Conspirituality
Bonus Sample: American Oligarchy and the Kremlin Wizard
What is an oligarchy, exactly? Is the US entering a period similar to post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s? What do Russian oligarchs have to do with proven interference in the 2016 US election? Julian digs into Russian history to explore parallels with modern-day America. Meet Vladislav Surkov, the architect of both Putin’s 25-year rule over what Surkov has dubbed “sovereign democracy,” and the global propaganda strategies generating our post-truth ecosystem of disinformation and conspiracies. There’s a reason why politics feels like theater these days, why democracy seems like a pipe dream. While MAGA has a fascism fetish, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine might be a better match for Hitler on the verge, with Trump and Co acting as macho-clown versions of Neville Chamberlain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
31 mars 2025 - 05 min 36 s
Brief: Is It Fascism?
Derek and Julian discuss Robert Paxton's 2004 book, The Anatomy of Fascism, in light of 2025 America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
29 mars 2025 - 44 min 49 s
250: The Mercola Tapes
McGill University science communicator, Jonathan Jarry, was recently given hundreds of hours of Zoom calls between alt-med salesman, Joseph Mercola, and a supposed clairvoyant that goes by Bahlon. Jonathan joins us to discuss what he found. Show Notes Brad Schimel Admitted to Having "Psychologically Beat the Daylights Out" Of His 8-Year-Old Daughter - MeidasTouch News Rallying Anti-Musk Donors, Liberal Judge Raises $24 Million in Key Court Contest - The New York Times Here are claims about Wisconsin’s Supreme Court candidates — and the facts Ahead of Wisconsin Supreme Court election, Elon Musk PAC offers cash for pledge - WPR Trump backs Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate in hotly contested race - ABC News Billionaires become a focus of the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court race Brad Schimel Begins Campaigning With Anti-MLK Advocate Charlie Kirk - MeidasTouch News Exclusive Videos Show Dr. Joe Mercola’s Dangerous Ideas Whipped up by Alleged Medium Brief: RFK's Health Propaganda Roundtable Terminated HHS grants Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
27 mars 2025 - 56 min 54 s
Bonus Sample: The War on Fat People
The Wellness Company is now selling retatrutide, a weight loss drug currently undergoing stage 3 trials by Eli Lilly. An anti-vax company that uses fear-based marketing to push supplements appears to be overstepping legal lines. Yet will they be held accountable in an RFK Jr-led HHS? Derek looks at private market healthcare propaganda from Ronald Reagan to Kennedy, showing how health is not the real goal of MAHA. But if they can sell untested products to fat and chronically ill patients along the way, all the better. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
24 mars 2025 - 05 min 37 s
Brief: Jordan Peterson’s Shady Billionaire Backers
Julian covers the recent Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in London. Headlined by Jordan Peterson, featuring Konstantin Kisin, Ayan Hirsi Ali, Jonathan Pageau, and Eric Weinstein, the conference positioned itself as an inspiring cultural gathering focused on reclaiming Western values. Behind the scenes, a hedge-fund billionaire new media baron, conservative libertarian think tank, shady funding source in Dubai, and an evangelical English aristocrat use the prestige of ARC and its celebrity figureheads to popularize a very specific political, economic, and religious agenda. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
22 mars 2025 - 40 min 11 s
249: Kings of Pain
Trump administration Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, recently stated the American economy is going to need a "detox" period. And so today we look at peak the conspirituality convergences between biological and political purification projects. Quinn Slobodian, professor of international history at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, joins Matthew in the final segment to offer his big picture view on the Kings of Pain. Show Notes Johns Hopkins to lose 2,000 jobs after Trump’s $800m cut in USAid funding Young scientists see career pathways vanish as schools adapt to federal funding cuts Report: mRNA vaccines are in RFK Jr’s crosshairs; funding in question FDA Makes Flu Vaccine Recommendations Without Convening Advisors HHS sends all employees a $25,000 voluntary buyout offer Exclusive: US CDC plans study into vaccines and autism, sources say USDA gears up for MAHA dietary guidelines update Musk Said No One Has Died Since Aid Was Cut. That Isn’t True. Watch CNBC's full interview with U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent Why we must teach medical students about the role of physicians during the Holocaust | AAMC Teaching Hard Truths About Medicine and the Holocaust | Journal of Ethics | American Medical Association Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
20 mars 2025 - 01 h 02 min 34 s
Bonus Sample: Antifascist Woodshed 2.1 (Punching Nazis?)
Click here to hear the full episode on Patreon. Second of Matthew’s two-part examination of why the hell questions of force, non-violent resistance with and without force, unarmed violence and property damage, and armed violence are so incredibly hard to talk about in a culture thick with spiritual and political bypassing. Are we capable of understanding the difference between morality and strategy? Part 1 focused on philosophy and psychology while today the focus will be on definitions and tactics. Together, both parts will push back on conspiracism about the identities, motives, and methods of antifascists. Both will present slices of the rich discourse on violence and non-violence from antifascist history, including clarifying definitions of key terms. Both will open a space to think carefully about what intensities of self and community defense are both useful and tolerable in the fight against fascism. Today we’ll get into the very thick weeds of how the “strategic nonviolence” research of Gene Sharp, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan is framed as empirical, but may be way more about idealizing Gandhi than about facts on the ground. Huge list of references for each! Show Notes Stopping the Press: The Threats to the Media Posed by the Second Trump Term | The New Yorker What the FBI Has Done, and Kash Patel Could Do - Columbia Journalism Review Hakeem Jeffries cracks down on Trump speech disruptions Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer Got Punched—You Can Thank the Black Bloc | The Nation Aamer Rahman: Is it really ok to punch nazis? $16.5M settlement reached in class-action lawsuit over mass arrests during 2010 G20 summit | CBC News Meditations at the ringed fence around G20 Toronto - rabble.ca Remaining Human: A Buddhist Perspective on Occupy Wall Street - Michael Stone Brief: The Outside Agitator Conspiracy Trope (w/Dr. Peniel Joseph) — Conspirituality Anti-fascists linked to zero murders in the US in 25 years | Donald Trump | The Guardian 40 Ways to Fight Fascists: Sunshine rules for radicals | saul d. alinsky 198 METHODS OF NONVIOLENT ACTION | — Gene Sharp She Interrupted a Town-Hall Meeting and Was Dragged Out by Private Security - The New York Times Martin Luther King Jr. had a much more radical message than a dream of racial brotherhood The Enigma of Frantz Fanon | The Nation Frantz Fanon and the struggle against colonisation | MR Online Frantz Fanon and the Paradox of Anticolonial Violence – Solidarity Frantz Fanon—a vital defence of violence by the oppressed - Socialist Worker Land and Freedom (1995 Ken Loach) [ENG Sub] (starting at the collectivization debate scene) Full Spectrum Resistance — McBay The Failure of Nonviolence | The Anarchist Library Beyond Violence and Nonviolence | ROAR Magazine Debunking the myths around nonviolent resistance | ROAR Magazine Social movements and the (mis)use of research: Extinction Rebellion and the 3.5% rule Responding to Domestic Terrorism: A Crisis of Legitimacy - Harvard Law Review Domestic Terrorism: Definitions, Terminology, and Methodology — FBI 676 | United States Sentencing Commission Activists use 'Tesla Takedown' protests to fight job cuts by Musk and Trump | Reuters Tesla vehicles destroyed, vandalized since Musk began role at White House, authorities say - ABC News Anti-DOGE protests at Tesla stores target Elon Musk's bottom line | AP News Tyre Extinguishers: A Night Out with the Climate Activists Sabotaging SUVs Leaflet | Tyre Extinguishers Tesla Stocks Tumble as Elon Musk’s Political Role Grows More Divisive - The New York Times Internal Memos: Senior USAID Leaders Warned Trump Appointees of Hundreds of Thousands of Deaths From Closing Agency Beyond Violence and Nonviolence | ROAR Magazine Violence Will Only Hurt the Trump Resistance | The New Republic Why Not Riot? Interview with Author Ben Case - CounterPunch.org 10 Lessons on Filmmaking from Director Ken Loach BBC Taster - How to Make a Ken Loach Film Land and Freedom (1995 Ken Loach) [ENG Sub] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
17 mars 2025 - 05 min 09 s
Brief: Antifascist Woodshed 2 (Punching Nazis?)
First of Matthew's two-part examination of why the hell questions of force, non-violent resistance with and without force, unarmed violence and property damage, and armed violence are so incredibly hard to talk about in a culture thick with spiritual and political bypassing. Are we capable of understanding the difference between morality and strategy? Part 1 focuses on philosophy and psychology while Part 2 focuses on definitions and tactics. Together, both parts will push back on conspiracism about the identities, motives, and methods of antifascists. Both will present slices of the rich discourse on violence and non-violence from antifascist history, including clarifying definitions of key terms. Both will open a space to think carefully about what intensities of self and community defense are both useful and tolerable in the fight against fascism. Part 2 gets into the very thick weeds of how the “strategic nonviolence” research of Gene Sharp, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan is framed as empirical, but may be way more about idealizing Gandhi than about facts on the ground. Drops Monday on Patreon. Huge list of references for each! Show Notes Stopping the Press: The Threats to the Media Posed by the Second Trump Term | The New Yorker What the FBI Has Done, and Kash Patel Could Do - Columbia Journalism Review Hakeem Jeffries cracks down on Trump speech disruptions Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer Got Punched—You Can Thank the Black Bloc | The Nation Aamer Rahman: Is it really ok to punch nazis? $16.5M settlement reached in class-action lawsuit over mass arrests during 2010 G20 summit | CBC News Meditations at the ringed fence around G20 Toronto - rabble.ca Remaining Human: A Buddhist Perspective on Occupy Wall Street - Michael Stone Brief: The Outside Agitator Conspiracy Trope (w/Dr. Peniel Joseph) — Conspirituality Anti-fascists linked to zero murders in the US in 25 years | Donald Trump | The Guardian 40 Ways to Fight Fascists: Sunshine rules for radicals | saul d. alinsky 198 METHODS OF NONVIOLENT ACTION | — Gene Sharp She Interrupted a Town-Hall Meeting and Was Dragged Out by Private Security - The New York Times Martin Luther King Jr. had a much more radical message than a dream of racial brotherhood The Enigma of Frantz Fanon | The Nation Frantz Fanon and the struggle against colonisation | MR Online Frantz Fanon and the Paradox of Anticolonial Violence – Solidarity Frantz Fanon—a vital defence of violence by the oppressed - Socialist Worker Land and Freedom (1995 Ken Loach) [ENG Sub] (starting at the collectivization debate scene) Full Spectrum Resistance — McBay The Failure of Nonviolence | The Anarchist Library Beyond Violence and Nonviolence | ROAR Magazine Debunking the myths around nonviolent resistance | ROAR Magazine Social movements and the (mis)use of research: Extinction Rebellion and the 3.5% rule Responding to Domestic Terrorism: A Crisis of Legitimacy - Harvard Law Review Domestic Terrorism: Definitions, Terminology, and Methodology — FBI 676 | United States Sentencing Commission Activists use 'Tesla Takedown' protests to fight job cuts by Musk and Trump | Reuters Tesla vehicles destroyed, vandalized since Musk began role at White House, authorities say - ABC News Anti-DOGE protests at Tesla stores target Elon Musk's bottom line | AP News Tyre Extinguishers: A Night Out with the Climate Activists Sabotaging SUVs Leaflet | Tyre Extinguishers Tesla Stocks Tumble as Elon Musk’s Political Role Grows More Divisive - The New York Times Internal Memos: Senior USAID Leaders Warned Trump Appointees of Hundreds of Thousands of Deaths From Closing Agency Beyond Violence and Nonviolence | ROAR Magazine Violence Will Only Hurt the Trump Resistance | The New Republic Why Not Riot? Interview with Author Ben Case - CounterPunch.org 10 Lessons on Filmmaking from Director Ken Loach BBC Taster - How to Make a Ken Loach Film Land and Freedom (1995 Ken Loach) [ENG Sub] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
15 mars 2025 - 42 min 55 s
248: What Side Are You On?
Lately a lot of folks (including us) have been doing the fascism comparisons. The questions we ponder this week: How long it takes for fascism to fully dig its roots in, how varied is the opposition along the way, and what role does the media play? Show Notes 165: Outrage Machine (w/Tobias Rose-Stockwell) 16 October 1919 | Hitler Archive Konrad Heiden Fritz Gerlich, publicist and prophet – how did he resist the Nazis? Fritz Gerlich Nazi Germany’s Schriftleitergesetz: The End of Freedom of the Press - Arolsen Archives The illegal press – Verzetsmuseum The Liberal Media Always Fails Against Fascism — Robert Evans Can a news media that doesn’t really oppose fascism ever cover it well? Against Normalization: The Lesson of the “Munich Post” | Los Angeles Review of Books The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler Fascist-Sympathizing Newspaper Barons Were the Blueprint for Today’s Right-Wing Media Media's Failure in Times of Crisis: Election Coverage in the Interwar Period How Journalists Covered the Rise of Mussolini and Hitler | Smithsonian How Britain's Nazi-loving press baron made the case for Hitler | The Times of Israel Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (2016). Is there a “postmodern turn” in journalism? In C. Peters and M. Broersma (Eds), Rethinking Journalism (pp. 97-111). London: Routledge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
13 mars 2025 - 01 h 15 min 07 s
Bonus Sample: Sex, Lies, & Communist Spies
Subscribe for full episode The MAGA attack on government jobs, takeover of government agencies, and purge of supposed “DEI” and “woke” professionals has a long history in the US. Julian uses old-timey newsreels, biographies, and events in the public record to trace the lines from 1919 to today, making stops at the so-called Red Summer’s “race riots,” Red Scare communist panics, Hollywood Blacklist, and Lavender Scare that fired thousands for being presumed gay. Unrelated to any of this completely useless and repressive paranoid bigotry, actual Soviet spies were being apprehended and prosecuted—even then everything was not on the level. The prosecutors had their own hidden skeletons and shady bedfellows, even as they claimed the patriotic moral high ground. At the heart of this history is a lineage of men who never let truth get in the way of gaining, and wielding, power and cruelty. Julian uncovers a surprisingly direct lineage of dirty-tricks demagogue succession, from Woodrow Wilson to A. Mitchell Palmer, to J. Edgar Hoover, to Joe McCarthy, to Roy Cohn, to Roger Stone, to our current president. Editorial Note: The Paul Robeson clip that starts the episode is a re-enactment by James Earl Jones for the Zinn Education Project. It uses the transcript of Robeson’s 1956 appearance before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
10 mars 2025 - 05 min 33 s