Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat

by Derek Beres

One dude who shows up on every thread had recently left an office job to become an empowered men’s life coach. He can’t contain his contempt for people who are living in fear. CrossFitters lament being locked out of their boxes and share shrill articles about vitamin D and kimchi while claiming face masks are petri dishes for bacteria. Another regular is a doula who writes a mommy blog. She shares a paranoid post claiming that toddlers were all terrified of adults in masks. They were forgetting who their mothers were.

herbalist the yoga teacher referred you to? There he is, proudly declaring he doesn’t believe in germ theory. Yes—the same guy who stuck needles in your back! “New German Medicine” is now his thing. “Viruses are essential to our evolution,” he announces. “Join me on Telegram for more of the truth they don’t want you to hear.”

Someone you know to be gaga about organic food and ayahuasca posts a sermon from an angel channeler who had a vision that Trump was a “lightworker.”

The timeline is chaotic, but cryptic hashtags keep it strung together: #savethechildren, #trusttheplan, #enjoytheshow, #WWG1WGA. It’s chilling, because you’ve heard these terms in a news report about QAnon,

COVID exposed the craven policies of governments interested in health only as far as it could keep people working.

“Your cancer happened for a reason,” they told him. They were hinting at the New Age dogma of personal spiritual responsibility, which is used both to explain aberrations that disrupt the idealized world of love and light and to blame people for remaining sick, even when they are chanting all the right mantras.

developing orthorexia, an eating disorder centered on an obsession with “pure” or “clean” foods. It’s a disorder that can lead to malnutrition, chaotic weight fluctuations, and social isolation in the singular pursuit of health.

leave the fad diet hamster wheel as he realized that wellness-world fat-shaming was a professionalized and socially acceptable form of bullying. It sharpened his radar for seeing how pseudoscience intersects with ableism to devastating psychological effect.

Modern yoga and wellness, which echoed with a kind of (now-depoliticized) body fascism that was over a century old, was being laundered through aspirational consumerism so that its sexist, racist, and violent implications were almost invisible.

Regardless of gender, conspiritualists convene at the spa, or at the MMA octagon. They indulge in self-care products, but also cloak-and-dagger political intrigue. They crave nurturance, but also dominance.

Charlotte’s web shows how conspirituality unfolds in the chaotic shadowland of the internet, where everyone can be the detective of their own fetishes—and feel heroic about it—where no one needs to or can be transparent, and where rumor can escalate through allegation into moral panic with blinding speed.

The reason is, conspiritualists are not wrong. They are attuned to systemic problems. They have felt their existential angst insulted by lifestyle marketing, and their humanity reduced to consumer data.

Conspirituality does, however, exploit a pandemic of disenchantment.

At the most intimate level of bodily agency—health care—conspiritualists speak to deep cultural wounds.

When QAnon broke into the online yogaworld in the spring of 2020, some of the earliest adopters of the satanic pedophilia myths were members of existing Facebook groups started by women who had survived sexual abuse in yoga schools.

In the summer of 2020, the pedophilia panic went viral through the power of the #savethechildren hashtag. In June, the Q-Tuber The Amazing Polly tweeted out the false claim that the Wayfair furniture company was shipping live children in expensive cabinetry units with girls’ names to feed the appetites of the Elites.

The seductive messaging of QAnon, shared by wellness influencers through hashtags and Instagram posts, appealed to their distrust of authority figures. A rush of money flooded new organizations that were suddenly interested in this fake anti-trafficking circus, and this diverted resources from organizations that had spent years and decades actually combating real-world sex trafficking.

Levinovitz argues that helplessness and uncertainty can be managed in New Age contexts via simply choosing to believe what feels empowering, regardless of evidence to the contrary. It could be Jesus, juice fasting, crystals, angels, or alien messages. Talismanic objects and in-group beliefs keep anxiety at bay, while the dangers being denied multiply and fester.

Fascism is a militant longing to restore the glorious mythical past of an idealized group of people. That golden age, and the land it supposedly flowered in, has been corrupted by the press, academics, immigrants, people of the wrong race, religion, or sexual orientation, or sick or disabled people. What’s needed is a strongman leader who will expel the degenerates, enforce law and order, and glorify the culture, values, and historic identity of the elect.

What she found were books crammed with racist, eugenicist, pseudoscientific ideas, wrapped up in the florid language of spiritual pretension.

Steiner believed that the primary role of the Waldorf teacher was to improve the karma of the child. Not through studying pedagogical research, developmental psychology, or diversity, equity, and inclusion, but by guiding their souls’ progress as they purged impurities that manifested as disabilities and diseases.

He built his fortune on health claims related to the 105°F heat in his practice studios—a protocol he contrived in the 1970s to mimic, he said, the temperatures in his native Calcutta, omitting for his Western customers the fact that in India, yoga is never practiced at midday, nor under the sun. As it turns out, the most researched “benefit” of the artificial heat applied in Bikram Yoga suggests that it brings participants dangerously close to heatstroke. A 2015 study by the American Council on Exercise found that participants were clocking internal temperatures of up to 104°F.

Wellness influencers and supplement shills are obsessed with purification. Intense sweating—with the added bonus of weight loss that may actually be dangerous dehydration—is super popular. People juice fast for days on “macronutrients” for a promised “metabolic reset.” They chug the magical lemon juice, maple syrup, cayenne pepper potion of the “Master Cleanse,” and, once released from the gross desire for ordinary food, are struck with light-headed reveries of quasi-spiritual freedom.

“I’m here to birth a new earth,” Angeline rhymes. She substantiated her argument in the usual manner for medical disinformation on social media. She correlated random anecdotes of women feeling nauseated, sweaty, anxious, or having a bad period to being increasingly surrounded by vaccinated people.

Christiane Northrup deployed a similar logic just days before, falsely claiming on Instagram Live that the mRNA vaccines shed virus through sweat glands. Then she went further. In the comments under the stream, she suggested that her followers withhold sex from partners who were considering getting the vaccine.

The collectivist logic of vaccination proves that immunity is a group effort.

ubiquitous blend of professionalized pseudoscience, bad metaphysics, and entrepreneurial libertarianism.

The problem is not just communications. Conspiritualists intent on undermining the credibility of scientific institutions on COVID did not have to look far for fair evidence. They could point to the racist medical atrocity at Tuskegee, doctors in the 1950s paid to endorse cigarettes, the US military pouring Agent Orange over the jungle canopies of Vietnam, or Merck scientists hiding the cardiac risk factors of Vioxx. They could flag egregious errors committed by respected members of the medical establishment and perpetuated for generations—such as the eugenicist attitudes that generated diagnoses like feeble-mindedness in the early days of clinical psychology.

Many North Americans who stuck with yoga after the 1960s wanted a religion that wasn’t a religion to bless a politics that wasn’t political. And they found their suppliers.

Then there’s Caroline Myss, who has said that AIDS was caused by “victim consciousness,” and Bruce Lipton, who claims that the new science of epigenetics proves that the power of thought can change DNA and create healing without medical interventions.

Brogan ditched her role as an alternative health critic of conventional psychiatry to cosplay as an epidemiologist.

Brogan startled followers by declaring that germ theory was false,

Ominously, she warned that the anti-COVID protection measures that public health officials around the world were only starting to figure out were akin to the “dehumanization agendas that preceded the Holocaust.”

Depression, generalized anxiety, bipolar disorder, chronic fatigue,” she once wrote of the diagnostics she was trained in, “are modern-day hexes” that cast a spell of fear manipulated by Big Pharma to sell pills.

Conventional psychiatry, she asserted, is rooted in patriarchal and controlling attitudes that lead to women being overmedicated and silenced. She was not entirely wrong.

But like many conspiritualists, Brogan had figured out how to blend valid critiques with simplistic politics and mind-over-matter claims that r...

thousands of followers she’s gathered over the decades who have watched her spiral as a leader in alternative women’s health into a mania, pulling thousands more with her. And influential. Given the sheer scope of her reach, she has become a primary vector of QAnon and COVID-19 conspiracism into mainstream spaces.

Trump is the authoritarian father building walls and fantasizing about assassinations and parades. But he’s also the permissive father who’s high on Adderall and assaulting women. Northrup is an avenging old woman predicting the end of days. But she’s also the comforting matriarch serving up gluten-free cookies.

Can anyone really separate out Northrup’s dodgy criticism of the HPV vaccine in her mainstream work from her Pastel QAnon take that COVID-19 vaccines are making women sterile?

Northrup is a case study in the quiet slide of a red-pilled alternative medicine influencer toward the political right. The confluence of anti-vax medical contrarianism, New Age spiritual goop, and right-wing information sources, fanned by a very active social media presence, drove her content deep into conspiracy territory as the year went on.

She falsely suggested that the mRNA vaccine secretes poison through the sweat glands of a vaccinated person, and could sterilize women who come into contact with it.

In 2019, Kennedy’s activism was implicated in a measles outbreak in Samoa that infected 5,700 and killed 83. Kennedy had personally visited Samoa earlier that year, and was pictured with local anti-vaccine advocates at the US embassy.