40: White Supremacy: Grift and Gravity (w/Michelle Cassandra Johnson & Daniel Lombroso)
Around 2015, the alt-right movement erupted online to both provoke and monetize MAGA momentum and distort and defame the real-world progress symbolized in Barack Obama and agitated by Black Lives Matter. Young white supremacist poster-boy Richard Spencer and edgy internet crypto-racists like Lauren Southern, Mark Cernovich, and Gavin McInnes led the viral charge, racking up subscribers while lining their pockets on the side. Daniel Lombroso of The Atlantic embedded with their ilk from 2016-18, collecting enough footage to release the award-winning documentary, White Noise. Julian sat down to talk with him about the movement, and about making this film while Jewish.Was any of this a surprise to anti-oppression activists on the ground? Not according to Michelle Cassandra Johnson, author of Skill in Action: Radicalizing Your Yoga Practice to Create a Just World. While the white supremacy Lombroso whistleblows is spectacular and absurd, the white supremacy Johnson and other justice activists feel in their bones has been a centuries-long war of attrition against equality. Matthew sits down with Johnson to discuss how the yoga and wellness worlds in particular are (and are not) responding to the intensification of both calls to justice, as well as the blowback.In the Ticker, we wonder if Gwyneth Paltrow’s new long-COVID Goop merch—and her “longer-term detox” that includes selling Goop-approved $500 blankets and $8,000 necklaces—heralds a dawning era in high-end disability consumerism.Show NotesIt took a year, but Gwyneth Paltrow figured out how to exploit the pandemicGwyneth Paltrow Is Selling VibratorsHealing My Body with a Longer-Term DetoxThe NHS dings Gwyneth’s long COVID curesLauren Southern hides the face of her biracial babyDaniel Lombroso’s White NoiseSouthern Poverty Law on CernovichSouthern Poverty Law on SouthernRichard Spencer, white subsidy suckerMichelle Cassandra Johnson’s websiteMichelle Cassandra Johnson’s
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Episode 40, White Supremacy, Grift and Gravity.
Around 2015, the alt-right movement erupted online to both provoke and monetize MAGA momentum and distort and defame the real-world progress symbolized in Barack Obama and agitated for by Black Lives Matter.
Young white supremacist poster boy Richard Spencer and edgy internet crypto-racists like Lauren Southern Mike Cernovich and Gavin McInnes led the viral charge, racking up subscribers while lining their pockets on the side.
Daniel Lombroso of The Atlantic embedded with their ilk from 2016 to 2018, collecting enough footage to release the award-winning documentary, White Noise.
I sat down with him to talk about the movement and about making this film while being Jewish.
Was any of this a surprise to anti-oppression activists on the ground?
Not, according to Michelle Cassandra Johnson, author of Skill in Action, Radicalizing Your Yoga Practice to Create a Just World.
While the white supremacy Lombroso whistleblows is spectacular and absurd, the white supremacy Jackson and other justice activists feel in their bones has been a centuries-long war of attrition against inequality.
Matthew sits down with Johnson to discuss how the yoga and wellness world in particular are and are not responding to the intensification of both calls to justice as well as the blowback.
In the ticker, we wonder if Gwyneth Paltrow's new long-COVID goop merch and her longer-term detox that includes selling goop-approved $500 blankets and $8,000 necklaces heralds a dawning era in disability consumerism.
This is the Conspirituality Ticker, a weekly bullet point rundown on the ongoing pandemic of messianic influencers who spread medical misinformation and sell disaster spirituality.
Goop, there it is.
Well, just one ticker item as we have a lot to get to today, but I had to cover it.
We've reached 40 episodes now of Conspiratuality without really discussing Gwyneth Paltrow.
In some ways, her ubiquity in the wellness grift space is so well known that it's hardly worth mentioning.
And every few months her uber-popular website churns out another ridiculous fad to remind you they're still in the game.
In fact, they're dominating the disposable income faction of the unproven wellness hype game.
Yoni eggs, vagina candles, and her latest endeavor, vibrators, are one thing.
And in fact, health claims about those eggs aside, I agree with Gwyneth that sexuality needs to be discussed more in a nation that's still hampered by its puritanical roots.
And I'm all for anything that sexually empowers people.
But last week she published a blog post on goop hawking COVID-19 wares called Healing My Body with a Longer-Term Detox, and it's as gross as it sounds.
Never mind that detoxes are bullshit, so let's start there.
As science writer Dara Mohammadi wrote in The Guardian in 2014, cleansing is a, quote, pseudo-medical concept designed to sell you things, end quote.
In the article, he quotes Edzard Ernst, Emeritus Professor of Complementary Medicine at Exeter University, who says that a respectable cleanse is the medical treatment of people with life-threatening drug addictions.
That's true.
He continues, quote, The other is the word being hijacked by entrepreneurs, quacks, and charlatans to sell a bogus treatment that allegedly detoxifies your body of toxins you're supposed to have accumulated, end quote.
He continues, The healthy body has kidneys, a liver, skin, even lungs that are detoxifying as we speak.
There is no known way, certainly not through detox treatments, to make something that works perfectly well in a healthy body work better.
So, let's replace Gwyneth's longer-term detox with better lifestyle habits and we can at least be honest with what she's trying to accomplish.
A habit isn't monetizable, however, while detoxes are, and Paltrow, who sadly reports suffering from long COVID symptoms, something we are not minimizing and should not be minimized, but she's using her clout to sell you an entire pantry of predominantly useless and definitely overpriced holistic tchotchkes.
She begins by talking about her diet, which is keto and plant-based, but flexible with fish and a few other meats.
That just sounds like food, right?
She eats food?
She eats food.
It is food.
She's flexible about it.
Okay, let's go.
She does list scallops and bacon in there in the plant-based, I don't know.
And honestly, I don't care what people's diets are, but at least pick a lane.
She then lists an incredible, herbal, non-alcoholic cocktail It's a cocktail that retails for $32 for 23 ounces, and it's made from peas, haze, hay, hay, hay, and hops.
I had to stop because I'm like, wait, I know I wrote this, but she's drinking hay.
Okay.
Of course, you'll need something to drink it in, which apparently is $112 old-fashioned glass that you can purchase on Goop alongside the pea slop.
Now, side note, but as whiskey is my favorite beverage, I drink it in a $12 CB2 glass, so this whole spectacle is sacrilege to me right now.
It's an outrage, yeah.
I could go point by point on this ridiculous blog post, but why bother?
You have the $90 supplement pack, the $60 detoxifying super powder, the $125 glow serum that she puts on before Zoom calls, The $500 Infrared Sauna Blanket, and I kid you not, the $8,600 Wholeness Medallion and Gemstone Heart Necklace, which is, I kid you not again, perfect for a hike!
And as a reminder, this is an article about treating COVID.
You know, you said, Derek, you said we're not minimizing that she has long COVID symptoms, but actually she is, really, when it comes down to it.
Right, okay.
Sorry.
Sorry to interrupt.
Yeah, no, no, not at all.
And that's absolutely a fair point and completely true.
And the monetizable, we'll talk about that.
But don't just take our word for this insanity.
The UK's National Health Service came out and spoke against this very same blog post.
Professor Stephen Powis, who's National Medicare medical director of the NHS stated, in the last few days I see Gwyneth Paltrow is unfortunately suffering from the effects of COVID.
We wish her well, but some of the solutions she's recommended are really not the solutions we'd recommend in the NHS.
So, no, kimchi and kombucha are not going to stop COVID no matter how much Paltrow claims to have done, quote, major research, unquote.
But to conclude, can we really expect anything less from her?
The New York Times article that covers Goop's latest product, the vibrator, it features an interview with her in which they talked about her role as patient zero in Contagion.
And the reporter then asked Paltrow about wearing a mask on Instagram last February before it became mandated in America.
And once again she replies with the only thing she seems to be able to discuss, which is herself.
And here's the quote.
This is a familiar pattern in my life.
I do something early.
Everyone is like, what is she doing?
She's insane.
And then it's adopted by the culture.
Oh boy.
And there you have it.
We've now covered Goop on our podcast, and I would love to claim that it'll be the last time, but somehow I doubt it.
She also, didn't she claim that she was the first person to practice yoga or something like that in America or outside of India?
Yeah, there was an article in which she apparently went off on someone who was checking her in for a yoga class and said, you know, don't you know who I am?
If it wasn't for me, we wouldn't even have a job.
There wouldn't be yoga studios everywhere.
You know, I'm thinking about how Trump Trump weathered COVID and Jair Bolsonaro and to a lesser degree, I think Boris Johnson, who then goes on to continue this patchwork plan of, you know, business first, NHS second choices.
And so we have this, all of these male leaders, political leaders who are, you know, like, what doesn't kill me makes me stronger.
But then Gwyneth is like, what doesn't kill me makes you and could make you into a more specialized consumer.
Well, and there's another piece here too, which I just thought of, which is that if all of these alternative wellness, spending money on these sorts of items and adopting these sorts of changes was so effective, how come she got COVID in the first place?
And so then how do you, after getting COVID and then suffering from long COVID, still make a case that you should buy my stuff?
Well, it's strange to position long COVID as something that you would have to detoxify from because I mean, the detoxification regime is pseudoscientific, but then there's this sort of hint that the virus itself is some sort of pollution that you would pick up, and that under natural circumstances you'd be able to rid yourself of, but, you know, if you have these herbs and these cleanses and these green juices, that you're going to be okay.
Yeah, maybe.
I feel like so often this approach is based on the idea, it's the terrain theory thing, right?
That if you keep your terrain pristine, then the nasty self will have nowhere to build a nest or something.
Yeah, I mean, I think what's really interesting is that it took her this long.
What did she say in the article or in the blog post about when she contracted it?
Was it early on, like May or something like that?
Oh, yeah.
I don't remember the date, but I know it was early.
I remember when it happened, so it has been many months.
Right, well, I mean, why did it take her so long to flip this into monetization?
I mean, I think that in all of these processes, the influencer has to get to the point where they can, I don't know, figure out what the tone is going to be for the delivery, figure out how they're going to rebrand around their new reality.
She has, if she has long COVID, she is a disabled person now.
And, you know, that's going to disrupt basic functions in her life.
And that's really going to sort of, it's got to tarnish the lifestyle branding and presentation.
And I'm sure it takes a lot of work on the PR side and the design side to figure out how to make that look right.
I wouldn't be surprised, but I can't say with certainty because I'm not a regular group reader, but that they haven't used immune system boosting supplements because even what she's pimping in there has been on the group site.
So I'm sure they've been forward with that.
This just seems to be the first time that she has come out and specifically attempted to monetize it.
And what's incredible is the article.
It's a terrible blog post.
If you were just reading it as a Trying to understand what it's actually about.
There are numerous different things happening.
There's her dealing with long COVID, which again is sad and wish her the best.
But then you have the detoxifying power and the supplements and the kimchi and the kombucha, which are for the immune system effects supposedly.
But then you have this whole section about How she needs to look good on Zoom calls.
And you have the glow serum and then you have the necklace which she hikes with and she says that it makes her feel better when she puts it on for a Zoom call.
And again, this is an article about dealing with COVID.
So when you look at all of those things thrown in there, it's what the problem of goop is in general.
I mean, the thing about someone at her level too, and we do know this from the documentary that was on Netflix, is that she has a whole team and I think she's being pitched things at least every week about, okay, what do we do next?
How do we go here?
What's the tie-in?
How do we connect?
Looking good on the Zoom call to having a strong immune system and to you being this heroic figure who has long COVID now somehow.
Right.
I mean, you guys, I think, both have said very kindly that we hope that she gets better.
And I'm a little bit on the fence here because, I mean, honestly, this could be a moment of humility.
But on the other hand, you know, is humility possible for the super consumer class?
It's like the moment that might turn a person around, like, oh shit, the world is actually real.
Oh, actually public health means something, it's probably better to direct my rich customers towards supporting public health initiatives instead of buying necklaces.
It just turns out that, you know, money seems to be so incredibly insulating from existential reality.
that anything, literally anything, you come as close to death as possible and you will come out the other end and see a conversion opportunity. - We all know you come as close to death as possible and you will come out the other end and see a conversion opportunity. - We We all know that white supremacy is a highly charged and often contested term in America.
Though its branches reach into the present, its roots lie in the Native American genocide and the atrocities of the transatlantic slave trade, Jim Crow, and anti-immigrant sentiment.
Donald Trump's 2016 election win seemed to fan the flames of a simmering modern-day bigotry that many progressive activists had warned was lurking beneath the surface all along.
Now labeled as alt-right, a reincarnated racism became visible at that time, using the tools of social media to spread its charismatic message and monetize both the support and backlash it evoked.
The appearance then at the Capitol insurrection in amongst the QAnon merch and MAGA stuff of Nazi symbols, Confederate flags, and the insignia of various groups with ties to white supremacy was grotesque but unsurprising.
This week on The Pod, I interviewed Daniel Lombroso, a journalist for The Atlantic and director of the new documentary film White Noise.
It focuses on three figures, Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, who coined the term alt-right, Canadian white nationalist Lauren Southern and anti-feminist conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich, an early adopter and amplifier of the Pizzagate conspiracy, which is a precursor to QAnon.
Canadian Proud Boy Gavin McInnes also makes an appearance.
Lombroso captured the now familiar footage of Richard Spencer speaking at the Ronald Reagan building in Washington, D.C.
after 45's victory.
Many in attendance leapt to their feet to give the Nazi salute when Spencer cried out, Heil Trump!
Heil our people!
Heil our victory!
Earlier in his speech, Spencer used what he called the original German to refer to the news media as the Lügenpresse or lying press.
He would later be a key organizer of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.
As for Lauren Southern, she's most well known for propagating the Great Replacement Theory in a YouTube video of the same name, as well as for being briefly detained by authorities in Italy for blocking a rescue ship from embarking to save Syrian refugees, in support of the anti-immigrant group Defend Europe.
Criticizing democracy in the film, Southern comments that gang rape is an inherently democratic process.
Nine people vote against one.
But there's a twist here.
By the end of White Noise, we find a visibly humbled Richard Spencer hiding out at his mother's as lawsuits loom for inciting violence at the Charlottesville rally where Heather Heyer was tragically killed.
We've also become privy to behind-the-scenes domestic footage of Cernovich, who has said diversity is white genocide, with his Iranian wife, with whom he has two kids.
We've discovered that Lauren Southern is carrying the baby of a non-white man, which she rather nervously murmurs, expressionless and staring into the middle distance right before disappearing off-camera, is not really a thing.
So, I'm left wondering, if two of these three alt-right protagonists have non-white partners and biracial kids, and if the neo-nazi race war instigator flees home to mummy to lay low when the going gets tough, what does this say about their messaging?
Are they just cynical grifters who have used the internet and social media to find fame?
Of course, we can't know for sure, but we can see the incongruity between what they publicly espouse and their private actions, whom they love, and how they choose to live.
I followed the money to find that Spencer is heir to a cotton farming business whose property is valued at roughly $14 million and goes all the way back to Jim Crow in poor and largely African American Louisiana.
How fitting.
His business also received $2 million in government subsidies between 2008 and 2015.
This is somewhat ironic given that a favorite rhetorical theme of his is that white people built America through hard work and superior intelligence.
Spencer's National Policy Institute think tank also solicited donations via fundraising campaigns and had tax-exempt status until it was revoked in 2017.
Though exact financial figures are unavailable, before Lauren Southern was blocked from Patreon and PayPal and demonetized by YouTube in 2017, it's safe to say that she would have been bringing in a lot of money.
Ad revenue on YouTube is a numbers game and her top 13 videos range between 1,000,000 and 3,000,000 views each.
and 3 million views each.
She has almost 700,000 subscribers and 50 million views in total on her account.
Southern also did an international speaking tour with fellow Canadian crypto racist Stefan Molyneux and has made other frequent speaking and television appearances.
As for Cernovich, he peddles his own brand of supplements and sells skincare products for men.
He also facilitates personal growth seminars for men based on his Amazon bestseller called Gorilla Mindset, how to control your thoughts and emotions, improve your health and fitness, make more money, and live life on your terms.
We find out during the film that he's also been receiving alimony from a previous marriage, which contrasts with his alpha male pretensions and misogynistic stance that date rape doesn't exist.
No.
Now, given his role in spreading Pizzagate, selling supplements, and teaching self-improvement seminars, Cernovich may intersect the most with our usual beat here on the pod.
In fact, QAnon Anonymous reported his appearing alongside Jacob Chansley, who you may remember as the QAnon Shaman, and the young talk show host and co-founder of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, At what the podcast referred to as a MAGA wake in Phoenix, where they gathered to pressure vote counters in Maricopa County days after the 2020 general election.
For our usual suspects like J.P.
Sears, Mickey Willis, Christiane Northrup, Lori Ladd, Zach Bush, Sasha Stone, etc., getting red-pilled and going full COVID denial, anti-vax, and MAGA has provided massive exposure and most likely revenue.
So, too, for the main characters in White Noise, discovering their inner white supremacist and repeating conspiracy theories like Pizzagate, White Genocide, and the fabricated voter fraud has opened doors to the alt-right economy of algorithm-generated exposure and income.
If, as we've covered in-depth at Conspirituality, 2020 ushered in the phenomenon of red-pilled new-agers and cue-spouting mommy-bloggers profiting on the notoriety of rebelling against the mainstream narrative, the alt-right phenomenon on social media in the Trump era may have already paved the way.
I'm joined today by Daniel Lombroso, director of a fantastic new film, a documentary called White Noise, the definitive inside story of the alt-right.
Thanks for making time for us, Daniel.
Thank you for having me.
Absolutely.
Let's start with this term, alt-right.
It gets thrown around a lot, but I wonder sometimes if people using it have a working definition.
Can you give us one?
So, the alt-right is fundamentally a white nationalist movement.
People who purvey the term alt-right was defined by Richard Spencer in 2008 and went mainstream along with President Trump when he became a candidate in 2015.
And proponents of the alt-right believe in a notion of a white ethnostate.
A white ethnostate is fundamentally a violent construct.
It means that the United States, or even Western countries more broadly, Should have demographics that are overwhelmingly white.
So we're talking about 90%, 95% of the population being white.
Of course, the United States is a diverse country.
It's a country that's becoming more diverse over time.
So if we're to achieve This dream, this far-right dream of a white ethnostate, it's fundamentally a violent construct.
We're talking about mass deportations, ethnic cleansing.
The turmoil, right, as it rose alongside President Trump, had all sorts of connotations, and I think they were flawed connotations.
People would see it as a new, edgy kind of conservatism, an alternative to Mitt Romney conservatives of old.
But alt-right, as it was conceived by Richard Spencer, and as it's been followed by his followers, is fundamentally violent, and it believes in the preservation of white power.
Yeah, I mean, that's so extreme and so awful sounding.
I feel like it's really good to define terms, you know, in this supercharged landscape.
Now, you captured the widely circulated Heil Trump footage of Richard Spencer addressing a group, and I believe it was right after Trump's 2016 victory.
I'm really curious what that moment was like for you.
Were you surprised to see people giving the Heil Hitler salute?
So, like you said, that was a week after President Trump won.
It was my third day filming with y'all, right?
My first day on the beat.
I had been talking to Richard on and off for two or three months at that point.
He wasn't especially well-known, but the movement in general was on the rise.
I was ahead of the curve in a lot of ways.
The way I pitched it to The Atlantic was really about understanding the rise of racism, the rise of conspiracy, the rise of anti-Semitism.
All of the trends that we've become familiar with, I identified earlier along with some other great reporters, seeing it rising in chat forums, but also in college campuses.
I don't think, even knowing that there was a tremendous amount of energy behind candidate Trump and behind these ideas, I didn't expect, you know, the optical shitshow, which was a room full of people breaking out into Nazi salutes down the street from the White House, that it all just went to say that these people felt so emboldened by then-president-elect Trump.
They saw a once-in-a-generation opportunity to bring these ideas mainstream.
And, you know, they were celebrating in the way that was most authentic to themselves, and that was giving Nazi salutes.
Wow, and in your experience of the alt-right, I mean, it sounded to me like the process was that you were embedded with these figures for a period of time, is that correct?
Yeah, so the film is what's called a follow film, meaning we're spending time with individuals, really understanding their intimate interior lives.
In taking those three individuals, Richard Spencer, but also Mike Cernovich, who's a Twitter troll, and Lauren Southern, who's the most prominent woman in the movement, collectively in those three subjects were able to make larger inferences about the movement and how it works.
It was fully embedded reporting.
So I spent four years with those three individuals and dozens more going to Weddings and movie premieres and I went to the European Parliament with Lauren and all sorts of just insane scenarios that one day maybe I'll save for a memoir.
Wow.
Four years.
Four years around the world.
You know, documentary filmmakers work all sorts of ways, oftentimes with larger crews, oftentimes in collaboration with subjects.
Here, I had complete editorial independence from the subject, so they never saw any clips from the film, they had no editorial control.
I was covering them in a really investigative capacity as an investigative reporter, and everything that you see in the film went through a rigorous fact check, through a legal review, was reviewed by all of our top editors.
The way The Atlantic treats a long-form magazine cover story, we brought that same rigor to this reporting process.
Yeah, clearly.
I'm curious, in terms of what we cover on the podcast, if You found that there was a religious or a spiritual component to the alt-right, and also if they're drawn particularly to certain types of conspiracy theories?
I'm glad you asked.
There are so many interpretations for the rise of the alt-right.
One is economic anxiety, that these are poor people.
That's untrue.
The hundreds or thousands of people I've interacted with, the vast majority are upper middle class.
They come from well-off liberal enclaves, places like New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Paris, Moscow, Belgium.
I mean, the places that this movement thrives is in upper middle class cities.
So that really discounts the economic argument.
People make, you know, tech arguments that are a little bit more complicated.
I think really the enduring appeal of this movement is an emotional one.
It is spiritual.
You might even say religious.
What the leaders of the alt-right do so well, because they are, even if they're deeply deranged individuals with horrible ideas, they're also smart, and they know how to recruit, how to mobilize, and they understand something that all great fascists, I don't mean great, me saying great, but great in that they built movements, something that all great fascists understood, Which is that you really have to have an emotional appeal to build a mass movement.
If you look at Mussolini, if you look at Hitler, if you look at all of the, you know, Franco, all the leaders of the 20th century, they were great orators.
They understood how to mobilize young people in youth movements.
The alt-right is doing the same thing.
They're telling the lost, the disaffected young white kid that you're not just some bored upper middle class kid in the suburbs of New York looking for a purpose in your life.
You're actually a descendant of a Greek, of a Roman, of a Crusader.
That you're inheriting this great historical legacy that dates back to ancient civilization.
It's a really intoxicating feeling if you're You know, alone in your mom's basement trying to make sense of your purpose in the world, and here this seemingly larger-than-life figure gives you a ready-made package and says, hey, join me and everything will work out.
That seems like a pretty good bargain.
Of course, over time, you know, I've tracked these subjects for years.
Many of them come to realize the con at the heart of all of this, but many of them don't.
And, you know, of the dozens of subjects I've covered, I can count on two hands the number who have left the movement over the past four or five years.
So, this stuff has incredible emotional appeal, it sucks you in, and oftentimes you get stuck.
Yeah.
It's interesting because it's slightly divergent from a lot of the types of figures we've looked at already, which is good.
It's good to get a sense of the other factions involved in the phenomenon of Trumpism in a way.
Yeah.
I came across in looking at these alt-right characters as the white genocide idea.
That seems to be sort of one that's shared across the board.
White genocide is sort of the main organizing principle of the alt-right.
It's this notion that there is an intentional effort to take power away from whites across all Western countries.
So we're talking about the US, but also Western Europe, Australia, Canada.
It's, you know, it's tricky because the demographics of these countries are changing.
But there's not... The way white genocide works is it alleges that there's a grand conspiracy where elites, which is really a synonym, you know, a synonym for Jews in many contexts, are working to open the gates.
You'll hear them talk about the gates often.
To open the gates to invaders, to migrants.
I mean, they use all sorts of nasty terminology.
But there's this notion that elites who are hiding in boardrooms at Davos are colluding to destroy whiteness once and for all.
It's a totally flawed construct.
Western countries are becoming more diverse and we are undergoing an unprecedented demographic transformation.
That's a beautiful thing and it's really, in my mind and in the mind of so many, it's finally fulfilling the promise of America.
This country was founded as an immigrant nation, it was founded on the ethnic cleansing of a different group, Native Americans.
The idea that white people could even claim this as their homeland is absurd to begin with, but the idea that there's a conspiracy that people are working to take power away from whites is really silly, but it's lodged so deep into the psychology of these individuals and their followers, and there's nothing you can do or say to them that will change that.
You see it across every aspect of the alt-right from the leaders, you know, Spencer, Cernovich, Southern, and others, and the individuals who stormed the Capitol, but even down to the terrorists who've been committing attacks.
You know, we saw a huge violent attack on a mosque in New Zealand, on a synagogue in Pittsburgh, At a Walmart in El Paso in an effort to target Mexicans.
All of those shooters left manifestos and all of those shooters talked about white genocide.
And of course, none of them have the self-awareness or maybe the humility to recognize that it's not a white genocide.
People actually just enjoy multiculturalism and prefer to celebrate it instead of cause havoc and violence in order to stop it.
You spend a good amount of time, I'm really interested in the Canadian connection here.
Lauren Southern is a Canadian YouTube political activist, I guess we'll call her.
She's really young, I think she was 22 when you started filming.
And what strikes me about her is that here you have this young, Tall, conventionally beautiful blonde, and she seems really caught up in this idea that straight white people are somehow the victims that she is fighting for in this crusading way.
It made me really curious, you know, broadly with the fairly young group of online alt-right folks, the YouTube celebs in that group.
How much of this do you think is rebellious, immature rhetoric for clicks and notoriety, right?
She even says that at one point, that you get more clicks if you're more extreme in this way, if you say the taboo thing that no one wants to say.
And how much of it is that they're really as radical and militant as those in the more established white supremacist groups?
You know, humans have mixed motivations, and I don't want to discount ideology, because ideology is at play.
I mean, all of them, whether you're talking about Southern or even the much more opportunistic Cernovich, all of them are at least willing to attach themselves to a fundamentally racist movement for their own gain.
So there has to be enough belief to be willing to go down with a sinking ship, or at least one that's as toxic as Richard Spencer in the alt-right.
That being said, Lauren Southern's rise is a fascinating case study in technology and also in character.
She's a young girl, grew up in a wealthy suburb of Vancouver.
She was a good student, not a great student.
She was a popular girl, but not the most popular girl.
Like you said, she's very pretty, she's quick-witted, she's articulate, but she had no idea what she wanted to do with her life.
She thought about joining the army.
She went to community college and ultimately dropped out and was working as a cocktail waitress at a casino.
But she quickly realized that, you know, with algorithms and technology working the way they are, and the huge void in space open to conservative women, because outside of the six blondes on Fox News, there are not a ton of fire, you know, when you think of far-right movements, you think of Spencer, you don't think of women.
There was, and we can talk more about that, there was obviously a void and an opportunity for women like Lauren and others that have spent time with to step into that space.
And Lauren realized from a young age that with tech moving in the way that it was, the way to build a brand online is to say the most controversial thing possible.
So In high school, when everyone was giving global warming presentations, she would give an anti-global warming presentation.
When her teacher said, dress up as a historical figure, her and her friend decided to dress up as Mussolini and Hitler, even though her friend is Jewish, was her one Jewish friend.
Lauren quickly realized that the way to get a rise, the way to build a brand, to get a rise is to do that, is to be a contrarian.
And that carried over into her career.
So when she was struggling working as a waitress, she said, I'm going to try my hand at the internet.
She put out a video saying why I don't need feminism.
It was, you know, I think a minute and a half video ended up exploding the internet.
She got a full time job with Rebel Media, which is sort of the Canadian Breitbart.
And for Rebel, it became even more provocative.
Her first big video for Rebel, she went to a feminist march and held a sign saying, there is no rape culture in the West.
You know, of course she understood that this was the most provocative thing you could do.
Maybe something that she didn't even agree with fundamentally, but it would work.
It would help her build a brand.
Racism is a commodity and anti-feminism, misogyny, all of those are commodities that many people on the internet are willing to pay for and sign up for.
She identified that niche and ran on it.
And, you know, in the years to come, I watched her go from several thousand followers to several hundred thousand followers.
I watched her make well-funded feature films, films way better funded than anything I made, like White Noise, across Russia and France.
I watched her give a speech at the European Parliament.
I mean, she understood that there was a real opportunity here and she seized it.
One thing I noticed is that both Lauren Southern and Richard Spencer, toward the end of the film, they both say that, you know, if anyone has enacted violence based on the messages that they were putting out there, then they've just completely misunderstood what they were trying to say.
Do you think that they and their companions knowingly incite violence while putting on an innocent face, or do you think their rhetoric is actually discontinuous with racial violence and is being misunderstood by the more hardcore consumers?
You know, if you're looking to join a radical movement, there are obviously push factors, like you feel Alienated by your peers, you feel like your life has no sense of worth, you have no purpose.
But there are also pull factors.
Richard became the face of the movement early because he coined the term alt-right, he was well positioned at the moment, he's also from a very wealthy family so he had the time to be able to spend to set up a, you know, to throw these big conferences and to spend his time devoted to this.
But if you're looking to get, you know, For people who are being radicalized, many turn to the most extreme elements like Spencer, but many more are recruited through intermediaries, people who are maybe a little bit more moderate, who give wink and nods to white nationalism, but also are very skilled at skirting the most extreme elements.
And no one is better at that than Lauren Southern.
She's able to produce Large, flashy, racist propaganda films on the dangers of multiculturalism while still having a veneer of respectability.
Her stuff can have a Hollywood aesthetic with soundtrack and beautiful drone imagery.
She speaks of the European Parliament and has, you know, inns with prominent members of the conservative movement in the US, Canada, and Europe.
So if you're a young person who's clicking around on YouTube, there's no better gateway, let's say, into the alt-right than a young woman like Lauren.
And it's so common to hear stories of people who start with a Mike Cernovich or a Lauren Southern and slowly but surely work their way into the more insidious elements.
Lauren and Cernovich to some extent knowingly play that role in the movement.
It's sort of a devil's bargain where they know that they're cooperating with the most extreme elements while also disavowing them in parts.
And they make no efforts to apologize or express any sort of remorse for whatever outcomes come from that.
So much of the recent prominence of the alt-right seems to have blossomed during the Trump campaign and then presidency after he won.
What I found interesting about the people you covered is that this is not really the QAnon crowd, and they're also not like the militia types, the Oath Keepers or the Three Percenters that we saw storming the Capitol, though all of those groups also have elements of white supremacy.
How do you sort of make sense of how these different factions intersect on the right?
QAnon is an absurd conspiratorial belief, really rooted in medieval antisemitism, that Jews and elites and globalists are conspiring together, running a pedophilia ring, which really relates back to the blood libel of medieval times, which claimed that Jews were sucking the blood of non-Jews.
QAnon is an absurd theory that believes that President Trump is the lone individual who can stop elites from running this mass pedophilia ring.
It's so infused with religiosity and cult and so far removed from anything that's even remotely logical that white nationalists seem rational in comparison.
The point isn't to condone Any of what I've witnessed, white nationalism is much more violent, but at least it's, I shouldn't say at least, but it is rooted in a real world reality, which is that this country is becoming more diverse.
I mean, there's no conspiracy in that.
The United States is becoming more diverse.
It's an immigrant nation.
It deserves to be one.
It was founded on the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, and no one has the right to call this country theirs, certainly not white nationalists.
The Oath Keepers have a lot in common with the people in the film.
I think it's easy to see aesthetic differences between the groups.
So, like I said, the Alt-Right, as I came to understand it, is an upper middle class movement.
It's a highly educated movement.
All of the leaders, you know, come from nice families, went to good universities, are articulate.
You know, the Militia-style groups are, you know, a little...
Let's say more DIY, more rough, they're less press savvy, they're walking around with machine guns, you know, running little, you know, these fat army veterans are like doing little routines to pretend to stay in shape for the inevitable civilizational war.
But they share the same fundamental belief of white nationalists, which is that this is a country that's being overtaken by quote-unquote brown hordes, by multicultural masses, and that needs to be stopped.
So there's a tremendous amount of overlap between white nationalists and militia groups, even if there's an aesthetic difference.
The QAnon crowd, you know, I think gets at the more conspiratorial, I guess you could say kind of primordial soup of the alt-right.
The alt-right came out of a lot of conspiratorial thinking, a lot of men's rights groups, out of Gamergate.
And you see those fringy elements overlapping in all of the worlds.
You know, QAnon is not a self-styled white nationalist movement in the way others are.
That's not to get them off the hook in any way, but it's fundamentally a religious cult around now former President Trump.
Okay, those are great distinctions.
Thank you.
You know, on our podcast, we cover the intersection of far-right conspiracy theories and wellness or new age influencers is where we've ended up spending a lot of time and especially how COVID denialism and being anti-mask and being sort of soft cue allows influencers to monetize the huge increase in exposure that that gives them.
The younger alt-right figures you covered Are also very much in the social media influencer category.
Are they as entrepreneurial as, you know, I was just referring to and if so, how do they monetize their platforms?
So I think the most surprising thing being in this world embedding in it for years is that many of these individuals feel like internet celebrities first and racists second.
So many of them are looking to build a brand to get famous and to sell products as you said.
They feel like lifestyle influencers who happen to be using racism and conspiracy as a catapult into fame.
And it's a really sad and sick reality that we live in a world where tech prefers to amplify extreme content over more moderate content.
So if you're looking to build a brand, the best thing you can say is the worst thing.
So to give you an example, Mike Cernovich He was an out-of-work lawyer.
He struggled for most of his adulthood.
He was in and out of his first marriage and now has been recently remarried.
He hit it big, first in the men's rights movement and Gamergate, but eventually by latching himself onto the alt-right.
One of his first big successes was tweeting, hashtag sick Hillary, the fake idea that Hillary had Parkinson's, completely illegitimate.
A day after he tweeted it, it came out of Sean Hannity's mouth on Fox News.
A few days after that, it came out of the mouth of President Trump.
Mike Cernovich built celebrity off of the backs of conspiracy and then leveraged it into a very successful lifestyle brand.
So he gives, you see this in White Noise, he's giving workshops to men.
He doesn't call them men's rights workshops, he calls them lifestyle seminars, guerrilla mindset seminars.
He gives seminars to men, helping them deal with their self-esteem issues.
He sells supplements, everything from insomnia pills to boner pills.
His daily routine is taking 14 supplements and chasing it with two shots of espresso and then going for a very failed run.
I can tell you've seen the film.
It's one of the best parts.
And the point is a simple one, which is that once you get to any level of celebrity, whether you do it on your own accord because you're a smart individual or you ride the tides of racism to get there, you can start to make money.
You have a platform, you can sell anything because a lot of followers are not discerning, they trust you, they see you as a god-like figure, and they'll buy whatever snake oil you sell.
You know, everyone from Cernovich selling pills and workshops to Alex Jones selling his potions.
Ben Shapiro, who sees himself as a prominent public intellectual, even he sells supplements and merchandise.
There's so much overlap now between the self-help space and the world of the far right.
That it can be difficult sometimes to discern where people's loyalties are, where their allegiances are.
But, I mean, the bottom line is a simple one, which is that people want to get famous by any means necessary.
And once you're there, you figure out ways to monetize it.
And I've watched individuals make a whole lot of money off of these ideas.
Your film ends on a depressing note for your subjects, but perhaps an optimistic note for the rest of us, which is that the movement seems to have lost steam and sort of gotten splintered.
Richard Spencer, you show us, is now living with his mom.
He seems, you know, sort of humbled, even though he still has his romantic sort of emotionalism about his, as you characterized it, I think, perfectly utopian sort of ethnostate vision.
Lauren Southern appears to have married someone and born his child, who she has acknowledged is non-white, although she seems to keep his identity and ethnicity secret, which is sort of an interesting twist in the tale.
Do you think that the alt-right phenomenon as you've covered it is fading, or is there just a changing of the guard taking place?
You know, the thesis of the film It's one that I think you've caught on.
Even though these three individuals are fledgling, they're failing, they didn't achieve as much as they might have hoped to.
Like you said, Richard Spencer is now living in his mom's mansion in Montana, spending his days skiing and playing Chopin on the piano.
Lauren Southern has receded to Australia where she She had a kid with a non-white partner, which, like you said, she's completely unable to reconcile.
I put it to her in the film and I put it to her even more frankly in a written article I wrote for The Atlantic.
She sees no contradiction in being this avatar for white femininity, for preserving a white world, and yet having a non-white partner.
She just doesn't see it.
Anyway, she's taken a step back.
Mike Cernovich As you mentioned, he's still in the political arena, but he's mostly pivoted to lifestyle products.
He's selling facial serums and pills and doing workshops.
All of these individuals who really coined the term alt-right and were the first avatars of these ideas, brought them mainstream, have taken a step back.
What the film is ultimately saying is that even though these individuals are falling, the ideas that they've enabled are now in the mainstream of American politics.
They've infiltrated the conservative movement.
The Republican Party has fundamentally transformed away from people like Mitt Romney, who are certainly not racist and were not obsessed with race-based ideas, towards something much more like a Mike Cernovich, who is very openly flirting with dog whistle white nationalism.
And you know, the easiest way you can tell is by putting on Fox News.
I mean, the highest rated show on cable news now is Tucker Carlson, and the things that are coming out of his mouth now are the things that someone like a Spencer was telling me four or five years ago.
So I guess the short answer is even though these three individuals have taken a step back, we're now living with the consequences of what they've unleashed, and I think we'll be living with it in American politics for many years to come.
There's a new generation of influencers who are coming to replace those ranks.
So there's a kid named Nick Fuentes.
He's 22.
He marched in Charlottesville.
He's now an avatar of conservatism.
He brings thousands of dollars in fundraising and has many, many viewers on his nightly white nationalist show.
There are podcasts.
There's a whole far-right media ecosystem.
And even though the tech platforms are starting to get rid of them, like Whac-A-Mole, one pops up and another one goes, There's a huge market opportunity for those ideas and so many people who are willing to consume them.
And as long as racism is a commodity that sells, we're going to be dealing with the consequences of that.
The one thing that really jumped out, it was such a fantastic interview, Julian.
Yeah, it really was.
Hearing what Daniel went through, it's just every minute of that I learned something from, and I couldn't imagine being in there.
But the one thing that jumped out, which Daniel returned to a few times, was this relating of religion to white nationalism.
And it made me think of a little war that happened called the Crusades.
It was a number of them that had happened.
And I came across this passage that I marked years ago when reading Karen Armstrong's book, Holy War, the Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World.
And she quoted someone, the Fulcher of Chartres, Um, who wrote about the, going on the first crusade, the very first one, and what happened.
And he, when a number of crusaders had went down to try to reclaim, you know, the holy land from the Muslims.
Um, they ended up staying in the area, and this is reflecting on what actually happened when those crusaders ended up not returning to Europe.
Quote, We have become Orientals.
The Italian and the Frenchmen of yesterday have been transplanted and become men of Galilee and Palestine.
Men from Reims or Chartres are transformed into Tyrians and citizens of Antioch.
We have already forgotten the land of our birth.
Who now remembers it?
Men no longer speak of it.
Here a man now owns his house and servants with as much assurance as though it were by a memorial right of inheritance in the land.
Another has taken to wife, not a country woman of his own, but a Syrian or an Armenian woman, sometimes even a baptized Saracen, and then lives with a whole new family.
We use various language of the country, turn and turnabout.
The native as well as the colonist has become polyglot and trust brings the most widely separated races together.
The colonist has now become almost a native and the immigrant is one with the inhabitants.
So, fun fact, the second crusade was launched to try to get the Europeans back who ended up living there in the series of crusades.
And I bring this up in this context is because what presents itself as a religious war has always been a war about power and real estate and dominance.
And what we're seeing, like, I could have read that quote Hundreds of years in the future and applied it to what America has aspired to be, at least with lip service, but is trying to grow toward.
And it just shows you that this is nothing, what we're experiencing right now with the white nationalism in America is nothing new.
This has been happening for as long as there's been globalized societies forming.
And the thing about it is, there's always these small packs of people who are, or the growing influence, obviously, that are trying to maintain power, but at the same time there's always going to be people who aspire to mix up the gene pool, which as we know from biological studies, that diversity is the healthiest thing you can do for any species.
I had no idea that the Second Crusade was about trying to get the Europeans back from overstaying their welcome and basically abandoning their mission, it sounds like.
Yeah, all of the Crusades had this ripple, trickle-down effect like that.
Yeah, and did Lombroso make you think of Armstrong?
Because, I mean, when Julian asks, you know, where does Spencer come from?
Where does Lauren Southern come from?
Where does Stephen Molyneux come from?
The answer comes back Well, these are middle-class white people who have developed a kind of religious fervor over a particular set of ideas, and then of course they've cashed in, they've monetized them.
So they go on a crusade, and is the link in your brain, Derek, to once they get What jumps out at me anytime I think of religion is always the power dynamic of politics.
Because I'm sort of separating religion from spirituality, although I don't think they can really be separated.
you know, the grift falls away. - What jumps out at me anytime I think of religion is always the power dynamic of politics because I'm sort of separating religion from spirituality, although I don't think they can really be separated.
You know, there's a common, I've experienced in my life often, that people will commonly say when they're challenged on their religion is they'll default to saying, I don't want to talk about it because it's personal to me.
The problem is that religion is a philosophical mindset and outlook about social relationships.
And what you believe is going to play out in society.
And so when he was speaking about what's happening in America now, that example of the Crusades came into my head of being an example of how this pack of Europeans went to reclaim the Holy Land.
It was an ideal because the Popes at that time had never even been to the Middle East.
Yeah, they had no idea what they were talking about.
So exactly, and they sent these people and one other thing that Armstrong brings up is that the rich and the poor crusaded alike, which then brought cohesion to the classes as well, which the people back in Europe did not appreciate.
And so that was really, that's how I felt, that's what I feel about white nationalism.
You know, 30% of Americans have passports.
That means 7 out of every 10 will never leave the country, and they don't really understand what a globalized society entails, or the fact that maybe this isn't the greatest country on earth.
Maybe there are better ways.
Maybe there is no greatest country on earth.
Maybe every country has their own way of doing things and some are objectively better than others.
But it was the tying together of the religion because with the crusades you had what was presented as an overtly religious crusade that was really nothing more than trying to get real estate.
And I feel like in a different way, that's what's happening, this whole idea that Lombroso talks about, this idea that we're losing our identity when we're living on stolen land in the first place.
Yeah, which is so ironic.
Two quick things about that, and I really like that you went there, and I have some thoughts about the connection based on what you were asking, Matthew.
But my parents lived in Spain.
For about eight years, and I remember the first time visiting this tiny little village they lived in in Spain, in the south of Spain, and learning for the first time, really, in some depth about the Reconquista, and about what happened during the Dark Ages, and how Spain was the place where, you know, philosophy and astronomy and mathematics and all of this stuff was happening.
The texts were being translated from the Greek and the Roman, and there was this rich interplay between the Jews and the Christians and the Muslims, and then how the Reconquista was this, you know, just, Horrific taking back of the country in the name of Christianity by, what was it, Ferdinand and Isabel.
And just reflecting on how, in a way, this is the history of humanity that gradually scales as technology allows for more wide-scale invasion and colonization and genocide.
The other thing is the first time I traveled to Sweden, I realized very quickly that I did not, in fact, live in the greatest country on earth.
Because it was just unbelievable how taken care of and how humane, how taken care of people felt and how humane that society is.
But to go back to your question, Matthew, I think that there is a good
correlation there with these with like Southern and Cernovich and Spencer that yeah they set off on the crusade and they build up the religious fervor and they learn how to be effective rhetoricists so they can get people on board and get people basically funding their crusade and then somewhere down the line I don't know if they run out of steam or if there's a bifurcation between what they're saying and their lived experience as human beings who are not
Agitating online, but somehow it sort of crumbles.
Well, and it really speaks to, are they grifting?
Do they believe it?
When you ask Lombroso, are these heartfelt beliefs?
His answer kind of leaves things open.
We can't really know, but Southern is willing, for instance, to attach her name to a violent, racist movement, and so she has to appreciate it.
you know, it's messages on some level, but- - To what extent is it that I have these unpopular opinions, they make me special in some way, I get a lot of attention online as a quite young person. - Yeah. - And then I sort of realize that the world doesn't really fit that, but I still have to keep, I still have to play my one hit song every time I get on stage, right?
But it's, I mean, and then there's this strange, like, separation between politics and shitposting, where, you know, it's really only sinking in now, and I'm remembering your introduction, Julian, that Rubin, people like Dave Rubin and Candace Owens started out center-left, or at least they dipped their toes in the waters of left-of-center politics, and I think that's true of Tucker Carlson, too, isn't it?
Who's now, like, Yeah, I feel like Lou Dobbs was sort of the sacrificial offering on the altar of dominion, right?
Yeah, and Tucker is a trust fund kid.
I mean, Trevor Noah did a great segment last week on his history and went through all of his appearances in media over the last 20 years, and you realize he is the ultimate grifter.
I mean, it makes me reflect that shitposting isn't really a job until somebody pays you to do it on their behalf, and so it seems often we're talking about this political parasite class that it more mirrors the cynicism of the black And then as you say, if they get famous for it, it will be because of the latter, but not because of the strength of their convictions.
These people may tag along or provoke racist content because they believe it.
They may make racist content because it gives them an engagement rush.
And then, as you say, if they get famous for it, it will be because of the latter, but not because of the strength of their convictions.
It will be because of their rhetoric, their charisma.
And why would they turn off the tap?
I also can't believe the existential dilemma that Southern must be in.
I shared with you on Slack.
Oh, this is incredible.
This is incredible.
Like, she has one photo of her with her child.
And granted...
To preface this, some people keep their children off social media, and that is fine.
That's not what she's doing!
No, no, no, no.
She's holding the baby and she blotted out the child's face so that you can't recognize what race it is.
And what must be going through your head when you have to even do that?
I can't imagine.
It's incredible.
That's the most incredibly sad thing I've ever seen.
So first of all, I will link to the photo, but you'll see that this is somebody who wants to do like almost a baby snuggly carrier affiliate link mommy shot like in a fashion sort of setting.
She wants to do normal mother stuff and she has this horrible history of promoting right-wing extremism and white nationalism and her child is biracial and so
She decides to blot out the child's face, what, for privacy, okay, but also she's protecting herself from the backlash against her followers, which she doesn't avoid anyway because they're in the comments talking about how she's a miscegenator or whatever stupid terms they're using, and so she's caught.
It's like she blots out the face for privacy, but also to hide from her own horrible ghouls Who are following her, but she deserves it, but at the same time, it's like she can't not post that picture.
Posting is actually more important than the moral dilemma of presenting the hypocrisy of your biracial child to your followers, or trying to protect the child's privacy.
Imagine the complicated world this child grows up in.
There's another piece to that too, which makes it even worse, which is that part of her brand, her brand is not only like anti-immigrant, don't replace the white race with all of these other races, right?
Don't let my children replace me now at this point!
What are they going to say?
What is that child going to do when the guys with the tiki torches come along?
What is he going to do?
It's not going to be summer camp.
Anyway, sorry, go ahead.
No, the other piece of that is in her brand explicitly links these racist ideas with these other ideas of traditionalism that have to do with family, that have to do with female gender roles, that have to do with being a mother.
And so those things are linked in her mind and in the mind of her followers for several years.
And now here she is trying to be like, look, I'm a traditionalist, nice mommy with my baby.
Oh, wow.
So she has to do the mom shot.
Yeah!
Oh wow!
So we've got two planes of influence sort of intersecting on this battleground where her followers are going to hound her to the end of the earth and she'll never be able to be a normal person again, of course, but she wants to be because that's such a nice baby rap.
And I'm just left with that moment of her staring into the middle distance just being like, Not a thing.
Sadly, it is where the world has always been going.
That is part of what evolution is.
I think I brought up this example before, but one of the worst things that you can do if you own a home is have a lawn.
And I know that sounds like a weird aside, but one A one-grass monoculture destroys ecosystems just like a one-tree forest doesn't exist.
And so we can look to biodiversity to understand what is best for our gene pool as well, which is to mix up the genes.
I think of my grandnephew who has in him, and this is the least that I can track, Hungarian, Polish, Puerto Rican, Filipino, Irish, Russian blood.
Those are the beginnings and there might be more there.
But that combination is in this one person.
So at what point do we actually reach a place where we can be like, let's just get over this, where we're from, because more and more of the world is moving in that direction.
But when I listen to an interview like that, it's just like, what are they resisting?
They're actually resisting something that is Worse for our population than possible, but we're just too short-sighted to understand that.
Well, speaking of location, I would just like to say, as a Canadian, I need to say fuck you to Lauren Southern, Stephen Molyneux, and Gavin McGuinness.
Fuck all of you.
The notion that you are, as fellow Canadians, aggrieved people, or that the multiculturalism that we try to cobble together here, it's not a melting pot.
thing that's kind of enshrined into our cultural codes and laws.
We don't do it very well, but we try.
The notion that that has disturbed their bougie lives in any way except for improving them is just a total joke.
Southern, as Lombroso said, grew up in a rich suburb of Vancouver.
It's called Surrey.
Molyneux was working out of his bedroom in Mississauga, which is just west of where I am here in Toronto, which is pretty close to where Adam Skelly got busted for selling ribs in his maskless restaurant.
He's also out, the news came in this week, he's been dinged by the Toronto Police Services for a $187,000 bill because of the protesters that he brought in.
Anyway, McGinnis graduated from Carleton University in Montreal.
All of these people grew up in economies where BIPOC people constituted the majority of the service labor.
They all ate food that was made by brown people.
If they used transit, they went to the hospital, if they got their cars fixed, all the same story.
These are extremely comfortable assholes who figured out how to monetize shitposting.
Instead of going to therapy, really.
And at least the Americans are serious about stuff, right?
At least they have guns and, like, survival chops.
I'm thinking of, like, the Bundy family and so on.
Like, they're actually hardasses.
They actually try to figure out how to take over territory.
And, you know, it's not like these... God, it's so pathetic.
Canadians.
It's Canadians that shitposting and just... That's it.
That's all they're doing.
That's all they're doing.
So, like, they're the ultimate LARPers, yeah?
It's awful.
It's just so awful.
Ridiculous, because it makes it so gamey to me.
It's very, very apparent that these are not people who are defending anything at all.
They haven't lost anything.
The entire country has been served up on a platter for them.
Well, what I love about this episode is really the two of you taking a holistic approach to your interviews after Julian had filed Daniel.
Matthew, you got to talk to Michelle Cassandra Johnson, which I think makes A really nice compliment to that because you're talking about someone who embedded with a white Jewish man who embedded with white nationalists.
And what I really appreciated, I don't want to give too much away, but there are two things that jumped out at me that maybe we can discuss before we go into that interview.
And one is like her talking about being in the yoga and wellness community, how wellness is supposedly all about awakening.
And yet, people do not awaken to things until they're forced to because they don't understand the second point that I'm going to bring up, which is the hyper-focus in the wellness industry on individuals and anecdotes.
And when they don't understand that health is always social, it's never individual, and you have to understand that Even something as seemingly simple as pain is never an individual endeavor.
It's a social construct.
An example that came to mind is I was just finished reading a book by Rob Bottas that a listener had suggested called Pain, A Very Short Introduction, and he talks about how in the late 19th century in Paris,
The tetanus was a major problem, and there was something where people would lie on the ground and curl up or arch their body almost like a bridge position out of pain from tetanus because they thought it was almost some sort of, you know, something infestation or something they need to be exercised from.
And when the tetanus bacterium was discovered, They didn't develop a vaccine for 30 years, but that arched back disappeared from the symptoms that people had from tetanus because they now knew that it was a bacteria.
And so, the pathology of this symptom completely disappeared from the population.
And that is such a great example of, again, we talk about placebo effect a lot, but Of how health and pain and disease are not just individual.
And I relate this back to Michelle just being the lived embodied experience of racism that she's had to experience her whole life is a very real phenomenon that a lot of the wellness industry so far has not been able to recognize.
One of the things that I appreciate about this episode is that by bringing these interviews together, we're really able to look at the topic of white supremacy from two very specific angles.
And, you know, Lombroso's beat is, you know, describes this emotionally driven, charismatically led, technologically facilitated, like fever dream that agitates for a white ethnostate.
And he really makes it clear that it must be fundamentally violent, given that it's, you know, the homelands that it thinks it's entitled to are already, and they always have been multiracial and multiethnic.
And then, you know, what really came through was that in this version of white supremacy, being a political movement without achievable goals, it tends to function, as we've said, as a religion.
And then it has this ritual of potentially, you know, outbreak type stochastic terrorism.
And also, you know, this is the view of white supremacy that That is treated by states in the global north pretty much like a security threat And you know if if leaders can be rounded up if people can be charged with hate crimes Which is actually really difficult because the thresholds legally are really high If individual actors can be taken out then then that's as far as it goes, but then Jackson prevents it presents an entirely different
presentation of white supremacy as more of a historical and structural fabric that black people live within day by day.
So I find that, you know, I found that really, really, I hadn't really sort of understood that often our discourse around white supremacy has already sort of built into it different lenses depending upon who's doing the work and what kind of content we're consuming.
But yeah, Jackson really talks about the felt experience of knowing that Richard Spencer will never be treated like George Floyd, you know, not because the cops are personally or somehow like psychologically racist to the core in their inner beings, but because systems of power have been organized in racist ways.
And so she'll, in her work, relate this back to the origins of policing and slave patrols, but then people who use this particular structural lens will point out that it's diffused through all sectors.
Voting rights, gerrymandering.
Medical systems disregarding black illness and suffering and like redlining by banks effectively shutting black families out of mortgages and home ownership for generations.
So yeah, a totally different approach from Jackson as a kind of like structural study and sharing of lived experience.
Yeah, I think it's so important to make the distinction between perhaps those two different lexicons, those two different contexts.
What are we referring to when we use the term white supremacy or when we use the term racism?
I think it can be really tricky to know sort of, you know, which language we're speaking in as we use terms that can have sort of related but sometimes quite different meanings.
Yeah, because I think when we peg Richard Spencer as a white supremacist, and then we use the structural framework of white supremacy, there's gonna be, there's a lot of people, well I know there are a lot of people, and sometimes I'm one of them, who says, not all white supremacists or something, right?
Like, not everybody's Richard Spencer.
But there are the actors and then there's the structure and I'm really happy that I'm actually sort of gaining a better focus on that.
Well I think all of those landmarks and the landscape of structural racism are really important to identify and something that I wish sometimes I heard more from social justice people would be identifying really specific policies and pathways to enacting change so that structural racism can keep being dismantled in really practical ways.
And I often feel like that's more likely to be effective with most people than some of the sort of invitation to do this deep inner work around uncovering unconscious racism and white supremacy, which I think is fine, but there's only a certain percentage of the population that are going to get on board with that.
You know, like you said, a lot of people are gonna feel like, hold on, are you saying I'm actually like Richard Spencer deep down?
I'm a progressive.
Right.
Yeah.
And I mean, I think that, you know, we, you and I particularly might have, um, Some resistance to the language of introspection that is mobilized in political contexts because, you know, anything that sounds like, okay, you've got to go in and really deeply excavate your attitudes about X or Y or Z,
For me, these are automatically going to red flag me back towards my cult days when I was, that's exactly what I was being told to do for reasons that I couldn't quite understand.
And so, yeah, I can imagine that for a lot of people there would be hesitance, resistance to the internal work aspect of things.
But at the same time, it's like, I have never learned more, I think, about my Positionality as a white person, you know, what it means to have privilege, what it means to listen more carefully than I have from this same language around internal work.
So there's that too.
And I agree that that's really powerful.
I just feel like it's mostly liberals and progressives who are going to be open to even Delving into any of that, you know?
Yeah, that's the thing, isn't it?
Right.
I mean, who's the audience?
And who needs to get on board?
and how wide is that net going to be cast?
I first met Michelle Cassandra Johnson at a yoga service conference at the Omega Institute in I believe it was in 2018.
Her book had just come out.
Her presentation on the embodiment impacts of white supremacy made a deep and very lasting impression on me.
Michelle describes herself as a social justice warrior, author, dismantling racism trainer, empath, yoga teacher and practitioner, and an intuitive healer.
She has over 20 years of experience leading dismantling racism work and working with clients as a licensed clinical social worker.
She was educated at the College of William and Mary and UNC Chapel Hill, and she's led dismantling racism trainings with large corporations, small nonprofits, and community groups including the ACLU, Duke University, Google, This American Life, the Center for Equity and Inclusion, Eno River Unitarian Universalist Church, Lululemon, and a bunch more.
She published Skill in Action, Radicalizing Your Yoga Practice to Create a Just World in 2017, and her new book is called Finding Refuge, Heartwork for Healing Collective Grief, and that comes out in July of this year, 2021.
Here's my interview with Michelle Cassandra Johnson.
Thank you, Michelle, for taking the time.
Welcome to Conspirituality Podcast.
Thank you for inviting me to be here.
Can we start with your general perceptions?
So 400 years or more of history and incomplete civil rights era, Trump, Charlottesville, police brutality, and now the inequities of COVID.
How, In your view, is the yoga and wellness culture responding or not responding to calls for racial equality and justice?
One thing I experienced over the summer after the murder of George Floyd is A lot of people reached out and ordered Skill in Action and I don't have a complaint about people finding my work.
I did have a big reaction to why another murder awakened people and why it takes that to awaken people in the spiritual community to the trauma that BIPOC folks have been experiencing for quite a long time, centuries.
And for a moment, I was like, this feels strange that people are reaching out at this time in this way.
And there was sort of a, I mean, people are panicked and felt like a hysteria in a way.
And I was interacting with a lot of white bodied folks who wanted to know what to do in the wellness community.
And I'm glad people are awakening.
And what I have noticed is that White-bodied folks in the wellness community, and I'm going to generalize knowing that, you know, we're different and complex beings, but white-bodied folks in the wellness community have not yet built the resilience to stay engaged in a movement for justice related to race, racial justice.
I don't see that white folks have built that resilience to stay engaged, and that's disheartening.
And because I think what What we're seeing is that more and more brown and black folks and marginalized people have to die for white folks to wake up in general and certainly in the wellness community.
And what's confounding to me about the wellness community is that it's all about awakening.
And it feels um I think that's what makes me uh feel angry and and frustrated at times like this is a this is a space and practice about awakening and yet it takes death for us to to awaken to suffering.
The industry or the practice and the discipline is about awakening but it also is telling itself that it's about resilience too and so you're you're kind of Showing a mirror to that.
And I'm wondering, what would resilience amongst white bodied folk look like, you know, in order to show that there was a sustained effort or attention?
Showing up over and over and building the muscle around which, of course, yoga can help us to stay engaged instead of withdrawing and avoiding the truth of what is.
And practice.
And what I mean is an active anti-racism practice.
That's what I mean.
Which would take consciousness raising.
It will also take white-bodied folks being in relationship with other white-bodied folks to understand how to dismantle white supremacy and internalize white superiority.
And of course, working across difference and when white folks can, this is not always possible, but working across difference with BIPOC folks and taking direction from BIPOC people, like building those muscles, that feels like that would build resilience.
Because what I think, and we're in a moment of this, well, it's longer than a moment, but the space of a global pandemic, that's what we're experiencing.
So I think people are fatigued in general.
And we're relating in a different way and socially isolating.
And I think what I witnessed is that white bodied folks became fatigued, I'm sure in response to the pandemic, and in response to, you know, black folks and BIPOC folks calling for our lives to matter and became overwhelmed by the just nature of the degree of the suffering that people And white folks don't have to stay engaged in a conversation, that's white privilege.
They don't have to stay engaged in a conversation about race and so I think that's why I'm talking about it as building a muscle and being resilient and showing up over and over again, which is a new practice.
Well, and I suppose it also points to this sense that I get from reading your book and also from learning from you at Omega Institute where we first met is that yoga and wellness seem to be fundamentally different practices and products for people who possess different levels of privilege.
You know, survival is different from lifestyle as categories.
Am I on track with that, do you think?
Yes, absolutely.
Yes, people are in closer proximity to power have more access to the products of wellness and yoga.
Yes, right.
And I guess and I guess they maybe some of the resistance to resilience is it's hard to conceive of yoga practice as being a survival strategy that would be that could be shared.
If you've used it for self-improvement or if you've used it for health optimization, it might be quite a leap to think, oh, I'm actually going to use it now for justice.
Yes, absolutely.
I mean, I think the culture of wellness and yoga, they're shifting in some ways because there are more people talking about social justice and yoga or the intersection of those or calling people into collective action and centering collective More of that's happening now, but we have a long way to go for sure.
And I do think it's a leap for people Who've been conditioned in a culture, dominant culture, and then in this wellness yoga culture to think of themselves as individuals and not as connected to other beings.
And we are, even though the practice says something very different, but the culture says, think about yourself, change yourself, transform yourself.
Don't think about how you're in relationship with others, which confuses me a lot, because I'm not oriented in that way.
I'm sure for many reasons.
So I do see why it would be a leap for people to be like, why are we talking about justice in the context of this practice?
Right, right.
Because that hasn't been the through line as far as the major demographic considers it.
You know, for this episode, Julian interviewed Daniel Ambroso, who tracked how white supremacist figures, you know, he tracked people like Laura Southern and Mike Chernovich, became virally visible from about 2015.
And this was partly in response, a reactionary response to the successes, or the visibility at least, of BLM.
Now, for a lot of white liberals, I would say myself included, watching Southern and others gain ground was shocking, or it seemed to be for some people.
Now, for a very practiced equality activist like yourself, was this at all surprising?
No, not at all.
I mean, I think since Obama was was elected.
I was I was holding my breath and trying to Figure out what would come after that because the what history has shown is there's a backlash, right?
We resist and make movement and then there's a backlash, right?
That's pretty severe.
And here we are.
So I think it didn't surprise me at all, and it's the You know, we have a movement of resistance that is dismantling these systems of oppression, and then this movement that is embedded in our culture, but this movement to maintain white power.
And those are right now they're colliding in a lot of ways in a way I've never experienced before.
So I'm not surprised at all about where we are.
Not that I understand everything about it, but I'm not surprised at the building and momentum around white power because of the The fear of losing what is assigned to one when they are white bodied.
It's very complicated too by the kind of social media chaos and influencer culture of it all and one thing that I almost hesitate to ask you about is because I find that it causes so much confusion is what would you say to you know, liberal white yoga people who, for instance, are sharing media from somebody like Candace Owens as though she has a reasonable point of view
or as though, you know, they're being, they're expressing, you know, equanimity or something like that by giving both sides of something.
Can you offer any guidance there?
To be honest, when I first heard of Candace Owens and what the messages she was perpetuating on social media, I went and looked at her page and was heartbroken and also just confused.
I didn't I was really curious about how someone who embodies an identity that is marginalized would be saying things like, like she does.
And I can see why some white folks would sort of grab onto those messages, especially from a BIPOC person, because there's like validation then in what white folks believe.
And I don't, And I know that we talked some about this question before.
What I'm curious about for her and people who are marginalized expressing messages like she is, that are divisive, that are misguided, that are false, I'm always curious about what led to that.
Like what led her to become this way and to be saying things that are just not true and to be...
I mean, I think participating in the dehumanization of folks by denying, like, for example, COVID's real and there's a denial about that and a denial about us wearing masks and how that can reduce the risk of contracting COVID.
It's harmful to perpetuate a message like that when 500,000 people have died in the U.S.
and I don't know how many people have died globally.
Millions, right?
So, I would say to I mean, the simple thing is to stop following her, but there's another Candace Owens or another person like her.
I would interrogate what she's saying, though, and interrogate myself if I believed what she was saying around what is going on for me that I would even attach to the messaging that she's offering.
Right.
Because it's so deeply harmful and toxic.
That's how I feel about her messaging.
Now, related to the complications of the online world, which of course have escalated over the past year in our current state of lockdown, I've heard you speak at length about the embodied experience of being black in America, being othered, moving within the landscape of white supremacy.
And you describe this in really careful detail in your book, in Skill in Action.
How does all of the online conflict and discourse around racism intersect and not with this embodied experience?
And I'm asking here because the online world is an access point, and it's often a very volatile one to the discussion for many white liberals.
And yet, like everything that unfolds online, it can be a very distorted lens.
Yes, it can be very distorted.
I feel like there's, you know, social media can certainly build movements, as we have witnessed and are experiencing, and social media and sort of online is not necessarily relational.
And part of what I have witnessed is that a lot of people are talking about cancel culture, cancelling people, right, or Demeaning people, because social media allows me to say what I want and then to not interact in a deep way, which I think when we're relational, it is from a place of embodiment, right?
It is from a place and point of connection.
And social, I think, in my experience, I have to work at that on social media.
You have to work on that?
I have to work at that.
I have to be like, this is my story.
I'm going to, I'm connecting with people versus like, I'm going to post this thing and, and I don't care who I connect with and I don't care about the impact of this.
I'm like thoughtful about it.
It's not a, because I'm, I'm reaching people, right.
And I'm in connection with them.
And so I think, I mean the culture at large, I feel like Does so many things to distract us from our embodied experience.
And because it does these things that are very divisive, that disconnect us, I think that lends itself to people then causing harm towards one another.
Because if I'm not embodied, I'm just going to harm someone else, right?
Or myself, or both.
And I think that's reflected in the online world.
I think it's more intense there because I'm not looking at the person I'm talking to, right?
I'm not, I'm just like posting something.
So it's, that's why I said I have to work at, at relationship in that way online.
Although it's not challenging for me to remember I'm embodied because as you named the culture reminds me of that all the time based on race.
But I think it's like the social media can feel transactional and it can feel transformative as well.
Well, I think that's a really sort of amazing fork in the road to identify.
I mean, in general, which fork is emphasized for you?
Like, what have you felt more of?
I guess I'm asking, has your activism life online worked and has it felt coherent with what you do in your trainings and so on?
Yes, absolutely.
And I think that is because of, I mean, one of my values is integrity and I want to be aligned.
And because so much of what I talk about is how deeply misaligned we are culturally.
And so I think how people experience me on social media is how they would experience me if they met me in person is how they would experience me in a training is how they would experience me when I'm trying to offer support to them or in a place of deep listening.
And that feels important to me, and that isn't necessarily something I've had to work at.
Integrity is just embedded in who I am, and my mother, I think, taught me a lot about integrity, for sure.
So, I feel like my voice through my online presence is connecting with people, and for some people is refreshing, and of course for others, perhaps not.
People who don't want me to talk about the things I'm talking about or to tell the truth about white supremacy, for example.
But yes, my activism online feels aligned with my activism in the streets, right, and my activism in other ways.
Right.
I guess I'm asking because so often I feel myself but then I also encounter activist cultures that are kind of despairing or almost feel a sense of paralysis that what they're doing online is actually distracting from or it's Building something parallel to what they would be out in the street doing.
And so these two arms often don't meet and embrace each other.
I think it's just a difficult situation for a lot of people.
You have moved from social work, I don't know exactly if it was gradually into yoga teaching or quickly, but these are two very potent worlds to bring together and obviously there are challenges.
And one that seems like really apparent up front is, you know, in general, as the broader yoga culture doesn't seem to have much stamina for justice analysis with as the broader yoga culture doesn't seem to have much stamina for justice analysis with regard to race, it doesn't really have a lot of stamina with regard to an analysis of class
And so I'm wondering whether discussions of, you know, racial equality and inclusion that you try to bring into the yoga space, are they supported by or not supported by this kind of absence of class analysis? are they supported by or not supported by this kind I mean, the threshold for a drop in class might be $20 in most cities.
And so, you know, if we want to bring a social justice conversation into that space, there's almost like an immediate question about who's not there to begin with.
Right, and if we want to bring a social justice context and conversation into spiritual space, we have to have an intersectional lens.
Right.
And so, I'm clear that even though I lead with race, that capitalism and classism are real and intersecting with that, and they shape how I navigate through the world and how others move through the world, right?
And what I've experienced in More in anti-racism trainings, not necessarily in the context of a yoga space or spiritual space, is that sometimes people will bring up class as a way to avoid talking about race.
And this isn't about oppression at Olympics, to be really clear, but there's a way that At times, white-bodied folks have been conditioned to distract from the task at hand, if we're talking about racism, because they're so deeply implicated in the system of white supremacy.
So I've seen that, but I haven't seen that a lot in my yoga, the skill and action offerings.
And I think you're right in inviting us to think about the different identities we embody.
And when we ask the question, who's not in the room, that we're looking at race, that we're looking at class, that we're looking at whether or not someone has a disability or is supported by disabled culture because they're not living with a disability.
Or are there trans folks in this space?
Are there older people in this space?
Elders in this space?
So, class intersects classism with racism, as does heterosexism, as does sexism.
I mean, you know all of these things.
And what I think is important is for us to hold that intersectional lens, even if we might be focusing on one identity, to understand how power works.
But we can translate that, like, how power works related to racism is similar to how it works related to classism.
Right.
And yoga studios who want to be more liberatory need to look at both and more.
So, this is like ongoing work, not a one-time thing, which is also about building resilience too, because the culture says you can fix something quickly.
Here's the problem, you have the solution, fix it.
That's not how anti-racism or anti-oppression practice is.
That's not what it looks like.
That's not how it feels.
And that's why I suppose you consistently use the word practice to describe it, right?
Yes, yes.
So it's not an influence.
So it's not anti-racism pill or...
Okay, or essential oil.
Now, you know, in your book, you describe this transformational moment where your own capacity for self-care and, you know, courage and, you know, resilience was almost instantly enhanced by ujjayi breathing.
And then from there, you describe that your fascination with yoga deepened until you made this pivot from social work into yoga work.
And now you've built a practice out of bringing social justice content into yoga spaces, but have you had to compromise or lose anything along the way as you've moved primarily into yoga spaces?
I don't think I've given up anything or had to lose anything to do the work I do or practice in the way I do.
Um, it's felt like I've, I've actually just moved more into alignment with what I meant to do.
Um, which I guess as I'm saying that there were like major life changes happening as I was writing skill and action.
My whole world was turned upside down.
And so that, um, I think that reconfiguration needed to happen for me to actually move into alignment and, and, I mean, I think I'm very clearly in my dharma.
And other people have told me that have witnessed me.
So I don't think I've had to lose anything.
I do think that it's scary to do this work.
And when I say work, it's scary to talk about white supremacy in the way I do in a white supremacist culture.
To, at times, predominantly white yoga practitioners.
Right.
And it's scary, and that's not about giving up something, it's just inviting people to think about the risk I'm taking as I do this.
And I feel like I have to do this, but it's a risk.
On top of my blackness being A threat to white supremacy all of the time in general as I walk out of my door, for example.
So I'm holding that and doing intentional work and talking about white supremacy very directly.
So that's not about loss.
It's just I want people to be aware that it's different for different people when we talk about white supremacy based on our proximity to power and our racial identity.
It's different.
So it takes courage for, I think, anyone to talk about white supremacy.
And I'm aware that white supremacy could take me out at any moment in a space, because I'm naming it.
I'm calling it what it is.
You know, I'm realizing that the bias of my question was assuming that you cross over into that space and you would dumb something down or compromise something.
But you're actually saying the reverse, that the stakes just got higher, in a way.
Is part of that because the predominantly white yoga crowd is going to be university educated, and you're going to want to really be communicating things that they may think they already know, or they think they have a handle on, or they think that their liberalism is good enough with regard to challenging the dominant power structure?
Yeah, I guess.
Is that involved?
You've got a tough crowd, I guess.
Sometimes.
I think I've noticed a difference since COVID, since the murder of George Floyd.
I don't know if... I mean, I've also noticed resistance.
You know, white yoga teachers saying, well, we don't want to talk about Black Lives Matter anymore.
Both are happening.
I've seen a softening though into a curiosity about what is happening.
Right.
And people are asking more nuanced questions in my workshops than they were a year ago.
Like it's, um, and do white people have a role in this work?
And do you believe in cancer culture?
These questions that I did not hear before.
So, Yeah I don't, I'm not in a space where I'm gonna skirt around the topic or issue and I don't feel like I have to.
I also feel like I talk about these things all the time and live them and I forget that sometimes folks listening do not live and talk about these things all of the time and so they're learning.
Like I'm basically confronting people with the way they've been conditioned and offering a different way of thinking and being.
That takes forever to like It takes forever to transform in the way I'm inviting people into, but I've seen it happen, the beginnings of it happen.
I don't doubt that it takes a lot of work, but I do have to say for myself that I did have an epiphany that I actually associated with a spiritual experience.
In conversation with Black Lives Matter materials, but then also with your own work, where this kind of, I don't know, initial veil of, I don't understand this jargon and I don't know why it's making me feel like a bad person.
That sort of faded to resolve to this sensation that, oh, I'm actually being told that privilege makes me, that certain types of privileges, including gender privilege, makes me insensitive to the interconnectedness of the world, right?
It makes me think that I am I'm the standard I am, the world should sort of bend to my own wishes, that I should feel comfortable wherever I am, and if I'm not, I'm really offended.
And to realize that that wasn't a universal state of being, and it couldn't be.
That was almost mystical, right?
And it's not like, often if I bring this up, I often feel like, oh, am I, you know, did I turn, you know, Black Lives Matter into, you know, some spiritual candy for myself?
And I don't think that's, I mean, there's a part of that perhaps, but yeah.
I'm wondering if you're getting some of those responses too, where people are starting to recognize that, oh, social justice isn't actually about running down my identity, but showing me that my identity actually gives me blinders that impede my empathy and that make me feel like I've got more shit to protect than I have to give.
That's right.
Yes, absolutely everything you just said, and what you named about when you were able to move through the limited thinking around, I'm a bad person, right?
You didn't say it exactly that way, but that thinking was there.
Pretty much, yeah.
People get stuck in that all the time.
White folks, people of privilege.
I mean, I have many points of privilege, right?
me being good or bad.
And she's saying I'm bad, so I'm going to stay there.
And that just leaves people in this space of resistance, which doesn't allow them to move.
And when I say move, I mean in the way we need to, to shift what is happening in our world.
And that's not the conversation that we're having.
It isn't about people's goodness or whether or not they're bad.
I am good and I do terrible things.
And I can be mean and impatient and yell at people, right?
It's not about that.
And when folks are having that conversation, I say, we're not actually talking about that.
Right?
It's not as simple as this binary thinking of good or bad.
It's how do I embody privilege and what power does culture give me?
And what doesn't that allow me to see?
Right?
When I have power, who am I not in relationship with and who don't ask to see?
Like, I don't have to be in relationship with people who are disabled.
My mother is, so I do.
But like, if I didn't have her, I don't know that I would be so vocal at times about people who are living with physical disabilities.
I suppose, yeah, I mean that was the key thing for me was that, aside from, I understood, I think I was trained enough, you know, as a kind of leftist to understand the structural arguments.
What I didn't understand, what took a while to get to was, oh, the structure doesn't work for anybody at all, actually.
And it puts some people in power and in comfort and other people completely bereft of power and comfort.
But neither of those situations have to do with the full expression of humanity at all.
Yeah, and that's where your work being specifically yoga-oriented made sense for me.
It's like you're not just doing political organization meetings.
There can be a broader political or philosophical context for what you're saying.
Yeah.
That may have, do you, do you see relationships between you, your work in the yoga world and how, you know, civil rights activists have, have mobilized, you know, uh, their, their, their Christianity as well?
Like, are there, are there overlaps?
I haven't thought about the before, but I, when you just asked the question, I, faith and devotion came to mind and like commitment that comes from devotion and faith.
Right.
And that, that, I feel like people have to believe in, I mean, civil rights activists, um, that I'm thinking of had to believe in something bigger to show up in the way they did.
Like, I don't know.
Otherwise, I don't know how someone would have the fortitude to, to show up and put their body on the line.
Right.
For what they value and believe.
Um, so I think that those things overlap for sure.
And the connection that comes from, That can come from a space of faith or devotion or practice together or the community that's built in that space.
Now, with regard to how spirituality is deployed or accessed in this discussion, one of the things that we reference regularly on the podcast is
The unfortunate fact that yoga has a kind of political neutrality to it that not only allows for, you know, white liberals to practice, you know, as though they, you know, as though being apolitical was some sort of spiritual achievement, but it also allows for, for instance, Hindu nationalists to use it as a fig leaf over their xenophobia and their fascism.
So does this complicated question around what yoga is give you pause?
Does it have any sort of real world impacts for you in your justice work?
Yes, I think for me, and this may not be a direct answer to your question, what I'm thinking about in my own practice is the lineage of the practice and cultural appropriation.
And I'm thinking about the way I'm Profiting from a practice we call yoga that I do not fully understand or expect I will before I leave my body or if I live 10 lifetimes, I wouldn't understand everything about yoga unless I was coming into a body deeply connected to the lineage.
So, what made me think about that is the question of what is yoga, right?
And what is Jasper?
He has an opinion on the definition of yoga as well.
He really does.
So I think it feels complicated for me to even say what yoga is because I don't fully understand it.
But I think in my experience here in the US where I've lived, people are talking about yoga as physical practice and not something beyond that.
And in my work, I'm talking about it as a way of living.
That I'm still trying to understand.
Right.
But you're right, that part of how people define things, because language is connected to culture, and it shapes culture, right, and shapes people, it's powerful.
So the terms we use and what we mean can be really powerful and can divide people or can be a strategy for change.
Right, and I think the uncomfortable scenario for yoga is that its political neutrality allows it to be this contested space, which also then gives you a doorway to come in and say, well actually you could apply You know, your introspection, and you could apply your breathing work, and you could apply your self-regulation to a vision of what political justice would feel like in your bodies.
And so that possibility is there too, even though, you know, there might be some fashy guy in the next studio who's doing the opposite with it.
Yes, that's right.
Yes, all of that is happening right now.
I have watched your growing impact in the yoga world.
And you really gave me pause when you opened by talking about how, you know, you watched book sales rise after George, George Floyd was murdered, which I hadn't really thought about the, the very painful irony of what it means for you to do well in, in, in, the very painful irony of what it means for you to do well in, in, in, in, In sales terms around such events.
But, you know, in that vein I've often wondered whether content like yours can be used by liberal yoga groups to Um, make themselves feel better to enact a kind of performative social justice.
Um, so one example I can point to is that, um, you know, uh, the Buddhist group Shambhala International that I've done some journalism on, I believe has cynically pivoted to platform social justice oriented work, uh, in partly to brand wash its long-term institutional abuse.
So, you know, that's an extreme example, but my question to you is, how do you, as an activist, know when your clients are engaging you in good faith?
Is that something that you can feel?
Can you measure it?
What are the good signs and the bad signs?
This is a good question.
So, you know, when I wrote Skill in Action, I went to this healer.
She did many things.
And, um, the skill and action was not yet out in the world, but I had finished writing it and she said, let it do what it's going to do.
She said, birth it and let it do what it's going to do.
And I, I, um, hear her in my head.
Um, a lot of the time when I'm thinking about what are people doing with this, how are they using this work?
Um, and is it performative or is it real?
And really, I don't have control over that, right?
I listen to her and let it go, and it's doing what it's supposed to do, I guess, in some ways for sure that are clear to me and evident.
I know there's a lot of...
Performative action going on in the wellness world, and that we all saw that after the murder of George Floyd.
All of a sudden people are reaching out to say, can I feature you on this, Michelle, on my Instagram?
As if my black life didn't matter before his murder.
I was like, we are not in relationship.
I don't know you.
You've never spoken to me.
Why now?
And you're going to benefit from this more than I will because you'll look good doing it and you're exploiting me.
And so that happens to a lot of BIPOC folks and black folks in particular.
Were you able to be that direct in your responses?
Did you say that directly back?
Yeah.
I said, we're not in relationship.
I don't know you.
And sometimes I said, why are you asking me this now?
I've been around.
I've been doing dismantling racism work for a long time.
Like, I've been out here, and I know part of that was the awakening, but people have also gone back to sleep.
So, which is disheartening.
So, I think this, you know, I don't know in my workshops if people are, I mean, I'm intuitive.
I can feel, at times I can feel that I'm saying things And they're landing with people in their hearts, not their heads, like they're feeling it.
And that gives me hope.
And then I have experiences where I think people are still like, why are we talking about justice and yoga?
What's the connection?
And I want to be like, just look around, experience the world.
Are you living your yoga or not?
And if so, how are you doing it?
And what questions do you have about the suffering that you see and experience on the planet and the suffering the planet is experiencing?
Isn't yoga supposed to help us be able to more clearly see, feel, sense what is happening to everyone and then to respond to that in some way based on our positionality and identity?
So, I think people are changing and I think some people are still learning how to do that and sometimes it's evident to me how and sometimes it's not.
You know, I have something similar in my own work when I'm hired by a training school to give some sort of presentation in the history of institutional abuse or something like that.
Sometimes I'll be hired by places that are affiliated with you know institutions that haven't really gone through an accountability process and sometimes I have the impression that you know maybe this is helping them make a look a little bit better and I have a little bit of a side eye about that but then then there will be individuals who participate who
Who will make their own connection with the content and I think both things can happen at the same time where you know you could actually you could be exploited for brand washing and you could also hit home and and it's really hard to say.
Okay, last thing.
Oh, actually two more things.
You know, we study the rise of conspiracy theories and related confusions in yoga and wellness spaces.
What have you seen in your part of the yoga world?
And is it resolving?
Is it shifting?
Yeah, what are you seeing?
I keep saying Capitol was stormed, but it wasn't.
People were let in, and then they took over the building.
I just want to be clear about it, right?
The gates were opened, and people knew they were coming.
I'm not talking about people inside the building, although some of them knew.
When I saw the QAnon folks and the To me, it feels like an extension of white supremacy, but it's not often talked about in that way.
And I saw the white supremacists together, I was like, how did these groups meet up?
So I've been in question about that.
How did this happen?
And I'm just curious about that, because those two groups feel so just not aligned with one another, and yet they were in this space.
And they're aligned in some ways, right?
But it just didn't make any sense to me at all how these people came together and were organizing together and taking over this building.
So, that led to a lot of confusion and questioning for me.
And what that connects with to me in the spaces I'm in where I'm teaching skill and action is that it happened the other day.
Some people believe we can transcend the relative truth.
And we can't because we're in bodies moving around the planet with one another.
And so I see people wanting to go to this place of transcendence.
We're not our identities.
And I'm like, we're not.
And we are.
Right.
But people want to be like, we're not to escape the reality that is happening and their responsibility to do something like that is what I've seen.
This is it for a long time in the yoga world.
Right.
And that happens through bypassing a lot.
And it is a bypass, right?
And I just invite people to remember to hold multiple truths at the same time.
I'm not my body, I'm divine.
I am my body, I'm divine.
You know, it's like both are happening and I think that's what I've seen in my space is this like desire to transcend the reality of what is going on.
Well, you know, you're just listening to I'm realizing that maybe the spiritual challenge that you offer to the space is to delinearize the
the kind of the journey because a very common defense against all political discussion within yoga and wellness spaces is that somehow they belong to a lower plane or these issues will don't really make a difference when we get to, you know, 5D or whatever.
And, and that, and that, you know, the, the yogi, you know, at least in the iron age, Yoga Sutra's version of things is on a sort of antisocial path of withdrawal from, from a relationship to the point at which they can disappear into the ether of, of meditation.
non-relationship actually of isolation and and so um you're actually i mean it would be interesting it would be interesting to um maybe you have but i'm wondering you know the which you what what it what the yoga scholar would say about where that challenge falls within the history of yoga literature because it's it's got to be somewhere right because because the literature is so vast um but that's also why i know that you i think you
you chose the gita as your model for your book right yes and i'm revisiting it every day it's sitting on my desk now because it's helping me at this time Yeah, no kidding.
So, last thing I heard, when I first heard you years ago, you told a story about your middle name, Cassandra.
This is the prophet who hears the truth, but is cursed to never be believed.
How is that name feeling for you these days?
It still feels really powerful, and I think I have Less of an attachment to not being believed.
And what feels connected to my middle name is being able to see or know some about what's going to happen based on the patterns in history.
Like, that's where that's coming from.
And I think it's coming from intuition and connection and And my mother was premonitions and my grandmother did.
I think there's a long line of knowing and cultivating the skill of deep wisdom and knowing.
So, what I've experienced is speaking a truth and having people mobilize around that now in a way that feels different than when I first met you.
Like, you know, it was new, the book had just come out, right?
And I think more people are like, oh yeah, Michelle wrote this down three years ago.
It may not have been like, they're going to take over the Capitol, or, you know, the white supremacists are going to be on the rise, and Trump's going to be igniting their fire, right?
I didn't write about that, but I knew we wouldn't survive if we continued on and look at where we are.
We're in a question of, are we going to survive and how?
And what do we need to change?
I knew that was happening.
So the name feels resonant and real, and I think people are listening.
