Wellness culture and fascism

Here’s a really interesting piece in the Guardian about the increasingly convoluted connections between right wing conspiracy theories and the traditionally left-wing — at least in an amorphous cultural sense — wellness and alternative medicine worlds:

Peter Knight, professor of American studies at the University of Manchester, who has studied conspiracy theories and their history, notes that the link between alternative therapies and conspiracy is at least a century old, and has been much ignored. “New age and conspiracy theories both see themselves as counter-knowledges that challenge what they see as received wisdom,” he says. “Conspiracy theories provide the missing link, turbo-charging an existing account of what’s happening by claiming that it is not just the result of chance or the unintended consequences of policy choices, but the result of a deliberate, secret plan, whether by big pharma, corrupt scientists, the military-industrial complex or big tech.”

Knight notes an extra factor, though – the wellness pipeline has become a co-dependency. Many far-right or conspiracy sites now fund themselves through supplements or fitness products, usually by hyping how the mainstream doesn’t want the audience to have them.

Alex Jones, the US conspiracist who for a decade claimed the Sandy Hook shootings – which killed 20 children and six adults – were a false-flag operation, had his financial records opened up when he was sued by the families of the victims. During the cases, it emerged he had made a huge amount of money by selling his own branded wellness products.

“Alex Jones perfected the grift of selling snake-oil supplements and prepper kit to the libertarian right wing via his conspiracy theory media channels,” Knight says. “But it was Covid that led to the most direct connections between far-right conspiracism and wellness cultures. The measures introduced to curb the pandemic were viewed as attacks on individual sovereignty, which is the core value of both the wellness and libertarian/‘alt-right’ conspiracy communities.”

The problem is, it rarely stops with libertarians. While they may not recognise it, those drawn in from the left are increasingly ending up in the same place as their rightwing counterparts.

“Although many of the traditional left-leaning alternative health and wellness advocates might reject some of the more racist forms of rightwing conspiracism, they now increasingly share the same online spaces and memes,” he says, before concluding: “They both start from the position that everything we are told is a lie, and the authorities can’t be trusted.”

The key link here is the belief in some sort of hyper-rational conspiracy of elites that controls a world that in fact is vastly more chaotic than all these flavors of conspiracism can ever acknowledge. The irony is that something like the Covid pandemic should reveal how insane the view that “Big Pharma” or “Bill Gates” or “International Banking Elites” control everything (cough cough) really is, since the pandemic turned the world upside down in so many ways.

But of course it too had to be assimilated to the conspiracist frame of mind, so Covid became a bioweapon engineered by Big Pharma and Bill Gates and International Bankers, to ensure that They retained complete control.

When you think about it, it’s not that strange that this kind of thing should become so resonant in vaguely hippieish alternative medicine and wellness circles, along with its more obvious home in the right wing fever swamps.