121: Conspirituality and Anti-Wokeness, with Matthew Remski
A real treat episode: Jack chats with special guest Matthew Remski of the excellent Conspirituality podcast ("dismantling New Age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy-mad yogis".) The conversation ranges over Teal Swan and influencers like her, the Anti-Wokeness of the conspiritualist milieu, the Satantic Panic and its relationship to QAnon, the fascists and their idea of 'after the revolution', and the neoliberal roots of our current cultural predicament. Content Warnings! Matthew and Conspirituality matthew remski (@matthewremski) / Twitter Conspirituality Conspirituality on Apple Podcasts IDSG: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618 IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
I'm Jack Graham, he/him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he/him, who spent years tracking the far right in their safe spaces.
In this show we talk about them, and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
content warnings always apply.
And welcome to episode 121 of I Don't Speak German.
A very special episode again this time.
We are still Daniel-less, I'm afraid.
Daniel is off beavering away, researching and preparing the next Mainline episode, where he and I will be talking.
So that'll be good, because he's putting a lot of work into it.
Despite the subject matter being very grueling.
But yeah, luckily, I have with me a very special guest, as I say.
I'm delighted and honored to be playing host to Matthew Remsky from the Conspiratuality Podcast, one of my favorite podcasts on the internet.
Matthew, hi, how are you?
I'm great.
Thank you so much for the invite, Jack.
It's a pleasure to meet you, finally.
Yes, likewise.
So, as I said before we started, I'd be surprised if anybody listens to our show that doesn't also listen to yours.
But just in case, and to give us a grounding, could you briefly describe what you guys get up to over there on the Conspiratuality Podcast?
Well, the term itself is a neologism that was dreamt up by an independent researcher in England named Charlotte Wood and her colleague David Voas in about 2011.
So, conspirituality, according to them, was a social movement with strong internet sort of juju at the time, but of course they had no idea how much stronger it would grow, that combined the relatively anxious world of political conspiracy theories with the aspirational world of New Age spirituality.
And they said a number of interesting things about the subject.
They said that the structures, the architecture of conspiracism and the architecture of New Age spirituality is very similar and they used The work of the political scientist Michael Barkun to describe that.
And they also said that the yoga, wellness and New Age spirituality spheres may be provided a way for some people to mitigate the anxiety of their modern experience and their sort of tangles with conspiratorial experiences in the various bureaucracies in which they lived.
And I think that it just was sort of like the perfect term to describe where my colleagues, Julian, Derek, found and myself found ourselves at the beginning of the pandemic.
We've known each other for about 10 years.
Derek, I've never met in person, actually, but Julie and I have on one of my trips to LA.
But we've been writing colleagues and sort of co-hosts on various projects for a long time.
And we started to notice in the spring of 2020, this eruption of this particular tangled phenomenon.
And so we've been tracking it pretty assiduously ever since.
And we use the lens of I'm looking at particular influencers that are prominent in the field on social media.
We also look at the pseudoscientific claims of the wellness industry and how they generally carry with them spiritual promises or at least the spiritual valence.
And we also look at the cultic dynamics that seem to proliferate throughout these demographics and their leadership structures.
And sometimes that involves looking at how old-school brick-and-mortar cults are actually rejuvenated by online movements, such as we see with the transition between You know, the old Kundalini Yoga of Yogi Bhajan and the new Kundalini Yoga of the now late Guru Jagat.
So it's been a lot.
The news cycle has been a real sort of laundry churn and it's been really enriching so far, quite exhausting sometimes.
But I think we're also trying to also concentrate on how people pull themselves out of conspirituality rabbit holes and also how they pull themselves out of fever dreams like QAnon.
And I find that to be really fulfilling. - Yeah, it is a fascinating show and the news cycle and the internet ecosystem has certainly provided you with lots of material.
I think you've really been producing some great stuff recently.
I particularly enjoyed the episodes where you covered the Twitter files and Matt Taibbi's interactions with Russell Brand.
Very good.
Right.
That's Julian and Derek's file.
I'm less tuned into that bit.
Now, the thing is, too, is that there's three of us.
We have, you know, sometimes quite separate and divergent interests, sometimes divergent politics as well.
But yeah, their concentration on that material has been great.
Well, as I say, that's been one of the really good things recently.
Another really interesting thing that's been on the show recently is the series that you've been doing about the influencer Teal Swan.
And I think that is your project, isn't it?
Yeah.
That started originally as one for backers only, but it's now been mostly published on the main feed.
And yeah, that has been fascinating, the way it's unfolded through all these different nooks and crannies.
You've been through Teal Swann herself, and interviews and documentaries about her, and her connection with the Satanic Panic.
Going back from there to Michelle remembers, etc, etc.
That's been a real journey.
I feel like Teal Swan could be a way into some interesting conversations.
Could you, I'm sorry to give you the task of explaining everything, but could you mainly, could you sort of sum up Teal Swan for us in case people haven't heard of her?
Because I confess I hadn't heard of her until I started listening to your series about her.
Yeah, I mean, the internet is a strange landscape in which somebody can have, you know, a million and a half YouTube followers and have, you know, devotees who hang on her every word, She can have a juggernaut of SEO managers working to spread her messages far and wide, and yet she's not going to penetrate certain corners, right?
There's this weird balkanization in internet land where very large countries sometimes don't touch up against each other.
But Teal Swan, I would say, is almost the theme of the podcast embodied in the sense that she is a charismatic, channeling New Age priestess.
Who claims her kind of spiritual and psychological authority from a backstory of satanic ritual abuse that she has told in full over many years and, interestingly, now is kind of backing away from, I think, because it hasn't been corroborated and it's very difficult to continue to support or to garnish support from it.
On her side, she emerged in the 2010s, really, as a kind of almost counselor to seekers who found themselves in the throes of spiritual depression.
In fact, Jennings Brown, who did a fantastic Investigative series on her called The Gateway began his own interest in Teal Swan by figuring out that she was popping up on his YouTube feed because he was actually going through a period of depression and he was seeking sort of
You know, documentaries and, you know, psychological tips and her videos started popping up where what she offers is kind of a an amalgam of New Age promises, karmic theory,
The notion that everyone is on a soul journey, and that everything that happens has a purpose, that everything is connected, that nothing is as it seems, and that everybody is recovering from some kind of Undefined, indistinct, but very real trauma that she can help understand or she can see into.
The videos are quite hypnotic.
She has mastered the art of intrusive eye contact.
She speaks in a very sort of somnambulant, you know, almost There's something about it that's like story hour for almost like a teenage sleepover type of feeling.
And her whole sort of archive is this incredible interweaving of paranoid visions of the world with New Age aspirations and promises of salvation.
And in that sense, she really carries with her the kind of flame or the torch of conspirituality.
And she connects it to an earlier age, which would be the golden age of, or I don't know if that's the right metal, but it's certainly an important age of the satanic panic beginning in 1980.
She's born in 1984.
So yeah, she is an extraordinarily important figure in New Age culture, and she also has a kind of reach into a kind of pseudo-psychotherapeutic discourse through her kind of rudimentary understanding of certain psychological concepts.
She's pretty good at, you know, reading summary articles of things like attachment theory or trauma bonding or, you know, personality disorders and then Almost instantly claiming a kind of expertise in those fields.
She has no mental health training that's formal.
But, you know, an essential part of her charismatic backstory is that she doesn't need formal training because she's been through these ultimate experiences in her youth that have given her a kind of divine intuition, right?
So she says that she survived years of abuse in two different satanic cults, And that she witnessed the murders of children, that she was implicated in the murders of children.
It's about as gruesome and as unlikely as every classic satanic panic story going back to Michelle remembers.
And I think the very painful truth of it all is that it's more likely than not that she was actually victimized by a friend of the family.
And somehow the story of that became Something that was much more mystical, much more grandiose, much more removed from the reality of regular old criminal, terrible child sexual abuse.
And that's been one of the main criticisms that people in professional mental health have had of her continuation of the satanic panic discourse, which is that it really distracts from the mundane realities of the ways in which children are actually abused, which generally has nothing to do with Satanism.
It has to do with adults who are very broken, who are doing very broken things.
Yes, and it's normally within the family or friends of the family.
It's not usually networks of people, strangers or anything like that.
Well, but if you imagine that they are networks of strangers, then you can begin to scapegoat, you can begin to displace the guilt of the actual event, and eventually you can begin to imagine an elite cabal of people who are somehow Completely different from you.
Somehow beyond your community altogether.
They have nothing to do with your parish.
They have nothing to do with your own school.
They have nothing to do with your extended family.
They're out there and they must be stopped.
And you must go and find them and prosecute them.
And what do you know?
Q will tell you how to do it.
Yes, indeed.
I should have said at the outset, actually, we always put a general content warning on the front of every episode.
So you will have heard that on the opening title, so to speak, listeners, but I should issue another warning on top because we are going to be talking about, as you will have gathered already, we are going to be talking about abuse of children or notional abuse of children anyway.
And that can, you know, Take care of yourself.
Don't listen to that if it's going to upset you.
In passing, I love your metaphor of internet communities as nations.
I feel like the algorithm constantly tries to sort us into boxes, and maybe you could look upon that as almost a process of online nation building, which is interesting because one of the things that's always said about The market is that it's supposed to bring us together, whereas online it seems to be doing the exact opposite.
It seems to be trying to sort us into oppositional groups.
That's an interesting point, I think, because Teal Swan, as you said, she's almost an embodiment of everything your show is about, and it goes with Broadly speaking, anyway, in a complex way, reactionary politics.
One of the things I was struck by recently when Kanye, I should say, Ye, went on his tour of right-wing propagandists and started talking about his political opinions, I love Hitler, etc.
Was the way he framed it within a discourse of universal love.
I love everybody.
So on the surface, the message is inclusive and loving and harmless, etc.
But it's actually a way of expressing deeply paranoid reactionary politics.
And that strikes me as something that seems pretty universal among the sorts of people that you cover.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think it's an indication of a kind of splitting, a kind of black and white thinking, a kind of all or nothing discourse that's very confused about the gray areas of life and the gray areas of people's behaviors and activities.
Yeah, there's, I mean, I have really no clue when it comes to Ye, but, you know, the oscillation that we get in conspirituality between the world is filled with love or God has a plan and terrible things are happening at the same time.
In fact, Because terrible things are happening, we are ever more clear that God's plan is in motion.
It's not just that the paranoid conspiracy thinking is balanced out by a kind of spiritual promise.
It's that the paranoid conspiratorial thinking is an indication that the spiritual promise is unfolding.
It's like there's a there's maybe a strip there.
And so when any of the influencers that we follow talk about the divine plan or about ascension or about coming into 5D reality or, you know, shedding lower layers of consciousness or however they want to phrase it.
They're speaking in kind of idealized and utopian terms, but the whole process depends on something really awful happening.
It depends upon, and then you can hear the bloodlust within it, right?
So one of the people that we follow, Christiane Northrup, is kind of extraordinary this way.
She is probably close to 80 years old now.
And she's an OBGYN who's famous in alternative medicine circles going back over decades for Her work in bringing a sort of more non medicalized perspective to women's health, and especially childbirth and postpartum, you know, processes.
And, you know, she became the primary vector for Conspirituality in mainstream Facebook and about in early in 2020.
In fact, she was the main conduit for the transmission of Mickey Willis's Plandemic film.
She first shared it at the beginning of May out of a QAnon Facebook group.
And she'll do things like You know, she'll play her harp into her Facebook Live while she's talking about how demonic energies are swirling around, but you don't have to worry about them because, you know, you can take a bath with Dr. Bronner's soap and listen to this beautiful music.
There's one interview she does where she's talking about how Everybody's evolving towards Christ consciousness during this time of social stress.
And, you know, sometimes she really thinks that she will need to go out and find doctors responsible for vaccinating children and shoot them in the head.
And so there's this flip between expressing like unrealistic levels of love and desire for communion and unity, and this barely concealed, sometimes absolutely explicit aggression that comes in.
It's like a strobe light going back and forth.
And one of the things that I found really helpful in trying to understand what the impact of this is, is the disorganized attachment theory of Alexandra Stein, who says that, you know, the person who seeks to, consciously or not, Lock people into a leader-follower relationship will often do two things simultaneously.
They will scare the shit out of them, and then they will promise them love.
And in a way, conspirituality is a kind of structural form of that.
It scares the shit out of people while promising them love and salvation.
I mean, many religious structures have this feature.
But it's very compressed and almost like, as I said, like a strobe light, a seesaw in conspirituality.
And I think that with somebody like Christiane Northrup, her followers are in this very charged, very activated state of being terrified and being in a state of yearning for her contact.
Almost as if, you know, she's the parent who is both terrorizing and protecting.
You know, both of those affects are coming from her.
And that creates a very powerful bond between leaders and their followers.
Yeah, as you say, it's common to a lot of religious structures.
It reminds me of the biblical stuff about separating the sheep and the goats, and the goats go into the lake of fire.
And it also reminds me of the sorts of things that we hear on our show when we talk about the outright Nazis.
They have their own version of the Great Awakening or the Storm, which they call things like the Day of the Rope or the Boogaloo.
Ostensibly, the point of those is that afterwards we'll have a wonderful, pure society where, you know, if they're being honest, it's just the white people left.
And if they're being a bit careful about it, then everybody's separate in their ethnostates, and therefore everybody's happy.
But Jack, let me ask though, do they have a positive vision?
Do they actually illustrate it?
Do the Nazis that you cover, When they fantasize the post-Bougaloo days, are they seeing bucolic pastures and fields, and everybody owns farms, and everybody's able to drink milk, and all of the women are fertile?
Is there a Valhalla kind of image that they have?
I haven't actually seen that described, but I'm wondering if they actually have a positive fantasy.
It's sort of yes and no.
I would say broadly no.
I think they're far too devoted to the hate, really, the discourse of hate, and the discourse of aggression, and the discourse of criticism of the people that they target, to spend all that much time on trying to think about, even, let alone plan, the post-revolution world.
Having said that, We are talking about fascism, and fascism is inherently a very confused discourse, set of ideas.
It isn't really an ideology as such.
It's been called a scavenger ideology.
It takes whatever bits and bobs of ideology it needs from this, that, and the other, and melds them together in whatever will work.
And really, it's far less an ideology and more a structure of tactics.
And whatever ideological justifications will work for those tactics.
And I think modern fascism is still very much like that, in exactly the same way that the German Nazis were like that.
And yeah, I mean, Valhalla, you do have people in the far right who are Odinists, people who profess faith in the Norse gods and things like that.
And of course, They do imply how they see the perfect world that will come about after they've purged society of all these people that they don't like.
I think one of the things about far-right politics is that it will take bits and bobs of things that are traditionally or traditionally thought of as left-wing politics as well.
This is one of the endless confusions about this, you know, it's the classic The Nazis were socialists, it's in the name thing.
Well, they weren't.
They were on the right, not the left.
That's the historical fact of it.
But the fact is, it's a complex thing, because they did actually have, certainly at the beginning, before the left of the party was purged, they did have certain ideas and certain policies that do seem Left-wing, at least within a state socialism reformist way of looking at things.
So I think they would look upon a form of, almost a form of state socialism, combined with, as you say, a very backward-looking, bucolic
um vision of almost like almost Jefferson's yeoman farmers you know right nation of yeoman farmers with the wife in the home and the children running around in the go it's very deeply patriarchal and unimaginative and old-fashioned i think that's basically to the extent that they formulated at all i think that is the the fascist vision of after the
It reminds me that Peter Stoudmire, the historian of Nazism, said on one of our episodes that the phrase was always, after the war, after the war, we'll sort it all out.
We don't know whether we're going to do biodynamic farming for everybody.
We don't know if we're going to guarantee a universal income.
We don't know how industrial our society is going to be.
We simply have to exterminate the Jews and win the war.
And that will be our, you know, our moment of decision.
And so, yeah, all of these impulses, these populist impulses, these impulses towards, you know, taking care of the land, the impulses towards You know, nation building and purifying.
They never really got to be enacted in policy.
They existed on the level of the Imaginarium.
And they were very powerful that way, I suppose, perhaps even more so because nobody really had to test them or put them to work.
Yes, although I would argue that the Holocaust itself actually forms a part of the project.
It's almost a form of preparation for the after-war project.
It's often thought of as this orgy of irrationality, and of course it was deeply irrational.
But at the same time, within their worldview, It made sense, because they needed to clear the land, as it were, of the subhumans, the Untermenschen, you know, in order to have the kind of society that... I've just been rereading Franz Neumann's Behemoth, actually, and there's quite a lot of interesting stuff in there about this, the Third Reich's plans for the Europe that they'd conquered after the war, the extended Reich, you know, and it's very much...
It is very much sort of, as I say, almost Jefferson's idea of a country of yeoman farmers.
They would plant Germans across Europe and you would have, really, you would have like very poor and engineered-to-be-ignorant population of Germans who were fulfilling the role almost of noble peasants, almost a neo-feudal situation, right the way across Europe.
With the Imperial Center, of course, in Berlin, and so on and so forth.
But it depended upon... One of the things about the Third Reich is that it was, to an extent, modeled on American Manifest Destiny.
And so, there is an affinity there.
They saw their task in Europe as being akin to what the What America had done in the West, you know, clear the land of the native, so to speak, and set up a new society on the land.
So I think that the Holocaust, in a way, was part of the preparation for that.
And I think that gives you an idea of what the post-war settlement would have been.
And that also, I think, that affinity is still there to be found in American fascism, because a lot of it is the reiteration of the ideology, scientific racism, justified imperialism, and so on, that was formulated in that era of manifest destiny.
And there is a kind of utopianism in that.
Another thing I think is that we were talking about that version of the great and violent rupture, whether it's the Great Awakening and the storm or the Day of the Rope or whatever, that also seems akin to the rapture.
in evangelical dispensationalist Christianity.
And of course, American fascism, as it's evolving now, is taking a very strongly Christian nationalist form, which is building on a very long process of building right-wing Christian movements in the United States.
And it's appealing to that same generation.
I don't particularly go in for the discourse of generational cohorts, but there is something to the idea that certainly the QAnon phenomenon is based in that boomer generation.
And so there's a kind of utopianism that carries over from, for instance, the 1960s from the hippie movement.
And then it finds itself re-encoded via Christian post-rapture utopianism, the kingdom of heaven and so on, in the idea that we'll clear away the deep state, which in many ways just seems like a reactionary reiteration of the hippie idea of the establishment or the man.
Yeah, yeah, and it has conveyed, I think, the impression through to the modern yoga and wellness structures and cultures that we study that somehow there is an inherent progressivism or counter-culturalism to the process of or the activities of self-care and meditation and You know, personal development.
And that's actually not really the case, because all of those internal turn practices generally wind up at a kind of, you know, apoliticized, you know, neoliberal individualism that doesn't really have anything to offer in resistance to fascist influences when social crises bring them out.
And one of the fascinating things about fascism in this day and age is that Original fascism always frames its enemies as monsters of various types.
And in the 1930s, fascism framed its enemies in terms of the monsters that were known, so to speak, at that time.
They're vampires, they're plague, etc., etc.
Of course, fascism, as it's now reassembling itself in our age, is assembling itself in a world where the Nazis have become the go-to image of villainy, of evil in popular culture.
You know, every science fiction film, every fantasy film has, on some level, reiterates the Nazis in the villains.
And so, you know, they're a pop culture villain now, aside from their actual historicity.
And modern fascism, as I say, it's this scavenger and it takes bits and bobs of ideology from wherever it can take it opportunistically.
It's taken that and it's framing its enemies as the Nazis.
By which it means, in a very politically deracinated sort of way, it means the authoritarians, the totalitarians, things like that.
So modern fascism now frames itself as being anti-political tyranny, and it frames its enemies as the representatives of that.
And, but in response to what exactly?
Because, I mean, the feeds are filled with charges that basically the managers of, the center-right managers of neoliberal states are somehow authoritarian.
That somebody like The Prime Minister here in Canada, Justin Trudeau, is heading up an authoritarian regime when really what he is doing is massaging state relations with capital just as best he can so that he can get beyond the COVID crisis and
Get everybody back to business, whether or not, you know, the virus has actually died out or not.
It's very odd.
It's like the claim of authoritarianism that is thrown at the managers of the state now is very difficult for me to understand.
I mean, I think that the Maybe the real target is the abstract machine of late capitalism itself.
And that's what people are really angry at.
That's where they feel the authoritarianism lies.
But it's definitely misdirected when people are drawing little Hitler mustaches on memes of Fauci.
Just doesn't make sense to me.
Yes, and people like Lauren Southern saying Trudeau is an outright dictator, full-blown dictator.
It is bizarre.
I think it's partly just sheer opportunism.
Right.
In the sense that they're trying to propagandize to people this image of the people that they don't like as the enemy, and the way you do that in political terms is to talk about them as dictators and authoritarians and fascists and things like that.
I think there's a strong degree of just naked opportunism and cynicism in it.
One of the things that really annoys me, and it's been rampant throughout the last few years, is when people People talk about and think about the resurgent fascism that we're looking at from Trumpism and on.
Their approach to it is to say, well, we need to understand them and we need to empathize with them.
And what we're looking at is the revolt of the left behind of neoliberalism.
And it's a very short step.
It's a very short step from that, which most of the people that talk like that take this step.
To, well, they have legitimate concerns and we need to listen to them and we need to give them a seat at the table, etc.
And it's incredibly, I think that's incredibly irresponsible.
Having said that, there is a germ of truth in the critique, because one of the myths about neoliberalism is that it involves a rollback of the state.
That's one of its own ideologies, is the idea of rolling back the frontiers of the state, to use the old Thatcherite language.
And actually, neoliberalism is aggressively carceral.
And it employs an escalation in the degree and the power of policing.
And it involves actually a great deal of state control over capitalism.
Not in the old way, but certainly in the way of bailing out big businesses.
We saw the too big to fail narrative unfold.
So neoliberalism is not a retreat of the state at all.
It's a repurposing of the state and an expansion of the role of the state in genuinely an authoritarian direction because neoliberalism cuts back social welfare in all sorts of ways, social provision, and it compensates for that.
It addresses the huge social problems that that creates with, essentially, with police and prisons.
So there is a germ of truth in the critique of the modern world that it is authoritarian.
I don't think that's really what the fascists are getting at though.
I think their problem is really to do with the erosion of their privilege.
I think it really is a question of, because we have, one of the arguments I run into when I talk about this with other people on the left is that they, some people will say, well, you can't really call it fascism because it's not happening in the context of a resurgent left or a revolutionary left.
And that's, some people in my political tradition tend to think of that as a necessary precondition because fascism is counter-revolutionary.
I think there's something to that, but I also don't think it's as necessary as some people think.
And at the same time, I think there has been enormous social change in the last few.
And again, it's almost to do with neoliberalism, because neoliberalism has Culturally compensated for the vast amount of damage it's done to social life and the way in which it's politically disorganized and de-oriented people by the destruction of things like labor unions and so on, with a kind of A discourse of inclusiveness and anti-racism and so on and so forth.
That's right the way through neoliberalism.
Totally insincere, of course, but it's a constant refrain.
And it has more to the extent that people from below have fought for these things.
It has included what from the top would look like concessions and from the bottom would look like progress on things like sexuality and gender and women's rights and things.
Not enough, but some.
And I think When that traditionally privileged middle layer, because again, in my analysis, fascism is very much based in the middle class.
When that sort of privilege that people in the middle class have enjoyed for so long, and it's bound up with patriarchy and white supremacy and stuff like that, and cis-normativity and heteronormativity, these have been the privileged groups in the middle classes of Western capitalism.
The erosion of that, even to a tiny extent, looks like a massive attack.
And it's perceived by them as a massive attack.
And I think that's part of where this resurgence of fascism comes from.
It's counter-revolutionary without a revolution, but in the sense that it almost perceives that there has been a revolution because of the social change that has been allowed.
Yeah, I mean, I appreciate the analysis.
And I guess what I also wonder about is, I think a while back, you said that fascism isn't an ideology per se, because it scavenges whatever it can in terms of affect and technique.
And when I look out into the affect and technique of the people that we follow who inevitably swing towards right-wing politics and fascist or neo-fascist sympathies,
And here's where my attempt to empathize with where these folks are coming from, I don't know, I'd be interested to hear what you think about it, but there's a way in which I'm constantly seeing people involve themselves in conspirituality and QAnon
Because or at least informed by the fact that they are desperate to be able to make some kind of meaning out of the incredibly complex world that they find themselves in.
And so it's almost as if Those, that yearning, as disorganized as it is, as impassioned as it is, as vulnerable to its own venal desires and grievances and resentments and also, you know, discriminatory psychologies as it is,
It's not organized except by the technologies that bring those people together.
I'm thinking about how, you know, the insurrection attempt on January 6th.
really was so surreal in its performativity, in the fact that, you know, everybody was sort of traced back to their homes because they live streamed themselves on Parler the entire time they were tracked.
Their data was, there was no OPSEC, right?
It's like, I don't think that we have any kind of organized historical version of a fascist movement that is so sloppy, is so incredibly, I don't know, vain, and so sort of fragmented by its own kind of hall of mirrors, like the
It's a collective movement that doesn't really bond together, except through sort of cheap refrains and, you know, merch at the convention table, you know?
So, I don't know.
What we've seen and what I've struggled with a little bit is that Definitely the undercurrents of the ideological streams that undergird the conspirituality movement and QAnon rhyme with fascism, for sure.
But they're much more sort of almost primal or archetypal in their psychology.
It's like it's a Jungian version of a fascist movement or something like that.
It doesn't organize itself.
It doesn't organize itself, it doesn't arm itself in the same way.
You know, my understanding of historical fascist movements is that there's a lot of disciplined boots on the ground.
And maybe this is why your colleagues are saying that it has to be counter-revolutionary because the actual pitched battles in the streets are really important before the sort of hinge point events occur, right?
Like who's actually going to Who's going to win in the street fights?
But all of this is online.
Most of it is online.
And yeah, it's very disorienting to me to think about it historically.
I mean, the historical threads are there for sure.
But it's very difficult for me to understand the actors as historical actors in the same way that we understand You know, periods of the century before.
So, those are all good points.
And I agree with the attempt to empathize to the extent that we need to know the psychology of people.
I mean, history is made by people, not in circumstances of their own choosing, within the context of, you know, history and society, etc.
But it is made by people.
So, every political movement starts at least one moment of its origin is psychological and emotional.
So that's worth looking into.
And there's a tradition of psychological analysis of fascism.
I think on the question of organization, I think you can see in some parts of the world, because I think in many respects, the resurgence is a global phenomenon because of global processes affecting capital.
You can see that it has reached much higher levels of organization, for instance with Hindu nationalism in India and so on.
I think we're in the United States… Very good example by the way, yeah.
Yeah, very good example.
And a diversified example with a full paramilitary organization with really, really sophisticated soft power arms.
Yeah, great example.
Yeah, and I think what we're looking at in the United States is almost the movement trying to cohere.
We see repeated attempts at formations of what we could look upon as prototypes of stormtrooper-like street enforcers, which was a key part of 1930s fascism.
You know, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, even in a way the Boogaloo Boys are all sort of floundering attempts at starting something like that.
And you can look upon Unite the Right in 2016 and even the capital coup attempt as attempts at the same thing, attempts to create a coherent movement.
It's not really working yet.
I think there is something about society is very different now.
Immensely different to how it was in the early 20th century.
I mean, it's 100 years ago that original fascism started to coalesce.
And we live in an immensely different world.
The media system, it penetrates every life with an enormous amount of imagery that simply, it was just beginning in the early 20th century.
So you have that sort of aesthetic fragmentation and social fragmentation in modern society, which seems to be mirrored in the fragmentation of the grassroots fascist movement.
But I also think it does kind of echo the original pattern because One of the things that, you know, I try to avoid teleology when I look at history.
It's a danger that's always present and you have to watch out for it.
And you have to watch out for spurious intentionality as well.
You know, if you talk about this movement was to do this or for this, it's very easy to slip into the wrong approach.
So I try to look upon political movements as almost like species in ecosystems, you know, that the mutation will will happen.
And maybe a similar, you know, the mutation happens in lots of different species.
But one species happens to, it just happens to land in an ecosystem, an ecological niche, where it gets It has an advantage.
So in a sense, it's selected, it's picked up.
And I think that's what happens with political movements.
They start, and then they go through an almost Darwinian process where they do or they don't get picked up by the society that they're growing within.
And I think you can almost watch that process in early fascism, where, you know, the Nazi Party grew out of a huge network of right-wing nationalist parties that had sprung up in Germany after the First World War.
But it, because of contingency and because of various different factors, Nazism was the one that was selected, as it were.
And I think we haven't seen that yet in the United States, although Trumpism is, you know, it almost got there.
I appreciate the sort of passive structural process that you're describing, whereby structures evolve and carry people along with them.
I think that one of the things that stood out about the demographic that we study is that The people who became interested in countercultural ideas in the 1960s and eventually moved into human potential interest and yoga and wellness and self-care and somehow
believed that once the 60s were over that somehow their quest for structural change and revolution was somehow passe or it wasn't going to be accomplished or something like that, that the pathway that was open to them was this internal turn.
That involved a very systematic depoliticization of a whole segment of the global North middle class, where people wound up
teaching themselves in yoga and meditation spaces, that somehow being too political was not a virtue, that engaging in the material world was low vibration, or that the thing that you really wanted to do in your life was to be the change that you wanted to see, that everything was going to start within.
And the turn towards the self-project that I think this whole subculture comes out of in the 1970s especially, Sam Binkley calls it the culture of getting loose and finding new possibilities, but new possibilities as expressed through the sort of liberated aspirational self.
And not, you know, not through your networks, not through your communities, not through a sense of solidarity or mutual aid, but like, how are you going to, you know, enjoy your sex life more?
And how are you going to, you know, feel the energy flow through your body?
And how are those things going to help you optimize your creativity as you created the next technology for whatever?
That whole sort of ascendancy of the self project provided people like me, I'm 51, with this, deracinated is a good word, a kind of like flattened apolitical space to enter into in the 1990s,
late 1990s, early 2000s, where late 1990s, early 2000s, where I believed that practicing yoga was somehow connected to becoming a better person.
It was somehow connected to progressive ideals and politics, but the specifics were all lost.
And the focus was all on the individual atomized self.
And when I came into the studio, I was supposed to sort of do my own practice on my six foot by two foot mat.
And there wasn't any sense that we were going to do anything else together except kind of share a contemplative hour or something like that.
So, I think that created, for this demographic that we study, a kind of vulnerability to very strong political forces that have risen up and washed over those portions of the middle class, really leaving people with no education whatsoever, and no kind of political analysis to ground them against What's happening around them, you know?
So that's been a very sort of interesting and disarming part of our journey is to figure out just how depoliticized our demographic has been.
Like I remember in 2000 and 2008, trying to do some basic online organizing amongst people who were yoga enthusiasts to go out and vote for Obama.
And, you know, that was hard to do, right?
Like, people would say, you know, yoga isn't about politics.
I'm not in this Facebook group so we can talk about politics and all of the parties are the same anyway and blah, blah, blah.
I mean, I was like, just fucking vote for the...
It's the least you can do.
It's the least you can do.
And so that was a real... Around that time, I also realized that nobody in the political sphere was appealing to the yoga vote or to the wellness vote because people just weren't interested.
They had somehow self-cared themselves out of material, out of dialectics, right?
It didn't really...
It was very effective, actually, you know, and if I had my own tinfoil hat, I'd almost say that, be willing to say that, or guess that, you know, the cultural turn towards self-interest and self-development and, you know, human optimization is a really effective, like, CIA project to, you know, depoliticized and
And make a whole generation of people kind of defenseless against late capitalism and its urges.
Yeah, it can be very difficult sometimes to resist the urge to interpret things as conspiracies when they certainly look like them.
But yeah, we're back to the old algorithm, sorting people again, again as a sort of instantiation of the market.
never underestimate the ability of the market to find our weak spots and our ignoble spots, our pleasure centers, and pander to them and change us as a result.
And we are kind of talking about neoliberalism again.
We are talking about privatization in both senses, because neoliberalism is not just an economic counter-revolution, it's also a cultural counter-revolution.
And it involves privatization in both senses, as it were, privatization of state industries and things like that, and also privatization of social life in an attempt to...
Blind or not, to mute or even destroy social movements.
Because it's, again, we're back to that revolution-counter-revolution dialectic.
It is very much about addressing the high point of social struggle in the 1960s, which is probably the biggest upswing of social struggle since before the Second World War, since the 1917 through to the 20s, the radicalism in Europe.
And it does create that culture of self-realization, which does carry with it atomization and privatization.
And I think, just to ground this in a story, it's very, very specific how it plays out.
And one of the things that I think about in my own history is, and my context here in Toronto, Is that in the opening pages of Naomi Klein's No Logo, she discusses how she moved into sometime in the mid 1990s, or the early 1990s, a loft apartment on Spadina Avenue.
And I don't know, Jack, if you've ever been to Toronto.
Spadina is like a main north-south thoroughfare in the center of the city, a huge boulevard with enormous warehouse spaces.
And on the southern part of the boulevard, it used to be called the Garment District.
And these enormous red brick and stone warehouses were garment factories.
A lot of furriers.
You know, thousands of tailors, there was, you know, the pre-war version of fast fashion, whatever that was.
But I mean, this was like teeming industrial, you know, center of the city.
And by the end of the 1980s, the last bits of the globalization, free trade arrangements had been hammered out.
And the last of those Manufacturers just picked up and left and, you know, started making their stuff in Vietnam or in Bangladesh or wherever it is they could find the cheapest labor.
Or they sold off their assets altogether and suddenly there were these empty buildings in the downtown core that become the sort of main sites of gentrification at that time.
And she's talking about how she rents a condo or rents an apartment that's actually a converted loft in one of these old buildings.
And outside of the building, there's actually, the city has created a bronze statue of a thimble to represent the fact that people used to make things here or do things.
And so there's like a romance around the fact that nobody does anything here anymore.
This is now an empty building that people will try to make work in.
And the work that they made was tech work.
There were sort of dot-com companies that started to move in, but she gets into an elevator, the freight elevator one day, and she's riding it with the guy who is running the yoga studio on the floor underneath her.
That guy, his name is Ron Reed.
He ends up running a place called Downward Dog that everybody in Toronto went to for years and years and years.
But they were only able to stay in that building for, you know, maybe a couple of years or the first lease cycle, and then the lease and then the overhead went up.
And they had to go out to the next region, the next leading edge of gentrification west on Queen Street.
They get another place.
But it's like, we didn't see at the time that The spaces of modern yoga and wellness were actually the hollowed out spaces of labor.
We didn't see that, you know, these were beautiful hardwood floored exposed brick You know, walled buildings where people used to make things with their hands that would be used by their fellow citizens.
And, you know, they might not be paid properly.
The industry is incredibly exploitative.
But suddenly, even that kind of I don't know, the opposite of alienation, where people are somewhat close to the fact that someone is making something that they will actually wear when they're out and about in the city.
That goes away too, and suddenly there's this open space in which you're not making a thing, but you're making the aspirational self.
Right?
You have an empty space where you can work on your body, where you can work on your self-image, where you can work on your inner sort of emotional landscape.
And I wanted to ask you, Jack, like, Given all of your theoretical knowledge, what would you say about an industry that actually doesn't have a product?
What's the product of yoga and wellness?
It's a dream.
It's a phantasm.
It's an aspirational thing.
And I get the sense that because it can't actually be grasped, and because it can't actually be priced properly, right?
It can't be costed out.
You can't really sort of put a an adequate price tag on the aspirational self.
And so there's all kinds of inflations and speculations and stuff like that.
Like what is this industry with no product, according to old lefty theory?
Well, I don't know about old lefty theory.
Certainly, what Naomi Klein says in No Logo is that neoliberal corporate capitalism is certainly in the West anyway.
What it sells now is not materials so much as brands.
It sells brand images.
And I think what we're looking at there is we're looking at de-industrialization, post-industrialism, which of course just means that the actual industrial work of production has been sent into the global South and poorer countries where you can have hyper-exploitation of workers, which you can't get away with in the West and the North.
I mean, gentrification is a perfect analog, as it were, an internal analog to that, because it's basically a polite way of talking about social cleansing.
Yes.
And, you know, you have populations who are at the sharp end of capital's contradictions who are just cleared out of the way.
A bit like when Britain was preparing for the 2012 Olympics, one of the first things that we did in this country was to get all the homeless people out of the middle of London.
Yes, and I should say that about all of the workers in Spadina, of course, the people who replaced them in those buildings were all white.
And that was a sea change in a kind of, you know, citywide Yeah, cleansing as it were.
Yeah, and you have a creation in both the gentrified space as a sort of a metaphor for something wider and in the culture as a whole.
You have the creation of this rootless new, not new, but rootless form of the middle class which are engaged in this post-industrial kind of capitalism.
There's a Marxist theorist that I really like I have lots of disagreements with him, but I really like David McNally, and he writes in an excellent book, Monsters of the Market, about how post-industrial Western capitalism has really become spectral, you know, with financialization and computerization, and so much of it being the movement of funds instantaneously, and money becomes almost theoretical, etc., and it's just
These things become almost abstract.
Money and shares and things, they become almost like abstractions that just float around in the air.
And the more the entirety of capitalism is subjected to that logic, the more spectral capitalism becomes.
I think it also opens the door for New Age spirituality, because there's a very strong rhyme between the spectral nature of the neoliberal economy and the vague, universalized, abstract, expansive promises made by
The vague language of the new age.
The first high-demand group that I was in, actually, run by a guy named Michael Roach, who taught a form of Americanized prosperity gospel Tibetan Buddhism, He was like an early, early internet adopter.
This is in the mid-90s.
And he would go on at length about how the internet was simply creating trillions of dollars of new wealth out of nothing.
And there was this thread that he tied between that excitement and everything that he thought he knew about the infinite expansiveness of consciousness, right?
And I think Bradbrook and his colleague get at that in their idea of the California ideology, that there's a merging between Sort of technological utopianism and expansionism and this feeling of, you know, spiritual potential and infinitude.
They're very, very closely related.
Yes, and I think that's always been there in capitalism.
In Marx's original analysis, one of the things that Marx, I think, finds most obnoxious about bourgeois society, or the bourgeois mode of production as he calls it, is That it subjects society to the rule of abstractions.
It makes abstractions into the ruling logic of life.
His analysis of commodity fetishism is that it has people relating to things as if they're people, and people relating to other people as if they're things, through the commodity relationship and the wage relationship.
His basic economic theory is often wrongly said to be the labour theory of value.
It's actually not, or it's such a revision that it's qualitatively different.
What he says is the substance of labour is abstract, homogenous, socially necessary labour time.
So there's another abstraction.
Through the medium of capitalist time, We are subjected to the abstraction.
We are ruled, literally our day and our time and our life is ruled by the need to conform to this notion of time in which we can do the socially necessary labour, which is not necessary for society.
What he means by that is necessary amount of time in which to perform a certain amount of productive task.
Otherwise, if you go beyond that time, you're not being profitable.
So society is completely subjected to that abstraction.
And Marx uses loads of Gothic imagery in his writing as well.
So I think That thing about capitalism being inherently spectral, that's kind of always been there in the Marxist analysis.
But it's like, as with so many things in neoliberalism, it's ramped up to an incredible degree now.
And as you say, so much of it is It's almost fake, the money that we live with now.
When we talk about people like Bezos and Thiel and Musk and so on, and all the money that they have, so much of what we're talking about is actually kind of theoretical money.
It's money that they don't actually have.
It's in futures and things like that.
And if you think about that, it's such a strange idea that you have wealth which is in futures.
I mean, it's what Marx referred to as fictitious capital, and in 2008 we had the massive crash, and a huge amount of that was society realising that it's built up this enormous bubble of fictitious capital, that it doesn't have enough actual productive value to back.
Right.
Now, okay, so this brings up another question that I had for you, which is that if the product of yoga and wellness and New Age spirituality is the aspirational self, and if we think about the economies that generate it as generating these sort of things to chase that you can't quite grasp,
What would the theoretical background that you have have to say about the labor value that doesn't...
Labor value that's expressed in influencer culture in terms of affect only.
Because what I've been kind of mystified by, a little bit creeped out by, is the fact that the conspirituality demographic
The New Age influencers that we follow, it's not just that they don't produce anything that is material, but what they do produce is a kind of emotional reality or oomph or juice that they can sell.
And then when In, let's say, some kind of workshop situation, they draw followers to, let's say, a retreat.
If they teach a meditation technique or if they teach a yoga technique, It's often the responses of the participants in terms of their testimonials of pleasure or the sighs that they release or the tears that they have that show that the transaction has actually taken place.
And so I often feel like I'm watching an economy in which emotions are the primary commodity.
And you can't really show that you have achieved the aspirational self unless you, you know, Do intrusive eye contact in a certain way, or unless you perform a certain type of physical virtue, or unless you figure out how to show your Instagram feed that you're sitting in a space of equanimity.
So, I don't know, was Marx able to predict the commodity of the performance of emotions?
No, I don't think he predicted it.
But he does talk about the commodity as being not necessarily a physical thing.
I mean, he talks about the commodity is something which satisfies a human need.
And I think his words are something like, whether the need is located in the stomach or in the fancy is immaterial.
So, his analysis can encompass, shall we say, this view of commodities, because services are commodities.
Marx lived in a world where he was perfectly well aware that a huge section of the working class, was service workers in the sense of like servants.
So he perfectly understood that capitalism, capitalist workers aren't always producing things.
Sometimes they're producing services.
And I feel like this sort of thing we're talking about is kind of an extension of that very old version of the commodity where it's a service.
And it's the classic example of, you know, break the window and then sell the person a glacier, you know.
Capitalism creates this vast amount of personal alienation and then it will very happily, again the market, it finds our weak spots, it will very happily sell you The palliative or the anodyne that will make you feel better about your... and it's always done that.
I mean, you only have to look at the huge industry in diet culture, which is an attempt to sell people that which will make them feel better about the fact that they're not satisfied with their bodies, which is a byproduct of the economy of media images.
And the economy of food, which in order to sell more, it packs in those things that we evolved to find incredibly appealing, fats and sugars and so on.
And we create a world where people, they eat loads of chocolate to make themselves feel better about the fact that they eat too much chocolate.
And then they go on a diet to make themselves feel better about the fact that they've eaten too much chocolate, etc.
They will go to some of the sorts of people that you're talking about.
When the crisis, as it were, of self-esteem and connection that's been created by this world of commodification gets them to the point where they need something more, and it's expressed as a spiritual need.
I mean, famously Marx talked about religion as the opium of the people.
People often misunderstand that as being kind of a sneer at... It's just a drug to make you feel better.
What he says in that passage is that it's the expression of... It's the soul of a soulless situation.
It's the heart of a heartless world.
In that sense, it's... Yeah, it's an incredible passage.
I wish that it was quoted in full, actually, because those two clauses are left out chronically and abused, I think, by the skeptic movement or new atheists or whoever wants to sort of like
bury the emotional wreckage of the analysis and what it actually describes.
Yes, I completely agree with you.
Your mention of the New Atheist is interesting because you were talking earlier about the political disconnection that you faced in the early 2000s.
I had very similar experience.
One of the things I was looking forward to about university was I can get into some politics and I went to university in the mid to late 1990s where Politics really wasn't happening, certainly not in the university I went to.
There were meetings of political groups, but they were minuscule.
There were like three people there, and I couldn't get anybody that I was in seminar groups with or lecture groups with to be interested in the sorts of things I was interested in.
So it was an incredibly politically Null point in time.
And I feel like one of the things about New Atheism when it came along was it almost was a kind of attempt to supply a kind of spirituality via a kind of anti-spirituality.
It was trying to provide people with, because there's something about the New Atheism of the early 2000s where it presents itself as this coherent, unified worldview.
And albeit that it's negative in the sense that it's a critique of religion and it's a promotion of atheism and so on.
It nevertheless promotes a kind of worldview which has politics in it and also a kind of spirituality, a materialist spirituality as it were, complete with its own group of holy men, Dawkins and
There's a delight in the discourse in the process of disillusionment, which I think was very, very captivating to a number of people who wound up following.
You know, I remember Just a certain kind of, as somebody who grew up Catholic, a kind of thrill in listening to how self-certain Hitchens was in his appraisal of somebody like Mother Teresa, how incredibly just transgressive it felt to
listen to somebody just not have any compunction at all about talking about the hypocrisy that he had grown up with in his own Christianity.
There was something thrilling about it, and I didn't recognize at the time it's Totalizing effect.
I didn't recognize the lack of sociological nuance.
I didn't recognize at the time that somebody like Hitchens was willing to make lots of blanket statements about huge populations like Catholics, you know, but A billion or more people.
And to do that so freely, to do that without recognizing the diversity of people's beliefs or how they manage themselves within complex systems.
But there was something thrilling about the transgressive totality of the discourse.
And that did have a kind of religious impact, I think, for me for a while, and I know for a lot of other people, too.
Daniel and I have both spoken about our dalliances with New Atheism back in the day, and I've said before that it was reading Sam Harris that cured me of it, because I read The End of Faith, and I found it so crass and obnoxious that it kind of woke me up.
I remember thinking, wow, this is not for me.
I don't go with this.
If this is where this goes, then I don't want to go there.
And Sam Harris is still very much a presence.
I feel like he's adjacent to a lot of the people that we talk about, and a lot of the people that you talk about.
Of course, he's still an atheist, and we did an episode about him, and we're at pains to point out that he's not a Nazi, because our show is fundamentally about the far right, and we do sometimes talk about people who are interesting in connection with that.
People like the Weinsteins, and so on.
But we always take care to point out that these people, they are distinct from the far right or the Nazis.
But I feel that there is a connection there in terms of the right-wing ecosystem.
And of course, Sam Harris has an element of conspirituality in his own worldview because he has this meditation sideline, as it were.
Positivity, or whatever it is he calls it.
Semi-spiritual.
Well, yeah, so I'm not sure about, I'm not really sure what atheism means when, I mean, technically it means rejecting a belief in the supernatural,
But I remember that my ears perked up quite a bit when he released that pitch for the meditation app where he linked the capacity to learn to meditate with Awakening from things like your racial identity, right?
Like if you could, you know, if you could really understand your mind clearly, if you could understand consciousness in some sort of pristine way, you would be insane to identify as black or white anymore.
And, I mean, not only Did it sort of serve a very reactionary politics, but it also indicated that there's something charismatic going on with his willingness to propose an internal process that would have some kind of very strong political and then interpersonal effect.
And that sounds like a religious proposition to me, right?
That if you have a kind of internal realization or experience that it would change you fundamentally in ways that would alter your relationships in the world.
That sounds, yeah, that sounds, I don't know, it doesn't sound like an atheistic position or affect to me.
It sounds like a faith position.
And an awful lot of the pronouncements of reactionaries, even the most seemingly materialist reactions, seem like faith positions.
And certainly this, I mean, one of the things that Tim Poole always says is that he's against identitarianism and his The logic there is that he's saying, you know, I'm against every form of political identification and organization along lines of identity.
And Sam Harris says something similar about the far left and the far right.
You know, I'm equally opposed to both because they both pose as centrists.
But of course, it's In its inner meaning and its inner intent, it's a deeply reactionary viewpoint because it equates the two things.
It equates the left and the right as if they have exactly the same meaning.
And in practice, it ends up portraying the left as a far greater threat.
And, you know, Sam Harris is very anti-woke, Tim Poole's very anti-woke, and that crosses over into perhaps to try to draw things together to get near to the end.
This is one of your recent episodes about Teal Swan has been about her open embrace of a discourse of anti-wokeness.
Yeah, so a little bit late to the game, Teal Swan released a video called Wokeism and Today's Woke Society.
And, you know, she's not the first conspirituality influencer who has Gone into or pivoted into anti-woke discourse, and I'm sure she won't be the last.
She's come to it a little bit slowly, I think, because she has such a lucrative juggernaut that she doesn't really have to respond to the news cycle.
But I think the advantage in her turning towards so-called wokeism as the next source of moral panickery, it secularizes her message while also creating a certain amount of continuity with where she's coming from in late satanic panic rhetoric.
So in trying to put these things together,
You know, tracing the lines, I came up with a couple of propositions, which is that, you know, when we go back to 1980 and the release of Michelle Remembers by Lawrence Pazder and his almost or soon-to-be wife... His victim!
Yeah, I mean, boy, it's hard because, you know, there are these videos of them together on national TV through to the mid 80s, in which she's appearing next to him, you know, in their Victoria home, talking to Valerie Pringle on the CBC.
And, you know, they're in lockstep with each other.
They're two peas in a pod, it seems.
And yet she is considerably younger than he is.
He left his family to be with her as his client.
She left her husband.
And the entire book was just sort of vomited out of this hypnotic trance that he put her in.
And maybe it was a very suggestible trance as well, because he had all kinds of prior interests in Satanism and demonism from his time in West Africa in the 1960s.
As part of a Catholic mission, by the way.
So, if we go right back to that sort of watershed event, we have a reactionary sort of cultural spasm that the book promulgates that uses the fiction of the presence of Satan to really necessitate the return of a divine solution in a kind of post-Cold War?
What happens when Russia is not really the problem anymore?
Who will the evil force in the world be?
Well, It's going to be Satan.
And Satan will provide something that the Soviet Union actually had previously provided, which is, you know, an organized, otherworldly, ungodly violence.
And that image of satanic organization into, you know, cultic actions.
It really, as we said before, it obscured the much more mundane and tragic reality that most child abuse occurs at home and is perpetrated by people who are, you know, known and harder to describe as monsters.
Harder to isolate and to throw away, harder to dispose of.
But of course, if they're implicated in satanic rituals, then you don't really have to interrogate who they are or why they're part of your community.
And so those threads are there.
There is the fact that the satanic panic was anti-liberal.
It was anti-secular.
It was specifically religious and specifically Catholic, especially in Pazdur's case.
He was a trained psychiatrist who really abdicated his standard of care and maybe even his license requirements in order to promulgate this vision of spiritual renewal in the world through overcoming satanic ritual abuse.
It had nothing to do with the practice of psychiatry.
And in fact, he spent a lot of time talking about how inadequate the scientific method was for resolving the metaphysical traumas and memories that his wife had.
Then also, the satanic panic was counter-revolutionary in the sense that it created these really Fantastical causes for the everyday cruelties of capitalism.
And it tried to, I think, close the door on the late 1960s and movements that would try to locate Suffering in the structures of late capitalism, in the history of the oppression of, you know, black and queer people.
Because what the satanic panic actually did was it said, no, it's not structures that are the problem.
It's not Western imperialism.
It's not the CIA.
It's not the foreign wars that we continue to fight and fund.
It's actually Satan.
It's not overconsumption.
It's not excess wealth.
The problem is Satan.
And so the answer to that is spiritual practice.
It's not mutual aid.
It's not solidarity.
It's not labor organizing.
The solution to the satanic panic is spiritual practice.
And that was the only solution that was actually found, because all of the legal avenues failed.
There were 12,000 allegations and criminal cases brought against people for satanic ritual abuse, and not a single one of them turned up any forensic evidence.
It's incredible, actually.
Then there's this way in which the satanic panic was politically ambivalent.
You know, it claimed to, or portended to, believe the women by taking the stories of survivors at face value.
And so it brought with it a kind of feminism, or at least a kind of feminist veneer.
It also seemed to be progressive in the sense that it was very interested in saving the vulnerable, especially children.
And so it made for these strange alliances between, you know, women psychotherapists, mainly feminists, for the most part, or self-considered feminists, and then also Christian fundamentalists who You know, together they all assumed that Satan was hard at work in torturing these children.
And so all of this sounds very familiar.
All of these themes appear in the discourse of Matt Walsh.
All of these themes appear in, you know, the discourse of Jordan Peterson.
And yeah, so there's a straight line to be drawn from Teal Swan's satanic panic fetishes and the politics of anti-wokeness.
And I was happy to make those connections and also very sad because there's a kind of eternal return going on.
And yeah, we'll see where it goes.
I'm not quite sure how far she's going to ride it, but other people in our demographic are sure to follow.
Yeah, I think it's that selling the brand thing again, isn't it?
She's developing her brand and trying to join in with what is proving to be a very profitable business model for a great many people in the online ecosystem.
The thing about Teal Swan turning anti-woke is that it's also a reassertion of the self-project as the route to salvation, because Her very poor understanding of whatever wokeness means, which she never really defines.
I think it hints at the understanding that there is a critique of structural inequality inherent in things like critical race theory or intersectional feminism.
And the thing is, is that the problems, when they're framed that way, are actually sticky.
They actually require dirty hands.
They actually require organizational work.
And the spiritual influencer is not- Shock horror, they might actually at some point require some redistribution of wealth.
Well, there's that, but I mean, like, The thing about the self-project is that it's fucking easy.
It's not just that it's undefined.
It's that you're doing it if you say you're doing it.
There's no validation, there's no measurement, there's no metrics for whether or not you're accomplishing your self-project.
But if people can sell you on programs to enhance your self-project activities, and they convince you that that's what needs to happen, and they convince you that You know, all of the talk that the SJWs are foisting on you through social media is somehow distracting you from your spiritual purpose.
You have reasserted the self-project as the center of human salvation.
And the thing is, it's easier.
It's easier to sell.
It's easier to do.
It doesn't require anything, but the sort of individual click and purchase of the meditation program or the hoodie with the mandala on it or something like that.
So I think there's something tragic about that that speaks to also the kind of Laziness, I think, of people who spend way too much time in the self-help arena.
But also not just laziness, it's lack of resources.
Because I think the more time you spend in the self-project, the less time you spend developing interpersonal and organizational skills that would actually connect you to a larger mutual aid project.
Yes, indeed.
There's so much in what you've just been saying, both then and before, that I absolutely agree with, and I think is very wise and very useful for an analysis of all these things.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
This has been a really enjoyable, really fascinating conversation.
Yeah, likewise, Jack.
I've learned a lot.
I learn a lot from you, and really happy to talk.
And thanks for listening.
Thank you.
Can you tell the listeners where they can find you online?
Sure.
Yeah.
So it's the Conspiratuality Podcast, which is on any podcast player.
I'm on Twitter under my name at Matthew Remsky.
I think that you can find us on Patreon as well at slash Conspiratuality.
And I think that's enough.
I think that's good.
Oh, we've got a book coming out on June 13th.
It's called Conspiratuality, How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat.
And it was a massive effort, I have to say.
I'm very proud of the three of us that we got through it.
I'm pretty excited for it to come out.
We bring receipts.
There's, I think, 700 plus end notes or something like that.
And yeah, so we're looking forward to that.
And we'll make sure you get a copy, Jack.
Oh, thank you very much.
I was just about to go and pre-order one, actually.
So if I'm getting a free one, I'll hang fire.
Thank you.
Yeah, and seriously, listeners, if you're not already a listener to the Conspiratuality Podcast, I cannot recommend it strongly enough.
It is one of the best shows on the internet, in my opinion.
Revelatory, interesting, three great, thoughtful hosts.
Yeah, absolutely check that one out if you haven't already.
Thank you, Jack.
Thank you very much.
No, thank you.
And thank you for listening, listeners.
What's coming up?
Daniel, as I say, is working on a new episode where he and I will be talking together about something more in our usual wheelhouse, so that should be coming fairly soon.
We're going to be recording another episode with our friend Ina Mohamed-Smith at the Polite Conversations podcast fairly soon.
I'm not sure if that'll be mainline or whether it'll be on her Patreon, but either way, So look forward to that.
You can check out our Patreon.
You can check out our Twitter.
You know where to find us, listeners.
And yeah, thank you again, Matthew.
It's been great, and we'll wind it up there.
Cheers.
Cheers.
Thank you, Jack.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
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