Bonus Sample: Conspirituality Marches on the White House (pt 2)
After reviewing how Mother Marianne and Bobby Kennedy Jr are set to disrupt the race in Part 1, we turn now to 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
A Major Life Change - Charles Eisenstein
https://twitter.com/jack/status/1247343782279839744
Charles Eisenstein | Zika and the Mentality of Control
Keys to the Navajo Nation’s COVID-19 Vaccination Success | Johns Hopkins | Bloomberg School of Public Health
The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible w/Sayer Ji
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Hello everybody, welcome to part two of our emergency Patreon series here on Conspiratuality Podcast, where, as you may know, we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
My name is Julian Walker.
I am Matthew Remsky, and we are back for the second part of our discussion of the full-frontal New Age assault on the Democratic primaries.
So this is part two of Conspirituality Marches Towards the White House, or we could call it A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Our Pub Date, or we could call it How We Wrote a Book And it was so accurate and well-sourced that Steve Bannon felt it fed a digital arc into a large language model to produce AIs of all the characters in it so he could play them like chess pieces across the 2024 electoral map.
Oh, you've been pilled.
Yeah.
That was epic.
Last time, we offered another brief scan of Mother Marianne's background and technique, and then we went a little deeper into RFK Jr.' 's COVID career and the anti-vax sort of legacy that is behind that for him, as well as some of his many psychological drivers.
Now, zooming out, I have been thinking about this and it feels like the upshot is that we are seeing a routinization of charisma, like taking it right back to Max Weber, that there's a transition process that we're witnessing from just straight out, unregulated, Wild West, charismatic leadership to institutionalized policymaking, and it's kind of incredible to watch happen.
And it's made me wonder whether what the neoliberal order actually requires, especially at this point in a history of chronic failures in providing the freedom that it promises to gig workers, is that it must be spiritualized on some kind of mass scale.
Now, I've said for years that yoga is the de facto religion of neoliberalism because it focuses upon your individual flow state and how resilient you can be in the midst of your trials and tribulations.
And let's also just be really clear there that you're saying yoga in the West.
Yes, yeah, we globalized modern postural yoga in the global north as a global product is the de facto religion of neoliberalism.
But what happens when the general order gets generally shittier, when wealth disparities grow, when tech surveillance is getting more intrusive, when nobody's really doing anything about the climate fast enough?
I mean, neoliberalism has always been about moral bypassing, always about assigning systemic failures to the individual.
But maybe that's just not enough at this point.
Maybe it's transparently thin and that now it has to be about spiritual bypassing.
So, I don't know, maybe this is the spiritual bypassing stage of neoliberalism where we have major democratic primary candidates Yeah.
Today, we're going to round up our triumvirate coverage by looking at our very own New Age Q, the aphorism-dropping poet of a new story of communion.
Why are we looking at Eisenstein?
Well, as we pinged briefly at the top of part one, on May 15th, Eisenstein published an announcement for his Substack subscribers under the title a major life change, in which he announced his affiliation with RFK Jr.'
's campaign.
Now, he didn't explicitly say in the article that he had an official role, but his wife, Stella Eisenstein, responded to a query in the comments section saying that Charles was the campaign's director of messaging.
So, let's look first at that announcement.
Julian, can you read the opening?
Hi, everyone.
I'd like to tell you why I haven't posted much over the last month and what it means for the future.
It all started a couple of months ago with a quote-unquote coincidence.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
knew my work vaguely before then as a fellow COVID dissident and environmentalist, but that had little to do with this coincidence.
One of my readers won a fundraising raffle for a quote-unquote day of falconry With Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
She was allowed to take a guest and so she invited me.
All right, so the first thing we have to note is that Eisenstein has coincidence in quotes, I think implying destiny.
So he's going to imply a little more about that in a bit.
And we posted this on Instagram and folks were surprised by the falconry bit, but it is true that Bobby is a master falconer from youth.
He's a licensed gameskeeper, as we mentioned.
I'm still sorting out where all of these activities take place because the Kennedy Empire is like one huge estate after another.
I mean, I'm not sure if he's doing that in Malibu with Sheryl Hines at his side, or if it's more of like a, you know, Northeast Kingdom, East Coast thing.
But basically, the vibe is upscale, blue blood, Tiger King.
And it's funny because in our last installment of these emergency bonus episodes, I mentioned the Yeats quote about, you know, the things fall apart, the center will not hold, what strange beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.
The falcon cannot hear the falconeer.
And I didn't even realize how apt that was.
Right.
Just as a nerdy moment of literary reference.
Here's Charles Eisenstein.
I have no interest in falconry.
But since I'd always admired Kennedy, I accepted the offer.
There were a lot of people there, at least 15, including me and my son, Cary.
At lunch, one of them was declaiming at length on some topic.
I was just listening.
But then Mr. Kennedy turned to me and said, Charles, what do you think?
Oh, a moment of glory.
So yes, you can hear the harps.
That is what began.
The relationship.
Soon we were in frequent communication.
I attended a pre-launch meeting with him and other close advisors where I presented my ideas on strategy and message.
I was deeply moved by their receptivity.
I'd never expected my thinking to strike a chord with a major political campaign, at least not in my lifetime.
One of the main areas of resonance was around the theme of reconciliation, unity, and healing the divide.
As I've said many times in these pages, polarization and division is at the core of our current crisis.
With coherence, we can rise to meet any challenge.
I think we should repeat that word because it just sounds so good.
Coherence.
Coherence.
Without it, even marginal changes are impossible to accomplish.
The meta-narrative shared by both sides, that the problem is those horrible people on the other side, is itself the real problem.
The kind of leader we need today?
is not one who settles into one camp to wage war on the other, but one who can see the potential for unity behind the divisions.
It is someone who can tap into shared moral values and universal human aspiration.
OK, so is this the populism that you're talking about, Julian?
I mean, look, first of all, let me just say the message of most every candidate on their way to the nomination is more polarizing and more definitive.
Right.
It has to be to set them apart from the other candidates.
They're going to fight for you.
They're going to set Washington straight.
They're going to bring bold, common-sense solutions for real people to the table.
They're going to make a stand for what's right against their opponents who have lost their moral compass.
So yes, this is the populism I'm talking about.
But then, during the general election, most candidates have to tone that down a little, talk about being a uniter and not a divider.
This is George W. Bush reaching across the aisle.
This is Barack Obama being pragmatic and inclusive, governing on behalf of all Americans.
Hello, Joe Biden, not just Democrats or Republicans, because we all have skin in the game and a shared sense of human decency and patriotism, blah, blah, blah.
It's a total boilerplate.
The thing about someone like Charlie is that he thinks that his particular new age spin On this is like somehow uniquely visionary.
You hear him kind of implying that it's ahead of its time, like at least not.
I wouldn't think my ideas would like appeal to a political campaign in my lifetime.
It's so visionary, but it's total fucking pablum.
That whole, we can win politics by transcending politics shtick, it's just naive and it's empty of content.
Like, what does it mean to win by transcending winning and losing?
There's no such thing as an actual political platform that doesn't disagree in foundational ways with anyone.
We wouldn't need politics.
If it wasn't about, you know, discussing, this is at the heart of democracy, is like figuring out where we disagree and why we think our solutions to certain problems are better than our opponents.
Even this idea of tapping into shared moral values and universal human aspirations, it is itself a cosmopolitan stance.
That exists in contrast to all of the reasons that people on the left and right say that the other side has betrayed moral values and is trampling human aspirations.
I mean, in politics, as in philosophy, the devil is in the details.
And Eisenstein's sort of know-nothing version of non-dual inclusiveness is, to me, a kind of thin patina on an even thinner analysis, which is kind of ironic because, you know, Matthew, both Eisenstein and his new boss have openly called for the supposed Provax and quarantine villains of the pandemic to be punished.
And Charles has even repeated cue-adjacent ideas that tie Fauci and Gates to the pedophile cabal, and he's sort of fantasized – he's been open in a public talk once about how he'd love to sort of, you know, tower over them as they groveled and begged for forgiveness, and he sort of danced on their graves or something.
Yeah, that's the New Year's Eve party in Albany, New York for either 2021 or 2022.
I can't remember which New Year's Eve, right?
And to be clear, he's saying we shouldn't be like that, but he still sort of indulges the fantasy and everyone sort of laughs.
But in terms of the populism, I think that there are some notes being hit here, like the noble and heroic outsider whose unifying vision goes beyond business as usual.