A chat with Matt Osborne

Well, first of all, I'm a history student in graduate school now. So history obviously, American history in particular because American history has had religion as a driver for a long time, and a lot of your friends over there, your friends are telling you that this seems like a very uniquely American religion you're dealing with. Guess what? They're right.

Well, what we're dealing with is an example of the esoteric child. Right. Esotericism, people are like, 'Oh gosh, that sounds weird.' Esotericism is just hidden knowledge. Right. Yes. And you've probably encountered hidden knowledge before. You can go all the way back to the ancient world. You know, the hidden knowledge is in the cave, you can only see it by torchlight with the elders explaining the history to you, that sort of thing. Right. Mystery religion. Well, esotericism is the idea that there's an invisible world that is disconnected from the material. Right. Gnosis is probably the best known term of that. And it's been a part of American religion for a long time. And in the modern era, the sort of New Age melting pot of ideas has produced an esoteric child called the indigo children, which has certain resonances with trans kids because they come from the same stuff. Right. This is the same source material kind of underlining it philosophically. And that's true always of text. Right. If I were to take the collected texts of Mr. Glennard there, Mr. Linehan, I would probably find some sources. Right. You've had influences from sitcoms that you've watched all your life and probably informed the way you've written, so you have sources. Yes. The New Testament has sources from the Old Testament and so forth and so on. Everything has sources. And no religion comes into the world whole cloth. They don't spring out full formed. No, every single religion is a pastiche to some extent of previous ideas and previous sort of iterations. So when you have in the 1970s in America, you have this very febrile atmosphere that we're starting to see the mainline denominations in America declining, and so you have alternative ideas coming in. A lot of that's stuff that's like after the hippie movement and whatnot. But this story actually starts in the 70s with a woman named Nancy Ann Tap, T-A-P-P-E, who claimed to be a synesthete, that is someone who can see colors around your head, right, auras. Yeah. Now, I don't know if you're aware of this, but you can trick yourself into seeing auras if you want to. It's a thing you can do. Yeah. And then you can pay hundreds of dollars to someone to take your spirit photo and show you all the colors and describe how you're an indigo child. And in fact, my first exposure to this was she published her book, Tap published her book in 1986, and the following year I happened to be, I was a kid, I was at something called the Harmonic Convergence, and I was told, I was informed by someone who claimed to be Native American, and I don't know if she was really that or not, but she told me in no uncertain terms that I was an indigo child.

And when you look at the characteristics, the supposed characteristics of the indigo child, what happens is the same thing you see with the trans kid phenomenon. Right. It's various characteristics being sort of swept up into a category. You're just discursively constructing the category. As we have, you know, we talked about Michel Foucault and philosophy, you've already had that discussion on your show. Here are some characteristics from Lee Carroll and Jan Tober. These are two of the people who started selling indigo children's stuff in the 1990s with books and so forth.

Yes, yes, yes. Oprah definitely is a big part of this story. As a matter of fact, historians of ideas will want to know where our country sort of had this weird phase right now, and I would point them towards Oprah. She is the single biggest source of woo, pseudoscience, New Age gibberish. It's all come through her.

Do you know, well, I think yeah, I can show you academic historiography now about Oprah as a key figure in American religion because that's what she is. Wow. Okay, okay. So that's what's going on. It's an American tradition carrying on through Oprah, and it's got these new sort of elements to it, some of which are familiar, some of which are not. And I don't know if you've noticed this, Graham, you may have noticed this, but my country is way more religious than your country.

You have noticed. And as a matter of fact, if you take all the countries of the world and you measure income level, right, there's a certain income level, it's about 24,000 pounds in British money or about 30,000 American, and we'll include arty, all right, 38,000 Canadian. That level of income is where church participation drops below 50% per week. That is, you are less than 50% likely for an individual person to go to church in that country when the per capita income reaches that level. Okay, every country ever studied except for the United States. The United States, we call ourselves the exceptional country. This is one thing that makes us very exceptional. So Oprah is part of that, and she had this boy on in 1999 who was of course an indigo child. And the child in question, his name was Matty Stepanek, and it's kind of tragic. He died of a rare form of muscular dystrophy, I want to say, at the age of 13. So very tragic, but he was a published poet at age nine, so he's kind of a prodigy, and therefore, you know, an indigo, definitely he's very special, so we have to have him. And here he is talking about the negative energies, and Oprah says, 'Well, when the negative energies come to you, what happens?' And of course, because he wants to please the adult, what does he do? He says, 'Oh, well, I get all fidgety.' Like I've never known a child that got fidgety, right. 'Okay, um, do they talk to you?' she says. And of course, wanting to please the adult, 'Well, sometimes, but not here, not here, not here, not now. I don't want to be interrogated on it right now.' Yes. And she says, she immediately says, 'Well, that's of course because there's good energies in here. We have good vibrations in here.' Right. So you know, it's obviously an adult leading a child through this. It's manipulation. And yes, it's coaching. I mean, look at the characteristics of the indigo child. They come into the world with a feeling of royalty. Have you ever known a child who just seemed to feel like they were royal? Yeah, that's never happened before. That's a whole new thing in history. And this whole idea that these new children are emerging, that they have some sort of psychic energy, that they connect with each other in some kind of way, that they're going to save the world, right, they're going to fix all the problems. Yes, does that sound familiar? We're going to save the trans kids to save ourselves. We're going to save the indigo children to save ourselves.

Right, right. See, yeah. There you go. It's a discursive construction of an esoteric child. It's got the child knows who they are. We have to trust the child because they are completely innocent of our world, and that's why they speak only truth. Right. Now think how far back that goes. Right. Moloch wanted the innocent blood. You have to have the child innocent blood because that's the most powerful magic that makes the rain come. Right. What was Moloch again? Moloch was an ancient Canaanite god or Phoenician god. So that's my point. Sacrifices there, child sacrificing cult. Yes. So you go very far in history, this is going on, and what we're seeing is kind of a current modern iteration. I should point out that indigo children, what it developed into in the first decade of the 21st century, is kind of a reaction against medicalizing the quote-unquote problem child of the American classroom, the ADD, ADHD, autism spectrum kind of problem. Right. So it's a reaction against medicalization. That's different from the esoteric trans child, of course, which we have to medicalize that child in order to release the secret knowledge inside of the child. Right. Yeah. So it's older, and it's as recently as 2011 this was on CNN, and it was, you know, Anderson Cooper, to his credit, is being very tongue-in-cheek, but you know, 'Are these kids being manipulated by their parents, or is there something to their unusual claims?' And you find our old friend James Randi, remember James Randi, the Amazing Randi? Yeah, yeah. There he is in 2006 in the Chicago Tribune saying that the parents of these indigo children don't know the difference between fantasy and reality. Right. So this is an old thing, and it runs parallel. And I'm not saying that it's the same. I'm saying that it's a very interesting case study that you place side by side and you see those similarities. It's just really resonant.

Oh yes. Yes. There is a certain emptiness, and you do already see this kind of change happening. As I've sent you, I just sent you a DM a little while ago as a matter of fact about another church where you can see they're incorporating the rainbow into the liturgy. Right. Yeah. Liberal American religions are now doing this, and that makes our problem that we're dealing with both easier to confine, right, keep it in church, we can do that, but at the same time, because it goes into a church, it becomes harder to destroy.

Right. It becomes both easier to deal with in some ways and harder to deal with in others. Right. So it's morphing before our eyes is my point, and that's where the whole discussion started. I wanted to explain to you why I think it's changing before our eyes.

Oh, I do, I do. Yeah, yeah. But there is this belief that children, and I know when I had kids very early on, they would really spook my wife by talking or pointing at something that wasn't there, and it was a real feeling of, 'Oh, what did I say?' There is an idea that children are connected to something beyond us.

Right. Yes, that's a perfect example of the cultural meme of the esoteric child. Perfect example. Yes, yes. Then Peter Pan is another good example. Right. Why is that an example? Well, if you believe hard enough in Tinkerbell, she'll live. Right, right, right. So that's what's going on here as well.

Well, you know, the indigo kids are in danger too. They're in danger from a world that doesn't understand them and just wants to crush their dreams and so forth.

Well, that's the thing. This woman Nancy Ann Tap is a synesthete. She sees auras, and these are kids coming into the world with these new purple auras. Right. I've never seen these purple auras before, and they're coming into the world. That's the idea. Yeah. And they've also been called, you may find them mentioned as star children. Oh, that's certainly not a Kubrick ripoff, I'm sure. Also crystal children. There's a couple other terms out there. Crystal children are supposed to be, oh well, those indigo kids are last generation, these are the new crystal kids. That's a real thing. Yeah. So you know, right. And the idea is that again, they're going to save us because they've got special psychic powers in this new generation that allow them to, I don't know, make a world that doesn't have war and where the environment, you know, and the animals or whatever. And then in the trans kid's case, a world where there is no gender, where it is new. Right. Exactly. Exactly. It's a different kind of heaven, but still it's a promise of a kind of esoteric heaven that comes from inside the kids. They've got it in them.

I know. It's just you're describing teenagers, you're describing just children. You're not describing something that really feels new to me. Right. Yes, yes. And also the coaching as well. The thing when Oprah is talking to that kid, I'll share the video underneath this so you can actually see it. But when Oprah is talking, it's quite clear that Oprah is kind of just getting answers that Oprah wants to get. It's extraordinary to watch it play out now actually because it feels like the type of thing that should have been more controversial or should have been stepped on as a teacher. I mean, well, it didn't seem harmful. Right. It doesn't seem harmful. It's just kids and they're special and they have special abilities and you know, they're creative and talented and smarter than previous generations of kids. Or maybe just parents want to believe that their kids are special. Either way, that seems kind of harmless. But this phenomenon though is not harmless.

Yes. That's the problem. You're talking about America, and in the United States of America, we will let children die before anybody does anything about a religion. I mean, guns are a religion here. You've seen how that works. Yeah. And you know, not to get too political, but yeah, we have all kinds of issues. And this is a land where people will not give medical care to a child because that's going against their religion or something, and the child dies. And oftentimes, even a prosecution will happen and the court will set aside a sentence. Yes, because courts don't want to get into the question of whether a belief is real or not. And again, that's why it becomes a kind of defensive space or defensive shell into which the religion can retract. Right. You can't get into here.

Scientology is a uniquely American religion. Right. That's a recent religion and it's got sources. Right. We can see the pop psychology texts that Hubbard ripped off. Yes. So you can see there's a good example of what we're talking about. And in terms of esotericism, you know, they wait until you get to OT3 before they tell you about Xenu. And that's my favorite crazy stuff. That's my favorite story about Paul Haggis. That may not be true, but I believe he was brought into an interview when he was at that level and only then realized that he was with a bunch of crazy people and he had spent... Well, I think it is, isn't it? Isn't it in the opening scene of his little documentary about Scientology? I thought it was. I think. Yeah, yeah. But that's just so funny that, and also very interesting because it shows that Scientology, apart from being insane, is so clever in the way that it hides its own lore, and this I guess is esotericism from its members until they reach a certain stage. You know, it feels again quite analogous to the trans phenomenon because a lot of the people who you see going trans rights, they often just don't know what it involves. They don't know that lesbians are being coerced, they don't know that kids are being manipulated and medicalized. They seem to, every time these things are brought up, it's kind of explained away and 'Oh, that's propaganda, that's propaganda.' These are things that you see associated with these kind of religions.

Well, let me put it another way. Let's look at an element of trans rights activism that we are now all only too used to, which is the savagery that it meets non-believers and the kind of anger and ferocity, the treatment that people like Dave Chappelle and J.K. Rowling get.

Oh yes, yes. Religions always want to impose blasphemy rules. Right. Religions always want to, well, if we're going to build paradise on earth, because that's what most religions are trying to do, and America is a place where people have done that over and over again, trying to build paradise on earth. And so that's just part of written into our narrative as a country. Yes, yes. And sure, you can see a lot of hostility. I mean, if you check out, for example, the origins of the Church of Latter-day Saints, I'm not going to make fun of LDS, I got a lot of friends who are Mormons. My point is that if you check out the history, right there it is, it was violence, and it's not just one side doing it. Right. So all religions are like that. I just in this last term took a class on the historical Muhammad, and did you know that there were other prophets in Arabia at the time doing similar things?

Yeah. There's all sorts of theories about that. And again, early Christianity is a great example of how esoteric ideas can sort of inform religion. But you know what? It's the literalists who actually end up in charge nine times out of ten, because literalism, fundamentalism, always has a certain power, shall we say, that is lacking in a religion that says, 'Oh well, you just have to understand that it's a mystery, that it's not literally true.' That's actually not the great way to build a religion. To really have a successful religion, it needs to be literally true. 'I am literally female.' Right. Right. Yes, yes. And that makes it, again, this difficult thing of religion where it's harder to fight and easier to fight in some ways. The interesting thing about this particular battle is that the skeptics movement in the UK and America, with people like PZ Myers and so on, seems to have just been completely taken in by it. You know, sure, but it is as you say, it's a religion and they literally do believe that sex is changing and stuff like that. You know, it seems, why do you think groups like them have had trouble dealing with this stuff?

You're asking me that question and I'm thinking, actually I just watched a documentary about John of God last night. What's John of God? John of God was this Brazilian faith healer guy who was like raping little girls and women on the one hand and healing people on the other. And I was watching this documentary about him and I'm thinking, like the protection that he got from people around him, it was not in anybody's interest to come to grips with what was going on right in front of them. Right. And so to some extent, what we're seeing in say, like with Amy Chaliner for example, isn't that normal for religions? Isn't it actually normal for the Catholic Church to have a priest problem? Isn't it normal for the Sovereign Baptist Conference here in the United States to have issues with, you know, they're having sort of a, well they're not Catholic, but they're having kind of a pastor issue now of reporting about all sorts of horrible sex crimes and shenanigans taking place over the years. Yes, this feels sort of normal actually.

Yeah, I'll tell you a story. Your people will like this. I was over here at Netroots Nation in 2018. I was doing a bunch of different stuff, but Netroots Nation is a progressive activists conference, huge conference. And on the first day of the conference, I go to the morning reproductive rights panel, and there are two women there talking about pronouns. Roe v. Wade is under threat like never before in my lifetime. What's going on? Pronouns and hormones are gonna save us. And then they're done, and then this six-foot-tall black trans woman starts to do a Sojourner Truth speech about 'Ain't I a Woman?' And you know, 'Reproductive rights are in my interest because stem cells and uterus transplants, well I might need an abortion one day.' Oh great, now men can have abortions. Yeah. So I got the hell out of there. And also, the further and further it travels away from women's health and women's rights, the easier it is for the right to oppose it. The right way to say, 'Well, this is obviously crazy, we're gonna crack down on it.'

Okay, great. Well, that's all right. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, we need to. We'll show you how they can drink. It's quite...

Thank you. All right, see you soon.