Just two days after surviving an assassination attempt, Donald Trump announced JD Vance as his VP pick. Vance has made a dramatic U-turn from calling Trump a "reprehensible idiot" and "America's Hitler" in 2016. But who is this 39 year old, really—who after less than two years of on-the-job experience, is now almost a heartbeat away from leading the free world?
Well, not unlike other right-wing populists in Europe and at home, Vance has an idiosyncratic political affinity for JRR Tolkien. We might even call him America’s conspiracy hobbit at this point, fresh from the Appalachian Shire but inexorably drawn by the burning crypto rings of Silicon Valley to eventually land at the feet of Sauron to meet his fate.
But to answer this question and examine where JD Vance fits into the conspirituality landscape, we’ll be breaking down a speech recently released by ProPublica. It’s from an intimate invitation-only conservative event hosted in 2021 by a group called the Teneo Network. Behind closed doors, Vance encouraged his audience to get away from that weird feeling in their chests when listening to the unique truths of conspiracy theorists. Like, Alex Jones sees the world more clearly than MSNBC's Rachel Maddow. The right also apparently needs more oligarchs. Oh, and the literal Devil is at work in the world around us.
Show Notes
J.D. Vance Speaks at a Private Teneo Network Event, Sept. 2021
Inside the “Private and Confidential” Conservative Group That Promises to “Crush Liberal Dominance”
How Lord of the Rings Shaped JD Vance’s Politics
The Influences on JD Vance’s Political Philosophy
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
If a person pauses with some flicker of moral conscience because it's rising up and it's saying inside, I'm not quite sure I can sign on to that theory about Sandy Hook, Vance is telling his followers to let it go, just let it flow.
And he's speaking to a demographic that needs reassurance, confidence, and validation of their persecution complex.
They need constant reminders of everything that they've lost.
His listeners need permission to be enthusiastic about the waves of rage and resentment,
and perhaps even the surges of violence that rise up in response to these validations.
If you're a fan of workplace comedies like The Office or satire like The Onion,
then I have a podcast that I know you'll love.
It's called Mega.
Mega is an improvised satire from the staff of a fictional megachurch.
That's the premise.
Each week, the hosts, Holly Laurent and Greg Hess, are joined by guests, people like Cecily Strong or Jen Hatmaker.
To portray characters inside the colorful world of Twin Hills Community Church, which they describe as a mega church with a tiny family feel.
The result is a sharp-witted and hilarious look into the world of commercialized religion using humor to cope with the frightening amount of power that church and religion have.
So I very much recommend you checking out Megha's episodes, like the one with Saturday Night Live's Cecily Strong playing Cece String, a hilarious character who's fresh out of jail, and also comedian Jason Mantzoukas.
You may find yourself dying of laughter and perhaps inspired to take an improv class yourself.
Megha is able to keep you laughing as you think and reflect about the world we live in.
You can find Megha on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Comedy fans, listen up!
I've got an incredible podcast for you to add to your queue.
Nobody listens to Paula Poundstone.
You probably know that I made an appearance recently on this absolutely ludicrous variety show that combines the fun of a late night show with the wit of a public radio program and the unique knowledge of a guest expert who was me at the time, if you can believe that.
Brace yourself for a rollercoaster ride of wildly diverse topics, from Paula's hilarious attempts to understand QAnon to riveting conversations with a bonafide rocket scientist.
You'll never know what to expect, but you'll know you're in for a high-spirited, hilarious time.
This is comedian Paula Poundstone and her co-host Adam Thelber, who's great.
They're both regular panelists on NPR's classic comedy show.
You may recognize them from that, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me.
And they bring the same acerbic, yet infectiously funny energy to Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone.
When I was on, they grilled me in an absolutely unique way about conspiracy theories and yoga and yoga pants and QAnon, and we had a great time.
They were very sincerely interested in the topic, but they still found plenty of hilarious angles in terms of the questions they asked and how they followed up on whatever I gave them, like good comedians do.
Check out their show.
There are other recent episodes you might find interesting as well, like hearing crazy Hollywood stories from legendary casting director Joel Thurm, or their episode about killer whales and killer theme songs.
So Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone is an absolute riot you don't want to miss.
Find nobody listens to Paula Poundstone on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Hey, everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and
spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
We are on Instagram and threads at ConspiratualityPod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes over on Patreon.
You can also get our Monday bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
And as independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
And as independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
J.D.
Vance.
Conspiracy Hobbit.
Just two days after surviving an assassination attempt, Donald Trump made history by announcing his vice president pick, J.D.
Vance, during last week's Republican National Convention.
And Vance became the first millennial to appear on a presidential ticket.
As it turns out, Vance has made a dramatic U-turn from calling Trump a reprehensible idiot and America's Hitler in 2016.
But who is this 39-year-old really, who after less than two years of on-the-job experience is now almost a heartbeat away from leading the free world?
Well, not unlike other right-wing populists in Europe and at home, Vance has an idiosyncratic political affinity for J.R.R.
Tolkien, We might even call him America's Conspiracy Hobbit at this point, fresh from the Appalachian Shire, but inexorably drawn by the burning crypto rings of Silicon Valley, to eventually land at the feet of Sauron to meet his fate.
But to answer this question a little more seriously and examine where J.D.
Vance fits into the conspirituality landscape, we'll be breaking down a speech recently released by ProPublica.
It's from an intimate, invitation-only conservative event hosted in 2021 by a group called the Teneo Network.
Behind those closed doors, Vance said some interesting things.
He encouraged his audience to get away from that weird feeling in their chests when listening to the unique truths of conspiracy theorists.
Like, Alex Jones sees the world more clearly than MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, apparently.
The right also needs more oligarchs, he said.
Oh, and the literal devil is at work in the world all around us.
Now, one quick editorial note here, listeners.
Starting this week, we are resurrecting a beloved segment from our early days called This Week in Conspirituality, which starts right now with stories about a panic over lead in tampons, a little bit of hormone grifting,
and a wave of anti-feminism sweeping through the wellness world.
This week in Conspiratuality.
Now you might have seen some recent headlines about toxic chemicals in tampons.
And who knew that lead and arsenic were in those things?
A couple weeks ago, and to be clear, we were going to run this segment last week, but then we got pushed from the assassination attempt, which kind of filled everyone's feed.
But it's been about two weeks now, but all of a sudden, I saw all of these, I knew it posts.
Can you believe this?
And these always occur whenever another unreliable study hits the mainstream and is taken over by publications that just want to grab the headlines.
Now instead of reacting, I just waited a few days because I knew experts would weigh in on this topic and I wasn't disappointed.
So off the top, the level of chemicals detected in tampons were nowhere near harmful, but that just doesn't make for a good headline in the attention economy.
So let's look at a few examples of people clapping back at that study, or at least the way that some journalists covered the study.
So on her substack, Immunologic, biomedical scientist and friend of the pod, Dr. Andrea Love, wonders why tampons Well, as it turns out, a lot of them are made of cotton, which pulls in lead from the soil.
In fact, all of our cotton clothing and textiles contain lead.
So if you're concerned about tampons going inside of the body, Dr. Love points out that the structure of the vaginal mucosa and epithelium in our skin is pretty similar.
Plus, she points out, tea leaves contain roughly 42 times the amount of lead as tampons.
No!
That's a lot, and you're like steeping that in hot water, right?
And I believe it goes inside of your body as well.
Yes, uh-huh, right.
Right down the gullet, actually.
The takeaway is to stop drinking tea.
So, bottled water has between 10 and 32 times as much lead, and uh-oh, cannabis has 16 times the amount, so I guess we're all in trouble here.
I knew it!
Point being, everything in existence is chemistry and the dose makes the poison.
As Dr. Love points out, the study controls weren't even that good.
There was too much variability between the production process of the brands that were chosen to be studied.
And the sample size was only 30 tampons from 14 different brands, which is tiny.
But that didn't stop wellness influencers and naturopaths jumping on the headlines to sell supplements, writes gynecologist and also friend of the pod, Dr. Jen Gunter.
She published an article called, Don't Panic About Lead and Tampons on her subsack, The Vagenda.
Now, here are Dr. Gunter's five key takeaways, exactly how she wrote them.
The arsenic, cadmium, and lead levels in this small sample cannot reflect what is found in all tampons.
The source of the arsenic, cadmium, and lead is almost certainly the soil.
It's possible that the non-cotton components of the tampons could interfere with testing, so there are some unknowns.
Extracting metals with nitric acid and then baking them for over an hour at 180 degrees Celsius is not reflective of what will happen in the vagina.
Gotta love Dr. Gunter's candor.
Finally, even if the results are correct and reflective of what is in tampons, if all the arsenic, cadmium, and lead made it into the vagina, Highly improbable, like very highly improbable, she writes.
The levels are still within safety standards.
All right, finally, epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz weighed in on his substat called Health Third, which is also excellent.
He notes something relevant to the broader wellness industry, the naturalistic fallacy or the idea that what's natural is better or pure.
He writes, quote, It's also interesting to note that there were no meaningful differences between organic and non-organic tampons, which implies that these contaminants are environmental rather than caused in the production line.
It's likely that the extremely small quantities of lead and arsenic are simply present in the soil that the cotton, which is used to make the tampons, is grown in.
So again, chemistry is everywhere inside and outside of us.
Humans are, at a fundamental level, biochemical beings.
Replicating chemicals inside of laboratories doesn't make them bad or toxic by default, just as nature is not always benevolent.
So the next time you see a scare headline about toxicity, just wait a few days before coming to a conclusion.
The reality of our media environment is that we need to build in time
between the damage that clickbait journalists do before people who actually know what they're talking about
can weigh in.
Next up, the preoccupation with supposedly plummeting testosterone levels
leading to the loss of manly men is perennial amongst bro-science supplement salesmen
salesmen, and conservatives raging against feminazis and soyboys.
And this famously led to Tucker Carlson's endorsement of testicle tanning.
As a cure for this fabricated crisis, biohacking workout routines, ice baths, infrared saunas, continuous glucose monitors, as well as buttery, buttery coffee, ketogenic or paleo diets, and intermittent fasting all seek to naturally restore fragile hormonal manliness.
Now, in an odd twist, some of the top dogs in the manosphere also either secretly or openly get on testosterone replacement therapy for good measure, injecting prescription testosterone, like Joe Rogan and Dave Asprey.
And high-profile raw organ meat-eating bodybuilders like Liver King turn out to be juiced to the gills on those not-so-natural steroids.
Well, what about Hulk Hogan?
That's all natural.
Absolutely.
All natural, pure, red-blooded American male.
But there's a surprising new hormonal wellness trend that was not on my bingo card.
And again, previous Conspirituality guest Dr. Jen Gunter recently addressed this via an Instagram post, along with a good reminder about how to evaluate any kind of online health advice.
Now, in this post, she was referring to a piece in The Guardian from July 5th titled, Prescribing of Testosterone for Middle-Aged Women Out of Control, Experts Warn of Long-Term Health Implications Amid Concerns Over Advice from Social Media Evangelists.
The article quotes medical experts concerned that women are being given the impression by influencers and celebrities that testosterone will give them energy, improve fatigue, and protect the health of their muscles, bones, brains, and hearts.
But that the evidence-based scientific consensus only supports this therapy for postmenopausal women with low libido, and then only once psychosocial causes for that low libido have been ruled out.
Yeah, okay, so just to underline this, Julian, this means that tea might help with sex drive if the problem isn't depression, overwork, or feelings of distance and alienation from your partner, or, you know, that your partner is an ass and you're over him.
Yeah, exactly.
So, I reached out to Dr. Gunther to find out what she meant because the caption in her video said this, testosterone is being sold to some women by some meno influencers.
And when I first saw that, I thought she meant manosphere influencers.
And then I looked again, meno influencers on social media as an essential hormone that needs to be, and in quotes here, topped up.
So, let's hear that clip first.
And then we'll talk about one of these prominent meno influencers.
Once again, I'm just going to put in a plea for looking at guidelines.
So guidelines, whether it's for hormone therapy, whether it's for statins, whether it's for any medical therapy, have been reviewed by multiple people.
Biases have been disclosed.
There has been a consensus about what the body of work shows.
So when people are being mavericks and they're going against the guidelines, They have some kind of agenda.
It's not your health.
Because if the data were that compelling, it would have affected the guidelines.
And here I'm specifically talking about testosterone, which is a valid therapy for low libido.
There is no good data to support it for any other reason in menopause.
And people who tell you that your testosterone levels are plummeting and menopause don't even understand the basic biology.
Someone who's telling you that your testosterone levels should be topped up doesn't understand the basic biology of menopause or of hormones.
So again, follow the guidelines.
You can look to the British Menopause Society, you can look to the International Menopause Society, you can look to the North American Menopause Society, now called the Menopause Society, Google those guidelines, read them.
They are pretty accessible for everybody.
And really just be aware of people on here who clearly have some kind of bias.
Yeah.
So the reason that I thought this was interesting is that this is now crossing over into the demographic of middle-aged women, right?
Of something that we've seen a lot in the manosphere.
When I talked to Dr. Gunther, She pointed me in the direction of someone named Kate Meir.
She describes herself as a woman's health expert, but has a degree in law and politics and has spent most of her career as a film critic and a novelist, which typically is what gives you scientific expertise.
In 2022, though, she published a book titled Everything You Need to Know About Menopause, But We're Too Afraid to Ask, and then followed it up with another book published this past April, Everything You Need to Know About the Pill, But We're Too Afraid to Ask.
She also pitched and produced two documentaries for Channel 4 in the UK on these topics.
And then her Instagram pages supporting this work are called Menoscandal and Pillscandal, respectively.
And she's a self-described activist for something called the Menopause Charity.
Which is registered in England and Wales.
But when I look at their website, it seems to be run by a group of doctors who are all on the same page of educating women on the benefits of hormone replacement therapy that includes testosterone, alongside several publicists, media experts and brand strategists.
So it's an interesting kind of charity.
Kate Mirra's work leverages concerns that seem legitimate about misogyny in medicine and menopause not being taken seriously enough by the research community.
But then it drives the same kind of narrative we see from alt-health pseudoscience promoters.
The mainstream is lying to you.
You can't trust the institutions, and these cherry-picked studies over here represent what will inevitably be the leading edge soon to be accepted.
Her menoscandal page vigorously promotes testosterone therapy for women.
But doctors who follow the existing scientific consensus say that the evidence just isn't there for the claims being made by doctors touting the value of testosterone, some even for women who are not yet menopausal.
They also point out the lack of research involving potential health risks for women who end up with supraphysiological testosterone.
To quote from The Guardian, Dr. Laura Briggs, chair of the British Menopause Society says, we don't know what's happening with their arterial systems or even their hearts.
Men who use high dose testosterone in gyms develop cardiomyopathy, where the heart muscle gets weak and it cannot pump and some die.
So it's not nothing.
Another person quoted, Professor Alice Mukherjee, an endocrinologist, says that women have come to her who were losing their hair and concerned about their voice deepening after having been prescribed testosterone without then being well monitored and ending up with male levels of the hormone.
So I filed this under the bespoke tinkering of optimization pseudoscience using powerful medical tools in ways that conflict with scientific consensus and based on a kind of conspiratorial reasoning and rationale for why they don't want you to know this.
Thanks again to Dr. Jen Gunter for her help here, and I'll just underline her statement about medical guidelines
reflecting what the best current evidence shows.
And that mavericks telling you to do anything else are usually doing so on weak or non-existent evidence for their
own reasons, and that's not your health.
If you're a fan of workplace comedies like The Office or satire like The Onion, then I have a podcast that I know
you'll love.
It's called Mega.
Mega is an improvised satire from the staff of a fictional megachurch.
That's the premise.
Each week, the hosts, Holly Laurent and Greg Hess, are joined by guests, people like Cecily Strong or Jen Hatmaker.
To portray characters inside the colorful world of Twin Hills Community Church, which they describe as a mega church with a tiny family feel.
The result is a sharp-witted and hilarious look into the world of commercialized religion using humor to cope with the frightening amount of power that church and religion have.
So I very much recommend you checking out Megha's episodes, like the one with Saturday Night Live's Cecily Strong playing Cece String, a hilarious character who's fresh out of jail, and also comedian Jason Mantzoukas.
You may find yourself dying of laughter and perhaps inspired to take an improv class yourself.
Megha is able to keep you laughing as you think and reflect about the world we live in.
You can find Megha on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
This is Chris Christensen from the Amateur Traveler Podcast.
The Amateur Traveler Podcast is about the love of travel.
It's about where to go and why you should go there.
We're going to open up to you different destinations you haven't heard of or places you have heard of but things you didn't know to do while you were there.
Each episode is about 45 minutes long and it's typically an interview with someone who wrote the guidebook on that destination or who has been there or who's a local tour guide or someone who is an expert on that destination and knows how to tell you what to do to get the most out of your precious vacation time.
So if you value your vacation time and you want to use it wisely, listen to Amateur Traveler and learn about destinations both domestic and international.
Places you've heard of and places you haven't.
Amateur Traveler has almost 900 episodes talking about different destinations.
So if there's a place you want to go, odds are we've already covered it and can help you plan a trip there.
amateur traveler subscribe today Boca still Toro Panama
A secluded seaside hideaway.
Scott Makeda has no idea that his tropical haven is about to become his personal hell.
A serial killer pretending to be a therapist.
Holbert rents a room and that's where he set up his business as a fake shrink.
Accusations of a gringo mafia.
Gun running, drugs.
A slaughtered family.
And then he goes back and he plants another bullet.
A killer on tape.
Hey man, I'm guilty.
Everybody knows I'm a monster.
The law of the jungle is simple.
Survive.
I'm your host, Candace DeLong, from Treefort Media and Village Roadshow Entertainment Group.
This is Natural Selection, Scott vs. Wild Bill.
Available now, wherever you get your podcasts.
New episodes drop weekly.
Okay, potential lead in tampons, bespoke tinkering of hormones, the old themes of purity and pollution and optimizing the self through the reproductive system are always in the air.
And your two stories today, Julian and Derek, seem pretty mainstream, but we also know that when the pollution optimization anxieties ramp up in the new age and wellness worlds, things get pretty twisted with pastel QAnon influencers going so far as to worry about how The sheeple who are dumb enough to be vaccinated are shedding on pregnant women and causing spontaneous abortions, and then tech moguls start setting up dating sites like Unjected so that the purest lovers can find each other.
So these anxieties about lead and tampons can, you know, cut in slightly different directions with different political valences, but I want to flag that in the world that we cover, They also feed into distorted and reactionary conversations about gender and feminism that are completely oblivious to the fact that J.D.
Vance and everyone behind him wants to tinker with and control every aspect of women's reproductive lives.
Okay, so a few weeks ago, I published a brief called Free Birth to Born Again Pipeline, and it was about how free birth mogul Yolande Norris-Clark had joined the ranks of fellow professional anti-woke contrarians In letting Jesus take the wheel through her conversion to Orthodox Christianity.
And the episode touched on how interwoven with her conversion content, Norris Clark was also talking about how she was now rejecting feminism, which she said had encouraged her to hate men and had led her away from her full sovereign divine femininity.
She isn't an outlier woman influencer taking up the manosphere torch to criticize all of feminism in reductive and bizarre ways.
There's, you know, a huge trending trad wife discourse on Instagram and TikTok, but Norris Clark I don't think would stoop to associate with those influencers.
Her vibe is too educated, too highbrow.
She does have a high visibility colleague in this, in Kelly Brogan.
And they've been collaborating on various pieces of media.
Now Brogan's latest gig, she has a new book out in this lane, is to tell the world that feminism is a nefarious psy-op.
And I've got an excerpt here from a little pamphlet she put out online to promote this.
It's called The New Feminism.
And maybe Julian, you can read this graph from it.
According to many, Feminism was a Rockefeller funded, socially engineered movement.
It was primarily intended to offer women the poison apple of egalitarian opportunity while removing them from their home.
Oh boy, sorry to get through this.
And from the role as primary caretaker of their children.
This rendered them additional taxpayers and created the conditions for industrialized schooling to program children into good workers.
Over time, We became more and more disconnected from our role as nurturers, our connection to the natural world, and our inner cycles.
We became the embittered, pantsuit-wearing corporate climber in competition with men and other women.
Now, as of now, Kelly Brogan has not yet endorsed Kamala Harris, and I wonder why, right?
So, listeners should be alerted that the get-in-touch-with-their-feelings is in scare mock quotes in the text, because Brogan is sneering at that idea, which is kind of wild for an old hand at New Age content, but also As an anti-psychiatry psychiatrist who actually made her name by telling the world that feelings had to be explored and owned, they couldn't be modulated by medication.
Now, at the end of my story here, I'll get to her source for the claim that feminism is a psy-op.
But first, and just cutting to the chase, what is her answer for it?
Well, to help women reclaim their sovereignty, she advises BDSM, which is as bad as it sounds.
I mean, it's possible, but not in her hands.
Exploring sexual submission, she argues, will teach women more generally that their safety comes from men.
So, by the way, we'll be dropping an episode in which our correspondent and veteran dom, Esme Providence-Brown, will be walking me through whether Brogan knows what she's talking about.
I think we're calling the episode so far, Kelly Brogan's Divine Dungeon.
So, I'll zoom out here to big picture three things.
First of all, Kelly Brogan and Norris Clark are, you know, as someone tagged Jordan Peterson a few years back, stupid people's versions of smart people.
They have big vocabularies, they speak in jargon-laced full paragraphs, unwaveringly confident, and both of them, they show as much of their ass on their understanding of feminism as they did when they pretended to understand that COVID was just a flu.
Secondly, the understanding that says that if you identify as a member of an oppressed class, you're really isolating yourself in an identity is a core sort of thesis that they have.
but the purpose of understanding your class status in feminism and going right back to Marx
is not about psychology.
It's about recognizing strength in numbers.
For instance, we're all under the same boot.
We're all in this together.
We can feel solidarity in a shared class struggle.
And Norris Clark and Brogan think that feminism is about personal psychology alone,
but in fact, it's really a sociological revelation.
And that's why and how intersectionality emerges.
From recognizing that sources of cruelty come at stigmatized groups from many angles, and recognizing ways in which you are systematically oppressed doesn't make you weak, it makes you sane, it makes you connected.
And then lastly, both of them have indicated in dozens of pieces of media over the past few months that their new orientations, so this is Orthodox Christianity for Norris Clark and the Power of Eros for Kelly Brogan, have formed in response to the chaos of their own online behavior during the pandemic.
Specifically, they both imply that their conspiracy theorizing during COVID was an expression of the same victim consciousness that they rail against.
They both, foolishly, childishly, in their words, bought into the story of governmental overlords destroying all that was tender and natural and divine.
But here's the kicker.
They say they did that because of feminism, making them paranoid, perpetual victims, forbidden from stepping into their own power, forbidden from taking responsibility for their own emotions.
But I actually think there's an easier explanation.
I think that a big part of what's happening with Brogan and Norris Clark is that they're feeling post-aggression remorse.
Like, these are two people who were some of the biggest assholes on the internet while the world was shut down and people were dying of COVID.
But it couldn't be their personalities that caught them up, right?
Like, it's a good thing they had feminism to blame.
So, Julian, here's how Brogan tracks her own development in that online pamphlet.
A lifelong self-identified feminist I celebrated the HPV vaccine, felt certain that elective c-section was the only sensible way to birth, and that my menstrual cycle was a nuisance that continuous birth control could take care of.
When I became an angry activist and changed my tune on all the aforementioned merits of modern womanhood, I was still fighting to win.
But as the erotic caress of the enemy always is, I was obsessed by pharma and conventional medicine and white men plotting behind closed doors to control us in an open-air prison.
I was driven by fear, specifically fear of being killed by a man.
The man.
Yeah, so she's getting over it by alchemizing that fear through the practice of subbing in BDSM, so we'll get to that with Esme Providence Brown.
Talk about oversharing.
Yeah, exactly.
I don't think that Brogan's anti-feminism was ever really about feminism.
Actually, I think it's about her psychological responses to things, which come in waves, always characterized by disgust.
You know, she published her first book with Hay House in 2015.
You know, Louise Hay and her stable of writers all targeted what they called victim consciousness.
And then she began to echo Louise Hay as an HIV-AIDS contrarian.
And that vibe blended in with echoes of Gamergate, which is the core engine of the black-pilled manosphere.
Which began with an attack on a woman developer who dared to make a video game about depression.
Now Brogan has nothing to do with that, even though she's in that manosphere zone when she shares Alex Jones and David Data.
But the zeitgeist of disparaging women who share about their depression online is in the water that she swims in.
And to that point, Her only citation for feminism as a Rockefeller woke enslavement plot is a single interview that Alex Jones did with filmmaker Aaron Russo, who directed The Rose with Bette Midler in 1979 and then Trading Places with Eddie Murphy in 83.
Then he turned into a crank with, like, faux documentaries about the New World Order, and then he almost became the Libertarian presidential candidate in 2004.
He gives one interview and says this one thing to Alex Jones that, you know, the Rockefellers plan feminism as a psyop, and that's her single source on the entire history of feminism.
But it shouldn't be surprising because, you know, she decided COVID was fake based on a few quotes from Rudolf Steiner.
I mean, I want to ask you, Matthew, how's your chest feeling?
Do you have that weird feeling in your chest?
I do have that weird feeling in my chest and I want to ask JD Vance what I should do with it.
Let's see what he has to say.
You need to get away from it and he'll tell you how.
Okay. J.D.
Vance presents as calm and competent.
He has piercing blue eyes.
He styles himself as a plain-spoken man of the people.
Vance claims to be from Appalachia, after all, and wrote a bestseller called Hillbilly Elegy.
But it's more accurate to say, it turns out, that he grew up in suburban Ohio.
And he's actually a bit of an intellectual.
He's well-read, well-spoken, and those who know him say he is very disciplined.
Vance has a law degree from Yale.
Well spoken, sure.
A bit of an intellectual sure.
That book was really painful.
I read half of it and put it down shortly after it came out because it's just so poorly written.
deals, venture capital firm, Mithril Capital.
Well spoken, sure.
A bit of an intellectual, sure.
That book was really painful.
I read half of it and put it down shortly after it came out because it's just so poorly
written.
So even content aside, I was kind of amazed he got a book deal.
But you mentioned Mithral.
After that, he co-founded his own VC firm and he called it Narya Ventures.
And I know we'll get a little more into Tolkien in a moment, but Narya is a play on the term Aryan.
And it is one of the rings of power in Lord of the Rings.
Now, Vance left that firm in 2021.
His co-founder, Colin Greenspan, continues to run it.
So two of his biggest holdings from that time are in Halo, which is the prayer app that Russell Brand now loves.
And speaking of Brand, he crosses over into conspirituality territory again, because Vance invested quite a bit in Rumble, the right-wing video streaming platform.
Now, like any smart investor, and that I'm being serious about, Vance is very diversified across industries in his portfolio, but he does seem to have put more money into companies he personally believes in.
I just want to say when that Halo app first came out, it was so jarring to suddenly have Marky Mark in my feed saying, would you take a minute to pray with me?
Yeah.
All right, back to J.D.
Vance.
It's been widely reported that he's on record saying victims of domestic violence should stay in their marriages instead of changing spouses like underwear, and that while rape and incest were wrong, two wrongs don't make a right.
And the second wrong in this case would be women and girls seeking abortions rather than dealing with what he called the inconvenience of carrying their rapist's baby to term.
Vance has also said that he believed the 2020 election was stolen from Trump And that those who tried to overturn the results by presenting alternate slates of electors and claiming widespread voter fraud did the right thing.
But today, we're looking at a less well-known private talk and Q&A recently unearthed by ProPublica, which Vance gave to the Teneo Network in 2021.
Now the Teneo Network was co-founded by Peter Thiel, but it's nestled squarely at the moment in the purview of a power broker I've covered in my Swamp Creatures series for Patreon.
His name is Leonard Leo.
In the last Trump administration, Leo helped stack every level of the judiciary with Federalist Society judges, and he's had a hand in the appointments of all six of the current SCOTUS conservative Catholic supermajority.
So the overturning of Roe vs. Wade sits proudly on his shoulders as well.
During J.D.
Vance's talk, He gives permission and endorsement even for conspiracy theories, and we'll get to that.
But the background of this talk fits into the larger and evolving narrative.
When Vance gave this talk to the Toneo Network retreat, this ultra-Catholic kingmaker, Leonard Leo, was on the organization's advisory board.
And it has significant overlap with his dark money activities, like helping facilitate the relationships that Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have been criticized for with billionaire GOP donors.
In fact, Leonard Leo became the chairman of Toneo Network in March 2023.
And it probably won't surprise anyone to learn that the Cineo network is on the advisory board in turn for Project 2025.
Which is in part why a lot of press has connected Vance to that Heritage Foundation project.
Hey, I'm just going to add here, as the jaded progressive former Catholic on staff, that the whole trad-cath scene in which this speech is embedded is just the fucking worst.
And Vance, as a recent convert—he was baptized in 2019—he fits right in.
I mean, these are people who believe that Vatican II was a mistake.
They're all about the fancy hats and the rituals of authority.
They couldn't care less about the social gospel part.
The whole talk we're looking at today is, you know, within this vibe of Catholic integralism, which is the belief that spiritual and mundane worlds are actually inseparable.
Teneo means I grasp in Latin, and the organization is openly aimed at crushing liberal influence in the public sphere and rebuilding institutions to align with Christian and preferably Catholic doctrine because it has the hierarchical history.
That's sort of Leonard Leo's mission statement.
You're almost quoting it verbatim, right?
It's also pretty interesting to note that the man endorsing conspiracy theories is involved with what we called an authoritarian conspiracy in January.
Now, of course, this one is right out in the open, and yet what we'll spend some time doing today is investigating how Vance frames Project 2025 as just a return to good old American values.
The truth is, he's quite good at disguising the true aims of the right with his language.
So on to the talk.
Vance outlined what he sees as the biggest challenges for the movement and the importance of returning to conservative values.
Which values are those, you might ask?
Well, barely two minutes in, he gives us a clue.
Vance bemoans reactions to what he calls this Texas abortion law as part of what he describes as challenge number one, which is how most big corporations have supposedly rejected conservatives.
A few of us over the past few years who have recognized that the big corporations have really turned against conservatives in a very big and powerful way.
One is recently this Texas abortion law.
Okay, Texas tries to pass a law that protects the right of the unborn to live their lives.
The fundamental problem revealed itself because virtually every major big corporation in this country felt the need to issue a statement in support of not the unborn babies, but in support of people who might want to abort them.
A few major corporations actually put a lot of money behind the effort to make it easier to achieve an abortion.
And the one CEO that I'm aware of, a medium-sized tech company, who actually spoke up on behalf of the unborn, was fired three days later after he issued a statement.
Like, if we're unwilling to make companies that are taking the side of the left in the culture wars feel real economic pain, then we're not serious about winning the culture war.
And so that is challenge number one.
Not that the law being applauded here is the infamous heartbeat law, or SB8, passed in Texas in 2021.
It's been dubbed the bounty hunter law by opponents because one aspect of it is that it incentivizes citizens to bring civil cases against anyone who assists someone else in getting an illegal abortion.
And people who do that could stand to win $10,000 in statutory damages if successful, plus court costs and attorney fees.
That controversial law has gone back and forth in the courts.
As far as I can tell, it's blocked for the moment by the ruling of a federal judge in 2023.
The second big challenge that Vance outlines in his talk at just four minutes in is that you can't speak the truth anymore about the differences between men and women.
He sees this, however, as a broader problem, of course, of wokeness.
The solution, he tells his conservative activist audience, is not to parrot conservative intellectual philosophical talking points from Locke and Montesquieu and Hayek, he named checks just to show that he's on that page, but to understand that most people just want to live a good life and love their country.
Well, the talk is only about 12 minutes long, so four minutes in, he's got to be cooking at that point.
Yeah, let him cook.
The good life, it turns out, is defined by Vance in this talk as a return to two-parent, single-income families.
Now, we already know from what he said earlier that he wants a return to the time when we knew the differences between men and women.
And, as a senator, he has opposed legislation codifying marriage equality.
So, okay, two straight, gender-conforming, parent, single-income families.
Oh, but what if that hetero couple struggles to get pregnant?
Vance voted against the legal right to use IVF to have a baby.
But otherwise, yeah, he's all for certain people living what he narrowly defines as the good life.
He also, he does qualify to be fair in this talk that he doesn't care if the earner is the man or the woman, which is further than I've seen other people, because this is a Project 2025 thing too, about getting the single income families.
But it is interesting the day after he announced for VP, his wife, who is a very successful lawyer,
quit her law firm because she needs to be there for him as that single earner.
And that's just pretty incredible.
And I don't know much about her, but I feel pretty bad that she would have to do that
for the mirage that's going on on the GOP side right now.
Yeah, it's the ideologically consistent.
I also saw reports that right after he was announced, all of the anti-abortion policy stuff on his website just sort of disappeared.
Now, challenge number three, according to Vance, is that people are too horrified to align themselves with those who speak lucid truth, but also happen to believe crazy things.
You know, like Alex Jones.
And Marjorie Taylor Greene, he says.
Matthew, I know you're going to get into his conspiracism a little later, but I want to share this brief clip in which J.D.
Vance demonstrates his millennial comfort level with online tropes.
I got myself into a little hot water last week because I made what seemed to me a plainly obvious observation that Alex Jones, the InfoWars guy, is a better source of information than Rachel Maddow, the MSNBC gal.
Now, some people said, well, J.D., you're just trolling.
Well, yeah, of course I was just trolling.
But that doesn't mean what I said is in any way untrue, right?
I mean, look, I think there's not a terrible chance that one of you is going to be sharing, you know, cell block 12A in Premier Harris' prison detention camp in a few years.
If we're going to all end up in that place, we might as well have a little fun while we get there.
It's okay to troll.
When you make and speak fundamental truths.
But look, I do think what I said was correct.
Yeah, I was trolling.
I was also speaking a truth.
Okay, he's just trolling.
Or is he?
No, no, he's also telling the truth.
A fundamental truth, as it turns out.
And the conservatives are so oppressed that we may as well have some fun as we go down and do politics for the lulz.
But the truth is, Vance is not just in it for the friends he makes on message boards along the way, or for extracting flashes of golden insight from Alex Jones and Marjorie Taylor Greene's ridiculous and hateful steaming stew of verbal diarrhea.
It's much worse than that.
Like Mussolini-loving Italian President Giorgia Meloni, Vance is a huge fan of J.R.R.
Tolkien, who, along with many other proto-fascists in Europe, he believes elucidates wholesome, ultra-conservative political and spiritual messages in his texts.
He's also got company closer to home.
Longtime friend and business associate Peter Thiel loves The Lord of the Rings so much, he named his controversial data analytics firm Palantir.
Teal's venture capital firm, which we mentioned before, Mythril, that Vance ran, is also named after a mythical metal from Lord of the Rings.
Palantir, as it turns out, is affiliated with a defense company called Anduril, named after Aragorn's sword in the Lord of the Rings.
That company is an innovative leader in sci-fi-style, terrifying AI and robotics-based weaponry.
As you mentioned, Derek, Vance used an anagram of the word Aryan for his own venture capital company, Narya.
So I'll just add here that one of the people Vance lists in the Teneo talk as speaking important truths while also believing what some people see as crazy or conspiratorial things is, in fact, Peter Thiel, who's on record as saying he has come to realize that freedom and democracy are incompatible.
In addition to being Vance's former venture capital boss, Thiel was the main funder of his Senate campaign.
And he's someone who Vance says he calls regularly to bounce ideas with whenever something interesting is going on.
That's a direct quote.
For an article by Politico that I will link in the show notes, Catholic University professor Luke Burgess is quoted as saying the following.
Vance's appreciation of Tolkien is not unrelated to his conversion to Catholicism in 2019.
Of the many ways that Tolkien's work exemplifies the Catholic imagination, one is the relationship between the visible and the invisible.
I think it's fair to say that Vance believes there is real spiritual evil in this world, and it can become embodied in rites and rituals.
Okay, so keep that in mind for later when we play the clip about how the devil is real and works terrible things in our society.
Speaking of the devil, I'm just going to come out here and say it, guys.
There's a way that J.D.
Vance is a more buttoned down and palatable Steve Bannon.
Right.
As we've established in previous episodes, Bannon brought the esoteric political metaphysics of Traditionalism, with a capital T, to the Trump White House, along with the influence of its most influential living proponent, Alexander Dugin, sometimes referred to as Putin's brain.
Dugan has called the idea of universal human rights a racist imposition of Western ideology on other cultures.
Now, that's the kind of quote-unquote crazy wisdom, Matthew, that I know you're going to get into regarding Vance.
Crazy wisdom is a gaslighting term often used to categorize nonsensical and immoral, even criminal, beliefs and behavior by charismatic gurus as transcending normal rationality or value judgments.
We can't judge them from our limited human consciousness.
They're at a different level.
Dugan's best instance of this is that he once described a Soviet-era serial killer of 52 women and children as a mystical practitioner of Dionysian sacraments, in which the killer or torturer and the victim Transcend their metaphysical dualism and become one.
OK, I did not know that story.
That's incredible.
All right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So listeners, bear with me.
You'll see why this is relevant.
The thumbnail on traditionalism is that it reveres the pre-democratic social order based on a divinely ordained caste system and sees chaotic destruction of liberal democracy as the spiritual shortcut to get back there.
Listeners curious about traditionalism can listen to our episode number 82, Steve Bannon, Mystic.
Now, J.D.
Vance does not run in exactly these circles or specifically use that language.
But according to Politico, Vance has his own noteworthy intellectual influences and friendships that give us clues about his beliefs, his thinking, his agenda.
We won't have time to go into detail today, so please see the link in the show notes, and stay tuned for a bonus episode on all of this from me.
But there is one instance where Vance is on record saying abortion should be nationally illegal, and it sounds like that Dugan sentiment that you brought up is very much like the baby, even if it's the result of the rapist and the woman, should still come into existence.
There just seems to be a thread there that would exist across those sentiments.
Well, because it's sacred, the fetus is sacred, the embryo is sacred, right?
Like, it's an act of God, everything has to be interpreted through that framework.
Yeah, so a return to a metaphysical basis for political rule, yeah?
Now, suffice it to say that the contemporary political philosophers with whom Vance, by his own account, has ongoing personal conversations are openly anti-democracy.
They include reactionary Catholics, as Matthew described, monarchists, admirers of Hungarian
ultra-right-wing strongman Viktor Orban. So the one thinker that I'll pull out of the list,
just to touch on briefly here, is Curtis Yarvin.
Who is that, you may ask?
He's a former computer programmer who became notorious as a blogger under the pseudonym Mencius Moldberg.
And around 2007, Curtis Yarvin became the main theorist of something called the Neo-Reactionary Philosophy, often stylized as capital NR and then a small letter X, also called the Dark Enlightenment.
Yeah, he's incredibly toxic.
So he's the original philosopher king of the alt-right.
He believes, you know, black people have genetically low IQs.
He criticized Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik, not because, you know, his mass shooting in 2011 that killed 77 people was a bad thing, but because his tactics weren't effective in overthrowing what he called the communist government of Norway.
He's a real piece of work.
So this crew called for a return to a pre-enlightenment world.
Absolute monarchy, authoritarian rule, and the neo-reactionary movement draw some inspiration from a metaphysical philosopher who was intimately associated, as it turns out, both with Mussolini's fascism and with the Nazis.
That philosopher, named Julius Evola, is also a key figure in the aforementioned traditionalist philosophy that has ties to right-wing populism around the world.
Jarvin has said in interviews that he believes the solution to America's corrupt oligarchy is a king or a dictator in the vein of a startup CEO.
One of Jarvin's fellow theorists is Nick Land, who echoes Peter Thiel's idea that freedom is incompatible with democracy.
Now, on a now defunct podcast, Vance actually cited Yarvin, who he considers a friend, in 2021 as the source of an idea he admires.
We should fire all government civil servants not loyal to Trump in a second term.
And that, of course, describes the so-called Schedule F plan outlined by Project 2025.
That podcast had hosted both he and Yarvin, as well as people like Chris Ruffo and none other than Alexander Dugan himself as guests.
So I'll leave this dizzying set of philosophical connections here as they set up one key perennial strategy, which is undermining trust in truth and human decency.
and encouraging an openness to conspiracy theories.
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So, we're going to round up soon with the focus on the conspiracy theories that Matthew
is going to address.
But what I think is important is that when Van says something like it's okay to engage in some conspiracy thinking, besides the fact that he boosts one of the most disgusting human beings on the planet, which is Alex Jones, As a reference in that moment, is that what they're also doing is sort of a sleight of hand so that you don't pay attention to what they're actually trying to accomplish.
The right is very good at this and they do it all of the time.
So there's this one moment that jumped out to me during this Teneo Network talk, which he lays out his vision for America, the conservative America that he wants to see implemented.
Like, there are all of these things that I'm very hopeful about, but one of the things that really does worry me is that we have very few oligarchs on our side.
And I don't mean just rich people.
I mean people who are smart about deploying their resources in a way that advances the cause.
Maybe only Peter Thiel.
On our side, I think.
Maybe a few others.
Right.
The left has a lot of oligarchs.
They have Bloomberg, they have Soros, they have Gates.
They have very wealthy people who aren't just rich.
They're very smart about accomplishing their objectives with their resources.
We need a lot of that.
We need a lot of it so that young conservatives have places to work where they can actually speak their values.
But we also just need resources to fund the institutions that will be necessary so the next time we really get a chance at governing, we really take advantage of that shot.
Because the left has shown over the past couple of months that they really don't want to give us that shot ever again.
Wonder why we would want to give you that shot there, JD.
So I know, Julian, you and I are going to do a 101 Brief soon on Curtis Yarvin.
And Yarvin, I found in a 2021 podcast where he expressly advocates for a monarchy.
But if you read through Project 2025, what you really see is the idea of the implementation of a monarchy through the unitary executive theory that's supported by an oligarchy.
And that is pretty much what Vance is advocating.
Now, before we get too much into that, I want to point out his assertion that the left has oligarchs and the right needs them.
So, first off, during the 2020 campaign, here are the top five big money donors to Trump.
You had America First Action Super PAC, $149 plus million.
Preserve America Super PAC, $104 million, and that included $90 million from the Las
Vegas casino magnate who is now deceased, Sheldon Adelson.
Trump Victory PAC was $144 million.
And Trump Make America Great Again Committee PAC, what a name, $326.5 million, which was
more than the entire DNC spent during that cycle, which is $179 million.
So I mean, look, Democrats do have big money behind them.
Priorities USA Action spent $138 million, and Future Forward USA dropped $150 million
during that election.
So it's not like money isn't flowing into both parties.
I'm personally dismayed and disgusted by how much money goes into our elections and honestly
how long they are.
I kind of appreciate the current switching to Kamala Harris right now because we're getting to see things happen much quicker.
But Vance is being dishonest when he says big money is only flowing into one party because the majority of the money in both parties comes from large money donations.
Yeah, and speaking of oligarchs, because the right doesn't have enough, those plucky right-wing underdogs, the biggest known political donation in history was actually facilitated through one of Leonard Leo's dark money channels in 2021.
And in that instance, billionaire Barry Seide donated 100% of the shares in his Triplight company to a 501c4 social advocacy group called Marble Freedom Trust, which they then turned around and sold for $1.6 billion.
And by the way, this maneuver, this dark money strategy allowed Barry Seide to avoid around $400 million in taxes.
That's the kind of oligarch-level money Toneo Network is actually playing with.
And Vance's choice of the word oligarchs is telling to me here, given the kind of elite criminality built around the very stage from which he is speaking and supporting him.
Usually used to refer to post-Soviet billionaires, oligarchs often function more like mob bosses, and some of whom, like Oleg Deripaska, are key players.
In the crimes of Trump associates like Paul Manafort and Mike Flynn, who were convicted and then pardoned by Trump, they had been playing both sides and colluding with Russian influence in the 2016 election and during the transition.
Well, I also looked up the three supposed oligarchs that Vance name-checked in 2021 specifically, and most of Bill Gates's money that year went into education, poverty eradication, and public health.
So, calling Bloomberg left is pretty funny, but his money predominantly funded New York City arts and 9-11 projects, as well as public health as well.
So very woke.
Exactly.
Only Soros is truly funding leftist causes through his Open Society Foundation, and this is mostly around helping marginalized groups gain access to capital and transforming policing.
Yeah, I just want to say that calling Soros a leftist is a very interesting thing that's emerged in the culture, right?
Like, Soros' main work through most of his life as a philanthropist and a big money donor has been to stop the spread of authoritarianism.
and to end communist dictatorships throughout Europe.
So he's very much a capitalist and he's very much someone who is in favor of liberal democracy.
How that eventually makes him get categorized as a leftist because he's opposed to right-wing
authoritarianism is a bit of a mystery.
Yeah.
And he talks about that openly, about using his capital in the ways that he sees fit.
You are correct.
To be fair, in 2021, he was specifically focused on funding BLM projects, like against policing in neighborhoods.
So I do at least understand that there is left-leaning tendencies given how the right treats DEI and critical race theory.
So I will at least admit that.
But he's always just been a convenient boogeyman for the right.
But stepping back, the way this is being framed is that Soros and Gates and so on,
these are bad oligarchs heading up a bad cabal bent on civilizational decline.
For some reason, they want things to fall apart.
And Vance's answer is quite openly that the Right needs its own cabal to preserve and enhance the West.
Yes.
Preserve, enhance through specifically conservative measures.
That is what he's advocating for.
So that's the illusion that he's creating because when your economic might is behind public health, eradication of poverty, and promoting education, as well as helping marginalized groups, as I flagged, you're actually helping to build a democracy by trying to level the playing field Not by assuming oligarchical powers.
But what Vance is calling for, and now that he's running for VP, he might actually be able to implement, is these sort of top-down, very hands-on policies that groups like the Heritage Foundation are always pretending that they're against.
Now the definition of oligarchy is being ruled by a minority, and in the case of billionaires, it's a very small minority.
Now elsewhere in this talk, Vance discusses something that's all over Project 2025, which is, as you flagged earlier, a return to a single income family.
Now, again, he does say he doesn't care if it's a man or a woman, but you kind of know he's not talking about LGBTQ plus families given his track record.
But since he's also for the federal banning of abortion, you kind of get the hint that it's really about the man.
You also know what class he's talking about as well, because the first Trump presidency was disastrous for the middle and lower classes.
He added $7.8 trillion to the national debt.
His 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act disproportionately benefited corporations and wealthy individuals rather than the working class, even though he's always lying about that.
Trump was the first president since Hoover to leave office with fewer jobs than when he entered.
And his administration limited access to food stamps and other social programs just to name a few.
Their whole economic plan for 2024 and beyond is Reaganomics for oligarchs.
It could never work for the middle class and Vance knows this.
So, you know, these guys are always railing against communism and pointing out that it's never worked in practice, and they would be right, but neither has an oligarchy.
Iran has effectively been a clerical oligarchy since the revolution in 79, modern China and Russia are run by oligarchs, and Ukraine is run by a group of 35 business groups, but to be fair, the government has tried to rail that in since 2021.
apartheid South Africa.
You might remember Julian was an oligarchy.
And in reality, thinkers from Thomas Piketty to Jimmy Carter have warned that if America
isn't one already, we're pretty damn close.
Now Carter said this in 2015, but he was referencing the 2010 Citizens United case.
And that's how we have the late casino magnate who I flagged, Sheldon Adelson, who is definitely
not on the left, donating 90 million to Trump in 2020.
And his wife, because he's deceased, is now also funding Trump's current campaign.
And that's how you get Elon Musk pledging $45 million a month to the Trump campaign
this cycle with other billionaires like Marc Andreessen and Ben Harwis.
Miriam Adelson pumping millions and hundreds of millions even into his campaign.
So, I'm gonna back out of the political and money weeds a little bit as we wrap and look at some of the
psychological stuff that I think is simmering under the surface.
In particular, I wanna flag two things in this Teneo speech.
First, Vance gives permission to his audience to bypass whatever their moral compass is telling them.
And he appeals, I think, to the principle of crazy wisdom to validate epistemological terrorists like Alex Jones.
So first up, there's this really important pivot in the Teneo speech.
It's very short.
In which he implores the audience to reconsider any feeling of trepidation that they may have when they hear something bizarre, horrifying, but also intriguing.
We have to get away from this weird tension that we feel in our chest when somebody says, this person believes something crazy therefore you must announce them.
So he's characterizing that feeling of recoiling from listening to Alex Jones or Marjorie Taylor Greene as a kind of repression that prevents people from fully jumping into the flow of their mystical knowledge.
What he's saying is, don't throttle your natural intuition or your confidence.
Now, on one hand, I think this tracks with a general discourse of self-aggrandizement that characterizes this movement, which is very American spiritual.
Like, don't let yourself become doubtful and small.
Don't criticize yourself.
Don't check yourself.
Step fully into your power.
Like, I'm hearing Kelly Brogan in this too.
But there's also a contradiction here that intersects with the premise of doing your own research, because how will Vance followers square this quashing of intuition with valuing the same intuition they might use to like muscle test medications or go with the flow of discomfort that leads them to reject vaccines?
So in one moment, he's encouraging people to trust themselves, but then he says, don't trust yourself.
And I think it's really powerful to see the contradiction laid bare because it shows that in this paradigm, do your own research or trust your own intuition never really means make up your mind.
It means reject those experts and follow me.
He's also railing against supposed censorship, right?
That the mainstream is going to try and tell you that because some of these people have said Admittedly crazy things.
You should have this fear about taking anything else they say to heart and that's the tension in your chest that you need to let go of because they can be brilliant truth tellers who also are sort of outside of the norm.
Yeah.
Now, I posted some of this clip about ignoring the feeling in your chest on Instagram, and a number of women commentators pointed out very quickly that this is exactly the kind of language that's used in patriarchal contexts to tell women to not trust their instincts for safety.
Don't pay attention to that internal voice that says, no, I'm not going to stay around this guy.
No, I'm going to take myself off to a safer place.
No, I'm going to call a friend.
Don't resist.
Don't, you know, submit to the situation.
That's what, you know, they're clocking that message as.
And I think that's a powerful reflection on control, but there's also a flip side to it.
Because I think Vance is giving permission to his followers to enthusiastically accept the consequences and the collateral damage of indulging their fantasies.
Because what he's leaving out when he minimizes the garbage that Alex Jones or Marjorie Taylor Greene say 60% of the time, like part of this speech he says, you know, they might be wrong 60% of the time, but 40% of the time, They're brilliant.
And I mean, I think 60% is a really low estimate.
What he's leaving out is the bloodlust.
He's leaving out the vengeance, the aggression, the fantasies of retribution.
And so, if a person pauses with some flicker of moral conscience because it's rising up and it's saying inside, I'm not quite sure I can sign on to that theory about Sandy Hook.
Vance is telling his followers to let it go, just let it flow.
And he's speaking to a demographic that needs reassurance, confidence, and validation of their persecution complex.
They need constant reminders of everything that they've lost.
His listeners need permission to be enthusiastic about the waves of rage and resentment.
And perhaps even the surges of violence that rise up in response to these validations.
And what I infer from this is that he's saying that if you shrink back from your moral conscience, if there's a part of you that recoils from the whole package of Alex Jones, you won't get the good stuff, you won't get the mystical insight, you won't get the magic, and you won't crush your enemy when the time comes.
And what ties into that is this whole notion of who Alex Jones is or what he contains.
And I think he's appealing to the principle here of crazy wisdom.
With regard to this claim that many insightful contributions come from people who are also marginalized by their madness, Vance has good reason to say that.
Julian, you and I just read a great book about Candace Peart by Pamela Reichman about the vibrant and eccentric biochemist who found the opioid receptor, but then she went on to be a kingpin in the pseudoscience realm, like starring in What the Bleep and so on.
Mad geniuses are everywhere.
And this is where we get into the volatile territory of charisma, which has been a study mainstay on this show, because it's the compelling and indefinable attractiveness of a leadership figure who has nothing to offer.
Because when I say undefinable, I mean beyond credentials, beyond achievements, because charisma is not a thing that can be measured.
It overshadows all other considerations like whether or not what they offer is fraudulent.
Charisma trumps content.
And so the first thing I think of when I hear Vance refer to Jones and Musk and Thiel as mad savants is the figure we find in religious or cultic contexts of the crazy wisdom teacher.
And the thing to remember about that guy is that whatever they seem to be insightful in is never something that can be tested or falsified.
So spirituality and conspiracy theories are perfect content zones of complete subjectivity.
Whatever relief or pleasure they provide in that zone might be deeply resonant to the follower's life in the moment. It might seem genius when they say it,
but it's not going to be a mathematics theorem. It's not going to be a scientific discovery. It's
going to be something that people coalesce around in part because it's undefinable and
contagious and it scratches some kind of guilty itch.
Yeah, and to go back, it's why someone like Alexander Dugan can use the language of non-dual
ritual magic to describe a brutal serial killer while he calls for a return to caste-based
depression as a spiritual virtue.
And it's related to Steve Bannon's famous propaganda instruction to flood the zone with shit, because once you've found the transcendent truth, facts and evidence don't matter anymore.
Now, with the crazy wisdom teacher, you come to just believe that he's hit and miss, but that the hits are worth it.
Now, Vance's formula is 40 to 60%.
He's saying this is worth the gamble.
But the problem is that in the moment in which the influencer or the guru speaks, there is no way to know which side of that line he's on.
There is no way in which his credibility is established outside of the excitement and adulation of the people around him, which is its own feedback loop.
Which encourages him to keep guessing, to keep rolling the dice.
And the thing about cold reading, like in astrology or tarot cards or palm reading, you know, for any kind of divination, which is basically what Alex Jones is doing on television, is that it offers the thrill of gambling.
You don't know what you're going to get, but the dopamine hits often enough and with enough regularity, but also enough uncertainty that you just keep rolling.
And that's true on both sides of the table.
It's mutually addictive to both consumer and producer, this process of expecting something big, making something up to feed that expectation, and seeing if it sticks, and then running with it when it does.
And so I think Vance is putting forward for his candidacy a really bad epistemology.
Encouraging followers to gamble, to go with the flow, but at the same time, to not trust their own reticence.
And that's the game of coercive communication.
The person has an ideological value they want to instill, or there's some kind of social power they want to seize, but they can't persuade you because their arguments are shit, and so they'll resort to tricks.
And seeing through this in the spirituality world involves recognizing the difference between the leader who's there to impress people and the leader who's there to serve people.
And I think the same principle applies here.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspirituality.
We'll see you here on the main feed on Saturday for a brief or next Thursday, or we'll see you over on Patreon for our bonus episodes.
