Bonus Sample: Conspirituality and the Imaginary Children (Series Intro)
In this series of audio essays, Matthew will examine how children as symbols—but not persons with their own internal lives—are at the center of conspirituality anxiety and discourse.
There are two types of imaginary child in conspirituality. One is an object of dread. The other is an idol of aspiration.
In the realm of dread we have fetuses murdered by late term abortion, children who are trafficked, made autistic by vaccines, sexualized by pornography in elementary school, or mutilated by trans activist doctors.
In the realm of idols we have newborn babies sliding like dolphins into warm birthing tubs after a mere hour of ecstatic, medically-unassisted home births. We have little girls in prairie dresses or first communion veils who must be protected from library drag queens or woke grade school teachers. We have starseeds and indigo children who carry prophecies from the great beyond.
We often reflect on the problem of authority on this podcast. Who are our leaders, and what gives them power? Why do conspiracists default to God to corroborate fantasies? What gap in cultural fatherhood is Jordan Peterson trying to fill?
With this series, Matthew looks in the other direction: what does the conspirituality crowd do with its own authority? How do misgivings, regrets and shame in relation to children get inflated and projected into moral panics?
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Hello everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Matthew Bremsky.
Today I'm introducing a Patreon bonus series called Conspirituality and the Imaginary Children.
Now I've drafted a number of episodes that will fill out this collection, and I'll preview many of them in this brief introduction to the series.
And near the end, I'll be asking you all a question to see what you have to say about this territory.
But I'm going to let Kelly Brogan kick this series off.
So you'd want to just kind of get centered and pull up in your mind's eye The image of yourself walking on a mountain path.
And as you're walking, you begin to hear the sounds of a child crying.
And you walk over to this child that you find in this brush on the side of the path.
And this child, same gender as you, so I will be a little girl, and she She has all cuts and bruises on her body and she's soiled.
She's full of dirt.
Her clothes are tattered.
Her hair is totally unbrushed.
She has bruises on her face.
And she's inconsolably crying.
And she can't even verbalize what's going on.
You try to ask and she just keeps crying and she's shivering.
And so you don't bother.
That's Kelly Brogan in April of 2020.
talk her out of it or soothe her through your words, you know that all you can do is just hold her.
That's Kelly Brogan in April of 2020.
She's sitting beside her now ex-husband, Sayer G, and guiding live stream followers through a meditation,
as you heard, in which they are visualizing and then rescuing their abused childhood selves.
Now, this bears all the hallmarks of the trauma recovery movement,
in which the subject peers into the past to find the crime that is somehow
imprisoning them in the present.
Now, Brogan's point, back in April of 2020, is that the world is responding to the pandemic in a traumatized way, through what she calls victim consciousness.
She describes this as an infantile overreaction that will encourage an authoritarian backlash.
Her answer is for us to heal the inner wounded child so that the adult will no longer be afraid of viruses and, in Brogan's extended world, the patriarchy, the medical system, and even capitalism.
If we find and comfort the beaten and bloodied child, the world will be renewed.
There will be nothing to fear.
This is a simplistic and banal idea, and just as it points back to some very morbid sources like the recovered memory movement and the satanic panic, it also points forward to the cursed fantasies of QAnon.
And at its center is an imaginary child going through things that the adult must diagnose and treat.
That's what I'll study in this series.
How children, as symbols, but not persons with their own internal lives, are at the center of conspirituality anxiety.
Now there are two types of imaginary child in a conspirituality, at least two.
One is an object of dread.
The other is an idol of aspiration.
In the realm of dread, we have fetuses murdered by late-term abortion, children who are trafficked, made autistic by vaccines, sexualized by pornography in elementary school, or mutilated by trans activist doctors.
Children who are bred for captivity in subway tunnels.
Children with large manga-style darkened panda eyes who have been drained of their adrenochrome.
In the realm of the idols, we have newborn babies sliding like dolphins into warm birthing tubs after a mere hour of ecstatic, medically unassisted home births.
They were ready to take birth, you see.
We have little girls in prairie dresses or first communion veils who must be protected from library drag queens or woke grade school teachers.
We have starseeds and indigo children who carry prophecies from the great beyond.
There are well-groomed broods of six, seven, eight children in trad-cath families who pose on their knees at Latin mass altars.
Or, if they're evangelical, they gather around their Christmas trees in tacky sweaters holding automatic rifles.
The children of conspirituality are the silent mouthpieces of social media sharenting.
They dutifully perform the content of their parents' hopes and fears.
If they are ever allowed to speak, it is to validate their caregivers or lend innocence to propaganda.
Now, it's not uncommon for our podcast to reflect on the problem of authority.
Who does the culture listen to and why?
Who are our leaders and what gives them power?
Why do conspiracists default to God to corroborate fantasies?
What gap in cultural fatherhood is Jordan Peterson trying to fill?
Why do Trump's followers sometimes act like children?
With this series, I'm going to look in the other direction.
What does the conspirituality crowd do with its own authority?
When its influencers turn away from the selfie camera and towards their own children, what do we see?
How does the movement deal with the uncertainties of the present and the dread of the future?
How do misgivings and regrets in relation to children get projected into moral panics?
How do people tolerate the terrible feeling that we've destroyed the world for the children, for those we love the most?
