Matthew and Julian draw back the curtain to take you behind the scenes of the book-writing process. They step back to consider the pantheon of conspiritualists we’ve covered over the last two years; the kaleidoscope of themes they represent, and the key moments they’ve had on the big cultural stage as the pandemic has unfolded. Who among them is worthy of being cast in the rogue’s gallery we will include in the book that will officially document all of our work over almost 100 episodes now?
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Thank you.
Today we wanted to look at the question of who do we actually study?
We have an incredible rogues gallery of figures that we have looked at and an immense network of themes.
Who do we include and why are they important?
Yeah, what are your opening thoughts there?
Well, I just want to say, because this is a bonus episode for our Patreon supporters, who we appreciate so much, this really is a behind-the-scenes kind of glimpse.
And so I do want to just disclose that we have this opening section where we're introducing people to the topic.
What is this?
Why have we been studying it?
How did we come to it?
And then we have this sort of middle section where we're really laying out the landscape.
And the more that we've brainstormed about this, the more that we've done the writing, and then we've got feedback from our editor, editor, the more we're sort of realizing that perhaps the way that we get into this is by looking at characters and themes and sort of important events that happened during the timeline that we've been doing this work and that this the more we're sort of realizing that perhaps the way that we get into this is by looking at characters Right.
So that becomes really interesting, right?
Because then it's not just about who fits the perfect profile of being a conspiritualist, it's also about do they have a key moment where they gain more influence or where they have an impact on the culture at large, or they become sort of a...
almost transcendent figure within the demographic of conspirituality?
And then also, what are the themes that may tie different people together, even though they're coming from slightly different places?
So I think in doing that, and you can say more about that if you want to, or we can start to go into the easy ones that we've been able to slot into our list as we look at this section of the book.
Right.
Well, I mean, we can start with easy ones.
Like, who's top of mind for you?
Like, if you wanted to give, let's say you wanted to, I mean, we're talking about a book, but if you wanted to pitch the Netflix executive on the ideal conspirituality character and narrative arc, who would that be?
Oh, it's gotta be Christiane Northrup.
It's gotta be Dr. Christiane Northrup, because she's lived long enough now, she's kind of the grand dame of this oeuvre, and she's lived long enough that she's been an OBGYN.
She's been someone who has then become an icon in terms of really, really situating herself, I think very sincerely, within a kind of feminist And she's positioned herself as someone who is saying, hey, here's all of this holistic and complimentary stuff that needs to be brought in.
And she's beloved by a generation or two of women for playing that role and has this incredible Bestseller, Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom.
And then during the pandemic, you see her take this incredible turn where it just becomes more and more essentially about QAnon.
And she goes, she takes the journey from being someone who we have been able to look at the records of this, the official documentation shows that she goes from being someone who only ever donated to Democrat candidates who were, you know,
Fighting for women's rights and women's freedom, reproductive freedoms, etc., to being someone who's a huge donor for Trump and is actively soliciting donations while she's talking about channeled information and crystals and all the rest of it to get money, which at the same time she's also making big donations to Trump.
Right, she's playing her harp for the sheriffs.
Yeah, right.
She's playing very new-agey, open-ended kind of music on her harp in a live stream at the same time as she's talking about the constitutional sheriffs and the importance of laws that allow you to buy a fucking gun.
Right, yeah.
And I'm glad that you brought up that she's old enough.
I think the other part of she's old enough is that she's old enough to just not Give a fuck about anything, right?
Like, she has nothing to lose.
She's obviously wealthy.
She's on the million-dollar seller list of that MLM, Usana, or Usana, however you pronounce it.
Yeah.
She is networked to the gills.
Somehow, she also is Mainstreamed enough and I would say socially acceptable enough that somehow she's held on to her Facebook account.
563,000 followers still.
She has put out as much disinformation as anybody else.
Totally.
And somehow she's gotten away with it.
I don't know whether, you know, but I feel like the moderators would just be looking at her and saying, she's harmless.
This person is harmless.
It's like she's doing the harp thing.
You have to pay attention, right?
You have to actually sit with your media literacy goggles on and like watch a whole 25 minute live video where she's talking about, oh, look at this lovely tie-dyed scarf that one of my followers sent me.
It's so beautiful.
And they told me that the colors represent this thing to do with the chakras and the special sacred frequencies.
And they go with these essential oils and crystals.
And, you know, someone would look at that and be like, I don't know why this is being reported.
And I think she's also done a fairly careful job of depending on which platform she's on, she'll kind of speak in code.
Well totally, and what we saw is after January 6th, I think she was, during January 6th, she At a water fast retreat.
Yep.
So, it was kind of like, it reminded me of Luke Skywalker in the second last movie, or maybe the last movie, where he's like meditating himself into bilocation from the Temple Island, and he's fighting Kylo Ren, but he's not really there.
Like I had that, that vibe from Christiane was that she wasn't going to get her hands dirty by actually going to DC.
She'd rather like do a water fast and like, you know, uh, I don't know.
Send, send good vibes.
Send good vibes to the insurrectionists and, and just endless, like wait until her poop is clear water or something like that.
And then she'll be totally pure and, uh, and, and, But then after that, the reason I'm bringing it up is that I don't think that after she gave her kind of like, everything will be revealed post without really saying anything on January 7th, I think she dialed it back.
I think she actually turned back to her organic hormone replacement therapy herbs and her turmeric pills and how to prevent vaginal dryness and stuff like that.
So all of that was, I think she's chilled out.
I'm on her telegram as well, so she also did this split where all of the Fever Dream stuff is now in the little telegram armpit app.