Antisemitism is in the news again, as Candace Owens defends Kanye West and Kyrie Irving, while her boss, Ben Shapiro shakes his head in dismay. In this Bonus special report, Julian looks into the Assembly of Yahweh family, which funds conservative new media giants, The Daily Wire and PragerU. How do we make sense of the racial and religious tensions created by the strange bedfellow alliances of right-wing propaganda? -- -- -- Support us on Patreon Pre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspirac...
Nov 14, 2022•8 min
An ancient text at the root of the culture that gave birth to the yoga tradition says that if an outcaste person—a Dalit—dares to learn the holy language of Sanskrit, they must be tortured. Molten lead must be poured into their ears. Their tongue must be cut out. In the Ramayana , a Shudra (caste oppressed) who dared to practice yoga was murdered so that the sickly child of a priestly family might regain his health. In the Mahabharata , an Adivasi (South Asian Indigenous) boy is commanded to cut...
Nov 10, 2022•1 hr 22 min
Matthew and Julian sit down for the first of a two-part examination of the 1988 bestseller at the heart of the recovered memory movement—which played a central role in validating Satanic Panic testimonials. The basic premise of The Courage to Heal , by creative writing instructors Ellen Bass and Linda Davis, is that memories of childhood abuse, especially child sexual abuse, can be recovered and articulated by survivors who are given the proper space, tools, and validation. The book explores how...
Nov 07, 2022•11 min
In the second of three episodes on Michelle Remembers , we recap its Catholic contexts, and Lawrence Pazder's quest to transcend the limitations of psychiatry through mystical nightmares. We then explore the front matter: how Pazder introduces his project (and himself), and the ambivalent endorsement of Remi de Roo, Archbishop of Victoria. In Pazder's many clerical alliances, a crucial theme is established: the rapprochement between psychiatry and the priesthood, in which the former submits to t...
Nov 05, 2022•1 hr 36 min
Mark Roseman opens Lives Reclaimed , his compelling history of the “Bund”—a leftist communitarian group that resisted fascism and protected Jews during the Reich—with a quote from Michael Ondaatje’s novel The Cat’s Table : “That was a small lesson I learned on the journey. What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.” Roseman, a professor of Jewish and German Studies at University of Indiana at Bloomington, joins Matthew to paint a picture of met...
Nov 03, 2022•2 hr 4 min
Imagine a technology so powerful it's been directly downloaded from spirit during a Scorpio eclipse. This revolutionary tool can cure burn victims, remove cysts from dogs, and endow you with ultimate productivity. Thanks to phase conjugation, this bioenhanced scalar tech will change the way you view medicine and healing forever—provided you don't have any expectations and remain open to source, that is. And whatever any of that means, Derek will try to decipher—and fail, though some other aspect...
Oct 31, 2022•8 min
Listeners: today’s episode marks a turning point for us all here at Conspirituality HQ. Humbled by a recent quantum download, we realize that we have for too long been relying on our critical faculties. For too long we have insisted that words mean things. Our poisoned irony has calcified our throat chakras and burned your ears to the point you may never trust a spiritual influencer again. Today we release our addiction to meaning, our fetish for precision in words. We begin to trust the inner b...
Oct 27, 2022•1 hr 25 min
A departure today, as Matthew eulogizes his teacher and friend Luciano Iacobelli. From the opening: This story may be a little personal and indulgent, but I’ll take a risk on it because I think it hints at an answer to a question we often get on the podcast about our own beliefs in the existential or spiritual categories. We spend a lot of time eviscerating bog-standard hypocrisy in the economy of spirituality. Listeners resonate with this, but the project is also depressing, and in the parasoci...
Oct 24, 2022•5 min
What is the state of the documentary film in the age of manipulative online propaganda? In the hands and eyes of a documentarian like Amy Berg we find a journalistic commitment to the truth combined with the artistry of compelling and intimate story-telling. Along the way, her projects are guided by an obsession with justice. In two cases—that of the West Memphis Three, and more recently the murder trial of Adnen Syed— her film-making played a role in changing the real-world narrative; leading t...
Oct 20, 2022•1 hr 30 min
The second part of Julian and Matthew's long look at the 1999 film Teal Swan was reportedly obsessed with as a teen. Girl, Interrupted is a freewheeling adaptation of a 1993 memoir by Susanna Kaysen about the 18 months she spent undergoing treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder in a Massachusetts psychiatric facility in the late 1960s. This study is provoked by a memory recounted by Swan's childhood friend, Diana Hansen Ribera, that Swan identified with the character of Lisa Rowe in the f...
Oct 17, 2022•9 min
For the prophet and the revolutionary alike, the time is always now. Gird up your loins brave heroes, and show your true faith! The signs portend that The Last World Emperor is rising to do battle against the AntiChrist. The time is always now, but in that flat circle of iterative history, no bad idea is really new under the Black Sun—it's just been engineered to go more viral. Our guest today is history professor Thomas Lecaque, who writes about how medieval ethnonationalist holy war is woven i...
Oct 13, 2022•2 hr
Methylene blue will give you more energy! It’s neuroprotective! Your skin will never look better! Your bunghole will never be bluer! This week, Derek investigates one of biohacking’s hottest trends: a textile dye that does, in fact, have medical applications—just not the ones optimizers are promoting, and optimizing. He’ll look into this organic compound’s history, how it’s being marketed by the butter coffee guy, and finally, reading from Aubrey Marcus’s latest newsletter on blue buttholes. Sho...
Oct 10, 2022•4 min
There's no Teal Swan without the Satanic Panic. And there's no Satanic Panic without the 1980 publication of Michelle Remembers , by Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith. In this first of three segments on this melted book, Matthew and Julian cover its historical, cultural, and mass media context. We start with a review of a 1985 20/20 episode called “The Devil Worshippers” for a taste of how mainstream outlets hosted cranks like Pazder, giving him a hall pass on evidence, and overlooking how his ...
Oct 08, 2022•1 hr 46 min
Mystery topic today. Emergency episode. Breaking story. Amazing if true! Totally transformative plot twist. You gotta listen through for the big reveal, and then hit smash for more. Spoiler alert: QAnon was foreshadowed by Pizzagate, but Pizzagate was foreshadowed by a moral panic in London, England that was driven in part by someone the three of us are karmically bound to, for good or ill, forever. But first, Derek’s got a This Week in Conspirituality segment on the boom times for pseudoscience...
Oct 06, 2022•1 hr 24 min
Julian and Matthew take a long look at the 1999 film Teal Swan was reportedly obsessed with as a teen. Girl, Interrupted is a bold adaptation of a 1993 memoir by the writer Susanna Kaysen about the 18 months she spent undergoing treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder in a Massachusetts psychiatric facility in the late 1960s. This study is provoked by a memory recounted by Swan's childhood friend, Diana Hansen Ribera, that Swan identified with the character of Lisa Rowe in the film. Angeli...
Oct 03, 2022•9 min
The book is filed. Our mental health is in check. And, as it turns out, Matthew found a new guru. We return to trio work by investigating his fellow Canadian's cure for, uh, anything, or maybe something, as well diving into two biohacking conferences and the conspiritualist's new favorite fascist on the block. Show Notes Tip of the iceberg: erectile dysfunction and COVID-19 | International Journal of Impotence Research Will in the News, TV & Internet Culture Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 1...
Sep 29, 2022•1 hr 24 min
If you tune into your favorite Instagram wellness influencer or financial life coach, you’ll learn that money is really a state of mind—right? Thinking the right thoughts is the truest judge of character, and therefore indicative of your bottom line. This week Derek looks at research from behavioral economics, which found the perceived relationship between wealth and morality dates back to post-WWII America—and has damaged the poorest among us for generations. He weighs evidence from this field,...
Sep 26, 2022•7 min
Some of the most valuable material that come to us from Paula Marino's Open Shadow film of 2017 is an extended interview with Swan's parent's, the Bosworths. They speak about Swan's sensory sensitivity as a young child, and how that morphed into a staunchly independent but sometimes isolated social life. They describe Swan's secret runic writing, their belief in her capacities as a medical intuitive, and discuss the gaps in psychiatric care that failed them all when her mental health needed help...
Sep 24, 2022•1 hr 15 min
Are you ready to biohack your brain with buttered coffee? How about going “within” at the Drybar of acupuncture? What if we told you that cannabis will catapult your chakras into higher consciousness—all it costs is a $5,000 retreat entry fee, not including airfare and hotel? In the $4.4 trillion wellness industry, is any cost really too expensive to achieve true self-care—even if it never really seems like you arrive anywhere at all? Rina Raphael was getting burnt out as a millennial digital ne...
Sep 22, 2022•1 hr 3 min
Christina Flinders returns for the second of a two-part tour through her experience with cultic dynamics, conspirituality, and the long road towards finding her place in the world. Picking up where she left off, Flinders discusses breaking free of the sexually abusive cult of Eknath Easwaren, finding ambivalent agency as a stripper, and then graduating to yoga teaching—where she then had to dodge being redpilled. Thanks again to Christina for her generosity and lucidity, and her family for their...
Sep 19, 2022•5 min
Did you know that Joe Biden is a Satanic alien Nazi pedophile intent on bringing about the New World Order? Or that Donald Trump is the only thing that will save us from complete tyranny? How about the fact that COVID vaccines are bioweapons destroying the global population? But that’s okay, because colloidal silver is the magic bullet that will boost your immune system to help you fend off this scamdemic. Add that to your herbal stack alongside Lung Health Organic Herbal Spray which is definiti...
Sep 15, 2022•1 hr 14 min
Christina Flinders is our honoured guest today for the first of a two-part tour through her experience with cultic dynamics and conspirituality. Matthew and Julian learn about her family's enmeshment in the cult of Eknath Easwaren, and her subsequent journey through rebellion, self discovery, and political awakening. We'd like to thank Christina for her generosity and lucidity, and her family for supporting her in this. We hope that this will be the first in a series. If you'd like to share your...
Sep 12, 2022•8 min
On May 31st, 2014, Morgan Geyser stabbed her onetime best friend Bella Leutner nineteen times, while her new best friend, Anissa Weier, looked on. All three girls were twelve years old. Geyser was living with schizophrenia, and Weier had introduced her to the crowd-sourced internet phantasm known as Slenderman, who first appeared on Something Awful, the message board at the root of chan culture. Together, Geyser and Weier came to believe that Slenderman was demanding a sacrifice in exchange for ...
Sep 08, 2022•1 hr 34 min
As we're all with family over the holiday weekend, here's a 2018 interview that Derek conducted with neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga after the publication of his last book, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind . Michael revolutionized the field of neuroscience in the 1960s with his work on split-brain patients and remains a towering figure in his field. -- -- -- Support us on Patreon Pre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became ...
Sep 05, 2022•6 min
Do you ever stop to think about whether or not you can afford organic food—and then consider that many people don’t have such an option? Is Goop’s $295 incense holder a sign of feminine empowerment or merely another Gwneth Paltrow grift? Will that $32 spin class that features an endless litany of positive affirmations make you more likely to slip $5 to the homeless person camped outside of the studio—or does it increase your happiness or contentment levels at all, once the endorphins wear off? T...
Sep 01, 2022•52 min
The homestretch of our study of Michelle Remembers zeroes in on the literal symbols—and symbols gone literal—of the Satanic Panic. Archetypes, gore, anxieties about sex and babies and filth: Lawrence Pazder mined it all, using modes of abstraction and dehumanization as old as religion itself to weave a story he claimed was all about Michelle—but was really an exercise of his own fetishes. Michelle Smith could have received proper care for her understandable stresses. She could have offered up he...
Aug 29, 2022•10 min
Fitness is the beating heart of America. No, wait, that’s opportunistic capitalism. But opportunistic capitalism, as it turns out, is the beating heart of fitness. Yet fitness has a soul too—in fact, mysticism, capitalism, and fitness have been dancing together for a very long time, while politics calls the tune, as historian and assistant professor at The New School, Natalia Petrzela, is here to tell us about today. We should also note that Natalia is our only four-time guest. She’s also the au...
Aug 25, 2022•1 hr 9 min
JP Sears constantly refers to himself as a freethinker. His increasing religiosity is counter to critical thinking, however. Derek responds to two recent videos that detail his religious thinking and transphobia, showing how a specific strain of Christianity—and binary thinking—is not freethought, but propaganda. -- -- -- 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 | J...
Aug 22, 2022•7 min
In this episode of the Swan Song Series, Matthew interviews Paola Marino about why she found Teal Swan a fascinating subject to film for 2018’s “Open Shadow.” They discuss aesthetics, the mystery of personality, why Swan’s parents agreed to sit down with her. Matthew also surprised her with the newly-revealed translations of Swan’s coded journal pages. Prefacing the interview is a discussion between Julian and Matthew about art, artifice, the risks of doing and not doing hard journalism on the s...
Aug 18, 2022•1 hr 50 min
In the second of three episodes on Michelle Remembers , we recap its Catholic contexts, and Lawrence Pazder's quest to transcend the limitations of psychiatry through mystical nightmares. We then explore the front matter: how Pazder introduces his project (and himself), and the ambivalent endorsement of Remi de Roo, Archbishop of Victoria. In Pazder's many clerical alliances, a crucial theme is established: the rapprochement between psychiatry and the priesthood, in which the former submits to t...
Aug 15, 2022•9 min
