Wtf? He is blaming Dave?
He CAME TO THE SHOW WITH A WEAPON!
How was he triggered?
He triggered himself
By that logic if he goes to a movie and doesn't like the actor or a scene triggers him, he can pull out a weapon and attack the viewing audience?
New Dave Chappelle Special” The Closer” October 5th
- Thread starter REDLINE
- Start date
Wtf? He is blaming Dave?
He CAME TO THE SHOW WITH A WEAPON!
How was he triggered?
He triggered himself
By that logic if he goes to a movie and doesn't like the actor or a scene triggers him, he can pull out a weapon and attack the viewing audience?
Caitlyn Jenner: ‘Everybody thinks they’re trans’
Caitlyn Jenner has an interesting perspective on the popularity of being a transgender. In a new episode of “The Pivot Podcast,” the former Olympic athlete and failed Republican guberna…
www.nydailynews.com
@ViCiouS
Finally saw this. It was entertaining but not that funny. Only really laughed during the beyond vagina part. And not one lie told about the lgbt. Don't know why they're so upset about it.
when you get a chance read some of the reviews from the fam on here
I think you will find that most agree with you
@ViCiouS
variety.com
deadline.com
Netflix Releases Dave Chappelle’s Speech Slamming Transphobic Joke Critics at Alma Mater
Netflix has released a speech from Dave Chappelle, which sees the comedian defend his recent use of transphobic jokes in his material.
variety.com
Dave Chappelle’s ‘What’s In A Name’ Quietly Drops On Netflix, Taken From School Speech
Dave Chappelle's 'What's In A Name' Quietly Drops On Netflix, Taken From School Speech
deadline.com
Dave is the only reason I don't pirate Netflix...@ViCiouS
Netflix Releases Dave Chappelle’s Speech Slamming Transphobic Joke Critics at Alma Mater
Netflix has released a speech from Dave Chappelle, which sees the comedian defend his recent use of transphobic jokes in his material.
Dave Chappelle’s ‘What’s In A Name’ Quietly Drops On Netflix, Taken From School Speech
Dave Chappelle's 'What's In A Name' Quietly Drops On Netflix, Taken From School Speech
I listened to Dave's speech in it's entirety. The part that is conveniently left out by Variety, HuffPost, etc. is that he was hurt from hearing the same canned talking points from the LBGT, ETC org spoken by some students and not their original words of expression.
That's the part that hurt him.
^^^^
Several SNL writers will reportedly sit out Dave Chappelle-hosted show
Chappelle, known in recent years for unapologetically transphobic comedy, is set to host Saturday Night Live on November 12 alongside musical guest Black Star
www.avclub.com
@22:00
@44:00
Cypher taking about preparing with Chappelle in London for weeks to perfect that opening SNL Monologue
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Trans activists, comedians grapple with Dave Chapelle's 'complicated' Netflix special
The comedian was no holds barred in his latest Netflix special, and some comics say that's a good thing.www.yahoo.com
Trans activists, comedians grapple with Dave Chapelle's 'complicated' Netflix special
David Artavia
Tue, October 12, 2021, 5:43 PM·11 min read
In this article:
Dave Chappelle
American comedian
Dave Chappelle is in hot water after making what some are calling "insensitive" jokes about trans people in his latest special. But others have come to his defense. (Photo: Stacy Revere/Getty Images)
It’s been a tumultuous week for comedian Dave Chappelle, whose release of his latest Netflix special, The Closer, didn't land as smoothly as some may have hoped.
The sixth and final special in the comedian’s multi-million dollar deal with the streaming giant, which was released globally on Oct. 5, was met with a slew of backlash from queer activists and allies who argued that his jokes about the LGBTQ community were incendiary, disrespectful and dangerous, especially for transgender women of color.
What happened?
During the special, Chappelle touched on several hot-button issues including DaBaby’s recent off-base comments about HIV, J.K. Rowling’s controversial anti-trans statements in 2019, cancel culture as a whole and his personal experience with the trans community — including the loss of a dear friend who died by suicide after being bullied online for defending him.
“You know a lot of the LGBTQ community doesn’t know DaBaby’s history, he’s a wild guy,” Chappelle said in the special. “He once shot a n****… and killed him — in Walmart. Oh, this is true, Google it. DaBaby shot and killed a n**** in Walmart in North Carolina. Nothing bad happened to his career. Do you see where I am going with this? In our country, you can shoot and kill a n**** but you better not hurt a gay person’s feelings.”
For context, DaBaby fueled HIV misinformation onstage by suggesting it was a “deadly sexually transmitted disease” that will make you “die in two, three weeks,” which is anything but true. In fact, people living with HIV live long, healthy lives and cannot transmit the virus to others so long as their viral load is suppressed. Following his comments, the rapper was bombarded by critics and has since apologized.
“Remember, taking a man’s livelihood is akin to killing him. I’m begging you, please do not abort DaBaby,” Chappelle later quipped in The Closer.
Cancel culture was also a recurring theme throughout the special. When discussing the backlash against Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who has been under scrutiny by trans activists following comments she made about gender identity that were viewed as divisive and triggering for trans women, Chappelle was no-holds barred.
“They started calling her a TERF,” Chappelle said of the acronym for a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, or a feminist who believes that biological sex determines gender, which contradicts the argument trans and nonbinary activists have made to affirm their existence — that gender identity is more complex and nuanced than one’s biological sex.
“I didn’t even know what the f*** [TERF] was, but I know that trans people make up words to win arguments,” Chappelle said onstage. “I’m team TERF. I agree. I agree, man. Gender is a fact... Every human being in this room, every human being on earth had to pass through the legs of a woman to be on earth. That is a fact.”
Chappelle’s comments were unwelcomed by some trans activists and allies, including some at Netflix, who criticized the streaming platform for publishing content they deemed was harmful to their community.
Last week, Terra Field, a queer/trans senior software engineer at Netflix, called out Chappelle on Twitter, arguing that his jokes have real-life ramifications.
“Promoting TERF ideology (which is what we did by giving it a platform yesterday) directly harms trans people, it is not some neutral act,” Field wrote. “This is not an argument with two sides. It is an argument with trans people who want to be alive and people who don't want us to be.”
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Dave Chappelle’s Netflix Special criticized by GLAAD for 'ridiculing trans people’
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Netflix's response
Days later, it was reported that Netflix allegedly suspended three employees — including Field — for reportedly “crashing a meeting of its top executives” in protest. The company later denied that the employees were suspended for tweeting about the special but rather for “attending a recent leadership meeting without proper clearance,” according to reports, telling the Los Angeles Times, "Our employees are encouraged to disagree openly and we support their right to do so."
In the wake of the controversy, Netflix's co-CEO Ted Sarandos sent out a memo siding with the comedian in defense of creative freedom, writing, "Chappelle is one of the most popular stand-up comedians today, and we have a long standing deal with him," adding of internal concerns, "As with our other talent, we work hard to support their creative freedom — even though this means there will always be content on Netflix some people believe is harmful."
'Now the victims have become the bullies'
Jaclyn Moore, showrunner of Netflix’s Dear White People, and a trans woman, called for a boycott of Netflix over the insensitive jokes, telling Variety that while she “never loved Dave’s trans material before,” it was the “first time I felt like, ‘Oh, people are laughing at this joke and they’re agreeing that it’s absurd to call me a woman.’”
Trans activists are making their voices heard, too. Raquel Willis, a Black trans activist, writer and thought leader, says that Chappelle’s views are part of a larger “structural barrier” that keeps Black trans people from being “masters of their own narratives.”
“We see a lot of folks who are not within that demographic being allowed to be the mouthpiece,” Willis tells Yahoo Entertainment. “For all of the discussion around ‘intersectionality’ being a buzzword over the last decade, there seems to still be a fundamental lack of understanding around this concept. There continues to be a lot of ‘oppression Olympics’ when it comes to discussing race and gender, and so many other dimensions of identity and experience. And so you can have someone who in one way is marginalized — like Dave Chappelle as a Black man — be able to use that as a shield to further the marginalization of other people, i.e. the LGBTQ-plus community, and particularly the trans community.
“I think that that is one of the major failures of Chappelle’s work,” she adds. “There's this idea that you can just flatly equate gender and race, and kind of switch them out amongst these other conversations around ‘Who's the most oppressed?’ And it's actually a lot more complicated than that.”
Furthermore, Willis argues, despite the trans community becoming more “visible” in recent years, it doesn’t mean that real progress has been made — socially, culturally and politically — toward justice and equity. “People have this idea that we have won so many fights that we actually haven’t,” she says. “Winning over more visibility does not mean that we actually have as authentic representation out in the world as people think."
Meanwhile, Flame Monroe, a Black trans standup comic who’s been working for nearly two decades, tells Yahoo Entertainment, “I see all facets of the Chappelle controversy. As a comedian, I don't want to be censored. As a trans woman, I want to be treated fairly in this country. And as a Black person, I want the equal rights that we've been promised. But I'm a fair person. I see the whole world and not half of the world.”
Monroe continues, “The safest place for comics to be is on a stage with a microphone and a willing audience. If you start censoring [comics], you're going to miss out on so many things. A comedian’s job is not only to make you critically think, but it's also to talk about things that make you uncomfortable, that are happening in the world — you may not be able to say it because you might lose your job. But my job is to bring information to you. My job is to bring it to the light.”
Other comedians, such as Damon Wayans agree, recently telling TMZ that Chappelle “freed the slaves,” referring to comedians. “We were slaves to PC culture and he just, you know — as an artist he’s Van Gogh. He cut his ear off. He’s trying to tell us it’s OK.”
It's complicated
To that point, Chappelle spoke directly to the LGBTQ community at the end of his set. “I’m not telling another joke about you until we are both sure that we are laughing together,” Chappelle said. “I’m telling you this is done. I’m done talking about it. All I ask from your community, with all humility, will you please stop punching down on my people?”
Monroe argues that even within the LGBTQ community, “context and research” are often missing when comedians make certain jokes, leading to a useless “tug of war” over who’s right and wrong.
“It is hypocrisy. Now the victims have become the bullies,” she says. “The LGBTQIA community keeps asking for inclusion — 'see us, accept us' — but not in our own community. The tug of war is not with us and them. The tug of war is in our own community.
“The rainbow flag is beautiful in the front but look at the back of it,” Monroe points out. “There are cracks, potholes, racism, ageism, classism, sexism, right there in the community. We can't ask to be repaired outside of our community when we won't fix what's going on in our own community, which is why we keep lashing out at everybody else who doesn’t speak like us.
“As a transgender person, he didn't say anything that was a lie,” she adds, explaining that while online critics “went after” his jokes, “no one pointed out his heartbreak” over the loss of his friend, Daphne Dwarman.
Later in the special, Chappelle gave a touching tribute to Dwarman, a young trans comic who he described as “the coolest person I ever met.” Soon after they met, he asked Dwarman to be the opening act for his shows each time he stopped in San Francisco. It was an opportunity of a lifetime for Dwarman, though her first night was anything but a showstopper. “This b**** bombed for 45 minutes straight,” Chappelle quipped in the special.
Regardless, their friendship continued to grow, and eventually Dwarman “blew the roof off the place," he acknowledged. Even when the trans community “dragged” him on Twitter over distasteful jokes from his prior special, Sticks and Stones, Dwarman rose up to defend him by acknowledging their friendship and the huge risk he took in hiring her.
“The hardest thing for a person to do is go against their tribe if they disagree with their tribe, but Daphne did that for me,” he said of Dwarman, who eventually became a target on Twitter for defending the comic.
Days later, Dwarman died by suicide. “My heart was broken,” Chappelle recalled of hearing the news of her death. “I don’t know what was going on in her life but I bet dragging her [on Twitter] didn’t help. I was very angry at [trans activists]. I was very angry at her.”
Chappelle would later start a fund to support Dwarman's daughter, which Dwarman's family confirmed. “Empathy is not gay. Empathy is not Black. Empathy is bisexual. It must go both ways,” he said in the special. “And I don’t know what the trans community did for her but I don’t care, because I feel like she wasn’t their tribe, she was mine. She was a comedian in her soul.”
While Dwarman’s story is indeed heartbreaking, Willis argues that it shouldn’t be considered “evidence that [Chappelle] understands the trans experience enough to be an authority on us to share with the world.”
Monroe, who’s had a ring of successful Netflix specials including Tiffany Haddish’s They Ready and the series Netflix Is a Joke, reiterates that comedy is meant to push boundaries because its purpose is to show that we’re more alike than we are different. “We all go through the same thing," she says. "And that's what Dave Chappelle said in his special."
John’s known to do coke and it’s cool, Dave talks about women with dicks and they’re upset!
You can’t win with those fuckers!
Why Female Celebs Could Never Get Away With Pulling a John Mulaney
The comedian’s savvy comeback special is an uncomfortable reminder that famous women have fared far worse under public scrutiny of their substance use.
Can copy and paste cuz the article is subscriptionWhy Female Celebs Could Never Get Away With Pulling a John Mulaney
The comedian’s savvy comeback special is an uncomfortable reminder that famous women have fared far worse under public scrutiny of their substance use.www.thedailybeast.com
Comedy
John Mulaney, ‘Baby J,’ and the Respectability Politics of Addiction
‘LIKABILITY IS A JAIL’
The comedian’s savvy comeback special is an uncomfortable reminder that famous women have fared far worse under public scrutiny of their substance use.
Izzy Ampil
Updated Apr. 30, 2023 3:54AM ET / Published Apr. 27, 2023 4:32AM ET
Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty
Early in Baby J, John Mulaney’s first stand-up special in five years, released on Netflix this Tuesday, the comedian addresses his long absence from the industry in sing-song. Nearly three years after a very public stint in rehab and subsequent divorce, he croons, “now [my] reputation is…different!” He riffs that former fans have already switched allegiances to “less problematic” comedians like Bo Burnham, and he finishes with a flourish: “Likability is a jail!”
That line hangs over the rest of the show, because he’s right: Celebrities endure massive pressure to maintain their public image while navigating private problems, and it is an undoubtedly burdensome task. And yet the success of Mulaney’s comeback special depends deeply on his likability. More bluntly, it depends on his respectability, his status as someone who can be trusted to reenter society. If likability is a jail, it’s not one Mulaney is ready to leave behind quite yet; it’s one he must burrow further into in order to reclaim his cultural cachet.
Throughout Baby J, as he walks audiences through challenging subject matter—the night of his intervention in December 2020, his first week of getting sober, and his various convoluted plots to obtain drugs, among other things—Mulaney brings an attitude of, “Aw shucks, wasn’t I being crazy?” Recalling the night of his intervention, when he decided to get a haircut from the stylists at Saturday Night Live, he jokes about how they accommodated his unreasonable ask: “You know… when a junkie walks into your office and asks for a haircut, and you’re like, ‘Eh, it’d be faster to cut the hair?’”
It’s his most comfortable mode throughout the special: chuckling affably about the poor judgment he once exhibited. The show culminates in Mulaney’s dramatic reading of a GQ interview he gave three days before his intervention, which he has “absolutely no memory of giving.” He plays the GQ interviewer as a bewildered professional, and himself as a raging lunatic, braying out unrelated sentences while holding the mic stand askew. His past self is more like a character than a memory, portrayed in goofy voices and exaggerated body language, thoroughly distanced from Mulaney’s sober, present self.
It’s a smart move. Mulaney is reasserting control over his image by redefining the most tumultuous period of his public life as a distant past that is as shocking to him as it is to anyone else. He is putting an end to voyeuristic speculation about the state of his health by offering a definitive final word: Yes, he made mistakes, but he’s better now, and look how lucid he is! It’s all incredibly smooth and thoroughly crafted; watch his extended interview with Seth Meyers from 2021, and you’ll see how long many of these jokes have been in the works.
Because Mulaney is indeed so likable, it’s tempting to attribute the success of Baby J to his precisely honed craft and obvious intelligence as a comedian. Yet very few famous people are afforded such a gracious opportunity to bounce back from a public reckoning with substance abuse. Watching Mulaney, it’s hard not to think of the famous women whose public breakdowns no one has let them forget, especially those raised into adolescent stardom: Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Amanda Bynes come to mind, among other women whose early collisions with fame resulted in combustive media spectacles and heavy scrutiny of their substance use and mental health.
Public perception of an individual’s substance use, like almost everything else, depends greatly on that individual’s demographic markers: race and class especially. Rich white people doing coke to sustain their hard-partying lifestyle has always been the most socially acceptable way to do drugs. Skim the Twitter reactions to The Cut’s recent history of New York “It” girls, and you’ll find plenty of people joking that the list is just skinny white girls who do coke. Mulaney, a Georgetown-educated, SNL-bred millionaire son of a professor and an attorney, is exactly the kind of person who could return from rehab and keep scaling his career up. Historically, designer drug use tends not to detract from a rich person’s respectability.
When he dubs himself a “junkie,” he’s relying on a potent dramatic irony. Dressed in an expensive suit, presiding over the storied stage of Boston’s Symphony Hall, he exists at a safe remove from the threatening, unlikable connotations of drug use: poverty, violence. The title of the special comes from a running gag, in which he says, “They call me Baby J out on these streets.” Again, the bit relies on the irony of his status: Of course this prim white guy grew up far removed from the worlds of gangs and cartels. Even his most “obnoxious” story, a saga about buying and pawning a $12,000 Rolex watch, is a reminder that Mulaney’s class status is aspirational, that he participated in the drug economy as a privileged consumer, never a dealer, never grimily entangled in the intergenerational cycles of poverty that pressure people into seeking the lucrative opportunity of selling drugs.
But even among rich white celebrities, age and gender change the way we perceive and respond to people’s histories of substance use and abuse. Famous women’s public struggles with addiction and mental health are both more likely to be treated as jokes and less likely to fade from their reputation.
The 2007 incident when Britney Spears shaved her head has been preserved in memes, shirts, and other souvenirs ever since; this precarious personal moment for the pop star made her into a public figure people felt free to make fun of. More than a decade after the incident, her off-kilter Instagram posts became fodder for parody and speculation about her mental health. Even after robust reporting on her entry into a conservatorship controlled by her father, and a monthslong push by #FreeBritney fans to reinstate the pop star’s autonomy, she hasn’t been able to reestablish herself in the public eye as an able adult whose life has been shaped and challenged by mega fame. Instead, she remains fair game for cheap laughs.
Part of the problem is that Spears—like other famous women in similar positions—had her public breakdown thoroughly photographed. It’s hard to combat the power of a photograph, and the privacy of famous women has always come second to the possibility of profiting off of their image. Spears’ half-shaved head, Lindsay Lohan’s mugshots, Amanda Bynes in a rumpled blonde wig at her courthouse appearance, Amy Winehouse stumbling on stage, Cara Delevigne barefoot at the airport: All of these images have fueled public fascination with the respective stars’ substance use, puncturing the celebrities’ reputations more gravely than a piece of tabloid gossip ever could.
Photographic evidence of Mulaney’s erratic behavior has never circulated—whether that is because none exists or because he has a diligent publicity team, it’s hard to say—and that has certainly made it easier for him to hold his substance use at a clear remove from his current life. But compromising photos of famous men have never been as sought-after as compromising photos of famous women.
From leaked nudes to pornographic deep fakes, people seek to possess and control images of famous women, to deprive them of privacy and dignity; whereas even famous men’s mugshots—Robert Downey Jr., Justin Bieber, Bruno Mars, Shia Labeouf all have mugshots from arrests on drug or alcohol charges—tend to be treated more like fun facts than reputation ruiners. The tabloid fixation with photographing women in their most exposed moments of grappling with substance use is a natural extension of more deeply rooted impulses to treat women’s images as commodities and their looks as metrics of their worth.
That Mulaney’s recovery has been unmarred by the distribution of cruel photographs is a lucky gift, but it’s not really a coincidence. He gets to stage a successful comeback because he is exactly the kind of celebrity to whom audiences are most likely to extend forgiveness: a mild-mannered rich white guy, well-groomed and seemingly trustworthy. He’s also a gifted comedian, and it makes Baby J a funny, compelling watch. But in some ways, that hardly seems to matter. Spears is a fantastic pop star, and Lohan and Bynes have always been deft actors. Their far less compassionate treatment in the public eye is not a function of their talent but their vulnerability as young women, all too readily judged for losing control.
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How Joseph Dispenza Seduced America With Pseudoscience
SPIN DOCTOR
Maria Shriver, Russell Brand, Maria Menounos, and Ana de Armas are among his devotees. But is he perverting science for popularity?
Emily Shugerman
Senior Reporter
Updated Apr. 30, 2023 2:45AM ET / Published Apr. 29, 2023 11:32PM ET
Photo Illustration by Luis Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty Images and official_drjoedispenza/TikTok
Joe Dispenza wants you to breathe. He wants you to relax. He wants you to focus on the space between your ears. He wants you to focus the space beyond the space between your ears. He wants you to open your heart.
C’mon! Dispenza says. C’mon! Open your heart!
Can you do it? Can you move into a new state of being? Can you be defined by a vision of the future instead of the memories of the past? Can you let the thought become the experience and let the experience create the emotion and teach your body emotionally how that future feels now?
Good. The doctor will see you now.
In a world in which “self-care” is sacrosanct, in which coffee shops sell crystals and tech bros microdose mushrooms and self-help-author-slash-spiritual-leader Marianne Williamson ran for president, it can be hard for a single New-Age guru to rise above the rest. Joe Dispenza has done that.
The 61-year-old New Jersey-born chiropractor with a striking resemblance to Wallace Shawn and a voice like your Italian uncle after inhaling helium has in recent months become the dominant spiritual leader of impressionable young women everywhere. His meditations have been translated into eight languages, his $2,299 retreats sell out in days. His book, You Are the Placebo, is a New York Times bestseller. And he is alllll over TikTok.
“Dr. Joe,” as he calls himself, preaches a fairly standard combination of mindfulness mixed with manifestation mixed with something he claims is quantum physics but definitely is not. But something about him has a chokehold on the kind of young, millennial influencer class that craves spiritual guidance and Insta-ready mantras. It could be his paternal countenance; it could be his professed scientific credentials. Or it could be something much more troubling: the fact that he markets his meditations as cures for deadly diseases.
I found Dispenza through a fitness influencer I follow—ostensibly for her workouts but, if we’re being honest, mainly for her abs. She started posting about Dispenza a few months ago, claiming his meditations had completely restored her gut health. When I looked him up, I noticed that almost every fitness influencer, yoga guru, recipe creator, and Instagram model I followed followed him too. So did 2.5 million other people.
Maria Shriver follows Dispenza; so do Russell Brand, Maria Menounos, and Ana de Armas. He does not have a TikTok, but he has managed to attain Andrew Tate-levels of omnipresence on the app, without the Tate-level misogyny or human trafficking arrests. “Warning!” reads the text on one representative video, over footage of Dispenza’s book Becoming Supernatural. “Do not read this book until you are ready for your whole life to change.” It has nearly 14,000 likes.
Jordan Younger, the absurdly popular lifestyle blogger who goes by the name “The Balanced Blonde” and posts largely about her matcha lattes and supplement routine, recommends Dispenza to all her followers. Beauty guru Michelle Phan swears by him. Dispenza even got a shout-out in Goop, where the founder of a “plant-based meal delivery system” recommended his book along with her “Detox Lemonade” and an $84 face cleanser. He has appeared on podcasts including On Purpose With Jay Shetty (1.06 million subscribers on YouTube), the Marie Forleo Podcast (805,000 subscribers), and the in-house Goop podcast. If The Oprah Winfrey Show were still around, he would 1,000 percent have been on that, too.
Many of these followers say Dispenza changed their mindset and outlook on life. Commenters on Instagram call him “life changing, “inspiring,” and “brilliant,” and say he helped cure their anxiety, depression, and even eating disorders. (“I’m creating my reality with every thought!” one ”spiritual business co-creator” commented recently. “So excited for the shift we’re making on this planet.”) Bloggers claim his meditations gave them an “incredible self-love and a deep inner peace,” and made them a “completely different person.” Menounos claims Dispenza’s online course healed her anxiety in three days.
“I went to the weeklong [retreat] and life completely changed,” the former Today show correspondent gushed on her podcast. “I am a whole new person. I am completely new.”
Others, however, say something more serious: that Dispenza’s methods changed their physical health. And that is where things get scary.
Photo Illustration by Luis Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty Images and official_drjoedispenza/TikTok, Marie Forleo/YouTube
Let’s start with Dispenza’s own story—or at least, what he claims it is. In 1986, Dispenza says, he was in a serious cycling accident that left him with six compressed vertebrae. Doctors told him he might never walk again and recommended spine surgery. Instead, Dispenza claims, he checked himself out of the hospital and dedicated himself to reconstructing his vertebrae with his mind. Within 10 weeks, he says, he was walking again. Within 12, he was back at the gym.Doctors couldn’t believe it; experts were blown away. “I made a deal with myself that if I was ever able to walk again I would spend the rest of my life studying the mind-body connection,” Dispenza said in a 2018 interview. “And I’ve been doing that ever since.” (Dispenza declined a detailed request for comment on this story.)
This is the core of Dispenza’s sales pitch: He used his mind to heal his body, and he can help you do it, too. His website contains no fewer than 40 taped testimonials of people claiming he cured their cancer or their multiple sclerosis or their infertility. Under a tab called “coherence healing,” the site boasts Dispenza and his disciples have “produced profound biological changes in multitudes of individuals around the world” and “observed hundreds of healings from a wide variety of health conditions.” According to a video posted on his website, a higher than average number of his followers suffer from conditions like cancer and autoimmune diseases.
In a 2020 interview with podcaster Aubrey Marcus, Dispenza bragged about bringing children onstage at his retreats to cure them of “really serious health conditions.” He claimed to have cured a 76-year-old woman of Parkinson’s. He said his treatments cured illness faster than chemotherapy and that “profound and prestigious universities” in the United States wanted to study his methods.
“[We’ve seen] tumors disappearing, people stepping out of wheelchairs, blind people seeing, deaf people hearing—crazy stuff,” he told Marcus. “This is biblical proportions stuff.”
In interviews and lectures, Dispenza often takes on the role of learned scientist, infusing every basic concept with overly academic language. (“Learning” becomes “forging new synaptic connections” and changing one’s behavior becomes “reorganizing circuits.”) In the Marcus interview, he claimed that meditating in the presence of others—combining “coherent fields,” as he called them—opens up “interference patterns of fractal geometry that are doors to dimensions.” (Peter Woit, a theoretical physicist at Columbia University, told The Daily Beast this was “almost spectacularly complete nonsense.”)
At his retreats, Dispenza assumes the rhythms of a faith healer, speaking in call-and-response and descending into the crowd to answer questions from afflicted audience members. He occasionally brings followers onstage to share the “miracles” they experienced at the workshops that day, such as a woman who claimed she regained her depth perception after decades of encephalitis. “She got a biological upgrade… and all she did was make up her mind to do it,” he told the audience.
In one particularly disturbing instance, Dispenza told a 44-year-old woman struggling with infertility that she wasn’t getting pregnant because she didn’t have “happy eggs.” The woman had already tried several rounds of fertility treatment, and wondered if it was worth the continued cost.
“The spirit is waiting for you to have happy eggs before you have a kid,” Dispenza told her, as her eyes filled with tears. “[The baby] doesn’t want to live in guilt, it wants to live in joy.”
“We’re going to help you,” he added, resting both hands on her shoulders. “You change the field, you change matter… You just need a little help.”
The audience erupted in applause.
To be clear, Joe Dispenza is not a medical doctor. He is a chiropractor. A chiropractor is a doctor of chiropractic care the way a dentist is a doctor of dentistry: both obtained a postgraduate degree; neither went to medical school. You would go to a dentist to cure your gum disease, but not to cure cancer. You probably shouldn’t ask your chiropractor to, either.
Dispenza is also not a neuroscientist, or a physicist, or many of the other things people say he is online. According to a college registrar, he completed 1.5 years of college at Rutgers University before transferring to Evergreen, an alternative college in Washington with no grades, few major requirements, and a 99 percent acceptance rate. (Rutgers makes frequent appearances in his online bios; Evergreen does not.)
He went on to earn his chiropractic license from Life University, a four-year institution in Georgia founded on the philosophy of “vitalism”—the idea that the universe is “self-conscious” and humans are “self-healing.” Besides Dispenza, Life’s most famous graduate may be Carla Sands, the socialite and businesswoman who served as Trump’s ambassador to Denmark. The school has been disciplined by the Council on Chiropractic Education at least three times, including in 2002, when it lost its accreditation for allegedly failing to teach students when to refer patients to a medical doctor. (A federal judge later retroactively restored its accreditation and placed it on probation.)
Dispenza’s website claims he attained post-graduate training in the fields of “neuroscience and neuroplasticity, quantitative electroencephalogram (QEEG) measurements, epigenetics, mind-body medicine, and brain/heart coherence.” Quantum University, an online-only holistic medicine school where Dispenza teaches, lists him as a PhD, though The Daily Beast could find no evidence that he ever earned such a title. (Quantum University did not respond to a request for comment.)
Instead, for much of the early 2000s, Dispenza served as an “appointed teacher” at Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment, a New Age spiritual sect in Yelm, Washington, that the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as a cult. The sect is led by J.Z. Knight, a former cable TV entrepreneur who claims a 35,000-year-old warrior called Ramtha the Enlightened One came to her in her kitchen in 1977 and has been speaking through her ever since. When she is not (allegedly) making racist or homophobic statements, Knight preaches that people can choose their own realities using only their minds.
Dispenza appears to have become a teacher for the sect as early as 2001, according to an SF Gate article that mentions him teaching a brain chemistry class for the school’s adherents. He was central enough by 2004 to feature in the group’s bizarre documentary What the Bleep Do We Know!?, which has been described as a “mushy self-help manual for gullible people” and a “glitzy recruitment tool.” At some point, however, Dispenza and Knight had a disagreement that led to a lawsuit, and the chiropractor and the cult leader went their separate ways. Dispenza published his first book, Evolve Your Brain, in 2007.
Today, Dispenza often refers to himself as a “researcher,” claiming to have collected more than 18,000 brain scans and 10,000 heart-rate measurements from participants as part of his inquiry into the benefits of meditation. The “Research News & Updates” section of his website contains only four links, two on the same topic: a research project he conducted in partnership with Dr. Hemal Patel, an anesthesiologist at the University of California San Diego, on the effects of meditation on preventing COVID-19. Though the men called their discoveries “astounding” and “amazing,” their research paper on the subject—a pre-print version of which Dispenza’s site said would be ready by January 2022—has yet to materialize. (Patel told The Daily Beast the paper was “out for review” but that he had not heard back yet. He did not respond to repeated requests for a pre-print version of the paper.)
The last entry on the research page, about a “study” Dispenza ran on participants at one of his workshops, also promised a research paper that was never published. In fact, Dispenza has published only one peer-reviewed article in his 40-year career—a collaboration with researchers at two Australian universities that found a change in the brain waves of retreat participants when they were meditating versus when they were not.
Nicholas Van Dam, a professor at the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences who frequently studies meditation, noted that most of the research displayed on Dispenza’s website relies on case studies, which do not allow researchers to isolate variables and are generally considered the least robust form of scientific evidence.
“There’s so much stuff going on, people are doing so many different things that it’s hard to know what the active ingredient is,” Van Dam said. Was it the meditation that cured the cancer? Was it the acupuncture? Or was it the chemotherapy they were receiving? “There’s no verifying what actually caused the outcome,” Van Dam said. “And that’s the appeal of these testimonial or case examples.”
There’s nothing wrong with using case studies as an entry point to researching a subject, Van Dam said. The problem is using these case studies as “proof” that a method works or combining them with pseudoscientific buzzwords—“energy fields,” “heart coherence,” “mystical experiences”—that make the results sound more promising.
“He’s interspersing science with new age spirituality and using a lot of terms very loosely,” Van Dam said. “He’s also extrapolating scientific research well beyond things to which it can speak.”
“And that’s part of the appeal to the public,’ he added. “It sounds like it’s science, it sounds like scientific evidence, but it’s not.”
Stacey Kelsey started doing Dispenza’s meditations in late 2021, after a client asked if she’d accompany her to one of his retreats. A trained hypnotherapist, tarot reader, and intuitive counselor whom Goop once described as a “one-stop spiritual shop,” Kelsey was deeply familiar with self-help and spirituality. “I’m a spiritual intuitive, I’ve talked with dead people,” she told The Daily Beast. “I’ve done the woo-woo stuff.”
But Dispenza was different.
In the months leading up to the retreat, Kelsey started meditating every day, focusing on a future self who had more money. (Dispenza claims that by changing your mindset to one of “abundance” you can attract more money into your life.) She bought five of Dispenza’s meditation courses and attended his monthly calls. She started waking up at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. to meditate, because that was when Dispenza said it was most effective. She even swore off watching true crime shows, because Dispenza said the negative imagery could lead to negative emotions. “You become hypervigilant,” she said. “Everything feels like it has meaning.”
Kelsey attended the retreat in December and found it “nice,” if a little disorganized. There were thousands of people there, and Dispenza often asked them to participate in “experiments,” like seeing if they could “heal” people who weren’t physically present. The experiments were so poorly run she wondered whether they could have any scientific value. “He’s trying to be a scientist in a non-scientific environment,” she said. “I just thought, ‘Well that was a waste of my time.’”
Still, Kelsey was hooked on Dispenza’s promise that she could create her own reality—that by changing her thoughts and feelings, her “energy,” from negative to positive, she could attract more positive experiences into her life. When she didn’t see results, she blamed herself for not working hard enough, for letting too many negative thoughts slip into her consciousness. That was a theme with the Dispenza crowd, she said: There was no room for questioning whether the method was flawed or didn’t work. Anyone who didn’t see success simply wasn’t a true believer.
After six months of this, Kelsey said, her finances hadn’t budged—but her mental health had significantly deteriorated.
“I felt more depressed than ever, because it wasn’t working,” she said. “So then I was gaslighting myself like, ‘OK this isn’t working, there must be something wrong with me.’”
“I was constantly afraid I didn’t do the meditation right,” she added. “Or if I did the meditation and I felt depressed that day… then it was my fault, [because] I should know how to raise my vibration.”
Around this time, Kelsey started seeing TikToks from other women who took issue with Dispenza’s methods—mainly women of color and disabled women who felt his claims about “creating your own reality” dismissed their very real, very painful experiences of hardship and discrimination. She started to question why most of the influencers she saw pushing his methods were young, beautiful, able-bodied white women. She started to have doubts.
Then, in October, Kelsey’s mother was hospitalized and started suffering from paranoid delusions.
“That’s when it all started breaking down,” she said. “Because I was like, ‘I did not manifest this. I did not manifest my mom having a mental breakdown… This is not me.’”
Kelsey slowly stopped practicing the meditations. She began accepting the ways in which her brain was not perfect (her PTSD, her clinical depression), and practiced sitting with negative emotions, rather than pushing them aside. The process was painful—“I really questioned my spirituality, really questioned my reality,” she said—but day by day, she found herself starting to feel better.
Today, she says, she feels happier than she ever felt when using Dispenza’s methods.
“I have this feeling of self-acceptance instead of hyper self-management,” she said. “I feel like I just let myself off the hook.”
“The word ‘liberation’ is the first thing that comes to mind,” she added. “I don’t feel so restricted and I feel happier.”
Plus, she said, her finances are better, too.
Brienne Michelle/Courtesy Stacey Kelsey
The combination of climate change, the COVID pandemic, and the Trump presidency has spurred a heightened worship of science on the left. Herbs and elixirs have been rebranded as “plant medicine” and algae-eating yoga devotees stick “Science Is Real” signs in their front yards.Dispenza is a perfect blend of these, a new-age guru who uses the language of science to make his mysticism seem slightly more mainstream. He openly acknowledges the marketability of this intersection in the Marcus interview, observing that talking about science “creates community,” while talking about culture, tradition, and spirituality “divides an audience.” Science, he says, has become “the contemporary language of mysticism.”
But what makes Dispenza’s approach even more appealing is his ability to go beyond science, to use the language of physicists and neurobiologists to make grand claims about immortality and alternate dimensions and miracle cures that someone with a firm grasp on the science would never claim.
The promise of something outside the modern medical system is especially attractive to women, whose medical conditions go disproportionately undiagnosed and untreated. Of the 40 testimonials on Dispenza’s website, 30 are from women, many of whom claim they found him after striking out with traditional doctors. In a survey of Dispenza’s followers he conducted over the pandemic, 8.6 percent of respondents identified as having an autoimmune disease and nearly 3 percent suffered from a neurological disease. A full 80 percent were women.
When I told a coworker that I was working on this story, she sheepishly admitted she had a Dispenza book on her shelf. She, like the influencer I follow, was struggling with digestive issues so severe she’d lost a noticeable amount of weight. No one—not her primary care physician, not her gastroenterologist, not even a functional medicine doctor—had been able to tell her why. She’d bought the Dispenza book in a moment of weakness. “I wanted to believe I could heal my gut with my thoughts,” she told me.
Scrolling through the comments on Dispenza’s Instagram page, even I felt a glimmer of hope when I saw someone claiming she’d cured her scoliosis with his methods. I suffer from severe scoliosis, the standard cure for which is having a surgeon break your spine and insert a metal rod in its place. Needless to say, I understood the desire for alternative solutions.
Kelsey, now several months out of the Dispenza rabbit hole, said this was one of the hardest parts of reintegrating into normal life: accepting that the miracle cures, the quick fixes, and the snake oil wouldn’t solve her very real problems.
“It’s a way of dissociating from the reality we live in,” she said of Dispenza’s work. “But we have to live in this reality. It’s happening.”
Emily Shugerman
Senior Reporter
@eshugermanEmily.Shugerman@thedailybeast.com
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