The religious trip he's been on started after the Podcast took off, maybe around 2018 or so.
He's spoken about how he was completely materialist, not being able to comprehend the proposition that he could be spiritual or religious until recently. Most of the religious stuff is vaguely christian, but also has that weird pastiche a lot of 90's and 80's kids got from Eastern concepts conveyed through media.
So, you've got a lot of "love", but all in service of the broader goal of self extinguishment, an ego death in order to understand oneself as a constituent part of a greater whole.
Also the faith, which isn't placed in salvation by the grace of God or resurrection, but faith in the world eventually being upended and capitalism destroyed. The faith isn't so much the conviction that you get with evangelicals, where you must believe it, it's more circuitous. revolution can only be embarked on if you believe that you can succeed, and therefore faith is a prerequisite. Alternatively, he has said that if humanity fails, then you can put faith in successive sapient species attempts at building civilization; while we might fuck up and cook the Earth, we can put hope in "the Squids," as he calls them. In this framing, you can attempt to make a change in the world (realistically on a small scale), and should you fail to do something grand, understand yourself as a component of a broader dynamic.
Ultimately, I see it as a concession that people can't be Vulcans, and in order to live, either more fully generally or in defiance of capitalist realism specifically, one can benefit from adopting spiritual paradigms.
The censorship was real. The NYpost was the only traditional media outlet (if you can call it that) who would publish the story.
I remember some saying that the laptop was stolen and therefore they couldn't report on its contents. Most people at CNN and MSNBC said that it was obviously Russian misinformation engineered as an October surprise.
I believe Facebook was preventing people from sharing the NYpost article, I know Twitter was keeping people from sharing and retreating somethings.
It was kind of wild to see. Media institutions more or less formed a consensus that the laptop was not only unnewsworthy, but that if you wanted to talk about it you were a crank who wanted to undermine American Democracy.
Weren't Trans Ukrainian women trying to get out first because they were afraid they'd be made to de transition and be conscripts? Like, stopped at the Polish border because their ID's said "male" and then sent back?
Sometimes I try to tell Libs that this Identity politics more often will be co-opted and weaponized into preserving the shit state of affairs we're all chafing under, and this is a prime example.