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July 18, 2024 - Conspirituality
01:01:45
215: Divinely Protected

Two landmark Supreme Court decisions—the Trump immunity case and the overturning of the Chevron doctrine—represent the legal institutionalization of the core values of conspirituality: self-sovereignty, natural immunity or divine protection, and “doing your own research.”  The attempted assassination on the former president forged the essence of these two rulings into a stunning still life of Trump’s image for those who love him and those he’s appointed to serve him.  Julian and Matthew wade into the flood, and what might happen at ground zero of conspiracy theory formation—this time veering left as well as right. Show Notes Former classmate of Trump rally gunman says he was ‘bullied almost every day’  The FBI Identifies Suspected Gunman in Trump Rally Shooting: What to Know - The New York Times FBI identifies Thomas Crooks of Bethel Park as the suspect in Trump assassination attempt FBI probing motives, background of Thomas Matthew Crooks, the Western Pa. gunman behind Donald Trump assassination attempt  A shooting range, a gun store, and a ladder purchase: Tracking the Trump rally gunman's movements leading up to his attack  Trump rewrites Republican convention speech to focus on unity not Biden - Washington Examiner   Vance shooting response: https://x.com/JDVance1/status/1812280973628965109  Musk shooting response: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1812256998588662068  Rubio shooting response: https://x.com/marcorubio/status/1812256529296613657  Boebert shooting response: https://x.com/KyleClark/status/1812316469016846373  Brief: The Theatre of Trump (w/Hank Willenbrink) — Conspirituality   23-939 Trump v. United States (07/01/2024) Clarence Thomas Raised Another Issue: Was Jack Smith Legally Appointed? - The New York Times  22-451 Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (06/28/2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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So there's this wild meeting of worlds where Trump survives something real that then gets immediately co-opted into what will become part of the stage performance of his self-image forever.
Like a real bullet has become a stage prop.
And a new mythology is going to spin out from this and likely define the rest of his life,
and maybe ours as well.
We'll find out.
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Hello everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersections of
conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Julian Walker.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
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♪♪ Conspiratuality 215 divinely protected.
So, Julian, we had a different episode planned for this week before the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
Yeah, what a three-week period we're in here between the terrible debate performance and then all of these Supreme Court rulings and then this attempted assassination and then Eileen Cannon throwing out The case that the documents case and now J.D.
Vance.
It's not to make it all about us, but this is this is draining.
So we were mostly focused on the alarming stream of decisions from the Supreme Court conservative supermajority and how that intersects with Project 2025 as of Friday of last week.
And then the weekend brought us here.
Specifically, we were looking at how two landmark Supreme Court decisions, so one is the Trump immunity case and the other was the overturning of the Chevron doctrine, represent a legal institutionalization of some of the core values of conspirituality.
So, self-sovereignty, natural immunity, or divine protection, and of course doing your own research and how all of these tangle together.
First, we'll talk about this past Saturday, June 13th, and the assassination attempt on the former president, which in a way forged the essence of these two and then some other recent court rulings into a stunning still life of who Trump is for those who love him.
By now, anyone listening to this will have heard the story in great detail, I assume.
about the media chaos in which it unfolded and what might happen at ground zero
of conspiracy theory formation, this time veering left as well as right.
By now, anyone listening to this will have heard the story in great detail, I assume.
While speaking at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump was shot through the right ear
by a gunman perched on a rooftop about 400 feet from the stage.
The gunman was then very quickly killed by a Secret Service sniper.
Bomb-making materials would later be found in the shooter's car and home, and he would be identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks.
Trump, after being shot and swarmed by Secret Service agents, rose up defiantly with blood on his face and his fist in the air, yelling, Fight!
Fight!
to his supporters.
These moments were captured in photos that will no doubt become iconic.
Yeah, and the most famous one by Evan Vucci of the Associated Press is composed like a Renaissance painting with the energy, as many people have pointed out, of the Iwo Jima flag raising event.
The flag itself is stretched taut like a windsail over the cluster of Secret Service agents who seem to be both supporting Trump, but also seeking shelter under his towering presence.
There's even a hint of muscular Christian resurrection here, as though the agents are taking him down from the cross, not dead, but victorious.
Now, Crooks was a 20-year-old who worked as a dietary aide in a retirement home in Bethel, Pennsylvania, about an hour from the rally site.
And in addition to striking Trump in the ear, he also injured two bystanders, and he killed bystander Corey Comparatore, who was a firefighter who reportedly was diving in front of his family to protect them.
The weapon was purchased legally by Crooks' father, but it's unclear whether it was his or whether he had permission to take it that day.
He was a registered member at a local gun range, which released a statement of horror and sympathy.
CNN now reports that Crooks had visited the range on Friday to practice shooting, and on Saturday morning, he purchased a ladder at Home Depot, which he presumably used to scale the wall to the rooftop.
Now, the FBI is scrambling to establish a motive.
Crooks comes from a middle-class background.
Both of his parents are licensed counselors.
They've commented that he seemed to have had no friends, but also no political views.
There's been no manifesto found, no social media presence.
The FBI has unlocked his phone and scoured his computer, but they've found nothing of interest.
Former high school classmates from Bethel have given a range of descriptions.
One said he was a loner who was bullied, who sometimes wore hunting clothes to school and a COVID mask long after most others stopped wearing masks.
Others noted that he had a hygiene issue and was sometimes teased as the next school shooter.
And others described simply a nerdy kid interested in coding and chess and government and usually conservative in viewpoint.
But everyone expressed shock and dismay.
Yeah, I was most struck by the schoolmate who said he was bullied every day and wasn't outcast and that that Made him a target.
And there's also a recent video I saw this morning of him being bullied, although it's not the most severe kind of bullying and it's like five or six seconds.
That bullying question is kind of up in the air.
There's another schoolmate who pushed back against that characterization.
It's a little bit unclear, obviously very subjective.
Now, the Secret Service has come under scrutiny for failing to secure the perimeter of the event, and a number of commentators have suggested that this is mainly about poor communications between the Secret Service and the local law enforcement officers.
A congressional hearing is scheduled for next week, and Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheadle has agreed to testify.
Yes, and some on the right were very quick to smear Kimberly Cheadle as a DEI hire, a diversity hire, and they pointed out that she had these policy goals of hiring more women and more minorities.
Now, she had herself worked for the Secret Service for 27 years and been involved in the evacuation, excuse me, of Dick Cheney during 9-11.
She was part of Biden's security detail under Obama, but she did also spend four years working as head of security for Pepsi.
And so that made for good jokes, like Elon Musk saying her last job was protecting bags of Cheetos.
Yeah, so that particular grossness extended to the women Secret Service agents who were mocked for appearing to be frenetic, which is understandable in my view in a moment of peak stress, while it's clear that any one of them could body slam virtually any commenter on Twitter.
But so far, Biden is backing the Secret Service and has actually assigned a detail to RFK Jr., which he's been asking for since he began his run.
Oh, by the way, someone in the Kennedy 24 campaign leaked a video of Bobby taking a call from Trump just after the shooting, which, you know, involves some wheeling and dealing.
Trump is agreeing with Bobby's anti-vax claims and seems to be offering him an appointment in exchange for dropping out.
Back to the story.
Wow.
Yeah, Trump quickly took to Truth Social to attribute his survival to God, posting the following.
Julian, maybe you can lean into the capitalized words here for listeners who aren't seeing it on their screens.
Thank you to everyone for your thoughts and prayers yesterday, as it was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening.
We will fear not, but instead remain resilient in our faith and defiant in the face of wickedness.
Our love goes out to the other victims and their families.
We pray for the recovery of those who were wounded and hold in our hearts the memory of the citizen who was so horribly killed.
In this moment, It is more important than ever that we stand united and show our true character as Americans.
Yeah.
And I'm split in listening to that a little bit because, you know, Trump is not a religious guy.
And if, you know, God is his metaphor for luck, I think this is a natural response.
But of course, it also dog whistles his Christian nationalist supporters.
So we'll get to that.
Yeah.
And the citizen who was killed.
I'm just like, how long does it take you to Google the name?
Trump is presently at the RNC Convention in Milwaukee, where he will be speaking Thursday evening after this episode airs.
And on Sunday, he told the Washington Examiner he was rewriting his speech to appeal to national unity.
On Monday, United States Court for the Southern District of Florida Judge Eileen Cannon dismissed the classified documents case against Trump.
This is the one about him keeping boxes of documents In a publicly accessible gilded bathroom at Mar-a-Lago, she ruled that the special prosecutor had been appointed in violation of the Constitution.
And that echoes some of the reasoning given by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in the immunity case we're looking at later.
The bottom line is that Trump seems to be dodging bullets every day.
That would mean, if it was adopted by the Supreme Court, that all of the special counsels Yeah, appointed in the last several years were appointed in unconstitutional ways.
So it's it's it's completely incoherent.
Another thing that's incoherent here, and I find it really jarring and frustrating, Matthew, is how many pundits and politicians and especially top Democrats feel the need to condemn this as political violence and to tie it back to the political polarization in our country and then to call for unity.
I mean, I get it.
I get why they feel they have to do it, but I really think it misses the point.
To me, anytime we have a lone wolf shooter like this, my mind just goes to two things, inadequate community mental health resources, and too easy access to military-grade weapons.
You know, the last attempt on a president's life was in 1981, and it was by a guy hoping to impress the actress Jodie Foster, whom he had been stalking for years by trying to kill Ronald Reagan.
And the year right before that, we saw John Lennon, another Prominent public figure murdered by another mentally unwell gunman seeking notoriety.
The first that I mentioned was obsessed and heavily identified with the film Taxi Driver and the second with J.D.
Salinger's fantastic novel Catcher in the Rye.
So yeah, we live in polarized times, but with Trump's attempted killer, I just don't think we can see an individual like this as a symptom of the political climate.
And that's the mirror world game that Republicans want to play right now by calling this stochastic terrorism that was driven by Democrats, raising the alarm about what a second term for the man already Yeah, I agree.
Mental health care is in shambles.
There are hundreds of millions of guns.
Congress has done precious little to enact gun control laws.
All true.
You know, it's impossible for Democrats to get much done without majorities in the House and the Senate.
Let's remember, Clinton did pass the assault weapons ban in 1994.
I do think it's worth being clear that we have no indication of Crooks having had mental health issues or prior incidents, and there's been pretty solid local reporting so far.
before the GOP then voted not to extend it.
I do think it's worth being clear that we have no indication of Crooks having had mental health issues or
prior incidents.
And there's been pretty solid local reporting so far.
I mean, one of the ex-classmates would have said something about that topic.
So, for me, that means I wouldn't eliminate political motivations, as misguided as they might be.
I can think of a lot of scenarios in which a conservative kid's profound disillusionment with Trump could lead down this road exacerbated by the accelerationist zeitgeist of the times.
I mean, sure, he could have woven a political obsession into whatever was going on here that leads a 20-year-old with his whole life ahead of him to plan out And enact the attempted murder of an extremely prominent public figure, knowing that it would be the last action of his short life.
I just, I think for me, it doesn't matter.
He doesn't have to have a history of psychiatric diagnosis for this to indicate that clearly something catastrophic had happened in his mind.
And some of the most debilitating conditions do tend to have their first episodes in the late teens and early twenties.
Obviously to be a hundred percent clear, we don't know.
But I just don't buy this idea that hearing Democrats condemn Trump as an amoral sociopath and a danger to democracy or being exposed perhaps to some ultra right-wing accelerationist ideas leads to a 20-year-old crossing this particular line.
We know that in 99.999 recurring percent of cases, it doesn't.
So something else has to be present to catalyze this.
And that said, it's super important to add that the vast majority of people with The full range of different mental illnesses are not violent at all.
But I don't think that should make it out of bounds to observe that a kid like this dying on a rooftop after trying to shoot Donald Trump likely had something specifically abnormal about his psychology.
It makes me think about Charles Whitman, who famously left a letter asking that his brain be donated to science so as to understand what had happened to him before he enacted an infamous mass shooting in 1966.
So, I don't know, for me it brings us into these very sticky and mysterious questions of what causes violence, of political radicalization and hate speech as an influence behind stochastic terrorism, and what factors come together to cause these kinds of extreme events.
On the one hand, we can talk about the deluge of bomb threats in 2022 against 24 children's hospitals after the Daily Wire hosts accused doctors who treat trans children of being groomers and child mutilators.
Yeah.
Or we can think about these attacks that specifically have targeted, say, black churchgoers or black shoppers in a supermarket or Jews at a synagogue.
Or patrons at a gay nightclub and, you know, in most of those cases we have manifestos and, you know, things written on the gun that tell us very explicitly what the person's ideology is.
And we can see a trail of online participation in hatred and dehumanization of these specific minority groups, often within message boards that have ties to the far right.
And sometimes this stuff is also being dog whistled by members of Congress.
So to me, all of this is a pretty strong fit for what we call stochastic terrorism.
But even then, I tend to weigh the lack of community mental health resources and common sense gun laws, as well as functional law enforcement involvement in both of those things more strongly than online radicalization, because the key ingredients to commit that kind of killing spree are just not there for most of the people, the vast majority of the people who participate in these groups or who hear these messages online.
And still, there is an ideological bigotry at the center of those murderous motivations who I've been listing.
And it is the kind of belief system that's despicable from top to bottom, whether it leads to shootings or not.
In the age of Trump, then, we also have this steady trickle of violence associated with the baseless QAnon and, before that, Pizzagate conspiracy theories.
All of these were preoccupied with radical right-wing politics, but they also are often the really, like, big events or the really extreme events that are characterized by mental illness in many cases.
But then we get to January 6th, and we have what many experts will name as domestic terrorism committed by a large group Who were radicalized believers in a false claim of election fraud, and who also, by all accounts, thought they were following orders from their commander-in-chief.
And that same commander-in-chief has completely normalized calls for political violence at rallies, in speeches, on social media, almost daily for years now, even going so far as to promise retribution if elected, saying, I will be dictator for a day.
Saying he would go after his enemies in government and in the media, which is a terrifying prospect given the recent immunity rulings handed down by his lackeys on the Supreme Court.
So how anyone can draw this equivalency to Democrats correctly raising the alarm about Trump as an existential threat to democracy as some kind of causative factor in the actions of crooks is beyond me.
I'm sickened by Democrats playing along with the pious theatre of calling for a cooling of rhetoric from both sides in the name of unity, when there's only one party in this country actively calling for and enabling political violence in this country.
Yeah, it is disgusting and it plays into the worst hands.
And it threatens to derail whatever is left of Biden's campaign, which is now dragging the DNC into utter paralysis.
Because it's a loop.
Like, you can't say Trump is a threat without threatening him, apparently.
And that's exactly how Trump's new VP nominee, J.D.
Vance, tagged it just two hours after the shooting, writing on Twitter, Today is not just some isolated incident.
The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs.
That rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination.
Okay, I want to slow down to dig into the gap between in real life human-ness and the instantaneous
impacts of some of the reckless online speculation and aggression.
that drive conspiracism.
This time from the right, as we heard from Vance, but also the rest of the gang as well, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, so many others, blaming Biden, Antifa, or an inside job by the Secret Service, which was, you know, ordered to, quote unquote, stand down, but then also from the left, claiming that it was staged, although we won't be making any false equivalencies today.
So, on Saturday, at about 6.30, I'm in the kitchen with my partner, her parents, and the 11-year-old, and we just happen to be talking about Biden's disastrous debate appearance after dinner.
And the adults are on a predictable adult tangent, sorting through the mess that the DNC has made for itself, whether the Biden family is enabling him, whether the party has the courage and skill to pull off an open convention.
But then the 11-year-old is laughing his butt off in this sardonic way.
Because this is the first presidential debate that he's watched.
He watched it in a replay on YouTube with one of those commentators.
And he can't believe the fumbles, the contempt for substance, and the terrible moderation.
He can't believe that this is the choice people have to make and that it will determine his fate.
It's like totally absurd to him.
Understandably, it doesn't feel quite real.
And then I'm embarrassed, Julian, to say that we're having this family moment, and I'm the one with my phone out on the table, and I see the headline in a notification, and I say, okay, I hate to interrupt, but it looks like someone has shot him.
And it throws the kitchen into this oscillating buzz and silence.
Like, there's three generations of progressives running down all the possibilities and implications at once as the shredded details trickle into the phone.
But then at one point, the 11-year-old reminds me that I hate this man.
I've said as much.
And it's as if to beg the question of whether I'm okay with what's happened.
Like, what is the nature of my hatred?
How far would I go with it?
And then I have to own that right then in the moment uncomfortably and say, yeah, I sometimes do feel that way, but this is a very bad situation for everyone.
And so this was a real sign of the times moment because I was pulled in by like online and offline worlds in every direction at once.
There's logistics, there's gravity, there's absurdity, there's a hatred expressed through these private polarizing statements that are suddenly under the microscope.
But all of that is before the on the ground testimony comes through.
So there was that guy talking to the BBC about seeing the shooter.
There was the OBGYN who was in the stands beside Corey Comparatory and who helped carry his, I think, headless body out to the ambulance.
And then this 20-year-old kid lying dead on the hot metal roof.
And all of that just silenced the online shouting.
And it's the online shouting that continues on its own path careening off into conspiracy land.
So there's something about that moment that stopped something for me.
It's an incredible moment, Matthew.
Mine was a lot more simple.
I was just on the couch after working out and my daughter's watching TV.
And I saw the first reports like literally in the minutes after it had happened.
And then a comment saying, oh, it seems like a BB gun from close range because it was, you know, just barely, barely did anything.
But then I started really staying alert to the unfolding story and of course got consumed by it like everyone else.
Before the human images really settled in, I have to admit that I had this awful thought.
And this was before I'd seen anyone blurt it out on Twitter.
And the thought was, he's faking it.
He's a lying, fraudulent TV con man.
He's faking it.
This guy worked with Vince McMahon, with the WWE.
He knows all about kayfabe and blood pellets or like blading your face during a fight.
How did that picture come together so perfectly?
Like, could anyone have created a more potent tableau by accident?
Wait, what's kayfabe?
Hey Fabe is, I don't know what the word actually, where it comes from, what the etymology is, but it's the premise that everybody's going to keep in character no matter what happens.
Okay, gotcha.
You're gonna own the role.
So I had this instinctual surge of cynical paranoia.
I wasn't alone, as we find out later, but of course I didn't post anything stupid.
I mean, so you saw this too unfold, Julian.
What's your diagnosis?
I mean, the photo op was unbelievable.
It's like, oh, how is it possible this is the photo we get?
And I said to you and Derek on text, like, shit, whoever took this photo is going to make millions from merchandising.
It will be in the history books.
It looks like the Iwo Jima picture.
Right, and of course, actually, we're also going to have grifters circling, and just before we recorded, Derek found that true to form and first out of the gate is MAGA's own Pepe impersonator, J.P.
Sears, who's offering this black and white print of Vucci's photo, who we should notify to make sure Sears licensed it, on a t-shirt called Truth Conquers, which he's selling now on his website.
I mean, this reminds me of what we've been saying from the start of the pandemic, is that some of these folks already had well-oiled marketing machines, you know, and merch ready to go, that they could then tie the kind of COVID grievance mongering and anti-vax stuff into.
Same here with J.P.
Sears.
He's got his t-shirt line of, you know, Trump supporting and patriotic and anti-trans t-shirts and caps and mugs, and he's just like, oh, cool, yes, here's a new image.
Yeah, and you can screenshot the photograph You can transition it to black and white, and you can drag it onto the t-shirt design app on your phone, and bang, you have a t-shirt, right?
Regarding it being staged, I don't mean to be a scold.
I think, to my mind, when I hear something like that, or even when I have that thought, like, oh, wow, it kind of seemed like it could be staged, there's just another voice that immediately counters it.
With rational observations about the risk-to-reward ratio, the number of people who'd have to be involved, for what purpose something like this would seem to be a necessary tactic, given how bad it already looks?
Yeah, this is Julian's super-ego, rational super-ego, like, hopping in.
And then how bad it would be for them if it backfired.
Like, that's the risk-to-reward thing, right?
It's like, wow, that's an iconic moment, but if you get found out, oh my god.
I mean, I think in the aftermath of immediate events like these, we're all trying to make sense of things with limited information.
So speculation is natural.
We try to fill in the gaps.
And I think true conspiracists just keep doing that.
They keep filling in the gaps and they keep believing that what they filled the gaps in with is plausible regardless of what other facts and evidence emerge.
Yeah, and that's why I want to flag a possible false equivalence developing between conspiracy theorizing on the left and the right.
Like, a few days of people having a knee-jerk response of, oh, that looked fake to me is actually based on some reasonable prior experience of who this guy is, whereas asserting that the election in 2020 is stolen is now a four-year-old article of faith based on a conspiracy without anything behind it, really, except this raw, like, my guy can't possibly lose and I won't live in a world in which he does.
And I think this false equivalence also implies a double standard, that anyone left of Trump has to be absolutely sure that we never do anything like that.
It also made me think about the difference between speculation and conspiracy theory in terms of the raw and the cooked.
Like, how solid is the story?
How much longevity does it have?
Or is it just people blowing off steam?
Like, 9-11 didn't become a conspiracy theory on September 13th, 2001.
It took about 10 years.
It was well-developed, solidly defended.
It had its own experts, people monetizing it.
Nobody's going to do that with the catch-up pack story here.
Partly because that crowd is far less capable of completely isolating themselves from the consensus reporting that's now beginning to kind of gel together.
So anyway, you didn't go down that paranoid path, Julian.
You have some internal antidote immediately on hand.
I didn't go too far down it either.
I rarely do.
But I do think in that moment, part of that was because I was with family as much as, you know, I have any access to critical thinking.
Because as the videos of rally goers filtered in, I could feel this continuity between my family and those families.
Like, not politically, but in terms of vulnerability.
And I wonder whether emotions like that can actually mitigate the need to theorize and scapegoat.
Because if that's true, it also speaks to the relationship between conspiracism and alienation or isolation.
Yeah, that's a good point.
But then we're texting about it, you and I, and you said that Trump's instant fist pump and then seeking the spotlight seemed to say something about the man in his moment.
Yeah, I just, there was something uncanny about it.
I was floored by his reaction.
By how quickly, seemingly, he was sticking his head out and raising his fist.
The Secret Service did look kind of incompetent to me because that was happening, given that he could accomplish those gestures and yell the word fight several times to the cameras and to his supporters, with his head completely exposed through his blood-streaked lips.
Yeah, I mean, some versions of the timeline suggest that he was allowed to be exposed for what became a photo op because the Secret Service had given the all-clear that Crooks was down.
Yeah, you know, I was curious about that.
I went back and watched just a real-time video with no edits.
And, and realize like, Oh, it's actually a pretty extended period of time.
It's almost a minute and 20 seconds from when he first goes down to when he comes
up and the video I watched had the, uh, the audio amplified.
So you could hear the conversation that was happening on stage.
And essentially they've already said for about 20 seconds, we're all clear.
The shooter is down.
I think they called it Hawkeye or something like that, the team whose job it is to take him out and then to report on whether or not the area is secured.
Nonetheless.
I mean, I didn't find his performance that surprising.
I mean, I think if he had been more profoundly injured, he couldn't have pulled it off.
But I can imagine getting grazed like that, getting tackled to the ground, getting lifted back up, realizing you're not only fine, but on the verge of seizing an incredible optics opportunity.
There's a lot of adrenaline there.
I don't know so much about, like, realizing I feel like it's instinctive.
It's just part of who he is and how he reacts.
Yeah, I've got a thing on that.
Yeah, I've got a thing on that.
And, you know, you also hear in the audio like about three times he says, let me get my shoes.
Let me put my shoes back on before I stand up.
So that's also like a personality thing, I think.
Now, some on the right have termed this display, you know, incredible bravery and strong leadership because he's reassuring everyone.
But a second later, I thought in this weird way as I was seeing it, I almost felt like he wants this.
He wants to be attacked.
It makes materially real, the victim narrative he sells every day.
I don't mean consciously, but it plugs into something.
He's being unfairly attacked by the radical left.
They will stop at nothing.
They're coming for his supporters, but he's standing in their way.
He loves to say, I will breathe your retribution, he said at Waco when he announced his candidacy.
The media has lied about me unfairly, and the Department of Justice has been weaponized against me.
So just think what they will try to do to you.
And this justifies all of this rhetoric.
And I think instinctively, viscerally, as I said, He kind of knows it.
He leans into it.
And all of that happens instantly within that minute.
And I think that is stage awareness and presence built up over a lifetime.
And, you know, we're imagining that that's gratifying, but I think it's also audience-captured and camera-trained.
Like, over and over we see him hit his mark like that.
When I had the theater studies scholar Hank Willenbrink on the show in June to describe Trump's stage chops from TV to the Oval Office, we talked about a lot of these incidents, including there's this famous moment in 2018 where he's with a bunch of world leaders.
This is very banal in comparison to Saturday, but they're forming up for the photo op and he pushes his way from the middle of the pack and basically shoves the Prime Minister of Montenegro to the side.
So he can hit a mark at the center of the frame.
And then he looks from side to side like he's conquered the stage, and then he gives a tug on his suit jacket.
Like, ten out of ten, no notes.
Every public appearance has something of that, you know, stagecraft flavor.
I also thought to myself, this might be a relief in contrast to having to be humiliated on stage by Biden calling him a convicted felon.
Like, I just think of how his face looked when he had to take that.
He had to just look down and he had that weird smirk on his face and he kind of nodded.
You know, he didn't object to that.
He objected later to, I think, to the Eugene Carroll thing.
And not really being able to fight back, like he couldn't fight back in the courtrooms.
He couldn't fight back against becoming a convicted felon, having to sit there while they read out all of those guilty verdicts.
Now he has blood on his hand, blood on his face, and the mangled ear to prove it.
Now he's back in the cut and thrust of the real battle.
I think you're 100% right about court.
I mean, I don't know if there was humiliation in that debate moment, because I think the smirk kind of detects that, you know, he knows maybe it's not sticking, who knows.
I think being a felon is cooler than being a ghost.
And he was aware that he was dominating as those minutes ticked by.
But overall, implicit, too, in this entire scene that produces this miraculous tableau is the projection that Biden is so frail, a breeze would just knock him over.
He would never survive gunfire in his direction.
We get to this really important thing about conspiracy theory origins in all of this, I think.
Like, this is a TV showman who's proven on the daily that he is a showman, a liar, malignant narcissist who would do anything to win and will do anything when he loses.
Deception and dissembling is woven into his nature.
Everybody knows it except his, you know, most ardent followers.
It is so easy to immediately imagine that this event is bullshit in those initial instance, given who this is and how badly he's damaged people's lives and how badly he'll damage the world when he gets elected in November.
And yet, if you spend 20 seconds on the actual reporting from the scene, Or the cost-benefit analysis, you say, Julian, you know it can't be staged.
There would have to be hundreds of people in on it, all of the Secret Service, the doctors, and would they really sacrifice two people over it?
The paradox is that on a gut level, and according to what this man projects all around him, Fakery both feels plausible and is deeply wrong to say out loud because it will raise the stakes, it will get people killed, and I think there's an epistemological fork in the road right there because the observer has a very short period of time to distinguish between what
Trump would totally do if he could, and what actually happens.
And then here's the really nutty part, how he blends those together.
Because we have this weird reality where the assassination attempt is not staged, and yet immediately as he survives it, he treats the reality as though it were a stage.
Yeah, and this is why I asked you about kayfabe.
Because it sounds like you're referring to something from professional wrestling where you're engaging in an activity where all manner of unplanned things might happen, where you might get hurt in certain ways, where you are to stay in character no matter what and keep reacting to the moment like an actor, but in this very, very visceral, bloody, kind of dangerous place.
Yeah, and even outside of the ring as well.
People get thrown out of WWE for breaking kayfabe when they're out at dinner, right?
And they don't perform the part.
So there's this wild meeting of worlds.
Where Trump survives something real that then gets immediately co-opted into what will become part of the stage performance of his self-image forever.
Like a real bullet has become a stage prop and a new mythology is going to spin out from this and likely define the rest of his life and maybe ours as well.
And so given all of this obvious sort of psychological knowledge for people on the left to avoid conspiracism, they not only have to disentangle themselves from their own emotions in response to a shattering event, we also have to forget everything that we know about the guy prior to the moment, because it doesn't matter whether being shot and injured is the greatest windfall he could score in terms of his paradoxical performance of victimhood and invulnerability.
So, there's this category gap between the profile that we've etched pretty clearly of him because we've been exposed to him so much, and then what you have to do as a responsible consumer and producer of media.
I mean, it's interesting.
It sounds like you're saying, you know, all of us would be conspiracy theorists if there wasn't some golden rule constraining us or something.
I mean, to me, the pull to construct a conspiracy theory about this just isn't at all strong.
It's not amplified by knowing what a liar he is, that the two don't, to me, have anything to do with each other.
As for the mythology, yeah.
I mean, I can imagine plenty of religious people who follow him believe he was saved by some kind of miracle because God wants him to triumph over the forces of leftist evil.
Yeah, I don't think I'm describing a pole to construct anything so much as an open door that I really have to close.
And I can see why some folks just can't close it, depending upon their circumstances.
But as for Trump's divine protection, he's implying he has it already.
And the hardcore Christian nationalists who are willing his deeper conversion into being, they are making their speeches, they're giving their sermons.
At Megachurch Calvary Chapel in Chino Hills, Pastor Jack Hibbs, who's a Trump evangelical advisor, noted that Trump's ear was hit for a reason.
Julian?
This has been a warning by Almighty God that your ear might be sanctified.
Will you hear this?
Can you hear this?
Listen to the Word of God.
Stop talking about God and come to know God.
It makes all the difference in the world.
Okay, in our final chapter today, we're going to rewind the calendar,
backing out of political violence territory to look at a more slow-moving moment of Trumpian
triumph over adversity, as presented by the season finale of the present Supreme Court.
Julian, when we started this podcast as skeptical trackers of wellness weirdness, we didn't anticipate that A Course in Miracles guru Marianne Williamson would launch a presidential run on the back of teaching people how to strengthen their immune systems against COVID through meditating.
We didn't know that the most paranoid New Age Catholic do-your-own-research conspiracy theorist on the planet, RFK Jr., would join her in the race to the White House.
We didn't predict that the core values of conspirituality, you know, self-sovereignty, natural, divine immunity, and doing your own research would become law.
But should we be surprised?
The Alitos protested Trump's election loss by hanging the flag upside down.
Clarence Thomas' wife Jeannie posted QAnon garbage while Clarence flew the world and MAGA donor private jets.
And then Trump appointed three rightward-leaning Catholics to the court, one of whom, Amy Coney Barrett, grew up in the high-intensity sect People of Praise.
Yeah, I mean, I think the thing that keeps hitting me lately is that we had no idea that the phenomenon we were covering Would take over, would become so much the norm.
I think for me, I thought, oh, this is this weird bubble that has emerged due to a perfect storm of variables and it'll probably eventually subside and we can be part of warning people about it.
Yeah, and I want to be careful here that I think I can imagine listeners who might say, oh, well, of course you've had to expand your remit as the time has changed.
And in that way, you might not be doing that much Differently from what Steve Hasen does when he moves from studying cults, you know, in a brick and mortar sense to talking about the cult of Trump or expanding his remit.
But I think what we try to do is to track the very specific ways in which Wellness influencers and New Age influencers and a number of spiritual gurus think about reality and think about the future and think about the apocalypse and the possibilities of apocalyptic, you know, events.
I think we're tracking that forward into more generalized cultural areas.
Yeah, and I think the process over the last four years, certainly for me, has been one of realizing
the phenomenon we started off studying, which was how right-wing conspiracy theories
were infiltrating the yoga and wellness space, was actually part of a much bigger phenomenon
that had multi, like it had multiple valences, multiple places where it could hook into
lots of different aspects of the culture and of the world.
And it's just so much bigger than we had thought.
And so we keep seeing these threads woven through in a lot of places.
Yeah, and at the risk of being apopheniacs, today we now see a conspirituality seeping into the law
through decisions on Trump's immunity and whether federal agencies will continue
So we're going to look at two cases.
So Trump v. USA.
It features a now-famous section in Justice Sotomayor's blistering dissent in the Trump v. U.S.
decision handed down on July 1st.
Julian, do you want to read that?
The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country and possibly the world.
When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority's reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution.
Orders the Navy SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival?
Immune.
Organizes a military coup to hold on to power.
Immune.
Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon.
Immune.
Immune.
Let the president violate the law.
Let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain.
Let him use his official power for evil ends.
Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be.
That is the majority's message today.
Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done.
The relationship between the president and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably.
In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law.
Just as a refresher, this case was about whether Trump bears criminal liability for post-election acts, including provoking the mob on January 6th into, let's underline it, political violence.
The Roberts Court declared that Trump and all future presidents are absolutely immune from whatever can be called an official act.
But unfortunately, they failed to really distinguish between official and unofficial acts.
For instance, was the then-transitioning former president acting in an official or campaigning, i.e.
non-official capacity on January 6th?
Well, he wasn't in office per se, but he was in communication with Mike Pence, which sounds pretty official.
The court decided basically that Trump asking Mike Pence to break election law was an official act.
It's really flabbergasting.
I posted a video to Instagram back when our episode 187 on Project 2025 dropped in January, and it featured Bill Barr talking candidly to the Federalist Society and just having fun.
Uh, making jokes about how scared progressives are of the term unitary executive theory.
He goes, Whoa.
And the thing is unitary executive theory is a key piece of the legal philosophy underlying project 2025 and everything that you were just talking about.
And yeah, Bill Barr, it actually is scary.
It gives the president absolute power over every other aspect of government.
And the reasoning here, I think, is fascinating because I think this official-unofficial conundrum points to a metaphysics of Trump that's going to strike a lot of subconscious chords.
Like, Sotomayor invokes kingship in her amazing passage, but I think it might go deeper than that, pointing to the old questions about Jesus himself.
Is he a god or is he a man?
If Trump is a god, he can't be responsible.
He's not a citizen.
He has a divine immune system, but if he's only a man, he can have his flaws.
They don't matter.
They're temporal.
So according to the Supreme Court, Trump is both official and unofficial.
Rising to his feet after getting grazed by that bullet, he's king and victim.
The paradoxes all point to a divine nature, but they're making me see that the line between divine nature and empty spectacle is really, really hard to find.
And then there's also an affect thing going on, which I think is really important.
Sotomayor pings over and over again in her dissent that Roberts and Clarence Thomas and the rest are afraid that if the president is scared of prosecution, he won't be able to act boldly.
She writes, The majority's single-minded fixation on the president's need for boldness and dispatch ignores the countervailing need for accountability and restraint.
Yeah, it's not hard for me to read that line now through the lens of tens of thousands of people in that arena in Milwaukee at the RNC convention chanting, fight, fight, fight.
Yeah, and they're not only chanting fight, fight, fight, they're also turning towards where the media is located.
Yes, right.
yelling obscenities at them and threatening them and saying this is their fault.
So Roberts and Thomas are using language like energetic, bold, fearless, unhesitating to describe their vision of executive power.
And like parts of their opinions sound like a damn transcript from a fit-for-service leadership summit.
Yeah, it's about self-actualization and like living your best life.
Yeah, and the logic is just about as sound, meaning, I would say, insane, because the majority is saying that unless a president is granted immunity for official quasi-divine acts, they will lack the bold, energetic, fearless initiative that they need to carry out the business of the office.
However, the cases about whether Trump in his official position can be prosecuted for undertaking actions that were targeting the validity of the presidency itself, he was taking bold and energetic action Yeah, that's what it's really about.
And the hypocrisy with these folks is that they want to have the cake of imposing Christian nationalism on all of society such that their theocracy invades people's lives.
I'm talking about a lot of the things laid out in Project 2025, while also eating the cake of claiming to do away with wasteful and invasive government agencies interfering in people's lives because they're all about freedom.
But that's really a cover for how those agencies that get in the way.
Let me say it another way.
That's really a cover for how those agencies get in the way of capitalism by protecting human beings and by protecting the environment.
Then they also want to supposedly protect the Constitution from the overreach of the exact checks and balances that the framers built in to prevent monarchical and religious tyranny.
So it's a tortured logic.
That I think gives up the game that we're not in jurisprudence anymore.
Like, there's no pretense of deliberation or sobriety.
We're somewhere far above the clouds, in which one person can be two things at the same time, in which Trump's destructive actions can also be his creative actions, like, I don't know, Shiva or something, in which the things that he might be responsible for, he could not possibly be responsible for.
Like, where are we?
And I think it suits that part of his base that we have followed very well.
Because when New Age channeler Lori Ladd tuned into the Galactic Federation and heard the message that Trump was a lightworker, she wasn't thinking about his politics.
We said this over and over again, that he hit this demographic that had been politically disconnected for decades.
And when countless Q-pilled yoga and wellness people followed suit, they weren't worried about populist fascism.
I don't think most of them knew what it was.
They didn't care about the policy details of immigration, which they hadn't been following, or of Roe v. Wade, or of the climate.
They were tuned out of the complexities.
What they cared about, primarily, was the promise of a new paradigm of absolute radiant certainty.
And through some combination of his clownish outsider absurdity mugging in the gilded ballroom of Mar-a-Lago, somehow Trump offers a symbol of that.
Not someone who could win within the system in which they had lost trust, but someone who could simply brush it aside as the mundane obstruction to spiritual glory that it always was.
Yeah, it really appeals to that fantasy that there can be one answer, right?
There can just be one enlightening moment in which then all of the conflicts and complexities are resolved.
And it's so breathtakingly irresponsible because it becomes, like with Lori Ladd, this appeal to a higher authority anointing a chosen political figure.
But they're still naively ignoring the real-world impact on so many less privileged people's lives that this will happen.
I've just realized something in hearing the way you said that, Julian, that maybe a short-form definition for conspirituality is that it is a reaction to the rigors of democracy, actually.
And you know, just within the sort of New Age spiritual zeitgeist, to me, that's also the echo, right?
The echo is all of your human suffering is based on some just central mistake in your belief system, some lack of consciousness, that if you could just Make this change.
If you could just take this workshop, if you could just be on this diet, if you could just devote yourself to this guru, if you could just fully commit to understanding, for example, that there are no victims, then you'd resolve all of the existential angst that is inherent to being human.
And that's always a lie.
And it has to be a singular answer, and that means that there's no room for town meetings, there's no room for committees, there's no room for actually the hard work of disagreeing and figuring out what is best but not ideal for everybody.
Yeah, and there's no room for anything that wouldn't fit on a bumper sticker.
The second case.
This is Loper Bright, the Secretary of Commerce.
This is the Chevron Doctrine decision.
Now the unitary executive principle put forward by Project 2025, it expands but it also narrows presidential power down to a spear tip.
The Heritage Foundation folks want the president to have strong executive order control over everything, but they don't want it to extend through agency appointments.
So, it wasn't good enough that Trump appointed climate monsters to the EPA, or MLM kingpins to the FTC, or Betsy DeVos as education department head.
They don't want federal agencies to have any power at all, to even exist.
The ultimate goal is to shut them all down.
And with the Supreme Court decision overturning the Chevron doctrine, they took giant leaps towards that goal.
Now, this doctrine comes from a 1984 case in which a Reagan-era change made by the EPA to the 1963 Clean Air Act allowed companies to dodge some pollution controls, but environmentalists sued the EPA saying they should do better, they should work harder, they should exercise more power, and the court agreed with them, with Chevron Oil and other polluting corporations losing out.
They were friends of the case.
The upshot from all of the wrangling is that the Supreme Court determined that federal agencies should have strong interpretive influence over complicated matters where laws may be ambiguous and where lawmakers may be over their heads.
And this was a validation of the agency principle that part of the executive branch should consist of verified experts in long-term positions.
So, that's the deep state, right?
And they should be able to make difficult calls on environmental, food, building, and medical safety.
Like, who else is going to do it?
Well, the Roberts Court says, we're going to do it.
And so now it's going to be federally appointed judges who have the last word on whether asbestos is harmful, ultimately, but also how much, whether abortion medication is safe, whether climate change is a real thing, that real emissions impact.
And how are they going to do it?
They're gonna Joe Rogan that shit.
They're gonna do their own research.
So, this is a decision that ratifies a whole epistemological style that's at the center of everything that we cover.
Like, what experts?
What elites are gonna tell me what to do?
What bean-counting pencil pushers should be in control of what I eat or how I build my house or how much gas I can burn?
Who's going to tell me what I should eat?
This is anti-intellectual and it works on a populist level because it reflects an accumulated disillusionment It's also the classic mirror world thing, right?
Because what they refer to as the deep state.
Really is lifelong civil servants and bureaucrats who know what they're doing, who are experts, right, who consult with scientists and who serve in administration after administration, maintaining some level of neutrality or some level of like, hey, there's a mixture of Democrats and Republicans who are in these different positions.
And what they're doing is not really about politics.
It's about how do we do these duties that are for the good of all Americans?
And the other thing that's going on here is, yeah, they're gonna Joe Rogan that shit.
They're gonna do their own research.
They're gonna go off of their vibes.
But they're also, the other big thing that's been happening with the Supreme Court
that might get lost in the shuffle for a lot of people is these massive corruption allegations and discoveries
and all of this great research that's investigative reporting
that's essentially showing like, wow, these guys are deeply in bed
with all of these Republican mega donors who take them on vacations and buy houses for them
and give them extremely lavish gifts.
So that's gonna be part of their decision-making process too.
And now that's just all out in the open.
It's like we have a group of dudes who are recognizing like,
oh, I can live out my bucket list now.
Here I am.
I have ultimate power.
I can do everything I've always wanted to do.
We've been railing against activist judges from the left for the last 50 years.
Right.
Well, hold my beer.
So I don't follow Supreme Court rulings closely enough.
It's really not my beat to be able to see how the themes dovetail over time.
But it does seem to me That the self-eating snake of these two decisions from this Trump court is really a harbinger of a more lockstep and predictable march towards a complete dismantling of the state.
Like if you decide that Trump is so above the law he's quasi-divine, then of course you're gonna have to let his appointees act out on his intuitions.
So right here I want to actually read something from Derek.
Derek is not With us today, but he and I have done a lot of work.
And in fact, he's been doing huge amounts of work in terms of reading through the entire 900 plus page document that is the Project 2025 sort of mission statement and breaking it all down.
We've been doing chapters both for Patreon and for some of our Saturday briefs.
And so this is from him.
He says, this accomplishes an even bigger agenda item in Project 2025.
The longtime conservative and libertarian dream, stripping regulating power away from the federal government.
The right has been chipping away at this since the New Deal, and the overturning of this case is possibly the most significant advancement in the 86 years since the last pieces of New Deal legislation were put in place.
In the Patreon bonus series we've been doing, we've focused on individual chapters of Project 2025 and covered dozens of regulations that the project calls for.
And Chevron is the piece that will help them accomplish those steps.
Here are a few of them.
So completely dismantling Obamacare while dismantling the entire Department of Health and Human Services and forcing every citizen onto the open insurance market, including senior citizens.
Gutting the EPA and eliminating the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assistance wing, which is the law enforcement agency that covers all environmental issues.
Let's just get rid of that.
The government would basically no longer be able to hold corporations accountable for pollution or environmental destruction.
Eliminating the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, which oversees the Department of Labor's non-discrimination policies.
They want to do away entirely with any discrimination legislation because more Americans are interracially marrying.
And Derek added here, I'm not kidding.
That's their reason.
It's too hard to really track ethnicities now, goes their logic.
But a few pages later in that chapter, the Department of Labor will actually track women's fertility on a monthly basis.
That's everybody who has a job?
Yeah, we'd have to ask Derek to comment specifically on the details of that.
But, you know, we just covered this and the amazing thing about the Department of Labor chapter is how much of it focuses on Christianity and family values and single income families and not having any kind of reproductive freedom for women covered under their employment insurance, right?
Last one Derek has here, defanging of the Department of Agriculture while strengthening agriculture gag laws.
There are many more, and Chevron was basically a keystone that held all the regulatory powers to keep the right in check.
With it removed, the federal government will basically be toothless when it comes to finding almost any corporate power.
Well, Derek, geez, thank you so much.
I understand.
It's much worse than we think.
Yeah, I understand why you didn't want to be here for that.
Yeah, OK.
So, well, Julian, any hopeful words as we go?
Hopeful words?
This is such... We knew that the months leading up to the election were going to be wild.
And we're going to be intense and stressful and scary.
I didn't have the events of the last six weeks on my bingo card.
And, uh, yeah, I'm just, I'm just trying to keep my head above water.
So hopeful words would be friends.
We've got to stick together.
We've got to figure out what kinds of local and national action we can take to participate in the local process, because we are hurtling now.
At turbo speed towards some very, very scary developments.
I mean, the hopeful thing that I can say is that, you know, if anybody out there is in the Toronto area, I've got lots of romaine in the garden.
It's really, really good.
Come by, I'll give you a head.
But yeah, it's hopeful.
Stick together, everybody.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspirituality Podcast.
We'll catch you back here on the main feed or on Patreon.
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