Last week, around 72,000 migrants flooded from Morocco into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. What really happened? Was a local girl abducted, never to be seen again? Did the Moroccan border guards step aside (or even collaborate) in an organized operation? 

Right-wing politicians and pundits were quick to crank up the moral panic machine. This is what open borders look like! They’re heading for our country next. Donald Trump said it was nothing compared to what would happen in the US if Democrats win the mid-terms.

Then came the conspiracy theories. Was Morocco retaliating against Spain for a recent deal with their enemy, Algeria? Were America and Israel behind it as punishment for Spain’s socialist prime minister being staunchly pro-Palestine and refusing to support the war in Iran?

For a few magical days, right- and left-wing conspiracy theorists spread overlapping versions of the Great Replacement Theory.

Julian dives into the diplomatic complexities, ideological contradictions, and historical twists to make sense of relations between Spain, Algeria, Morocco, Western Sahara, and Israel to ask: are there any good guys or is it colonizers all the way down?

Show Notes

AP Fact Checks Unsubstantiated Ceuta Claims

The Far Right Is Distorting Ceuta

The Real Story Behind Ceuta

How X Turned Ceuta Crisis into A Global Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory in 72 Hours

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MS NOW senior reporter Brandy Zadrozny spent 10 months tracking the conspiracy theories that evolved online in the wake of the death of Charlie Kirk. She joins Derek to discuss what her investigation found.

Show Notes

Deep End: Who Killed Charlie Kirk?

Charlie Kirk’s murder case has a conspiracy theory problem

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During an extraordinary career, Dr. Anthony Fauci led the federal response to HIV-AIDS, SARS, H1N1, Ebola, and Zika. He always advocated funding for pandemic preparedness, vaccine development, immunology and pathogen research. Then came COVID-19, which, unlike outbreaks past, was trapped in a politicized online disinformation and conspiracy-mongering stew. 

As he was pushing 80, Fauci rode the dragon of a novel coronavirus pandemic that was leaving piles of bodies in Italy, India, and New York. He served as the interface between scientists, government, and the public, all while learning about the virus in real-time. Like any good public health communicator, he sought to save lives using the best available knowledge. Like any good scientist, he kept an open mind about what was not yet known. 

But the pandemic-grievance industry made him the face of a conspiracy theory. Did he cause a catastrophically deadly pandemic, decimate American freedoms, or ruin the economy over a largely harmless flu? Today we discuss the release of his “diaries” and tune into last week's Senate hearings, where crackpots bullied, berated, and slandered the 85-year old public servant.

Show Notes

Beyond Gain of Function: Strengthening Oversight of Research

Genetic Tracing of Market Wildlife and Viruses at Epicenter of COVID-19

Anthony Fauci biography

New report reveals consequences of Trump administration's HIV/AIDS funding cuts

The Doctor and His Diary: What Fauci’s Innermost Musings Reveal

Did Fauci suffer pulmonary infarction due to COVID-19 vaccine? What we know

Lab Leak Fever with Philipp Markolin

Lab Leak Fever: The COVID-19 Origin Theory that Sabotaged Science and Society

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In the lead-up to our full episode on Anthony Fauci this Thursday, Derek looks at a recent MAHA Action webinar that focused on Rand Paul's publicly releasing over 1,100 pages of diary entries and other related material. As with all things MAHA, the event largely turned into a marketing pitch for the speakers' books.

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Back in the fall, Trump's NSPM-7 redirected the FBI, DOJ, and IRS toward "left-wing political violence," opening the door to labeling domestic groups terrorist organizations — despite three independent datasets (New America, CSIS, even the ADL!) showing right-wing violence outpacing left-wing violence by factors of 9-to-1 or greater.  Last week, Rubio's "Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism" internationalized this McCarthy reboot.

Central to the rhetoric of Rubio and Miller is framing leftist politics as being driven by envy and resentment rather than a response to inequality. Matthew traces this rhetoric, empirically contradicted by relative deprivation research, back through Nietzsche, Scheler, Schoeck, and Rand. 

Four days after the Ministerial, the State Department's Cuba report named 70+ Americans — from spies to wedding guests — as one undifferentiated network, a scapegoat machine now churning out congressional subpoenas, a federal grand jury, and a widening dragnet.

Show Notes

NSPM-7, full text — The White House

NSPM-7 constitutional analysis — The Conversation

New America, "Terrorism in America After 9/11" impact summary

CSIS, "Left-Wing Terrorism and Political Violence in the United States"

Just Security rebuttal of the CSIS report

ADL, "Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2024"

Rubio and Miller Ministerial remarks, full transcript

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), full text

Scheler, Ressentiment (1912), full text PDF

Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour — Online Library of Liberty

Ayn Rand, "The Age of Envy" — Ayn Rand Institute

U.S. Department of State, Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism (July 20, 2026)

National Lawyers Guild, "The National Lawyers Guild Reaffirms its Solidarity with Cuba in the Face of Increasing McCarthyite Repression" (July 2026)

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Climate reality keeps colliding with denial, erasure, and rebranding — across media, politics, and religion. Temu conspiritualists weave melted stories about the origins of wildfires, while the high-class guys run meditation-and-regenerative-farming spectacle backed by Exxon money. Julian’s on that angle.

Derek will be telling us about how climate journalism is collapsing faster than the climate itself with mass environment reporting layoffs at NPR, CBS, the Washington Post, and the LA Times. Trump gutted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. EPA webpages have been scrubbed of human-caused warming language.

Are religious institutions doing any better? In 2015, five world religions — Jewish, Catholic, Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist — independently issued climate statements ahead of the Paris COP21 talks. Matthew looks at how they struggled to challenge the global economies they depend on.

Show Notes

What Is Happening to Climate Journalism?

Where Climate Coverage Goes to Die

How will NPR layoffs affect climate stories?

CBS axed its last climate reporting pillar

How do you report on the weather when data is disappearing?

NOAA stops tracking cost of extreme weather and climate disasters

NOAA monthly media calls on climate change suspended

EPA websites now downplay link between humans and climate change

A Rabbinic Letter on the Climate Crisis Rabbis Against Climate Change 

"Laudato Si'": Encyclical Letter on Care for Our Common Home 

Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change 

Hindu Declaration on Climate Change The Time to Act is Now: A Buddhist Declaration on Climate Change  

"Laudate Deum": Apostolic Exhortation to All People of Good Will on the Climate Crisis 

Al-Mizan: A Covenant for the Earth (full text PDF)

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What do films like Dracula, The Truman Show, The Matrix, Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, Being John Malkovich, and Night of the Living Dead all have in common?

Science fiction and horror bend our everyday experiences and beliefs around mind and body, sensory perception, identity, and reality itself. But it turns out that many fictional tropes (zombies, vampires, cloned imposters, reality-simultations, and shapeshifters) may be rooted in rare brain disorders.

These conditions, often caused by injury or disease, can make people prone to becoming convinced that their loved ones are imposters, the same person (in elaborate and convincing disguises) is following them everywhere, their surroundings are an artificial duplicate of a real place, or even that they themselves are already dead.

Once our perceptions are sufficiently distorted, our minds invent explanations that confound reality. Might these overlap with supernatural and conspiratorial beliefs?

Julian blends storytelling, cultural references, and observations from psychiatry and neurology to take you on a fascinating journey. 

You’ll learn about:

• A woman in a 1903 Prague clinic who patiently explained to staff that the clinic was a perfect replica—not the real clinic itself

• A man in 1970’s Sacramento who believed he was a real-life zombie and went on to commit a series of grisly crimes

• A woman in 1920’s London who believed that two famous French actresses were following her everywhere in hyper-realistic disguises—and controlling her mind

• One man in LA and another in Utah that tragically killed their own family members because they believed they were imposters

These cases drive to the core of how humans experience self, relationships, and the structure of reality.

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The MAHA Chiropractic Hub had a big launch in Washington DC this week, with RFK Jr extolling the benefits of the practice—and promising to redirect research funds their way as his movement attempts to spread chiropractic throughout the American healthcare system. But can back cracks really "reset the entire nervous system," as one MAHA-endorsed speaker claims? Or is the profession just dressing up subluxation theory, which has never been clinically validated, for the modern age?

Derek and Julian discuss the four objectives of the Chiropractic Hub, what this could mean for American healthcare, and how Kennedy is likely helping funnel money earmarked for actual scientific research into this ghost religion. They begin with a brief history of chiropractic.

Show Notes

Subluxation Theory: A Belief System That Continues to Define the Practice of Chiropractic

Chiropractic Vertebral Subluxations: Science vs. Pseudoscience

Subluxation: dogma or science?

Chiropractic subluxation is still "unsupported speculation"

Chiropractic: A Skeptical View

Effect of chiropractic treatment on primary or early secondary prevention: a systematic review

This is how science dies

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The pharmaceutical industry is filled with greedy businessmen getting innocent consumers hooked on their toxic products in order to barely keep them alive. But if you want to actually thrive, an entire array of natural supplements are just a click away.

So goes most every wellness pitch on social media. Mallory DeMille returns to break down the marketing techniques as we dive into the sordid world of supplements and peptide creation, which, in reality, is not dissimilar from pharmaceuticals. In fact, many products use the same manufacturing processes and production plants, as Derek discusses.

In the final segment, Julian revisits Bryan Johnson, the centimillionaire on a quest to live to 200, and what his recent chronic illness diagnosis says about pumping your body filled with experimental drugs.

Show Notes

Bryan Johnson Autoimmune Gastritis Explained

What everyone got wrong about biohacker Bryan Johnson’s viral diagnosis: A medical expert weighs in

What Bryan Johnson’s diagnosis says about the limits of health tracking, longevity medicine

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Matthew considers two registers of painful eulogy: spectacles thrown for elite terrible people, and the music offered for ordinary terrible people, when we can manage it. 

Lindsey Graham's death triggered a wave of bullshit from Trump, Harris, Booker, Netanyahu, and Canadian PM Mark Carney — while online ghouls predicted the same fate for Mitch McConnell and Trump. 

Where does the elite eulogy reflex come from? Ancient taboo, Thucydides on praise as a function of a rival's removal, and terror management theory on why elites protect their own at the moment of death. 

Then we have a music thanatologist's story about playing harp for a dying man nobody liked, and what it teaches about the difference between forgiveness that strengthens ordinary people and deference toward the powerful.

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Graham Platner’s recent 11-minute video, where he announced he was dropping out of his bid for the US Senate, is filled with some of the hallmarks we heard during peak QAnon: there's a deep state conspiracy between powerful politicians and the media to destroy me. The truth, as Derek and Julian cover, is anything but.

They look at Platner’s campaign and, by contrast, another recent incident: two instances of public harassment against Scott Wiener, the progressive state senator from California who recently won a primary to try to replace Nancy Pelosi, and how that intersects with the type of political rhetoric we’re enduring this political cycle.

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