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- [00:01]
Julian Walker
Location the Lab Quentin only has 24 hours to sell his car. Is that even possible? He goes to Carvana.com what is this, a movie trailer? He ignores the doubters, enters his license plate.
- [00:14]
Matthew Remsky
Wow, that's a great offer.
- [00:16]
Julian Walker
The car is sold, but will Carvana pick it up in time for it?
- [00:19]
Matthew Remsky
They'll literally pick it up tomorrow morning. Done with the dramatics.
- [00:23]
Julian Walker
Car selling in record time.
- [00:26]
Matthew Remsky
Save your time.
- [00:26]
Julian Walker
Go to Carvana.com and sell your car today. Pickup fees may apply. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. With the price of just about everything going up, we thought we'd bring our prices down.
- [00:36]
Derek Barris
So to help us, we brought in.
- [00:38]
Matthew Remsky
A reverse auctioneer, which is apparently a.
- [00:40]
Derek Barris
Thing Mint Mobile Unlimited Premium wireless everybody get 3030 better get 30 better to.
- [00:44]
Matthew Remsky
Get 202020 better get 2020 everybody get 151515 15. Just 15 bucks a month sold.
- [00:49]
Julian Walker
Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.
- [00:53]
Matthew Remsky
Of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of network's busy taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com Foreign.
- [01:12]
Derek Barris
Welcome to Conspirituality where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism. Quite a topic for this week. I am Derek Barris.
- [01:25]
Matthew Remsky
I'm Matthew Remsky.
- [01:26]
Julian Walker
I'm Julian Walker.
- [01:27]
Derek Barris
You can find us on Instagram and threads at Conspirituality Pod. We are also all individually over on Blue sky where I spend most of my time and you can access all of our episodes ad free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on patreon@patreon.com conspirituality we also post our Monday bonus episodes on Apple Subscriptions. As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
- [02:04]
Julian Walker
Spirituality 261 where are they now? From 1999 to 2002, VH1 ran a show called Where Are They Now? The irregularly produced series wondered aloud what happened to former cultural icons like 80s hair metal bands, kid actors and one hit wonders. While some people remained surprisingly relevant, most were confined to at very best, appearing at VFWs and regional summer festivals in parking lots of or tragically gripped by an addiction and dreams of a better time that they couldn't make last. Two years ago this month our book Conspirituality was published. We called one section Rogues Gallery to highlight a range of figures we've covered on the podcast. One of those chapters was dedicated to a man named Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Don't say we didn't warn you. How about the other nine in our version of Where Are They Now? We're going to turn back the clock and revisit those nine other chapters. We'll do it over three episodes in the coming weeks. This week we begin with famed women's health expert turned heart playing conspiracy peddler Christiane Northrup, self proclaimed philosopher king Charles Eisenstein and former model turned middling new age filmmaker turned anti vax documentarian Mickey Willis. All right, so guys, I greet you today from the test case city in the front line of American authoritarianism. It's pretty crazy in LA right now and everyone I know who has connections to or families who have some kind of contested immigration status is very freaked out. And we have police and National Guard and now Marines engaging with the people of our city. Pretty awful.
- [04:04]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah. And you also have a lot of people doing a lot of supporting of each other and learning a lot about community support and self defense and bringing out the leaf blowers and, you know, all of this stuff and also food and people dancing. It's pretty incredible.
- [04:22]
Julian Walker
Yeah, people are terrified and angry and also really loving one another. So everyone knows what's happening and we're all going to be glued to seeing how it unfolds. In terms of our topic today, I chose to check in on my personal favorite best selling women's wellness author and one time Oprah darling, she of the livestream Harp Music Serenade Dr. Christiane Northrup. She was one of the first heavyweight boosters of Mickey Willis's plandemic anti vax Covid conspiracy video released in May of 2020. So we're talking really early days of what we've been doing.
- [05:02]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, right.
- [05:02]
Derek Barris
If I remember correctly, the New York Times kind of pieced together how plandemic bounced around the Internet. Northrop was really the vector that sent it off into the stratosphere. But she was also an early adopter of that phrase the Great Awakening, wasn't she?
- [05:17]
Julian Walker
Yeah. So not only was she patient zero in spreading the pandemic of plandemic, but she also imported the term great awakening from QAnon lore into Facebook holistic wellness discourse by publishing a daily Great Awakening video series that blended her reports on the powerful messages from various spirit channelers. She followed with advice on essential oils and then, as we've said, moments of live soothing heart performance. She's really very good. And then appreciative unboxing of gifts from her fans. And along with all of that came moments of Advice on how to red pill the normies in your family, how to understand your gun rights and get prepared to protect your kids against microchipped vaccines that would turn them into demonic half animal chimeras.
- [06:04]
Matthew Remsky
There was a lot of scary stuff. And also she flipped most often every day, I would say, into kind of like a soothing counseling right here with you, making deep eye contact through this selfie sermon kind of format where it was often sort of like, I think it felt to many of her followers like a daily prayer ritual. And I also want to point out that the Great Awakening kind of carried with it part of her subconscious Americana appeal because, you know, it's this. This recurrent religious theme in US history. And I think it goes along with the fact that listeners might remember us talking about her gracious rolling main farmhouse, you know, where, you know, the fourth of July, the whole place would be festooned with bunting. So a lot of influences in there. And I remember you did all of these IG kind of open letters to her back then, Julian, I think, in the hope that maybe she would, I don't know, listen or come to her senses or, I don't know, maybe you wanted her attention. I don't know.
- [07:15]
Julian Walker
Yeah. I mean, to the point of what you were just saying, I do think that she was very personable in those selfie sermons. I think you're right that it had a kind of ritualized, sacralized quality to it. And it was. The parasocial vibes were very high and I think very real. And you're absolutely right to point out the Great Awakening as having this. This rich history. Actually, as part of my series on Patreon called Roots of Conspirituality, that's something that I address in depth. And the Northeast is really the major area where a lot of this intense new religious movement, passionate, prophetic, apocalyptic stuff, has had a very vibrant history. In terms of the Instagram videos I did to her, this was in response to her radicalization arc. And that included like dog whistling, second Amendment and militia support just sort of in the mix amongst all of the New age niceties. And then I tracked how she switched from donating to pro choice Democrats for a long time exclusively in terms of any political donations, in terms of the available documentation to then sending money to Trump and conservative PACs at the same time as she was fundraising from her audience. So that was interesting. By January 6, 2021, as we tracked her, she was water fasting in solidarity with the Capitol rioters. But her most radical moment was when she told the podcast that she'd put a bullet in the head of anyone who tried to vaccinate any kids in her family.
- [08:48]
Derek Barris
I'll have to look up and see if I could find the VH1 theme song to insert here. But where is she now?
- [08:57]
Julian Walker
Well, you may be unsurprised to know she's still there. She's still on Facebook with over half a million followers. It hasn't grown since her heyday. It's pretty much stayed the same even after being named one of the disinformation dozen responsible for over 65% of anti vaccine content during the pandemic on social media. Like many who massively expanded their exposure during COVID So we've seen this a lot. Northrop has sought ways to then monetize as one does. Her Facebook videos now are now almost entirely about marketing. And we're not seeing a lot of the conspiratorial or political stuff. It's mostly repetitive promos for Amata Life. And Amata Life, in case you're fortunate enough not to know, is her personally branded safe and natural set of menopause relief products, the active ingredient of which is a miracle herb from Thailand called Puraria mirifica. And unsurprisingly, these types of wonder supplements usually have very slim evidence to support them. And that's the case here too. But that doesn't stop Dr. Northrup from selling it in pills and tinctures and eye cream and separate moisturizers for your face, your decoration olette, your body, and yes indeed, your vagina or ladies vaginas. Her sales pages also serve as email capture sourcers for her video courses and her book on menopause as well as her Amata Life newsletter that will deliver a steady drip of marketing edutainment.
- [10:34]
Derek Barris
That's always the key with these hucksters is finding a country that people don't particularly know a ton about with the folk medicine and then taking an herb from it. David Wolf would do that with the Tibetan goji berries, even though most of his goji berries were from a different country.
- [10:49]
Julian Walker
Yeah, and there's such a long history of that. Right. It's like the orientalism and the, the, the thing from far away that is rooted to an ancient tradition.
- [10:56]
Derek Barris
Right, right. And my mother in law is from northeastern Thailand. And my wife would tell me these stories where when they came to America, they would pull over on the side of the road and she would gather dinner in places where Americans just thought there was just the side of the road. And she would be able to identify things. So there's this, there is this actual folk understand, but that does not necessarily translate as medicine. And I think in that gap, people like Northrop are able to exploit the biases that people have around folk medicines or just being able to procure dinner from various sources. But in terms of specifically, I just wanted to say with the menopause industry stuff, Dr. Jen Gunter, a friend of the pod, she has done a lot of great work and I'll look for some to include in the show notes. Just talking about how this, this has become really a cottage industry for wellness influencers to take advantage of women who are going through this period of life where there's a lot of physical, emotional, mental transitioning happening and trying to sell them things that have never been shown to work. And they're really exploiting what is a challenging time in ways that are really egregious. So Definitely check out Dr. Gunter's work on that.
- [12:13]
Julian Walker
Yeah, one of the things that's fascinating about that, which kind of runs parallel to a lot of the men's wellness kind of optimization grift, is that it's not only alternative supplements and various kinds of remedies and practices, but it's also off label use of hormones, Big Pharma produced hormones that you're, you know, these, these influences are trying to get you to get on board with as the cure all for a range of things, you know.
- [12:38]
Matthew Remsky
I was surprised to hear that her Facebook following hasn't gone down because I recall when we were following her very closely, the amount of disappointment and disillusionment expressed by what seemed to be a pretty substantial chunk of her following. Because her main book, Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom, was really like a bible to a certain demographic within the wellness world for, you know, I would say a couple of decades. It was, I think it was as popular among the women I knew in yoga and wellness as like light on yoga was or something like that. And the title, here's the, the thing, the title seemed to rhyme with the title of the famous book Our Bodies ourselves from the 1970s. And I think that coded her content as feminist. And in some ways it was from the point of view of correcting, you know, a lot of the misogynistic aspects of the ob GYN profession in prior years, you know, things that institutionally she had rejected. And she also did things like she decried unnecessary practices like routine circumcision for baby boys. I didn't have any idea, given the number of people around me who were reading it that the book already had pseudoscience red flags in it, including in the last edition. I think there was some misinformation about the HPV vaccine warning people off of taking that. But I don't know. I think it might be a case in which the reader's commitment to an idea of promoting women centered medicine and for very good reason obscured some of the red flags. And that's just what I remember from the fallout. And that's why I'm surprised that she didn't actually lose people. I think that she probably has to maintain a recruitment of followers that just sort of patches in the gaps for everybody that she's disappointed.
- [14:33]
Derek Barris
Well, it's sort of similar to Naomi Wolf and the Beauty myth, right? People at the time, it was speaking to a thunder population that needed that sort of information. And you, you would, you wouldn't necessarily know even where to look in the 90s for that information. And then in reflection, it's like, oh, they, they kind of played loose here with, with a lot of what they were saying.
- [14:54]
Julian Walker
Yeah, yeah, I was, I was just about to say that, Derek. Absolutely. The two run parallel, right? So the Beauty myth comes out in 1990. Women's bodies, women's wisdom comes out in 94. Both of them are criticized for quoting a bunch of stats incorrectly. Both of them make all sorts of claims about eating disorders that completely overlook the scientific and psychological consensus on the major CAUs, along with various cultural influences. And throughout, she's pretty consistent. I think there are ways in which she may have had more of a liberal leaning feminism, especially around things like reproductive freedom. But throughout that book, she's saying that you should issue cancer treatments in favor of holistic methods, that alternative medicine is empowering and takes us back to our ancestral kind of roots of how to have natural immunity and that you need to have informed consent on vaccines because you should trust your intuition. So there's also like a lot of the gendered, the essentialism of what it is to be a woman that we see throughout the new age, which is essentially saying patriarchal western medical science has robbed you of your intuitive wisdom and doesn't respect it. And you need to really get back in touch with that if you want to be truly healthy.
- [16:09]
Matthew Remsky
I think that's why I really appreciate Jen Gunther's take there, which is that there's nothing more anti feminist than giving women a bunch of bad information about their health.
- [16:19]
Julian Walker
All right, so back in 2020, the Great Awakening series was huge for Northrop on Facebook. And it's interesting what you say, Matthew, I feel like she may have lost a certain number of supporters due to her radicalization, but she filled those in with new people who were going, oh, finally someone's singing our song. But also, it's that weird thing on Facebook where, you know, once you've followed someone on Facebook, you tend to always be following them. I don't know, it's a. It's a different dynamic than the social media.
- [16:46]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah. It has to be like, it has to be an activist action to like unf. And then it becomes a thing and then everybody's watching how many people are unfollowing the person and so on. Yeah, that. That rarely happens. You're right.
- [16:57]
Julian Walker
Yeah, yeah. So the Great Awakening series ran almost daily from March of 2020 all the way through January 26th of 2021. And it mostly got like 25 to 50,000 views per video. Some of them ballooned up as high as 120,000 views, probably due to good timing and sensationalist content. And that level of exposure, if you track through her video stream on Facebook, actually does crossover at those times onto her other business videos that she was also putting up much less frequently. But it's there. And then probably due to Facebook content moderation efforts, she does seem to have just flipped back into being a pseudoscience wellness promoter and doing things like shilling for structured water or partnering with a quack cancer coaching program, which actually is consistent with her early work. These days, her less politicized video view videos are getting 2,000 to 5,000 views for the most part. So a big drop. There's an occasional bump to 10 or 20,000, and it's hard to see why. But around three years ago, every five to 10 videos, there's this little 13 second clip that says, come and find me on Rumble and Telegram.
- [18:14]
Matthew Remsky
Right.
- [18:14]
Julian Walker
Just in case you lose me here. So she was doing the Russell Brand routine before Russell Brand. Her Rumble account, though, when I go look at it, it never really took off. Not a lot of subscribers, not a lot of views. It's, It's. Everything's below 10,000, mostly even lower than that. And I think I can see why, because it's basically a duplicate of her Facebook video feed. It's just promoting her products in a repetitive loop of a lot of the same videos going up again and again every couple months. There are some additional political vlogs that you don't see on her Facebook, but really, it's a bit of a flop. Same sort of failed strategy on Twitter, where she actually does have 130,000 followers, but nowhere near the kind of engagement she still gets on Facebook. Then she has a substack which is completely paywalled at 10 bucks a month and it's hard to see how that's going, but we don't know in terms of the long tail of inflammatory conspiracism and how much sort of enduring influence she's had. She has a widely debunked viral video. It's an interview from November of 2020 in which she talks about Bill Gates and surveillance nanobots in vaccines and the ominous sounding luciferays which is going to mark us all with the number of the beast that still shows up everywhere every few months. People post that clip legacy but I'll finish up with this June 1 tweet that caught my eye. It just reads this is incredible and then links to a long, odd and very interesting substack piece from an account called Observing Consciousness. I've shared this piece with you guys. It's called the Palantir, the mirror that captured the Machine. And it's a 3,600 word essay written with poem style, line breaks, lots of short declarative sentences. It's a bit like a sci fi observational account on how a momentous event went down. But it's happening now. And here's how it starts.
- [20:09]
Matthew Remsky
Power was always built like a pyramid, layered in secrecy, ruled from the top. That's why it's falling in degrees.
- [20:18]
Julian Walker
The narrative of this piece is that Trump's executive orders have been some genius level legal warfare that have flipped the script on Palantirs all seeing surveillance tyranny, which I guess was being used by Biden for evil and also by the deep state tyrants during COVID Because newsflash, Trump was in office during COVID but now Palantir has flipped to serve the.
- [20:42]
Matthew Remsky
Good as Trump's executive orders weren't politics, they were legal warheads, coded acts of silent rebellion. Harvard fell surveillance systems turned and Palantir, their mirror of control, became the system that now watches them. This canon doesn't theorize, it documents. Each degree reveals what they never wanted seen. Who built it it, who ran it, who paid for it, and who falls next. If you think this ends in courtrooms, you haven't seen degree 33.
- [21:17]
Julian Walker
Oh boy, it's so intriguing. It applies this vast conspiracy literally, from Masonic lodges to Ivy League halls organized in a towering pyramid of 33 levels, which is actually the featured image for this post. And Palantir is the nefarious crown jewel of that pyramid, the All Seeing Eye until, of course, Donald Trump blew it all up.
- [21:38]
Matthew Remsky
Not a physical explosion, but a legal one. A structural implosion of the global corruption grid masked as routine bureaucracy. Donald Trump didn't walk into Washington to play the game. He came to flip the board.
- [21:52]
Julian Walker
Oh boy. What's noteworthy here about what seems like a next iteration of QAnon storytelling is how it combines unhinged conspiracy paranoia with a very organized, legalistic, confident tongue timeline that goes into a lot of depth. Someone put a lot of time and effort into this. They did their own research, but they taught the class in narrative coherence and internal logical consistency, even though it's pretty wild and baseless. Christiane Northrup is the first person I've seen sharing it. And where have we heard that before? So we'll be keeping an eye on this particular account and what this person writes next.
- [22:30]
Matthew Remsky
You know, I was going to say, as you were going through her recent material, I was wondering whether she was getting bored. Like it takes a particular type of person to return to just marketing her supplements after all of that excitement during the Great Awakening. And so I'm not surprised because this seems like a good example of how an evolved QAnon worldview has to continue to fantasize about the pathway of Trumpism leading to mass spiritual liberation. And it takes a lot of energy and intricacy to explain why the results are not just exactly what we see in the streets of LA right now. And also, you know, he's got this, whoever it is, I said he, but I'm not sure. It sounds. I don't know, it sounds like a tech bro guy. Yeah, I'm also hearing a weird inversion of Klein's Mirror world here. But you know, when you first brought this to our attention, I wondered, is this going to fuel a new round of QAnon dreams? But then I began to wonder whether the attraction of an ornate conspiracy theory is actually only really attractive and useful when you're not in power. I don't know. What do you think?
- [23:38]
Julian Walker
I mean, it definitely has a lot of energy behind it when you're part of the Rebel alliance, as Peter Thiel likes to call it. But nonetheless, I think one of the features of the information age and of the speed of digital life is that myth making is happening in real time. And there will always be people who will continue to write the myth, which is how it really is, which is not how it appears, because everything is connected and nothing is an accident, etc. The Hoover Dam wasn't built in a day, and the GMC Sierra lineup wasn't built overnight. Like every American achievement, building the Sierra 1500 heavy duty and EV was the result of dedication. A dedication to mastering the art of engineering. That's what this country has done for 250 years and what GMC has done for over 100. We are professional grade. Visit GMC.com to learn more. Assembled in Flint and Hamtronic, Michigan in Fort Wayne, Indiana of US and globally.
- [24:40]
Matthew Remsky
Sourced parts, this Father's Day Help dad be all he can be with a gift from the Home Depot. Because he's not just dad, he's the.
- [24:47]
Julian Walker
Handyman of the house, the plumber in a pen and the emergency mechanic.
- [24:55]
Matthew Remsky
Upgrade his gear this Father's Day with.
- [24:57]
Julian Walker
The Husky mechanic's 270 piece tool set from the Home Depot. Now on Special buy for $119. A $695 value for every kind of dad. Find the perfect gift this Father's Day at the Home Depot.
- [25:14]
Derek Barris
I think you're on mute.
- [25:15]
Matthew Remsky
Workday's starting to sound the same.
- [25:18]
Julian Walker
I think you're on mute.
- [25:20]
Matthew Remsky
Find something that sounds better for your career on link with LinkedIn job collections you can browse curated collections by relevant industries and benefits like Flexpto or hybrid workplaces so you can find the right job for you. Get started@LinkedIn.com jobs finding where you fit. LinkedIn knows how so we wrote a whole chapter in our book on Charles Eisenstein called New Age Q because he played throughout the early pandemic period the kind of role of channeler and prophet for the conspirituality wing of what became or of the MAGA movement and then what became the Maha movement. He was really, I think, the most eloquent, genteel and liberal coded of the lot. Coded being the keyword there. And you know, he was kind of a muse for the, I don't know, the blindered thinking person.
- [26:17]
Julian Walker
Yeah, the way that you just framed that made me remember that he was the most appealing for a lot of folks in the more kind of yoga, mild mannered, vegan, et cetera, et cetera. Not particularly gravitating towards the more intense aspects of QAnon. But he made a really big impact early on, I think with a fairly broad population. Right?
- [26:39]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, I'd say fairly well educated left leaning yoga types who have human humanities degrees really like picked up on what he had to say and they found it very relieving. He was first out of the gate in March of 2020 with an essay called the Coronation for All in which he tagged the Pandemic as a mass spiritual opportunity that would come to fruition if we didn't rely on othering the virus with technologies of separation like quarantine and so on. So he also networked through that essay with all of the early Covid contrarians and usually played the role of providing pseudo intellectual and a kind of spiritual gravitas for, you know, what became the Maha movement. Then he went on to do a stint as a kind of rent a guru guy with Aubrey Marcus before he was displaced by Mark Gaffney, which I think is a huge mistake on Marcus part. Like, you should have stuck with Charles. You should have. I mean, he might have told you an honest thing once in a while and not just like, you know, stroked your ego. But during that time with Marcus, he also helped to create the New age origin story for the Maha movement and for the relevance of RFK junior on the world stage. They produced together this film called the Gathering of the Tribe that suggested that Marxist crew especially associated with Fit for Service were like anti Vax space shamans. You guys remember that?
- [28:07]
Julian Walker
Yeah. I mean, speaking of real time mythologies, that was really something. It was really high level artistic animation. People should check it out. Music by ambient composer are John Hopkins really well known and successful. And then these wild implications that anti vaxxers are really aliens that were sent to save all of humanity.
- [28:27]
Matthew Remsky
And it was that sort of stuff that helped to consolidate a solid chunk of liberal or left leaning support for RFK Jr. At least those portions of that demographic that were really invested in wellness. And then, then Eisenstein was hired as messaging director for Bobby, earning at one point over $21,000 per month for telling Bobby how to bring the story of separation to the world stage or whatever. But the denouement for that contract featured Eisenstein having to make this crazy wisdom apologia for Bobby's endorsement for Trump, in which he kind of said that Trump is really only a trickster character. So we don't really know how this is going to manifest. And it's going to take all of us to, you know, seek our highest intentions to figure out how to make things turn out well. But eventually Eisenstein broke with him over Bobby's support for Israel's military action in Gaza, which is now a genocide, of course.
- [29:29]
Julian Walker
Yeah. So Trump, in what you were saying a moment ago, Matthew, is. He's whoever people project onto him. Right. There's no way of knowing who he really is. He's kind of a cipher. He is all things to all people. And you should really need to get out of your own kind of dualistic thinking if you think you know who he is. And then with regard to Bobby and Gaza, I mean, don't forget this is obviously about blackmail. Right?
- [29:53]
Matthew Remsky
Well, that's what he told Bret Weinstein, that, you know, he thought that Bobby was blackmailed into this kind of hardline. Israel is our aircraft carrier in the Middle east and you know, and the Palestinians are the most pampered people in the world or whatever the fuck he said. And that of course ignores that the Kennedys have been Israel hawks forever along with the vast majority of legacy Democrats. Democrats. But I would say that the bottom line on Eisenstein's legacy so far, because I'm going to look forward now into what he's been doing since is that, you know, he's got millions of words behind him and they have secured a permanent career on the workshop circuit. And now on Substack, you know, he has a subscription based aspirational literature economy career that he's going to be able to continue for the foreseeable. But over the past five years, those words really sped up a river that pushed this pseudoscientific populism into a position in which it's gonna cause a mass casualty event. At this point, anyone who goes with Charles Eisenstein on a healing workshop to a hot spring should check the water after he's had a dip because he's gonna be washing blood off his hands for the rest of his life.
- [31:08]
Julian Walker
Oh, that sentence started off funny and it got really dark by the age.
- [31:12]
Matthew Remsky
And I was thinking too that there's historical pre for this. Like the period between World War I and World War II saw the rise of all these proto fascist poets who they either engaged in direct propaganda on behalf of people like Mussolini, so that would be Ezra Pound, or they played a more ethereal role in aestheticizing fascist themes. So that would be like William Butler Yeats, who, who wrote marching songs for the Irish blue shirts who sailed under a swastika to fight for Franco. And that thing about the center cannot hold that's actually like appeal for a kind of authoritarian return to some sort of normalcy. It's very, very strange that I missed that in my English lit education.
- [31:58]
Julian Walker
Yeah, me too. You've ruined it now.
- [31:59]
Matthew Remsky
Sorry.
- [32:00]
Julian Walker
I'm seeing that the, the antidote to the strange beach, that's the strange beast that slouches toward Bethlehem to be born is actually fascism.
- [32:08]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, the return to order. Some sort of order. That's what he was worried about. I mean, it's Very complicated. And you know, people have a lot of views on, on Yates, but that was in there and I had no idea.
- [32:16]
Julian Walker
And then, you know, alongside what you're saying, you have spiritual philosophers like Julius Evola from that time period who are now inspirational darlings of the alt right. People like Bannon and Curtis Yarvin will reference Julius Evola, who moved in Mussolini and Hitler's circles.
- [32:31]
Matthew Remsky
To be fair, on first scan, Eisenstein's content doesn't line up with the romantic nationalism, the machine and speed fetishes, or the praise of masculinity that were the keynotes of a hundred years ago. So on the surface it doesn't look like that at all. But I think he actually does something more, more subtle and effective and also plausibly deniable because he turns the minds of erstwhile progressive humanities degrees people to jelly with Jungian riddles, with his metaphor of healing, separation and othering. And he can apply that to everything from political polarization, which ultimately is meaningless. Right. The space between left and right just shouldn't really exist in the ethereal plane or whatever. But neither should we, you know, separate ourselves from nature with vaccines or food dye and fruit loops. So I think he winds up softening up his readership with this general sense that nothing really is as it appears and that there are always deeper forces at play, that politics is this rigid illusion and that people should intuitively realize that a figure like Trump might be the agent we all need to break the illusion of politics as usual.
- [33:44]
Julian Walker
Yeah, I mean he's really a one trick pony in that regard. He's got this archetypal pseudo non dual code breaking skeleton key that just intoxicating the reframes everything as actually being its opposite. And it's, it's really sad to me that people with humanity degrees can't see through that, you know, to the extent that they've been taken in by this guy because it's real, like first year, you know, what is reality really? How do we know anything at all? Kind of philosophy student, you know, silliness.
- [34:13]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, well, I think the punchline today is that he's starting to get wise to himself. So I've got this final quote that says, kind of astonishing to me. So I think whether he intended it or not, he carved out a really perfect content arc for today's proto fascist poet. Because we know that the hardcore QAnon crew was recruited and entertained by memes. We know that maga boomers love maga country music. But Eisenstein's real gift is to help a more cultured demographics slide into anti vax ideology and pastel q under the spell of a kind of, you know, spiritual wisdom, but with all that culpability. And all these years later, I still find him the most morally and psychologically complicated actor that we covered. And maybe that's because I actually identify with his writing habits, if not his, like, politics. Like anybody who writes as much as he does shows signs of, like, hypergraph. He can't stop. And I can diagnose that informally in myself. As someone who I'm pretty sure I've had bouts of what's called Geschwin syndrome, which is a form of temporal lobe epilepsy. I haven't had a seizure in 30 years, and I don't know what's going on with him, But I can identify something both rigid and preoccupying in terms of the special interest of writing that is just on display. I don't think he can stop it. And so I think it has to be directed somewhere. And I also think that he does it when he's stressed out. He says as much. It's right. It's like something. This terrible thing happened in the world and I had to disappear into myself for like eight days and come up with 9,000 words on whatever. So if he finds a mystery that will provoke more writing, that's where he's going to go. And he doesn't have journalism or academic boundaries or rules. I don't think he has an editor. I don't think he's ever had an editor. He has nothing really, but his own obsessions and this mechanism of. Of like, chameleon, like audience capture that he shared with Marcus back when they disclosed basically that God told them that RFK Jr. Should be president. So we have a clip from that. Every time I do public speaking, and maybe even to some extent in this.
- [36:34]
Derek Barris
Conversation right now, I'm not just transmitting information.
- [36:39]
Matthew Remsky
In everything I say, there is always a question.
- [36:43]
Derek Barris
The question question is, right, am I crazy here? Do you resonate with this?
- [36:48]
Matthew Remsky
And so I look at your face. I sense the energy in the room.
- [36:52]
Derek Barris
I hear the laughter or the tears.
- [36:56]
Matthew Remsky
And that helps me more deeply inhabit and receive the field of information that I am speaking from. Yeah, it's interesting that Marcus is actually reflecting back to him that he's doing okay. Right. And he's describing.
- [37:15]
Julian Walker
It's like.
- [37:15]
Matthew Remsky
Like he's describing cold reading. But, you know, feedback like that is not a substitute for editorial fact checking, peer review. Like, he's on his own. Right. With that particular tool that he's using.
- [37:26]
Julian Walker
Yeah. Hearing that clip again, it is also like channeling and there's a grandiosity about it. Right. I say something and then I notice if the crowd is crying or if they are laughing at the effect of my words is because I'm not just imparting information. I'm actually engaged in this very intense, very subtle, energetic thing. It is cold reading in a way, but I think that often is used to refer to like one on one interactions, like the one he's having with Marcus in that moment. But I also hear it as being like an improviser.
- [37:54]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah.
- [37:54]
Julian Walker
A courageous improviser standing on the edge of the present moment in front of an audience and he's taking collective vibe cues on how his intuitive pronouncements are landing. And there's also something really sad about that because it's. It also sounds to me, I can't help it, I'm not diagnosing him, but like a traumatized child who's trying to fix. Figure out what to say or do so that the parents don't fly off the handle.
- [38:14]
Matthew Remsky
Well, yeah, there's that. And gosh, with regard to improvisation, if you called yourself a musician, no harm, no foul, man. You're not telling people what to do with their lives or not to take vaccines. So I think we were. I was surprised. I don't know about you guys, but when he wound up taking these particular kind of tender skills into the field of political hardball, it didn't seem like a match. It didn't seem like it was going to fit. And as you look at his. As I looked at his most recent work, it seemed like that spell in his life has taken a toll because over the past few months on his open substack, he's been writing about adrenal fatigue, blood sugar crashes, and a kind of psychological collapse that followed his stint in campaigning.
- [38:55]
Derek Barris
Adrenal fatigue is not a thing, just for the record.
- [38:58]
Matthew Remsky
It is. It is for him, though. That's how he's framing his fatigue.
- [39:02]
Julian Walker
Yeah, that's how he's framing how he's feeling through the lens of pseudoscience. Wellness.
- [39:06]
Derek Barris
No. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's not actually a thing. That's all I'm saying.
- [39:10]
Matthew Remsky
Okay, so, okay, he's tired. Yeah, he's really tired. And so currently he's on, quote, a life changing journey of physical, emotional and spiritual healing. And he says that an African spiritual guide told him that he was sick because his public work made him a target of psychic projection. I suppose, you know, we've made him sick. In a way, we've contributed to that, I'm sure. So, quote, the attacks land on my body, he said. I asked him, what can I do when society seems to have gone gone mad? He said, wait. Now he says that he feels vulnerable about this journey, so he's setting his more personal work behind a paywall to limit the impacts of criticism on his health. So I subscribed.
- [39:52]
Julian Walker
You got it under his immune system.
- [39:54]
Matthew Remsky
I did. But, you know, I'm going to respect it. I mean, unless he starts using this smaller forum to incubate conspiracy theories or start at like an in real life cult or incite violence, I'll respect that. Like he's saying, I'm tired out, something has collapsed. And, you know, I understand that there's nothing much up on the private feed now except a description of how a new West African plant medicine he's taking is taking apart and reassembling his psyche. The comments that he's getting are all very supportive. So I think, you know, tracking his sort of relationship with his audience in that way, it shows that he, he has put himself in a safer space. But also it's a new spiritual kind of bit of information. And I think tracking his spiritual syncretism over time would be its own book. Like way back he was interested in yoga and Buddhism and Taoism. First nations philosophy pops up here and there. And more recently he's been interested in ayahuasca and other psychedelics. So now it's West African bwiti, which I don't really know how to pronounce, but I think it comes from gauntlet. But here's the punchline. I think he's seeing something about himself. One of his main preoccupations in his 2025 writing has been the meaning and impact of AI as it has been for all of us. And he has all of the concerns that everybody does. But get this. In a January essay called Intelligence in the Age of Mechanical reproduction, he asks ChatGPT to write an essay in the style of Charles Eisenstein. And he was pretty shocked at how accurate but also boring the writing was. And Julian, maybe you can read this extraordinary passage.
- [41:40]
Julian Walker
I wonder if ChatGPT was simply holding up a merciless mirror for me to see the deficiencies of my own writing. Do I self plagiarize and recycle the same ideas over and over again? Do I resort to hackneyed metaphors and cliched figures of speech? Honestly, sometimes I do do that when I'm tired, especially or distracted or not fully present. My writing becomes, well, mechanical. I can feel the question or topic by looking for certain key concepts to which I can apply a familiar analytic profile process. The story of separation or gift, or the culture of quantity, or the abuser, victim, rescuer triad, or quantum superposition of timelines. I feel like I'm saying and thinking the same thing over and over again. I feel like I could just as well be replaced by an AI chatbot trained on everything I've already said. With the familiar lens now glued to my eyeballs, I can't see anything other than what it reveals. The infinite diversity of the world collapses into a finitude of categories, a rigidity of thinking, a kind of inner orthodoxy.
- [42:40]
Matthew Remsky
Slow clap Charles that is incredible stuff. It's really beautiful. I'm really like excited to see what comes out of that. But maybe you can apply some of that same analysis to the Maha movement you helped turn into an avalanche of self plagiarized falsehoods and bigotries. Oh, and oh and also like white papers with AI hallucinations in the citations. But you know there won't be much money in that.
- [43:16]
Julian Walker
Going on vacation? We're here for it. With kids who turn a backseat into a courtroom drama over whose tablet is louder, whose charger is faster, and why.
- [43:25]
Derek Barris
Watching the same cartoon for the hundredth.
- [43:27]
Julian Walker
Time as a human. Right? Yep, we totally have vehicles to handle that. Because whether it's a road trip or.
- [43:33]
Derek Barris
A business trip where your flight's delayed.
- [43:35]
Julian Walker
Your phone's at 2% injured. Dinner, whatever's open. Yeah, here for that too. Enterprise. We're here for it.
- [43:45]
Derek Barris
My day kicks off with a refreshing.
- [43:46]
Julian Walker
Celsius energy drink, then straight to the.
- [43:49]
Derek Barris
Gym, pre K pickup back home to meal prep. Time for my fire station shift.
- [43:53]
Matthew Remsky
One more Celsius.
- [43:54]
Derek Barris
Gotta keep the lights on when the three alarm hits.
- [43:57]
Matthew Remsky
I'm ready. Celsius Live Fit.
- [44:00]
Julian Walker
Go grab a cold refreshing Celsius at.
- [44:02]
Derek Barris
Your local retailer or locate now at Celsius.
- [44:09]
Julian Walker
This episode is brought to you by Amazon Prime. From streaming to shopping, prime helps you get more out of your passions. So whether you're a fan of true crime or prefer a nail biting novel from time to time with services like Prime Video, Amazon Music and fast free delivery, prime makes it easy to get more out of whatever you're into or getting into. Visit Amazon.comprime to learn. Learn more.
- [44:36]
Derek Barris
All right, let's turn to the very inspiration for this podcast, Mr. Mickey Willis, whose early pandemic era pseudo documentary Plandemic gave the anti vaxx movement the steroids it's still feeding off of today. We've covered Willis often over the years, but let's just do a quick recap. He's a former model turned filmmaker whose brother died of AIDS and who he retroactively blames Anthony Fauci for, which could account in part for his hard anti vax pivot that would happen decades later. Willis was around the LA yoga scene when I moved there in 2011, and he was making environmentally conscious documentaries while he was living in a mansion in Ojai. At the time, he had a moment of Internet virality when he posted a video of his son playing with an Ariel doll in 2015, which then sparked a global conversation about parenting and acceptance.
- [45:36]
Julian Walker
Yeah, and I went back and had a look to remind myself of this. It had over 20 million views and there were local news spots covering this feel good story as a result in several different places. And he was. He was interviewed and then he was on TV talk shows, all based on this short video. And at the end of it, he tells his sons, I promise you that I will love, love you and accept you no matter what life you choose. Because, you know, his son had chosen to replace a duplicate toy with an aerial doll, the. A doll of a mermaid that would more typically be thought of as a girl's toy. But as you'll cover, Derek, it is unsurprising that these days that video does not live on any of Mickey's online accounts anymore because that promise, I think, will probably have morphed over time.
- [46:23]
Derek Barris
Yeah, he scrubbed a few of his properties. I've been tracking them for, you know, with many conspiracialists that we cover. He calls himself a disaffected liberal. He was on the Bernie Sanders tour during the 2020 election. That's when he claims he had his aha moment that eventually turned him maga. Today, he continues to pump out anti vax and Covid contrarian content. His Twitter and Facebook feeds are filled with deep state pseudoscience. He's also really leaned into conservative values, more than most people that we track. He signs all of his transmission with Mickey Willis, father, filmmaker. And a lot of his posts include his family, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does kind of cross over a little bit, which we'll get into. His son, the same one who was playing with Ariel dolls, I'm not naming him because I want to leave family out of it in terms of their personal identities, but his son has started making films and he's giving TED style talks now. So maybe in the future we'll have to dissect some of those. I did watch his first film. It was fine. I'm sure his dad helped him. They're all. All fine stuff. But I bring this up because it paints a very disconcerting image, though, one that reminds me strongly of Christian nationalists who champion family values in one post, then in the next, they talk about satanic forces draining the lifeblood of humanity. Barry Christian Norther playing the harp and, you know, sounding the alarm on Satan. Coming. Everything Willis doesn't like or agree with seems to be propelled by a secret for some part of an agenda.
- [48:02]
Matthew Remsky
You. This flipping between the championing of family values in one post and then satanic forces draining lifeblood in the next. I think one of the things that impressed me most about Willis early on was his capacity to recognize that he had scared the shit out of people with plandemic. And so he took to Facebook to record a selfie sermon in which he openly seemed to weep and say, you know, I'm with you through all of this and I understand and feel your pain.
- [48:32]
Julian Walker
And.
- [48:32]
Matthew Remsky
And there was this aspect of it, like, I pegged it at the time as a kind of fostering of a disorganized attachment pattern amongst his parasocial following. Because, you know, on one hand he's. He's saying, you know, the government's out to kill you with everything they have. And on the other hand he's saying, but I'm here to love you and we're going to get through it together. And that's, you know, that's a pretty charismatic, one size fits all guru trick where, you know, it's like you create the problem and then you solve it. And. Yeah. It depends on that contrast. It's like you have. You have flowers in one hand and a dagger in the other.
- [49:06]
Julian Walker
Yeah, yeah. And in that little video that you're referring to, I believe he also says he's willing to die.
- [49:12]
Matthew Remsky
Yes, he's willing to die.
- [49:13]
Julian Walker
He's making a stand.
- [49:15]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah. For everybody, for the cause. For it. I think it's kind of vague, but, you know, it's as vague as he is. Radiantly, goldenly lit. Yes. Yeah.
- [49:24]
Julian Walker
Yes, yes. So he's simultaneously the one who's scaring you, the one who's saving you, but he's also kind of a revolutionary hero.
- [49:30]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah.
- [49:31]
Julian Walker
Who's willing to die for the cause. And that's the thing about all three of these sort of nominally liberal or progressive figures who go down this rabbit hole is that they. They all latch onto some conspiratorial or pseudoscience kind of counterfactual interpretation of where the real struggle is and then commit themselves to it and drag a bunch of followers with them. And as you were just saying, Derek, he. He's weaving more and more MAGA talking points into everything he does. Because along with the paranoid anti vaxx narrative, everything is a plot to undermine family values. And the trans agenda and the communist Black Lives Matter movement are front and center. It's not just about vaccines and Anthony Fauci anymore.
- [50:12]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, and he's great looking. We just have to add. He's like Zoolander. Jesus, I tell you.
- [50:16]
Julian Walker
Did we mention he was handsome?
- [50:18]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah.
- [50:18]
Derek Barris
Well, it's always very easy to say you'll die for a cause when you're in no actual danger of dying when.
- [50:25]
Matthew Remsky
You'Re sitting in your. When you're doing a selfie video video about the bullshit documentary you just released. Yeah, I'm willing to die for this cause. Yeah. Have a sandwich.
- [50:33]
Julian Walker
Yeah, I have to say, too, just hearing that his son is doing TED talks and hearing you, Derek, saying, maybe one day we'll have to dissect what he's doing. Maybe one day our kids will be hosting a podcast where they talk about Mickey Willis Jr. Whatever.
- [50:46]
Derek Barris
Oh, my God, not mine. I don't have any kids. But I can get Temple my puppy on. He can bark at you.
- [50:52]
Julian Walker
Yeah, well, by then we'll have AI where his thoughts are translated.
- [50:56]
Derek Barris
It. It's definitely possible. Let's do a quick rundown of what Willis has done since Plandemic. He's produced two more pandemics, including a children's musical that's as bad as that sounds. As with most every sequel, none have had nearly the impact of the original, and he generally seems to be struggling to regain his viral popularity of the first.
- [51:19]
Julian Walker
Yeah, no. I don't know how much this contradicts or. Or adds to what you're saying, but something I also notice about him is, Derek is that when it comes to regional film festivals, and admittedly, some of these are tiny, he's been super successful at a grassroots level. He essentially figured out how to red pill each of these little independent film events. And each installment of the plandemic series gets featured there and ends up winning awards, like Best Director, Best Documentary, Best of the Festival, like the Free Spirit Film Awards, Malibu, Santa Monica, Toronto, Silicon Valley. He's won honors at other small events, like the European Independent Film Awards in Paris.
- [51:56]
Derek Barris
I can't speak to most of those, but I remember how hard he was pushing the Santa Monica and Malibu Film festivals. As you know Julian in Los Angeles now, it's a very incestuous community. So the people who run those festivals are old friends that were part of his community for a long time. So winning best film there, yeah, sure isn't that challenging. But I do hear you. He definitely, he's a hustler. You know, all my criticisms aside, he definitely hustles and works his networks.
- [52:27]
Julian Walker
Looks good on the resume.
- [52:28]
Derek Barris
Willis also launched a supplements company. Surprised. He marketed it initially, quote to protect against the next pandemic because of course he did. His rebel lion line, that's rebellion broken up with two with this cutesy little lion logo that he devised. It features just one product. It's called Fierce Immunity. It's $58 a bottle for vitamin D3, zinc and quercetin, all of which you could buy at Costco for much cheaper but you wouldn't get the lion logo right. To promote his lion, Wilson Willis has recently leaned into the measles outbreak really hard. He has a measles protocol on his company website. It features tons of affiliate links to things like mouthwash and nebulizers and natural energy drinks for measles. Serious, you can find this page. Meanwhile, he's staunchly against the exceptionally cheap and often free MMR vaccine which would render all of his wellness tchotchkes useless. Like Children's Health Defense, Willis traveled to East Texas to interviewed families whose children were infected with or died of measles. He released a 12 minute propaganda hell documentary. It features disbarred physician Pierre Corey who is a big anti vax Covid contrarian. He often floats around the maha scene. I have to note that both Children's Health Defense and Willis talk about how the Mennonite communities are being exploited by the media and by evidence based medicine practitioners. Yet they're the ones with cameras in an actual agenda going in. There was a moment when Robert F. Kennedy shot a photo with the family and they were like, oh, we didn't know this was going to go on social media. So who's the real exploiters here?
- [54:18]
Julian Walker
Yeah, yeah. And I'll just add to Pierre Corey is probably the the biggest salesman of I Ivermectin in the world. And I'm amazing, I'm amazed actually that that Mickey doesn't include Ivermectin in rebellion.
- [54:30]
Derek Barris
Well, interestingly Mallory just shared with me this morning I might do a video on it. This guy. So the newest conspiracy theory in the Ivermectin community is that people with bad results. It's because the ivermectin being produced is being hijacked with nanotechnology, and black seed oil is just as effective.
- [54:54]
Matthew Remsky
Wow.
- [54:55]
Julian Walker
All right.
- [54:56]
Matthew Remsky
What's black seed oil? Is there something called a black seed that's not just colored black, like a Mustard seeds are black. Right.
- [55:03]
Derek Barris
I have seen it. I am sorry. I was not prepared to talk about it. I just got it from Mallory. But I will make a video on it.
- [55:10]
Julian Walker
It sounds vaguely familiar in terms of the various herbal remedies for parasites that, you know, when you come back from India, people are like, oh, you have to take. I've taken. Taking all of that stuff.
- [55:19]
Matthew Remsky
Right. Okay.
- [55:20]
Derek Barris
Okay. Just looked it up live. It is black cumin.
- [55:24]
Matthew Remsky
Oh, all right.
- [55:25]
Derek Barris
Black cumin seed oil. That's.
- [55:27]
Matthew Remsky
And that's supposed to be just as good as ivermectin, the guy said, specifically.
- [55:32]
Derek Barris
At fighting cancer and parasites, you know.
- [55:35]
Matthew Remsky
Okay, I can. I. 90% sure. I'm. I'm speculating here, but I think it's a really good bet that one of those people got into touch with an ayurvedic hustler in India or in the diaspora. And that sounds like a pretty common Ayurvedic remedy.
- [55:53]
Julian Walker
Yeah. And not only is it good for Covid and for cancer, but if we have a bird flu pandemic, it'll be really good for that too.
- [55:58]
Matthew Remsky
Awesome.
- [55:59]
Derek Barris
Oh, it's very adaptable. Cumin is my favorite spice. So that really, they're getting to me here. So, last one. Willis recently shot a short documentary. He seems to be doing like, these 12, 15 minute bits recently. It's about naturopathic practitioner Robert Young. He treated a woman for breast cancer through an alkaline diet, and he was featured by Oprah Winfrey. Surprise. Because the woman claimed that Young cured her cancer through this diet and then she died. Which resulted in Young being convicted of theft and practicing medicine without a license, something he had done since the 90s in order to sell supplements. So naturally, Willis calls him a non conformist who has been unfairly targeted by the pharma cartel.
- [56:49]
Matthew Remsky
Well, you know what? There's 17 positions now on the vaccine board at CDC, and I'm sure that guy can find a seat there under Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
- [56:59]
Derek Barris
I think he's going to be appointed the head of the acip. Yes.
- [57:04]
Julian Walker
Yeah, he's qualified. It's all par for the course. We talk here about the overlaps between conspiracism and supernaturalism and wellness and authoritarianism, but even within the alternative wellness space, there's that frictionless segueing between anti vax and pseudoscience supplements and then dieting to cure cure a cancer.
- [57:20]
Derek Barris
Well, that is where Mickey Willis is right now. He's making short documentaries for YouTube about convicted felons and suffering families while constantly fundraising for more projects. I've been on his email list for years with my burner account as. As someone who barely ever logs into Facebook, however, I didn't realize that's where he spends most of his online time. It's pretty eye opening seeing so many people I know from wellness land who are still on board with his over on Facebook. Yeah, maybe that just speaks different demographics of where I spend my time, but there is still a lot happening over there.
- [57:56]
Matthew Remsky
I do think that that seems to be happening to Facebook. I haven't really, you know, been up on how the various platforms are are moving in those directions, but certainly when I log in now, it does feel like it's about five or six years ago or it's. It still kind of has this sort of, you know, early pandemic feeling to it.
- [58:16]
Derek Barris
I did log on to see where he was at because like I said, I follow him on his other account accounts. Then I noticed a recent post about his brother and I'm not going to read it all, but here's the gist. He thinks Pride parades do more harm than good because they've been over sexualized. And he blames Bill Clinton for declaring June Pride Month, which Willis says resulted in a gradual polit politicization of identity. Willis claims he went to early Pride parades and beyond. A few quote assless Ch chaps most people kept their sexuality private.
- [58:50]
Matthew Remsky
False.
- [58:50]
Derek Barris
Then he writes, quote, little by little the rainbow has been obscured by dark clouds. Now Pride is less less about unity and more about normalizing extreme sexual fetishes. He concludes by saying that this overt sexualization is all part of the agenda. Now. What agenda? He doesn't have to say because part of his brand is obscuration. But I do want to comment anecdotally for a moment because I was at Pride in San Francis in 1997. I had just moved there after graduating college. The first friend I made happened to be a gay poet. So I hung out where he did and I went. The places he he went to the bars and the parades. And to say that early Pride parades weren't sexualized, as you just said, Matthew, is just flat out wrong. It wasn't a big deal then or now. Maybe the difference is that everyone has a camera in their pockets and there's an entire right wing media apparatus, which Willis very much a part of that weaponizes anything that they deem suspect. So I'm not interested in a long discussion over the politics of identity here. What does seem apparent is that a man who just a decade ago was championing his son for playing with dolls and doing a lot of media about it, then stumbled his way into his greatest success with a predominantly right wing audience. I can't say for sure whether whether he shifted due to sincere beliefs or that he just followed the attention, or both. What I do know is that Willis regularly criticizes the left for kowtowing to the powers that be, yet he seems incapable of recognizing how far he's been beholden now to a predominantly Christian nationalist and a fully anti scientific base. While his star is nowhere near as high as it was during Pandemic, his rhetoric continues to meet the moment for the audience that he's selling to. It's close minded, it's insular, it can even be labeled isolationist because it's cloaked in the language of revolution and seasoned with traditional family values. Maybe in some ways everyone is beholden to the communities they make their name in. Making sure to toe the line might just be what's expected to remain in whatever that community's good graces are. But pretending to think critically about power and science when all you're really doing is regurgitating generations of spiteful anti intellectual propaganda to me is really fucking disingenuous. And that I'm sure is something that Mickey Willis excels at.
- [61:27]
Matthew Remsky
All right guys, so we've got two more of these coming up. I'll look forward to seeing where our they now for the next two groupings.