Tens of people will be flocking to Washington DC this Sunday as Rumble comes to life during Rescue the Republic, a one-day event featuring RFK Jr, Russell Brand, Jordan Peterson, Bret Weinstein, Tulsi Gabbard—it’s quite an impressive roster of anti-vax luminaries and right-wing contrarians gathering under the pretense of what is effectively a glorified Donald Trump rally.
And that’s not hyperbole, given that Trump is seated next to Elon Musk on the marketing materials, which is a graphic retelling of George Washington crossing the Delaware River. While this event is already infected with tons of conspirituality, one late addition caught our attention: Human Garage. This fascia-release-cures-everything organization had to flee California for Canada due to legal troubles, yet their star continues to rise as they embark on their “Transforming Trauma” world tour. And nothing says “healing” more than spreading pseudoscientific wellness jargon and hawking turmeric supplements at a Trump event.
Show Notes
Apostolic Journey to Singapore: Interreligious Meeting with Young People in the Catholic Junior College (13 September 2024) | Francis
Lord by Thy Holy Cross
Pope: War in Gaza is too much! No steps taken for peace - Vatican News
Physio Reacts: Episode 1 - Human Garage (Part 1 of ?)
Physio Reacts: Episode 2 - Human Garage (Part 2)
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This is why, like, there's no... These are humorless people because to them this looks unironic.
It looks like it's noble.
It looks... I don't think they get that it looks funny.
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Conspiracuality 225, trauma healing for Trump.
Tens of people will be flocking to Washington DC.
this Sunday as Rumble comes to life during Rescue the Republic, a one-day event featuring RFK Jr., Russell Brand, Jordan Peterson, Brett Weinstein, Tulsi Gabbard.
It's quite an impressive roster of anti-vax luminaries and right-wing contrarians gathering under the pretense of what is effectively a glorified Donald Trump rally.
And that's not hyperbole, given that Trump is seated next to Elon Musk on the marketing materials, which is a graphic retelling of George Washington crossing the Delaware River.
While this event is already infected with tons of conspirituality, one late addition caught our attention.
Human Garage.
This fascia-release-cures-everything organization had to flee California for Canada due to legal troubles, yet their star continues to rise as they embark on their transforming trauma world tour.
And nothing says healing more than spreading pseudoscientific wellness jargon
and hawking turmeric supplements at a Trump event.
This past week, the journal Nature published an article about the origins of the COVID pandemic.
This was a summary and commentary on a new re-analysis published in the journal Cell of a huge trove of genomic data gathered from the Hunan seafood wholesale market in Wuhan, China in January of 2020, after it had just been shut down.
Previous articles in Nature and elsewhere had looked at this exact data set and found plenty of evidence of SARS-CoV-2 in animals, but they'd still been inconclusive on the chain of infection.
At the time, they pointed out that it was still a small possibility that a human could have infected one of the animals, for example, as a possible hypothesis, but this new reanalysis utilized more sophisticated genomic techniques for enhanced specificity about exactly which animals were present in the samples.
They've identified half a dozen potential intermediate hosts from the market, and the names of these animals are just too interesting for me to leave out here, so bear with me.
We have raccoon dogs, the masked palm civet, the hoary bamboo rat, the amur hedgehog, That's so amazing.
I would love a civet.
Those are so cute.
Experts say that the co-location of animal and viral material is strongly suggestive.
And the authors note that the viral density, as well as the presence of two different viral lineages, also increases the likelihood of the wet market being the origin point of human infection.
And this is because it's much less likely that in the earliest days of the pandemic, humans could have infected animals twice.
But two versions of a virus already circulating and mutating between the animals could have jumped to different humans.
Scientists have known about the presence of these two lineages in the market since 2022.
Now, the competing lab leak hypothesis, so popular amongst the people we cover, would require a human essentially walking out of a lab, carrying the lab in some form, and then passing it along to other humans, as well as in huge quantities to the mostly wild-caught animals in the market, who had such high concentrations of the two different strains.
And all of this would have had to have been in the waning months of 2019.
So the article in Nature concludes that this more granular processing of the data now gives researchers a way to follow leads about certain specific animals in the wildlife trade so as to help prevent future spillovers via better regulation.
What is so noteworthy about this story in conspirituality terms is that this is just the latest in a long line of findings since 2021 that have shaped an overwhelming scientific consensus around a zoonotic spillover, which, by the way, is the case with about 60% of viruses that are currently in circulation amongst humans.
And the evidence and the consensus is that this is the most likely explanation for COVID.
Nonetheless, good science communicators have always said a lab leak is not impossible.
There's just been no supporting evidence for it.
And what we've had over the course of the previous years is President Donald Trump calling it the China virus.
This didn't help, nor did the appearance of secrecy from the Chinese government or their retaliatory attempts to say maybe the virus originated in an American lab.
Which was then an idea that was promoted in 2022 by Bobby Kennedy.
Wow, what a mess.
Of course it was.
And then we had legendary host of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart, having that epic Lab League moment on Colbert, in which he ran directly to the camera, walking right up to it to say, it's just too much of a coincidence.
Then there's Bret Weinstein on Bill Maher's show, as well as a who's who of conspiritualists on Joe Rogan, adding noise to the data signal.
Everybody loved this.
Everybody loved this possibility instead of what seems to be like almost intuitively most likely, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
And what we've had, as I've been saying since early 2023, is all the folks who've been pro-lab leak basically saying, well, it's a done deal now.
It's all but proven that it came from a lab and we were right all along, based on nothing.
Jon Stewart's still on it too.
I mean, I listened to his weekly show podcast as well and a couple of weeks ago, he brought that up and he stepped around it lightly, but he's still in that camp.
So what all of these influential personalities have in common?
Is that their passion for the lab leak theory has always been based entirely on the exact elements that always fuel conspiracy theories and not on any specific evidence.
They just felt it in their bones.
It was too suspicious.
It was too much of a coincidence.
And I'm sorry, but that's really just another way of saying I haven't taken the time to learn about the history and science of animal-to-human viral transmission via intermediary species.
They also really haven't considered the fact that, in terms of contemporary pandemics, that capitalism, urbanization, the proximity of wet markets to big populations is actually also a factor.
It's like there's no political analysis in there either.
That's right.
That's right.
Nonetheless, I'm sad to say, a YouGov poll from March of 2023 found that two-thirds of Americans believe that COVID originated in a lab.
And of course, that breaks down in predictable ways.
It's about 53% of Democrats, which is still too high, but 85% of the party that today we still call the Republicans.
At this point, the real question is, will better science have any impact on these numbers?
And I think the answer is probably no.
Okay, so for this week in Conspiratuality, I have a story that's like two steps forward,
one step back, because it involves the Catholic Church.
And it's about how two weeks ago, Pope Francis was in Singapore on the last stop of a grueling, for his age, Asian tour.
It started in Indonesia, he stopped in Papua New Guinea, and Timor-Leste.
He attended a gathering of young people in Singapore on the theme of inter-religious dialogue, and he gave some generally encouraging remarks, but he also threw in one that betrayed his age and inconsistent understanding of non-harming speech.
He told the group that if they weren't willing to reach beyond their political and cultural comfort zones.
They might get fat.
But anyway, he's an old guy.
In Singapore, he also said something a little bit less ambiguous.
He said it in Italian.
He said, if you start arguing my religion is more important than yours or mine is the true one, yours is not true, where does this lead?
Somebody answer.
And a young person answers, destruction.
That is correct.
All religions are paths to God.
I will use an analogy.
They are like different languages that express the divine, but God is for everyone, and therefore we are all God's children.
But my God is more important than yours.
Is this true?
There is only one God, and religions are like languages, paths to reach God.
Some Sikh, some Muslim, some Hindu, some Christian.
Now, I don't have to inform the Catholics or ex-Catholics out there that this is actually an incredible statement, that no Catholic leader has ever, in millennia, come close to saying anything like this.
And then, like, whenever fringe mystic types like Thomas Merton have, they're always tempting excommunication.
But Italian isn't the Pope's first language, and so when this stuff comes up, the Vatican has this tendency, especially if it's anticipating a shitstorm response, and this one could have been written by Swami Vivekananda.
You mean like 120 years ago, right?
Yeah, I mean, they tried to massage the sentence, which in Italian is, Tutte le religioni sono un cammino per arrivare a Dio, which very clearly means all religions are pathways for arriving at God, into what they wanted to say was all religions are seen as paths trying to reach God.
But they had to walk that back really quickly because, you know, the Italian was very clear.
And, you know, in my opinion, the comments are just basic common sense.
You know, as Julian, you're saying 120 years of universalist history are in align with that.
They're also in line with the rest of Francis's sometimes inconsistent politics of inclusion.
And I think they show a kind of vulnerable absence of fragility that we should expect from someone who's learned that service trumps dogma.
And I'm kind of chuffed that this statement provides a kind of test case for something we've debated on this show, which is the difference between how religious people versus religions define themselves.
Like, you can have a stated doctrine that's centuries old that says salvation comes only through Jesus, and then you can have the supposed defender of that doctrine who says, eh, meh, maybe not.
Well, I mean, he is in a fairly protected position historically as opposed to a lot
of people who were under the thumb of, you know, the theocracy of Catholicism.
He also is facing pressure from the American bishops, half of whom are following Bishop
Strickland.
There's pressure coming from different cultures, like the African bishops as well, who are going to want him to take a much more conservative line all the time.
Yeah, I mean, my sense is that there is a general kind of liberalizing message at times from the current Vatican as a way to try to reach out more, perhaps because numbers are waning in places, you know, where...
In places that are different from where they have this hardcore conservative kind of line.
But to me, it's like, are we grading this guy on a curve?
Because really, he's sort of a moderate Republican.
In his official acts, he remains opposed to women becoming priests.
He remains opposed to gay marriage.
He has said homosexuality is terribly unjust that it was a crime.
We should separate a sin from a crime.
So he does things, he makes noises that are pleasing to those of us with a progressive temperament, but the policies are still very, very conservative.
They are, and his commentary is pushing and pushing and pushing, and progressive Catholics, you know, as well as conservative Catholics are arguing always about what that means.
I mean, I'll just give one example.
In a recent talk, he put weapons manufacturers and people who sell condoms in the same category, because one destroys life and one prevents life.
Yeah, he made those comments also on his trip back from Singapore.
I'm going to get to that, actually, on the plane.
But I think this capacity for the figurehead of a religion to really speak outside of the belief doctrine is pretty understanding.
It was pretty crucial for the understanding of how many drivers are involved in conspiracism because, you know, beliefs can be powerful in an abstract, structural community identity sense, but it's actually not always easy to look into the gap between what a group says it believes and how that shows up in the practice of individuals and subgroups.
Like, in order for the conspiracist to scapegoat any group, from Jews to Catholics to the Gates Foundation to RFK Jr.
talking about the FDA, they have to impute a homogeneity of doctrine.
And people are generally weirder than that.
But, in response to this common sense statement, we have the real doctrinal, you know, stick-in-the-muds.
The QAnon Catholics, who are committed to rigidity and doctrinal belief, they come out and accuse the Pope of the heresy of indifferentism.
And leading the charge is Bishop Strickland.
I've covered him extensively.
Francis removed him from the Archdiocese of Tyler, Texas, for anti-vax and pro-QAnon shitposting.
And I also have to say, I hadn't heard of indifferentism before, and I think it's a very cool-sounding heresy, because it's the heresy of, I don't give a shit, which is perfect, because I think it preserves something essential but undervalued about Catholic life, which is that the doctrine's power depends in part on this part of you that's still being a little kid in the back pew, scratching like, this is bullshit, into the oak with a little pen knife.
But I also think that Francis' universalism comes off at a crucial time because one of the primary complaints you'll hear from the Strickland crowd is that if all religions are the same, what does that mean about our martyrs who died for their faith?
And I think that in a time of holy war, they should probably say a few rosaries and look in the mirror and think about it.
But I also have to leave this with one more Francis Communications issue because he then gets on the plane home from Singapore and the media reports that he says both Trump and Harris are against life.
And he's referring, but not by name, to Trump's immigration policy and to Harris' abortion rights policies and that Americans must vote but also choose the lesser evil.
But what wasn't widely reported was that he also condemned the military action in Gaza
and capital punishment, and the omissions from the reporting made it seem like he was comparing
immigration to abortion rights alone instead of giving a fairly consistent pacifist position,
which unfortunately hasn't yet stretched to include offering peace to women who want
authority over their bodies.
And now it turns out that their founder is appearing at this big tent conspiracy theorist event called Rescue the Republic on Sunday alongside many of our usual suspects.
Now for just a little more context here before we get into it, this is a free event.
at the National Mall, like the Defeat the Mandates rally, which was organized by the same people in 2022.
And that's the place you'll remember where Bobby Kennedy compared anti-vaxxers to Anne Frank escaping the Nazis, which she didn't do.
Spoiler alert.
So one imagines they're planning on having a huge crowd, even though we said tens of people are flocking there.
We'll see what happens.
Included in the weekend's activities, which is all on the same stage and all part of the same promotional lobby here is a Libertarian Party sponsored rally on
Saturday from 12 to 5 p.m. called Rage Against the War Machine.
And then there's an outdoor movie premiere of Vaxxed 3, authorized to kill, on Saturday
evening.
Vaxxed is a series.
Vaxxed, if you're not familiar with it, this is a series of anti-vaccine films, which was started by the devil incarnate.
Oh, wait, no, that's a typo.
Andrew Wakefield is his correct name.
Do we know who Andrew Wakefield is?
Really?
Do we really know who he is?
This is the guy who is patient zero in terms of the virulent lie that vaccines cause autism.
Disbar Dr. Zero.
Yeah, Dr. Zero.
And so he had his license taken away.
The study was retracted.
He should have disappeared into a pit of shame at that point, but he's made a whole career grifting on this lie that vaccines cause autism.
And he moved to Austin just to up-level his grift, which is where he now lives, I believe.
Yes, yes.
I thought it said Mecca, but that was a typo too.
He went to Austin, which is the place you go to if you want to do this kind of grift.
So the VAX series was continued then by, of course, RFK Jr.' 's Children's Health Defense and their propaganda wing.
So being involved with all of that is somehow the next step for Human Garage.
But let's do some background on what exactly Human Garage is, and then we'll get later into what this development might represent.
I first became aware of Human Garage about a year ago.
I actually did a brief earlier this year with David Lysandak about fascia specifically, but it was because of Human Garage's work.
So that brief, and I'll include in the show notes, just is more generally about fascia, but I do present some of Human Garage's claims to David and he replies.
Now at the time, Human Garage had about a million followers on TikTok and that has swelled to 1.6 million.
And there were immediate red flags in what I was seeing.
They were claiming to heal a variety of mental health and emotional problems through fascia release.
Honestly, I could clip from almost any video they produce, but let's start with one of Human Garage's founders.
His name is Gary Linehan.
He's also sort of the face of Human Garage, even though we'll mention the other three founders in a bit.
This is from June.
And again, I will give a 101 in a moment, but you should know that he's not clinically trained in anything, but he feels comfortable speaking like this about trauma.
When the body naturally comes out of stress, trauma starts to leave the body naturally.
So all these sophisticated trauma ceremonies and stuff like that do not need to happen.
People can do it by themselves at their home.
We have hundreds of thousands of examples now.
It works.
It works really good.
Take the stress off twice a day.
Let the body do what it was meant to do.
Our bodies are naturally in stress today, but that's not natural.
But we are in stress.
So who here feels super calm?
Clear-headed?
Yeah, absolutely.
This is what you're getting closer to what presence feels like.
The more you do this, the calmer you get.
And just if you think you're calm right now, it's because your perception, you went from here to here.
But you got all the way down here to go and over time I found that over the last three years, four years in particular, I have gotten calmer and calmer and calmer.
Less use of hormones, no more thoughts which were like, I worry, I wonder if this is going to happen, did I piss that person off, am I okay?
Are they okay?
All that stuff that I used to play in my head has all gone away.
I get a reminder of it once in a while.
Like every third or fourth day I get a thought.
But that's it.
This is what we're doing.
We're systematically taking the stress out of your body.
I am getting more and more stressed out listening to him already.
I'm like stiffening up.
I just want to underline something for a moment.
Okay, so Derek, did you really say there's no clinical training at all, like no education in a clinical setting, no medical education or anything like that?
No, Gary, I'm going to get into his origin story in a little bit, but he supposedly trained as a bodybuilder.
He lists no clinical experience.
The other co-founders, you have Cynthia Lavoie.
She lists no clinical training in her bio other than homeschooling her children, which says she taught her about childhood psychology and birthing.
You have Jason Van Blurk, who is a certified personal trainer.
That's his trainings.
And Aisha Rodriguez only lists I mean, in a way, I can already see we're going to talk about this, but this whole you-can-do-this-yourself-at-home DIY thing is going to be perfect for the libertarian mashup of this particular convention.
But yeah, let's go on.
And also, I just want to note, when I say lists no training, I want to flag that because it's really important because any certified expert, someone who is really knowledgeable in their field and has training, will always list that, usually in the first sentence or paragraph of their professional bio.
And it's a red flag whenever you see someone use an anecdote or lists no training or doesn't list where they were trained or what certificates they have.
And that's the case with all of these people.
But what if they're just modest, Derek?
What if they don't want to brag about their personal training?
They don't want to gatekeep other people.
Yeah, we need to rethink education entirely.
Why would you say where you went?
From a heterodox perspective.
So I want to know, in the video, when Gary asks how the crowd is feeling, it's after these basic repetitive movements and what he calls fascial release.
And this is pretty much the entire basis of the organization, that trauma is held in certain energetic places in the body and that either through specific movements or through touch, which we'll also get to, it can be magically released.
And it's not only Gary that does the releasing for Human Garage.
Well, and I think it would have to be that way with regard to the lack of clinical training and him having underlings, like he can't actually, he wouldn't be able to have anything under, anybody under him with any credentials.
I just want to comment too on this thing about, you know, when he asks how the crowd is feeling, because that's a very standard, it's a way of working a crowd of people, right?
You have people do something that will create a temporary shift in their nervous system state, and then you ask them how they're feeling, and then everyone gets on board with like, yeah, we feel this way, we feel that way, we feel better, this is great.
And then you link that to whatever ideology you're trying to indoctrinate them into.
It's because of this.
You see, you have undeniable felt experience evidence.
And it's just, it's a way of establishing a certain kind of control.
Julian, it sounds like you know how to do this.
It's something I've observed a lot.
Yeah, right.
They have claimed on their website to have treated over 200,000 people over the last decade, but we don't have any proof of that.
But Gary also claims that all diseases and bodily and mental dysfunctions are emotional, mostly acquired through stress.
Uh-oh.
And he claims that fascial maneuvers can reduce 75% to 90% of stress in your body within minutes.
Human Garage even offers astrology-based fascial release coupled with cacao ceremonies over Zoom.
Awesome.
That was one of it.
So while their workshops might entail movement, touch, and faith healing, their views on illnesses are rather expectable.
All disease starts with an emotion that's dysregulated.
If I'm angry right now or I'm fearful, my body doesn't feel comfortable.
It feels uneasy, right?
If I leave that in my body over a long period of time, that disease is now measurable.
What about a genetic disease?
How do genes mutate?
Well, through epigenetics, the stressors of the environment.
Yeah, epigenetics always sounds interesting to me, but I don't know what the evidentiary consensus is on it at the moment.
But one drawback to that as a theory is that guys like this can just use it as a backup for the obvious hole in their theory, which is like, what about children born with diseases, which is a You know, a torturous question that you, you know, have to be a ghoul to ignore, you know, because of course that can't be from negative emotions.
Yeah, epigenetics has become the sort of newer version of quantum physics.
Just invoke it and it magically means everything.
But simply put, epigenetics refers to changes in gene function that are heritable through cell division, but that does not alter your DNA.
So you have environmental factors like diet, stress, and environmental exposures that do affect genes.
Cells also change naturally with age.
A lot of the biohacking movement is to try to not get them to do that.
Epigenetic changes are reversible through lifestyle and environmental changes, and this is where groups like Human Garage slip in.
They're not wrong that you can change your health with lifestyle changes, but there are two issues here.
They're extrapolating from generally new science and applying it broadly without proof, and to specifically discuss what you brought up, Matthew, they're injecting a whole set of assumptions about disease with No credible evidence.
And this is a common tactic in wellness.
You borrow from a very limited understanding of science, and then you build a narrative around it that feels right, but that actually doesn't hold up to any scrutiny.
Yeah, yeah.
So he starts with that.
I mean, that clip starts with a declarative statement that all illness comes from an emotion, right?
And that's just completely not based on any real science.
And it's such an overreach.
And this stuff makes me really mad because There are aspects of these kinds of practices that can be really helpful and that do help to modulate the effects of stress and do help people to feel better.
But when you go into this complete pseudoscience territory and make completely like over the top pseudoscientific claims, it just it makes a mockery of all of it.
It absolutely does, and his invocation of numbers, too, reminds me of Trump after he lost the debate, where he's like, 89%, 71%, 85% of people thought I won.
So when Gary's like, 75 to 90% can be healed with what we do, it's just making shit up with a large number that's not 100%, but that makes it seem like you've done some clinical work to prove this.
So I want to play a few more clips just to highlight the dangerous pseudoscience coming out of this group.
The first one is a Human Garage facilitator in discussion with Gary, and I apologize in advance to any cardiologists who are listening right now.
The unnamed facilitator in this video, it's from TikTok, is discussing the connection between leaky gut, which is not a real diagnosis, and heart attacks.
So the number one day for heart attacks in the United States, which is the leading cause of death, is guess what?
Thanksgiving.
Sometimes we'll get exposed to pesticides and chemicals or medications or different types of genetically modified food.
You have a thin lining mucus where these bacteria cultures will live.
They don't have a lot of food.
They kind of hibernate.
And if you have the right food for them, they kind of start to grow.
And we get breaks in that mucoid layer.
And then what happens is food doesn't get eaten up properly by the bacteria and converted into building blocks or energy units.
You got food leaking into the bloodstream.
Your white blood cells are going to come in because they think you're under attack.
They think there's a virus.
They think there's an invader.
They got to go break something.
You feel tired.
Why?
Because your blood starts to thicken.
I thought he was going to talk about family conflict.
take all of this food they can't digest, the blood thickens up, blood sugar goes crazy.
If you've got narrowing of the arteries, it contracts, boom, that's when you have your heart attack.
I thought he was gonna talk about family conflict.
Well, I mean, all heart attacks must come from an emotional cause, right?
We're not being consistent here.
This is such a terrible middle school explanation of how leaky gut leads to the epidemic of heart attacks that happen on Thanksgiving, which is why all hospitals bring in all sorts of extra employees on Thanksgiving.
This is widely known.
Yes, and it's also often attributed to the stressors of travel, for example.
Exactly.
It's multivariate, like all disease.
And when you just say things and throw in mucoid layer and then also talk about epigenetics, just a bunch of buzzwords thrown at people very quickly gives an appearance of authority without actually being earned if you actually read the transcript.
The gravy had something in it that made your blood thick thicken.
And on the same day that you ate too much Thanksgiving dinner, you had a heart attack.
I mean, come on.
Yeah, it's called cornstarch and I don't think that's what people are putting into their veins.
Yeah, but there's a logic there about substances that I think comes up.
I think we're going to get to it as well, where, you know, there's some substance in the world that is like glutinous or it's thickening or it's doing something and then suddenly it's going to infect you that way.
Yeah, absolutely.
So let's listen to Gary explain what fat, bodily fat, really is.
Awesome.
And I should note, in the video, he's pointing to his abdominal region.
We have layers of fascia.
Fascia is our structure.
So let's listen to Gary explain what fat, bodily fat, really is.
And I should note, in the video, he's pointing to his abdominal region.
We have layers of fascia.
Fascia is our structure.
Each layer of function belongs to an organ.
What I've noticed is that if I have a lot of anger, I'll get a rush around here, around the liver.
And I've noticed that the water will hang out for the release of the emotion.
So if I'm holding a whole bunch of water in these layers of fascia here, around my liver as an example, Because I'm angry and I'm not releasing it.
And that water is staying there saying, I'm waiting for you to release the emotion so I can get the toxins out of there.
And you're not doing anything to release it.
The water stays there.
And it keeps staying there, staying there, staying there.
And if it stays there long enough, it becomes stagnant.
And the stagnation of that water over time, it starts to change its color and it goes brown.
Stay there long enough, that brown stagnation starts to go white.
Now that's a very different look at what fat is.
Sure is.
Yeah, you're not fat, you're waterlogged.
Holy moly.
I mean, this guy is real.
He's torturing all kinds of metaphors as if they represent something absolutely concrete.
It's incredible.
Yeah, but they also track with probably stuff that he's heard on the fringes of the Ayurveda world.
Because what he's describing is what they would call kapha, like in mala form or in degenerated or polluted form.
Where the earth and water elements of the body are not sufficiently mobilized to provide support and nurturance and stuff like that.
And so they stagnate, they become, you know, sort of swamp-like, they become cold and frigid and like gelled over with gunk.
And that's what's called, that's what they call Ama or like, you know, stuff that needs to be purified.
I think that's where it's coming from.
Yeah, yeah.
It's coming from there.
It may be coming from certain Chinese medicine things that he's heard.
And we can also trace it back in Western terms to the humors.
Exactly.
You have too much bile.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, that's and that's this elemental stuff is why I think the undercurrent of blood and soil purification is so important for the demographic that this stuff is going to go on to serve as we're going to see when we get to the conference.
And he's starting from a place of truth because he is a former bodybuilder.
I lift weights three days a week.
I take creatine.
It adds about five pounds of water weight into your muscles to support bodybuilding.
So he's starting from a place of something that he knows and then using all of these metaphors and analogies that don't make sense.
Right.
So their TikTok is filled with outrageous claims.
They talk about healing from chemotherapy, vertigo, tinnitus, sinus problems, autoimmune disorders, Parkinson's disease, depression, insomnia, all varieties of pain and trauma.
And one more clip in case you were wondering, yes, they do go here.
Hey, Gary, why is your hair wet?
Really?
It's because I got urine in my hair and I got urine on my skin and it's drying and it's gonna take about 20 minutes and it opens up all the hair, all the skin and moisturizes.
Urea is the only moisturizer that's ever been scientifically proven.
It's in every skincare product you can imagine or it's free.
Use somebody else's or use your own.
It's your choice.
What about the epigenetic changes that might happen from using someone else's urine?
They do this thing often where someone's filming and Gary is walking by as if he's going to do something around the little compound they live in.
And they're like, hey, Gary, and he turns.
Oh, what?
What can I answer today?
That's a format they use.
Yeah.
So I can't believe this is my job, but here we go.
Skincare urea is synthetically produced and not derived from urine.
It's a purified compound, whereas urine contains a number of waste products and the concentration and purity of synthetic urea is controlled and standardized by law.
Topical urea does actually moisturize and hydrate the skin.
It also helps exfoliate and it's even used in products to treat eczema, psoriasis,
and dry skin.
Urine helps none of those things.
Censorship.
Alexi, who is a physical therapist and fitness misinformation debunker who goes
by NoBullshitPhysio on social media, he saw me post about Human Garage.
We've interacted a few times over the years.
And he reached out because he's debunked a lot of Human Garage's claims,
including he did an entire video on urine therapy.
And he sent me some of his writing on Gary's claims about urine and boron acid.
And I'll link to it in the show notes.
He also told me that, quote, it's sad that I have to say this,
But don't rub or drink your piss unless that's your kink or if you're in a life or death situation and there's nothing else to drink.
So yes, totally acceptable in those latter examples, not in the former.
He also writes, urine is not actually sterile.
That's a common misconception.
I'm really glad that he said, unless that's your kink, because I think that's an important element here is that there are really strange impulses that are difficult to explain that people have.
And I think they feed into some of these practices and then, but there might be some shame around it.
And so they have to be justified in terms of like, well, this is the wellness sort of potentiality of it.
But I also think there's another.
Echo of Ayurveda popularizer influencer stuff here because auto urine therapy in some corners of that world draws on this logic of almost like inoculation because you know the idea is that if you ingest or if you expose yourself to your own waste products that somehow you'll boost your own immune system like everything that you've already rejected you can remind yourself Yeah, I mean, it's like homeopathy.
more strongly or something like that.
And so that logic, you know, it might be a little bit ironic amongst anti-vaxxers,
but they also might distinguish between natural and unnatural inoculants.
Yeah, I mean, it's like homeopathy, that the ideas kind of rhyme,
but ultimately they're quite different.
And again, always to note, if any homeopathists and anti-vaxxers are listening,
Samuel Hahnemann loved the idea of vaccination because he thought it proved his theory.
So, so far, you've mostly been listening to Human Garage's main founder, who's Gary Linehan, and strap in.
Here we go.
So, Human Garage started as a clinic in an actual garage in Venice, California.
It was founded by Lineham and, again, Lavoie, Van Blerk, and Rodriguez.
It calls itself a global fascial movement, and it claims to have, quote, pioneered the 10 most powerful healing movements.
Now, as I said, no founder has any clinical training, but Gary's origin story is really worth noting here.
He was born Nathaniel Linehan, but it's not surprising that he goes by Gary, which is a version of his middle name, Garrard.
And this is why.
Here's some reporting from the LA Times in 2010.
Nathaniel Garrard Linehan, 41, was convicted in February.
Of being the electronics man who distributed encrypted cell phones for a drug ring that stretched from Canada to Southern California, Chicago, and Seattle.
In 2008, authorities indicted 18 people as part of Operation Candy Store, a two-year federal investigation into a trading operation that sent cocaine to Canada in exchange for methamphetamines and ecstasy.
According to the indictment, Linehan used his job at data locking, also known as bStealth, to distribute encrypted BlackBerry cell phones that traffickers could use to send text messages.
Gary came out a couple years ago and addressed this, sort of, on the Human Garage blog.
His post was called, Privacy Was My Disease.
Which obviously was also emotional.
It's a rather masturbatory, moral grandstanding post about living authentically, the scourges of society, and then some Eckhart Tolle quotes thrown in for good measure.
Awesome.
The only time in the entire post that he mentions the actual charges is right here.
During this time I was being detained by the U.S.
government on charges that were trumped up, to use the expression lightly.
I wasn't willing to share this with my children because I didn't want them to see me in pain.
By hiding that pain from my children, for their protection, In air quotes, it caused more pain because it wasn't long before the national media put a spotlight on my situation.
I had been holding secrets for politicians, governments, criminals, and lawyers.
I was known around the world for holding secrets that even the U.S.
government was not able to break into.
I was the encryption on top of BlackBerry, which was used by everybody in the world that wanted to hide information.
I bought into the idea that this was okay because it was Air quotes, just business, and I was protecting the rights of people to be private.
You know, guys, there's a hint of QAnon theme in here, a little bit subtly, like I was protecting the secrets of the elites.
Jeez, that's amazing.
Yeah, and to be clear, again, he was encrypting cell phones for an international drug ring.
He doesn't mention any of that.
He doesn't link to any of it.
It probably, as Human Garage was getting popular, it probably got out in some comments, and he was addressing it by not really addressing it.
And that's not actually his only run-in with the law.
He now operates, as I mentioned earlier, Human Garage out of Canada.
That started in June of 2023.
According to the website OpenCorporates, which registers corporations and LLCs, they stopped operating legally in California after their business was suspended for not paying taxes.
That information also comes from the California State Franchise Tax Board.
And during this time, we should note, Gary had three listed residencies, two in Newport Beach, California, which is a very rich enclave on the coast there down below Los Angeles, as well as one in Phoenix, Arizona.
And that information is according to the US Index to Public Records.
People have pasts.
I have many feelings on drug use in general and decriminalization.
Cocaine and meth, trafficking is one thing.
Whether or not they should be legal is another.
Those can be debates.
But the idea that he was making money by supplying these people to run this ring and then comes out without actually addressing it and saying that he was really a victim in all this is really telling and should be a big red flag when we think about the overall message.
that this organization is trying to spread in their terms of trauma healing.
Since shutting down the Human Garage Clinic in Venice, the group only operates online out of their rather large house, at least based on the TikTok videos.
Now, they're embarking on their transforming trauma world tour, which is occurring in California, Minnesota, and Florida, with dates in Indonesia and Ireland, all for the low cost of $450.
Now, let's look at the tourist stop in Washington, D.C.
this weekend at the Rescue the Republic event.
I think we have some great background, guys, but I want to paint a picture of how Gary
and Human Garage present this material to the world visually and performatively, because
we've listened to some of the dumb explanation for things.
And that constitutes one main category on their Instagram and TikTok feeds, this sort You know, spontaneous lecture format.
But the little sermons really wouldn't go anywhere, I don't think, without the theatre of the other main category, which we're going to be calling faith healing or trauma healing.
In this genre, we see Gary—this is about two-thirds of the time—he dominates the feed.
Approaching workshop participants who look like they are in some kind of pain or discomfort.
They're often melancholic and withdrawn, but they're standing in a large hotel conference room, usually surrounded by a lot of other participants, and they look to be on the verge of surrendering to whatever is going to happen.
Now, Gary is always, it seems, in his Human Garage-branded t-shirt and his Lulu-type shorts.
He's got a bright face and this Bob Barker shock of short white hair.
And he very matter-of-factly approaches the subject and he says something like, okay, we're gonna move that block or free that up.
Sometimes he'll break the fourth wall because he knows he's being recorded and he'll talk directly to the camera about the cancer or other ailment the person needs to be healed from.
He might wrap his arms around them in a chiropractic type kind of lock or hug and tilt or torque them.
I've never seen any sharp like cracking type jolting movements.
So it's all very slow, pretty like gentle and peaceful looking.
But he'll also take his hand with his fingers pretty rigidly stretched out to probe the subject's abdomen or maybe their side, and then in a low and steady voice, he'll instruct the person to breathe.
This, again, sort of alludes to chiropractic practices before the torque and the crack stuff.
So that's zoomed in.
That's the sort of client or subject interaction.
The camera will back out often in these videos just a bit and you might see other healers from Human Garage putting similar moves on subjects who are also standing in that space.
They might be lying on the floor.
But you'll often also see a circle of observers surrounding Gary and the primary subject.
And I can say that from being in a lot of rooms like this back in the day, I can pretty confidently speculate that what that circle is doing is actually several things at once.
Julian, you alluded to this.
If you ask them directly what they felt they were doing in their circles surrounding Gary and the subject, they would say, well, we're holding space for this healing to happen.
Which sounds nice, but it's also vague, and it also implies that the group ritual aspect is important and acknowledged.
But in the absence of any real evidentiary stuff actually happening, what holding space often boils down to is a kind of intense group attention that's hyper-focused on the subject who's already feeling quite vulnerable.
may be embarrassed.
They're certainly isolated.
And many of them give you the sense that they really want to do the right thing.
They want to be good patients.
So that circle is essential because their response in part determines how long the treatment goes on for.
Because the manhandling or the poking or the prodding will continue until the subject expresses some significant response.
It could be a deep sigh, they might fold over and nearly collapse, but the most important and I think tender response, the one that's most highly rewarded by the camera is a deep bursting into tears.
And when the tears come, everyone in the circle seems to feel gratified.
The tears are interpreted as proof of healing, of trauma or cancer leaving the body, not as the logical conclusion of reaching some tipping point or emotional overwhelm.
And then it doesn't stop there because there's an aspect of that emotional dumping that's also contagious.
Everyone in the circle learns from the person in the center what the cues are for being correctly healed in the performative space.
And so the workshop will just roll on like that, one person after another, one healing scene after another, with all of the responses being sort of, you know, learned and then spread throughout the group.
And Julian, like, you're familiar with these scenes as well.
Like, what would you add to this?
I mean, you know, there's a few things.
On the one hand, I think the faith healing comparison is really appropriate, right?
Because there's a performative quality, there's a group sort of energy and attention dynamic that you're describing really well.
I would also say, you know, people kind of know what they're getting into.
They're there for that experience.
They've seen these promotional videos, they've heard the stories, they've been referred.
So, you know, there is an element of people Really wanting to have that experience and letting themselves be in that position in terms of the group.
And it's, I think, you know, there's so much going on.
There are some really problematic aspects.
And part of why it's problematic is because there's something going on that I think Is quite real and does point to something in our society about emotional repression and about how the stories of our lives really do live in our bodies absolutely in in context where we feel supported and empathize with it can be really powerful and really beneficial to be able to get in touch with that and open up some of the some of the repression so to speak so.
It reminds me of some of the inadvertent cultic dynamics that can emerge in any group altered state experience though and that's where I think it gets problematic because a context is created by a leader.
A set of beliefs and interpretations and expectations are established as part of that context.
And then the context serves to be a container for these often very real and powerful experiences.
And when I say that they're real, I mean that the person entering the altered state is not acting.
Something is happening in their nervous system and its relationship to myofascial tension.
And that's being engaged through whatever the techniques are.
And it's a fast track into the emotional and psychological layers of what it is to be human.
And those layers, for some people, are going to be completely unfamiliar.
They're not part of most people's everyday experience, especially in group settings.
So for me, then, the tricky part is that because it's so powerful for the person being focused on and also for the witnesses, it generates this shaman priest-like halo effect around the leader and then lends authoritative weight to their claims and their interpretations, which in this case are about things like cancer.
Yeah.
So you have this nonsensical but elaborate metaphysical structure that he brings in and then the unsupported medical claims and then this unqualified model of trauma healing and it all appears to many of the people in attendance or on social media as powerful evidence that that powerful evidence for all of this is provided by the compelling emotional and somatic experiences as they unfold.
And that reminds me of the psychedelic space holders that we've covered on this show who were preaching QAnon ideas to people as they were coming out of ayahuasca trips.
Oh, yeah.
And so it makes me wonder what's going to happen politically.
to vulnerable people who are already converts to human garage.
How will this style of revelatory experience fit into the armory of conspiritualists like Russell Brand or Mickey Willis and others who see MAGA as some kind of endpoint awakening to higher truth?
And now also we'll see somatic trauma healing as a way into like freeing yourself up to realize that Trump is a lightworker, for example.
Well, before you get to those comments on how those guys are going to pick this up, I do want to raise one red flag, which is just setting aside the evidence question.
The rules and boundaries around the poking and prodding need to be super clear in these environments.
And this is kind of like a public service announcement for our listeners.
Because the first TikTok of Gary and Human Garage that I saw months ago, it featured him giving a male subject who was lying face down on a massage table what he called an anal sphincter release after explaining something about how this would realign his neck and loosen his hips.
And he was pressing some sort of massage ball or cone into the guy's backside.
And while he was pressing, he was chatting about how if one had to, quote, move the tailbone, unquote, one might have to do a, quote, rectal insertion, unquote, and if one had to manipulate the pelvic floor of a woman client, one might have to do a, quote, vaginal insertion, unquote.
Now, he doesn't use the phrase, I would have to do this, so it's possible that he's referring to what qualified practitioners might do.
And there is a credentialed and evidence-based practice in physiotherapy developed to treat pelvic floor problems.
You need years and years of formal training, internship, and supervision to know that you're doing the right thing with that.
But I have to say that I wrote a whole book about how a yoga guru, the late Patabi Joyce, would routinely do such things without that training and that it was clearly a pattern of abuse disguised as therapy.
So, I'm not alleging anything about Gary or this organization, but I would say that the willingness to do this sort of thing makes the protections and boundaries of professional training even more critical.
If that's a human garage practice, I would wonder if even their basic consent waivers would protect them.
Because, you know, they're not qualified to do that type of physio because what exactly would the subject be consenting to?
You're flagging a video we reviewed a while ago.
I will say since then, when I was preparing for this episode, I've seen at least two videos where he's working on a woman around her vagina in the same way.
And there's consent.
Like, she is definitely... Yeah.
Okay with him touching her there.
I want to be clear on that.
But he is also making the same sorts of claims that you're hearing in these other videos about what he's doing.
And that, to me, is really suspect.
And the idea that some other person might take that and then try to apply it on their own is really dangerous.
Well, it brings up the question of what informed consent is, because, like, what is he informing the person that they're consenting to if there's no qualification there?
That's the issue.
Right.
So we started today with mentioning that Gary Linehan is going to be at what is essentially a conspiracy theorists for Trump conference in D.C.
at noon, starting at noon this Sunday.
RFK Jr., Russell Brand, Jordan Peterson, and Tulsi Gabbard are the headliners.
But how does this holistic fascial release figure fit into a lineup like this?
Well, just briefly, Bobby Kennedy infuses his anti-vax save the children from the epidemic of chronic illness routine with appeals to nature spirituality, devout Catholicism, and addiction recovery piety.
Russell Brand has a parallel path to RFK to ending up kissing the Trump ring.
Addiction, New Age spiritual questing, escalating conspiracism, and then the recent public conversion to Christianity and MAGA after his scandal.
Jordan Peterson's wild self-help success amongst younger men may have been the early warning sign of what polling now confirms as an ever widening gender gap in this election, especially for Gen Z,
with young men really breaking in the direction of Trump and young women going the other
way.
Peterson's first few years on the big stage, he spent dancing around what are actually
his most ardent reactionary political and religious commitments.
But when the music stopped, he took his rightful seat upon signing his contract for the Daily Wire.
And now last of all, Tulsi Gabbard grew up in a breakaway fundamentalist Hare Krishna cult in Hawaii.
It's best known for its leader's authoritarian style and vulgar homophobic rants where he Makes the children in that cult listen to a lot of explicit details to try to impress upon them how disgusting homosexuality is.
He's actually pretty obsessed with it.
And like Bobby and Russell, Tulsi Gabbard has made the transition from Democrat to MAGA via the conspiracy pathway.
As we mentioned in the intro, Derek, the event's website has this incredible banner at the top.
It's this kitsch heroic update of Immanuel Lutz's famous historical oil painting that depicts Washington and his Continental Army troops crossing the Delaware in the dawn's early light on December 26th, 1776.
This is why these are humorless people, because to them this looks unironic.
It looks like it's noble.
I don't think they get that it looks funny.
And all of the branding and the logo and the font is all based on Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back specifically.
So if anyone who works at Disney is listening, please check out jointheresistance.org because they're actually selling merch, shirts and hats and all the swag with this specific font that I think would be up for a lawsuit.
Could be, could be.
So just for any listeners who have not visited Join the Resistance yet, The banner image has all of the passengers in these boats crossing the Delaware, which perfectly replicates this famous painting.
They're all wearing 18th century Revolutionary War outfits, and the faces are familiar.
It's Donald Trump and Russell Brand sitting up front with Lady Liberty between them.
She's dressed in white.
She's holding a lich torch.
A lit torch up high to guide their way.
Elon Musk is just behind, kind of gazing into the middle distance, thinking about life on Mars.
Laura Logan has a tricorn hat on, and she looks right at us like a petulant child.
Then there's anti-vax kingpin Robert Malone, who has an oar in the water.
He's like moving us forward.
And across from him sits a kind of like smug-looking Brett Weinstein.
So you get the idea.
And Elon and Trump are not going to be there at the event.
No, they're patron saints.
Yeah, in the original script, as we were writing this, I was like, it is a glorified Trump event because they put him— Trump is leading with Elon over his shoulder, and then for some reason, Russell's kind of like a monkey hanging over the front of it.
But it is very much about supporting Trump in various ways.
Yep, yep.
And then I didn't notice this until yesterday, because there's some kind of weird inconsistency, but when you go to the mobile version of the website, there's an automatic pop-up of a three-minute video by Mickey Willis, who introduces the event via his now standard agitprop conspiracy paranoia.
That is a pitch for why Rescue the Republic is at the frontier of awakening and securing freedom.
And to your point about the Star Wars stuff, he calls this group the Rebel Alliance, and then lists all of their names using not only the font you're describing, but that scrolling effect where the text is moving away from you into the universe.
The pandemic, he says, woke up the rebels to the reality of the empire of lies.
And then he very quickly gets it all in.
9-11, wars, vaccines, open borders, censorship, centralized banking, critical race theory in schools.
And then this is the thing that stood out for me.
Mickey tells us that the alliance is forming in the name of liberty and life.
And there's a couple more moments in those three minutes where he comes back to emphasizing this word, life.
So it makes me wonder if there's going to be some kind of anti-abortion consensus emerging as part of this conference, too.
Oh, for sure.
For sure.
How does Gary Linehan fit into it?
What's going to happen on Sunday?
Will the conversion experience go both ways as Linehan embraces MAGA?
Will the alt-med-friendly MAGA converts be initiated into mind-body-faith-healing vulnerable revelation?
I've long held that it's the rejection of scientific evidence and rational argument as being somehow inadequate to, or an offense against, spiritual experience that ends up unifying conspiracy theorists and religious fundamentalists, New Age magical thinkers, And the alternative medical crew who are susceptible to this stuff.
The common denominator here is stigmatized knowledge, intuitive certainty, and emotional appeals to a revelatory grace and mystery that can tip over into telling us the truth about politics.
You're right, Julian, that we don't know how he's going to integrate and how he's going to perform in this.
It's only a one-day event, so I don't know if there's going to be a session where he sort of trauma heals the entire crowd, or whether he's going to invite one presenter up after another to do demonstrations.
Like, I would love to see him heal Matt Taibbi of something.
I would love to see him...
I would love to see him prod Brett Weinstein's abdomen and see what he can find there.
I think that would be so awesome.
Here's my take on why he's important to this bunch.
I started thinking about it when we were going back and forth on the title for this episode.
I think we landed on Trauma Healing for Trump.
When we first talked about it, we had New Age faith healing for Trump, which was a little bit clunky, versus simply faith healing for Trump.
But, you know, we were discussing how that could imply evangelical or Pentecostal modes.
And then we were talking about whether there was enough of a difference between those two to override the fact that one was more direct and punchy.
Then we went with something else entirely.
But I think the discussion brought up a good distinction.
Because if Gary Linehan was in the evangelical or Pentecostal faith healing sort of zone supporting Trump, and he was part of a church group that convened a meeting, And they all gathered around Trump, if he was there, or the speakers, if they tried to heal Matt Taibbi by, you know, doing a kind of Holy Ghost healing jitterbug.
Which is not that different, by the way.
I mean, the actual, like, experiential bodily manifestations and all of that, right?
I think there is a bit of a difference, so let me hash it out.
Okay.
I think that the Pentecostal healing would be something that the country had seen before.
It would be a pre-existing part of the American landscape.
It would be set up to appeal to a particular and limited religious sensibility.
But the evangelical faith healer can't really behave like a dispassionate technician of personal empowerment.
And one thing that we should say about, you know, what allows Gary's magic to work is that he's absolutely 100% matter-of-fact committed to the bit.
He's completely sort of, you know, workaday.
It's like he's a car mechanic who's been fixing all makes and models for 30 years.
He can listen to the engine and just know exactly what needs to be replaced and it's no big deal.
Like there's a kind of downplayed, you know, non-importance casualness about it.
And that's really not what the evangelical faith healer does because what they have to do in a real Old Testament sense is they have to call down the power of a primal God Who can then overtake the subject in usually a much more violent way, in which the person becomes possessed and then they're healed by paroxysm.
The devils are driven out.
And I don't think that that is an empowering vibe.
I think it's actually overpowering.
And I don't think that Matt Tebe or Eric Weinstein would like that, actually.
Brett Weinstein.
Brett.
Oh, wasn't Eric there, too?
No, no Eric on this one.
No.
Okay, so while I don't think Brett would like being overpowered by Jesus and having the devil thrown out of him, I think he would rather, much rather find it within himself through gentle encouragement.
But Russell could swing both ways.
Russell could swing both ways.
That's a good point.
I think Gary's technique is important for this group because he continually focuses on self-healing, that you can do this yourself.
I mean, this is not honest because he's obviously presenting himself as the master transmitter of whatever vital energy is doing the thing.
But his pitch is that everybody in themselves has access to their own trauma.
They can release their own cancer.
They can feel their own imperviousness to sickness and disease.
And I think that is why he fits in so well at this conference, which is headlined by people who, even if their politics are incoherent in their diagonalism, what they share is a kind of narcissistic epistemology and libertarian affect.
and a grandiose confidence in their own vitality and self-knowledge.
Because I think there would be nothing more insulting that you could say to Bret Weinstein
than, you are acting out of a shitstorm of unconscious and contradictory drives that
you should have taken to therapy years ago. Or, you should submit to the will of Jesus
who's going to throw out your devils.
Like, Gary doesn't do that.
He's going to tell him the opposite of that.
He's going to massage Brett's sense of invulnerability.
Because I think with these people, the whole idea is, you're not going to tell me what to do.
The whole conference says, I don't live in a society.
I think that for them, trauma held in the body is analogous to the toxicity of the state itself inside you.
That you've eaten poisoned food, you've drunken poisoned water,
you've been poisoned by vaccines and woke ideology.
They wanna be purged of all of that and it's better for them to do it for themselves
than to be taken over by and possessed by Jesus.
And the added advantage goes back to something we've talked about a million times.
This technique supports the neoliberal neglect of, If the healing doesn't work, it's your fault.
You can't do that with the Pentecostal method, because if that method doesn't work, it's because God decided it shouldn't work, that God decided it was time to take you home.
