Conspirituality

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.

Episodes

November 24, 2025 4 mins
This bonus episode is Part 2 of Graeber vs Bannon, Anarchism vs Leninism.  I start in the 1870s with Marx and Bakunin fighting over the joys and traumas of the Paris Commune. Marx sees it as an imperfect but historic prototype of a workers’ transitional state, cut down before it could consolidate power. Bakunin reads it as a betrayal of anarchist principles — too willing to replicate the machinery it meant to overthrow. Out of tha...
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In this first of a two-part series, I dig into a century-long debate within revolutionary politics—one that now shapes the fault lines between MAGA authoritarianism and the fragmented resistance against it.  How did the American far right end up using Leninist strategy more effectively than the American left? And what does that say about our own movements—our blind spots, our strengths, and inherited illusions? In 2013, Steve Ban...
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In 1954 a doomsday alien cult headed up by Chicagoland housewife Dorothy Martin was waiting for the cataclysmic flood that would herald the arrival of spaceships to transport her and her followers to safety. When the hour came and went and nothing happened, she and her followers made up a Bible’s worth of excuses, saying that the group's penitence and piety had saved them, and so the failure of the prophecy was actually a validatio...
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November 17, 2025 7 mins
They offered initiation into ancient Christian mysticism, ritual communion with the spirits, an understanding of reincarnation, and the destined transition to inhabiting a "solar-body" in the Sirius star-system. But it all ended in murderous blood sacrifice and fire—and 74 dead believers. What is this dark preoccupation with sacrifice and ritual killing in the name of metaphysical belief? Grotesque to modern ears, yet quite common...
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RFK Jr's senior advisor and supplements salesman, Calley Means, has repeatedly fabricated the story of Abraham Flexner and the birth of the modern medical system. Derek looks into his historical revisionism and what it could mean for the MAHA movement. Show Notes Medical Education in America: Abraham Flexner The Great Influenza: John Barry The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: Roy Porter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megap...
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November 13, 2025 66 mins
Back in June, we published an episode about the "Speaking with American Men" (SAM) project, a $20 million initiative designed by political consultants to understand and win back young men (18-29) who increasingly voted for Donald Trump. We talked about this cringey, inauthentic approach to compete over the influence of manosphere figures like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Huberman, who exploit a perceived "meaning crisis" with pseudo-...
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November 10, 2025 5 mins
Listen to the full episode The nonprofit organization (and its adjoined Super PAC), MAHA Action, is leading semi-regular Zoom calls featuring a host of wellness influencers and RFK Jr appointees, including Jillian Michaels, Dr Oz, and Russell Brand. Derek listens into a recent call to see just what they're saying. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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November 8, 2025 43 mins
Taylor Swift: Nazi sympathizer, freshly-minted racist, MAGA trad wife. Or so proponents of a recent conspiracy theory would have it. For years, the most successful female recording and performing artist of her generation (and therefore of all time) has used “easter eggs” as part of her marketing. Hidden messages in music videos and lyric sheets, oblique references in social media posts, and puzzles as merchandise marketing gimmicks...
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November 6, 2025 64 mins
When restaurants and cafes in Portland and elsewhere link into networks of food pantries and soup kitchens, will mutual aid feel real in the US? When regular folks come out of their houses to shame and chase ICE thugs out of the neighborhood, will that feeling of power from below catch on? Will it create some craving for a different way of doing things and understanding authority and order? Derek looks at Portland, Julian looks a...
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Listen to the full episode on Patreon Part 2 follows the money flowing from US agencies and interests to anti-Liberation Theology figures in Latin America. We meet Jesuit operator Roger Vekemans, who in the 1960s drew funding from the CIA, USAID, West German bishops, and U.S. conservative foundations to undermine Liberation and Christian socialism in Chile and beyond.  Nelson Rockefeller used Protestant missions as a model for so...
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November 1, 2025 39 mins
This is the first of a two-part deep dive into how U.S. foreign policy stared down the political threat of Liberation Theology by promoting Evangelical Christianity in Latin America. The CIA and USAID, in league with Vatican conservatives like Cardinal Ratzinger, spent money and social capital on the suppression of this vital new movement which insisted that poverty is political and that faith without structural change is hollow.  ...
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October 30, 2025 53 mins
“Meet the man who built RFK Jr’s kitchen cabinet” goes the title of a recent investigative article in Politico. Yet that man, Jeffrey Tucker, is much more than that. In fact, you can make the case, as Politico does, that Tucker is one of the main driving forces behind MAHA. We’ve covered Tucker before on this podcast, including two previous interviews with his estranged daughter, Julia—who Matthew will again be talking to in segme...
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Earlier this year, a spate of news stories told of chatbot users travelling through the looking-glass right into Conspirituality. Paranoid conspiracies, spiritual awakenings, even falling head-over-heels in love with the simulated personalities of large language models like ChatGPT. Could AI have finally crossed the threshold into autonomous sentient consciousness? Could it be that chatbots were anointing new prophets—or, converse...
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October 25, 2025 33 mins
Social media has been filled with clips of Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee for mayor of NYC. He's been proving quite the foil for Andrew Cuomo's attempt to upset Zohran Mamdani. But who is this man, exactly? Derek and Julian discuss. Show Notes 16 Cats, 320 Square Feet and One Long-Shot Candidate for Mayor 7 Takeaways From the Final N.Y.C. Mayoral Debate Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Tech billionaire Peter Thiel is no cuck philanthropist. The co-founder of Palantir is leading his company at the bleeding edge of mass surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, and AI-assisted warfare. He also fancies himself a political player, responsible for funding his protege, JD Vance, to a heartbeat away from the presidency. Considering this CV, the announcement that Thiel would give a series of four lectures on...
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October 20, 2025 5 mins
Listen to the full episode on Patreon After attending the No Kings rally in Portland on Saturday, Derek shares some thoughts about the week leading up to the nationwide protests. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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October 18, 2025 31 mins
Stephen Miller is once again making headlines for saying the quiet part out loud. Derek and Julian look into this strange little man from Santa Monica. Show Notes Stephen Miller: Understanding the man who became ‘Trump’s brain’ through his Chronicle opinion column ‘I love Hitler’: Leaked messages expose Young Republicans’ racist chat What Stephen Miller Was Like in High School - Charles Gould Learn more about your ad choices. V...
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October 16, 2025 56 mins
ICE is on the loose in our cities, acting with seeming impunity. They've repelled from Black Hawk helicopters, thrown journalists and protestors to the ground, and belligerently refused to unmask, provide identification, or present warrants for the people they're kidnapping. Among the social media videos documenting this despicable stormtrooper behavior came the image of a priest being hit in the head and knocked to the ground by...
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Hey everyone… special drop today: the inaugural episode of Matthew’s new side project, Antifascist Dad Podcast.  Matthew sits down with songwriter Nathan Evans Fox to talk about kinship, Appalachia, and the viral hymn that’s resonating across communities. Nathan shares the roots of his concept of yallidarity—solidarity rooted in labor, joy, food, music, and taking care of one another. They discuss the myths and realities of Appal...
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Full episode on Patreon Part 2 moves from Christofascist spectacle to the “mushy middle” of liberal Christianity—why it so often blesses order over justice and falters when fascism rises. Drawing on MLK’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, Reggie Williams’s Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus, and lived experience inside white urban churches, he traces how bureaucratic piety, respectability politics, and spiritual bypassing drain the Gospel of con...
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