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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:

Bonus Sample: Losing My Charisma Mar 27, 2023

Show notes

Recording the audiobook at a swanky Toronto studio sends Matthew down a memory hole to wonder about performance, self-awareness, and anxiety, and their relation to charisma.

“Whatever charisma I have or project into the world has always been both prompted and tempered by the belief that becoming larger, that reaching out and creating an impression would soothe a confused or immature sense of self. That if I could be seen, I would be loved, and if loved, I would be real.

“If there is an anxiety at the core of the influencers we study, it might be related to this. This week I had the opportunity to meditate on it, to remember how charisma formed around and within me, first through an arts education, and then as a yoga and wellness entrepreneur. It’s made me wonder whether and how I’ve been that much different than Zach Bush, or Mikki Willis, or Katie Griggs. I know how to project that voice, I know how to put on my resting guru face.”

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146: The Reality of Online Child Abuse (w/Håkon Høydal) Mar 23, 2023

Show notes

Conspiritualists are not wrong that Jeffery Epstein’s downline has so far evaded justice. Or that the highest levels of the Catholic Church aided and abetted child sexual abuse for generations. They are not wrong about the existence of child sexual abuse materials circulating online, and that children are coerced, abducted, and sometimes killed in order to make them.

But their narratives are contorted by panic, mythology, stereotypes, paranoid and grandiose assumptions, and the antisemitic conspiracy theorizing of QAnon, which spread like wildfire through yoga and wellness social media during the pandemic and has now normalized as the “groomer” meme. They say that child sexual abuse is a planned, nefarious, top-down attack on innocents. They say that its purpose is to turn the world away from God, to starve humanity of hope.

Matthew sits down with Håkon Høydal, an investigative journalist in Norway who has spent years researching and exposing the most abject behaviors on the dark web. His work reveals a very different landscape. It’s a banal world, close to home, hiding in plain sight, presided over by young men who are making reckless choices after having decided that their pathological and criminally harmful impulses will never be understood, much less treated.

Show Notes

Hunting Warhead | CBC News

VG exposed the largest child sexual abuse forum. It was run by the police.

Porn site founder accused of sex trafficking arrested in Spain - The Globe and Mail

Sex offender treatment scheme led to increase in reoffending | UK news | The Guardian

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Original music by EarthRise SoundSystem

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Special Report: Nostalgia for the Superego (w/Sam Binkley) Mar 21, 2023

Show notes

Matthew sits down with Sam Binkley, Professor of Sociology at Emerson College in Boston to discuss his 2007 book Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s.

We cited this very helpful work as we dug into the sociology of conspirituality for our own upcoming book. Here’s a thumbnail of Binkley’s argument:

The 1970s ushered in a period of “getting loose” in relation to the body, work expectations, family relations, and political allegiances. This happened as the great moral and political questions of the 1960s deflated without resolution, even as they enshrined looser social mores around sex and finding meaningful work. The cultural yearning for structural change found its home in the project of the self, facilitated by an accelerated consumerism that expanded the conflation of agency with consumption. Getting Loose characterizes this inward turn as a retreat from the terrors of revolutionary freedom.

Show Notes

Getting Loose — Binkley

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Original music by EarthRise SoundSystem

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Bonus Sample: The Privilege of Wellness Mar 20, 2023

Show notes

There are a number of philosophies presented in yoga spaces as "universal truths" that turn out to be little more than directives in an echo chamber. And there are protocols presented as therapeutic in wellness spaces that blur the line between spiritual rhetoric and pseudoscience — and some are quite dangerous.

Derek looks at his experiences as a student at Jivamukti Yoga as well as the recent "ozone enema" podcast between Gwyneth Paltrow and Will Cole to discuss spiritual rhetoric and pseudoscience. He opens with his experiences as an international music journalist to provide a framework for thinking outside of your box, be it a local yoga studio or the websites you treat as gospel.

Show Notes

Gwyneth Paltrow Admits to Getting Ozone in Her Rectum

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Original music by EarthRise SoundSystem

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145: Fever Dream Goes Mainstream in Florida Mar 16, 2023

Show notes

When Disneyworld becomes DeSantisland, Eric Weinstein will be in charge of the Epcot Planetarium, JP Sears will headline the Family Values comedy stage, Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pageau will build an Orthodox cathedral for male transformation rituals. And Cinderella Castle will be remodeled into a Potemkin Capitol where Mikki Willis will choreograph and film daily insurrections.

The groundwork is being laid now, as we explore the institutionalization of QAnon. Moms for Liberty, egged on by Mike Flynn, is taking over school boards throughout the Sunshine State. Chris Rufo is now a college trustee, and Bret Weinstein is holding court in state medical committees. All while our conspirituality influencers, from Sears to Northrup to Avocado Wolfe, cheer on the dissolution of every social contract, every veneer of democracy.

The propaganda and sadism is so despairing that Derek might need religion, and Matthew might lose himself in retro fantasies of Disneyworld. Luckily, Julian talks with Sarasota anti-DeSantis activist Terra Kater about fighting the good fight under the hot sun.

Show Notes

CBD is everywhere. But is it a scam?

Dear Conservatives, I Apologize

The Paranoid Style in American Politics

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Original music by EarthRise SoundSystem

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Brief: Roku-Q, The Sequel (w/Alex Kaplan) Mar 14, 2023

Show notes

QAnon ain't over—it's on your television. It's been mainstreamed, networked, and remixed. Senior online extremism and disinformation researcher, Alex Kaplan of Media Matters joins Julian to share his reporting on the latest developments. 2024 is fast approaching. Under the looming shadows of legal calamity, Trump is rallying the Anons on Truth Social while Mike Flynn and his grifter-entourage roadshow preaches hellfire and ivermectin anti-vax election denial at an evangelical church near you. Can't make it? Sit back and grab the remote.

Show Notes

Alex Kaplan's Media Matters archive

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Pre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada

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Original music by EarthRise SoundSystem

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Bonus Sample: Hydroxychloroquine Emergency Mar 13, 2023

Show notes

In this listener story, Julian talks to disabled rights activist and journalist Abby Mahler about how the fake COVID-cure grift endangers people who really need hydroxychloroquine to survive.

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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

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144: The Magic Spells of Wellness (w/Colleen Derkatch) Mar 09, 2023

Show notes

"Cleansing is no longer an option, it's a necessity.”

From wellness influencers obsessed about the meat-body, to Christofascists obsessed about the body politic, rhetoric bombards us from all sides.

Professor of Rhetoric Colleen Derkatch joins Julian to discuss the techniques of the meaning miasma. Her focus is on wellness rhetoric specifically, and how it points to incipient illness, encourages recreational diagnostics, and describes daily routines as liturgies that grant membership in divine communities.

Also we can't avoid talking about Russell Brand on Bill Maher. Sorry.

Show Notes

Meet Colleen Derkatch

Gish Gallop: When People Try to Win Debates by Using Overwhelming Nonsense

Pharma Wants In - Rina Raphael

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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

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Bonus Sample: Marianne Williamson for Prez. New Age Jesus for VP. Mar 06, 2023

Show notes

Can Marianne Williamson maintain street cred as a progressive while promoting New Age Jesus?
Can she hammer out functional policy while preaching out of A Course in Miracles—the most anti-political pseudospiritual text on the planet?
Can she advocate for public health despite a history of waffling on vaccine science? Can she make a strong argument for health care reform while giving sermons from a book that says people get sick because they are not spiritual enough?
Can she really help fat people with her book that says that fatness is a "repository of twisted thoughts and feelings?"
Matthew doubts it, but hey—miracles happen!
Show Notes
William Thetford's CV (MKUltra reference)
Marianne Williamson's Democratic debate performance raised eyebrows. But she's no friend of the left.
Marianne Williamson is a controversial AIDS-crisis figure for gay men.
Kevin Sessums on MW, FB post: "I am an HIV+ man who lost lots of friends to AIDS and I know the harm she did conning many into believing they deserved their biological condition - and even their deaths- because they weren't spiritually fit enough to visualize the AIDS virus away."
Marianne Williamson on Twitter: "Let’s not forget that masks aren’t our only protection against Covid. Strengthening the immune system is also very important: recommendations like vitamins C and D, healthy food and exercise, positive/spiritual consciousness." / Twitter
A Course in Weight Loss: 21 Spiritual Lessons for Surrendering Your Weight Forever
Marianne Williamson promoted anti-vaxxer theories on her radio show in 2012 episode | CNN Politics

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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

Brief: Flood the Zone (w/Dr Dan Wilson) Feb 28, 2023

Show notes

Answering the current wave of confusing vaccine misinformation. Julian is joined by molecular biologist Dr. Dan Wilson. "Died Suddenly," correlation vs. causation, the vaccine court, and the recycled anti-vax tropes gaining fresh traction are all addressed in this succinct PSA.

Correction: Julian incorrectly calls Dr. Dan a "microbiologist" at the start of this Brief—but he actually holds a PhD in molecular biology.

Show Notes

Vaccinated/Unvaccinated Viral Load Study

Vaccination Reduces COVID Transmission

Standard Child/Adolescent Schedule

What is Gene Therapy?

Accelerating Vaccine Trials

"Died Suddenly" Debunk

Vaccine Court and Lawsuit Realities

-- -- --

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

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