Conspirituality - TopPodcast.com

View Top 200 Chart

Back to Rankings Page

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:

Bonus Sample: Project 2025's Plan: Let It Burn Jul 15, 2024

Show notes

Project 2025's approach to environmental issues is pretty straightforward: deny climate science, dismantle the EPA, clear a path that prioritizes corporate profits, and let the world burn.

Derek and Julian unpack the details on the chilling chapter from Project 2025's 920-page manifesto that outlines their plans for the Environmental Protection Agency. 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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brief: Project 2025’s “Bloodless” Coup Jul 13, 2024

Show notes

While speaking on Steve Bannon’s podcast, The War Room, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts recently stated, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless—if the left allows it to be.”

Roberts is the mastermind behind Project 2025, Heritage’s 920-page “presidential transition” agenda that seeks to implement authoritarian power in America. The text combines the anti-regulatory stance of libertarianism, laissez faire capitalism on steroids as espoused by conservatives, and the heinous and anti-democratic religious dogma of Christian nationalists, and it’s finally receiving a lot of attention.

Derek and Julian look beyond the “bloodless” comment to hear what else Roberts and crew have in store for America should Donald Trump regain the presidency. As you might imagine, it has nothing to do with democracy.

Show Notes

Taraji P Henson Calls Out Project 2025 at BET Awards

‘Complete and utter B.S.’: Trump DEFINITELY knows his own team authoring Project 2025

Kevin Roberts on The War Room

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

214: Aubrey Marcus is Totally Not a Cult Leader Jul 11, 2024

Show notes

Today we’re looking at a lavish infomercial put out by New Age oligarch and RFK Jr superfan Aubrey Marcus, in which he tries to show the world that his very expensive encounter group, Fit For Service, is definitely not a cult. And at how Matthew got quoted in the opening montage as though he endorsed FFS as an “anti-cult.” He hasn’t.

Marcus might be protesting too much. Because no one with any credibility has actually called FFS a cult, and they couldn’t, because no one has done the investigative work that would take. In a lot of ways, that question is beside the point. It’s not the ‘70s anymore. If you have 604K YouTube subscribers, and millions in the bank from oil money and supplement sales, you don’t need to coerce anyone into staying on your ashram compound and working on your spiritual ideas for free. You too can have an unlimited supply of well-heeled seekers cycling through your coaching encounter group.

So the real questions are: what is it really worth, and what does it really serve?

Show Notes

87: The Aubrey Marcus Spectacle

Brief: The New Age Origin Story of RFK Jr’s Campaign

107: An Open Letter to Aubrey Marcu

86: Charles Eisenstein, New Age Q

Why Kyle Kingsbury Quit The UFC

Myths That Make Us | Godsey Montana Summit talk

The music festival that wants to know your deepest secrets

[Annihilation] Can someone explain the shimmer from the movie scientifically?

Dharma Artist Collective—Godsey’s online community

'I Was 13 When Marc Gafni's Abuse Began'

Former Rabbi Accused of Improper Sexual Conduct Now Rising Star in U.S. Spiritual Movement

Gafni Faces Fallout From New Age Community

Marc Gafni Named In Latest Sexual Abuse Lawsuit Against Yeshiva University

Popular New Age author Marc Gafni molested 13-year-old girl in 1980, lawsuit says

Sara Kabakov lawsuit docket

Aaron Rogers in Marc Gafni’s library

Has Aaron Rodgers been learning Torah at his offseason retreat?

My Dad Died: The Blessings Of The Father Pt 1 w/ Dr. Marc Gafni

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bonus Sample: You Can’t Do Religion on the Internet Jul 08, 2024

Show notes

Back in 2011, Ward and Voas wrote that conspirituality was a mainly-online movement, and they were right about that. They didn’t do fieldwork at events. They didn’t attend trainings and rituals. They combed the internet for evidence of what they were looking for.

They found strange and anxious spiritual themes. But they also found evidence of what the internet does in all of its speed and dissociation, in its invitation to seize attention through contrarianism and amplify jagged anxieties and glittering pieties.

In finding conspirituality, they may have proven that you can’t do religion on the internet. And maybe, that’s part of why conspirituality exists.

Religious impulses are ancient and primal, centering communities as campfires do. But they also throw off sparks of narcissism and extremism, which the algorithms must capture to drive engagement.

Show Notes

MMMEATTT — “A newsletter about things that can’t exist on the internet” by Beau Brink

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brief: The Freebirth to Born-Again Pipeline Jul 06, 2024

Show notes

The stress of influencing in the New Age / alt-med world is rough. You have to pretend to know everything, from vaccine science to the origins of autism, to how feminism has desecrated the sanctity of motherhood. It’s not surprising that a growing number of the conspirituality influencers we know and love are all tuckered out, and now choosing to let Jesus take the wheel.

Freebirth mogul Yolande Norris Clark now joins the growing ranks of converts from conspirituality to Orthodox Christianity. How will she square her politics of the divine feminine with a hyper-patriarchal tradition? Or is it really such a stretch?

Show Notes

"Giving Birth in Yogaland"

She wanted a 'freebirth' with no doctors. Online groups convinced her it would be OK.

From Costa Rica, Yolande Norris-Clark Free-Births COVID News About “Hellscape” of Canada

Free-Birther Yolande Norris-Clark Promotes “The Secret Covenant”

COVID-Denialist: “Rona Is as Real as You Want it To Be”Argentino on Pastel Q — Twitter

The Women Making Conspiracy Theories Beautiful

The Instagram aesthetic that made QAnon mainstream

The Conspiracy Theory to Rule Them All

'Pastel QAnon' Is Infiltrating the Natural Parenting Community

First appearance of "The Secret Covenant" online

Secret Covenant: Freedom-Force (2004)

Secret Covenant boosted on a QAnon channel, 2020

PolitiFact | John D. Rockefeller did not write a ‘secret covenant’ about world domination Transphobia in the Midwifery Community

Yolande Norris-Clark: Transgenderism, Feminism & C0Vid (Content warning: transphobic creator)

Orthodox Christian churches are drawing in far-right American converts

Matthew Heimbach excommunicated

Justin Trudeau & The Misuse Of Words

Giving Birth in the Church

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

213: Yoga for Gaza, Yoga for Israel Jul 03, 2024

Show notes

Can yoga bring hostages home? No. Can yoga stop a genocide? Also no. But this won’t stop earnest practitioners from instrumentalizing practice for both purposes.

For supporters of Israel, practice is dedicated to the protection of land, the return of hostages, and to uphold the spiritual valor of soldiers. Among supporters of Palestine and a ceasefire, yoga practice and community is an organizing principle for decrying genocide, building mutual aid, and resisting global colonialism. Both factions cite the Bhagavad Gita.

Does yoga support nationalistic violence and body fascism? Isn’t that where its modern origins lie? Or does it have deeper, intersectional roots in universal liberation?

The interpretive war, articulated and inflamed online, only accelerates the material war.

But there is a third space we examine today: the gap between how spiritual aspirations appear and are praised or condemned in the world of the spectacle, and how they play out in the flesh.

Show Notes

Tel Aviv Yoga Event

About : Israeli hostages taken by Hamas

We Are Still Standing handstand event

Carmel Gat | Yoga in captivity

Taken captive: Carmel Gat, seen doing yoga with hostage children

Initial Twitter posting of Alfie's yoga class in Gaza

Reserve combat engineer practices yoga with soldiers in a house in Gaza

IG post | criticism of Yoga Journal cover

In Israel, Chanting 'Om' Between Missiles

What does Israel's rescue of 4 captives, and the killing of 274 Palestinians, mean for truce talks?

AP: Calculating death numbers in Gaza

Sarah Martin Little Rock yoga benefit event

Rasha Madkour fundraiser for The Longhorn Muslim Alumni Network

UK yoga event for the Palestine Children's Relief Fund

Hot Yoga Glasgow yogathon for the International Rescue Committee

A look inside the growing Pro-Palestine student solidarity encampment at UCSB

Pro-Palestinian Demonstrators At USC Join Camp-In Movement On Heels Of Valedictorian Controversy

Sheena Sood's Yoga for Palestine series at Bhakti Yoga Movement in Portland

50. Sellouts & Zealots (w/Sheena Sood)

Samson's Foxes insignia

Reserve combat engineer practices yoga with soldiers in a house in Gaza

The Dangerous History Behind Netanyahu’s Amalek Rhetoric

Dark Mirror: A Torah View of Revenge, and its Reflection in Israeli Media During Operation Iron Swords

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bonus Sample: The Prophet & the Electrical Storm Jul 01, 2024

Show notes

What does it really mean to be a prophet, found a religion, and persuade millions of people that god speaks directly to you?

And what does this god tell you? How to live morally. What kinds of sex are forbidden. How to avoid death and live forever. When the end of the world is coming, and which messiah will bring it.

In this latest installment on the history of the intersection of spirituality and pseudoscience, Julian looks at the story of a prophet named Ellen G. White and what she may have in common with historical figures as diverse as Gopi Krishna, Dostoevsky, and Joan of Arc.

Show Notes

Christian Experiences and Teachings of Ellen G White

Phantoms in the Brain

Sam Kean: Heaven is for Neuroscience

Neuroscience for the soul

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brief: Jordan Peterson Teaches Russell Brand Theology Jun 29, 2024

Show notes

Last month, Russell Brand visited Jordan Peterson's podcast for “The Evolution of Theology.” Which, given these two figures, had to focus on topics like the unreligious impulsivity of gay people and why slaves should “just not be slaves.” Derek and Julian discuss.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

212: US Military Tells RFK Jr-Style Lies Jun 27, 2024

Show notes

On June 14, Reuters published an article about the US Military’s clandestine program to discredit China’s Sinovac vaccine during the early days of Covid-19. Turns out the Pentagon hired an outside agency to purposefully spread FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) about the Chinese inoculation program by flooding social media with anti-vax propaganda. It was a smack in the face for anyone—including us—who’s been calling for sound public health measures over the last four years. And it very likely killed people in Southeast Asia.

This week, we look at the harrowing reporting that revealed a shameful, interventionary program that began under the Trump administration and persisted at least a few months into the Biden presidency. We’ll also review the very few conspiritualists that have even covered the story—somewhat surprising, given that a good ol’ government conspiracy is their bread and butter. But what happens when anti-vaxxers are confronted with a government-led anti-vax program, enacted by the same military that some of them, like RFK Jr, want to drastically reduce? Let’s find out.

Show Notes

Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic (Reuters)

Pentagon Ran Secret Anti-Vax Campaign in Philippines, While Censoring Americans Who Criticized COVID Shots (Children’s Health Defense)

Supporting military missions overseas (GDIT “Careers” page)

Companies Profiting from the Gaza Genocide

CONTRACT to GENERAL DYNAMICS INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, INC.

DynPort Vaccine Company

Vaccine Diplomacy in the Wake of COVID-19

Pentagon Orders Sweeping Review

Martin Luther King Jr.’s moral stance against Vietnam War offers lessons for the Middle East

Exclusive: Inside the S--tshow That Was the Trump-Biden Transition

The Scam at the Heart of the Mysterious Epoch Times

End The Forever Wars | Kennedy24

EXPOSED: Secret Pentagon MISINFO Campaign Spread LIES About COVID Vaccines (The Hill)

DISGUSTING! Glenn Greenwald GOES OFF On Pentagon Anti-Vax Psyop (Breaking Points)

Pentagon Opens Sweeping Review of Clandestine Psychological Operations

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bonus Sample: Sanctimonious Spirituality Jun 24, 2024

Show notes

What is the distance between spiritual practice and social action? Derek has weighed this question for decades. This unscripted meditation on the topic uses Aubrey Marcus's new "documentary," Anti-Cult, as a jump-off point.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Related Podcasts