7: Doctoring COVID: Christiane Northrup’s Great Truther Awakening (w/Britt Hermes)
OB/GYN Dr. Christiane Northrup has been a giant in women’s healthcare advocacy for decades. She has persuasively argued for lower-intervention childbirth, an end to circumcision, and policies that place family unity at the heart of health care. She’s known and loved for challenging her medical training with faith-based values and an intuition framed as feminine (if not feminist) and “sovereign.”
Northrup draws on astrology, feng shui, chakra theory, and “vibrational” healing as modes of resistance to what she sees as medical patriarchy. This resistance began seamlessly intersecting with COVID trutherism in April, when she started posting daily Facebook sermons to her half-million followers. The series is called “The Great Awakening” — a phrase first used to describe 18th-century American spiritual revival movements, but was recently co-opted by QAnon conspiracists to describe the inevitable triumph of Trump over the Deep State.
Northrup’s sermons, combined with her posts of Plandemic, Tony Robbins interviewing anti-vaxxers, and a podcast with “Andy” Wakefield in which she called COVID a “flu” and expressed concern about Bill Gates taking over public education, give a rich glimpse into the seduction of conspirituality in the hands of a wellness matriarch.
Most recently, Northrup has strengthened her alignment with QAnon by posting a trailer for a follow-up to a key recruiting video. With up to a dozen QAnon supporters running for office in November, Northrup is positioned to nudge middle-class white wellness women with money into a cult that believes Trump is a messianic figure.
This week’s interview is with Britt Hermes, who earned her doctorate in naturopathic medicine from Bastyr University in 2011. After three years of practice, Hermes left the profession to became its most vocal public critic. We asked her to weigh in on women’s wellness in the pandemic and the appeal of Dr. Northrup.
Show Notes
Pharmaceutical Ethics and Grassroots Activism in the United States: A Social History Perspective
Just 50% of Americans plan to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Here’s how to win over the rest
To celebrate the Fourth, Michael Flynn posts a pledge to conspiracy group QAnon
How New Age Guru Louise Hay Harmed a Generation of Gay Men
How the ‘Plandemic’ Movie and Its Falsehoods Spread
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Cool.
Thanks, Derek.
Yes, this week, episode seven, the title is Doctoring COVID, Christiane Northrup's Great Truther Awakening.
So OBGYN Dr. Christiane Northrup has been a giant in women's health care advocacy for decades.
She's persuasively argued for lower intervention childbirth, an end to circumcision, and policies that place family unity at the heart of healthcare.
She's known and loved for challenging her medical training with faith-based values and an intuition framed as feminine, if not feminist, but also sovereign.
Northrop draws on astrology, feng shui, chakra theory, and vibrational healing as modes of resistance to what she sees as medical patriarchy.
This resistance began seamlessly intersecting with COVID trutherism in April, when she started posting daily Facebook sermons to her half-million followers.
The series that she's shooting is called The Great Awakening, and this is a phrase that was first used to describe 18th century American spiritual revival movements, but has been recently co-opted by QAnon conspiracists to describe the inevitable triumph of Trump over the deep state.
Northrop's sermons combined with her posts of Plandemic, Tony Robbins interviewing anti-vaxxers, and a podcast with Andy Wakefield in which she called COVID a flu, and expressed concern about Bill Gates taking over public education, give a rich glimpse into the seduction of conspirituality in the hands of a wellness matriarch.
Most recently, Northrop has strengthened her alignment with QAnon by posting a trailer for a follow-up to a key recruiting video.
And with up to a dozen QAnon supporters now running for office in November, Northrop is positioned to nudge middle-class white wellness women who have money into a cult that believes Trump is a messianic figure.
Our special guest for this episode is Britt Hermes.
She earned her doctorate in naturopathic medicine from Bastyr University in 2011, but after three years of practice, she left the profession to become its most vocal public critic.
So we asked her to weigh in on women's wellness during the pandemic and the appeal of Dr. Northrup.
So before we get to all of that, Julian, what's up in this week in Conspirituality?
Thanks, Matthew.
This week in Conspiratuality, we have an actual conspiracy.
Michael Flynn, who you may remember, was the national security advisor in the Trump administration right at the beginning, who ended up pleading guilty to lying to the FBI about Russian contacts, and then turned state's evidence for the Mueller probe.
The Mueller probe, which you probably remember, was called a hoax and a witch hunt by the GOP and by Trump, but which, by the way, returned 199 criminal charges 34 indictments and six convictions.
Not bad for a witch hunt that was empty of content, right?
And these convictions, the six convictions included Trump's one-time campaign manager, Paul Manafort, Trump's personal attorney and fixer of 12 years, Michael Cohen, both of those guys now out of jail due to the pandemic, and self-proclaimed dirty trickster all the way back to his days as a Nixon operative, talking about Roger Stone, Also hasn't served a single day of his short jail time yet.
That same Michael Flynn, yet to serve a day in prison, had in a highly unusual move a couple weeks ago, all charges against him dropped by the Trump-appointed Attorney General Bill Barr.
Charges dropped, by the way, that Flynn had already pled guilty to in order to do the plea bargain and turn state's evidence.
So this is really unprecedented.
And this happened, the charges being dropped, not before the lead prosecutor in the case resigned in protest.
The guy working underneath Bill Barr said, I'm done with this.
And the same exact thing happened in the Roger Stone case.
So why does all this background matter?
Well, we have the 4th of July this past week, and wouldn't you know it, Michael Flynn and his family, this is very, very widely publicized, posted a video to Twitter reciting a camera-facing patriotic pledge, all with their hands raised.
So what?
It's the 4th of July.
Patriotism is cool, right?
Well, at the end of the pledge, they all lower their hands and very pointedly look at the camera and recite, where we go one, we go all.
This happens to be the most prevalent slogan in the QAnon lexicon.
You'll see it on everything that they put out.
Where we go one, we go all.
Turns out, Q folks had actually been doing the exact same pledge, the full patriotic pledge, with that slogan at the end.
All week online leading up to the 4th of July, and the Flynn family included another QAnon hashtag, Take the Oath, which Flynn also added to his Twitter bio.
What's chilling about this is that the Q loyalists are revving themselves up for what they believe will be the Great Awakening that Matthew mentioned in the show notes, following something they call The Storm, in which the liberal political and Hollywood elites running a supposed child pedophile ring Will all be exposed and charged.
Michael Flynn holds a special place in the current iteration of Q mythology.
They see him as a hero persecuted by the Deep State and refer to themselves as digital soldiers, a phrase he actually coined, Michael Flynn, in a speech.
Some even think he may be the secret identity of Q himself.
You cannot make this shit up.
That happened this week.
So this has to be the first time in history that a group of humans ever thought we're on the precipice of a Great Awakening.
That's never happened before, right?
No Great Awakenings, no Armageddon or apocalyptic end of the world has ever been suggested before, you're right.
Wow, we are the ones we've been waiting for.
Absolutely.
So I also want to step back and talk about a real conspiracy this week as well and it's so good timing on that because and it's important because Even the term, you know, sometimes we've gotten some flack on social for using the term because it was coined by the CIA.
But there is foundation for what a conspiracy theory or conspiracies are.
It's just that they've gotten so confused with reality that it's put us in a precarious position that we're in right now.
But I recently had R.P.
Eddy on my personal podcast to discuss a book he wrote in 2017 with Richard Clarke called Warnings.
And in that book was a chapter on the coming pandemic.
And so Eddie has a very pretty impressive career.
He was the Chief of Staff to Richard Holbrook, he was a Senior Advisor to Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson, and he was the Senior Policy Officer to the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.
And during that time he was the architect of the Global Fund to Prevent AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.
So this RP has some pretty heavy chops in the pandemic industry at a very high governmental level, and he currently runs a council on the coronavirus, so he's pretty deep into it even now.
And when I asked him about conspiracy theories around vaccines and COVID, Well, the first thing he said was he just sighs when he hears them.
But then he said that they actually, they begin in really good places, like distrust of government.
So conspiracy theories are rooted somewhere that is actually problematic, but then they just kind of go off the rails.
And for example, we were talking about The whole crop of conspiracy theory is occurring right now.
And he said, one thing people don't really take into consideration is that the US government is completely incompetent.
And the idea, like Trump cannot, like if he eats something for lunch, it gets out.
So the idea that there's this like massive group of people doing something behind the scenes, it's same with 9-11.
Like the amount of stuff that leaks, the idea that these huge operations could actually happen, I mean, he said he's had some of the highest levels of clearance, and they really do not have the capabilities of doing this.
So, setting up context for conspiracies.
At the turn of the 20th century, there were two important pieces of muckraking journalism that were published, which was Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Samuel Hopkins Adams' The Great American Fraud.
Now, both of these were serialized magazine articles that turned into books, and they caused legislative change, and they also helped to push forward the consumer advocacy group movement that was happening.
Now, interestingly, most consumer advocacy efforts were run by women who were battling against problems with drugs and food.
And throughout the 20th century, women-led groups made an impact in consumer rights, from drugs to AIDS to gay rights to reproductive rights.
And this is all summated in a new research article published in the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry called Pharmaceutical Ethics and Grassroots Activism in the United States, a Social History Perspective.
Now, I'm very interested in this because I'm writing a book on psychedelic therapy, and so I spend a lot of time looking at current mental health treatments.
And if I'm arguing that psychedelics are important, then we have to understand why our current models aren't working.
And these female-led groups spend a lot of the 20th century working on this very issue.
I'll get back into that in a moment, but I want to briefly explain something that is relevant, and that's how FDA drugs become approved.
Now, for a drug to be approved, trials don't actually have to conclude that the drug works.
They only need to show that they work better than a placebo, right?
So the journalist Bob Whitaker, who I also talked to recently, he told me that if a drug is shown to work in 20% of volunteers for the trials and the placebo only works in 10%, then it can be approved because it works better than the placebo.
Now, Matthew did some math last week, and I'm going to do a little bit now, and I'm not very good at it.
But if those rates, 20% and 10% are true, that actually only means one out of every 10 people are positively affected by this new drug.
But 100% of those people are susceptible to the side effects of the drugs.
So, you know, 10% over, 10% overall at 20%, and that's who the drug actually helps.
And this is how a lot of drugs get on the market.
Here's where it gets even crazier.
Consider Xanax.
I have a personal history with this drug.
I took it as needed for six months for severe panic attacks.
And in that time, I took under 30 pills because I never got a prescription.
Now, Xanax actually helped me the way it's supposed to, as needed for a short period of time.
But that's not how a lot of people actually take Xanax.
Now, the Xanax trial, when it got approved, it was a 14-week study.
Now at four weeks, Xanax outperformed the placebo, as is common with benzodiazepines.
After eight weeks, there was no difference between Xanax and placebo.
And then after 14 weeks, the placebo was way outperforming Xanax.
So the question is, how did it get approved?
Well, The manufacturer, Upjohn, only reported the four-week results.
They just completely disregarded the rest of the study.
This was in 1980.
Now, in 2017, there were 25 million Xanax prescriptions written in America.
Remember where I started this, talking about real conspiracies, right?
So, that alone is problematic, but let's return to the article.
Starting in the 1980s, pharmaceutical companies began funding advocacy groups, specifically and intentionally.
Today, an estimated two-thirds of all advocacy groups in America accept money from pharmaceutical companies.
And in 2015, that was $116 million.
One of the biggest groups, the National Alliance of Mental Illness, is mostly funded by pharmaceutical companies, and Eli Lilly, who produces Prozac, even loaned an executive to help the group with strategic planning.
Now, this isn't only affecting mental health.
The authors write, an international study of groups in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and South Africa found that the extent of relationships with industry was inadequately disclosed in websites that address 10 health conditions.
So, when I hear a lot of these wellness figures that we discuss on this podcast talk about problems with the medical industry, they're beginning at the right place.
Kelly Brogan is a great example.
When she talks about psychiatric drugs, there are problems there.
But since the focus today is on women's health issues, There are specifically a lot of reasons to be skeptical of these industries, right?
Until the 70s, women's health was entirely based on the male understanding of female bodies.
And we don't have a very good track record of doing that.
But here's the thing.
Science still matters.
Matthew pointed out in our prep for this show how Andrew Wakefield is now Andy Wakefield, and he's targeted mother's intuition for decades.
Now, if you trace his work back to the early 90s, he was always stoking fears to promote an anti-vaccination agenda, while at the same time he was taking out patents on his own vaccines.
That's what's really dangerous when we discuss health in the modern era.
There's this binary choice between either something working or not working full stop.
Xanax really did help me for a short period of time.
It was actually one of the toughest periods of my life.
But I had the wherewithal to withdraw myself and not get hooked on it because I knew how the drugs work in your system.
The problem is most people get advice from their doctor and they take it as the final word, and they're not ever told about the long-term effects of drugs without informed consent, which is a very important concept in psychiatric care that is very under-discussed right now.
And what we're seeing right now is the outright politicization of medicine, and that's really dangerous.
So as we develop a coronavirus vaccine, there are going to be errors.
We already know this, and it really sucks, but it's part of the process of vaccine development.
And we're going to be in a far more dangerous place if this narrative of all vaccines are bad keeps getting pushed.
So, to conclude, as with Wakefield, you have to look at the financial and social interests of the people who push the narratives that you're being told.
I think Matthew's going to go in depth on this.
It might feel right because they understand their target audience, but you have to always wonder what their motivations actually are.
Such good points.
Such good points.
And there are people who listen to this podcast who I think are going to have a sigh.
Of relief.
Maybe they're having it right now as they hear me, because acknowledging the very real problems and the very real corruption, I think, is so important.
And teasing that stuff apart from the just completely outlandish speculative stuff that people often then launch into, to me, is crucial.
Well, the tragedy is that those who have been abused by conspiracies are the most vulnerable when it comes to those who would manipulate conspiratorial thinking.
And I think that's really our, I mean, when I think of the moral mission of this project, it's really about that for me.
That we're talking about a lot of people who have really good reason to distrust authority figures or their medical care or the government or what have you.
And it's precisely those folks who really don't deserve to be indoctrinated or to be emotionally manipulated by BS.
Cool.
Okay, well, I'm foregoing my This Week in Conspirituality segment because I've been up to my neck in Dr. Christiane Northrup's social media flood.
It's been about a month, actually, but I almost drowned this week, so this is what I'm focusing on.
And first of all, I wanna say that I'm kinda nervous about this segment because it's no small thing to tackle a true hero of the wellness world.
And for a certain crowd of ideological purists, The optics of me and two other men taking this on in relation to a matriarchal figure is just going to look wrong from the outset.
But I believe it's worth doing as respectfully as possible.
And I also believe it's urgent because as the New York Times reported back on May 20th, it was Dr. Northrup's Facebook page That functioned as the gateway for the viral spread of the film Plandemic into mainstream wellness circles.
Her post lifted it out of the smelly basements of QAnon groups.
And in fact, there are several parallels or points of contact between Dr. Northrup and QAnon in terms of demographics and themes that we'll cover.
An additional caveat, before I go through this reporting, I want to make clear because people can really get up in their feelings about their idols.
I'm not reporting on who Dr. Northrup is as a person, I have no idea.
I'm talking about what her professional and social presence is doing.
And I feel silly saying that, but it has to be said over and over again in the wellness industry because personal identity is so often merged with professional product.
And that makes things sticky.
But in any case, there's nothing personal here.
This is really an observation of what the professional profile is performing.
Also, I want to shout out a thank you to journalist Travis View, whose relentless and thankless coverage of QAnon has been really inspiring to me.
You can follow him on Twitter at Travis underscore View.
Okay.
So, Dr. Northrup has had a truly transformative spring and now early summer, during which long-term paradoxes in her content and presentation have been drawn into stark relief, and I would also say mobilized.
Because at the heart of the Northrup persona, I'll just say this right up front, there's a dual identity.
On one hand, she's a no-nonsense OBGYN with decades of clinical service and a down-to-earth vibe, and on the other hand, she's a sky's-the-limit new-ager.
And since April, she's been releasing nearly daily video chats, all about 12 minutes in length, under the series title The Great Awakening.
Now, more on that phrase in a bit, because it may not mean what her followers think it means, and she has a half million of them on Facebook, and they've been lapping it up.
In fact, she's getting a lot more engagement on conspirituality than on her typical wellness posts, and I think that's really important.
There's an emerging story now of people who jump onto conspirituality themes or content on social media, and suddenly their followings explode.
Now, the chaos, grief, but also possibility of the pandemic are all echoed in Dr. Northrup's recent timeline.
In late April, her partner of three years died.
And on a brighter note, she released the updated edition of her 1994 Women's Wellness Bible called Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom, which has sold close to 300,000 copies internationally.
She's written a new foreword to the new edition, and the foreword is this hymn of vindication that ties what she sees as her pioneering vision of women's health, which is all about agency and intuition, to the Me Too movement.
So it's very topical and very compelling.
And the rest of the book stands as a real monument to holism and, I would say, second-wave feminist medicine.
She might be wrong about the dangers of HPV vaccine, and she might be outdated in her rigid gender assumptions, but her mantra has had inarguable and also lucrative value.
It is simply that women know what's best for them.
But through these same past months, Dr. Northrup's pages have been an open sluice gate of conspirituality.
Some of it's puzzling, some is disgusting, some feels dangerous and reckless.
Oh, also, she can troll people, which is kind of interesting to see.
And it's all confusing because, like, she's so endearing.
Following her, like I've been doing it daily, it's like getting daily FaceTime with your aunt, who just came from cocktails or something.
She's chatty, gossipy, jokey, sometimes snide, but always, it seems, reserved, gracious, in this very New Englander, old-school Republican kind of way.
And I say that as somebody who lived for years in Vermont, so like, I just, I I'm I'm warm generally towards this type of this archetypal figure Anyway, so let's take a look at her social media feed.
It's gonna be a deep dive.
You might want to grab some tea Maybe some painkillers on April 4th Northrop launches the Great Awakening series by referencing an online meditation event that calls for 1 million people to raise their vibes at exactly 1045 p.m.
Eastern.
Now, over the next several months, the doctor will refer to other meditations that should be happening in the middle of the night.
She invites her followers to do them, to get up and do them.
And as a cult researcher, you know, this raises some red flags about whether some of this stuff and some of the engagement is being provoked by disordered sleep.
So, we've got links to all of this stuff in the show notes, but I just want to read to you an excerpt from what the meditation organizers say to get you a sense of what's really inspired Northrop to post.
They say, on April 4th, 2020, a tremendous astrological portal will open through which humanity must unite as one mind, one consciousness, And by so doing, take great strides in reclaiming our independence from the financial debt slave system instituted 700 years ago.
I'm not quite sure what they're talking about.
Also, this will dissolve the old world structures, erase the coronavirus and the fear surrounding it, and end the 5G network and its deadly radiation.
likely a major factor in what happened in Wuhan, China, with reports now surfacing that as many as 3 million people may have died from radiation poisoning in that province.
Okay. - I'm sorry, Matt, did you say April 20th? - April 4th, 2020. - April, okay, sorry, I thought it was 420, 'cause that would have made more sense.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Okay, so they're reporting 3 million people reportedly died.
Now, there's no footnote, there's no link, this is not a website that is like reporting on news, but I just want to note here the casual sensationalist racism of fantasizing about 3 million Chinese people dropping dead without a single news organization covering it.
Anyway, in the following days, she posts an article about how effective group meditation is.
So that seems fairly, you know, on topic.
And then to absorb the energy of all that astrological transformation, the doctor starts going on walks through the woods, mobile phone in hand.
She's producing videos that have a very New England transcendentalist vibe.
And most of the Great Awakening videos that follow feature astrology references.
But also from this point on, Dr. Northrup starts posting a steady stream of COVID truther related propaganda.
So on the 9th of April, she posts a YouTube link to a video that claims that COVID death certificates are being manipulated.
Facebook actually flags that link as partly false, but that doesn't stop 531 of her followers from sharing it.
And then on the 11th of April, she posts an article from her friend, Kelly Brogan.
I'm not being sarcastic there.
They really are actually friends.
And the article is in that Charles Eisenstein vein.
It's called, Why the Current Moment is an Opportunity.
And it features this pull quote, which I'm gonna have to read twice.
Brogan says, when we can individually and collectively acknowledge that medicine is a personal belief system, We will finally be free to practice embodiment according to our own truth.
Okay, so when we can individually and collectively acknowledge that medicine is a personal belief system, we will finally be free to practice embodiment according to our own truth.
So I experimented with this a little bit, like I crossed out medicine and I replaced it with physics.
I replaced it with like criminal law.
I replaced it with climate change.
You know, acknowledge that climate change is a personal belief.
I don't like, anyway, this is, this is, and I'm not, I'm not just cherry picking, like this is, this is a pull quote turned into a meme that is in one of those sort of like picture frames in the article.
Anyway, I'm not sure how much microdosing it would take to make that make sense.
Right.
Okay, so moving forward.
April 15th, she posts, Dr. Northrup posts a hit piece on Bill Gates that comes from anti-vax activist Robert F. Kennedy's Children's Defense Fund.
That gets 1.1 thousand shares.
On the 21st, she posts something from John Rapoport's blog called Corona Creating the Illusion of a Pandemic Through Diagnostic Tests.
Now, if you don't know who John Rapoport is, he has his own page in the Encyclopedia of American Loons, and he's also a sometimes host of Alex Jones' podcast, InfoWars, and Dr. Northrup's lead calls Rapoport's blog post solid journalism.
Now, all through this time, Dr. Northrup is continuing her wellness-related posts.
She has started asking for PayPal donations for her Great Awakening content, but I'm guessing that her main income is still coming from royalties and courses.
She has an herbal supplement line, too.
I'm not sure if she's making money through endorsements or affiliates, but people at that level of social media penetration usually are.
So yeah, on the 22nd, she's advertising her supplements, and the shares are low here.
Like, there's 135 shares, and most of her instructional wellness shares are under about 200 in number, while her truther shares are typically 500 to 1,000.
So she's getting a lot of traction, and that's gotta, you know, there's gotta be some feedback mechanism going as well.
Or I would imagine.
Doesn't have to be, but that's speculation.
Opinion on my point, on my part.
She's advertising for Hay House programs, You Can Heal Your Life Summit.
There's also a Food Revolution Summit.
Oh, this is where I picked up that she might be affiliating because I think she uses the word that I'm sponsoring this summit.
So who knows what that means.
On the 24th, she posts the Bakersfield Doctors.
Remember those dudes?
Where did they go?
They've now got 12 million views of that very early video that they produced.
And this is the way the doctor introduced it in her Facebook post.
Quote, the most important one hour interview of the pandemic making a strong case.
For the immediate end of social distancing, these two ER doctors who have been testing and treating many patients in California point out that the cost-benefit analysis for lockdown no longer makes sense.
The secondary collateral damage to health and the economy is now significantly exceeding the risk of death from COVID-19.
This is April 24th.
We are now, I think it's July 9th that we're recording.
On the 25th, she posts a video link to the anti-vaxxer Rashid Batar.
On the 29th, she posts another YouTube video with the title, Dr. Fauci's Darkest Secret, all caps, of course, surfaces as his predictive model crushes the Trump economy, Dr. Majkovic's PhD.
This has been removed by YouTube for violation of community standards or pseudoscience.
That got 838 shares.
On the 30th, she posted a London Real TV interview, that's the Brian Rose guy with Rashid Batar, and it's called Why You Shouldn't Wear Face Masks, Media Misinformation Will Make People Sick, 389 shares.
And then we come to May 5th.
This is a big day.
She posts Plandemic, writing in her OP, quote, it's all here.
This is 999 shares.
Again, the New York Times report shows that this post really unleashed the doc from beyond the bounds of QAnon groups in Facebook.
Then on Mother's Day, this is May 10th, she makes a very important appearance on Andrew, now known as Andy, Wakefield's podcast.
She praises him for his feminism and his support of mothers.
Now, from eight minutes on, we've got the podcast and the show link.
You will hear about her natural birth and anti-circumcision activism, plus stories about how she was radicalized as a child.
And she remembers that on entrance to med school, she said to her father, I think, I came here to find out, or I'm going to find out why doctors don't tell you the truth.
And the irony is not lost.
Okay, the next day, the 11th, she shares a Del Bigtree video about one of the Bakersfield guys.
On May 12th, there's a re-release announcement of Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom.
And then on May 19th, maybe this is one of the most important posts that we'll cover, And it's in relation to her QAnon pathway.
She posts an interview that she did with a guy named Sean Morgan.
He's a full-on QAnon booster.
And here's where we really got to ask the question, is Dr. Northrup using the same Great Awakening hashtag as the QAnon Surreal death cult.
The ambiguity of the phrase is that it goes back in American religious history, right back to the 19th century, to describe the wishes and activities of evangelicals intent on cultural reform.
But if you type it in on Twitter or on any search function, you basically spiral down into QAnon land.
And on this guy's YouTube channel, Morgan links to all of his QAnon related accounts and media products and also, what do you call it?
I think he has mugs and t-shirts and stuff like that.
He has 35,000 followers.
I want to point out, too, what's important.
When you're talking about that Great Awakening, the revivals, I think there were three revivals over the course of the 19th century.
And they were very rooted in race, too.
These were very racist.
This was about bringing a, you know, not only a specific form of Christianity, but bringing about the white culture over the uncivilized peoples that were in the land.
That was very much a part of it.
So if that does, the term itself, you can never tell where the terms come from.
We don't have insight into that.
But just knowing that it's their history, you know, it's not a comfortable term to be using for a number of reasons.
Yeah, and we're in a land of illusion, dog whistles, and references, and the possibility of maybe appearing ironic.
No, I don't really mean that, or they sort of have the truth, but I'm not gonna go that far.
So there's a lot of, yeah, there's a lot of room these days through the technology and the performance within the technology for never quite committing to a particular meaning.
Okay, on the 30th of May, this one really stuck out to me.
She posts a podcast with Tony Robbins that's called Unmasking the Science You Aren't Hearing on TV, COVID-19 Facts for the Frontline.
Robbins doesn't do anything special here.
It's standard truther-influencer stuff.
What kills me about this is that she manages, she's willing to boost a known sex predator.
And I just have no idea how that's coherent with her supposed feminism, her interest in, you know, women's health and intuition and women's agency and autonomy.
Like, how do you write a Me Too-influenced preface to your big book and then boost Tony Robbins?
Big question.
Want to point out that I think if there has been one video this whole time that I've seen that really Encapsulates this idea of I'm just asking questions It's not Tony Robbins video, right?
It starts off very sort of ambiguous big picture and then I believe the Bakersfield doctors come in, right?
It's just like the people that come in.
It's just there's a way that this whole I want to say movement, but this idea that I'm going to push my agenda, but make it seem like I'm the investigative one here and I'm just looking at things.
And that video specifically, I watched the whole thing when it came out and I was like, that's that.
I mean, he really has his platform down.
Well, I think it's an indication of how good he is at what he does, right?
And that, you know, you spent X number of minutes at the front end wondering where he was going with it, right?
Whereas, you know, when you open up Plandemic, it's absolutely clear within about five seconds what Mickey Willis is doing.
Yeah.
Okay, so getting into June, June 7th, now Dr. Northrup is posting about abductions orchestrated by aliens or by the Deep State, and she's referencing Stephen Greer, who's a ufologist, but also, here's a spirituality tie-in, he's also an old-time transcendental meditation guy.
And then we go even further into the ether when the channelers start popping up in the stream.
I haven't read enough of Northrop's literature to know how long channelers have been part of Her referral list, although I do know that her collaboration with Louise Hay goes back to the mid-90s at least, and Hay promoted all kinds of stuff like that.
Also, I do want to honor the fact that channeling might be particularly, like, personally useful for Dr. Northrup at this time.
As I mentioned, on June 10th she disclosed the April death of her partner, Ron.
And then on the 18th, she boosted a channeler who she implies has been helping her communicate with Ron.
Now, I was very interested to read that this particular channeler rents her Airbnb to dead people so that they can come and hang out with her and be really comfortable as they deliver messages to her for their families.
Then, on the 28th of June, in a Great Awakening video, she talks about her heroes Zach Bush, Rashid Batar, and Andrew Wakefield.
She gushes over Andy again.
She also intimates that she's leaving Facebook because of all the censorship.
Now, this is something to keep tabs on, because the very next day, Kelly Brogan and her partner Sayer G announced via email, I believe, that they're taking their business over to the MeWe platform, which is basically a substitute for conventional social media, where all the conspiritualists and white nationalists are safe from Facebook moderators.
Now, in this same video, however, Northrop also reports on messages channeled from a medium named Belinda Womack, who charges 600 US dollars for an angels session.
And I just got to read this from Womack's website about the money.
If you do not have the financial resources to pay for your session, please ask Divine Source to send you the funds with ease and grace.
She doesn't give like a email address, but This works much better for both of us.
You get to practice asking God for what you need, and I am paid for my service that requires more time and energy than can be measured with money.
And in case you are curious, the angels set the price, not my ego.
Payment is due at any time prior to your session.
Where's, can you read the part about the scholarships that are available?
There are no scholarships.
Well, I think you apply to the Divine Source Scholarships Department, actually.
Oh, got it.
That's between you and them.
Right.
Yeah, and you've got to talk to the angels.
But I'm going to talk to the angels through her.
I don't really understand, like, if you did ask the angels for the money, do you have to, like, give the money to her for the appointment?
Because you could just...
Maybe you can only talk to them about money before talking to her.
I don't know.
It's almost like it doesn't make sense.
I don't know, Matthew.
It's almost like it doesn't make sense.
I don't know, Matthew.
It's almost like, all right.
So on June 30th, this is, in this Great Awakening video, she makes one of several references to a 27-year-old spirit medium named Elizabeth April, who I believe is originally from Toronto and who I believe is originally from Toronto and now is living in LA.
Now, I feel like there's something very significant about this particular intergenerational connection and endorsement.
April, you know, could be her granddaughter.
But there's nothing about April's channeling that has anything to do with women's health or research or consensus reality.
You know, in fact, on her YouTube channel, she's got 61,000 subscribers.
So actually Northrop is boosting her up at, you know, sort of a, you know, a beginning arc of her career.
The following disclaimer and warning appears.
It reads, Elizabeth April is a universal source channeler.
She was given the message at 16 not to do any external research.
Everything you listen to in her videos is channeled through conscious meditation.
So like in a more coherent world, I could imagine Northrop boosting some Zoomer naturopath who shares her values and maybe studies some of the things that she studies.
But with April, Northrop seems to be passing the baton to a zone outside of conventional reality altogether.
Although like April presents a load of conventional privileges and, you know, And just to be clear, April says that she hears voices all the time and people pay her to take dictation.
And in her bio, she says she was abducted by aliens at 18.
And this was terrifying, but it also set her on her path.
She writes, this newfound knowledge somehow reawakened my DNA.
My psychic and clairvoyant channeling abilities came back in extremes.
I started astral traveling, lucid dreaming, reading minds, and talking to interdimensional beings in my bedroom.
This life for me would never be the same.
So here's what concerns me.
I'm not a mental health practitioner but what April describes raises some red flags and not necessarily about whether she's okay now.
Currently, but whether her story will encourage people to reframe potentially dangerous psychiatric crises in ways that may not pay off as well for them as it has for her socially and financially.
Obviously, there's a real danger to this.
For instance, in the video that Dr. Northrup refers to, April talks about ascension symptoms or physiological phenomena she claims are related to spiritual transformation.
Now, we could do a whole show on just that, and maybe we should at some point, but when, for instance, she describes that her having to stay in bed for three days because she was psychologically incapacitated by all that was going on, and as she's describing this, she looks like a magazine model, except without the depressed gaze.
Like, she's overflowing with joy and, you know, ebullience.
So the structure of that, like, I was devastated yesterday, but look how radiant I am today, is like, That's, you know, that's up and down.
That's, you know, that's uneven.
And please note, obviously, I'm not diagnosing anything.
I'm saying that as a media figure, she's presenting a precarious persona.
And I imagine that that's part of her appeal.
I think this is important.
The video that you shared, she says at one point she was having chest pains.
Yeah.
And she got the word from the plebeians or whatever reptile alien she talks to that it was higher heart chakra activation.
Right.
And here's the thing about that.
There's a relatively well-known musician, and I won't say this, it's probably a private story, but He was doing ayahuasca and he had heart pains.
He had a heart attack while doing ayahuasca.
He was young.
He was only probably in his 30s at the time.
And he got the proper medical attention and he's alive today.
But if he was doing ayahuasca and he had someone like this in his mind of, oh, this is my heart chakra activation, he would likely have died that evening.
Right.
And just adding to the levels in a real-world case of why that sort of discourse or dialogue or monologue that she's putting forward is really dangerous.
Well, it also links right up to COVID symptoms.
So I'm actually gonna quote from that video, which you've already flagged a little bit of it.
Here's what she says.
The wonderful thing about these symptoms is that no matter how intense they get in that moment, no matter how much you think you're dying in that moment, and we've all been there and gotten sick and had these huge upgrades and ego deaths, no matter how much it sucks in the moment, it would leave the very next day, right?
The beautiful thing about these awakening symptoms is that they're very intense, but just as quickly as they come on, they can actually leave our body, especially in the summer of 2020.
So really the next three months, July, August, even September.
So she does some soothsaying.
And then she says, she goes on to say, so the last three days I spent in bed, I never do that because I'm very productive and I'm a very go-go-go kind of person.
And you know, it kills me to not be productive.
And even my wife is like, I've never seen you like this.
This is weird.
And I'm like, I don't know what it is.
And when I tapped into it, all I heard now, when she says tapped into it, she's referring to when she begins to channel on this particular question.
All I heard was activations, activations, activations.
And what they, the sources, showed me is that we need to basically turn this switch off completely, which means go to sleep, in order for the activations, the DNA activations and upgrades to come through.
Okay, so she goes on a bit in that sort of interpreting the symptoms of exhaustion, and then also she talks about nausea, she talks about Huge pineal gland activations, which means pressure right in the back in the middle of your skull.
And then we're opening up two new chakras on the top of our crown chakra, which means it's going to feel pressure like something that's clamping down on the top of your head.
So headaches.
So she continues on her interpretation of symptoms and then she starts talking about breathing.
Yes, the breathing issues have been weird.
The overall awareness of breath has been really apparent.
Heaviness on the chest.
I'm specifically talking about sharp pains in your heart area, sharp pains in your chest area.
Look, I'm 27, almost 28.
Technically, I'm almost 30, which freaks me out a little bit.
No, I'm kidding.
I don't care about age, but there's no complications for me.
You know what I mean?
Honestly, if I was probably like 50, 60 plus, I would be pretty worried that I was getting chest pains, you know?
I'd be worried, but I have to remind myself I'm a fit young human being and there's no reason for these chest pains, right?
So I want to remind all of you who are older, who maybe you do have breathing issues or heart issues, I want to remind you that heart pains And then she pauses.
It's almost like she's gonna give a disclaimer.
You know, like, make sure you take care of yourself.
But then she goes on, she says, I took a look at this just the other day, just this past week.
I had to ask the Galactic Federation and the Palladians.
I'm like, please tell me, what are these chest pains?
The second that I got it validated that it wasn't just me, I asked.
And basically what they told me, this is really cool, they said it has everything to do with higher heart chakra activations.
So she says that, and then she says on, let's see here, she talks about the 13 chakra system, and then she ends by saying some other honorable mentions with the activation symptoms are tooth pain, anyone else have weird jaw or tooth pain, ear ringing, popping ears, and then she says heat, intense heat going through your body, really intense chills or cold going through your body, I think she's talking about fever.
But like, I mean, it's just imagine, we got to imagine the Zoomer and Gen Y kids feeling all of this stuff and not seeking medical attention because Elizabeth is smiling at them beneficently, telling them it's all part of a wonderful process.
And this show is not about Elizabeth April.
It's about Dr. Christiane Northrup, which I'll just remind everybody that, you know, she felt that this is a good person both to encourage and also to share her insights with her half million followers.
So, yeah, two more bits.
She's tweeted out the trailer for Andy Wakefield's new film, so we can look forward to that.
And then on Monday this week, she retweeted Terry Kristoff, who I didn't know before, but Kristoff posted a clip of Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany complaining about not being asked questions that would make Trump look good.
And Kristoff's retweet praises McEnany, who's a professional liar, as a rock star.
Now, I haven't found Northrop explicitly endorsing Trump or QAnon, but if any of you have any doubts about how she'll be voting in November, let's just leave it at her retweeting praise of K-Mac from Kristoff, an ultra-right pundit whose Twitter feed is stuffed full of racist and anti-Black Lives Matter content.
So here we are.
Dr. Northrup, a matriarch of women's wellness, retweeting a far-right Trump supporter.
And remember that we're talking about someone who rewrote her health Bible to laud the achievements of the Me Too movement.
And she's retweeting support for a malignant narcissist sex criminal.
Oh, and last thing, on the question of whether the Great Awakening is related to QAnon, Dr. Northrup actually answered the question for all of us just, well, not quite answered, but gave a hint for us all just on Monday as well by posting excitedly that the follow-up to Out of Shadows is coming out soon.
If you don't know that doc, it's a primary recruiting tool for QAnon.
It's had 15 million views.
We'll post some research on it in the show notes.
And to get a sense of how some of her readers are taking the bait, here's a comment on that post that reads like a copy-paste from countless QAnon sources.
I don't think I've commented on your Facebook before.
I have one of your books and gifted it to my sister.
I was delighted to discover you on Facebook recently, especially since you are so in tune with the reality of COVID and the elite satanic human trafficking and abuse, particularly of children.
God, I know it's awful even to think, let alone write, but if we don't talk about it, then we allow it to continue.
I recently spoke with Britt Hermes about alternative medicine and women's wellness.
She received her doctorate of naturopathic medicine from Bastyr University in 2011 and then went on to practice as a naturopath for three years before becoming an outspoken critic of homeopathy and naturopathy.
She may in fact be the biggest critic of naturopathy on the world stage right now.
Hermes contends that accredited naturopathic programs do not, as they claim, adequately prepare students to become competent medical practitioners.
She says that they are not prepared to recognize and treat serious health conditions due to inadequate medical training.
On her award-winning blog, Naturopathic Diaries, Hermes has described her experiences observing licensed naturopaths, frequently misdiagnosing patients, and providing inappropriate medical advice, such as advising against vaccinations and treating cancer with untested alternative
In fact, she tells a really harrowing story about a doctor she was working for really early on when she was straight out of getting her doctorate, who was using a non-FDA approved alternative cancer, alternative to chemotherapy, cancer treatment, and you can't make this shit up, called Ukraine, that she realized was not FDA approved when the shipment didn't arrive that week and the cancer patients were there to get their infusions.
And she said to the doctor, oh, it didn't come.
He said, oh, it's probably just been stopped because it's, you know, The FDA is not letting it into the country and that began the falling of the dominoes for her.
So, she's an interesting character in terms of her story and being on both sides of that naturopathy question.
Here's my interview with her.
I mean, I wonder sometimes about how the medical model, you know, may not be particularly relationally warm Or caring?
That there's an in-and-out kind of cut-and-dry, maybe reductionist seeming approach?
There's probably multiple things, right?
So for sure, for sure, women have historically been sort of pushed out of medical care where Pain and symptoms aren't considered real or considered to be overblown.
I mean, there's a long history of this happening in medicine.
So I think on the one hand, it's normal for women to feel like they're not getting the care that they need from a medical doctor because historically they haven't.
So I think that makes sense.
Also, I don't know if you've witnessed this, but I can just sort of speak from personal experience.
When I became a mom, Things got really scary in the sense that I realized I suddenly had to make a lot of healthcare decisions and I was really afraid of my baby, my child, getting sick and how to navigate that and who to turn to for support of that.
And when I started to Google anything on the internet, 90% of what came up was not legitimate healthcare sources.
It was all sorts of mommy bloggers, tons of mommy bloggers who are blogging about health, and then lots of alternative medicine stuff.
And so to scroll through and to find the real websites containing the information was really difficult.
It was really overwhelming, and I even know how to find that information, and I found a hard time.
Doing that.
And so I immediately understood why anyone offering promises of an easy, fast solution that alleviated all of my fears about making that decision, why that would be so appealing.
And so I think a lot of what alternative medicine offers is a clear-cut answer.
Whereas it isn't always so clear-cut with real medicine, and you tend to get nuanced answers with a lot of like, well, it depends.
We have to see.
Not everyone responds to this.
We can try this, and if the side effects are too bad, then we'll try that.
Which is really honest, but it's really just...
It's like emotionally laborious, I guess, is how to explain it.
Where if the answer is like, oh, let's just do this food elimination, and if we take dairy out, then all of your baby's ear infections will go away, and the colic will go away, and they'll never need antibiotics.
We're like, well great, that's easy.
Plus it feels empowering for the mom, right?
To be like, I am going to make this change in the household and I am going to, with these actions, steer my child into health, right?
Away from disease and into health.
And that can be really empowering.
And I think, as you know, as a parent, sometimes things can feel really like out of your control.
So, I think that's an appealing aspect to the allure and just the marketing, the shiny vernacular of alternative medicine.
Yeah, I agree with that.
And I think there's another piece there too, which is the experience, right?
If the experience is that you go to a really nice room that has soft lighting and Native American flute music playing, and someone sits down and is really warm and present with you, takes an inventory and then tells you, well, if we remove dairy from your child's diet, then this is, it's all gonna be wonderful.
And it's natural and there's no side effects and there's no chemicals.
And it's, I get the appeal of that. - What I think is interesting, hopefully for you and your listeners to understand is that naturopaths know this.
We take classes in how to market ourselves.
Like I took a whole series of classes, it was like four weekends or something, about how to become profitable in my practice by how I present myself.
And we literally went over things like what I should wear, what music should be playing, how I should have my hair, how patients prefer you dress white coat or regular clothes, where you should put your chair.
How you should sit next to the patient, when you should touch the patient, and what sort of therapeutic relationship you should try to build.
And so, naturopaths are hippie and earthy and all of that, but there's also a massive marketing piece that we are intentionally exploiting in order to draw the patient in And then keep the patient.
And so it's not all like, I was going to use the word natural, but it's not all like organic.
It's not just all like what it is.
It is, it is intentionally designed to be that way to attract that patient, which is typically, honestly, a white woman with money.
And to keep her.
And once you keep her, you get her friends.
And once you get her friends, you now have white suburbia.
You now have a white suburban wealthy neighborhood, and their children, and you draw in their husbands, and you're set.
It's a great business model, to be honest.
So, I asked Brit about Dr. Christiane Northrup next.
Northrup, as we've been discussing, is the much-beloved author of the best-selling 1993 book, Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom.
She's well known not only for empowering messages about female health, but also for opposing vaccines and more recently for endorsing a range of COVID-19 conspiracy theories.
The through line I was curious to hear Ms.
Hermes' thoughts about is the tension Northrop plays on between a kind of oppressive medical patriarchy on the one hand, and a very idealized framing of women's intuition as the ultimate spiritual guide to wellness And now, it seems, to political truth.
Here's what she said.
Well, she's certainly not the only female medically trained physician to sort of try to capitalize on the marketing power of targeting women.
The story is pretty familiar, I have to say.
I haven't read her book, but I've read other books by other female medical doctors and different specialties that talk a lot about the same stuff, especially this idea that women are intuitive and that their intuition should guide healthcare decisions rather than the expert in the room.
This is sort of a fascinating idea that I have been thinking about a lot, actually.
And again, it goes back to being a new parent, where I have found myself in a situation where, to some regard, I have some power over the medical decision that is going to be made, either for me or for my child.
And feeling like I am not well equipped to make that decision.
Like, I don't know what's best.
I don't know if I should delay this treatment or do this treatment now.
I don't know if I should have treatment A or treatment B.
And what I was really looking for was the expert in the room to guide me and to help me make that decision because I am not educated to do so.
And I think it's really interesting that experts and people who are trained in how to make these decisions are telling patients that actually they should do whatever they want and sort of disregard the expert advice.
And of course, that can lead to really dangerous and bad outcomes.
That outcomes, but I'm finding now that I'm getting older and now that I have to make health care decisions for little people in my life, meaning my children, you know, I want that.
I want that expert to be able to help me make that educated decision.
I don't want to be left to my own devices to, um, to sort of do that on my own.
But it's really, this female intuition thing is a powerful idea and I haven't talked about it out loud before and so I hope this answer isn't too muddled and confusing.
Maybe you can help sort of like guide this.
This is very emotionally appealing.
This idea that, like, something inside of me knows what's best.
I've seen it with my own daughter from examples of, like, I can just give you examples, how she cries, right?
I feel like I have a sense of when it's a cry that I need to go into her room at night and intervene versus it's a cry that I can give her five minutes and see if she settles down.
And I tend to be able To know the difference, but actually I don't know if that's true.
I don't know that if I sort of logged the times that I went in there thinking something was wrong and she was fine versus the time that I went in there thinking something was wrong and I was right.
I don't actually know what that ratio is, but that doesn't matter because all I remember is the times that I was right.
And so now I think that I have some sort of like mama superpower to be able to know when I need to go in there and intervene with that cry.
And another recent example is, so my dad is 72 and he has back problems.
He has He has scoliosis and sort of severe back problems that he might need to get surgery for.
And my parents like to include me on these doctor's appointments via FaceTime.
And so he had a recent appointment consult with a really fancy surgeon in Los Angeles who has a good reputation.
But there were a number of red flags in that appointment for me.
And after that appointment happened, I spent the next couple of days thinking about it and sort of mulling it over.
And then I called my parents and I was like, listen, I don't think this is the right surgeon for you.
And then I did some more research and it turns out that this Surgeon has a serious pending complaint against him with the California Medical Board and just found some really good reasons for my dad to not pursue any therapy with this particular surgeon.
The first thing I thought of was, ah, my intuition was right.
But it really wasn't my intuition, right?
Now that I'm thinking about it, it was actually critical thinking skills of putting pieces of what I was listening together and then stepping back and sort of trying to think about it objectively.
But the way that I wanted to frame it, and actually the way that I framed it initially to my mom, was something in my intuition tells me that this isn't right.
It doesn't feel Right.
And so that's a really power... I don't know why it's more emotionally appealing to be like, hey, listen, I had a feeling and that feeling was right, versus to be like, no, I critically thought through this and my brain told me that this wasn't the right way.
I don't know how to explain that.
Interesting.
I think that there are two different ways that we tend to think about intuition.
One way of thinking about intuition Is it's this mysterious, magical, non-rational, almost sixth sense that if you trust it, it's always right.
Always trust it, right?
If something feels off, like, and that is very appealing for a host of really obvious reasons, right?
And we do tend to have confirmation bias about it.
We're like, yes, I was right.
But I think the other way of thinking about intuition is that it's, you are, you're, Because you are knowledgeable about a particular subject, you are picking up on something that doesn't feel right, but you can't put your finger on it.
So it's a starting point.
And from that starting point, then you go, I need to look into this more and find out if I'm right.
And you might end up being wrong.
You might learn something, but you might follow it through and go, Oh, hold on.
This, this makes sense now.
And that's where you're employing your critical thinking and you're looking into it and you're exploring.
And then I think there's a, there's another aspect to it, which, Which really is, like when you're talking about hearing your kids crying, I'm sorry, I'm taking over and telling you my thoughts, but when you're hearing your kid crying, I think we do have all sorts of non-linear or non-verbal ways of knowing, right?
There's body language, there's facial expressions, there's tone of voice, there's the Process you go through, for example, with your baby, of bonding with that child and learning how to pick up on all of those signals, including tone of voice, including the pitch at which they cry, where there is something in you that goes, oh, that feels really terrifying and I need to run to them immediately, or that goes, I think that's that thing where they just need to work through it a little bit and then they'll go back to sleep.
And you might actually learn to be quite accurate in that.
But I also hear what you're saying, which is that you don't have a control group and you're not really logging any of it.
You're just kind of convinced.
And in a way you have to.
This goes to, I think, a key piece of being human is that we create a working model of how we're navigating life and then we buy into it.
And that's fine.
But it seems to me that what happened when science came along is we started to go, OK, let's be more careful.
about how how we claim to have knowledge about the world how what we claim is true about the world regardless of who is looking in a way that allows us to be responsible and it seems to me that medicine is this this high demand for responsibility right yeah yeah yeah there there's How do I want to say this?
I mean it is sort of like an innate aspect of alternative medicine that you can sort of emotionally go and emotionally decide your health care steps.
Yes.
It seems to be like a Like a mainstay of it almost, of like you have to do what your body, you have to listen to your body.
You have to listen to your heart chakras and where that chest pain or that tightness in your throat that you're feeling, is that a symptom of a heart attack?
Or, are you grieving something?
Are you suppressing emotion?
And maybe we need to clear that blocked energy.
What do you, as the patient, think is going on?
Which is sort of a crazy way to have an expert, a physician, tell patients to make their healthcare decisions.
But having experienced it myself, having been in that field myself, and then just coming from where I come from in the world, which is a suburb of LA that is predominantly white and upper middle class, I just know that that is an effective marketing tool, and that is what is profitable, and that is really what draw women
And this idea of like you have to be careful how you think and how you talk and and how you you know make beliefs because those things can manifest in the world and they can affect your health and they can you can make yourself sick through your thoughts you can make yourself sick through your belief system and
Anything that sort of targets that to help you believe better, I think is really just really attractive in a way that's difficult for me to succinctly explain.
All right, great interview, Julian.
I really enjoyed listening to Brit.
It amazes me when a figure can walk down a road for years and really dedicate herself to something and then admit that she was wrong.
Or, and change course like that.
And I think that's something that we don't have enough of, right?
We have a president right now who refuses to ever admit error, and that trickles down in the culture.
So when I see people like Britt come forward and be like, hey, I was wrong in this and now I want to follow something, that's really commendable.
I wrote my This Week in Conspiratoriality after I watched the interview, and when I was talking about women's health and women's intuition, I was thinking about what Brit says, and I think it's important to point out, because A lot of times, intuition is presented as something mystical, like it's downloaded from somewhere and you're granted this knowledge, like Matthew was talking about with the channeler.
Intuition, it's been studied pretty extensively, intuition is just your experiences.
But here's the thing.
This is how our memory works.
If we had to relearn everything every time we did it, we would never get much done.
So if every time I'm tying my shoelaces, right, when you first learn, it's really challenging.
And then you can do a myriad of activities While tying your shoelaces because it comes embedded.
That's all intuition is.
It's your personal experiences and beliefs sped up.
So that when you encounter a situation, you automatically default to everything you know already.
And it's just that intuition is checking what you're up against, against what you already believe.
There's nothing mystical about that process.
It's actually called conservation of energy, right?
It's our brain's way of being like, I don't really want to take the high road and really dissect this.
I'm just going to go with the quickest possible route.
Most subconscious programming or processing happens extremely rapidly below the level of conscious awareness.
That's what intuition is.
So when I hear, When I hear this term thrown around, it's just a reminder that your pre-existing biases and beliefs are your intuition.
And to be able to work like what Britt did, be like, my intuition is towards naturopathy, but hey, wait a second, I gotta look at this.
And that's actually the opposite of intuition, which is just as important.
Intuition is very important sometimes, but critical thinking is also really important.
Do you know, I think, for the most part, I agree with, I mean, I don't doubt the science you're citing on intuition and the speeding up of memory and the availability of habits that have been sort of committed to the subconscious.
I think when I hear people use the appeal to intuition, I also hear an appeal to the miraculous and or an appeal to grace.
And as somebody who has been through many different iterations of agnosticism and sometimes atheism, my feeling my feeling and my experience of what I would call intuition is often coupled with this feeling that I'm not really having a memory of something or something.
Or I'm not calling upon something that I already know.
It's actually, I'm learning how to do something new for the first time and I don't know how I did that.
Like, I don't seem to have a precedent for thinking about my relationship in this way, thinking about my family in this way.
You know, this comes up a lot with parenting, actually, where the ways in which I was treated as a child, I was raised in schooling, are absolutely, they are off They are beyond the pale now for what I intend to do with my own parenting.
And so when I have to reach for something different, I actually don't know where it's coming from.
And I can see how appealing it is for people to feel as though they're being guided by something.
That is innate within them, but I don't think that being a better parent is actually innate within me.
I think I'm actually improving something and I'm not trying to pat myself on the back.
So I guess I also, maybe this is a future episode.
Is we have to figure out, I think we also have to figure out, because I think specifically for the conspiritualist, the notion that we can, that the human being can be, I don't know, like inspired Truly inspired by something that is unknown and indefinable.
That all of that, we have to do justice to, and some kind of, we have to have a kind of respect towards, because it's the hook, really, for manipulation.
And what I'm so disgusted by, in the cultic organizations that I study, is that, as this one theorist says, whose name escapes me now, They take the best part of you.
And they manipulate the best part of you.
And I really don't, I don't want that to happen anymore for people.
You know, the sense that one can have of grace or something that is miraculous, wherever it comes from, something that is new and unknown and you can't explain it, that is a very vulnerable thing to manipulate.
And I say just off limits.
Yeah, I'm with you on that.
And I'll mention this really quickly, just because it's so topical.
I'm sure you're both aware of the Malcolm Gladwell book, probably going back about 15 years now, called Blink.
And this was a huge bestseller, made a big cultural impact.
It's about intuition, and he spends the first half of the book really talking about intuition in ways that I think for most of us, especially in our subculture, are very inspiring about, you know, how intuition is this fascinating way of knowing things without being able to explain it to yourself, of having sort of implicit knowledge or subconscious knowledge.
And he talks about how People who are experts on particular topics are more likely to have correct intuitions about those topics.
He uses examples like whether or not a statue purporting to be from ancient Greece is a fake, and that someone who has many, many years of knowledge on the topic and has been looking at those kind of statues for a long time can say in an instant, it's a fake.
Can you explain why?
No.
I just know it's a fake.
And then as they do the research, they turn out to be right because there's some set of things that they're picking up on correctly because of their knowledge base.
But then in the second half of the book, what does he go to?
Amadou Diallo.
He goes to police killings.
He goes to implicit bias.
He goes to how racism It's based on an intuitive sense that you have, like, I don't trust this person, right?
And so I thought he did a really good job of sort of unpacking, like, this way of knowing that we tend to idealize in our subculture that, you know, sometimes it's a good starting point for your exploration, but it may not be the be-all end-all.
- Right. - On her July 6th installment of the Great Awakening video series that we've talked about quite a bit already, about eight minutes in, Dr. Northrup says to the camera, we've already made it into 5D.
She's referring to five-dimensional reality, some sort of transition that has happened that has been downloaded through the Cosmic Portal.
We've already made it into 5D.
We've made it!
Our job now is just to hold the vibration for those who are only now waking up.
We're not done.
There's still work to do.
There are going to be a lot of silly things that will happen until the election, but you'll be okay.
Elsewhere in the same video series, she swoons at the poetic language and handsomeness of Dr. Zach Bush.
I wish I could speak like him, she says, and oh, he is just so handsome.
With a faraway gaze, she repeats his liturgy.
When he talks about the microbiome and living in harmony with nature, If figures like Bush and Charles Eisenstein are the young up-and-coming male messiahs of natural wellness and sovereign immunity, Dr. Northrup is happy to be the prophet who hails their ascension to her legion of intuition-embracing female followers.
But we have to go further back to find the primordial matriarch that prefigures wellness conspirituality during COVID-19.
And yes, I know, I'm blowing right past Gwyneth Paltrow But make no mistake, Gwyneth built her goop empire on a glittering worldwide foundation already in place.
Though the name of this OG matriarch is anything but unfamiliar, the gradual process of amplified influence, or dare I say, infection, via the vector of being the star maker who launched or resurrected the careers of so many best-selling authors, pseudoscience peddlers, Anti-vaxx advocates and propaganda documentaries is singular in its reach and stature.
So much so that you already know exactly who I'm talking about.
Every day, talk show host and media mogul Oprah Winfrey brings psychic mediums who talk to the dead, alien abductees, and proponents of quantum woo into the living rooms and kitchens of roughly 12 million people.
She's the king and queen maker who almost 30 years ago anointed recent Democratic presidential hopeful Marianne Williamson's course in miracle-based stardom and launched what would become Deepak Chopra's ubiquitous presence as New Age royalty.
Oprah routinely featured guests involved in the well-documented satanic panic period of the late 80s and early 90s.
This resulted in dozens of people being wrongly convicted.
In 2006, Oprah baptized the faithful in her hefty support of the iconic magical thinking film, The Secret.
One of whose teachers, James Arthur Ray, ended up in 2010 manifesting a prison sentence for negligent homicide after greedily packing too many $10,000 per person participants into a sweat lodge where three people died.
But just like any form of public prophecy, pseudoscience, or outlandish claim, the modus operandi is to keep moving, never look back, never acknowledge when the experimental data from your actually falsifiable hypothesis is wrong in ways that have real-world consequences.
The neat trick our subculture has fallen for in the age of Oprah is to frame all spiritual beliefs as simultaneously too sacred to criticize, Yet too inconsequential to have any human impact beyond good vibes and tolerance.
But when she first hosts Jenny McCarthy in 2007 to talk about her anecdotal conviction that her son's autism diagnosis is a result of the MMR vaccine, the perfect storm begins.
And that little butterfly flaps its way right into today's tsunami of 50% of Americans, according to recent polls, saying they will refuse a COVID-19 vaccine when it is ready.
Oprah's segment in 2007 included her giving a canned CDC statement about the effectiveness of vaccines, but it still ended with the almost perfect last word from McCarthy.
When asked about her scientific evidence for her son's autism being caused by the vaccine, she looked straight at the camera and said, my science is named Evan, and he's at home.
That's my science.
Why is this so perfect?
Well, it's perfect because we find ourselves increasingly In a world of populism, a world in which strongman dictators with no experience or education who tell it like it is are seen as more trustworthy than experts, civil servants, and lifelong academics or scientists.
That attitude finds a perfect expression, or should I say extension, in what I'm going to call medical populism, in which questions of medical science are believed to be best answered by fringe natural health advocates, unqualified self-promoting supplement salesmen, oh, He's so handsome.
And spiritual healers or teachers who claim knowledge from the great beyond.
What, then, is the infallible guide to this medical populism?
Gut feelings, personal anecdote, spiritual revelation, and at the heart of it all, intuition.
But not just any old intuition.
It's the divine intuitive knowing of the sacred feminine.
It is Jenny McCarthy on Oprah who injected the misinformation from disgraced former physician Andrew Wakefield's discredited 1998 study that claimed a link between vaccines and autism, which infects wellness culture to this day, especially embedding itself in the consciousness of holistic moms as a meme that no matter how much voluminous research has negated, just won't go away.
Despite Wakefield being stripped of his medical license and the study being exposed, here's another actual conspiracy, right?
As not only methodologically flawed due to insufficient data, but biased by a competing vaccine manufacturer paying the participants and giving Wakefield a previously undisclosed £400,000.
10 of his 12 co-authors in the study have retracted their interpretation of it and expressed their official dismay at the implications for public health based on an implied connection between vaccines and autism that was simply never there.
Cut now to Mother's Day 2020.
Who is the featured guest on Andy?
You have to imagine, rebranded to fool the search engines, right?
Andy Wakefield's podcast, Dr. Christiane Northrup.
What is the first topic of conversation?
How a mother's intuition is the most powerful form of wisdom.
Andy and Christiane each recount an anecdote of the man in the white coat being wrong and the protective mama being right.
You really can't Make this shit up.
On July 7th, Northrop added a new video to her Great Awakening series that has increasingly become a vehicle for QAnon dressed up in New Age cosplay.
Her latest call to action?
Join Dr. Pam Popper's growing army of one-issue voters concerned not with the candidate's stance on anything except vaccines.
Because, and I'm quoting, if we let the government mandate what we inject into our bodies and those of our children, nothing else matters.
That's the end.
It doesn't matter what side you're on or what race you are.
Yesterday, on July 8th, her Facebook page was dedicated to promoting Andy Wakefield's brand new anti-vaxx documentary that we'll no doubt be talking about, called 1986, The Act.
What else was she promoting this week?
As Matthew mentioned, Oh, just the QAnon-inspired documentary film, Out of Shadows.
And so the conspirituality world just keeps turning.
Thank you everyone for listening to Conspirituality.
You can find us at conspirituality.net, facebook.com slash conspirituality podcast, and at our Patreon page, patreon.com slash conspirituality.
