There’s been a question gnawing at fans of Charles Eisenstein: what does he really feel about RFK Jr’s pivot to Trump? The always aspiring poet-philosopher was hired as a messaging advisor to Bobby, after all. We’ve spotted little fragments of Eisenstein’s exceptionally long essays sneaking their way into Bobby’s speeches. There was some influence, for sure, even after Charles went on multiple Costa Rican sabbaticals right in the middle of campaign season and apparently cut his consulting rate down from $21k per month, perhaps out of the goodness of the heart he knows is possible. And yet, for weeks after Bobby jumped the shark, Charles remained silent.
Until now, that is. With the publication of his recent 6,711-word essay, “Shades of Many Colors,” Eisenstein finally breaks his silence and lands firmly on the side of…well, we’re not quite sure. But one thing that’s emerged is Charles’s penchant for not crediting the source of some of his galaxy-brained ideas. Today, we’ll look at some of what Charles says in his latest opus, and try to figure out what exactly he’s saying.
Show Notes
mRNA vaccine spike protein differs from viral version
The effect of SARS-CoV-2 variant on respiratory features and mortality
SARS-CoV-2 Infections in mRNA Vaccinated Individuals are Biased for Viruses Encoding Spike E484K and Associated with Reduced Infectious Virus Loads that Correlate with Respiratory Antiviral IgG levels.
Autoimmune and Autoinflammatory Connective Tissue Disorders Following COVID-19
Risk of autoimmune diseases following COVID-19 and the potential protective effect from vaccination: a population-based cohort study
The Lancet: Most comprehensive study to date provides evidence on natural immunity protection by COVID-19 variant and how protection fades over time
Conspirituality 1: Coronation for Whom?
Brief: The New Age Origin Story of RFK Jr’s Campaign — Conspirituality
86: Charles Eisenstein, New Age Q — Conspirituality
Disavowing Disinformation - North Atlantic Books
Inside the Last Weeks of RFK Jr.’s Campaign
Charles Eisenstein - What is the Next Story? - Scientific and Medical Network
Brian Swimme: The Cosmos Watching Itself (E35)
Charles Eisenstein Whitewashes Trump, Caricatures & Demonizes Democrats in Post Decrying Caricatures & Demonization (Part 1)
Charles Eisenstein Endorses Trump, but Thinks You're Not Clever Enough to Notice (Part 2)
Cardiac Events Following Mpox Vaccine
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
And this is where I think the blatant parasitism of this stuff becomes really, really loud, but we can talk about that.
I want to be paid $21,000 a month for a political campaign that I actually don't care about and I can say whatever I want.
That's an amazing grift.
An amazing, amazing, amazing gig.
Imagine if you said that.
Imagine if RFK Jr.
said, well, what is your strategy?
And he says, well, I don't really care whether you win or not.
Hey, it's Julian.
If you've been paying attention to this last year's presidential campaign, not to mention our podcast feed, you've heard about Project 2025.
It's a plan of deregulation that former President Trump's allies aim to implement if he wins.
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For the past two years, award-winning journalist and former Bernie Sanders speechwriter David Sirota has been working to unearth never-before-reported documents showing how a group of tycoons legalized corruption for the wealthy.
On Masterplan, you'll go on an epic journey from the 1970s to the present, hearing the untold stories of infamous folks you already thought you knew, like President Richard Nixon and Fox News boss Roger Ailes.
And you'll meet operatives and oligarchs you've probably never heard of.
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If you somehow think government corruption doesn't affect your daily life, think again.
From high medical bills to lower wages today, it's all part of the master plan.
So listen to Masterplan every week, wherever you get your podcasts, and tell them we sent you.
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersections of
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I'm Matthew Remsky.
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Conspiratuality 224.
RFK Jr.' 224, RFK Jr.'s pet guru blesses Trump.
There's been a question gnawing at fans of Charles Eisenstein.
What does he really feel about RFK Jr.' 's pivot to Trump?
The always-aspiring poet-philosopher was hired as a messaging advisor to Bobby, after all.
We've spotted little fragments of Eisenstein's exceptionally long essays sneaking their way into Bobby's speeches.
There was some influence for sure, even after Charles went on multiple Costa Rican sabbaticals right in the middle of campaign season and apparently cut his consulting rate down from $21,000 per month, perhaps out of the goodness of the heart he knows is possible.
And yet, for weeks after Bobby jumped the shark, Charles remained silent.
Until now, that is, with the publication of his recent 6,711-word essay, Shades of Many Colors.
Eisenstein finally breaks his silence and lands firmly on the side of, well, we're not quite sure.
But one thing that's emerged is Charles' passion for not crediting the source of some of his galaxy-brained ideas.
Today, we'll look at some of what Charles says in his latest opus and try to figure out what exactly he's saying.
Hey, how do you say croissant, Julian?
Croissant.
I figured.
This week in conspirituality.
I get emails from RFK Jr.' 's Children's Health Defense Organization every single day.
Twice on the weekend days.
This keeps me flush with all the dangerous but noble-seeming lies about medical science my inbox can handle.
Everything is urgent.
Everything is evidence of public health corruption and big pharma evil.
It's just incredible how much awful stuff is going on that no one else, except maybe Epoch Times, is reporting.
And Joe Mercola.
An email from Children's Health Defense on Friday did grab my attention, though.
It was about the MPOX vaccine being approved in Africa for babies by the WHO, despite, they said, no clinical trials.
So, okay, let's look into this.
Mpox has been surging in Africa with 90% of the cases in the Democratic Republic of Congo, who had over 21,000 cases this year so far, with children comprising 60% of those cases.
And even worse, children make up 80% of the deaths.
The WHO has declared the situation a public health emergency of international concern.
Total cases for 2024 across 15 countries in the African region are over 25,000 with 700 deaths.
Children under five, especially those who are malnourished, have the highest risk of death with pregnant women and immunocompromised people next.
Current data says babies under 12 months are four times more likely to die from mpox than adults.
Now, AP reported last week that a vaccine made by Bavarian Nordic had been approved by the WHO, which is what Kennedy's organization immediately jumped on.
So here's the exact language from WHO.
The WHO Strategic Advisory Group of Experts, otherwise known as SAGE, on immunization reviewed all available evidence and recommended the use of MVABN vaccine in the context of an mpox outbreak for persons at high risk of exposure.
While that vaccine is currently not licensed for persons under 18 years of age, it may be used off-label in infants, children, and adolescents, and in pregnant and immunocompromised people.
This means vaccine use is recommended in outbreak settings where the benefits of vaccination outweigh the potential risks.
So we've already heard about the significant risks from mpox to children and infants.
But what Children's Health Defense routinely does is fearmonger around safety, which perpetuates this false notion that vaccines are inherently dangerous, they're suspicious, and they cause people to die suddenly, or they frequently have scary side effects, which is not true.
And that the WHO colludes with big pharma in approving vaccines without adequate testing.
But here's the thing.
This is not a new vaccine.
This is a third generation smallpox vaccine that has newly been approved for use against mpox because they're closely related.
It's the version of a smallpox vaccine that has been found to be the safest in a developmental process that stretches back to the late 1700s.
And vaccines developed since the 1950s have been so effective that smallpox was declared eradicated from the planet in 1980.
So Julian, I'm assuming here that the tests that Children's Health Defense would want for this MPOCS application have already been fulfilled through the smallpox testing process, which is very old.
I mean, what groups like this do, what anti-vaxxers typically do is they seize on any small technicality, right?
Where they're like, okay, technically this has not been tested for smallpox on people in these demographics and of these ages with enough time for us to really know if it's safe.
And yet, actually these vaccines have been used for a very long time for smallpox.
Sometimes we don't have double-blind placebo phase 3 clinical trials, for example, on babies because it would be unethical to do some of the types of protocols that the anti-vaxxers demand.
So it's this moving the goalposts kind of unreasonable expectation of perfection when actually we have decades of evidence that says, ah, these are safe.
You know, we haven't seen terrible results from using it.
it. If anything, we eradicated smallpox. The article claims that there was up to a 2.1%
incidence of serious cardiac events in clinical trials for this vaccine. But then the hyperlink,
if you follow it to the citation, goes to an information page from the manufacturer
that says, no such thing anywhere. I read the whole document. I went in search of the
actual number and I found that cardiac events were mentioned in just one study, which I
I will link to in the show notes.
It said cardiac events of special interest occurred at 0.3% or 3 per 1000, but then clarified that every one of those actually had an alternative explanation and no one was found to have been hospitalized due to vaccination itself.
So Children's Health Defense also says the vaccine has not been adequately tested for efficacy or safety in pediatric populations.
And again, that's a typical half-truth maneuver, which ignores the fact that part of how we eradicated smallpox was by giving the first vaccine dose to babies for decades in lots of countries all over the world, often at birth, and then two more doses over the course of the next 30 years of the person's life.
So the WHO has really good reason to evaluate that safety profile as worth the risk during an emergency in which the dangers from the illness are so high.
Meanwhile, phase two trials are in motion for children as young as two years old.
Then, Children's Health Defense engages in concern trolling about the WHO waving their magic vaccine wand while neglecting to address broader public health issues in Africa.
They go so far as to say that this signals a return to colonialist-era approaches, rather than evidence-based public health, and that this reflects Big Pharma's corrupting influence on the WHO.
Now, speaking of actual grift, this dishonest article appears alongside appeals to donate to CDH.
And why is that significant?
Well, Bobby is hitching the tattered wagon of the Kennedy dynasty to the black hole of a potential second Trump presidency.
But meanwhile, operations keep opportunistically humming along at his propaganda cash cow.
Let's not forget.
His salary there reached $500,000 in 2022, having ballooned from half that in 2019 to over $345,000 during 2020's escalation of anti-vax fearmongering.
And then his nonsensical conspiracy theory book, The Real Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health Has sold over 1 million copies.
I also want to point out in terms of this Mpox vaccine fear-mongering, I recently wrote an article about Peter McCullough and Drew Pinsky from The Wellness Company because McCullough appeared on Pinsky's podcast and he said things like there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission of Mpox until 2020 when it started spreading throughout the gay community in America.
Mpox was first identified in the early 70s in a baby in Congo, and that baby was the first example of a human-to-human transmission.
In fact, about 10 years later, they did a study in Congo and found that over 30% of cases were human-to-human transmission in the 1970s.
So he was just lying because they sell antibiotics and supplements from the wellness company and that's literally his job is to promote them.
But he also added that egregious comment about it spreading through gay men in the Bay Area and elsewhere, which technically is true.
It did hit that community the hardest during that outbreak, but it had nothing to do with sexual transmission.
It's just that these people were in close contact with one another.
They could have been sitting next to one another.
He also said it's not spread airborne, which is also wrong.
We've known for decades that it's spread airborne.
So, these are all just examples of how these companies with vested interests will just straight-up lie.
It did not take me long to research all of that, just like I'm sure you read that article.
It wasn't an outsized, laborious task for you.
But they'll just say, no, it's this number, even though you can't actually find evidence of it.
And my twig is also combined with yours this week because it also is on this topic because I want to think about a question that we've had on this podcast, which is what sort of impact do these anti-vax contrarians and these networks have on the general population?
And we can say with certainty now, four years after we started this podcast, that it is quite a lot because kindergarten MMR vaccination rates have dropped for two consecutive years here in America, but that represents A quarter million children who are not getting vaccinated now, or at least not showing proof of it.
One recent survey found that 43% of Americans plan on getting the new COVID vaccine, but that same poll showed that 56% are going to get a flu shot this year, which is to me still low, but it's still more than the COVID vaccine.
But the most troubling statistic in that poll is that 37% of respondents who have gotten a vaccine,
any vaccine in the past, now say they will never get any vaccine ever again.
Yeah, we're always wondering about public impact, but what you're describing here
is something we've imagined was a fairly safe bet, given how many followers of the gallery of rogues,
as we called our conspirituality influencers in our book, how many followers they had
and how much their followings grew as they became more extreme along the vectors that we study.
It's hard to imagine being passionately enthralled with the vociferous and paranoid conspiracist,
buying their stuff, going to their public appearances, posting about them on social media,
and then just flip-flopping when CVS says, it's time for your next vaccine.
I also just want to say that 37% of respondents saying that they're never going to get a vaccine again kind of reminds me of the sort of blanket voter suppression tactics that don't really have to convince people that, you know, their candidate is wrong or something like that.
They just have to put them off the entire idea of participating in this, you know, sort of public endeavor.
Like, I can imagine that a lot of those people are like, oh, I don't even want to think about it.
It's not that they actually have been convinced that the vaccines are dangerous or anything like that.
It's more of a demoralization.
And that's been coming from, as Julian flagged, RFK Jr.' 's organization.
I mentioned the wellness company.
We also have Mickey Willis, who is about to release Plandemic 70 or whatever fucking number he's on now.
The children's musical is going to be public and he's on that.
But even more worryingly, the Florida Department of Health has now issued new guidelines.
They were published last week.
And here is the text.
The federal government has failed to provide sufficient data to support the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 boosters.
Okay, so I looked this up.
previously demonstrated safety concerns associated with COVID-19 vaccines
and boosters," false, including,
prolonged circulation of mRNA and spike protein in some vaccine
recipients. Okay, so I looked this up.
This is a rare complication that affects a tiny minority of
recipients, especially those who have experienced myocarditis after the
vaccination. As is well known, the risk of myocarditis
is much greater if you get COVID COVID than if you get the COVID vaccine.
Second bullet from the Florida Department of Health, increased risk of lower respiratory tract infections.
I looked at the research.
It shows the opposite, that vaccines reduce the risk of severe respiratory illnesses.
And finally, increase risk of autoimmune disease after vaccination.
I looked into this.
There is no conclusive evidence that the vaccine increases the risk of any autoimmune diseases that they're associating with, like arthritis or lupus or multiple sclerosis.
It's just likely to be correlation, not causation, and a large cohort study found that COVID is associated with a greater risk of developing autoimmune diseases, and some data suggests that vaccines could reduce the risk of acquiring one after being infected with COVID.
So final part from the Florida Department of Health, quote, based on the high rate of global immunity and currently available data, the state surgeon general advises against the use of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.
Wow.
Any provider concerned about the health risks associated with COVID-19 for patients over the age of 65 or with underlying health conditions should prioritize patient access to non mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and treatment.
Yeah, all of this, I mean, this makes me want to scream and I have no doubt that this is coming out of that task force that Brett Weinstein is involved in, along with like some of the architects of the Great Barrington Declaration that DeSantis appointed, right?
And they had that little press conference and because these are all just like Right, right.
And there's also no evidence for something that I just read, which is the idea of global immunity.
Tons of data show that both vaccines alone and vaccines with prior infection provide better immunity than not getting a vaccine.
And it's also just a little bit insane to me because roughly 21% of Floridians are over age 65.
It is the second most populous state for seniors in America.
So why their government will roll the dice when such a large percentage of the population is in the high risk category for COVID complications boggles my mind.
But then again, State Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo sided with anti-vaxxers years ago, and Ron DeSantis has done nothing to stop him.
So, as with any population that refuses vaccination in the short term, most of the effects won't be felt for years, by which time I'm sure Florida leadership will have come up with another dozen excuses for why their anti-vax activism wasn't really the problem that they're seeing unfold right before their eyes.
It really sort of makes me think of how closely this tracks with, you know, the conspiracy theory one might form around, oh, well, you know, this is a really convenient way of culling a population or what have you.
I mean, older people, their burdens on the state, whatever.
Yeah, it's really, really strange.
Well, that's interesting too, right?
Because there's a whole There's a line of thinking in moral philosophy and sort of cognitive psychology about the bias that we feel towards doing something versus not doing something, right?
So if we perceive a risk, if we perceive a greater risk from doing something, even though the risk is worse if you don't do the thing, like getting the vaccine, somehow there's a sense that the safer option is to not do anything.
Right.
And that's wrong.
Okay, two quick This Week in Conspiracuality stories, both related to the dogs that Haitian
immigrants in Springfield, Ohio definitely did not eat but are now being harassed for
via a brewing MAGA race war, which is incredibly horrific.
A while back, I tempered some of my concern and prior criticism with Marianne Williamson as a know-nothing New Age Democratic race spoiler because she distinguished herself by taking a strong stand on the war in the Middle East.
Very early on, she called for a ceasefire pretty much at the same time as Cori Bush and Rashida Tlaib did.
This is this past fall.
But that honeymoon is over now.
That funny mood is over because last week she really walloped herself on the head with a giant crystal.
Because now that Vance and Trump have settled on race war as their homestretch strategy, circulating the libelous story that Haitians are eating pets, which has led to bomb threats being called into Springfield schools and hospitals, Marianne Williamson has again intervened with a tweet.
She writes, continuing to dump on Trump because of the eating cats issue.
We'll create blowback on November 5th.
Haitian voodoo is in fact real and to dismiss the story out of hand rather than listen to the citizens of Springfield, Ohio confirms in the minds of many voters the stereotype of Democrats as smug elite jerks who think they're too smart to listen to anyone outside their own silo.
So she manages to drum up unnecessary but also kind of confusing empathy for two groups here.
So Haitians are practicing voodoo, according to her.
And it's real.
It's real.
Which was implied in the story, but it was never really a central part of the claim.
And it's real, as you say.
I think she means by that that it should be respected like any other magical tradition, but the phrasing really just sounds menacing in her tweet here.
And then secondly, you know, the reasoning is that because even the Homer Simpsons of Springfield know that the voodoo is true, you have to let them be scared of it because calling the idea racist while the bomb threats pour in will only further alienate normal people and maybe encourage the bomb threat dudes to act.
Yeah, I mean, this is the classic own goal where the person who's trying, who's posturing as if they are being inclusive actually ends up defending a racist stereotype.
Yeah, it's a totally nonsensical tweet.
It makes me wonder if Williamson has any staff left to help her keep her shit together.
I really don't know.
She's since deleted it, and then in a fresh Twitter flurry she's admitted to sloppy language, but she hasn't really apologized.
Secondly, and relatedly, J.D.
Vance is a slippery fascist fucker, and journalists have to be really careful about not playing his game or falling into semantic traps.
When confronted by Dana Bash on CNN about the dog-eating libel that he helped spread, he uttered the sentence, quote, If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, Then that's what I'm going to do."
So that alone was clipped and isolated and circulated, but minus the fact that he twice said he was passing on real testimony from his Ohio constituents.
Now, he may well be lying about that, but almost every center-to-center-left commentator I read on this lost focus by over-interpreting his statement to mean, if I have to lie, I will.
And that's not necessary, besides not really being what he said.
The simpler lead is, Vance recklessly spreads racist lies about Haitians leading to bomb threats.
So I feel like I'm adding to a bit of a theme I've got going here about anti-fascist reporting.
Like, if you make stuff up about them, he's weird, there's the couches, the dolphins, or now he openly admits he's free to make up stories.
He is going to do something very specific.
He's going to judo that shit around and make it about you.
He's going to make it about your own dishonesty and projection.
And that will be plausible to his base, but more problematically, I think, to the squishy middle.
Sure enough, I mean, he tweeted his response to the charge, correctly pointing out that he wasn't saying he was making the story up.
He was passing the story along from his constituents.
So if you take the bait and let him dictate the terms in these exchanges, he's going to take the focus off who he's really hurting.
And I think this is a core strategy to be aware of, which is this guy slashes wounds into the body politic and then just, like, co-ops every possible victimhood affect and position.
Yeah, I agree with all of that analysis.
I mean, the only question I have is do we think that he wouldn't have done this if he hadn't been sort of the target of untrue shaming kind of tactics from some people?
I would only say it could not have helped because any way that we can depersonalize that 4chan rhythm I think is going to be best because now it's kind of locked in.
I don't think it's going anywhere.
It might have been that way anyway.
I'm not sure.
Okay, Derek, Julian, our first episode on Conspiratuality podcast was about Charles
And here we are again.
How many years is it?
Is it four and a half?
Four and a half years later.
Okay, so we'll just have to do a little bit of a rundown here first before we get on to this incredible essay in which he sort of non-explains what he's going to do now that his leader and father figure and guru has flipped over to endorse Trump.
He's born in 1967.
He did math philosophy at Yale.
He worked as a translator in Taiwan.
He's done construction.
He's a yoga teacher.
He's been a stay-at-home dad.
He's got three sons with one partner and one with his second partner, who's Stella.
She's a TCM practitioner and a bodywork person.
And we know from some social media posts that she's very excited that Trump's coming electoral victory will create the circumstances by which Kennedy will enforce the placebo trials of all vaccines, which of course would kill many, many people.
But suspend any placebo trials and all the alternative medicine that she loves.
Yeah, right.
So he starts writing maniacally and publishing in about 2001.
His first book is called The Open Secret.
If anybody out there has any version of this that doesn't cost hundreds of dollars on Amazon, I would love to see it.
Please hit us up in the DMs.
So that's 2001.
Then there's The Yoga of Eating.
The Ascent of Humanity.
You can hear the titles are getting more grandiose.
Transformational Weight Loss.
And then there's a book called Sacred Economics, which I think made the biggest waves of his young writing career.
That was published by Evolver in 2011.
And then he bumped over to North Atlantic Books for The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, possibly his bestseller.
And that was followed by Climate, A New Story in 2018.
Now, we did our episode one on him because in March of 2020, he published a 9,000-word novella called A Coronation for All on the apocalyptic opportunity of getting really sick and how the coronavirus was actually an opportunity for a mass-scale reintegration of society.
Which is not entirely implausible, but it was a lot of words full of a lot of bullshit.
And it was very popular as well.
It was tweeted out by Jack Dorsey.
It was quoted at a commencement speech by Ivanka Trump, which is shades of what's to come.
And he keeps blogging.
all the way through the pandemic.
And that leads to Tim McKee of North Atlantic Books, this is his publisher, coming out with a statement condemning Eisenstein's disinformation after one of his blog posts compared the treatment of unvaccinated people to the treatment of Jews during the Holocaust.
And I think this is before RFK Jr. does it himself.
Now NAB pledges to donate profits from Eisenstein books going forward.
And I think that's pretty rare.
I haven't heard of anything like that happening in the publishing industry.
Now he also becomes the court philosopher for Aubrey Marcus and the Fit for Service
group.
Together, they cut this mythic cartoon based on a short story at the back of A More Beautiful World.
It's called The Gathering of the Tribes, and in this film, they're sort of depicting themselves as alien shamans who are coming down to save everybody from the vaccinators and the people who give out SSRIs.
Throughout the pandemic, he of course supports anti-vax and contrarian doctors.
And then when RFK Jr.
announces his candidacy, he cuts a podcast interview with Aubrey Marcus in which Marcus talks about taking ayahuasca, which gives him the prophecy that Bobby will be president.
And Eisenstein says that Bobby is ushering in a new reality that comes from beyond the conventional world.
And he offered the idea that the timeline that had forked off in November of 1963 when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, after which no one could have any faith in anything, that Bobby was now here to mend this sacred rift in time.
So are you suggesting that Aubrey Marcus's prophecy has failed?
Well, I don't know.
He hasn't posted about it.
He's shut down most of his Instagram.
Maybe he's getting ready for another film, another spoken word performance.
But it's got to be big, right?
It's got to not be interrupted by other posts.
It may also have been like a defective ayahuasca that didn't give the actual concept.
Oh, or the wrong prayers, or... Oh, do you know what?
That's why we need regulation in the ayahuasca industry.
Absolutely.
Yeah, so we can make good predictions.
Good predictions about time-traveling parallel universe Kennedys.
Yeah, so now Bobby has endorsed Trump.
And now Eisenstein has a real quandary.
I would say a double problem.
Is his political crush and guru not who he thought he was?
And how will he sell this to his own followers?
Well, we'll see as we look at this essay, how he's going to sell this to his own followers.
What I am freshly struck by, and I can't believe I never noticed this before, because we talked about Marianne Williamson, is both she and Charles Eisenstein kind of kicked off their spiritual influencer careers by selling New Age books about losing weight.
Yeah, right.
And that's pretty damn telling in terms of their entry point, right?
It might say something about You know, sort of the first sort of best strategic steps for new age teachers, right?
Yeah, it's exploitive.
So we've got a almost 7,000 word essay here that we're gonna, you know, go through bit by bit, or we're gonna pull out some key bits.
And just to be fair, I thought I would summarize it with some bullets.
Okay, so this is me speaking as Charles.
I'll run through the summary.
So he basically says, people really want to know where I stand on Bobby's Trump endorsement,
and as an insider, I know all about it.
And I'm gonna summarize two arguments that advisors made, but I'm not gonna tell you which one I favor,
so I'm gonna be mysterious about that.
So argument one is stay in the race, don't abandon your ideals.
Argument two is endorse Trump, don't squander your political capital.
I'm not telling you which one I favor because as a political advisor,
I refuse to engage in polarizing discussions or be pigeonholed as a partisan on one side or the other.
I most want to avoid having to enact any humility or purification rituals or be caught up in a witch hunt around the possibility that I am supporting Bobby's endorsement of Trump.
Also, he explains, if I take sides, I will be contributing to the growing possibility of civil war.
By the way, he then goes on to say, winning was not my main goal when I got involved with this.
Silly, silly people.
Yeah, I don't care how you vote.
I don't care who wins.
I just want you to think deeply about my message.
And this is where I think the blatant parasitism of this stuff becomes really, really loud, but we can talk about that.
I want to be paid $21,000 a month for a political campaign that I actually don't care about
and I can say whatever I want.
That's an amazing grift.
An amazing, amazing, amazing gig.
Imagine if you said that.
Imagine if RFK Jr. said, well, what is your strategy?
And he says, well, I don't really care whether you win or not.
In fact, I think in this essay, he quotes himself as saying to Bobby, you know, you
won't win by winning or some sort of Zen-like saying like that.
Maybe we'll get to it.
He's a middle school, middle school softball coach.
Yeah, he goes on to say, my main goal was to put forward my view of a new story for civilization.
I didn't care about winning.
My work is about narrative, storytelling, and actually it's not very important at all, not compared to the real work that compassionate people do.
I counseled Bobby to not put winning first.
Oh, this is the quote, you can only win if you put something else above winning.
My role as advisor is in helping Bobby stay true to himself, but also to call him out when he is misaligned.
Now, Trump is really not what anyone thinks he is.
He's not a strategic genius, a Mussolini figure, or even right-wing.
And I believe Bobby when he tells me that Trump told him that Project 2025 was written by right-wing assholes.
Donald Trump is anyone people think he is.
He is a cypher.
But now he is also sour on the neocons beating the war drum in Ukraine and Israel.
This is what Eisenstein thinks.
No, no, no, no.
He's saying that Trump is sour on the neocons.
And then he says, if you look more closely at the pandemic and at the events of January 6th, you'll come to some startling conclusions about Trump's real influence.
But he pulls back again.
This is not about issues or policy.
It's about something deeper, always deeper.
But he does end, I would say, strongly by saying, with some substance, actually, by saying that Bobby's failure to recognize the origins and gravity of the situation in Israel made him irrelevant as a candidate.
He spends about 1,000, 1,500 words on this at the end.
Eisenstein says he could have stood outside the union center in Chicago and picked up
all those uncommitted votes.
Big mistake, he says, but maybe he'll come around.
From the very beginning, his essay is disingenuous because he fails to mention the third option,
which is the fact that RFK reached out to Kamala Harris's campaign.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
Was that phone call first, too?
It was first, too, wasn't it?
I believe so, in the timeline, yes.
I think it was the same week, so he was definitely feeling his options out at that time.
And Eisenstein presents this as a binary from the outset, and it allows him to frame the choice as if it was about RFK staying in or siding with Trump, when I'm going to say that the choice has always been about what's best for RFK.
So, when Eisenstein writes in Choice 2 that joining Trump means Bobby can still avert the catastrophe of another Democratic administration that will continue to pursue the neokind agenda of endless war, he's failing to mention the fact that the Harris campaign, that Bobby wanted the Harris campaign to dangle a cabinet position in front of his nose, and he would have jumped at that.
But one thing Eisenstein relies on generally as a rhetorical technique, he also did it when he republished his trite Sith allegory, and he misrepresents the Jedi Order right off the top of the essay, and he also positions it as indicative of the Trump-Harris choice here.
He's claiming he's beyond binaries when he's using them as a framework to set up his initial arguments, which is a bit rich because the only thing he lands on at the end of the essay is that we need to move beyond binaries.
And I just want to say that in that Star Wars piece, he is questioning this conventional storyline of the Jedi good, the Sith are bad, things are not always as they seem.
You know, in polarities, you never actually know who's moral and, you know, who's merely reactive.
But I would say that even here, I don't know if you saw this, Derek, or you pulled this out of it, but even here, he pulls on one half-truth that I think, like, sensitive George Lucas People, fans sense when he tries to equalize the two groups, which is, and he needs to do this in relation to the Democrats, right?
They're basically borderline kidnapping, neurodiverse from their homes and forcing them into lives
of magical violence.
And this is why the whole epic is about failed patriarchal relationships.
So, Eisenstein has some good instincts there in my view, but if his argument was that the Sith darkly mirror
the Jedi, that would be great.
But he can't really stop there.
He has to go farther with it.
He has to say that actually the Sith are the misunderstood heroes, and that's why he's harping on them as he's trying to rationalize his own father figure, R. F. K.
Jr., turning to the dark side.
Like, we could even think of Eisenstein's arc as that of the Jedi child, like, kidnapped for training by R. F. K.
Jr., but then sold into allegiance with Trump.
I think that would work too.
Yeah, and he's just a little hop, skipping away and jump away from Daryl Cooper territory, right?
Yeah, I think so.
Really, Hitler wanted peace.
It was that terrible Churchill.
So from early on, In the essay, two sentences jumped out at me, and you sort of flagged this in your summary, Matthew.
He says, I was privy to the decision-making process.
In case you think that I'm no longer in the inner circle because of my criticisms of RFK over Israel, he wants readers to know he still has an inside track.
He still has influence.
And then in his join Trump section, where he's mapping out the two arguments, he has this moment Where he says Trump wants to drain the swamp, but he didn't know how to do it last time, but that Kennedy knows how.
And Kennedy can reform the health agencies and save millions of children from death and misery.
That's a direct quote.
We should note, of course, this section is written with the conceit that it's one voice in the dialogue he's representing.
It's the one urging Bobby to join Trump.
But this is still outrageous because the throwaway implication is that millions of children are dead.
Or living in misery because our government agencies, and it's not a leap to say he means agencies involved in vaccine science, are corrupt and murderous.
And underneath that, there are two more naive assumptions.
Yeah, and let's just say, too, that that perception of millions of children dead or living in misery, that is a core, fundamental, unshakable belief.
Like, that is just reality.
And it's not about, you know, wealth inequality.
It's not about, you know, structural inequality or marginalization.
It's because of, you know, these poisons.
But they believe it with Yeah, and you know, we did an episode, we've covered Charles a couple times, we did an episode where we had obtained this video from him speaking in Ithaca to a small group of people on New Year's Eve.
And in that video, he made comments about how he has a side of him that would love to stand over the, you know, beaten and tortured corpse of people like Anthony Fauci, who have committed such heinous crimes against the children of our country.
Yeah, he's very non-binary about his positions when it serves him, but he has some real ugly instincts here.
And so for me, this is a moment where that kind of comes out with this kind of throwaway comment.
Of course, he's like echoing this assumption that Trump is really a good guy who was focused on rooting out corruption in Washington.
And I'll just direct anyone who's curious enough about this and doesn't know that I did a whole Patreon series called Swamp Creatures about the unprecedented corruption, criminality, and treason of Trump's closest allies, who he ushered into the White House and then ended up getting found guilty of all kinds of crimes.
And then, of course, he pardoned them.
The second assumption is that RFK Jr., who thinks Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates are supervillains and whose entire salary is based on courageously giving misinformation the biggest megaphone possible and who's never had a job in government, can somehow help the earnest swamp-drainer Donald Trump to get the job done properly this time.
I don't know what he's basing this on.
Trump is a conman carnival barker posing as a populist strongman.
Kennedy is an aging Don Quixote on TRT.
He's hellbent on endangering children he thinks he is saving.
And Charles, in all of this, to me, looks like a pretentious idiot posing as a sage.
Don Quixote was much more charismatic.
Sorry.
Well, let's move on, because I'm going to start seeing comments in the chat now about us doing ad hominem.
Something that characterizes all of Eisenstein's writing is the New Age posture that we sometimes call faux non-dualism.
This is rooted in the idea that all of humanity's problems stem from division.
It's what he calls the story of separation, which is almost like a trademark trope that he comes back to again and again.
It's a key indicator of waking up spiritually to realize that one has to transcend this framework, the story of separation, and rise above it to a place of unity.
Consciousness sounds nice.
And like all good New Agers, Charles knows it's not actually evil in the world that causes suffering.
It's our moral judgments of something as being evil.
This rhymes with the oft-quoted fake Albert Einstein quote that you cannot solve a problem from the same level of consciousness that created it.
Bear in mind that New Agers will also often unironically invoke Einstein's theory of relativity, which is a physics observation about how gravity affects the fabric of space-time, as if it somehow relates to the equally distorted postmodern principle they'll use of there being no such thing as absolute truth because everything is relative, man.
As a philosophy nerd, I have to say this, the actual non-dual ideas of Advaita Vedanta, of Taoism, of the Tantras and some schools of Buddhism have practically nothing to do with generalized New Age relativism about non-judgment.
They are more defined by their specific metaphysical perspectives on ultimate reality as being inseparable from our lived humanity.
Rather than being transcendent and beyond the material world.
Okay, Julian, just to pause there, what is an easy example of, like, a real non-dualism and why do its proponents find it useful?
Like, I think everybody gets that it's not about, you know, Trump is the same or the Democrats are the same as the Republicans, but, like, what does real non-dualism say?
Well, I mean, in terms of this philosophical, the technical philosophical usage,
the dualist position would be that the divine and the mundane are somehow radically separate
from one another in order to get to some realization of the sacred or the divine or God,
you have to transcend the material world.
The non-dual perspective would say, no, the divine is radiantly present
in every aspect of the material world and in our humanity.
And actually attempting to cross over the line, you're actually going to screw yourself up.
So actual philosophy aside, even at the most basic level, Charles's extreme relativism is just internally incoherent.
The very assertion that the story of separation is the cause of human confusion and suffering is itself a way of separating people into an us and them.
So the world is divided into people who want a unity in which no one is wrong or bad, and then those on the other side who perpetuate division, which is wrong and bad.
This is like, you know, very, very self-amoric.
It's technically called the performative contradiction in the act of doing or saying the thing that you're saying you contradict yourself.
It brings me to the section I mostly want to focus on.
So under a SEB heading that reads, The Taint of Association, Charles paints a picture of his poor, apparently as yet unenlightened readers and supporters, he does this, you know, sort of inadvertently, who sent him hundreds of messages asking if he was okay after Bobby kissed the Trump ring.
And he says that he detected or imagined a subtext in their concern.
The implicit question was, have you gone over to the dark side?
The question of which side I'm on, have I gone over to MAGA, evokes in me a primal dread.
The question cannot be met with a discussion of the relative merits of Trump's policies compared to those of Kamala Harris.
It is asking, are you one of us or one of them?
Are you an acceptable member of society, my society?
Because Charles, your proximity to the untouchable one now makes you untouchable unless you purify yourself of his taint by performing the necessary ablutions.
The implicit plea then is for me to clearly disavow, denounce, and repudiate Donald Trump along with Kennedy's alliance with him.
Then I will have established myself as an acceptable person again.
To make a measured assessment of Trump's flaws and virtues, or those of the people around him, or the possible ramifications, good and ill, of his administration violates the requirements of the purification ritual.
One must other him.
One must cast him out of the circle of one's associations.
Which group are you part of?
This is an ancient and terrifying social force.
When a witch hunt is on, you'd better not have any friendly relations with a witch or with anyone who does.
That was good.
You had the clipped phrasing that he often uses.
I noticed it a few sentences in.
It was a little bit fast though.
I have to close my eyes and reach for it a little bit more.
Yeah, but thank you for your service.
All right, thanks.
OK, let's start with the question cannot be a discussion of the relative merits of Trump's policies as compared to those of Kamala Harris.
No, of course not.
Why not?
Well, because the question of political support is much deeper than that.
You see, we wouldn't want any policy details to cloud our metaphysical insights.
And his insights in this case have to do with the sin of othering.
And he uses the old Hindu caste system word Untouchable, as if to designate Trump as a member of the lowest caste, believed to be spiritually impure, such that in Brahmin culture, higher castes would need to purify themselves.
They'd need to perform evolutions, as he said, after any contact, sometimes even after them, like, looking at you while you were eating.
Oh my God, this is going to be, you know, toxifying.
He's saying that anyone who sees association with Donald Trump as unacceptable is doing this, right?
After all of his criminal convictions, his multiple attempts to overturn the last election, the fact that half the people who've worked for him have written the authoritarian Project 2025 plan, while the other half have vowed to do everything they can to stop him from getting back into the White House because he's dangerous and incompetent.
Anyone who sees partnering with this sociopath as unacceptable is similar to someone adhering to irrational and dehumanizing fundamentalist religious bigotry, is the implication.
Now, hold on a second.
That sounds bad.
Sounds like Charles wouldn't partner with someone who supported the caste system.
Or at least not a caste system that had the fortunate son habitual liar convicted criminal and failed coup leader at its bottom.
He compares the reflexive pressure to denounce Trump as being like a witch hunt.
And this makes me wonder if Charles was absent from philosophy class when thought experiments were introduced as ways to test your ideas and beliefs about the world.
If Trump And by extension, Bobby and maybe Charles himself represent the witch that the superstitious townsfolk, because this is the implication, want to burn.
Then who is Anthony Fauci?
Right?
Who's Kamala Harris?
Who's Bill Gates?
Who's George Soros?
If Democrats are the angry religious fundamentalists in your analogy, Charles, who the fuck is MAGA?
Who's Leonard Leo and Clarence and Ginny Thomas and Samuel Alito?
You know, to be fair, going through his archive of posts throughout the pandemic, he will also turn around and apply nominally the same logic to any public figure.
So he probably has some plausible ass covering there.
But the one thing that I want to say is that, like, All of this is all about him.
It's all about him.
Like, it's an amazing essay about him, not about his sort of political position or his agency.
It's just about him and how people see him.
Are people going to reject him or not?
That's how he opens.
I also want to note that all of you have thrown F-bombs today and you're really encroaching upon my language.
It's making me a little uncomfortable.
Oh, OK.
Sorry.
We're appropriating New Jersey speak.
Yeah, no, I agree with that, Matthew.
It's about him.
It's about how people perceive him.
It's about how he is going to orient himself in the dynamics of power in the wake of this new development.
Now, look, to be fair, as you just said, he does even here spend a couple paragraphs reflecting on, well, you know, Maga is technically not small.
It's not powerless enough to be the target of a real witch hunt.
But then he quickly pivots away from that, back to how all of this relates to the polarization that could lead to civil war, unless we overcome the divisiveness that evaluates Trump as despicable.
Nuts, because the civil war looms large on our horizon.
The potential of another civil war looms large unless MAGA can overcome the hypnotic trance that prevents them from seeing Trump as despicable.
It's not because we see Trump as despicable that terrible things could happen.
He actually is despicable.
The thing is to find out what's really true.
Because here's the thing, the antidote to superstitious overly tribal group hatred based on false claims on misinformation is actually a set.
The antidote would be a set of rational judgments based on the facts and the evidence.
Just a little primer for you, Charles.
The justice system tells us the difference between witch hunts and actually prosecuting criminals.
It's something that Trump doesn't know.
You might whisper this in his ear.
Science tells us the difference between medicine and quackery.
Investigative journalism tells us the difference between conspiracy theories and actual proven conspiracies which have happened.
And sound philosophy, which is what you're educated in, supposedly debunks the kinds of fallacies in which you traffic every time you put pen to paper.
Last thing I'll say here is that the key to all of this nonsense, and this specific essay's raison d'être, there it is again, Derek, lies in this one sentence.
I am not joining Donald Trump's campaign, but if I have the opportunity to seed ideas into his mind, his message, his campaign, or his administration, I will do so.
Pick me!
Pick me!
It's going to be a lot more than $21,000 a month though, I can tell you that.
You know it.
Well, I also picked out two passages that really jumped out at me.
Matthew, would you read the first?
I first felt the heat of this drama around 2018 when I was a guest on Russell Brand's podcast.
Shortly thereafter, Russell hosted Jordan Peterson.
So I was on the same platform as Jordan Peterson.
I soon received emails demanding that I distance myself from Russell Brand and denounce his association with Peterson.
The popular kids had declared that Jordan Peterson had cooties.
Therefore, Russell Brand had cooties too, and so would I if I didn't distance myself.
Yes, of course I wanted him to win.
But my main fidelity was, one, to that which his campaign might serve, truth, peace, transparency, freedom, and behind all those, a new story for civilization, and two, to the best version of himself that I could witness, believe in, and encourage as an advisor and as a friend.
You've already touched upon some of these.
I don't think we need to unpack too much of it.
I just wanted to show some of the language that he's specifically using.
But as you flagged, Matthew, he just mostly inserts himself throughout this essay.
And the fact that he had to bring up the fact that he was on Russell Brand's podcast, it just seems like a flex.
And he's trying to set up this idea that, oh, podcasts host divergent trains of thought, and I was caught up in that.
And we know that there are many other reasons to criticize Charles Eisenstein, whether or not he went on Russell Brand's podcast Six years ago at this point.
But in terms of these really trite roles that he's setting them up, first of all, have you guys ever heard, I mean, I don't think any of us have ever worked on a political campaign, but we all kind of study this in some sense.
I have never heard of anyone being hired by a political campaign to do the sort of work that he's insinuating that he's done.
No, no, I've never heard of it either.
But it sort of makes sense for the entire sort of world that we come from.
Like, if you were going to put together a political campaign, you know, that was made up of New Age yoga wellness influencers with the sort of, you know, strongest strongman bro scientist at the top, and then you were going to staff it with the people who came forward with their sort of pretenses of skill, this is what it would look like.
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, we have Bannon.
And in a way, this is an echo, and of course it's much less ominous of someone like Alexander Dugan.
It's like the state-sanctioned philosopher or something.
At the second point, I'm currently just really deep into these readings on the history of socialized medicine or how medicine evolved in America from the The 18th century onwards, as well as a book about individualized medicine.
And what I'm thinking of right now is just how little we understand what happened at the turn of the 20th century to give us all of these sort of luxuries that we have.
Like the fact that the diphtheria vaccine Greatly extended our lifespan at the early 20th century.
All of these public health measures and infrastructures that were set up that we are the beneficiaries of.
I knew some of this, but to get actual data and history on what happened to construct what we have is astounding.
Everything Eisenstein says about the fact that Arth K is the one who's going to offer us transparency and truth is utter bullshit, because everything he does is always about the glorification of the individual as the sole proprietor of their own health, when we have centuries of data showing that that is simply not the case.
So, Julian.
I know I'm putting this on you.
Maybe you can read the second passage in Russell Brand's voice.
I don't know.
You can try Eisenstein or just pull someone, Martin Short.
I don't know.
Go for it.
I think with all of that pressure, I would get very confused that I should just do my own voice.
Donald Trump is an uncannily accommodating vessel for projection, good and ill.
It occurs as something of a cosmic joke that his last name is Trump, which is the Joker in a deck of cards.
A wild card.
A card that can be any card.
So it is that Donald Trump can be any character, whatever people hold him to be.
This serves both to elevate him and debase him.
This is so banal, holy shit.
Whatever his flaws and virtues, he's definitely a talented showman.
A creator of spectacle, as one would expect from the Joker, the Jester, the Trump.
Why so serious?
The showman's openness to projection allows the spectators to see in him that which he is not, whether hero or villain.
He is a cipher, a proxy through which society's intensifying divisions can materialize in human form.
He also, therefore, represents an opportunity to heal those divisions.
Oh, obviously.
Clearly.
That opportunity is not up to him.
It's up to us, and we can choose it by cutting through the demonization and the valorization both to see the man beneath the Trump.
Derek, I know you have comments on this, but like I just have to say that if we scanned this against what he said to Aubrey Marcus about RFK Jr.
back when they were on stage talking about their psychedelic sort of validation of his candidacy, it's the same argument.
It's the same argument.
RFK Jr. is not really anybody.
He can both heal our divisions, but also we can see him as a demon or whatever.
Same script.
This is my problem with the whole mythopoetic sphere, especially how it's manifested in
the wellness space, is that this is actually my background academically, is studying religious
texts.
And I am very into understanding analogies and metaphors, and also understanding the
cultures which gave birth to these ideas.
I love religious texts even as an atheist because they are symbols.
There are ways of being that you try to live up to.
They present them with a lot of other problems attached to them when it comes to social restrictions and such.
But what he's doing is he's trying to enter this mythopoetic sense.
And the only comment I really have on this entire thing is, you are not a woman who has lost bodily autonomy because of what Trump has done.
Yeah, exactly.
You are not someone who had to escape your country to try to give your children a better life and were separated at the border because of Trump's policies.
You are coming at this from such a privileged position and the idea that you can just kind of shunt Trump into this mythopoetic space as if he's this archetypal figure that we have to deal with, that you can only say that if you're not dealing with the consequences of the policies that his administration has wrought.
Yeah, I agree with all of that, Derek.
You know, rounding up as we head to the end here, I've got a few thoughts about this larger question of how does somebody like this get to where he is?
And I think those thoughts reflect on how RFK Jr.
got to where he is as well.
And the general theme is there's an anxiety that comes from never really having an original thought.
Now, Eisenstein's strength has always been about tapping into something true-ish, whether it's appropriate or not, as you're suggesting with, like, are we going to use, you know, mythopoiesis to talk about Trump.
But what he's tapping into is just the basic notion that myths are structurally important and motivational.
And then when he applies this to conspiracy theories, he says that they speak as a kind of folk knowledge.
And some scholars agree with him, that myths use symbolic terms to express intuitions about the world that just can't be substantiated because of access limits or institutional gatekeeping.
And then he goes further and he says that QAnon gets the feelings right and the facts wrong.
He actually previews Naomi Klein's much better and actually researched argument before she gets to it.
And he's not entirely wrong for those who carry an awareness of just the debauchery of the neoliberal age.
So here's my speculation about how he arrives here.
Somewhere along the line between pretending to be an expert in yogic diet, to an expert in global economy, to how we should solve climate change, he sort of suffered a personal disaster that he may not be aware of, which is that he was surrounded by feedback that told him he was uniquely insightful, He was a savant.
He was indispensable to the human knowledge project.
Like nobody was around to inform him that he had picked up on a fairly common observation about mythic structures that we find in literary studies, comparative literature, classics, you know, Bible studies, Shakespeare, you know, in criticism going back to the 19th century and before.
Maybe he was never in a room where someone could fact check or peer review him.
So either that's luck or it's actively avoiding that stuff.
No one early on tells him that he's either full of shit or simply banal.
But then there's also something weirder going on too, which is that there's a cultural memory holding going on that let Eisenstein kind of just ram himself into the spotlight as though he'd invented certain ideas.
I want to read something to you both, and you can take a guess as to where this comes from.
Okay, quote.
It's all a question of story.
We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story.
We are in between stories.
The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is not functioning properly, and we have not learned the new story.
The old story sustained us for a long period of time.
It shaped our emotional attitudes, provided us with life purpose, energized action.
It consecrated suffering.
It integrated knowledge, guided education.
We awoke in the morning and knew where we were.
We could answer the questions of our children.
We could identify crime, punish criminals.
Everything was taken care of because the story was there.
It did not make men good.
It did not take away the pains and stupidities of life, or make for unfailing warmth in human association.
But it did provide a context in which life could function in a meaningful manner.
But when we look outside the traditional believing community, we see a society that is also dysfunctional.
Even with advanced science and technology, with superb techniques in manufacturing and commerce, in communications and computation, our secular society remains without satisfactory meaning or capacity to restrain the violence of its own members.
Our miracle machines serve ephemeral purposes.
So we begin to talk about values.
Where can we begin?
My suggestion is that we begin where everything begins in human affairs, with the basic story, the account of how things came to be at all, how they came to be as they are, and how the future life of man can be given some satisfying direction.
We need a story that will educate man, heal him, Okay, Derek, Julian, who wrote that, do you think?
Well, I can see the script, Matthew.
Do you want me to just read the next line?
I mean, you hear it, right?
Yes, yes.
If you didn't see the script, this is the opening of a small book called A New Story, and it's by the Jesuit eco-theologian Father Thomas Berry.
It's published in 1978.
If this isn't plagiarism of some kind, then I believe that Eisenstein can really access the mind of Thomas Berry, who died in 2009, maybe through the Akashic realms.
Maybe he can channel him directly.
You know, I don't know if when you channel someone you have to give citations, but does anyone know about this?
I was kind of flabbergasted after all these years of looking at his work.
I did not know that there was this direct antecedent.
I came across the connection in this really good critical analysis of Eisenstein's essay by Drew Dellinger that we'll link to, and then I found three hits that put Barry and Eisenstein together.
One is a commenter on a blog that points out the possible cribbing.
Then there's a video lecture that Eisenstein gives on another topic where the producer makes the connection on the host page for the lecture.
And then there's an interview with someone named Brian Swim who asks Charles Eisenstein if he is familiar with the work of Thomas Berry.
Swim says, do you know the work of Thomas Berry?
Very little firsthand.
Yeah, everyone tells me there's a lot of resonance between my work and Thomas Berry's.
And so I scanned Eisenstein's books in Google Books, and I can't find any clear citations of Thomas Berry.
Yeah, and that reference to Brian Swim is really important, because Brian Swim did a whole series of beautiful videos on YouTube about the new story.
Like, Brian Swim is deep, deep into this particular thing about how we need some kind of mythopoetic way forward that is infused by scientific knowledge about the universe and how incredible it is.
Okay, now does SWIM predate Eisenstein's work on this?
I believe so.
Okay, and so I wonder if that was a poking question, right?
He's like, oh, by the way, ever heard of... Yeah, so how does this happen, this stunning lack?
Because I would equate a lack of originality with a lack of, you know, real world ideas to put forward, which is what we've been talking about for the last hour.
Eisenstein is writing into a charismatic, unboundaried space in which failing to check sources is pretty standard.
Like, you know, I didn't check sources when I got tied up with Michael Roach and, you know, other people who I admired, but all it took was him reciting some verses in medieval Tibetan that I was, you know, signed up to hear what the rest of Roach had to say.
So there's something about also, for me at least, you know, dropping out of college where you ostensibly know that professors are not making shit up, And then you enter these pseudo-college spaces and retreat centers and meditation, you know, retreats where people can make things up, but you assume that they won't.
But also there's a generational issue here, because whoever was reading Barry with any concentration was probably Boomer, and Eisenstein really found his crowd with younger Gen X and Millennial readers, and I think maybe among people who were new to eco-spirituality as well.
So he gets this self-validating feedback loop going.
He turns the banal into the grandiose.
He somehow finds a professional garden for it, which is not the academy, it's not journalism, it's not the political think tank, but it's the self-help workshop economy based in post-60s retreat centers that have been gentrified into sites of neoliberal spiritual pilgrimage.
These are places where the product is not knowledge or policy, but inspiration and experiences of mindfulness.
Good vegetarian dinners, places to lean into your healing so that you can better lean into your bicoastal startup.
So there's a pure audience capture aspect to Eisenstein's product.
It's not rational.
It's never been disciplined.
It's not guardrailed.
It encourages constant overreach, constant spiritualization.
And it rides on super simplistic principles that can be made to apply to and just obfuscate any issue.
The story of separation comes to stand in for everything.
And as it takes on its own momentum, it acquires much more than a readership.
It acquires a participatory community.
And it has to, because on its own, the content won't really satisfy.
There has to be community, there has to be engagement, workshops, retreats, and Zoom courses.
And what we've seen over the last year is that they've tried to scale this up into a political campaign, and it cannot work.
Reading Eisenstein is not complete unless you also sit close to him and watch him make shit up on the spot.
And that is why everything can shift around.
That is why nothing really means anything.
That is why Trump can be a trickster, capable of anything.
And maybe actually that's why Eisenstein is not so secretly attracted to him.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality.
