12: So You Want To Stop Child Abuse (w/Regan Williams & Dr Theo Wildcroft)
Last week, we started to explore how the real issue of child trafficking is being weaponized by bad-faith actors. This week we’re joined by two experts that explain the overt and subtle impacts involved.
Regan Williams, CEO and founder of Seen & Heard, a nonprofit that provides youth in foster care with professional and personal development via the performing arts, offers a ground zero perspective of trafficked children and teens (and the people that actually care for them) being made even more invisible by conspiratorial clicktivism.
Religious Studies scholar and trauma-sensitive yoga consultant, Dr. Theo Wildcroft, joins us from England to discuss the consequences of trauma histories being hijacked for political and emotional manipulation. She offers insight into the mythic elements of conspirituality-to-Q that cannot be ignored if we want to understand how trauma is both stored and resisted.
On This Week in Conspirituality, Matthew considers the absurdity of David Wolfe accusing the medical community of not doing anything about cancer. Julian investigates anti-Semitic blood libel themes in QAnon and Derek discusses the chronic dangers of seeking utopia.
Show Notes
To report abuse/neglect, call the child abuse hotline: 800.540.4000 (LA county) / 800.422.4453 (National)
Epstein is a real pedophile. Why are QAnon and Pizzagate so focused on fake ones?
The Dark Virality of a Hollywood Blood-Harvesting Conspiracy
Just how anti-Semitic is QAnon?
QAnon isn’t newly anti-Semitic—it’s always been that way
Q supporters are incorrectly doxxing journalists who report on QAnon as Jewish
Nearly 600,000 people have voted for candidates who support QAnon
Here are the QAnon supporters running for Congress in 2020
QAnon Supporter Who Made Bigoted Videos Wins Ga. Primary, Likely Heading To Congress
Prominent Republicans back a conspiracy theory-promoting congressional candidate in Georgia
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All right, so for episode 12, welcome to So You Want to Stop Child Abuse.
Last week, we started to explore how the real issue of child trafficking is being weaponized by bad faith actors.
And this week, we're joined by two experts that explain the overt and subtle impacts involved.
Reagan Williams, CEO and founder of Seen and Heard, which is a non-profit that provides youth and foster care with professional and personal development via the performing arts, offers a ground zero perspective of trafficked children and teens, and the people that actually care for them, being made even more invisible by conspiratorial clictivism.
Religious studies scholar and trauma-sensitive yoga consultant Dr. Theo Wildcroft also joins us.
She joins us from England and will discuss the consequences of trauma histories being hijacked for political and emotional manipulation.
She offers insight into the mythic elements of conspirituality, on its way to QAnon that we really can't ignore if we want to understand how trauma is both stored and tested.
And on this week in Conspiratuality, I'm going to consider the absurdity of David Wolff accusing the medical community of not doing anything about cancer And Julian's going to investigate the anti-Semitic blood libel themes in QAnon, and Derek will discuss the chronic dangers of seeking utopia.
But before we begin, we really have to get a particular news item out of the way, and that's that it's being widely reported that the first full QAnon-supporting Republican has made it through her congressional primary in Georgia's 14th, Marjorie Taylor Greene.
She won her primary last night.
She's virtually assured of a seat in Congress come November.
And so here we are, a full-on Q-supporting Republican congressional member coming up for November.
And of course, Trump congratulated her.
So I know you guys have something to say about that.
Do you have any in Canada, by the way?
That's a great question.
I have heard of scattered Q-type street protests here and there.
And I think at one point there was a Q-related protest that got mixed up with the Yellow Jacket protests, labor protests in Quebec, but that would have been months and months ago.
Also related to lockdown concerns and whether or not people were going to be allowed to get back to work.
And, but no, I haven't seen it in the political sphere at all.
There wouldn't really be a home for, a political home or a party home for, for, for Q candidates, as far as I can tell.
Like, I don't think anybody, even to the furthest right of the conservative Spectrum here would be able to tolerate it within party structures.
So not yet.
I could be mistaken.
I mean, the most, you know, sort of the hard right of Canadian conservatism is in the Midwest.
And if it's going to show up, it's going to show up there.
So, yeah.
So even now, your conservatives still have a little bit of common sense, at the very least.
I don't know if it's common sense so much as... I mean, ideologically, no, there's a lot of alignment between slash and burn conservatism in Canada and what you see policy-wise in the States.
I'm not a political analyst, but I think I'm safe in saying that.
But it's more that there would be much more social and political risk in allowing a particular kind of discourse to float its way in.
So that's my sense anyway.
Yeah, yeah.
I heard one commentator saying, one political analyst, that the victory of her in this runoff and the support that a lot of other candidates who are spouting this kind of Q rhetoric are getting doesn't so much show that all of the thousands of people voting for them necessarily are Q true believers. that the victory of her in this runoff and the But it does show, to your point, Matthew, that being someone who supports Q is not a deal breaker in terms of still getting their vote.
Right.
I mean, what's really weird is that and, you know, really pertinent to our podcast is that the test for somebody like Green is really now going to be how much does she have to distance herself publicly from QAnon to secure mainstream Republican support.
You know, there was this clip on Anderson Cooper's show of the correspondent in Georgia who was initially locked out of the The victory party, but went and found Taylor Green in her car in the parking lot afterwards and tried to ask her a question through the window about her allegiance to Q. And she responded by not responding, by saying, you know, I don't want to talk about that.
I want to talk about you know, this other, you know, patriotic agenda or something like that.
But she's going to be, I'm sure she's going to be cagey and deflectionary for a while.
And what's really super interesting for us, I think, is that for somebody like Christiane Northrup, who's indicated in Dog Whistle that she's Q adjacent or even Q supportive, she's going to have to be cagey as well, but in the opposite direction, Like, how close can she come to full-on evangelical Q-redpilled without losing mainstream wellness support?
She's kind of walking that line, but coming from the other direction.
The word utopia was coined by Sir Thomas More in his 1516 book of the same name.
Of course, in terms of literature, dystopia rules.
We're required to read the Inferno in high school, yet that trilogy gets more boring with each edition.
But I love the etymology of the word utopia.
More borrowed from two Greek words, not and place, to get no place.
And that is, a utopia is a place that never exists.
A lot of thinkers recognize this.
Oscar Wilde wrote that progress is the realization of utopias.
He didn't write that it was a perfect place, which is effectively how it's been used for the last few decades in the American wellness space.
Now, let's not pin it all on modernity.
The earliest literature is filled with ideal states of being and places that humans will achieve if only X and Y and Z occur.
In our earliest known mythology, Gilgamesh travels around the world to achieve the plant of immortality, which he dives to the bottom of the ocean to find.
But then, a human being human, even though he was half-god, he falls asleep and a fish snatches it up.
So mythological writers had a sense of humor.
And they also had a sense of reality, which is more than I can say about the focus of this week's podcast, which is the devotees of QAnon.
Since this podcast's inception, we've been looking at ways that the wellness influencers are falling down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole.
And to be honest, I don't think there's a singular reason for it.
These topics are complex, and complexity is multivariate.
It's not a condition that causes this, but rather a number of circumstances that lead to it.
And I think that the desire for utopia is one of them.
Last week, Matthew commented that wellness doesn't have a product to offer except for aspiration.
There's nothing to sell but the promise of something down the road.
And that something has always been utopia, a promised land that will come if only this or that occurs.
And we're seeing that in QAnon right now.
In fact, it's actually the foundation of this cult or whatever we want to call it.
Donald Trump is going to rid the world of the elite pedophile cabal to usher in a new age.
Which all this makes me wonder, as it does with every religion that uses utopia as an ideal state, what are we being ushered into?
Pedophilia isn't new.
Pedestrian, which is romantic relationships between adult men and young boys, was part of ancient Greek culture.
And there have also been rituals where young boys had to drink the semen of adult men in order to become men, and the way that they attain that semen is exactly what you think it is.
Child brides are still a thing in America even today.
Now, I'm not advocating for these practices.
I'm only highlighting that humans have always had different views on sexuality, and informed consent wasn't much of a thing for a very long time.
Now, we're trying to course-correct today in the best way that we know how.
Namely, don't traumatize children, be it by abduction, forced prostitution, child pornography, or even cat-calling teenage girls on the street.
But there has never been a utopia and there never will be.
It is no place.
And that's the chronic problem in the wellness space and elsewhere of striving for utopia.
You're putting your mental resources into an ideal that can never exist.
In fact, as you'll hear during my interview with Reagan Williams, collectivism, which is sharing these insane conspiracy theories as if you're providing some public service, does more harm than good because traumatized children are reading these things and they think that they're real.
That doesn't help their healing process.
And all I can say is shame on you if you're not thinking through the consequences of your actions.
Humans have always had a difficult time grappling with evolutionary biology, as if we're exempt from our animal nature.
Our brains are designed to predict.
We predict where food is, where to flee for safety, and who to procreate with.
Now this goes back to unicellular life.
The ability to see the future uses the same neural networks as memory, which is the hippocampal networks.
So think about that.
What you use to imagine where you're going to be is the same network as knowing where you've been.
And what that means is that we spend almost all of our time either thinking about the past or the future.
And that, I feel, is why we imagine a perfect state that is never quite here.
And that's why this conspirituality mashup with child abusers is so confusing.
The goal and the purpose of practices like yoga and Buddhism is to yoke the mind to the present moment.
We're not wired to pay attention to detail considering in our new nature, which is society.
Now, instead of envisioning the perfect tree to sleep under, that tension is now applied to society and more recently to the newest environment that we inhabit, which is the internet.
And with no physical place to go, we see in real time the consequences of anxiety that is being let loose online.
So if these wellness influencers took a step back and practiced what they preach, which is the present moment, perhaps they would have a better grasp of what's happening right now.
But maybe I'm asking too much.
But I'll end with this.
If your brand uses the language of spiritual practices to sell you on the idea of a future utopia, you're missing the point.
Humans will always envision the future, and if we're not suffering from severe depression, and I think that some of these people are, but that discussion is going to happen in another episode, we'll be hopeful about the future.
Yet if on the way to that future, you're overlooking the very real needs of traumatized children right now, I don't know what value you're bringing to anyone.
And in fact, as you'll hear as this episode progresses, you're only doing more damage to children who really need help.
And at this point, you've lost your practice entirely.
So strong, yeah.
This whole utopian tendency, I feel, it's underneath so many topics, right?
It's underneath conspiracy theories.
It's underneath spiritual, aspirational, kind of neoliberal spirituality.
It's underneath populism, right?
That you can just come along and And oversimplify everything in a way where you're just going to paint a picture of how as the strong new leader, I'm going to change everything, drain the swamp, you know, solve all the problems without any real nuanced analysis or experience, right?
Derek, what was it that you said?
What was it that you said?
I almost wrote it down about, you know, if, if wellness influencers are actually practicing what they preach or... No, I think it was the phrase where you started with, um, uh, if, if, if your, if your brand is, is trading on the concept of spirituality, then you should... What was that?
What was that again?
Because it brought something up about like, To me, the spirituality that's often taught in In wellness spaces that are inextricable from the way in which neoliberal economies want us to basically be pacified to our own, you know, consumerism.
It almost feels as though the promises, the utopic promises of the conspiracy or a freedom from the medical establishment or You know, something as extreme as Trump is a light worker and he's coming to save us all, that they speak to a kind of dissatisfaction within that discourse.
It's like we've listened to people say over and over again, just be with the present moment as though it were a successful bromide.
And maybe what's happening is that we've been People have been offering a kind of affect stasis within the context of their regular consumerist lives, and that hasn't been enough.
And so what people actually are reaching for is some sort of resolution, is some sort of change.
And maybe in some weird way, when an actual social movement like BLM comes along and says, oh, hey, well, actually, the concrete steps towards social improvement and equity are, A, defund the police, B, see here are the other proposals, then there's this huge disconnection because the wellness industry and its discourse hasn't been thinking in material terms at all.
They have been thinking in terms of self-regulation, right?
And that hasn't been enough.
And so why not?
Why not actually take on some sort of fantasy about a real change?
Yeah, I think there's a few points in there, but they've been living, again, with a sense of privilege that they never had to recognize or confront before is one piece of it.
In terms of specifically what I said, I mean, first off, let me clarify that we will always look towards the future.
It's what we do as biological beings.
It's animals for survival need to foresee the future.
In fact, most animals can't see, like, can't plan Many different futures.
That is a unique feature of human consciousness, is seeing many different futures.
And that creates anxiety.
And this gets into Freud, but that's where pathological anxiety comes from, is that you can foresee many futures and then you get stuck.
Now, the metaphysical aspect of it comes in because you can see many different futures that are always informed by your past, regardless.
Like Joseph Campbell used to talk about this a lot, how the Buddhist nuns don't dream of Jesus, right?
Because it's not in their training, so they're not going to, but it's still your memories that you're bringing and extrapolating from and applying to the future.
Now, practices like Buddhism, I mean, that's why I've always, there's two words that really stuck with me.
Which is Viveka or discernment in yoga, and then Santosha or contentment, which was a big part of Buddha's philosophy and what he took from yoga.
And it just is an ability to Be content in the present moment, yet knowing that you are still planning for the future.
You're not abandoning where you're going, but there has to be some level of contentment with where you're at.
And what we're seeing, like I said, to tie back to privilege, is that people, now that their privilege is being challenged, They're not comfortable in the present moment and all of those things they've espoused for so long about being present, they're abandoning it and then they're putting forward this ideal utopic state because you have to wonder how comfortable they've ever been in the present moment.
Well, that's the thing.
I think if you tell a generation, now two generations of people, to reside in the present moment, and you fill them with the... How do you tell two generations of people To abide in the present moment, when out of the corner of their eye, they can see ecological collapse progressing.
They can see that Fukuyama was wrong and that history hasn't actually ended.
They can see that, you know, something like Trump can slouch towards the horizon.
Like, what happens when you tell a bunch of people to reside in the present and history keeps chugging along?
What are they equipped with?
Other than the capacity to calm themselves down, perhaps.
Which is valuable.
But I totally understand why suddenly waking up to the fact that, oh, things are happening.
Things are at stake.
You know, there's a pandemic.
That suddenly there might be an exhilaration involved in getting on with or getting into a story that starts rolling somewhere.
Yeah, and you're completely right.
We're having our own challenges, but if you look back for precedent in history, imagine if you live in a city that's being bombed by the Germans in World War II.
You have an existential terror every moment of your lives.
And so the value of that practice is the simplest things, right?
It's to appreciate the moment, to care for the ones you're with, And to value that you have a shelter and you have food, right?
We're moving up Maslow's Pyramid right now, if you have those things.
But it just seems like that middle chunk of the period we can't get past.
We want to get to self-actualization, even though all of these bottom layers are fine and taken care of, but we're not really looking at those middle layers, which have to do with the fact that a lot of other people aren't Don't have even the bottom layers taken care of.
Right.
And so, but, but that really simple encapsulation you gave around, you know, self-regulation, you know, treasure the present moment and something like that, you really can't commodify that.
And so when I'm rolling through the Facebook feed and I see, I see, oh, Jack Kornfield and Tara Brock are selling online their meditation or mindfulness meditation teacher training for $6,500.
I'm like, what the hell?
How many ways in which you're going to offer some basic advice about appreciating the present moment and self-regulation and emotional attunement?
How much does that actually cost?
So there's also an economy behind making a useless thing into something that seems like it's going to save the world.
I'm not saying it's useless.
It's immaterial.
It's like a It's something that you would have gotten from your aunt, for shit's sake, you know?
Or an elder.
And, you know, some good advice.
But now that's professionalized.
Maybe because, I don't know, we're not gardening or something.
Yeah, I mean there's a piece here too that has to do with my hobby horse, which is spiritual bypass, right?
That if the kind of spiritual preoccupations and belief systems and communities that you've been immersed in have not actually acknowledged the shadow, have not given you any tools for dealing with the shadow, have been about transcending the world, not facing your difficult feelings, not facing real trauma and injustice,
Then, you know, at a certain point you're actually very ripe to be flooded with all of that shadow material coming up to the surface and buying into some, you know, super fantastical archetypal out picturing of it.
Right.
We better, we really better get on.
Let's roll!
Alright guys, so this week I found myself curious about the central claim that we know in Q mythology a cabal of Democrat and Hollywood elites are involved in a satanic baby blood-drinking cult.
This sounds borrowed from the plot of a 70s horror B-movie, not like something a decent percentage of the American electorate and even some running for office would find plausible.
The Washington Post estimates that around 600,000 people have so far voted for candidates who have expressed support for Q. Media Matters documented 59 Congressional and Senate candidates, 46 of whom have gone further than merely using hashtags by actively engaging with Q supporters, including promoting the movement and even wearing the merch publicly.
How has this happened?
Well, I came across an interesting concept from researchers Britt Paris and Joan Donovan.
They coined the term hidden virality for the phenomenon of underreported fringe ideas that fly beneath the radar in specific pockets of the internet and gradually gain more traction and visibility as they evolve.
The idea that pedophile elites are junkies for adrenochrome harvested from tortured children, both to get high and to derive eternal youth, exploits the fact that while adrenochrome is in fact a compound that exists in the human body, it's a chemical so unimportant as to exist online in a kind of data void.
It's another term from those researchers.
And this data void is there because of a lack of published research or academic writing on adrenochrome, which means that viral conspiracy claims about it can quickly rank on search engines without much competition.
The longer these sorts of ideas are able to fester undetected, unchallenged, or debunked, the more likely they are to gain social importance.
This is another case of the unique ways algorithms are weaponized, even if inadvertently, when it goes to the interview from last week.
Now, it turns out this central claim is a remixed version of the old Jewish blood libel that has been documented as far back as 800 years ago and that rears its head periodically in Europe, America, and especially in the Middle East.
Blood libel is the false claim that local Jews are responsible for kidnapping missing children or babies.
So that they could use their blood for the preparation of Passover matzah.
I kid you not.
And for other satanic purposes, of course.
And Christian babies being supposedly more highly prized than any others.
No accident, perhaps, then, that the Democrats, Hollywood, the Rothschild banking dynasty, and George Soros all feature so prominently in the Q myth, as the far right often equates all of these code words with some kind of Jewish conspiracy.
A recent search via a website that compiles Q-related message boards found 89,000 mentions of the Jews and another 25,000 of the Rothschilds, as well as thousands of other anti-Semitic slurs.
Historically, Jews are familiar with being the go-to scapegoat in so many conspiracy theories that seek to explain what has gone wrong in a society.
According to far-right conservatives disgusted with progressive change, right?
What better contrast to claims of traditional religious and racial purity than slandering an outsider minority as satanic baby killers who drink blood?
In his excellent piece for Mother Jones, reporter Ali Breland makes the link between the fabricated McMartin preschool pedophilia scandal of the 80s and 2016's Pizzagate.
Both imagining elaborate underground tunnels and horrific child abuse.
In the McMartin case, the accusation of one boy against the Manhattan Beach daycare metastasized into a case involving hundreds of children violated in satanic rituals involving black robes, chanting, and sacrificed bunny rabbits.
What a shame!
What a shame that legitimate accusations of real molestation would get lost in the carnival of a bad B-movie plot.
But perhaps this is precisely the desired displacement.
As you said last week, Matthew, it's those kids over there that are being horribly abused in fantastical ways, right?
Not our kids in the ordinary, denied dysfunction of middle America.
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
It turns out that American society seems primed for such wild claims to take hold immediately following periods of progressive social change, which convinced conservatives that God, the family, and American values are under siege.
Daycare, argues author Richard Beck, was a symbol of mothers being more prominent in the workplace, right?
So the kids needed to go to daycare because mom was working, and women in general having made big equality gains in the 70s.
Pizzagate, of course, emerges after eight years of America's first black president, who by his final year had become an effective proponent of universal health care, gay marriage, legalized marijuana, and brought a sense of soulful intellectualism to the White House that left conservatives hungry for the idea that making America great again could undo all of that.
Yeah, great.
It's an amazing turn and like an overturning of this historical compost over and over and over again.
And specifically with regard to the linkages to, I mean, we've raised the Satanic Panic era Over and over again so far, and we have to do a proper deep dive into it pretty soon.
Theo does speak to the lack of resolution of that era in a really amazing way, so the listeners can look forward to that.
But it really does feel like there's this almost echo of complete lack of closure with regard to this This terror that just comes and returns and returns and returns.
I also want to mention, and I think this is going to be a repetitive theme now, especially after we had the interview with Imran, I hope more people recognize how much time that people put into getting their ideas algorithmically to the front of the line.
Right.
Like I've worked, I work on the side, I've worked with a number of companies.
I do marketing, writing and SEO and things like that.
And the, the ways of getting to the front page of Google, There are ways of doing it and it takes a lot of work and then some luck, but don't think that there aren't people behind it trying to get those valued top spots.
They'll either pay for it or they'll put in a lot of effort to do that.
And then anytime that someone is doing that, you have to ask, what are the motivations?
Because one thing that is constant with all of this is that Some of the biggest QAnon researchers, as they like to call themselves, they have storefronts.
They have storefronts.
They're one of the biggest ones has his like Alex Jones, like products that he sells is protein powders and nootropics and all of this.
And the... Pam Carper.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's like, they're always selling something.
So I think that people just like we've been talking about with the wellness industry and there's something to be sold and that's aspiration.
It's also happening in QAnon.
And, but this happens to be a lot of t-shirts and swag, but there is other stuff and it has to do usually with self-aspiration, self-enhancement with nootropics and reishi powder and all of those things.
And it's happening right in front of us.
Again, we're seeing the same cycles.
Yeah, you know, what I don't understand about, I totally get the wellness product mill, but as, you know, I'm going to talk about a little bit in my This Week in Conspiratuality, the aspirational selling is really based upon a performance of wellness.
And what I don't get about Alex Jones is like, who is buying supplements from that guy?
Because You know, I don't know if he's taking his own stuff, but he's 46 years old and he looks like a walking heart attack ready to happen.
And like, I just don't, like, if he's selling health products, I have no idea what, how that works.
Like, it makes me think that maybe the survivalist set is not, they don't need it to look a certain way.
To be fair, if you watch that PBS documentary that we posted for Alex Jones, The Conspiracy Theory, he was in good shape for a while.
It left, but when he started that, he actually looked like he took the products and he looked like he took care of himself.
Maybe he wasn't taking the products.
Maybe he's taking the products now.
Who knows?
Maybe you took too many of the products.
He's got a short, stocky build, but you see some of the old photos and videos and he's in shape.
And then you watched his one from this week in Austin and that's where the heart attack is happening.
Unbelievable.
Him marching around, what is it, a bus stop or something like that?
Where he's harassing teenage lifeguards.
We've got to put that into the show notes.
Yeah, that one's special.
The guy's incredibly lonely and sad, but the kids aren't having it, so that was really cool to see.
They're just scrolling on their phones and giving him the finger.
That was great.
Yes.
Okay well for me, first thing I want to say is that we've got an addition to our red-pilled list this week which you can find on our site.
This is channeler Lori Ladd and she says she received a message in March from the Galactic Federation of Disembodied Light Beings and those are the folks she hangs with and they told her They told her Trump was a light worker.
Now, she didn't use the overt Q hashtags, but her video from yesterday, which she says on her Facebook is one of the most challenging she's ever had to share, asserts that Trump has been sent to destroy all of the systems of the cabal and that he's the only president ever to talk about sex trafficking.
So, You know, she didn't use the hashtags and that's kind of her threshold for the Red Pill page, but we're gonna put her on there anyway.
But just to fact check the Galactic Federation here a bit, Barack Obama issued several proclamations about trafficking and he empowered forums on the issue, so maybe Lori meant that Trump is the only president to openly talk about sexual assault as something he strongly supports.
I left the following comment on her Facebook and YouTube posts.
Hi Lori, how do you and the Galactic Federation feel about the 25 women who have accused Trump of sexual assault?
Is this something lightworkers do when the reports are based on first-person testimony?
Are we supposed to look past the mundane details?
If we do with these cases, are we calling these women liars?
Thanks for reading.
And I left a link.
As of now, I just checked, it's about 10 hours later, my comment is still there, but Lori has 3,000 plus comments on that YouTube video, and the vast majority are from women.
Oh, and guess who retweeted it?
Dr. Christiane Northrup.
So, that's that.
I also want to thank listeners who helped crowdsource the Conspirituality to QAnon glossary this week online.
We got so many great entries.
We're going to bake them into a proper segment for next week.
And I'm going to try to track the history and inflections of each as best I can.
And then we're going to put it all on to the Conspirituality.net site for both public hygiene and posterity.
But the main thing that I wanted to bring this week for the segment is that the David Avocado Wolf videos on Facebook that we discussed last week are gone.
Now one of them is still up on YouTube.
And it looks, in terms of Facebook, it looks like the account of the woman who posted them got deleted.
So I hope everything's all right there.
I have no idea who Natalie Swan 5 is or was, but I was under the impression, this was just a gut feeling, that she might be his Calgary host, because that's how it tends to work.
Like, I'm betting for a raw food workshop, he flew in and he fit in an anti-mask protest on the side.
Well, he lives in Canada.
Pardon me?
He lives in Canada.
Who lives in Canada?
David Wolfe.
No!
He did for a while, he had a farm up there, I know that.
Oh, all right, well maybe he's going back and forth, but I thought he was living in California.
Okay, we gotta fact check that, and maybe he lives in Calgary, I'm not aware.
All right, anyway, if she was hosting him, I mean, that's kind of, most people on the wellness circuit, they will go to these events and they'll have hosts, You know, they might get billeted or they might get a hotel room.
And of course, you know, any kind of side event that gets publicity is going to be part of boosting the workshop.
So maybe that's what that was about.
But, you know, the videos have stayed with me because in the one that's totally gone now, He's shouting on a Calgary sidewalk through a megaphone with, you know, curly locks flying in the wind at passing cars.
And he says these two sentences back to back.
He says, what about the pedophiles?
And what about all the cancers?
And the two questions, of course, are set against the idea that COVID was some kind of inflated non-issue designed to distract us.
Now later in this episode, we're going to further unpack the casual weaponization of child abuse for social media attention and cue recruitment.
And last week, I looked at the juxtaposition of child abuse and vaccination.
Now, putting child abuse and cancer side by side is somewhat similar, but I'm going to focus here on Wolf's question about the cancer, because he's been barking that out for a long time.
His online activist interest in child abuse, by contrast, is virtually invisible.
If you go to his website and enter pedophilia into the search bar, the site returns two hits, both from 2017.
There's a blog about Cardinal Pell in Australia, and there's a blog about YouTube generating autofill phrases that suggest that pedophilia-related terms are commonly searched.
But when you type cancer into the David Wolf search bar, the site comes back with 3,421 hits, which is pretty good for a chocolate salesman.
Mind you, this is a total junk blog.
All of the posts are unsigned.
All of the posts are free to reproduce if you provide link backs, which is, you know, a main way in which these sites build marketing structures.
Now, The connection that Wolf is implicitly making with his megaphone is that child abuse and cancer are both contemporary aberrations caused by nefarious forces that are new.
Something has gone wrong in the world.
Somebody wants to pollute us.
We need to go back to some kind of Eden of purified foods and ideal relationships.
We have to eliminate the toxins of modernity and In this sense, Wolf talks about cancer as though it's a problem of modernity, but then he also talks about apricot seeds and raw chocolate as though they are age-old cures for it.
And let's just keep in mind that humans have always suffered from cancer.
The word itself comes from Hippocrates, who thought that all tumors looked like crabs.
So there he is.
He's yelling, what about the cancer at CARS in Calgary?
And I'm thinking, yeah, actually, what about that cancer, David?
What did you have to offer with those 3,421 blog hits?
3,421 blog hits and like the answer is nothing.
3,421 hits for cancer on his blog and 12 million followers on Facebook.
And if there's a single iota of actionable, verifiable information about what cancer is or how it can be treated, I would love to see it.
I looked up David's age and I saw that he's born just a year before me in 1970 and I thought about how difficult it became for me over time to travel to places like Calgary to give workshops and work on trainings.
I thought about how every time I got on a plane like a little bit of my soul died and how strange it was to look out the window at 35,000 feet and try to console myself about the carbon by thinking about how valuable this yoga information was that I was carrying with me and you know how much it would help people do self-inquiry.
And, you know, I thought, like, if I was super clear about abuse patterns in yoga schools, would the trainees build safer and more fulfilling relationships?
And, you know, there was no answer to that question.
The trade-off often felt like a cancel-out, except for the money I brought home.
You know, you can't really know how much you're really helping people versus how much you're entertaining them in the wellness industry.
And I mean, by contrast, musicians go about it a lot more honestly.
You know, it's like, just so we're clear, we're burning a fuck ton of carbon and commanding your attention because you want to rock and why not?
So I'm not saying that I was depressed as I was doing my job.
It's more that I was aware that the wellness economy is rooted in aspirations that are bolstered by performance, but also fueled by consumption.
And that feels awful when you start waking up to things like climate collapse.
But what does this melancholy have to do with Wolf?
I'm getting at the fact that I like to think of myself as a normal person.
And so I'd expect anyone in normal range who'd traveled the globe for 20 years claiming that raw chocolate would cure our problems would be carrying a profound sense of despair.
And that if you had a conscience, there might be guilt on top of that despair.
David is the guy who told Derek to his face, chocolate resonates on a direct frequency with the sun.
So here he is shouting, what about the cancer at the powers that be?
As though public health officials and food quality assurance people and medical colleges and oncology labs have been ignoring cancer or screwing it up for decades and they can't get anything right.
But what's closer to the truth is that oncologists don't work in an aspirational economy.
They are responsible for a product, and that's called research.
And they can be held accountable for that product and its impacts on people's lives.
And there's all kinds of skullduggery that goes on there.
It's not perfect.
But these are people who spend a lot of silent hours poring over their microscopes and gene mapping data, and they're working hard at a mystery, and they make small gains here and there, and they're super conservative about what they claim.
So for them, the question, what about the cancer, is answered really carefully.
Well, we know this, but we don't quite understand that.
This looks promising for remission, but in the meantime, we have some other therapies that improve quality of life.
So even at the most capitalistic peak of pharma, the promises and marketing can't be transcendental.
So there's Wolf shouting about pedophiles.
But that's a LARP-y gesture, live-action role-playing gesture, to point to his chocolate business.
He's using pedophilia as a branding meme, but then if you look at that chocolate business, that's kind of a live-action role-play too.
Here's a whole business model that dresses up in all-natural shamanic garb and sells chocolate to yoga women.
But the live-action role-play part is that the heroic chocolate guy is changing the world, defeating cancer.
But he doesn't.
He's yelling, what about the cancer?
And it's like this big self-own.
So I really wonder about how much self-righteous but also projective despair is driving some of this stuff.
Like David Wolf is top avocado, but isn't the whole wellness industry following his lead in a way?
And don't they have the equal burden of having to prove themselves and others that all their wellness investments have been worthwhile, all of the workshops, all of the expensive foods, but that they can't really prove it?
And what happens when you spend your entire adult life and your disposable income on wellness products sold by guys like Wolf or even smarter people who all promise something that conventional medicine can't?
What happens when your entire concept of health and wellness evolves in a libertarian discourse of total self-responsibility plus miracle superfoods?
Wouldn't the pandemic present you with an existential challenge?
So in that sense, it's like the pandemic has replaced cancer in Wolf's Grift, because that was an unsolvable problem as well.
So I watch Avocado yelling, what about the cancer?
And I know his raw chocolate didn't cure it.
And I think he knows it too.
And it just seems like he's yelling at his own irrelevance.
Isn't there yoga?
There's yoga by something.
She's a big YouTube player.
Okay.
Oh yeah.
How many are we talking about?
There's a really big and I, you know, I shouldn't know her name, but BuzzFeed did a big piece on her recently, and it's fine.
I mean, it's what it is.
You know, she's built something that a lot of Midwestern women and men like to do, and that's great.
That's totally fine.
But what was interesting about the article was that they point to Tara Stiles being in the original YouTube phenom for yoga, and they give her credit, but then they go on to say how yoga, I should look at her name, but how she has better production style.
And so I sent it, Tara is a close friend of mine, and I sent it to her, I texted it to her, and she laughed when she read it, and she was like, I like that the writer talked about the production style, not the quality of yoga that's being presented.
Right.
Right?
And that's, and that's, that's, that, when you're telling there, that story came on my head because I think of David really had a moment when the vegan raw food thing was taking off.
And I'm sure it's still around, but it's not nearly what it was in the same way.
Chocolate isn't the same.
It doesn't have the same cultural currency it did in the, in the aughts.
Right?
And, and so I'm just seeing this person just grasping at anything current to try to yoke it back to him to be like, I'm still here.
I really wonder whether raw chocolate has spent itself out on the lie that it could be ecologically responsible or something like that.
Like, I wonder if there's just fewer people to buy on that.
Yeah, I don't know.
But I know that I'm never paying $10 for a piece of chocolate like yay big.
It's just, it's insane.
It's crazy.
And yeah.
No, that thought just fled me.
Sorry, Julian, are you going to say something?
No, no, no.
Go ahead.
I had two thoughts and there goes one.
Well, the thing about, I mean, it's a great exchange that you have with Tara because, you know, maybe for a future episode, we can talk a little bit more about how as the product of yoga and wellness industries being the aspirational self, It makes sense that the people who rise to the top of that production chain are the people who can perform the aspirational self the best.
And lo and behold, they are the ones who also actually have literal stage training.
So I'm waiting for somebody to do their PhD on the fact that like, you know, most of the A-list back in the Yoga Journal conference days came from movies and theater.
That's a whole other discussion though.
Because the thing is, you know, it's like spirituality is not something that you can, in a group exercise or photographic context, that you can convey except through a particular look.
Yoga with Adrienne, that's her name.
She has 7.27 million YouTube subscribers.
Oh my god!
And again, there's nothing against her.
I know nothing about her.
I haven't watched.
It was just the article I happened to read.
So, you know, she might be great.
She might be lovely.
Nothing.
But I just thought that it was more about the journalists and the way that they framed popularity and resonance more than anything.
Yeah, they gave away the game, right?
Yeah.
I'll just add, like, one of my most criticized qualities is that I have this kind of disdainful incredulity when I come across someone like David Avocado Wolf.
I mean, if you ever watch him being interviewed or watch him give a talk, the things he says are so absolutely ludicrous and incoherent.
It's amazing to me that this man could build an empire.
Yeah.
You're saying you take heat when you say something like that?
Oh yeah, yeah, just the fact that I express this kind of disdainful incredulity when I come across someone like him, like what the fuck are you even talking about and how is it that people take you seriously?
Right, yeah, you're really rude, eh?
We're gonna be doing...
We're going to be doing more discussion on channelers in the future weeks, it looks like.
And I have to just say this for now that I go, when we're finding these QAnon related channelers, which there's a whole business cottage industry I didn't know about, you know, in one day they'll have 70,000 views, mostly positive likes and comments.
And I'm like, wow, I, I really feel detached from society at certain points like that.
Last point I want to make and we'll get to the interviews, Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee.
I think if you want to understand cancer, I read it a couple of years before I got cancer and I will say that having read that book and understand it helped me when I found out I had it.
It really gave me a framework to understand what it is and Like you said, oncologists, any good oncologist will tell you that chemotherapy is not the best answer, but it's the best response we have right now.
And they're trying to make it better.
And that's all of science.
It's like, this is the best we have right now.
And so for someone to just ad lib on something that every human being has cancer cells in their body, And whether or not they get turned on or not, it's complex, but the fact that we all can succumb at some point to it, and anyone just brushing that off as if it's immune system building through chocolate, it's just ridiculous.
I wonder, something's occurring to me about the care with which oncologists explain their craft.
I'm wondering if part of the Overreaching and, you know, highly expressive marketing that we hear from, you know, superfood sellers is actually responding to that discourse with a yearning of kind of re-enchantment.
Like, I want to say something in the wellness sphere that is not reserved or qualified a hundred thousand times, that's not really conservative.
I want to say something that inspires people.
I mean, they will talk about that openly, but I'm wondering if there's like a cultural need being fulfilled around, well, I listened to my doctor and I didn't quite understand what they were saying.
They seemed to be ambivalent and For me, a bunch of options, but then I went to David Wolf's Raw Food Seminar and he told me that chocolate vibrates with the sun, and so that sounds a little bit clearer to me.
It's enchanting, right?
I think there's a need being met for sure.
Whether it helps or not, I don't know. - So coming up next is my interview with Reagan Williams.
She's the CEO and founder of Seen and Heard, which is a Los Angeles-based nonprofit organization that takes foster youth and teaches them performing arts.
Regan herself graduated from NYU.
With a BA in English and Acting, and she spent her first few years working in the arts and teaching drama.
And then in 2014, Regan became a foster parent.
Two years later, she became a court-appointed special advocate.
Then she launched a successful foster care campaign called Invisibles.
And during that time, she sent 70 foster youth to summer camp and packed and distributed 1,000 duffel bags And recruited 200 volunteers to work with foster youth.
During that time, she also raised over a quarter million dollars for foster youth related organizations.
All that is to say that I've known Regan for a number of years now and this is her life.
And talk about someone on the ground doing the work every day to get it done and to help children.
This is the real deal.
So here's my interview with her and we'll discuss it after.
So thanks, Reagan, for taking a little time out.
This is an important field to you and your work, which you do with your nonprofit, and child abuse and child trafficking is a very hot topic right now, but not necessarily for the right reasons.
This is all, we've chatted offline about this with QAnon, and I know you're somewhat aware of what's happening there, and I want to know Why, first of all, you would think that child trafficking and abuse has become the focus of this conspiracy group?
Yeah, I think that's a great question.
I think for a couple reasons.
One is they need a common enemy, like they need to have a bipartisan sort of like a way to attract the base.
They're supporters rallying around one common enemy.
And nobody is okay with kidnapping children, trafficking children, exploiting children.
And so it's just a really easy, easy sort of, this is who we're against.
So it rallies people together around a common enemy.
And so I think that's why it's become Uh, sort of a unifying tool.
I think, you know, fear is also a really powerful, um, unifying force.
And so if you can rally people around fear, um, the idea that maybe my kid can be, you know, taken, exploited, or You know, my neighbor's kid or a niece or nephew.
So I feel like we all have children in some form, shape or form, a common denominator, whether we have children or not.
Everybody cares about children, you know?
So it's a really easy target, I think, to solidify a group of people, you know?
Now, we're looking at this from the lens of being Generation X, obviously, in our 40s.
And a lot of the people, at least in the wellness scene, they're in their 30s and 40s discussing these topics.
But I know in your own work, you work directly with foster youth and children who are looking for homes and children who have been abused and drug abuse.
How do you think that they are managing this time and the way that they're being used on this platform?
Yeah, boy, that is, so that's a great question.
I have been surprised at the number of students that we have that actually believe in some of these stats that are coming out from conspiracies like QAnon.
For example, one of our students was telling me all about Wayfair.
She was the first person that told me about the Wayfair conspiracy.
She has ideas about the Obamas.
She has ideas about Bill Gates.
She has ideas, like, and so when I kind of lovingly and kindly fact check her and say, you know, that that statistic or that theory has been debunked and I can send you the article, her response is, well, who owns the media?
So she goes from this small little thing to some QAnon talking points of like, yeah, but Yeah, but, and I've been thinking about it for a long time, why would she believe such a preposterous idea?
And there's others, it's not just one student, we have a handful of them that are in deep with this kind of rabbit hole and following a lot of these folks on Instagram.
I think it's because when something horrific happens to you as a child, when you experience abuse, neglect, sexual abuse, violence in the home, it's a lot easier To distance yourself from the immediate reality that it was an uncle or a parent or a sibling that hurt you.
And so by detaching from that immediate, they project it onto Bill Gates or Chrissy Teigen or whatever it is in order to say, see it so much.
It's not so personal.
It's actually global or it's national.
So, conspiracy in some ways keeps them safe and provides a reason why did this happen to me, right?
The other, I think, is that these are kids that have been in a system that is not perfect.
So, the Department of Children and Family Services here in Los Angeles has around 30,000 foster kids in it.
There aren't enough social workers to go around.
There aren't enough foster homes to go around.
And so everybody is doing the best they can.
But the bottom line is kids fall through the cracks.
Kids are continually abused.
Kids are commodified.
So they're already part of a system that is imperfect.
So it makes sense that the rest of the world is evil or out to get them or there's some grand design because they haven't been in safe environments Or they've been, their exploitation has continued as a result of being in care.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, absolutely.
It's something I didn't think about, but if you... Well, there is discussion that people who are more likely to fall for conspiracy theories on this level have some mental health issues or lack of confidence or self-esteem or something has triggered them.
They lost their job, something of that nature, but I never really thought about it in terms of the children.
Yeah, the vulnerability of the children.
You mentioned the 30,000 number and we were talking before I hit record briefly about statistics and of course the one that's floating around right now is that 800,000 children are abducted every year.
In our last episode, Matthew cleared that up saying that it seems from what his research found, 115 children are abducted by strangers, people they don't know.
But where do you go to to get your stats and in your research, What have you found to counter that 800,000 number?
Yeah.
Well, I'll say this first.
Stats can be useful and they're important, but stats are abstract in and of themselves in a lot of ways.
And also a lot of times victims of trafficking do not identify as trafficking victims.
Okay.
So there, there are not a lot of self-reporting.
There's a lot of difficulty in keeping track of these kids and also these, so these statistics fluctuate.
But the 800,000 missing is absolutely like a huge inflated number that the experts in the field are looking at saying, no, I don't buy this for a minute.
They haven't seen these reports.
It just seems to be this number that's just out there in memes on Instagram, etc.
So where the two main sources for this kind of data that's checked and reputable is the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
They do a great job of keeping track of kids that have gone missing, but also the National Crime Information Center, which is another database that is more law enforcement specific.
So these are the two main sources.
So those numbers between NCMEC and the National Crime Information Center are going to look a little bit different for a couple reasons.
So National Crime Information Center, they record data points continually.
Meaning, so if you have a kid that goes missing, and both the teacher and a caregiver report the missing child, that counts as two, not one.
Okay?
So that's one of the reasons, for example, for some of the fluctuations.
So the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children estimate it's between 25 and 29,000 that go missing every year.
But here's something really interesting about that that I just recently learned.
94, they estimate that 94% of that number are recovered within four to six weeks.
So they're not documenting the recovery rate.
Okay.
So it's not like these numbers are just perpetually hanging out there.
So if you've got a 94% recovery rate, that's pretty good.
So this 800,000 number is just ludicrous.
And it's, and spreading this kind of sensational information is actually harmful to some of the real boots on the ground efforts that are, that are happening.
And we can go into that a little bit more about the harm of spreading misinformation.
Um, If you would like to.
Well, I would.
Let's start here.
Because what's amazing is looking at these circles and again, we're specifically focused on wellness, but we're well beyond that with this conspiracy.
Yeah.
Everyone all of a sudden has all of this interest in trafficking and child abuse.
And yet, of course, obviously everyone agrees that it's a problem, period.
But all of a sudden, all these people are spreading these, but I don't see anyone talking about real world solutions of how they can actually help.
They're just perpetuating misinformation.
So what would you recommend that someone wants to help with this?
What could they actually do that would make an impact?
Yeah, well, if I can just say it's kind of a level of false allyship.
When you look at the Black Lives Matter movement and people that would black out their Instagram feed or share, you know, resources maybe in their Instagram stories, but they're not actually doing the work of reading or educating themselves or they're not supporting Black-owned businesses, etc.
The same can be said for this kind of trafficking fad.
Where you've got people that, you know, I'm not saying they don't genuinely care.
I believe that they genuinely care.
But, you know, trolling Chrissy Teigen on Twitter is not going to stop trafficking.
OK?
Like, what stops trafficking, there's a variety of different ways that people can help.
So I'll maybe illustrate with three ways, OK?
So the most basic easy way to sort of help trafficking is to actually put your phone down and start looking around at the community in front of you.
So when we project this fear of trafficking onto a celebrity figure or Pizzagate, what it does is it actually, it's a scapegoat.
It excuses us from our personal responsibility To children in our community.
And it's now more than ever, it's important to have our eyes and ears open because kids aren't in school.
Teachers are mandated reporters and they're not getting their eyes on these kids.
So if you're just scrolling through your Instagram feed, just shocked and continually entertained, by the way, a kind of sick sort of fascination with this phenomenon, instead of actually doing the work in educating yourself And then looking around at your neighbors, looking around at your community and saying to yourself, what can I do to support vulnerable kids, vulnerable families?
So these are hard times, really, really challenging times for families that have lost their jobs.
And there are effects on kids and homes right now.
So one of the most simple ways you can do this is go upstream.
So the kids that are getting trafficked are the vulnerable kids.
They're the ones spending hours a day on, you know, Xbox and Instagram.
Those are the kids.
So traffickers, by the way, aren't kidnapping kids.
They don't have to kidnap kids.
They've got them in technology and they're grooming them for weeks and months.
They don't have to snatch kids off the street.
There's no reason, right?
So what we need to do as citizens is to keep our eyes and ears open for vulnerable kids in our communities.
So what that looks like is It's offering support and help to families that are struggling and kids that are struggling.
And it also involves calling the child abuse hotline when you see abuse.
And a lot of people are afraid to do that.
But what I always, what fascinates me is people call the cops if there's a dog sitting in the back seat of a hot car outside of the grocery store.
But they're not gonna call the child abuse hotline if they hear a mom hitting their kid in a Target bathroom.
And that's wrong.
We need to take personal responsibility and call when it's very clear that there is abuse happening.
We do not need to be calling the child abuse hotline when kids are poor or just because of the color of their skin.
But we absolutely should be calling the child abuse hotline When we're hearing domestic violence at our neighbor's house next door or the apartment down below, you know, yeah, you could knock on the door, see if everything's okay.
But if you know there's a problem, please do something about it because that kid's not going to be in school.
So that's the first way, right?
The second way is if you have the means, support an anti-trafficking organization in your city.
Okay?
So it's really simple.
If you're taking the time to Google, Okay, so the ones that I love here in Los Angeles are Saving Innocence and Zoe International.
the time to actually do a quick Google search, anti-trafficking organizations in my city.
Okay.
So the ones that I love here in Los Angeles are Saving Innocence and Zoe International.
Saving Innocence is a sort of like a continuum of support for trafficking survivors.
They do the rescues from the rings.
So they do like the extractions, but then they also do the rehabilitations.
They do, because it's a long road, guys.
It's not just getting a 12-year-old girl out of a trafficking ring and then it's done.
It takes years and years of walking alongside that girl who has been traumatized in order to reverse that and get her on a pathway that she will experience healthy relationships and have a job.
that isn't involved in being on the streets or being in the life.
So Saving Innocence does excellent work.
You can support them financially.
You can reach out to them and say, hey, I can put together a clothing drive.
So the third way you can help stop trafficking is by becoming a resource parent or foster parent.
And so organizations like Saving Innocence are the ones rescuing trafficking victims
And they're becoming a resource agency because they've seen that when you take kids out of a trafficking situation and then you put them in congregate care or like a group home setting, oftentimes those kids are either being recruited out or going AWOL because they're not receiving that kind of love and attention that a kid can experience in a household that maybe only has one or two foster kids.
And there's just more attention devoted to a kid that's recovering from that kind of experience.
Because, you know, it's not just about snatching a kid out and then that's the end of the story.
That like, oh, they're rescued.
You know, amazing.
It's actually a long time of work.
It takes a lot of time and energy to help recover and rehabilitate a young person who's been trafficked.
You've been working with foster youth for a long time, and I wonder if we can just conclude with you talking a little bit about Seen and Heard, your organization, but also why you got into this work and how it's transformed you and your understanding of trafficking and abuse and foster youth.
Yeah.
Well, I'll say this.
The first thing that I've learned just in working recently with foster youth through Seen and Heard, You know, I've been a court-appointed special advocate, I've been a foster parent, and now that we're moving into serving transitional age foster youth, so that's 16 to 21, these are the kids that are on the precipice of adulthood, I am continually surprised by how resilient and how smart they are.
Their street smarts and their ability to read people is phenomenal, because they've had to, right?
That's a skill that they've had to develop because of the life that they've lived.
So that actually translates beautifully into certain occupations, right?
And so all is not lost.
These are incredibly, one of our core values at Seen and Heard, the one we have four, but one that stands out to me in this moment, is that all human beings are inherently valuable and have the right to dream.
So you are not valuable because of how much money you can get from a pimp.
You are not valuable based on how many likes you get on Instagram or how provocatively you're dressed.
You are valuable because you are who you are.
You are a human being and you have the right to dream.
And I know that sounds a little bit woo-woo or granola crunchy, but it's really not because if we're providing young adults from more stable or affluent environments with a gap year or the time to slow down and figure out What they want to pursue in college?
Why are we not affording that same privilege for youth that have experienced horrific abuse and neglect?
All the more reason why these young people should have their needs met in creative ways.
So organizations like ours, like Seen and Heard, we're providing arts-based curriculum that helps develop those kind of soft skills that are going to allow them to not just get a job, but keep a job or to form healthy relationships.
So our program is a little bit longer, um, and our program is arts-based.
So it's not just a fill in the blank, listen to this lecture, check the box, and you're onto the next thing.
It's really, um, rehabilitative, it's psychosocial and it's arts-based and that's a great fit for some kids.
So, There needs to be more organizations that are thinking creatively and outside the box, because it's not just one-size-fits-all.
These kids should have a variety of opportunities.
What an inspiring, down-to-earth human being just doing the fucking work.
Really, really wonderful interview.
I was struck, of course, by her amazing moment just saying, if you have the time to Google all of this ludicrous stuff, you can Google the real people who are offering resources and doing the work, and you can figure out how to get involved in really helping kids who are suffering in the real world.
Regan sent me about 10 links to organizations and people, so they're all in the show notes for anyone who's interested in what she said.
They're all in there.
Yeah, I'd just like to second what Julian says.
And like, I don't know.
I think Like, I have spent maybe the last, I mean, I appreciate the desk work and the study and the research that I've been able to do.
I feel very privileged to have been able to do it.
And I've also become increasingly aware of My isolation from my own neighbourhood.
And so, you know, this summer I'm trying to, you know, collaborate with neighbours on gardening and I'm trying to, you know, this isn't easy for me.
I'm not a joiner anymore.
So it's not, I have a lot of, you know, sort of social anxieties to get over.
But I'm realizing that there's this dovetailing between the wellness industry and its content production and how much of that takes place online and how disconnected that can be from actual real world economies and, you know, local food movements and, you know, volunteerism and so on.
And, you know, Regan really brings that all home with all of the projects.
I mean, it sounds like 90% of her life is hands-on, and that is just really inspiring.
And just from your introduction, which I heard the interview before, but a thousand backpacks that she prepared for teens?
Oh my god.
I don't know.
I just, I realized that so much of what we talk about takes place in this alternate universe that has real world consequences.
You know, there's violence that's emerging from QAnon already.
There, you know, conspiritualists are convincing people not to wear masks and that's going to kill people.
But another, you know, maybe the largest impact in conspirituality is the goddamn distraction and how much time is occupied and taken up in In this material, this fantastical material, when you've got neighbors, and you've got fences, and you've got people that you meet in the hallway, and you've got local businesses that you can work at or buy from or whatever.
So anyway, just fantastic interview.
It's so good to hear from her.
A few weeks ago, you made a challenge to Steven Dinan, and I want to make a challenge now to people.
If you're out there posting about pedophiles and you're watching this, or you just saw the interview with Regan, if you really do care, well, she just gave you about 10 or 12 places where you can put that energy.
So go to our website and do it.
and then you will actually be making a difference, not just sharing someone's post.
Well, also this week, our second guest is Dr. Theodora Wildcroft and And I'm just super happy about how this week turned out.
We actually pulled these interviews together in this very week.
So that was very lucky.
And, you know, it's been so direct and on point to hear about Reagan's work on the ground.
But Theo comes at this issue explicitly from a survivor's point of view.
And it's not easy to share what she shares here.
And so I'm really grateful for the energy and the care that she's put out.
I'm going to read what she says about herself from her website and her bio note.
She says, I'm a yoga teacher based in North Wiltshire, looking for a more sustainable relationship between our many selves, the communities that hold us, and the world that nourishes us.
I'm a lover of vulnerable people, of wild things and wild places, of all our ancestors, and of the simple miracle of life itself.
I am particularly fond of rhythmic movement and gentle devotion.
I'm also a postdoctoral researcher investigating the democratization of physical practice, how it evolves, and why that matters.
So we'll link to all of this and to her doctoral thesis in the show notes.
I blog and write articles on this, on social justice, on hope, and on untold stories.
And that's really the focus of this interview with Dr. Wildcroft.
Welcome, Theo.
Hi.
So Theo's a good friend that I talk to like all the time, but we've never really, I don't think, let anybody eavesdrop, nor have we tried to be disciplined about timing.
So we'll see how this goes.
Yeah.
Now the world is getting to know your work through your breakthrough project in religious studies, where you examine What you've dubbed post lineage yoga.
And this is a phenomenon that I think has great significance when we're considering the health of spiritual communities and charismatic leaders.
But we're going to talk about that in the second part of our conversation, which will roll next week on the podcast.
And at that point, we'll also talk about some big zoom out questions like, And how spiritual or religious is conspirituality and things like is QAnon an emerging religion?
But for this week, Theo, related to your academic work also is your teaching and consulting in the emerging discipline of yoga and trauma awareness.
Can you just describe that work a little bit for our listeners and how you came about it?
Yes, it's interesting partly because it was the thing I definitely wasn't going to do when I began my PhD.
There was a choice that I could take in terms of looking at essentially kind of Practices of resistance and practices of harm.
And what I wanted to focus on was the practices of resistance and change.
And what people did after the kind of crisis of faith that often happens when people have adverse experiences of one kind or another within yoga communities.
And that was a decision I made partly because of my own history.
I am not a survivor as such of kind of abuse within yoga.
Although, as you're well aware, I am certainly very, very close to a number of different kind of cultic moments within yoga.
But my own trauma load is much more about my childhood history.
And that still has a cost to talk about as a result.
So talking about trauma, It's always a process I have to budget for within my kind of emotional capacity and so on.
But within the yoga discourse as a whole, the more that I started to talk about the things that I was talking about in terms of my research and the You know, all of my research is about what isn't being said.
What's the untold story here?
And a lot of those untold stories were around survivors of one kind or another.
So the way survivors find healing within yoga, the way they find harm within yoga, and the ways in which they are harmed by yoga.
And I find myself more and more being called to speak on behalf of that.
And I think that Part of that is around the untidiness or the messiness of trauma-related discourse.
There's actually some really interesting work on that around the fact that our stories are wanted but not our voices in many ways.
You mean the voices, the stories of trauma survivors are wanted but not your voices?
Yeah, because our voices tend to be Quite endlessly pointing to uncomfortable truths.
And particularly survivors who are neurodivergent in some way, whether that's as a function of their trauma or, you know, as a result of their trauma, or whether that is, you know, the causality there is reversed.
We're often the ones who are pointing out the elephant in the room.
And, you know, therefore, there's a way in which often Survivors will kind of almost fill in for other survivors, so I found myself being included on panels to talk about abuse in yoga, because I'm a survivor, more often in some cases than actual survivors of abuse in yoga.
Right.
So I could tell other people's stories in ways that felt tidy and that felt safe for other people.
And that has also started to become quite troubling for me, in terms of the way that happens and why that happens.
And again, this thing about the uses to which the stories of survivors are put, basically, which is really related to kind of what we want to talk about today.
Right, well, I mean, we are talking today because we've been messaging back and forth about the ways in which this emerging discourse of conspirituality and how it moves towards the QAnon peak has lately been filling the social media landscape with a lot of trauma-related or even traumatizing content.
Now, so vaccinations are conflated with child abuse, for instance, and then child abuse itself has seemingly been weaponized for political ends.
And this seems like, you know, some sort of ultimate expression of the ways in which, as you're saying, the stories of survivors are used, but their voices are ignored.
So I'm wondering how this all strikes you so far, coming from where you're coming from.
I think one of the things that feels missing for me so far, in terms of previous episodes of this podcast, has been a sense of reality beneath the conspiracy.
Right.
I think in some ways survivors live in a different world and the world that we live in is one in which abuse is widespread, endemic, systemic and enabled.
When we talk about abuse happening, the majority of cases in the home, We're also talking about that being enabled in different ways by the structures of society.
There's a lot of Of truth hidden within that conspiracy.
So, for example, in my case, you know, my abuse happened absolutely within the home, at the hands of, you know, mother, stepfather, stepbrother.
But my stepfather was a teacher.
My mother was a teacher and the governor of my school.
There was no safe place for me to go.
There was no one that I could go to that would have believed me.
Right.
There was nowhere I could go to be safe.
And therefore, you know, the ways in which we trap children and young people within particular environments, I think, is really important.
And that's one of the things that's got twisted within this narrative of conspirituality.
That, you know, the abuse is happening.
It's very much happening.
It is very much systemic.
It probably is.
At the highest level of the political system, not as some corruption of this New World Order, but because it's everywhere else.
Why would it not be in those places?
And particularly when we're talking about that kind of Jeffrey Epstein level of Damaged young people being overly sexualized to the point at which a story can be told about their ability to consent.
That that is a justification that powerful men in particular have been using for decade upon decade upon decade.
You know, you look back at, you know, the majority of kind of pop and rock stars in the 60s and 70s and earlier, for example, and so many occasions in which 14, 15, even 13 year old young girls have been quote unquote consenting to relationships or you know they're groupies or so on and so forth but that sexualization that happens of adolescent young women in particular um it
it would be a surprise to me if that wasn't absolutely endemic within hollywood if that wasn't endemic within the political system and so on and so forth the error i think within the conspiracy discourse that we have is in saying that there are places that this is somehow new and this is somehow different and this is somehow not a function of the way the world works as a whole.
And that is the uncomfortable truth that we're not ready to listen to, I think.
Right.
Well, it really amounts to a kind of outsourcing of a very intimate, personal, recognizable, if we would look at it, series of dynamics that none of us are really free from.
And it must provide some relief in that sense.
Yes, because you can, you can absolutely, in the same way as we kind of outsource our pollution by sending all our trash to kind of, you know, developing nations to sort through and therefore we can pretend that, you know, the smog has lifted in London and therefore we have no more pollution.
We are outsourcing the kind of moral and ethical pollution of our lives in some ways, I think.
Right.
Exporting to those, to those and the othering that happens as a result.
You used an interesting phrase, which is the error in conspirituality.
I just want to track that back and maybe hear that again.
I don't think I entirely caught it, that the error is that The propaganda really that we're seeing now is that somehow this is new and organized in a way that has a clear political purpose and it's externalized and that sort of thing.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, error is an interesting word and I'm sure in some cases there's just sort of like some sort of thinking problem or amplification that doesn't make sense.
But there's also what you're referring to earlier as being the co-opting of...
of a real set of internal experiences and lived experiences for a kind of political purpose.
And that must be very odd to witness and harmful, really.
It is extremely harmful to witness.
It is certainly not odd to witness.
It's extremely common and has happened You know, regularly throughout my life.
I mean, you know, I remember when we first, as a culture, I mean, I'm talking about, you know, obviously the British culture here, but I think it was true across many other similar nations.
I remember when people first started to talk about, you know, stranger danger and the idea of abuse of children not being inherently safe and that that was something that could happen.
And it was like this shock went through the adult community.
And, you know, as a young adult myself, I would say, Yes.
I mean, you know, I once asked my friends when I was, I think I was around 13 at the time, when I asked my friends in school, it's my first bit of informal research, and I checked in to see how many of them had ever seen a flasher.
And I couldn't find anyone that hadn't.
Right.
But it was so normalized, you know, we didn't, we didn't even tell people this was just a thing that happened, you know, that kind of, you know, that kind of sexual, form of sexual assault was, was, wasn't, I, I, I particularly at the time didn't even categorize it as part of the abuse that, that I, you know, it, it wasn't, it didn't even feel abusive to me, it was just the landscape that we lived in.
So, you know, to have that idea of a stranger danger was the first thing.
And then, you know, when I knew that your average, well, certainly as a young adult, I had, you know, after I'd left home, I knew that your average stranger was probably a lot safer for me than anyone in my own home.
So, to see these kinds of Revelations ripple out across mainstream society one after another, about every 10 to 15 years or so.
So I think now we are just starting to get a mainstream acceptance of the idea that there are people who abuse their own children, but we're not ready to accept them as being quote-unquote normal people.
We still see them either as You know, it's part of the blood libel or it's part of the, so it's an anti-semitic libel that's done, or here in the UK it's all about Muslim grooming gangs, you know, and I mean I grew up in those places.
I grew up in the northwest of the UK and I would say, like I said, I think Casual sexual abuse of many kinds, the sexualization of young women, was absolutely endemic and universal within the kind of working-class environments that I grew up in.
The idea that that was something that only happened to young white working-class girls when they came into contact with Muslim men is insane to me.
So the fact that the conspirituality discourse is doing the same thing is like, well here we go again.
You know, you're not actually interested in what we actually have to tell you because then you'd have to accept that we're talking about your police officers, we're talking about your teachers, we're talking about your judges, we're talking about, you know, the nice guy in the street, we're talking about that kindly old uncle, you know, we're talking about all sorts of people that you believe to be safe.
And all sorts of people who belong to the generalized category or operate under the generalized category of rape culture, not as something that's sort of separate or outside or fomented in Hollywood, but something that is endemic.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, my own mother's response when I first disclosed to her was basically, well, we all go through that.
Right.
You know?
Like, this is just something that happens.
And that's incredibly common, I think, for a lot of women that disclose to other older women.
And the role of those kind of previous generations, and I'm sure it still goes on, in essentially not enabling, necessarily enabling abuse, but just not challenging it.
Now, it seems very strange and poignant that we're seeing the eruption of this kind of discourse coming right on the heels of the Me Too movement.
In which we've had a moment, a cultural moment lasting for a couple of years in which these kinds of disclosures and the sharing about endemic or systemic abuse has become more commonplace or it's become an open topic of discussion and there's been A kind of survivorship bonding that has emerged.
And one of the things that I see in conspirituality discourse is kind of a hijacking of that disclosure structure in which somebody who's not believed
is suddenly lionized, but they might be, you know, iconic in the sense that they're the doctor who was never believed about vaccines, or they're the physician who has always been marginalized, or something like that.
It's almost as if The principle of hidden knowledge, secret knowledge, something that has been suppressed, has been moved from Me Too discourse into, well, what are public health officials suppressing?
Or what have, you know, governments been suppressing all of this time?
But it still feels as though there's not really a clear linkage to what do survivors say about their experience.
Yeah, I mean, I think this is where we come into more of the kind of the analytics and that kind of, you know, religious studies kind of analysis of the situation is that I think I, you know, I'd not I think that conspiracy is always reflective of a reality.
It is always a metaphor for something that is unspeakable.
And we know that there has been great healing, but also great harm done by various aspects of the medical establishment.
We are aware of that.
And we know that that harm has been disproportionately visited upon those who are already made vulnerable.
Often trauma survivors, often the neurodivergent, you know, this is the interesting thing when we're talking about We're talking specifically about people on the spectrum.
We're talking specifically about children.
We're talking specifically about young women.
And that kind of harm that's been visited by certain aspects of medical practice has disproportionately fallen on those communities, as well as people of colour and disabled people more generally and so on and so forth.
I could give you endless examples of, for example, what it's like as a queer woman to try and get a pap smear.
And what that feels like, and the resistance of medical professionals to even consider doing that procedure.
Again, on the one hand, you have a lot of very, very real-world harm that's being visited upon these communities, so that's one part of the story.
You also have a very real issue around what happens to whistleblowers.
You know, whistleblower syndrome is a well-known cause of complex trauma or PTSD, and I mentor people who who are in that situation so again these these are real things that are happening but that have that become twisted right in the town um in many different ways you know we we are you
i think you you know you've talked in your podcast about you know different procedures that were visited the secretive research covert research that was done on communities of color or you know other other kinds of people you know the fight fought by the treatment of uh of of queer men uh in kind of the early stages of the hiv and and still you know still the reluctance to prescribe prep for example
There are examples of the ways in which the medical establishment are set up in ways that are oppressive to those groups.
That is not to say that individual doctors can't be extremely supportive and sympathetic, and that is not to say that medicine itself is a total loss, but when you are talking about communities of alternative and complementary health, which we are talking about here, you are talking about populations that in many ways are carrying the trauma of their experiences with the medical establishment.
Right.
We're talking, you know, anecdotally, I know anecdotally, we don't have stats on this, but we know you have never met a yoga teacher who wasn't suffering from some form of low-level either neurodiversity or chronic anxiety or hypermobility or fibromyalgia or something that they were unable to find resolution for or even care for in any meaningful way within the medical mainstream.
So they're already Looking to alternative and complementary therapies, specifically because there isn't space for them within that mainstream.
Right.
And there's something about the, I mean, yoga as the ultimate sort of neoliberal gig economy job,
That allows for people who have to invest in self-healing because they don't have anywhere else to turn to find themselves in a place where they are able to professionalize into a kind of message of hope that they haven't been able to gather from any other source.
Yes and people do things for multiple reasons and complex reasons and so some of it yes is about earning a living but you know you can choose how to earn a living and if your choices around you know not everyone has the same numbers of possibilities in terms of what those choices are but you know there's
How much are you being pushed into a situation where this becomes your professional identity as well as your personal identity?
You know, you follow your heart, follow your bliss, etc, etc, etc.
It's all of these terms that we hear over and again.
And this is how we find ourselves in these situations where this is what we do.
Because that is the work that is meaningful to us.
That is the work that gets us up in the morning.
That is the work that brings us to our mats endlessly for, you know, an hour a day or 90 minutes a day or whatever else it is.
And I have to be honest.
I have found more healing on the mat than I have found within mainstream medicine in many ways.
I mean, you know, I would go to the doctor if I have a cut that's becoming infected or, you know, when I broke my leg, for example.
But I have attempted to go to gain care for mental health issues and the help isn't there.
Right.
The help just isn't there, and our treatment of trauma in particular is such a lottery.
I've used this term before, as you know, this lottery of harm and healing, and the important thing about that is that It is a lottery of harm and healing that can worsen the very condition you're coming with.
And the way I'm thinking about it now is it's like the early days of surgery, right?
Before there was any sensible anaesthetic and there was any sensible sterilization.
Right?
How bad was your condition?
How gangrenous was that foot for you to submit to that amputation?
And were you strong enough to survive the actual operation?
And we see those forms.
We look back on that era of physical medicine and we see it as extremely primitive.
But in many ways, our treatment of psychological issues and mental health issues, and particularly of trauma, is very much in that same state.
You know, most of the options that are available to me on the NHS, for example, or even, you know, in common use, could actually worsen my condition.
Things like CBT, I know some people find helpful, but in many cases, it would actually make my complex trauma worse.
So in a landscape in which options for mental health care and care in general seem narrow and seem pre-modern almost, you know, with regard to reference to surgery,
It really does make sense that wellness culture in general turns towards a kind of internal certainty as a gauge or as a compass for figuring out what is it that I need.
And I suppose what we're seeing is the impacts of that fact, that set of facts, upon attitudes towards public health.
Because why shouldn't there be distrust?
Yes, and when you have, you know, in many cases, and we're not just talking about diagnoses that may come down to something like PTSD or CPTSD, we're also talking about all of those related conditions that either are experienced as traumatic or are a result of trauma.
So we're talking, like I said, about fibromyalgia.
We're talking about chronic pain.
We're talking about, you know, ME.
We're talking about all of these conditions.
We're also talking about borderline personality disorder.
We're talking about dissociative identity disorder.
All of these conditions are, you know, women who have a trauma load are more likely to be diagnosed with.
And getting appropriate treatment that actually heals them is often a matter of being able to essentially fight your corner with the medical establishment.
I mean, I have had friends who have fought for years, decades, to get even an appropriate diagnosis, let alone actual treatment.
I'm lucky in that I am old enough, articulate enough, and well-connected enough, well-read enough to be able to argue my case, but the treatment still isn't available.
You know, it's still not there, even though a lot of those people will agree on what that treatment should look like.
And a lot of those treatments, if they're therapeutic treatments, are based on an inherent loss of agency.
And that's what's also primitive about them.
The therapeutic relationship is often still one in which the therapist is the expert, and their job is to bring me to a place of awareness that I don't already have.
So the assumption in many therapists' minds, which is often implicit rather than explicit, is that I have a faulty perception of my reality, and if they can correct that faulty perception, I will be healed.
And not only that, but they have to bring me to that awareness via some sort of a deceptive process.
They kind of have to lead me to it, step by step.
Because if they confront me with it, I will not understand it.
And yet the journey of most survivors is exactly the opposite.
most survivors are in an ongoing and increasing fight for agency, for self-determination.
And for self-definition.
And for self-definition.
Yes, yes.
So this is why we're so at odds often with the therapeutic environments.
So, for example, myself at the moment, I have an increased anxiety load at the moment because the world is on fire and I'm having some neurological issues with that.
I know exactly what I need.
Those issues are neurological.
I do not need to talk about my childhood again.
It's just going to, you know, it's just going to increase It's just going to kind of wear me down in a way that will increase my anxiety level.
What I need is specific somatic and neurological help, both on an emergency level and then, you know, more long term as a way of recalibrating my ability to manage That anxiety load, right?
Because I manage it fairly well already, but apparently not well enough to cope with these kinds of shocks.
So I need to retune, I need to fine-tune that.
So what I need is a therapist who essentially can just hold space for me to be able to do that.
You know, what strikes me is that the lucidity with which you're able to, as you said, you know, you're articulate enough, you're well read enough that you can describe what you need in a way that maybe not be met by the care that's available.
But that lucidity is rare.
Right.
And it's hard for, and it's hard won.
And it's taken 47 years for me to get to this point.
Zooming back a bit, the two themes that seem to be really emerging like poll stars really are that, first of all, Every day and widespread traumas are generally silenced and unrecognized.
Secondly, that care for trauma survivors is rare, difficult, and difficult to access.
Yeah and maybe starts from entirely the wrong premise.
And maybe starts and maybe starts from the opposite premise to that which is useful because as you say uh the person who's trying to recover or suggest the person who's trying to recover from trauma really what what they primarily need is a return of agency because that was what was deprived of them.
Right, okay.
So, along comes a very loud, bright, flashy discourse of conspirituality, and what seems to happen is that the reality of silenced trauma
And poor access to care becomes something that is bootstrapped into a vision of a world in which there is organized domination and the only way out of it is spiritual transformation.
Or the only way out of it is to accelerate the crisis to be able to find some sort of transcendent relief.
So it is a first step in being heard, right?
Because the first step in being heard is admitting that this pain exists to begin with, right?
So the attraction of a narrative that does that, is strong right and the attraction of a narrative that does that and then says it's not chaotic it is organized systematized and you can be the hero that solves it right Oh wow, okay, so actually you can be the hero that solves it, resolves the agency issue as well.
Yes.
Oh, I haven't seen that before.
So in fact, when the QAnon people use language like we are joining the digital army or we are patriots or we are... they're actually invoking a heroism narrative that
That in one way or another, now we don't know to what extent they're being manipulated or to what extent, you know, this is a LARP by people who want to influence elections, but taken as from the generous perspective of there are people who are earnestly attracted to this material, there's a heroic function being fulfilled.
I haven't seen that before.
I'm really grateful you pointed that out.
It's being able to save others in a way that you weren't able to save yourself.
Right.
And sometimes being able to save others is almost...
To externalize that is almost easier, not easier, but I'm just thinking about all of the journalism that I've done on abuse survivors and how often the breakthrough moment for people has been when they recognized that their abuser was abusing somebody else.
That as soon as they recognized that, for instance, when I saw that Patabi Joyce was touching this, was assaulting this woman in this way, I realized that this was wrong for me.
Over and over and over again.
Yes, on two occasions.
So if we go back to that thing of having seen flashes on a regular basis from the age of 13, it was when I was 17 and I realised that my young cousins were going to the same park.
That was the first time I actually bothered to report a flasher to the police.
And there was no help.
The police were just like, what do you expect us to do?
This gets to something very, very profound, I think, because If it's a general pattern that survivors are able to, or more able, to speak truth to power based upon seeing the injustice externally and being able to report on it and regaining agency that way, Yes.
It seems like, I don't know if my brain can do this, you know, very well, but it seems like that inverted, in a way, shows up in the externalization of, well, this must be happening everywhere, right?
Because it is happening everywhere.
Right, okay, but... It is happening everywhere.
Right.
But, you know, are lizard people behind it?
Because that's when we have to start talking about motivation.
And that's when we come back to the religious studies discourse.
Who's behind it?
Who's at fault?
Who do we need to stop in order to stop this happening?
Okay, well let's put a pin in that because we'll come back to that next week, but the last question that I want to finish with is that, you know, we arranged this yesterday because we're messaging back and forth furiously about the, you're listening to episode 11, and I cited in that episode a statistic from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the one about about 800,000 children per year going missing in the U.S., and
Okay, so this is the statistic that's been distorted by certain conspiracism memes to suggest that every last one of them is being trafficked by strangers.
And so when we dig into that, you know, we see that only a tiny minority is wrapped up in stranger danger, like 115 out of that 800,000.
And some of it's custody battles, right?
So it's fights between different adults.
Right, right, exactly.
And the rest?
Right, right.
Now, you pointed out that, you know, if we're talking about some of those kids being runaways, you know, you said, well, we've got to look at what they're running away from.
And this made me think, this brings me back to... The majority.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
We're not talking about some of those kids being runaways.
On your statistics, it's the majority.
The vast majority of those children and young people are running away from home.
They may well be going back, like you say, they survive, blah blah blah.
Why does a child run away from home?
Because they're not safe.
Because they're not safe.
Right.
Always.
On some level, right?
And sometimes that doesn't mean to say that the home itself is necessarily abusive, although in many cases it is.
Sometimes it's about, you know, young people again being queer and coming out within a household that isn't going to accept that identity.
Or, you know, or sometimes it's young people for whatever reasons that are kind of going off the rails and their lifestyles.
are chaotic in a way that the adults around them can't, you know, aren't coping well with, you know, if they're doing a lot of sex, drugs and rock and roll.
But in all cases, it's an incompatibility between the needs that the child perceives for themselves and the environment that they're in.
They're running away from something, or they're running towards something.
Right.
But as a result, in and of itself, their situation is inherently traumatic.
We're not talking necessarily about who's causing that, but there is trauma there.
All right.
So I guess the religious studies question is the whole landscape of who is causing that.
What's the worldview?
How is the universe put together that allows for this to happen?
And so on.
So is that something we can return to next week?
Of course.
All right.
So for listeners who are watching this on YouTube, you're going to see us in exactly the same format because we're just going to continue on.
But I really want to thank you for Oh, maybe one last thing.
You said, I want to pick this up and just maybe leave on it, which is, conspirituality might in some cases be a first step to being heard.
And I'm wondering, so as the discourse sort of escalates towards full-on You know, Illuminati cabals who are devouring children.
Is that escalation reflective of the depth of silencing in some way?
Partly.
But it's also something else that's very difficult, I think, to explain to people who haven't been through it, which is that
Our relationship to truth and to personal identity, particularly if it's childhood abuse, particularly if it's long term, often our histories are more mythological than they are factual because of the way trauma impacts on the brain.
So therefore, I mean, I actually had my statement taken once by the police in terms of what happened to me as a young person.
They spent four hours with me trying to create a coherent narrative out of the actually very average events I was describing.
There wasn't anything strange and satanic and unusual about it.
It was It was about sexual assault and rape, which happens a lot.
But even so, you know, I was completely unable until their patient work to put those very real memories in a coherent order.
Wow.
It's not that those memories were repressed.
They were always there.
But I couldn't tell you how old I was at the time anything had happened.
I couldn't tell you when anything had started and when it had finished until I'd had that four-hour conversation with them in which they helped me figure it out by context cues.
So they would say things like, okay, you remember that incident happening.
Can you tangentially remember who your teacher was?
At that time.
And through that, can we figure out how old you were when that incident happened?
So they had a whole battery of techniques for helping you contextualize the narrative that you wouldn't have had access to yourself.
And so that happens relationally.
Yes.
If the trauma load is even more intense, and I'm speaking as a survivor, not as a psychologist, but from conversations with other survivors, my instinct is that the relationship between what's factual and what's true becomes more blurred.
So that you will get inconsistencies, you will get survivors telling stories that are fantastical, But my suggestion would be to you that there is always a truth there.
Right.
Because the pain and the trauma is real.
How you remember, whether you remember your abuser having devil horns or not, does not change the fact that you were actually abused.
Right.
So one of the untidiness of trauma and the reason why trauma can be so Contagious in terms of the chaos it brings into non-survivors' lives is that we can tell you the truth of what happened to us, but we cannot tell you the facts.
And you're not ready to hear that.
So what I can tell you is that my instinct as a survivor is every single one of those stories, if they're first-person accounts, is true.
But they are not necessarily factual.
And if you ask me about recovered memory syndrome, you know, that's that's a whole other thing.
But you asked me about the satanic panic.
And I say that there's an aspect of that story that is not usually talked about, which is that what happens is you get this thing whereby you say, well, we figured it out.
We figured out the facts weren't true and therefore it didn't happen.
Absolutely, yes.
No, that's just, that's completely unsatisfying.
It's not just unsatisfying, it completely blows past the fact that people were able to become extraordinarily, from either side, from the survivor's standpoint, from the observer's standpoint, people were able to become extraordinarily exercised In a way that panic doesn't cover it at all.
But those children had traumatic symptoms.
That's pre-existing.
To end up in those relations, to end up in therapy, they had issues.
Now, their issues may have been that their, you know, their primary caregivers were, for example, you know, chaotic alcoholics rather than some kind of satanic ritual child abuse.
But the trauma is real.
The truth is real.
And what we tend to do is we tend to say, well, we figured out the facts are wrong.
The social workers were wrong.
The therapists were wrong.
It's all their fault.
Job done, case closed.
Right.
Whereas the reality is those children are telling you something.
They're telling you something true, even if the facts I'm not.
The moment that hit me hardest in that talk was when she said she couldn't be safe at school or at home because her mother worked in the school system.
And that was, I just can't even imagine.
We all have, you know, I experienced some physical abuse growing up.
Being hit around a bit.
I confronted my father about it later, and we are very close.
I think in that generation, it's kind of common.
A lot of my friends experience the same, so I don't put it nearly at the same level.
But I remember that I would crawl into my closet, and that was my safe space in my room.
And to not have a safe space at all, and at least when I got out to play basketball or whatever I was doing, I had somewhere to go.
But to not have it everywhere you turn, I couldn't imagine the trauma that comes from that.
And I was especially touched, and it's something that I think about a lot with her take on how she had more healing on the mat than mainstream medicine.
And you know, we've been criticized a bit on the podcast by people who are vaccine hesitant, I'll put it nicely.
But you know, some have been good conversations, some have been trolling.
It doesn't mean that we are, or at least I'll speak for myself, that I am pro-medicine in every capacity.
I'm thinking about a quote that I took from a 1974 book by psychiatrist Dean Schuyler, that's in my book that I'm writing on psychedelic therapy, when he said that most depressive episodes will run their course and terminate with virtually complete recovery without specific intervention.
We have built up a mental health care system that is in cahoots with the psychiatry industry and that happened in the 1940s and 50s because after disease specificity came around and people had microscopes and they could say, this is a cancer cell and this is how we're going to treat it.
Well, post Freud, psychiatrists wanted the same level of recognition for their For their profession.
And so if they could say, these are the parameters of depression and anxiety, and with this pill, I can treat it, they were elevated to the same status.
Now, I'm not saying that everyone was just doing it for that reason.
A lot of people actually thought it was happening, but there's enough evidence now to show that most mental health treatments do not work for most people.
And the longer we keep giving people pills and then taking them away from the communities that support them, that will be the real healing, the more we're going to continue to spiral into further anxiety and depression.
And so when she spoke to those points about treatment of trauma is a lottery, that right there really made a lot of sense because that is actually how it is for most people who are suicidal, depressed, or anxious.
Yeah, and with that level of impersonality, how compelling would it be to be given a rich, mythic, poetic narrative about how abuse is systematized?
Because it is, as she points out, but that it also could be resolvable.
It could also be addressed, and it could be addressed heroically.
That really stood out.
I'm still sort of crunching on that.
Yeah, and it goes to this theme that I think has, certainly for me, unexpectedly been emerging across multiple episodes, right?
Which is the necessity of taking into account the vulnerabilities that have to do with actual abuse and trauma, that have to do with the inadequacies of the medical establishment that has to do with how people have felt failed by institutions and how that contributes so much to people being vulnerable.
I thought in Reagan's interview, it was just heartbreaking to hear that she works with kids who are survivors of having been sex trafficked, and they are prone to believing the QAnon stuff when they come across it.
And it kind of re-traumatizes them, and they're also drawn to the mythic heroic aspects, as you're referencing here, Matthew.
And I thought that, I thought that Theo did a really good job of sort of encouraging the listener, encouraging us too, to take seriously the actual trauma and abuse that is at the heart of then some of these more fantastical extrapolations that could end up building around them as a distraction.
And that for someone who has been traumatized, especially as a child, it's not unlikely that the memories might be more dreamlike and might have more of that sort of archetypal, imaginal quality.
So how to tease apart, and I think that's the work of a really good therapist, is to tease that stuff apart effectively and patiently.
And it's very different than the kind of lurid fascination with, you know, what I've been calling B-movie horror plots, right?
Right, and yet it's so interesting that she describes how it was really the police investigators who were able to help her piece together the facticity of her account, because they were able to cross-reference this event with that particular period in life, and they were able to put the arcs together
And so she's able to bring to the table this lived experience of, you know, what happens with traumatic memories when they are not held and listened to and investigated with good practices.
And when they're not, and when they're not, they're further silenced.
And when they're further silenced, why wouldn't the colors become brighter?
Why wouldn't the pitch become higher?
Why wouldn't the story become more and more essential for survival?
Sure, sure.
And why wouldn't it be even more sort of amplified in that in the intensity?
Because if you haven't heard me in my telling of everyday grimy trauma and abuse, maybe if it goes to this next level, that's a way of being heard.
And that's in a way the wisdom of the psyche to try and finally get heard.
But I thought that what she shared was really hopeful.
And it may paint a distinction between the way that English I think it's interesting to watch detectives who explore this sort of stuff and American ones, the differences between how they're trained and how psychologically informed they are, because it sounds like the investigators who were able to help her did have some knowledge about how memory functions and how to help piece together a coherent narrative that would actually lead to more wholeness as opposed to more dissociated fragmentation.
Yeah, and I'll just add, if you're interested in memory, because of my work in consciousness studies, memory happens to be my particular fascination.
If you want to know how poor our memories generally are, take a look at the 9-11 studies that were done where they tracked people asking them the month following 9-11 and then a year later and then five years later, I believe was the time span of their recurrences of what happened and see how their I believe was the time span of their recurrences of what happened
So they have the documents of right when it happened and then five years later, they're completely different stories because every experience that you have will be written into the record of who you think you are in the past.
And because we're fluid creatures in time, time doesn't really move the way that we think it does on a clock.
We're just repeating experiences, but we're also constantly changing the narrative of our past to fit who we aspire to be in the future.
And if that past self has been traumatized, That is going to inform the mythology or creating of yourself moving forward, which very often happens, as Julian pointed out with his experiences with his family and forest yoga, of rewriting that narrative to more fit the hero that he is trying to become in the day, but falsely, because those things never happen.
I mean, this is happening over and over again, and we're experiencing it right now.
What's such a tender, like, resilient flower of a thing we are, that we are able to have all of these, you know, resources for internal self-care to call on when we have the, you know, when we do have those resources, and how incredibly
How pernicious it is when these aspects of memory are preyed upon or they're manipulated.
It's like there really is, as I said in the interview, there's a special place in hell for people who take advantage of the way in which our fragmentary memories are yearning to come together.
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