Episodi
-
Trump has decreed it’s the Gulf of America, and Google agrees, at least for US users. Rep Buddy Carter has introduced HR 1161, the Red White and Blueland Act of 2025 to rename Greenland. And then, of course, there's making Canada the 51st state.
Pay attention to shit like this: it's a magic spell.
Trump is speaking in the old language of the Discovery Doctrine. That’s what we’ll excavate today.
Show Notes
Zizian Killing Spree and Arrests
Zizian leader denied bail
Roko’s Basilisk and Zizian beliefs/practices
Feb 2023 Community Alert about Ziz on Less Wrong
Project 2025 Observer
Native America, Discovered and Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and Manifest Destiny — Richard J Miller
Trump calls Canada a 'very serious contender' to become 51st state
H.R.1161 - 119th Congress (2025-2026): Red, White, and Blueland Act of 2025
DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM Aime Cesaire Translated by Joan Pinkham
Biography - Burnum Burnum - Indigenous Australia
The fight to 'free' the Aboriginal flag
Common Methods of Annexation | Snohomish County, WA
Doctrine of Discovery: How the 500-year-old Catholic decree encouraged colonization
Speech Acts (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Mexico's President Sheinbaum threatens to take legal action over the Gulf name change : NPR
How Canada planned to invade the U.S. (and vice versa)
Poilievre says Canada is broken
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
What do we worry more about: the far-right beliefs of trolls, or the coding skills of the trolls?
The split focus on Marco Elez and Elon Musk—are they Nazis, or hackers, or Nazi hackers?— highlight two prongs of emergent fascism. The ideological/aesthetic/psychological on one side, and the technocratic on the other. We can call them the manners and the machine.
First, Matthew unpacks a century-old thesis by an OG fascist that says totalitarian regimes take shape when both are working together, but that ultimately, the coup d’etat is about seizing control of the machine.
Then he rounds off with a rant about how easy it is liberal-centrist discourse about manners to distract from the reality of the machine. Why? It’s because in the absence of a clear analysis of how capital and power work—it’s in the sphere of manners—that liberals feel they have a fighting chance. But it’s also exactly where Musk and Elez and Vance and Trump can ignore them.
Show Notes
A Doomed Democracy | STANFORD magazine
The October Revolution - Introduction | Marx Memorial Library
Alexander Kerensky Dies Here at 89 - The New York Times
Curzio Malaparte | Italian Author, Journalist & Politician | Britannica
Reading the Eccentric Italian Writer Who Tried to Cover Up His Fascism ‹ Literary Hub
Curzio Malaparte: The Illusion of the Fascist Revolution
The Californian Ideology
The Californian Ideology Personified - Truthdig
Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology on JSTOR
175: Diagonalism (w/William Callison and Quinn Slobodian) — Conspirituality
Opinion | Don’t Believe Him - The New York Times
Welcome to Neokayfabe — Abraham Josephine Riesman // Writer
40 Ways to Fight Fascists: Street-Legal Tactics for Community Activists — Spencer Sunshine
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Episodi mancanti?
-
Education / Public service alert:
Matthew critically reviews six books that define fascist eras and recount how they have been opposed. A kind of “here we are, now what?” episode that hopefully interrupts the doomscroll with the sobriety of some practical considerations.
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (2017)
Robert Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism (2004)
Paul Mason, How to Fight Fascism (2018)
Mark Bray, Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook (2017)
Curzio Malaparte: Technique de Coup d’Etat (1931)
Spencer Sunshine: 40 Ways to Fight Fascists: Street-Legal Tactics for Community Activists (2021)
Formats range from popular nonfiction to academic history to pragmatic field guide. Politics range from liberal to anarchist. More feminist and non-white sources to be reviewed soon.
Show Notes
On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder
Timothy Snyder’s Bad History | City Journal
Robert O. Paxton - The Anatomy of Fascism
Is It Fascism? A Leading Historian Changes His Mind. - The New York Times
How to Stop Fascism
Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook
Curzio Malaparte - The Technique Of Revolution
40 Ways to Fight Fascists: Street-Legal Tactics for Community Activists — Spencer Sunshine
Joyful Militancy | The Anarchist Library
Let This Radicalize You | HaymarketBooks.org
Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life — Natasha Lennard
DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM Aime Cesaire Translated by Joan Pinkham
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Raw Milk. Raw Water. Raw Meat.
Mallory DeMille returns to break down the raw trend in wellness. We look at the science and cultural implications behind it.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
The eighth installment of Matthew’s Five Big Questions Posed to an Extremely Thoughtful Person.
Friend of the pod Blair Hodges joins Matthew to talk about how he’s transformed the teachings of his Mormon upbringing into inspiration for social justice, how he grapples with the limits of the nuclear family as he thinks about community building, and why James Baldwin is so important to him.
Blair has degrees in journalism, religious studies, and disability studies from the University of Utah and Georgetown University. He’s currently working on a research project on the history of intellectual disabilities in Mormon thought.
Show Notes
Relationscapes—with Blair Hodges
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
“You don’t get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, start a religion.” With those words, prolific sci-fi pulp fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard prophesied the course of his life’s work.
The 1950s saw the emergence of UFO- and alien channeling-based spiritual groups, as postmodern religious syncretism transformed supposedly ancient angels and demons into benevolent and/or terrifying aliens. No iteration of this fantasy has been more financially fruitful, culturally impactful, controversial, or bizarre than Hubbard’s brainchild: Scientology.
In the latest episode of Roots of Conspirituality, Julian digs into the fascinating backstory of this prolific author, revered as prophetic by thousands, pursued as a fraud by the IRS for decades, described as a cult leader by church escapees, and called an abusive madman by his ex-wives. Allegedly…
The religion is a complex blend of self-help psychology, elaborate pseudoscience, high-demand paranoia, and alien mythology that, at its height, commanded 100,000 members—and is still valued at roughly $2 billion.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Given how much shit the zone is being flooded with right now, you might have missed Donald Trump screaming about the supposed mistreatment of white South Africans recently. Last week, he said “certain classes of people” were being treated “very badly.” The trigger was a bill signed by South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, a former anti-Apartheid activist, trade union leader, and successful businessman—three qualities Trump doesn’t really understand.
Like the Trump administration, we have our own South African on staff—and he’s legitimately employed here! Julian grew up under apartheid and left the country due to it. Derek chats with him about what life was like growing up there, and he explains the confusion that Trump is injecting into the body politic.
Show Notes
Trump vs. South Africa
South African president signs controversial land seizure law
No Proof Elon Musk's Grandparents Belonged to Nazi Party
Errol Musk Talks About Elon’s Maternal Grandparents
Understanding What the 2025 Expropriation Act Means
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
As of recording time, RFK Jr has not yet been confirmed to the HHS Secretary position by the Senate. That might change by publication date. But if we were setting odds on this confirmation, we’d say put your money on Bobby.
So, WTF. Bobby Brainworms will be in charge of US public health, and its influence around the world. Our years of reporting on him have been defeated by the influencer noise of the MAHA Mamas. But we. Will. Carry. On.
Julian reviews the misinfo docket. Derek runs down the bureaucratic implications. And Matthew speculates on just how perfect someone like RFK Jr would be as the domestic health figurehead of a fascist movement, if, you know, that were ever to be possible.
Show Notes
Some Cancers Rising Amongst Younger people
Increased Lung Cancer from the 1960s to 80s.
Lung Cancer Rates Today
Smoking Suppresses Appetite and Results in Lower BMI for Some
64% of Adults in UK Overweight
65% of Australians Overweight
Diabetes Was 1.8% in the US in 1960
11.6% of US Population Has Diabetes
Risk of Alzheimer’s Doubles Every 5 Years After 65
30% of Smokers are Overweight or Obese
A recent study did NOT show vaccines cause autism, but RFK Jr. keeps pushing the lie.
“A New Academic Publishing Model”: Right-Wing Dark Money Group Launches Fringe Medical Journal
Judge Orders White House to Unblock Funding for NIH, Others
RFK Jr.'s financial disclosures reveal millions in both debt and income as he awaits HHS confirmation
Racial ‘Sterility’ and ‘Hyperfecundity’ in Fascist Italy. Biological Politics of Sex and Reproduction in
History of fascism, reproductive rights offers lessons for today
Are tyrants good for your health?
When the leader is ill—or addicted to cocaine, meth, steroids, or hormones
Five Pseudosciences That Fueled the Nazis
‘Hitler Was Centre of Our Lives’: Confessions of Nazi Criminals’ Wives | History | Nuremberg. Casus pacis
Theodor Morell: Hitler’s Particularly Odious Physician
Public Health Under the Third Reich
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Derek meditates on a recent conversation about the left-right divide between Ezra Klein and James Pogue.
Show Notes
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide: Ezra Klein Show
Going Back to Cincinnati — James Pogue
Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets — James Pogue
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
In the spring of 2017, Jordan Peterson first went viral by writing this in Canada’s National Post:
I will never use words I hate, like the trendy and artificially constructed words “zhe” and “zher.” These words are at the vanguard of a post-modern, radical leftist ideology that I detest, and which is, in my professional opinion, frighteningly similar to the Marxist doctrines that killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century.
Remember that horseshit, or things like it? Did you guffaw because he was obviously absurd? Did you try to reason with his stans online? Did you see him as a crank influencer, or a dangerous political figure?
Did you hope his ideas would be beaten down in the marketplace of ideas? Or did you seek him out at a public event and shout him down with a bullhorn?
Today, word salad like this is everywhere—including in Project 2025, now driving the Trump admin.
Matthew visits the antifascist woodshed to investigate the liberal manners, free speech naivety, and lack of community alliances that dissuaded him from grabbing the mic during a Peterson Q&A in 2017 and shouting:
“Your ideas are fascist and you should STFU. You are endangering trans people with your bullshit. Why do you care about how they experience their bodies, you whining pervert? Why are you inciting hatred against young people who want a better world?”
Because… look where we are now.
Show Notes
Read the Memo Pausing Federal Grants and Loans - The New York Times
President George H.W. Bush on political correctness (1991)
The History of Political Correctness—Lind
The Pitfalls of Liberalism — Kwame Ture
The Forgotten History of the World's First Trans Clinic | Scientific American
Jordan Peterson: The right to be politically incorrect | National Post
Bill C-16, An Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code (gender identity or expression)
Jordan Peterson is trying to make sense of the world — including his own strange journey
Postmodern Neo-Marxism — Jordan Peterson’s Shadow
Doug Ford met Jordan Peterson, appointment calendar reveals | CBC News
Why are the Proud Boys so violent? Ask Gavin McInnes — SPLC
Jordan Peterson revealed he once earned $400,000 a month
Antifa by Mark Bray
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Edward Snowden is largely only a public name thanks to Glenn Greenwald’s reporting, for which he was one of the contributors to a Pulitzer Prize-winning series for The Guardian in 2014. For a while, Matt Taibbi was considered the heir to Hunter Thompson when his gonzo journalism tore open the 2008 financial crisis and gave the public the term “vampire squids.”
Yet in more recent years, both men have swerved right: Glenn became a darling on Fox News and Taibbi was recruited by Elon Musk as one of the Twitter Files “journalists.” How did that happen? We’re joined by journalist Eoin Higgins, whose new book, Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left, dives into the career arcs of both Greenwald and Taibbi, and how they confuse and distort right-left alignments.
Show Notes
Sharath Jois, Heir to Founder of Ashtanga Yoga, Dies at 53 - The New York Times
Sharath’s Statement on Pattabhi Jois’s Assaults: Context, Links, Notes – Matthew Remski
Surviving Modern Yoga - North Atlantic Books
Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left
Eoin Higgins Morning Brew | Bluesky
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Part 2 of Matthew’s sit down with sex-work veteran and social justice advocate Esme Providence Brown to discuss New Age / wellness antifeminist, Kelly Brogan, and how her craven politics bolster the permission structure for Trumpian misogyny.
They track her political and aesthetic journey from labcoat wearer to wellness pole dancer to BDSM cosplayer—a spiral through deepening layers of appropriation, disavowal of responsibility, and cringe-tastic ideas. Esme concludes with some deep insights on what it means for artisanal BDSM to be stripped of its political and consent-culture context, and who Brogan’s “feminism is a psy-op” argument really serves.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
When asked if he thought Mark Zuckerberg’s effective ending of fact checking was in response to threats that he would “put him in jail for a very long time,” Trump replied, “Probably. Yeah, probably.” A week later, TikTok voluntarily disabled their app for users, then put up an announcement saying that Trump was going to bring them back.
Julian talks to digital disinformation expert Renee Diresta about the massive Big Tech realignment with MAGA, which now means Meta, X, and TikTok may become more like TruthSocial. If fact checking is biased, content moderation is censorship, and combating foreign propaganda is anti-free speech, where does that leave us now?
Show Notes
If you Give A Mouse a Cookie: Renee Diresta
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
What the ever loving fuck. That’s our intro today.
But we do have a structure. Julian’s going to review the Executive Order chaos, including the pardoning and deputizing of fascist street gangs. Derek’s going to explain what the ever loving fuck it means for health agencies to turn off access to health data. And I’ll look at two Xtian responses to fascism: one hypocritical and one poetic… but maybe toothless.
Show Notes
Freed Capitol riot ringleaders regroup - and vow 'retribution'
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Full episode available here.
The alien from Venus in George King’s head said: “Prepare yourself. You are to be the voice of interplanetary parliament.” It’s 1952 and the Englishman has been meditating deeply. Eight days later, a famous yogi from India materializes to explain what’s going on.
These experiences became the basis for the Aetherius Society—an organization that still has 35 chapters around the planet today. They claim the world’s governments are covering up their communication with a spiritually enlightened galactic federation, so as to maintain control over humanity.
If that sounds like 2020 red-pilled Instagram grift, you’re right! Everything old is new again.
Julian’s series, The Roots of Conspirituality, a history of new age conspiracism, is now conveniently organized under the “Collections” tab at the top of our Patreon page. Each episode is self-contained—but listen from the start if you want to trace the journey from the 1840’s “burned over region” of the American North East to today!
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
On Jan 10, the Oregon Nurses Association launched the largest healthcare strike in Oregon state history. Some 5k frontline caregivers from 8 Providence hospitals and 6 clinics have been holding the line in freezing temperatures as they fight for basic rights that their employer—a Catholic nonprofit healthcare system whose C Suite members make millions of dollars every year—refuses to give them.
Derek discusses why such strikes, and unions in general, are so important as the new administration takes office. He breaks down some of Providence’s past legal problems, discusses his own experience as a Providence patient, and talks to some of the nurses on the strike line.
Show Notes
Dr Jennifer Lincoln
Oregon Nurses Association
Resources for striking healthcare professionals
It's Time for Providence to Put Patients Before Profits
Providence, striking Oregon health workers remain apart on key issues
They Were Entitled to Free Care. Hospitals Hounded Them to Pay.
Hospital System to Refund Poor Patients Who Were Entitled to Free Care
Wealthiest Hospitals Got Billions in Bailout for Struggling Health Providers
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
One of the top podcasts in the world—even beating out Rogan for a few hours—is popularizing a well-meaning intervention for non-speaking autistic people. Unfortunately, that intervention happens to be a proven failure, and may set autistic and disability rights discourse back by decades.
Filmmaker Ky Dicken’s The Telepathy Tapes podcast delves into the world of Facilitated Communication, in which non-speaking people are believed to miraculously gain access to complex written language after lives of silence. According to Dickson, non-speaking people can also gather in transdimensional spaces and channel spiritual knowledge.
But there’s a problem. Every controlled test shows that the messages produced through letterboards and iPads are coming from the facilitators—not the non-speaking persons.
In this episode, Matthew interviews experts in pseudoscience and autism, including Janyce Boynton, a former (now dissident) practitioner of Facilitated Communication who explains how seductive and promising it was to practice, but how it ultimately steals agency and dignity from the autistic client.
And... this is also a story about parents dealing with crushing levels of unpaid and invisible labour. They are already doing miraculous work. A fantasy is no replacement for true support and recognition.
Show Notes
Podcast About 'Telepathic' Autistic Children Briefly Knocks Joe Rogan Out Of No. 1 Spot
Ky Dickens Director | Filmmaker
Facilitated Communication—what harm it can do: Confessions of a former facilitator
MD25438 - Powell, Diane Hennacy, MD - OR License Verification - 01/12/2025 11:07:47 AM
The Telepathy Tapes: Separating Science From Pseudoscience In Autism Communication
Stolen Voices: Facilitated Communication Devalues Autism | Psychology Today Canada
Multiple method validation study of facilitated communication: II. Individual differences and subgroup results - PubMed
The Telepathy Tapes Prove We All Want to Believe
"The Telepathy Tapes" is Taking America by Storm. But it Has its Roots in Old Autism Controversies.
Mixed Messages: Validity and Ethics of Facilitated Communication | Disability Studies Quarterly
Is There Science Behind That? Facilitated Communication
Controlled Studies — Facilitated Communication
Served people with severe communication impairments — Obit for Rosemary Crossley
More Doubts over Disability ‘Miracle’
Katharine Beals
Jonathan Jarry MSc - Science Communicator
FCisNotScience - YouTube — Janyce Boynton’s awesome YouTube channel
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
The seventh installment of Matthew’s Five Big Questions Posed to an Extremely Thoughtful Person.
Sam Adler-Bell is a journalist, political theorist, and co-host of one of Matthew’s favourite podcasts, Know Your Enemy—a show about the American right. They discuss the normalization of genocide, the stark comforts of Freud and Janet Malcolm, the relief of DW Winnicott, how we can’t avoid playing the role of our own mothers, and also good advice from his dad, a labour lawyer who knows something about long, uncertain, but always worthwhile battles for the common good.
Show Notes
Sam Adler-Bell
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Twitter Files journalist Alex Berenson recently published two articles claiming that Moderna covered up a child's death from a Moderna Covid booster trial—and the FDA is complicit. Children’s Health Defense then hosted him on their TV program to learn more about this outrageous scandal.
Do Berenson's claims hold up? All Derek did was click on the links in his own article to discover the "truth." He looks at this phenomenon through the lens of the 2020 book, Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World.
Show Notes
Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World
Alex Berenson’s article
Children’s Health Defense interview
The Lancet study on Covid vaccination in children
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
We know Bryan Johnson gobbles 100 pills a day. He pumps his son’s plasma through his veins. He does light therapy on his junk and wants to live forever. But do we understand how Johnson’s fascinations reflect his Mormon heritage? No. No we don’t.
That’s why we called our very own Salt Lake City expert, Blair Hodges, host of the Relationscapes podcast.
Blair joins Matthew to discuss Johnson’s transhumanism, which has roots in the LDS but has also led him away from it. They cover the spirituality of his money, whether he’s trying to become a living god, and how his home gym has some distinctive Mormon temple elements. Also: is Bryan really as polite as he seems, or is he hiding
Blair has degrees in journalism, religious studies, and disability studies from the University of Utah and Georgetown University. He directed communications for the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Studies at Brigham Young University before moving to the nonprofit sector. He has served as communications director for Volunteers of America, Utah and RMHC of the Intermountain Area. He’s currently working on a research project on the history of intellectual disabilities in Mormon thought.
Show Notes
Relationscapes—Blair Hodges
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices - Mostra di più
