Conspirituality

As the gases slowly leak from Trump’s orifices and IV holes, the bright flame of his inspiration to MAGA Christians is fading. Did he drain the swamp? Prosecute the pedophiles? Save the Holy Land? Lower gas prices? Give all the grill dads better health care? What was all the speaking in tongues for?

JD Vance has an answer for the MAGA faithful: another memoir, another rebrand that turns to the device that made Hillbilly Elegy a smash hit, and the worst book ever: the gall to turn his personal and familial despair into the diagnosis of an entire culture, in Appalachia. 

With Communion: Finding my Way back to Faith, Vance plays the same narcissistic trick: turning his lifelong journey through rightwing American Chrisitianity—with a short and shameful detour into New Atheism—to land in the Catholic faith of Leonard Leo, sketching out a redemption plan for every bro seeking their way home. 

Show Notes

Rerum Novarum (1891) — Pope Leo XIII

Elizabeth Catte, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

Appalachian Reckoning — Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll, eds.

Battle of Blair Mountain — West Virginia Encyclopedia

Hurricane Helene federal aid gap — Associated Press

PolitiFact — Springfield "Lie of the Year" 2024

Institut Montaigne — JD Vance analysis

Randall Balmer, "The Real Origins of the Religious Right" — Politico

Know Your Enemy podcast — episode on René Girard with John Ganz

Laudato Si' — Pope Francis

Magnifica Humanitas — Pope Leo XIV

Mike Fox, "JD Vance's Memoir Communion Performs Catholicism for Evangelicals"
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RFK Jr has been one of the loudest champions of the Trump's work requirements for Medicaid and SNAP recipients. While he frames it in the language of health, he's really just reviving a generations-old argument first made by Ronald Reagan.

Derek digs into the archival tapes to deliver the goods.
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Matthew applies three interlocking frameworks to the conspirituality phenomenon—and to the podcast itself. Drawing on Jodi Dean's theory of neofeudalism, Yanis Varoufakis's technofeudalism, and McKenzie Wark's vectoralism, he argues that conspirituality is an epistemic crisis—a problem of bad information spreading through inadequately critical communities—but also a structural product of platform capitalism's feudal logic.

Dean's four elements (parcellated sovereignty, new lords and serfs, hinterlandization, and catastrophic anxiety) explain why certain populations are rendered susceptible before they encounter any specific piece of misinformation. Varoufakis names the extraction mechanism as  cloud rent. Wark shows what this means for the producer: a hacker class worker who owns every tool except the vector that makes the work valuable. 

Matthew then turns the analysis on himself, exploring what it means to have spent six years building critical content inside the infrastructure he is criticising.

Show Notes

Dean, Jodi. 'Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?' Los Angeles Review of Books, May 2020.

Dean, Jodi. 'From Neoliberalism to Neofeudalism.' Emancipations, Vol. 3, Iss. 3, 2024.

Dean, Jodi. 'Neofeudalism: The Messy Political Economy of Transitioning to Something Worse.' Emancipations, Vol. 4, Iss. 3, 2025.

Dean, Jodi. Capital's Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle. Verso, 2025.

Dean, Jodi. 'Communism or Neo-Feudalism?' New Political Science, Vol. 42, No. 1, 2020.

Varoufakis, Yanis. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Bodley Head, 2023.

Wark, McKenzie. Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? Verso, 2019.

McIntyre, Lee. How to Talk to a Science Denier. MIT Press, 2021.

Heron, Kai. 'Are We Witness to the Disintegration of Capital's Laws of Motion? A Review of Jodi Dean's Capital's Grave.' Emancipations, Vol. 4, Iss. 2, 2025.

Gane, Nicholas. 'Capitalism is Capitalism, Not Technofeudalism.' Journal of Classical Sociology, 2024.

James W. 'Worse than Dead: A Critical Response to McKenzie Wark.' Cosmonaut Magazine, October 2020.

Freedom Socialist Party. 'Book Review: Techno-Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism.' Socialism.com, 2024.

Beres, Derek, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker. Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat. PublicAffairs, 2023.

Wark, McKenzie. A Hacker Manifesto. Harvard University Press, 2004.
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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 “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 antisemitic 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. Is Sears sniffing out opportunities again? How is he balancing legitimate critiques of the genocide with blatant antisemitic rhetoric? And how does he fit into the growing diagonalism occurring in the right-wing attention economy?
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Influential right-wing pundit turned celebrity conspiracy-peddler, Candace Owens, just visited Russia for the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. While at “Russia’s Davos” she marvelled at the cleanliness and beauty of Moscow, explained that Americans were never given any real reason why Putin invading Ukraine was bad, and deflected questions about her potential presidential run.

She’s not alone. MAGA has increasingly found a warm place in its heart for Vladimir Putin and other strongman dictator-types (like Viktor Orban). Owens rubbed shoulders with accused sex traffickers, the Tate Brothers, fake martial artist and aging film star, Steven Segall, Trump’s head of the Commission of Fine Arts, and representatives of the Taliban, North Korea, Iran, and China.

In this reimagining of Russia—the same “evil empire” of GOP patron saint, Ronald Reagan—the post-Soviet dictatorship is poo-pooed as a danger to European democracies by a growing cadre on the right. Figures like Owens, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Tim Pool, Nick Fuentes, and Marjorie Taylor Green all oppose US support for Ukraine and involvement in the war in Iran.

In another interesting turn, they now also all oppose US support for Israel—which makes for some strange diagonalist bedfellows with certain figures on the left, like Hasan Piker. 

Julian unpacks this story. Stay tuned for claims that Carlson and Green have been less harmful to Gaza than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as for erstwhile left-wing pundit Ana Kasparian’s come-to-Jesus moment on Owens’ show.

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