{"podcast":{"title":"Conspirituality","slug":"conspirituality-582888","podcast_index_feed_id":582888,"rss_url":"https://feeds.megaphone.fm/GLSS1122389842","website_url":"https://conspirituality.net/","image_url":"https://megaphone.imgix.net/podcasts/244201b2-c360-11ed-8a91-97e8b69444b5/image/Conspirituality_Show_Art__1_.png?ixlib=rails-4.3.1&max-w=3000&max-h=3000&fit=crop&auto=format,compress","author":"Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, Julian Walker","episode_count":811,"summary":"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.","last_synced_at":"2026-06-26T20:20:18.804323+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/conspirituality-582888"},"episode":{"title":"Bonus Sample: Liberals Punching Left","slug":"bonus-sample-liberals-punching-left","published_at":"2026-05-18T10:00:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/conspirituality-582888/bonus-sample-liberals-punching-left","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/conspirituality-582888","url":"https://pdst.fm/e/swap.fm/track/6bpBPtHL977KJxLX2zPs/pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.megaphone.fm/GLSS5217366986.mp3","audio_url":"https://pdst.fm/e/swap.fm/track/6bpBPtHL977KJxLX2zPs/pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.megaphone.fm/GLSS5217366986.mp3","summary":"Listen to the full episode In this contribution to an ongoing co-host conversation, Matthew argues that the liberal centre's habit of punching left is a historically conditioned class strategy. From FDR's New Deal—designed to inoculate capitalism against socialism—through Hayek, Buckley, the Birchers, Limbaugh, and the Obama-era \"socialist medicine\" smear, liberals have accepted the premises of Red Scare attacks, because doing so served their own interest in disciplining the actual left. The result is a Ratchet Effect that pulls discourse perpetually rightward, and a narrowing of the Overton window to convert anticapitalist politics into psychological pathology. When the liberal centre engineers conditions in which no structural challenge to capitalism is rational, it can caricature the resulting conflict as hysteria, cultishness, and immaturity. There’s also a gendered dynamic going on here, in which the leftist is unreasonable, nitpicky, always demanding too much, focused on minutiae but also big feelings, and always missing the “big picture”. Sometimes the only real division between right wing and liberal responses to the left is the difference between outright hatred and resentful dismissal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices","meta_description":"Listen to the full episode In this contribution to an ongoing co-host conversation, Matthew argues that the liberal centre's habit of punching left is a h…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":325,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/conspirituality-582888/episodes/bonus-sample-liberals-punching-left/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/conspirituality-582888/bonus-sample-liberals-punching-left.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}