#Matthew Remski

[creature-wizard]

Found this podcast episode featuring Matthew Remski talking about the New Age to Alt Right pipeline, which is a thing that everybody in witchy, pagan, and occult communities needs to know about. I also doubly recommend that baby/beginner witches give this one a watch, because it's way too easy to fall into this stuff when you're still figuring out your beliefs and practices.

[blackspiritshake]

September Book Pile

In It’s Always Been Ours eating disorder specialist and storyteller Jessica Wilson challenges us to rethink what having a "good" body means in contemporary society. By centering the bodies of Black women in her cultural discussions of body image, food, health, and wellness, Wilson argues that we can interrogate white supremacy’s hold on us and reimagine the ways we think about, discuss, and tend to our bodies.

A narrative that spans the year of racial reckoning (that wasn't), It’s Always Been Ours is an incisive blend of historical documents, contemporary writing, and narratives of clients, friends, and celebrities that examines the politics of body liberation. Wilson argues that our culture’s fixation on thin, white women reinscribes racist ideas about Black women's bodies and ways of being in the world as "too much." For Wilson, this white supremacist, capitalist undergirding in wellness movements perpetuates a culture of respectability and restriction that force Black women to perform unhealthy forms of resilience and strength at the expense of their physical and psychological needs.

With just the right mix of wit, levity, and wisdom, Wilson shows us how a radical reimagining of body narratives is a prerequisite to well-being. It’s Always Been Ours is a love letter that celebrates Black women’s bodies and shows us a radical and essential path forward to rediscovering their vulnerability and joy.

Conspirituality takes a deep dive into the troubling phenomenon of influencers who have curdled New Age spirituality and wellness with the politics of paranoia—peddling vaccine misinformation, tales of child trafficking, and wild conspiracy theories.

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a disturbing social media trend emerged: a large number of yoga instructors and alt-health influencers were posting stories about a secretive global cabal bent on controlling the world’s population with a genocidal vaccine. Instagram feeds that had been serving up green smoothie recipes and Mary Oliver poems became firehoses of Fox News links, memes from 4chan, and prophecies of global transformation.

Since May 2020, Derek Beres, Matthew Remski and Julian Walker have used their Conspirituality podcast to expose countless facets of the intersection of alt-health practitioners with far-right conspiracy trolls. Now this expansive and revelatory book unpacks the follies, frauds, cons and cults that dominate the New Age and wellness spheres and betray the trust of people who seek genuine relief in this uncertain age.

With analytical rigor and irreverent humor, Conspirituality offers an antidote to our times, helping readers recognize wellness grifts, engage with loved ones who've fallen under the influence, and counter lies and distortions with insight and empathy.

An enthralling and original first novel about exile, diaspora, and the impossibility of Black refuge in America and beyond.

In the morning, I received a phone call and was told to board a flight. The arrangements had been made on my behalf. I packed no clothes, because my clothes had been packed for me. A car arrived to pick me up.

A man returns home to sub-Saharan Africa after twenty-six years in America. When he arrives, he finds that he doesn’t recognize the country or anyone in it. Thankfully, someone recognizes him, a man who calls him brother—setting him on a quest to find his real brother, who is dying.

In Hangman, Maya Binyam tells the story of that search, and of the phantoms, guides, tricksters, bureaucrats, debtors, taxi drivers, relatives, and riddles that will lead to the truth.

This is an uncommonly assured debut: an existential journey; a tragic farce; a slapstick tragedy; and a strange, and strangely honest, story of one man’s stubborn quest to find refuge—in this world and in the world that lies beyond it.

[walrusmagazine]

Faith Healers Are Back, and They’re Getting Rich

Spiritual pseudoscience is everywhere on social media with promises to cure diseases. It may also be costing lives

If Joe Dispenza’s meditation had simply been religious in nature, if it had been about accepting death or gratitude or setting one’s moral affairs in order, that would have been one thing. But pseudoscience isn’t honest in that way. It’s one thing pretending to be another. Dispenza was promising healing, spontaneous remission. The former chiropractor, who calls himself a doctor, was giving Louis cover for giving up on real doctors. Dispenza was also giving Louis permission to pretend he was healing himself, with some kind of dignity, even while he was saying goodbye.

Read more at thewalrus.ca.

[joncronshawauthor]

Jon's author diary - January 26, 2024 #amwriting

Welcome to this week’s Author Diary! After the whirlwind launch of “The Fall of Wolfsbane,” I took a well-deserved break to recharge. Now, I’m back with some exciting updates on my ongoing projects and recent reads! 🌿 Post-Launch Rest: Taking a few days off post-launch was essential. It gave me the much-needed time to relax and rejuvenate after the intense period leading up to the release of…

[barbaragenova]

[female-malice]

Read this thread about cult social relationships by Matthew Remski:

When you deconstruct harmful ideas and beliefs—from antivax positions to reactionary social views—you will inevitably be seen and felt as attacking the relationships that people form through those views. That’s a big problem in a lonely world, and there will be blowback. 

In anti-cult theory and journalism, this alienation is usually seen as unavoidable. The idea is that the relationships within a toxic group are transactional, unfulfilling, and fragile. The gamble is that the person will wake up into wholesome relationships outside of the group.

That may work out. Or, the person will crawl out of a mid-level engagement with NXIVM and find themselves in late stage capitalism looking for gig work, missing the friends they had on the inside, and the sense of shared purpose.

This analysis can scale up: It’s been helpful for some to look at QAnon, the Trucker Convoy, and antimask protestors through a cult studies lens. All the boxes get ticked: information silos, emotional manipulation, charismatic leaders and their failed prophecies. But there is never a single explanation and the activities within these groups are diverse. It was dangerous for antivax parents to open mask-free homeschool spaces when the schools had to shut down. But the reason for the school was the outer layer on what it felt like to be in the school, or teach in it.

In researching an antivax parenting group on IG, I saw they posted about their parties and playdates in politicized language. They were also parenting at the time, doing all the things that parents do. Shooting criticism into that space will feel like an intimate attack.

There was a lot of disgust at the Convoy crowd for partying on Parliament Hill. But pissing on snow while rave music throbs can signify bonds that may outlast any incoherent ideology. Which is why the same group will cycle through different ideas. The ideas may be fragile.

The most dangerous bonds are locked in with fascist hatred and must be resisted. But most participants are not leaders, and not monetized. Many of the yoga and wellness people I interviewed had no idea how toxic the views of the leaders were. But they did feel they had friends. 

These groups are diagonalist, distrusting all power structures, including (maybe most of all) an interpretive power structure that would discredit their views without knowing or valuing their relationships. 

The truckers hated Trudeau’s position on vaccines and fossil fuels, but they may have hated more what they saw as his smug privilege and mastery of national hypocrisies. He stands outside and above their society and friend circles, like Clinton using the word “deplorable.”

There’s an amazing passage in Naomi Klein's Doppelganger where she basically asks Why should we be shocked that after decades of neoliberal cruelty and individualism, people will say Fuck you to the “elites” who are suddenly asking them to act like we’re a society after all?

I think this problem scales further, with different political valances, up to broader critiques of religion from rationalists/skeptics, where the target is low-hanging fruit: crazy shit people believe. The collateral damage is usually a neglect of social desires and needs. 

Currently there’s this question floating around about how so many former members of rationalist and skeptic movements, and IDW influencers, slid rightward and conspiratorial in their politics. Many answers there, including: “They might have always been like that.” But one answer is that when Hitchens guts Mother Teresa like a fish, there’s schadenfreude, but no more clarity around the diverse reasons for what people experienced when they gathered around her. The charismatic religious is taken down by the charismatic debunker.

And what is left over, aside from lonely smug men? Are people forming real communities of solidarity and resilience through Sam Harris’s meditation app, or in Bill Maher’s garage? Is there a single pro-community initiative that has emerged from this commentariat?

If not, could this be because they never really took an interest in the day-to-day lives or shared needs of the people whose ideas and beliefs they preferred to snigger at?

I’m not debunking all debunking here because we’re all doing what we can. But I am advocating for a more social and anthropological approach, an approach that offers more than “follow the science” or “develop critical thinking,” or anything else that implies stupidity among people who need friends and meaningful work. We all guffawed when Ron Watkins, pretty much caught out as Q, gave up on the LARP by saying “Maybe QAnon was all about the friends we made on the way.” It was a POS statement for a POS dude to make.

But he wasn't all wrong. That’s the thing about grifters. They exploit a social vacuum progressives often think they can fill with irony. They wrap their followers in flags or ideas, but in that huddle there are real connections that have to be understood and not dismissed.

–

This is very relevant when dealing with cults on all sides of the political spectrum.

Most young people are wrapped in colorful flags and anti-scientific homophobic ideas pushed by big industries. But they also find community through those flags and ideas. No young person wants to be outcast by their peers.

And then there's the people who deny climate science and oppose catastrophe mitigation policies. These people also find a powerful form of community. They are uniting through a shared relationship to the land. The relationship they all share with the land is toxic and misinformed. But uniting over your shared perspective and feelings about land is powerful. Human-land relationships are neglected by modern neoliberal society. But solastalgia is now causing everyone to reach desperately for that human-land connection. And we're all coming up with different perspectives on land and forming social groups around those perspectives.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[from the article]

But I didn’t have to interview Manos in the end. He showed me exactly how it worked. His pedagogy in that moment was all about contrast.

He pivoted from verbally assaulting me to commanding the class to “go within and find your centre point of stillness.”

The room went from the dead silence of discomfort and fear to the dead silence of self-surveillance. I felt everyone stiffen into perfect meditation posture. It was picture-worthy. It could have become the Abode’s Facebook cover photo.

I could feel the palpable relief that the attack was over and that it hadn’t fallen on anyone but me. This seemed to create a strangely serene and floating sensation in the room.

Manos then guided the class through a remarkably detailed, intimate, and subtle internal meditation, while we were lying in corpse pose.

So: after verbally attacking an invited guest, Manos put the whole class into a vulnerable position, guiding them into a hypnagogic state with a voice that had just been yelling, but was now meant to be internalized as a source of guidance and care.

I found it impossible to pay attention or feel much because my heart was pounding and I was flooded with cortisol, and physically afraid. I’m willing to bet that most of the room was also defensively aroused by the attack.

But because they weren’t specifically targeted, perhaps some could use their own cortisol for heightened attention and awareness. I imagine that this felt slightly confusing, but also invigorating for many of them.

In general terms, this pivot from chaos to care is at the heart of intimate, sustained abuse. The caregiver terrifies you, and then seems to love you. And because you depend on him, you’ll go through a lot for those moments of love and support.

In this particular context, the hyper-detailed instructions of Iyengar Yoga are freighted with the task of restoring order: not just to the body or mind as-they-are-generally, but also to the person who has just been disrupted by the attack. The countless cues for how to orient the bone, muscle, skin and even hair are like step-by-step instructions for how to restore yourself to social safety within the classroom.

The feeling for some might be: if I follow these steps perfectly, I won’t have to be afraid.

In researching my book I discovered that it’s not only that certain powerful men in the yoga world have figured out how to spiritualize a psychological abuse dynamic of arbitrary fear and care, and that this may resonate with students familiar with that oscillation in their personal histories. It’s that bodily care after bodily stress can feel incredibly sweet and addictive, on a biochemical level.

Among those who practice bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism, I’ve learned that the most important part of any “scene” of consensual eroticized pain exchange, is the “aftercare”. A scene — the term evokes theatre: participants know their roles, and know it will end — may seem violent, but if it resolves with the dominant partner holding, cuddling, and soothing the submissive partner, the full impact of the encounter can be metabolized into care. It can even be felt as a healing reversal of past traumas. This is not only because it is consensual, but because the aftercare strengthens the trust of the relationship.

I now believe that part of what made the elite pedagogy of B.K.S. Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois so powerful and murky is that it is playing with intense mechanisms that BDSM culture make conscious: the oscillation between stress postures and care, played out in dominant-submissive dyads. This dynamic may also constitute a form of unrecognized post-traumatic play.

There’s no clarity, or dialogue, or notion of consent in these spaces of dominance. The activity is not understood as theatre, but as the vital transmission of the knowledge of salvation. The yoga itself — the breath, the relaxation poses, and the spiritual promises — stands in as a proxy for the conscious aftercare that BDSM practitioners recognize as the key to preventing re-traumatization.

As I packed up my things at the end of Manos’ class, some of the other students gave me apologetic looks. Others avoided eye contact. But several devotees approached me to say hello and wish me well, like unconscious recruiters.

One woman cornered me to tell me about Manos’ miraculous healing powers. I was listened patiently, feeling rage smoulder way down deep.

After I edged away, another woman touched me on the shoulder from behind. I turned around to find her beaming at me.

“I hope you had a great class,” she said, effusive.

“Well, after a welcome like that…” I started.

My voice trailed off as her face darkened. I went from feeling snide to guilty to sad.

“It’s just that… he is a hero to so many of us,” she said, choked up. “And we want you to love him as much as we do.”

[thehungryphil]

Attending, listening Yoga-style

“The art of listening is the marriage of ear and space.” – Remski interpretation of Patanjali’s sutra 3.41

In my Theory and PracticeCourse for Social Work, we are learning the art of interviewing. Step one involves achieving a compassionate and empowering balance between attending and reflecting. Here is an ancient yogic way to develop the super power of deep listening by being mindful of our…

[foundcarcosa]

This hit me in a lot of feels so I’m sharing it. 

[kellyannecontent]

This is the issue with most q Anon coverage. Just complete lib shit. It's why I really only like QAA (hellwqrld is good too) (conspirituality is good but even those guys are waaay too lib except for Matthew Remski who is awesome)

Like what the fuck!!? OF COURSE NOT . Libs really just want their own PC version of fascism. Come the fuck on, and the comments are all just like "yes".

I offered this and nobody liked it

[anniekoh]

embodied aspirational selves

Yoga scholar and teacher Matthew Remski has written great posts on the ways that yoga is produced by and produces neoliberal logics and relationships.

The Biopolitics of Neoliberalism in Contemporary Yoga: Exploring Questions Posed by Giada Consoli

Yoga isn’t a force for social change because breathing deeply makes you suddenly recognize that Steve Bannon is a liar and the promises of populism are corrupt. It’s a force because it organizes money and time and attention. But administrators who want to mobilize that towards the common good have to stick their necks out by actively politicizing their spaces.

For me the real relationship between yoga and social justice is that the former gives me the resilience to undertake the latter. I was a really good yoga practitioner while still way more of a racist than I am now. Taking care of my internal ecology made it easier for me to learn about and engage with my white privilege. But that learning came from PoC activists, not from Patanjali.

As for the yearning for authenticity and purity, I believe we have to look at two things —

First: late capitalism hollows out anything that we would understand as original, from land use to inherited culture, and sell it back to us. When people long for authenticity and purity in a yoga practice, I believe that they are longing for a stable sense of self, something that can be trusted within, something they didn’t have to buy.

There are no authority or purity claims, no matter how loudly trumpeted, that can truly satisfy this ache. In fact, the louder a claim is performed, I believe, the more it conceals its doubt. It’s not an accident that the Kundalini celebrity who proclaims yoga to be 40,000 years old has to wear a jewelled crown while she’s saying it, ostensibly to feel certain about it.

Second: the yearning for authenticity and purity intersects very easily with nationalism and even fascism. That’s what we can detect with some of the Hindutva claims around the supposedly eternal and unchanging Hindu nature of yoga practice, as if Jains, Buddhist, and Muslims don’t practice. It’s tragic to see white social justice activists jump on board with this, thinking that they are supporting an inclusive or anti-racist politics. I believe their longing for something noble and trustworthy is being manipulated.

Back at the end of March, Remski wrote an essay Most Yoga Teachers are Not Online Producers. They Have a Deeper Gift, and Now Is the Time to Trust It. A thinking out loud and in public about the future of in-person classes in a screen-mandated life. Others have also been seeing this as a chance to reconfigure yoga’s “product,” the “aspirational self.”

It doesn't produce consumables, athletes, or even easily quantifiable health benefits. It produces a feeling about a potentially better self. It's the perfect product of neoliberalism. (quoted from Accessible Yoga’s Presence vs. Performance as the Pandemic Forces Us Online by Accessible Yoga, March 25 2020)

[barbaragenova]

These days Matthew Remski is best known as the co-host of Conspirituality, the podcast about “dismantling New Age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy-mad yogis” he created with fellow researchers Derek Beres and Julian Walker, so of course I found his work sometime in 2021 by searching “what happened to Russell Brand”, but we’re going back and forth in the weeks leading up to the release of the Conspirituality book (Public Affairs), and this conversation should motivate you to pre-order the book on the grounds of its own considerable merit alone.

Topics include: getting recruited in “brick and mortar cults” vs. getting sucked into a digital-first online community, the ways Yoga and general wellness have been sold to Western consumers over the past decades, the political posturing adopted by spiritual influencers hungry for engagement, the infinite boredom stemming from “self-care and optimisation and working endlessly on your mindfulness”, the gilded age of cult documentaries and memoirs, how to avoid turning tragedies into trauma porn, the “survivor-to-crusader pipeline”, de-platforming, the Disinformation Dozen, and how to keep going in the middle of this.

Enjoy.

[meditativeyoga]

10 Things We Didn`t Know About Yoga Until This Must-Read Dropped

Forget whatever you assumed you found out about yoga exercise history. Author Matthew Remski evaluates the new publication Roots of Yoga and also (spoiler alert) shares 10 of its greatest surprises.

Imagine you're a guppy in a fishbowl. Simply swimming around among the phony algae and also little plastic castle. If you're precocious you'll have an unclear hunch that there's something small or counterfeit regarding your little world. As well as recently, the waves have actually chosen up. Your water is sloshing as well as swirling. What's going on?

This is just what being an English-speaking yoga nerd has resembled over the past years. The waves originate from yoga scientists like Norman Sjoman, Suzanne Newcombe, Elizabeth de Michelis, David Gordon White as well as others, carrying your aquarium along the winding course of yoga exercise history as well as anthropology. You could have heard features of yoga exercise's relationship to Indian fumbling, the innovation of the modern-day master, and also just how some yogis just weren't exactly known for non-violence. In 2010 they handed it off to Mark Singleton, whose magazine of Yoga Body: The Beginnings of Modern Position Practice caused a small bedlam, sucking you down into the opportunity that every little thing you 'd pertain to believe regarding yoga exercise through its modern-day advertising and marketing may be a misconception. While you were down there you additionally heard something concerning social appropriation, yet you were wheezing for breath and also could not rather make it out.

Now, 2017 will certainly be referred to as the year when Oxford Sanskritist Sir Jim Mallinson grabbed hold too. With the publication of Roots of Yoga (Penguin, 2017), he and also Dr. Singleton have actually unloaded your aquarium into the sea, releasing you to the wilds. However not without navigating devices. With brand-new important translations of over 100 obscure yoga texts dating from 1000 BCE to the 19th century, threaded with each other with clear as well as steady-as-she-goes discourse, these authors have charted the deep.

Their constantly varied sources-- equated from Sanskrit (naturally) but additionally Tibetan, Arabic, Persian, Bengali, Tamil, Pali, Kashmiri, as well as very early kinds of Marathi and Hindi-- explode the readily available sources for everyday professionals. They sink the ideas that yoga exercise is any solitary point that anybody has ever set or that it brings every person to the very same location. Currently, there's nothing to do but swim. As you do, right here are 10 deep-sea explorations (as well as a few monsters) you'll run into:

1. Shock horror! The Yoga exercise Sutras are not widely approved ...

... or perhaps respected among yoga exercise adepts. Composing in his 18th century Haṃsavilāsa, Haṃsamiṭṭhu tells his spouse and also fellow visitor Haṃsi: "Precious woman, Patañjali's training is nonsense, since there is absolutely nothing reasonable in anything attained forcibly."

2. Historically, if ladies practiced yoga, they were primarily unnoticeable or sexually objectified.

Domestic tête-à-têtes apart, "texts on yoga are written from the perspective of male professionals," confirm the writers. "There are no pre-modern depictions of females practising yogic poses ... Sanskrit as well as vernacular poems of ... north Indian ascetic traditions are highly misogynistic ... Ladies are never clearly restricted from practising yoga exercise, although [medieval] haṭha messages generally urge that male yogis need to avoid the business of women." Other than, naturally, when they have to procure menstrual fluid to get superpowers. (You'll need to read the book for that a person.) The sexism at play here relates to the anxiety that ladies are the key thieves of "bindu," or seminal fluid, which numerous middle ages yogis looked for to sublimate into overjoyed understanding. Clearly, all of this things has to be revisited and also revised by a worldwide society that now contains 80% women.

3. The social appropriation as well as religious identity disputes in yoga are even muddier than we understood.

Mallinson as well as Singleton effectively show that Buddhists (Indian and Tibetan), Jains, or even atheists all lay claim to yoga exercise strategies. And that knew? Muslims also exercised a whole lot of yoga, and created outstanding books concerning it.

4. Middle ages yogis recognized that asana-- and pranayama-- can be harmful.

“In the Gorakṣaśataka, as an example, we reviewed, 'Through practising yoga I have actually come to be sick'." Then there were several yogis who assumed postures as well as breathwork were whack. "There is no factor in spending a lengthy time cultivating the breaths [or] practicing hundreds of breath-retentions," states the 12th century Amanaska writing, "which trigger illness as well as are tough, [or] great deals of agonizing as well as tough to understand seals. When [the no-mind state] has actually developed, the magnificent breath spontaneously and also right away vanishes."

5. "Vinyāsa" didn't constantly imply a "series of postures."

Mallinson and Singleton create: "The Sanskrit word vinyāsa made use of ... by Krishnamacharya as well as his students to represent a phase in among these connected sequences is not found with this meaning in pre-modern messages on yoga exercise ... Vinyāsa and also relevant words are more usual in tantric messages, where they generally refer to the setup of mantras on the body ... The modern use of vinyāsa is therefore a reassignment of the significance of a typical Sanskrit word ..." This does not make vinyāsa any less effective, obviously, unless its results come partly from faith.

6. Body image isn't really simply a contemporary yoga exercise trouble.

Medieval yogis were stressed with slimness. The primary cleaning methods focused solely on losing weight are defined in most of the haṭha texts. Maybe today's yoga exercise feminism, which is gradually steering the culture toward body positivity, is likewise recovering an ancient fatphobia.

7. The chakras are as a lot a spiritual dream as a really felt reality.

Different yoga exercise sects mention 4, 5, 6, or twelve chakras. So that's right? One says that if you can't situate the chakras within you, that's okay-- doing a fire ceremony is equally as excellent. The chakras "are not a result of the yogi's empirical observation," compose the writers, "however instead components of a visualized setup on the body of tradition-specific metaphysics and ritual schemata." To puts it simply: they are ways of "clothing" the body in spiritual imagery proprietary to various method teams. This holds an important message for practitioners who recognize that language remains to affect physical experience. "The goals of a certain system," compose our authors, "establish the means the body is visualized as well as used within its yoga exercise methods. The yogic body was-- and remains to be in conventional specialist circles-- one that is built or 'written' on as well as in the body of the specialist by the custom itself."

8. "Yogic suicide" is a thing.

But is it actually suicide? In many communities, samādhi was considered as a joyous meditation where the yogi, intentionally as well as happily, never ever emerged. Yet instead of leaving the world, the 11th century Amṛtasiddhi suggests it's even more concerning combining the body with the serenity of the world, while solving the unknowability of the moment of fatality. "When the sun, in line with Meru, stops carrying on the left, know that to be the equinox, an auspicious time in the body. By acknowledging the equinox in their own bodies, yogis, packed with the vigour [created by] their technique, conveniently abandon their bodies in yogic self-destruction at the correct time."

9. A dominant motif of middle ages pranayama was complete self-sufficiency.

Muslim yogis give the example of the embryo, breathing its very own liquids, within a womb. This lines up with 19th century records of yogis burying themselves in underground caverns for months on end, stopping their breath in suspended computer animation. This might sound appealing for the modern-day specialist determined to conceal from the 24-hour information cycle.

10. If you read this book, you are distinct in yoga background.

No one has had such broad accessibility to the variety of traditions as we have now. We used to be offered techniques. Currently we are given choices.

So this is simply a couple of decrease in a whole lot of ocean. It's a vast and maybe frightening region. Guppies, besides, can easily obtain lost, or ingested by bigger fish. However after that-- so was old Matsyendranath, the orphan young boy who, legend states, founded haṭha yoga. He was deserted at the shore by his parents and gobbled up entire by a whale, which then took a deep dive. By chance or fate, this provided him the opportunity to eavesdrop on Siva as well as Parvati as they rested on the sea floor, murmuring concerning the mysteries of yoga. He listened for 12 years, which is regarding for how long it will take this reviewer to completely soak up Roots of Yoga. And, probably-- for it to come to be the leading book on every yoga exercise teacher training analysis list in the English-speaking world.

[shirlleycoyle]

Health Conspiracy Theorists Hate Living In the World They Helped Create

“Anyone who refuses to be injected with experimental poisons will be prohibited from travel, education, and work,” Larry Cook declared recently on a fringe social media site. “No, this is not a synopsis for a new horror movie. This is our current reality.”

Cook is an anti-vaccine activist and a QAnon fan; he was one of the single biggest sources of anti-vaccine misinformation on Facebook before his banning in November. As usual, he was, on a broad level, wrong: People who refuse COVID-19 vaccines are not necessarily going to be prohibited from “travel, education and work,” nor are those vaccines “experimental poisons.” But Cook was correct in one way: He and other conspiracy theorist “health freedom” advocates are closer than they were before to living in a world they would find to be a nightmarish dystopia. What none of them have acknowledged, though, is that their relentless flood of misinformation helped us get here. By fighting the most common-sense public health measures at every turn, the health conspiracy theorists helped create a climate where more restrictive ones are looking more and more necessary. 

For years, Cook and a host of other people who make a living selling vaccine skepticism, snake oil, and a heaping dose of anti-government suspicion have traded on the idea that someday vaccines will be mandatory and the government will track citizens or control our entry into public spaces. (Cook’s Facebook group, before it was deleted, was called “Stop Mandatory Vaccination.”) Today, as the country and the world continue to try to get control of the coronavirus pandemic, some of those ideas are being discussed—albeit not quite in the nightmarish ways the health conspiracy theorists envisioned.

Vaccine passports will not be introduced on a federal level. New York is so far the only state to introduce a standardized proof of vaccination, the Excelsior Pass, which will be used to gain entry to places like Madison Square Garden, though more states may follow suit. While they haven’t yet, businesses like airlines and schools could very much decide to require proof of vaccination. The Supreme Court ruled in Jacobson v. Massachusetts in 1905 that states can enforce mandatory vaccination laws. And many countries are only reopening to American travelers if they’re fully vaccinated. Some of the same dynamics are playing out outside of the United States: in the United Kingdom, the BBC reported, organizers of large-scale trial events are being harassed and threatened by anti-vaccine, anti-lockdown protesters for requiring attendees to show a negative COVID test. The demonstrators believe, without evidence, that the events are a trial balloon for an eventual vaccine passport.

The fact that these discussions and restrictions are happening at all is also proof of how far and fast anti-vaccine, anti-mask, and anti-science ideas spread during the pandemic. Public health experts said last week that community or “herd” immunity against COVID-19  will likely never be achieved in the United States, due to a virulent combination of more transmissible variants and persistent vaccine hesitancy across broad swaths of the country. The best we can do, instead, is live with COVID-19 as a hopefully manageable but ongoing threat. Meanwhile, an article in the medical publication PLOS-One found that several major strands of COVID denalism have gained a foothold worldwide, including the idea that COVID was “planned,” that it was deliberately engineered “bioweapon,” and that wearing a mask to protect against it can cause “hypoxia” or other health problems. (There is no proof of any of those things.) I have a Google Alert set up for the names of a few prominent anti-vaccine advocates, and nearly every day, I see the ideas of one of them, the disgraced scientist Judy Mikovits, being cited in letters to the editor in small newspapers across the country as a reason not to trust COVID vaccines or as a justification for not wearing a mask, which she frequently and falsely claims will make you sick.

There was little chance that any of the most virulent anti-vaccine COVID denialists would ever buy into basic public health measures, of course. Most of them had decided from the beginning that the virus spelled the end of humanity, and pivoted their messaging and business models accordingly. In January 2020, when COVID had killed just under 100 people worldwide, Mike Adams was already making a dark prediction. “It’s over for humanity,” he declared, speaking to Alex Jones and the InfoWars audience. “There will only be lone survivors. The strategy must now shift. You can be a survivor. We can help you survive.” 

Having given up pretty quickly on humanity, Adams, who runs a conspiracy site called Natural News and has dubbed himself The Health Ranger, re-dedicated himself to making sure his audience are “lone survivors” by providing the worst possible information about both COVID-19 and potential treatments for it. He’s decried what he calls “worthless Communist masks,” for example, while relentlessly promoting debunked treatments like hydroxychloroquine. Larry Cook, too, fought against masks: In June 2020 he wrote that he had filed complaints with the FBI and the Department of Justice and sent a letter to then-President Trump over Los Angeles’ requirement to wear a mask in public places: “If you do not want to be forcibly masked and treated like a slave under the color of law, I highly recommend you file a complaint as well,” he wrote. 

Now that vaccines are being broadly administered, the health conspiracy theorists are, naturally, fighting those too, using a broad mix of fear-mongering tactics. One of the more recent is falsely claiming that people who have been vaccinated are “shedding” either COVID or something more exotic and dangerous, in a move that author and Conspirituality host Matthew Remski dubbed “Reverse Contagion Anxiety.” (Most infamously, this led to a Miami school declaring that it will refuse to hire vaccinated teachers; most amusingly, some anti-maskers are now declaring themselves ready to mask up to protect themselves from the vaccinated.) 

While it’s extreme, in a way, none of this is new: Anti-mask protests took place during the 1918 flu pandemic, of course. More broadly, the United States has a long history of groups who insist that any community-level action against public health problems is an infringement on human liberty. That attitude creates disastrous—or at least extremely stupid—results.

Take, for instance, the water fluoridation debate. The anti-Communist John Birch Society in the 1950s, was either, depending on who you talk to, morbidly afraid that Communists would contaminate the drinking water supply of the United States through fluoride, or merely opposed any fluoride being added to the water because it believed it was an impingement on the rights of Americans to choose what medication they took. As a result of its efforts, and those of other anti-fluoride groups, what would have been a basic public health measure turned into a pitched 75-year battle that’s still being fought one municipal water district at time. (For what it’s worth, the John Birch Society denies today that it ever opposed fluoridation on Communist mind control grounds, writing on its website, “While the JBS doesn’t agree with water fluoridation because it is a form of government mass medication of citizens in violation of their individual right to choose which medicines they ingest, it was never opposed as a mind-control plot.”) 

And even before COVID, we’ve seen this same pattern before much more recently: The suspicion and refusal of basic public health measures leading an increasingly strict government response, thus heightening the original underlying suspicion. In 2018 and 2019, two severe measles outbreaks among New York’s Orthodox Jewish communities, one in Brooklyn and one in Rockland County in upstate New York, led to a series of increasingly heightened government actions. But public health officials were battling against a disinformation campaign by Orthodox anti-vaccine activists, and when measles continued to spread, unvaccinated children were briefly banned from being in public in Rockland County March 2019. The ban was overturned by the New York State Supreme Court, but by then, bigger anti-vaccine activists had alighted on the state’s Orthodox community. (Anti-vaccine celebrity Del Bigtree, for instance, pinned a yellow Star of David on himself in a speech, and then sent out a press release to make sure no one had missed it.) While the measles outbreak subsided, anti-vaccine suspicions—fueled, in part, by the memory of the government restrictions—have continued, and remain a factor in how Orthodox communities have responded to COVID vaccines.

Today, the audiences of “health freedom” and anti-vaccine advocates are constantly told that they only need to do what will ensure the survival of themselves and their families. In a neat trick, that attitude also allows virtually all of these people to make money: Cook has started a new social network for COVID vaccine “refusers,” as he calls them, and is marketing numerous supplements there. (One of them claims to provide “Better sleep, less stuttering, better eye tracking, better bowels, anger dissipated, better mood and better speech,” which is certainly a collection of things.) Mikovits has appeared at numerous anti-vaccine, anti-lockdown conferences across the country this year, as has anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who’s also made headlines internationally, appearing at an enormous anti-lockdown protest in Berlin; later in the day, some 300 of the demonstrators were arrested after attempting to storm the Reichstag. 

The conferences themselves have become a burgeoning industry in the U.S., with names like “Truth Over Fear,” held this past weekend by a fringe media personality and meant as a response to a Vatican-led health conference at which Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared, or the “Health and Freedom Conference” in Oklahoma, which drew thousands of people into a cramped indoor space to hear COVID conspiracy theories and declamations on liberty from pro-Trump figures like Lin Wood. The author and conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf, meanwhile, appeared this past week at a conference in Michigan dubbed “United We Stand for Freedom,” and has become a much-lauded figure in the anti-vaccine world over the past few months. (Her anti-vaccine beliefs have managed to paper over the last time she was in the news, for making a series of staggering errors in a 2019 book that led to its release being canceled.)

The "Health Ranger" Mike Adams promotes pine needle tea as a cure for the fake phenomenon of "vaccine shedding." Screenshot via Brighteon

The claims of vaccine “shedding,” too, have predictably led to new products being marketed, new bids for a little more market share. In a recent article, Mike Adams claimed that pine needle tea could help protect against the so-called shedding, while another popular health conspiracy theorist, Sayer Ji of the site Green Med Info, at the end of an apocalyptic video about vaccine shedding, urged people not to “freak out,” but simply to subscribe to all his content to stay informed. “Tell 100 of your friends,” he urged, to create “a grassroots army of health-loving, freedom-loving individuals.” Another popular anti-vaccine influencer named Ashley Everly, who claims to be a “freelance toxicologist” and who has more than 80,000 followers on Instagram, has been disseminating unconfirmed reports of “shedding” injuries for weeks, while urging her followers to download an anti-vaccine guide she’s written and subscribe to her Patreon. 

Dr. Lee Merritt presents her view that the COVID-19 pandemic is "stealth warfare" at the Truth Over Fear conference. Screenshot via Truth Over Fear.

There’s evidence that some of the people promoting the shedding theories are ultimately trying to funnel their audiences towards even more bizarre and toxic ideas. America’s Frontline Doctors has promoted the “shedding” theory; it's an extremely questionable group of physicians and backers who had an alarming hold on both the Trump White House and have more recently been influencing state-level politics. At a small fringe health conference this weekend, Dr. Lee Merritt, a member of the group, claimed that the pandemic is a form of “uncharacteristic, unrestricted stealth warfare” and approvingly quoted infamous British conspiracy theorist David Icke in claiming that everyone who controls the world could fit in one room with “room left over.” (Icke is frequently and credibly accused of anti-Semitism, often implying that the people in that room are “Rothschild” Jews, as he puts it. He also believes that most world leaders belong to a race of evil and omnipotent 12-foot lizard beings.) “This isn’t just about a virus,” she told her audience, in a taped lecture. “There’s no set battlefield … your warfare extends to your own brain, and that’s what a lot of this right now is a psychological operation.” 

It’s tempting to think that these fringe figures are only talking to themselves and their pre-existing audiences. But an article published in Nature in May 2020 found that anti-vaccination clusters of Facebook users were more likely to “become highly entangled with undecided clusters in the main online network,” as the authors put it, while pro-vaccine viewpoints were more peripheral. There’s good evidence, in other words, that for people who were already dubious about vaccines—or perhaps, things like the efficacy of masks or social distancing—exposure to bad information proved to be a kind of tipping point. 

But the frenzied level of fear and paranoia that the health conspiracy theorists are stoking is affecting some of them, too. Recently, Everly, the "toxicologist,” began claiming that she, too, is suffering symptoms that she believes are the result of being around vaccinated people and might need to post less content on social media. 

“Hopefully with a bit of time ‘away,’ (not completely) I can jump back into this,” she wrote. “Every now and then I get a bit overwhelmed and start to burn out.” 

Most of the health conspiracy theorists, though, seem energized by the new hellish dystopia that they believe they’re living in. By exhorting their audiences not to get vaccinated, social distance, adhere to contact tracing or take even the most minor of public health steps, they helped get us to this hellish place, but they won’t necessarily be the ones who suffer. Instead, as Adams exhorted back in January 2020, they’ll be focused on being the “lone survivors”—and leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves. 

Health Conspiracy Theorists Hate Living In the World They Helped Create syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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How QAnon and the Wellness World Became Entangled

How QAnon and the Wellness World Became Entangled

When reporting for an article earlier this year about how fringe segments of the wellness world became a hotbed for COVID-19 denial and contrarianism, I had the pleasure of speaking with (the very smart) Matthew Remski, co-host of the Conspirituality podcast and a cult dynamics researcher. In our conversation, we danced around an often interrelated phenomenon: the wellness world’s infiltration by…