First, the blue wave. Then, Russell Brand gets convicted of rape and sexual assault. Derek and Julian talk about the meltdowns going on in America right now.

Our midterm elections debrief.

Julian interviews journalist Anand Giridharadas about his new book, Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City.

VP of Media Matters for America Julie Millican joins Julian to discuss her organization’s excellent reporting on how figures like Steve Bannon, Jerome Corsi, and Cleta Mitchell are sowing distrust and calling for confiscation of ballots and voting machines. 

Journalist Anthony Mansuy joins to discuss the protests in France.

Matthew welcomes friend of the pod, Brad Onishi, back to Conspirituality. Brad is the co-host of Straight White American Jesus, and he’s here to discuss his new book, American Caesar: How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America into a Monarchy. 

A good time to reflect on the Charles Eisenstein’s post-Covid trajectory and what it might mean for the ground of conspirituality writ large.

Josephine Riesman returns to Conspirituality to discuss her exceptional new book, The Last Temptation of Beck, with Derek.

Mallory DeMille returns to investigate the “Carnivore MD.”

Journalist Scott Carney joins Derek to look at the slipperiness of many claims inside Andrew Huberman’s new book, Protocols.

We explore how we may be losing the precious resource of charisma to the brutal extractivism of our tech overlords.

Matthew examines how Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has paired an 18-month austerity rampage with approval ratings near 60%.

Canadaland’s Jesse Brown recently hosted anti-vax charlatan, Peter McCullough. It didn’t go well.

Julian reviews Anand Girirdhardas’ new book, Man In The Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been meeting with MAHA activists in an attempt to bring the coalition to the Democratic party. Recent reporting reveals that she’s been meeting (or trying to meet) with some close to RFK Jr, as well as those who have been critical of the HHS Secretary. It might be a sound political strategy, but what happens when you start courting conspiracy theorists?

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.

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.

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." 

Conspiracy theorists have decided Novak Djokovic has long COVID — despite no evidence — because he's become an anti-vax icon courted by RFK Jr. and Dr. Oz. So we thought it was high time for a long COVID update.

Gil Duran's exceptional new book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, explains how technofascists like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Curtis Yarvin, JD Vance, and Marc Andreessen are not-so-quietly dismantling America as we know it.

Derek discusses this science fiction nightmare we’re now all living through.