Dismantling New Age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy-mad yogis. 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. 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.
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In 1994, Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard psychiatry professor John E. Mack became one of the most pedigreed proponents of UFOs, alien abductions, and the alien-hybrid breeding scheme. He was introduced to celebrated painter, amateur hypnotherapist, and UFO researcher Budd Hopkins by transpersonal psychologist Stan Grof. Hopkins had helped author Whitley Strieber recover the abduction “memories” that became the book (and then movie) Communion.
Mack and Hopkins quickly produced their own movie, Intruders. Mack published Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, going on the TV talk-show circuit with star patients that believed they were being experimented on while on alien spacecraft. Oprah slotted alien abductions right into her schedule, alongside Satanic ritual abuse, multiple personality disorder, and past-lives regressions.
In reasoning not unfamiliar to Conspirituality listeners, Hopkins claimed a government conspiracy was covering up the ET hybrid breeding scheme, while Mack explained the lack of physical evidence by claiming the abduction experience “challenged the Western paradigm of materialist science.” The X-Files TV show was inspired by their work, which also spawned today’s generation of UFO grifters, alien channelers, and pastel-Q lightworkers.
For today’s installment of his The Roots of Conspirituality series, Julian explores the characters, stories, psychology, and cultural significance of fantastical repressed memories retrieved under hypnosis—be they of horny demons, ritual Satanic abuse, or alien scientists who steal abductee’s DNA in the night.
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Brief: Nicki Minaj Goes MAGA (00:36:28)
Turning Point USA's AmFest 2025 saw a record number of attendees pour into Phoenix last weekend to watch a host of MAGA and MAHA luminaries proclaim they're raging against the Deep State—even though their coalition is now the Deep State. Derek and Julian look at the conference through the lens of the white, Christian Nationalist identity politics on display.
Show Notes
Inside AmericaFest: Infighting, lies and the desperate search for Charlie Kirk’s heir
Vance Refuses to Take Sides in G.O.P. Fight Over Bigotry
Turning Point exposed a brewing MAGA civil war. Can JD Vance unite it?
‘It’s Very Controversial, but I Love Nick Fuentes’
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UNLOCKED: Chatbot Awakening to Love and Enlightenment! (00:51:25)
An unlock of a bonus episode from earlier this year. Access all of our bonus episodes here.
Happy holidays, everyone!
-- --
Earlier this year, a spate of news stories told of chatbot users travelling through the looking-glass right into Conspirituality. Paranoid conspiracies, spiritual awakenings, even falling head-over-heels in love with the simulated personalities of large language models like ChatGPT.
Could AI have finally crossed the threshold into autonomous sentient consciousness? Could it be that chatbots were anointing new prophets—or, conversely, that very special users were awakening their very special friends via the power of love and illuminating dialogue?
Step aside, QAnon, the code behind the screen is illuminated by God!
Sadly, some of these stories trended very dark. Suicides, attempted murder, paranoid delusions, spouses terrified of losing their partners and co-parents to what looked like spiritual and romantic delusions.
For this standalone installment of his Roots of Conspirituality series, Julian examines this strange new phenomenon, then takes a detour into Ancient Greece and the oracle at Delphi to show that everything old is actually new again—just dressed up in digital technology.
Show Notes
I Married My Chatbot
FTC Complaints Against OpenAI for Chatbot Psychosis
AI Spiritual Delusions Destroying Human Relationships
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Bonus Sample: The Monetization of MAHA (00:08:16)
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RFK Jr trademarked MAHA in a giant swath of categories, including many he now advocates for in his position as Secretary of HHS. After making $100,000 in licensing fees, he transferred the trademark to his anti-vax compatriot, Del Bigtree, before it was transferred again to former Kennedy security lead, Gavin de Becker. Currently being used by a variety of MAHA-based organizations, the opportunity to monetize MAHA, the brand, could be directly affected by Kennedy’s policies. Given how much MAHA leadership loathes social services, more health-based privatization could be on the horizon—just as Projected 2025 prescribed.
Derek winds down the rabbit hole into the MAHA trademark.
Show Notes
MAKE AMERICA HEALTHY AGAIN - Trademark Details
The MAHA Enterprise Explained
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Brief: Dr Mike vs MAHA (00:34:25)
Dr Mike has become one of the most effective debunkers of science misinformation. His second appearance on the uber-popular show, Jubilee's Surrounded, pitted him against 20 fans of RFK Jr. Derek and Julian discuss the debate, as well as the value of Jubilee in an oversaturated media environment.
Show Notes
1 Doctor vs 20 RFK Jr. Supporters (ft Doctor Mike) Surrounded
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288: Conspirituality Live with Dr Jessica Knurick (01:06:22)
Derek sits down with Dr Jessica Knurick at the Eudemonia Summit for this special live recording. They discuss combating health misinformation online, what MAHA gets right and wrong, whether or not "nutritionist" should be a protected term, and Jessica's possible political ambitions.
Show Notes
Dr Jessica Knurick on Substack | Instagram
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Bonus Sample: Marx’s “Atheism” vs. the Capitalist Religion of Everyday Life (00:05:31)
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Matthew explores Marx’s “opium of the people” passage by placing it back into the philosophical and political project it came from. Marx was not attacking religion in some essential way, but criticizing the conditions that make religion necessary as a consolation. The problem is not faith itself, but the suffering — inequality, exploitation, alienation — that gives rise to the instinct for spiritual escape.
Marx’s atheism was not a New Atheist-type negation but a theological critique — a way of revealing how capitalism itself can displace Christianity as a religion of profit, rent, and wages. According to liberation theologian Enrique Dussel, Marx frames money as a jealous god, capital as the Antichrist, and private property as original sin. No wonder he is eternally hated.
Full show notes at https://www.conspirituality.net/episodes/brief-demonic-karl-marx
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Brief: Demonic Karl Marx ATTACKS Private Property and DESTROYS Religion (00:40:49)
Matthew examines how Karl Marx has long been framed as a demonic threat to religion and private property — a tactic that sidesteps Marx’s actual critique of capitalism. J. Edgar Hoover, Ronald Reagan, and a raft of Evangelical blowhards cast communism as satanic and civilization-ending, a narrative now accelerating through Trump-era rhetoric, and Project 2025.
Capital is difficult to rebut directly, so detractors often attack Marx himself, calling him godless or deranged. Jordan Peterson and Paul Kengor treat Marx’s horny gothic teenage poems as literal evidence of demonic influence—which is much more interesting to them than taking surplus value, alienation, or commodity fetishism seriously.
But the OG distorter of Marxist economics is the Catholic Church, beginning with Pius IX, who Red-Scared the 19th C faithful with a now-famous trick: conflating personal property with bourgeois private property. Marx targeted only the latter — profit-generating property — which the Church depended on then and still does today.
Full show notes at https://www.conspirituality.net/episodes/brief-demonic-karl-marx
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287: She Did Nuzzi RFK Jr Coming (00:58:54)
How does an elite Millennial politics reporter wind up having phone sex with and giving campaign advice to the 70-year-old emerging fascist she’s reporting on?
Most of that should stay between Olivia Nuzzi and her therapist. What we do know is that American Canto, Nuzzi’s new book, is a memoir (or maybe novel) made for the conspirituality age, in which raging toxic roided-up hypocritical male charisma is always the center of attention.
The domineering ghoul is the pole star of interest and fascination, always moving too fast and chaotically to understand—unless you know how fascism accelerates. We scavenge these pages for clues about Kennedy and how the hell this journalism disaster happened.
Show Notes
Zyn pouches and American Masculinity
The Olivia Nuzzi Comeback Is Everything Wrong With Modern Media
A Serious Journalism Scandal Hiding Inside a Frivolous Sexual One
The Scandalous Rollout Was the Best Part of Olivia Nuzzi’s Memoir
119: We Are Slenderman (w/Kathleen Hale)
The first-person industrial complex: How the harrowing personal essay took over the Internet.
A Q&A with Olivia Nuzzi of New York magazine on her career, covering Trump and access journalism
Guests urged to be vaccinated at anti-vaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jr’s party
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Bonus Sample: “Joe Rogan of The Left” Glazes China (00:05:58)
Listen to the full episode here
Hasan Piker just spent two weeks in The People’s Republic of China. The famous streamer is often invoked as being a potential “Joe Rogan of The Left,” who might bring young voters, especially working class men, back into the Democratic Party.
But Piker’s livestreams from China raise controversial questions. Is he whitewashing Chinese human rights abuses? Was he paid by their government to propagandize his combined 5 million viewers? How else to explain first-class plane tickets, ultra-luxury hotel rooms, privileged access to forbidden Western social media, and carefully avoiding criticisms of the authoritarian state while waxing poetic about their country and Mao Zedong?
Julian digs into Piker’s politics in the context of China’s tumultuous history. First stop: Tiananmen Square.
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Brief: Have Tech Bros Killed Psychedelics? (00:28:41)
"Immortality influencer" Bryan Johnson recently livestreamed his second-ever psilocybin trip "for science." But was it, really? Derek and Julian break down the performative nature of this stunt and discuss the growing right-wing influence on psychedelics culture.
Show Notes
Bryan Johnson Has Discovered Shrooms, and He Really Wants You to Know It
Silicon Valley’s Man in the White House Is Benefiting Himself and His Friends
How the Right Coopted Psychedelics
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286: RFK Jr’s Great Crusade (01:08:18)
RFK Jr is one of the greatest perpetrators of a firehose of falsehoods that we’ve ever covered. The stakes were raised when he was installed as head of America’s public health system. A new longform article in The Atlantic offers an inside look at the history and current thinking of this man, as insightful for what it offers as telling for what it omits. We discuss the role of journalism in an age defined by propaganda.
Show Notes
Scoop: The new #2 at CDC is a top ivermectin prescriber who ended Louisiana’s vaccine-promotion media campaigns
Doctor Critical of Vaccines Quietly Appointed as C.D.C.’s Second in Command
CDC Quietly Turned Off Its Vaccine Search Tool. It’s Not Clear When It’s Coming Back.
The Olivia Nuzzi and RFK Jr. Affair Is Messier Than We Ever Could Have Imagined
RFK Jr. and the Inexplicable Appeal of Repulsive Men
RFK Jr. is overhauling the program that helps preserve Americans' access to vaccines
Why Is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. So Convinced He’s Right?
Nature: Pertussis, A Tale of Two Vaccines
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Bonus Sample: How Does Andrew Wakefield Keep Getting Resurrected? (00:05:53)
Listen to the full episode.
With the CDC recently updating its website with anti-vax propaganda under the direction of RFK Jr, disgraced and disbarred physician, Andrew Wakefield, is back in the news. In fact, Senator Ron Johnson even tweeted out that he deserves an apology. He must be relying on short attention spans, given all the ways Wakefield manipulated the “study” that showed a link between vaccines and autism—even though the study itself found no such proof.
Derek revisits the retracted 1998 study, as well as shows just how much proof exists to the contrary of the CDC’s new page.
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Brief: Black Friday’s Wellness Extravaganza (00:34:24)
Derek and Julian survey all of the incredible, life-changing deals going down this weekend in Wellnesslandia.
Show Notes
Influencers made millions pushing ‘wild’ births – now the Free Birth Society is linked to baby deaths around the world
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285: Can Peter Attia Live Forever? (01:11:18)
In the wildly popular biohacking and longevity space, Peter Attia is often cited as one of the leading luminaries. His straightforward, science-backed approach seems to cut through the noise in a space dominated by fit bros and wellness grifters who always seem to have a product to sell. But the man who dropped out of residency at Johns Hopkins to found a private clinic focused on longevity has his share of critics, who are a bit suspicious about his self-experimentations—and the millions he makes counseling Silicon Valley insiders about experimental medicine.
This week we take a look at longevity broadly and Attia specifically. Derek kicks off the episode with a recap of his time at Eudemonia Summit, where, among other things, he got to debate another leading biohacker, Dave Asprey, about seed oils. As it turns out, longevity was the top buzzword there as well.
I Went to Eudemonia – a Wellness Summit with the Industry's Top Thought Leaders – Here's What It Was Like
Outlive: A Critical Review
A Review of OUTLIVE
Critiquing Peter Attia
Andrew Huberman and Peter Attia: Self-enhancement, supplements & doughnuts?
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Bonus Sample: Graeber vs Bannon, Anarchism vs Leninism (Part 2) (00:04:49)
This bonus episode is Part 2 of Graeber vs Bannon, Anarchism vs Leninism.
I start in the 1870s with Marx and Bakunin fighting over the joys and traumas of the Paris Commune. Marx sees it as an imperfect but historic prototype of a workers’ transitional state, cut down before it could consolidate power. Bakunin reads it as a betrayal of anarchist principles — too willing to replicate the machinery it meant to overthrow. Out of that conflict comes a rift that still haunts us: should revolution be disciplined, organized, and strategic, or spontaneous, horizontal, and permanently suspicious of institutions?
I explore David Graeber as a hopeful modern anarchist, highlighting his idea of “everyday communism”—the mutual aid and cooperation we already practice—and his vision of Occupy as a revelation of our capacity to act as if we’re free. I contrast this with Marxist-Leninist critiques: the exhaustion of consensus, obstructionism, spectacle without strategy, and the refusal to make demands. A story about my late friend Michael Stone at an Occupy “mic check” shows how openness can invite opportunism. Finally, I contrast No King’s vagueness with MAGA’s fusion of mystical energy and disciplined technocracy—QAnon shamans backed by P2025 architects, vibes condensed to machinery.
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Brief: Graeber vs Bannon, Anarchism vs Leninism (Part 1) (00:43:28)
In this first of a two-part series, I dig into a century-long debate within revolutionary politics—one that now shapes the fault lines between MAGA authoritarianism and the fragmented resistance against it.
How did the American far right end up using Leninist strategy more effectively than the American left? And what does that say about our own movements—our blind spots, our strengths, and inherited illusions?
In 2013, Steve Bannon called himself a Leninist. In 2016, he openly called for the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” In Trump 2.0, he’s been an ideological whip for the vanguardism of Project 2025. If Bannon has a foil, it was the late anthropologist David Graeber—Occupy organizer, anarchist, and author of The Dawn of Everything—who championed prefigurative politics and rejected the idea that the state could ever be an instrument of liberation.
Drawing from Vincent Bevins’ If We Burn, I explore why a decade of globally interconnected mass movements failed to build lasting power—and how the right learned from their mistakes. We revisit January 6 through the lens of conspirituality influencers, we go to São Paulo to watch anarchist punk collectives lose the narrative to organized right-wing actors, and we return to Occupy to understand the spiritual hopes and organizational gaps that still shape protest culture today.
Part 2 will dig deeper into Graeber’s legacy, the theological undertow of spontaneity vs. structure, and what younger activists may inherit if we don’t learn from the last half-century of revolt and repression.
NOTE: Full citations are available on the episode page at https://www.conspirituality.net/.
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284: When Prophecy-Science Fails (w/Thomas Kelly) (01:12:12)
In 1954 a doomsday alien cult headed up by Chicagoland housewife Dorothy Martin was waiting for the cataclysmic flood that would herald the arrival of spaceships to transport her and her followers to safety. When the hour came and went and nothing happened, she and her followers made up a Bible’s worth of excuses, saying that the group's penitence and piety had saved them, and so the failure of the prophecy was actually a validation of their new religion. And even though its central claim had been refuted, they accelerated their efforts to proselytize and convert new followers.
This is the story of the 1956 classic study, When Prophecy Fails, by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter.
Problem is—this didn't really happen. At least not that way. As our guest this week Thomas Kelly points out from his investigation of newly unsealed archival materials, the psychologists not only embedded themselves in Martin's cult in a way that provoked their most irrational statements, they fudged the outcome of Martin story to suit their virally popular new theory of cognitive dissonance.
Show Notes
Debunking “When Prophecy Fails” - Kelly - 2026 - Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
Failed Prophecies Are Fatal | International Journal for the Study of New Religions
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Bonus Sample: Temple of Blood & Fire (00:07:02)
They offered initiation into ancient Christian mysticism, ritual communion with the spirits, an understanding of reincarnation, and the destined transition to inhabiting a "solar-body" in the Sirius star-system. But it all ended in murderous blood sacrifice and fire—and 74 dead believers.
What is this dark preoccupation with sacrifice and ritual killing in the name of metaphysical belief? Grotesque to modern ears, yet quite commonplace historically.
Julian covers the late 20th-century French cult, The Order of the Solar Temple, for his Roots of Conspirituality series. They identified with the Knights Templar, weaving Rosicrucianism and Theosophy into a tangled web of fraud, spiritual deception, and the dramatic, tragic deaths of everyone involved.
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Brief: Does Calley Means Get Anything Right? (00:28:13)
RFK Jr's senior advisor and supplements salesman, Calley Means, has repeatedly fabricated the story of Abraham Flexner and the birth of the modern medical system. Derek looks into his historical revisionism and what it could mean for the MAHA movement.
Show Notes
Medical Education in America: Abraham Flexner
The Great Influenza: John Barry
The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: Roy Porter
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283: Guys (01:06:40)
Back in June, we published an episode about the "Speaking with American Men" (SAM) project, a $20 million initiative designed by political consultants to understand and win back young men (18-29) who increasingly voted for Donald Trump. We talked about this cringey, inauthentic approach to compete over the influence of manosphere figures like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Huberman, who exploit a perceived "meaning crisis" with pseudo-intellectual and often reactionary messages.
Instead of what? We said that the better route would be to focus on material concerns so that the rage of young men isn’t ceded to right-wing movements. Big-money consultant-led efforts to micromanage online interactions will not spawn-in the authentic cultural engagement that right-wing influencers naturally achieve.
Well here we are now in the fall, and we’ve got a bunch of guys stepping into this contested space from different angles. Zohran Mamdani and Graham Platner present very differently as masculine role models, but share the same economic populism, but also a deep challenge in the long shadow of patriarchy: how do men become trustworthy?
Show Notes
Brief: Nair, Mamdani, and Culture against the Culture War (Pt 1) — Conspirituality
Matthew's Review of Notes on Being a Man by Scott Galloway
A Political Litmus Test: Can You Hang With the Boys?
Zohran Mamdani Is New York’s First Millennial Mayor. You Can Tell by His Suit.
A Political Misdiagnosis—NYT on How Dems lost Black and Hispanic Voters
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Bonus Sample: MAHA Inaction (00:05:57)
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The nonprofit organization (and its adjoined Super PAC), MAHA Action, is leading semi-regular Zoom calls featuring a host of wellness influencers and RFK Jr appointees, including Jillian Michaels, Dr Oz, and Russell Brand. Derek listens into a recent call to see just what they're saying.
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Brief: Taylor Swift Goes MAGA? (00:43:05)
Taylor Swift: Nazi sympathizer, freshly-minted racist, MAGA trad wife. Or so proponents of a recent conspiracy theory would have it. For years, the most successful female recording and performing artist of her generation (and therefore of all time) has used “easter eggs” as part of her marketing. Hidden messages in music videos and lyric sheets, oblique references in social media posts, and puzzles as merchandise marketing gimmicks have all contributed to a parasocial sense of intimacy and insider knowledge for her millions of ardent fans.
With the release of The Life of a Showgirl, these treats seem to have backfired on Swift. A deluge of TikToks claim dog whistles and hidden symbols reveal a far-right turn for a progressive artist that previously stood for feminism, reproductive freedom, gay and trans rights, BLM, and gun control.
Maybe it’s her “cancelled” friends, the influence of Travis Kelce, or traditional, conservative “family values” finally coming home to roost as she celebrates the desire to settle down with her soon-to-be-husband, make a home, and have some kids.
Julian peels apart the layers of this highly charged political conspiracy theory and looks at what it may represent.
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282: Mutual Aid Against ICE (01:04:26)
When restaurants and cafes in Portland and elsewhere link into networks of food pantries and soup kitchens, will mutual aid feel real in the US? When regular folks come out of their houses to shame and chase ICE thugs out of the neighborhood, will that feeling of power from below catch on? Will it create some craving for a different way of doing things and understanding authority and order?
Derek looks at Portland, Julian looks at street resistance, and Matthew unpacks the old anarchist idea of mutual aid, and whether and how it intersects with our time and what’s left of our institutions.
Show Notes
Here are 18 Portland-area coffee shops and restaurants that have pledged to feed people who lose SNAP benefits
Angie Vargas, ICE Chaser
LAHoodLove on Instagram
BraveNewFilms on Instagram
Kat Abughazaleh in Mother Jones
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Bonus Sample: US v. Liberation Theology (Part 2) (00:05:28)
Listen to the full episode on Patreon
Part 2 follows the money flowing from US agencies and interests to anti-Liberation Theology figures in Latin America. We meet Jesuit operator Roger Vekemans, who in the 1960s drew funding from the CIA, USAID, West German bishops, and U.S. conservative foundations to undermine Liberation and Christian socialism in Chile and beyond.
Nelson Rockefeller used Protestant missions as a model for soft power in the region, including the Summer Institute of Linguistics and their aviation-radio infrastructure (JAARS) that doubled as state and military logistics in Amazon frontiers. That infrastructure was part of a project to rewire communal lifeways into an individualism compatible with capitalism.
But what about the “reverse boomerang”? Pope Leo XIV’s Dilexi te: On Love for the Poor, is a pastoral yet pointed retrieval of Liberation Theology’s moral center, in which inequality is posited as the root of social ills. Leo rejects trickle-down myths, insists on solidarity with migrants, and quietly sidelines the old Marxism panic. By grounding church mission in the lived poverty of Jesus himself, Leo offers a calm but withering rebuke to Christofascism and the politics of exclusion.
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