A trend that has been noticeable over the course of the pandemic surrounding the issue of conspiracy theories and misinformation regarding the vaccine and covid itself is that a lot of those peddling this stuff are not typically what you imagine when you hear the words “conspiracy theorist”. I would imagine the stereotype if you were to ask a random pool of strangers to describe a full-on conspiracy theorist is an angry, lonely, not very healthy and probably unemployed middle-aged man who spends all day in a dark room behind a computer. For the record I’m not talking about people who think Oswald was not a lone wolf or who don’t believe the official line about what happened at Roswell. We all have some level of suspicion about historical events. The people I’m talking about are the real hard-core conspiracy theorists who believe everything is a satanic plot and they are trying to save the world from a 91 year old man named George Soros.
The perception has in many ways been shattered in the last eighteen months. There have been several documented instances where some of the most committed, most deranged lies about the pandemic have been spread by the type of the people who on the face of it do not match the perception at all. What these people have in common is they are women who participate in the idea of wellness and holistic living. Many of these people and communities were already quite sizeable in their following which was established before taking this turn into conspiracies. There are many people who have built big followings online after producing content that is anti-vax, highly political and conspiratorial in nature. But in the case of the wellness ‘influencers’, they already had a big following based on content that was non-political and non-conspiratorial. People who ordinarily would not have sought out that content were now subject to seeing them because a yoga teacher they’ve been watching for several years has now started posting videos ranting about celebrities who are child traffickers or a community page that built its following based on positive upbeat quotes is now sharing quotes from Alex Jones.
Here are a few examples that look into the overlap between wellness and conspiracies:
There are plenty of others too. Including commentary from people who watched in horror as their friends went down the rabbit hole and others who fell down it but after a while climbed out.
Perhaps the idea that promotes alternative methods of living becoming a pipeline towards believing the vaccine contains microchips shouldn’t come as a shock because a lot of the New Age ideas have been based on pseudo-science. But it was also caked with a dose of innocence and that they were not really harming anyone. Qanon’s slogan is about the world getting an “awakening” which is the same word associated for so long with those in wellness except the latter for years was supposed to be a method of clearing the mind and finding peace whereas Qanon is a movement that has cluttered the minds of ordinary people to believing they are on the front lines of a psychological war to the point of destroying relationships and reputations.
For me this is an interesting trend to come back to in a few years. Is this a new permanent “state of mind” to borrow a phrase so common with spiritual teachings?
I think a lot of this overlap is because segments of the wellness industry have long promoted the idea that there is a far-reaching conspiracy to suppress cheap and easy natural treatments for serious illnesses.
For many people, this belief was the entrance to the rabbit hole.
In related news, the Spokane Regional Health District Board of Health might soon have a naturopathic doctor as a member. WA does license them so maybe they are a bit more legit then elsewhere.
I dunno, I know it’s good citing by the OP, but I’m still a bit skeptical about the premise.
I’ve seen quite a few opinion pieces that seemed desperate to say “Hey look! It’s not just the right believing crazy conspiracy theories, many new agers on the left are vaccine skeptics!”
Well, yeah there’s a correlation between espousing “natural remedies” and the like and being vaccine skeptics. And there’s a correlation between the former and left-wing political views. True.
But in terms of stuff like QAnon…as a couple of the cites above imply, it’s more like the majority of new agers being alarmed by a minority following that crap.
And I had previously heard, for example on the BBC, that QAnon and before that Pizzagate, branched off from far right forums on 4chan. The washington post article seems a bit misleading framing if that is the case.
I know a number of people who are into “naturopathic” stuff. They have terrible intellectual habits, they get most of their information via word-of-mouth from their friends and moms groups. They “do their own research”. The only reason they choose turmeric and lavender over ivermectin and urine is that they just happened to pick better friends, and have slightly more liberal politics.
It’s based on the reporting that has been done that has looked into some of the biggest wellness communities that have become hotbeds for conspiracies. These groups are run by women and their original purpose that made them popular was aimed for women.
Being a licensed channeler of magic powers doesn’t actually make you any more magical that someone else. Naturopathy isn’t medicine. Being a "naturopathic doctor’ is like being a “Doctor of Legos” or a “Doctor of Swiss Cheese Shaped Like Elvis”. None of those people have any licensed medical training.
When people say “alternative medicine”, it’s actually an “alternative to medicine”.
It’s like a religion and highly correlated with credulity, like the stories that @Boycott linked.
For an average person without the benefit of any medical knowledge or limited exposure to higher education, there is already distrust that 1) the government looking out for you, and 2) pharmaceutical companies have any redeeming value. So the progression of logic may go something like
The government and pharma are colluding to rip you off - they make money by keeping you sick
The Medical Establishment doesn’t recognize Natural Cures and Natural Supplements because they can’t patent herbs
The rational choice is to seek out those with Real Knowledge of how the body works
The alternative health practitioners are the only ones who care about me. What they say about the body healing itself and ridding oneself of toxins and cheap treatments all appeal to my limited understanding of the healthy functioning of the body.
Woo ensues
Additionally, woo practitioners are dogged shameless opportunists.
There are those in their ranks that genuinely are concerned with their clients’ best interests in mind, but, you know, not to the degree that they would consider nuisances like ‘evidence’ and ‘debunked theories’. It’s a rare event indeed when they throw their hands up and say “welp, this isn’t working, you’d better see a real doctor.”
My impression is that while there has for a long time more Snopes level one shot fake news from the right than from the left, (e.g. Obama refuses to sign Eagle scout certificates). Up until relatively recently the hard core conspiracists were about equally distributed among the parties. For every believer in a new world government run by the UN on the right there was someone on the left who beleived that the CIA made AIDS. This started to change with the Birthergate conspiracy, and Climate hoaxers, which was to my knowl and then went into overdrive when Trump came on the scene and started promoting a post-truth choose your own reality world view.
Anti Vaxers also used to come in both stripes since you could either blame the suppression on an evil government or an evil corporation but as indicated above probably tended more towards the everything natural is good, Hippy, environmentalist side of the political spectrum. Then came the pandemic. Trump wanting to keep the economy booming regardless of the cost to life, down played the virus and the scientists warnings, fed into the anti-intellectual, anti-science, mixed with the don’t tell me what to do, and resulted in the idea that even considering any form of mitigation was communist.
Suddenly the granola and crystals anti-vaxers found their ideas had suddenly gone mainstream, probably generating a feeling akin what what I, an old comic book geek, felt when the marvel movies started coming out. Suddenly when you go to your anti-vax news group it isn’t just about Jenny McCarthy, autism and natural child birth, its mostly about Rand Paul, Bill Gates microchips and blood sucking pedophiles. So you are being presented with a whole new set of evidence is being presented that justifies the anti-vax belief that you “know” with every fiber of your being is true, and which everyone around you is accepting it as common knowledge, its easy to start believing it yourself.
That’s what I figured, but I am uniformed beyond the article I linked to. It still looked like bullshit to me, particularly for a public health board. It also shows how far CT/misinformation is spreading into politics and public decision making.
And yet one of your links is talking mostly about Jake Angeli, Robert Bly, “New Age male spirituality”, and men’s groups; another, which doesn’t want me to read more than the first paragraph or so without subscribing, seems to be written by a man going to what was apparently either a mixed-gender or a male meeting; a third is about members of the “wellness community” of male, female, and undescribed genders objecting to an apparent attempt on the part of Qanon (a group I’ve never heard described as all female) to subvert that community. Only the Guardian article seems to focus on women, and says Qanon “originated on far-right message boards before entering online wellness communities, where it found a largely female following,” but even that one doesn’t say that the wellness movement is entirely female. And it’s only one out of four links, which you chose yourself.