Conspirituality: Conspiracy + New Age Spirituality
Brad is joined by Julian Walker and Matthew Remski, two of the hosts of the Conspirituality podcast and co-authors of the new book, Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Public Health Threat.
Emma Hulbert provided research assistance for this episode.
https://www.powells.com/book/conspirituality-9781541702981/1-2
Each of the three authors has witnessed firsthand the use of fear-based political agendas to manipulate the human desire for spiritual fulfillment. They throw a spotlight on the telltale signs of cult dynamics and expose how influencers have stoked suspicion of public health initiatives. And they show how charlatans and pseudo-doctors encourage their followers to oppose mainstream advice as a form of spiritual quest.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, and today I have a long-awaited interview, something that I've been preparing for, been anticipating, and been very excited about, and that is with two of the hosts of the very popular And a very important podcast, Conspiratuality, and those hosts are also the authors or co-authors of a new book called Conspiratuality, How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat.
So I want to welcome Matthew Remsky and Julian Walker to Straight White American Jesus.
Great to have you.
Thanks for being here.
Thank you, Bradley.
Thank you.
It's really a pleasure.
Yeah, thank you.
So tons of questions.
I have a document in front of me that is quite long.
We're not going to get to all of them, but you all work on this idea of conspirituality.
And I think there's people listening who are fans of yours.
They already know what y'all do and the beat you cover.
I think there's others who are meeting you for the first time.
So I want to define conspirituality.
I want to tell people what that is.
It really is a kind of a mixture or conjunction of conspiracy theories and wellness or new age spirituality leading to some pretty deleterious effects on individuals and on our public square.
But before we do that, let's talk about the two of you and your stories.
What made you into the authors of a book about conspirituality and the hosts of your podcast.
So, Julian, can we start with you?
How did your road lead us here?
Sure.
Yeah.
So, you know, I actually came to the United States from South Africa when I was 19 years old, fleeing the apartheid draft, coming to the land of the free and the home of the brave, where I believe the Woodstock nation would have rendered a complete transformation into, you know, a country of light and love and democratic freedom and tolerance.
And that year I arrived and the Iraq invasion happened and I had some of the kinds of rude awakenings that everyone else who lived here was already familiar with.
And so I ended up staying.
I came here to go to music school.
And as part of my journey through music school, I realized that yoga really helps me with the difficulties of hunching over a music stand for many hours every day.
And over time, I found that teaching yoga was a great way to supplement the non-existing income from being a starving musician.
and And I just, I got very ensconced in the yoga and new age and wellness scene for a good 20, 30 years in one way or another.
And when the pandemic hit, I started to notice, you know, there's a lot of things going on on my social media timeline that I did not expect.
But then that made sense to me in a weird way because of the type of critique I had developed about New Age spirituality over the years.
And that critique was developed in part through my association with Matthew.
And in part through my association with Derek, largely through online writing and conversation.
And we, you know, we just took that conversation to the next level and it turned into the podcast and the podcast turned into the book.
That's fantastic.
And you're based in L.A., which I think is at least one of the world's, perhaps, centers for New Age spirituality, wellness, culture, and so on.
So you're right there in the thick of it all.
Matthew, let's talk about you.
You have a fascinating story, and one with many twists and turns.
So how did you arrive at this moment?
Sorry.
That's all right.
Like Julian, I left home fairly early as well before finishing high school under a lot of stress.
It wasn't political stress.
And after trying to make it as a novelist for a few years, I met and married an older woman who got me into Tibetan Buddhism.
And through that, we fell in with a guy named Michael Roach.
And I will not forget the first meeting because He was teaching a basic sort of intro to Buddhist renunciation.
And he said, you know, the central or first question that we ask is, or that we realize is that, you know, you are going to die.
Now, what are you going to do about it?
And I felt electrified by some kind of existential challenge at that moment.
And he turned out to be, you know, a charismatic whirlwind and a bit of a nightmare.
He was both a legitimate monk In the lineage of the Dalai Lama, he was also illegitimate in a lot of ways.
But after three very culty years with him, it fell apart, and then my wife and I wound up in another group, this one in Wisconsin, and it was centered around A Course in Miracles.
Another three years there, and then I was out in the gig economy, I think similarly like Julian, finding myself at the crossroads of this time where the yoga industry is taking off And neoliberalism is also just becoming the political norm.
I studied hard.
I opened studios.
I ran a festival.
I learned and practiced popular commercial forms of Ayurveda and even, I hesitate to say, Vedic astrology.
And I also had a number of disillusionment events that were centered around medical crises and that showed me how full of shit I was about my knowledge of the body and how, I don't know, how proud I was about just the world in general, how vulnerable I how proud I was about just the world in general, how And that got me up to about 2016, which is when I started to get back into writing more professionally.
And from there, the proximal cause of getting into the podcast was spending about four years doing investigative journalism on cults.
So I wrote a book about how the founder of Ashtanga Yoga, Pattabhi Joyce, had been aided and abetted by his senior devotees as he sexually assaulted his students on a daily basis for 40 years.
I wrote features on similar crimes and themes in Shambhala Buddhism and Sivananda Yoga.
And looking back on that, it's kind of funny to think that I was doing this at the same time that QAnon was starting to kick into high gear.
And in some ways it was beneficial because it gave me a good foundation in cult literature and studies.
And in other ways, you know, this training in brick-and-mortar cults really seemed to be insufficient to deal with this new thing that we were looking at.
But I think it gave me some preparation once the pandemic hit.
That's a phrase I'm not going to forget.
Brick-and-mortar cults.
That's incredible.
Yeah.
Incredible.
Now envisioning a Saturday Night Live skit where there's folks who are lamenting the demise of the brick-and-mortar cult at the hands of the online versions.
Yeah, exactly.
We need to return to artisanal cults.
Mom and pop shop.
What happened to the neighborhood cult?
Okay, all right, I'm done.
So fantastic to hear about your stories.
I think one of the things that resonates me deeply with y'all is that on our show, Dan and I are really former insiders who now provide this former insider lens, but also this scholarly lens.
And I really feel like the three of you do that as well.
You all have your various experiences in these communities, and yet now you can provide this more Studied, scholarly, academic, journalistic, however you want to describe it, approach to these things.
So let's get into some definitions.
Let's talk about what conspirituality is.
I'm going to do something that a lot of writers hate, and you may hate too, but hopefully it's not too bad.
I'm going to read a sentence from your book, and then I want you to sort of just respond and fill in some things about the definition.
So, Julian, I'll come to you first.
Page 8.
In its current form, we see it, conspirituality, as an online religion that fuses two faith claims.
The world is possessed by evil forces, and those who see this clearly are called to foster in themselves and others a new spiritual paradigm.
And I recognize that not all forms of conspirituality may be online, and that this quote may sort of leave some of that out, but nonetheless, we have these two things.
The world is possessed by evil forces, and those who see clearly are called to foster a new spiritual paradigm.
Yeah, so essentially, when we started to become aware that there already was this body of work that had coined this term, conspirituality, going back to Charlotte Ward and David Forrest in 2011, what we found was that they were looking at this as an immersion phenomenon on the internet, in which this overlapping kind of epistemology and worldview
Existed between the darker, more paranoid, more typically male coded realm of the conspiracy theorist and the more typically feminine coded light and love.
Everything is unfolding in accordance with the divine plan of the new age and that they were already tracking back then.
This has interesting counterintuitive overlaps and those overlaps are summed up by these three statements.
Nothing is as it seems.
Everything is connected and everything happens for a reason or nothing happens by accident.
And so you can see how, if you look at that through the lens of a very positive take, an optimistic take on the universe, well, yeah, nothing is as it seems.
So the bad stuff is not really so bad.
It's all for the highest good.
God has a plan, would be the more traditional way of saying it, right?
Everything is connected.
You are not alone.
You are not lost in a sea of meaninglessness.
Your life has purpose and you are woven into the tapestry of the universe.
And there are no accidents.
Just go with it.
Go with the flow.
But from a more paranoid point of view, No, don't try it.
These are not coincidences.
Someone is behind this and nothing is as it seems.
It's actually much darker and there are people behind the curtain pulling the strings.
So we just started to say, okay, this is a very accurate insight and it fits with what we're observing.
Let's go deeper and study how it's unfolding right now.
Anything to add to that, Matthew?
Yeah.
Yeah, if I can add that Julian pinged that Ward and Voas describe a kind of gendered binary within the discourse, and I think that holds true to a certain extent, although there's a lot of crossover and we can't generalize too much.
But there's this other binary at play, which is that they say, and we can confirm, that for the person who's really invested in the paranoid worldview of conspiracy theories, the New Age spirituality provides a kind of relief.
Conversely, for the person who has spent their life in New Age reverie, the political conspiracy theories gives them something to do in the world.
It breaks the boredom of, you know, endless smoothies, for example.
And what really strikes me most about the phenomenon is that the two ideas that, you know, as we say, the world is possessed by evil forces and those who see this clearly are called to foster in themselves and others a new spiritual paradigm, they're collapsed.
Like, they happen at the same time.
Like, you are blessed, you have an opportunity because you've intuited how bad or illusory or satanic things are.
And that implies that you actually need the world to be a horrible, condemnable place for your spirituality to work, or to be activated.
I feel like there should be a name for that, like, I don't know, Spiritual Munchausens by Proxy or something like that.
Like, you have to poison the world with your vision in order to save it.
So yeah, I just find it fascinating.
It's also, I think, particularly relevant that we're talking to you today, Brad, because it also is a new iteration I would offer of apocalypticism in which there is A golden age to come in which everything will be light and love in the New Age parlance.
But first we have to get through this cataclysmic prophecy and we have to wake up to how bad everything is so we can manifest the reality that we truly want, which is going to be 5D awakening and ascension and contact with the aliens and all the rest of it.
It's already here though.
It's already here.
Well, yeah, at the time of recording yesterday, it seems the U.S.
government confirmed the existence of alien life forms.
Anyway, another podcast.
There's just so much depth here and so much insight.
One of the things that really gets me, just as somebody who studies the religious right and Christian nationalism and comes from that world, is that This world resonates so deeply.
As you say, Julian, there is an apocalypticism here that feels very similar to what I'm used to.
There's also a sense of a divine plan and nothing happens on accident.
That's, of course, part of the world I come from, too.
The thing, however, that I think is different is this binary between, in some sense, the alienation from a world that has gone awry, That's familiar, but then there's also that love and light and the invitation into a world of joy and healing and wholeness that is, I think, coded differently.
Now, you'll get that in the Christian nationalist universe, but it's, of course, just coded differently in the kinds of communities and movements that you're talking about, and the boredom of endless smoothies.
If you all write a sequel to this book, I hope the title is The Boredom of Endless Smoothies, because that is just incredible stuff.
Now, on page 50, you point out something that I think is just at least worth bringing up for a moment here, and that is that the conspiracy worldview does have legitimate concerns.
It does have pro-social impulses.
And I think this is true of many of the people that I cover as well, that it's not that they woke up one day and said, I want to be somebody who follows a conspiracy theorist who becomes duped by a QAnon influencer and ends up storming the Capitol because I just want to be I want to be somebody who follows a conspiracy theorist who becomes duped There are people who want the world to be better.
They do have concerns.
Page 50, if we do not acknowledge the things conspiritualists get right, how much credibility will we have when it comes to pointing out what they get wrong?
So just as an attempt to think ourselves into some of these communities and individuals, what are some of those concerns that seem legitimate to you, even if they are often manifested and executed in ways that are hurtful and conspiratorial?
Matthew, do you want to start?
Yeah, I want to thank you for the question, because I think the most important chapter of our book, in my opinion, is called Conspiritualists Are Not Wrong.
And I'm proud of it because it does get into this territory of how honest we can be about how basic systems in society are corrupt or dysfunctional and, moreover, about how terrible people get away with terrible behavior all the time.
We hear endless stories from listeners and interview subjects who describe descending down the rabbit hole of what's really a kind of institutional distrust.
And that that begins with something like a cancer diagnosis, where the person feels ignored or brushed off or bankrupted by their medical bills.
Women will describe the well-known experience of not having their pain taken seriously or not feeling as though they consented to procedures during childbirth at this time that's meant to be sacred and profound.
And then there are the issues of accountability and abuse.
You know, they, conspiritualists are not wrong that Epstein probably abused girls in order to manipulate political and financial power.
They're not wrong that the Catholic Church is basically a crime cartel and part of it that is involved in shuffling abusive priests around and limiting liability.
They're not wrong that surveillance capitalism monetizes, you know, identities, and all of our activities, and bloats the bank accounts of its leaders.
So they have a very accurate cynicism about the realities of late stage capitalism.
They're just not wrong about any of that.
And the question is, what solutions are they going to harvest from a broken internet?
Julian, what would you add to that?
That's very comprehensive.
I mean, I would just say they are cynical and critical about
Neoliberalism, late-stage capitalism, and the world that we find ourselves in today, especially with regard to big tech, without recognizing that they are very much a product of all of that and that the solutions they're coming up with, even though they're not wrong about the problems, the solutions don't actually contain accurate analysis and prescription.
So it's a tragic situation.
My name is Peter, and I'm a prophet.
In the new novel, American Prophet.
I was the one who dreamed about the natural disaster just before it happened.
Oh, and the pandemic.
And that crazy election.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not bragging.
It's not like I asked for the job.
Actually, no one would ask for this job.
At least half the people will hate whatever I say, and almost everyone thinks I'm a little crazy.
Getting a date is next to impossible.
I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
But the job isn't all that bad.
I've gotten to see the country, and meet some really interesting people, and hopefully do some good along the way.
You can find my story on Amazon, Audible, or iTunes.
Just look for American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
That's American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
This is another one of the resonances I feel between the folks that you study and analyze and my world, because there are so many folks who, again, recognize the evils of the world.
They recognize the brokenness of systems.
They recognize the abuse that it levels upon certain people, and they're looking for answers.
And I think one of the things that I found in your work and I find in my own is that
People are facing an onslaught of uncertainty and they get to a breaking point where enough uncertainty means they're willing to engage in epistemologies and in authority structures that often are not going to do anything to actually help with that abuse, those crises, et cetera, and are actually going to make them worse, but they get there because of this feeling of bewilderment in a world that in some ways doesn't make sense.
In the book, you all provide just example after example of conspirituality, conspiritualists, and people that I think many will have heard of.
I mean, we are going to get to QAnon.
I do want to talk about Joe Rogan, so if you're listening and you're kind of wondering about maybe people that you heard of or that your uncle brings up at a barbecue or something, there you go.
But I want to bring up some folks that just stand out as examples of this that I know are really important and that many folks listening may not be aware of.
So, I'm just going to say a name.
I have some notes here and things that I kind of want to get to, but I'm going to say a name and let y'all just fill us in on who they are and how they fit into the category of a conspiritualist and what they meant or do mean as a leader As a conspiracy theorist, as perhaps an abuser, as perhaps an influencer, whatever it may be.
So, I'll start here.
Teal Swan.
I say Teal Swan, you say, what do you say?
Julian?
I say Teal Swan is the bridge between classic satanic panic going back to, say, the late 80s, early 90s, and what we see in terms of QAnon forming its strange alliance with the new age.
From the time of the pandemic onwards, Teal Swan is an incredibly photogenic, eloquent, intelligent influencer and self-styled spiritual teacher from a very young age who used a backstory about horrific satanic abuse that she supposedly endured as a child.
To create her legitimacy as someone who had deep spiritual influence and deep spiritual insight and could help people who she found online through very effectively hacking algorithms who were suffering the effects of trauma and emotional pain.
I would add that she really embodies the very collapse between the conspiratorial worldview and the enlightened perspective in the fact that her survivorship of satanic ritual abuse is her education, it's her degree, it's her credibility.
Those two things are intrinsic.
You know, we're going to say that she's a supposed survivor of satanic ritual abuse, but a likely survivor of run-of-the-mill child sexual abuse committed by a family friend.
And there's all kinds of evidence for it.
Jennings Brown did a fantastic podcast called The Gateway that we drew on heavily.
She was described by her scientists turned New Agey parents as being a highly sensitive person or child, which I think is coding for neurodivergent.
She starts doing spiritual talks and readings in her early 20s.
And as Julian mentions, she built an online empire getting in at the ground floor years and years ago with a pretty diverse portfolio where, you know, she would not only give her spiritual teachings, but she would also give kind of like Kohl's notes or what's the American version of CliffsNotes.
CliffsNotes of sort of basic psychotherapeutic theory, right?
Like this is what gaslighting is.
And then she would sort of plagiarize something and comment on it.
This is what disorganized attachment is.
So there's also a pseudo-academic angle to her educational aspect.
And yeah, she's been incredibly influential in figuring out how to zero in on and monetize the notion of trauma in modern online life.
And I would just add to that that the claim, when we say supposed, and when I say she's sort of the bridge between satanic panic classic and QAnon, the main piece of data there is that we found that she did therapy with Barbara Snow, who is one of the major figures in the satanic panic interface between the legal system and a now completely discredited approach to recovered memory psychotherapy.
So, if folks are listening at home, many of them will be familiar with the Satanic Panic of the 80s and 90s.
And friends, if you're listening and you need background on that, go to our website and look for my interview with Megan Goodwin, who wrote a book called Abusing Religion and covers this at length.
But the satanic panic really is this panic in the 80s and 90s about the supposed abuse at the hands of satanic communities across the country.
We could talk about the West Memphis Three.
We could talk about other events that point to this.
If you have ever heard jokes about listening to cassette tapes, you know, in reverse and hearing Satan worship, this is where that comes from.
There were congressional hearings.
There were concerns that if you dropped your kids off at daycare, they were going to be participating in satanic rituals.
So I guess what I'm hearing from the two of you is that Teal Swan is somebody who undergoes, it appears, some form of abuse, attends and is treated in therapy by Barbara Snow.
And eventually the story becomes, whether this is confirmed or not, and as you all are explaining, it's supposed the abuse becomes rendered as satanic abuse.
And then this leads to, as you're saying, a kind of spiritual approach to healing.
And that is what would mean that Teal Swan is a conspiracist and a spirituality figure, meaning that Teal Swan is a conspiritualist.
Is that right?
I mean, fill in the blanks for me there.
What did I miss or what's important to get right?
Well, I think that when Julian correctly pegs her as a bridge to the satanic panic, we have to remember that the entire movement kicks off with the publication of a book called Michelle Remembers, which was an account from hypnotically recorded therapy sessions conducted by Dr. Larry Pazder on his client at the time, Michelle Smith.
And she supposedly Remembered in great detail, vision after vision, memory after memory of being five years old and being subjected to the most horrific kinds of abuse in a satanic cult in the 1950s in the very bucolic Canadian town of Victoria, British Columbia.
Now, What we should remember and what we tried to outline in a very long series of episodes about this entire sort of connection called the Swan Song series, Pazder was a devout Catholic psychiatrist who, like Father Damien in The Exorcist, is going through a professional crisis.
In which he realizes that his client, with whom he's spending increasing amounts of time daily, can only really be cured of her history through a Catholic religious framework that he not only elicits from her, but then she also senses that he needs and she begins to feed to him as well.
Now, there's zero evidence for the claims that she makes about her history.
That doesn't matter.
You know, the book is debunked almost from the go by journalists trying to figure out whether she's saying anything that makes sense.
But still, they got a $250,000 advance for the book, and they became celebrities who no one investigated.
And they ended up creating this training circuit for therapists and law enforcement officials as a married couple, because that also happened as well.
The purpose of that little background is to suggest that a main thrust in all of satanic panic history and its legacy down to the present day is that there are no secular solutions to the world.
There are no social programs.
There are no reforms that people can make of, you know, institutions that will do any good.
What has to happen is what happened at the end of Michelle Remembers, which is that the Virgin Mary herself comes down and blesses Michelle with a redemptive vision of how she survived this thing and now she'll exist.
She'll continue to live and act as a kind of cautionary tale for the reality of Satan in the world.
So yeah, it's an extremely important part of the present day context.
Yeah.
So not only is there has to be a religious solution to this, not a merely psychological one, but the cause of these kinds of terrible events is the absence of God in the world, the ascendancy of What I would add specifically to your question, Brad, is that When we say Teal Swan is a good spiritualist, it's not just because of all of this supernatural confabulation and backstory and becoming.
It's almost like an initiatory story that gives some gravitas to the claim of being a spiritual teacher.
I have made it through the gates of hell and so therefore I really have downloaded the wisdom.
But even more than that, the reason why she's in the book Is that then she pivots when COVID starts.
And in the first week, like several of the people we cover, like Kelly Brogan and Sarah Gee, like Mickey Willis, there's a whole list of them that in the first week, they are ready to go with their interpretation of what COVID-19 really is.
And it's not what the mainstream media is telling you.
And it's the fear that is the real virus.
And this is all an attempt to take away your spiritual sovereignty.
And we're off to the races.
Getting clicks and views and collaborating with one another and starting to generate a ton of money early on and just riding that wave all the way through the pandemic.
And it's so rich that their premise was that COVID was planned because what was really planned, what was really stored up, what was in the hopper already to go was their particular story that they would apply to a public health disaster, right?
There was nothing that they said throughout the pandemic that they hadn't said a thousand times before.
It's just that the urgency was ramped up.
And the urgency was really about, and I think this is where it overlaps with your work, Bradley, is that it's the urgency of the absence of God.
And I wanted to ask you, actually, about that, because what the front of Michelle remembers It opens with a statement, a famous statement from Pope Paul VI in 1972, where he says, evil is an effective agent, a living spiritual being perverted and perverting a terrible reality.
One of the greatest needs is defense from the evil, which is called the devil.
The question of the devil and the influence he can exert on individual persons, as well as on communities, whole societies or events is very important.
It should be studied again.
And so, We really sort of, or I really as an ex-Catholic, really zeroed in on this and I thought, oh wow, the Catholic Church was losing, and other denominations, were losing a kind of epistemological hold on the culture.
And so they needed to do something, they had to do something.
Does that resonate with you?
It does very much.
So I think one of the things that really sticks out here is that whether it's the COVID pandemic, whether it is changing social dynamics of the late 1970s, early 1980s, when there's uncertainty, when there is a disruption to the social fabric, people are rife for exploitation because they're unsure.
I mean, look, we were all there in the pandemic.
What do we do?
Can I go to the grocery store?
Is it safe?
Is it not safe?
Can I go to the park with my kid?
All of those questions in the very beginnings of the pandemic were just open to all of us.
And I think what I would call spiritual warfare motifs, these ideas that there are evil forces in the world, but you are needed to combat them.
So in my world, in the Christian Nationalist world, it's about being a godly soldier, a Christian soldier willing to stand up to Satan's army.
In the ways that I see in your work, that's rendered differently, but it's similar in the sense that you're invited to join in a battle for good that will repair yourself and the entire universe.
And that's why a secular answer is never going to be good enough.
And it's never offered because what you need is not programs that will improve people's lives or systemic change that will make things on the whole more healthy, more accessible, more, you know, what you need is a silver more accessible, more, you know, what you need is a silver bullet, It's always a silver bullet.
It's like, I need perfect healing.
I need an absolute closure.
I need 100% recovery from my wound, from the evil.
And I think that's what is so similar to me when I think about these things is you're invited into a war or a battle It's spiritual or divine in nature.
And the end result is not an improved social square where more people have access to healthcare and education, where less children are... No, no, forget it.
That's why none of this stuff is left trending.
It's not actually about...
And it's like, even though there may be, in our case, a light and love messaging, it's not for everyone.
It's for the chosen few.
And there's another point of fantastic intersection, and I want to say it right here, if you don't mind, just because of the connections that you're drawing and the distinctions that you're making, because yes,
Amongst the New Agers, the prophecy of the Great Awakening that was going to mean the planet entered into 5D consciousness and that we finally realized alien disclosure and, you know, that everything was now going to be radically changed for the awakened ones.
That had a quality of like, um, energetic, uh, sort of gauzy.
We're just, we're, we're lightworkers.
And then I forget the exact date, but it's, it's, it's about a week before the insurrection.
One of the channelers we follow, whose name is Lori Ladd, who's frequently referenced by Christiane Northrup, who's this massive old health influencer.
Issued a transmission from the Galactic Federation.
Hey guys, I was just lying on the floor and they started talking to me and here's what they said.
I just need to tell you into my Instagram feed.
And this was essentially a call to New Age Holy War.
This was, you're lightworkers and you may have judgments about certain forms of action in the world, but we can no longer be above the battlefield.
We have to enter in, we have to Hold hands and rush forward to defeat the cabal.
And that was an incredible intersection where now it's like, okay, the clothing is different.
You may have a crystal necklace around your neck and you may not be referencing the blood of Christ, but this is holy war of the exact same variety, just in different language.
Yes, and we can say that that particular transmission was published on December 22nd, and when we went back through the online chatter, we could see that it was around that day that the initial planning chatter around January 6th bumped up to a new level.
And so we also have the confounding problem of Lori Ladd probably being doom scrolling on Telegram, getting excited about what she's reading and being audience captured in a way or red pilled by the additional urgency and just passing it on.
Because what is channeling actually, if it's part of it doesn't involve scrolling through Telegram, like she's receiving data and this is what it means to her.
But it's also translating.
Well, so I was going to do this later, but I think it's probably time now because what you're So here you are talking about essentially a call to the warriors of light to become warriors of violence.
The title I now have in my head is from smoothies to swords.
And so, you know, it sounds like the transmission was put down your smoothie.
And get your sword, it's time for battle.
And I guess that leads us to QAnon, because now I'm thinking about the QAnon shaman.
So here's the QAnon shaman who seems to represent the confluence of so many traditions, the appropriation of so many traditions, including Native American traditions.
Somebody who's heavily influenced by QAnon, who at times is using Christian language.
So let's just talk about QAnon and how it fits into this universe.
It's obviously something that takes off During the pandemic, it's something that takes off when people are feeling most vulnerable, unsure of the world and how it works.
If this is the thing that's on people's minds, if this is the contemporary example par excellence, how does QAnon fit into the conspirituality category?
I would say that after QAnon got beyond its purely political retribution phase, intermingled with just regular 4chan shitposting and LARPing, and when, you know, middle class alternative health wellness practitioners started picking up bits and pieces of it that were integratable into their content and started touting the Great Awakening,
It began to function as the kind of endpoint of conspirituality commitments.
So we have people like Sayer G, the founder of GreenMedInfo and the former husband of Kelly Brogan.
We have Christiane Northrup that Julian just referenced.
We have life coaches like Bernard Gunther.
These people are directly referencing QAnon on social media.
And then there's a raft of wellness people that we follow who begin obsessing over hashtag save the children.
But conspirituality also maintains a kind of socially acceptable distance from the pure fever dream because it already has a market to preserve.
It has an economy that it has to keep running.
So Bobby Kennedy can He can stand shoulder to shoulder with the Querdecan group in Berlin while he shouts about vaccines, or he can stand on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and shout, they're coming for your children, which is a super QAnon statement, but then he can roll back into his children's health defense talking points.
So QAnon ends up functioning as really inflammatory clickbait for the better monetized conspirituality set.
And that makes people like Northrup safe from getting too much deep platforming trouble because as soon as she goes right up to the edge and starts talking on other channels or on Telegram or on Rumble about fantasies about shooting vaccinating doctors in the back of the head, she can modulate her speech on Facebook and make sure she's just talking about turmeric.
It's an amazing pivot from Attacking doctors, too, just talking about turmeric.
But, you know, Julian, can I ask you about another aspect of this that I think is quite relevant, especially here in the United States, as we think about 2024?
2024. Page 67.
Conspirituality draws heavily on old fascist anxieties about sexual potency and deviancy.
Conspiritualists in general are obsessed with fertility and virility on a proprietary spectrum.
As we think about the future of this country, at least, many of us are worried about the F word, fascism.
And, And so I'm wondering if you could help us understand the fascist tendencies in this domain.
Yeah, you know, this is an area where Matthew has done a ton of the research and the heavy lifting in terms of what we talk about in the book.
I'll just say here to sort of tee him up that the anxiety around the purity of the blood The anxiety around living naturally and not being out of harmony with the earth and with the true destiny of your race of people and with the ways of being that keep you in touch with the wisdom of the Spirit.
All of that has this overlapping, rhyming kind of resonance with Golden Age fantasies about a kind of fascist past in which everything was simpler and cleaner and was working better for the chosen people.
And without necessarily intending consciously to resurrect or dabble in that energy, shall we say, the yoga new age wellness demographic Yeah, I would say that one of the most contentious questions that we ask is, you know, did Nazis really love yoga?
And therefore, if you love yoga today, are you, you know, stretching out your inner Nazi or something like that?
And I think the complex truth of it is that while the timeline is filled with smoothies, intermittent fasting, juice cleanses, yoga postures that cleanse the liver, you know, advertisements for purified water and charcoal, whatever, and parasite cleanses, sauna detoxes, There's this fascination with purity and an obsession with pollution, even on a psychological level.
So people want to release negative vibrations, they want to realign their chakras.
Unknown to most practitioners who really just want to relieve themselves of the garbage of the neoliberal landscape, Is that all of these fascinations carry the echo of these very old anxieties that, you know, everybody who knows anything about ancient religions and purification rituals are familiar with.
But there's also a direct thread from this current iteration back to the physical culture ideals of the early 20th century.
Where we have nationalistic movements driven by a deep sense of anxiety about the fate of the white middle classes of Europe, all happening at the tail end of colonialism, where northward immigration is beginning to open up.
And there's a lot of white guys who are concerned that they're going to be replaced by brown people who are more vital because they are still working in the fields and whatever.
And that particular anxiety becomes central to the message of early physical culturists like Eugene Sandow and Bernard McFadden, who in this bizarre kind of pizza effect scenario are primary influencers of the rejuvenation of yoga or postural yoga in modern India.
But these guys were obsessed with what they believed was a coming white racial suicide.
They complained about urban lifestyles.
They were worried that men who were made effeminate by the same sort of industrial office lifestyles that gave the country's wealth, that that lack of vitality was going to depress the white birth rate and change everything.
Simultaneously, there are these anti-communist movements in Northern Europe that begin focusing really closely on the perfection of the body as a way of kind of blessing the national spirit.
And so this is where the famous Nazi phrase blood and soil comes from.
So all of that gets jumbled together and creates a kind of historical resonance that comes through, I would say, primarily in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s through yoga culture as it migrates into North America.
And then yoga culture, I believe, I kind of see yoga culture as a kind of hub of worldviews and resources, and also infrastructure that begins to influence other forms of new spirituality, including the new age.
And it doesn't mean that people who take up yoga are somehow, you know, internally fascist.
It does mean, however, that if you thought you were doing something progressive, you know, you might have another thing coming when you actually look into the history.
Yeah, and so the culturally liberal signifiers of having a yoga mat under your arm while you're at Whole Foods, getting a veggie juice from the juice bar, don't necessarily mean you're politically progressive, even though you may feel that you are.
The cultural signifiers just say, I'm open to a spirituality from another part of the world.
Wow, look at how liberal I am!
Not necessarily the case.
The two reactionary things I want to ping that go back to your question to some extent, Brad, is one is the natural way of being healthy has been lost.
The natural way of being in pure good health that is just like our condition, our birthright, has been lost through modern medicine that is not holistic enough.
And so, Vax, this is an easy pivot into anti-vax.
And then anti-vax because the evidence is not there for it is an easy pivot into conspiracy theories because that's the only explanation for why.
Same thing with, you know, alternative medicine and claims of the paranormal.
The reason there isn't evidence is it's being covered up because they don't want you to know about it.
So that's an easy pivot.
But the other one, which you referenced specifically, is that there's a loss of connection to our innate essential masculinity or femininity, which is sacred, which is divine, And that's because of things that have happened in the culture and ways in which men and women are no longer really men and women anymore.
And so there you have another political hinge point.
The way you link those, I think is going to be really helpful to people to see how you can go from yoga to anti-vax to conspiracy.
I mean, you really just, you can see the links in the chain so clearly of like, oh yeah, yoga.
Oh, okay.
I'm going to eat in a way that restores the purity of my body.
Oh, you want to inject me with a vaccine?
What's in there?
I don't think so.
Oh, there's no evidence for the vaccines actually being hurtful.
That's because of the new world order covering that, you know, and boom, there you go.
You can see that clearly.
We're going to run out of time, so I just want to say that if we come back to the idea that there's no secular answers and that the alienation we feel as the individual or community has to be solved, that we need a cure, that we don't need to be improving the measures by which we live, but we need a cure to the problem of ourself.
Well, fascism is that.
Fascism is a final solution.
And so you can see all the history and social dynamics that both of you are laying out.
You can see that overlapping in this Venn diagram with fascism, which promises a final solution and it makes certain people and certain others the problem that must be solved.
All right.
We got like five minutes.
So, here we go.
I'm going to ask you a really easy question.
No, not really.
A lot of folks listening who have uncles or cousins or whoever's that may not be familiar with Teal Swan, but they certainly go to the cookout and have to listen to them say, well, I heard on Joe Rogan.
So, is Joe Rogan a conspiritualist?
Well, let me just jump in right here, because I'm so glad you made that transition before we do run out of time, because what we were just talking about actually is a perfect segue into this.
Matthew, I don't know if you probably remember better than I do, the tweet that Joe Rogan retweeted about how soft times make soft men, what does it hard times make hard men, like what it means to really be a tough guy.
It was a reference to the Kali Yuga cycle of eternal return, that if the society gets too comfy, that men will get soft.
It's all about men.
And then soft men will make for difficult times, but difficult times make hard men, and then hard men will make for soft times.
Make for good times!
No, no.
So when the men get harder, Then the times get better.
The world improves because the men are tough and strong and are not like wimps in the face of difficulty.
And when times are good, like living in a democracy with a strong social safety net, well then it turns us all into pussies who've got low testosterone, right?
So, there's a set of relationships here that also translate across these multiple domains.
Is Joe Rogan a conspiritualist?
Well, Joe Rogan has a long history of being very, very open to conspiracy theories, and some of that comes from sitting in long-form Podcast, which he pioneered for hour after hour, smoking joint after joint, bullshitting with his buddies, several of whom are major conspiracy theorists.
And I think there's something about that kind of subculture that gives rise to those sorts of paranoid flights of ideas.
And then what we found through the course of the pandemic is that he trended further and further to the right.
He trended from, if you just look at the guests that he hosted early on in the pandemic, he hosted vaccine scientists who talked about COVID and talked about how pandemic spread and talked about vaccine science and how it works, and he wanted to give people the information.
But by the time we get deep into 2021, he is platforming a who's who of anti-vax, grifters, ivermectin opportunists, people who are just making millions, people who are on the radar of the Center for Countering Digital Hate as part of the disinformation dozen.
People like Pierre Corey, who has the biggest Ivermectin, you know, networked kind of money-making machine on the internet.
And so is he or is he not a conspiritualist?
At the end of the day, I don't know that it really matters what's in his heart.
What matters is that he's had a very deleterious impact on the discourse on these topics.
I am so uninterested in what is in people's hearts.
I'm just going to say that as an ex-Protestant.
Because that is such a Protestant thing, right?
Protestantism is all about what's in your heart.
And I am so tired of what is in people's hearts.
I'm really interested in what they do and what they say.
And the evidence to me points heavily in the direction of all of the The bad ways that Joe Rogan has influenced our public square, including, I think, men in their 20s and 30s who listen.
Can you give us one minute?
Go ahead, Matthew.
Jump in.
Go ahead.
I can tell.
Yeah.
Well, you wanted to ask about uncles and brothers and family members and what they're doing if they're caught up.
And, you know, maybe here we can think about Maybe here it's acceptable to think about people's hearts a little bit, because all of the best advice that we've heard and put into practice about dealing with loved ones who have gotten neck deep into this stuff is that to the extent that you're able, maintain the relationship.
Because we're talking about movements that are hyper-individualistic, they're super-consumerist, they're super-neoliberal and aggressive, and these environments cannot offer stable relationship.
And so if you have social capital with a person who has spun off into something that is not serving them, You've got things to bring to the table that this mixture of paranoia and pronoia can't really offer.
So I would say that it's the most important thing to do to recognize that whatever your friend, your loved one has come to believe, that Somewhere in their heart, they have a good reason.
They have good incentive to believe it.
Maybe they were neglected by the medical establishment.
Maybe they are survivors of sexual abuse and they've been told very specifically and, you know, I don't know.
Clearly by their society that they're not going to experience any accountability.
And you can help that person in any way that you can to help them get what they need while you maintain the normalcy of the friendship.
Because in, you know, cult studies we say there's somebody who was there before this happened.
And if you can remember them, if you can help them remember them to themselves, that's really valuable.
Now, that said, during COVID, there were countless inevitable zero-sum conflicts where, you know, the red-pilled family member would just refuse to wear a mask at a family gathering, and then that just can't be worked out on the spot.
It's too urgent.
Somebody's gonna die.
So not wearing the mask is a huge challenge, but you know, aside from those acute conflict zones, I would just always look for places to be patient, places to be generous, not without compromising your own boundaries and safety.
I appreciate that advice.
I get asked this question a lot about Christian Nationalists and I always say that if you can maintain the relationship, do so.
And if you're able to ask them about their fears, their anxieties, their worries, their hopes, that is better than saying everything you believe about the world is so demonstrably false and I'm dumber for listening to you.
Well, nobody's listening because nobody's actually asking them.
Nobody's listening to the anxieties and the fears.
They are implanting anxieties and fears, and it's very impersonal, and it's not stable.
Yeah.
No, I think that's right.
All right, I have so many more questions, but I've taken up enough of your time and we need to sign off.
So I want to say, friends, check out Conspiratuality, How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat.
It is out now.
You can always check out the Conspiratuality podcast.
Julian, Matthew, what are other ways people can connect with you other than the podcast and the book?
Well, those would be the major ways.
We're also on Instagram at conspiratualitypod.
Perfect.
And glad you didn't, well, anyway, glad you didn't mention Twitter or X or whatever that is these days.
And all right.
As always, friends, find us at Straight White JC, find me at Bradley Onishi, and you can always use your help on PayPal, Venmo, Patreon, or an indie show.
We do this three times a week.
No, no major grants or outside funding.
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So if that is something you can think about, that helps us a lot.
Other than that, we'll be back later this week with It's In The Code and the weekly roundup.
But for now, we'll just say, thanks for being here.
