Since the election, Democratic voter disbelief and despair has alternated between grief and rage. We watched some erstwhile vociferous critics of Trump in the legacy media, like Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, kiss the ring and bend the knee, while others adopted a contorted posture of seeming legitimization, like NPR hosting Leonard Leo for a nice long sit-down interview.
Meanwhile, the big egos of MAGA 2.0 seem to rise like Soviet propaganda banners over the American landscape. Trump has named his cabinet picks at lightning speed. His list includes a pro-wrestling executive, a Hare Krishna cult member, a tech billionaire, an anti-vax conspiracy peddler, a FOX News host with far-right tattoos, an alt-med snake oil salesman, two sex offenders, a COVID-contrarian doctor—and, contrary to his claiming to know nothing about it during the election, prominent Project 2025 authors.
What most high profile nominations all have in common is being completely unqualified for the job. Maybe that’s the point. We look at the cabinet picks that intersect with our beat, as pseudoscience conspiracism now completes its journey from the social fringes to deciding White House policies—and all the consequences that entails.
Show Notes
Conspirituality’s Project 2025 coverage
Everything You Need to Know About Donald Trump’s FDA Pick
No, Medical Errors Are Not the Third Leading Cause of Death
Dr. Oz Shilled for an Alternative to Medicare
Trump picks former Florida Rep. Weldon to lead CDC
13 things everyone should know about Pete Hegseth
Trump reportedly plans to kick trans troops out of the military within days of inauguration
Transgender Military Service in the United States
Did RFK Jr. eat McDonald’s in that viral pic aboard Trump’s plane? Here’s the answer
Part One: Vince McMahon, History's Greatest Monster - Behind the Bastards
C-03-CV-24-004019 — John Does suit against WWE, trigger warning.
Case 3:24-cv-00090 Document 1 Filed 01/25/24 — Janel Grant suit, trigger warning.
152: Tulsi Gabbard’s Krishna Consciousness (w/Nitai Joseph)
Tulsi Gabbard's ties to the Science of Identity Foundation, a controversial religious sect that some call an abusive 'cult'
Tulsi Gabbard Had a Very Strange Childhood
What Does Tulsi Gabbard Believe?
Tulsi Gabbard’s ties to secretive cult may explain her perplexing political journey
Islamophobic World View of Tulsi Gabbard's Guru Revealed in Unearthed Recordings – Can she Still Run for President?
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster.
If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep Podcast.
I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice.
Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention and then your mind lets you drift off.
Find it wherever you get your podcasts.
That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster.
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remski.
I'm Julian Walker.
You can find us on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod.
You can also access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes over on Patreon at patreon.com slash Conspirituality.
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As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
As the days after the election turned to weeks, Democrat voter disbelief and despair alternated with grief and rage.
We watched some erstwhile vociferous critics of Trump in the legacy media, like Joe and Mika, kiss the ring and bend the knee, while others adopted a contorted posture of seeming legitimization, like NPR hosting Leonard Leo for a nice long sit-down interview.
Meanwhile, the big egos of MAGA 2.0's assembling Avengers seem to rise like Soviet propaganda banners over the American landscape.
And at lightning speed, Trump started naming his cabinet picks.
The list has included a pro wrestling executive, a Hare Krishna cult member, a tech billionaire, an anti-vax conspiracy peddler, a Fox News host with far-right tattoos, an alternative medicine snake oil salesman, two sex offenders, a COVID contrarian doctor, and contrary to his claiming to know a COVID contrarian doctor, and contrary to his claiming to know nothing about it during the election, prominent Project 2025 Surprise!
Besides loyalty to the new supreme leader, what the most high-profile nominations all have in common is being completely unqualified for these extremely consequential government jobs.
But maybe that's the point.
Today we will look at the cabinet picks that intersect with our beat as the pseudoscience conspiracism we cover now completes its journey from the societal fringes to being fully established in the White House.
We are foregoing this week in Conspirituality this week because pretty much everything is happening this week right now.
In fact, Trump is picking cabinet members at record speed.
So that's what we're going to be drilling down on here.
And a lot of attention has been placed on the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be the administrator of the Department of Health and Human Services, and for good reason.
He's about to oversee 11 federal agencies, including the FDA, CDC, and NIH.
And he'll have a budget of $144 billion in discretionary funding and $1.7 trillion in mandatory funding.
Jesus Christ.
So this whole first section is going to be about the Maha movement.
So in total, HHS has somewhere between 83,000 and 88,000 employees under its umbrella.
Besides overseeing those agencies, if confirmed, Bobby will be responsible for the following.
Advising the president on health, welfare, and income support.
We'll see how that goes.
Managing Medicaid and Medicare policies, working to reform and improve those programs.
Monitoring the FDA, overseeing food safety practice and medication approvals.
I also just read a supplements business journal that's very happy about Bobby because they've been oppressed for the last 30 years.
So we'll see how the FDA goes.
Supervising the CDC's disease prevention research and public health programs, overseeing the NIH and its medical research, supervising health services for Native Americans, and working with Congress and the president to develop and implement health-related legislation and policies.
Now, a lot of people have come out and are rightly concerned that an anti-vax, anti-science conspiracy theorist is going to have this much power.
And considering we've done over 10 episodes on him, Matthew laid them all out on Blue Sky recently, so we have a nice little list there.
We're going to include the most pertinent in the show notes about why this appointment is so problematic.
And if you don't want to listen to them all, I think we can just sum those episodes up by saying, you know, there is nothing that comes out of Bobby's mouth that is ever truly accurate, that he can never really shut the fuck up, that the majority of the time his ideas are batshit, reactionary, romantic nature fallacy drivel that mourns over a golden age that never was.
But that he also casts an effective spell of spiritual warriorship and divine intuition, very ecumenical as well.
There's Catholic stuff, there's AA stuff, there's New Age stuff, and he casts this thing over followers who are disenchanted with liberal institutions and who think that he can give everyone the life of a gentleman farmer.
I mean, he sounds reasonable when he talks about chemicals in the food and in the soil, right?
Right.
Yeah, I mean, well, back to, you know, that's where you guys come in and just actually do the line-by-line fact check and then realize that everything falls apart.
Yeah, he does sound reasonable.
That's actually true.
The problem is he's not a toxicologist and he doesn't understand chemistry.
So overall, if you're worried about chemicals, yes, but when you're getting down to the dose level, which is what all of science depends on, then all of his arguments generally fall apart.
Now, I mean, we can go on about Bobby, of course, but let's focus on the other choices that Trump has announced so far and the agencies they're going to be tasked to run.
So first up, we have Marty Makary, who is being appointed to be the FDA commissioner.
Now, he's a surgical oncologist at Johns Hopkins University, and as FDA commissioner, he'll oversee 18,000 employees with a $7.2 billion budget.
Macari will be tasked with managing the full breadth of the FDA portfolio.
This includes the safety and effectiveness of human and veterinary drugs, vaccines, biological products, medical devices, food supply, cosmetics, dietary supplements, tobacco products, and products that emit radiation.
There comes the 5G. While he's actually not anti-vax, he did oppose vaccine mandates during COVID-19, and he emphasized natural immunity, which we know is inferior to vaccines.
Now, if you don't know Macri's name, you most likely know a study that he was involved with that found that the third most common cause of death in America is due to doctor error.
Maha activists often repeat this.
Casey Means regularly repeats it like she did in front of Congress a few weeks ago.
The problem is it's not true, but it's become a bit of an earworm or maybe a brainworm in this case.
So people just repeat it without bothering to investigate whether or not it's actually based in reality.
The editors-in-chief of BMJ Quality and Safety debunked the findings shortly after publication due to methodological problems.
Macri extrapolated from limited data to speculate about the causes of death and relied on decades-old studies that also had methodological errors to assess this data.
And he's part of that same group of people who were constantly saying during COVID that the death rate was inflated because of methodological problems where people were dying with COVID and not from COVID, and so we've got it all wrong.
Here he turns around and does the exact thing that he was accusing the medical establishment of doing.
Seems like they do that often, actually.
So I'll link to that article as well as Walker Bragman's excellent reporting on Macri in the show notes.
Like many Maha members, Macri relies on suspicions about the medical industry to build a platform.
He's written books about it.
As Dr. Andrea Love pointed out this week, he also got pancreatic cancer rates wrong when speaking in front of Congress, but no one is fact-checking him in these spaces.
Next up, we have Dave Weldon, who is going to be, it appears, the Director of the CDC, where he'll have 15,000 employees and an $11.5 billion budget to manage.
His main responsibilities will include developing and implementing disease prevention and control, environmental health, health promotion, and health education activities, protecting the health of Americans from domestic and foreign threats, and leading the charge in any public health emergencies like a pandemic.
Maybe the bird flu looks next up.
Now, Weldon practiced as a physician in Florida while serving in Congress from 94 to 2008.
He represented Florida's 15th congressional district.
In 2007, he decided not to run anymore, but he did run for Senate in 2012.
He lost in the GOP primary.
He tried to return to the House in 2024 where he also lost in the primary.
He fits very well with Bobby's vaccine ethos.
Weldon has often criticized the vaccine review process and he's linked vaccines to autism, so the prospect of him running the CDC is pretty frightening.
Now, he gets a Janet Neshawatt.
I don't know if that's how you say it.
I should have looked that up.
She will be the Surgeon General, and Neshawatt will lead the U.S. Public Health Service Commission Corps, which oversees 6,000 health professionals ready for deployment during health crises.
She'll promote dietary and lifestyle habits, Warned about public hazards, advised various health organizations like the American Medical Association and World Health Organization, and she will be the lead spokesperson for public health in America.
Now, this in some ways is even more frightening than Weldon.
She is in favor of vaccines, and she's even promoted them on Fox News, but she also described them as a gift from God, which she says in her recent Christian memoir, Beyond the Stethoscope, Miracles in Medicine.
That could be parody, that title.
That's just too good beyond the stethoscope.
Well, but what's the implication, Derek, is that hydroxychloroquine could also be a gift from God or something like that in treating COVID? Well, it's the fact that she's relating religion to medicine in the first place, I would say.
I mean, she says her book is about the global medical missions that illuminate the transformative power of prayer and unwavering dedication to healing and service.
Yeah, and let's just point out too here that people involved in medicine and then in global initiatives like this who have this kind of Christian faith, very strongly their purpose is to make sure that contraception and abortion is something that is not available to people in developing countries.
Or, if you remember a few years ago when there was the earthquake crisis in Haiti, there was a bunch of Christian missionaries who went and were actually doing good work on the ground, but would only give supplies to Haitians if they converted to Jesus in front of them.
What did they have to say?
What did they have to say?
I don't know what the magic words are.
I accept the Lord Jesus Christ into my heart.
Most likely, yeah.
So she's also criticized the government's response to COVID-19.
She advocates for natural immunity over continued boosters.
Oh, and surprise, she sells her own line of supplements.
On the marketing page of BC Boost, she writes, although I am a doctor, I am not quick to prescribe drugs unless I feel necessary as we want to put into our body the most natural, wholesome ingredients.
Ladies and gentlemen, our next surgeon.
Oh, get ready for all of these cross-link affiliate marketing things between.gov websites and.com websites.
Okay, well, that's a serious question.
Are there any sort of guardrails about that?
This whole last couple of weeks for me has been, surely there's a rule against that.
Right.
Yeah, just like Trump was divested from all of his companies in his first presidency.
No, if they want to sell supplements on the.gov site, they're going to do it.
They'll figure out a way.
Now, Jay Bhattacharya, who is one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, is up as director of the National Institutes of Health.
He is widely believed to be the top contender, but as he has not been named yet as of recording, I will not go into him, but that's another problematic appointment.
But let's turn to everyone's favorite, Mehmet Oz, who is tapped to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
6,000 employees, a $1 trillion budget.
All of these budgets are so horrifying when you pair them with the names that's It's incredible.
The director has to develop policies, administer programs, monitor performance, and manage data of Medicare and Medicaid.
Now, Medicare is a lifeline for over 65 million Americans.
As of 2023, an estimated 18.9% of the population is covered by it.
As of 2022, approximately 94.5 million Americans are enrolled in Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program.
COVID-19 created a surge in recipients because between February 2020 and April of 2023, Medicaid enrollment grew by 23.1 million people.
That's a 32% increase.
I don't think we need a deep dive into Oz.
He is a very well-known medical grifter.
He sold magic green coffee extract and raspberry ketones for weight loss and It couldn't be schooling.
treats to COVID-19.
He has said in the past that spacing out is due to childhood vaccines.
And yes, he has discussed that link between vaccines and autism.
It couldn't be schooling, right?
He believes in energy medicine, talking to the dead, astrology for health information, and perhaps his most egregious offense, he is a fan of homeopathy.
Now, what worries me most is that it appears that he'll gladly align with Project 2025's plan to gut Medicare and Medicaid.
He may have even been auditioning for it in recent months.
His reporting came out that he has been championing Wait, so it's called Medicare Advantage, but it's a private company using the sort of Medicare branding to suggest that it's attached to Medicare, but it's not?
Yes.
No, it has a lot of crossover in terms of premiums and services offered.
Where it differs is that people have to pay for more out-of-pocket things.
It does do things like cover certain aspects of dental and vision that aren't covered in Medicare.
But basically, it's the type of thing where if you don't need a lot of health coverage, there's not that much of a difference between the plans.
But as soon as you start to need more coverage, Medicare Advantage becomes a lot more expensive.
Right.
Right.
But just the framing, the phrase itself, it makes me think of like, I don't know, State Department advantage or like other ways in which you could take governmental agencies and just sort of like privatize them in some way and create offshoots is a very, very bizarre world.
It's kind of like conservative think tanks that name themselves like agencies.
Yeah, right.
And it's also the emergence of oligarchy, as we've discussed somewhat behind the scenes.
So Republicans have been chomping at the bit to either eliminate or turn these programs over to the private market for years, and now they have found a man for the job, which sort of underlies all these picks to me.
Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer having people who know what they're talking about running agencies that they're tasked to run.
And the one consistent trend across Trump's Health and Human Services picks, as well as a number of other cabinet appointments which we'll be getting to, is that they are not qualified.
Any discipline, and I'd argue any business or relationship, is richer when intellectual and creative tension exists.
But we know that Trump has been vetting for two main qualities, loyalty and TV readiness.
He broke Bobby with that McDonald's photo on his private plane, just like he's broken every politician that's tried to challenge him, and I would imagine he expects anyone under Bobby's purview at HHS will be similarly housebroken.
Yeah, so at the end, I want to circle back to TV readiness because I think that's so important here.
And yeah, Don Jr. posted that photo from the plane and was clearly mocking Bobby.
I read in the Miami Herald that he told Charlie Kirk on a podcast the following day.
We definitely had some fun with that one.
He definitely looks like he got his hand caught in the cookie jar.
And I think the people in Trump's inner circle just don't give a shit about Bobby's ideas at all.
Like, they're tolerating him for his disruptive power.
Okay, let's move on to education and defense as there's a lot of crossover with our beat here as well.
So I want to focus for a moment on what I believe is the most pertinent aspect of appointing Linda McMahon to head the Department of Education.
Most people know she's the former wife now separated of Vince McMahon, someone who is burned into my brain given how much WWF wrestling I consumed in the 80s.
Linda co-founded Titan Sports with Vince in 1980 and she eventually became CEO in 1997.
Yeah, and Matthew, I know you're going to talk about the Society of the Spectacle, but this is just so on the nose here.
He's literally appointed a lady whose CV is in high-drama, theatrical, macho, fake-fighting entertainment that much of the low-IQ audience believes is real.
I want to return to this idea of whether they believe it's real, but I don't want to interrupt Derek.
He'd have to go and get a cup of tea and stuff like that.
Let's talk about Linda, and then I want to come back to this point, Julian, because I think it's really important.
So just like Vince, Linda was both a power behind the scenes in business and on the screen.
She was often filmed getting into slap fights with her daughter Stephanie, who was also a professional wrestler in the ring.
But that's not all she's done.
She hasn't just slapped her daughter in the ring.
No, much more than that.
Here's the list.
She slapped her son as well, who is also a professional wrestler.
But then we get to the Ring Boys scandal, in which both she and Vince were accused of negligence as they allegedly helped cover up the sexual abuse of young boys in the 90s.
Yeah, so this is five John Does who have sued WWE accusing the McMahons of knowing and then doing nothing about their ring announcer Mel Phillips sexually abusing them while they worked for him at the ages of 12 and 13 or thereabouts.
But, you know, honestly, covering up abuse is the least of it.
I would encourage listeners to seek out Robert Evans' six-part series on the depravity of Vince McMahon and the long list of abuse allegations against him, including human trafficking.
According to Evans, Vince ran his wrestling promotions like a crime syndicate.
There's a lot of books on this, too, as well.
It's very well covered, showing total disregard for the health or safety of his wrestlers and their families.
But the abuse and trafficking aspect is now in a fresh spotlight through a suit that's currently brought against him by a former employee who alleges being sexually trafficked as talent bait and then years of incredibly depraved abuse.
So I'm going to link to the suit filed by Janelle Grant with a trigger warning.
But basically, the worst type of Marquis de Sade thing you can imagine a sociopathic 70-year-old doing to a personal assistant in her 20s, it's in there.
And the suit alleges, this is the important part, that WWE knew all about it and they were trained to cover up for McMahon.
So it's this guy's former wife of 40 years who's now supposed to look out for children.
Now, you're right, Derek, that Linda was an organizational powerhouse in WWE. But if you're working alongside Vince McMahon for 40 years, two other words come to mind, enabler and possibly survivor.
And I think that's a big part of the Trump cabinet theme.
Sure, I understand that aspect, but she also seemed to have been profiting greatly from her time in those spaces.
Outside of wrestling, Linda was appointed to the Connecticut State Board of Education in 2009, though she resigned just over a year later because she couldn't solicit campaign contributions and she was running for Senate.
She lost to Richard Blumenthal in 2010 and again lost to Chris Murphy two years later.
Then she pivoted back behind the scenes, deciding to focus on fundraising and donating to Republican politicians.
Her first support of Donald Trump actually came in 2007 when she donated $5 million to his foundation.
She later donated $6 million to a Trump super PAC in 2016.
After that, she was rewarded by being appointed to run the Small Business Administration during Trump's first term.
She remained in that position until March 2019 when she resigned to chair a different Trump super PAC. So, what makes her qualified to head the Department of Education?
Nothing, really.
I mean, her one year on the Connecticut board did not result in much.
And...
We do know, however, that she's a proponent of school choice, and that's why I believe she was placed in that role.
Short answer to this, it's a way to funnel taxpayer money into private religious schooling.
So, Derek, you've covered this for a long time, but I'm interested in this particular category of private schooling backer.
What does it signify when McMahon is not overtly religious?
She's got some Catholic affiliation that I can tell, and When it comes to Christian nationalism specifically, which is kind of a thread that's running throughout this entire administration and throughout Republican politics right now, I don't see that much of a distance between faith and power.
Yeah.
And so if that particular faith is what you use to amass power, I don't think that people will necessarily care.
I mean, it's difficult to tell.
We always talk about how you can't tell someone's intention behind things.
And it's also very difficult to assess someone's faith interest.
But we can tell their actions very well.
And so with Linda McMahon, her entire career is built on amassing power.
So if the particular avenue for doing that happens to be through this particular strain of Christianity, I don't think it matters that much what our personal religion is.
Yeah, and I think the MAGA crew have lined up around a concept of Education and around bringing religion back into education which is seen as the antidote to wokeness taking over education.
So that's where they're fighting the battle.
And so how devout of a Christian you are I don't think really matters.
Let me briefly unpack the school choice thing because we know both from Trump's own mouth and the Project 2025 roadmap, this administration plans on completely dismantling the Department of Education.
that is a stated goal.
So when Brown v. Board of Education was announced in May 1954, the right went into a frenzy because schools were going to be desegregated.
And to them, this was a continuation of assaults on American society dating back to the New Deal.
They were tired of their rights being infringed upon.
And this meant that Black children being offered the same opportunities as their own kids was highly problematic.
They felt that abolition provided the Blacks and all of the other minorities with enough.
So by 1956, 11 Southern states had passed 106 measures protecting their populations against desegregating public schools.
And it was in this environment that the rallying cry of school choice was born.
Now, since that time, the right has weaponized this anthem in many ways.
The most recent is education savings accounts, which effectively means no free public schooling.
This initiative is similar to FSAs, or flexible savings accounts, which allow you to add pre-tax dollars to cover healthcare expenses.
FSAs Actually obscure the fact that the hundreds of dollars you pay each month for health insurance still isn't enough to cover your basic health expenses.
So then go to an education savings account, an ESA, and this allows you to pay for your children's education expenses from kindergarten through 12th grade with tax-free money.
But just like FSAs are presented as a perk to obscure Americans' crippling for-profit healthcare system, ESAs are simply a band-aid on the fact that we don't have free schooling in America except for public schools, which are taxpayer-funded.
The right, especially the Christian conservative right, doesn't like public schools because of the whole you can't pray here thing.
And so you have years of attacks on liberal, woke institutions, starting with college but eventually trickling down to public schools.
The right has been trying to dismantle public education for generations by using this rhetoric.
Yeah, I still remember it was a few years ago that in Texas they outlawed the teaching of critical thinking in public schools.
Like literally, you're not allowed to talk about this subject of critical thinking.
And to me, it's let's make America bankrupt again.
Let's make America stupid again.
As our Supreme Leader has said, I love the poorly educated.
They vote for him.
Every statement like that that sticks out from the last, you know, eight years in the light of this election, I have to look at or listen to differently because the question has to be answered.
How does he say things like that and then win non-college educated votes?
How does he insult Puerto Ricans at Madison Square Garden and win a larger majority of Latino men in New York State?
To me, a statement like that is nudging the follower and saying, we both know that education is bullshit.
I'm poorly educated too.
He goes on about how he's proud about Wharton, but when it comes down to it, He is a transgressive failson, and this is his fake bonding with the working class.
I think when he says, I love the poorly educated people who identify as being stigmatized by poor education, they will say, God damn it, he's okay.
God damn it, he's okay.
It's quite a magic trick.
It's amazing.
It's amazing, actually.
What we really saw that that was – I couldn't help but notice it again and again was the Trump advocates and apologists who had otherwise had fairly reasonable takes in the past in the run-up to the election were saying, well, that's just Trump.
He says a lot of things.
He gets this pass where he gets graded on a curve and anything he says can be, well, he's just trying to own the libs.
Well, he's just exaggerating.
Well, he's just a showman.
Well, he'll never actually really do these things.
Oh, he doesn't really mean it when he says that.
He's just – Julian and I did a full bonus episode on Project 2025's chapter on the Department of Education, which I'll link to in the show notes.
It's all anti-woke, anti-Marxist bullshit, but this line really jumps out.
Federal education policy should be limited and ultimately the federal department of education should be eliminated.
Okay, so how does this play out in reality?
We already have examples, and I covered one during episode 220, but let me summate it here.
$940 million of taxpayer money is being shuffled into private Christian schools in Arizona using ESAs under the banner of school choice.
And that's just one of 29 states with similar private school voucher programs.
So when announcing McMahon as a pick, whoever wrote Trump's press release is probably pulling from the Heritage Foundation language, as this was what was said.
As Secretary of Education, Linda will fight tirelessly to expand choice to every state in America and empower parents to make the best education decision for their families.
Copy and paste, right?
Yeah.
He also said he wants to send education back to the states, which is the same playbook that was used to dismantle Roe v.
Wade.
And sure, many states have fought back to protect a woman's right to bodily autonomy and healthcare, but we also know that women in red states aren't going to get as many checkups, and doctors in those states are scared of repercussions.
So we can expect much the same to happen to children who can't afford private religious schooling, specifically Christian, because in some states it was tried to shuffle some of this money into Muslim or Jewish schools and the local communities fought back.
So we know this is very much a Christian initiative, especially when that taxpayer money that funds public schools is going to be gone, which is the entire point of the appointment of Linda McMahon.
Yeah, so it's all about choice as long as you make the right choice.
Yeah.
Okay, we've got Linda McMahon in the can.
I want to come back to this question, Julian.
I don't know how serious you are about this thing about pro wrestling fans believing or not believing that fights are real.
But I wanted to say something about that because I think, well, a lot of people sort of talk about that issue, and I think there can be a misconception there that I don't think we can afford because I think if we believe that WWE fans are just dupes, we can miss a lot of the interaction between the leaders and the followers that's directly relevant to understanding Trump and his followers.
Because like for a century, a significant portion of wrestling fans have known about kayfabe, like playing the rules.
But most believed that the performers had to keep the role playing under tight wraps.
That was the rule.
So you're never supposed to show that you're faking.
But McMahon is super significant.
And I think it's so fascinating that he is tied to Trump in this way.
Because he's responsible in 1985 for coming out with it and just saying wrestling actually is entertainment.
It's not sport.
He was forced to because he was struggling against regulatory commissions who wanted him to bring his shows up to safety standards, which he didn't want to do.
So he came out and spilled it.
Which immediately makes me think of Alex Jones saying he's just playing a character once he's held liable for his statements.
This is all tied together.
So apologies for this digression.
But I think it's really important.
This allowed McMahon to grow his brand.
It gave him license to do all kinds of totally absurd things for storylines.
WrestleMania comes out of this kind of post-modern admission of fakeness because everybody knew when Hulk Hogan was going to win and when he was going to lose.
So, of course, he's going to be in Cabinet 2, right?
It's so synchronous that these guys are coming together like this.
The vast majority of fans know about kayfabe, but they know now that Vince is also admitting to the game.
So it's called neo kayfabe these days.
Wait, who calls it neo kayfabe?
Well, scholars who study this.
Scholars, yes.
Well, people who have recognized that like now we're in a different era where regular fans know that Vince McMahon has said that it's a lie and that we're enjoying it anyway, right?
They've broken the rule that you're not supposed to talk about it.
Okay, so this harkens back to a couple of weeks ago we were talking about either Dasha or Ana saying on the free press election night that when Trump lies, you know, everybody knows it and he knows that everybody knows it.
But when liberals lie, they expect you to be fooled by it.
And I think this is so crucial and wrestling ties in to this because, you know, Vince McMahon, Linda, Donald Trump, they've made their social capital on a kind of secret deal with the audience that they're letting them in on some kind of hidden knowledge.
It's like the, you know, I love the poorly educated people thing, right?
So Donald Trump basically lives and he tells his followers that all of this business stuff, all this tax stuff, all this budget stuff, it's all bullshit.
It's a scam.
Look how I live my life pulling fast ones.
So he's nudging and winking and saying this is his working class appeal, right?
Such as it is.
He's trying to say the system isn't real, that you really are the sum total of your performances and maybe you can be like me.
But the thing is, it works because it strikes back against the condescension and liberal smugness that the Red Scare women are telling us about.
Like when she says liberals lie and Democrats expect us to believe it.
Like Trump runs The Apprentice.
Everyone knows it's bullshit.
McMahon runs WWE.
Everyone knows it's scripted.
They're making stories out of the cruelty of capitalism.
And that creates this alternate universe outside of the boredom and the hypocrisy of the state.
Because the alternative is Bill Clinton, right, destroys the welfare state, and then he goes on Jay Leno or whatever it was and plays saxophone.
Or Obama is like, keeps Guantanamo Bay open.
And then he tells us what his reading list is from Martha's Vineyard.
So I think wrestling fans know what lying looks like and feels like.
And I'm afraid that if we say they're stupid, we play right into that resentment.
Like we sound like Hillary Clinton, calling them a basket of deplorables because they They no longer believe in the lie of liberal economy.
They don't believe in it anymore.
They have too many reasons to distrust it.
This is really, really interesting analysis.
The place where I think it might be slightly weak is that there is a critique of liberal government, let's just use that term, that people from the left and people who are scholars have that I think is in some ways being attributed to No, I don't think they're Marxists.
I don't think they're Marxists.
I think they sniff out the distrust.
I think they sniff out the fact that this guy is not pretending to be anything other than an asshole.
And they have bought into the fact that, well, maybe nihilistic chaos is all we really have left for us.
Yeah, so we have a pro-wrestling president who's making a bunch of pro-wrestling nominations and appointments here of people who are going to act as if they are in this really important role.
Yes.
And everyone knows that it's bullshit, but the problem is that everyone knows that it's a bullshit piece of the performativity.
Behind that is the reality of government agencies and infrastructure and people's lives and massive budgets and all of this kind of stuff.
Yes.
And then the liberal smugness and condescension gets conflated with actually having any kind of background qualifications, education, and being able to be a real person who is trying to make tough decisions and communicate about really complex things in the public eye, like Anthony Fauci, for example, right?
Yeah, it's tough.
It's tough.
It's tough to be trustworthy at this point.
Yeah, and so my point is, I'm not saying that you think the MAGA voters are Marxists.
I'm saying that there may be a way in which there's an overlapping sort of confusion about, do the MAGA voters actually have a legitimate critique of Of Clinton and Obama, or are they just bought into the conspiratorial, overgeneralized, racist hatred of liberals, calling them all Marxists, etc., etc.?
I think if they get 30 years of zero going towards labor policy and working class and 30 years of growing wealth inequality, then yeah, they do have an analysis.
Yeah.
Yeah, and yet Clinton is the only president in the last four or five decades who's balanced the budget, who left with a budget surplus.
And what do Republicans run on?
Oh, they're going to be so good for the economy.
The economy under Biden is actually one of the best economies we've had in a really long time.
And so they're buying into this idea that we get nothing from these Democrats, but actually they get plenty.
And so the whole thing is turned into...
this disconnect between what's really happening and what's being sold in this propagandistic spectacle way.
In the dizzying media flurry around all of the Trump 2.0 appointments, Tulsi Gabbard, Bobby Kennedy, and Matt Gaetz, who appears to now have resigned from Congress to avoid the ethics report on his alleged who appears to now have resigned from Congress to avoid the ethics report on his alleged payments to female minors for sex and then withdrawn from being appointed as the top law enforcement official in
In the midst of all of this came Pete Hegseth, who was tapped to head the Department of Defense.
Now, anyone not dialed into Fox News had probably never heard of the guy, but he's now getting a lot of attention on cable news and in print media.
Before we talk about who he is, The DOD has 1.3 million active service members, over 800,000 National Guard, over 700,000 civilian employees, and over 600,000 private sector employees.
It's the largest government agency we have.
The DOD is also a global operation with over 4,000 sites worldwide.
They draw around 16% of the U.S. budget at almost $2 trillion.
Okay, so that's the agency.
Now, who's this guy, Pete Hegseth?
Well, he grew up in Minnesota.
He went on to play basketball for Princeton, making it to the NCAA finals, which is something he draws on in his writings on masculine discipline and strength.
All right.
Hexeth earned a BA in politics from Princeton and then an MA in public policy from Harvard.
So, educated guy.
On graduating, he worked briefly as an investment analyst for Bear Stearns before the 2008 mortgage crash took them down.
But his career for the next 20 years was in the Army National Guard.
He started at Guantanamo Bay, served in Iraq, and then became a counterinsurgency instructor in Afghanistan.
And there's a disturbing overlap here, Derek, between his background in counterinsurgency and what we've been talking about with regard to education so far.
Turns out Hexeth is really obsessed with the conspiratorial fantasy that he and his fellow Christian patriots are literally at war with the very dangerous and sneaky Marxist left.
And of course, this is in the educational system, too.
In an appearance on CrossPolitik, which is the podcast associated with the controversial Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, Hexeth talked about the role of fundamentalist Christian schools, which he refers to as being boot camp, to do spiritual battle with the secular world.
He also said the following in a clip that has been widely circulated.
In the last part of the book, I lay out what an educational insurgency would look like because I was a counterinsurgency instructor in Afghanistan.
And kind of the phases that Mao wrote about.
We're in middle phase one right now, which is effectively a tactical retreat where you regroup, consolidate and reorganize.
And as you do so, you build your army underground with the opportunity later on of taking offensive operations in an overt way.
And obviously all this is metaphorical and all that good stuff.
The host of the show had a good laugh like I did at this last throwaway comment, but notice what he's saying here.
The leftists in America who supposedly follow a Maoist approach are within the educational system in retreat right now so as to attack again later via an insurgency.
So his background in counterinsurgency will come in handy when that happens.
Also in drama class, because honestly, the dramatics of the comparisons are such an Overton mindfuck.
I mean, except for, in very rare instances, actual progressive or leftist policies in public schools that go beyond identity politics or inclusion efforts or land acknowledgments or moderate support for neurodiverse kids that parents have to fight like hell for.
There is no, like, Marxist utopianism he's describing.
Like, I don't see it.
I don't see much more than, you know, the purpose in liberal democracy is anything, much more than adapting children to the market economy with, you know, childcare, sometimes, you know, child storage thrown in, a little bit of arts, so that both parents are freed up to work.
I mean, that's what most of these people actually want.
It's like they already have what they want for the most part, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, the thing is that since the success of propagandist Christopher Rufo in what he did with critical race theory in the media, there is this complete conflation that anything that has to do with identity politics, anything that has to do with racial equality, anything that has to do with being inclusive to LGBTQ folks, all of that actually is Marxism.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So as I mentioned, that podcast comes out of a controversial Idaho church led by someone named Doug Wilson, about whom Hegseth has made a lot of admiring comments.
And Hegseth also belongs to a congregation in Tennessee that is affiliated with Wilson's network.
Why is Christchurch controversial?
Well, NPR has described them as possibly the major player in American Christian nationalism.
They advocate for theocracy.
Restricting women's voting rights, barring non-Christians from holding office, and criminalizing gay and trans people.
Wilson described resistance to COVID quarantine measures as the cold civil war that will lead to the hot civil war.
And as an overlap here with Hegseth's writing and podcast statements, Doug Wilson also heads up the Association of Classical Christian Schools, which has hundreds of fundamentalist schools around the country affiliated.
But back to Pete Hegseth.
After his military career, he became a conservative activist and ran a failed campaign for Senate in Minnesota.
Then he became a news personality appearing on Fox News, CNN and MSNBC to criticize the Mueller probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
And of course, that led him then to getting the job as a Fox News host, where he has advocated for pardoning Americans found guilty of war crimes.
And he appears to have persuaded frequent Fox viewer Donald Trump to do just that.
But it's in his work as an author that we really get to see how dangerous this man is.
In addition to a pain to Roosevelt and a book of war stories, he has published three books in quick succession in the last four years.
That's an impressive output.
He clearly has a lot on his mind.
He's preoccupied with some themes here.
The titles of the books are American Crusade.
Battle for the American Mind and War on Warriors.
They're the same book.
They're the same book.
Well, that's a feature, not a bug.
Huge hat tip here to Jonathan Chait, who read all three of these books in their completeness and reported on them last week in The Atlantic.
He describes a theme running through all three about the importance of masculinity, of boys being raised with discipline.
Hexeth uses his own exploits, as I mentioned, on the basketball court and on the battlefield as examples.
He sees war as the masculine endeavor that creates a sense of honor that is otherwise hard to salvage as a man.
Hexeth decries the supposed woke takeover of the military, which apparently promotes unqualified minorities in the name of diversity, there's your Marxism, and alienates really much.
hardworking soldiers who may just happen to have some racist beliefs.
He also opposes having female combatants as undermining civilization.
Now, in his books, he claims that vaccines are poison, climate science is a hoax, George Floyd died of a drug overdose, and it was actually German socialists who enacted the Holocaust, that old chestnut.
Ticking all the boxes.
Yep.
Now, Jonathan Chait describes Hegseth as advancing an elaborate conspiracy theory in battle for the This goes all the way back to the founding fathers, Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, whose religious deism claims Hegseth opened the door to Marxist influence in the education system somehow.
And then in War on Warriors, Hegseth bemoans creeping wokeism in the military and calls for a purge, which is something that Trump is reportedly already planning.
Yeah, and it's not just generals that Trump doesn't like.
Part of that means purging all trans service members on day one, as per Trump's recent comments.
So how many are there?
I looked it up back in 2014.
There were an estimated 15,500.
That's 10 years ago.
So even if that number hasn't gone up, and if many of those have stayed, they've moved up a decade in experience and training.
Cruelty aside, I don't know how you throw that many people away.
Yeah, that's a violation of their civil rights.
Hegseth writes of calls for due process for Guantanamo Bay detainees as a stab in the back.
And he calls the rules of war woke nonsense, saying our enemies should get bullets, not attorneys.
In his book, American Crusade, Hegseth calls for the categorical defeat and utter annihilation of the left, without which, he says, America cannot and will not survive.
Our American Crusade, he says, is not with swords and not about guns yet.
So the framing of everyone on the left as a traitorous and determined wartime enemy runs throughout these three books.
So much so that Chait ends his piece by saying he started off Asking if Hegseth might go along with the hypothetical order from Trump to fire on peaceful American protesters, and then ended up having read the books, believing that Hegseth wouldn't even wait for the order.
So that brings me to the two final pieces of information that cannot go unsaid.
The first is that Hex has paid an undisclosed sum of money to a woman who accused him of a drunken sexual assault, which may have included drugging her after they'd had an argument after 1 a.m.
outside a hotel bar during a conservative conference weekend.
And that altercation was so loud that the hotel staff were dispatched at the request of guests to quiet them down.
Okay, so there's some rape culture history background here.
Independent journalist Judd Legum was digging around in the Princeton Torrey, which is their college paper, because Hegseth was actually his publisher back in 2002.
And Legum found that Hegseth ran this column by a guy who was making fun of an anti-rape orientation on campus in which the women facilitators presented a scenario in which the woman, the writer calls her a girl, of course, was intoxicated and then assaulted.
And the writer claimed that the presentation didn't show that the woman provided consent, but also didn't show that she put up a fight because she was unconscious.
Ergo, it couldn't be rape, at least according to the law in his unnamed home state, which he doesn't cite.
So that is, Legum thought that was a good piece to run.
I think while we're here, guys, we have to note, along with a bunch of other people, that an adjudicated rapist strongman has surrounded himself with people also accused of sexual assault or of covering it up.
Hegseth, Gates has withdrawn.
Musk is accused of workplace harassment.
RFK Jr. accused of assault by a former family nanny, Eliza Cooney.
And then the lawsuit against Linda McMahon mentioned above.
He's basically wiping the Me Too movement out of history, reverting back to some 1980s norm of crazy, slutty women are always trying to destroy powerful men.
The broader statement, I think, is feminism is bullshit.
So, you know, we talk about purity tests in conspirituality circles, but these are pollution tests, really, because for everyone in the position of having to support Trump and his nominees, he's basically telling them that they're going to have to roll in his shit and be complicit with him.
That's some stuff about Hegseth's ideology, shall we say.
Now we get a little bit more specific in terms of his proximity to power.
So there were photos that emerged of Hegseth's shirtless body, revealing that he has tattoos associated with both Christian nationalism and white supremacy movements.
These include a Jerusalem cross, a really big one on his chest, and the words deus volt on his rather large bicep.
Both are symbols of the First Crusade and both have been adopted by far-right and anti-Muslim extremist groups in the U.S. and elsewhere.
In fact, these tattoos raised security risk flags about him when he was assigned to be part of the National Guard on duty during Biden's inauguration in 2021. So much so that he was removed from the detail, an act that would end up seeing him resign from the military in disgust.
But this was the same guy who had downplayed the January 6th insurrection on Fox News, describing the crowds as patriots, reawoken to the reality of what the left has done to their country.
And so he was expecting to be able to be part of the detail that would protect Trump, that would protect, excuse me, Biden during his inauguration.
And then, you know, because of the tattoos, how dare they say that I might have unpatriotic attitudes.
In his book, War on Warriors, Hegseth accuses the Pentagon of peddling the lie of racism in the military and manufacturing concerns of far-right extremists in the ranks.
But as Politico reports, more than 480 people with military backgrounds were accused of ideologically driven crimes between 2017 and 2023 in this country, including more than 230 arrested in connection with the insurrection on January 6th.
So they may not have taken the capital on that day, but with Pete Hexeth, one of their own may be about to be in charge.
Okay, homestretch.
And Derek, you said above that loyalty and camera readiness were the criteria for these picks.
I think that's totally on point.
So I think with Tulsi, we've got Trump's most camera ready appointees, someone who really is the image of like health and a kind of hard to describe piety.
She's been tapped to be the director of national intelligence, where she'll be overseeing an intelligence community budget of around $70 billion annually.
um 70% of which we found out from the Snowden leaks in 2013 is paid out to private contractors and tech firms.
And most of the details of that spending are classified.
So Tulsi Gabbard is going to have a lot of money at hand that nobody will be able to.
And that's par for the course, I think, because there's a lot about Gabbard's life that's also classified because it's wrapped up in a spirituality that is kind of incoherent with regard to predictable political values.
We added to the rich discussion about this back in episode 152, Tulsi Gabbard's Krishna Consciousness.
Our guest was Nittai Joseph, who, interestingly, like Gabbard, grew up in an ISKCON breakaway sect.
And has since been doing graduate work in high-demand groups.
And he suggested that whatever Gabbard's political inconsistency is at the moment, because it changes, Democrat to Republican, a veteran to anti-interventionist, except when it comes to Israel, it may stem from a fundamental loyalty to the religious group rather than any solid moral or political convictions.
but you just can't know and that's the thing.
The group is called Science of Identity and it's run out of Hawaii by an ex-Hari Krishna member named Chris Butler who's actually married to yoga apparel guru Y. Lana who used to be featured on the backs of every Yoga Journal magazine that was on the newsstand and you know if you picked up a VHS about yoga in 1987 she was probably on the cover with with a lay.
So some highlights from Gabbard's greatest hits.
Or life, sorry.
As far as we know, she remains a devout follower of Butler.
The Byline Times journalist CJ Wuerlman found a video clip of her attending a Butler veneration session in 2018 in the Hawaii ashram.
Her parents were part of Butler's original group, and Mike Gabbard, her dad, has been a Hawaii state politician since 2002.
He's now a state senator.
I think he's held that seat since 2006.
He's mostly known for being just an openly homophobic asshole legislator, which is right in line with Butler's views.
science of identity is secretive It's high demand.
Butler demands obedience and dictates choices regarding diet, relationships, and employment.
The children are generally homeschooled or they're sent to Science of Identity-run boarding schools, which limits exposure to the outside world.
And Gabbard herself spent a chunk of her own schooling in an ashram school in the Philippines, about which former students said the environment was, quote, almost prison-like and traumatizing.
I don't believe she's spoken directly about her experience there.
Science of Identity teaches a strict adherence to their Hare Krishna-style interpretations of Hindu scriptures, like the Bhagavad Gita, and people might remember that Gabbard was sworn into Congress on a copy of the BG.
And the focus is really on personal purity and detachment from the material world.
And we know that Butler demonizes homosexuality.
He says terrible things about gay people and AIDS and all kinds of things.
And he promotes traditional gender roles with women being subservient to men.
It's not a surprise that Gabbard's general anti-trans stance is a sort of stable feature.
The nature of this Chris Butler cult is that it's a breakaway Hare Krishna cult in which he sees himself, he presents himself as the world teacher, as the holy one, and that it is a guru devotion cult in which everyone who lives in the ashram has a massive picture of him in their living room above an altar that they are to meditate on daily to imagine him becoming one with him, essentially.
It's pretty specific.
So science of identity people are kind of like the Sedevacontists in the Catholic Church.
They don't believe that the Pope is really the Pope.
Yeah, they actually believe that their guy is the leader.
So yeah, that's the way it works.
This brings up the question, too, of what Gabbard thinks about Islam and Muslims.
Like on one hand, she has this science of identity lingo that sounds like it is universalist and ecumenical.
And she will voice anti-interventionist support for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who's used chemical weapons against his own people over 300 times.
But then she'll also do things like press Obama to highlight the dangers of radical Islamism.
Like if he doesn't use that phrase, he's not really like, you know, doing his political duty, that he should emphasize, he should have emphasized that over any other threat to world security.
And, you know, as I've said, she's an all-in hawk on Israel.
So is there any clarity here on this?
There are breadcrumbs all over the internet that Chris Butler is a raging Islamophobe.
And that would track with his general alignment with Hindu nationalism.
But as of this moment, it's hard to find the source material, even though as late as 2022, we have a report from the Independent that, quote, Butler's Islamophobic teachings that have been widely circulated online, or, sorry, Butler's Islamophobic teachings have been widely circulated online. Butler's Islamophobic teachings have been widely circulated online.
But that's not true anymore, if you go and look, except one excerpt of an audio record.
And I recognized his whiny voice in which he talks about Islam as an insane Mickey Mouse religion of total violence.
My point here is that something that everyone knew a lot about only a few years ago seems to be spiraling into a memory hole.
And I think this is worth considering when we think about Gabbard in control of $70 billion of mainly classified intelligence funding.
So, you know, rounding up on Gabbard is that, you know, her politics show strong signs of social conservatism and an admiration for strongmen and a tendency towards Islamophobia.
But her commitments seem out of focus.
We're kind of outshined by the iconography of beauty and equanimity.
It's not just that she gazes into her phone and says that she wants to bring the spirit of aloha into the Russia-Ukraine war.
it's also this constant stream of saintly imagery produced by her husband, Abraham Williams, who may be a member of Science of Identity or may not be.
They were married in a Vedic ceremony that's typical of the group.
But I mean, definitely he makes her look in every shot like an idol in Iskhan Temple.
And that brings me back to some of the stuff that I've been talking about before, which is what kind of landscape is this?
And here I want to just finish by talking a little bit about the notion of the spectacle and to re-up what I said about Trump really telling his followers that it's all a show.
And I think my point is that if we're serious about Trump and his cabinet showing this fascistic merging of resentment-fueled corporate state aggression, going forward, I want to include some ideas from the rich history of anti-fascist thought.
And so today I'm going to ping Raoul Vanigam, who's the author of Revolution in Daily Life from 1967, and Guy Debord, author of Society of the Spectacle in 68.
These were new school Marxists.
They were critical of the Soviet evolutions.
They were founding members of the Situationist International in Paris.
And that was at the center of mass protests in May 1968, in which university students almost toppled the government with demands for educational reform that boiled over into demands for the end of capitalism itself, which didn't happen.
But both of these guys condemned fascism as a violent, irrational attempt to defend a failing bourgeois economy, which I think is really poignant for our moment.
Like, corporations are called out for cheating, make them stronger.
Democracy threatens oligarchs, then fuck up voting, right?
Like, that's what fascism does.
And I think they really predicted the TV-based Trumpian version of fascism as this final tier realm of illusion and alienation, driven by endless consumption, dominated by images, representations that obscure human experience.
I think they predicted the feeling of the internet, this voyeuristic, screen-based capitalism, exactly the system that allowed Trump to build power out of bullshit.
Like, Debord says that we live in spectacular time, an eternal present of time spent consuming images.
Like, we're scrolling.
He's describing scrolling.
And he says that spectacular time is cyclical, it's repetitive, and it erodes the capacity to imagine anything changing.
When I think about this stuff and I think about how the theory is felt for me, it's like I can wake up every morning and cross the space from the floatingness of sleep to the material stuff of sleep.
Putting myself together, finding underwear and socks, sipping water, feeling the floor.
I feel human, knowledgeable, and at scale.
And I know what care means.
I know what threat might be.
And if in my immediate environment anyway, and if I leave my phone off, which is a very important thing, and if I go walking in the dark, I will smell the air, marvel at the stars, and then I'll pass by unhoused people sleeping in the tents in the park in the cold now.
And it makes me think about what that means and how I might help because it's just immediate.
There's no mediation in that social relationship.
And I know that some of our worst instincts have elected people who are rushing headlong into fascism who might send the cops into the park later that same day to trample on their possessions.
I know that the cops are waking up.
They're making coffee.
I think they're thinking about the day ahead.
And they, too, will have clear moments of feeling and access to their morality.
So that's a space in which I'm worried and anxious, but I also feel warm and somewhat connected.
But if I open my phone, and this is just a metaphor for being drawn back into the flow of things, something changes.
There's an endless scroll of interests and opportunities and products and outrageous personalities like Linda McMahon, and the space between that world and the tents in the park expands.
So, Trump and his cabinet, in my view, are like spectacular capitalists who will keep everyone mesmerized.
but to be in Trump's TV show.
And to speak to something you just said, Julian, earlier, the TV show has these fascist storylines that attract a really high number of viewers, and they will ruin things for many selfish reasons because they will have real effects.
But in the meantime, the people who are running the show will also know or feel like it's good entertainment.
And, you know, I'll have to do bonuses on the situationists and other people who have, you know, grappled with fascism in future bonuses because, you know, some of the best ideas that come out of this period look like the Aubrey Marcus program, Like it was the 60s after all, because Raoul Vonnegum actually said that capitalist alienation can be battled with a constant commitment to creating experiences of authenticity, returning to the society of the gift and imagining revolution as a festival.
Right.
So from the famous Situationist Workshop at Esalen.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah.
Well, that's the thing that gets commodified.
The machine continues.
So but if I put aside the thought like, OK, you're describing Burning Man and that hasn't worked out so well.
I can still feel something useful in this description of there's a fake Trumpian politics that will ruin lives for ratings.
And then there is still a real politics, a revolution that won't be televised, as Gil Scott Heron said, that has to do with constantly building stuff locally, like keeping focused on that in the dark mornings, maybe, you know, and the TV fascists are going to do their thing in the meantime.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspirituality.
Next week, Mallory DeMille returns to discuss Maha Moms.
