Hello, Conspirituality Podcast listeners. Welcome to a sample of a Patreon bonus episode.

We release these every week for our subscribers. They're usually solo essays from our team.

It costs $5 a month for access, and the support helps to keep us ad-free and editorially

independent. You can sign up at patreon.com-conspirituality. Thank you.

Hello, Conspirituality listeners. In the three short weeks since I published my last installment

in our bonus category here about Canadian bypassing, war has broken out in Europe. Trans

children have been targeted for harassment and family separation in the state of Texas.

And we've already seen some yoga and wellness. QAnon boosters begin to incorporate these

news streams into their demented worldview. Now, if you're like me and you feel that once

again you have come to a saturation point in terms of hopeless news, I hope the subject

today is a little bit lighter, a little bit more promising, but also parallel to the

beat we cover here on the podcast. But an angle that engages with it in such a way that

gives a little bit of breathing room. I'll start with a little bit of a review. The definitions

of Conspirituality that we've run through over the past two years have definitely evolved

as one would expect in the accelerated milieu of the pandemic and online chaos. The one

we started with, however, I find to be perennially useful. It comes from Charlotte Ward and David

Vowas from their paper in 2011. They write, the female dominated new age with its positive

focus on self and the male dominated realm of conspiracy theory with its negative focus

on the global politics may seem antithetical. There is a synthesis of the two, however,

that we call Conspirituality. Conspirituality is a rapidly growing web movement expressing

an ideology fueled by political disillusionment and the popularity of alternative worldviews.

It has international celebrities, bestsellers, radio and TV stations. It offers a broad political

...