2017? Feb 08, 2025

Show notes

In the spring of 2017, Jordan Peterson first went viral by writing this in Canada’s National Post:

I will never use words I hate, like the trendy and artificially constructed words “zhe” and “zher.” These words are at the vanguard of a post-modern, radical leftist ideology that I detest, and which is, in my professional opinion, frighteningly similar to the Marxist doctrines that killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century.

Remember that horseshit, or things like it? Did you guffaw because he was obviously absurd? Did you try to reason with his stans online? Did you see him as a crank influencer, or a dangerous political figure?

Did you hope his ideas would be beaten down in the marketplace of ideas? Or did you seek him out at a public event and shout him down with a bullhorn?

Today, word salad like this is everywhere—including in Project 2025, now driving the Trump admin.

Matthew visits the antifascist woodshed to investigate the liberal manners, free speech naivety, and lack of community alliances that dissuaded him from grabbing the mic during a Peterson Q&A in 2017 and shouting:

“Your ideas are fascist and you should STFU. You are endangering trans people with your bullshit. Why do you care about how they experience their bodies, you whining pervert? Why are you inciting hatred against young people who want a better world?”

Because… look where we are now.

Show Notes

Read the Memo Pausing Federal Grants and Loans - The New York Times

President George H.W. Bush on political correctness (1991)

The History of Political Correctness—Lind

The Pitfalls of Liberalism — Kwame Ture

The Forgotten History of the World's First Trans Clinic | Scientific American

Jordan Peterson: The right to be politically incorrect | National Post

Bill C-16, An Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code (gender identity or expression)

Jordan Peterson is trying to make sense of the world — including his own strange journey

Postmodern Neo-Marxism — Jordan Peterson’s Shadow

Doug Ford met Jordan Peterson, appointment calendar reveals | CBC News

Why are the Proud Boys so violent? Ask Gavin McInnes — SPLC

Jordan Peterson revealed he once earned $400,000 a month

Antifa by Mark Bray

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243: Free Market Contrarians (w/Eoin Higgins) Feb 06, 2025

Show notes

Edward Snowden is largely only a public name thanks to Glenn Greenwald’s reporting, for which he was one of the contributors to a Pulitzer Prize-winning series for The Guardian in 2014. For a while, Matt Taibbi was considered the heir to Hunter Thompson when his gonzo journalism tore open the 2008 financial crisis and gave the public the term “vampire squids.”

Yet in more recent years, both men have swerved right: Glenn became a darling on Fox News and Taibbi was recruited by Elon Musk as one of the Twitter Files “journalists.” How did that happen? We’re joined by journalist Eoin Higgins, whose new book, Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left, dives into the career arcs of both Greenwald and Taibbi, and how they confuse and distort right-left alignments.

Show Notes

Sharath Jois, Heir to Founder of Ashtanga Yoga, Dies at 53 - The New York Times

Sharath’s Statement on Pattabhi Jois’s Assaults: Context, Links, Notes – Matthew Remski

Surviving Modern Yoga - North Atlantic Books

Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left

Eoin Higgins Morning Brew | Bluesky

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Bonus Sample: Kelly Brogan’s Divine Dungeon: Pt 2 (feat/Esme Providence Brown) Feb 03, 2025

Show notes

Part 2 of Matthew’s sit down with sex-work veteran and social justice advocate Esme Providence Brown to discuss New Age / wellness antifeminist, Kelly Brogan, and how her craven politics bolster the permission structure for Trumpian misogyny.

They track her political and aesthetic journey from labcoat wearer to wellness pole dancer to BDSM cosplayer—a spiral through deepening layers of appropriation, disavowal of responsibility, and cringe-tastic ideas. Esme concludes with some deep insights on what it means for artisanal BDSM to be stripped of its political and consent-culture context, and who Brogan’s “feminism is a psy-op” argument really serves.

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Brief: Anti-Social Media (w/Renee Diresta) Feb 01, 2025

Show notes

When asked if he thought Mark Zuckerberg’s effective ending of fact checking was in response to threats that he would “put him in jail for a very long time,” Trump replied, “Probably. Yeah, probably.” A week later, TikTok voluntarily disabled their app for users, then put up an announcement saying that Trump was going to bring them back.

Julian talks to digital disinformation expert Renee Diresta about the massive Big Tech realignment with MAGA, which now means Meta, X, and TikTok may become more like TruthSocial. If fact checking is biased, content moderation is censorship, and combating foreign propaganda is anti-free speech, where does that leave us now?

Show Notes

If you Give A Mouse a Cookie: Renee Diresta

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242: Executive Disorder Jan 30, 2025

Show notes

What the ever loving fuck. That’s our intro today.

But we do have a structure. Julian’s going to review the Executive Order chaos, including the pardoning and deputizing of fascist street gangs. Derek’s going to explain what the ever loving fuck it means for health agencies to turn off access to health data. And I’ll look at two Xtian responses to fascism: one hypocritical and one poetic… but maybe toothless.

Show Notes

Freed Capitol riot ringleaders regroup - and vow 'retribution'

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Bonus Sample: 1950’s Alien Yoga Jan 27, 2025

Show notes

Full episode available here.

The alien from Venus in George King’s head said: “Prepare yourself. You are to be the voice of interplanetary parliament.” It’s 1952 and the Englishman has been meditating deeply. Eight days later, a famous yogi from India materializes to explain what’s going on.

These experiences became the basis for the Aetherius Society—an organization that still has 35 chapters around the planet today. They claim the world’s governments are covering up their communication with a spiritually enlightened galactic federation, so as to maintain control over humanity.

If that sounds like 2020 red-pilled Instagram grift, you’re right! Everything old is new again.

Julian’s series, The Roots of Conspirituality, a history of new age conspiracism, is now conveniently organized under the “Collections” tab at the top of our Patreon page. Each episode is self-contained—but listen from the start if you want to trace the journey from the 1840’s “burned over region” of the American North East to today!

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Brief: Patients Before Profits Jan 25, 2025

Show notes

On Jan 10, the Oregon Nurses Association launched the largest healthcare strike in Oregon state history. Some 5k frontline caregivers from 8 Providence hospitals and 6 clinics have been holding the line in freezing temperatures as they fight for basic rights that their employer—a Catholic nonprofit healthcare system whose C Suite members make millions of dollars every year—refuses to give them.

Derek discusses why such strikes, and unions in general, are so important as the new administration takes office. He breaks down some of Providence’s past legal problems, discusses his own experience as a Providence patient, and talks to some of the nurses on the strike line.

Show Notes

Dr Jennifer Lincoln

Oregon Nurses Association

Resources for striking healthcare professionals

It's Time for Providence to Put Patients Before Profits

Providence, striking Oregon health workers remain apart on key issues

They Were Entitled to Free Care. Hospitals Hounded Them to Pay.

Hospital System to Refund Poor Patients Who Were Entitled to Free Care

Wealthiest Hospitals Got Billions in Bailout for Struggling Health Providers

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241: Unravelling The Telepathy Tapes Jan 23, 2025

Show notes

One of the top podcasts in the world—even beating out Rogan for a few hours—is popularizing a well-meaning intervention for non-speaking autistic people. Unfortunately, that intervention happens to be a proven failure, and may set autistic and disability rights discourse back by decades.

Filmmaker Ky Dicken’s The Telepathy Tapes podcast delves into the world of Facilitated Communication, in which non-speaking people are believed to miraculously gain access to complex written language after lives of silence. According to Dickson, non-speaking people can also gather in transdimensional spaces and channel spiritual knowledge.

But there’s a problem. Every controlled test shows that the messages produced through letterboards and iPads are coming from the facilitators—not the non-speaking persons.

In this episode, Matthew interviews experts in pseudoscience and autism, including Janyce Boynton, a former (now dissident) practitioner of Facilitated Communication who explains how seductive and promising it was to practice, but how it ultimately steals agency and dignity from the autistic client.

And... this is also a story about parents dealing with crushing levels of unpaid and invisible labour. They are already doing miraculous work. A fantasy is no replacement for true support and recognition.

Show Notes

Podcast About 'Telepathic' Autistic Children Briefly Knocks Joe Rogan Out Of No. 1 Spot

Ky Dickens Director | Filmmaker

Facilitated Communication—what harm it can do: Confessions of a former facilitator

MD25438 - Powell, Diane Hennacy, MD - OR License Verification - 01/12/2025 11:07:47 AM

The Telepathy Tapes: Separating Science From Pseudoscience In Autism Communication

Stolen Voices: Facilitated Communication Devalues Autism | Psychology Today Canada

Multiple method validation study of facilitated communication: II. Individual differences and subgroup results - PubMed

The Telepathy Tapes Prove We All Want to Believe

"The Telepathy Tapes" is Taking America by Storm. But it Has its Roots in Old Autism Controversies.

Mixed Messages: Validity and Ethics of Facilitated Communication | Disability Studies Quarterly

Is There Science Behind That? Facilitated Communication

Controlled Studies — Facilitated Communication

Served people with severe communication impairments — Obit for Rosemary Crossley

More Doubts over Disability ‘Miracle’

Katharine Beals

Jonathan Jarry MSc - Science Communicator

FCisNotScience - YouTube — Janyce Boynton’s awesome YouTube channel

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