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Melissa Harris-Perry: It's The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry.

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Melissa: All right, y'all. There is no shortage of wellness influencers and so-called health gurus who are ready to capitalize on the reliable annual influx of customers that the month of January brings, but in recent turbulent years, it's taken a more sinister turn.

Speaker 2: Some influencers in wellness communities are using their platform to promote conspiracy theories. During the pandemic, the spirituality community embraced something new, QAnon.

Speaker 3: How do you think QAnon became mainstream in the wellness community?

Speaker 4: Where we go, one, we go all. That's yoga.

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Matthew: This strange convergence between right-wing political conspiracism and its anxieties and the aspirational hopes and dreams of new-age spirituality. My name is Matthew Remski. I'm the co-host of Conspirituality Podcast and co-author of the upcoming book, Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat.

Melissa: Matthew and other researchers called this phenomenon Conspirituality. It's a combination of spirituality and conspiracy. Matthew says certain wellness circles are primed for this convergence because of three major themes they share with conspiracy thinking.

Matthew: Everything is connected, nothing is as it seems, and nothing happens by accident.

Melissa: Now, to be clear, these ideas can be beneficial to many. They can help us feel connected to our communities and it can help us feel that our actions have deeper meaning and purpose. Matthew spoke with WNYC's Janae Pierre about what happens when these ideas turn sour.

Matthew: If you spend a lot of time with those meditative principles during periods of social stress, they can change color a little bit and become actually quite paranoid where nothing happens by accident really means that because 9/11, then 5G, or because the World Bank then vaccines, or if nothing is as it seems, then Dr. Fauci doesn't really want to take an interest in public health. He's a salesman for Big Pharma. It's very easy for very positive internally helpful principles to curdle in a way during a period of social stress.

Janae: What are we talking about when we mentioned wellness culture? What kinds of disciplines and practices does that entail?

Matthew: We're talking about disciplines that are susceptible to conspirituality or conspiracy thinking. Disciplines that are based on intuition as a primary way of knowing the world, practices that foreground magical thinking, practices that present themselves as more holistic or in tune than evidence-based medicine and therapy. We're talking about things like yoga and reiki and certain forms of new-age massage that are offered by people who can't really decide whether they're healthcare providers or new-age priests. That's where customers become vulnerable.

I would also say that there's a sliding scale there of susceptibility that isn't really based on specific disciplines so much as on how anxiously the consumer comes into the market. We've heard some really sad stories about people who in the stress of dealing with an intractable health issue, they plunge headlong into the hard cell part of the wellness sector where influencers are claiming that they can cure diabetes and cancer with herbs or biofeedback machines.

The conspiracy theorizing is really, really explicit there because these people will often be told that mainstream medicine is corrupt or that doctors want to make you sick so that they can sell you drugs and so on.

This is not what you would generally hear in your typical yoga class at the YMCA, but that said, there are styles of yoga, for example, that can be particularly complex like Kundalini yoga, for instance, where there's a fantastical and imaginary world of meditation levels and purification practices designed to bring you towards enlightenment but the complexity really rhymes closely with the zaniness of corkboard guy. I think that's part of what we believe on the podcast happened to somebody like Russell Brand who was very into Kundalini yoga before he took this conspiracy theory-associated right-wing turn.

Janae: How does all of this then get us to QAnon?

Matthew: This has to do really with the links between the history of yoga and fascism, to be honest, in the early 20th century. Going back a hundred years, the roots of yoga and wellness are really hopelessly tangled up with notions of ethnonationalism and genetic purity with fascist notions, which of course themselves rely on conspiracy theories. This is happening both in Europe and in India.

Famously Heinrich Himmler carried around a copy of the Gita and he loved yoga and he conceptualized of the SS as an order of yogic monks. The basic attraction that they had was not just to the supposed mysticism of ancient Aryan culture, but it was to the notion that good Nordic white men could become super healthy wizards, really, without the aid of modern Jewish things like vaccines and antibiotics.

They were also obsessed with making pure babies, and that gets tied up with demonizing queer people. They really liked that the pre-modern medical practices of yoga preached the necessity of bodily purification. This resonated with their anxieties about genetic pollution. All of this is happening as the colonial superstructure of the world is cracking.

Upper-cast Indian pro-nationalists pretty much import this vision of yoga back into their politics in a pizza effect. That builds up yoga in pre-independence India as a nationalistic exercise regime that will purify the nation. If you fast forward to today, and we have a right-wing prime minister, Narendra Modi in India who's an avid yoga practitioner and the paramilitary that he cut his teeth in.

The RSS uses yoga as its spiritual calisthenics. The most popular yoga teacher in India, Baba Ramdev, is a billionaire right-winger who teaches that yoga can cure homosexuality. He's got a daily TV show that plays to millions. It's not a big step from there to a vulnerability in the global north yoga market when it comes to the fever dreams of QAnon.

Melissa: Tel me more about how the history of modern yoga got us here.

Matthew: Fascism contains a number of complexes about the body and how it must be purified in order to represent the strength of the nation and to recall a forgotten grandeur of some ancient perfected society and so this will resonate in any space that encourages people to be anxious about their health, about how pure their food is, how connected to the land is, how healthy their reproductive organs are. That's all going to connect.

We're not saying that everyone who wants to go to a yoga class is a secret Nazi, but that once you're in the echoes of these ideas, which are deeply embedded in the literature and the culture and the affect of the culture itself, can start to make an impression because there's a short road really from thinking about the purity of your body, whatever that means, and then imagining what other types of impurity might be plaguing your community and who might be to blame for it and then what you can do about it.

On the subtlest level, like the daily level, we talk a lot about perfectionism of body objectification as we see played out on social media every day. That puts a lot of stress on people, especially in this confusing context in which it's conflated with self-care.

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Melissa: Stick with us because next, we're going to look at how to practice wellness with awareness. It's The Takeaway.

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Melissa: It's The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry and we're back with more of Janae Pierre's conversation with Matthew Remski, a researcher of conspirituality. It's a term to describe the ways that certain streams of wellness and health culture can funnel people into conspiracy theories like QAnon.

Matthew: I think there are some red flag keywords that you might want to listen for. Agenda, if you hear the phrase, the powers that be, if you hear the phrase, mainstream narrative, if the person doesn't say vaccine, but they say jab or injection or gene therapy, then you're probably in a territory in which the conspiracy theory orientation of wellness culture is at a very high pitch.

Then there might be some orange flag keywords like cleansing. Our practices improve natural immunity, which isn't really a thing when we're talking about a novel coronavirus. Our practices give purification. They give vibrational healing or frequencies. I think also people can be aware of shenanigans and discourse around multi-level marketing that they might encounter in wellness spaces. Where, especially on social media, the influencer will say like, "Hey guys, I just wanted to hop on here to tell you about a new protocol. You can make passive income, you can take healing power into your own hands." Giving you some feeling that they're looking into your soul when they're probably not. They've actually learned how to perform direct intimate attention that people rarely receive from their healthcare providers, or from government officials. Of course, they can't really follow through on that attention.

Janae: Is there a way to practice yoga, or any of these other disciplines that doesn't fall prey to this kind of thinking?

Matthew: It's really good if you can find a space in which either your yoga, and contemplative, and wellness practices are associated with forward-facing social justice orientation, because the notion that your self-care should be for something beyond yourself I think is a very important clue. There's been a depoliticization within the yoga, and wellness demographic that dates back to the 1970s, that really has pushed people away from taking concerns of mutual aid, or community building as being primary, and it's turned people towards the self-project.

I would say that a really good way of practicing yoga or practicing meditation is to make sure that you're actually doing it within a neighborhood community that also fosters other types of relationships within it. Unless these spaces become more than transactional spaces in which people are just working on themselves so that they can become better citizens, to be more productive in the gig economy, they're going to be vulnerable to all of the social movements that take advantage of their atomization and their social isolation.

Janae: Matthew, what's been your experience with Conspirituality in the wellness spaces that you've been a part of?

Matthew: My deepest involvement with wellness culture really dates back almost 15 years now. I was in two high-demand groups. One was a New Tibetan and Buddhist cult, I would say, and then another one was a cult that was based upon the Course in Miracles.

Now, a Course in Miracles is extraordinarily conspiritualist, because it posits that the material world doesn't exist. That when you see conflict or stress, or war happening around you, it's actually all a projection of your own consciousness. If you see something unpleasant happening, or unfolding in the world around you, then your responsibility is to actually just change your mind. That's the opportunity and the call, and the more horrible the world is, the more compelled you should be to actually reorganize your internal life.

I just want to point out that this book is extremely popular. It is the basis of Marianne Williamson's ideology and daily practice. She teaches out of it every day. These ideas are not fringe.

Janae: What do you think people who get sucked into this pipeline are really looking for?

Matthew: Oh, I think they're looking for connection, they're looking for explanations, they're looking for some way of having a unified theory that will deal with the complexity of their world. They're also not wrong in criticizing the neglect of predatory, and For-Profit healthcare systems. They're not wrong in criticizing the lack of accountability for child sexual abuse in the Catholic church. They're not wrong about institutional failure in modern global north neoliberal democracies.

They want something that will nourish them. They want to be heroes of their own stories. They want to believe that they can take positive actions as individuals in the world, and they're being given a lot of bad charlatan-driven answers for these very earnest desires.

Janae: It's no secret that America has a broken healthcare system. What role does that play into the rise of wellness conspiracies?

Matthew: I am talking to you from Canada, and I'm pretty confident in saying that QAnon, anti-vax conspiracist did not have as much of a public health impact here as it did in the US. That boils down to Americans not only having this habit I think. I'm also a dual citizen, so I'm not a total outsider, but I know that we, as far as we go, have this habit of reaching for religious solutions to material problems, but also Americans legitimately feel abandoned and neglected by governments, and For-Profit healthcare.

They're not wrong that the system is rigged against them, but their solutions are misguided. I think a good analogy and one that's very related to our topic is how we know now that the Satanic panic of the 1980s and 1990s spotlighted the problem of child sexual abuse, but then it attributed it to the nefarious plans of satanic cults rather than the more mundane fact that child sexual abuse is mainly perpetrated at home.

Now, we see this theme playing out again in the groomer discourse of people like Tucker Carlson. All of these things are diversions from the mundane, cruelties and ravages of capitalism in which we are all participating. I think Conspirituality and QAnon offer an easy way out of very difficult problems.

Janae: In your opinion, what's the most effective way to help people break free of Conspirituality?

Matthew: I think you have to listen to them where their critiques of capitalism, or surveillance technology, or medical neglect are correct, really take the criticism seriously. You have to point out that the person that is selling them the answer that seems to be so attractive to them is probably just as opportunistic as the very operators in big business, and neoliberal governmentality that they're criticizing.

We as a podcast really try to find where does the rabbit hole actually produce interesting and authentic human discoveries about the nature of the societies that we live in, and where do people get lost in it? I think that if we walk with the uncle or the aunt who has fallen prey to anti-mask rhetoric, or who has become an anti-vaxxer, as much as we're able without compromising our own safety, if we say, "Yes, I understand why you're afraid". We at least have the beginning of a conversation.

Dr. Melissa: Matthew Remski, co-host of the podcast, Conspirituality. His upcoming book is Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat. Matthew, thanks so much.

Matthew: Thank you so much, Janae.

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