A background story about how a healthgroup became conspiracytheorists. Not a completely new subject, but still relevant.
"They have been moving generally to far-right views, bordering on racism, and really pro-Russian views, with the Ukraine war,” she says. “It started very much with health, with ‘Covid doesn’t exist’, anti-lockdown, anti-masks, and it became anti-everything: the BBC lie, don’t listen to them; follow what you see on the internet.”
Things came to a head when one day, before a meditation session – an activity designed to relax the mind and spirit, pushing away all worldly concerns – the group played a conspiratorial video arguing that 15-minute cities and low-traffic zones were part of a global plot. Jane finally gave up.
This apparent radicalisation of a nice, middle-class, hippy-ish group feels as if it should be a one-off, but the reality is very different. The “wellness-to-woo pipeline” – or even “wellness-to-fascism pipeline” – has become a cause of concern to people who study conspiracy theories.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Things came to a head when one day, before a meditation session – an activity designed to relax the mind and spirit, pushing away all worldly concerns – the group played a conspiratorial video arguing that 15-minute cities and low-traffic zones were part of a global plot.
One of the leaders of the German branch of the QAnon movement – a conspiracy founded on the belief that Donald Trump was doing battle with a cabal of Satanic paedophiles led by Hillary Clinton and George Soros, among others – was at first best known as the author of vegan cookbooks.
Something about the strange mixture of mistrust of the mainstream, the intimate nature of the relationship between a therapist, spiritual adviser, or even personal trainer, and their client, combined with the conspiratorial world in which we now live, is giving rise to a new kind of radicalisation.
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.
“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.”
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