Hello well this caught fire and I’m glad it was helpful. A few questions came up as well as some cab-ride thoughts so I’ll thread them here. /1

https://x.com/matthewremski/status/1846018161767813122

First, for “traumatized narcissism”, please see my interview with the coiner of the term, psychoanalyst and cult recovery therapist Dan Shaw:


/2conspirituality.net/episodes/brief…

🧵Trump surrendering tonight's Q&A to 30 minutes of his fave songs while standing on stage, awkwardly conducting at times, echoes MANY instances of cultic leaders who, exhausted, ill, and at the end of their cognitive rope, outsource their emotional dominance subroutines... /1 ...to canned music they personally find exquisitely sentimental. As traumatized narcissists, they are seeking comfort and avoiding work, but also assume that their core memories of pleasure will make their power and soul transparent and accessible to their followers. /2

🧵 After reading Eve Sedgwick I’m trying to lift myself up out of the paranoid reading stance that dominates debunking and anti-cult work, because I also want to look for possibilities and repair, and where people are healing. /1 Experiences and relationships within a high-demand group can be toxic, authoritarian, and exploitative. But some members experience love and connection that they’ve never known before. That is what makes it so hard for them to reckon with abuse, leave, or whistleblow. /2

🧵 Great that we’re all studying #KatieBritt ‘s uncanny SOTU performance. Takes from @angela_denker and @piper4missouri on the aesthetics and fundie baby voice of Evangelical women’s submission are crucial.

And… it's an opportunity for progressives to look in the mirror. /1 What Denker and Piper describe so well is evangelical women’s entrained affect, an embodied primal signalling of deference and obedience. It’s palpable before Britt says a word, and then the ASMR tremulo seals the deal so hard even the MAGA world cringes at the inauthenticity. /2

The most popular framework for looking at the cult leader is evil/pathologizing: He’s a malignant narcissist. He’s a sociopath. It’s black and white and moralizing.

These are only diagnostic guesses, unnuanced and unforgiving. There may be other frameworks. /1 After 8 years of cult journalism, there’s only 2 leaders who fit the bill of "simply evil" for me. All the rest, including the leaders of the groups I was in, showed signs of neurodiversity or mental stress that they somehow positively mobilized through the charisma economy. /2

I'll be more specific. I have many reasons to loathe #RFKJr’s bullshit, but the ones that hit closest to home are his pathologization of autistic people and his disgusting claim that SSRIs (not guns) are a causal factor in mass shootings in American schools. /1 Of course these two melted claims blend together. He believes vaccines are a causal factor in autism, and that autistic people have no light in their eyes and cannot express love and affection (he literally says this). /2

I get a feeling when I hear phrases like “critical thinking,” or admonishments to “follow the science.” Obviously we should do these things. But the discourse often values individualistic effort over issues of access, education, and most of all, social trust. /1 For most folks there are sharp limitations on grasping complex issues in health care or ecology. These are zones beyond lay capacity. We have to rely on institutions and traditions and the general feeling of care in how we govern ourselves. Nobody thinks alone. /2

On Israel, #RFKJr is sounding unlike the end-the-forever wars, bring-our-troops-home candidate that many of his followers in the alternative health, anti-vax, and New Age spiritual communities thought they were supporting.

Now it's costing him.

conspirituality.net/episodes/brief… Lifelong pacifist @RepKucinich quit the Kennedy24 campaign nine days after Israel began its retaliation for the Hamas attacks. RFK Jr.’s Director of Messaging, @ceisenstein , is speaking out against his boss’s one-sided stance. /2

When you deconstruct harmful ideas and beliefs—from antivax positions to reactionary social views—you will inevitably be seen/felt as attacking the relationships that people form through those views. That’s a big problem in a lonely world, and there will be blowback. /1 In anti-cult theory/journalism, this alienation is usually seen as unavoidable. The idea is that the relationships within a toxic group are transactional, unfulfilling, and fragile. The gamble is that the person will wake up into wholesome relationships outside of the group. /2

For the next few months or more you’re going to hear me obsess about @NaomiAKlein's insanely good new book, Doppelganger (review and interview dropping in September), about how the “mirror world” is swallowing up evidence-based discourse, and what to do about it. /1 It's like being handed a Rosetta Stone for translating the paradoxical politics of the figures we’ve followed for years. Like Christiane Northrup, the grandmotherly advocate for women’s health who fantasizes about murdering doctors who vaccinate children. /2

Prepping our #RFKjr ep and very disquieted at the intersection of charisma, logorrhea, and the bunk-debunk tango that only inflates his engagement. Even with (or maybe because of) having a New Age hack as his messaging director, he’s crushing a broken media landscape. /1 As a litigator, he’s committed to rhetorical victory and can do anything to achieve it. Pivot, reframe, move the goalposts, flash dodgy studies to perform competence at a crucial moment. And: *never *stop *talking. “Let me say one more thing,” is his refrain. /2

I get thoughtful letters from young folks wondering whether the cultic corruption of a new religious group invalidates the founder’s teachings. Often they are starting to take classes with the students of the founder, and are wondering if they’re getting a Potemkin version. /1 Someone just asked me about Chogyam Trungpa of Shambhala, and I thought this reply might apply to other situations.

(I wrote about him here: ) /2thewalrus.ca/survivors-of-a…

Props to the comms team here for continuing to launder Bobby’s fear-mongering through semi-secularized spirituality. Bonus points for tagging the currently fashionable brophilosophy of stoicism, for not featuring women in this heroic mythos, and for showing he’s kind to bugs. /1

https://twitter.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1678931499591016449

We get the message: he’s on a Sisyphean mission to aid humanity against the elites. Battling “consensus narratives” is an endless and thankless task. He’s defeating the chaotic gods by bringing moral order and meaning to the world they have ruined. He’ll die happy doing it. /2

Onnit founder and life coach Aubrey Marcus tells New Age author Charles Eisenstein his conspirituality origin story about the campaign of RFK Jr. Eisenstein is working as Bobby's Director of Messaging. /1 In March, Marcus recorded a 2h podcast with Bobby. Marcus released it on April 12 under the title “Our Next President Exposes the Corruption of Empire.” This was a week before Bobby launched his campaign. /2

This messaging is over a century old. European physical culture begins with the romantic natural fallacy that modern medicine, concocted by godless elites, was an affront to god-given and discipline-maintained health. It was worried about urbanization & feminization of men… /1

https://twitter.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1673054172902563840

…and whether whites could keep with the fertility rates of immigrants. Terrified of racial suicide, Eugen Sandow (who changed his name to point at “eugenics”), preached the rejuvenation of the body politic through calisthenics and weightlifting. And posing like a Greek god. /2

@RobertKennedyJr backers who self-identify with the older tag of “Kennedy Democrat” speak to the heart of a chaotic grasping at nostalgia. New Age author and campaign advisor Charles Eisenstein is talking about resurrecting the timeline where the assassinations didn’t happen. /1 Dr. Christiane Northrup is talking about how it was only the Kennedys who brought left and right together, and only a Kennedy could do it again.

As if that’s what QAnon Grandma wants, after hundreds of FB live videos dogwhistling rightwing extremism. /2

Passage from a 2nd ed of my 2019 book (out next year):

The cult analysis language of “deception, dependence, and dread of leaving”, is intense and impersonal. The picture it forms is harsh; the reasoning aggressive and seemingly bulletproof. /1 At a feeling-level, it seems to mirror the problem it tries to untangle. This is not surprising, since so much of this research comes from the study of military-grade thought reform techniques employed by hardline Maoists against POWs during the Korean War. /2

So this full professor came after Mike Rothschild, implying he was plagiarizing her and her colleague’s “original” research about how taking a walk in nature is good for you. When she doubled down on the absurdity with insults and a GIF, I decided to take a look at the text. /1

https://twitter.com/MiaMBloom/status/1658145404452581386

For comparison, here’s Mike’s bucolic tweet plus Bloom’s response. The OG is for everyone, but anyone aware of the brutal antisemitic trolling he puts up with can also appreciate that he’s disclosing vulnerability and modelling resilience while in a war of attrition. /2

About @marwilliamson changing the subject. Watch how she turns on @franifio in this clip (cue at 10:55).

Francesca has a basic question about strategizing against fascists. MW opens with one bit of comms advice, but then pivots to sanctimony. /1

She needs to *quickly* land in her wheelhouse, to model non-defensiveness and non-aggression, and to scold the naively reactive and emotional younger woman across from her. The next minutes are pure tone policing. She’s avoided the question and has zeroed in on F’s attitude. /2

Please track how many times @marwilliamson answers a complex question about strategy by changing the subject, instantly, to love, consciousness, forgiveness, and transcending right and left polarities. That’s her theory of change. I understand if you enjoy how it feels... /1 …it is novel and disarming and creates a moment of uncanny relief in the tornado of political discourse. But dodging every IRL question is not a “new politics”. It’s actually not politics at all, but the echo of 40 years of doling out spiritual advice to mainly white women. /2

For no particular reason I'm thinking of Nguyen + Williams' "Moral Outrage Porn"

"Moral outrage porn, as we understand it, is representations of moral outrage engaged with primarily for the sake of the resulting gratification, freed from the usual costs and consequences... /1 of engaging with morally outrageous content. The gratifications might include, among other things, a sense of moral superiority or smugness, the comforting sense of clarity that arises from moral certainty, and the sheer pleasure of the feeling of outrage itself. /2