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Jan. 9, 2025 - Conspirituality
50:28
239: Conspiracy Of Dunces

Like it or not, 2025 is here. What happens in post-truth America when formerly fringe conspiracy theorists, religious extremists, pseudoscience-peddlers, and wannabe authoritarians become a government—now weaponized against their personal enemies, both foreign and domestic? Should political analysis take a page from academics who study professional wrestling? We each offer our views on what's ahead. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Julian Walker, and Matthew Remski today is knee-deep working on an episode that's looking at the telepathy tapes.
So he won't be joining us today, but he did pre-record a segment, so stay tuned for that.
You can find us on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod.
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Conspiratuality 239, Conspiracy of Dunces.
Happy New Year, everyone.
Like it or not, 2025 is here.
I don't like it.
Complete with surreal cabinet appointments, the MAGA Civil War with Elon that some of us are cheering on, and the New York Times podcast calling for finding common ground with RFK Jr. We, of course, started the new year off with lone wolf terror attacks in New Orleans and also in Las Vegas.
As the New Jersey drone panic was morphing into fears about a mysterious fog enveloping the nation.
And as his supporters are anticipating the release of January 6th domestic terrorists, the president-elect announced a victory rally for the day before his second inauguration.
And because the gods must be twisted, he'll actually be sworn in on Martin Luther King Day.
So what happens in post-truth America when formerly fringe conspiracy theorists, religious extremists, pseudoscience peddlers, and wannabe authoritarians become the government?
Now weaponized against their personal enemies, both foreign and domestic, should political analysis take a page from academics who study professional wrestling?
All right, Eric, here we are.
We're facing down the brave new world we've been dragged kicking and screaming into despite all of our work and that of our allies over the last five years.
We've got the calamitous climate denialism.
Christian nationalism, anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-trans, pro-oligarch deregulation bonanza of Project 2025 kicking into gear.
Anti-vax COVID grievance mongers Bobby Kennedy, Marty Macri and Jay Bhattacharya taking over government medical science agencies and opening the doors, as you've covered extensively, for their pseudoscience peddling wellness grift friends like Casey and Kaylee Means.
We've got the QAnon-boosting wannabe journalist prosecuting deep state conspiracist Kash Patel set to run the FBI, breakaway ultra-conservative Hare Krishna cult member Putin and Assad appeasing Tulsi Gabbard looking to be director of national intelligence, and Pete Hegseth, the drunk-on-the-job B-team Fox News co-host with a history of sexual assault who believes America is in an all-out war with woke Marxist enemies within.
He's on deck to run the Department of Defense.
Now, conservative evangelical Mike Huckabee, who has said there is no such thing as a Palestinian, is set to be Trump's ambassador to Israel.
His friend and colleague, who I've talked about a bit, John Hagee, who's preached and published on how biblical prophecy requires a war between Israel and Iran to usher in the rapture and Christ's second coming, has called Huckabee...
An inspiring choice for this position.
These are fun times.
That might be the most amount of adjectives you've ever used in an intro, so congratulations on that.
We're recording this on Tuesday.
I also want to note that just this morning, I woke up to news, as all of us did, that Mark Zuckerberg is going to stop any sort of fact-checking on any of his Meta platforms.
And just before recording, I learned that Dana White is now on the board of directors at Meta.
So the professional wrestling angle that Matthew is going to touch upon in his pre-recorded segment, in which he also covered this past weekend in his excellent brief, just kind of foreshadowed this conglomeration of just weird figures coming together under the auspices of the next Trump administration.
So I'm having a lot of fun, Julian.
How about you?
Yeah, billionaires betting on...
The disinformation economy.
Like, why not?
Let's go all in.
Yeah, it's dismaying.
Sometimes you have to just laugh at how absurd it is or else you're going to, I don't know what, slam your head down on the desk.
My focus today is on how conspiracism is being normalized and institutionalized in ways both alarming and ridiculous, but also alarming.
Because it's ridiculous that important government time and resources are likely going to be spent focusing on completely fabricated non-topics.
I'll say more in a little bit about the ludicrous and yet oh-so-serious UFO hearings, or UAP as they prefer to call them now, that have been happening on the Hill for the past few months.
I would expect more of those to come.
We've got the Maha Rising preview with Bobby Kennedy's super grifty Senate roundtable that we covered.
As well as the Stanford Science-Denying COVID Revisionist History Medical Conference.
The ideas of both, which will no doubt follow the keynote speaker from that Stanford conference, Jay Bhattacharya, into his role as head of the NIH. So we've got some previews of what is likely coming up.
I'll be expecting congressional hearings on Anthony Fauci and Hunter Biden.
Why not?
Let's go back there.
And the thoroughly debunked lies about vaccines and autism, too.
Brought up that Stanford panel.
I also want to mention that this Saturday you and I will be covering Vinay Prasad and what appears to be him trying to be a pick-me for the RFK Jr. HHS administration.
He's been going hard in defense.
So we're going to cover two instances this Saturday of what he's been doing lately.
I've already clipped all of the video where he's...
Where he creates a conspiracy that never actually exists and then defends it.
It's pretty amazing, actually.
He's talented.
He's very talented.
He's wrong, but he's talented.
So today, I'm going to focus on the recent panic about drones.
The story starts in mid-November of last year with hundreds and then thousands of residents of your garden state, Derek, New Jersey, reporting unidentified objects flying overhead.
As sightings increased to the thousands across different counties of New Jersey, they also spread to nearby states like New York, Delaware, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Connecticut.
Some noticed with alarm that these objects were hovering over water reservoirs, military bases, police stations, and bridges.
And as more people surveyed the sky, more mysterious sightings were documented.
So here's how CBS News rather breathlessly reported on it.
People in New Jersey are concerned and demanding information after a wave of mysterious drone sightings.
But the government has yet to give any concrete answers.
One lawmaker is calling for a state of emergency, while another has an ominous theory about a foreign adversary.
Here's CBS's Tom Hansen.
This is over my house right now.
What is that?
It's the million-dollar question baffling New Jersey residents looking skyward.
They're just pacing back and forth, going very slow.
Since last month, dozens of drones mysteriously hovering in the skies at night.
Near Morris County, the FAA has now ordered two temporary flight restrictions prohibiting drones over this military base and Trump National Golf Club after receiving reports of unexplained activity.
Today, Homeland Security and state police met with some New Jersey officials, including Mayor Jim Mailey.
I truly don't believe they have any idea where the drones are coming from.
Many still have questions, including Congressman Jeff Van Drew, who says individuals with high security clearance have a theory about where the drones come from.
Okay, so let's put a pin in that Jeff Van Drew high security clearance theory for a moment.
High security clearance.
If they were drones...
Reports of them being as large as cars and being able to fly as long as six hours at a time in coordinated patterns led some to propose a high-tech and ominous type of drone perhaps spying on sensitive locations.
Concern about military bases is of course not unfounded and there have in recent years been instances of unauthorized drones flying over bases in multiple states.
But during the six weeks or so of heightened focus on this in the news, police and government responses like from the FAA, the DHS, the DOD, the FBI, saying that all of the visual evidence they had seen was actually consistent with legal small airplanes that pose no risk,
and that there are around one million licensed hobbyist drones or legal commercial drones in the continental U.S. At this point in history, so they're in the sky.
The public was unsatisfied, and so too several of their political representatives.
So, top of the list, President-elect Donald Trump stated that the government knew exactly who was behind the drones and demanded that they release the information.
Texas Congressman Mike McCaul accused China of purchasing farmland next to military bases from which to launch spy drones.
South Carolina rep Nancy Mace went scattershot, speculating that they might be from Iran or China or from outer space or from outside the universe.
Maybe they were searching for a missing nuclear warhead.
Wait, is outer space different from outside the universe?
Apparently so.
She may be going into multiverse territory here.
We'll have to get some physics expert in to consult.
Maryland's governor, former governor, Larry Hogan, shared a social media video.
Of what he thought were dozens of large drones hovering ominously over his house.
And that video actually showed the constellation Orion.
With some airplanes flying by.
This is going to get so much worse.
A recent Hard Fork episode, Kevin and Casey went into an Amazon warehouse to talk to the head of drone operations there because they are planning on delivering package via drones.
And they watched some demos and they actually asked him, you know...
Is it possible that some of these account for what's happening in New Jersey?
He's like, no, we haven't done tests there.
That's not it.
But once that is implemented and our sky is as busy as our roads, I just can't imagine the sort of conspiracies that are going to be coming down the pipe.
And for the record, I think...
Drone delivery on a consumer level is just a really bad fucking idea.
Some people also complained of having cold and flu symptoms after they saw the drones.
So some wondered that perhaps this was the start of an alien attack or that of a foreign enemy making us sick.
But it could also be the Christmas cold and flu season.
I'm just saying.
Either way, surely the military should be shooting down the drones to find out what's going on, just in case.
So civilians started pointing lasers into the sky.
So much so that there was an over 230% increase in pilots reporting laser strikes.
And these are actually very dangerous because the windshield gets momentarily filled with a flash of blinding light.
Are these pilots who are in smaller planes and lower?
Because you couldn't reach 30,000 feet, so I'm guessing this is more just not commercial airlines.
Yeah, I would think so.
Not that it makes it any better, by the way.
I'm just wondering.
Yeah, because the flights are going to happen closer to the building.
By mid-December, New Jersey rep, and I said we'd come back to him, Jeff Van Drew, covered himself in glory by saying on Fox News that the drones were coming from an Iranian mothership that had been launched a month previous and was sitting off the American East Coast.
Is that in outer space or beyond the universe?
Where is Iran, really?
I doubt he could find it on a map.
He added that he did not say this lightly because he had heard it from high sources.
Well, New Jersey, we have some strong weed.
Well, that probably explains it.
He was only outdone by Pennsylvania Senator Doug Mastriano who credulously retweeted a photo on Twitter of an ominous-looking drone that had apparently crashed in Long Beach and had been whisked away to an undisclosed location.
And that turned out to be a picture of a replica spaceship toy.
Based on Star Wars.
So the Pentagon, now this is where all of this is like, oh, these dumb people, right, were sort of having a laugh at their expense.
But now, check it out.
The Pentagon had to refute the Iranian mothership claim and other fears and speculation from government officials and an anxious panicking public across several press conferences.
In the end...
This was all just a kind of mass hysteria which is fading as quickly as it spread, but conspiracy theorists will likely weave the great drone scare of 2024 into their narratives moving forward about what they are up to.
Meanwhile, on the group hysteria tip, drone panic transitioned into fears about the strange and ominous fog supposedly making people sick and leading wellness influencers to prescribe Cleansing products and practices.
And it was immediate.
I posted on Instagram about this because it was pretty funny, but Mallory DeMiller, our TikTok correspondent and friend, the first text that she sent me this year, and we're always trading stuff that we end up posting or covering, was about this fog.
And it is as dumb as it sounds.
It's literal fog, and people are saying that, did you notice the fog and that there's been an increase in illnesses?
And without skipping a beat, they're selling cleansing.
And these are already products that are on their downline as it is.
It's some sort of supplement or tincture.
And now all of a sudden, it's been magically repurposed to help you combat fog.
So, like I said, I was going to clip some of it, but it is that...
Yeah, and Mallory actually has a really good post about it.
Yes, you just had these wellness influencers who now have protocols.
Here's what I would do if I had gotten stuck in the mysterious fog.
I would instantly cleanse my liver and do this to support my kidneys.
Well, the one woman that she clipped and highlighted was basically saying, we did not get sick from the fog because we take this tincture every day.
But all these other people around us who aren't taking the tincture were getting sick from the fog.
Yeah, the audacity and the marketing opportunism is just amazing.
So look, as you said, Derek, the increased presence of hobbyist, commercial, and even delivery drones.
It means that this type of panic will probably flare up from time to time, and we'll probably have lots of little collisions in the air.
I think it's a terrible idea as well.
Of course, there's always the real danger of either terrorist or foreign enemy attacks using drones.
But my main point here is that government time and resources and news reporting focus had to be spent on this fabricated and paranoid topic.
And this wasteful idiocy and conspiracy mongering from within the halls of power is sadly what I imagine we're going to see across the board over the coming years.
We've already had those two congressional committees on UAPs, which were a combination of promo tour stops for cranks with new books or TV shows about UFO disclosure and government cover-ups, as well as opportunities for members like Nancy Mace and Lauren Boebert.
Anna Paulina Luna, to demonstrate their familiarity with History Channel-style research.
They made references to alien-human hybrids and underwater ocean bases, all while they were role-playing tough question-asking of the so-called whistleblowers.
And the whistleblowers would make outrageous claims about recovered ships and biologics.
And then when pressed for evidence of any of this, they'd say, well...
I've been prevented by the government from saying anything else unless it's in a closed session or unless you can join me in a skiff.
The second of those sessions, because they had one in the Senate and one in the Congress, the second one featured Twitter files, lead journalist and climate denialist author Michael Schellenberger, who we've covered many times, submitting what was his new report, compiled with help from the whistleblower.
Authors and media personalities sat beside him for the hearing, who, by the way, had new TV shows coming out, on a top-secret UAP program supposedly named Immaculate Constellation.
And the overlaps there with the Maha roundtable are striking, right, Derek?
We're going to have these people come.
They're going to give very important testimony.
And by the way, here's their website, and here's where you can buy their book, and here's the special chocolate that they sell.
And probably not experts in the field that they're claiming to be experts in.
Now, on a more serious note, it's not hard to imagine hearings coming down the pipe now that will try to prosecute the January 6th committee members, more Hunter Biden and social media censorship nonsense, especially given what you said about the news today.
I will not be surprised if there's a complete re-litigating of COVID and attempts to prosecute Fauci and Hotez and others.
And of course, live-streamed government hearings on the dangers of seed oils and pesticides and antidepressants and vaccines supposedly causing autism and, during COVID, sudden death.
This is all time and energy that should be spent solving real problems and really dealing with what's going on in our country.
And this aspect is really breaking my brain right now, I have to say.
The fringe crackpots who've cried government conspiracy against their nonsensical and paranoid beliefs are now poised to become the mainstream.
And as with the disturbing developments like the New York Times podcast episode urging that we find common ground with RFK Jr., The Overton window is in dangerous motion.
Soon, people like us will be the ones pointing out all the conspiracies being enacted by the government to hide the truth from the American people.
At least no one will accuse us of trying to protect the status quo.
Oh, don't be so sure.
For my show and tell this week about entering the new year, one interesting thing about this turning into 2025 is how much of my work on this podcast is coming to life right here in one interesting thing about this turning into 2025 is how much of my work on this Not so much on the misinformation side, though that is certainly a thing here in Portland and throughout the state.
But on the healthcare end of things.
And in many ways, the misinformation spread by wellness influencers resonates with people because of our fucked up healthcare system.
And the problem is, from my perspective, they focus on the wrong things.
I'm talking about wellness influencers and the conspiracists.
They talk about...
They talk about all of these downstream problems that are not real problems.
Meanwhile, doctors, researchers, nurses, and other healthcare professionals and the interventions they offer are really important to us while we should be focusing on C-suite greed and the lack of legislative will that could help meaningfully evolve our healthcare so that we match the rest of the developed world.
Some context.
In the spring of last year, I started thinking seriously about where all of this work leads for me.
Identifying health misinformation and pointing out grifter techniques only goes so far.
I think it's important, but there is a ceiling to that because the ability to think through their marketing chops and scientific flaws is important.
Yet, I always want to talk about the importance of addressing things like the social determinants of health.
So the question...
What am I doing about that?
My answer is Cyrus Health, which is a nonprofit that I launched in November.
So far, I've just been writing a weekly newsletter and posting on social media.
Yesterday, I launched a new podcast.
It's adjacent to this one.
It's called Clarity Lab, and it's a seasonal podcast where one expert talks about one topic.
So, for example, yesterday, I talked to Dr. Andrea Love.
About the complexities of cancer.
I will have Dr. Danielle Bilardo talking about statins.
Doctors Michelle Wong and Jen Novakovich talking about facets of cosmetic chemistry.
Mallory DeMille is also a board member of Cyrus Health.
And we did the interview yesterday.
We talk about influencer marketing.
But my longer-term goal is to work on universal healthcare in America because our patchwork approach is responsible for all of the horrible aspects of our system.
So you got the fact that when you lose your job, you lose employer-based healthcare and you're shoved into the free market.
At the very moment, you lose your income.
This happens nowhere else in the developed world.
You have the fact that in no other country do doctors carry such high insurance premiums because it's only in America that suing a doctor is a regular occurrence.
You have the fact that millions of people remain uninsured in America and the fact that you can go bankrupt from medical bills, which again is not a thing in other developed nations.
So, for this work, I was inspired by a man named Tommy Douglas.
If you're Canadian, you've probably heard of him.
He was a politician who invented Medicare.
Universal healthcare did not just happen in Canada.
It took nearly four decades to become fully codified.
Douglas launched the program in Saskatchewan, and he was heavily criticized until people said, Oh shit, I really like this thing.
And all the other provinces then wanted to jump on board.
And it spread there.
It did not become fully nationalized until 1986. But here's where it comes back to what I was saying about Oregon.
We might be following this trajectory, and I plan on getting more involved in this effort.
So for background, in 2022, we passed Measure 111. It was my first year living here, and it was the first election that I voted in here.
And this measure amended our state constitution and declared healthcare a fundamental right for every resident, meaning that the state has to provide affordable...
for everyone.
No other state in America has this written into their constitution.
Now, kind of surprisingly, it was very tight.
The majority was only 50.7%, and there's still a lot of work left to be done.
So in 2026, a governance board will submit a recommended plan to the Oregon legislature.
And then the following year, the legislature will then codify some version of that plan into legislation and will have two years to implement it.
So I expect a lot of industry opposition, that they were definitely involved in 2022, trying to scare people out of voting for it.
But there is a nonprofit called Healthcare for All Oregon that I just yesterday reached out to to do some volunteer work.
Because if we can implement universal healthcare in Oregon, which we are set to do, I am hoping that it will snowball and other states will adopt it.
Perhaps sometimes it'll become a federal plan.
All of this leads to my second story.
One opposing force to this might be, I'm guessing, Providence Health and Services, which is a Washington state-based nonprofit Catholic hospital system, and it's also one of the largest healthcare providers here in Oregon.
It's where my wife and I go for care, so I know some of the pain points.
Their system is extremely profit-driven, and the Catholic aspect is a bit of a farce considering how little charity they actually offer.
So in 2022, the New York Times conducted two separate investigations into Providence, and they found that they accepted a half billion dollars in COVID relief from the government, despite having $12 billion in cash reserves.
And that cash reserve they use to invest Wall Street style and generate a billion dollars a year from those investments.
And yet they took half a billion from the government, which I don't believe they had to repay.
Absolutely appalling.
I mean, it's unsurprising, but always shocking when you find out that the people who least need it were able to very quickly jump on getting access to that COVID relief money.
Yeah, there are many wellness influencers too.
We've covered some of them, but you know, that's...
One thing I love about ProPublica is you can actually go and you can look up and see who accepted the money and whether or not they had to repay it.
It's a big database, but it's very worthwhile if you're wondering about anyone in your life.
Yeah, like RFK Jr., who's been very much in our lives.
So the second New York Times investigation found that Providence hired McKinsey& Company to create a program that requires payments from patients after their Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements were received, which is illegal.
in Washington state because the state requires that low-income patients receive care with no co-pay if they're covered by Medicare or Medicaid.
Yet Providence sent anyone who didn't pay those co-pays they weren't supposed to pay to a debt collector.
And so the state attorney general successfully sued Providence, forcing them to forgive $137 million in medical debt that shouldn't have existed.
And they had to refund $20 million to patients who did pay because they didn't know what the fuck was going on and they didn't want to get in trouble.
So thankfully, they have to be reimbursed.
Now, that's not all.
Providence was forced to pay $220 million to 33,000 employees who they underpaid between 2018 and 2023. They're also currently being sued by failing to provide an emergency abortion for a woman experiencing a life...
She was told that she could take a $40,000 medical helicopter flight to a facility 271 miles away if she wanted that procedure conducted.
So imagine that.
You go into the hospital, you are having a life-threatening miscarriage, and they tell you right there, you could pay $40,000 and receive the care that you need.
If you want to be taken hours away from here into California.
Now, the hospital, all they would give her was a bucket of towels.
So, she jumped in the car with her husband, sped off to a community hospital, and she was saved, thankfully.
So, again, remember, this is a Catholic hospital system.
They have an anti-abortion stance, but it is illegal.
To do that if it's a life-threatening miscarriage, and they still did it anyway.
So again, this concept of charity from the Catholic hospital system.
And I'll just note that it's not just Providence.
There's been some investigation showing that Catholic hospital systems have been buying up medical providers all over the country.
These practices are kind of endemic at this point within those systems, which is just so frustrating.
So this is the type of healthcare bullshit Americans deal with that drives people away from trusting any part of the system, which I completely understand.
And that is where wellness influencers can often slip in.
Going back to Providence, one final thing here.
5,000 hospitalists, nurses, and other healthcare workers are going to strike at Providence tomorrow, Friday, and is the largest healthcare strike in state history.
The Oregon Nurses Association has been negotiating with Providence for over a year to no effect.
And the hospitalists and nurses, what they ask for are things like not being required to travel all over the state to provide healthcare.
Or at least being reimbursed for travel expenses and time.
So basically, Providence can say, hey, you're needed three hours away.
Go do this thing.
And they're not reimbursed for that travel time.
Providence said, no, we're not going to reimburse you.
Another one, there are signing bonuses that are common with a whole range of hospitalists.
For this strike specifically, the OB, the OB-GYN, the OB hospitalist group, was denied this request and they are all women.
So figure that out however you'd like to, but that is another sticking point.
We are recording this on Tuesday, as we always do.
Last-minute negotiations are possible.
Just this week, Providence has been on a big PR push with local media trying to say, we've been trying to negotiate, but they won't when the actual Nurses Association has documentation of over a year of their negotiations.
So they're just lying right now.
But if the strike does happen, I'm going to head over to my Providence Hospital, which is the main one here in Portland, and I'm going to try to talk to some of the workers, and I hope to publish something on that next week and share any video that I capture on our social media feeds.
Now, as all of this is happening, I just learned this morning that 2,200 nurses from another system called Legacy Health, which is about to combine with OHSU, which is the largest provider here in Portland, They are joining the Oregon Nurses Association, and this is considered the largest organizing effort in this organization's history and across the country.
A thousand doctors plan on striking in New York City for similar reasons.
So there's a lot going on in healthcare, and it's really refreshing to see that all of these organizations are gathering and trying to make a difference so that they can work under conditions that aren't stressing them out, that aren't overworked, and they can provide the best care because that's what they really want to do.
That's what's on my mind heading into 2025. I'll continue working on identifying and calling out health misinformation, but my mind has really been on solutions, and right now that takes the form of my nonprofit, talking to these striking workers, and seeing what I can do with this little microphone I have and the platforms we have to ensure that Oregon gets a beneficial universal healthcare program passed, as we're on track to do.
And this is all just an extension of what I've been saying for years.
The issues with health and healthcare aren't about drugs or conspiratorial doctors or vaccines.
It's the profit-driven system that exploits everyone but the C-suite and the shareholders that they're hired to serve.
And as long as that continue, propagandists and influencers have plenty to work with, and people aren't going to get healthier if you're focusing on fucking food dyes and seed oils.
We have to look upstream at the actual root cause of our problems, and that begins with the executives and corporations benefiting from the lack of a universal healthcare system in this country.
Like, I'm never going to expect a utopia.
Every system I've studied, everyone I talk to from other systems has problems, but we can certainly do a lot better here.
Hey guys, apologies for filing remotely and async this week.
Just a little scheduling chaos going on around here, but I have found some time to wedge this in and file it.
Now, for listeners who caught my last brief, I started my new year off with that dive into the work of Josie Reisman on Vince McMahon, Donald Trump, and Neo Kayfabe.
And I think that's going to set the tone for me for a good part of at least, I don't know, some of this year.
She basically said, in this politics as pro-wrestling world, in which...
Everything is fake, except the parts that you want to believe in, and except the parts where the guy in charge is really doing the heel things he's only pretending to do, and so no one really believes it, but they're hooked in nonetheless.
The human mind has no place to rest.
The mind cannot find its bearings in the neo-kayfabe world, and we are really vulnerable in that state.
And in a way, Reisman summarized for me some kind of peak expression of a crisis that is always hanging around the periphery of our work, which is the question, what is real?
What is authentic?
What stretches the truth and for what purpose?
What is a sincere belief and what is a LARP? Who is grifting and who is earnest?
What is real spirituality?
So this is a crisis, and we tend to see it everywhere.
So we see it in the wellness influencer who's trying to find and market the purest product.
We see it in the wellness influencer who's modeling the perfect life while their real lives are a mess.
We see it in the yoga marketer And,
you know, just a side note on that.
It's not like Zen Honeycutt is up to speed on the chemistry of breakfast cereals.
But it doesn't matter if the core emotional objection to food dye is, you know, why is Kellogg's trying to trick our children with colors?
My goats are all natural colored.
So we see this crisis of authenticity.
Here's a few more.
The paradoxes of anti-technology views promoted on social media.
We see it in this process of uncovering the real past and true history from the authenticity of bodily sensations, a la Bessel van der Kolk.
We see it in returns to Orthodox Christianity or traditional Catholic fetishes of the traditional Latin Mass.
We see it in rolling back the supposed inauthenticities of feminism, which of course destroyed the pure and orderly function of the gender binary.
We see it in fascinations with pure masculinity, pure femininity, and how these are reducible to things like ball tanning and using yoni eggs.
The anxiety is really that you don't want to be poisoned by You don't want anything to stand in the way of your true core relationship with your own internal wisdom.
You don't want to be socially defined or socially constructed.
And it's this type of thing.
That makes that photo of Trump embracing RFK Jr. on the campaign stage with fireworks going off behind them so weird and stunning because Bobby is the embodiment of all that wounded and contradictory yearning for wellness authenticity.
He's the playboy.
Who loves St. Francis.
He's the womanizer and accused sex assaulter who loves his Catholic heritage.
He's the pure foods advocate who pumps himself up with TRT. He's the environmentalist who says dick all about climate.
And he's the former drug addict who wants to wean the country off of all medications.
And there he is, arm in arm with Trump, who makes a virtue of inauthenticity, who builds his image and assets on active lying and who wouldn't know what to do if you somehow made it impossible for him to bullshit.
So that's an image that says a lot about.
The patron saint of the naturalistic fallacy rolls the dice on the master of bullshit, and fascism walks in through the back door.
It's an alliance that feels like the last nail in the coffin in the epistemology of the spectacle, especially as we watch legacy media generally, not all reporters, but a lot of them, bend, fold, and roll over.
We see it in their soft light profiles of Zen Honeycutt or the Atlantic publishing op-eds from legit doctors on the pragmatics of working with RFK Jr. I'm sure Casey Means will be a CNN darling within months.
So here's what Josie Reisman said about this particular condition and what we as journalists can do.
It's a little bit of a lengthy clip, but I think what she says is really important here.
To shame or debunk the practitioner of neo-kfabe.
Sure.
Maybe worse than impossible because actually the shamer and the debunker will be rolled into the storyline as a kind of heat.
So how would you advise journalists cover the Trump cabinet and Trump himself?
Oh, geez.
I mean, I think about this a lot.
I think I'm going to toss out some advice that no one's going to take.
I'm serious, but I would say if you're going to cover Trump 2, the Trump administration that is coming, I mean, A, stick rigorously to the facts, which is, I wish I didn't have to say that, but a lot of people don't seem to care anymore.
But also, if there's one thing that threatens the practitioners of neo-Kfabe, it's, well, two things really.
One, appearing to be pathetic or disgusting.
And the other is appearing to be out of control.
Because as long as you can seem like you are the one who manipulates everything and can't lose, it's all good.
And it doesn't work to try and attack a neo-KFA practitioner by saying they're evil or they're deceptive or they're a liar, because that's the appeal.
No, I'm serious.
That's what they've sold.
That's what they've sold the public.
The thing that took down Vince McMahon to the extent that he's been taken down, which I don't think will last long because Trump's probably going to end the Department of Justice investigation against him.
But what really took Vince down a lot of pegs that he'd never been taken down before was this recent lawsuit by Janelle Grant in which it was alleged that, I'm not going to say the details, but there was a very particular...
Embarrassingly disgusting sex act that he committed during a rape.
Now, if it had just been a series of accounts of rapes where Vince was not embarrassed, then I think the lawsuit would have not had the same impact that it had.
But this act that everyone talks about, which involves defecation, it turned into something where people were like, well, that's just gross and pathetic.
That's not a dictator.
That's not somebody I need to be scared of.
That's somebody who's either got sick weird perversions that I don't even want to think about, or they're incontinent, and either way, they are not controlling this narrative, so I don't want anything to do with that.
Okay, so remember when I was worried about the blowback on calling J.D. Vance weird?
I mean, Derek and Julian disagreed with me on this, so guys, I know you remember that.
I think you're – I see what you're saying.
I see where you are coming from.
I think it's still a risk when we're talking about shitposting and humiliation and the effects of liberal smugness or perceived liberal smugness.
But now I have to walk that back and sort out the interpersonal ethics from the professional pearl clutching, calling out weirdness or revulsion.
Reisman has convinced me is effective if it makes the figure lose status amongst their following.
But it has to be clear.
It has to be accurate.
Their following has to buy it.
I don't think the couch-fucking was exactly that.
But being super alert to some potential moment where Trump appears out of control or weak and then reporting the shit out of it like a dog with a bone.
I think that's going to be key.
And you know, that makes me think about breaking some ethical rules I wouldn't normally consider breaking, like thinking like a paparazzi who knows that if you shoot pictures of Marjorie Taylor Greene doing CrossFit and she's lifting so much weight, she shits herself, you sell that photo.
Or if you catch audio of RFK Jr. asking Olivia Nuzzi to spank him like a bad little boy and then do urine therapy together, you publish that.
I haven't really thought in that manner before, but I can see myself doing it.
Other than that, my hope and concentration for the coming year is going to be on stories of full personhood, in real life actions that people are taking to...
Pushback on fascism.
People who do extraordinary things.
And then events that break up the real political fog and lay sentiments bare, which is why I think the reaction to the assassination of Brian Thompson carries a lot of cultural meaning.
There's an old Marxist principle called deepening the contradiction.
And usually it's applied to the activist and journalistic highlighting of growing wealth inequality, wage theft, and colonial brutality to the point where people find it intolerable and they have to take collective action.
Now, some folks confuse this with accelerationism, but it's not that.
It's actually observatory.
And at this point, I think deepening the contradiction can be applied in terms of living against Neo-kayfabe by withdrawing attention from it and building real things and having faith in real things.
So last thing in this field, this category that I'm thinking about, is that Taylor Lorenz made this interesting post on Threads where she shared a post of...
10 AI-generated videos by Google Veo.
I don't know how to pronounce it, but it's their new AI film or video tool.
And the thread started with a cosmetics ad product review, and then there was a tutorial format and a sporting challenge video, and then travel vlogs and product unboxings.
All of the avatars were women, which gave me a very strange feeling in a sense that maybe the whole discussion of unpaid labor is going to take on a whole new dimension at this point.
All the avatars are conventionally beautiful, somewhat diverse.
And the tech is pretty flawless, although you can tell the uncanny parts, especially around...
That, you know, fucked up hands.
And then there's one ensemble dance video where the AI was obviously maxed out on creating 20 dancers at a time and, you know, just made up changing their heads out or making their legs go rubbery.
But I showed the thread to our 12-year-old, who's a pretty precocious visual artist, and he immediately picked out all of the problems and we had a laugh together.
So at this point, at least, he's pretty confident it's not going to screw with his drawing.
It's not going to steal anything from him.
But then I showed it to the eight-year-old who hadn't really been exposed to it before, and his jaw dropped to the floor.
But then he also picked out some issues, and we ended the conversation with him just shaking his head, half really impressed and half a little bit disgusted.
But it illuminated this moment between wow and ew, which I think is very common in a lot of responses to AI. And it made me think that it seems to be like a microcosm of the maturation process that people have to go through in the psychology of attachment and love.
Like, I don't think you can reach adulthood.
Without realizing the difference between the surface and the depth.
Between infatuation and falling in love and then the work of being in love.
I think that initial moment of being taken in by AI is like a teenage moment in which you're passively swept away by this initial hormonal response that's...
All cued by your conditioning.
Because what could be more conditioned than AI, which doesn't really do much besides recycle?
And then life happens.
You see the flaws in the object that caught your attention or that sparked love.
And then...
Eventually you show your own flaws and you have to go through disillusionment.
You have to let the idealization die and then the real person live.
But with AI and the Trump spectacle, there's nothing underneath.
There's no payoff, I don't think.
And I have to imagine that people over time will come to feel that emptiness.
And they certainly did.
In the comments section of Lorenz's post, where a lot of people really committed to the idea that human beings need more than surfaces and performance and visual artifacts that seem to be like humans but aren't quite.
So her own caption was, quote, this begs the question, will anyone care about authenticity anymore?
For product reviews, sure.
But how about for videos, tutorials, informational content?
I don't know, man.
So that was her caption.
And then immediately after, friend of the pod, Rennie DiResta, comments, well...
Personhood is going to matter an awful lot in the very near future.
And then a commenter called Glenn with Onin says, At least that's the response I think is most appropriate to generative models.
Let the vocal be a little...
Flatten spots instead of doing that extra take.
Let your lines be a little crooked and your color run a little occasionally.
But then I came across my favorite comment that expresses the value of deepening the contradiction.
And it came from a handle of the tropical eccentric.
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