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Sept. 29, 2022 - Conspirituality
01:21:37
122: Timeline Retox: Biohacking and Fascism and Stuff

The book is filed. Our mental health is in check. And, as it turns out, Matthew found a new guru. We return to trio work by investigating his fellow Canadian's cure for, uh, anything, or maybe something, as well diving into two biohacking conferences and the conspiritualist's new favorite fascist on the block. Show NotesTip of the iceberg: erectile dysfunction and COVID-19 | International Journal of Impotence Research Will in the News, TV & Internet Culture Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism | Open Culture The Cruelty Is the Point Alessio Di Giulio's Racist Selfie With Roma Woman Enrages Italy Meloni holding melons CPAC: The Whole World is Watching - Giorgia Meloni Dal rugby allo yoga, tutto lo sport di Giorgia Meloni Pierre Poilievre rubs his old wood  -- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
As always, you can stay up to date with us on all of our social media handles.
Collectively, we are on Instagram.
Individually, we are on Twitter.
I think we still have a Facebook page where Julian puts some stuff up once in a while.
And, of course, we're on Patreon at patreon.com slash conspirituality, where for $5 a month, you can help support us and keep us editorially independent, as well as access our Monday bonus episodes, which I believe we have some things going on, right guys?
We do.
I think our Patreon material has been rocking recently.
We want to give a huge shout-out to Christina Flinders, who offered her hard, one-life wisdom up on our inaugural Listener Stories episodes.
So good.
So good.
Yeah, so good.
Yeah, and coming up, we'll be actually talking to another listener.
They'll be telling us about the chaos of growing up with a parent who was caught up in a satanic panic story.
We'll be talking to them about their childhood.
Also, we'll be featuring something extremely rare, which is a positive story of a Neo-Hindu spiritual mentorship.
This is very off-brand, Matthew.
Very off-brand.
Well, I think we should do something like it, though, because these stories do happen.
This goes back to the 1980s, back when everything was open with both possibility and precarity.
But we're also not done with the Swan Song series yet, are we, Julian?
So I really want to interject here to say that the Swan Song series, you know, which we've been doing for quite a while now, it's really turned into a pretty substantive cultural project.
I mean, we've been digging into the history of the satanic panic in which American parents were terrified by serious news outlets and law enforcement organizations in the 80s and 90s into believing that Satanists were prowling suburban neighborhoods in search of innocent kitties to sacrifice, right?
We've looked into how this links back, and you've done a lot of great work on this Matthew, to the reactionary crisis around liberalization that was happening in the 1970s Catholic Church.
And that then influenced a whole genre of hugely successful and scary horror movies about demonic possession and exorcism.
And that of course also links directly into what we know today as QAnon.
Oh, and Teal Swan's therapist, as it turns out, was also a notorious and of course since discredited key player in this satanic panic phenomenon.
That's of course the same therapist with whom Teal recovered the truly gruesome and fantastical satanic ritual abuse memories that launched her career as a magical wounded healer.
And so now, We turned to a different kind of movie.
This is one set in the late 1960s, Girl Interrupted, which as it turns out played a formative role in Teal Swan's adolescence, apparently.
It's about young women, friendship, and mental illness.
Now, whether you've seen it before or not, because I just watched it for a second time, dear listeners, you have homework.
Go watch Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie, who won her Oscar for this performance in 1999's Girl Interrupted.
We'll see you bright and early Monday to break it all down.
We will.
Conspiratuality 123, timeline re-talks.
You know, biohacking and fascism and stuff.
Yeah, we're back together, gentlemen, and we're catching up on some recent events.
We're doing this as a way of previewing the reinstitution of This Week in Conspiratuality, which will start up again next week.
But we should probably open with a note about why we migrated away from This Week in Conspiratuality.
I mean, at least I'll say something, which is that we've been working on this book.
We have the final, final filing coming up on Monday, and I think when working on a book It just works to unplug.
Twitter is very useful and fun and the threads can build a kind of argument and help us generate discourse and we can learn.
They can gesture at chapter writing, but you can't produce chapter-level writing when you're plugged in, at least in my opinion.
know, chapter level writing has to be ambivalent, it has to seek balance, you know, it needs
counterweight, counter examples. We have to create some sort of rhythm between data and
human stories. And as we have learned over and over and over again with the people that
we study and from guests like T. Nguyen, you know, online discourse really forces you into
the corner where you have to find and pitch and then stand by, you know, the stickiest
ideas only and, you know, those tend towards ideological narrowness and flatness. And also,
I don't know about you guys, but I started to find that the mental health drag of the
news cycle to be really intense. Because in most cases, The themes that we covered, the antics of the influencers we've followed, none of that stuff changes.
It generally accelerates, it gets stupider, and you know, I think if you're following conspirituality influencers, you're following people who are creating an alternate reality.
And so, You know that whatever actually happens in the material world will be instantly converted into their contrarian content, and what I found was that the lag time between
Being able to absorb like real world events and how that process felt and then predicting and then usually being right about how someone is going to frame the war in Ukraine or the rise of a fascist leader in Italy, you know, that time just gets shorter and I could only just take that for so long.
What about you guys?
You're right in that the book takes a lot out of you.
We've individually all written books and it's quite a process.
It's an emotional process because when you're doing it by yourself, you're sitting with a screen trying to figure out what you want to say and then get it down.
But collectively, I've always said people hear us for 75-90 minutes a week plus our bonuses, but we talk every day and that hasn't changed.
We're on Slack all the time working on these projects and the book was between us and then having two sets of editors for our different publishers.
You know, which is wonderful and I'm personally really happy with what we've produced and I look forward to getting it out into the world.
But also, what you just said references to where we're going in terms of how is conspirituality evolving.
Like, we started this project, it doesn't end because the pandemic is quote-unquote over.
It's not.
But besides that, these influencers have to continue to market.
And that's what we're going to be looking at a bunch today is some of the ways that it's evolving.
And I feel like, at least for myself, Moving forward, these few months of working on the book and then looking at the landscape has really helped me to focus more on my individual contributions to this project, which have to do with, first of all, health and science and supplements, and I'm going to be pursuing a lot of those stories every week on This Week in Spirituality.
But also, I do work full-time in finance, and I have this behavioral economics cognitive bias world that I work in.
Which completely fits with The Conspiritualist, so I'm going to be able to bring a lot more of that information into how they're producing their products and their downlines and all of that, and I feel very good about being able to analyze it through the lens of both their charismatic affect that they have, but also looking at the real financial consequences of how they're moving through these spaces.
Yeah.
Yeah, I agree.
I think that, you know, in writing the book, it's almost like stepping back and saying, looking at all the data that we've gathered, looking at everything that's happened over the last couple of years, especially the intensity of 2020, everything leading up to the election, then the Fucking capital insurrection, the pandemic, the vaccines, right?
All of it.
And there was just so much to parse out.
And then part of the book too is kind of going back into history and saying, what are the threads
that kind of lead to the situation that we found ourselves reporting on in real time?
And so I think all of that made us sort of step back a little bit from the intensity of the news cycle.
And I agree with what you're saying about, you know, social media and its usefulness
and also its distracting quality.
I almost feel like we're at a turning point right now where we're starting to say, okay,
where are we at in 2022 in terms of this phenomenon?
How is it continuing to evolve and what do we see in terms of a potential future and how all of this kind of hangs together?
I can say on the mental health front that things have become a lot easier.
Since I began to undertake a little bit more self-care.
Oh, that's good, Matthew.
I'm really glad that I found Will Blunderfield, who's a fellow Canadian from Vancouver.
He's a musician.
He practices sexual kung fu for men.
He does butthole sunning.
He's really plunged deeply into the timeless teachings of Mantap Chia, who has taught all about the Tao of semen retention.
Very helpful.
So I signed up for all his content.
His OnlyFans.
I bought the oils.
He's got me doing yoga again!
And so I've got a nice, I got a nice clip here for you.
It's a little vulnerable.
It's not safe for work.
So maybe listeners, you can pause here and switch over to earbuds.
What's up, Yogi?
So me and Brian Crew just taught a really juicy anus workshop today and got a little bit into the prostate too.
And that caused some pre-cum to be secreted from my manhood.
So a little bit of sperm seeped out, a little bit of testosterone, a little bit of spermidine, which is good for muscle growth, a little bit of nerve growth factor, which is really good for your brain and your nervous system.
What else came out?
A little bit of vitamins, minerals, oxytocin, a bonding hormone, which lowers cortisol.
So not only am I getting the benefit of the urine therapy, which is powerful on its own, the shivambu, I should call it, But I'm also getting the benefit of the sperm, the semen, tiny bit of semen that's been mixed in with my urine.
Wow.
Wow.
This guy has a whole vitamin factory up his ass.
That's very, very potent.
I love this.
Yeah, you just broke in on his tasting, actually.
Yeah, I think he missed the gargle as well.
But, you know, to get the, I mean, he's amazing.
He's really a master.
Like, I can't do all of that stuff, but I want to just, you know, communicate some of the full vibe here.
I pulled a montage of men's workshop material.
It also features Will doing a little bit of Leonard Cohen My balls produce massive amounts of testosterone.
My balls produce massive amounts of testosterone.
My testicles attract girls from all over the world.
My testicles attract humans from all around the world.
Some people are like, well, you're saying that, you know, you should love yourself as you are.
Why are you encouraging guys to grow their cocks?
But I'm just saying let your cock and your balls fully exist in the form that they're meant to exist in beyond the
poisoning It's not a cry that you hear at night, oh it's not someone
who claims to have seen the light So me and my buddy brian did a new moon ejaculation ritual
We wrote what we wanted to let go of and we ejaculated onto it.
So it was actually very powerful and then we let it dry.
That's his.
is a bit more intense.
Hallelujah.
Hallelujah.
You're cutting Jeff Buckley there.
You lied to us.
Leonard Cohen wrote that song.
No, but that's Jeff Buckley's version.
No, that's him.
I know, I know that.
Anyway, he's a great singer.
I mean, that's his background, actually.
There's a lot of old yoga music up on his YouTube channel.
Very poppy George Michael type ballads with adorably bad Sanskrit.
Ugh, Will.
Anyway, a lot going on here, guys.
What do you think?
Is this a bit?
Is it harmless?
I mean, the first time I saw it, I was just like, holy shit, this is the apocalypse is upon us.
Like, this is what this is just the next step beyond anything I've ever seen.
And the more I sat with it, the more I was like, it's got to be it's got to be a parody.
I don't know.
In your notes, Matthew, you didn't get to the question, but would his workshops sell out in Austin or would he be picketed?
I actually think that's a really good question because he does cross over into wellness territory, but I think he might go a little too far for people.
And there are some photos of him standing around with five other guys all naked.
And I feel like you're not going to get into the Onnit gym.
There's only so much you can push on those buttons, but you're not going to get into the gym if you're around other guys jacking off for whatever reason.
You're making it sexual, aren't you?
You're making it sexual.
I think that anyone looking at it from the outside would think it's sexual in some capacity, especially if you have as much of an ego as the Austin crew does, because there are limits there that you can only push so far on certain themes.
It still will come down to the warrior mentality and the vulnerability that you have to have to stand in a room with a bunch of other naked men jerking off.
I couldn't imagine that.
A, it's not anything I aspire to do, but besides that, the amount of vulnerability So as I was saying, I want to agree with you because the first time I saw it, I thought it was parody.
And if you look back at his career, he's a performance artist.
So it could be in there, but you know, we were saying before we started recording, where does parody cross over when you start getting eyeballs on you?
Like it could start off as parody and then you're like, I mean, look at JP Sears, right?
Oh, you're listening to me.
Oh, these are the people that listen to me.
Okay, let me start telling my message to them.
So it's that, you know, it goes back to that question we're always asking on this podcast, the question of intent.
And it's really hard, especially in this case, it's really hard to tell.
Yeah.
I mean, there's also the question of what does a person do if, you know, in 2012, they're in their early twenties and they're trying to make it as a musician?
And they do a little bit of circus performance work, and then they get into yoga teaching, and then they start to age out of that, perhaps.
And then online platforms become live, and then he finds out that there's actually a market niche for seminal retention workshops, and he's always kind of been into that anyway.
And it's kind of like, what do people do if they didn't Get the 9 to 5 job, or if they didn't, you know, if they didn't sort of slide out of the influence gig worker economy.
Yeah, I mean, and the truth is, there are plenty of people, and some of them are conspiritualists, who are into this whole urine therapy kind of thing, and who are into using various, you know, pseudoscience claims for all of the benefits of urine therapy.
So, it's a step beyond, but it's not way out beyond what already exists, right?
No, and he actually might have found something lucrative as far as the near future goes because, you know, the Yoga Wellness Dick Care gig is going to be dealing with a wave of erectile dysfunction amongst sufferers of long COVID.
So, I wouldn't be surprised if that starts entering into his marketing as well.
You know, I just want to note here, full disclosure, that a lot of listeners will know that the three of us have never met in person.
I had lunch with Julian once about ten years ago.
It was great.
I've never actually met Derek in person, and we're going to post links to Blunderfield in the show notes, and you can see for yourself why I'm starting to wonder whether Derek and Will might be the same guy.
And whether this whole podcast has been an elaborate catfish to draw me in.
Why are you so anti-bald guys with beards?
I'm not!
I'm just connecting the big bald dots.
You think we all look alike.
Well, I have to say, it is undeniable that the two of you have never been seen in the same place at the same time.
That's true.
I will say that.
How else do you explain it, Derek?
We do have serious stuff to talk about today.
Julian, you've got a long piece on how conspiritualists gel with the rise of global fascism. I'm going to be
looking at Giorgio Molone and a little bit on Pierre Polliev. But first, Eric, you're going to bring us
on a tour of a biohacking conference, is that right? Yeah, two different ones actually.
As I mentioned a little earlier, the question came up once COVID was quote-unquote over, where would this go?
How would they shift?
Overall, I feel it's important to track where the figures that we've been covering, where their messaging is now, but also look at to where it's going to evolve, as I hinted at earlier.
The immune system was all the rage during COVID, and I think we all expected that wouldn't last.
Mickey Willis pimped his supplements, helping you prepare for the next pandemic.
There was that moment.
But supplements will always be circling somewhere.
So I do want to look at Two conferences that occurred in just the last two weeks as they're really indicative in my mind of where this is all headed.
And to be honest, it's really just picking up where the wellness industry was when lockdowns began, which is this intensive focus on optimization.
And I know I've been threatening a Dave Asprey episode for a while, and honestly, I do want to do one.
He's just really hard to listen to.
So, you know, he said mental health before.
I can't do more than one clip of him.
But his eighth annual biohacking conference recently went down in Beverly Hills at the Beverly Hills Hilton, which is a very nice hotel there.
And the following week, he was the keynote speaker at the Modern Nirvana conference in Yeah, Austin, of course.
And as can be expected, both of these conferences featured an array of junk science and grifting to levels that astounded even me when I was on their Instagram feeds.
So, first off, do you guys know how much a ticket to the biohacking conference was?
I think that question is actually upside down.
The question is, how much is it worth to the individual to go to the biohacking conference?
Can you afford not to go?
How much will it cost you if you don't spend the $777.77?
Nice guess.
What's your guess, Matthew?
Oh, I don't know.
Is it $600?
General admission was $1,799.
Fucking hell, what, three days?
Three days, yeah.
Preferred admission was $3,000 and the VIP was $4,300 or $4,299 because he knows it's $99.
Is this just people setting up tables in a conference center and then people lecturing in rooms?
Yeah, exactly.
Now, hold on.
This doesn't include...
Accommodations meals.
No, no, no.
Well, I don't know.
There are probably some fucking pills that they gave you there, but no, not accommodations, not accommodations.
No, that was just for the tickets at the conference.
So second question, what topics were they talking about?
You want to take a guess?
Uh, geez.
I mean, probably but butthole sunning with, uh, with, with.
It's not techie enough.
It's not techie enough.
Well, maybe.
No, Will is not in this league.
Will Blunderfield is not at that club.
But Dave Asprey does sun butthole suntan.
Like he's posted that he does that.
Oh, yes.
Good.
Well, well, then I'm going to take him seriously.
Maybe there's some kind of, uh, bulletproof coffee enema that you can do.
Close, close, close.
Maybe it's calibrated with some kind of AI.
No, no.
So Bulletproof Coffee was so 2017.
We've evolved, Julian.
But I'm not going to do a full rundown.
But at Asprey's conference, there was cold plunges, of course.
Cryotherapy, which has never been proven.
Stem cell therapy, which has been proven for certain things, but not what they're promoting it for.
New states of consciousness.
So there's all new things happening right now.
But my personal favorite, as you hinted at, was Asprey's latest coffee innovation, which is called Danger Coffee.
Which he's marketing as clean, mold-free, farm-direct coffee engineered to detoxify and remineralize the body with more than 50 trace minerals, nutrients, and electrolytes.
Coffee.
Coffee mold is bullshit.
Like that was his first book.
One of the big things that brought him into notoriety is this idea.
He said over 90% of the world's coffee supply is moldy.
But he's never his beans.
So that's the biohacking conference.
Over at Modern Nirvana, Asprey talked a lot alongside Sri Sri Ravi Shankar.
I don't know if you know this guy.
I actually went to one of his events in 1995, my first year as a religion reporter,
and covered it back then.
Even then, watching a bunch of white people in Central Jersey touch his feet weirded me out, even though I was only like 20 at the time.
Sad Guru was there, of course.
Luke Story talked with his partner about sacred relationships, and there was a lot of talks about unhealthy guts.
I think the microbiome is probably the most grifted space right now.
There's so, as I talked to Daniel Bellardo a few episodes about, there's so little science behind it, but there are so many products behind it right now.
And there was also a talk on the spiritual applications of melatonin and methylene blue.
Methylene blue.
Oh, what's that?
Methylene blue is an old, it was actually used in textile dyes in the late 19th century.
It has a lot.
It's what you use when you want to see different applications of minerals.
It's the dye that you use, the blue dye that you use to see things in, but they also use it to dye textiles.
And it was the very first ingredient that created Different states of consciousness, which then became the tranquilizer industry, which eventually became the antidepressant industry.
So this is part of your origin story.
Yes.
Yeah, very much so.
And so, but now that's a spiritual application.
So I really need to find that talk.
Um, there was a lecture on your favorite field, Julian, quantum biology and connectedness.
I'm the only expert on that topic.
I can't believe someone else.
So, in this whole landscape, Asprey is sort of a godfather energy at this point.
He's capitalizing on his buttered coffee empire, but he's also clawing his way up in an attempt to stay relevant.
The modern Nirvana crew is much younger and hipper.
They're led by a self-proclaimed biohacker and a guy who is the former backstage interviewer on Dancing with the Stars.
His name is Frank Probably saying that wrong, I'm sorry, but that's who it is.
There's a successful actress and vocalist, Kat Graham.
She starred in a bunch of Netflix movies and even Cutthroat City, which was created by RZA from the Wu-Tang.
And then there's a breathwork instructor named Bryant Wood, who teaches something called Pranashramanic Yoga.
Oh, that's great.
You could add a few more words to that.
Well, I'm not including his whole bio.
There are many more words.
The Modern Nirvana, it really is this new, young wave of aspirational conspiritualists.
And I really do put them in that category because in 2021, their conference was mask-free and promoted as mask-free by them, even though Austin was still under a mask mandate at the time.
But they have hipper branding and they come with a soundtrack.
I just want to ask about that.
So there's a lot of, I imagine that there's a lot of 2020-2021 conferences with people like, folks like this in places like Austin that had municipal mask mandates, they were mask free, they obviously became, they probably became super spreader events, but all of that data, all of that information, that's going to be lost to history.
We're just never going to know what the impact was of these gatherings during that time, I suppose, right?
Yeah, we're not going to know.
And the only reason that I know is because one of our listeners, and I'm sorry I forgot who it was, but they were there because they were interested in the conference, but they were masked.
And they were emailing or DMing us on social media, and I saw it, and I was going back and forth with that person, and they were like, I'm getting a lot of dirty looks because I'm wearing a mask, but no one here is masked, and they're talking about, like, why it's bad for you and stuff like that.
So that's specifically how I know that was that conference.
And yeah, absolutely.
I mean, that's what we've always said, though.
Like, you'll never know the collateral damage of what this movement, the anti-mask, anti-vax movement has done, because it's just impossible.
If you run into a store because you're protesting and you have COVID and you give it to someone and they bring it home to their grandma, you're never going to know those effects that you had.
So, back to Modern Nirvana, I want to briefly focus on Kat Graham as her latest music single really points to a disparity in wellness spaces that I personally hoped we would leave behind, but that was really stupid of me to believe.
It's this personal gloating of riches.
Which is not surprising, given that Luke Story and Dave Asprey are in their circle.
But this idea that you can transcend your material conditions through this new conglomeration of spiritual practices rooted in biohacking, psychedelic shamanism, and whatever else is trending this month.
So before I play this clip, Matthew, would you read Modern Nirvana's marketing copy for me?
The goal of Modern Nirvana is to be a catalyst for transformation in people's lives, to inspire them to take control of their spiritual and physical well-being by sharing both ancient practices and modern biohacks on our YouTube channel and at our annual summit.
Our mission is to bring inspiration and information to a new generation, paving the way for a more enlightened world.
If you are human, you have the potential to be superhuman.
And we can.
What if you're not human?
I'm so, you know, I should have done more prep for this episode because 2021's keynote speaker was Deepak Chopra.
And not that you could have read it in that voice, but I blew it.
So this is the same blasé rhetoric promised by every aspirational wellness business and entrepreneur.
And I'm all for people having multiple careers.
I've had a bunch.
It's cool to do a bunch of things.
I think there's something to be said, though, for being consistent across your messaging.
Even if you have disparate careers that come together.
So Kat, as I mentioned, is one of the three founders.
She's an actress and a wellness entrepreneur and a singer.
And her latest single is called Oprah Rich.
And you guys are in for a real treat.
Alright.
♪♪♪ I love counting all my does.
My piggy bank overflows.
Sign my name on the dot, let's go.
I got cars a European more often the museum. I love it when I see zeros
I love counting all my doughs my piggy bank overflows. Sign my name on the dot. Let's go
I love it when I see zeros. I love counting all my doughs my piggy bank overflows
It's almost over, I know it's gonna be a disaster.
Oh, there's a chorus?
There's a chorus going?
Okay.
I really want to let this horrible repetitive part play over so we can get to the chorus.
Oh, there's a chorus?
Well, that's a good thing.
There's a chorus going on?
Okay.
Alright, after the drop Matthew.
I wanna be filthy, nasty, dirty, rich.
Filthy, dirty, Oprah rich.
I wanna be Oprah rich.
I wanna be Oprah rich.
I wanna be filthy.
Okay, you get the point.
So I will cut it there.
And just like you were saying, Matthew, before, or Julian, too, like, is Will Bunderfield a parody?
At first, I really thought this song was a parody.
Oh, yeah.
It's not.
What'd you guys think?
Well, I mean, it's it's so utterly derivative.
And yeah, I would listen to those lyrics and just be like, this is gotta be if I heard it, I would think I gotta go find the video because it's gonna be making fun.
Of a whole demographic and worldview.
And I guess it isn't.
There's no video at this point.
Any thoughts before we move on, Matthew?
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know.
I can't tell.
Like my my my my irony poisoning is poison.
I don't know.
It's also weird, right?
Because you there's OK, so there's a there's a kind of convention or something that has been established within hip hop culture right in the last maybe 20 years where where there's there's this expression of Bragging about wealth that comes from people who started with nothing and it's it's there's a way that you can critique it as being kind of distasteful but it's but but then you can also understand it and go wow this is this is a person who had nothing and who through their talent found their way into a position where now they have can they're able to do conspicuous consumption in their videos right but to have these types of people
Going that route.
It's a kind of appropriation that actually just doesn't make any sense.
When I think of that story, I think of Jay-Z, who I think is one of the greatest lyricists of all time, and just on a whole other level of being able to do that.
And I don't know Katz.
I don't know where she comes from.
I know nothing about her, honestly.
First of all, the fact that she picked Oprah, which obviously, for the wealth reason, is understood.
Kat is also African-American, and so there's some connection there, which is great.
But Oprah, we know, has platformed dangerous spiritual figures and cult leaders before.
So through all that auto-tune, I keep waiting for that parody to come out.
And there's not a video, but she does have other successful videos, and I don't think that it is that.
It is literally just a pop song.
It's also not like, like in the verses she's saying, look at all my shit, which is very profound.
But, but when she gets to the chorus, it's aspirational, right?
It's basically saying my heart's desired is to be as rich as Oprah.
Exactly, and she's brokering in this biohacking spiritual breathwork.
They also have the Modern Nirvana Oracle deck that's coming out in two weeks.
You have all these tchotchkes that they're brokering, and it's just part of that empire that she's building.
So it really just comes off as shallow and vapid in so many ways.
And especially, I mean, it's just a horrible song.
I'm sorry.
I did listen to some of her older music, and it's not as bad.
It's catchy.
But to have this conference followed by an Oracle deck and then this song all coming out at the same time, it really just gives you insight into this conspiritualist brain of how these wellness practices are ultimately monetization, even if you practice them Wholeheartedly, they are still monetization vehicles that become part of your brand.
It's like we said, what has been happening in the pandemic online is now continuing in real life.
You have these collections of grifters moving about in a coordinated fashion, Offering numerous levels of entry, right?
If you can't afford a long weekend in Beverly Hills or Austin, you can buy the fucking Oracle deck and it's, you know, you can pre-order it on their site now.
And I'm going to go ahead and guess that Luke's story already has an affiliate code for this because that's how these circles work.
We know this from our Hay House episode where we talked about how they all work together.
Yeah, as well as all of the great work that CCDH did on the pandemic profiteers and how networked they all are from RFK to Ty and Charlene Bollinger and all of them.
Christiane Northrup is in on that action.
They're all just heavily networked in this digital marketing methodology.
Yeah, and it's returning to real life.
And so from my perspective, and what I'll be looking at, as I said, in the coming months, is where is this wellness community heading?
And first, it's in more groups because they really need that cross-pollination.
Disgusting as some of this is, I do think that a lot of people are more skeptical than before, having seen what happened.
There will be more of a focus on biohacking because there's something very seductive about the idea that you can transform your neurons, even if that statement is meaningless.
You see it all the time.
And third, the continued confusion between wellness posturing and financial success, which that song points to, which further blurs the lines, Between this ego-driven salesmanship and a true quest for holism that takes into account that most people don't have the opportunity to partake in the universal truths about success that I covered on Monday's bonus episode, right, that are on offer.
This idea that you can pull yourself up by the bootstraps, you do these practices, you will find success in some ways.
The price of entry, as we just saw with the biohacking conference, is way too steep for most people.
So it's going to be this continual aspirational model, as far as I can tell.
Yeah, now just let me slow down and ask a kind of a dumb question, which is, is there anything more to biohacking than rebranding Chopra and Sheldrake for the tech crowd?
Yes, in terms of their accessibility to Scientific studies and the ability to take things like, let's go back to stem cell therapy, which does possibly have some applications if you've gone through an injury, and they're going to repurpose it as an optimization tool that, hey, maybe your shoulder didn't pop out of its socket and you needed that surgery, but if you do this,
You're actually going to prolong your life this much further.
They haven't access to science on a consumer level that has never existed before.
I think, you know, in some ways, no, because Chopra and Sheldrake, for example, I mean, they've been using whatever physics or science was available for generations now in their speech and their language.
But I think on a product level, Right.
We talked about this with Daniel Bilardo again about these take-home microbiome kits that are not regulated.
They probably don't do anything, but they're just another vehicle that can be sold.
I'm going to talk about this next week on This Week in Spirituality about the telehealth industry that is booming right now, or at least a lot of these influencers and quote-unquote anti-vax Doctors are spinning up right now.
Those are more monetization vehicles for them.
So, yes, that connectedness that was always more like, I can see you at a conference because we have social media and we have these ways of connecting now.
I think that interconnectivity and access to science gives them something that wasn't accessible before that.
Yeah, but maybe they lose something, because it just occurs to me that the terms biohacking and optimization are really, like, super materialist.
They're super hard dualist.
So I wanted to know if you had any thoughts about that, Julian, because they're not talking about chakras, are they?
No, no.
So, I mean, the crossover point, you mentioned Sheldrake and Chopra.
The crossover point, of course, is quantum physics, which we've already mentioned, right?
The crossover point, or the way in which people like Sheldrake and Chopra are deploying their form of pseudoscience is to say, here's a scientific reference point where we mangle quantum physics and then use it to justify a bunch of you know, bullshit philosophical claims that are ultimately
about that are ultimately idealistic.
They're ultimately about how thought creates reality. And so when the biohackers come along,
it's much less of that kind of spiritual philosophical angle, and I'm going to sell
you books and much more about I'm going to sell you products based on the fact that I have tapped
into sort of the secrets of the growing edge of science.
And I can tell you these secrets that will optimize everything about you.
And you get into kind of Cronenberg territory with someone like Tim Ferriss.
And Tim Ferriss is kind of the Mac Daddy, I think, of a lot of this stuff.
Where Tim Ferriss was doing things 10 years ago, like self-implanting an insulin meter into like the side of his belly so that he could track his glucose and insulin levels at But maybe it's metaphysical because Sheldrake and Chopra already sacralized those terms, right?
and how he was exercising so he stayed in the optimum zone.
You know, it's a different turn of the screw.
But maybe it's metaphysical because Sheldrake and Chopra already sacralized those terms, right?
It's not like Ferris and all of these other guys have to come in
and give spiritual import to this language that has already sort of been divorced from its scientific
discourse and made into a kind of poetry.
In a way, in a way.
I mean the far end of the biohacking logical conclusion is that you're going to live forever in some kind of transhumanist kind of technological utopia, right?
The far end of the Sheldrake and Chopra thing is that you're going to realize phenomenologically that you have always existed forever in a quantum superposition, right?
So they've gone in different directions for sure.
It's hard to, it would take some time for me to really parse out like how that all fits together.
I do want to say that Tim Ferriss just learned the term conspirituality.
He said he didn't know who came up with it or much about it, but he actually gives a really good story about his run-in with conspirituality and ayahuasca in Austin on his latest episode with Kevin Rose, and someone pinged me about it, and so I listened to it.
So, maybe now that he knows the term, He has some language to understand some of the more egregious players around him in Austin, hopefully.
We'll have to cover that.
We'll have to look into that.
Right, right.
The self-reflective moment.
Alright, so we're going to shift gears here into the mainstreaming of fascism, which is part of what's happening in our world of conspirituality.
Not only this week, but I would say it's been going on for a while and there are some new manifestations this week and certainly this year.
I'm curious, you guys, how do you think the rise of conspirituality as a social movement, which we've been covering, Well, we know that our field of influencers have always tracked right, and it's partly because of the narcissism of consumerist yoga and wellness.
It's partly because of the depoliticization of the demographic over decades.
I think it's also a really easy move from kissing the hem of the guru's robe to licking the boot of the demagogue.
There's also a kind of persistent anti-intellectualism that creates a demographic with really low cognitive defenses against bullshit.
But your question actually makes me think of this feature of fascism that was articulated by Umberto Eco in his Fourteen Principles.
He says that fascism is a cult of action for action's sake.
So, in other words, just do it.
Be in your body.
Surrender to the flow.
The body knows.
before or without any previous reflection, thinking as a form of emasculation."
Wow.
So, in other words, just do it, be in your body, surrender to the flow,
the body knows, trust your intuition.
Yeah, and it also, it's, to me, on a micro scale, it's the reason why Will Bunderfeld
wouldn't be allowed into Onnit.
Because it's a closed system.
As much as they talk about being open and for everyone, it's actually a closed system.
And closed systems are usually read by people who are egomaniacs.
Egomania will always lead to some sort of authoritarianism when you're challenged.
So, on a micro scale you see it, so it doesn't surprise that it would lead to having some sort of affection for people who do it on a macro scale.
Yeah, and so part of what I hear you gesturing at is that it's probably not going to trend in the direction of the homoerotic, at least not overtly.
No, no.
Right.
Definitely not, as much as, again, they're for everyone.
You know, I'm sure that People who are gay are allowed in those spaces.
I do believe that.
But again, there's limits that will happen.
And when you are breaking into the brand of the MMA guys who are all about the body, and then you see that penetrating their circle, it's just not going to happen.
Yeah, I mean, it's really always been very telling to me, the incredibly tiny number of athletes, pro-athletes in the United States who've ever come out as gay.
I mean, there's got to be so, so many more.
So, it is a very restrictive culture.
You know, one of the things that we've been observing, both as we keep tabs on our conspiritualists and then in the research that we've done for the book that we're referencing earlier, Is that conspirituality actually leans toward being anti-democratic.
I mean, just like magas, conspiritualists will talk a lot about freedom and sovereignty and even awakening, but they actually support an epistemology and a spiritual and political style that quite simply is authoritarian.
And what we've been reporting on is that increasingly that also includes rationalizing and even sanctifying violence.
Yeah.
You know, we all watched the right-wing outcry a couple weeks ago at Joe Biden's very direct speech about the danger that MAGA Republicans pose to American democracy.
And that came after he had said in a different speech that under Trump, the GOP had become home to a semi-fascist philosophy.
Divisive, they cried.
Offensive to half the country.
Authoritarian, they complained.
And they circulated doctored images that made the guy they've repeatedly portrayed as a fragile and senile geriatric soy boy seem, in fact, like a terrifying dictator bathed in an ominous red glow and flanked by menacing marines.
It's like they really do seem to think that political critique comes down to theatrics and aesthetics.
And you know, these are the people who often decry the corrupting influence of postmodernism.
But one of their go-to strategies is just making words mean whatever they want.
Vaccines?
Authoritarian.
Democratically elected party?
Totalitarian.
Capital insurrectionists?
Protesters.
Or better yet, tourists.
The guy under investigation for trying to undermine democracy in multiple illegal ways?
Well, he's the god-emperor-savior of the children.
That same failed entrepreneur, fortunate son of wealth?
He's the people's billionaire.
Yeah, I mean, the irony here is that a good deal of postmodern theory actually emerged to account for this kind of thing, to account for what fascists can do and what they did do with language in the 30s.
Namely, to empty it of definitional meaning to fill it with aggressive power.
And that's why those 14 theses on fascism are so potent because Eco studied it as a mode of like contradictory meaning breaking that really the purpose of it is is really just to glorify the speaker.
A lot of the reaction from the right and from conspiritualists as we'll discuss Boils down to saying that the term fascist is just kind of an insult that lefties use for anyone who isn't woke enough or who espouses, you know, family values.
I know that you hate that, Julian.
You have this great tweet that's kind of sitting there kind of forlorn on your timeline. It says
fascism has a meaning. It's not just a left-wing slur. And it put me in mind of the analysis that
Sartre gave of exactly just this, of the language issue. Back in 19, what must have been 46
or something like that, he writes, never believe that anti-Semites, he's talking about Nazis,
of course, are completely unaware of the absurdity of the replies.
They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge, but they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary Julian, who is obliged to use words responsibly, since Julian believes in words, the anti-Semites have the right to play.
They even like to play with discourse, for by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors.
They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument, but to intimidate and disconcert.
And if you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating By some phrase that the time for argument is past.
You know, I want to say that that that tweet of mine that you're that you're reading this as a response to came out of a previous Twitter exchange where someone where, you know, I basically said if it if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, dear, dear reader, the the duck is a fascist and, you know, listed all the different sort of qualifiers and and talked about Maloney, who I know we're going to discuss in a minute.
And someone responded by saying, you know, I'm just a blue collar grunt, but it seems to me that everyone on the left is much more enamored of hurling insults and slurs than of actually criticizing people's policies.
Which, you know, exemplifies exactly what we're talking about.
The thing is, I think that exchange actually makes it very clear that we need almost two forms of discourse.
Totally.
It's like amongst allies and friends, we have to know what fascism means, we have to know what the theses are, we have to know what the descriptors are.
But as a label, it doesn't really work anymore.
It doesn't really suit.
And I think a lot of liberals are walking around thinking that it would be mortifying to be called a fascist.
But if you actually, you know, walk up to Georgia Maloney and you say, you're a fascist, she says, fuck off, as we'll see.
Like, lick my boots.
You're not going to define who I am.
So, it almost seems like, you know, we have to be able to describe fascism as a predictable and definable political phenomenon.
But then in relation to fascists in the public sphere, maybe we need to name the behaviors that it's not enough to just use the political label
anymore.
We have to be able to say, actually, that's a really self-centered and self-obsessed point of view.
You are obsessed with your own family to the exclusion of everyone else.
Actually, your point of view is really un-Christian.
Because I think the label of fascism almost feels like an empty signifier at this point.
Not internally amongst us.
It also, you know...
I'm reminded of this great piece by Adam Seward in The Atlantic, and he wrote a subsequent book of the same title called The Cruelty is the Point.
Where he stayed away from the political nomenclature altogether and writes things like, the president's ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them, his followers, euphoric.
It makes them feel good.
It makes them feel proud.
It makes them feel happy.
It makes them feel united.
And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything no matter what it costs them.
Right before this episode, I was reading this book on marketing and I came across this quote by Dale Carnegie.
So often we see these things, like what you said, Julian, where one moment Biden is geriatric, portrayed by right-wingers, and then the next moment he's this terrifying dictator.
Carnegie's quote was, when dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic.
We are dealing with creatures of emotion.
And it's such a basic, you know, it's actually the leading quote of this book.
It's so basic and fundamental, but I think when you're so wrapped up in things like, oh, we're trying to save democracy, you kind of forget that logic really doesn't play a role in any of this, which is kind of frightening.
Yeah, one of Echo's thesis actually is that the enemy must be terribly strong and terribly weak at the same time.
They have to flip back and forth.
They are dominating you, but they're also disgusting worms.
They're vermin.
Yeah, they're vermin, right.
You know, I was listening to Roger Griffin, who I want to talk about his definition of fascism in a moment here, but I was listening to him a little earlier today.
And he was talking about Machiavelli and he was quoting a passage in Machiavelli that talked about how to maintain power and the sort of an allegorical thing where he talks about being able to be the fox and the lion.
Being the fox means that you're able to be wily and to see the snares and to avoid the snares, but the fox is not scary enough to deal with the wolves from the other side.
And so you need to be able to be the lion so as to scare away the wolves and to assert power, but the lion is not as clever as the fox at avoiding the traps that the enemy will lay for you.
So this ability to switch back and forth between different ways of portraying yourself, right?
Yeah, so, you know, among allies and friends, perhaps we can look to someone like Roger Griffin, who defines fascism as palingenetic ultranationalism, which of course is a confusing yet impressive phrase I love to use.
It makes more sense once you hear his three elements of fascism.
The first is the myth of rebirth.
So palingenesis is the capacity to be reborn or to be resurrected in some way.
So the myth of rebirth, ultranationalism, and the myth of decadence.
So we are a great people who have fallen due to corrupting influences from outsiders, immigrants, people who don't share our ethnicity and religion, decadent intellectuals, perhaps Jews, homosexuals.
But we can have a glorious rebirth under the leadership of an unapologetically strong patriotic chosen one.
Why?
We might even make our country great again.
Yeah, and that brings us to Giorgia Maloney, right?
And we bring her up because it took about, what, six hours or so for her to, after she was declared the presumptive new Prime Minister of Italy at the head of Fratelli d'Italia, or the Brotherhood of Italy, for the conspirituality world to start singing her praises.
So we have reposts from David Wolff but then also Amber Sears of a viral clip of a famous speech in which she says, this is just sort of classic, I transcribed it from the captions, Why is the family an enemy?
I mean, let's start with a non-sequitur to begin with.
Anyway, why is the family, or a red herring, why is the family an enemy?
Why is the family so frightening?
By the way, the only family in European media that's being depicted as being frightening or an enemy are the families of migrants that are actually crawling onto shore in the south trying to flee their
desperate situations.
So there's also something, it's not just a red herring, it's projective right off the
top.
Why is the family an enemy?
Well, it's not that the family is an enemy, it's that they've been saying that certain
families are enemies but then they're sort of pretending, she's pretending that it's being
said about her.
Yeah, it's like the war on Christmas essentially, right?
Incredible.
Why is the family an enemy?
Why is the family so frightening?
There is a single answer to all these questions.
And she has it.
Of course.
Because the family defines us.
It is our identity.
Because everything that defines us now is an enemy for those who would no longer like us to have an identity.
and to be perfect consumer slaves.
And so they attack national identity, they attack religious identity, they attack gender identity, they attack family identity.
I can't define myself as Italian Christian, woman, mother, no.
I must be citizen X, gender X, parent 1, parent 2.
I must be a number, because when I am only a number, when I no longer have an identity or roots, then I will be the perfect slave at the mercy of financial speculators.
Wrapping it all up with antisemitic dogmas.
Those financial speculators.
Did Jordan Peterson write that for her?
Because that sounds like his same sort of rhetoric.
I also saw Jonathan Pujo, who the Decoding the Guru guys have been analyzing and getting into, the demon guy recently, also reposted being like, how is this fascist?
Yeah, this is very beautiful.
This is very beautiful.
Well, and that illustrates the language problem that I brought up before.
He says, he says, I'm told that this is fascistic, but I find this to be a beautiful speech.
And then people are retorting in the replies.
They're saying, well, that just, that's kind of means that you love fascism and, and, but that doesn't really work.
It doesn't, it doesn't really, it doesn't, it doesn't get to the, it's like if his tweet would have to be, I'm told that this is cruel and dog whistling, but I find it to be beautiful.
Now that's a different situation.
So anyway, that speech was in Italian, but here she is at CPAC in February in English.
We live in a time in which everything we stand for is under attack.
Our individual freedom is under attack.
Our rights are under attack.
The sovereignty of our nation is under attack.
The prosperity and well-being of our family is under attack.
The education of our children is under attack.
In front of this, people understand that in this age, the only way of being rebels is to preserve what we are.
The only way of being rebels is to be conservatives.
We are going to say it loud.
Yeah.
We are not going to care about the labels they stick upon us.
We are fed up of a left that presumes to lecture us even on what the right should be, what it should do, how it should behave, and even how it should define itself.
The left would do better to try recovering its own identity.
We on the right know exactly who we are and what we stand for.
Yeah, who we are, what we stand for, anti-immigrant, homophobic, trans bigot.
She believes that Christianity is persecuted.
She was born in Rome, by the way, home of the Vatican.
Her doctor isn't vaccinated, and if there's any doubt... Your daughter.
You meant her daughter.
What did I say?
Doctor.
Or doctor, who knows?
Well hold on, this was in Florida too, right?
That's where CPEC was back in February?
Yeah.
And if there's any doubt about where Fratelli d'Italia, this is Brothers of Italy, this is a phrase from the 1946 National Where they are coming from, a few weeks before the election a party hack from Florence took a selfie video beside a Romany woman and literally said,
Yeah.
So, I think, I mean, Amber Lee Sears, she's listening to that speech and then she's posting.
She is fire, full body chills when she speaks.
And I think that with Maloney, you can really see that the girl boss, life coaching, soul certainty, hacker types will be all over her.
And you've got to notice too how she commands the framing.
As we've been talking about, it's all about language as in it doesn't matter what they label us or if they call us fascists because I did things like say Mussolini did a great job when I was a teenager.
We know who we are.
And then this other aspect is that she pulls off this very sort of trad, retro, Fellini-esque, I think, sex appeal that dates back decades.
On election day, she posts a selfie clip where she's holding two melons in front of her breasts.
This is a pun on her surname, Maloney.
And she says, I've said everything I need to say.
In other words, I think she's saying, it's time to fuck your queen, right?
Like, just do it.
Be in your body.
Surrender to the flow.
The body knows.
There's no point in talking or thinking anymore.
Just enjoy my juicy melons.
Let's go.
So I think this will also be gold for the anti-intellectual blood and soil crowd.
She's also big into athletics, loves rugby, loves yoga.
She has kind of a Marjorie Taylor Greene CrossFit, like, ass-kicking vibe going on, too.
Who's getting divorced, I might just add.
I hate it when I see it.
I don't gloat in anyone getting divorced, but when you're someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is on the trail every day talking about Christian family values, and you can't keep your shit together, it's just more of that That contradictory nature of these people where they project so much out there and then they're a nightmare to deal with.
At least that's what it seems to be.
So I would imagine it seems to be the case so far.
You're saying you don't want to date Marjorie Taylor Greene?
Because she's free and open right now.
I mean, she was single.
Right, right, exactly.
Right.
There's not many CrossFit boxes up in Portland, so.
So Meloni's win happens to coincide with the furthest right-wing party in Sweden this week,
becoming the second largest party in their parliament.
That party, which is called, perhaps confusingly, the Sweden Democrats, was started in 1998 with prominent members having been drawn from white nationalist and neo-Nazi organizations I should say they do now publicly disavow those roots, but it's not really that unlike the origin story of Meloni's Brothers of Italy Party, who are the de facto heir to Mussolini's banned National Fascist Party.
Anyway, the Sweden Democrats are now poised to form a coalition government with the increasingly socially conservative Christian Democrat Party.
And I just want to say again, this is Sweden.
So, the far-right, anti-LGBT, China-allied Polish government has celebrated both the Italian and the Swedish results publicly, as have members of Viktor Orban's anti-gay, anti-democratic government in Hungary.
Orban has made statements against race-mixing, and in the past, in his interviews, he also predicted that Italy was the country most likely within the EU to flip.
Maloney, for her part, has backed Orban on controversies over financial corruption and erosion of democracy with the EU.
And let's not forget that Orban also spoke at CPAC's convention in Texas last month.
And in May, CPAC actually held their conference in Orban's Hungary.
This is the same Hungary that Tucker Carlson has traveled to to do admiring puff pieces on Orban's harsh anti-immigration policies.
Look at how clean and orderly the borders are.
Tucker, Maloney, and Orban have all recited screeds against George Soros, and they've all floated the racist and anti-Semitic Great Replacement conspiracy theory.
And in turn, Orban and other international right-wing leaders have repurposed GOP anti-woke talking points, some of which you've already touched on a little bit, right?
This is the sort of stuff that conspiritualists like J.P.
Sears and propagandists like Matt Walsh post on the regular these days.
So, for example, in 2021, Orban banned any references to LGBTQ topics in schools.
But not only that, also any positive depiction of LGBTQ characters in movies, or books, or advertising.
And then, during their version of the midterms this year, he included a referendum on LGBTQ issues in education.
Now, Ian, you've been following this for a while, Julian.
You've got a bunch of past bonus episodes referencing Steve Bannon and his affinity for Alexander Dugan.
You've been on this for a long time.
You've tracked how Bannon has worked on behalf of ultra-right-wing parties around the world.
Yeah, so he'll go and visit and campaign.
He'll visit and campaign for these people, and then he will have a big conference, like in Mayfair at a fancy hotel, and draw together all of the far-right leaders from around the world to discuss their strategy.
Right, and it's all rooted in a grander vision inspired by Dugan and René Guénon, as you've covered.
And through this particular lineage, the argument champions sovereign nations who are free to reject universal human rights along with Western-style democracy.
All in favor of aristocratic and monarchical hierarchies, spiritual case systems, and the eventual return to the Golden Age.
And of course, all of this roots back to somebody who's probably going to come out in the washes, figuring in Maloney's intellectual history as well, Julius Evola, whose work inspired Mussolini, of course, in the creation of fascism.
Yeah, so I may sound, when I get onto this topic, a little bit like the corkboard guy.
Yeah.
Thanks for that generous summary.
Yeah, I mean it's like, Bannon is, the number of links that Bannon has to all of these characters and how underneath all of it is this René Guénon and Julia Savola traditionalist philosophy that wants to take the world back into a kind of Spiritual hierarchy, monarchical, oppressive, our nation is free to reject human rights and democracy.
That is all really pretty terrifying.
This is happening all over the world, Brazil, the Philippines and India as well, not to mention places like Belarus and of course Russia.
Most of these leaders publicly embrace nativism alongside some form of fundamentalist religion.
They use slogans that lean into the fascist link between God, the country and the people.
And by the way, Giorgio Maloney describes herself as a defender of God, fatherland and
family.
And I found this really interesting, Matthew, that, you know, she's leaning on fatherland.
She named the party, the brothers of Italy, right?
She's the one who said, we have to take the tri-color flame that represents the flame
that burns in Mussolini's tomb as being part of our symbology.
And here she is, the first female PM of Italy.
Right.
Yeah, doing the work of the patriarchy, right.
Yeah, amazing.
And so perhaps she's the sexy mommy who's going to bring about the rebirth of the nation, right?
Right.
Now the US, of course, is part of this picture.
Next month we have two episodes coming up on white Christian nationalism.
This is a topic very much in the news stateside as well, of late.
We're going to talk to sociologists Philip Gorski and Matthew Perry about their book, The Cross and the Flag, as well as religious scholar Thomas Lecoq, who's the expert on the Crusades that I referred to several times in our Temple of the Gun episode back in June.
In America, the synergy between far-right politics, gun culture, and Christian nationalism is running hot.
In amongst their voluminous research, Gorski and Perry show that a majority of evangelicals rate the Second Amendment as even more important than freedom of religion or speech because they see all of our freedoms as flowing from the right to bear arms.
Yeah, and that pretty much proves that the ideology or belief system is secondary to the will to power or force, doesn't it?
Absolutely.
Yeah, they've turned a corner where what's most important is that we have enough guns to impose our beliefs on the rest of the country.
It turns out 78% of evangelicals are in favor of officially declaring America a Christian nation.
And so many people will have seen that recently Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert and the less high profile Mary Miller, who's from Illinois, have expressed open support for Christian nationalism and presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis will use Christian nationalist imagery, putting on the armor of God, for example, and talking points in his speeches.
Now, this is the same Ron DeSantis, of course, whom Joe Rogan has opined on his podcast would make a great president.
Oh, he was just shooting the shit though, right?
Yeah, I mean, he's an idiot.
You shouldn't listen to him.
Boebert has publicly said that she's opposed to the separation of church and state.
Green told the young audience at Turning Point USA conference that they should call themselves Christian nationalists.
It's nothing to be ashamed of.
And then afterwards, she tweeted that she was being attacked for this by the godless left.
We've known for a long time that the GOP shifted their strategy after the administration of born-again evangelical Democrat Jimmy Carter by very effectively positioning themselves as the pro-Christianity family values party.
But a lot of people don't know there's a newly ascendant religious ideology on the right.
It's called the Seven Mountain Mandate.
This is based on a series of workshops and trainings, first offered in 2000, which were created as a self-described template for warfare.
The originator of this work is a business consultant named Lance Wallnau, who I kid you not, has a doctorate in ministry with a specialization in marketplace.
Awesome.
From the Phoenix University of Theology, which on further research is just what it sounds like.
It's located in a rented corporate office space and it fits the federal definition of a diploma mill.
In other words, this preacher has a dodgy PhD in how to sell religious ideology to the masses.
He turned his ideas into a book in 2013.
And it lays out his form of Christian dominionism that claims a divine mandate to gain control over the seven key areas or mountains of society, family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government.
And on this view, only when they have secured control over the earth in these ways will God be well pleased.
Oh, and of course, by fulfilling his mandate, these good Christians can then achieve their ultimate goal, to bring about the end times.
So, I talked about all of this during my TikTok Cults and Conspiracies episode, people can go back and have a look, because a different pastor, Robert Shin, He's accused of running an exploitive cult of high-profile young TikTok dancers who've appeared on TV shows and commercials and danced in NBA halftime shows.
This guy is apparently indoctrinating them into this ideology and then framing their success as part of this Christian Dominionist Seven Mountain Mandate vision.
He calls his production company 7M, while of course also allegedly controlling their lives and stealing all their money.
I hope they can get away and just dance and make money.
They're really good authors, my God.
Yeah, they're fantastic.
That's definitely a story we're following as it unfolds.
Now, in addition to Boebert and Green, there's another new Congresswoman in town who's made similar comments.
This is Republican Mayra Flores, and she actually just made history three months ago by becoming the country's first Mexican-born woman elected to Congress In a district that had for 150 years in Texas been a Democrat stronghold.
It's going to be an issue for Democrats.
She's a former Obama voter, but she's part of an emerging wave of conservative Latinas who are pointing out that Mexican Americans have traditionally voted against their conservative Christian values that are actually more aligned with the GOP.
Flores also told an MSNBC interviewer that she supports Christian nationalism and ran in a special election that she won under the slogan God, Country, and Family.
And for that campaign, she also enlisted the support of her pastor's movement, which is called Make America Godly Again.
But Julian, do they really mean it?
Do they really know what they're talking about?
Do they understand the history?
This is the problem, right?
It's pretty low-hanging fruit to take a look at Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, perhaps even Mayra Flores, and say, you know, they're just not that sophisticated and neither are their followers.
They may not know the history or the politics in the broader sense.
They maybe don't know that America was founded explicitly on the principle of there being no official state religion, and when they say that to them Christian nationalism just means being a good Christian and loving America, we can almost take them at their word.
Yeah, why not?
You know, but there's something here that right-wing populism and its fascist tendencies actually has in common, as I think about it, with the more familiar spiritual cults that we've encountered over the years.
You know, when they're successful, both of these will rely on nurturing a very large outer circle of supporters who buy into their more idealistic, benign, appealing messaging and marketing.
So, you know, in the past, Matthew, when you and I have tried to talk to yoga people about how certain high-profile gurus are actually just figureheads for explosive and abusive cults, they'll often either say, well, you know, unless you've been in their presence and directly experienced their divinity and love, you're not really qualified to offer your opinion.
Or they'll say that you don't have to be in their presence and directly experience their divinity and love, you can just encounter the general beneficence of their content out in the world, right?
Yeah.
Because it's put out there too.
It's available, it's freely available.
You know what Osho teaches, you know the books of Trungpa, right?
Totally.
So the content is out there and then what's also out there with some of these really well-established super lucrative organizations around gurus is they usually have some kind of philanthropic project that they're very public about where they're supposedly using lots of money to help people and very often those are debunked and shown to be completely false.
They'll also say, you know, when you listen to the guru, they don't say any of these cultish things.
They just talk about finding freedom from the suffering of the ego and that you should think for yourself and trust your intuition, be a lamp unto yourself.
So how dare you call this a cult?
And in the same way, we see that many on the right will react to the terms fascist or far-right as merely being slanderous and slurs against people who just want to stand up for Judeo-Christian values and the sanctity of the family and marriage.
And after all, they're just trying to stop their home country and its traditions from being degraded and turned into shit, right?
Yeah, it's really difficult with populism or faux-populism to actually narrow down and say, this is what the influencer or the politician is actually saying.
This is where they come from.
Because there is this kind of fog of beneficence that surrounds them and ripples out through these layers of marketing.
But on the note of degrading home country and tradition, well, it's happening here in Canada.
No.
Yes.
And neo-fascists who are seeking the limelight are trying something akin to what Georgia Maloney is trying, a little bit more nerdy though.
Thank God.
So here we are introducing Pierre Poiliev.
Look at these scars.
Each one of them represents the swing of an axe by a logger converted by hand.
Logs into posts and beams that became the bones of barns that dotted the countryside of Canada for hundreds of years.
This post and these boards were probably on a barn for centuries.
I picked them up from a local farmer.
10 bucks a board, 50 bucks a post.
I had to clean them by hand, you know, scrape off all the shit and mud and debris in order to bring out this beautiful honeycombed exterior that you see now.
But it made me think, why did I go through so much trouble?
When I could have simply gone to a hardware store and picked up some boards that I could have painted whatever color I wanted, they would have been planed and perfectly cut rather than jagged and out of line like this wood behind me.
Why is it that so many coffee shops and restaurants go through the same trouble that I did?
I think it's because these boards have a story.
Not only the hard work of the men and women who built these barns, but also the way that nature, through wind, sun, rain, sleet, painted this beautiful patina on the outside of them.
And what I'm doing and what all of us do when we bring these boards into our house is we are reclaiming something that was already there.
That's what my campaign is about.
It's not about inventing some brand new utopia out of scratch.
It's about reclaiming.
The freedom that is our natural right.
Yeah, it goes on and on, and it's interesting stuff.
I'm lining up a full episode on Polyev soon, so this is just a preview.
By the way, the visuals here is that he's in his kind of suburban McMansion where he's used reclaimed barn boards to decorate around his gas fireplace.
Yeah, but this is the guy who just won the CPC leadership federally by a landslide over other center-right candidates, including a real veteran named Jean Charest.
He's just a total shit-gibbon of faux-populism.
This means he's now the leader of the opposition in Canada.
He's leader of the opposition.
Yeah.
Right.
And faux populist, corporatist, anti-labor record going back into his 20s, pretends to care about working people.
He has no idea who they are.
He's been the attack dog of some of the most regressive Tory governments in recent memory.
He's also the most prominent politician to have met with the so-called Freedom Convoy.
We did that episode with Liz Simons a while back.
He was the one who was glad-handing All of the white supremacists who are now going to jail.
So, in this promo, he hits all of the soft fascism notes like a one-man boy band.
And he also does something here that I haven't seen before, which is he's invoking a white Canadian originalism through the symbology of suburban renovation.
He's talking about old stock laborers and antique wood.
But he's really talking about an imagined authenticity nourished by blood and soil.
One commenter dubbed him an alt-right Bob Villa.
In other words, his message is to white male Canada.
There's nothing wrong with you.
There's nothing to change.
There's no reason for shame.
No point in curbing your appetites or changing your ways.
Things were perfect before the state tried to shame you.
Your identity is as noble as a finely built barn.
You couldn't possibly get sick through natural processes because you are naturally immune.
And you can only lose your authenticity to those who pretend to be able to change what is already perfect.
And I have to say, I don't know how it's going to play out here, but you can tell that he's taking notes from his favorite Canadian influencer, who is Jordan Peterson.
I think when I do the extended episode on him, I'll probably cover his extended interview with Peterson.
He's folksy.
The interview that they have is flattering.
It's pseudo-spiritual.
It leans into the Canadian rights crush on the United States.
You know, the notion of freedom and the Republican notion that he's running for PM.
He's not talking.
He never talks about running for the leadership of his party.
He talks about running for Prime Minister, which is very weird in a parliamentary system.
But he also keeps all of the aggression, as you can tell, clenched up in a polite little Canadian sphincter.
And, you know, he is not going to feel comfortable on the same stage with Giorgio Malone, and it'll be very interesting to see, you know, how they get on.
I think all Polyev needs, actually, for the extra boost, is for Will Blunderfield to come and rub his balls on those planks.
Maybe they can do a midnight ejaculation ritual to bring out the patina.
Oh, God.
This is an awful image.
Thanks, everyone, if you made it to that last piece of poetry from Matthew.
We'll see you next time.
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