Shows
From the New WorldGeoff Shullenberger: Foucault in AmericaGeoff Shullenberger is managing editor of Compact and co-host of the Blame Theory podcast.Find Geoff:https://x.com/g_shullenbergerhttps://www.compactmag.com/contributor/geoff-shullenberger/Mentioned in the episode:https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/https://www.amazon.com/United-States-Paranoia-Conspiracy-Theory/dp/0062135554https://www.amazon.com/Birth-Biopolitics-Lectures-Coll%C3%A8ge-1978-1979/dp/0312203411http://home.lu.lv/~ruben/Deleuze%20-%20Postscript%20On%20The%20Societies%20Of%20Control.pdf This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers...2025-03-241h 10
Blame TheoryThe Crisis of Liberalism (Part 2)Geoff Shullenberger and Ashley Frawley continue to explore the crisis of liberalism. They begin by discussing recent reversals around free-speech debates in the United States and the odd fact that ostensible post- and anti-liberals have often positioned themselves as defenders of a central liberal value: free speech. They then begin to explore the postliberal critique and other blame narratives that have arisen around liberalism in recent years and ask whether the problem with liberalism is that it grants too much freedom, or too little. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with...2025-03-171h 08
Blame TheoryThe Crisis of Liberalism (Part 1)Liberalism is in crisis. Its parties and institutions are suffering one setback after another across the West, and forces described as “illiberal” are on the rise globally. But when did this crisis begin? Was liberalism ever not in crisis? Is liberalism itself a kind of crisis? In the first episode of a longer series on the meanings and legacies of liberalism, Ashley Frawley and Geoff Shullenberger lay out the themes and questions that will inform their exploration of an ideology that has received plenty of blame from both the right and the left—in part because it has been the do...2025-03-071h 15
Cracks in PostmodernityPost Election Post Mortem: How Mass Media Shapes Your Mind w/ Geoff ShullenbergerThanks to the exponential growth of mass media over the last few decades, we find ourselves bombarded with information that is presented to us through a variety of framings.
Whose narrative is most accurate? Which sources, if any, can we trust? Join Stephen G. Adubato and Geoff Shullenberger for a discussion on how mass media shapes the way we take in information.
Thanks to Interintellect for hosting our salon!
2025-02-061h 01
Blame TheoryBlaming Men, Blaming Women (Part 1)Geoff and Ashley discuss the online war of the sexes prompted by a recent mass shooting, which Ashley wrote about last month. They then explore the deeper roots of the gendered blame game that often defines our online culture wars. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit compactmag.substack.com/subscribe2025-01-171h 09
Eminent AmericansWhat Was the Post-Left?My guest on the show today is Geoff Shullenberger, managing editor of Compact magazine and host of their Blame Theory podcast. Geoff emailed me a few months back, after a post of mine that touched on the the risks of hitching one’s identity too thoroughly to hating on the left. What do I think, he asked, about the “post-left.”To which my answer was, “What’s that?”That’s the topic of much of this episode of the podcast. One answer comes from a piece on the phenomenon that Park MacDougald wrote a few years ag...2024-12-171h 37
Blame TheoryThe Age of EmotionAshley Frawley, Compact’s new senior editor as well as a new co-host of Blame Theory, joins Geoff Shullenberger to explore how collective social and political problems have been blamed on individual psychic and emotional defects. We discuss her two books on this subject, examine the history of therapeutic culture, and explore to what extent particular thinkers—Pareto? Freud?—bear some of the blame for this set of developments. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit compactmag.substack.com/subscribe2024-12-151h 07
Blame TheoryWho Is to Blame for Wokeness?Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi joins Geoff Shullenberger to discuss his new book We Have Never Been Woke. A great deal of discussion of wokeness attempts to trace it to the influence of certain thinkers and ideas: Foucault, Critical Race Theory, and so on. Al-Gharbi offers a different approach, focusing on the social stratum in which woke ideas became salient—that of "symbolic capitalists"—and how ideas function as a currency of social legitimation and status competition. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit compa...2024-10-081h 55
Blame TheoryBlame Marx?Compact's Sohrab Ahmari joins Geoff Shullenberger to discuss one of the most widely blamed thinkers of all time: Karl Marx. We consider why Republicans, all the way up to Donald Trump, are reviving anti-communist rhetoric during the 2024 presidential campaign, to what extent Marx can be blamed for the crimes of regimes inspired by his theories, why Marxism is so appealing to intellectuals, what we can still learn from Capital today, and more. Listen either here on Substack or on your preferred podcast app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this wi...2024-09-271h 15
Blame TheoryBlame Postmodernists?Writer David Shields joins Geoff Shullenberger to discuss his new book and documentary How We Got Here. We ask whether postmodernists are to blame for our post-truth predicament and explore Trump's instinctive postmodernism, the propaganda techniques of Putin adviser Vladislav Surkov, and David's own theories on reality and (non-)fiction.Listen either here on Substack or on your preferred podcast app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit compactmag.substack.com/subscribe2024-08-281h 27
Blame TheoryBlame Foucault? (Part 3)David Dudrick, professor of philosophy at Colgate University, joins Geoff to discuss his recent Compact essay "Why Foucault Couldn't Kill Sexuality." They discuss the misunderstandings around Foucault's History of Sexuality and the persistence of what he called the "repressive hypothesis," even among those who might claim to be his followers. Listen either here on Substack or on your preferred podcast app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit compactmag.substack.com/subscribe2024-07-301h 14
Blame TheoryBlame Foucault? (Part 2)Compact founding editor Sohrab Ahmari joins Geoff and Nina in this episode to examine Michel Foucault’s later work on biopolitics, governmentality, and economics. Did Foucault predict or even contribute to the dominance of neoliberalism? To what extent was Foucault ever left-wing? Can we reconcile the brilliance of his thought with the moral and ontological absence at the core of his work? Listen either here on Substack or on your preferred podcast app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit co...2024-06-211h 08
Blame TheoryBlame Foucault? (Part 1)This episode examines Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, vol. 1 and asks to what extent Foucault is to blame for contemporary progressive dogmas about sex, gender, and power.Listen either here on Substack or on your preferred podcast app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit compactmag.substack.com/subscribe2024-05-171h 05
Blame TheoryBlame the Greeks? (Part 1)Anchored by our own Nina Power and Geoff Shullenberger, Blame Theory takes a seriously playful look at the ideas that have shaped our minds and our world, to ask: How have we ended up here, and whom or what can we blame? Plato? Hegel? Marx? Nominalism? Gnosticism? Feminism? Postmodernism? Critical theory?This episode takes a page out of Nietzsche’s writings and asks whether we should blame the Greeks for society’s woes. Geoff and Nina discuss Geoff’s review of Brandes and Høffding’s book The Great Debate: Nietzsche, Culture, and the Scandinavian Welfare Society, published l...2024-04-151h 10
Blame TheoryBlame Butler?This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit compactmag.substack.comAnchored by our own Nina Power and Geoff Shullenberger, Blame Theory takes a seriously playful look at the ideas that have shaped our minds and our world, to ask: How have we ended up here, and whom or what can we blame? Plato? Hegel? Marx? Nominalism? Gnosticism? Feminism? Postmodernism? Critical theory?This episode asks whether we should blame Judith …2024-03-2204 min
Blame TheoryBlame Deconstruction?This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit compactmag.substack.comAnchored by our own Nina Power and Geoff Shullenberger, Blame Theory takes a seriously playful look at the ideas that have shaped our minds and our world, to ask: How have we ended up here, and whom or what can we blame? Plato? Hegel? Marx? Nominalism? Gnosticism? Feminism? Postmodernism? Critical theory?The debut episode—“Blame Deconstruction?”—was recorded live at KGB Bar, featuring Avital Ronell, University Professor of German and Comparative Literature at NYU and author of The Telephone Book and Comp...2024-03-141h 03
Compact PodcastCompact Conversations: Geoff ShullenbergerGeoff Shullenberger joins Sohrab Ahmari to discuss his essay "The Poverty of Anti-Wokeness." Compact Magazine is reader-supported. Become a member and gain unlimited access. https://compactmag.com/subscribe 2024-01-0937 min
The Lee ShowGeoff Shullenberger on Rene Girard and the New RightGeoff Shullenberger is back for another fantastic episode. Geoff is one of the leading scholars on French philosopher Rene Girard. For this episode, we explore Girard's ideas and why they are important. We discuss the implications for the "New Right"; how Girard's ideas are becoming more popular; religion mapping to Girard's ideas; Christianity, Judaism, and Violence; growing out of your Ayn Rand phase, and much more.
Geoff is the Managing Editor of Compact Magazine, a teacher, a thinker, and an important influence on many leading figures in Silicon Valley and beyond.
During the discussion we...2023-12-0653 min
Psyop CinemaHalloween (2018), Halloween Kills, and Halloween Ends, with Geoff ShullenbergerGeoff Shullenberger joins us for an analysis of the recent David Gordon Green Halloween trilogy. He discuses a Girardian reading of Halloween Ends as well the "lab leak theory of Michael Myers." Is the 2018 film correctly read as based and right-wing, or is it more of the same MK-culture fetishization of trauma? Why is Halloween Kills so terrible? And does Halloween Ends present a cringe lib approach to evil or a positive subversion of typical Hollywood incel revenge fantasies?https://outsidertheory.com/https://twitter.com/g_shullenbergerhttps://compactmag.com/https://twitter.com...2023-10-312h 00
Maiden Mother Matriarch with Louise PerryThe Philosophy of Bronze Age Pervert - Geoff Shullenberger | Maiden Mother Matriarch 35This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.louiseperry.co.ukMy guest today is Geoff Shullenberger, an academic and managing editor at Compact Magazine. On the podcast we discussed Geoff’s essay about Bronze Age Pervert (BAP), a pseudonym internet personality associated with the manosphere. In the extended episode we discussed BAP’s writing on race, intelligence and sexual politics. You can find extended episodes, bonus episodes and the MMM chat community on louiseperry.substack.com2023-10-151h 03
Compact PodcastCompact Conversations: Geoff ShullenbergerGeoff Shullenberger joins Matthew Schmitz to discuss his latest Compact contribution “What BAP Learned From Feminism.” Support Independent Journalism: Compact Magazine is reader-supported. Become a member and gain unlimited access. https://compactmag.com/subscribe Topics Discussed In This Episode: [00:00] Why read BAP (Bronze Age Pervert)? [03:10] BAP’s thesis: Philosophy is born from eugenics – what does this mean and what is the appeal of his writing? [07:43] BAP adopts the feminist viewpoint of history and transvaluates it to advocate for elitist patriarchy [12:03] Is BAP correct...2023-09-2435 min
Outsider TheoryLockdown Literature with Tim AbrahamsLockdown diaries became a literary fad in 2020, but few if any were memorable. What if the real literature of lockdown was written over a century ago? This is the hypothesis behind "The Machine Book of Weird," an anthology of fiction from the late 19th and early 20th century that explores isolation, domestic confinement, and the uncanniness of home. Publisher Tim Abrahams joins me to discuss this project, plus Freud, Mark Fisher, and more.
You can donate to the project's Kickstarter here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mbow/machine-book-of-weird2023-05-101h 00Psyop CinemaThe Thing and Other Carpenter Films, with Geoff Shullenberger and James EllisThomas is joined by two returning guests, James Ellis of Hermitix and Geoff Shullenberger of Outsider Theory, to discuss several John Carpenter films. We talk about the struggle against paranoia and inhuman monstrosity in The Thing, Gnostic-Catholic conspiracies and pop-science in Prince of Darkness, the insights and shortcomings of They Live's critique of consumer capitalism, and we disagree about whether there's anything of cinematic and thematic value in Vampires. Overall, we come to a mixed assessment of Carpenter's work, appreciating some pro-human notes despite his darkly apocalyptic and boomer liberal tendencies. Geoff and James also offer some bonus thoughts on...2023-04-252h 46
Outsider TheoryDisabling Medicine: Daniel Hadas with Medical NemesisIn this special episode, guest host Daniel Hadas interviews Medical Nemesis on covid, Illich, industrialized medicine and thought, and more.
https://twitter.com/DanielHadas2
https://twitter.com/Medical_Nemesis
https://medicalnemesis.substack.com/2023-04-141h 20
Outsider TheoryThe Psychopolitics of Masturbation with Matthew CrawfordMatthew Crawford joins me to discuss his essay, "Was the Sexual Revolution a Government Psy-Op?," the politics of masturbation, Wilhelm Reich, the Frankfurt School, masculinity, the therapeutic state, and more.
https://unherd.com/2022/12/the-politics-of-masturbation/
https://mcrawford.substack.com/2023-03-041h 37
Outsider TheoryThe Automation of Midwittery with Brian ChauBrian Chau returns to Outsider Theory to discuss ChatGPT's woke catechism.
https://cactus.substack.com/2023-02-031h 02
Outsider TheoryExiting the Vampires' Campus with Blaise BaynoBlaise Bayno (@urgurlblaise), former critical theory PhD student and co-organizer of the conference "Society Must Be Inoculated," joins me to discuss how critical theory became uncritical cheerleading for biopolitical authoritarianism, academic labor issues, the history of the UC Santa Cruz History of Consciousness program, and more. 2022-12-261h 19Psyop CinemaThe Da Vinci Code and Dan Brown, with Geoff ShullenbergerGeoff Shullenberger returns to Psyop Cinema, this time discussing the novels of Dan Brown and their trilogy of film adaptations (the subject of Geoff's recent essay for American Affairs). He and Thomas talk about the strange prescience of Brown's novels, in his early work's treatment of the deep state, surveillance, and encryption and his later work's promotion of transhumanism and depopulation. They cover The Da Vinci Code's defense of elite sex rituals, Angels and Demons' weak approach to the reconciliation of science and religion, Inferno's portrayal of a virus meant to depopulate the world, Brown's consistent themes of reproduction and...2022-12-082h 32
Psyop CinemaUniversal Basic MKUltra (On Outsider Theory)Our appearance on recurring Psyop Cinema guest Geoff Shullenberger's Outsider Theory podcast, discussing our overall approach to cultural engineering, the Hollywood psyop, and low-intensity MKUltra. The conversation covers the ideological history of conspiracy theory, the overlap between academic theory and cultural engineering analysis, CIA involvement in Hollywood, and much more.https://outsidertheory.com/https://twitter.com/g_shullenbergerhttps://twitter.com/CinemaPsyophttps://www.patreon.com/PsyopCinemahttps://linktr.ee/psyopcinemathomas-psyopcinema@protonmail.combrett-psyopcinema@protonmail.com2022-10-251h 40
Outsider TheoryUniversal Basic MKUltra with Psyop CinemaThomas and Brett from Psyop Cinema join me to discuss Hollywood and cultural engineering.
Psyop Cinema: https://www.spreaker.com/show/psyop-cinema
My Psyop Cinema episodes on Roland Emmerich:
https://www.spreaker.com/user/15144188/shullenberger-interview
https://www.spreaker.com/user/15144188/geoff-shullenberger-2
2022-10-251h 40Psyop CinemaStargate, Moonfall, The Thirteenth Floor, and Anonymous, with Geoff ShullenbergerGeoff Shullenberger returns to Psyop Cinema, continuing his conversation with Thomas about Roland Emmerich. Having previously covered the depopulation themes of Emmerich's disaster trilogy, Geoff and Thomas first consider the unabashed elitism and glorification of the manipulative artist found in Anonymous, before looking at how Stargate, The Thirteenth Floor, and Moonfall portray gnosticism, AI, ancient astronaut theory, and the simulation hypothesis. Emmerich's filmmaking quality may be uneven, but he couldn't be more consistent about his message that humanity needs to hand over control to an overclass of artistic geniuses and technical managers whose knowledge makes them worthy to rule the...2022-10-061h 55Psyop CinemaGeoff Shullenberger on the Limits of the Red Pill and Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012Thomas talks with Geoff Shullenberger, managing editor of Compact Magazine and host of the Outsider Theory podcast. They discuss how the regime benefits from over-simplified understandings of the red and blue pills as well as from certain blends of conspiracy theory with pop-spirituality. Roland Emmerich's "disaster trilogy" (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012) is also discussed, revealed as blatant propaganda for depopulation and globalist technocracy. https://outsidertheory.com/https://compactmag.com/https://twitter.com/daily_barbarianhttps://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/redpilling-and-the-regimehttps://compactmag.com/article/alex-jones-crusader-and-clownhttps://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/06...2022-09-061h 53
Outsider TheoryThe Rule of Midwits with Brian ChauBrian Chau (Cactus Chu on Substack, @psychosort on Twitter) joins me to discuss institutions and why midwits rule them, decentralization, sorting mechanisms, right-wing aesthetics, Curtis Yarvin, William F. Buckley, and more.
https://cactus.substack.com/
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/rule-of-midwits2022-08-311h 41
Outsider TheoryRIP Reality with Jon AskonasJon Askonas joins me to discuss his ongoing series of essays in The New Atlantis, "Reality: A Post-Mortem."
Read the series here:
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/collections/reality-a-post-mortem2022-07-181h 35
AmericanoDid René Girard understand America?Freddy Gray speaks to Geoff Shullenberger, a lecturer at New York University and columnist for Compact Magazine about a range of topics, from the ideas and appeal of philosopher René Girard to transhumanism and transgenderism, and the war in Ukraine.
2022-07-1539 min
ex.haustEpisode 85: School Shooters, Nihilism, and Child Sacrifice ft. Geoff Shullenberger and Default FriendEmmet sits Geoff Shullenberger and Default Friend to talk about their respective articles on the Uvalde shooting, school shootings in general, "zeitgeist killers," the spiritual hole in our society, and more!
"The Faith of Mass Shooters" by Geoff Shullenberger, Compact Magazine.
"Mass Shootings and the World Liberalism Made," by Katherine Dee, Contra
Closing Song: Lowered by Greg Puciato ft. Reba Meyers.2022-06-301h 06
Conservative Conversations with ISIGeoff Shullenberger on Spiritual Decay, School Shootings, and René Girard’s MimesisConservative Conversations Episode 46—Geoff Shullenberger on Spiritual Decay, School Shootings, and René Girard’s MimesisIn this episode:Geoff Shullenberger, a clinical associate professor at New York University and a columnist at Compact, discusses the phenomenon of the school shooter in America after the tragedy in TexasHow René Girard’s mimetic theory can explain violent behaviorThe religious and social dimensions of mass shootings and human sacrificeTexts Mentioned:The Faith of Mass Shooters by Geoff ShullenbergerHuman Sacrifice and the Digital Business Model by Geoff ShullenbergerThresholds of Violence by Malcolm GladwellBecome a part of...2022-06-1444 min