Hello, everyone. Welcome to Conspiruality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism. I'm Matthew Remski. We are on Instagram and threads at Conspiruality Pod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon,

or just the bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.

We really appreciate your support.

Today's bonus is called Deep State Religion.

It's about an idea that I have about how

maga religion obscures the religious nature of liberalism and how both obscure the underlying

religion of capitalism. As our tagline says, we look at spiritual influence, cults, and authoritarian extremism.

That's been our beat for four and a half years. And the vast majority of that time has been taken up

in examining the bizarre and ecumenical religiosity that swirls around and elevates Donald Trump.

For instance, many of you will remember the Renaissance

tableau style photos of Trump surrounded by evangelical megastors, laying their hands on him to bless him

and call down the spirit of the Lord to help him bring about their theocratic ideals. But then

in other corners of the internet, the Anon movement also conceived of him,

or at least memed about him, as though he was a muscular avenging Messiah. And in December

of 2020, we started tracking the incredible surge of New Age influencers sharing their sudden

revelation that Trump was a light worker,

a shaman type figure with the capacity to transform social and political chaos into opportunities for

enlightenment. And we tracked that new age theme all the way through to this summer when it reached

maybe its intellectual high mark or low mark. It's hard to know.

But this is when New Age guru Charles Eisenstein in thinking aloud about how to rationalize

RFK Jr.'s endorsement of Trump described Trump in the same quantum terms he used to describe Bobby himself before he went to work for him as messaging director. So that would be Trump as a mysterious non-local empty of form and meaning blank screen for the projections of the masses. Trump is the savior who can reflect our own saviorship. Now in going through all of this

material, we ran all the psychosocial angles. Trump, the racist, is a perfect fit for replacement

...