"Conspirituality" podcast hosts now push globalist propaganda in their new book

Authors of the recently published book document the rise of misinformation spreaders in the age of Covid while unwittingly revealing their own blindspots

Hachette Book Group

Hosts of a popular podcast called “Conspirituality” have recently published a book in which they attempt to explain the rise of conspiracy-based thinking in our world. While their perspective may resonate with those entrenched in the cult of consensus thinking, by ignoring evidence of real conspiracies the authors perpetuate the real problem. The book is well-written but is devoid of any critique of the “anti-science” opinions the authors seek to discredit. Do the authors really believe what they are saying? Are their book and podcast tools of globalist influences? Is it both?

A couple of months ago one of my friends was singing the praises of a book he had just read. He is an intelligent and open minded physician. Unlike most of my physician colleagues “Greg” is always willing to discuss the topics I am most interested in: the deception behind the Covid mRNA shots, events of 9/11, and central banking. Topics the mainstream call “conspiracy theories”.

He acknowledges that some of what I spew in the doctors’ lounge when no one else is around may have some truth to it. He asks questions and lets me wax on without interrupting. I appreciate our friendship. He is, for the moment, content to sit back and observe as yet more information becomes available.

“It’s called ‘Conspirituality’. You should check it out!”

I knew of the book and its authors : Derek Beres, Matthew Remski and Julian Walker. Their podcast, of the same name, enjoyed a rise in popularity over the last two years thanks to its early and positive exposure on NPR, The Times, The Washington Post and the BBC among others.

Although they claim on their homepage :

“We appreciate vigorous and critical discussion of the content we present, and we’re grateful for it. It helps us learn.”

This invitation for “vigorous” discussion comes with some stipulations:

“COVID-denialism, anti-vax disinformation, defamation of public health officials will not be tolerated. Any activity like this is subject to deletion and banning, without warning.”

What is Covid-denialism? Is it the idea that SARS-COV2 doesn’t exist? Or is it the understanding that the virus was the product of human intention and design? Is it the opinion that what we all experienced as the COVID era was largely manufactured by health officials, media and the pharmaceutical industrial complex through the exaggeration of Covid related deaths and the need for mitigation measures?

What is anti-vax disinformation? The hypothesis that vaccines are solely responsible for the rise in chronic diseases and every case of autism? Or is it the observation that the mRNA shots could not have been “rigorously tested for safety” if Phase III trial participants were observed for an average of six weeks prior to authorization?

Why can’t public health officials be attacked if they are incompetent, caught in a conflict of interest or clearly responsible for poor policy given what is known? Are these human beings infallible? What would happen if public officials are considered beyond reproach and those who challenge this sentiment are “not tolerated, subject to deletion and banning without warning”? We don’t have to look hard or far to see where this will lead.

Greg thought their new book was thoughtful and nuanced. “It might give you a broader perspective on the topics you are interested in.”

I told Greg that I would consider reading their book and that I had my reservations about the authors’ credibility and intentions. He was surprised to know that Walker, Remski and Beres devoted the better part of one of their podcast episodes to me two years ago. They weren’t flattering.

What exactly is “Conspirituality” ?

From their book:

“In its current form we see it as an online religion that fuses two faith based claims, 1) The world is possessed by evil forces and 2) Those who see this clearly are called to foster, in themselves and others, a new spiritual paradigm.”

What’s the problem? Aren’t people free to believe and express what they wish?

Although I personally wouldn’t name them as “evil”, I am convinced, based on an extraordinary amount of evidence, that there are unimaginably powerful, self-serving forces that have exacted untold misery upon an unsuspecting public for generations while our trusted institutions, specifically our “free press”, remain silent or complicit. I am thus called to bring this to the attention of those who remain content with the status quo.

Remski, Walker and Beres, I discovered (unceremoniously) a couple of years ago, disagree with my world-view. They explain their issue with people like me and Conspirituality on their podcast site:

“At best, the conspirituality movement attacks public health efforts in times of crisis. At worst, it fronts and recruits for the fever-dream of QAnon.

As the alt-right and New Age horseshoe toward each other in a blur of disinformation, clear discourse and good intentions get smothered. Charismatic influencers exploit their followers by co-opting conspiracy theories on a spectrum of intensity ranging from vaccines to child trafficking. In the process, spiritual beliefs that have nurtured creativity and meaning are transforming into memes of a quickly-globalizing paranoia.”

They too feel called to do something about the problem as they see it:

“Conspirituality Podcast attempts to bring understanding to this landscape. A journalist, a cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic discuss the stories, cognitive dissonances, and cultic dynamics tearing through the yoga, wellness, and new spirituality worlds. Mainstream outlets have noticed the problem. We crowd-source, research, analyze, and dream answers to it.”

As they further clarify early in their book, their issue with Conspirituality is that it “is not just a set of ideas people come to value in their quiet and humble hearts. It is generated and circulated by virtual churches, revival meetings and seance sessions in the form of small-group classes and mastermind Zoom sessions.”

Remski, Walker and Beres disagree with “conspiracy theorists”. The problem, as they see it, is that conspiracy theory is clearly and rapidly propagating in the zeitgeist, and it is having real-world consequences. This prompted the launch of their podcast in 2021 and more recently their book “Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat”. Why is “conspiracy theory” flourishing?

Their thesis is simple:

• Influencers in the yoga and new age spirituality worlds are able to manipulate their followers into accepting unsubstantiated ideas using their charisma upon a particularly susceptible crowd who seek greater meaning and connection

• Some skeptics of conventional thinking, specifically with regard to vaccines, are also charismatic and manipulative

• Thus vaccine skepticism, commonly thought of as dangerous misinformation, must also be unsubstantiated

• Vaccine skepticism can be extrapolated to 9/11 Truthism, flat-earth theory and the proposition that the world is under the influence of a global cabal which cares not of the plight of humanity

While there are most certainly instances of non-conventional thought spreaders who use inaccurate information or faulty arguments, the authors’ simple explanation is based in obvious logical fallacy. Early in their book they plug their unique capacities to make sense of the presumed problem:

“By chance, we had the chops to hack into this tangle, and quickly. Derek had been covering the pseudoscience of alternative health grifts as a journalist. Julian was a noted yogaworld skeptic. Matthew had graduated from years spent in two spiritual cults and into the world of anti-cult activism and research.”

What is the obvious problem here?

Taken as it stands, their personal experience with the yoga world and spiritual cults is useful in exposing the manipulative tactics of new age influencers. But how can “a journalist, a cult researcher and a philosophical skeptic” differentiate between science and pseudoscience?

I don’t believe one has to go to medical school to know something about the immune system and vaccines. One is not required to formally study advanced mathematics to make sense of published vaccine trial results. Neither is it true that all doctors and math majors will always be right about vaccines and what large data sets signify.

But the journalist, cult researcher and yoga world skeptic have let us know, right up front, that they don’t understand why and how science works.

The scientific process will eventually get to a better understanding of objective reality as long as open discussion is defended at every turn. When the process is stripped of its ability to self-correct, it isn’t science anymore. Silencing and punishing critics and dissenters is antithetical to the scientific process. When that happens, it isn’t science anymore; it’s a cult—something the authors claim to be uniquely qualified to identify.

They aren’t just intolerant of any opinion critical of vaccines and the pandemic response that was engineered by public health officials. Two years ago on social media, Julian Walker and I found ourselves in disagreement about the implications of proposed technology spelled out in a patent application filed by the Microsoft corporation called “Cryptocurrency System Using Body Activity Data”. Walker mocked anti-globalist, environmental activist, scholar and author of twenty books, Dr. Vandana Shiva, for writing about the potential dangers of such technology.

Walker thought the technology was harmless. I believed that it hinted at the ability of an intelligent system to remotely track a human mind’s level of interaction with technology conceived, coincidentally, by one of the biggest technology corporations on the planet. I thought it was, at the very least, disquieting. Julian thought I had succumbed to the “quickly globalizing paranoia” he was endeavoring to dispel.

I thought he would be willing to have a conversation about it on a public forum. Here’s his response to my invitation:

“My sense is that a speculative discussion with you on what that patent may or may not be is about as useful as the endless circles we can go in with 9/11 Truthers about building 7...The larger set of conspiracy claims and attribution of nefarious motivations are part of a style of paranoid thinking that can always take some facts and sound analysis, some reasonable seeming speculation and some outlandish nonsense and weave it all into a captivating seeming argument. I am not particularly interested in debating on a public stage in front of people who find arguments like [Dr.] Shiva’s in any way convincing or laudable, just as I would not be interested in debating creationists, flat earth-ers or 911 truth-ers.”

His response is indicative of the general approach he and his co-authors use to dismiss all opinions that hint at unsavory intentions behind powerful institutions, in this case the Microsoft Corporation, brainchild of multibillionaire, Bill Gates, the big-tech entrepreneur who fought off antitrust law violations and then turned philanthropist and vaccine advocate.

Walker throws my opinion into a bucket of ideas which he personally finds absurd, like flat-earth theory and creationism, so that they can all be jettisoned en-bloc while refusing to engage on grounds that anyone who supports such notions is not worthy of his time or consideration.

Not exactly the response we would expect from a the host of a podcast that “appreciate[s] vigorous and critical discussion”. Apparently the yoga instructor doesn’t believe a critical discussion about “body activity data” would be possible with a physician who monitors human physiology in the operating room on a daily basis.

Walker also wasn’t interested in wasting time in a “speculative” discussion about his own assessment of technology which, paradoxically, is also completely speculative.

What was most peculiar was Julian’s unwillingness to share his opinions on a public stage where the audience may not agree with him. If he wanted to “bring understanding to this landscape [of] cognitive dissonances and cultic dynamics” as he, Remski and Beres professed, why would he decline the opportunity to address their target audience?

This is the very same non-sensical maneuver used by establishment experts who refuse to hash it out with legitimate dissenting voices in a public forum while exhorting the public to believe them and not their critics. Why would anyone on the fence about a topic choose to follow the side that avoids a debate?

This tactic is only sensible in two situations: when you are so confident you are right that a discussion would be a waste of time, or you don’t want the shortcomings in your argument be exposed. Why would anyone take people like this seriously? Might this be a reason why ideas which they regard as preposterous seem to be flourishing?

Thoughts on the book

I fully expected that the authors would tone down their anti-anti-vax rhetoric given the broken promises of our health authorities, the preponderance of opinion that the virus was of lab origin, the various foreign governments who have backed away from a universal vaccination strategy, the mounting reports of vaccine injury in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System which a study funded by the CDC proved is underreporting by a factor of 10 to 100 and Pfizer’s own post-marketing surveillance report released in the autumn of 2021 which indicated that over 1,200 deaths and 75,000 serious adverse events were reported to the vaccine manufacturer within just the first two months of deployment.

I was wrong. In an act of unmatched chutzpah, Remski, Walker and Beres decided to put their unwavering support of the mRNA products, pandemic response and medical establishment into print despite all the undisputed facts above.

Nevertheless, the book is well written. I can see how their narrative would resonate with a great many readers, especially a left-leaning, fully vaccinated crowd who are trying to understand why their once reasonable friends and family wandered off into anti-vax, conspiratorial thinking at a time when reasonable people needed to trust the science, or at least the version promoted by the media outlets which supported the authors’ podcast.

They do an admirable job of exposing some of the charlatans in the new age world and the real damage they have done, giving voice to a number of victims who have suffered serious harms, including death, from their inability to see through the bullshit and miracle cures their venerable influencers peddled.

When it comes to the new age/yoga/spiritual spheres, the authors certainly know their stuff and it shows in their writing. They’ve done their homework. They offer the reader a perspective most don’t get to appreciate.

It is their first hand accounts which are the most compelling. They are candid. They aren’t afraid to let the reader know how they were duped, how they suffered and how they have learned from the experience.

Beres openly discusses his struggle with obesity early in his life. This led to orthorexia, an obsession with consuming “pure” and “clean” foods which can lead to fluctuating body weight and health. When he was diagnosed with testicular cancer, he was shunned by his new age community who felt that all illness was due to spiritual shortcomings when in fact he had an undescended testicle, a condition that predisposes to testicular cancer.

Walker tells of his acceptance into the inner circle of the highly influential yoga teacher, Ana Forrest, who claimed she could “see” the energy fields of those around her and could diagnose repressed trauma. Forrest convinced Walker that he had been abused by his family and had been repressing the memory. Walker believed her and confronted his family leading to a long period of acrimony and estrangement. He eventually realized she was wrong but the damage done took years to mend.

Remski identifies as the survivor of two cults. He poignantly tells the story of how the leaders of these communities capitalized on his need for meaning which blinded him to their manipulative tactics they employed to earn unquestioning trust from others in the community.

The three emerged from their trauma clear-headed and secure with themselves, soberly aware of the basic elements used by cult leaders to acquire fanatical loyalty from their flock:

• Leaders profess supernatural powers of insight or wisdom which they suggest can be learned by ever increased devotion to them and their teaching.

• Once learned, devotees may finally rid themselves of the obstructions to their shortcomings and lack of meaning.

• Failure to arrive at the exalted state is a sign that efforts must be redoubled. Doubters are shunned and ostracized into a world devoid of meaning and the answers they are desperately seeking.

• Believers are rewarded with inclusion and hope. Skeptics are left to fend for themselves while having to nurse the wounds of excommunication. It’s a religion, and like all religions, they create, at some level, herd mentality.

Conclusion: It’s not easy to liberate oneself from a cult.

We can understand where these three are coming from and why what they have to say about their personal experiences and research are important, especially right now.

Then they, in my opinion, make a crucial misstep. While they do correctly identify the emergence of conspiratorial thinking in new age communities, they attribute it entirely to blindspots that they themselves once had. They believe it’s these same blindspots, the desire to see some sort of bigger picture or deeper truth and to distance oneself from conventional thinking which make conspiracy theories so seductive to those entrenched in spiritual communities.

It’s a reasonable idea which certainly is true in some cases, but does it explain them all?

Moreover, conspiratorial thinking is undoubtedly gaining popularity outside of new age spiritual cults too. The authors don’t offer any explanation for this. Amazingly, they never even mention it.

To prove their thesis they identify key misinformation spreaders over the last three years: Joe Dispenza, Aubrey Marcus, Mikki Willis, J.P. Sears, Drs. Christianne Northrup and Zach Bush, Sayer Ji, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Charles Eisenstein. Like the New Age cult leaders whom they condemn, these “misinformation” spreaders are charismatic. They are powerful orators or skilled in the “soft sell”. They are also savvy with media and have enjoyed growth in their popularity (and income) in the age of Covid. And they all are, more or less, critical of the medical orthodoxy and our response to the outbreak of Covid-19.

The identified bad actors fit the description of the cult leaders the authors despise. The ideologies they espouse therefore, the authors posit, must be unsubstantiated and part of an insidious scheme designed to play on fears of their following while fulfilling a need to belong, to feel special and be accepted.

Although the authors find everything ‘alt’ or ‘far’ right deplorable, especially the QAnon phenomenon, it is the so-called anti-vaxx ideology which receives the bulk of their contempt. The misinformation spreaders they cite above, along with Del Bigtree and Dr. Joseph Mercola, have capitalized on the pandemic. In their opinion these people are the new wave of cult leaders, and they are responsible for vaccine hesitancy (and therefore some of the Covid deaths) as well as the deaths of those who eschewed allopathic therapy and succumbed to treatable diseases.

The Cult in Front of Us

Julian, Matthew and Derek make a compelling argument, but are they aware of the biggest cult and who its leaders are?

They shake their heads in disgust at the few millions of dollars that some of these “misinformation spreaders” have earned recently.

What about Big Pharma and the tens of billions of dollars they have made in profits recently?

What about how they use these unimaginable sums of money to buy positive media coverage and fund research that only seeks answers to questions that won’t shed light on potential dangers of their products? Or how they too use their fortunes to prey on the new age/yoga communities as well:

People Magazine

What about the control of state medical boards that defrock physicians who buck the narrative?

What about the shadow-banning of legitimate voices who dissented?

What about the unprecedented media campaign that painted the unvaccinated as unworthy of healthcare or basic rights?

What about the tens of millions who were coerced into rolling up their sleeves because they had to work to feed their families?

People were rewarded with ice-cream and Krispy Kreme donuts for complying and excluded for resisting. People were muzzled or vilified if they complained. Those who preached the Covidian narrative were lionized.

Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared on millions of TV screens every day and attained infallible status. The diminutive doctor who never treated a person with Covid-19 while claiming that he embodied science itself announced ever-changing and contradicting edicts. And millions listened and abided.

Take off your mask.

Put two masks on.

If you get the primary series you will be protected.

You won’t be fully protected unless you get a booster.

Everyone needs a second booster.

The shots prevent transmission.

The shots don’t prevent transmission.

Everyone needs to stay home for the holidays.

If you don’t comply you don’t care, you are harming others and you are ignorant because you don’t trust the science. You don’t trust us.

Julian, Matthew, Derek? Does this seem vaguely like a cult to you? How do you know that you haven’t been duped again? How would you know if you were?

The answer to this key question is simple. You have to consider all scientific opinion openly. I understand why this is a difficult proposition. However you should be able to see that simply going with the consensus narrative and rejecting all others is a faith-based decision. You are free to do this, however declaring that this is an objective approach is wrong.

Two chapters are devoted to Drs. Christianne Northrup and Zach Bush. Reasonable criticisms are voiced. However there are many, many more highly credentialed doctors and scientists who disagree with your chosen spokespersons. Most are excluded.

There is no mention of

• Dr. Meryl Nass. A bioterrorism and anthrax vaccine expert who has given Congressional testimony a half dozen times. She lost her medical license because she was treating Covid with HCQ. She recently created the organization “Door To Freedom” which exposes the very real threat of the W.H.O.’s attempt to usurp nations’ sovereignty in the event of a pandemic or health emergency which they themselves have the sole authority to declare

• Dr. Paul Marik, a giant in critical care medicine who has lost his medical license over his use of Ivermectin in Covid-19 patients

• Dr. Vinay Prasad, professor at UCSF who has written many peer reviewed articles critical of the data used to justify mask mandates and quarantines

• Dr. Jay Bhattacharaya, one of the architects of the Great Barrington Declaration, a sensible strategy to countering a pandemic that was the target of a hatchet job ordered by Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci

• Dr. Harvey Risch, one of the world’s most respected and published epidemiologists who has been critical of the studies used to confirm the safety and efficacy of the mRNA products and those that refute the benefit of repurposed medicines like HCQ

• Dr. Theresa Anne (Tess) Lawrie, Director of the Evidence Based Medicine Consultancy, an early and outspoken critic of the risks of the mass vaccination campaign in England who further exposed the meddling of corporate interests in the assessment of Ivermectin’s efficacy against Covid

The list can go on and on. None of these doctors and scientists offered opinion that wasn’t backed by real data. None of them materially benefited from speaking out. Some lost their titles and income. The continuing relentless attack on the contrarian experts, which comes with material consequences, is predictably backfiring. Some people are beginning to understand that those who are willing to accept the blowback for speaking up are more trustworthy than those who enjoy the benefits of echoing the ascendant narrative.

Drs. Robert Malone and Peter McCullough are mentioned but dismissed because they appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast. Rogan, in the authors eyes, is the biggest enabler of misinformation spreaders. Yet no mention is given to the fact that Rogan also hosted Peter Hotez, perhaps the most rabid vaccine proponent on the surface of the Earth. Rogan is trying bring light to both sides of the argument when no mainstream media source will.

Dr. Pierre Kory is also discredited because of his support of the use of “the ineffective drug” Ivermectin in the treatment of Covid-19. How do the authors know this extremely safe, cheap and old medicine is ineffective? No mention is made of these dozens of studies which show efficacy or the fact that Kory is a highly published and respected leader in his field.

Walker, Remski and Beres are not infectious disease specialists or pharmacologists. However it is a basic tenet in science and epistemology that one cannot prove no effect, or the “null hypothesis”. There are studies that didn’t find any benefit of Ivermectin. There are also studies which did. Even if you accept the former as valid and reject the latter as pseudoscience, one can never conclude that it was proven ineffective.

Yet this is how the opinion of the big Pharma controlled medical establishment was used by legacy media in an attempt to close the case on the benefits of Ivermectin in the treatment of Covid-19. Here are the key results of a study published in the NEJM and trumpeted by The New York Times in an article titled “Ivermectin does not prevent Covid Hospitalization in Large Trial” as proof that Ivermectin is useless:

The results are actually quite promising. Nearly every subgroup demonstrated a benefit if they got Ivermectin compared to placebo, but the difference was not statistically significant. It doesn’t prove Ivermectin doesn’t work. It only proved that Ivermectin’s measurable benefit was not large enough to count.

Why?

It’s because the study was too small (and the researchers under-dosed the trial participants). If public health wasn’t dominated by big Pharma this would have immediately triggered the execution of larger trials using the dosing regimen Kory and others were using successfully. Why wouldn’t the CDC fund such studies just in case there were a significant benefit at scale?

Imagine, we have something called the Center for Disease Control and Prevention whose officials see numbers like those above in the middle of a pandemic which they claim is taking hundreds of lives a day and choose to look the other way and urge people to get vaccinated. Whose interests are they really serving? The public’s? Or big Pharma’s, who, incidentally, could not get Emergency Use Authorization for their vaccines if an effective treatment for Covid existed?

This study wasn’t trying to find out if Ivermectin could help in the treatment Covid-19; it was designed to show no effect. Yet it was offered as proof that Covid could not have been treated by an enormously safe drug which costs pennies per pill.

Nevertheless, the authors discredit Dr. Kory for “claiming, against evidence, that the efficacy of ivermectin was being suppressed by Big Pharma.” Kory was right, but you have to look further than a headline to see this.

An attack on a Presidential hopeful

The authors devoted a twelve page chapter, titled “A Kennedy Son Spirals”, to 2024 independent candidate for the President of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., one of the biggest spreaders of “misinformation”. In it the reader is offered statistics about his net worth and recent jumps of his income. Is this proof that swaths of the public are hungry and willing to pay for the kind of dangerous misinformation he is peddling? Perhaps. It could also be evidence that there is truth to some or all of what he has been saying.

His book, “The Real Anthony Fauci”, is mentioned as an Amazon best-seller which targets “the alleged corruption of Dr. Fauci.” Not a single specific allegation is cited, but sales from the book, they report, will earn Kennedy anywhere between 2.5 and 3.8 million dollars. Such sums of money, they ironically imply, are an indication of how big a problem we have…

Kennedy’s book goes deep, exposing the capture of our agencies of public health by the Pharmaceutical complex, the industry which these institutions are supposed to regulate.

Using his multibillion dollar annual budget, Dr. Fauci, the director of the NIAID during the pandemic and decades preceding, was able to hand-pick loyal Principal Investigators and dictate which studies are done, which studies get into print and which questions get answered. Fauci wasn’t exaggerating when he said he was “science”.

Kennedy’s allegations are backed by over two thousand references to official documents and peer-reviewed literature. None of this was mentioned. Remski, Walker and Beres don’t tell us if they read the book.

In any case, they aren’t curious about about why Kennedy’s excoriating attack on the public official directing this country’s pandemic response did not result in a single defamation lawsuit. Could it be because his allegations cannot be contested and it would expose some uncomfortable truths in a courtroom?

Final Thoughts

Why aren’t the authors able to see that they have “cult hopped” into a much bigger, much more powerful and insidious cult, one that hides in plain sight? Do they truly believe in what they say and write? Or are they being controlled by deeper globalist influences?

Derek Beres is listed as an “agenda contributor” to the World Economic Forum.

I spoke with Kennedy’s Director of Policy, Charles Eisenstein, who also has a chapter,“New Age Q”, dedicated to him in the book, about his thoughts on the Conspirituality Podcast, its hosts and their recent book.

Eisenstein hasn’t read “Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat” but has been a guest on their podcast in the past. I asked him if he thought the authors actually believed they were doing a good job steering their audience to discernment or whether they were just after a paycheck:

“Their job is to fashion and entrench polite opinion, what all good and educated people in the in-group believe. And people need to know what opinions to profess as badges of their belonging. People like these guys help establish what are the ‘right’ opinions to have. That’s an important function in the maintenance of the operating narratives of our society so that they can get ‘paid’.

[In that sense] they are probably doing a fairly competent job of what they are supposed to be doing.

In a way, from the set of assumptions that they are operating from, they’re right about us.

We are violating consensus reality, and consensus reality has only a tenuous connection to objective fact. Consensus reality is maintained by filtering objective facts and distorting them and interpreting them in order to fit the narrative. Everybody knows this now. So if you violate the narrative you have to be dealt with by the ‘immune system’ of the narrative. People like the Conspirituality folks are part of the immune system that will reject ‘pathogenic’ ideas—pathogenic in that they will disrupt or damage the narrative, which is the host.”

What are their assumptions and what is wrong with them?

“The assumptions are based on institutional medicine and science as it has evolved over the last hundred years, wedded to corporate profit, even more deeply grounded in a scientific ideology …, and that represents only a very narrow spectrum of reality or that is obsolete.

[Another incorrect assumption] is that the most enlightened approach to knowledge and choices is quantification. For anything to be science, you have to be able to measure it—that’s the fundamental ritual of science. And the assumption is that first, anything meaningful can eventually be measured and be made susceptible to cost/benefit thinking and that secondly, any deficiencies in this program of making choices by the numbers can be remedied by a more comprehensive data set, and it is blind to how easy it is to manipulate the data to bring the desired conclusions. That’s what we saw during Covid.

It is actually a post modern understanding of the relationship between the human being and the world, between fact and belief.”

Eisenstein noted how easily data and its interpretation can be used to create a narrative that gets absorbed as “objective” reality by well-intending people, doctors and scientists. He agreed that those who accept the ascendant narrative about “the science”, i.e. the majority of the world, are stuck in a cult.

He isn’t surprised that Walker, Remski and Beres aren’t able to realize that they, in their effort to liberate themselves from cults, have landed in a much larger and more powerful one. One that they are unwittingly or not, serving.

Breaking free from cults is not easy, as the authors readily admit. But they claim to be able to identify cultish mind traps and to be hypersensitive to the ploys cult leaders employ. So why is it so hard for them to see the cult in front of them?

It’s because they do not have the capacity to critique the published studies that serve as the foundation of the Covidian cult. They are therefore forced to either accept or reject the professed “truths” of this cult of scientism, whose leaders are adorned in the sanctified garb of lab coats and scrubs and preach from pulpits of TV studios wearing badges of advanced degrees, on faith alone, ironically.

Not possessing “the chops” required to see through the misinformation on both sides while labeling all dissenting movements as cults of covid denialism, anti-vax, pseudoscience, 9/11 truth and flat-eartherism, it is unlikely that Remski, Walker and Beres will ever snap out of it. Convincing them that they have been wrong may not be possible. Convincing others is.

This is why Eisenstein believes it is vital to engage with compassion and not contempt. If measurable quantities can be thrown into databases and run through algorithms that churn out results which feed a narrative that may have only a tenuous connection to objective fact, it will be our level of humanity and temperament that will set us apart and ultimately make a difference.