Conspirituality

Recent reporting in the Washington Post found that Tulsi Gabbard has been taking policy guidance from her guru. We revisit our episode from May 2023, where we lay out Gabbard's lifelong involvement in this cult:

What does it mean for a prominent American politician to come into power as the sleeper cell of an eccentric Hindu-American cult? Does she act independently, or has her God-man got her on speed-dial? Can she bridge the divide between left and right with the radiant glow of Krishna consciousness?

Joining us today to help answer these questions is Nitai Joseph. He shares some heritage with Gabbard, because he also grew up in a Hare Krishna sect. He holds an MSc. in the Psychology of Coercive Control and has worked across a range of issues connected to ideology and manipulation, including cultic awareness, child sexual abuse prevention, adverse meditation experiences, and organizational ethics and accountability. 

Show Notes

Tulsi Gabbard, her guru and the mysterious messages that helped shape her political career

Gopala Govinda Rama Chant by Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa Chris Butler

QAnon Anonymous Episode 211: Tulsi Gabbard P1 (The Cult) feat Mike Prysner

QAnon Anonymous Episode 212: Tulsi Gabbard P2 (The Fascist Turn) feat Mike Prysner 

Tulsi Gabbard Had a Very Strange Childhood

What Does Tulsi Gabbard Believe? | The New Yorker

Chris Butler Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa: on “freedom”

An Insiders Perspective on Tulsi Gabbard and her Guru | by Lalita | Medium 

Tulsi Gabbard 2016 Janmashtami Message 

ISKCON Abuse Timeline

Definition of Betrayal Trauma Theory

Archived ex-Hare Krishna message board

Nitai can be reached via LinkedIn

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As the gases slowly leak from Trump’s orifices and IV holes, the bright flame of his inspiration to MAGA Christians is fading. Did he drain the swamp? Prosecute the pedophiles? Save the Holy Land? Lower gas prices? Give all the grill dads better health care? What was all the speaking in tongues for?

JD Vance has an answer for the MAGA faithful: another memoir, another rebrand that turns to the device that made Hillbilly Elegy a smash hit, and the worst book ever: the gall to turn his personal and familial despair into the diagnosis of an entire culture, in Appalachia. 

With Communion: Finding my Way back to Faith, Vance plays the same narcissistic trick: turning his lifelong journey through rightwing American Chrisitianity—with a short and shameful detour into New Atheism—to land in the Catholic faith of Leonard Leo, sketching out a redemption plan for every bro seeking their way home. 

Show Notes

Rerum Novarum (1891) — Pope Leo XIII

Elizabeth Catte, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

Appalachian Reckoning — Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll, eds.

Battle of Blair Mountain — West Virginia Encyclopedia

Hurricane Helene federal aid gap — Associated Press

PolitiFact — Springfield "Lie of the Year" 2024

Institut Montaigne — JD Vance analysis

Randall Balmer, "The Real Origins of the Religious Right" — Politico

Know Your Enemy podcast — episode on René Girard with John Ganz

Laudato Si' — Pope Francis

Magnifica Humanitas — Pope Leo XIV

Mike Fox, "JD Vance's Memoir Communion Performs Catholicism for Evangelicals"
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Listen to the full episode

RFK Jr has been one of the loudest champions of the Trump's work requirements for Medicaid and SNAP recipients. While he frames it in the language of health, he's really just reviving a generations-old argument first made by Ronald Reagan.

Derek digs into the archival tapes to deliver the goods.
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Matthew applies three interlocking frameworks to the conspirituality phenomenon—and to the podcast itself. Drawing on Jodi Dean's theory of neofeudalism, Yanis Varoufakis's technofeudalism, and McKenzie Wark's vectoralism, he argues that conspirituality is an epistemic crisis—a problem of bad information spreading through inadequately critical communities—but also a structural product of platform capitalism's feudal logic.

Dean's four elements (parcellated sovereignty, new lords and serfs, hinterlandization, and catastrophic anxiety) explain why certain populations are rendered susceptible before they encounter any specific piece of misinformation. Varoufakis names the extraction mechanism as  cloud rent. Wark shows what this means for the producer: a hacker class worker who owns every tool except the vector that makes the work valuable. 

Matthew then turns the analysis on himself, exploring what it means to have spent six years building critical content inside the infrastructure he is criticising.

Show Notes

Dean, Jodi. 'Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?' Los Angeles Review of Books, May 2020.

Dean, Jodi. 'From Neoliberalism to Neofeudalism.' Emancipations, Vol. 3, Iss. 3, 2024.

Dean, Jodi. 'Neofeudalism: The Messy Political Economy of Transitioning to Something Worse.' Emancipations, Vol. 4, Iss. 3, 2025.

Dean, Jodi. Capital's Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle. Verso, 2025.

Dean, Jodi. 'Communism or Neo-Feudalism?' New Political Science, Vol. 42, No. 1, 2020.

Varoufakis, Yanis. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Bodley Head, 2023.

Wark, McKenzie. Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? Verso, 2019.

McIntyre, Lee. How to Talk to a Science Denier. MIT Press, 2021.

Heron, Kai. 'Are We Witness to the Disintegration of Capital's Laws of Motion? A Review of Jodi Dean's Capital's Grave.' Emancipations, Vol. 4, Iss. 2, 2025.

Gane, Nicholas. 'Capitalism is Capitalism, Not Technofeudalism.' Journal of Classical Sociology, 2024.

James W. 'Worse than Dead: A Critical Response to McKenzie Wark.' Cosmonaut Magazine, October 2020.

Freedom Socialist Party. 'Book Review: Techno-Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism.' Socialism.com, 2024.

Beres, Derek, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker. Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat. PublicAffairs, 2023.

Wark, McKenzie. A Hacker Manifesto. Harvard University Press, 2004.
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A decade ago, JP Sears built a large following poking fun at yogis and wellness types with his “ultra spiritual life” videos. Then Covid came and Sears took a hard right turn. In fact, he credits the pandemic with “opening his eyes” to many of the world’s problems—in his eyes, that means Anthony Fauci, vaccines, and transgender “ideology.”

Sears is one of the very first people we covered on this podcast six years ago, and was one of the influencers we featured in our 2023 book about the wellness-to-right-wing radicalization pipeline. Turns out he’s turned again, this time into a flavor of Christian nationalism with an antisemitic bend.

Lately, Sears has been pumping out tons of Israel commentary, even turning against his former favorite president, Donald Trump. In fact, a number of right-wing influencers have soured on Israel. Is Sears sniffing out opportunities again? How is he balancing legitimate critiques of the genocide with blatant antisemitic rhetoric? And how does he fit into the growing diagonalism occurring in the right-wing attention economy?
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