When Disneyworld becomes DeSantisland, Eric Weinstein will be in charge of the Epcot Planetarium, JP Sears will headline the Family Values comedy stage, Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pageau will build an Orthodox cathedral for male transformation rituals. And Cinderella Castle will be remodeled into a Potemkin Capitol where Mikki Willis will choreograph and film daily insurrections.
The groundwork is being laid now, as we explore the institutionalization of QAnon. Moms for Liberty, egged on by Mike Flynn, is taking over school boards throughout the Sunshine State. Chris Rufo is now a college trustee, and Bret Weinstein is holding court in state medical committees. All while our conspirituality influencers, from Sears to Northrup to Avocado Wolfe, cheer on the dissolution of every social contract, every veneer of democracy.
The propaganda and sadism is so despairing that Derek might need religion, and Matthew might lose himself in retro fantasies of Disneyworld. Luckily, Julian talks with Sarasota anti-DeSantis activist Terra Kater about fighting the good fight under the hot sun.
Show Notes
CBD is everywhere. But is it a scam?
Dear Conservatives, I Apologize
The Paranoid Style in American Politics
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Well, happy March break, gentlemen.
To start off, I thought I'd share a little memory with you, so don't mind me as I take a deep breath and let my eyes flutter shut, so that I can return to around this time of year 44 years ago, 1978.
My parents took me in a great big airplane from Toronto to Tampa, Florida.
I listened to the Bee Gees on the armrest radio, you know, with those disposable headphones that felt like rubber catheters sticking in your ears.
We rented a Ford Pinto or something like that, and we hit the road for Dunedin because we had tickets to watch our brand new team, the Blue Jays, at spring training camp.
I remember bright sunshine, polyester uniforms, chemically perfumed motel bedsheets, chocolate chips on a tall stack at International House of Pancakes.
And after the games, on the road to Disney World in Orlando, we drove by cheery trailer parks with raisined snowbirds lying out in Chez Long with umbrella drinks.
We stopped at an orange grove and drank orange Julius and ordered a crate of Navels to be flown back home.
And at Disney World, I saw Cinderella Castle from a distance as we ferried across the artificial lake.
I lay back in a reclining chair at the Epcot Center Planetarium, holding my parents' hands, feeling at home among the artificial stars.
Okay, Matthew.
Open your eyes.
Florida today.
What do you see?
The highways are all still there.
More potholes.
Some of the gas stations and motels are boarded up.
Ballparks and orchards overgrown with tall weeds.
The sun is hotter, the vibe is clammy, the paint is peeling.
There's a trailer park smashed by the last hurricane, an Amazon fulfillment center with camper vans outside and senior citizens cooking over open fires.
Plasma collection centers in strip malls.
I'm getting a real, like, Last of Us feeling, and not just because four more decades of capitalism have hollowed almost everything out.
Something else has happened, its roots buried within that fairy tale time, when the Cold War was as far away as the invasion of Afghanistan, when stranger danger just wasn't a thing yet.
Before I knew that Walt Disney himself was a ferocious anti-communist.
Back when I was too young to grok the wave of horror films cresting in suburban theaters, or how they predicted the coming satanic panic.
The vibes were all Jimmy Carter and Karen Carpenter, but everything was fragile.
And everyone, I think, could feel it.
And so the paranoid patriotic elected Reagan to animate a Potemkin vision of a country that conservatives would spend the next 40 years defending by railing against welfare queens, painting gay men as vectors of disease, convincing everyone that basic social contracts were for pussies and healthcare reform was for the weak.
And that if America wasn't being threatened by Muslims who must be detained and tortured at Guantanamo, the real danger was the government itself, the nanny state, the deep state, the rotten liberals and their teacher unions packed with queers who give your kids books about anal sex and how Thomas Jefferson owned slaves.
But what do I see here now?
Empty school library shelves?
What's happening here, Julian?
It appears an efficient neo-fascist regime is forcing librarians to seek state approval for books.
Many Florida school librarians have emptied the shelves out of caution as they seek some kind of assessment as to whether or not these books are appropriate for children.
Right, so into that empty space flows the internet, carrying with it the cultural garbage of 40 years of reactionary panic, distilled and potentized into conspirituality, pastel Q, and QAnon fever dreams.
It's like the panic gels into a miasma and gains the structure, momentum, and administrative zeal of a fungus.
And it's seeped into the network of Ron DeSantis, seizing control of every managerial impulse.
And it sends out runners and spores to recruit Chris Ruffo and Brett Weinstein, moms for liberty and doctors against public health.
The mycelium has covered the statehouse, medical boards, a new college.
Its tendrils are twisting around the spires of Cinderella Castle in Disney World and filling up the vault in the planetarium so that the sky appears to be flat.
Julian and Derek, something is happening in Florida.
And we've known it.
I mean, when Sayer G and Kelly Brogan made their COVID conspirituality debuts back in March of 2020, they did it from their Miami love nest.
When Layla Centner decided to warn the teachers at her alternative private school in Miami to not get vaccinated, Christiane Northrup flew down to lend her Instagram support because her grandchildren go there.
But it's gone way beyond vaccine panic and alt-health DIY research.
By this point, every chaotic echo of every resentment, bitterness, and conspiratorial paranoia from across the country has organized itself into this post-pandemic vacuum.
It's tightened itself into a barrel-shaped knot that stuffs the suit of Ron DeSantis.
What the fuck is he doing down there?
I'm gonna argue that what's happening is the latest iteration of how the mainstreaming
of conspiracism and both the moral panic and political religion themes of QAnon
are still fueling the far right.
As Alex Kaplan mentioned when I talked to him for Tuesday's brief,
the gamified QAnon phenomenon mobilized a network that transitioned over the last two years
into strategies that inject their fever dream ideology into the very institutions that govern people's lives.
So we are more and more living in that internet of things is what you're saying.
Yeah, and likewise we're seeing the online framing of all progressive politics as woke Marxism translate into actual legislation and kangaroo committee appointments.
So we'll get to why Florida is the current really significant staging ground in a moment, but here's a quick rundown for context.
Mike Flynn and a motley crew of anti-vaxxers, COVID grievance mongers, and white Christian nationalist evangelizers are crisscrossing the country with Clay Clark's Reawaken America tour, coming to further radicalize thousands in each town at non-denominational evangelical churches with their rock concert political religion propaganda.
Okay, so just to review, who is Flynn?
How did he become important?
Well, long story short, Mike Flynn is the retired Army Lieutenant General who was the National Security Advisor under Trump for exactly 22 days, the shortest in history, before resigning under a cloud.
It came to light that he had inappropriate dealings with both Turkey and Russia, and Flynn would end up turning state's evidence in the Mueller probe, later withdrawing his guilty plea, though, and claiming government vindictiveness.
Trump would then instruct his freshly minted Attorney General Bill Barr to intervene, dropping the charges, after which Trump issued Mike Flynn a pardon, but not before he and his family recited the QAnon oath in a video he posted to social media.
Now in the weeks after the 2020 election, Flynn suggested that Trump should suspend the Constitution, silence the press, and hold a new election under martial law.
Since then, as I mentioned, he's been touring the country with Clay Clark's Reawaken America show.
And Clay Clark is like a wrestling promoter, but for evangelicals, right?
That's a good way of framing it, but you'll love this, Matthew.
He's actually a former entrepreneurial business coach.
Awesome.
Like with a pyramid and everything?
Totally.
The whole thing, the whole thing.
You know, website, a podcast, and he talks about how you two can make much more money if you just get out of your own way mentally, right?
Right.
He also failed at running for mayor of Tulsa, Oklahoma before becoming I'm the promoter of this tour.
That's good.
But Flynn has gone on to inspire the post-2020 strategy of a grassroots-seeming activism at city council meetings and school boards, a lot of which is being spearheaded by a group called Moms for Liberty.
They're pushing the barely laundered save the children moral panics around critical race theory, shaming white kids with reverse racism, and gender ideology queering the youth.
Okay, so how many Moms of Liberty or Moms for Liberty are there?
And how large is their breakaway group, Moms for Pious Emotional Repression?
Well, let me just tell you a bit about Moms for Liberty.
They're a nonprofit organization founded in Florida in January of 2021.
They've campaigned vigorously against mask and vaccine mandates in schools, and also against curricula containing any reference to racial inequalities or LGBTQ rights, including calling for the banning of specific books that they deem unsuitable or even pornographic, like, you know, the one showing the mating cycle of seahorses.
Yeah, this group has claimed at their first national conference last year to have 195 chapters countrywide and, to answer your question, nearly 100,000 members.
Oh wow.
They style themselves as a grassroots organization funded by membership dues and t-shirt sales.
Merch!
Yeah, but Media Matters has shown their ties to conservative funders like Eris, Julie Fancelli, and others.
But along with the chorus from Libs of TikTok and Fox News, Moms for Liberty have ideological allies with The Daily Wire.
Their hate-mongering just culminated, as we've reported, in Michael Knoll's CPAC call for the eradication of transgenderism.
Which has been continuing an anti-LGBTQ trend aggressively pursued by other Daily Wire stablemates, Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro, and Matt Walsh.
Is this a conspiracy, Julian?
Are they all working together?
Is there somebody in charge?
I wouldn't call it a conspiracy.
And certainly no one's in charge, as we see by some of the infighting that could happen amongst these bitter and twisted individuals.
It's an ideological campaign in which figures with related agendas support and reinforce one another.
And next up in this motley crew is former atheist academic James Lindsay and his brother-in-arms in the fight against the phantom menace that is woke cultural Marxism, Christopher Rufo.
These two have become the explainers-in-chief on right-wing media about how the communists and the pedophiles are coming for your kids and using Disney As their indoctrination delivery system.
So we're back around to Disney, Matthew.
Right.
And that brings us now to the noble anti-woke warrior and governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, who does battle against the queers while reportedly wearing at least three inch heels to appear more manly?
Now, look, we're not going to tolerate short shaming on the podcast.
And when an otherwise drab Cishet man dreams of fashion glory.
We are 100% supportive.
Absolutely.
You go, Ron.
Right.
Okay, so Disney World opened in 1971, year I was born, and Walt was able to do it, in part, I read, by striking a deal with a state in the town of Lake Buena Vista for tax-free bonds.
And Disney World has retained that tax benefit In light of the massive tourist revenue that they bring in, but DeSantis sees that as some sort of plot to get patriots to fund drag queens.
Am I right?
I mean, there's a convoluted story going on there in terms of DeSantis lashing out against Disney because they have criticized his bill, which has been called the Don't Say Gay Bill by opponents.
Oh, right.
This is where the threads all start to get woven together.
Last year, DeSantis passed this infamous Parental Rights and Education Bill, which, as I mentioned, is called the Don't Say Gay Bill by opponents, because it prohibits any mention of same-sex marriage, LGBTQ history, or rights, and forbids teachers and students from discussing their LGBTQ families.
Oh, wow.
It also forces schools to out Gay and trans kids to their parents, even if their parents would not be accepting of their identities.
And this ties in with DeSantis' Stop WOKE Act, which prohibits DEI trainings, diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings, or materials in workplaces and educational institutions.
DeSantis, as you mentioned, has also revoked Disney World's long-standing special tax status, and he appointed a five-person board to oversee operations.
On that board, guess who?
Moms4Liberty founder Bridget Siegler.
Now, despite wooing Disney World during the 2020 election cycle, the governor appears to be retaliating theatrically against their vaccine mandates for employees, as well as Disney CEO's statements in opposition to the Don't Say Gay Bill and their attempts to increase diversity and representation in their content.
DeSantis also repealed a special carve-out granted to Disney World on a 2022 Florida law that forbids banning any political candidate from a social media platform.
And that repeal aspires to levy a $250,000 a day fine for anyone who Yeah, I don't know exactly the details at a granular level, but yeah, it's along those sorts of lines.
identifying Disney's website as being a social media platform because of its size.
But would that apply to us? Let's say that if we ran our podcast out of Florida and we
kicked somebody off of our Patreon because they were spamming us with MAGA content, would
that apply to us?
Yeah, I don't know exactly the details at a granular level, but yeah, it's along those
sorts of lines.
Right.
Right. That it's considered a form of censorship and oppression against the rights of conservative
speech.
Right, okay.
Amazing.
That law, thankfully, has been blocked as unconstitutional by a federal court.
But that's not all.
A small progressive university in Florida with a storied history dating back to 1960 has been the subject of a hostile takeover.
It's called New College and it is to be cleansed of DEI and woke ideological agendas.
DeSantis' chief of staff has said they hope to turn it into the Hillsdale of the South, referring to a Michigan Christian conservative university founded by Baptists in 1844.
And I was reading that this is pretty much because New College is considered kind of like the evergreen college of the South at this point, right?
Yeah, to some extent.
I mean, the comparison there is that they're a progressive school With a similar grade-free, open-ended approach to learning and intellectual exploration that has been characteristic for Evergreen as well.
Yeah, I like it.
So, just who do we think might be central to that project by being appointed to New College's new board of trustees?
Why, one Christopher Ruffo, flanked by Christian education leaders Eddie Speer and Matthew Spaulding, who, as it turns out, is the Dean at Hillsdale.
Now, Rufo shares openly and proudly on social media that the new college strategy will be a model for other schools in Florida, and presumably part of the proposed national platform in DeSantis' run at being the GOP presidential nominee.
Rufo's also been posting video footage to his YouTube account of his interactions with administrators, professors, and students.
And I know you looked at this too, Matthew, it's just this perfectly nauseating blend of managerial sadism and pseudo-academic doublespeak delivered by Rufo with that self-satisfied smirk of someone hungry for power Yeah, he's really good at it, actually.
And I think sadistic is a good term.
He's clearly enjoying the position of power that's totally unearned and by bringing a sort of paradigm of discourse into those spaces that That really doesn't belong there, that's sort of hyper-politicized, that has no regard for the actual educational content or the pedagogical concerns of the administrators.
Yeah, it's wild to watch.
Yeah, so all of this is going down in Florida.
We had to talk about it.
I think the question now is, to what extent do we see our conspirituality gallery of rogues interacting with this phenomenon?
So as you teed it up, Julian, we're looking at politics this week, so we need to understand not just what's happening in Florida, but how the wellness to hard right pipeline is progressing, and it is definitely progressing.
While I was listening to the latest Decoding the Gurus episode on Dave Rubin, Chris mentioned that anti-vax fervor is increasing on the right.
Even though the government is loosening restrictions.
So in some ways, the intensity of what people like Mickey Willis and RFK Jr.
were promoting at the beginning of the pandemic are actually increasing in intensity on the right side of the political base, a phenomenon that Chris attributes to the escalation of grievance politics.
So you have wannabe pundits like Rubin who need something to fight against Because the charade of their platforms fall apart quickly when they're forced to explain what they're fighting for outside of vague notions like freedom.
It also really shows that the panic over the vaccines is more of a metaphysical panic than anything else that isn't actually resolved by the course of the pandemic or who gets vaccinated and who doesn't.
It's entirely on the symbolic order.
It's about the state entering the body and the implications there.
I don't think it was ever about the science or about the research or testing or anything like that.
No, and in fact, during that episode of Decoding the Gurus, Chris clips some of Ruben talking about metaphysics as well, about the universe.
Oh, good.
He was trying to play to Bill Maher's atheist base during that particular episode he was talking about, so he kind of couched some of his God language into the universe.
But yeah, it usually falls back, and same with Rufo, it falls back on some sort of metaphysics.
But I just mentioned the vague notions of freedom, so the next person in my mind was obviously J.P.
Sears.
He knows what he's talking about.
He says that word with conviction.
Dangerous freedom.
Dangerous freedom, yeah.
Awaken Your Freedom.
It's his new CBD company, although he's a few years late on that.
And I did post on social media about being a little late to the game.
And what I meant by that was that CBD clinically has shown efficacy at the lowest dose of 300 milligrams.
Most clinical doses are 400 milligrams.
So when you're buying a 100mg dropper for $50-$60 and the serving size is 5-10mg, right, that's what you're paying in your CBD activated coffee, you're getting 5-10mg, it's doing absolutely nothing.
It's a homeopathic dose.
It's homeopathic!
It's not even there, Derek.
It's so strong.
He does know that his audience is a bit behind the curve, so I'm sure he's going to cash out here as well.
JP has mastered the use of grievance politics, and I realize when I say JP it could be JP Sears or Jordan Peterson.
In terms of grievance politics, either applies.
But he's adding a secondary layer of why right-leaning conspiritualists need things like vaccine fear-mongering to be at a fever pitch.
It is to keep monetizing their base in whatever ways they can and they see fit.
Now, attention capture is always first, but the monetary capture will follow.
I have a question, Derek.
Do you think that when he moves from, he was doing the blue light glasses, I don't know if that was first, to then there's teeth whitening and now there's CBD oil.
Now they're probably all overlapping and maybe he's got those ads running on YouTube sort of intermittently, but do you think that he is The teeth whitening and the blue blocking, he's got affiliate codes for those.
is, are the people getting bored with the blue light glasses
and they enjoy them enough that they're gonna go on to the teeth whitening because JP did it.
Like, is there, what kind of turnover are we talking about, do you think?
The teeth whitening and the blue blocking, he's got affiliate codes for those.
CBD is his company.
Oh, I see, okay, so it's a different model, right?
Yeah, it's a different model.
In some way, he's behind it.
I don't know if it's manufacturing or what, but this is his company.
So, that's a very different model.
He's definitely going to be pushing this harder than what he's doing for affiliate codes, where he might get 10 or 15% of profit margin.
Now, he's going to get 50, 60, whatever percent of the sales that he's getting.
Of course, JP Sears is a bit more politically outspoken than most of the cohort that we cover.
And since we're talking about Florida, I want to briefly discuss his video on his YouTube sub-channel, which is JP Reacts, which currently has 333,000 YouTube subscribers.
This is where he plays clips from the news and then talks about it over them or stops the video.
Yeah, and he very often pretends to be a newscaster and he's wearing like ripped up clothes where he kind of almost looks like the Hulk, you know, where his muscles are.
That's his main channel.
That's when he's playing newscaster.
This is him.
Just imagine if the audience could see us right now.
He's in his room and he's just talking and stopping video.
So this is a sub channel.
His regular channel has millions of subscribers.
I need to catch up.
I need to catch up.
Yeah, it's a whole thing.
The reaction video is a whole genre.
But usually, often people are like expressing pleasure because they're being introduced to Led Zeppelin for the first time and they only know hip hop or something.
What do you think JP would react to with pleasure, though, if he was doing a pleasure reaction video?
Well, he does get some pleasure like when he's looking at AOC.
It's a little misogynistic.
Oh, OK.
All right.
Yeah.
All right.
That's another episode.
The video in question is called Reacting to CNN Trying to Bash Ron DeSantis and Carrie Lake.
It's about five months old.
It has 30,000 likes and 4,000 mostly positive comments.
So in this, he calls Ron DeSantis and Carrie Lake two of the most credible conservatives.
And then he corrects himself and says, two of the most credible of all politicians in America.
Right.
Now, this video, it's about 17 minutes long.
It's full of defending Trump.
He calls the Mar-a-Lago search a raid numerous times.
He says George Soros is pulling the strings behind CNN.
And then he says that while he doesn't agree with everything Trump says, he knows that Trump is, quote unquote, for the greater good.
This was also during a video where he reveals CNN's nefarious tactics when bashing their political opponents because covering news, in his view, is to pick opponents.
Because that's basically all he knows.
And in Trumpian fashion, he brags about how some of his own videos Get higher ratings than CNN.
He also says that, and I'm quoting here, DeSantis is clearly out there for the greater good of the people.
Therefore, he's a great threat to those who are not out for the greater good of the people, but rather out for their own greed around power control and money.
And later, he looks straight into the camera, stops the video and says, I love Ron DeSantis, period.
Soaring rhetoric there.
But, you know, it's not like he has a good history of picking winners, right?
Like, Lake was his pick for governor for Arizona, and then she got beaten by Katie Hobbs, and then she spent weeks standing outside the Maricopa courthouse shaking her fist at the sky over stolen votes.
That didn't happen.
Yeah, we should also note that JP stumped for Carrie Lake twice while on the campaign.
Yeah, yeah, I remember.
He mentions that.
So, I think out of everyone that we cover, JP is the most likely to run for some sort of office.
I can actually see him going that way.
And it just feels like everything he's presented at least leaves that open.
I'm not saying he's definitely going that way, but out of all the cohort of conspiritualists, he's priming himself to do that.
Yeah.
But then I had to look over at Christiane Northrup and her Telegram channel.
I found it funny because Matthew, you had asked if she had ever boosted DeSantis, given that she has grandkids in school in Miami.
And as I looked for it, I actually found a post of hers from Facebook from 2020, where she's happy that Ron DeSantis is rolling out the vaccines in Florida.
That didn't age too well.
I shared that in Slack.
That didn't age so well for her, but she's never taken it down.
But I don't know if she currently has support, but she does have support for Naomi Wolf.
And she shared Wolf's Substack article called, Dear Conservatives, I Apologize.
Now, talk about a pipeline here.
Wolf is responding to Tucker Carlson's propaganda piece hand-delivered to him in the form of 41,000 hours of January 6 footage by Kevin McCarthy, which Tucker then used on his show to Splice and create a video showing that it was really more like a normal day at the Capitol.
The police were escorting the QAnon shaman across.
Of course, Elon Musk boosted that saying, free Jacob Chansley.
All of this has been happening.
It is one of the most egregious things.
In all three years of this podcast that I've seen in terms of actual propaganda, and most of the media sources are kind of talking about it and then being like, this is insane.
But when you read the comments on Naomi Wolf's piece and the people that are actually buying into this, it's one of the scarier aspects Of Orwellian propaganda.
And I think Orwell is overused.
I also think the term gaslighting is overused a lot.
Those are terms that are in vogue.
But if there was ever a reason to use a term like gaslighting, it's this gambit by Carlson.
Here's Wolf reacting to the video.
You don't have to agree with Mr. Carlson's interpretation of the videos to believe, as I do, that he engaged in valuable journalism simply by airing the footage that was leaked to him.
It wasn't leaked.
McCarthy willingly handed it over to him.
I have a question about gaslighting.
I agree with you about its overuse.
I mean, we know that Carlson is like a malignant liar who lies, with the texts from the Dominion case and all of that showing how much he despised Trump while he boosted him.
But you're saying that this is strategic, that he wants to make opponents feel insane?
Wants opponents to make him feel insane, trolling them, yes, but also Rewriting the narrative, people are actually coming out and
I think genuinely being like, wow, we weren't told everything here.
Most of the time of this footage, things were peaceful, which is just crazy.
It's also been shown that the cops were escorting them through to places because they were outnumbered.
They didn't have backup and they were scared.
What else are you going to do in those situations?
You're not going to fight them physically.
So they were trying to keep the tempers down at that point.
Right.
Yeah.
And I just, I just want to add here too, that, that Wolf, Using that language that the footage was leaked to him as a way of also trying to cast Tucker Carlson in the kind of Julian Assange, you know, like, like, like he's he's a bold, bold journalist exposing the truth.
I don't know about Wolf.
I can't even.
Imagine what's going on inside of her brain.
It seems like pure opportunism here, jumping on this.
And in fact, like the whole piece is a mishmash of ideas.
It is also works as a piece of propaganda on her substack.
She's effectively apologizing for believing there was even an insurrection attempt on January 6th.
And here are her closing remarks from that piece.
The gatekeepers who lie to the public about the most consequential events of our time, and who thus damage our nation, distort our history, and deprive half of our citizenry of their right to speak, champion, and choose, without being tarred as would-be violent traitors, deserve our disgust.
I feel like I should be standing on my head while I'm reading this, like completely upside down.
I am sorry the nation was damaged by so much untruth issued by those with whom I identified at the time.
I'm sorry my former tribe is angry at a journalist for engaging in journalism.
I'm sorry I believed so much nonsense.
Though it is no doubt too little too late.
Conservatives.
Republicans.
MAGA.
I am so sorry.
So, I mean, for me, there's a really interesting displacement going on here because the MAGA world Could take Wolf or leave her, really.
I mean, maybe DeSantis is going to find some novel way to pair her up with Chris Rufo for some, like, pseudo-academic project.
But the vast majority of people who are pissed at Naomi Wolf are liberal, third-wave feminists who grew up reading the beauty myth Which, like, burned her name into their brains like some sort of rune of resistance.
So it's really, like, coastal, college-educated women who want her to apologize for becoming an anti-vax influencer, for posting selfie videos of herself, like, firing ARs on the range.
Yeah, it's not like there was some great call from the Conservative establishment.
Naomi Wolf!
You owe us an apology!
Yeah, or else we'll cancel you.
No, I don't think so.
And here's something else that Wolf isn't apologizing for while she apologizes to, like, Proud Boys and Three Percenters and Oath Keepers who stormed the Capitol in body armor and carrying zip ties.
Her really stupid scholarship, in which her own incipient conspiracism is like, blindingly clear.
Like, even in The Beauty Myth, she wrote that 150,000 women per year were dying of anorexia nervosa in the U.S.
It's more like 60.
She actually made the incidence rate into the death rate in that book.
And then there's a book called Vagina, a new biography, which is packed with all kinds of pseudoscience to support the basic claim that women think and feel primarily through their vaginas.
So you can see where she would get into sort of anti-trans bias there later on.
And then most famously, I don't know if you heard her get dinged on the BBC for this book called Outrages, but she misread 19th century English legal documents so badly That she thought that gay men were being executed for sodomy.
And this was her, and they weren't actually, this was her PhD.
The book was pulped.
Yeah, and what was amazing about that is that she did an interview in which this was pointed out to her, like the person just basically said, Oh, I see where you got this data.
Actually, you misread it.
And in that interview, she was like, Oh, that's a real problem.
I should probably go back and have a look at that.
Thanks for pointing that out.
It's like your entire dissertation is just Anyway, she's apologizing, and I think there's got to be a word for alienating your entire historic readership, and then apologizing to the people who never read you, who didn't care about you, and will totally ghost you when they remember you're a Jewish academic from San Francisco.
It's also her Mickey Willis moment, right, in which now I'm going to apologize to you because you've really been the noble ones and I've been part of that degenerate sort of liberal establishment.
Yeah, I was a left-wing activist for so long.
I did so much.
So much work taking selfies.
But what's what always strikes me as bizarre about this, you said, I should be reading this on my head.
Yeah, it's all upside down.
But it's also this, it's like, the person is sort of having a completely, they're being taken over by a completely distorted operating system through which they're now seeing current events.
But their interpretation of it is that they're finally waking up.
They've seen through the distorting lies that before had sort of owned their perceptions.
It's just such a strange moment.
The beauty myth aspect is fascinating in that she's always had no problem apparently stretching the truth.
I've mentioned this before, but Dax, Devon Ross, and I used to run a book night in Jersey City at a local bookstore.
We hosted her for the end of America.
I have some videos from that night.
I should go back and watch them.
I couldn't stomach it at this point.
But I would love to go back for that book particularly and see what kind of scholarship was involved with it.
It is amazing that people like her and Russell Brand seem very invested in this idea of the end of America and that is playing into the politics that they're promoting now with Russell recently being on Tucker Carlson and here she's boosting him as a real journalist.
There's got to be a word, too, for people who fantasize about the end of America, when actually they're probably feeling the end of their own personalities as things crumble down around them.
It's like, I used to be an academic, and now I'm not quite sure, but, you know, I can do things online if I want, and social media seems good, and, you know, brand.
I used to be an actor, I used to be a comic, and now I can be something else.
Like, they're not really talking about the end of America, are they?
No, no.
And I just want to point out, too, that again, sometimes when we say these things, we're presenting them as fringe ideas.
JP Reacts, 333,000 subscribers.
Tons of comments, 4,000.
33,000 subscribers, tons of comments, 4,000, not a totally fringe idea there.
This, what I was just talking about, Naomi Wolf, was boosted by Christian Northrup on Telegram, 70,000.
70,000 subscribers there.
It's being endorsed.
Many of the wellness influencers that broker in conspirituality present themselves as apolitical.
They say things like both sides are bad, Russell Brand.
You know, yet over and over, they hold liberals and Democrats to account on their social media feeds, but they never do the same for conservatives or far-right.
And their ideology is this paranoid conspiratorial tone that puts the left in control of the world's nefarious plans.
They match up perfectly, time and again, with the far-right.
And so, you scroll through David Wolf's manic Twitter feed.
No.
David Wolf.
No.
Now again, again, French character.
Yeah, we've covered him before.
He has 210,000 Twitter followers, 112,000 followers on Telegram, 11.3 million followers on Facebook.
Matthew, you tried to correct my script.
No, it is million.
I thought that was a typo.
It had to be a typo.
No.
Okay.
No, and what's interesting, again, if you think he's completely unhinged, I'm not saying look at his Facebook, but when you look at his Facebook, there's almost no politics there.
It's all like anti-GMO, here's my workshop, here's my conference, et cetera, et cetera.
It's not the Telegram experience.
He's very aware of what he's doing.
So, when you go to the Telegram, and even on the Twitter now, because there's no blocking of pseudoscience or political misinformation on Twitter anymore, you see him boosting Tucker Carlson, you see him boosting Josh Hawley, he's sharing disgusting memes.
There's one where he says there's only two genders, and there's a photo of Michelle Obama next to Melania Trump.
He's such a pig. What a fucking pig.
He really is.
And maybe I shouldn't be surprised that I haven't seen much from Wolf on someone like
DeSantis given that he previously stated that Trump is the only thing that's going to save
America.
But like Northrup, he too shared Naomi Wolf's apologetic propaganda followed by Elon Musk's
demand that Jacob Chansley be released from prison.
So, scrolling through this thread, account after account with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers are towing Fox's line that the insurrection attempt wasn't that bad after all.
I have to admit, and I've been saying this in the lead up to this episode, I've remained optimistic, at least on some level, for some time.
Not in a religious sense.
I still believe extinction is inevitable for us, every species for the planet.
We've known this our whole lives.
The delusion is to think there's something else out there for us besides what we're doing right now.
That's not true.
But we can make right now a little bit better while we're here, and that's the basis of my philosophy.
Now, we get to this Tucker Carlson segment, and the way it's zipped through conspiritualist feeds at rapid speeds, it's hit me harder than most anything else in the time we've covered.
We all know what we saw that day, and yet somehow a media company has captured a large part of the public imagination.
And when you're inside someone's head like that, you can make them believe anything.
Well, that's why, Derek, maybe you do need a source of religious hope at this point.
Maybe there's something out there I'm sure a listener can write in and suggest a program, a movement, a spirituality.
I need a plan.
I need a program, guys.
Give me a downline.
Give me a code.
Give me something.
This line between organic righteousness and political sovereignty that we thought were far apart is actually a very thin line because right above This retweet by David Wolff of Naomi Wolff's article is his promotion for the David Wolff Health and Rejuvenation Conference going on next weekend in Montgomery, Texas.
His featured guests, Mickey Willis and Del Bigtree.
So we can imagine the content that's going to be promoted and sold there.
And the list of conference topics perfectly captures what we've been discussing today.
Because there's the expectable Wolffian fairs like Charcoal, activated charcoal, and super charcoals for clean living.
Hold on, hold on, hold on.
We prefer, we prefer ultra MAGA charcoal as the term.
You're supposed to eat it, right?
You're supposed to eat it and it, no really, is that what it is?
You eat it and then it pulls toxins out of your... It sucks the toxins out of your GI tract, yeah.
Out of the pooper?
That does happen when you have actual toxins in your body.
Yeah, it is used therapeutically and clinically, not in the bottles that David Wolf sells.
Other topics, the power of intention, cleansing and detox in a toxic world.
For you, Matthew, Rudolf Steiner, Charles Fort, Book of Revelation, and the navigational philosophies of our times.
Of course, there's detox protocols for people who have been injected with dangerous, untested products.
But then right next to all that you find slipped in crisis equals opportunity, thriving during an apocalypse.
That's right.
And I'm going to guess that you're not thriving in a DEI workshop because that isn't on the schedule.
And in fact, there's a rumor boosted by Wolf and others that the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank was due to DEI Of course it was.
A ridiculous idea.
I shared something on my personal feed yesterday from the Wall Street Journal suggesting that as well.
It's also been boosted by Ron DeSantis.
So as I spent part of my weekend collecting clips and looking at these feeds for this episode, all I could think about was Richard Hofstadter's 1964 essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics.
And to think that he wrote these words Nearly three generations ago, and they so perfectly fit today, including the final sentence I'll get to in a moment.
It's a reminder both that we've always teetered on the edge in some manner of collapse of civilization seemingly, but also that we have to fight not to let the paranoid push us over with their propaganda.
Now, you can find this Harper's essay online in PDF form.
I'll link to it in the show notes.
And if you take a look, and I recommend that you do, You'll notice that he doesn't attribute paranoia to the left or liberals, and that's not an excuse for bad behavior by any political party.
It's just the reality that, as we've described on this podcast for years now, conspirituality and paranoia always track right.
So here's Hofstetter.
Events since 1939 have given the contemporary right-wing paranoid a vast theater for his imagination, full of rich and proliferating detail, replete with realistic cues and undeniable proofs of the validity of his suspicions.
The theater of action is now the entire world, and he can draw not only on the events of World War II, but also on those of the Korean War and the Cold War.
Any historian of warfare knows it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence.
But if for every error and every act of incompetence, one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination.
In the end, the real mystery for one who reads the primary works of paranoid scholarship is not how the United States has been brought to its present dangerous position, but how it has managed to survive at all.
And of course, there's the cautionary tale in his closing sentence.
We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.
It's such a powerful piece.
You know, I wanted to say as well, Derek, as you're watching in dismay, along with the rest of us, Tucker doing revisionist history on the insurrection.
It's no accident that McCarthy gives him all of that footage right as the Dominion story The Dominion lawsuit story is exposing how Fox News are just there.
They are deliberately lying.
They are admitting to one another that they wish they didn't have to deal with Trump anymore.
Tucker says he passionately hates him.
They're saying that obviously the election was not stolen.
All of this stuff is completely dodgy and not well supported by evidence.
And as all of that is being talked about everywhere except Fox, Now, suddenly Fox is able to transition into, oh, we're going to expose how the entire story of the January 6th insurrection was distorted and you were lied to and you weren't shown all the footage.
Just astonishing.
And when you said it's the most egregious thing you've seen in the three years we've been doing this podcast, I would argue it's the most egregious nefarious moment in the history of American media.
It's a really, really wild, completely cynical, radical distortion of one of the most consequential events in American history.
And of course, if people buy into it, what comes next will only be amplified through that
and could actually lead to some real civilizational collapse.
We started off in Florida, and I wanted to talk to someone on the ground in Florida. And it just
so happened that a Sarasota, Florida mom, which is what she goes by on her Instagram account called
Americans for Democracy, Tara Kater, reached out to us and gave us her account of what's happening
in Florida right now.
I'm joined now by Tara Kater.
Hello.
Tara is a mom and a nurse practitioner in Sarasota, Florida.
It seems that you have this Instagram group.
This is how we got connected.
It's now called Americans for Democracy, or was it called Americans for Democracy before?
And now it's Florida Moms Against DeSantis.
No, it was actually the other.
It was called Florida Moms against DeSantis prior to the midterm election.
And then afterwards, we kind of all voted and we wanted to change it to kind of something more general so that we could talk about the dangers, not only of DeSantis, that's like our biggest thing, but the whole GOP in general and going into the 2024 election.
That makes sense.
Yeah.
It sounds, with Moms Against the Santas, it sounds like you're sort of lining up against the Moms for Liberty, which I'm sure we can talk about, but now Americans for Democracy, because the danger is actually a lot bigger.
It has big implications for our national democracy.
Yeah, it does.
So let's talk about what's going on.
You're on the ground there.
You're an activist.
You are a concerned parent.
There's a lot of that going on on the other side in ways that seem to me to be, frankly, unhinged.
You have a list of issues that you sent me.
I've broken them up into some groups here.
So the first is the banning of books in school.
And you said that the Moms for Liberty are now being referred to as the foot soldiers for DeSantis.
So tell us a little bit about that.
So I live in Sarasota, Florida.
Moms for Liberty basically kind of were born here.
Bridget Ziegler is kind of the head of Moms for Liberty, and she ran for our school board.
So when I started the page, Florida Moms Against DeSantis, it was in reaction to our school board election.
Okay.
Our school board election became partisan.
These women that were running had DeSantis backing them.
And it was a nasty, nasty campaign.
And so now they took over the school board, the conservative school board.
They actually had the Proud Boys help them.
There was an entire Proud Boys group down here that helped them with their campaigning.
And I mean, the campaigning was just absolutely ridiculous.
And then we also have Mike Flynn.
that lives down here now. So he's been getting involved in like politics at our local level,
like where I am living. He also has like a little like this would be maybe a topic for another day,
but he has like a little camp down the road actually from my work right here. They are
training kids with guns. They are meeting there to discuss Christian nationalism basically.
Like that's kind of the the gist of the group that I got.
So this whole group intertwined kind of are backing Moms for Liberty and now Moms for Liberty has literally spread like all over the country where they're trying to go into the other school boards all across the states and they're trying to do conservative takeovers of the school board.
And now with recently last week, the Florida Senate introduced a bill to specifically make school board elections partisan.
So that is one of the big things.
And they are the biggest backers of banning of the books, which they claim is against pornography.
But many of the books that have been banned, especially I think in Duval County, there was like 176 books banned.
Most of them are, you know, about people of color.
And then, of course, anything that has any LGBTQ reference at all are all banned as well.
And now he also has a list of like 14 school board members that he calls the woke school board members.
He has a list of them, almost like a hit list.
And his goal is to get all of them out.
So literally all over Florida, it's conservative school board.
And then another big thing is just letting the country know like what DeSantis is doing down here in Florida.
This is what he wants to do to the rest of the nation.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So under this category, we have oldest moms for liberty, you know, supposed grassroots activism, but we know they're actually funded by pretty deep pocketed Republican donors and conservative Christian groups.
Yes.
We have Mike Flynn's strategy of taking his roadshow around the country and then also setting up infrastructure for this kind of quote unquote grassroots activism to take over.
Right.
And I actually have, I have a few posts on the page that kind of go into the dark money, the PACs that are behind Moms4Liberty.
I just, you know, try to tell people to, you know, talk to other people.
When you see Moms4Liberty in your community, this is what they want.
You know, they come across with this message.
They're very planned.
They're working with that Leadership Institute as well, which is very much funded by the Koch brothers.
Is it Koch or Coke?
Is it Coke?
Oh my God, sorry.
The Coke brothers.
And there's just one left, one of them died.
Okay, so the, okay, that's right.
But they are like funded by, yeah.
They're funded by their foundation.
A lot of the money comes from them, which I just find hilarious because when we were doing like mostly vaccine stuff and we'd be called every day that we were taking money from George Soros and I'm like, can I?
Like, where is he?
But here, these people are actually taking money from somebody that's on the other side that's like him.
And I'm like, it's crazy.
Yeah, I mean, the ironies are thick because these are the same people who are always complaining about censorship.
Here they are banning books.
Under this category, we have the banning of books, banning of AP African-American history courses, banning of pride flags.
You mentioned making school races explicitly partisan.
Yeah.
And this this all, you know, is sort of tied or existing under the umbrella to some extent with the Don't Say Gay Bill.
And wanting to ban gender-affirming care.
It seems to me like DeSantis is taking the lead from these activist groups and from these messengers of this particular anti-woke kind of crusade.
And so then we move from schools to universities.
And we've talked a little bit so far about the Takeover by Chris Ruffo, like basically becoming one of the senior figures on the board of trustees at New College of Florida.
Yes.
So again, here's DeSantis, I think, being influenced by Ruffo and then Ruffo getting this appointment where he just gets to walk in and say there's a new sheriff in town.
Yeah.
So he yeah, he is basically taken over the entire New College.
Now, New College, for people that don't know, was is a very liberal, progressive school.
It was.
Kind of like all of the outcasts, the marginalized people, the LGBTQ community.
And it's a super small school.
I think there's only like seven or eight hundred students there.
But what he's accomplished with doing what he's done there is now, if you look at his Twitter, I mean, he is trying to do it to every single Florida university.
That is their goal to abolish, you know, gender studies.
Uh-huh.
thing with the black history, any queer studies, and they're just trying to get rid of it all.
And I mean, they had said that they wanted to make New College more like a Hillsdale
College. Those kids that are at that school, that's just not so they really, they really
have been fighting back. I don't know if there's anything that they can really do at this point,
because we've got DeSantis and then we've got the conservative Senate.
We've got the conservative representatives.
We're a trifecta.
Anything that they want to do, they're going to be able to do it.
I read one article, and I do have the post on my page, but they called Florida the laboratory for fascism.
And I was like, that is very accurate.
And that's what it that's what it feels like down here.
This is from a journalist who's critical of DeSantis.
Yes, it was like a historian.
And he said it was that's what it is.
And that's it was an accurate description.
This is this is the test laboratory for fascism and authoritarianism.
Yeah, the quote that I saw from the trustees at New College, the new trustees headed up by Chris Ruffo was something along the lines of and one of one of the trustees, by the way, is the dean at Hillsdale, right?
Yes.
And that that they want to turn into the Hillsdale of the South.
And then the description was along the lines of a university that teaches Christian values and a sense of, you know, America's true place in the world and greatness.
And this kind of stuff was like, oh, really?
So this is This is the opposite of indoctrination that you're ushering in.
Right.
But it isn't like it's indoctrination on the other side.
They want to groom up future young conservatives.
I think that a lot of them are nervous because They're not getting younger people.
I mean, you see people like Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens, and they try to appeal to, you know, to the kids, to college age students and things like that.
But like, in reality, I don't know many kids have those values.
And I think that they're just kind of freaking out.
So this is kind of a way to be like, yeah, we're gonna we're gonna get these schools and we're gonna Teach these kids how to be conservatives.
Other categories here, we have things that are more in the realm of civic life.
So, open carry gun laws, you said, are being proposed.
A bill protecting cops from disciplinary action for violent behavior, I assume.
And a proposed six-week abortion ban with no exceptions.
This is all part of DeSantis' plan?
That's all part of dissent.
And there's already been bills that have been drafted up for all of these things.
And like I said, when we have a trifecta, Congress, representatives and the governor, like it feels a little hopeless.
And that's what a lot of people are feeling.
I mean, I'm not going to give up, but It does feel a little bit hopeless down here.
I mean, prior to the midterm elections, I mean, I kind of, you know, I wanted to pull through, but, you know, the Democrats during the midterms were just not very organized.
So that's another thing that we're working on as well.
I've been working with some other influencers coming together and having a more similar messaging so that we can get a little bit more organized because the right wing right now, especially down here in Florida, I mean they're very organized.
Another, you know, shady thing as well is I talked about Bridget Ziegler and how she took over our school board.
Well, with everything that DeSantis did with Disney, which I don't totally understand the whole realm of everything that he did with Disney.
It's very strange.
But I know he appointed this new board.
Well, Bridget Ziegler on our school board, she was appointed also to the Disney, the new conservative Disney board.
Then her husband, Christian Ziegler, is also the head of the GOP down here in Florida.
It's all just very shady.
They want to eliminate the Democratic Party in Florida.
One of the senators, it was your senator representative, he proposed a bill called the Ultimate Cancel Act to literally cancel the Democratic Party in Florida.
You can't do that.
Like, I mean, I'm sure that there would be, if anybody really tried to do that, there would be lawsuits and different things like that.
I mean, I can't imagine.
But just like the proposal of it, it's just shocking.
A lot of people are afraid to speak out because we feel, you know, that we're in such the minority here as Democrats in Florida.
They're loud and they're organized.
And that's what we need.
We need to get to that point that we are to.
Absolutely agree.
Last thing.
And this kind of was gobsmacking when I heard it, that bloggers and reporters who want to write about Ron DeSantis need to register with the state.
I know, and I was, I mean, I don't know exactly how that's going to be possible.
Does that just mean, like, anybody that's posting about him on Instagram?
Like, am I considered a blogger because I post, do I have to register with him?
Am I going to be, get on some sort of hit list or something?
I mean, my husband jokes about it with me, like, oh, you're probably going to be on Ron DeSantis' hit list.
But I'm like, well, I could be, honey.
And if I do, like, we're going to possibly need, I'm going to need some help.
I have other friends that are teachers.
I mean, everybody's just kind of like in fear that he's going to come after people.
And that's another reason why it's hard for them to speak out.
There is one, I think, that I did post it.
It was like two posts next to each other.
And it's exactly what Putin did.
That's what he did.
And that's what DeSantis is doing, to register with whatever media you have to register with him.
And that's exactly what Putin did.
My sons want to go to the new Star Wars theme park at Disney World.
It's called Galaxy's Edge.
You know, I try to be enthusiastic about riding in the fake Millennium Falcon and building a lightsaber out of mix and match handles and plastic Kyber crystals.
But, showing up on a theme park movie set and pretending to cosplay as rebels is a little bit too much left-wing online politics to me.
And also, unless you drive down and sleep in your car, any package to actually go there for a family of four runs about $10,000, and I'm a fucking podcaster.
But my children help me dream.
And when I look ahead to, let's say, 2035, I see hope at the end of a perilous journey.
Global temperatures are up two degrees.
The Keys, Miami, St.
Petersburg are all under seawater, along with a whole eastern Florida coast up to Jacksonville.
But Orlando still has the high ground.
The theme parks are still open.
Vacationers arrive daily from the north through swamps by ATV and from the surrounding waters by hovercraft.
Now, back in 2025, Disney World was renamed DeSantis World after he won the White House.
And it turns out he was always bluffing about changing the tax status.
That was just leverage.
All he wanted to do was to take over the parks himself, remodel them as for-profit infotainment universities.
And so he recruited all of his favorite conspiritualists and heterodox influencers and put them in charge of the appropriate theme zones.
So he gave the Epcot Planetarium to Eric Weinstein, who sat in the tiny projection booth and monologued about his theory of everything for 12 hours a day.
And then J.P.
Sears ran the family comedy stage, which was all anti-trans jokes all the time.
Very, very funny.
And DeSantis headhunted Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pagot to build an orthodox cathedral for male transformation rituals.
And they renovated Cinderella Castle to look like the Capitol, and they put Mickey Willis in charge of choreographing and filming daily insurrections.
Sayer G ran the cafeterias, but Peterson had his own all-beef sidebar, and Naomi Wolf ran the mama bear shooting range, and Christiane Northrup headed up the homeopathic first aid.
And Lori Ladd played Tinkerbell, flitting through the crowds, telling them their childhood trauma was a sign they were chosen for awakening.
But, of course, DeSantis' world contained the seeds of its own destruction.
Because by the time Ron's first term in Washington was winding down, a revolution was winding up, but from inside his own fantasy land.
Workers and engineers at Galaxy's Edge, bored to death of the old Lucas Wizard stories, started secretly building an Andor theme park.
No Jedi temples, no Mandalorian death cults, no funding from the Kochs.
There was one ride only.
Running wild through the other sectors, laughing maniacally at Weinstein, Peterson, and the rest, punching Nazis and bellowing, there's no other way out.
And that's the ride I'll take my sons on, or they'll take me on if I'm in bad shape, and we won't pay a dime for it.
