Conspirituality
Dismantling New Age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy-mad yogis. At best, the conspirituality movement attacks public health efforts in times of crisis. At worst, it fronts and recruits for the fever-dream of QAnon. As the alt-right and New Age horseshoe toward each other in a blur of disinformation, clear discourse, and good intentions get smothered. Charismatic influencers exploit their followers by co-opting conspiracy theories on a spectrum of intensity ranging from vaccines to child trafficking. In the process, spiritual beliefs that have nurtured creativity and meaning are transforming into memes of a quickly-globalizing paranoia. Conspirituality Podcast attempts to bring understanding to this landscape. A journalist, a cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic discuss the stories, cognitive dissonances, and cultic dynamics tearing through the yoga, wellness, and new spirituality worlds. Mainstream outlets have noticed the problem. We crowd-source, research, analyze, and dream answers to it.
- Update frequency
- every 2 days
- Average duration
- 48 minutes
- Episodes
- 686
- Years Active
- 2020 - 2025
218: Meet the Sexvangelicals (w/Julia Postema & Jeremiah Gibson)
You’re an eight year-old girl. The purity culture of your evangelical church, ruled by men but policed by women, has you worried that the spaghetti straps on your summer top might be sinful. You lear…
01:15:00 |
Thu 08 Aug 2024
Bonus Sample: The "Crisis" of Meaning
Scroll through masculinity influencer social media feeds and you're constantly told there's a "crisis of meaning." But is that really true? Has a shared meaning ever reflected the totality of any pop…
00:05:18 |
Mon 05 Aug 2024
Brief: JD Vance Taps into Parental Rage
The “childless cat lady” thing is as ridiculous as JD Vance is. But it’s not stupid. It’s tapping into something powerful, because it’s shameful.
Vance’s fantasy that childless cat ladies are miserab…
00:32:03 |
Sat 03 Aug 2024
217: Childless Cat Lady
If something real occurs in this timeline, but no conspiracy theorist is there to FUBAR it, does it actually happen?
An old man, weakened by COVID, picks up an old-timey phone handset on a Delaware S…
01:14:54 |
Thu 01 Aug 2024
Bonus Sample: Imaginary Children: “God’s Word on Spanking”
This is the second episode in “Conspirituality and the Imaginary Children,” an occasional series on how children, as symbols (but not persons with their own internal lives) are at the center of consp…
00:04:01 |
Mon 29 Jul 2024
Brief: Bret Weinstein: “The Biden Psy-Op”
A tale of two tweets: Dark Horse podcast cohost and “conspiracy hypothesizer” Bret Weinstein took to Twitter twice this month, first dropping a video claiming that RFK Jr becoming Donald Trump’s runn…
00:27:14 |
Sat 27 Jul 2024
216: J.D. Vance, Conspiracy Hobbit
Just two days after surviving an assassination attempt, Donald Trump announced JD Vance as his VP pick. Vance has made a dramatic U-turn from calling Trump a "reprehensible idiot" and "America's Hitl…
01:10:56 |
Thu 25 Jul 2024
Bonus Sample: Project 2025 on Worker's "Rights"
Project 2025's plan for workers is clear: crush unions, eliminate minority protections, curtail reproductive health care benefits, and make the workplace biblical again.
Derek and Julian unpack the d…
00:06:05 |
Mon 22 Jul 2024
Brief: Cult of the Lamb Anti-Cult School? (w/Riley MacLeod)
We cover conspiracy theories, spiritual abuse, and religious and right-wing extremism. We cover showmen and charismatics suffering from King Victim Complex. Last week we had to study a goddam assassi…
00:46:59 |
Sat 20 Jul 2024
215: Divinely Protected
Two landmark Supreme Court decisions—the Trump immunity case and the overturning of the Chevron doctrine—represent the legal institutionalization of the core values of conspirituality: self-sovereign…
01:02:59 |
Thu 18 Jul 2024
Bonus Sample: Project 2025's Plan: Let It Burn
Project 2025's approach to environmental issues is pretty straightforward: deny climate science, dismantle the EPA, clear a path that prioritizes corporate profits, and let the world burn.
Derek and …
00:05:59 |
Mon 15 Jul 2024
Brief: Project 2025’s “Bloodless” Coup
While speaking on Steve Bannon’s podcast, The War Room, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts recently stated, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodl…
00:26:50 |
Sat 13 Jul 2024
214: Aubrey Marcus is Totally Not a Cult Leader
Today we’re looking at a lavish infomercial put out by New Age oligarch and RFK Jr superfan Aubrey Marcus, in which he tries to show the world that his very expensive encounter group, Fit For Service…
01:12:55 |
Thu 11 Jul 2024
Bonus Sample: You Can’t Do Religion on the Internet
Back in 2011, Ward and Voas wrote that conspirituality was a mainly-online movement, and they were right about that. They didn’t do fieldwork at events. They didn’t attend trainings and rituals. They…
00:05:48 |
Mon 08 Jul 2024
Brief: The Freebirth to Born-Again Pipeline
The stress of influencing in the New Age / alt-med world is rough. You have to pretend to know everything, from vaccine science to the origins of autism, to how feminism has desecrated the sanctity o…
00:37:29 |
Sat 06 Jul 2024
213: Yoga for Gaza, Yoga for Israel
Can yoga bring hostages home? No. Can yoga stop a genocide? Also no. But this won’t stop earnest practitioners from instrumentalizing practice for both purposes.
For supporters of Israel, practice i…
01:09:13 |
Wed 03 Jul 2024
Bonus Sample: The Prophet & the Electrical Storm
What does it really mean to be a prophet, found a religion, and persuade millions of people that god speaks directly to you?
And what does this god tell you? How to live morally. What kinds of sex a…
00:06:30 |
Mon 01 Jul 2024
Brief: Jordan Peterson Teaches Russell Brand Theology
Last month, Russell Brand visited Jordan Peterson's podcast for “The Evolution of Theology.” Which, given these two figures, had to focus on topics like the unreligious impulsivity of gay people and …
00:35:04 |
Sat 29 Jun 2024
212: US Military Tells RFK Jr-Style Lies
On June 14, Reuters published an article about the US Military’s clandestine program to discredit China’s Sinovac vaccine during the early days of Covid-19. Turns out the Pentagon hired an outside ag…
01:12:39 |
Thu 27 Jun 2024
Bonus Sample: Sanctimonious Spirituality
What is the distance between spiritual practice and social action? Derek has weighed this question for decades. This unscripted meditation on the topic uses Aubrey Marcus's new "documentary," Anti-Cu…
00:06:14 |
Mon 24 Jun 2024
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