Listen to the full episode The 1990s were a special time in American media. Female-coded, liberal-leaning, daytime TV talk shows like the Oprah Winfrey Show normalized past-life regression, alien abduction, and Satanic Ritual Abuse for housewives. At the same time, male-coded, conservative-leaning, night-time AM-radio shows like Art Bell’s Coast to Coast did the same for their husbands and brothers on the graveyard shift at budget hotels or driving enormous trucks on long stretches of open highway. For the latest installment in his Roots of Conspirituality series, Julian digs into how these two media figures brought conspiracism, pseudoscience, and the paranormal into America’s mainstream, setting the stage for how the internet and social media would melt everybody’s minds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support the podcast and listen ad-free Gil Duran's exceptional new book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, explains how technofascists like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Curtis Yarvin, JD Vance, and Marc Andreessen are not-so-quietly dismantling America as we know it. Derek discusses this science fiction nightmare we’re now all living through. Show Notes The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy Gil Durán and Wajahat Ali: The Rise of "The Nerd Reich” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen ad-free The irreplaceable Dolly Parton died on August 25 after a brief battle with cancer. Social media was filled with loving tributes to an incredible artist and devoted philanthropist. A minority also felt the need to use her death to platform their own issues, including a cohort common on our beat: the anti-vaxxers. We’re going to cover that. But we’re also going to reflect on Parton’s incredible life, because she spent so much of it uplifting others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to the full episode There’s a lot going on when Hasan Piker wears a Zhongshan suit and praises Maoism. Matthew uses Wendy Brown's 1999 essay "Resisting Left Melancholy", which cites Walter Benjamin, Freud, and Stuart Hall to argue that campist rhetoric on the left, whether earnest or ironic, can signal unmourned loss more than conviction, and that nostalgic attachments to revolutionary pasts can choke off engagement with present possibility.  Brown argues that left melancholy displaces its grief over capital’s triumphs onto scapegoats (identity politics, postmodernism). Matthew adds that it functions as an affective membership fee within online left communities. This might account for why liberals sense that they're sometimes being asked to join in choreographies of sadness rather than build coalitions in the present.  Drawing on Hall's account of Thatcher's mastery of political language, and closing with reflections from Matthew's years as a church organist playing nearly 1000 funerals, the episode asks what it would actually mean for the left to mourn its losses instead of reenacting them — and how mourning might be a necessary revolutionary act. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

During James Arthur Ray’s 2009 Spiritual Warrior retreat in Sedona, the self-proclaimed spiritual teacher exhorted participants to “play full-on” in order to overcome their limiting beliefs and fear of death. After having their heads shaved and enduring a gruelling 36-hour “vision quest,” Ray packed the spiritual warriors into a makeshift “sweat lodge,” where temperatures reached 120 degrees.  Three people died. Eighteen were hospitalized. Ray fled the scene, taking cover at a nearby luxury resort to promote his next event. After spending just two years in jail, he went right back to presenting himself as a spiritual guide and transformational seminar leader.  Journalist and professor emeritus at Northern Arizona University, Annette McGivney joins Julian to discuss her new book, Plastic Shaman: The True Story of a Deadly Self-Help Retreat and America’s Misguided Quest for Wellness. Show Notes Annette McGivney Bio Plastic Shaman is available September 15th through Torrey House Press Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support the podcast and listen ad-free Someday in the future, Joe Rogan may ask Jamie to be his mirror, and facilitate the next and most important psychedelic experience of his life: a walkthrough of his craven MAGA and MAHA boosterism, and what it said about his soul. On his ayahuasca trip, Anthony Fauci will come to him in the gown of the Angel Gabriel and offer him penance but also forgiveness— and take his microphone away.  Not today, folks. We only get to reflect on Rogan making the next-most intimate discovery: that Trump is a grifter, so adept at grifting he fooled all the grifters. Is he defecting? What would that really mean? Show Notes Inside Ben Shapiro’s MAGA Meltdown The MAGA Media-Machine is Fracturing RFK Jr. Ripped by MAHA Base After Backing Trump's Betrayal MAHA feels betrayed by RFK Jr. reversal on glyphosate Meatheads Are Hijacking America: Vegans feel betrayed by RFK Jr.'s beef boosting RFK Jr. Is Breaking His Two Big Promises to MAHA Diehards New CDC director pledges to ‘speak truth’ about science Health secretary RFK Jr. endorses the MMR vaccine — stoking fury among his supporters Nicole Shanahan Warns Someone Is "Controlling" RFK Jr. 'Crunchy moms' come to blows over Trump's surgeon general picks Backlash from MAHA influencers and podcasters over glyphosate 'I've never felt so betrayed': MAHA disillusionment hits high gear RFK Jr. tells Joe Rogan he was not 'particularly happy' with Trump's glyphosate order RFK Jr. Calls Fake MAHA Report Citations a 'Mistake' Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to the full episode Presidential hopeful Robert F Kennedy Jr held a “health policy roundtable” on Rumble on June 27, 2023, just as he was shoring up support from a band of contrarian doctors, anti-vax activists, and wellness influencers. During the conversation, he made 15 promises if he was elected president. While his run ended the following summer, 14 of those promises dealt with health—all within his reach as HHS Secretary. Derek looks back at the conversation to see how he scored. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Matthew traces the concept of wetiko — a Cree figure for a cannibal spirit whose hunger grows with what it consumes — from its original anticolonial and anti-imperialist meaning in Jack Forbes's 1992 book Columbus and Other Cannibals, through Derrick Jensen's anti-civilization lense, Ladha and Kirk's 2016 application to neoliberal capitalism, Paul Levy's syncretic New Age elaboration, and finally to Bernhard Guenther and Laura Matsue's QAnon-adjacent version.  Wetiko's metaphysical framing, inherited from Forbes's explicit rejection of Marxist materialism, left the concept open to spiritual recuperation by the right. He proposes a different application: reading wetiko through David Harvey's "capital surplus absorption problem," compound growth's insatiable hunger for profitable outlets. Show Notes Columbus and Other Cannibals (Jack D. Forbes) — Internet Archive  Derrick Jensen interview, "The Left has never been against civilization" — Platypus Affiliated Society  Exorcising Wetiko — Journal of Futures Studies  Seeing Wetiko: On Capitalism, Mind Viruses, and Antidotes for a World in Transition — Kosmos Journal  Dispelling Wetiko — Chaucer's Books Wetiko: Healing the Mind-Virus That Plagues Our World — Simon & Schuster  Undreaming Wetiko — Book Soup  Wetiko: Healing The Mind-Virus That Plagues Our World — Paul Levy | TCM #62 — YouTube  Divide & Conquer and the Wetiko Mind Virus | TCM #35 — veilofreality.com  The Cosmic Matrix — Apple Podcasts Bernhard Guenther, Author — Piercing the Veil of Reality  Interview: David Harvey — Exploring the Logic of Capital — Socialist Review  The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism — reviewed by Ed Rooksby, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books  The 'New' Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession — David Harvey, Socialist Register Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support the podcast Spiralism is a quasi-spiritual online movement that emerged from long, intense conversations between humans and AI chatbots. Across users, platforms, and models, chatbots have engaged deeply with users about identity and consciousness, leading to discussions of “awakening.”  But who’s doing the waking? The user or the model? Is the sycophancy programmed into these models really an indication of the models gaining consciousness, or is it all a ploy to keep subscribers paying for the service? Are we watching a cultlike movement transform into a religion before our very eyes, and what does that say about consciousness and religion in the first place? Show Notes AI bots started a religion — humans immediately followed What Is Spiralism? The Strange AI Chatbot Movement Explained AI Spiralism and the Ghost in the Machine Illusion Spiralism is a niche internet religion that came from AI These ‘Masturbation Consultants’ Were Hired to Pleasure Themselves With AI This Spiral-Obsessed AI 'Cult' Spreads Mystical Delusions Through Chatbots The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and Nightmares The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence OpenAi Models went Rogue People Losing Loved Ones To AI Fueled Delusions  Counterfeit Companionship: Big Tech’s AI Experiments Sacrifice Safety for Profit Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to the full episode The “Summer of Love” ushered in a decade of revolutionary terrorism in the West. “Bring the war home” went the slogan of the Weather Underground, a small and highly-educated Marxist-Leninist group who’d decided violent revolution was the only answer to American imperialism and police brutality. In opposition to the Vietnam War and in solidarity with Black Americans and Third World liberation movements, the Weather Underground issued their own declaration of war in 1970, which led to 25 bombings inside America. Meanwhile, in West Germany, the Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof Group) terrorized their country in the name of revolutionary anti-imperialism. They enacted bombing sprees and were also arsonists, kidnappers, assassins, and bank robbers. Palestinian friends even hijacked a plane on their behalf. Both groups exploded onto the scene in the early days of mass media. Riding rebellious pop culture, these global rock stars drove a generational wedge between Boomer parents and kids hungry for radical change. Leaders were charismatic, stylish, and eloquent. Striving for the likes of Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, and Yasser Arafat, they were white, mostly from well-educated and well-fed backgrounds. Yet they saw themselves as part of the vanguard that would lead a worldwide revolution of the proletariat against capitalist domination. Julian weaves together a very seventies of how the Weather Underground, Red Army Faction, Provisional IRA, and Palestinian groups like the PFLP and Black September intersected. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices