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Josemaria Escriva founded Opus Dei, an ultra-conservative, high-demand, secretive Catholic organization in Madrid, Spain, after receiving a supposed vision from God in 1928. His small inner circle initially initiated university students into strict obedience, celibacy, medieval practices of self-flagellation, and deceptive recruitment techniques to convert their friends.
Operating outside of the mainstream church, Opus Dei rose to prominence under Spain's authoritarian dictator, Francisco Franco. Escriva was eventually canonized as a saint while the group amassed enormous wealth and influence around the world.
Today, their reactionary religious and political mission has established a foothold in Washington DC through the Catholic Information Center—the tabernacle closest to the White House.Bill Barr, Leonard Leo, and Project 2025 mastermind, Kevin Roberts, all visit for spiritual guidance. Meanwhile, scandals and lawsuits involving child sex abuse, money laundering, and human trafficking plague Opus Dei's reputation. Gareth Gore joins us to discuss his controversial new book on the past and present of this secretive organization, Opus.
Show Notes
Pew Research Center: America’s News Influencers
How Opus Dei Converted DC
Gareth Gore Author page for his book, Opus
Opus Dei Paid $900K to Settle Sexual Misconduct Claim
Argentine Prosecutors Accuse Opus Dei of Human Trafficking
Maria del Carmen Tapia Book Summary on Opus Dei
Financial Times on Opus
Biblical omen uncovered in aftermath of Hurricane Helene | Daily Mail Online
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A personal journey through health describing what led Derek to focus on health, science, and healthcare as a career and, eventually, this podcast.
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The post-election online chaos has a lot in common with what can go wrong in online survivor groups. Matthew tracks how opportunities for connection and solidarity can crater into gravity wells of recrimination, trauma-dumping, moral outrage porn, and the rise of new influence hierarchies. Not just because of differences in politics and values and temperament—but because of inequality and privilege.
A meditation on the difference between building a boat to sail in vs. a boat in a bottle, on considering the second arrow, and on when to log the fuck off.
Show Notes
Mutual Aid Hub
MORAL OUTRAGE PORN C. Thi Nguyen and Bekka Williams
The Second Arrow — Sutta Central
Log the Fuck Off with Amber Frost, Matt Christman, & Ben Fong
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Once upon a time, there was a golden age. A time when the news media was fair and balanced, unbiased and honest. But we've lost all that to the corrupting influence of big money, political correctness, and woke censorship. Blame the radical left.
Not to worry: the online charisma of heterodox new media figures like Bari Weiss and her plucky, centrist, truth-telling little start-up, The Free Press, has come to Make Journalism Great Again.
Yet their supposed heterodoxy is neither neutral nor journalistically rigorous. It's pure culture war contrarian sensationalism that wastes little ink critiquing the rise of right-wing authoritarianism.
We trace these tangled threads by listening in to the supposedly non-partisan The Free Press election night livestream, which giddily praised Trump for being the consummate bullshitter that will take an ax to Democratic institutions.
Show Notes
The evolution of France’s left and right politics, from the 1789 French Revolution to this year's election
What to Know About the Origins of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ in Politics, From the French Revolution to the 2020 Presidential Race
Our American Zion
When a Terrorist Comes to Your Hometown
Columbia's Own Middle East War
Bari Weiss’s Unasked Questions
TFP latest round of funding
Thiel/Lonsdale and UATX funding
UATX huge cash injection after pro-palestine protests
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Matthew got The Question on the morning after the election. At that moment, he came up with nothing but a hug. But then he chewed on it for days, and came up with eleven things to consider.
So here are some notes for possible conversations with tweens about anxiety, bullies, fascism, friends, mutual aid, and love.
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Derek discusses Tucker Carlson advocating for corporal punishment as a way to discipline children in his appearance at the Turning Points USA MAGA rally.
This is an unlock from a recent Patreon bonus, with a new intro from Matthew.
Show Notes
Stephen Colbert: Tucker Carlson’s Weird Daddy Issues
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Rapid-response electoral punditry is not our lane. So, while we gather our feelings and thoughts, Matthew hosts novelist Sheila Heti for a discussion of her encounter with A Course in Miracles, and what she discovered when she investigated its origin story for Harper’s Magazine.
Was Helen Schucman, the book’s “scribe”, mentally ill? Was she unduly influenced by her boss at Columbia Medical School, William Thetford, who once worked for the CIA’s MKUltra programme, and with whom she was clearly in love, even though he was gay? Were they dropping acid on assignment from Langley? Why was the initial dictation of the book so radically altered by its first editors? Why did Helen Schucman curse A Course in Miracles so soon after publication? Why did she keep writing trite poems to Jesus before dying in bitterness?
Heti was the ideal gumshoe for this project, because as a novelist all-too-familiar with internal voices and the feeling of “channeling,” she was able to feel her way into Helen’s life. Matthew asks her what she found.
Show Notes
The New Age Bible — Sheila Heti
Sheila Heti — website
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Having lived under Apartheid in South Africa, voted in the UK, and now staring down this terrifying US election, Julian reflects on the political differences between the three countries.
Stay tuned for some hopeful poetry at the end.
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Recently, “holistic veterinarian” Marcie Fallek, whose latest book, “Little Miracles Everywhere: My Unorthodox Path to Holistic Veterinary Medicine," is the #1 bestseller on Amazon in the Alternative Holistic Medicine category, appeared on Children's Health Defense's daily morning show.
During “Pet Vaccines and Holistic Vet Care" she spreads the same sort of vaccine misinformation and fear-mongering that RFK Jr's nonprofit has become infamous for. All of which made Derek realize that yes, they're actually coming for our pets.
Show Notes
Why Your Vet Bill Is So High
Private Equity Is Killing Your Pets
Nearly 70% of veterinarians have lost a colleague or peer to suicide, study finds
The acute suicide crisis among veterinarians: 'You're always going to be failing somebody'
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With days left before the most consequential US election in our lifetime, we reflect on the last 4.5 years of this podcast while expressing our hopes–and our own reporting goals—for the future.
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Matthew here with the third installment of Five Big Questions Posed to an Extremely Thoughtful Person.
Michelle Cassandra Johnson was an early guest on our show and helped us lay the groundwork for understanding the reality and impacts of racism in the worlds of wellness and new spirituality.
She’s an author, activist, and racial equity trainer. Her latest book, A Space For Us: A Guide For Leading Black, Indigenous, and People of Color Affinity Groups, was published by Beacon Press in August 2023. She lives in North Carolina with her sweet dog, Jasper, and her honeybees.
Show Notes
Michelle Cassandra Johnson
Conspirituality 40: White Supremacy: Grift and Gravity (w/Michelle Cassandra Johnson & Daniel Lombroso)
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Derek discusses Tucker Carlson advocating for corporal punishment as a way to discipline children in his appearance at the Turning Points USA MAGA rally.
Show Notes
Stephen Colbert: Tucker Carlson’s Weird Daddy Issues
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Billionaire legal activist Leonard Leo has had a role in placing all six conservative justices on the SCOTUS, and so therefore is in large part responsible for the overturning of Roe V Wade. But his right-wing activism isn’t even close to over, as he recently stated during a rare interview with The Daily Wire. Derek and Julian discuss Leo’s dark vision for the future.
Show Notes
Swamp Creatures 6: Leonard Leo, Judicial Kingmaker
Inside Leonard Leo’s Plan For Conservatives To ‘Crush Liberal Dominance’
We Don’t Talk About Leonard: The Man Behind the Right’s Supreme Court Supermajority
Leonard Leo’s Extremely Revealing Letter to a Dark-Money Group
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On Oct 4, Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford, held a symposium at his university. Titled “Pandemic Policy: Planning the Future, Assessing the Past,” it was marketed as an open-minded series of panel discussions involving a range of experts to debate and discuss the efficacy of Covid mitigation techniques.
In reality, it was a collection of mostly anti-vax and definitely anti-lockdown contrarians that tried in vain to bait people like Dr Peter Hotez to attend in order to give the event an air of legitimacy. Held on the anniversary of the “Covid is bad for business” doctrine, The Great Barrington Declaration, the day presented an opportunity to air supposed “censorship” grievances and demands that the public should have a say in the science of future pandemics.
The rub: most everyone involved is invested in the economics of public health, not the science, though those lines were freely and falsely blurred throughout the day. Considering Stanford’s new president, economist Jonathan Levin, gave the opening remarks, the Covid contrarians took one more step into the mainstream with their business-first, science-whatever attitudes.
Show Notes
Pro-COVID UK Charity With Anti-Vax Ties Behind Controversial Stanford Health Policy Conference
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick says a failing economy is worse than coronavirus
Dr. Vinay Prasad: “Public Health’s (Mis)Truth Problem”
Can Stanford Tell Fact from Fiction?
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As the world watches, Israel and Iran are squaring off for a potential war. Meanwhile, a Texas evangelical preacher, who runs the biggest Christian Zionist group in the world, is cheering on the coming apocalypse—as predicted in his 2005 book, Jerusalem Countdown. John Hagee even flew to DC to persuade Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, to jam through another military aid package.
Julian examines the real-world significance of conflicting religious prophecies focused on one particular piece of real estate in East Jerusalem as the “shoreline of eternity”—the portal into God’s Kingdom.
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Trump’s Town Hall DJ love-in stumped a lot of folks. From the conspirituality angle, however, there’s something familiar about this improvised ritual. Because the world we cover is strewn with the wreckage of charismatic patriarchs who bleed their followers dry in the closed-loop system of cultic dynamics.
When leaders like Trump get to the end of the line, all that’s left is pure affect. They have exhausted themselves in the efforts of self-aggrandizement. They have nothing left to say because they’ve said it a 1000 times. They’re all out of stories. They might even be bored of their own bullshit. Underslept or dysregulated by chaotic schedules, they may not be sure where they are. They’re beset by enemies, ill and in cognitive decline, but can’t admit it. And when they start to feel overwhelmed by their followers' pathetic—in their view—neediness, they will reach for any help they can get in maintaining their emotional dominance.
What October 14 showed us is that in these moments, Trump’s go-to resource is canned music, and, without his own iPad at the ready, a DJ handler who can spin the tracks and support his reverie of relief and control.
Show Notes
Trump holds town hall in Pennsylvania suburbs with focus on economy
How Media Outlets Covered Trump’s Musical Town Hall
Donald Trump is DJing weekly at Mar-a-Lago, plays Broadway songs and Celine Dion from his iPad, report says
DJ T: How Trump controls the music at Mar-a-Lago
Twitter thread
152: Tulsi Gabbard’s Krishna Consciousness (w/Nitai Joseph)
PLAYING FOR OSHO 1989 Introduction – Chinmaya Dunster
Patted Down by India’s Hugging Saint
The Soft Nationalism of Amma, India’s Hugging Saint
37: Guru Jagat Cultjacks Kundalini Yoga (w/Philip Deslippe & Stacie Stukin)
Letter to Sogyal Rinpoche from current and ex-Rigpa members details abuse allegations
Trump's bizarre music session reignites questions about his mental acuity
Brief: Trump’s Impending Ego Implosion (w/ Daniel Shaw)
Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation
Sex abuse allegations surround L.A. Buddhist teacher
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People will reach for anything to relieve the stress of climate anxiety.
There’s outright denial: this can’t be happening. It doesn’t fit in with my understanding of the world. The science must be wrong. During Milton, Catturd wonders why the wind speed keeps changing on the weather reports. They must be making it up. Or the guy in Galveston, TX, posting that he can’t see any hurricane from his Gulf view.
When denial is impractical, there’s political displacement: our enemies are responsible. They’re seeding the clouds, they’re spewing the chemtrails. The Democrats are sparking tornadoes with invisible drones over swing states. They’re using radio waves to steer the hurricane’s eye. They’re clearing land for lithium mining so they can take our gas hog pickups away.
But when the storm surge is just too high to attribute to Jewish space lasers, there’s also good old spiritual displacement: God is punishing our enemies for their sins. We didn’t stop all their abortions and anal sex, and now we are caught in the crossfire of God’s just vengeance.
Today we look at the distortions and disruptions, the fallacies and fables—and not all of them from the right—that keep people locked in climate paralysis.
Show Notes
Food Babe misinformation carousel
Wigington v. MacMartin, 2:21-cv-02355-KJM-DMC
Record Hot Water Is Fueling Hurricane Milton
Hurricane Milton: what causes such intense storms?
What Big Oil knew about climate change, in its own words
Early oil industry knowledge of CO2 and global warming | Nature Climate Change
Exxon Confirmed Global Warming Consensus in 1982 with In-House Climate Models
No obituary for Earth: Scientists fight climate doom talk
Guy McPherson and Near Term Human Extinction - The Mike Nowak Show with Peggy Malecki
Arctic News: It’s time to pursue hospice, by Guy McPherson
Statement on Guy McPherson - Eugene
The faulty science, doomism, and flawed conclusions of Deep Adaptation -
Ecological Grief as a Response to Environmental Change: A Mental Health Risk or Functional Response? - PMC
The faulty science, doomism, and flawed conclusions of 'Deep Adaptation' | openDemocracy
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Matthew fields excellent questions about his new book from colleagues Ann Gleig and Michelle C. Johnson.
NAB Show Notes
This event includes discussions on sensitive topics related to abuse; sexual assault; high-demand tactics; racism; gender-based violence; and systems of dominance, patriarchy, and oppression. We know that these topics may be distressing or triggering to some attendees, and we invite you to take care when listening, and to tend to your needs if you feel activated, overwhelmed, or emotionally impacted. We're so grateful you're here, and we thank you for coming. We also want to thank survivors of sexual violence and abuse in yoga, wellness, Buddhist communities, and beyond, whose stories, voices, and feedback have been invaluable to the work each of us continues to do in service of healing our communities from the harm of sexual violence.
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Born in 1831, Helena "Madame" Blavatsky pioneered the New Age grift. The Russian aristocrat plagiarized her books while claiming to be channeling the “Masters of Ancient Wisdom” to tell a dodgy heroic back-story. She founded the Theosophical Society in New York, claimed to have learned a secret Tibetan language, and laid the foundation for alien channelers and Woo-Anon. She also inspired the Nazis.
In the latest episode from a series on the pseudoscience New Age roots of today’s conspirituality phenomenon, Julian pins Blavatsky on the cork-board map.
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On September 29, a predicted one million people were going to show up for the Rescue the Republic event in Washington DC. Founded by the libertarian party chair, the Defeat the Mandates founder, and “professor in exile,” Bret Weinstein, about 1,500 mostly MAGA acolytes showed up. Yet the event represents something a long time building in America: the strange and at times uncomfortable merging of wellness and right-wing politics via MAHA and MAGA.
Sure, RFK Jr was there, but today we’re going to look at a few figures we haven’t covered in a while, or at all. As can be expected in conspiracy land, the C-list celebrities brought some of the most outlandish, and most dangerous, ideas along with them.
Show Notes
Orange Shirt Day | The Canadian Encyclopedia
National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and the History of Residential Schools - Foundry
Phyllis’ Story - Orange Shirt Society
More Than Anything Else, the Rally to Rescue the Republic Was Awkward
Are food dyes used in the US banned in other countries? No, not really.
IDF Ordered Hannibal Directive on October 7 to Prevent Hamas Taking Soldiers Captive - Israel News - Haaretz.com
Have no childhood vaccines ever been tested using double-blind placebo controlled trials?
Vincent van Gogh's "Sunflowers" paintings vandalized hours after activists sentenced for similar incident - CBS News
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