Rosaries made of shell casings. A breakaway Unification Church sect that holds rituals with gilded ARs. JP Sears on the gun range. The unholy American trinity of conservative politics, religious extremism, and gun culture is deep into its liturgical calendar. And it looks like conspiritualist influencers in the yoga and wellness space are setting up their juice bars outside the temple of the gun. Is Christiane Northrup LARPing when she talks about murdering political enemies? What would Mikki Willis wear to tactical boot camp? Amidst the carnage of Uvalde and the Supreme Court, are conspiritualists gearing up to offer logistical or merely symbolic support for political violence? Does it even make a difference? When does the Temple of the Gun become a firing range, and then a staging ground? We’ll cover these questions this week in part one of our look at guns and spirituality. Then in three weeks, Julian will talk to sociologist of religion Alan Levinovitz about how New Age spirituality and US gun culture shake hands through an “epistemology of individual empowerment,” which, he argues, has emerged amidst a crash in social solidarity.Show NotesNew York Times report on Guns in GOP AdsHow Many Lives Were Saved by The Assault Weapons Ban?Christian Nationalists and the Holy Gun CrusadeRod Of Iron Ministries Buys “Spiritual Retreat” Property in Tennessee
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Going back to Patreon, this past week on The Bonus, Julian and Matthew had an exploratory conversation about the chapels in their brains.
Where meditations and prayers from Catholicism to Buddhism seem to create little neurological cul-de-sacs of pleasure, safety, but also rigid isolation.
Now this coming Monday on The Bonus, as a first installment in our Swan Song series, we have a very personal story.
So some of you might recall from very early on in this podcast, Julian describing how a cultish yoga group he was in during the late 1990s and early aughts, which was led by Anna Forrest, trauma bonded over her insistence that her students harbored repressed memories of childhood abuse.
We're calling this episode Close to Home to underline how extensive this echo of the satanic panic really is.
And this is a key tool in T.O.
Swan's toolbox.
We'll hear about its impacts on Julian and his family.
And just a reminder that the Swan Song series features early access bonus episodes, which means our Patreon subscribers will hear them a few weeks before they are released into the wild.
Conspiratuality 110, Temple of the Gun.
Rosaries made of shell casings?
A breakaway unification church sect that holds rituals with gilded ARs?
J.P.
Sears on the gun range.
The unholy American trinity of conservative politics, religious extremism, and gun culture is deep into its liturgical calendar.
And it looks like conspiritualist influencers in the yoga and wellness space are setting up their juice bars outside the Temple of the Gun.
Is Christiane Northrup LARPing when she talks about murdering her political enemies?
What would Mickey Willis wear to the tactical boot camp?
Amidst the carnage of Yuvaldi and the Supreme Court, are conspiritualists gearing up to offer logistical or merely symbolic support for political violence?
Does it even make a difference?
When does the Temple of the Gun become a firing range and then a staging ground?
We'll explore these questions this week in part one of our look at guns and spirituality.
And then in two weeks time, we'll feature the interview I did with sociologist of religion, Alan Levinowitz, about how New Age spirituality and U.S.
gun culture shake hands through what he calls an epistemology of individual empowerment, which he argues has emerged amidst a crash in social solidarity.
So to start, I want to ask each of you guys, is there an image or a moment that stands out to you as a turning is there an image or a moment that stands out to you as a turning point in terms of starting to realize that America's gun fetish actually has not only spiritual overtones, but is so I'll do the first one.
The image for me is a photograph from a 2018 church service of several men standing around, this is in Pennsylvania, and they're listening to a sermon from a man wearing a golden crown made from bullets.
And these men are dressed, it's unclear exactly what their sort of rank within this religious military might be, but they're dressed in priestly white satin robes, they have pink overshirts, they look very much like they could be in the Catholic or the Anglican church as I remember it.
And then they have assault rifles held kind of military style, you know, with the butt of the rifle in their hand and then the barrel on their shoulder.
And this is during a ceremony in which their weapons were about to be blessed.
And I'll talk more in more detail about where that image comes from later.
It's totally cursed.
Speaking as the Canadian on staff, I can't really think of 400 million guns or whatever it is in a country that scores high on religiosity indices as anything other than some sort of massive mistake or paradox, like a national confession of anxiety and doubt.
And I can't really shake, I know this is a limited angle, but the psychoanalytic approach to a culture that thinks of itself as faithful or committed to God while stockpiling weapons is actually lying to itself.
That that stockpile has no room to grow except within the vacuum of a profound anxiety that God is nowhere to be found, that God has abandoned everyone, that only steel that you can buy with a credit card can protect you, and that the more guns there are, the more desperate that anxiety is.
But as I said, this is an angle that can only go so far before it sort of overshadows history.
But you asked about images, and three come to mind.
And I'll just say that I think this episode in general is about taboos, and so the images are about broken taboos and how certain You know, very strange things are normalized.
I think that with the religiosity of guns that we'll explore in this episode, we're in the realm of the symbol, and I think we're really thinking about how symbols at some point become active and deadly in Christian terms, how the word becomes flesh.
And this point of view about taboos that I have is really informed by the cross-border citizenship that I have, Canadian-US, because since childhood I've had a visceral response to crossing the border, and that's related to the presence of guns on one side and not really the other.
There's this huge sign up on the Ambassador Bridge over the Detroit River that connects Detroit and Windsor, where my two sides of my family are from.
And the sign is larger than the Welcome to Canada sign.
It says, handguns prohibited.
Okay, so to images, when the Alito opinion overturning Roe was leaked last month, There was photos of this group of trad Catholic activist bros.
They were gathered in these groups to pray in Thanksgiving outside of a New York courthouse.
And I saw the images because QAnon GOP Congressman Paul Gosar posted a photo of one of them clutching a rosary.
I think he actually zoomed in on the rosary.
And this led me to a thread by Toronto-based anti-hate researcher Dan Penaton, who we'll have on the show soon enough.
I'm in talks with him now.
The thread was all about the increasing and increasingly visible role that traditional Catholics are playing in anti-democratic, neo-fascist politics.
But the taboo-breaking part of the image that stood out in Penaton's thread was of a rosary made of shell casings.
Now, I grew up Catholic, but that was new to me.
And like a dream, I think that image sent me into a kind of macabre diorama of childhood memories, especially the iconography of the crucified Christ.
And there's a part of me that still can't get over that by the time I was seven years old, I was aware that the cathedral I went to in downtown Toronto had an executed man hanging above the altar, and that I was to understand that symbol as representing love and nobility and salvation.
And not just that he was a man, but that he had been a boy, a baby, that just like four months previous, he had been in the manger, and then when Easter comes around, he's grown up and bleeding to death.
He had been the apple of his mother's eye, and then he's sacrificed while she watches in some sort of radiant dissociation.
And he's sacrificed for what?
We're meant to kneel in awe in front of his bleeding corpse.
And then, you know, I'm a boy and I leave the cathedral and I'm supposed to be outraged at the pictures of late-term abortion, which is kind of a made-up thing, or miscarriage medical waste that anti-abortion protesters are waving around.
So there's this Freudian rabbit hole is on parade throughout the Catholic world, but there's something about America that takes it out of like religious fantasy and into a kind of duty.
And then one more, just very briefly, image that kind of speaks to this cross-border, you know, threshold stuff for me is that when Jordan Peterson tweeted a photo of himself looking rather undernourished, a little bit ill, holding an AR-15 at a firing range with this awkward grip.
As a fellow Torontonian who sees Peterson very clearly as the kind of kindred nerd that he is, the shot really made me laugh.
But it also got me thinking about how for a Canadian reactionary, playing at guns expresses a kind of wish to shed politeness, to cross the border and participate fully in American nihilism.
Yeah, that Peterson photo reminded me of American politicians who don't actually shoot guns, like Dr. Oz, but needing to shoot them for videos in order to appeal to the crowd.
Right.
But it was even worse because he's not running for anything.
It's just like he had to cosplay and just be there for that.
I think he was wearing night vision goggles, too, in the fully lit range.
I wanted to ask you guys, is he in his usual, like, you know, expensive three-piece suit and, you know, wingtips or whatever?
No, he was dressed down.
He was in jeans or maybe dungarees, we would call them.
It was casual wear for the Peterson family that day.
I don't remember the first image.
It was probably in college when I was studying religion because you can't escape violence when it comes to religion.
Not specific to guns, but I do recall reading Karen Armstrong's book, Holy War, the Crusades, and their impact on today's world.
And I read most of Armstrong's work, but that one stuck out because I didn't know that much about the Crusades.
And what I found interesting was that after the first crusade, which isn't as well known, it's not as part of the the bookended crusades that are traditionally known as the crusades, there was a minor crusade, but what happened was some of the crusaders went
to the Holy City, and they ended up staying and then marrying locals and having families, and that created a sort of neurotic reaction in Pope Urban II, who then sent another set of crusaders to save them.
And that cycle kept repeating, because any time the Crusaders ended up in the Middle East, they would be like, oh wait, these are people, too, and maybe I like it better here.
And if you look at civilization comparing the Middle East to Europe at that time, the Middle East was more developed.
So, there was this constant neuroses that were happening at that time from men in power who had never been to these cities, but it was such an abstract mental picture in their imagination that they had to control this land.
And that intersection of Christianity and violence, we very much see that playing out.
We're going to get much more into it in this episode, but that book really solidified in my head of being like, this is much more violent and crazier than I had ever imagined.
Yeah, I wanted to add to what I already said that listeners will know that I came here from apartheid-era South Africa, but even in that hellhole, we had stricter gun laws than America has.
And I remember when I first arrived here, I went to music school, I found a roommate, the roommate and I found an apartment, we went shopping for fridges and beds for the apartment, and we pulled into this little strip mall, and I saw the big sign above one of the storefronts that said I said, guns.
And I was like, wait, you can, you can walk into a store on the street and buy guns here?
And my, my, uh, from New Jersey, uh, 25 year old old guy, you know, with the long hair and the tats turned to me and said, it's the second amendment, man, the right to bear arms.
I was like, shit, I am really in America.
That was, that was like day three in America.
Yeah.
Then he showed you that he was packing actually.
Yeah.
So we know that Joe Biden last week signed legislation making the most significant change to gun laws in 30 years.
And there was much closed-door negotiation.
The Democrats, through that, were able to establish a support of 15 Republican senators to pass the bill.
And it does include some important measures, but perhaps predictably, it still failed to ban the assault weapons used so often in mass shootings, or to make it illegal for 18-year-olds to be able to buy those guns.
Because, you know, self-defense and freedom.
Though hopeful to some extent, this new bipartisan bill comes on the heels that same week, as everybody knows, of the Supreme Court striking down as unconstitutional a law that had been in place for a hundred years, which set limits on who could be licensed for concealed carry in New York.
Like, you have to have a good reason for it.
You don't anymore.
And of course, The overturning of Roe vs. Wade's protection of women's reproductive freedom, which had been enshrined for 50 years.
So now we have this activist SCOTUS slanted heavily toward the agenda of the religious right, and the death drive that links American politics, religion, and gun culture seems to be stronger than ever.
That New York concealed carry ruling also creates a bit of a cliffhanger as legal experts are saying it threatens similar gun rights expansion in other states by opening up who can have that right to carry a gun without it being visible.
The GOP is soldiering on.
In a May 25th report in the New York Times, we found out that in the first five months of 2022, Republican-seeking office had produced over 100 campaign ads for the midterms that included guns.
Candidates in Alabama, Nevada, and North Carolina, to name but a few, were shown holding and even aiming and firing guns in their ads.
One bragged about his wife's shooting skills, another about owning a gun range, and a candidate for governor in Georgia said, I believe in Jesus, guns, and babies.
That's the new trinity, by the way.
I know, there it is.
The 77-year-old female governor of Alabama is shown in her ad unpacking her purse to reveal an iPhone, lipstick, and as she turns to tell us, a little Smith & Wesson 38. - Right.
Very cute.
Which she then points and aims off-camera.
Senate candidate in and former governor of Missouri, Eric Greitens, invites voters to get their rhino hunting permit as he's shown flanked by armed guys in tactical gear making forced entry complete with a tear gas cloud into a home.
It's a political ad.
Graydon follows with his long gun raised, and RINO here, R-I-N-O, refers to the right-wing insistence that any Republicans who disagree with them on Trump's big lie and unlimited gun access and banning abortion, for example, are Republicans in name only, RINOs, and presumably should be hunted down and killed.
The candidate closes his ad by saying that the permit to hunt RINOs has no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and doesn't expire until we save our country.
He's talking about his own party members.
Yeah.
And he also broke into an empty house, which made absolutely no sense.
There was no furniture.
The walls were decrepit.
The entire ad was a farce.
It's like there's a full there's a full sales sign outside.
It hasn't even been staged yet.
And they're like, that's where we're going.
That's kind of like a symbolic for end stage capitalism, though, isn't it?
Is the mad Republican breaking into the empty house to like steal what?
What are they going to steal?
Freedom.
The ghost of something.
Right.
Freedom.
So, 68% of Americans support stricter gun reforms, but opponents say that not only would those reforms infringe on Second Amendment rights, but they're misguided because they don't really prevent shootings.
As we all know, only a good guy with a gun can do that.
Well, if we look at the facts during the 10-year lifespan, this is from 1994 to 2004, of the assault weapons ban, Which stopped the sale of AR-15s.
Researchers have recently calculated that the risk of a person dying during a mass shooting in the U.S.
was 70% lower.
And to go back to that New York Times article about the pro-gun posturing in GOP ads, that was on May 25th.
Meanwhile, on May 24th, the Uvalde shooting at Robb Elementary School left 19 children and 2 teachers dead.
Now, buckle up, listeners, because what you're about to hear really strikes me as the worst kind of perverse profiteering.
Just eight days prior to Yuvaldi, the company that makes and sells the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle the shooter purchased the day he turned 18 had tweeted out an image of a toddler sitting cross-legged with that exact same weapon in his lap.
This is already grotesque, but I did a little quick math and I realized that this tweet was actually sent just two days after the other 18-year-old murdered 10 people in that racially motivated supermarket shooting in Buffalo, New York.
The child in the photo is looking down at the gun he's cradling, and an adult hand is visible, kind of coming into the shot, pointing at him.
The shirt on the little boy says, hashtag rascal on it.
And the image is captioned, train up a child in the way he should go.
And when he is older, he shall not depart from it.
There's a praying hands emoji at the end of that sentence.
And the sentence of course is a biblical quote.
It comes from Proverbs 22, six.
We have to note here that the child, I think a little bit older than a toddler, maybe four years old.
When does toddler cut off exactly?
I don't know, but dad, you should know.
Yeah, I still call my four year old a baby, so I don't know.
I have no clue.
Yeah, let's just note that he's somewhat obscured by the angle and focus, but we can clearly see that it's a blonde-haired white boy.
Could be four or five.
Of course, he's allowed to have a weapon, because he's a lovable rascal.
As the parent of two blonde-haired boys, the totally depraved emotional manipulation here is kind of hard to bear.
And I think that The bitterest irony might be that the image, I mean, once you get past the shitpost equality of it, like if you take them at their word that they're actually seriously producing an image that they stand by, the image is presented as some kind of brave and narrow path towards dignity.
When really, I think you see the hand of the father in the photograph as well, and it's like a guiding hand.
And it's presented as though this is kind of some sort of difficult choice or some kind of spiritual ardor or something like that, but it's actually just that father's hand, whatever it's doing, it's caving to the dominant culture.
Because, you know, if you leave the ARs aside, Child-targeted capitalism is just built on pressing these primal buttons, which is why we see these Nerf guns that look like Gatling guns, or that throw exploding foam shrapnel balls.
And it's fun, and it's play, and you can't get away from it if your kids aren't homeschooling off the grid, or if you're not in a Waldorf school where they're not allowed to touch plastic or something.
Yeah, I was gonna say, the homeschooling kids off the grid are probably playing with even more deadly guns.
Right.
Yeah, that have real organic materials, right?
Like mahogany stalks and stuff like that.
Anyway, so, I mean, for what I find as a parent is that the real teachable moments within a landscape like that are about can you tell the difference between fantasy play And what these objects mean in real life.
And I think that's the same question that we're actually asking of our influencers, is that can you understand the difference between symbolic violence in your rhetoric and the actual violence that you're aiding and abetting?
And, you know, as a parent, I find that we can start to cross into this really uncomfortable video game threshold zone between playing an adventure game like Zelda, which is extraordinary,
And then wanting to try out first-person shooters because all the other kids are and I just want to be clear here that I'm not making some sort of correlation between video games and violence, but about I'm pointing out the difference between the realization that you are engaging in something that looks like death and what that might actually mean and what's the moral gravity of that.
But as that happens, the stakes of the conversation go up.
You know, and so, for me as a parent, it's about how clear am I about the boundaries of this fantasy world, and how clear as the child is, and is it possible that if you fantasize about war, your commitment to empathy could actually rise instead of you becoming, you know, dissociated from the rest of the dominant culture.
But with this ad, we have the gunmaker patriarch, like, actively fucking up that line.
because they're putting a killing machine into the hands of a child who only knows how to play and for whom the consequences of play should be harmless and generative and educational.
So this fantasy of the adult, the adult is interrupting the fantasy of the child and like both are just completely deprived of reality.
Yeah, the one thing that I didn't mention yet, great analysis, is that the kid is cradling the gun and then on the floor, just in front of his crossed legs, is the magazine and you can clearly see that it's flush with bullets.
So it's right there, it's not actually...
attached to the gun, but it's within hand's reach.
Oh, and so it would be like a nice hand-eye coordination exercise for the child to learn how to plug that magazine and tap it into the whatever you call it.
Developmentally appropriate.
They've done their research.
The company is called Daniel Defense, which sounds kind of biblical, but maybe that's just a riff on the fact that the guy who founded it is named Daniel Defense.
Their Twitter account has now been made private.
They got a lot of controversy for this tweet.
They cancelled their display booth at the NRA's annual meeting in Houston that weekend.
Which still went on!
Which still went on.
Cancel culture, though.
Cancel culture, guys.
It's terrible.
Yeah, it still happened.
But this is not their first rodeo.
Firearms made by Daniel Defense were also used in the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, which is the deadliest in American history.
It wounded 411 people and killed 60.
They sell to militaries both foreign and domestic.
They're the first AR-15 maker to sell to American law enforcement.
But nonetheless, they say that 90% of their sales are to consumers and just 10% to government.
They've come under criticism for digital advertising that appeals to young people, to your point Matthew, by including references to the Call of Duty video game series, Star Wars characters, and even Santa Claus.
Maybe Santa will bring you a nice AR-15.
And I just want to add here that they took over $3 million in PPP loans during the pandemic.
Now, as history professor Thomas Lecoq wrote in Religion Dispatches, using biblical verses to market guns is not unique to Daniel Defense.
Militant Christian overtones are made even more explicit by a Florida manufacturer called Spikes Tactical, which sells an AR-15 called the Crusader.
To your point, Derek, it features symbols representing the Knights Templar from the First Crusade and the Bible verse from Psalms 144.1, Blessed be the Lord my rock who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle.
That's embossed right on the gun.
When the Crusader first rolled off the assembly line in 2015, Spike's tactical marketed explicitly as a weapon that Muslim terrorists could never use due to its Christian symbology.
They may have missed the fact that Jesus is considered a prophet in Islam.
The gun runs around $1,700, but for another $300 and change, customers can get these badass cosplay lower receivers.
That's like the part where the magazine kind of clips into containing all the bullets.
These you can get designed, cast, and painted to look like a choice of different helmets, either Samurai, Spartan, or Crusader.
So not only does this crusader rifle glorify Holy War, the Knights Templar, Catholic Crusades against Muslims, Jews, Pagans, and of course other Christians who had the wrong doctrine, but they explicitly invite customers to imagine themselves in that hateful lineage today as follows.
Now, I need to take a breath here and advise listeners to do the same because The gun has three standard settings, and these would usually be labeled something like safety, single fire, and semi-automatic, right?
Three different ways the gun can be functioning.
But the words etched onto it for each of those settings are in Latin, and they read PAX for safety, PASSIS BELLUM for fire, and DEUS VOLT for semi-automatic.
Now, these Latin words mean peace, war, and God wills it.
This is a Latin.
Yeah, I was, I was, I was gonna, I was, I was gonna be the obnoxious Catholic and correct your Latin a little bit.
Please do.
It's, yeah, it's, it's Pax Pachis, Belum and Deus Vult.
Yeah.
So, sorry.
That's a punctuation problem.
Pax Pachis for Safety Bellum for fire and Deus Volt for the semi-automatic and these translate as peace war and God wills it.
This is a Latin battle cry from the first crusade, but turns out it's also popular today amongst white supremacists.
Yeah, and I want to just comment that the Latin here is significant because on one hand, it's firearms bros larping on crusading, but on the other hand, I think we should start being more aware that there's a very powerful traditional Catholic movement that organizes itself around the idea that Latin is a sort of God-given
Ritual language and that returning to the Catholic liturgy that was standard before the liberalization of Vatican II in the 1960s, that liturgy was called the Latin Mass, sometimes called the Tridentine Mass or the Old Rite.
that that will bring about a renewal of faith, morals, and God's will on earth.
It'll make Catholicism great again, in other words.
That's exactly, that's a great way of putting it.
You know, nevermind the fact that Jesus spoke Aramaic.
Okay, so there's a lot to examine in all of that.
And that's part of my post, when we get done with Teal Swan, I'm gonna try to work on another series that gets into traditional Catholic worldview But for now, we'll just lay out this key idea within this reactionary worldview, which is that
Traditional Catholics are extremely anxious about the fact that, on the whole, Catholics increasingly do not literally believe in the Presence, and that is the fact, the alleged fact, that the Bread and Wine of Eucharist is actually transubstantiated into the Body and Blood of Christ.
And that the tabernacle of the Church does not actually contain the Divine Presence.
They are terrified, in other words, that global Catholicism will at some point in the near future become corrupted by a triumph of mere symbolism and not enough people will believe that Jesus Christ is actually here in material form represented within the sacraments within the tabernacle.
What happens then when not enough Catholics believe?
Well, we don't really know, but of course it's going to be bad.
So, this very infantile and evidence-free argument and hope is that if more Catholics would just memorize and attend the Latin Mass that their boomer parents grew up with, which incidentally is like boring as fuck, that more people would believe in the Presence.
And I'm adding this because I think it's right up our alley with regard to the movement between symbolic and material orders amongst conspiritualists.
We're watching our influencers test the waters, seeing if their symbolic support for sacred violence will become literal.
And the traditional Catholics are way ahead of that game.
They've actually been forcing the issue for decades, telling followers that their beliefs in violence and sacrifice are worthless and God-denying if they are not literal.
They're so boring.
When I say I didn't grow up with a religion, it's because I was Catholic and I went to a few when I was young and I just could not deal.
Wait a minute, though.
Wait, you just turned 47?
Yes.
How old were you when you went to a Latin Mass, and who was doing it in New Jersey?
Because that would have been a little bit odd.
The church in my town was called Our Lady of Lords.
It's where I went to CCD up until 6th grade when I told my parents I didn't want to go anymore, and they said, okay, that was fine.
So that was the church in my hometown.
So that's the late 70s, right?
Uh, up until early to mid-80s is when I stopped.
Well, yeah, so 85.
You were actually in a throwback church because most of the churches in New Jersey, Catholic churches, would have been doing Mass in English.
I've been to both.
They're all boring.
Okay, I'm making a real distinction here, Derek.
Come on.
From somebody who was Catholic for longer than you, I'm trying to like massage this a little bit.
I just know that I didn't go to any sort of rituals for a long time, and then my ex-wife, her mother was Jewish, her father was Catholic, and I would go with them to either synagogue or a church, and I always had a great time in the synagogue.
Like, the rituals there were fantastic, and then I would It was just like being thrown back to when I was young.
They were horrible.
You escaped, man.
You got out.
So, as listeners can no doubt tell, I've spent some time on this Spikes Tactical website looking at the Crusader rifles and their fancy cosplay additions that you can make if you want to spend the extra money.
On the current sales page, the description of the Crusader rifle reads, Spikes Tactical created a balanced, reliable rifle that would bring an excellent fighting rifle to people of all abilities and resources.
The Everyman Fighting Rifle.
We named it Crusader and engraved Psalm 144-1 on the lower receiver to hoist the flag of our faith and to make a statement, reminding our customers that we are with you.
The war is here.
We have a duty to defend our homeland and our way of life.
So it's simultaneously a gesture towards inclusivity, right?
All abilities and resources.
But then, oh my god, the Holy War.
That's pretty woke, actually.
Yeah, they've been infiltrated.
Red text informs shoppers that... This in-demand gun is backordered and the wait is 12 to 18 months.
Now that same red text under the special order Crusader Helmet Lower Receiver that I mentioned also says...
COVID-19 protests and riots has, that was a misspelling, created a strong demand for firearms.
We are fulfilling orders as quickly as possible.
Now here on the pod, if we come back to our beat, we've chronicled Dr. Christiane Northrup's slide from ultimate pro-choice feminist icon into anti-vax COVID denialism, and then again into promoting Trump and QAnon and urging her followers to read up on gun rights laws about constitutional sheriffs and local militias before she talked about her favorite essential oil.
New listeners can go back to episodes 8 and 108, funnily enough, as well as episode 20, and you can also find my two video open records to her, my two open letters in video form to her.
These are searchable on social media.
Along the way, Christiane Northrup has seemed to tacitly endorse violent rhetoric from people like Sasha Stone and Kevin Jenkins.
And then the good doctor went full mask off, as Matthew recently described, calling doctors who deliver vaccines demons and saying that she would not hesitate to put a bullet in the head of anyone coming near one of her kids.
She expressed that she wanted her followers to feel more free to own their righteous anger, which she described as a cause of health.
Yeah, blood of the cross here.
I want to just point out the Christian paradox and how Northrup can kind of launder it through this kind of New Age faux-liberal look that she's maintained but is starting to do away with.
When she says that righteous anger is a cause for health, she's really invoking a kind of sacrificial logic.
And this is where I think you cross the threshold from fantasizing about shooting doctors for giving vaccinations.
And I just want to remember that there's been 11 murders of abortion providers in the US since 1977.
And these issues are tightly bound in the current political climate.
You cross over into aiding and abetting or even providing online support for this stuff.
And you're suddenly in crusader territory, in which spilled blood is literally thought to wash away impurities.
And And, you know, if Northrop is able to do this while maintaining the guise of an unrepressed New Age manifester, it's because she's also using the language of You know, apparent emotional transparency, like, it's not good for you to hold your sacred emotions inside.
Yeah.
Yeah, that would be spiritual bypass, liberals.
Right.
So, Northrop represents just one individual arc, and not only of the conspiritualist trend toward the reactionary right, but also toward a militant embrace of gun culture as part of an apocalyptic religious accelerationism.
Which sees violence and chaos as inevitable ingredients in the recipe of global spiritual transformation.
This is where you'll remember Lori Ladd's New Age messaging around channeling the Galactic Federation who called on Lightworkers to rise up and get their hands dirty on the Mahabharata-esque battlefield of illusion just days before the Insurrection.
That intersects with Northrop's murderous fantasies and Stone, Sasha Stone's mythology-infused sociopathy.
As well as the remixed Blood Libel and End Times prophecies of QAnon.
Derek, I know you've been looking at this.
Who else among our pantheon of conspiritualists has been cozying up to guns?
And have they been bundled into a kind of conservative red-pilling of yoga and wellness?
Well, there's definitely an intersection of the support for Donald Trump, either anti-abortion or all births are sacred life, so you shouldn't get an abortion wing that's growing in the wellness community.
And with guns.
So there are a few.
There's a lot of intersections here.
Specific to guns, we saw Mickey Willis brag about his tactical training.
Aubrey Marcus has posted about being a gun owner.
Matthew did a great little post about how he tries to play both sides all the time.
And I will say, on that specific gun post, to his credit, he publicly stated that people should earn a license, which I haven't seen from others in that space.
Yeah, but that's because he wants to sell a fit-for-service authentic AR certification package.
It costs $4,000.
You hang out with Tim Kennedy.
You have to learn how to embody your sacred masculine before you're allowed to carry a gun, right?
Exactly, yeah.
Yeah, there's lots of self-massage involved before going out on the fire range.
Well, Alpha Aubrey did just post a Walmart ad for Onnit recently on his Instagram feed.
So Walmart also sells guns, I believe.
So maybe we're looking at some new tropic for gun shooting, tactical training coming up down the pipeline here.
Yeah, well, everything is rising and converging.
Well, you mentioned Tim Kennedy.
There's an Austin Vector around Kennedy, who's a former MMA fighter.
I will say, this dude's all in.
He re-enlisted in the Army in 2017 after having left in 2004.
He teaches tactical training to the likes of Mickey Willis.
And the person I want to focus on for a moment, so rather than going down a laundry list of characters, I think this episode From JP Sears, we'll put it into perspective.
So I'm going to run some clips from a recent Sears video, which are indicative of a lot of the Second Amendment showboating and misinformation that has been occurring in these circles.
The video is called Why I Was Wrong About Guns, and he says that admitting you're wrong is learning.
It's true.
It is true, yeah.
It's not false.
When you were wrong, yes, then it's true.
Then he goes on to discuss what he's learned since making this 2017 satire video about gun owners.
I want to flag a few things before I roll the clips.
First of all, Sears styles himself as a free thinker who changes his mind, and that puts forward information after doing research.
As you'll hear in these clips, there's plenty of misinformation masquerading as knowledge, however.
Sirius admitted he was wrong about Donald Trump when calling the former president a victim of the biased media.
He even posted a photo of him and his wife Amber with Trump at a 2021 event.
Wait, wait, wait.
He was wrong about saying that the president was a victim of biased media?
Oh, I'm sorry if that didn't come across clearly.
He was wrong that Donald Trump was a bad president.
Oh, okay.
So he realized he was wrong and that he was wrong because the president was a victim.
Because he was listening to the media who are biased against Trump, yes.
And not his old YouTube videos.
You know, but this is something that I didn't realize until you've just sort of pointed it out.
He's got this back catalog now.
He can just do posts about his posts.
That's, yeah.
There's this endless wheel.
That's what he's doing.
Right.
He can go back to 2016 and say, look at how wrong I was here and turn that into more sweet, sweet content.
That's amazing.
That's what he did with the abortion video after this one, too, which we're not covering today.
But yeah, what can we do that in our catalog that's like that?
What did we get wrong in 2020 that we can go back and apologize and then turn that into content?
Speaking of content, Sears regularly produces videos claiming that Joe Biden can do nothing right and is leading America into tyranny, which is rich given that Democrats are currently handcuffed and honestly often handcuff themselves legislatively.
But I wanted to give this context because it's important as you listen to his evolution on guns.
So, in this first clip, you're going to hear Sears from that video, from his 2017 video, before he explains why he was wrong.
And, well, let's listen to his reasoning.
Just think about it.
What if we faced a tyrannical government who turned against us using the military?
We would need guns to form a militia to fight the oppressive government.
A tyrannical government?
Well, that could never happen.
I was wrong.
Because it's happening.
I mean, even outside of what's happening in the U.S., take a look at what's happening in Australia and Canada, with the tyrannical regimes keeping people locked in their homes, taking people out of their homes to detain them, and putting people into camps.
Do you think the tyrannical powers that be just don't want to go that far in the U.S.?
No!
Of course they do!
There's just one minor difference.
The US population is armed.
So he even goes on to compare Australia and Canada to China's government.
Of course.
Which shows you how uninformed he is about global politics.
China actually runs a surveillance police state.
The New York Times did an exposé last week that showed how egregious it is and how much worse it's getting there.
And it's increasingly threatening by the day.
But Australia?
And Matthew, how's the Canadian surveillance state going?
Okay, well on one hand, America is insane, but on the other hand, former Commonwealth countries, like, we've managed to launder our insanity through some historical particulars of colonialism.
And I vote that we get Patrick Blanchfield on the show soon, because in his amazing work, Gunpower.
He shows how one of the main structural and legal reasons that here in Canada we don't have your gun policies and your proliferation of firearms is that the Revolutionary War in the States left the U.S.
awash in guns, and that enabled genocidal expansion enacted by citizens.
Because, after 1776, the colonials in the Commonwealth wised up and kept guns in the hands of imperial soldiers who did most of the genocidal work much more efficiently and allowed a less armed settler population to put down roots.
And all of that is to say, fuck J.P.
Sears, but Canadians shouldn't be smug about the gun scene here because I think the fact is we don't have them because the government was simply better at maintaining a monopoly on state violence.
And quicker genocide, right?
And quicker genocide, right.
Just more efficient.
We had the RCMP and the Catholic Church out disciplining and murdering the First Nations, so we didn't need the Klan, for example, to the extent that it existed in the States.
And of course, the we there is disowned.
I'm ironic.
uh, as I'm saying that you're talking about actual history and actual tyranny and actual genocide, uh, as regards to colonialism, JP Sears is talking about countries that are probably in the top 10 of the most liberal or progressive in the world right now, as if they are authoritarian states.
Right.
I, a little bit resent having to take apart his, like his, his history and spending time on it.
Uh, But I just do want to say that we have this psychology of civilian modesty around arms possession, and I think it feels really good for Canadian liberals who can say, we're not barbarians like down South, when in reality we just sort of delegated the barbarity up the chain.
But, the larger point is, yeah, he's nuts.
He's not describing anything that bears any relation to reality.
Yeah, point taken, point taken.
I don't want to get hung up on the second clip too long.
It's one of those, I'll interpret the Constitution how I see fit sentiments.
But since we often discuss conspiritualists using the concept of sovereignty, mostly in regard to bodily sovereignty in the anti-vax movement, we can trace exactly how someone like Sears extrapolates from this concept and applies it to politics writ large.
Our constitutional rights are the most important thing in this world.
In fact, they're more important than the world is.
Born out of my own ignorance, I thought it was silly and unnecessary to be concerned with our constitution.
It's like that old thing.
It's not going anywhere.
Don't worry about it.
Do we really need to talk about it?
But since then, as the current administration has absolutely walked all over every constitutional right of ours, I've snapped out of my ignorance and realized not only is the Constitution vastly important because it's what gives us freedom, but protecting it is just as important.
So I've learned that protecting and preserving the Constitution is necessary in order to protect and preserve our lives as free, sovereign Americans.
Quarantine showed him because they stepped all over all of our rights by requiring that we try not to have everyone, you know, who could die of COVID do so.
Now, the next clip is a common refrain.
It's something that aligns JP with Mickey Willis, his good friend, for example.
And we'll talk a little bit more about this, but it's where we get into the real man territory.
I own a gun to protect me and my family.
Old JP thought owning a gun to protect your family was just a deceiving excuse to own a murder weapon.
Wrong again, JP!
Like, I have a family now, so now I very much understand that being able to protect your family is part of what makes you a true man, father, and husband.
Instead of relying on someone else to protect your family.
Now, if you're like, well, JP, I'm not set up to protect my family, so what are you saying?
I'm saying you're not a real man.
Oh, man.
I mean, so gross.
I love how he doesn't even try to reason this out about whether safety in the home increases with gun possession.
And, you know, like with everything else, he argues on vibes or muscle testing.
There's also, he's really capitalizing on the sort of classism that he is correctly attributing to liberals who have a certain view of Southerners, so he's clever there.
But in any case, he's sort of depicting the firearm as some sort of like amulet or stuffy.
That will prove his ability to provide.
It reminds me of your bonus, Derek, about Japan's weird period of divestment from guns.
Very interesting period in their history, because for some reason, were they able to tone down the toxic masculinity?
What was that guy's argument?
Actually, what you said earlier, Julian, made me laugh about that gun company putting a samurai amulet on their gun because that was exactly why Japan gave up their guns for almost two centuries.
Noel Perrin, who was a late Dartmouth professor, argued in his book just why they gave up their guns.
And there were a multitude of reasons, but one directly challenges that real man myth that JP just flagged and that we're seeing in America overall.
It's Simply put, there's not a lot of skill in shooting a gun.
And I know gun fans are screaming right now.
I've shot skeet personally.
I know there's skill involved, but think about this from the perspective of the Japanese and the samurai culture, because the gun obliterated the folk hero of their nation.
So seemingly overnight, Once guns were introduced by some Portuguese that were on board a Chinese ship that were shooting ducks and one of the local lords saw it and then purchased the guns and Japan started manufacturing weapons, all of a sudden cowards could defeat very skilled warriors.
And this was disorienting in a culture proud of its heritage.
To them, true skill meant wielding a sword, not firing a pistol.
And to that point, Perrin writes, Swords happen to be associated with elegant body movement.
And a sword simply is a more graceful weapon to use than a gun in any time or country.
This is why an extended scene of swordplay can appear in a contemporary movie and be a kind of danger-laden ballet while a scene of extended gunplay comes out as raw violence.
I'm not romanticizing the past, but I do find it ironic that the gun-loving conspiritualists like Kennedy, Rogan, Sears, as well as so many others, they lament the loss of some supposed masculinity when men were really men.
And yet they choose the most inelegant and unmasculine weapons to fetishize.
I want to come back to unmasculine in a moment, but I'm thinking about that LARPy cosplay fake haka dance that Aubrey Marcus staged with the Fit for Service group, and I'm thinking about how Within the, you know, the ritualized martial arts type wrestling and, you know, the forms of martial art prowess that are kind of part of the performance of whatever dance they were doing.
It would have been really weird for that to be juxtaposed against machine gunfire on a firing range.
Like, those are very, very different environments.
And I wonder how I wonder how that culture is actually squaring the difference between those two aesthetics, which I think is what you're getting at, Derek, but when you say unmasculine, maybe is what you're talking about this paradox where, you know, if you're in the organic yoga all-natural world in which
You know, true masculinity is coded in like, you know, seminal retention or the no fat movement and you take recovery shakes after you tan your testicles like the AR is some sort of weird uber industrial overcompensation, right?
Like I couldn't make my dick hard enough with ashwagandha smoothies.
So here's my crusader AR.
Is Perrin also suggesting that back then at least the Japanese were rejecting these kind of displays of overwhelming force that also represented foreign intrusion and maybe the sort of capitalist ruin of their economies?
Well, he argues that the real problem were foreign ideologies.
He doesn't get too much into economics or Culture per se, but he gets very much into religion.
Now he's going with a limited set of texts, but there was something about Christianity that really tweaked out the Japanese.
And fittingly, the era of guns in Japan was also known as the Age of Christianity.
And the banning of guns coincided with the banning of Christians in the country.
And a few centuries later, when the Christians returned, that is exactly when the guns returned.
We're not proposing to cancel Christians though, right?
The Japanese did for two centuries.
And in fact, I mentioned this in my episode, but the very last full-scale battle that was accomplished with guns, the Japanese put down a revolution of samurais who were landless, who had converted to Christianity because of the missionaries.
and they were trying to acquire some land.
And then after that slaughter, they decided to completely get rid of guns, which they were successful in doing for two centuries.
But they were also rooting out, again, you can't really disentangle Christianity and the violence that it brought with the striving toward maintaining that proud Japanese culture.
Now, there were problems with that culture as well, I'm sure, but these are all tangled up together and the timeline shows just how much that the violence that Christianity brought was part of that foreign ideology that they were trying to reject.
Can we just stitch up this little piece by mentioning my favorite story from your reading, which is that some lord actually got a buyback plan for all of the guns in the region by saying, I need to smelt a huge iron Buddha.
Can you please bring your guns and I'll melt them down and I'll make them into a Buddha, please?
Is that what happened?
Yes, that was exactly what happened.
That's pretty cool.
That's based.
Because he was not going to just say, we're taking your guns.
He wanted to get them away from everyone.
I'm going to give you a meditation object in return.
We have a solution for America.
Give us your guns.
We're going to smelt them down and make a giant crucifix for the White House lawn.
The Buddha that was planned was twice the size of the Statue of Liberty.
The Statue of Liberty is 381 feet tall, so if you think about that at scale, it's almost 800 foot Buddha that they were working on, so yeah, that was a lot higher than they were working on.
But back to your point about overcompensation, Matthew, it is a great point and I would agree with it, which will bring us back to the overcompensator-in-chief here.
So I want to play a clip of his variation of the good guy with a gun argument which he parrots because all of his thoughts on this topic are not original.
They're Fox News NRA branded content.
This one you'll notice though did not stand the test of time very well.
Some countries that outlaw guns don't have mass public shootings.
We can remind ourselves that gun laws only affect law-abiding citizens, not criminals.
Mass shooters are criminals.
Criminals aren't like, well, I was gonna murder someone with this gun, but I don't want to risk getting a gun possession charge to go along with my murder charge, so...
I'm not gonna do it.
I'll obey the gun law.
If a potential mass shooter knew that everyone around him was armed, or her, you psychotic women, then he'd be pretty discouraged from opening fire.
That's why very few mass shootings happen in Texas.
Oh dear.
Because everybody knows that most people in Texas are carrying.
Oof.
Wow, he didn't take that down, huh?
No, of course not.
This video was a few weeks before the Valdez shooting.
He only takes things down when he was wrong.
No, of course not.
So, what's the condition of being incapable of feeling shame?
What is that?
Narcissism.
Yeah.
Exactly neurologically, I don't know.
You don't know what the psychedelic would be to cure that?
The psychedelic of shame?
I'd like to microdose on shame, please.
I wish we'd find it by now.
I've read reports that up to 1% of the general population is narcissistic and I'm sure that's represented in an outsized manner on social media.
Of course, of course.
In terms of the neurology, there's something going on around an inability to feel empathy for others in a way that would generate the kind of self-reflection that gives the rest of us pause when we've acted like that.
Technically speaking.
You know, back to the educator, JP, for the final clip, who's always learning.
He tries to play teacher by listing off historical incidents in which foreign governments took away guns and then murdered its citizens.
Something history teaches us is that any time a government takes away their people's guns, catastrophe follows.
I wish this wasn't the case, but it's a true pattern in history.
For example, consider these shocking historical facts about what happens when a government disarms their population.
In 1911, Turkey established gun control.
Then from 1915 to 1917, 1.5 million Armenians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
I can't even express how ridiculous a sentiment this is.
Coming in from Los Angeles, which has a huge Armenian population, there are many days that commemorate that.
There has been a long-standing where the Turkish government will not admit that that genocide took place.
He also, right after that, he goes on to talk about how 20 million dissidents were murdered in Russia due to gun control, which is just as laughable as putting the Armenian genocide on gun control legislation.
There were some dissidents that were in gulags, but the predominant amount of people were brought in for a variety of reasons, mostly revolving around labor and trying to boost the economy.
I guarantee JP has never read a history of the Gulags, and he certainly knows nothing about the relationships between Armenians and Ottomans, which goes back to at least the 15th century.
He doesn't even mention the Armenian massacres in the 1890s or 1909, so the decades leading up to The, what is known as the Armenian genocide, because none of that would actually fit into his narrative.
So you have him here just presenting these, these little sound bites, but they have no original thoughts to them.
And the fact that he, for someone who constantly is blaming the media for manipulation, that entire sequence is exactly that.
There's no context.
There's no understanding of the politics that created the situations and the fact that Gun legislation was a part of it, absolutely, but to point to that as the reason that it happened is laughably absurd and really just sad in my opinion.
Such a noble job, Derek, taking JP to school.
I'm sure he will listen very carefully to this episode.
And he will correct all of his thoughts.
That's a turning point.
He will make notes.
It's a turning point.
He's gonna have to go back on Tucker Carlson.
There will be a conversion.
Might have to go back on Tucker, which I don't know whether we'll cover or not.
I don't know if I have the stomach for it.
But yeah, I mean, this is why I come back to the capacity for shame because you also have to leave that statement up about Texas not having mass shootings after taking in the stories of The children not being able to be identified except by their shoes.
He's a father now, and I suppose he can shield himself from imagining that into his future by knowing that Wilder will always go to homeschool or to a private school or something like that.
Yeah, and that people around him will be armed and be able to protect him.
I also wanted to say that the logic is, it's pure confusion of correlation for causation, right?
Which is consistent with people who make all sorts of claims about vitamins, supplements, and who tend to be anti-vax.
There are plenty of countries with very, very strict gun laws that have never turned into tyrannical regimes, so we'll just leave that there.
I wanted to introduce another just very brief story here that ties back to my image when I asked you guys at the beginning about the image that sort of evoked for you this relationship between guns and spirituality, if you will.
Regular listeners will remember that we had Steve Hassan on the podcast way back on Episode 6.
Now, he's the high-profile cult expert who was once himself in the Moonies, and the Moonies was the sort of pop culture name that stuck for the Unification Church presided over at that time by Reverend Sung Myung Moon, who at his height would perform mass weddings in sporting stadiums for up to 30,000 couples at a time.
You may have seen photographs of this.
Many of those couples had recently just been introduced and matched to one another and through these weddings, the doctrine of the church was that followers could be removed from a lineage of sin and begin their lives now restored to God's ideal.
So getting married is kind of like the initiation into the cult.
Any children that were born out of such a marriage could then be themselves also free from original sin.
So it's perhaps obvious that they have a deeply conservative view on sex outside of marriage and on homosexuality.
In fact, Moon has many, many times said incredibly offensive, dehumanizing things about gay people.
The Unification Church today still has around 3 million members worldwide and a massive bank account.
I covered this in one of my bonus episodes.
I couldn't tell you the exact amount, but they generated a huge amount of money.
But speaking of divinely ordained children, the youngest son of Reverend Moon is named Hyung Jin Moon, and he also goes by Sean Moon.
Him and his wife, Yeon, founded something called the Rod of Iron Ministries, which is an offshoot now of Daddy's Unification Church.
Only it's much more militant.
In fact, Rod of Iron helped organize and carry out the capital insurrection.
They had about 50 members there on the front lines.
They're very proud of that.
They post photos of this.
They believe the phrase Rod of Iron in the Book of Revelation refers to the AR-15.
And the reference is from Book 2, verse 27, And He will rule them with a rod of iron, as when earthen pots are broken in pieces, even as I myself have received authority from my Father.
And the image I talked about was of this 2018 Marriage Vows Renewal Ceremony in Newfoundland, Pennsylvania, which asked participants to bring their AR-15s to have them blessed.
Nearby neighbors protested that this was insensitive because the recent Parkland school shooting had, just within weeks, left 17 students dead.
The younger moon began that same year to wear a crown of bullets on his head.
And in 2019, members, just a crown of bullets.
Like all the time, breakfast?
Ceremonially, when in his role ministering to his flock.
In 2019, members were invited to show their willingness to defend their families, communities, and nation by bringing their guns to another service in which they were to be blessed.
Sean's older brother, Cook, is an assistant pastor in the church and just so happens to own a gun company called Carr Arms in the church.
In 2021, reports say that Moon and his sanctuary church had moved to a compound 40 miles from Waco, Texas, and also purchased a 130-acre retreat center property in Tennessee.
So to my mind, that has all the makings of a pretty incendiary developing story.
Yeah, and it's also very extreme and surreal, like some sort of RPG scenario, and I think it really drives the Temple of the Gun theme home.
But I'm kind of still stuck on that threshold, and I think maybe the Crown of Bullets really underlines that as well.
This threshold between Dressing up, making crowns and rosaries out of bullets, having ritual fantasies about divine violence, and then shooting up Pulse Nightclub and murdering abortion doctors or terrorizing Pride events with ARs.
Like, who crosses that line and how?
And do some people not have to cross it if they feel a catharsis through fantasy?
And are the moons doing actual tactical training, or are they just dressing up and marching around?
So, I want to just return to this cross-border memory for a moment, because I just can't express to you how stark it is to move over the Detroit River and to realize that you're In a place where people might be caring, and that is just completely just impossible from where you are.
Like, right after the Uvaldi massacre, two pieces of my Twitter feed stood out for brief moments before everything just sort of like blended together again in carnage.
And one thread came from a Toronto friend of mine who's now working in Manhattan and living in Brooklyn with her family.
They wrote, as a lot of people did, somewhat abstractly about their shock and overwhelm, but then they followed up with something that really outed them as a Canadian, which is that they spoke about how impossible it seemed that they were just meant to carry on, to send their children to school the next day, to continue with basic tasks.
And, like, my first thought was, yeah, you've got to get out of there.
And I realized that I was echoing my late mother, because she was born and raised in Windsor, Ontario, in Canada, and her dad worked at the tunnel that ran 600 meters under the Detroit River, and that led straight into Detroit, where my father grew up, and they met at a high school dance in Windsor.
In, I think, 66.
And with a few different turns of the screw, he might have dodged the draft, but to stay clear of the police and not alienate himself from family, he enlisted in the Air Force.
He knew that his eyesight would prevent him from ever flying anything, so he was stationed on a base in the Upper Peninsula until his service was up.
And my mom would say, I couldn't wait to get him out of that country.
And she was talking about the war, but also the insanity of guns and the rapid economic immiseration of Detroit.
And like many Canadians, she looked down her nose a little at the US.
And as I've kind of alluded to before, there's a little bit of hypocrisy there because this is also a racist nation founded on First Nations genocide.
And I said earlier that because we had the RCMP and the church, we didn't need the Klan, we didn't need an armed civilian population to carry out Manifest Destiny, and all of this contributed to a psychology of civilian modesty around arms possession.
But, there is something about that modesty that I think is quite human as well.
It might be hypocritical, but it works.
I just want to note that I was transfixed.
I don't know if you saw them, but there was a series of photographs published by this Italian photographer who toured the U.S., and it could only be in the U.S.
that he captured these images.
He shot photos of regular folks posing with their hundreds of weapons on display.
And it's not clear whether the photographer helped the subject stage the arrangements, which made their homes look like, you know, places of worship, really, like mosques with intricate geometric designs.
But it's clear that the subjects in the photographs feel dignified, honored, almost as if they're in a sacred space.
I can say that there's very little chance that you would find anyone who isn't like in the Atomwaffen in Canada who would pose like that for photographers.
We often think of the problem, rightly so in some ways, especially since you brought up the genocidal nature of our two countries, as being white male.
And that series showed that There was no gender specificity or ethnicity.
Right.
It was people from, it was just American.
It was a wide range of Americans.
Yeah.
Who were proudly displaying their guns, so it does go pretty deep.
Yeah, I mean there's a normalization of all of those forces that are now, that really now transcend those identities in so many cases.
But to me it points to the question of In general, what kind of absence of social contracting and safety does there have to be for these outrageous displays of firepower to not be shameful as they would be in this country?
But in the country where I'm sitting in Toronto, but you know, really kind of emblems of pride
And then, secondly, when I circle back to think about how traditional Catholic philosophy is trying to restore the literal presence of God in the church and the world, I can see how this rhymes with the need of these regular citizens increasingly abandoned by the neoliberal state to become states unto themselves
to make their own protection and their own power palpable and visible.
And so, the only real answer for any of this that comes to me, and I get the same answer when I think about QAnon for long enough, is to say, give people healthcare.
Like, take care of the marginalized.
And, you know, if you want a Christian nation, remember Jesus saying, let the children come to me.
You know, not so that he can indoctrinate them or shoot them, but so that they can get some care and develop some trust in the world.
Because when I look at that parade of photographs, they're the photographs of people who have made the temple of the gun into their own homes, because where else is there protection?
Yeah, this is going to be a long standing issue.
I don't have an answer.
I don't think we'll see one in my lifetime.
I think we'll see hopefully some progress and we're going to see more murders.
It's just inevitable.
John Mellencamp, of all people, on Twitter the other day was just talking about it.
He's just like, just get ready for more because what else could it be right now if things don't actually change legislatively?
But I also think that hope is always around.
And as Perrin's book that I talked about before and on the bonus, what Japan did is a reminder that cultures don't always move in a straight line.
And that sometimes what seems to be backwards is actually a step forward.
And to that end, I want to conclude my thoughts with The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengro.
And some anthropologists and archaeologists have pushed back on some of the research in this book.
But I feel that a high-level observation is worth considering, the notion of inevitability.
So basically the idea is this, we often think that all of history has led to this moment right now and it could not have been any other way.
Graeber and Wengro point out that that's not true at all.
A series of forces has created the conditions that have resulted in our current society, but that does not imply destiny.
And we see this in yoga spaces all the time, right, that things are meant to be, when really what we should say is, well, that's just kind of how it happened.
So, as they show throughout their book, societies have been constructed in many ways, and how we live now will also one day be a relic, and to future people it will likely appear inevitable to them as well.
But in reality, none of us can really predict the future.
Before, we were talking a little about the neurology of ethics and narcissism and shame, right?
And I want to point out another evolutionary feature of us, which is that the same brain region that's responsible for memory formation is also implicated in the ability to predict So, how we remember is also how we portend the future.
Now, we even have a term for this heuristic and it's called intuition.
So, basically, intuition is a series of repeated observations that you predict will result in some manner in the future, and all of which happens so rapidly that it feels spontaneous and inevitable.
And so if you've been educated to believe that humans are naturally violent creatures that are always at war, that's the lens in which you view the world and then your intuition will feel justified when things happen.
I'll just interrupt you there, Derek, because that makes me think too about déjà vu, how déjà vu is kind of this blending of the perceived sense that something that's happening right now has happened before and sort of was inevitable, right?
There's that Twilight Zone kind of feeling.
Same sort of neuronal territory, no doubt.
Yes.
Graeber and Wingrow point out that there are other ways that we could have ended up, all of which is to say that humans possess creative powers to form new cultures.
That's kind of where their book concludes.
So nothing is actually inevitable then or now, and as we're seeing with the dismantling of so many rights in America over just this last week, voting and activism do matter, taking part, having some hope, all these things matter.
And while what I just said merely scratches the surface of their tremendous work, they question why we've lost the ability to recreate ourselves, which really means, in their view, recreating our relations with one another.
And as I just said, one pipeline for such change is legislation, which really drives at the heart of the gun debate in America.
Other countries have changed their gun laws, and we have data to show that it's beneficial to the welfare of the citizens to do so.
Pontification, like what JPS Sears was doing in the clips I ran earlier, it has no data to back it up.
Right, as you saw when he tried to make parallel arguments that were historically bankrupt, you have to kind of shape arguments to fit into what you're trying to say, which actually doesn't reflect what actually happened.
But all that said, we're still going to have to grapple with the fact that violence is part of our inheritance as animals.
And what we're seeing in America right now, intuition or not, it is the manifestation of the idea that life is rooted in some form of warfare.
And so people like Sears and many others believe that it's better to be armed than not.
But AR-15s?
Really?
I can perhaps imagine a pistol duel producing a folk hero, that real man territory that we talked about, but not a weapon that can mow down dozens of people in a minute.
So these mythologies and histories are all crossed because there's no talk of aesthetics or gracefulness or even common sense.
So, what they're trying to accomplish, it doesn't match up.
This let's arm everyone all the time crowd, they've been indoctrinated into one particular story that they've chosen to pursue regardless of its violence or rationality, because the two often go together.
And they're content to watch that story play out in the most inhumane manner possible in schools, in hospitals, in music festivals.
There was even a recent mass shooting In a cemetery during a funeral.
So yeah, everything changes and evolves, right?
The Japanese do use guns again, thanks to the Christians, but there is a cautionary tale here.
A society of violence is not inevitable and can be changed, and this whole notion of guns and masculinity being married It's garbage.
It's the antithesis of manhood.
There are places and times for guns in warfare and sport, if that's your thing, but that's not really what we're talking about here.
What we're facing is an increasingly frantic neurosis that's often boosted by this skewed version of Christianity that we have that envisions guns as totems that serve as replacements for real power, as Matthew flagged earlier.
And to me, there's little scarier than men with killing machines and a grudge, even if their enemies are only in their heads.
As they saw in the latest YouTube video that they consumed.
You know, by way of closing here, Derek, I want to pick up on two words that featured quite strongly in what you were just saying, inevitability and intuition, because I think both are implicated in the spiritualization of violence and the metaphysical sense of apocalyptic destiny in which a glorious cleansing fire will separate the sacred from the profane, thus ushering in a global dominion for brave, holy warriors.
Of course, none of that is new for old world fundamentalists of any stripe, but what differentiated us spiritual but not religious types, to my mind at least, was always the emphasis on valuing the inner life, inner work, the rich language of metaphor and symbol, the inner work, the rich language of metaphor and symbol, the small r revelation in a personal journey of discovering humble, intuitive connections and emotional truths, which ideally point the way toward generating more love and less harmful karma.
But that's not this intoxicating cocktail of conspiracism and prophecy which deranges counterculture peace loving rebels into believing that the age of Aquarius will be manifested by the temple of the gun.
They've transformed all right, but they haven't evolved.
So, I want to talk directly to them for a moment.
Uh-oh, here comes Julian, Reverend Julian.
I'm on a roll, guys.
Derek was preaching there too a little bit.
He was on it.
I was invoking my early Catholicism.
Yeah, we're holding forth.
Yeah, good.
Well, it's not so boring after all, is it, buddy?
Are you guys done yet?
All right, so listen up JP, Christiane, Lori, Mickey, Charles, Aubrey, Kelly, and the millions who've been red-pilled by them and by others in the last two years.
My question is, what good is all this yoga and ayahuasca if your spiritual destiny culminates in a paranoid anti-vax compound?
Did you notice when your spiritual path crossed that particular line in the sand?
Were all those past life regressions and crystal healing sessions really preparing you to pick up an AR-15 engraved with Bible verses?
What happened to your humanistic skepticism of authoritarian power, your holistic vision of that more beautiful world our hearts know is possible via the ancient wisdom of compassion and non-violence most often invoked by spiritual figures like Chief Seattle, the Buddha, and yes, Jesus Christ's advice to love your enemies and turn the other cheek?
Julian, though, I mean, my take is that haven't they been looking for that threshold for a long time?
You know, both of you can tell me, when we started out in the early aughts in yoga and wellness, it was like stretching and breathing exercises and Buddhist meditations and mindfulness, turmeric, neti pots, right?
That was the scene.
And that at a certain point, some of these people began to up the ante.
I mean, I think the market got more crowded.
Maybe they were getting bored.
I mean, like how much concentration do you really want to pay to Downward Dog?
And then at some point, like we know that a lot of these people went to like Peru or Costa Rica or whatever.
They went on ayahuasca retreats.
They probably had their heads blown open in ways that they could never put back together again.
And maybe that they didn't have the therapeutic support to do so.
And maybe that gave them a little taste for the apocalypse because now here we are, which is a place where there's this quest for more and more real feeling, more and more action, more and more impact upon the world.
Didn't they want something to happen?
Didn't they want something to happen for something to be real?
It could be that the more intense the revelatory experience, the more it persuades you that now you really have to go all in on manifesting your vision in the world and on proving that you have faith in this Inviolable kind of intuitive wisdom that has now shown you a grand truth about how you can participate in this metaphysical apocalyptic process.
Right.
Because I think pacifying your nervous system only goes so far, right?
It's like you pacify and pacify and then you have to do something with it.
Well, then you have to have a real life with good relationships and, you know, be a decent human being.
Yeah, or go back to school and figure out how to do geoengineering or, like, do something to help the planet or something like that.
Yeah, so there's this quest for activity and to do something.
And it seems to have been curdled into this passion for nihilism.
Dropkick me, Jesus, through the goalposts of life.
End over end, neither left nor to right.
Straight through the heart of them righteous uprights.