'Evil forces': how Covid-19 paranoia united the
wellness industry and rightwing conspiracy theorists
Brigid
Delaney
Wellness
advocates used to talk about Bali retreats and coconut oil. Now it’s Bill Gates
and 5G
Instead of recommending a retreat to Bali, wellness
podcasts and Instagram accounts are talking about 5G, Bill Gates and ‘evil
forces’.
Published
onThu 4 Jun 2020 18.30 BST
About a
month ago some of the wellness podcasts and Instagram accounts I follow started
to go decidedly off-piste.
Instead of
recommending a retreat in Bali or new ways to cook with coconut oil, they were
posting links about 5G, Bill Gates or more coded but no less strange messages.
“We” shouldn’t trust “them”. The “them” being a shadowy, authoritarian cabal
that controls the media, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the
government and the World Health Organization.
In March
one usually reasonable podcaster I listen to for health tips started talking
about “evil forces” at work. His guest also knew about the “evil forces”. They
spoke around it, carefully.
Then in
April my life coach, a man who mostly advises me about time management and
creative projects, told me if a Covid-19 vaccine came along he wouldn’t be
taking it “because, as you know I am very careful about what I put in my body”.
Memes
turning up on Maga pages were being reposted by yoga teachers who once quoted
Maya Angelou but were now quoting David Icke, while health and wellness
mega-influencer Pete Evans was posting about Obamagate, inflated Covid-19 death
counts and, most bizarrely, that US race riots were “instigated by
organisations affiliated with the elite” – alongside recipes for ham hock soup.
What was
going on? How and why did the largely progressive and left-leaning proponents
of wellness merge with rightwing conspiracy theorists and Donald Trump
supporters?
Such
unlikely allegiances were termed “fusion paranoia” in a 1995 New Yorker article
by the journalist Michael Kelly, who saw leftwing and rightwing activists
coalesce around the anti-war and pro-civil liberties movements that shared
common traits of anti-government views and belief in conspiracy theories.
Such a
tight alliance (or fusion paranoia) between the wellness industry and the
far-right would have been unthinkable to me a year ago. But the connection
between the alt-right, conspiracy theorists and sections of the wellness
community have strengthened and bonded during global lockdowns. The messages of
the different groups are remarkably the same: the virus is a cover for a plot
of totalitarian proportions, designed to stifle freedom of movement, assembly,
speech and – to the horror of some in the wellness industry – enforce a program
of mass vaccinations.
A popular,
multitrillion-dollar sector, the wellness industry’s huge reach and influence
has the power to bring people into the conspiracy that previously would not
have had any contact with the alt-right.
Superstars
in the wellness world appear on multiple platforms and have mature, established
audiences who may have first followed a wellness influencer for recipes or
fitness tips, but are now scrolling through a mixture of quotes by Rumi, Trump
and a nurse from Birmingham who has “proof” Covid-19 death certificates are
fake.
The ongoing
and now-accelerated collapse of mainstream media has provided a perfect
environment for the Covid conspiracies to reach millions of people unchecked
and unchallenged.
Disagreement
with a conspiracy on an influencer’s page could have you blocked, in dispute
with other followers or, as the logic of conspiracies dictate, mocked and
pitied for not getting it and having your mind controlled by the “evil forces”
that you are too dumb to see.
Like many
conspiracies – or even religions – the beliefs are part of a closed system that
is engineered to provide answers to our most maddening mysteries but also
designed to allow no room for questioning and dissent.
And there are
a lot of maddening mysteries about the coronavirus. The gaps in our knowledge
about the virus, combined with the speed and urgency of new social control
measures that started seemingly overnight in March (essentially global home
detention), panic buying and intense levels of collective fear in the
community, have meant that previously fringe theories have found a broad,
sticky surface.
A poll has
found one in five young Australians believe that Bill Gates played a role in
the creation and spread of Covid-19, and the same proportion think 5G
technology is being used to spread the virus.
In some
ways the wellness community’s response to the virus is not a shock.
Although
the global wellness industry was worth an estimated $4.5tn in 2018, and
pre-pandemic many practices were becoming mainstream, elements of the sector
have always been under siege from the mainstream.
This
includes those who refuse vaccinations, those who encourage fasting for long
periods of time, those who eschew chemotherapy for a raw food diet, and those
who believe wifi causes tumours.
Now in this
current state of emergency – where almost total social control is paramount for
controlling the virus – purveyors of these views feel they are having their
paranoia confirmed.
While
herbalists, acupuncturists, yoga studios and alternative medicine practitioners
were forced to close in the lockdown, conventional doctors and pharmacies
remained open.
Speech was
also monitored, as the more fringe elements of the wellness scene migrated from
platform to platform. Like a belligerent orator at Speakers’ Corner, they kept
getting moved on until they either wound up in the darkest corners of the web,
or mumbling on podcasts in code about the “dark forces” they could not name.
While some
in the wellness world appear to have had a terrible time of it, the
restrictions actually feed into their ur-narrative. That is: evil forces,
including big tech (like YouTube and Facebook which have been removing
content), big media and big government are intent on silencing them.
This
shutting down, or censorship as they call it, further fuses their experiences
with figures in the alt-right (including Alex Jones and Steve Bannon), veterans
of no-platforming and first amendment wars. These “trauma bonds”, which
strengthen and unite disparate movements, is a maturation of the trend of
Conspirituality, a term coined by Charlotte Ward in 2011 in an article
published in the Journal of Contemporary Religion.
She noted
the overlap between wellness and new age groups and the alt-right as being a
“broad politico-spiritual philosophy based on two core convictions, the first
traditional to conspiracy theory, the second rooted in the New Age: 1) a secret
group covertly controls, or is trying to control, the political and social
order, and 2) humanity is undergoing a ‘paradigm shift’ in consciousness.
Proponents believe that the best strategy for dealing with the threat of a
totalitarian ‘new world order’ is to act in accordance with an awakened ‘new
paradigm’ worldview.”
Spending
time in this Conspiritual world, it’s easy to see the ecosystem. The same
arguments or phrases start appearing, whether you are listening to a podcaster
broadcasting from his basement in Byron Bay, or reading the Medium post of a
philosopher and yoga teacher based in upstate New York.
Down the
rabbit hole, listening to dozens of wellness podcasts and YouTube broadcasts,
the same themes keep arising: fear as a means of social control, fear as a
hormone response that weakens the immune system, how social distancing and
intensified hygiene practices ruin the body’s natural immune response, the
unhealthy body (the body with pre-existing conditions) being a body that is
more reliant on and easily controlled by the state and Big Pharma.
Deeply
embedded and perhaps central in the connection between the wellness industry
and conspiracy is the notion of sovereignty over our bodies. For believers, the
sovereign body is the body in a “pure” state, not reliant on chemicals to heal,
and trusted to fire up its own immune response when confronted with a virus –
even a novel one like Covid-19. Believers aren’t dissuaded by the facts: all
the pure bodies that died because there wasn’t a smallpox or polio or
chickenpox vaccine.
For many in
the wellness industry, a pure body is their life’s work. Don’t underestimate
their fight.
• Brigid
Delaney is a Guardian Australia columnist and the author of Wellmania (Black
Inc)
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