Trump administration Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, recently stated the American economy is going to need a "detox" period. And so today we look at peak the conspirituality convergences between biological and political purification projects.
Quinn Slobodian, professor of international history at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, joins Matthew in the final segment to offer his big picture view on the Kings of Pain.
Show Notes
Johns Hopkins to lose 2,000 jobs after Trump’s $800m cut in USAid funding
Young scientists see career pathways vanish as schools adapt to federal funding cuts
Report: mRNA vaccines are in RFK Jr’s crosshairs; funding in question
FDA Makes Flu Vaccine Recommendations Without Convening Advisors
HHS sends all employees a $25,000 voluntary buyout offer
Exclusive: US CDC plans study into vaccines and autism, sources say
USDA gears up for MAHA dietary guidelines update
Musk Said No One Has Died Since Aid Was Cut. That Isn’t True.
Watch CNBC's full interview with U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent
Why we must teach medical students about the role of physicians during the Holocaust | AAMC
Teaching Hard Truths About Medicine and the Holocaust | Journal of Ethics | American Medical Association
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Nobody listens.
To Paula Poundstone, you probably know that I made an appearance recently on this absolutely ludicrous variety show that combines the fun of a late night show with the wit of a public radio program and the unique knowledge of a guest expert who was me at the time,
if you can believe that.
Brace yourself for a rollercoaster ride of wildly diverse topics, from Paula's hilarious attempts to understand QAnon to riveting conversations with a bona fide rocket scientist.
You'll never know what to expect, but you'll know you're in for a high spirit.
So, this is comedian Paula Poundstone and her co-host Adam Felber, who's great.
They're both regular panelists on NPR's classic comedy show.
You may recognize them from that.
Wait, wait, don't tell me.
And they bring the same acerbic yet infectiously funny energy to Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone.
When I was on, they grilled me in an absolutely unique way.
about conspiracy theories and yoga and yoga pants and QAnon and we had a great time.
They were very sincerely interested in the topic but they still found plenty of hilarious angles in terms of the questions they asked and how they followed up on whatever I gave them like good comedians do.
Check out their show.
There are other recent episodes you might find interesting as well like hearing crazy Hollywood stories from legendary casting director Joel Thurm or their episode about killer whales and killer theme songs.
So, Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone is an absolute riot you don't want to miss.
Find Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
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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.
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.
We are also all on Blue Sky individually.
And you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes over on Patreon at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
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There's going to be a natural adjustment as we move away from public spending to private spending.
The market and the economy have just become hooked.
We've become addicted to this government spending, and there's going to be a detox period.
Did you hear that, listeners?
You're all hooked.
Addicts.
Your appetites are out of control.
You've been on a bender, totally debauched on the drug of state.
You're fat with education, sluggish with science, coddled by your veterans benefits and filled up with the torpor of national parks.
You've been nodding out to the psyop trance of Voice of America and the sloth of public health is claudical.
But don't worry.
That was Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, and he's here to manage your withdrawal, purgation, and purification.
RFK Jr. is standing by to give you a castor oil enema.
Nicole Shanahan is going to power wash you down with kombucha.
And ice boss Tom Homan is turning every deportation cell into a sweat lodge.
So if they lock you up without cause, at least you'll sweat out your cultural Marxism in the meantime.
So today...
We look at peak conspirituality convergences between biological and political purification projects.
Where is it coming from?
Project 2025?
The Mar-a-Lago Accords?
Curtis Yarvin's Discord?
We're not exactly sure, but we know the language of detox, pain, sacrifice, and austerity sliding off the wellness sites of Maha grifters and onto the press releases of Doge flunkies is here.
Oh, and stay around because friend of the podcast and brilliant political historian Quinn Slobodian is going to be joining us to get into even more detail.
But first...
But first, we need to talk about a new investigation into Joe Mercola by friend of the pod, Jonathan Jerry, who, of course, is a science communicator over at McGill University.
On Tuesday, he published an investigation into Mercola, one of the biggest alt-med supplement salesmen in America, and his relationship with a supposed psychic named Balan after reviewing a few dozen Zoom calls between the men.
We had early access.
I finished watching it this morning.
It is fascinating.
And let's just say Mercola did not hold back.
So in preparation for next week's episode, which we're going to call So we already knew that Dr. Joseph Mercola is one of the biggest,
you know, most influential alternative health gurus out there.
He was one of the first ones to latch onto the promises of the internet and create a website for himself.
We knew that he was incredibly wealthy, that he had donated money to the anti-vaccine movement.
But we also knew from a bit of coverage from journalist Rick Polito in a trade publication that focuses on dietary supplements that as of...
Late 2023, Dr. Mercola had been consulting with a medium who claimed to be channeling an entity and that he was getting a lot of his advice from this channeler and that he had completely dismissed his executive staff and replaced them.
There was a lot of movement happening within his company, but we had never seen the video sessions between him and the channeler.
A whistleblower from inside of Mercola's company reached out to me and delivered many of these videos.
And I've watched over 50 hours of this stuff because, yes, that is what I do for the good of mankind.
And there are a lot of very interesting things that come out of what I'm calling the Mercola tapes.
One of them is this massive call for violence where he is...
Planning on recruiting millions of people to march with weapons on these creatures.
And by creatures, he's referring to veterinarians.
He is against the veterinary industry, and he has a plan that his spiritual guides gave him for people to march with weapons on veterinarians.
I've also seen that a lot of his alternative health insights come from this spirit that is being channeled by the medium.
The name of the spirit is Balan.
And when it's not coming from Balan, it's often coming from ChatGPT, because Joe Mercola says that ChatGPT doesn't lie, because apparently he doesn't know that large language models can hallucinate.
Music
This week in Conspirituality.
One question we've grappled with for years is this.
What harm does health misinformation...
And Derek, I know you've been reflecting on this lately.
Yeah, I've thought about it for years.
And the answer over and over from so many of the health experts that we've had on the show, it usually includes three different possibilities or scenarios.
The most dangerous in my estimation are people who choose not to see a doctor and forego the care that they need.
We wrote about this in our book at the end when, of course, people...
Diet of cancer because they did a Joe Dispenza workshop instead of seeing an oncologist.
You have the most expensive, which is people wasting money on things like supplements that do nothing for their health.
And then you have a more rare situation, but it's also important.
And this involves basically all chemicals, even in the form of supplements.
Now, pharma companies need to list every possible contraindication that they know of on the packaging by the law, but supplement manufacturers do not have to do any of that.
Yeah, it's such a good point.
And with regard to the first couple of things you said, it really just strikes me.
These people have formed a new set of beliefs based on the influence of misinformation that then leads them to take what can sometimes be catastrophic action with regard to their choices about whether to avail themselves of medical science or whether to trust the new beliefs that some influencer has sold them on.
With regard to the contrast between supplement manufacturers and then the contraindications and the warnings that come with fire.
It's sort of this unintended side effect, right, of regulated versus unregulated industries.
And the big irony that always strikes me here is that the safer drugs are required to tell you in those super-fast disclaimers, you know, it may make all of these sorts of things happen, be careful if you've ever had this kind of condition, in the TV ads.
So any possible side effect, no matter how rare, has to be disclosed.
And by contrast, it makes these so-called natural supplements seem safer because they've not been thoroughly tested and they're not held to the same standards.
They don't have to tell you all those things.
I think it's really unfortunate that those disclaimers We're so easy to turn into a joke because I think that says something about perhaps public tolerance for jargon and proceduralism.
Like if they can't see the benefit clearly, it sounds boring.
And of course, if they buy the supplements, they don't have to listen to that stuff.
You know, one of the promises of RFK is that he's going to ban DTC advertising because we are one of two nations in the world alongside New Zealand who feature it.
Of course, I don't think that's ever going to happen.
But also, my wife is a UX researcher who works specifically on pharma inserts.
That's what she does for a living.
And she tries to make the experience as clean and smooth as possible for consumers, especially disabled consumers.
That is her specific job.
So I have some insights into what goes on to make those inserts and that language.
It is a lot because one wrong word.
You have lawsuits all over the place.
So the idea that like their farm is hiding everything and they're so nefarious when they are probably one of the most transparent industries we have is just ludicrous.
But it's wild because not hiding everything means that people will feel overwhelmed.
And then what happens?
They turn off, they become bored, they think they're being talked down to, who knows?
And they overestimate the danger.
Right.
Yeah.
And that gets into patient adoption, which is a whole other thing.
And of course, this is all in a for-profit model.
We all know this.
But with all these scenarios that we've been covering over this time, what no one has brought up that I've heard, and to be clear, I don't think it was even actually possible to bring up prior, what happens when an anti-vax wellness crowd runs all of our health agencies?
We covered the basics of this on episode 247, and even in those two very long weeks since, there are suddenly a whole lot of new problems that we are now facing.
Yeah, I mean, the misinformation peddlers and the conspiracy theorists have won, and they have their hands now on the levers of power and their mouths at the megaphones.
And so then it raises the question, are actual scientists and those informed by the science, the new outsiders, the new conspiracy theorists, the new whistleblowers who are going to look like cranks?
Yeah, suddenly Peter Hotez's little bow tie looks a little bit crankish.
It looks like he's the outsider now.
And I'm like, no, no, he was the nerdy insider.
No, it hasn't flipped.
It hasn't.
He's still cool.
So I've often remarked how Maha is just a ripoff of MAGA, but it is not a one-way relationship.
So in our main story today, we're going to discuss how MAGA is using language that has been part of fascist and authoritarian movements for generations.
But that's also long been at home in Maha, which is the language of purity and the spiritual necessity of pain, which we'll get to shortly.
For now, I want to do a brief rundown of some of the existential problems we are facing when it comes to health.
So first off, the administration just cut $800 million in funding to Johns Hopkins University, which ranks first in the nation for biomedical engineering and second for medicine and biology out of all American universities.
And they had to cut over 2,000 jobs.
And those jobs impact the university's Bloomberg School of Public Health, its medical school, and affiliated nonprofit for international health, but also all of the research that they're doing, including some really important mRNA vaccine research, which brings up the next one,
which is the NIH cut or canceled over 40 grants focused on vaccine hesitancy or improving immunization levels.
Think about this.
They're studying how to get wider adoption of public health protocols like vaccines.
And Kennedy was like, nope, we're going to stop that research.
Then the agency's acting director requested information about mRNA vaccines specifically.
So that's led some to speculate what will be next.
And in fact, on Sunday, Kaiser Family Foundation Health News reported that the NIH has directed all scientists.
To remove references of mRNA from their grant applications.
Does that mean that the actual term itself, like if it shows up in the grant application, that it's just going to be...
Sort of, it's going to be shelved or it's going to be trashed.
That is what they believe.
And that is the NIH saying, if you are going to be looking into research into this, just understand it's not going to get funded.
Yes.
And this comes at a time when cancer researchers are discovering that a new wave of mRNA vaccines could actually provide a moonshot for combating certain cancers that have plagued us.
Forever, basically.
And it's going to stunt research on those vaccines to combat influenza and bird flu, which are now being researched as well.
Next up, the FDA, which falls under HHS, of course, canceled its annual meeting of independent vaccine advisors for the 2025-26 influenza season.
And then it made its recommendations without their input.
So this means that only strains selected by the FDA are allowed to be distributed in the US.
That's a longstanding rule, but without that input from actual experts.
Now normally the WHO and FDA are in lockstep as they meet twice a year to discuss this vaccine.
Okay, so they're not pooling the information anymore,
but...
I mean, that can only decrease the effectiveness because the pool of data that they're looking at is reduced.
What's the end goal?
Is like, well, the flu vaccine hasn't been effective now.
It's 2028 and it really hasn't worked against the flu, so we're going to stop it altogether?
Ding, ding, ding, ding.
Now I'm wearing the bow tie.
But yeah, I mean, that could be it.
I mean, if you're picking strains that are completely ineffective, all of a sudden you could say, this shit just never works, so why are we even going to bother with it anymore?
Right.
Fun.
So HHS also sent all 80,000 employees a $25,000 buyout.
As of the recording, there is no official number of workers who have accepted this specific offer from HHS.
But according to the White House, 77,000 workers across all federal agencies have accepted a buyout, including the HHS.
So those numbers apparently are wrapped in.
And this is on top of thousands of probationary employees, which from my understanding is people who've been there for a year or less across all the agencies, being fired in the last two weeks.
Okay, a couple more.
The CDC is planning a large-scale study on the link between vaccines and autism because why the fuck not?
We haven't done that already.
Given this new crop of anti-vax publications posing as scientific journals that we flagged two weeks ago, I'm pretty sure they're going to magically find a link and publish it in one of those journals.
Which will further spread this horrendous myth.
Bow ties all around.
We are also up for new dietary guidelines.
Now, this isn't just because of Kennedy.
We update them regularly.
It just happened to fall during this administration.
And given Kennedy's recent advertisement for the beef tallow fries at Steak and Shake on Sean Hennedy's show, I can't wait to see what's at the top of that food pyramid.
Okay, we haven't used the pyramid since 2011.
I know we use it at my plate.
They're going to come along with ice baths and sauna rituals, too.
Derek, there must be, in the foodie capital of Portland, there must be beef tallow fries that are already on the menu way before RFK.
There was some early adopter.
Have you tried them yet?
What do they taste like?
I don't know, but I will say the fry game in Portland is strong, but Portland is a tater tot city.
That is our official food.
I thought that was Wisconsin.
I thought that was only the Midwest.
The Cajun tater tots here, like Roscoe's, Jesus, I mean, they are delicious.
So they fry all sorts of stuff here.
I am kind of immune from a lot of the chaos that we cover in such a foodie city.
Now, finally, when it comes to global health, the New York Times crunched numbers of what a year without USAID intervention means in terms of deaths.
It is startling.
So this is, again, because the US is no longer funding USAID, they are showing all of the impacts on a global level that's going to have.
So HIV prevention and treatment.
They think 1.65 million people will die without the money that's been going into these projects for decades.
Vaccines, 500,000.
Food aid, 550,000.
Malaria prevention, which we have to remember a ton of people die from every year, 290,000.
And tuberculosis prevention, which I just before recorded read a scientific article stating that We are looking down the pipeline of tuberculosis, which cannot be combated because of the USAID cuts.
But from the New York Times article last week, it's 310,000 deaths.
You know, I think we're trying to get very clear on our language.
And Derek, you've been using the term soft eugenics to describe.
I know this doesn't match any sort of technical definition, but I would call this list of statistics a genocidal act against the global poor.
I saw another source that predicted 2-3 million malnutrition deaths.
And also, you know, this is a parallel issue, but I just want to throw out there something that's obvious.
I'm sure we'll talk about it as we go on through this.
It's downstream and a little bit hidden, but every single reduction in healthcare and social support that we see through these cuts, it...
It represents a structural ratification of misogyny, because as home and community care needs go up, the vast majority of extra labor in all of this stuff is going to fall on women.
This is also incredibly disheartening, and it's making me think too, Matthew, I'm sure you've tracked this, of the messaging amongst evangelicals about the sin of empathy.
about how having empathy for so much of what we've just been discussing is part of what limits the agenda of moving forward to Christian nationalism.
Music by Ben Thede
Okay, Matthew, you found that Scott Besant quote off the top and definitely all rang in our ears to be like, yeah, we need to look into this more.
And interestingly, Besant is the first openly gay Treasury Secretary in our history.
He's also the first openly LGBTQ plus Senate confirmed cabinet member in a Republican administration ever.
I mention this because...
A man who is married to another man with two children through surrogacy is quite an outlier in this administration, but his economic policies do line right up.
Okay, so just pausing on this for a moment, do we think that the rule is that if you're sufficiently wealthy, sufficiently...
You know, there's a very infamous quote from Roger Stone where someone asked him about Roy Cohn being gay, and he said, Roy Cohn was not gay.
He liked to have sex with men.
Gays are weak.
And I think that that probably conveys...
That sounds like Bronze Age pervert stuff, right?
Yeah, totally, totally.
And then there's, you know, in terms of trans people, I can think of, you know, three off the top of my head, Breonna, Boo, Buck Angel, and Blair White, who, you know, are darlings of the right up to a point, right?
course, that no one's going to go to their anniversary parties, as Shapiro famously said to Dave Rubin, because they believe it's immoral.
But there is a welcoming if they have their political ducks.
Yeah, I would imagine being that wealthy and in those situations just kind of gives you a pass, look the other way.
I mean, the Republicans have done that with black people for generations too, putting tokens.
I mean, we all know that.
So I would imagine it cuts across.
But I think that intuition about trans...
People is totally on, although who knows what's coming down the pipe there.
So Besant recently stated that the US economy needed to detox, which we played off the top.
Now, in economic terms, this means reducing dependence on unsustainable government spending.
And here's the key point.
This is specifically what that term means for this Trump administration.
Besson believes that this will stimulate private sector growth, maintain employment levels, and then you flag that addiction off the top, right?
And that's the idea that the American government is just addicted to spending on its people because they're so empathetic, to get back to your terms.
So this detox period will supposedly help us avoid a recession, which of course is in contrast to reality.
Yeah.
Besson is also in favor of what's been dubbed the Mar-a-Lago Accord, which everyone knows is Trump's flawed theory of economic stimulation through tariffs.
Specifically, this accord involves sweeping tariffs on America's largest trading partners and establishing a Bitcoin reserve.
Embedded within this philosophy is the desire for a weaker US dollar.
Now, however, we actually don't know if the Mar-a-Lago Accord is a real thing or whether it's like a script in Vince McMahon's binder of WWF storylines.
Like, what is the status of this thing?
I first heard about it just last week on Ezra Klein's podcast, and then I looked into it more.
I don't know the origins of it, but I don't know who coined it to give the overall impression, but those two points are linked to it with the tariffs and the Bitcoin reserve.
So it seems like it could get further into our...
It's not like a page, though.
It's not like written on parchment or something like that.
It's not signed with, we can't access it.
We don't know where it is.
Until it replaces the Constitution, which is going to happen on Thursday.
Right.
So going back to the dollar, why would Trump and friends want to weaken the world's global reserve currency?
In their minds, it would boost American exports, enhance manufacturing competitiveness, create more jobs, reduce our $1.2 trillion trade deficit, and reallocate global demand.
Which this idea is that a weaker dollar would force the rest of the world to purchase more American goods.
But then we have the unfortunate reality, which is that...
All actual economics would be like, that's bullshit, because it would actually turn into higher inflation for Americans, reduced purchasing power, and diminishing trust in both our currency and our products, as well as our politics.
Yeah, but there's a lot of magical thinking involved, it seems, like this imagination that manufacturing could be instantly restored.
It reminds me of this logic in video games.
Where there's a lot of world building and strategy games like Civilization where you can just sort of like click and drag and spawn in fully functioning factories for your country with a click and then suddenly they're pumping out cars like instantly.
And I think that's what's on their brains.
It also contradicts...
The free market principles that they all espouse because in a free market, the corporations, if you're going to try to tank their business, they're going to look elsewhere or for just other ways to reduce costs.
And so you have on one hand them saying the state is going to do this and then make everything better, which completely contradicts corporate philosophy and you're only going to make it worse for them.
Chaos, again, could be part of that end goal and just distrust all around in institutions.
Matthew, what you said about magical thinking reminds me of Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, who in his criticisms of austerity measures in Europe in the 2010s, he said, you know...
Austerity obviously is going to be bad during the period where the economy is at a low.
And that the argument against this was that, no, austerity measures would create public confidence.
And he came to refer to this as the confidence theory of economics, that somehow there's this magical confidence that will improve everything because people know that the government is tightening their belts.
The Heritage Foundation, whose Project 2025 is obviously the blueprint for pretty much everything that...
Well, they applauded Besant's appointment.
And we should note that Besant gave Elon Musk and Doge access to the Treasury Department's payment system.
And he also had a one-week gig where he was the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and he ordered the agency to halt all work.
So yeah, for the common man.
Now, I know we're going to get into the history of detoxing now.
Parallels between detoxing the body and detoxing the body politic.
But let's just say that the only ones getting clean from this proposed detox are the billionaires and their C-suite enablers.
Yes.
On the history, Derek and Julian, let us go back long ago to when sickness was a problem of demonic possession.
The wrong spirit and the wrong body cavity would bring madness, sloth.
Lust, addictions, groaning, excessive sleeping, bad smells, too much sleeping.
Oh, I said that already.
Extra too much sleeping.
You could also die.
The possessor could be appeased through prayers and rituals, or they could be chased away with clanging noise, fire, or flails and whips.
Slowly, this idea secularizes and medicalizes.
In India, some of the possessing gods became synonymous with bodily humors or energies that would send the body's equilibrium with nature into a kind of turmoil or imbalance.
The healer would still pray over these patients.
They would commission rituals and sacrifices, but as they navigated the journey between priest and doctor, they also concocted herbs.
They used oil and heat, steam baths and sweat boxes, flaming incense and burning glass cups.
They let blood.
They purged people.
They studied the snot and the poop to verify that the austerities had done their work.
So basically the good old days is what you're saying.
The good old days.
We've covered it for years that nothing about this basic logic of healthcare has evolved with the emergence of online wellness economies, except, I mean, the marketing tech has changed.
Yeah. And I'll just add that having once actually been a huge consumer and proponent of cleansing, I can report that the contemporary American narrative is that we are all unavoidably contaminated by the chemicals of the modern world.
Pesticides, GMOs, cosmetics, toiletries, cleaning products, clothing materials, and dyes, all of the off-gassing and the runner from unnatural manufacturing.
Plus you've got birth control and antidepressants, the hormones that are fed to cows.
It's really a minefield of things that could contaminate you.
And the contamination is not diagnosed or treated by Western medicine you see.
I can report that But then there are also some ailments or diagnostic assessments that can really indicate how crucial it is that you do some kind of cleansing,
like a sluggish or slippery or dry meridian line is detected through a fingertip.
Or a weak muscle test, maybe you have acne or exhaustion or depression, or a pain syndrome that won't resolve, or palpation of the tissue having this telltale fudgy feel.
That's a big one.
I remember when I had, but I didn't know what it was, a DVT in my calf.
And what I was really trying to do is, because I thought that the energy was stuck, I was trying to dig my fingers into the muscle to really sort of...
Like, get that moving and to free the prana.
And then I remember I'm in emergency and I'm showing the doctor.
I said, it really hurts right here.
And I get my thumbs out and I start digging in.
He says, don't do that.
You're going to break it off.
It's going to go to your brain and kill you.
Yeah, so there's all kinds of very intuitive things that go along with this stuff that end up just being not good.
I mean, if you'd caught it earlier and done some good liver cleansing, you may have avoided the whole crisis.
Maybe with green apples and olive oil.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
Yeah, and so then, once you've started the prescribed cleansing regime, just about any bodily response, especially negative ones, are all evidence that you need it.
And it's working.
So diarrhea, great.
Nausea, it's a cleansing reaction.
So too, a rash or indigestion or exhaustion.
Fever?
And double vision?
You're having a healing crisis.
The ordeal is a moral initiation.
It's the price of purification.
You will emerge on the other side stronger, healthier, more protected from the illnesses that all of those normie toxic people are prone to.
Last night I was making dinner and for the first time in my life, because we cook with Thai peppers almost every night, and I got some in my eye and I couldn't open my eye for 10 minutes.
I wouldn't call it cleansing in any way.
It was one of the scariest eye-related instances.
There was a crisis going on.
I just don't know about the healing.
But as I gaze at you right now, I can tell that it was your left eye because it's brighter.
It just looks healthier.
It was actually my right.
No, it's reversed in the camera though.
We're doing this online.
The reason, and I can cop to this because this is something I used to say, This is common within this domain of beliefs.
The reason no evidence supports any of what I've just been describing is that big pharma needs to keep you sick to keep raking in their profits.
And of course, it's not just bodily sludges, because now we also have the poisons of things like cultural Marxism and...
Radical gender ideology that poison the psyche as well, and those are going to have to be cleansed and purged.
Yeah, so cleansing in the time of diagonalism.
I mean, in the past, it was just your victim consciousness and not having strong enough belief in abundance.
So we have this ancient history, and there are resonances, but the pipeline doesn't go exactly from...
Ayurvedic ashrams in the jungles of South India to the in-house spa at Mar-a-Lago.
It doesn't go directly to Marjorie Taylor Greene's post-CrossFit massage parlor.
There's a more proximal source, which is the European romanticism that resists modernity tooth and nail.
It's holding on to its nature cures, hydrotherapy, you know, walks in forest bathing, their version of it, homeopathy.
Because their cities were filling up with industrial pollution, with coal smoke, with chemistry labs.
The universities were pumping out doctors.
Everything is getting dirtier and more complicated.
And the people who seized on these old cures for their violent political metaphors, well, who were they?
We have a whole chapter in our book called The Nazis Loved Yoga, so that's who.
Because for them...
As for the Maha crowd today, the impurities of modernity are both chemical and interpersonal, and you can't pull them apart.
So Jewish doctors, according to them, were anti-healers who devised abortion drugs to target Aryan babies.
They were compared to lice who spread typhus.
They needed to be quarantined.
I mean, ghettoized.
They needed to be purified.
That would be exterminated.
It's impossible to disambiguate bodily anxiety from the will to power.
And then cleansing and purification metaphors transition into war and conquest.
You know, so I'm always thinking about, like, on the other side of RFK Jr.'s bullshit, you know, Pete Hegseth is standing there in, you know, a military baseball cap, right?
Heinrich Himmler portrayed the war as a clash between the pure Germanic Nordic blood of National Socialism and the mixture of races and peoples on the other side, describing the enemy as animals and subhumans, linking them to historical invaders like the Huns and
the Mongols.
The Volksgemeinschaft, or the community of pure people, unified by the mystical German ubersoul, this is what would be restored through the purgations.
But purity is always a lie, because, you know, in this case...
Within a few years of the invasion of Poland, the entire German army is tweaking out on ketamine.
I mean, sorry, methamphetamine.
Here we are.
And Julian, you've been making these connections too.
Yeah, I mean, when you mentioned Hegseth, not only that, also underneath his clothing, he has tattoos that in various ways connect him back to a lot of these sorts of ideas.
There's certainly a lineage of demagoguery.
I talked about this a little bit last week.
It stretches back over 100 years and has prominent flashpoints along the way.
I did a whole Patreon bonus deep dive into how this fetish for purification led to what I call sex lies and communist spies, this sort of Red Scare panic.
As we know, Trump has resurrected the slogan, America first.
Which has its strongest associations in the America First committee that opposed U.S. entry into World War II and propagated standard anti-Semitic conspiracism after the war.
But that same reactionary isolationist usage of America First goes back to World War I. And the segregationist president Woodrow Wilson, who used the term in contrast to what he called hyphenate.
Yeah, so Irish Americans, Italian Americans, not quite white people at that point.
Yeah, exactly.
And so Wilson said so in a speech in 1915.
I'll quote him here.
There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries.
Yeah, that's it.
Sounds familiar?
That's the stuff.
Now, one event I mentioned a couple weeks ago also happened under Wilson during 1919.
In the wake of at least 250 black people being terrorized and killed by white supremacists and their fighting back being labeled race riots and communist agitation, the attorney general arrested thousands and deported hundreds on suspicion of being communists or anarchists.
So here we are again.
We must be cleansed of this poisoned blood in order to make America great again.
Trump and Musk also constantly tell lies about undocumented immigrants and their supposed negative effects on our country.
They eat our pets.
They take up all the entitlements.
I don't know how that works, but somehow they do this.
They rape and kill our young girls.
Democrats pay them to come here and then turn them into voters.
This is classic white replacement theory.
Part of the purge now is scrubbing any mention of DEI, which we know is really code for a return to white male Christian dominance, and then resurrecting these old racist tropes about who's on welfare, who's taking up the resources of the country, as well as eugenic-style cruelty towards those who need Medicaid and Social Security.
You know, of all of the things...
That have made me feel insane with rage and depression in waves.
I think the scrubbing of the U.S. Air Force's websites of black and people of color veterans is almost peak.
So what they've done is that the links to those pages have all been broken with a random insertion of DEI into the URL so that nothing works anymore.
The other day, they erased the history of the Navajo Code Talkers.
I don't know if you guys know the Navajo Code Talkers.
Tell us.
Yeah, well, they were Navajo guys who spoke an ancient language that nobody else in the world knew anything about.
It wasn't written down.
There was no dictionary for it.
And so it got past all of the German surveillance and they were essential against the Nazis and in the South Pacific.
And and the purest examples of merit that you can actually find because literally no one else could speak those languages and evade the decryptors.
And they're wiping that away from a people who, after...
Their own genocidal displacement were able to help out in this war.
It's incredible.
And then true to Project 2025, alongside this, we see the purification of official documents and agency websites, eradicating any mention of gay or trans people, other minorities, climate change, and in some cases, even women, because we don't want to have any special dispensation.
We see, too, how Trump has recycled Joe McCarthy's Red Scare terminology.
He uses his same phrase, the enemies within.
And disturbingly, J.D. Vance voiced this exact idea to win a gas group of leaders in Munich last month, the European premiers.
The term has always referred enemies within to the communists and the gays.
And today's association, as you just pointed out, Matthew, with the woke proponents of DEI.
We've seen all of this coming.
Both through Chris Ruffo's propaganda against critical race theory, which goes back a few years, as well as his hostile takeover of New College in Saratoga, Florida.
And then the astroturfed local activism, which has best been exemplified by Moms for Liberty.
That has sought to purge school libraries over the last several years of anything that doesn't fit with some kind of white Christian nationalist morality.
So we're going to get to a friend of the pod, Quinn Slobodian, in a moment.
But as we round up this section here, I think we should just...
I think we've said a lot, and I think the themes are clear.
But one thing to drive home is that every theory of detoxification predicts a kind of pain that has to be accepted in a noble fashion.
And usually, you know, the poorer you
And there's always going to be these religious or pseudo-religious rationalizations that invoke the disciplining of the desires or even a kind of ego death.
I mean, the Christians who are writing Project 2025 are worshipping a crucified son, and a lot of them are in Opus Dei and wearing that thigh strap, the celice.
But, I mean, I don't think J.D. Vance needs it because his pants are really tight.
In fascism, the ego also dies, but to serve the nation, not God, per se.
But in this vein of the cruelty is the point, which I can't remember who wrote the article several years ago, but I think it was in Trump's first term.
You know, I feel like there is this rationalization of pain that actually really allows the administration to conceal a kind of sadism.
And so with that, I think about what it means for them to welcome Andrew Tate back to the States as a known batterer of women.
And in a way, kind of openly saying that disciplining...
Women and minorities is what we're all about, right?
That's what we do.
And even more than that, I mean, Andrew Tate is held up on rape charges, on human trafficking charges.
He has virtually held women in captivity and forced them to do sex work for him.
Then we have, I think, probably the most spectacularly open displays of sadism yet from the administration through the deportation videos.
One of them was literally, and these come out over the White House social feeds, one of them literally says, you know, deportation ASMR or something like that, and it just features no scripted or no voiceover, just concentration on the sounds of shackles and,
you know, boots moving up the gangplanks of planes.
Just incredible.
Like ASMR, this should give you pleasure as you watch people being deported.
And then I think even worse, the music video, I think from yesterday, we're recording on Tuesday, which is kind of like a, I don't know, it's just a music video orgy over images of the Venezuelan deportees in pain positions and being humiliated as they're shaved.
Again, these are people, we don't know who they are.
They've just been scooped up and blackfanned.
I think anyone wait and seeing about whether or not that alone is a constitutional crisis, right?
Like whether the administration will ignore the court orders that are still playing out.
I think they really have to square their thoughts or their hesitations with this crowd actually saying, not only will we say fuck you to the judge.
We're going to post a victory lap video of us doing what we're doing.
*Squeak*
Our guest today to wrap up is friend of the podcast, Quinn Slobodian, professor of international history at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University.
His books, which have been translated into 10 languages, include most recently Crack Up Capitalism, Always on point.
Always brilliant.
I asked Quinn for the big picture on our Kings of Pain.
Quinn Slobodian, thank you for taking the time.
We have this quote from Scott Besant that we played off the top of the show.
I want to hear your take on it.
He says, look...
There's going to be a natural adjustment as we move away from public spending to private spending.
The market and the economy have just become hooked, and we've become addicted to this government spending.
And there's going to be a detox period, to which you tweeted in reply, Maha logic meets Trumponomics.
But what else comes to mind for you with that?
Yeah, I mean, there's actually a much simpler reference, which is just the idea of shock therapy, right?
I mean, this is...
Unusual only insofar as this kind of commandment to suffer for later economic well-being is being transmitted to an American population.
If you're on the other side of the equation, usually you're in the Global South, you're in post-Soviet Eastern Europe.
That idea of short-term suffering for some kind of long-term stability is a pretty common motif through the neoliberal period over the last few decades.
So that's the first thing that came to mind to me was, oh, this is just shock therapy coming home.
You've also talked about this kind of triumvirate of groups that are now in play within the Trumpian world.
Corporate interests, previously friendly with the Democratic Party, Christian conservative think tanks who are always advocating for the end of the administrative state, and then this online-driven movement of totally reactionary extremists who traffic in white supremacist and neo-Nazi rhetoric.
And so where does this type of discourse fit in?
Yeah, I mean, I have this book coming out called High X Bastards, comes out next month, the middle of April, that tries to knit together some of this story.
And someone who's quite helpful there is Charles Murray.
So Charles Murray bridges the gap, I would say, quite well between Clintonites, Christian conservatives, and then the new racialist IQ fetishists.
The way he does that actually dovetails pretty well with the best in quote as well, because in his early work, Murray was really influenced by behavioral economics.
So his argument and behavioral psychology.
So his argument was that poor people were addicted to welfare just because they were seeking pleasure.
And they were able to specifically have sexual pleasure with no consequence, according to him, because of no-fault divorce and then support for things like single poor mothers.
What needed to be done transforming the welfare state was to actually make people suffer again.
So the idea was quite explicitly that you need to tweak the incentives so that people experience more pain than pleasure.
You know, they will go back to self-governing and self-disciplining.
That got turned into a kind of moral cultural register quite easily, obviously.
I was looking back at this book that he was associated with called This Will Hurt, The Restoration of Virtue and Civic Order.
Oh my God.
It was published in London by the International Economic Affairs think tank in 1995.
So it works on both ends, right?
I mean, it works as sort of Skinnerian language of inducements and objections, but then it also works in a more Christian language of actual punishment and self-flagellation,
actually. And then it dovetails well with the idea of a hierarchy of humans because
This idea that people have innate ability, in his mind, measured by IQ, means that these kind of social Darwinist purges of the unhealthy ends up separating the wheat from the chaff.
And people who hurt too much presumably then just fall by the wayside.
And without a social safety net, that's okay.
They can just take care of themselves and sort of perish in the twilight.
While the more effective economic actors in the crowd will be able to fight their way to the top.
Turning to specifically the biopolitics and the metaphors involved, the pollution and purity metaphors...
Yeah, it's an interesting question.
I mean...
The idea of the economy itself being either healthy or sick is, of course, a very old idea.
One of the things I write about in Globalists is the way that business cycle charts that would actually show the rise and fall of specific indicators, whether it was the stock market or consumer confidence or unemployment even.
and get treated kind of like EKGs or EEGs of the body politic.
And it becomes this thing where you can kind of plug it in and say, like, OK, things look like they're going all right.
So that anthropomorphization of the economy and then thus its treatment as either a well or an unwell subject has a pretty deep and long history.
The idea though that some of the people managing the economy would have Specific business interest investments in ways to juice that economy that are fringy or unconventional is probably newer.
I mean, what comes to mind for me, and maybe you've heard about this, is what almost ruined Bill Ackman's reputation, right?
Right.
I am recalling this now.
How did that work out for him?
Poorly, really poorly.
I mean, it actually almost cracked him up.
And I don't remember the details, but it would be interesting to return to that now and sort of ask whether he has reformed his way of thinking to realize that actually the supplement industry is the future and we need to go long on herbal life rather than try to short it.
But I think that, in general, that idea that there is some edge that can be gained inside of the zero-sum competition of the market through some kind of a product, whether it's a pharmaceutical product or a lifestyle product or simply a new diet or a new kind of smoothie or whatever,
is something that yuppies have long believed for decades.
And it is, though, interesting to see how that...
In the figure of all of your favorite character, RFK, has now just crept closer and closer to the heart of economic management.
Then there's a question I have about holism, which is, very broadly speaking, the thesis in Crack Up Capitalism is that the ideal of these newly evolving, fragmented...
techno fiefdoms is now in competition with and maybe even overcoming these older ideals of the nationalists
state bound with corporate interests.
Do you think that a concentration on body purification metaphors lets the fragmenting people, the fragmenters retain some notion that there's something
holistic that they're trying to hang on to?
Because for the most part, they're really just creating little kingdoms, as you suggest.
It's well-timed, actually, because this week I'm teaching the beverage report, so the kind of document of the post-war welfare state in the United Kingdom.
So I've been looking back at that, and it's really interesting to compare that rhetoric to the kind of rhetoric we hear today.
Then it was all about the idea of pooling risk, right?
So the idea was everyone in the course of their life is going to have some of these things happen to them.
They're going to be a child.
They're going to get sick and they're going to die.
So it makes sense for everyone then to pitch into a common pool that covers the costs of childhood, the costs of occasional unemployment or illness, and literally the cost of funerals.
That's a central part of the beverage report and the post-1945 welfare state.
I think that we've already been down this road quite a long way in the United States through the total privatization of health insurance.
The turning of that up to 11 through the shattering of something like Social Security or Medicare and Medicaid, which definitely seems to be on the agenda.
Elon Musk referred to Social Security as the big one in need of elimination just last week.
It does a number or maybe a terminal fatal number on that idea of pooling risk in which the pool of the nation now is just, you know, these innumerable small hot tubs.
that are behind barbed wire fences.
Right, right, or ice baths.
It really fits with this Victorian vision of the virtues of stigma and the need to
those who have been dependent for too long.
So this...
Besant called to mind for me something that's in the introduction to my book that's coming out where Charles Murray himself voices a similar concern that there needs to be this withdrawal period where,
as he put it, where has he put it?
Quoting Herbert Spencer from 1898, that the transition from state beneficence to a healthy condition of self-help and private beneficence must be like the transition from an opium-eating life to a normal life.
Painful, but remedial.
So the idea is quite clear that there will be this withdrawal period and that it not only will be painful, but not everyone will survive it.
Because curious about that quote, I actually went back to the original.
And to see what context Spencer was referring to that in.
And it's a completely eugenic, sort of bone-chilling passage where he says, Spencer says, having by unwise institutions brought into existence large numbers who are unadapted to the requirements of social life and are consequently sources of misery to themselves and others,
we cannot repress and gradually diminish this body of relatively worthless people without inflicting much pain.
Evil has been done and the penalty must be paid.
Wow.
So this is not just, you know, some people are not doing well and they need a period of rehabilitation.
It's a purging that is being prescribed that some people need to be, who are large numbers of people, unadapted to the requirements of social life.
These people actually need to be eliminated from the body politic.
So in the drastic escalation of the rhetoric of...
Hyper-libertarianism and the like that we've been exposed to over the last couple of months.
This sort of thought starts to be much closer to hand, I think, that the idea of a surplus population is something that is lurking not too far beneath the surface.
You know, escalations, amplifications abound because in our archive we look very closely at how But
But now we have the additional sort of overbearing image of the figure who is often at the top of that communications network, the tech giant, who is now
also has to be an ubermensch, also has to be the muscle man.
Whether it's Mark Zuckerberg wearing new clothes or whether it's whoever it is doing broadcasting their workout regimen, there's now...
It's that also the titans have arrived and they're flexing over us.
Yeah, and that rawness is definitely a shift.
I'm thinking of someone like John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods, who had this idea of...
Conscious capitalism, and he was part of this thing called Flow, Freedom Lights Our World.
Michael Strong, who was an early investor in Prospera in Honduras, was part of that.
Or Jack Dorsey with the long beard and the lotus position on mountaintop.
There's just such a difference between that and the Zuckerberg thing.
I was talking to Nicole Hammer, who's a good historian of the right, and she was listening to Rogan.
Recently, and Rogan and some of his guests kept on complimenting Zuckerberg on the thickness of his neck.
It's something that kept on coming up.
They're admiring him, his physique.
So this self-regarding vanity, which comes along with, obviously, a contempt and scorn for people who don't measure up to that particular kind of physical parameters, Yeah, it takes things from a kind of,
you know, everyone needs to get their head right to some people, as in Sparta, are just not going to be able to make the cut and so need to go over the cliff.
Last question, Quinn.
How do you know for sure that you're not simply polluted with cultural Marxism yourself and that a good sweat lodge won't sort you out?
Such a good question.
I mean, I...
I know I could definitely use a sweat lodge or 20 these days.
My thinking about this cultural Marxism woke mind virus stuff has been influenced by my unfortunate lengthy exposure to Musk and Jordan Peterson batting around these issues, after which something became clear to me that wasn't clear before,
which is that Musk sees the idea of the woke mind virus literally.
Maybe this is something you all talk about on the pod already, but he actually thinks that Altman's open AI has, as he said, ingested content infected with the woke mind virus.
Yeah. And will now virally be spreading
I don't think it's a pure...
You know, large language model.
I think it's one that spreads an anti-woke mind virus.
I think he thinks you can only fight viruses with viruses.
So, you know, maybe I don't need to go to the sweat lodge and purify myself.
I just need to inject myself with the anti-woke mind virus and just let it pump through my veins.
