transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:08] If anybody ever tells you to just trust them, don't! Welcome to Trust Me, the podcast about cults, extreme belief, and manipulation from two cult hoppers who've actually experienced it.

Speaker 2:
[00:20] I am Lola Blanc and I am Meagan Elizabeth.

Speaker 1:
[00:23] And today is once again, Matthew Remski, part two with him. He is an author and he is one of the hosts of the Conspirituality podcast. And Matthew is going to talk to us about how he cult hopped from his first guru to his second, the moment that disillusioned him with the second one, and the cultural patterns, including a resurgence of the satanic panic that are most alarming to him as he follows conspiracies and spirituality on the podcast.

Speaker 2:
[00:47] He'll also talk about how his interests now lie in addressing the root economic causes of why so many people are looking to snake oil salesmen for answers, some pointers from his upcoming book, Antifascist Dad, about how to navigate the fraught information landscape and why it's important to create healthy organizing spaces since all sides of the political spectrum are susceptible to cultish behavior.

Speaker 1:
[01:12] Amen, sweetie.

Speaker 2:
[01:14] Amen, sweeties.

Speaker 1:
[01:15] I don't know why that was the right thing to say. Meagan, before we get into it with Matthew, can you tell me your cult is saying up this week?

Speaker 2:
[01:22] Yeah, mine's depressing. Are you ready?

Speaker 1:
[01:25] I'm ready.

Speaker 2:
[01:26] We've talked on here before about the online cultish group 764 that's now being investigated by the FBI. It is a group that's targeting mostly kids online through video games, what have you.

Speaker 1:
[01:43] Online spaces.

Speaker 2:
[01:44] Online spaces.

Speaker 1:
[01:45] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[01:45] And I went home last weekend and my friend's son got targeted by them.

Speaker 1:
[01:53] Oh no.

Speaker 2:
[01:54] So my friend was calling me and she was like, he is, well, number one, their entire household was getting swatted. So these people got nudes from this child. So now they're in possession of child pornography.

Speaker 1:
[02:10] Because they were claiming to be a girl.

Speaker 2:
[02:12] Yeah. That's what they do.

Speaker 1:
[02:13] Okay. So up.

Speaker 2:
[02:15] So then they said that he had a bomb and swatted his house.

Speaker 1:
[02:19] Like they called 911 being like, there's a bomb at this kid's house. Oh my God. So do we know, is there a goal here other than just straight sadism?

Speaker 2:
[02:31] Well, if you can get a kid to kill themselves, that seems to be the main goal. Because then you get kind of the like horrible person's Reddit star, you know, rating.

Speaker 1:
[02:46] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the goal is, oh my God, that's like the final level. That's so fucking crazy. That's so fucking crazy. Because like, I feel like normally, like I've seen it happen where someone online tries to solicit a nude and then tries to use it as a blackmail to get money.

Speaker 3:
[03:05] Right.

Speaker 1:
[03:05] And like money is a goal that like makes sense at least if you're going to be scamming people that way. But for this stuff, it's just straight.

Speaker 2:
[03:13] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[03:14] Cruelty, evil, sadism, like I just like I can't, and with children, like I just can't write my head around it.

Speaker 2:
[03:20] This is like multiple people that I know now.

Speaker 1:
[03:23] Really?

Speaker 2:
[03:23] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[03:24] So I thought it was like this like rare thing.

Speaker 2:
[03:27] No, no.

Speaker 1:
[03:29] Oh my God.

Speaker 2:
[03:29] So I don't know. It's just, it's really bad. It's so awful. Make sure to check on your kids when they're online. And I don't know. And maybe we can cut this out or maybe we can figure out how to say this correctly, because like there is that fine line of normalizing, like, hey, it's no big deal. It's just your body. Like, you don't have to kill yourself because that's kind of what pedophiles do. Like, you know, like just show me your body is no big deal. But also being like, hey, if you send a picture of your body, it is still worth living.

Speaker 1:
[03:59] Your life will go on. It will be okay. Yeah, 100 percent.

Speaker 2:
[04:02] I'm trying to find that middle ground of me. I'm trying to find it for the FBI, for them to tell kids.

Speaker 1:
[04:12] No, it's true. Like, obviously, no one wants to normalize any of that. But also, like, if that happens, it's fine.

Speaker 2:
[04:19] It's like my friend and I were talking, she's like, I've seen him naked since he was a baby. Like, you don't have to kill yourself. Oh, that's so sad. What I guess I was trying to say is that, you know, the FBI had to come to her house, talk to her about it. They're like, they're just very advanced. They have dead people's phone numbers. They're like, yeah, we track the number. It's like a...

Speaker 1:
[04:40] So they don't know how to catch them. So they're evading justice.

Speaker 2:
[04:43] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[04:43] Wow.

Speaker 2:
[04:44] They're like hackers, dude. And it's not even hard to be a hacker anymore.

Speaker 1:
[04:48] Can we get vigilante hackers to take down those hackers? Where's anonymous when you need them?

Speaker 2:
[04:55] It's so evil. It's just that there's so many. There's so... We need...

Speaker 1:
[04:58] But they're obviously operating within a community.

Speaker 2:
[05:01] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[05:01] It's not... These aren't just random. It's because they can go back to their friends and their community and be like, look at this, what a good thing I did. So obviously whoever's leading those communities, which I know they've taken down a couple of them, but...

Speaker 2:
[05:13] Yep. It's just interesting that the FBI has now started calling this a cult.

Speaker 1:
[05:18] I mean, it makes sense. Yeah. Absolutely makes sense. It's the most modern horror show. Yeah. The most modern version of the Manson Family or something. Very 2026.

Speaker 2:
[05:31] The cool thing about my friend is that she was able to convey to him, these images, don't send them anymore and stop, but it's okay. By the time I left, I was only there for a few days. They were going to baseball games.

Speaker 1:
[05:45] Oh, good.

Speaker 2:
[05:46] So the son is seemingly handling it well, but I'm going to check back in with them, of course.

Speaker 1:
[05:52] Yeah. But thank God.

Speaker 2:
[05:54] Yeah. Yeah. Thank God he wasn't isolating with it and hiding it. Oh my gosh, I know. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[06:03] Phew.

Speaker 2:
[06:04] Phew. So rumor has it, you have a lighter cultious thing today.

Speaker 1:
[06:09] It's opposite cultious thing.

Speaker 2:
[06:10] I think that's for the best.

Speaker 1:
[06:11] It's really stupid.

Speaker 2:
[06:12] Okay. All right.

Speaker 1:
[06:14] I went to see a movie the other night. It's called Exit 8.

Speaker 2:
[06:17] Cool.

Speaker 1:
[06:18] It's a Japanese horror film, I guess, is the genre, kind of thriller, kind of horror, based on a video game called Exit 8. None of this is relevant to what I'm about to say.

Speaker 2:
[06:26] I think I know what you're going to say and I don't know how this...

Speaker 1:
[06:28] It's not relevant.

Speaker 2:
[06:29] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[06:29] But it's a very tense movie. There was a moment in the movie where things were really quiet and the whole theater was really quiet and someone started cracking their knuckles really loudly. And I kind of like reacted verbally because I was like, eww.

Speaker 2:
[06:47] Right.

Speaker 1:
[06:47] And then another person started cracking their knuckles really loudly. And I'm like gasping. And then like three other people were like, group thing. Well, I'm going to start cracking. And then the person next to me starts cracking their neck and their back. And I cannot tell you in a horror movie where it's silent other than like, I can't do it.

Speaker 2:
[07:10] And my knuckles don't crack. And you don't like that sound.

Speaker 1:
[07:12] Ew, no, it's disgusting.

Speaker 2:
[07:13] I like it.

Speaker 1:
[07:14] What were you doing for us right now? I think I already did them all. You got them all out? Ah, no, you got them. But I was just like amazed. I've never witnessed anything like that where something spreads in an audience like that. That's something that's obviously like kind of gross and weird. But everyone's like, I'm going to make the squeamish people uncomfortable by also cracking my body.

Speaker 2:
[07:37] That definitely wasn't conscious for sure. They just were cracking their body.

Speaker 1:
[07:42] I mean, I was audibly gasping.

Speaker 2:
[07:48] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[07:49] And going, no, no, oh, no.

Speaker 2:
[07:52] You're just making me need to crack my back so badly.

Speaker 1:
[07:54] It was a small enough theater that everybody could hear. Everybody knew. It wasn't like a, there's just no way. Wait, what am I thinking of? Oh, like a yawn. It wasn't like a yawn. It was like a chorus of cracking all at the same time.

Speaker 2:
[08:09] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[08:10] Really horrifying sound.

Speaker 2:
[08:11] Okay, okay. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[08:14] Anyway, I was like, wow, the instinct. If those people are all like, hey, they're being gross and it's making people feel weird, I'm going to do it too.

Speaker 2:
[08:25] I think a crack is a yawn.

Speaker 1:
[08:27] You think a crack is a yawn? Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[08:28] Honestly, I think I miss my calling to be a chiropractor because I can crack people's necks and backs. Like, you've never, like, I can just look at somebody and be like, take their, like, head in my hands and just crack the shit out of their neck.

Speaker 1:
[08:43] Aren't you scared of, like, hurting someone?

Speaker 2:
[08:45] No. And I used to do it when I was a drinker.

Speaker 1:
[08:50] Oh. Drunk Meagan cracking your neck?

Speaker 2:
[08:53] No, thank you. There's a story about me leaving the Black Cat in Silver Lake. I'd taken an Ambien while I was out drinking. There was eight men sitting on bar stools outside. They cracked all of their necks, got in an Uber, and drove away. And my friends were like, are you guys okay? And they were like, honestly, it felt good.

Speaker 1:
[09:14] That's amazing.

Speaker 2:
[09:15] So I'm lucky I never got sued.

Speaker 1:
[09:16] That's the weirdest interest and skill.

Speaker 2:
[09:20] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[09:20] I have no interest in that. Nor do I have skill.

Speaker 2:
[09:24] Well, we can't all be chiropractors, DL chiropractors.

Speaker 1:
[09:28] That's so true.

Speaker 2:
[09:30] Well, do you know who else?

Speaker 1:
[09:34] Can't wait to hear where the sentence is going.

Speaker 2:
[09:37] Do you know who else spreads news?

Speaker 1:
[09:41] Wow. Pretty good. Who, Meagan?

Speaker 2:
[09:45] Matthew.

Speaker 1:
[09:45] Wow. Maybe we should talk to him.

Speaker 2:
[09:47] Let's do it.

Speaker 3:
[10:01] When I arrive at Endeavor Academy, talk about cult jumping, I would say that probably half of the participants, half of the members had come from other places. I was with Osho. I was in ISKCON. That didn't work out. I was in this place.

Speaker 2:
[10:21] So they all had come from other...

Speaker 3:
[10:23] Not all of them, but enough of them had. And the weirdest part was that that lent Endeavor Academy a certain kind of status. Like this is the cult at the end of the cult road. Like we've seen the other places and how they fuck up, but like this one, totally free. We can do what we want. We're just, you know...

Speaker 1:
[10:42] So funny.

Speaker 3:
[10:42] And to be honest, while Charles Anderson, I believe, commanded everybody's time in ways that wasted a lot of labor hours, and that he might have been personality disordered in terms of his narcissistic needs, I can't really say that this group was, you know... Well, it wasn't a violent group, as I've said before, but there were a lot of benefits to participating in it. And, you know, it started when I was able to get over the resentment of the lost time and the endless demand for money and labor and resources and all of the disruptions to one's social life and to parenting and, you know, all kinds of things. I was able, it was really from that experience that I was able to understand that one of the things that Cults will offer is a kind of ersatz socialism that is so attractive within our political economy. Of course. And they set themselves apart from the regular world in a way that seems to be generous, that seems to be based on mutual aid, that seems to be based on the notion of the fraudulence of private property. And I think that's incredible. That's not how it actually works out. That's not what's actually going on. But when I was able to reflect on that, I started to develop a political perspective on why I ended up there and what cults actually are and what kind of cultural work they perform.

Speaker 1:
[12:27] Right. They're presenting as we share everything, but it's just the same as capitalism in that it's just a soul serving the people at the top who are in control of everything to begin with.

Speaker 3:
[12:39] Right. Yeah. But the recruitment process tells you otherwise in a very forceful way. You are free and the world and your needs will be provided for.

Speaker 1:
[12:52] Right.

Speaker 3:
[12:53] And the number of people who came into those groups, who were in deep financial distress or who had been alienated from their families, or who were situationally vulnerable in a bunch of different ways, there was a lot. Right. The thing about Michael Roach is that he wasn't that interested in those folks. Right. He was much more interested in sort of high value clients.

Speaker 1:
[13:21] Yeah. Russian oligarchs use that.

Speaker 3:
[13:23] Exactly. Exactly. I mean, he made a big deal of like, you know, we're doing Dharma in Hell's Kitchen, but like, you know, he wanted nice hotel rooms in Singapore more than anything else.

Speaker 1:
[13:35] Right. So what was your like, final disillusionment with this type of community? I mean, you end up practicing yoga very seriously for very, it's not like you left spirituality altogether.

Speaker 3:
[13:47] Yeah. Well, I think I left Endeavor Academy at the same time that yoga was becoming a gig work phenomenon that was ideal for marginally employed and partially educated people like myself. So basically, it was like I had a bunch of, you know, new age spiritual orientalist language and concepts on board that I could pretty easily inject into this physical practice in a performative way. And not that I didn't actually mean it, but I was actually good at, you know, I was good at presenting it. I was pretty successful as a teacher, but it was a very natural like, oh, I can do this for work. And it is actually a bridge back into the quote unquote normal world through the precariat. You know, it's not like having a profession that has institutional support and benefits and whatever, but it's a place to become part of society again. Like you could actually work at a fitness club or you could.

Speaker 1:
[14:55] Right.

Speaker 2:
[14:56] What prompted you to want to go back to normal society?

Speaker 3:
[15:00] I think that I had reached a point where I could see that the utopianism of Endeavor Academy was hollow, that I had enough objective material distance from it to be able to say, most of you who are here, and this includes me as well, are very broken people at the end of their rope with nothing else to do, and you are trying to survive on who gets the next set of credit cards. This is not sustainable, and when Charles Anderson dies, there's not going to be anything here. So I could see that it was a failing kind of dream, and I think the moment, which just haunts me to this day, that I realized that this was true for him, and I think you actually kind of unconsciously gave me a gift by showing me this, is that every day after he gave his sermons, he would go up to his sort of green room in this old resort that we were using, and he would take private meetings. And if you got up there, you could get in line. Usually it was packed, but for whatever reason, one day I went up, because I wanted to ask him a question, and there was nobody there. He was in his room, and it's in this old resort, so they're all hotel rooms, and so you come in the door. Very poetic too, right? Like almost like a, there's a movie about some weird hotel that's like this. It's a Coen Brothers movie. Do you know the one that I'm talking about?

Speaker 1:
[16:41] Oh, Barton Fink?

Speaker 3:
[16:42] Yes! Anyway, it was abandoned. It was probably used by the mob in the 1930s or whatever. But you come in the door and you turn to the right and there's the ensuite bathroom, and he's in the bathroom. And I said, Master Teacher, you there? And he says nothing. And I turn around the corner and I look, and he's standing at the mirror, looking at himself with this expression of utter self-loathing. This expression of complete depression. Like, if his internal monologue was audible, it would be like, what the hell am I doing here? What am I doing with my life? Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? He's looking at himself. And I said, Master Teacher, can I talk with you? And then I watched him put his face back on. So he turned to me, and he, it's like he, Krusty the Clown makeup, like googly eyes. Like, it was, Krusty is good, like, because you know how he can, like, be collapsed and, you know, have a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. But then, like, when he's on, the TV lights are on, he sort of brightens up. That's what it was like. It was that sharp. And I was like, oh, you don't believe what you're doing.

Speaker 2:
[18:01] You're pretending.

Speaker 3:
[18:03] You're pretending. This is not true. This is not a thing.

Speaker 2:
[18:19] I mean, what does that feel like? That were you just shattered on the spot, or did you try to?

Speaker 3:
[18:24] I was relieved, I think.

Speaker 1:
[18:26] Really?

Speaker 3:
[18:27] I was relieved, yeah. So I can't say that in either circumstance, the disillusionment was really shattering. I was filled with resentments, but it wasn't like, and shame, because like, oh, I spent this much time doing this. But it's not like there wasn't a lot of relief as well.

Speaker 2:
[18:51] That makes sense, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[18:53] And then you went on to construct an entire career out of talking about gurus, and power dynamics within communities. Bring us to your podcast. You guys cover so many people, groups, topics, conspiracies, such a wide range of stuff on the podcast.

Speaker 3:
[19:14] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[19:15] What patterns do you see emerging culturally right now? What are you finding alarming? Tell me your perspective as a fellow cult podcaster who's with a slightly different perspective.

Speaker 3:
[19:25] Yeah. I mean, I think that in the first, I've been doing Conspirituality for about six years with Derek and Julie and my colleagues. And I think that in the beginning, we were similarly focused on the incredibly disruptive effect that this kind of wave of spiritual influencers and guru types were having on just the basics of public health communication during the first part of the pandemic. And so, I think our first couple of one within our first couple of episodes, we were talking about the kind of conspirituality overtones within Mickey Willis' Plandemic. We were talking about, you know, Kelly Brogan and her kind of kundalini mysticism, explaining, you know, why you shouldn't take vaccines. And we saw very clearly this intersection between alternative and high demand group based spirituality and a kind of political transgression that was very interesting. And we could see that it was also tracking towards the political right. We could also see that, you know, QAnon was infiltrating a lot of yoga and wellness spaces and becoming very current and very sort of monetizable as content.

Speaker 2:
[20:59] Well, it was very surreal because these were the kind of people that I was good friends with. And it was like the pipeline from, you know, Kundalini yoga to suddenly not trusting the government at all was a very quick slide for people. And it was quite jarring.

Speaker 3:
[21:18] I think we had enough background between the three of us that we had a pretty good instinct about why that was happening. And that when we came across Charlotte Ward and David Voss' article from 2011 called Conspirituality, when Ward pointed out in particular, because Ward did most of the work on that paper, the backstory on her is that like she was actually a believer in this stuff. So that's a whole other thing. But yeah, it was very strange. But she pointed out that the sort of three pillars that Michael Barkan identifies as being central to conspiratorial thinking, that nothing is what it seems, everything has a purpose, everything is connected, are actually axioms of New Age spirituality and thought and a lot of Eastern philosophy as well.

Speaker 1:
[22:10] Interesting.

Speaker 3:
[22:12] So there's this sort of parallel, if you've built into your spiritual expectations, these three axioms around like, you know, illusion and karma and, you know, interconnectedness, then it would be very easy for those under circumstances of political stress to just curdle into a kind of paranoia. And that's what we saw happen. But your question was like, having looked at that for so long, like, what patterns are you most interested in or or alarmed by? Is that on right? Is that correct, Lola?

Speaker 1:
[22:51] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3:
[22:52] I mean, we have covered so many strange, irritating, um, corrosive, you know, grifting personalities. You know, and I have a lot of sort of personal, visceral reactions, uh, to many of them. My pain points in particular have to do with, you know, spiritual influencers who, you know, monetize children's issues or maybe even their own children, or they turn their, you know, super fertility, free birth stuff into content that is, I don't know, resonating with, with tradwife ideals or whatever. So I have personal things. I also personally can't stand the satanic ritual abuse, this copy-paste, you know, process that gets transferred onto each new difficult to understand thing. So like, you know, this is not an appropriate literature to use when you're trying to understand the Epstein files, right? Like that's not going to help the victims of sex trafficking. This is just not an appropriate thing. So I do have these sort of personal alarm points, but I think at this point, and maybe this is, I don't know if this is me, like moving beyond the material or just giving up or something, I think that it's really more interesting to me to look at the overall systems in which this material emerges. And in that case, the real sort of villains are the tech bros who wind up creating these ecosystems of gamified outrage and performativity in which misinformation is specifically made, or it is incentivized and made sticky. And then there are these principles of like audience capture and value capture that make a whole bunch of the worst aspects of charismatic bullshit just totally frictionless and easy to profit from. So, I would say that the weirdos that I've spent a lot of time covering are fringe and minoritarian and that there's no bottom to where they go. I remember having, you know, about four years in this distinct feeling of like, do I really need to know what the next, you know, piece of bullshit Christiane Northrup is putting out is about, like, do I, like, is there anything? At a certain point, I can feel like I am kind of parasitizing a kind of outrage at a kind of...

Speaker 1:
[25:48] At like the symptom.

Speaker 3:
[25:49] Yeah, at the symptom. And that's the best word, is that there's something that it's all coming out of. And, you know, that's where I just sort of step back and have a much more political analysis. With regard to individual figures, though, I'm a lot more interested in the less weird people now, like... You know, there are large scale borderline grifter personalities like, for instance, Scott Galloway, who is extremely successful because he has many hallmarks of legitimacy. And if you look more carefully, though, he is really offering a kind of content that is Manosphere light and gender essentializing, and it continues to be misogynistic. And he does it while convincing liberal parents that he has a vision for their wayward sons. And I think that type of stuff that has enormous reach, that gets onto CNN, and that gets, you know, back slapped in major reviews, that's a lot more, I would say, culturally dangerous than the fringe material at this point.

Speaker 1:
[27:04] I feel like that I have like five questions at the same time. Let me try to pick one. Okay, so like the three of you on the podcast, I think are doing a really excellent job at navigating some very amorphous cultural moments that are hard to parse, like what's real and what isn't, and like promoting a really healthy kind of critical thinking. You have a book coming out about being a father, an antifascist dad, right, that's coming out soon, which is obviously like a slightly different topic, but I guess I just wonder like, do you have thoughts for like, on like a framework for how to navigate this?

Speaker 2:
[27:41] What's the answer?

Speaker 1:
[27:42] Information landscape. I mean, yeah, like honestly, like it's so difficult, incredibly intelligent people are just finding it impossible to figure out what's true and what isn't, which is making us all more vulnerable to people like this. Who are, I believe you're correct, symptoms of this greater thing, but like what the fuck do we do?

Speaker 3:
[28:00] Yeah, okay, well first of all, I'll say that I've taken on a second project because I think that, for me anyway, to spend enough time recording symptoms had to bring me to some kind of diagnostic point.

Speaker 1:
[28:17] Yes.

Speaker 3:
[28:18] And I can't see any of these dynamics evolving or developing or accelerating, or becoming as impactful as they are without the sort of baseline crises of capitalism at play. Like my sense now is that, as kind of mentioned before, cults are hyper concentrated forms of capitalism that disguise themselves as socialist projects. And that tells us something about who's attracted to them. It tells us something about why they persist. It tells us something about why it's so difficult to leave, because if you have some kind of experience for six months that your needs are provided for, and you're actually in a community that's supported and believes in things like mutual aid, then you've never felt that before. That can be extremely attractive. And I also have really come to the conclusion that was first iterated by Marxists in the 1930s, that anti-Semitism or forms of any form of conspiracism that we can point to is a kind of socialism of fools. That when people have to create a story for why they are immiserated, why their world is burning, why there's a genocide going on and they can't do anything about it, why they don't seem to have any voting power, why nothing seems to change. And, you know, your actions politically seem to be meaningless when people realize that that is their condition. They are very vulnerable to being offered scapegoat answers.

Speaker 2:
[30:03] Us vs. them, one on one.

Speaker 3:
[30:06] And the conspiracy theory that scapegoats Jews or trans people or Muslims or people of color or queer people or whatever, these come to the foreground.

Speaker 1:
[30:18] Or socialists, yeah.

Speaker 3:
[30:20] Yeah, or socialists or communists, right. So I think, you know, just anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools is kind of like a guiding light for me, that when I look at the content that we review for Conspirituality, that's my lens now. It's like this weirdo is offering something, but what is it the wrong answer for? Because there's probably something about what they're saying about for-profit medicine or, you know, surveillance capitalism or border control that makes some kind of sense with regard to being a working person who is just trying to make a living. And so, yeah, I just try to take that analytical frame, and that's what brought me to, okay, also, I think we've crossed over through Trump's second election into a fully fascist era, and I don't think that sort of, for me, tracking the, I think tracking the daily devolution of institutions is very important. I think tracking how that's being carried out by fascist ghouls is really important. But that takes a lot of time. And I felt that, especially because I'm a parent, I need to put my time into what is the history of antifascism and what does it have to offer to this particular moment. So that's how I started. And so, to speak to your question, I really tried to begin from what would I tell my now 13-year-old and now nine-year-old about what it will mean to grow up in a fascist era and what it will mean to grow up in the conditions of continuing and heightened capitalist crisis that even once Trump implodes and Gavin Newsom becomes president are not really going to change that much, right? Like, what am I going to say? And I think you're absolutely right that it begins with epistemology. And so the way I laid out this upcoming book is that the first thing I said was all of the things that I learned in these cults around self-regulation and co-regulation, around being able to do breathing practices or being able to find some sort of emotional peace or being able to meditate in some way, that those are really actually important starting points. So I can't actually say that I regret anything because I feel like I got boot camp experience in a number of spiritual environments, and a couple of them were really, really toxic, but that gave me the kind of starting point of what I would say to the 12-year-old, which is, OK, you're not going to be able to think about this unless you can touch grass. And you're not going to be able to think about this unless you touch grass and unless you figure out who you can trust with regard to how you're looking at the world. And so what was cool was I was able to take kind of the media studies aspect of Conspirituality and how misinformation is spread through sort of charismatic methods that are not guardrailed, that are not fact-checked, that are driven by the personalities of the presenters and to say, you know, these are the clear signs of bullshit that you can look for. And then there's a discussion of, well, how is actual knowledge created, you know, in a sort of horizontal and communal network. And from there, because my diagnosis for Conspirituality is basically Marxist, the rest of the book is, well, the middle part of the book is, let's figure out what is baking everybody's minds in this capitalist world. And why it is so easy for people to feel exploited, and not just feel exploited, but actually be exploited.

Speaker 1:
[34:41] Right.

Speaker 3:
[34:41] And for that to be the governing logic of the way we're organizing our lives. And then from there, there's like stuff on friendship, there's stuff on, you know, scapegoating various groups and why that happens. There's stuff on gender relations and, you know, what it means to actually navigate your way through a hyper-objectified and sexualized world. And yeah, and then there's stuff on spirituality in there as well.

Speaker 1:
[35:08] Well, that sounds awesome. I'm not a parent, but I hope to be at some point, and I will read your book about being a dad.

Speaker 2:
[35:17] Either way.

Speaker 3:
[35:19] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[35:19] There's so much in what you just said. First of all, like, yes, it frustrates me so much sometimes when I'm like, we are identifying that there is a problem correctly. We are misattributing the source of the problem because when we attribute it to these, like, nefarious, amorphous forces that have this, you know, power over all of us, then there's nothing we can do. But when we actually, like, look at the structures and look at the symptoms and assess, like, where those oppressions are coming from, where that inequality is coming from, who is actually exploiting us, like, there are steps that we can take, you know? There are ways that we can engage politically and resist and whatever. And, like, obviously, the conspiracy theory stuff comes with so much hate and so much scapegoating and blaming, whatever. But also, it's, like, it's not actionable. It renders people to, like, feeling powerless, alone in their rooms, just, like, scrolling on their phone when there are actually, like, things that we could do together to build power.

Speaker 2:
[36:24] Well, I think it's scary for people. I see a lot of people online being, like, Epstein was a vampire. And it's, like, easier to think that than he's a man who's not that different from a lot of people. Like, it's easier to say, you're a vampire.

Speaker 3:
[36:41] And if it wasn't him, it would be somebody else.

Speaker 2:
[36:43] Exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[36:44] Yeah, that we actually live in a system that selects for apex predators and why and why not? Right. Like, it's one of a number of scenarios that can emerge. And is there going to be any accountability? No. Is there going to be full reporting? No. Are we going to, are the victims going to be compensated or even all known or found? Uh, no. Um, that is, that, that is symbolic of, of peak capitalism. And it's not unique, right? It's, uh, it's, it's not out of the ordinary. And in a way, it's like the fascination with metaphysical explanations. Not only, as you say, both of you are saying this, I think you're, you're quite right that when you turn to metaphysics, you actually create an answer that you can't do anything about. Um, but, but also like, you don't, um, I think you lose contact with the building blocks of where Epstein gets to where he is. And, you know, that's in your everyday politics. It's on your city council. It's on the media that you put into the world.

Speaker 1:
[37:57] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[37:57] Yeah. So.

Speaker 1:
[37:58] When we let politicians be put into office by billionaires, it creates a system where billionaires have all the power. And not the people.

Speaker 3:
[38:09] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[38:09] Um, we're almost out of time. I feel like I could, I could talk to you about so much. I wondered if we could quickly touch on, again, we're just kind of going all over the place here, but you did go viral recently for your explainers on Cesar Chavez's ties to Sinanon. Um, and I would like to just briefly touch on that if we can. For folks who don't know, um, Cesar Chavez was a very revered historical labor leader, really an icon of the left, and it has now come out that Dolores Huerta and other women were very severely abused by him. And it's been this, you know, a big blow to the left. And obviously, I mean, what I'm seeing on my end is a, is a complete denunciation of him. But you talk in your videos about the lessons that we can learn from this. And I, and I wondered if you could talk about that quickly.

Speaker 3:
[38:54] Well, first of all, I kind of made a, a white guy intervention into a very deep Mexican American cultural phenomenon that I'm not that familiar with. And I just want to acknowledge that. And I got some feedback. I got some criticism on that. I went forward with it because the New York Times article sort of had these three or four waving red flags that before the news cycle was going to close off on them. I wanted to point out to say these are things that anybody doing social movement organizing can look out for. These are the clear sort of aspects of Chavez's charismatic authority. Here are the clear aspects of his usage of disorganized attachment to push and pull people towards him and away from him and punish them but love them at the same time. And then there's this stunning moment in which it looks like he's applying kind of new age bodywork healing stuff to a 13 year old girl who he then goes on to assault criminally. And so I wanted to flag these things because cult dynamics are just not about ideological content. They arise in all contexts. We have cults on the right wing of the political sphere. There's left wing political cults. There's psychotherapy cults. There's cults based on, you know, essential oils. And I just wanted the sort of the very obvious generalizable details to be to be clear. Now, Chavez is also very complicated because, you know, he was actually had a number of racist ideas about immigrants coming over the border. He was viciously anti-communist. He appropriated really the work of the Filipino workers who instituted the Great Boycott, which was actually his sort of first rise to prominence. Very complicated figure that people have complained about for and criticized for a long time. But nonetheless, in general terms, he was identified as a leftist icon. And I thought it was important to show that it's really, really good for people who want to do any kind of social movement, to do any kind of social work, to be able to identify and start to learn about cultic dynamics. Because they show up, and they show up in soft ways, they show up in hard ways, I would say like on the soft left or white feminist progressive side, there's a lot of kind of emotional coercion and a kind of intensive lucrative workshop economy that builds up around people like Robin DiAngelo. On the hard left side, there are groups of legit Marxist Leninists who they idealize the notion of the intellectual vanguard, who will lead the workers towards revolutionary consciousness. But that really relies on this notion that a couple of people or maybe even one person would have some kind of mastery of Marxist theory when Marxism is actually really diverse. And then because it's also a utopian ideal, that really, if you're going to be in a tendency like that, you really have to be careful because, you know, we're talking about a group that believes in a kind of utopianism that's going to be precipitated by a crisis. And the structure there is similar to apocalypticism, right? Just full stop, even though, even though, and this is to say nothing of the logic or the sensibility of Marxism, Leninism, like to just to leave that to the side because I think they might actually technically be right about a number of things. But there's a lot of pressures there that have to be dealt with really carefully. And I have not seen many people use the tools of cult theory to look at that material clearly. So one good thing about cultic dynamics as they emerge on the left is that at least sometimes to a fault, leftists can be obsessive about self-criticism and the notion of charismatic control and coercion has been an open struggle, well documented by black feminists, for example, well documented within struggles within the Black Panther Party. You know, there's a number of communities that have dealt with this quite directly. And it's not like anybody's come up with an answer, but at least it's not sort of taken as part of human nature and, you know, swept under the rug. But I would just say that like the world is on fire and we need people to be in social movements and movements for economic and environmental renewal that are robust, that are horizontally organized, that are democratic, and we can't afford for the problems that arise when we treat each other like shit. And so if we have some tools to figure out how to prevent that from happening, then we really have to take advantage of them because, you know, otherwise the glue that fascists have is a lot stronger than the left's ability to survive its own cultic problems.

Speaker 1:
[44:28] Right, right. It comes back to something that we've been saying from the very beginning, which is that all people are susceptible to cults, all ideology, all religion, all frameworks, like all of these things can become cultic, and it is our responsibility to be mindful about those dynamics when we do enter community spaces, so that if it starts happening, we catch it, instead of letting it run rampant and evolve into 12 other offshoot cults, as tends to happen. I wish we had more time. Maybe we can have you on again.

Speaker 3:
[45:03] Anytime.

Speaker 1:
[45:03] Is there anything you would like to conclude with, or anything we didn't hit on that seems important?

Speaker 3:
[45:09] I would just say that, just going back to the beginning of the conversation, is that I believe that people who have had intense, but perhaps conflictual, experiences in religions and spiritual communities, everybody will heal and find recovery resources in their own ways. There's a lot of luck and chance involved with that. But I want people to be aware that within religious traditions, there is always a radical flank. You know, we have plenty of examples of Christians who have aided and abetted fascism, or they've been, you know, squishy liberals. But then we have lots of Christian traditions that are antifascist or revolutionary, or that have been central to the attainment of civil rights. We have the same thing happening in Judaism. We have an Islamic socialist tradition. I would just say that because of the work that I've done over the last six years, I think that I have contributed, unfortunately, to a general perception that religion and spirituality is kind of hopelessly conflicted and dysfunctional, or it will lead, it will generally lead towards bad places. And I want to say that that's just not necessarily so. That what I've come to study and believe and understand, even though I've had so many negative experiences in spirituality, is that spirituality and religion are downstream of material conditions. And so that means it's just like politics. Whatever the material conditions are, you're going to have people who worship in ways that support power, worship in ways that make apologies for power, and worship in ways that resist power. And you can find people in that third group. So if you feel like you have been cut off from some sort of religious impulse or intuition, if you're missing something, if you feel that you have lost some sort of connection that you mourn, you might find it again, right? And the example from my life is that, you know, the Catholic Church is a shit show of imperialism, colonialism, fascist apologies, fascist enablement, and it's also the home of liberation theology. And it's kind of like the Democratic Party that way, right? It is Gavin Newsom to the intern in AOC's office who's doing the most radical thing in the party, right? And so just don't paint everything with the same brush, especially if you feel that locks you out of a part of yourself that you want to get back.

Speaker 1:
[48:14] I love that so much. It gave me chills. Thank you. I guess I tend to get black and white about these things as well. And it is nice to remember that there is room, there is a place for you to still have connection to your spiritual life without it becoming some abusive situation. So thank you.

Speaker 3:
[48:32] Yeah, you're welcome.

Speaker 1:
[48:32] Yeah, exactly. And thanks for joining us. This has been so awesome.

Speaker 2:
[48:36] Yeah. Where do people find you?

Speaker 3:
[48:38] I am on Blue Sky under my name. I'm under my name at Instagram where I try to do a real every day. I'm on TikTok at Antifascist Dad. I'm on YouTube at Antifascist Dad. If you just Google my name, you'll come up with like a sub stack and the books that I've done and stuff like that. My book is coming out on April 26th. It's called Antifascist Dad, Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times. And I'm really grateful to my publishers at North Atlantic Books for supporting that. And yeah, I'm around. I try to answer all of my communications.

Speaker 1:
[49:15] Awesome. Perfect.

Speaker 2:
[49:17] Thank you.

Speaker 1:
[49:19] All right. That is all we have with Matthew Remski. And I did already ask Meagan the question last week. So I think, I think we all know.

Speaker 2:
[49:28] Would I join Michael's cult was last week's question.

Speaker 1:
[49:31] And there was a second guru this, would you also join the second guru's cult?

Speaker 2:
[49:35] Probably.

Speaker 1:
[49:36] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[49:36] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[49:37] Yeah. All right. Well, everybody listen to Matthew's podcast, Conspirituality, go get his new book, Antifascist Dad.

Speaker 2:
[49:45] Absolutely. And listen to us, Rape Inside Stars, come back next week. And as always, remember to follow your gut, watch out for red flags, and never ever trust me.

Speaker 1:
[49:59] Bye. Bye. This has been an Exactly Right production hosted by me, Lola Blanc, and me, Meagan Elizabeth.

Speaker 2:
[50:07] Our senior producer is Jiha Li.

Speaker 1:
[50:09] This episode was mixed by John Bradley.

Speaker 2:
[50:11] Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain, and our guest booker is Patrick Kottner.

Speaker 1:
[50:16] Our theme song was composed by Holly Amber Church.

Speaker 2:
[50:18] Trust Me is executive produced by Karen Kilgareth, Georgia Hartstark, and Daniel Kramer.

Speaker 1:
[50:24] You can find us on Instagram at Trust Me Podcast, or on TikTok at Trust Me Cults Podcast.

Speaker 2:
[50:29] Got your own story about cults, extreme belief, or manipulation? Shoot us an email at trustmepod.gmail.com.

Speaker 1:
[50:35] Listen to Trust Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.