Bonus Sample: Conspirituality Marches on the White House (pt 1)
Marianne Williamson—New Age matriarch and popularizer of A Course in Miracles—is polling at 9%. Muscular Catholic antivax entrepreneur Bobby Kennedy Jr is polling at 20% or more: Rasmussen has him in a dead heat with Biden.
And Mr. “Coronavirus is a Coronation for all,” Charles Eisenstein, has just disclosed that he’s working on Bobby’s campaign as Director of Messaging. Holy shit.
It’s like our book is so accurate that Steve Bannon fed a digital ARC into a LLM to spit out AIs of all the characters in it so he could play them like chess pieces across the 2024 electoral map.
Matthew and Julian take stock of this new stage: the routinization and institutionalization of conspirituality.
Show notes available on Patreon.
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Welcome to an emergency bonus Patreon series of Conspirituality Podcast.
This is where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Julian Walker.
Yeah, and I'm Matthew Remsky, and yeah, a little bit of an emergency.
These two episodes are called Conspirituality Marches Towards the White House, and we just did not expect to be doing this while a storm of book release commitments rains down on our heads.
But, you know, as of this moment, There are three subjects we reference in our forthcoming book.
We cover two of them in considerable detail, and they are making serious political inroads, and they stand to really disrupt the democratic primaries.
And so, Julian, I think our bloody book is coming true before our eyes, and I think we manifested all of this.
Things fall apart, the center will not hold, what strange creature slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.
It's simultaneously this unexpected twist, I guess, but it's a logical next step in the phenomenon that we have been tracking.
There's this disruptive Trumpian element now happening on the Democrat side, and oddly that makes sense.
Here's the headline and the lead slug.
New-age matriarch and popularizer of A Course in Miracles, Marianne Williamson is polling at about 8 or 9% in the primary field.
Muscular Catholic anti-vax entrepreneur Bobby Kennedy Jr.
is polling at 20% or more, and Rasmussen has him in a dead heat with Biden.
Now, Mr. Coronavirus is a coronation for all.
Charles Eisenstein has just disclosed that he's working on RFK Jr.' 's campaign as director of messaging.
So, holy crap.
Well, he does not do it because it is easy.
He does it because it is hard.
You know what else is hard?
Coming up with a description that no one's ever called RfKJr before.
Muscular Catholic anti-vaxxer entrepreneur.
Yeah.
I salute you.
I salute your service.
This could be the headline as well, that two of these figures have written entire books about how being fat is a spiritual problem that can be rectified through meditation, right?
We have Marianne Williamson's A Course in Weight Loss, I kid you not, and Charles Eisenstein's The Yoga of Eating.
And you know, both of these titles seem to come straight out of like, you know, they did early in internet era market research on like, what, what kind of ebook should I write to promote my new website and build my email list?
Ah, a course in weight loss and the yoga of eating.
Exactly right.
Exactly right.
Is this part of RFK Jr.' 's obsession as well?
Well, he is a promoter of the obesity epidemic, quote unquote, but he connects it like he connects everything else to additives, pesticides and so on.
I haven't seen him openly fat shame, but he is definitely tone deaf when it comes to ableism vis-a-vis constantly pushing the vaccines make you autistic argument.
And let's remember that the whole Kennedy family has a real sort of fitness value system going on.
There is nothing, I think, more unfortunate than to have soft, chubby, fat-looking children who go to watch their school play basketball every Saturday and regard that as their week's exercise.
I hope that all of you will join, and everybody in the United States, to make sure that our children participate fully in a vigorous and adventurous life which is possible for them in this very rich country of ours.
So that's Jack Kennedy really caricaturing a whole demographic and kind of making me wonder why those kids are sitting out on the sideline, how they're feeling about participating in The Great Project.
Yeah, I mean, it's like...
We will only have jocks.
Everyone will be a jock.
No fat kids.
Let's clarify at the top here that the DNC has so far said it will not be hosting debates with these long shot candidates.
But they will be on primary ballots.
You and I discussed this back and forth, trying to make sense of like, what does this mean exactly?
Historically, we know that when an incumbent faces a strong primary challenger, it really hurts them in the general election.
So the effects here are mitigated through the perhaps stifling rules of the party and, you know, how the superdelegates vote.
Right.
But have you checked the world we're living in?
Crazy shit can happen.
We don't know what the impact is going to be, and I think anybody who says they do is really selling something.
But before we get into the content weeds on this triumvirate, you've been chewing on a kind of meta view of two influential and intersecting subject areas.
So, first of all, the rise of populism and how it mobilizes misinformation very effectively.
There's another one, but for this one, what is your elevator summary on how our typically, you know, disorganized and narcissistic conspirituality cohort is getting such mainstream traction?
Like, what is populist about New Age and alt-health discourse?
Well, I think to start with, you know, technically, the way I understand it is that populism utilizes this rhetorical appeal to a kind of ordinary and decent common sense, you know, part of the population that's just going to roll up their sleeves and expose and defeat the dishonest and corrupt elite, right?
And these people have been callously exploiting us for too long.
So now we're going to rise up and take back control.
Yeah, I'm with you.
I'm with it.
Yeah.
And so that's me.
That's me.
And so the ideal populist leader in this analysis is someone who can position themselves as an outsider and who can therefore claim immunity to the crass insider loyalties and the sort of blunting and deliberately ineffective customs of government where they do nothing wrong and they're just focusing on lining their pockets, you know.
And so of course you have real man-of-the-people outsiders like Trump and RFK Jr.
They're going to bring the sword of righteous truth.
They're going to tell it like it is and bring sweeping change.
Right.
I think that the messaging of populism usually presents these emotionally satisfying, oversimplified solutions to complex problems, which kind of fits with the idea that the common people are going to rise up.
Right.
One way to do that is to find scapegoats.
We know who's doing this to us and we're going to punish them.
So, of course, that could be immigrants, it could be people of color, it could be the Jews, depending on how mask-off this is going.
Initially, it starts off as it's Big Pharma, and it's the corporations, and to some extent, there's truth to that, right?
Another way is to sort of stitch together those partial truths with outright lies and conspiracies and empty prescriptions for what ails you.
So with regard to your question, maybe you can already hear the overlap, right?
That populism is a kind of snake oil.
It can be driven in the direction of selling a kind of snake oil.
Is big government failing you?
Well, I'll drain the swamp and root out the big state.
You resented how quarantine measures during this once-in-a-hundred-year pandemic impacted your business?
I'll put Fauci on trial.
Right.
And this is like literally RFK's platform.
Don't trust vaccines because of pseudoscience disinformation?
Well, we've got a supplement protocol and a meditation course on boosting natural immunity for you right here.
Now, that's not RFK Jr., but it's a lot of people who run in his circles.
Right.
You heard about the specific cases in which Big Pharma lied about research and then was punished through the due process of our legal system?
Well, surely then they also lied about ivermectin, regardless of what the data shows.
Here's a link to a doctor, by the way, who will prescribe you ivermectin as a daily prophylactic.
Medical science, therefore, is a scam.
So you see how the snowball gets rolling now.
Medical science is a scam.
Democracy is a sham.
Journalism is a lie.
The pandemic was a hoax.
The government is corrupt.
But not to worry, folks, because Bobby Kennedy Jr.
is riding in on a white horse to tilt at all the motherfucking windmills.
Right.
And Marianne Williamson is gonna transcend divisive political ignorance and bring the power of love to bear.
And then here comes, you know, entrance stage right, Charles Eisenstein will craft the poetry of a more beautiful world that really all of our hearts know is possible.
Okay, so that's solid on the content front, but from talking to Rene Diresta about information flows, how would you characterize how this trio is working the algorithms?
I mean, you know, the algorithms surround you.
We are so in the algorithms that I think if you spend any time online, if you spend any time in the commentariat, if you spend any time consuming most media, but especially old media, it's just everywhere.
The way that Williamson and Kennedy are working the current dynamic, I think, is well exemplified by how the heterodox independent media sphere has actually been courting them.
Yeah, that's the clue, isn't it?
It's that there's a way in which they've made themselves attractive to the heterodox platforms and from the left primarily, right?
Yeah, yeah.
So the thing is, I think that what a lot of people miss is the claim at being an independent media source and being paid by your audience.
That means that you are, there's an even more direct and readily apparent and very simple relationship between like needing to create content and needing the next person to interview who's going to bring a lot of clicks and a lot of views and a lot of ad revenue.
So there's, it's actually not independent at all.
Um, and so they need, these people need, Bobby and Marianne more than the other way around.
So you see Williamson showing up online last week in photos from the wedding of Kyle Kalinske and Crystal Paul.
Did she officiate?
She didn't officiate, but she's there in the pictures alongside all of these sort of, I guess you could say, populist left media figures.
And it was a who's who of these YouTube news personalities.
For anyone who doesn't know these names, Crystal Ball is the former Democrat candidate for office.
She's been a longtime contributor at MSNBC.
Not anymore.
She was an anchor on an online news show by The Hill that had over one and a half million subscribers called Rising.
She now and they had they had some kind of bust up and she now co-hosts an even more independent show called Breaking Points.
Which in just two years is pushing close to a million subscribers.