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 ch ...
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Derek Beres Matthew Remski Julian Walker Podcasts
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280: Peter Thiel is Definitely Not the Antichrist
1:08:14
1:08:14
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1:08:14Tech billionaire Peter Thiel is no cuck philanthropist. The co-founder of Palantir is leading his company at the bleeding edge of mass surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, and AI-assisted warfare. He also fancies himself a political player, responsible for funding his protege, JD Vance, to a heartbeat away from the presidency. Con…
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Listen to the full episode on Patreon After attending the No Kings rally in Portland on Saturday, Derek shares some thoughts about the week leading up to the nationwide protests. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesBy Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, Julian Walker
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Stephen Miller is once again making headlines for saying the quiet part out loud. Derek and Julian look into this strange little man from Santa Monica. Show Notes Stephen Miller: Understanding the man who became ‘Trump’s brain’ through his Chronicle opinion column ‘I love Hitler’: Leaked messages expose Young Republicans’ racist chat What Stephen M…
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ICE is on the loose in our cities, acting with seeming impunity. They've repelled from Black Hawk helicopters, thrown journalists and protestors to the ground, and belligerently refused to unmask, provide identification, or present warrants for the people they're kidnapping. Among the social media videos documenting this despicable stormtrooper beh…
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Yallidarity (w/Nathan Evans Fox) [Introducing Antifascist Dad Podcast]
46:36
46:36
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46:36Hey everyone… special drop today: the inaugural episode of Matthew’s new side project, Antifascist Dad Podcast. Matthew sits down with songwriter Nathan Evans Fox to talk about kinship, Appalachia, and the viral hymn that’s resonating across communities. Nathan shares the roots of his concept of yallidarity—solidarity rooted in labor, joy, food, mu…
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Bonus Sample: Antifascist Christianity: Black Jesus (Pt. 2)
5:40
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5:40Full episode on Patreon Part 2 moves from Christofascist spectacle to the “mushy middle” of liberal Christianity—why it so often blesses order over justice and falters when fascism rises. Drawing on MLK’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, Reggie Williams’s Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus, and lived experience inside white urban churches, he traces how bureaucr…
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Brief: Antifascist Christianity: Black Jesus (Pt. 1)
35:48
35:48
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35:48In this first installment of Antifascist Christianity: Black Jesus, Matthew revisits Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s journey from the theological classrooms of Berlin to the Black churches of Harlem — where he encountered a Jesus entirely unlike the imperial figure of his upbringing. Bonhoeffer arrived in New York a servant of white European Christendom, and…
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Our podcast is not actually illegal—yet. Thanks to Trump’s recent Security Presidential Memorandum, NSPM-7, or “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” it soon could be. Today we talk about one of the starkest moves into fascism Americans have yet seen from MAGA: what it is, how pre-crimes can soon be reality, and the fear …
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The People’s Temple in Jonestown, Heaven’s Gate, The Order of the Solar Temple. All cults that ended in tragic mass suicides. How could such lofty aspirations end so badly? For today’s self-contained installment of The Roots of Conspirituality series, Julian explores the shadow side of the anxiety-relieving religious notion that death is just a doo…
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RFK Jr posted a seven-minute video earlier this week that assures us that vaccines aren't all that great, actually. Derek reads the studies Kennedy references as proof. You might be surprised to learn the HHS Secretary has very selective reading. Show Notes Annual Summary of Vital Statistics: Trends in the Health of Americans During the 20th Centur…
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277: TikTokTylenol [feat Mallory DeMille]
1:02:35
1:02:35
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1:02:35Did you hear about the pregnant woman who ingested too much Tylenol just to “own Trump” and is now on a ventilator and will likely not wake up, offing both herself and her baby? If you were tapped into social media at all this past week, you likely saw dozens of wellness and right-wing influencers sharing it, each with their own hot take. One probl…
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Listen to the full episode here. When RFK Jr announced that Tylenol might be implicated in autism, he forefronted correlative research that has yet to prove causation. That didn’t stop a number of MAHA-pilled wellness influencers from running with the narrative. Derek looks at their posts, as well as the immediate pushback, after breaking down Kenn…
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MAGA congressman Clay Higgins recently sent a letter to top tech executives demanding subservience when it comes to "acceptable" speech. This comes two years after Higgins co-sponsored a bill protecting freedom of speech. Given recent capitulations to the Trump administration by tech CEOs, we shouldn't write off Higgins's aggressive push. Derek and…
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Charlie Kirk became the latest victim of gun violence in America on September 10. And he wasn't the only person shot on a school campus that day, nor was he the only political figure killed this year. Unlike Melissa Hortman and her husband, the motivation for Kirk’s murder remains unclear. That hasn’t stopped right-wing pundits and politicians from…
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Bonus Sample: Antifascist (Autistic) Christianity — Simon(e) Weil (Part 2)
5:48
5:48
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5:48The second installment in a two-part exploration of Simon(e) Weil for the ongoing Antifascist Christianity series and the Antifascist Woodshed project. At the heart of the episode is Weil’s terse, luminous definition of love—“belief in the existence of other human beings as such”—and Richard Gilman-Opalsky’s unpacking of how that love rejects proje…
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Brief: Antifascist (Autistic) Christianity: Simon(e) Weil (Part 1)
47:39
47:39
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47:39Matthew begins a two-part exploration of Simone Weil—French philosopher, mystic, and antifascist activist—through the lens of autism, embodiment, and political courage. Following the earlier Antifascist Christianity Woodshed series on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, this installment positions Weil as a kind of spiritual auntie to Greta Thunberg, whose uncompr…
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Less than two weeks after a shooter unloaded 500 rounds at the CDC in Atlanta, RFK Jr gutted that agency's violence prevention research by firing 100 employees. Less than a month later, Charlie Kirk was shot in front of a crowd of 3K at a Utah university. Millions saw the graphic clip online, which ignited a propaganda and disinformation culture wa…
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The events of September 11, 2001 changed the world. Julian reflects on several interpretations of what they meant, proposing that each is a kind of Rorschach-test result based on our own religious and political beliefs, backgrounds, and social conditioning. The conspiracy theorist simply can’t believe something like that could happen to America, go…
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Derek worked for nearly 10 months on a NY Times opinions video, "You Might Have Already Fallen for MAHA’s Conspiracy Theories," which was published this week. He discusses what it took to produce this video with his collaborator, Alex Stockton, as well as the role journalism has to play in dispelling health misinformation. Show Notes You Might Have…
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274: Is Rogan REALLY Leading a Death Cult?
1:13:22
1:13:22
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1:13:22If it wasn't all so tragic, politics might seem like a bad joke. But how did comedy become so unfunny, so politically toxic? From his hideout in a remote mountain cabin, anonymous video collage artist and essayist The Elephant Graveyard has finally cracked the code. According to him, Joe Rogan has created a doomsday death cult that feeds the dad-sh…
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Bonus Sample: How Wellness Influencers Became Radicalized
7:17
7:17
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7:17Biostatistician Halbert Dunn's 1961 book, High Level Wellness, set the stage for the modern wellness movement. Derek reads it alongside some of today's top conspiritualists, noticing the themes (and differences) that run throughout Dunn's work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…
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The recent killing of two police officers (and wounding of a third) in Porepunkah, Australia has highlighted the dangers of sovereign citizen-style conspiratorial beliefs. The alleged shooter is still at large, but his social media footprint shows anti-vaccine, COVID-contrarian, and even QAnon-aligned beliefs, as well as a long history of violent t…
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Trump is still alive, though a lot of folks are excited that won't last. Maybe it’s testimony to the allure of the fantasy that he really is powerful, that his strongman schtick has legs, that he really has cast some magical spell over everyone—and that if he drops dead we’ll all wake up to a different world… Of course we won’t. But we’ll go throug…
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Bonus Sample: Antifascist Christianity: Bonhoeffer (Pt 2)
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5:34Matthew recounts the story of a young, hoity-toity soft-nationalist German theologian named Dietrich Bonhoeffer who discovered the radical soul of antifascism by hanging out in a Black Baptist church in Harlem in 1930. He came to the US believing in the white Jesus of European empire, but left enthralled by the Black Jesus of the oppressed. Back in…
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Brief: Antifascist Christianity: Bonhoeffer (Pt 1)
37:39
37:39
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37:39Matthew recounts the story of a young, hoity-toity soft-nationalist German theologian named Dietrich Bonhoeffer who discovered the radical soul of antifascism by hanging out in a Black Baptist church in Harlem in 1930. He came to the US believing in the white Jesus of European empire, but left enthralled by the Black Jesus of the oppressed. Back in…
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