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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:

218: Meet the Sexvangelicals (w/Julia Postema & Jeremiah Gibson) Aug 08, 2024

Show notes

You’re an eight year-old girl. The purity culture of your evangelical church, ruled by men but policed by women, has you worried that the spaghetti straps on your summer top might be sinful. You learn from the women around you how to defer, serve, please, keep your voice girl-like forever, and use it to both signal obedience but also piously request relief from sexual aggression.

You’re a seven year-old boy. The holy laws of gender in your church dictate that when you’re the only male present at Bible study, you must lead the room full of women in reading and prayer. You must perform manliness in your boy’s body, assuming an anxious leadership role you did not earn. If you don’t puff yourself up, you’re a sissy—one of the girls alongside you learning the tones of the Fundie Baby Voice.

These are parts of the stories of Julia Postema and Jeremiah Gibson, the co-hosts of the podcast Sexvangelicals: The Sex Education the Church Didn't Want You to Have. They are Boston-based licensed psychotherapists and certified sex therapists. They specialize in helping couples with negative religious backgrounds discover sexuality that works for their partnership. Julian and I sat down with them to learn about how their clients recover from purity culture, and sometimes in the process run smack into its mirror world: the tantric workshop land of divine masculine and feminine stereotypes plus fascinations with semen retention.

Show Notes

Sexvangelicals: Podcast | Website | Instagram | Substack

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Bonus Sample: The "Crisis" of Meaning Aug 05, 2024

Show notes

Scroll through masculinity influencer social media feeds and you're constantly told there's a "crisis of meaning." But is that really true? Has a shared meaning ever reflected the totality of any population?

Derek turns this idea over in his head by looking at the mythology of the hero's journey. But first, he provides some inspirational messages from the White Dudes for Harris call last week, where perhaps a new and empowering sense of masculinity is taking hold.

Show Notes

White Dudes for Harris

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Brief: JD Vance Taps into Parental Rage Aug 03, 2024

Show notes

The “childless cat lady” thing is as ridiculous as JD Vance is. But it’s not stupid. It’s tapping into something powerful, because it’s shameful.

Vance’s fantasy that childless cat ladies are miserable in their lives is another case of every accusation being a projection.

In actuality, he’s speaking to that swath of parents out there in general—and particularly on the right—who are actually miserable in their lives, regretting their choices, wondering why God saddled them with 4-5-6 kids in a country that does so little to support families.

But it’s illegal to say any of this. Children are gifts from God, right? They have to disown it and pretend that their families are perfect and perfectly fulfilling.

An editorial-style Brief from Matthew, who’s been parenting as a stepdad and biodad for long enough to know that parents and the childless absolutely need each other.

Show Notes

Full text of "GHETTO DIARY - ENGLISH - JANUSZ KORCZAK"

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217: Childless Cat Lady Aug 01, 2024

Show notes

If something real occurs in this timeline, but no conspiracy theorist is there to FUBAR it, does it actually happen?

An old man, weakened by COVID, picks up an old-timey phone handset on a Delaware Saturday to tell a childless cat lady that the reins of destiny are now in her hands.

A staffer clicks “post” at 1:46pm, and X lights up with something real… that throws an instant shadow of insanity.

Biden is too sick to have posted, they say. He’s dead, they say. He has staged or suffered a coup. And Kamala Harris? A DEI bimbo flashing esoteric Marxist hand signals. The DNC is fraudulently transferring the campaign war chest. They couldn’t kill Trump so now they’re playing dirty with the nomination. Biden’s brother is stepping in, Biden’s body double is 8 inches too tall. Dudes who made too much “Let’s Go Brandon” merch are launching lawsuits and crying in their beer.

We run down the most cursed Kamala conspiracy theories, how they distort the real questions about her, how being a childless cat lady is her superpower, and whether the ghouls that dream them up really matter.

Show Notes

Vivian Wilson on Threads: There’s a lot of stuff I need to debunk

Elon Musk's transgender daughter, in first interview, says he berated her for being queer as a child

J.D. Vance’s Hatred of Cat Ladies Is Weirder and More Dangerous Than You Think

J.D. Vance Really Is the Key to Understanding the American Right

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Bonus Sample: Imaginary Children: “God’s Word on Spanking” Jul 29, 2024

Show notes

This is the second episode in “Conspirituality and the Imaginary Children,” an occasional series on how children, as symbols (but not persons with their own internal lives) are at the center of conspirituality anxiety and discourse.

The title is taken from a pamphlet published by Ralph Drollinger, a former professional basketball player from San Diego who founded a 501c3 called Capitol Ministries in 1996 to facilitate prayer meetings and study guides for congresspeople in Washington, and state legislators in more than 40 states.

Drollinger’s crowning achievement was to initiate a weekly Bible study group in the White House during the Trump administration. The 60-90 minutes were regularly attended by ten Trump cabinet members.

Like many evangelicals, Drollinger argues that spanking children is mandated by the Bible But he also goes a Trumpian extra mile—explicitly connecting the virtue of child assault in the home to the state’s monopoly on violence. Matthew walks through what this looks like and how Drollinger justifies it through narrow and dishonest readings of scripture.

Show Notes

God's Word on Spanking [text]

God’s Word on Spanking [youtube]

194: The Power Worshippers (w/Katherine Stewart) — Conspirituality

How the Trump Cabinet’s Bible Teacher Became a Shadow Diplomat - The New York Times

White House Bible Study Led by Pastor Who Is Anti-Gay, Anti-Women and Anti-Catholic - Newsweek

Is God Judging America Today? by Ralph Drollinger

Ralph Drollinger | GLAAD

Exclusive Interview with Ralph Drollinger: Meet the preacher who teaches the Bible to the US Cabinet - WELT

Capitol Ministries 2023 revenue

Jordan B. Peterson’s Support of Corporal Punishment for Children: A Critique - Mad In America

Shepherding a Child's Heart — Tripp

Shepherding a Child's Heart (a short critique) — DonOwsley.com

Ministry Versus Political Activism by Ralph Drollinger

Text of the Spencer Spanking Plan

Misused Scripture: Jeremiah 17:9.

HEBREW WORD STUDY – Deceitful and Wicked אנשׁ עכב | Chaim Bentorah

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Brief: Bret Weinstein: “The Biden Psy-Op” Jul 27, 2024

Show notes

A tale of two tweets: Dark Horse podcast cohost and “conspiracy hypothesizer” Bret Weinstein took to Twitter twice this month, first dropping a video claiming that RFK Jr becoming Donald Trump’s running mate would make them “assassination proof,” then later floating the idea that an AI Joe Biden really phoned into Kamala Harris’s first conference as the presumptive presidential nominee. Or…is Biden even alive?

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216: J.D. Vance, Conspiracy Hobbit Jul 25, 2024

Show notes

Just two days after surviving an assassination attempt, Donald Trump announced JD Vance as his VP pick. Vance has made a dramatic U-turn from calling Trump a "reprehensible idiot" and "America's Hitler" in 2016. But who is this 39 year old, really—who after less than two years of on-the-job experience, is now almost a heartbeat away from leading the free world?

Well, not unlike other right-wing populists in Europe and at home, Vance has an idiosyncratic political affinity for JRR Tolkien. We might even call him America’s conspiracy hobbit at this point, fresh from the Appalachian Shire but inexorably drawn by the burning crypto rings of Silicon Valley to eventually land at the feet of Sauron to meet his fate.

But to answer this question and examine where JD Vance fits into the conspirituality landscape, we’ll be breaking down a speech recently released by ProPublica. It’s from an intimate invitation-only conservative event hosted in 2021 by a group called the Teneo Network. Behind closed doors, Vance encouraged his audience to get away from that weird feeling in their chests when listening to the unique truths of conspiracy theorists. Like, Alex Jones sees the world more clearly than MSNBC's Rachel Maddow. The right also apparently needs more oligarchs. Oh, and the literal Devil is at work in the world around us.

Show Notes

J.D. Vance Speaks at a Private Teneo Network Event, Sept. 2021

Inside the “Private and Confidential” Conservative Group That Promises to “Crush Liberal Dominance”

How Lord of the Rings Shaped JD Vance’s Politics

The Influences on JD Vance’s Political Philosophy

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Bonus Sample: Project 2025 on Worker's "Rights" Jul 22, 2024

Show notes

Project 2025's plan for workers is clear: crush unions, eliminate minority protections, curtail reproductive health care benefits, and make the workplace biblical again.

Derek and Julian unpack the details of another insane chapter from Project 2025's 920-page manifesto that describes their vision for the reduced rights of the working class. According to their own statements, a Trump presidency would set these and other disastrous plans in motion from day one.

Show Notes

Conspirituality 187: Project 2025: An Authoritarian Conspiracy

Project 2025's Disdain for Public Education

The GOP Thinks Food Stamps Are the Real Problem

The GOP Takeover of Media

The Plan to Dismantle Health Care

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Brief: Cult of the Lamb Anti-Cult School? (w/Riley MacLeod) Jul 20, 2024

Show notes

We cover conspiracy theories, spiritual abuse, and religious and right-wing extremism. We cover showmen and charismatics suffering from King Victim Complex. Last week we had to study a goddam assassination attempt.

But sometimes we get to peek into the worlds that younger people are making within our cursed digital environments, and we realize they might be laughing at some of the problems that fill us olds with despair right out of existence.

Gaming journalist and Master of Divinity Riley MacLeod joins Matthew to talk about whether the hit indie game Cult of the Lamb might be all the inoculation against cultic dynamics that generation Alpha ever needs.

Show Notes

Riley MacLeod - Aftermath

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215: Divinely Protected Jul 18, 2024

Show notes

Two landmark Supreme Court decisions—the Trump immunity case and the overturning of the Chevron doctrine—represent the legal institutionalization of the core values of conspirituality: self-sovereignty, natural immunity or divine protection, and “doing your own research.”

The attempted assassination on the former president forged the essence of these two rulings into a stunning still life of Trump’s image for those who love him and those he’s appointed to serve him.

Julian and Matthew wade into the flood, and what might happen at ground zero of conspiracy theory formation—this time veering left as well as right.

Show Notes

Former classmate of Trump rally gunman says he was ‘bullied almost every day’

The FBI Identifies Suspected Gunman in Trump Rally Shooting: What to Know - The New York Times

FBI identifies Thomas Crooks of Bethel Park as the suspect in Trump assassination attempt

FBI probing motives, background of Thomas Matthew Crooks, the Western Pa. gunman behind Donald Trump assassination attempt

A shooting range, a gun store, and a ladder purchase: Tracking the Trump rally gunman's movements leading up to his attack

Trump rewrites Republican convention speech to focus on unity not Biden - Washington Examiner

Vance shooting response: https://x.com/JDVance1/status/1812280973628965109

Musk shooting response: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1812256998588662068

Rubio shooting response: https://x.com/marcorubio/status/1812256529296613657

Boebert shooting response: https://x.com/KyleClark/status/1812316469016846373

Brief: The Theatre of Trump (w/Hank Willenbrink) — Conspirituality

23-939 Trump v. United States (07/01/2024)

Clarence Thomas Raised Another Issue: Was Jack Smith Legally Appointed? - The New York Times

22-451 Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (06/28/2024)

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