Tuesday 6th August, starting at 7pm: Dark Star Rising. Did “positive thinking” and “mental science” help put Donald Trump in the White House? And are there other kinds of “occult politics” at work in the world today? In my book Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump, I look at the strange magical and esoteric ideas that are informing postmodern politics in the United States and Russia in the twenty-first century. From New Thought to Chaos Magick to the far-right esotericism of Julius Evola and the Traditionalists, a web of connections stretches out across the globe bringing together such disparate characters and phenomena as Norman Vincent Peale, Ayn Rand, Pepe the Frog, the Alt-Right, Vladimir Putin, President Trump, Reality TV, “meme magick” and much else in a weird tangle of postmodern occultism in which reality is up for grabs, facts give way to internet fictions, and truth is a negotiable commodity. My talk will try to find a path through this post-truth alternative fact landscape in reality is what you can get away with.