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Carvana User
Hey sweetie, your mother showed me this Carvana thing for selling the car. I'm gonna give it a try. Wish me luck. Me again. I put in the license plate. It gave me an offer. Unbelievable. Okay, I accepted the offer. They're picking it up Tuesday from the driveway. I haven't even left my chair. It's done. The car is gone. I'm holding a check anyway. Carvana, Give it a whirl. Love you.
Julian Walker
So good you'll want to leave a voicemail about it.
Alex Schwartz
Sell your car today on car pickup fees may apply.
Derek Barris
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism. I'm Derek Barris.
Matthew Rimsky
I'm Matthew Rimsky.
Julian Walker
I'm Julian Walker.
Derek Barris
You can find us on Instagram and threads nspirituality Pod, as well as individually on Blue sky and our personal Instagram accounts and all different places I've been posting on Substack Notes More. You can also access all of our episodes ad free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on patreon@patreon.com conspirituality. You can grab our Monday bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions as well as independent media creators. We really appreciate your support.
Julian Walker
Conspiracuality 313 the resurrection of JP Sears 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 quote, 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 anti Semitic 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. Alongside him is Sears sniffing out opportunities again? How is he balancing legitimate critiques of the genocide with blatant anti Semitic rhetoric? And how does he fit into the growing diagonalism occurring in the right wing attention economy?
Matthew Rimsky
Okay, trip down memory lane, guys. 2023, our book comes out in April. Do you remember that?
Julian Walker
Oh yeah.
Derek Barris
Was that this lifetime? I don't know.
Matthew Rimsky
So long ago. So there was a chapter, as you said, Julian, on JP Sears in a section of case studies that was called Gallery of Rogues. So I've got the first three paragraphs lined up for us to read in order. So Julian, want to take the first one?
Julian Walker
As we edge closer to a completely groundless 2 online space, some prickly questions return. Is conspirituality a social movement or a grift? Are these people practicing a new and legitimate form of spirituality reality? Are they caught in the no man's land of audience capture? Are their hopes and fears in earnest? Are they high on their own supply?
Derek Barris
These are all judgment calls that point to a spectrum of guesses. When Kelly Brogan quotes Tom Cowan quoting Rudolph Steiner on the spiritual delusion of the pandemic, she's working her angle, but her eyes genuinely seem to burn with quiet certainty. Charles Eisenstein. Eisenstein's brain has gone smooth in the river of his own mythic poetry, but it appears he's committed to the flow. Christiane Northrup is a devotee, albeit of two masters, QAnon dog whistles on one hand and supplements on the other. We forgot to add in her harp.
Matthew Rimsky
Right?
Derek Barris
A sales pitch always complicates sincerity. And Mickey Willis, he's a true believer in himself.
Matthew Rimsky
But when we get to wellness influencer turned right wing poster JP Sears, all questions of intention and authenticity turn back on themselves and disappear into a black hole where we look in vain for a moral center. Because if there's one thing we can say for sure about Sears, it's that he makes it impossible to assess whether he believes in anything. Even as he pushes his ragtag demographic towards right wing extremism through a semi conscious alchemy of pranks and clout chasing. It's pretty well written.
Derek Barris
I have to say that it is a trip down memory lane. Yeah, for sure.
Julian Walker
It seems like a good book, guys.
Matthew Rimsky
It seems like a okay book. Yeah. So we did some history after that. In the chapter on JP Sears, we talked about how, you know, in 2013 he's an earnest, if under qualified Life coach making aspirational YouTube content. I don't know if you guys remember the very old videos.
Julian Walker
Oh, yeah.
Matthew Rimsky
He's kind of drifting back into that zone through this long sort of hero's journey. Anti hero's journey. Um, one of his non expertise issues back then was helping dudes with porn addiction. I'm sure that's gonna come up in his Better man program or whatever he's doing now. In 2014, he pivots to satirizing wellness and yoga, and that wins a lot of fans, probably a bipartisan demographic, as he skewered New age cringe and pretension.
Julian Walker
Yeah, I'm not so sure though. Right. Because, like, I. I felt like within yoga and wellness circles, his stuff circulated amongst people who are like, y. Yeah. It's like they were comfortable poking fun at the aspects of that community that were, you know, just. Just kind of ridiculous and goofy.
Matthew Rimsky
You're saying that he didn't have like a. A right wing market then?
Julian Walker
I don't think so.
Derek Barris
Oh, no, not at all. I mean, I was with Julian in the epicenter of yoga, teaching yoga in Los Angeles at the time. One of my students bought me JP Sears book.
Matthew Rimsky
Oh, God.
Derek Barris
Because we all thought it was funny.
Matthew Rimsky
Yeah.
Derek Barris
And at the time it was. So I. I think it was, you know, definitely in center left to. He was someone that we laughed at, even if sometimes it kind of hit close to home. But there was that Whole Foods parking lot song which was right by the studio. I talked at JP Sears. There was a lot of that happening in Los Angeles.
Julian Walker
It may have been the one period where he was actually qualified to be doing pretty insightful satire.
Matthew Rimsky
Yeah.
JP Sears (voice in clips)
Right.
Matthew Rimsky
Now, as you mentioned, Julian Covid changed everything for everyone. And Sears began showing a kind of oppositional defiance that, you know, he previously had directed in this kind of, you know, satirical form at wellness. And he found a real money lane for it. He cycled through vaccine skepticism, mocking people who wore masks. Covid minimization, election fraud, amplification. He boosted Russia's, you know, war on Russia. He started mocking trans people. He started running interference for the January 6th insurrection within 24 hours of the event. Part of that was through his friendship with Tim Kennedy. The chapter that we wrote traces how each escalation delivered larger audiences and more revenue. And in our book, we compared him to Pepe the Frog. This is the Matt Fury cartoon that migrated from like, stoner slacker contentment through irony into weaponized right wing symbolism. Sears arc mirrored Pepe's. We argued because he kind of went from this earnest feel good content that curdled through irony into smug nihilism. And then it tracked slightly behind the Chan board to mainstream media pipeline. And we also Talked about the 4chan posting ethos of irony poisoning, where the sincerity of any statement is, like, permanently undermined. And Sears version of that came with a new age rapper like don't outsource your truth in which he's telling followers. That was his mantra. And he was saying, you know, treat your internal impulse as superior to everything. And of course, that gave them permission to believe anything while feeling principled. Ultimately, we said at that point that Sears solves a problem for followers who feel culturally adrift. Like, he performs selfhood in a landscape where selfhood feels hollow. By claiming internal integrity while functioning as a switchboard for, like, all these bad ideas. He reassures people without coherent identities that they can still act as though they have a coherent identity. So his ultimate life coaching product was licensing selfishness, really, while providing the emotional reward of feeling smug. So we filed that chapter four and a half years ago. Book came out three years ago. That's how publishing works. You know, so much time passes between filing and publishing and of course things developed. Like a lot of our rogues, the end of peak pandemic left him struggling for content. And so he and Amber, his life coach, wife and the mom to their kid, went through some changes. They separated in February of 2024. They filed for divorce. So the former Amber Lee Sears now goes by Amber Lee sky and is back to making content for her retreats. But she's also making some post Epstein solidarity with women content, which I find kind of interesting. And we know that Trump's second victory took a lot of the contrarian wind out of the sky around that whole set, that whole segment of people. So now we have to look at how JP Sears is resurrecting himself yet again. He's gone from wellness satirist to awakened father and political critic to now kind of a Christian masculine identity advocate. And we're going to see if it still feels true that he doesn't believe in anything, which would be very ironic given that he bases the launch of his new Better man project on the strength of his authenticity in relation to Trump, who he's now saying is a fraud.
Derek Barris
Well, let's first look at how JP became a Christian. On March 24, 2023, he dropped a 25 minute video on his YouTube channel titled I changed my mind about God. Here's why, here's how it start changed
JP Sears (voice in clips)
my mind about God. I was Wrong. So accordingly, in this video, I want to share with you what I used to believe, what I believe now, and what made me change my mind along the way. And also, very importantly, I want to share with you a few thoughts of mine that I have that will help us bring more God not only into our lives, but also the world around us, which seems like it needs a lot more God right now, because I don't know about you, but living in a world where Satan reigns and you and I and our families have to suffer the consequences doesn't really feel appealing to me.
Matthew Rimsky
You know, he's got the tinkle piano going in the background. He sounds like kind of a kids TV host from the 1980s, like in Milwaukee.
Derek Barris
Yeah, I will say I watched half the video in preparation and I had to stop because I don't think he's using a transcript and he just repeats himself over. I noticed that happens in a lot of his videos. But I want you to put a pin in Satan, his reference there, because he does define it, or him, if you're thinking it's going to be Anthony Fauci. He then goes on to discuss how he fell into the spiritual, not religious, camp for a while, which he says he learned a lot from, but that he was also spiritually arrogant.
Julian Walker
Not anymore.
Derek Barris
He describes treating Christianity as dusty and outdated. Then something clicked about tradition, namely through prayer. But the way he accident his word arrived at Christianity with slowly over the course of years, to which he adds hashtag plandemic. Then he gives a short sermon on the evils of the world, like authoritarianism, which is rich given how much of a Trump stand he was at the time. But also corporations and tech companies, the entire thing is very boilerplate, it's ambiguous. Then he identifies one particular evil that stands out.
JP Sears (voice in clips)
And also specifically we could say, hey, there is an attempt to bring communism all over the world. Certainly in the United States we don't call it that, but it is that and it's happening all over the world. And there's a reason why communists have their number one objective, to disconnect people from God, where they ban religions. And of course right now it's more like discouraging it, shaming it. But with full on communism, they ban religion. Why is that? Because they don't want people having faith in a real higher power. So if you can get people to disconnect from God, if you get people to disconnect from the teachings of God and the ways of God, the belief in God, then those communists get to be your higher power. And honestly, they make a crappy higher power. They don't even make good fertilizer.
Matthew Rimsky
That sounds like if you kill us we won't even fertilize the farm. That last line.
Julian Walker
Yeah, and it's like 1982, cold. And they want their right wing discourse back. Like what is he even talking about? Communism is trying to spread all over the world. Really?
Matthew Rimsky
Is that where he intersects with satanic panic resurrections though? Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, it might not be worth fact checking Sears, but like communism isn't one thing. But yeah, he needs it to be one thing. It's definitely not one thing. Towards religion, like Marx used theological metaphors. There is Soviet militant atheism that was a terrifying force wherever churches were seen as reactionary instruments and they killed or imprisoned priests that they believed were fascist or counter revolutionary. But then there's this whole range of coexistence pacts, places like Vietnam, other places, and then Nicaragua and El Salvador where liberation theology puts Marxist analysis together with Catholic based communities. And then priests become like collaborators with that. So it's, it's so it's so weird how sort of singular. I mean, I guess he's referencing Satan so he's got to collapse everything into a single figure.
Derek Barris
Well, I put that clip in there for you, Matthew. I knew it would get you going today.
Podcast Advertiser (Sleepy Podcast)
Yeah.
Derek Barris
Sears then gets into a childish heaven is great if you die argument. He conflates evil and satanic with communism, as you just heard. But also he then segues into the Democrats relating them to communism. Yeah, his old hits like the transgender ideology are invoked. The whole video is like listening to an eight year old returning from Sunday school. Which is pretty ironic given that Sears says that belief in God makes you
Matthew Rimsky
uncontrollable returning from Sunday School in 1952.
Derek Barris
But he does invoke some telling language. He repeats that he's returning to traditional religion and that America is engaged in spiritual warfare. And those terms are key for understanding his relationship with Joel Webb. That I'm going to get into in the next segment because when you combine Sears's evolving love of guns around the time this video was shot, along with his increased use of steroids and a growing love of muscular Christianity, the pieces fit together quite snugly. It didn't take long for him to start discussing Israel after this conversion. His channeled has long tracked news cycles. And while he did a about October 7th shortly after that date, it was on November 4th, 2023 when he dropped a seven minute video called Israel vs Palestine. What they don't want you to know. It's a satirical video in which two JPs are seated across from each other going back and forth. Why it's important is that it doesn't actually take sides. He punches at Hamas and at Israel. He punches at college campuses and at anti Semites. And he concludes that it's really the media that's at fault.
JP Sears (voice in clips)
So you're saying the reason why I might be so pro war, no matter what side I'm on, is because I've been played by the media to be obedient with her nefarious agenda? No, of course not. What I'm saying is if you're a good person, you better forget your humanity and be all out supportive for this war. Okay, I am. I support it. Thank you for standing with the current thing. You're a good little sheep. Thank you. You're welcome. I believe health equals freedom. And that's why I started Awaken cbd, because I want to help support the viewers of this channel, myself and my family, with the most important element of freedom there possibly could be.
Carvana User
Your health.
Julian Walker
You know, I want. I was.
Derek Barris
I was.
Julian Walker
I had not listened to that clip yet, Derek. And I was going to say, I was thinking, I wonder if he's going to go into the current thing kind of discourse, because during this period, that was very much what was coming out of all of these influencers was like, oh, yeah, everyone now is focused on this thing and it's really just a distraction from the conspiracies that we know are happening behind the scenes.
Derek Barris
I also just kept the ad in there just because that's how jarring it is. That's how jarring his content is all the time.
Matthew Rimsky
I've got a supplement idea for him, I think. I mean, he can. I don't know if this is just for you, jp. Christianity,
Julian Walker
right.
Matthew Rimsky
Big T. You don't even have to say muscular.
Julian Walker
He's got a. Then combined with Christian Northrup. Right. That needs to be a collab, right?
Alex Schwartz
Yeah.
Derek Barris
Well, he's probably sitting on a lot of CBD from Awakened cbd, which was his company. I'm sure he's going to throw creatine in because that's something we're gonna get into in a couple weeks when we discuss cons. I wanted to highlight this clip, though, because is supposed I'm being reasonable and bringing nuance into the conversation. Style is a far cry from where he ends up with his latest round of Israel videos that we're going to discuss in the next segment. But it also points to me to Sears regular chasing of attention, which inevitably leads to him being all over the place mentally and morally. So I don't know if we'll actually answer your Matthew of Does he believe in anything at all? But this sort of shows that he's very loose with whatever he's actually covering.
Matthew Rimsky
Or he does have a sense of what kinds of interventions have to be staged in what order, because it might make sense if he wants to take a turn in terms of his position towards Israel. You know, if he wants to complicate that in some way, it would make sense that he would do this kind of like doppelganger talking to himself about how it's actually a lot more complicated than we thought it was. And so I don't know, maybe there's some method in there.
Julian Walker
Well, that was a long time ago too, though, right?
Matthew Rimsky
Yeah.
Nomi Fry
I'm Nomi Fry.
Matthew Rimsky
I'm Vincent Cunningham.
Alex Schwartz
I'm Alex Schwartz. And we are Critics at Large, a podcast from the New Yorker. Guys, what do we do on the show every week?
Matthew Rimsky
We look into the startling maw of
Julian Walker
our culture and try to figure something out.
Alex Schwartz
That's right. We take something that's going on in the culture now. Maybe it's a movie, maybe it's a book, maybe it's just kind of a
Nomi Fry
trend and we expand it across culture as kind of a pattern or a template.
Alex Schwartz
Join us on Critics at Large from the New Yorker. New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow wherever you get your podcasts.
Matthew Rimsky
Hey, it's Matthew here from Conspirituality recommending you tune in to the Trust Me podcast where cult survivors Lola Blanc and Megan Elizabeth talk to former believers, experts, and sometimes even the people still inside to analyze how these systems work. They had me on to discuss my culty life and journalism, and I found them super well informed and empathetic and funny. They bring you real stories about how easy it is to fall for something that seems just right. So if you're into cults, coercion, or just wild human behavior, listen to Trust me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Podcast Advertiser (Sleepy Podcast)
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Derek Barris
As we discuss Sears transformation, it's important to note that he's thrown his hat into the ring with Joel Webbin, who I mentioned in the last segment. I first learned about this relationship when I saw a poster for an upcoming three day conference in Irving, Texas. Obviously it's called Christ is King Americ After Trump. So if we're going to talk about Sears baptism into Christ, it's worth knowing what type of Christ he's gotten into bed with and oh boy, it's it's a doozy. Joel Webbin is a Christian nationalist's Christian Nationalist I want to start with a taste of what this conference, in which JP is one of eight speakers, is all about.
Joel Webbin
America why they have Christ or It Will have Chaos for years, conservatives believed that Trump could revers reverse America's decline. But after Trump, the right is now fractured, exhausted and losing ground. Endless infighting and electoral loss have exposed a deeper problem that politics alone cannot solve. A nation that rejects Christ cannot be restored by mere personalities, grandstanding or Christless conservatism. So NXR Studios 1st Annual Conference America After Trump brings together together pastors, politicians, commentators and Christians that are committed to strength, cooperation and a durable future for the American right. Complaining is not a strategy and despair cannot be an option. Christ is King.
JP Sears (voice in clips)
Let's live like it.
Joel Webbin
Save 50% off your ticket only by registering before May 31st.
Matthew Rimsky
It's so interesting that he's he's basically using revolutionary language, predicting this fork in the road between chaos and order. But instead of revolution, of course he's saying that belief will somehow overcome or overthrow the evil powers, restore things. That is some extreme opium of the people shit in a different sack.
Derek Barris
Yeah, and I had to keep the sales pitch in again. It's so jarring. But what's a conference announcement without a discount code? And I do apologize to conspirituality listeners. We are are recording this after May 31st, so you're gonna have to pay full price now. Webbin is the founder of Right Response Ministries, which uses newchristianright.com as its website, and they brand their brand as unapologetically Christian, unapologetically right wing. Here's part of their mission statement.
Julian Walker
We believe God ordains sovereign nations composed of people who share a common ancestry, history Culture and Lang.
Matthew Rimsky
Oh, we are not conservatives. There is little left to conserve. We seek to recover and restore a Western. Oh, Western heritage that has been lost. Oh, my God.
Derek Barris
Yeah. And here's webin from an April 2026 broadcast about the state of race in America.
Julian Walker
It's so clear that America does not have a racist problem. White people in America are, if anything, I think, too trusting, too gullible, toxic empathy. So not only is racism non existent, if anything, we could probably use a little more racism in America. And I just want to say, Matthew, your. Your comments about it being like revolution in a different sack of. Of whatever, and that it's just about belief overcoming the evil powers. I think he's more in that radicalized right wing Christian, you know, white Christian nationalist kind of camp where he probably thinks January 6th was great and we need more of that.
Matthew Rimsky
Yeah. So America after Trump is like fascism plus Christofascism plus we didn't do enough Christofascism.
Derek Barris
And it also points to something that's kind of at the foundation of all the figures we're going to cover, even in segment three today, which is these people are all looking at the fact that Donald Trump is not going to be here much longer, whether that's electorally or in life, which, you know, seeing 22 specialists at your last checkup is not a good sign. And you can really see them all chomping at the bit to say I'm. We're going to slide into this space that's this vacuum that's about to be filled.
Matthew Rimsky
I think he slept through that entire fight night, didn't he?
Derek Barris
Oh, yeah, parts of it, yeah. If you go to the new Christian rights website, you'll see they're promoting a new book by Pastor Dale Partridge, who's also a featured speaker at Christ is King and an equally incendiary preacher who teaches at Kingsway Reformed Church in Prescott, Arizona. He also trained here in Portland, sadly, where I live. The book is titled 19 Reasons to Repeal the 19th Amendment.
Matthew Rimsky
Oh, God.
Derek Barris
If you haven't been paying attention to Christian nationalists lately, not only do they want to repeal no for no fault divorces, they want to assign one vote to a household which is put in by the man. Of course, Partridge wrote an entire book about it, which I will not be reading for Conspirituality Book Club.
Matthew Rimsky
It's amazing that these ideas come in waves on social media because I wasn't aware of any of this, but I have seen a whole bunch of kind of like, gotcha, sort of, you know, Woman on the street clips at various conferences where, you know, the woman is saying, well, you know, of course I trust my husband to vote for me and for the family. And, you know, he's. He's the leader and I don't need to vote at all. So there's just sort of a flood of, you know, media hits that, that follow the, the waves of these particular ideas rising up.
Derek Barris
Right. And the repealing 19th has always been around, but it is exactly that. It's. It's hitting a. It's having a moment right now in these places.
Julian Walker
Yeah.
Derek Barris
On the COVID of the book is an endorsement by the British priest Friar Calvin Robinson that goes, quote, sane women will love this book.
Julian Walker
Oh, my God.
Derek Barris
Robinson is also a Christ is king speaker. He's made big inroads in American Christian nationalism over the past few years. He's. You've probably seen him, he's half black. He's very tall, thin dude. He vehemently opposes black life matter, Black lives Matter, and critical race theory. He defends colonialism. He opposes reparations for slavery. He was associated with Turning Point uk, and he's known for making severely misogynistic statements.
Matthew Rimsky
Wasn't he excommunicated or defrocked from a particular. Was he Catholic first or Episcopalian?
Derek Barris
I think Episcopalian. He was defrocked from a couple, I believe, of churches.
Matthew Rimsky
Third or fourth caller?
Julian Walker
Yes.
Derek Barris
Yeah, yeah.
Matthew Rimsky
Come on, man. You don't need it. You don't need the call. God, what a sign of a sucker.
Julian Walker
Let's just add, too, that he's able to argue all of those right wing positions in. In a. In a nice British accent, while sporting often a pretty impressive Afro.
Derek Barris
Yes. He also wants Islam out of Britain. He opposes abortion, same sex marriage, and the ordination of women. Like webbing. He's pro tobacco.
Matthew Rimsky
Nice.
Derek Barris
They've posted photos together smoking cigarettes and cigars.
Matthew Rimsky
Yeah, keep doing it, guys.
Derek Barris
I on. But why? I. I just wanted to paint a picture of the Christianity that Sears is actually vibing with right now.
Julian Walker
It's traditional, Derek. It's traditional.
Derek Barris
As we move on to Sears's recent video about Jared Kushner and Jeffrey Epstein. That's extremely Israel coded. I want to just play one more clip. It's from Webbin's recent video and it's entitled this is what Real Jew Hatred Looks like. So. So we can now hear why he's actually not an anti Semite.
Joel Webbin
You want to talk about Jew hate? You want to talk about Jew hate? Jew hate is as a Christian, knowing that Jews are under the white hot wrath of God lest they repent and put faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. And somehow telling them that despite that reality that you know you as a Christian, you know better. And yet still consoling them saying peace, peace when there is no spiritual peace between them and God because they've rejected the one bridge between a fallen man and a thrice holy God that is the Lord Jesus Christ. And yet we preach peace, peace as false heretical prophets to them at the cost and the weight of their soul being eternally damned. That's Jew hate. And I reject it because at the end of the day I am not actually an anti Semite. I want to see Jews come to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and Christians are currently standing in their way.
Julian Walker
Wow, this is so classic, right? Real Jew hate is not telling them the truth about how converting to Christianity is the only way not to go to hell.
Derek Barris
I just want to just really make a point clear. Sears is not just speaking at Webbins event, he's doing numerous videos with him podcasts. Yeah, they did a series like satire video on on Israel recently. So again I'm just really trying to make a point because we're going to hear about Sears where he has legitimate critiques of what Israel is doing. But this is what it's mixed.
Matthew Rimsky
I mean if you just do the thought experiment with his logic there. Like he should go on to say that real misogyny is refusing to convince women that they are inferior to men because you know, that's the only way that they'll actually be happy. If you don't convince women that they're inferior to men, they're condemned to sort of pursue this delusion of equality and they'll never be happy or fulfilled in their purpose in life.
Julian Walker
Let's go one better. Real homophobia is failing to accept explain to gay people that they've just been indoctrinated by Satanism because you're letting them go down the road to ruin.
Matthew Rimsky
You know what, it's funny that these are the guys who talk about toxic empathy because actually that is the sort of mathematical formula of toxic empathy.
Julian Walker
That's actual toxic empathy. Yeah. So we've looked at how JP Sears very public association with this Christian nationalist is likely influencing his current life and worldview. I want to end this segment by touching on JP's 17 minute video from June 6th titled Meet Jared Kushner, the new Jeffrey Epstein. And I'll thank you very much Derek for sending this gem to me. That is 17 minutes. I will never recover from it's. Done in Sears usual, like, mock news presenter style. And correctly points out the massive corruption that Kushner's role in the Trump administration does represent. You know, husband to Donald's daughter, Ivanka. He's 45 years old. He served in both administrations. In 2017, a special role was created just for him as director of the Office of American Innovation, which essentially meant being a liaison between Trump and and the big tech guys who wanted in. He was also central to the Middle east peace process. So that's gone really well. He played an influential role in the administration's response to Covid. So these are his greatest hits.
Derek Barris
He solved Middle east peace. Remember that? He solved the Middle East.
Julian Walker
Middle east, yeah. It's amazing what you can do with no background and a lot of confidence.
Derek Barris
No.
Matthew Rimsky
And also AI videos of the future Gaza resort.
Julian Walker
Oh, God, yeah. And then during the Biden administration, Kushner used his newfound profile and connections to start Affinity Partners, which is a private equity firm that seems to mostly be funded by the Saudis. During the current Trump term, Kushner was involved in diplomatic negotiations around the wars in Gaza and Ukraine and has this year been dubbed, dubbed the Special Envoy for Peace again, going wonderfully. Now, Sears correctly points out, because conspiratorialists always have some little element of truth in what they're doing, that being involved in investment deals with Saudi Arabia while playing a role in negotiating for the American government in the Middle east represents an extraordinary conflict of interest, especially given that the success of his new company, founded during the Biden administration, Affinity Partners, turned Ivanka's husband into a billionaire in 2025. So, so far, so good. But from here, we enter the conspiracy whirlpool of JP Sears style. Recent plans by Kushner, very high profile, controversial plans to build a luxury resort on Albania's Sazan island in the Adriatic Sea have caused mass protests. Albanians are concerned about the environmental impact of this roughly $1.4 billion development government on what is essentially a nature reserve. They also claim that the contract has been negotiated without public transparency as to these impacts. And they're already up in arms over the corruption in their own current government. But here's the twist. The island was once a Cold War base and it has a network of bunkers and tunnels underneath it. And so in JP Sears framing, this is really the thing to focus on because it's actually going to be the
Matthew Rimsky
new Epstein island, which is also common. Communist. It has communist echoes, right? Yes, it's the communist Epstein Island.
Julian Walker
Well, communism and Satanism are sort of, you know, roughly synonyms for each other.
Matthew Rimsky
Epstein. Satanism and communism. It's like the trifecta island.
Julian Walker
He also then references the lurid but true details, which I was disappointed to be reminded of of Jared Kushner's father, Charles Kushner, who actually served prison time, having been convicted in a case that involved secretly filming his brother in law with a sex worker that Kushner himself had hired so as to then blackmail his own sister. This was his sister's husband who was filmed with the sex worker who was cooperating in Charles Kushner's prosecution for tax evasion. And so according to JP Sears, this is all very Epstein like.
Matthew Rimsky
No, it's not. It's. That's just basic. That's normal corruption. Yeah, no, it's not that.
Julian Walker
Plus the idea. Get this though. This is going to convince you, Matthew.
Matthew Rimsky
All right.
Julian Walker
And the initial negotiations for the new Albanian island resort apparently took place on the super yacht of British billionaire. Wait for it. Nathaniel Rothchild, of the same Rothchild family that funded the Zionist project in the first place. So it's all coming together.
Derek Barris
And now we brought it out. Is JP Sears unique as he joins a growing number of right wing influencers splitting with MAGA over Israel? It follows a general trend, though the right is still predominantly with that country. A recent Pew Research poll found that 60% of US adults have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 53% last year with 37% reporting favorable. That includes 80% of Democrats and Democratic leaning independents on the unfavorable side. On the right, it's 58% favorable favorable versus 41% not. A recent NBC News poll found that Israel's positive rating among Republicans declined from 63 to 54% between 2023 and 2026. That poll also discovered that 2/3 of Republicans side with Israelis, while 2/3 of Democrats now side with Palestinians. So Sears is part of a right wing pundit culture that's watching a slight dip in numbers on the Republican side. What I wonder, and where we actually started this episode in planning, is with this question, how many right wing and or wellness influencers are sliding leftward? I mean, is that even a thing? I've noticed a few MAHA influencers like Alex Clark and Will Cole, who were super pro RFK Jr say things like, we're not for a party, we're for health. In recent months, Kennedy pissed off a number of influencers in his circle when it became apparent he was not in fact going to ban glyphosate. And then actually support Trump's decision to increase production of it. There's been a number of wellness influencers that have taken on similar messaging lately, which is rather convenient for their brands. My guess is that national politics will swing largely liberal again and that a number of these figures will be right there sliding left as they try to
Matthew Rimsky
stay relevant or they'll try to hold on to their original bag.
Podcast Advertiser (Sleepy Podcast)
Right.
Matthew Rimsky
Like, because that's what they're doing with, you know, we're not for a party, we're for health. We're not going to be brought down by, you know, Trump's corruption. Our agenda was always more elevated than that. You know, we used this in a kind of opportunity way. I mean, it's, isn't it disconnection? I, I don't, because I don't know. I don't know what kind of leftism they would be expressing there.
Derek Barris
Well, I'm saying, I'm saying left of center. I'm not saying leftism, to be clear. I'm just saying moving more liberally.
Julian Walker
Yeah, yeah. And I hear it too, as, as saying, you know, our focus on health is transcendent of party politics. And yeah, we, we want to continue occupying this space culturally, even if MAGA fails.
Matthew Rimsky
Well, and haven't you detailed. I think both of you have looked at particular, maybe centrist Democrats who have started to take up some of these same MAHA issues. I mean, isn't there a softening Cory Booker. Yeah, yeah, like there's a softening of the, of the Democratic center towards the populism of maha. Right. So I think that's going to be, that's going to be here for a while.
Julian Walker
I think some of that, especially with someone like Cory Booker, is more a reflection of the stuff that we've talked about for a really long time, which is someone who, who is left of center. But, and, and, and not well informed enough on the science and so has some common sense kind of views about like. Well, yeah, I think it's good that we remove unnatural chemicals from our children's food. Like, it's just a kind of a hot take. Right.
Derek Barris
Well, I did just launch the spirituality book club, you know, episodes with Food Intelligence and these. Kevin hall, one of the authors, is someone who Kennedy basically made resign because his research on ultra processed foods did not line what Kennedy wanted him to say. But they even make the point that regardless of their beliefs, MAHA has pushed a lot of important conversations to the front and, which I don't think is a bad thing. My, my criticism has always come in their proposed Solutions and how they handle it and what they defund along the way. It's not the fact that we're talking about chemicals in the water and the food supply or the processed foods. All of those are important conversations.
Julian Walker
Yeah, but I think one of the problems is what they prioritize and what things they see as major threats versus cosmetic, you know, posturing like, like making old breakfast cereal look a certain way.
Matthew Rimsky
Well, they have a criticism of consumerism and profit seeking in processed foods and. But they don't really have a criticism of for profit medicine or, you know, you know, healthcare inequality that way. So. So I mean, I mean, it's like they can bring up issues of food safety in some regards, unless they're talking about raw milk, but they can't really bring up issues of food security. They can't really go into that territory.
Derek Barris
And they absolutely have a criticism of for profit medicine. RFK Jr rails on big Pharma all the time. The irony is just this morning it came out that American obesity levels in adults have declined for the first time in a decade. Kennedy is taking credit for it. The problem, of course, is that it's mostly GLP1s and so the big Pharma that he always decries is actually the reason now he's going to take credit for what they've helped to produce.
Matthew Rimsky
You know what, he's going to take credit by saying that the weight has come off while he has meditated and taken blue methylene. Like it's all come from his brain, his mind.
Derek Barris
Blue methyl and blue. You're keeping up with your subscription. You said blue methylene.
Matthew Rimsky
Oh, sorry.
Derek Barris
Over the years we've discussed the relevance of horseshoe theory and, and we've come to disagreements over its applicability.
Matthew Rimsky
Well, I would say from my point of view, it's more like whether it exists at all or whether it's like this, you know, kind of Cold War artifact that's used to suggest that extremes of left and right are symmetrical, that ultimately both tendencies wind up in the same place and might be driven by the same psychologies instead of by like just different philosophies towards the material world.
Derek Barris
Yes. I would say, though, in terms of an artifact, there are many. There are many concepts that arise during particular times that then broaden out, become universal in its applicability. So just putting it on its origin point doesn't mean that it doesn't have applicability moving down the line. I mean, at most every philosophy or religion happens that way. Now, all the way back on episode 175. We published an entire piece about diagonalism with the coiners of the term, William Callison and Quinn Sabodian. I also want to mention Quinn Quinn, which just on Jon Stewart's podcast about his new book Muskism. It's an excellent interview and conversation. And we all agreed more properly that that diagonalism more properly represents what's happening in wellness and politics right now than horseshoe theory. It's a much more elegant theory in my estimation. So let's pull back and see how this phenomenon might be playing out right now. Julian, can you give us a quick 101 on diagonalism?
Julian Walker
Yeah. So as you said, we had them on and. And they're the coiners of this term. Cal. It emerged out of their study of political reactions to COVID 19 in Northern Europe. And diagonalism is their way of describing something that's sort of similar and parallel to what we call conspirituality. Diagonalists reject elite control and expertise as well as conventional definitions of left versus right politics. And as we observed during the first phases of the pandemic, Callison and Slobodiam also noted that new age homeopaths would be rubbing shoulders in northern Europe with individuals in qanon merch at anti lockdown protests. In the German context, they cited studies showing that though they stood together on these issues around Covid and conspiratorial beliefs and populism, essentially Green party members actually outnumbered the far right alternative for Germany in the Corona skeptic movement. At the extreme end, they say diagonal movements share a conviction that all powers power is conspiracy. So seeing the JP Sears shift we've been discussing today made me think about diagonalism as an interesting lens for the continuing evolution of our cultural and political discourse. You know, when Trump won in 2024, we speculated about how the conspiracy driven elements of the right could create fracturing in the maga movement as they turned on themselves. So this combination of paranoid skepticism, algorithmic fame seems to be an unstable cocktail. Slobodian and Callison also described diagonalism as partially born of new media technology, made more combustible by, quote, the freelance media hustlers movement messiahs and entrepreneurial contrarians is quite a trinity who have every motivation to sharpen social tensions as they seek to create new poles of authority and self enrichment.
Matthew Rimsky
I just want to say a shout out to all good writing everywhere. Yeah, it's like there's some sentences that are just like chef's kiss. Fantastic. Thanks a lot, guys.
Julian Walker
Totally agree. So that little description brings us quite nicely to someone called Candace Owens who has done exactly what they describe. She's been a contrarian right wing pundit since about 2017. She was a major figure at the Daily Wire, before that Prageru, before that Turning Point usa. She parted ways at the Daily with her boss Ben Shapiro over Israel in 2024. She was of course also a Covid contrarian and a COVID vaccine skeptic. Since going independent, she has leaned hard into sensationalist, gossipy conspiracy content. Like she's broadened out what she talks about, I think to reach more people and it's been very successful. She's done these long form multi part YouTube series on, you know, the whole Blake Lively versus Justin Baldoni controversy, which you'd only know if you follow celebrity gossip. It also on how she believes Erica Kirk may actually have been involved in the killing of her husband Charlie. And then most notoriously, she's alleged that French President Emmanuel Macron's wife is secretly transgender. And she's devoted hours and hours to unpacking this conspiracy.
Matthew Rimsky
She's also devoting hours and hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars in her legal defense against their defamation suit which is slowly progressing. Through which court? I don't even know. I don't know whether she's being prosecuted.
Julian Walker
Not. But then last week I couldn't help but notice that Candace Owens appeared as a panelist at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum and she spoke on a panel there of quote, influential figures with large families who produce content that focuses on family values. This is a conference that happens in Russia every year. It's been boycotted since the invasion of Ukraine by Western countries. There were some other Americans there though. The Tate brothers, who you might remember are awaiting trial for rape and sex trafficking. Fake martial artist who provides a lot of, a lot of humorous entertainment with his, with his martial arts and former film star Steven Seagal. And all of these folks in turn rubbed shoulders with representatives of the Taliban, North Korea, China, Iran and the Donetsk People's Republic, which was illegally established in part of annexed Ukraine after Putin Putin's actions there when interviewed Candace while there after the conference praised the beauty and the cleanliness of the country. She dismissed American critics of Putin and Russia and criticized American support for Ukraine. And then she also laughed off rumors from the interviewer that she may be running for president. She said she'd rather campaign on behalf of former Fox News star, now fellow freelancer Tucker Carl Carlson.
Matthew Rimsky
You know, one thing to add maybe to diagonalism with the list of the Tate brothers, Steven Seagal, but then the Taliban representatives from North Korea and Iran and so on. Like, isn't this is a big sort of appeal to the idea of the multipolar sort of post American world? Right. Like, you know, we, we are the sort of. From the, from the regions, from the margins. We have come together. We oppose. Oppose NATO, we oppose Western hegemony, we oppose the US but we also are sort of constructing new centers of power because, you know, the Cold War is so far over that this sort of. Sort of, I don't know, like, unitary superpower of the US Is no longer relevant. Like, it's a. It's a multipolar party, Right?
Julian Walker
Yeah. And I think it's becoming that even more since 2022, because, you know, in the past, Western countries would be there. It's basically Russia saying we're open for business.
Derek Barris
Right.
Julian Walker
In our, in our post Soviet state. But yeah, at this point, it, it is sort of one of these axes of, of people coming in from the margins. And I like that you use the word multipolar because that is, that's a word that gets used by Alexander Dugin a lot. And, and I'll touch on him in a moment here. So Candace's trip to Mother Russia was in fact, following in Tucker Carlson's footsteps. He traveled there in 2024, very controversially, to interview both Vladimir Putin and my favorite philosopher of spiritual fascism, Alexander Dugin. Like Candace, Tucker believes that American journalists. Here's the sort of populist claim should platform enemy dictators so that Russians can make up their own minds. Excuse me. So that Americans can make up their own minds about them, rather than. Than just trusting the experts. And their attitude, in this case Tucker and Candace is consistent with what we've seen as a kind of MAGA turn toward Putin, which is interesting. I'm not saying all of this perfectly fits the. The framework of diagonalism, but it's an interesting thing to think about. Like the evil empire of the GOP's most revered saintly president, Ronald Reagan has now been radically reimagined as a bastion of Christian values. Values, Western civilization and this strong masculine leadership, despite having the world's largest stock of nuclear weapons and Putin invading his neighbors to rebuild the Russian empire, which is precisely what Alexander Dugin talks about in interviews. Somehow, alongside Owens and Carlson, far right figures like Megyn Kelly and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Nick Fuentes are all willing mouthpieces for Kremlin talking points about how the invasion of Ukraine was actually provoked by NATO Go. And that while claiming to want peace, Western support for Ukraine is really Just prolonging the war.
Derek Barris
I want to throw in there that Reaganomics and Reagan's image has been, you know, just put up, as you said, saintly, by the right since, since he died. But also, I read a story recently about how the Nixon foundation is reviving Nixon as a working class hero, basically. Oh, gosh. And they're doing.
Julian Walker
Through Instagram.
Derek Barris
Through Instagram, they're doing all these Nixon did nothing wrong videos with popular hip hop beats right now. And the journalist who wrote about it just shows how, like there's a lot of people in the comments, real people, not just trolls, who are like, oh, he's. This is great. So it really blows my mind that Anyone who took 10 seconds to research Reagan would understand what a horrible person he was. And now the fact that we have, we're going to just have the entire list of Republican presidents are going to be revived in, in the coming years.
Julian Walker
Yeah, Hagiography of the great American heroes who've been unfairly criticized. So here's where we get into slightly more controversial territory where we're not all going to agree, but one of the things I observe in this context is that some related Kremlin talking points have also been echoed by the leftist streamer Hassan Piker, who in a now deleted viral rant that appears to be from early 2022, as best I can ascertain about the 2014 annexation of crime, Crimea replied to a question in the chat he was talking about. He was basically saying that Putin was not going to invade Ukraine. And they were like, well, what about what he did in Crimea? And he replied, what do you call Crimea? I call it part of Russian territory, bitch. That's what I call Crimea. I call it Crimea River, a Russian river. And he justified this in his argument based on Crimea being majority Russian. But many have pointed out that that was actually a function of Soviet mass deportations of Crimean Tatars after War ii. And he's not recanted on this position. He's, he's repeated that, those kinds of statements in the time since. But he has criticized the broader invasion of Ukraine, even though he loudly said it would never happen. And then when it did, again, the Kremlin talking points, he blamed it on NATO's actions.
Matthew Rimsky
So is that the main quote? What do you call, like Crimea River? Is that the main thing? The, the, the, the main talking point that he's echoed? And then you're saying that he's brought it up a couple of times or when he's been asked about it, he's repeated it or he hasn't backed down.
Julian Walker
He's repeated the position that Russia had every right to go into Crimea.
Matthew Rimsky
Okay, so, but he's not. This is not really fitting within the diagonalist framework, is it?
Julian Walker
Well, as I said, I'm not being overly literal about it. I'm not accusing anyone of being a diagonalist. I'm describing this sort of independent political media environment in which these unexpected crossovers happen. Like for me, Hassan Piker's version of that is being far left in the American context, but in this case, repeating Kremlin talking points and, and, and you know, saying things about who the indigenous people actually are there and in other places in the world. That kind of analysis I don't think would really fly. And you know, he also glorifies Mao and praises China as the model the west should emulate, despite being a one party capitalist dictatorship with no democratic freedoms that has an accident ethnic cleansing of 1 to 2 million Uyghurs. And the other thing that I think I found does kind of fit into this is on a recent visit to China, he danced giddily at a patriotic sunrise flag raising in Tiananmen Square where thousands of protesters were killed by either being shot or run over by tanks back in 1989. So I don't know, I mean, maybe Diagnolis is too gentle.
Matthew Rimsky
Well, I mean, if you're using Slobodian and Callison, the first line of the definition you gave is that diagonalists reject elite control and expertise as well as conventional definitions of left versus right politics. So he might be wrong about Crimea in a single comment in over tens of thousands of hours of streaming, but his leftism is pretty conventional in that it identifies capitalism and imperialism as core unreformable problems, problems. And he also highlights tensions within leftist politics on how to understand and align with or not align with actually existing socialist projects, such as the historical meaning of Chinese state capitalism. So diagonalists are contradictory. I just don't know how he's contradictory.
Julian Walker
Well, to me he's contradictory in the sense that he's advocating for very progressive politics within America while being willing to sing the praises of regimes and figures who are profoundly authoritarian and anti democratic. And that to me is interesting. I'm not trying to completely condemn him in the context of what we're talking about today. It's more just, oh, there are these interesting crossovers that have contradictory qualities about them. How do we have think about that.
Derek Barris
My question, and this would be pretty simple, if he were to make a statement about a similar river in Israel, how would that go over because you're talking about colonization Israel of Palestinians, which he rightfully criticizes and which a lot of things I agree with him on. But then Russia is actively trying to colonize two countries right now. And so that, that's where the contradict to me, I would question why you would be okay with colonization in one place and not the other.
Matthew Rimsky
Yeah, I mean, I think that has to do with the contested ethnography of Crimea.
Julian Walker
It's exactly the same as the Israel Palestine just in terms of the structure of it. Ethnic cleansing. Two different people claimed to be the original inhabitants of the land.
Matthew Rimsky
So the Tatars were moved through a settler colonial project.
Julian Walker
They were deported to Uzbekistan to clear the way for Russians to take over. Yep.
Matthew Rimsky
Right.
Julian Walker
During the Soviet years.
Matthew Rimsky
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, he might be wrong about Crimea.
Julian Walker
He's also wrong about Tibet. He defends China taking Tibet. So these things, they're observations about someone's different positions about things. I personally have a hard time taking someone who has those sorts of positions, positions seriously as someone I trust politically. So there is this interesting twist and maybe it's a twist about how people line up their domestic policy versus their foreign policy. Because alongside Hasan, probably for quite different reasons which we can discuss, but which may be really obvious. Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and Nick Fuentes are not only anti NATO Putin apologists to one degree or another, not only opposed to the war in Iran, but are now vocally opposing US support of Israel along with JP Sears. And they share these positions with Anna Kasparian, who has long worked with Hasan's uncle Cenk Uygur at the huge left wing Independent Young Turks network, which started back in the early days of YouTube and grew really huge, but has become quite, quite controversial in the last, I would say 18 months or so. Anna appeared on Candace Owens show last month and they bonded together over Israel and Gaza as well as Anna's recent return to Christianity. It's funny how these things tend to tend to come together. Now, of course, people, I want to absolutely acknowledge this. People of any political persuasion can find the basic human empathy to be appalled by what has been done to Gaza and is continuing to be done to Gaza.
Derek Barris
Gaza.
Julian Walker
It's not hard to see how America first Republicans would then also combine that healthy empathy with the general principle of isolationism and, you know, not shipping tax dollars to any foreign wars or military alliances whatsoever. But for the next twist in this tale, in terms of interesting diagonalist contradictions, I want to share this clip. It's of longtime Al Jazeera journalist Sana Said on Democratic Socialist Brianna Joy Gray's Bad Faith podcast from about month ago.
Nomi Fry
Look how popular AOC is with young voters. And I'm like, you guys, you guys really aren't. You need to get outside the bubbles. You need to get outside the east coast bubbles too. Yeah, it's crazy. I know many, you know, people on the left who would happily vote for Tucker Carlson before aoc. I am frustrated by that dynamic because
Alex Schwartz
I, you know, I don't want Tucker Carlson be president.
Nomi Fry
I also can't see myself damaging my own credibility by telling someone to vote for a doc like these options hurt us all. That little stupid thing that she said at the DNC carried more water for the genocide of the Palestinians than Marjorie Taylor Greene ever did. Yeah, for her to get up on stage. For her to get up on stage and yell about how they are working tirelessly for a ceasefire when by every account we now know, and we knew then too that they weren't. For her to get up on stage and say, and for people to be like, you know, well, yeah, she should apologize. Yeah, that wasn't cool. But there's no but. If you are actively carrying and knowingly carrying water for the extermination of an entire people and for people to be sitting online and talking about how she's more pro Palestine than this. More. No you're not.
Julian Walker
Such highly charged material and interesting analysis. My point in sharing it is the observation of our volatile times and how right wing independent mutual media figures may be finding some common cause, as illustrated here with those on the left. And some left wing independent media figures are even floating the idea of supporting right wing politicians over democratic socialists like aoc. If they think someone like Tucker or Marjorie Taylor Greene has the right position on Israel. It's like a single issue kind of focus. And thankfully there are some prominent commentators on the left like Mehdi Hassan who has have been vocal in their criticism of this saying. Really? You're talking about Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson?
Matthew Rimsky
Well, first of all, I just want to put it into the active voice and name that what happened to Gaza was a genocide. It's still ongoing, but it was perpetrated by Israel. And to Gray's point, which I'll get to, it was enabled and funded by both Biden and Trump and most of the global North. But I have some other questions. Are you saying that there's some right wing influencers that are now, now leftist in their orientation to Israel?
Julian Walker
Not exactly. I mean they've come around to a more traditionally left wing position given that the GOP is usually more hawkish, has been pro Israel for a really long time in part due to their Christian Zionism. But I think the more interesting thing I'm trying to get at is how figures on the left like Brianna Gear Gray and her guest Sana Said have favorably compared compared Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson against AOC over Gaza, despite all of their other far right bigoted conspiratorial positions and despite AOC's clear identity as being in the most far left group in the American government as it stands.
Matthew Rimsky
Yeah, I'll put a pin in that because I don't think that's what she's doing. But what I think we're seeing is competing nationalisms within maga. So America first versus Empire first first none of it is leftist in the sense that it's not about solidarity with Palestinians or it doesn't have any interest in global north south relations. It's not interested in the history of colonialism. Carlson platforms Fuentes he rants about ZOG type conspiracy theories. So his focus is still this version of the OG great replacement theory that just easily slides into anti Semitism like he could have Joel Webbin on any day of the week. Peter Beinart I think is probably doing the best, I don't know mainstream analysis on that now, especially on the most recent Know youw Enemy, which I highly recommend. Greene always voted against Palestine and only turned against Israel after Trump blocked her political ascent. But I don't get Gray being an example of a left wing media figure floating right wing support like she she said she's agreeing with said that AOC damaged her trust with the left flank of the Democratic Party party by lying on the stage in the biggest stage in Democratic politics about Harris working tirelessly for a ceasefire. Harris didn't do that. So AOC lied and that happened and the party clipped that lie and used it all over Twitter to try to the attempt was to try to quell criticism of Harris, especially from young people and the left flank. And that's a huge deal for a lot of people behind her since 2016 as an insurgent candidate. I think when said that AOC did more damage in that moment, it's because she had this function of turning a certain segment of her follower followers who were going to be anti genocide to begin with or could have been into a softer position on Harris so that there would be less rancor around the election. That's what she's referring to. She's not Saying that AOC is somehow like worse in general than Marjorie Taylor Greene. She's saying that she did a treacherous thing. And that's big for people who were behind AOC since 2016 as an insurgent candidate. AOC has to own that. And Gray is a third party voter. So that's the other thing that's going on.
Julian Walker
Yeah, I mean, she does self describe as a Democratic socialist and she worked as press secretary on Bernie Sanders campaign.
Matthew Rimsky
Sure. But recently she's talking about third party all the time.
Julian Walker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you're right to point out that she shared that she voted for the Green Party, I believe Jill Stein in 2024, which essentially was a vote for Trump, but kind of maybe worse.
Matthew Rimsky
But I don't think we have to litigate like what that vote was. That's what she is. She's, you're, you're trying to say that she's, she's a left wing voter that somehow like enabled Trump coming into the party towards the right, but ideologically that's not true.
Julian Walker
I don't think she's edging toward the right at all.
Matthew Rimsky
Okay, but that's, that was your premise. You had, you said left wing media figures floating right wing support.
Julian Walker
So I don't think that she's floating right wing support herself. But she's saying in the clip that she knows plenty of people on the left who would vote for Tucker Carlson before they would vote for aoc, and she is frustrated by that. Yeah, but she doesn't know what to do in response because it would damage her credibility if she endorsed AOC in that kind of matchup. Right. Between AOC and Tucker Carlson, for example.
Matthew Rimsky
In the context of being a third party voter though, that's, that's a reasonable, reasonable response. I don't know. I can't put my energy behind somebody who betrayed an entire movement. And so I'm looking elsewhere. That's a reasonable third party answer.
Julian Walker
Yeah. If you accept the premise that she was betraying and she was lying and Kamala Harris wasn't doing any of that.
Matthew Rimsky
Well, that's her position. That's her position.
Julian Walker
Kamala Harris had gotten in. She wouldn't have done anything different on Gaza. I don't know that we can know pretty much any of that stuff.
Matthew Rimsky
We know that she did shit. Nothing. She did nothing. Intention within the Democratic Party to pull back from that policy. We just know that. And the autopsy cub covers it up. So it's like you're talking about people who are responding to a political betrayal and then somehow that Makes them floating support for the right instead of actually saying, no, we have to be more radical, let's figure out how we can get Butch Ware somewhere close to power.
Julian Walker
Yeah. I mean, she's saying that people in the circle should she moves in on the left would be more willing to vote for a racist Nazi Apologist Pro Jan 6. Great replacement conspiracy theorist Putin and Orban glazing far right Christian nationalist nut job before one of the most charismatic progressive politicians in American history. I'm not saying she's.
Matthew Rimsky
And she hates that.
Julian Walker
Yes. I'm not saying she's endorsing it. I'm saying she's naming a phenomenon and that phenomenon is part of what we're talking about here.
Alex Schwartz
Okay.
Julian Walker
I like Brianna Joy Gray. You don't need to defend her. I'm just talking about how these phenomena are going on.
Matthew Rimsky
Back to the contradictions of Piker. Now he's out there guesting on Democracy Now. He's keynoting DSA conventions. He's supporting insurgent candidacies in the AOC mold, although he probably also would criticize her convention statement. And just on Tuesday, like we're. This is Tuesday. Actually this morning he's live on Breakfast Club, which is now on Netflix. He's talking with Charlemagne about NYC DSA candidates for the fall. He's also talking about techno feudalism, which I'm going to wrap up with. And so yes, he makes a dumb remark about Crimea. You don't like that he went to China. You don't like that he likes the writings of Mao. He's wrong on Tibet. But which of the actual DSA candidates who are feminists anti genocide candidates? Claire Valdez. He's out on the road for in the country where he actually lives. Like, which of them has, you know, I don't know, autocratic tendencies or, you know, that. That he would somehow praise them if they became dictatorial or something like that. Like he's working for Democrats while criticizing the shit out of them. And now Congress is hauling him in for a hearing because he went to Cuba, which the US is literally starving. Like, I don't get. I don't get how he's in this mix here.
Julian Walker
I don't think he would endorse any of them. I don't think any of them are in danger of becoming autocrats or dictators. That's not the kind of system we have here. He does want to dismantle the system we have here. And he has praised people who I see as profoundly anti democratic both historically and currently. And I think that that means that as someone who is going to be endorsing candidates within our system, I him actually as more of a liability than an asset because all of the positions I have listed will turn off a lot of people who are not all in on that particular camp. And I know you disagree about that.
Matthew Rimsky
I think the core center of the Democratic Party agrees with you absolutely, Julian. And I just don't think that they've been successful. So I want to zoom out because my evolving understanding of these reality alignments really focuses on the incentives of platform capitalism. And that I think has a bearing on whether these debates that we have between us, sometimes endlessly, especially on slack, over the content of these influencers brains amounts to like a hill of beans. Like I have thought for years about these figures as though they're political influencers that are compromised by audience capture. They are, you know, incentivized by algorithm chasing, but they still represent political views or possibilities and they're somehow linked to real demographics. But it's never really clear to me where those gears meet, like how we measure how many Candace Owens subscribers believe what she says versus how many are consuming political surrealism as an entertainment commodity and how to understand what if any consequence any of that has on electoral politics. And I mean that is getting more and more unclear to me now, especially as I've gotten more involved with local politics like here in Toronto and in the province of Ontario, Ontario. On my other show I've interviewed grassroots socialist politicians like Serena Purdy and Diana Chan McNally who have to work in the real world like ward boundaries, community meetings, budget cycles, constituents who can vote them out. Their political attention is granular, it's relational, it's slow. And the trust that they accumulate is over time, it's not through viral moments. And that means that they can't really shift their commitments, they can't really fake it.
Julian Walker
Right.
Matthew Rimsky
But then with this class of Carlson, Greene and Owens, they're not accountable to anything but their platform performance and they're rewarded for escalations in novelty and outrage. So an anti Israel turn can carry anti Semitic content, but it will mainly be driven or it could be mostly driven by platform optimization. And I wouldn't just to pick this up, Julian, I wouldn't put Piker in that category because I think he is accountable now in Korea increasingly to this network of people that he's starting to campaign for, whether you think he's a liability or not. Like they want him there. And that means he's going to reciprocate in some way like he's building some in real life relationships.
Julian Walker
Yeah.
Matthew Rimsky
Anyway, I've been reading a few books that are changing my view on this stuff. One is Capital is Dead by Mackenzie Work, Techno Feudalism by Varoufakis, and Capital's Grave by Jodi Dean. I've got a brief episode coming up on Saturday on their perspectives, but in general they're helping me get clear on the value neutrality of political information when it is made into money. Right. So Dean has a concept called communicative capitalism which sums a lot of this up that in real life politics involves messages and meanings and responses, but social media and broadcast politics involves producing commodities that circulate for the benefit of platforms. And her concern is for how leftists can get smoked by this all the time. Because we tend to believe that online politics are more than performative. But not only performative, they are actively fueling platform profits. Like that's what's actually happening. So the same constraints might apply to maga, but MAGA doesn't have to build anything and fascism thrives on disintegration. So if I go out door knocking with with Diana Chan McNally and I hope to get time for this in the fall as she runs for counselor here in October, I'll spend 15 minutes talking with each family about how much more money it costs to permanently house unhoused people in their neighborhood. Then I'll know that I will can open up my phone at the end of that shift and I'll see clips of Carlson and Owens and I'll know that it has nothing to do with almost anything in the real world world or the majority of the conversations that actually make things work like these are just not in the same category of political acts. But then they also meet because we've seen that. We've seen it at council meetings where red pilled folks will commandeer speaking slots. And in the US we know that they can build momentum so successfully in red states that they take over school councils or voting boards or bylaw committees. So the worlds are not disconnected, but where they do connect, it's on a right word slide. And so I'm starting to regard this whole lot of people as being in many ways alienated and segregated from the actual political work that needs to be done. But they also sometimes have some effects. But from Carlson to Piker to even the three of us, everyone is producing information commodities for the platform owners who regulate access to the markets or the listeners. Listeners, the readers. And Varoufakas points out that under techno feudalism, every view and Engagement, regardless of ideology, generates data that flows upward to YouTube and Spotify and gets converted into cloud rent. And with communicative capitalism, Dean says that whatever the political intent is, content enters the platform as a contribution rather than a message, as engagement data rather than deliberate. Now, in Capital Is Dead, which is a beautiful little book, Mackenzie Works says that the old Marxist division between owner and worker needs an update or at least an addition. And I think this speaks to the weird political alignments of diagonalism. She says that data based capitalism divides people into the vectoralist class or those who control the flow of information, and then the hacker class and everyone who must use these flows for their livelihood, including us. And according to that class analysis, I have way more in common with Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens than I do with Jack Dorsey, even though I'm much more likely to meet Jack Dorsey on a meditation retreat. But the other guys are all out hacking me now. In Capital's Grave, Jody talks about something that is outside of this framework that we're very familiar with. It's a demographic that I don't belong to, but that it became as visible visible as we did at the height of the pandemic. She calls it the servant vanguard. This is the labor force of nurses, teachers, grocery stockers, home care workers. These are the people Dean calls collectively indispensable. And we all felt that. Everybody said it at the time. And they are better able to mobilize because they still work in actual places of higher political organization. So if there's going to be anything like a general strike, it's going to be motivated and organized by them. Like, how could it come from us?
Julian Walker
No more podcasts until the system gets more equitable.
Matthew Rimsky
No, no, no. Actually, we're going to keep doing podcasts to ask other podcasters to go on general strike. It's not going to work. So the servant vanguard are also the workers with direct experience of social reproduction being more valuable than profit, and more of their work takes place outside of the vectors of the apps. So I'm still going to do what I do. But I find Dean persuasive that the most robust answer to JP Sears and the rest happens outside of the platforms which equalize our information with theirs. And just one last note, we've done all of these segments from so many angles on the masculinity shit. All of these performances from Sears. And who's the really wacko guy? The conspiracy theorist who just lost his infowars. Who's he?
Julian Walker
Alex Jones.
Matthew Rimsky
I forgot his name. Can you believe that? That's good Carlson, a whole chunk of Joe Rogan's guest list, and now cabinet ministers RFK Jr and Pete Hegseth doing man stuff. We've talked about muscular Christianity, biohacking, infrared, sunburning your balls. We've talked about these as juvenile compensatory copes. But that idea of the compensatory takes on new meaning in the light of what Jody calls the circumstances Servant vanguard. Because I think that to the extent that Sears works out so that he can protect something, as the super divorced guy he is, he is also mimicking servant vanguard relevance, right? Like he's trying to say my body matters, right? Like what I do with my muscles matters within my personhood. So I think working out in that context is in part about imagining a world in which your body can mean as much as information does, where it can actually serve and protect. I think it's a form of envy.
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Matthew Rimsky
So I'm dripping. Could be the rain, could be the upstairs upstairs bathroom.
Julian Walker
Yikes.
Matthew Rimsky
You could hire the guy your neighbor
Julian Walker
recommended, but I'm pretty sure that's just his cousin.
Matthew Rimsky
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Date: June 18, 2026
Hosts: Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, Julian Walker
This episode explores the complex evolution of JP Sears, wellness satirist-turned-right-wing influencer, and how his persona now embodies Christian nationalism and anti-Semitic undertones within the conspirituality movement. The hosts critically dissect Sears' transformation—recounting his origins, unpacking his adoption of Christian nationalistic rhetoric, and situating him within broader cultural and political trends, including "diagonalism" and influencer contrarianism. The discussion also widens out to examine similar horseshoe/directional shifts among both right and left wing influencers, and how social media platform dynamics shape the modern culture war.
[02:05 – 11:13]
[11:13 – 19:53]
[22:23 – 29:54]
[31:46 – 39:48]
[43:02 – 80:33]
This episode offers a sweeping, critical view of how charismatic wellness and right-wing influencers like JP Sears shift identities to match—and monetize—the currents of the attention economy, revealing the larger dangers and dynamics at play in the convergence of conspiracy, spirituality, and political grift.