This article describes a connection between wellness and self care and the extremist groups that we have seen pop up the last years.
I thought it was interesting to see how missing research for women is causing more people to see the mainstream as ‘wrong’ and looking for alternative truths.
One of the most effective (and horrible) things the people behind Qanon did was find a way of collecting and brainwashing people from all sorts of sub-cultures under their umbrella of crapulence. Wellness nuts, western New Agers, evangelical Christians, traditional Catholics, survivalists, Falun Gong, conspiracy theorists (flat-earthers, ancient alien believers, anti-vaxxers, ‘plandemic’ believers, etc.), white supremacists, libertarians, anti-semites, the anti-gay movement, mothers who worry about sexual child abuse, anti-immigrant advocates… The list goes on and on.
So many friendships and families have been destroyed by this crap. It’s heartbreaking.
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.”
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
The guys from the Conspirituality podcast have been on this since the start of the pandemic. They released their findings in a book not too long ago. It’s a good one.
Seconded, Conspirituality is one of my favorite podcasts! I always find the hosts to be extremely reasonable and thoughtful, and I think the topics they cover are unique and important.
There’s a new podcast with one of the guys on the Jordan harbinger show right now.
There was a recipe blogger who supported the Canadian trucker convoy, and got cancelled as a result. I also used to work with a woman who is a doTERRA hunbot and has some popular wellness site who also is a Jordan Peterson antivaxxer. The wellness movement is mostly made up of rich white women with little education and the combination is deadly…
Rich white women of a certain age might have been the ones whose parents chose to not send to college over their brothers. Perhaps this goes for rich women of any colour. My mother’s (now 68 yo) parents sent her brothers to college, not the girls. My mother got a vocational training, contributed to the brothers college funds, and then finally paid for herself through college. My mother’s not white.
I believe that most people have a certain hunger for information and education, and if college wasn’t an option, they’d look for these educations elsewhere.
I find most of the ones I know personally didn’t bother with higher education because they started having babies right away.
Which is sad, because the way for women of that milieu to have any standing in society or a disposable income is by marrying. And the way to “seal and secure” the marriage is to have children ASAP.
I had a part time job when I was in uni. It was a crappy job at a cinema (it was not crappy, it was actually a load of fun, but you know, “crappy”), but I’m a millennial. My mother’s cousin told me she used to want to do part time at a store, just to have her own money (her husband had a flashy job), but hubby told her not to do it, because, “What if our friends visit that store? Where do we put our face?”
Saving face… pffftt. I believe this is still the sentiment in places like Hongkong, certain classes in India, in Indonesia, etc. Upper class women shouldn’t work or study, lest it makes them look working class.
That’s absurd!
Yes, absolutely bonkers!
Another good article on the topic; https://www.fridaythings.com/recent-posts/angela-liddon-oh-she-glows-canada-trucker-convoy-2022
