Current Reading
On the MAGA Movement's public intellectuals and the history of supra-normal religious (subjective) experiences.
A. An important new book:
Laura K. Field's Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right (Princeton University Press, 2026). It examines four groups: National Conservativers (Josh Hawley; Christopher Rufo), Postliberals (Patrick Deneen, JD Vance), the Claremont Institute (Michael Anton, who authored The Flight 93 Election essay), and the Hard Right Underbelly (MAGA Movement intellectuals like "Mencius Moldbug" aka Curtis Yarvin, "Bronze Age Pervert" aka Costin Alamariu, and "Raw Egg Nationalist" aka Charles Cornish-Dale). Deneen has been very active in advocating for an emerging postliberal, multipolar world order.
Michael Anton's essay The Flight 93 Election, which brought the Claremont Institute to greater public awareness:
I've been researching this for about 6 years, and dealt with its precursors in 1998-2008 whilst editing and writing for the former website Disinformation.
In particular, for those of you who were stunned when DJT was re-elected (and Kamala Harris lost) in the 2024 Presidential election, this book may help to explain the MAGA Movement networks that developed in 2015-25. These people both influence - and provide post hoc justification for - second Trump administration policies (including specific foreign policies being pursued).
The book has some similarities with the earlier work 20 years ago on the neoconservatives around George W. Bush, as illustrated in books by Murray Friedman (The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy), and Gary Dorrien (Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana).
B. Jeffrey J. Kripal is the J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religion at Rice University (Faculty profile page). He was PhD Supervisor to Erik Davis (the PhD dissertation-to-book is the excellent High Weirdness), who wrote for the former 21C Magazine. Kripal has been involved with the Esalen Institute and his book Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007) deals with a number of important, adjacent aspects like Michael Murphy’s Transformation Project that mapped US-USSR scientific exchanges in the 1970s and 1980s on parapsychology / remote viewing oriented research. I learned about the Transformation Project from LTC Dr Michael A. Aquino and subsequently looked up aspects of in various university libraries - much of this body of work translated into peak performance training for Olympics athletes, which the late psychiatrist Ari Kiev then took and applied to trading psychology for hedge fund managers in the United States in the 1990s and 2000s, including for Steve A. Cohen’s SAC Capital.
I have borrowed the first edition of Kripal’s PhD dissertation-to-book Kali’s Child from La Trobe University’s Borchardt Library (a second edition is available, and Kripal has responded to critics and their rejoinders) and Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011) from the University of Melbourne’s Baillieu Library. I also have Kindle copies of Kripal’s How To Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2024) and Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Kripal is one of the annotators of the late science fiction author Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis reflections on his 2-3-74 encounter with VALIS (a Vast Active Living Intelligence System) which I wrote about in 1996-97 in an unpublished article pitched originally to Perth’s former REVelation Magazine.
A couple of brief comments from a research management / administration perspective on Kripal’s career:
Early on, he gained the support of Professor Emeritus Wendy Doniger at the University of Chicago. At Rice University, he was able to develop an innovative teaching program. Kripal was able to draw on “lived experience” and practitioner-informed insights - including via the Esalen Institute - that address many of the controversies in two epistemic communities: the anticult / countercult / cultic studies exponents (often psychology, psychiatry, social services and victimology oriented) versus new religious movement scholars (often anthropology, sociology, political science, and religious studies oriented). Being involved in such groups or movements have their own complex issues. However, in actually engaging with such ideologies, practices, teachings, and transmissions - you gain (more epistemologically grounded) transformational insights (many that may be more like Altamont’s darkness rather than Woodstock’s idealism) than in being an “armchair quarterback”.
There are some things we might differ on - Kripal’s advocacy of the late Adi Da Samraj (like Ken Wilber - to which Adi Da devotees have responded to) reads to me like an experience of altered states of consciousness / trance induction that interpersonal / social neuroscience can provide an empirical analysis of (in terms of its causal mechanisms). My own stance is probably closer to the Gurdjieff Work exponent William Patrick Patterson (in his book Adi Da Samraj—Realized and/or Deluded? - see reviews): the rise-isolation-fall arc of Adi Da Samraj’s avatar transmission, how he ended up in Fiji and what actually happened, and the closed nature of the community and much of its publications / public engagement (in terms of its attempted diffusion of ideas, beliefs, discourses, norms, values and worldviews) from a fringe community into the broader society are both cautionary and problematising.
Kripal built much of his career at the University of Chicago Press. He was able to collaborate with authors for trade press books that helped to reach a broader audience. Kripal has also captured many of the “lessons learned” from his Teaching & Research academic career in his memoir Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religion (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017). The latter book is highly recommended - and can be read along with other academic career and cumulative research program literature.