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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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With MAHA taking over stages nationwide, we’re experiencing a deluge of wellness influence and contrarians screaming about systemic issues with food, medicine, and government. Yet the solutions they offer never actually address public health.
Ironically, the same trend has been occurring in investment-driven medicine, where both government and private sector money is flowing into individualized medicine at the expense of public health.
Derek dives into this sordid affair, concluding with six steps experts agree would actually do something about the state of our health.
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Finally: a dedicated, concise report on RFK Jr’s sordid history with women, with all the sources.
Why?
Because now one of the allegations involves a criminal act.
And because it’s becoming clearer that the emotional manipulation he allegedly deploys in his personal life—many sources say that “love-bombing” is his technique—rhymes so closely with his political day-to-day that it’s hard to find the lines between stumping, white knighting, seducing, and screwing.
Correction: The RFK Jr clip “I’m not a church boy” ran on Breaking Points, not Majority Report.
Show Notes
The real victims of Olivia Nuzzi’s affair with RFK Jr are other female journalists | Moira Donegan | The Guardian
Exclusive: Multiple Women Claiming Romantic Relationships With RFK Jr. Threaten His Standing in Trump Orbit
RFK Jr.’s Family Doesn’t Want Him to Run. Even They May Not Know His Darkest Secrets. | Vanity Fair
Damning Report Reveals RFK Jr.’s History of Alleged Sexual Assault | The New Republic
RFK Jr. Was a Compulsive Womanizer, and Yes, We Should Care | The New Republic
43 suspected mistresses found in RFK Jr.’s phone
Former babysitter for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. accuses him of sexual assault in Vanity Fair profile
Woman who accused RFK Jr of sexual assault says he apologized by text | Reuters
Keith Edwards — “I’m not a church boy.”
Massachusetts Sexual Assault Laws
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Texts Apology to Woman Who Says He Sexually Assaulted Her
A Timeline of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Controversies
The Last Days of Mary Kennedy: 'She Is Angry and Depressed, but She Is Not Ill' (Exclusive)
AA meetings in the White House? Kennedy, a recovering addict, says it's just one of changes he'd make
RFK Jr. Wants to Send People Addicted to Antidepressants to Government “Wellness Farms” – Mother Jones
Brief: The New Age Origin Story of RFK Jr’s Campaign — Conspirituality
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Cleanse the soil! Purify the blood! Save the children! Make America Healthy Again!
On Sept 23, Jordan Peterson, RFK Jr., rising alt-health stars Casey and Calley Means, and many other nutrition non-experts gathered for a live streamed event they called the American Health and Nutrition Roundtable, hosted by Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.
Their subtitle, A Second Opinion, was an apt description for the alternative fact-filled diatribes that ensued. The soil has been poisoned, everyone is fat and sick, the entire medical industry is corrupted by Big Pharma, and Big Food is enacting a genocide on the American people via metabolic dysfunction. COVID skepticism and anti-vax messaging lurked just beneath the surface.
The speakers painted a terrifying picture and then presented themselves as benevolent common-sense saviors. At the climax of her speech, Casey Means, fresh from her career-boosting Tucker Carlson appearance, took a deep breath before declaring that this is all actually a spiritual crisis.
Show Notes
Killers of the Flower Moon: The real history behind diabetes and Native Americans.
Special Report: QAnon Fantasies Look Like Colonial Realities (w/Julian Brave NoiseCat) — Conspirituality
Palestinians pampered”— Robert Kennedy Jr
CDC Sociodemographic Data on American chronic disease
Commonwealth Fund: Portrait of the Failing US Healthcare System
Mikhaila Fuller | Yeah, I get botox. From the latest Q&A, link in bio. | Instagram
Mikhaila Peterson’s life at the molten core of the culture wars - New Statesman
NPR on International Journal of Obesity Study
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Matthew here with the second installment of Five Big Questions Posed to an Extremely Thoughtful Person.
Does Natalie Wynn need an introduction? Or do we simply know that every frame of every Contrapoints essay is a gorgeous still life, a love letter to the unknown viewer thirsty for smarts and queerness and justice?
Often, top-tier artfulness will wind up concealing the artist. But despite the rigors of curation and the introversion Wynn ‘fesses up to in this interview, she also communicates welcome and generosity, and it was an honor to hear her speak personally about these Big Things..
BTW: here are the five questions. You can think about them too.
What terrifies you most in these times?
What is the most meaningful and supportive idea or story you return to for reliable wisdom and relief?
What is the greatest obstacle you face in forming community relationships, and how do you work to overcome it?
If you were responsible for comforting and guiding a child terrified of climate catastrophe, how would you do it? What would you say?
If your wisest ancestor came in a dream to offer you one piece of advice about living in difficult times, what would it be?
Show Notes
ContraPoints - YouTube
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An essay from Matthew exploring the problem of authenticity which plagues every investigation we do on the spiritual influencer beat.
There are queasy questions we’re always contending with when we’re listening to the preaching of Charles Eisenstein, Kelly Brogan, Zach Bush, or RFK Jr:
Has this person really committed to the spirituality they are presenting? Or is spirituality instrumental to them? Do they have experience to share, or programs to sell?
It’s hard if not impossible to find the line between these things, especially in the society of the spectacle, especially when we’re talking about influencers we don’t personally know. But it's an important consideration because assumptions made in one direction or another taint the entire discourse.
Maybe, we’re talking about the difference between unearned faith and earned faith.
Show Notes
Zero at the Bone: Wiman
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On Monday, Senator Ron Johnson sponsored a congressional panel entitled "American Health and Nutrition: A Second Opinion." Unfortunately no actual health or nutrition experts were invited. Instead, the four-and-a-half hour event featured speakers like Robert F Kennedy Jr, Jordan Peterson, Jillian Michaels, Vani Hari (Food Babe), and a host of other influencers and contrarians. Derek investigates all the science that wasn't told—and all the products and services that were sold.
Note: Derek meant to compare aluminum fear-mongering with thimerasol (organomercury) but instead conflated them. Both are safe at the level used in vaccines as adjuvants, though most thimerasol was removed due to public outcries and an abundance of caution. Links added to Show Notes.
Show Notes
Mandela Barnes Says Sen. Ron Johnson 'Bought and Paid for' by Big Pharma
The Congressional "American Health and Nutrition Roundtable" was an egregious display of anti-science disinformation
MEDIA ADVISORY: Sen. Johnson to Lead Roundtable Discussion: “American Health and Nutrition: A Second Opinion”
Thimerosal and Vaccines
Adjuvants and Vaccines
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