Latest / The Joe Rogan Recap / Rachel Wilson (2026) - The CIA, Eugenics, and Occult Feminism

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Rachel Wilson (2026) - The CIA, Eugenics, and Occult Feminism · The Joe Rogan Recap

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Welcome to the Joe Rogan Recap and before we get going, please
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follow us right here on Spotify to make sure you get sight of
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our latest episodes in your feed.
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Today we are taking a deep dive into an absolutely massive,
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highly provocative and just completely alternative
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historical narrative. Yeah, it's a huge 1 today.
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It really is. Our entire source for this
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exploration is a single transcript.
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It's The Joe Rogan Experience episode 2460, featuring author
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Rachel Wilson, and she's discussing her incredibly
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controversial book Occult Feminism, The Secret History of
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Women's Liberation, right? And before we get into the weeds
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here, we really need to set some ground rules directly with you,
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our listener, definitely, because this source material
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contains highly charged, politically polarizing, and, you
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know, majorly revisionist claims about history, feminism, and
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gender roles. We want to state right out of
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the gate that we are strictly remaining impartial today.
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A. 100% we are not taking sides. Exactly.
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We are not endorsing, validating, or condemning the
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viewpoints of the author or the host of the source material.
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Our sole mission on this deep dive is to objectively report
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and explore the fascinating concepts contained within this
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text. Right, we just want to layout
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the architecture of the author's arguments so you can understand
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them for yourself. Yeah, we're just acting as your
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neutral guides through a very complex maze of ideas.
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OK, let's unpack. This Wilson score thesis
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completely inverts the narrative that pretty much all of us were
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taught in school. It really flips it on its head.
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It does. The traditional story frames
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feminism as this beautiful grass roots liberation movement.
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You know, women collectively waking up, locking arms and
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demanding equal rights. But according to Wilson, that is
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a complete myth. Right.
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Her book argues that the true history of women's liberation is
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actually this tangled dark web of economic CIA funding,
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eugenics, and even the occult. It is a sweeping conclusion, and
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to understand how she even arrived at a theory like this,
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you really have to look at her personal roots.
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The transcript details this right at the beginning.
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Yeah, she had a pretty intense upbringing.
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Right, Very intense. Wilson describes growing up torn
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between two entirely different realities.
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Her mother was a self-described Marxist feminist, OK, and her
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father was a staunchly conservative Rush Limbaugh
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listening Republican. Wow, so complete opposite ends
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of the spectrum. Completely.
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She actually shares this wild anecdote about them fighting so
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bitterly over the 1988 Bush Dukakis presidential election
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that they literally threatened to lock each other inside the
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House. Wait, what?
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To lock each other in. Yeah, just to cancel out each
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other's votes. That sounds like an incredibly
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chaotic environment to grow up in, so she's caught right in the
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middle of this intense ideological tug of war.
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How does she say that shaped her worldview?
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Well, she claims she saw her mother's emotionally
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unregulated, you know, constantly at war with the world
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and always feeling like she was robbed of her potential by
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society. Interesting.
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And her dad. Meanwhile, she viewed her father
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as a hard working, purpose driven business owner who just
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provided for the family. That specific childhood dynamic
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LED Wilson to completely reject modern feminist ideals.
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Even though she was kind of primed for that path.
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Right, exactly. She was pushed into all the
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gifted programs, given a full ride college scholarship, and
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pressured by everyone to become this independent boss babe and.
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She didn't do that. No, she.
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Walked away from all of it. She decided to get married at
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20, specifically seeking the traditional intact family life
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she felt she never had. So she makes a very personal
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pivot. But how does she extrapolate
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that personal choice into a massive economic theory about
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society? It happened when she had her
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first child. She was told she needed to get
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back to work immediately to be a productive member of society,
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but she sat down and looked at the actual system.
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What did she find? Well, she realized she was
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paying for childcare, paying for commuting, buying a professional
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wardrobe, and paying heavy taxes, all just to see her baby
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for maybe 2 hours a day. When you lay it out like that,
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it sounds exhausting. She concluded it was an
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incredibly inefficient, broken system.
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Prior to the 1970s, Wilson points out that only about 5% of
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mothers with school age children worked outside the home.
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Just 5%. That's a tiny fraction compared
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to today. Right back then, a single earner
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could comfortably support a large family, but when society
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pushed women into the workforce on mass, it effectively doubled
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the labor pool in the span of a couple of decades.
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Oh wow, so just strictly based on the basic economic laws of
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supply and demand, if you double the labor force overnight, you
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drastically devalue the cost of Labor?
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Exactly. She argues that doubling the
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labor force permanently stagnated men's wages.
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In her view, this didn't liberate women at.
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All it just changed the economic baseline.
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Yes, she claims at birth what we now call the two income trap.
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Families today don't have the luxury of choice.
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They now require 2 jobs just to survive the baseline cost of
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living. So if we boil all this down,
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what she's essentially arguing is that a social liberation
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movement was actually a massive economic restructuring in
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disguise. If we connect this to the bigger
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picture, Wilson is directly challenging the feminist concept
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of unpaid labor. Right, the idea that domestic
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work is unpaid exploitation. Exactly.
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Early feminists argued that women were enslaved by the
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unpaid labor of cooking, cleaning, and raising children
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at home. Wilson's counter argument is
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that women didn't actually escape that labor at all.
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What does she mean they still do it?
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She says they merely traded doing those tasks for their own
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families where they had autonomy to doing those exact same tasks
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for massive corporations. I see as early childhood
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educators, retail workers, housekeepers.
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Exactly. And the kicker?
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Now they pay taxes on that labor.
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Wow. In her framework, this economic
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shift was designed by progressives and Marxists who
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simply wanted to expand the taxable workforce and politicize
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women. That is a fascinating way to
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look at it, but let me play devil's advocate here.
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If this was really a calculated economic restructuring, how did
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the history books miss it? Why wouldn't we know about this?
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According to Wilson, we don't know about it because the
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history was intentionally rewritten.
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Rewritten by who? Well, the transcript states that
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in the late 1960s, Gender studies and Women's studies
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departments were suddenly created in universities, and
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allegedly this was with heavy funding from the Ford Foundation
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and the Rockefellers. So she's claiming corporate
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money funded these departments? For what purpose?
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Wilson claims these departments acted as APR branch.
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Their job was to create the modern narrative that women
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historically suffered under a universally oppressive
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patriarchy. So she sang academia, basically
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ran a marketing campaign for this new economic reality.
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Does she have any data to back that up?
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She points to research by a professor named Joseph Miller.
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He allegedly examined the 12 main textbooks used to teach
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women's history in these departments.
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What did he find? He's supposedly found that they
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intentionally left out massive, highly relevant chunks of the
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historical record. And the biggest secret they
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kept, according to Wilson, is highly counterintuitive.
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OK, what is it? She claims that most women in
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the 19th century actually opposed the right to vote.
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Wait, really? Most women opposed it.
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That's her claim, yes. That makes zero sense to a
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modern listener. Why on earth would the vast
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majority of women actively fight against their own
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enfranchisement and political voice?
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It's a great example of the fallacy of presentism, which is
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when we judge the past using today's cultural standards.
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Right, we assume they wanted what we want now.
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Exactly. Back in the 1800s, laws in
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places like New York included what were known as breadwinner
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laws. Breadwinner Laws.
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Yes, these laws held men exclusively legally and
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financially liable for their families.
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Women could not be thrown into debtors prison and their
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inheritances were legally shielded from their husband's
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deaths. Oh wow, so they had legal
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immunity in a way. Exactly.
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Women fear that if they gain total political equality, they
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would lose these absolute legal protections.
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So it was a financial calculation.
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Financial and physical. They also feared they might
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become subject to the military draft or mandatory jury duty,
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Which? Doesn't sound terrible today,
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but back. Then back then, jury duty meant
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being locked in a room hearing the gruesome details of violent
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crimes, which was considered highly inappropriate for women
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at the time. OK, when you explain the sheer
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terror of debtors prison, that context completely changes
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things. But is there actual proof that
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women felt this way in large numbers?
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Yes, the source details a very specific historical anecdote.
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There was a Massachusetts referendum where women were
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temporarily allowed to vote on whether or not they actually
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wanted suffrage on the ballot. Oh, a vote on the vote.
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Exactly. Yeah, thousands of women showed
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up, but a staggering 96% voted against it 90. 6%.
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Only 4% of the women who showed up actually wanted the right to
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vote. Just 4%.
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That completely undercuts the idea of a massive of grassroots
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uprising. It really does.
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Wilson claims that after that absolute disaster, famous pro
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suffrage leaders like Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady
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Stanton banned women from voting on the issue entirely.
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Because they knew they didn't have the popular support.
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Exactly. They knew they would lose.
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And Speaking of those famous leaders, the outline mentioned
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she goes after some of the big figureheads.
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Right? We're taught these women are
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flawless heroes, but Wilson paints a very different picture.
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She absolutely does. Take Victoria Woodhull for
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example. Right, she's a big name.
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The history of books present her as the first woman to run a
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major newspaper and a famous early feminist, but Wilson
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describes her as an outright scam artist, not a.
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Scam artist also. She allegedly travelled around
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selling fake cancer cures to dying people and was wanted by
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the law in four different states.
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Wow. OK, that's.
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Dark, it gets darker. Woodhull supposedly ran a
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prostitution ring for wealthy Wall Street gentlemen.
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You're kidding. Nope.
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And she used the women working for her as an illicit spy
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network to gather insider trading tips from these men in
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vulnerable moments. Wait, insider trading via a
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brothel? Exactly.
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She then passed those tips to the massive industrialist
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Cornelius Vanderbilt. That is insane.
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Did it actually work? Very well.
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When Vanderbilt made the modern equivalent of $26 million during
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the first Black Friday, the press asked him how he predicted
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the market so perfectly. What did he say?
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He famously claimed he consulted the spirits.
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Oh sure, the spirits. Right.
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But Wilson argues it wasn't spirits, It was Woodhull's
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intelligence network. It's this intersection of the
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unsavory, the illegal and the historical that Wilson says has
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been completely sanitized by modern academia to protect the
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movement's image. Here's where it gets really
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interesting, though. We pivot from Wall Street scams
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to something much heavier. Yes, the Malfusian population
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agenda and eugenics. Let's talk about Margaret
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Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood.
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What is Wilson claiming here? This is a heavy section for
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anyone not familiar. Malfusian Agenda refers to the
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theory by Thomas Malthus that human population growth will
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eventually outpace our food supply, leading to societal
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collapse. And people who believe that
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usually want population control. Exactly.
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Those who believe this often push for strict population
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control, which historically targets the poor or minority
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groups. Wilson claims Sanger was heavily
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funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and was deeply
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entrenched in the eugenics movement.
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So she wasn't just about healthcare.
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Not according to Wilson. She alleges Sanger's true goal
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wasn't empowering women with healthcare, but social hygiene,
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specifically lowering the birth rates of populations she viewed
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as inferior. That is a massive accusation to
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level against a historical icon. Does Wilson explain how Sanger
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convinced the public to go along with this if her motives were so
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sinister? Wilson asserts that Sanger's
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public narrative was built on outright fabrications.
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Sanger famously told a tragic story about a woman named Sadie
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Sacks. I think I've heard of that.
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Yeah, the story goes that Sadie allegedly died from a self
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induced abortion because male doctors refused to explain how
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reproduction worked. And Wilson says that didn't
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happen. Wilson dismisses this entirely,
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arguing the basic reproductive knowledge has been understood by
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women since the dawn of time. Furthermore, Sanger wrote a book
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claiming she had received thousands of letters from
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desperate young women. Begging for birth control,
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right? Right begging for birth control
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because their bodies were breaking down from non-stop
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pregnancies. And this is where Wilson did
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some of her own digging, correct?
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Yes, Wilson says she personally contacted the Margaret Sanger
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Papers Project. This is an archive that holds
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literally every scrap of paper Sanger ever touched.
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OK, Wilson asked to see these thousands of desperate letters
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to verify the historical record, and the archives only possess 3.
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3000. No, just three letters.
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Wait. Are you serious?
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Just three. According to Wilson's research,
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yes, just three. That is wild.
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Her conclusion is that Sanger fabricated the idea of this
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massive public outcry to manufacture consent for birth
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control clinics, basically hiding her eugenicist goals
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behind the guise of female empowerment.
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OK, so that's the medical and economic side of the theory, but
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the outline also mentions the CIA.
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Yes, it definitely does. How on earth does the
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intelligence community get involved in women's liberation?
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The narrative shifts here to Cold War geopolitics in the
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1960s and 70s. This is where Wilson introduces
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A bizarre claim about the famous feminist icon Gloria Steinem.
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Gloria Steinem, what's the claim?
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According to the source, Steinem was recruited straight out of
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Smith College by the CIA. The CIA recruited Gloria
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Steinem. That's the claim they allegedly
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created a fake grant called the Chester Bulls Fellowship.
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A fake grant to do what? To send her to India and to
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youth festivals in Eastern Europe.
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To use feminism as a weapon. A weapon against who?
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The goal was to promote Western liberal democracy against the
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Soviet Eastern Bloc. The CIA realized it's much
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easier to sneak female spies and propagandists across hostile
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borders under the unthreatening guise of promoting women's
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education. That is incredibly strategic.
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It gets crazier. Wilson notes that Steinem even
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went undercover at the Playboy Mansion as a Bunny, and that the
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CIA actually helped fund the launch of Misses magazine.
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So the argument is that the intelligence community actively
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weaponized feminism to create a new, radicalized, permanent
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voting bloc during the Cold War, shaping young women into the
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revolutionaries who viewed the traditional family unit as an
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oppressive capitalist construct. Exactly.
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It was a geopolitical strategy that scaled over into domestic
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culture. OK, so we've covered economics,
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eugenics, and the CIA, but we need to address the actual title
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of the book, Occult Feminism. Right, the occult connection.
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Where does the occult come into play?
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Well, if you look at the roots of these early movements, Wilson
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argues, you do not find traditional church going
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Christian women fighting for civil rights.
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You find spiritualism, seances and theosophy.
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Let's pause there for those who don't know, what is theosophy?
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Essentially, it's a mystical philosophical system that became
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popular in the late 19th century.
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It focuses on tapping into hidden esoteric knowledge and
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often explicitly rejects traditional Western religions
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like Christianity. Give me an example of how that
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showed up in the movement. For example, in 1895, Elizabeth
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Cady Stanton and her peers published a book called The
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Woman's Bible. In it, they explicitly rejected
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Christianity, claiming it was entirely made-up by men solely
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to oppress women. So they were trying to dismantle
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the Christian patriarchy on a spiritual level, not just a
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legal one. Exactly.
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Stanton openly embraced more New Age concepts like monism.
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Monism. Yeah, the idea that we must all
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return to a singular genderless 1.
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And the transcript mentions a Norwegian professor detailing
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Satanic feminism. Did these women actually worship
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the devil? Wilson clarifies that
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Luciferianism in this historical context isn't necessarily
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Hollywood style devil worship. You know, no pentagrams and
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animal sacrifices. OK, So what does it mean then?
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Instead, it's viewing Lucifer as a Promethean symbol.
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In esoteric traditions, Lucifer translates to Lightbringer.
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He is viewed as a rebel who offered humanity, enlightenment,
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intellect and the free will to reject the dogma of a tyrannical
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God. So it's more about rebellion and
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intellect. Right.
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It centers on secular humanism, the idea that you're your own
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God and your personal fulfillment supersedes any self
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sacrificial duties to a family, a husband, or a community.
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OK, philosophically I understand how that ties into a hyper
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individualistic movement, but is there a literal ritualistic
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occult connection here? Or is it all just metaphor?
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Oh, there is a literal connection.
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Really. Yeah.
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The transcript dives into the story of Jack Parsons and
17:01
Marjorie Cameron. Who were they?
17:03
Jack Parsons was a literal pioneer in rocketry.
17:07
He was one of the principal founders of the Jet Propulsion
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Laboratory at NASA. A NASA guy.
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But secretly, he was also a devoted, high-ranking follower
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of the infamous British occultist Aleister Crowley.
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Wait, the NASA rocket guy was an occultist?
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Yes, and after Parsons met Marjorie Cameron, who was this
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rebellious counterculture redhead, the two of them went
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out into the Mojave Desert. Doing what?
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Fueled by heavy hallucinogens like peyote, they engaged in
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weeks of what the source calls sex magic rituals.
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You cannot be serious. What were they trying to do?
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Their literal stated goal was to birth moon children.
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Moon Children. Yes, which they believe would
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usher in the Antichrist and destroy the old age of
17:48
Christianity. Wow.
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Now, Parsons eventually accidentally blew himself up in
17:52
his home laboratory. That took a.
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Turn it did, and after his death Cameron moved to the desert,
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started a cult, and actually became a massive counterculture
18:00
feminist icon in California the 1950s, 20s and 60s.
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Wait. The woman trying to birth the
18:05
Antichrist became a feminist icon.
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Yes, her artwork, her poetry and her persona essentially birthed
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the archetype of the cool, rebellious, unattached bad girl,
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Wilson argues. That specific archetype
18:20
completely dominates female pop culture today.
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That is objectively wild. I mean, doing sex magic in the
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desert to birth the Antichrist and then becoming a feminist
18:29
icon is a crazy trajectory. It's a huge leap, yeah.
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But Wilson doesn't just leave all this in the past, right?
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She uses all of this historical and occult analysis to diagnose
18:39
where society is today. And the picture she paints is
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pretty bleak. What's fascinating here is how
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she anchors her historical and occult claims to modern
18:48
sociological data. She cites a massive 2008 study
18:51
detailing the paradox of female happiness.
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The paradox of female happiness. What did it find?
18:56
Researchers compared data from the 1970s to the 2000s and found
18:59
something shocking. Despite decades of feminist
19:02
liberation, despite breaking glass ceilings and getting
19:04
immense social power, women globally reported being less
19:08
fulfilled, less content, significantly less happy than
19:11
they were before the movement became dominant.
19:13
So the data suggests that the liberation didn't actually lead
19:16
to happiness. How does she explain that
19:18
paradox? Wilson points directly to the
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fallout of tearing apart the traditional family unit.
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She looks at plummeting global birth rates, pointing to
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countries like South Korea that are facing literal population
19:30
collapse. Which is a huge issue right now.
19:33
Exactly. She also notes a staggering
19:36
statistic that 26% of American women are currently on at least
19:40
one psychiatric prescription drug to cope with modern life.
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Over 1/4 of American women, yes. And she leans heavily on
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statistics regarding fatherless homes.
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The transcript claims that children from homes without a
19:53
married biological father faces 70 to 85% higher risk for
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addiction, learning disabilities, homelessness.
20:00
And ending up in juvenile detention facilities.
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So if we synthesize all of this, her ultimate conclusion is that
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society gave women an immense amount of social and economic
20:08
power, but in the process stripped away the accountability
20:12
and the protective framework of the family.
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That is exactly her thesis. By convincing women that
20:16
motherhood and marriage are inherently oppressive, she
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argues, we've just left a generation of women isolated in
20:23
the corporate world, completely exhausted by the 2 income trap,
20:27
and fundamentally unhappy. You nailed it.
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That is her entire argument in a nutshell.
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So what does this all mean for you, the listener?
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The mission of this deep dive was to explore how a single
20:39
author has attempted to completely dismantle and invert
20:42
a historical narrative that most of the Western world accepts as
20:46
absolute fact. Whether you fundamentally agree
20:49
with Wilson's conclusions and see this as a hidden truth, or
20:52
you entirely reject her premise as cherry picked conspiracy, her
20:56
narrative is a master class in how economics, geopolitics,
21:00
intelligence, operations, and even fringe spirituality can be
21:03
woven together to challenge the status quo.
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It really forces you to think. It does.
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She forces you to look at the fabric of modern society and
21:11
question exactly who built it, who profits from it, and why.
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And, you know, this raises an important question, and it
21:17
brings us to a specific, almost hidden biological detail
21:21
mentioned in the text that we haven't touched on yet.
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What is it? Well, according to genetic
21:25
studies cited in the transcript, modern humans actually have
21:28
twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors.
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Twice as many. How does that work?
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Throughout ancient history, because men died in brutal wars,
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performed incredibly dangerous labor, and faced fierce violent
21:41
competition for mate selection, a far smaller percentage of men
21:44
actually reproduced compared to women.
21:47
Oh I see so many men just never passed on their.
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Exactly. So if biological reproduction
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and successfully passing on your genes was the ultimate
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historical currency for securing a legacy, how does this
21:58
incredible genetic bottleneck reframe our understanding of
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which sex truly held the power throughout ancient history?
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That is a wild thought to chew on.
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The implications of that genetic reality completely flip the
22:11
traditional oppressor oppressed dynamic on its head.
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It really does. It makes you rethink everything
22:16
we assume about historical privilege.
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It definitely does. We want to thank you so much for
22:19
joining us on this incredibly complex deep dive.
22:22
It's been a fascinating exploration of some truly
22:24
challenging and provocative source material.
22:27
Thank you for listening. And we will catch you on the
22:30
next Deep dive 5.