How does an elite Millennial politics reporter wind up having phone sex with and giving campaign advice to the 70-year-old emerging fascist she’s reporting on?
Most of that should stay between Olivia Nuzzi and her therapist. What we do know is that American Canto, Nuzzi’s new book, is a memoir (or maybe novel) made for the conspirituality age, in which raging toxic roided-up hypocritical male charisma is always the center of attention.
The domineering ghoul is the pole star of interest and fascination, always moving too fast and chaotically to understand—unless you know how fascism accelerates. We scavenge these pages for clues about Kennedy and how the hell this journalism disaster happened.
Show Notes
Zyn pouches and American Masculinity
The Olivia Nuzzi Comeback Is Everything Wrong With Modern Media
A Serious Journalism Scandal Hiding Inside a Frivolous Sexual One
The Scandalous Rollout Was the Best Part of Olivia Nuzzi’s Memoir
119: We Are Slenderman (w/Kathleen Hale)
The first-person industrial complex: How the harrowing personal essay took over the Internet.
A Q&A with Olivia Nuzzi of New York magazine on her career, covering Trump and access journalism
Guests urged to be vaccinated at anti-vaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jr’s party
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58:54
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58:54
Bonus Sample: “Joe Rogan of The Left” Glazes China
Listen to the full episode here
Hasan Piker just spent two weeks in The People’s Republic of China. The famous streamer is often invoked as being a potential “Joe Rogan of The Left,” who might bring young voters, especially working class men, back into the Democratic Party.
But Piker’s livestreams from China raise controversial questions. Is he whitewashing Chinese human rights abuses? Was he paid by their government to propagandize his combined 5 million viewers? How else to explain first-class plane tickets, ultra-luxury hotel rooms, privileged access to forbidden Western social media, and carefully avoiding criticisms of the authoritarian state while waxing poetic about their country and Mao Zedong?
Julian digs into Piker’s politics in the context of China’s tumultuous history. First stop: Tiananmen Square.
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Brief: Have Tech Bros Killed Psychedelics?
"Immortality influencer" Bryan Johnson recently livestreamed his second-ever psilocybin trip "for science." But was it, really? Derek and Julian break down the performative nature of this stunt and discuss the growing right-wing influence on psychedelics culture.
Show Notes
Bryan Johnson Has Discovered Shrooms, and He Really Wants You to Know It
Silicon Valley’s Man in the White House Is Benefiting Himself and His Friends
How the Right Coopted Psychedelics
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28:41
286: RFK Jr’s Great Crusade
RFK Jr is one of the greatest perpetrators of a firehose of falsehoods that we’ve ever covered. The stakes were raised when he was installed as head of America’s public health system. A new longform article in The Atlantic offers an inside look at the history and current thinking of this man, as insightful for what it offers as telling for what it omits. We discuss the role of journalism in an age defined by propaganda.
Show Notes
Scoop: The new #2 at CDC is a top ivermectin prescriber who ended Louisiana’s vaccine-promotion media campaigns
Doctor Critical of Vaccines Quietly Appointed as C.D.C.’s Second in Command
CDC Quietly Turned Off Its Vaccine Search Tool. It’s Not Clear When It’s Coming Back.
The Olivia Nuzzi and RFK Jr. Affair Is Messier Than We Ever Could Have Imagined
RFK Jr. and the Inexplicable Appeal of Repulsive Men
RFK Jr. is overhauling the program that helps preserve Americans' access to vaccines
Why Is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. So Convinced He’s Right?
Nature: Pertussis, A Tale of Two Vaccines
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Bonus Sample: How Does Andrew Wakefield Keep Getting Resurrected?
Listen to the full episode.
With the CDC recently updating its website with anti-vax propaganda under the direction of RFK Jr, disgraced and disbarred physician, Andrew Wakefield, is back in the news. In fact, Senator Ron Johnson even tweeted out that he deserves an apology. He must be relying on short attention spans, given all the ways Wakefield manipulated the “study” that showed a link between vaccines and autism—even though the study itself found no such proof.
Derek revisits the retracted 1998 study, as well as shows just how much proof exists to the contrary of the CDC’s new page.
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Dismantling New Age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy-mad yogis. At best, the conspirituality movement attacks public health efforts in times of crisis. At worst, it fronts and recruits for the fever-dream of QAnon. As the alt-right and New Age horseshoe toward each other in a blur of disinformation, clear discourse, and good intentions get smothered. Charismatic influencers exploit their followers by co-opting conspiracy theories on a spectrum of intensity ranging from vaccines to child trafficking. In the process, spiritual beliefs that have nurtured creativity and meaning are transforming into memes of a quickly-globalizing paranoia. Conspirituality Podcast attempts to bring understanding to this landscape. A journalist, a cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic discuss the stories, cognitive dissonances, and cultic dynamics tearing through the yoga, wellness, and new spirituality worlds. Mainstream outlets have noticed the problem. We crowd-source, research, analyze, and dream answers to it.