Conspirituality

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Julian interviews journalist Anand Giridharadas about his new book, Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City. The book centers on the tragic death of Jordan Neely, a deeply traumatized, mentally ill, and unhoused former Michael Jackson impersonator who was put in a five-minute choke hold on a New York subway car by Marine veteran Daniel Penny, who was acquitted on all counts.

Giridharadas spent three years investigating the stories beneath the high profile criminal trial. He takes readers on an immersive narrative journey that explores race, mental illness, homelessness, addiction, and the networks of support and care struggling within a failing system of social services.

Show Notes

Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City

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Matthew tracks the concept of "islamo-gauchisme," the French accusation that leftists are useful idiots for jihad. Pierre-André Taguieff's 2002 book on "new Judeophobia" is ground zero, and a forensic Twitter analysis has shown that far-right accounts pushed the term for years, until it was taken up by Macroniste ministers in 2020. The academic consensus is that it is a political slogan with no empirical reality.

But like any (potential) conspiracy theory, it also emerges from a constellation of partial truths: solidarity between leftists and the French immigrant working class, the contested influence of the Muslim Brotherhood on civil society, Mélenchon's pivot from friendship with the late Charlie Hebdo editor to an anti-Islamophobia position, and the LFI refusing to condemn October 7 as an act of terrorism.

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Election denialism didn’t go away after the Capitol Insurrection. If anything, the revolving door between the Trump administration, the far-right conspiracy-mongering media ecosystem, and those directly involved in (and even convicted and imprisoned for) undermining democracy has only gotten more elaborate and determined.

As the elections loom, Julian talks to the VP of Media Matters for America, Julie Millican, about her organization’s excellent reporting on how figures like Steve Bannon, Jerome Corsi, and Cleta Mitchell (the attorney involved in the infamous Brad Raffsenberger phone call) are sowing distrust and calling for confiscation of ballots and voting machines.

They also discuss the armed ICE presence at polling sites and Tina Peters, who was convicted on charges involving attempts to overturn the 2020 election and sentenced to nine years in prison. After President Trump threatened to withhold federal funding from Colorado, the Governor commuted her sentence, freeing her to now reportedly meet personally with the President and work on “preserving election integrity.”

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In 2021, the first secular embryo adoption organization received federal funding after decades of pro-life Christian organizations had hogged the kitty with their particular views on who is fit enough to raise a family.

Then in 2026, a change in language and some apparently shady bookkeeping on the part of an agency under RFK Jr's HHS resulted in two ultra-religious organizations receiving nearly all funding. Derek is joined by Maya Grobel, who cofounded that secular organization, Empower with Moxi, to discuss the consequences of this funding direction.

Show Notes

Empower with Moxi

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The protests in France were initially sparked in mid-September by high school kids as young as 14 in the poorer metro districts, articulating concrete grievances about their neglected schools, underpaid and absent teachers, an AI-driven vocational assignment algorithm that forces them to choose career paths at 15, and a pervasive culture of smug condescension from the adult world.

Anthony Mansuy joins us today. You might know him as the French correspondent for QAnon Anonymous. He was part of a journalist team from Societe publication, a print-only magazine in France, that travelled to places like Creteil and Alencon to interview these kids, and he walks Matthew through what they told him.

First: the midterms are upon us, and so are new waves of MAGA bullshit. Derek has an update on what MAHA action is up to in the final push and Julian catches up on how Team Trump is aiming to invalidate the polls before they open.

Show Notes

An Iowa Republican’s Unusual Connection to the Kochs (and Kansas)

Calley Means, top MAHA ally, resigns from Trump administration

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Mikki Willis is back with another installment of Plandemic—er, with a new book that further explains Plandemic, or something like that. Given how badly his sequels have gone, it appears that he’s looking for a new angle to mine (and monetize).

Derek opens the pages of Bad Medicine: How COVID Protocols Turned Hospitals into Death Traps only to find Willis’s continual inability to grapple with reality is in book form.

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Matthew welcomes friend of the pod, Brad Onishi, back to Conspirituality. Brad is the co-host of Straight White American Jesus, and he’s got a new book out called American Caesar: How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America into a Monarchy.

Onishi’s scholarship charts the Frankenstein alliance of reactionary Catholic integralists, Protestant Reconstructionists, and Silicon Valley monarchists who find a common vein of worship in their rejection of democratic rule and a preference for an unbound executive.

But: How will the trad-Caths out-maneuvre Pope Leo? Why do Paul Weyrich and Leonard Leo see Trump as a wrecking ball who precedes a Vance-type successor? How do they justify their openly minoritarian strategy?

And: can these post-liberal believers really subordinate markets to a "common good"? Or is that impossible, given the wrath of their true deity, capital itself?

Show Notes

American Caesar by Bradley OnishiPeter Thiel calls Greta Thunberg a servant of the Antichrist (CTV News/AFP)Thiel's Nashville Antichrist lectures target Pope Leo XIV over AI (Gizmodo)Paul M. WeyrichBarre Seid's $1.6 billion donation to Leonard Leo's Marble Freedom Trust (JTA)US government takes 10% stake in Intel (CBS News)Kevin Roberts and Dwarkesh Patel, "Tech and the American Republic"Catholic Land Movement gaining momentum (The Catholic Register)Jeff Bezos on AI and a three-day work week (VnExpress International)Review of David Harvey's The Enigma of CapitalKarl Marx, Capital, Volume One (Marxists Internet Archive)

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Charles Eisenstein’s very long essay, “The Coronation,” was the focus of EP1 of Conspirituality. The sacred economist turned philosopher king joined us on EPs 30 and 32 for a two-part interview about that very essay. We’ve had no contact since, even though the man turns up in the most unusual places.

Including, recently, another podcast to take stock about his time serving as advisor to RFK Jr. We thought it would be a good time to reflect on the man’s post-Covid trajectory, and what it might mean for the ground of conspirituality writ large.

Show Notes

Public Citizen: How Trump Conned MAHA

RFK Is Gloating That His Changes to HHS Are Permanent

RFK Jr. Vaccine Injury Plan Rebuked for Skewed Doctor Incentives

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The Church Universal and Triumphant became an international mainstream news story in 1990. Their leader, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, was poised, eloquent, and beautiful. She also claimed to have received messages directly from God about an impending nuclear holocaust. But it's more complicated than that: the theology of her new religious movement has significant overlap with three figures Julian has covered in the Roots of Conspirituality series.

In the realm of conspiracism, cults, and apocalyptic religion, history always repeats itself. What’s unique about this story is the combination of colorful New Age syncretism and dark survivalist paranoia. Armed to their throat chakras with AR15s, tripod-mounted semi-automatic rifles, and armored personnel carriers, the church had spent $25 million building the largest underground nuclear bunker network in America. It contained enough food for seven years and over 600,000 gallons of fuel.

What could go wrong?

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Although Beck David Hansen was born into Scientology, he’s never really practiced it. Except for that period where he did, heavily, when he even contemplated becoming an auditor. But then he left the church he was never really involved with—though pressure from the church appears to have completely ended his long-term relationship and close friendships. Does one of Gen X’s most iconic pop stars really believe in Thetans?

You’re not alone if you’ve ever wondered because Beck has remained one of the most elusive celebrities for over three decades—apparently from those closest to him, and maybe even himself.

Josephine Riesman returns to Conspirituality to discuss her exceptional new book, The Last Temptation of Beck, with Derek.

Show Notes

The Last Temptation of Beck

Losing Beck

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Paul Saladino doesn’t like peanut butter. Or whey protein. Or processed foods at all. Except when they’re his peanut butter whey protein bars that are, you guessed it, processed. But his bars are different: they're really good and totally natural processed foods. Those other guys make shitty non-food foodstuff products. Paul produces the real deal.

Just don’t ask the psychiatrist turned carnivore “doctor” turned fruit and honey is ok sometimes and, screw it, I’ll just make my own unprocessed processed food products, too. And definitely don’t question him about it, as guest host Mallory DeMille did. Paul wants the criticisms to rain down on him, for this is a lifelong learner, you see. Just don’t call him a hypocrite, or else he might come after you, shirtless, barefoot, wandering around grocery store aisles filming content and maybe, just maybe, searching for a friend.

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Max Haiven's The Player and the Played: From Gamed Capitalism to Twenty-First Century Fascism (MIT Press, 2026) argues that financialized capitalism has turned us all into speculative "players" in rigged games. It produces a "cheated player" whose resentment the far right redirects onto scapegoats rather than the ruling class. This is what contemporary fascism is.

Matthew reviews Haiven’s re-reading of the conspirituality era: QAnon as a participatory game, Gamergate as a prototype of the "playgrom," and January 6th as a swarm of user-generated fascism. He traces how his own frameworks for conspirituality have shifted: cult dynamics, Lagalisse on conspiracy theory as allegory, Dean's communicative capitalism, Lubrano on the limits of persuasion.

NOTE: Contains Squid Game spoilers through season 3.

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Andrew Huberman’s new book takes many hours of podcast transcripts and distills them to what he believes are ideal protocols for a healthy life. Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body became an instant bestseller upon its publication last month. Does the science behind the hype hold up?

Journalist Scott Carney joins Derek to look at the slipperiness of many claims. They also discuss the rather “unique” marketing model Huberman appears to have followed.

Show Notes

Auditing Andrew Huberman’s “Protocols”

Andrew Huberman’s Mechanisms of Control

Scott Carney

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This is episode 1 of a new side project Julian is doing with Azi Ghaffari, Dr. Inna Kanevsky, and Aaron McCall. Find upcoming episodes via Grifty Podcast and at http://grifty.org

The wellness people think your toothpaste is poisoning you. Finance bros think empathy is bad economics. Somebody on the far right thinks Taylor Swift is a Democrat psy-op, while someone on the far left thinks your aunt buying hummus is personally funding colonialism. On parts of both fringes, everything is somehow Israel’s fault. The old antisemitic conspiracies apparently have remarkable staying power among people who think they’re having brand-new thoughts.

Then, while the MAGA right was helpfully laying out its intentions in Project 2025, a corner of the online left looked at Russia and the Islamic Republic of Iran, a regime that jails journalists, murders protesters, brutalizes women, and executes gay people, and thought, “Maybe these guys have a point.” It’s impressive how much authoritarianism you can overlook once you’ve decided the authoritarians hate the right people.

Different politics, same inability to enjoy Thanksgiving. And somehow, all of these people have podcasts. Actually, so do we. Welcome to Grifty Pod. We’re opening a season about how America lost its mind, which every podcast host seems to have already solved. In our defense, we’re planning to disagree with each other, which is a terrible way to run a cult.

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When we started this show, the charismatic influencers we covered had identifiable tactics of hard-selling, finding pain points, using disorganized attachment strategies like cult leaders do, to scare followers with sometimes real, sometimes fictitious stories that only they could understand and help solve.

Beyond the patterns shared by supplement hawkers, alien channelers, and New Age enema healers, each had something unique: a style, a manner of cadence, a particular intensity of intrusive eye contact. Are these not embodied, somatic skills that will outlast the AI jobs apocalypse? Can the chat bots really displace the guru economy?

We explore how we may be losing this precious resource to the brutal extractivism of our tech overlords.

Show Notes

Popular Health Guru Sayer Ji Curates the Scientific Literature with His Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy

A Dozen Misguided Influencers Spread Most of the Anti-Vaccination Content on Social Media

Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart — Nicholas Carr

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Last week, MAHA Action once again blurred the lines between activist organization and government entity, with RFK Jr, JD Vance, Dr Oz and other officials sharing the stage with dozens of corporate sponsors and private healthcare executives—and Russell Brand. Derek tunes in to this nine-hour fiasco.

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Matthew examines how Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has paired an 18-month austerity rampage with approval ratings near 60%.

Centralized power, new surveillance and protest laws, refugee restrictions, public-service cuts, a tripling of the military budget, climate rollbacks, a seeming refusal to protect the basics of Medicare. Why do so many people love him?

Carney's appeal and ability to absorb critique rests on more than managerial competence. A devout Catholic, Carney manages to make many people feel like they should be respectful and polite and not make a fuss during the high mass of finance, in which crisis is transformed into eternal life.

Matthew traces Carney's low-key Catholicism through the Pope Francis parable that opens Value(s), his role in the Vatican-backed Council for Inclusive Capitalism, and his practice of the Ignatian daily examen, and how he appeals to medieval canonists as forerunners of stakeholder capitalism.

Show Notes

Prime Minister of Canada – Statement on the passing of Pope Francis

Open Canada – Book Review: Value(s)

Vatican – Pope Francis to the Members of the Council for Inclusive Capitalism (11 November 2019)

The Catholic Register – The Catholic or the Davos Man?

The Catholic Register – Carney can confirm his Catholic credentials

The Catholic Register – A little Catholic, a bit Davos

APTN – Former day school students say Robert Carney was their principal

Greenpeace Canada – Carney's bills explained: C-2, C-12, C-8 and C-9

The Hub – The Carney government's expanding power to identify Canadians online

Littler – Bill C-39 and federal collective bargaining

National Observer – Budget vows to cut 40,000 jobs from public service by 2029

Environmental Defence – Carbon pricing rollback undermines climate goals

PBI USA – Canadian company equips ICE with armored vehicles

CTV – Canada supports U.S. strikes on Iran "with regret"

Religion News Service – Pope Leo calls just war theory "outdated"

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In 2013, businessman turned independent journalist Jesse Brown launched Canadaland as a podcast focused on media criticism. He grew the business to include many other podcasts, creating his own small media empire. Then October 7 happened and things took a turn. Recently, he hosted anti-vax contrarian doctor, Peter McCullough, in what he claims was a focus on media, but which really turned into a science-denying sh*t show.

We’ve covered McCullough for years, especially since becoming Chief Medical Officer of supplements grifters, The Wellness Company. There’s a lot to understand about his media tactics, which we’re going to dive into in segments two and three. But first, Matthew fills us in on the rise and stumble of his fellow Canadian’s media journey.

Show Notes

How a B.C. business scion flipped to hawking supplements and conspiracy theories

Risk of Myocarditis after Vaccination

Incidence of COVID-related Myocarditis Higher in Unvaccinated

Clinical Outcomes Worse for Unvaccinated

US Adverse COVID Vaccine Event Deaths

55 Adverse Reaction Deaths Worldwide, 13 Billion Doses Delivered

Secret Life: The Jian Ghomeshi Investigation by Kevin Donovan

Canadaland staff file to unionize

Scott Martin, "What We Lost with Canadaland's Decline"

HESEG Foundation

Jesse Brown Destroyed Canadaland's Credibility

Justin Ling quits Canadaland hosting role

Noor Azrieh and Cherise Seucharan, "A response to Canadaland's interview with Israel's ambassador to Canada"

Jesse Brown Insists He's Done Nothing Wrong

Avi Lewis, Yom Kippur post on X

Olivia Chow opts out of antisemitism debate

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Who was behind the gunman that shot Pope John Paul II in 1981? We know the man who pulled the trigger was a Turkish member of the Grey Wolves. We know he planned to flee via the Bulgarian Embassy. We know an Italian nun ensured he didn’t get away.

But had someone ordered the assassination? One possible clue is held in the answer to this next question: how did the Soviet Union collapse? We also know three unlikely heroic figures played pivotal roles: a Czechoslovakian playwright, a salt-of-the-earth electrician, and the Polish Pope.

Even as the totalitarian Soviet empire cracked down against uprisings in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, the voices of people crying out for democratic freedoms, human rights, and equal opportunity became undeniable.

In his latest historical narrative, Julian weaves together powerful stories of three people who risked everything to defy an authoritarian power. They exemplify the playwright’s ideal of “living in truth,” the electrician’s movement known as “Solidarity,” and John Paul II’s advice that his people “be not afraid.”

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When the Black, 30-year-old Michael Jackson impersonator stepped onto the F train in Manhattan on May 1, 2023, he was ranting angrily about being hungry and thirsty, willing to kill, die, or go to jail for life. His name was Jordan Neely. He was clearly in distress.

Daniel Penny, a white, 24-year-old former Marine put him in a chokehold and pulled him to the ground. Neely struggled for almost 6 minutes before dying.

Julian reviews Anand Girirdhardas’ new book that places this event at its center. Man In The Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City is Anand’s fifth book. He appeared on Conspirituality in January 2022 to talk about The Persuaders.

In his new book, he takes readers into a deep and rich background of the broken New York City system of social services for unhoused and mentally ill people. He tells the story of how these two very different lives collided, and the consequences that ensued.

Show Notes

Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City

135: The Persuaders (w/Anand Giridharadas)

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