Conspirituality

Matthew tracks the attack on disability justice activist Beatrice Adler-Bolton after a clip from her Socialism 2026 panel — "Health Fascism, Body Politics, and the Anti-State State" — was stripped of context by a right wing rage-farmer, and made to go viral. Adler-Bolton used the word "dysgenic" ironically, as a reclamation, arguing the left shouldn't try to out-fitness fascists. The clip drew 12 million views and wound up on Rogan.

Matthew unpacks what his colleague Adler-Bolton actually said, and why swoletarians in the “Left Manosphere”—as per Ayman Makarem's framework—misheard her point about fitness as an attack on their attempts to prepare for revolution.

Show Notes

Health Fascism, Body Politics, and the Anti-State State

Death Panel podcast

Ayman Makarem, "The Leftist Manosphere and Identity Politics"

Elite Capture by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

The Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977

Ben Case, Street Rebellion: Resistance Beyond Violence and Nonviolence

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Harvard paleoanthropologist Daniel Lieberman returns with Fed Up: What Evolution Teaches About Food, Diet, Health, and Eating Well. In the book, he tries a variety of major diets, breaking down the latest science around each. His work, Derek argues, is a necessary corrective to the wellness influencers who promote and monetize single-diet solutions, when history and biology tell a much different story.

Show Notes

Fed Up: What Evolution Teaches About Food, Diet, Health, and Eating Well

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Humans are social animals. We’re not the strongest, fastest, or even best adapted to our environment. But what we excel at is our ability to work together, which means we’ve been able to adapt to every environment, a true outlier in the animal kingdom. And a big reason for that is our ability to empathize with others.

Basically, empathy is the ability to step into someone else's shoes, understand what they are thinking or feeling, and share in that emotional experience. The main types of empathy are cognitive, affective (or emotional), and somatic.

Derek looks at the first two in segment two through the lens of Paul Bloom’s work, but given a recent book by Lebanese-born Canadian marketing professor, Gad Saad (which Matthew covers in segment three), we thought we’d look at how empathy is being used, and potentially distorted, in modern society. Or, as Julian starts with, how it’s being weaponized on social media by Christian nationalists.

Show Notes

This Lebanese-Canadian Behavioral Scientist Is Gaining World Fame

Gad Saad: Google Scholar profile

Jews safer in Mississippi than Canada, says Jewish prof who left Montreal for Ole Miss

He's Canada's number one author, and he's leaving Canada for safety reasons

David Saad: Olympedia (official Olympic biographical record)

Gad Saad thread on his brother's Olympic/antisemitism story

Trump Says There Are 25 Million Illegal Immigrants

Fact Check: Did 20 Million Illegal Immigrants Enter US Under Biden?

Record 14 Million Unauthorized Immigrants Lived in the US in 2023

Vance magnifies false claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets

ADL's Global 100 Survey: What Does It Actually Say About Muslim Attitudes Toward Jews?

Examining the ADL's Antisemitism Audit

Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences (CASE)

Flawed by Design: Jewish Faculty Network Response to CASE Report

First Anti-Islam March by Pegida Movement Fizzles in Denmark

Why Moslems Cannot, Will Not, Need Not Integrate
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A recent article in The Atlantic ponders the current state of yoga. Derek weighs in based on his decades-long experiences.

Show Notes

What Happened to Yoga?
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AJA Woods (The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy) joins Matthew to trace how "cultural Marxism" mutated from Nazi "cultural Bolshevism" and the British Union of Fascists' attacks on modernist art, through Lyndon LaRouche's CIA-brainwashing lore, into Paul Weyrich and William Lind's 1990s "political correctness" rebrand, Pat Buchanan and the Tea Party's free-floating panic, Andrew Breitbart's arugula jokes, before finally landing as Christopher Rufo's anti-CRT crusade and James Lindsay's "Race Marxism."

Woods argues the throughline isn't honest scholarship on the Frankfurt School but a recurring move: relabel any liberation struggle—civil rights, feminism, trans rights, climate action—as an elite conspiracy, so its gains can be revoked as "foreign" corruption. Should sane people keep participating in these "debates" or refuse the frame and point to material stakes instead?

Show Notes

A.J.A. Woods, The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West

Jack Z. Bratich, Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture

Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism

James Lindsay, Race Marxism: The Truth About Critical Race Theory and Praxis

Christopher Rufo, New Yorker
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