Matthew brushes off and polishes stories and analyses we’ve only had the time to glance at in various episodes. A second or even 3rd instalment may be forthcoming.Presented in chronological order, dating from a year before the WHO declared the pandemic, up to just after they did.
March, 2019: How JZ Knight, aka Ramtha, began forging alliances with Qanon promoters back in the spring of 2019.
February, 2020: How Joe Mercola positioned himself very early as the go-to for COVID quackery, and how his platform primed the pump for circulating terrible ideas right out of the gate.
March 11, 2020: How Dr. Tom Cowan resurrected R Steiner for his wisdom on COVID.
March 20, 2020: How Mak Parhar, a Flat Earther Bikram Yoga teacher, was the first yoga studio owner in Canada to defy the shutdown. What was he thinking? He later died of COVID.
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Hello, Matthew here from the Conspirituality Podcast Team.
The following is a sample of the bonus episode we produce every week for our Patreon subscribers.
You can support our work and have full access to bonus episodes and other premium content by subscribing for as little as $5 a month at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
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Hello Conspiratuality Patrons, it's Matthew here again.
We're switching up the order this week because we voted to bump Julian's work on Alexander Dugan into the main episode stream for this coming Thursday, so you can look out for that.
I hope you're well.
Thank you for your support.
I'm titling this bonus Conspirituality Timeline Stories because that's what it is.
It's a simple selection of news reports and analyses from the COVID-era conspirituality timeline.
Now this is material that we've glanced at in various episodes and I've outlined a bit of some of these stories in my Medium series, but in this format the stories are tidied up and crystallized.
And I wanted to preserve them in the record here because I'm not quite sure where they will otherwise come to light.
As you know, we deal with a real fire hose of data.
Now I'm marking it as part one because I anticipate a second or third installment in upcoming months.
And today I've got four stories presented in chronological order dating from a year before the WHO declared the pandemic.
Up to a few days after they did.
So, today we will hear about, firstly, how Jay-Z Knight, also known as Rampha, the channeled entity, began forging alliances with QAnon promoters back in the spring of 2019.
And then jumping forward to February of 2020, we'll hear about how Joe Mercola positioned himself right from the get-go as the go-to COVID quack and how his platform really primed the pump for circulating terrible ideas about COVID cures right out of the gate.
Third, we have a story about how Dr. Tom Cowan resurrected Rudolf Steiner for his insight into COVID.
And then finally, a bit of the sad story of Mac Parar, who is the Flat Earther Bikram yoga teacher and the first yoga studio owner in Canada, perhaps even the world, to defy the shutdown.
So, I'll talk a little bit about what he may have been thinking or influenced by, and I'll just note that he later died of COVID.
Okay, so here we go.
March 3rd, 2019, cult leader Jay-Z Knight forms alliances with QAnon promoters.
And a trigger warning for this one, I'm going to quote some very anti-Semitic statements that Knight makes.
New Age cult leader Jay-Z Knight forges ties with QAnon influencers as rocker JT Wilde opens a spiritual event hosted by Knight with his hit song, Where We Go When We Go All.
And during the event, Knight's students wear QAnon-themed t-shirts and sing along.
Night is a former rodeo queen and a cable TV saleswoman, and she's claimed to channel a 35,000-year-old warrior spirit named Ramtha.
She became famous through a 1985 appearance on the Merv Griffin Show, where she apparently fell into a trance and then woke up to ask Griffin things like, This is that which is called television.
Very strange scene, indeed.
And she's headed up the Ramtha School of Enlightenment, which is situated on an 80-acre farm in Yelm, Washington, since 1989.
And in that environment, her group has hosted thousands of pilgrims seeking the wisdom of Ramtha.
There are some notable graduates, including filmmaker Mark Vicente, who, while at Romtha School of Enlightenment, produced the influential New Age documentary, What the Bleep Do We Know?
And Vicente then went on to become a lieutenant of Keith Renier in the NXIVM cult, but more recently has become an anti-cult whistleblower.
Another Romtha School of Enlightenment graduate is chiropractor Joe Dispenza, who has played a minor role
In 2012, ex-members of her group outed Ramtha's or Jay-Z Knight's channeling as being fueled by a steady supply of red wine, and they also leaked video footage of her drunkenly hurling anti-Semitic and racist abuse during prayer gatherings.
Susie Buchanan of the Southern Poverty Law Center reviewed the tapes and heard her say and reported on it, uh, fuck God's chosen people.
I think they have earned enough cash to have paid their way out of the goddamn gas chambers by now.
And Buchanan also reports that Knight declares that, quote, Mexicans breed like rabbits and are poison, and that all gay men were once Catholic priests, and that organic farmers have questionable hygiene.
Knight, of course, claims the quotes were taken out of context, which I think is pretty easy to do if you're a channeler.
A spokesperson for the Ramtha School of Enlightenment told QAnon investigator Will Sommer that Ramtha declared that the person behind QAnon is, quote, divine intelligence.
Okay, so a bit of analysis here.
Q really is a perfect add-on for any savvy cult leader, especially one who channels.
Because the Deep State Insider himself has a lot in common with a figure like Ramtha.
He's visible only through his interpreters.
He knows everything.
He speaks cryptically.
Knight doesn't have to pay attention to what Q says so much as how to use the Q drops.
But arguably, it goes farther than this.
Because if Knight doesn't gather QAnon into the Romtha tent, she might have to compete with it.
So by dubbing it a divine intelligence, she also makes it her own, to add to this portfolio of improvised wisdom.
Now, one thing that no legitimate cult leader can abide is a source of divine intelligence that is not theirs, or one that can relativize their own revelation, or that can draw away their followers.
So, for conspirituality to become the public health crisis we saw emerge during COVID-19, its ideas really had to be taken up by users with a really well-formed skill set.
And I believe that the top players were those trained in or influenced by the charismatic leadership structures of cults, or by cult leaders themselves, and that their compulsion for acquiring and spreading content like wildfire through expanding networks of devotees and customers was the key dynamic.
And in Knight's case, the media power was well established.
Because the 2004 word-of-mouth marketing drive got their pseudoscience movie, What the Bleep Do We Know?, into 146 theaters across the U.S.
and also brought in almost $16 million in earnings worldwide.
In fact, I remember that this was the year that I had, after I had left Endeavor Academy in Wisconsin Dells, and the members of the group that I was still in touch with were all abuzz about this movie that I hadn't heard of in any other context.
You know, there weren't advertisements for it out.
I suppose if I had followed the movie listings for I don't know, the cinemas in Madison, Wisconsin or something like that, it might have been playing there, but the word-of-mouth marketing campaign through the New Age and Cultic Network was extraordinary and really effective.
Now, as we've noted many times before, charisma is the internal combustion engine of cults, and it is insatiable for highly charged content.
And it's that highly charged content that allows leaders and followers to vent a kind of grandiose urgency.
And the content can express QAnon fever dreams, or that 5G cell towers destroy white blood cells, or that vaccines are designed to poison children's bodies, or that critical race theory is designed to poison children's minds, because the content doesn't really matter.
All of the content is transitive, which is why, throughout the COVID-19 crisis, conspiritualists were constantly changing the subject.
Their skill was to use content in a way that seemed to validate their mystical insight, as opposed to, let's say, credentialed research skills.
