76: A Field Guide to White Supremacy (w/Kathleen Belew)
There is no avoiding the fact that conspirituality plays out against a backdrop of racially-charged politics and the echoes of colonialism. And from the beginning of this podcast project we’ve tackled things like the origins of yoga and wellness being tangled up with European fascist movements and racist eugenics. We’re speaking from and into a culture that is predominantly white, and has the disposable income to afford boutique health ideologies. We know it’s naturally allergic to the project of public health. We know that it ignores the social determinants of health — because if it didn’t, it couldn’t sell its green-smoothie-based hero’s journeys.But reporting on race and conspirituality is only going to get harder. In this episode, Matthew reviews a new volume of essays that might help. A Field Guide to White Supremacy, edited by Drs. Kathleen Belew and Ramon Gutierrez, brings together a pile of resources for journalists and policy-makers who want to engage thoughtfully with issues of equality. And he interviews Dr. Belew on best practices, The Great Replacement conspiracy theory, and why there are no “lone wolves.”In a debrief discussion, Derek and Julian join in to puzzle out the complexities of reporting on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. platforming Black anti-vax activists, how the sources of vax-hesitancy shown by Aaron Rogers and Kyrie Irving might be coming from different places, and how to think empathetically about vaccine hesitancy in Black liberation movements. Show NotesKathleen BelewA Field Guide to White Supremacy by Kathleen Belew, Ramon A. Gutierrez RFK Jr is one of the Disinformation Dozen, and He has actively courted and collaborated with Black communities and leadersTwitter thread of Barclay's Center protest clipsThe Creator Of 'The Punisher' Wants To Reclaim The Iconic Skull From Police And Fringe AdmirersKyrie Irving hints at redpilling followers on IG
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Conspiratuality 76, A Field Guide to White Supremacy with Kathleen Belew.
There's no avoiding the fact that conspirituality plays out against a backdrop of racially charged politics and the echoes of colonialism.
And from the beginning of this podcast project, we've tackled things like the origins of yoga and wellness being tangled up with European fascist movements and racist eugenics.
We're speaking from and into a culture that is predominantly white and has the disposable income to afford boutique health ideologies.
We know it's naturally allergic to the project of public health.
We know that it ignores the social determinants of health because if it didn't, it couldn't sell its green smoothie-based hero's journeys.
But reporting on race and conspirituality is only going to get harder.
In this episode, Matthew reviews a new volume of essays that might help, A Field Guide to White Supremacy, edited by Drs.
Kathleen Belew and Ramón Gutiérrez.
It brings together a pile of resources for journalists and policymakers who want to engage thoughtfully with issues of equality.
Matthew interviews Dr. Ballou on best practices, the Great Replacement Conspiracy Theory, and why there are really no lone wolves.
In a debrief discussion, Derek and I will join in to puzzle out the complexities of reporting on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.' 's platforming black anti-vax activists.
And how the sources of vax hesitancy shown by, for example, Aaron Rodgers versus Kyrie Irving might be coming from different places.
And how to think empathetically about vaccine hesitancy in black liberation movements.
At the end of my interview with Dr. Kathleen Ballou, which will roll coming up, I referenced something that Tatum Feirstead said back in episode 74, which was about the intersections between yoga, life coaching and predatory MLMs in the charismatic aura of Elena Brower. life coaching and predatory MLMs in the charismatic aura of
Now, if you didn't catch that story, Fjersted was the erstwhile student of Brouwer who published a letter just this past fall about some negative experiences under her celebrity influence.
In answering a question about why she came forward with her story, Fearstead gave the following as one reason.
I've been learning a lot about how white cisgender women are the gatekeepers of the patriarchy and how we protect it to serve our own best interests.
I really want to stop doing that.
And after trying multiple times to say something to Elena privately, I felt like by not saying anything publicly, I was continuing to protect and enable another harm causing white woman.
And I didn't.
I didn't want to do that anymore.
So I had three feelings about the comment.
I mean, probably more than three, but to narrow them down.
First of all, I felt like it made a lot of sense to connect this interpersonal and culty story to larger issues of political inequality.
I generally find that that's a really enriching thing to do.
Secondly, I also thought that for some people, the comment might seem to come out of left field, that it might feel like it was shoehorned in from another conversation.
And then thirdly, I guess relatedly, I wish this shorthanding of themes could be more digestible to a broad leadership, because I knew that some would get what Fearstead was saying, but to others, I know it might sound jargony or like quote-unquote virtue signaling.
In other words, I felt it was a valid comment, but also broad and provocative, and it might be heard as being out of focus.
But part of that, as Fearstead admitted, is about her being in a learning phase.
Part of it is the soundbite format of the interview quote, which is a kind of reductionism that also dominates social media discussions about social justice.
And part of it is that the idea and reality of white supremacy is vast, its impacts pervasive and confusing, and dialogue in its landscape will too easily spiral into guilt, shame, and recrimination.
So when things are sped up this way, and cultural revelations and intellectual demands are presenting themselves, it's just a real fortune to be handed a roadmap in paper form of several hundred dense pages to take time with and absorb.
And that's just what dropped into our inbox when the publicists for Kathleen Belew and Ramón Gutiérrez's A Field Guide to White Supremacy got in touch with Galli.
He's back in August.
I was able to take a good amount of time with this diverse and comprehensive text.
I'm not all the way through it.
There's a lot to absorb.
But I've learned a lot.
Beginning with their style guide, which is right up front, because Belew and Gurdjieff has pitched this book as a true field guide for journalists and policy makers, and so they open with the devil in the details of language.
As in, what does it mean for journalists to produce and readers to consume terms like, quote, reverse discrimination, unquote, without quotation marks, or words like tribe or tribalism, which tend to have negative connotations, but they remain legitimate First Nations organizational terms?
Or what does it mean to use the pseudoscientific term Caucasian?
They point out that the term gay avoids the historical pathologization attached to the term homosexual.
And then, speaking to a major chunk of Bellew's own scholarship, they dissuade the usage of lone wolf when speaking of criminal violence motivated by personal, but more importantly, systemic racism.
The Field Guide is organized into four parts, roughly.
So there's a history of white supremacy in the United States.
How white supremacy intersects with misogyny, antisemitism, homophobia, and trans bigotry is the second section.
With the third, there's a study of the rise of anti-immigration movements.
And the concluding section is all about how white supremacy goes mainstream.
So the book opens with an excellent essay from Oneida Nation scholar-activist Doug Keel that really shows the ancient modern state of affairs at play through a story about how a Wisconsin town, Hobart, astroturfed an anti-indigenous legal activist to accelerate the municipal creep of the town into Oneida territory.
And then it closes with Bellew's essay that rounds up the need for systemic reporting, especially in light of the bias towards the Lone Wolf story.
She wonders why exactly we don't have a full picture of the Oklahoma City bombing.
Why isn't that networked story clear?
There are also studies of slave codes eliding into modern policing.
There's an essay about the roots of Islamophobia, which is kind of eye-opening, and essays about the state mechanisms of xenophobia, You know, policy marginalization and then mechanisms like deportation.
And there's also a political history survey of the right from Pat Buchanan to Trump to Charlottesville.
So, as I said, it's a lot to wade through and absorb.
I'll be sitting with this volume for some time.
Now, I think here on the pod it's safe to say that we've been on the themes of racism and white supremacy since early episodes, but we've started with the relatively easy matters of privilege and exclusivity.
And how yoga and wellness have, in some ways, become the religious rituals of a neoliberal age that does everything it can to pretend that our life opportunities are always already equal, that the playing field is always level, and to pretend that gentrified yoga studios are open to everyone.
To pretend that bespoke alt-healthcare is both accessible and doesn't draw dollars and attention away from the public health infrastructure that actually keeps the majority of people healthy.
On episodes 4 and 56, Dax Devlin-Ross helped us understand these things from the inside a little bit, and also on episode 4 with the historian Natalia Petruzzella, we got into the historical weeds that we've been pulling on ever since.
Which is that these industries that we cover have their roots in European physical culture movements that are both parallel to and complicit with early 20th century fascisms, along with the various eugenics programs that went along with them.
So, the short story of that analysis is that the yoga class you go to today, the CrossFit gym that you love, these wouldn't be a thing, or at least not in the same way, if not for some very anxious white men at the turn of the 20th century preaching about the value of working out and purifying your diet as a way of enhancing white birth rates in a rapidly globalizing world.
So here's my interview with Dr. Balu, which I hope will advance these themes with some receipts and some heft, and make our initial forays into this landscape more stable, so that statements like Firsted's about white women and patriarchy in the wellness world have a broader place to land.
And as you'll see from the racially charged conspirituality scenarios I throw at the professor at the end, and which we'll recap in our debrief, I hope we keep building better tools for meeting the mind-bending reporting challenges that we face and will continue to face going forward.
Dr. Baloo, thank you for joining us on Conspirituality Podcast.
Thank you so much for taking the time.
Thank you for having me.
You know, I've never started an episode or an interview with a land acknowledgement on this podcast.
I have done it in other circumstances, but given the topic today, I thought it would be appropriate.
This is the one for Toronto, where I'm sitting, and it says that I am on the traditional territory of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples.
And this territory is now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples.
And how about you, Doctor?
I'm in Chicago, so I am here on traditional lands of Council of Three Fires, Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi Nations, and in lands that have been used as a home by the Miami, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac, and Fox peoples.
But more broadly, we are all who are listening to this podcast in the United States and Canada.
Unless you are on traditional tribal lands right now, All of us are standing on lands that once belonged to someone else as home.
And I think starting our interview with that acknowledgement is a wonderful place to start this conversation.
Well, I thought so, too.
And maybe to be very grounded, too, in the general subject of this incredible volume that you've co-edited, I have some general questions to start with.
In the second part of our interview, I'm going to pivot to specific scenarios that are germane to our listeners who are all trying to grasp how white supremacy plays out in the conspiracy theory universe.
Because you and Dr. Gutierrez have pitched this rich volume specifically as a guide for journalists and policymakers.
So I want to give you time to take me to school, as it were.
But starting with your introductory definition, you and Dr. Gutierrez write, White supremacy is a complex web of ideology, systems, privileges, and personal beliefs that create unequal outcomes along racial lines across multiple categories of life, including wealth, freedom, health, and happiness.
White supremacy includes both individual prejudice and, for instance, the long history of the disproportionate incarceration of people of color.
It describes a legal system still predisposed towards racial inequality, even when judge, counsel, and jurors abjure racism at the individual level.
It is collective and individual.
It is old and immediate.
Some white supremacists turn to violence, but there are also a lot of people who are individually white supremacist, some openly so, who reject violence.
And others have seen the ugliness of their personal racism Okay, so is there anything that stands out to you as I read that back to you?
Anything that you'd emphasize or change?
This is post-publication.
If you were giving this thesis as an elevator pitch, what really stands out?
Well, I've been trying to find a metaphor to sort of illustrate this idea because what we really need, I think, is a way of thinking about white supremacy as both a problem of individual belief and a problem of structural racism.
So, you know, my first book, Bring the War Home, is really about organized white power violence.
There's no mystery to it.
It's openly racist, openly violent.
It is openly anti-democratic.
And it's very clearly something that many, many people, if not most people in our country, would oppose.
But the problem is that when we see an act of racial violence, the action is only part of the issue because our failure to reckon with it Has to do with multiple sites of failure across the rest of our society, how we prosecute, how we talk about these events.
And those are the parts where we sort of lose the thread.
So I've come to think of this as sort of like a big wooden fence, the kind you have in your backyard.
And, well, if you have a particular kind of backyard, which is a different question about white supremacy.
So the plank that is openly racist violence is one board in the fence.
And then there are all these other boards in the fence, like Disproportionate incarceration rates, maternal health outcomes, education outcomes, the accumulation of wealth, property ownership, all of these things are unequally distributed in our society based on race.
And the fence was built by people who believed in white supremacy.
And it is reinforced from time to time very urgently in our present moment by people who believe in white supremacy.
But it won't ever be enough to just walk away from the fence and say, like, OK, we're not doing white supremacy anymore because the fence is still standing.
And if you look at something like, in my first book I write about the shooting of leftist demonstrators in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1979 by a caravan of Klansmen and neo-Nazis.
One part of the problem of Greensboro is the act of racial violence.
But the reason that that became such a huge moment for the white power movement and for our country was the failure of the judicial system to hold gunmen accountable at state, federal, and civil trials such that the movement actually encountered a major opposition.
And that happened not because of people who were in the white power movement, but because of things like peremptory challenges or the ability to create an all-white jury that were legacies of white supremacy in the legal system in North Carolina.
So these are all part of the same issue.
So the Field Guide tries to zoom out to see the whole set of issues as they appear across different parts of our society.
So that, you know, really we can avoid this process of pulling at one of the planks at a time.
Because I'm thinking of, you know, the fence.
What's actually unseen about the fence is that it's going to have, you know, concrete footings, you know, that are invisible actually.
And behind the fence there are going to be the sort of upright supports that you don't necessarily see.
Yes!
But that's all part of the picture.
Yes.
Oh, I like that.
Yeah, exactly.
And I like that.
Sorry.
I like that in that this metaphor is working for explaining the idea, not that I am a fan of the fence.
Well, well, also, I think, I mean, if you're if you if I think it's a good I think it's a good metaphor because you can also start to talk about how people want to paint it instead of take it apart.
Right.
Yeah.
But, you know, to return to this combination of individual and structural influences, you know, my understanding of the recent political exposure of critical race theory, much of it disingenuous, you know, for obvious reasons, is that it emphasizes the structural roots and outcomes of racist history and policy, but it de-emphasizes moral failures like personal prejudice.
To be clear, though, the white supremacy that you're talking about encompasses both.
This is what you're presenting.
Yeah.
Well, I think we need an analytic that can both understand and articulate these structural inequalities in our society that are deeply, deeply based on race and deal with the continued problem of individual belief in upholding those structures.
So I think critical race theory is a really good example of this because, you know, There's been a lot of excellent historical study of the continued work of white supremacists and segregationists to impact school curricula in order to make those ideas more palatable and more mainstream, ranging from, you know,
The reconstruction period forward and over and over again, changing the story of how we talk about moments of profound racial inequality in order to allow us to continue to exert systems of profound racial inequality.
So I think we need to be talking about both, particularly when individual belief and openly racist rhetoric has made our way its way back into our political mainstream.
Now, speaking to our conspiracy theory remit on this podcast, the publication date for a field guide of white supremacy is this month.
So, I don't think you had time to include any research or writing on how these straw man critiques of critical race theory have entered the conspiracy theory landscape.
So, I'm just wondering if you can speak briefly on this because this volume is going to be landing right on that battlefield.
Yeah, I mean, you tell me about how the conspiracy theory side of critical race theory is going.
But what we know is that, as has happened many times before, there has been a coordinated campaign by politicians and interest groups on the right to raise these issues in local school boards all across the country.
In order to impact both school curriculum and local politics and to galvanize people around this idea.
And I think, you know, I think critical race theory picked up because it targets a very specific kind of discomfort that people have often when they encounter this history for the first time.
And I'll say, like, I remember this feeling very well the first time I encountered this set of ideas, reading, I think, what The Possessive Investment in Whiteness by Lord George Lipschitz, which is a, you know, a classic in college.
And what that essay does is ask you to think about all the ways that you as a white person, or me as a white person, benefited from unequal systems, even if I was going about my life trying to do my best and be Not a racist person, right?
So it's a deeply uncomfortable moment for a lot of people, and I see this in the classroom a lot, right?
But the thing is that I think that learning about our history at the end is a very good antidote to that discomfort, because what it shows is that over and over again, people in the United States have organized together to demand inclusion in those radical promises of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, which we might well remember were never meant for most of us.
That was only for free, white, property-owning men at the beginning, and it was expanded to other groups, not out of Magnanimity by the people in charge, but when people worked together and organized and demanded those rights and the story of people accessing democracy through their own action and volition, I think is a very hopeful and uplifting story.
I agree.
And to speak to your point about how critical race theory has intersected with conspiracism in contemporary political discourse, I think we can see a melding of themes and content subjects
At those very school board meetings that are becoming so contentious, where this character insult of the state is now going to tell me how to be more just and fair in my relations, in my racial relations, in my community, in my school, in my institutions, that that argument and that resistance is being combined with, oh, the state is also going to tell me what to do with my bodily identity, with my bodily autonomy.
It's going to tell me that I have to wear a mask that I actually have to so even we've even heard language crossover language where you know masking is equated to being ashamed of one's whiteness for example.
So this is this is where those those combinations begin to happen.
Yeah I mean that's really interesting and I think like I think that the way that a lot of that ideology works is to Push down hard on individualism at the expense of collective and community tie or at least To push down on only particular, very limited kinds of personhood or individuality being recognized.
Right.
And, you know, white supremacy is a very potent way of doing that.
Now, you and Dr. Gutierrez, as I said, position this field guide as a map for journalists and policy makers who want to positively contribute to the conditions for racial justice and may not know What are the top three things, zooming out, that you would say journalists get wrong or miss when reporting on racially charged events or topics?
Thank you for the question.
I think that the big one is just context.
So I noticed doing interviews for Bring the War Home, which came out right after Charlottesville.
It was in page proofs when the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville happened.
And as a result has had a sort of second life as a work of urgent public scholarship.
A lot of the work I was doing with journalists was just basic historical context, which, you know, no one should be expected to know about any one of these stories.
But I do think it's really important to have some context going into report.
So, for instance, when we think about reporting about groups of immigrants arriving to the United States, Often people use, without thinking, language like a wave of immigrants, a tide of immigrants, or a horde of immigrants.
Oh wow, right.
Yeah, historians know that that language has been not only used to sort of dehumanize arriving groups of immigrants for more than 100 years, but also that when that language is present, there are upticks in vigilante reprisal against immigrant groups.
So these are simple problems, right?
Like just don't use the word wave or tide or hoard when you're talking about this group that have to do with long historical context.
And for that reason we started with some ideas about how people might think about the Associated Press style book and other local newsroom style guides in just thinking about the language we're using around all of this.
Because the scholarly community has spent probably too much time Hyperanalyzing exactly which words lead to exactly which kinds of issues over time.
Another one that I am particularly interested in is the kind of trope of the lone wolf terrorist.
I think this one is incredibly damaging.
So the problem is we have stories about white power activism that are presented as one-offs, as mental health crises, as I mean, sometimes it's even as awful as someone having a really bad day or something like that.
When, in fact, we are dealing with a political movement with an ideology with interwoven ties that has been interested in acts of domestic terror and a war on the country since the late, well, since the early 1980s.
And the problem there is that that doesn't let the public account for leaderless resistance, which is the main mode of organizing in the white power movement, and which is effectively cell-style terrorism.
And what we get instead are stories about Charleston as anti-Black violence and El Paso as anti-Latinx violence and the Tree of Life Synagogue as anti-Semitic violence and Christchurch as anti-Islamic violence.
They are all those things, but they are also all perpetrated by white power gunmen with a common ideology and a common set of beliefs.
And so that, you know, that reporting both breaks apart our ability to confront white power And it distances impacted communities from each other.
And those communities don't share the same amount of resources and visibility and media savvy.
I mean, there's a lot in common between these communities that might be leveraged for coalition building.
You know, as you enumerated the synagogue shooting and the Christchurch shooting and the different communities that are targeted, I suddenly had this image of, oh, we're actually, we're looking at a mosaic.
And there's a bias in the reporting towards perhaps, you know, very respectfully understanding that, oh, the Muslim community in New Zealand or in Christchurch is very specific.
We should learn You know, very clearly what its culture is, or we should represent that faithfully.
But there can be a failure to connect that to other marginalized communities that are facing the same threat.
That somehow the continuity of the storytelling is not firm.
Right, and I think that it's especially important when you think about things like an attack on a community like El Paso, on the Latinx community there, often borderlands communities have very tenuous representation in our media for a number of reasons having to do with documented and undocumented citizenship, with sort of the amount of attention paid, whereas A community like the Tree of Life Synagogue commands a great deal of our national attention.
Right.
So linking those together is a really powerful place to begin.
And I also think, not for nothing, this is all of us after January 6th.
That was an attack on our entire country.
That was an attack on our democratic process.
Um so linking I think is really important and I you know I'm I'm sympathetic to why this happens because you know this was my experience of getting into this archive too.
When you locate a very different belief system there is a lot of um I mean just the way people's brains work I think people really want to understand exactly what it is and categorize and sort and lock it down and pin it down right.
So there's a lot of if you look at the 80s There's a lot of scholarship and journalistic accounts that are just about like, okay, so we have this group of people.
How many of them are skinheads?
How many of them are Klansmen?
Which tattoos go with this group?
Which ones go with that group?
Okay, wait, but are the Neo-Nazis like affiliated?
Or are they doing their own thing?
And like, which slogan should be?
Where are the headquarters?
Like, exactly how big?
All of that stuff, it turns out, is not helpful at all to how it works on the ground, where we see that activists were in multiple groups at the same time, regularly moved between these things as sort of different versions of the same thing.
You know, you'd find tattoos of all three of those ideologies on different people.
So, instead of trying to sort out the differences, I think we have overcorrected in that direction and we need to instead think about commonality and the broad groundswell.
There's another issue that I think you really highlight in your essay in A Field Guide to White Supremacy.
It's called There Are No Lone Wolves, to speak to your subject now, the White Power Movement at War, and you pick apart this journalistic tendency, also a policymaking tendency to focus on the narrowness of not only stories that, you know, can be like tightly framed and sort of classified according to who's wearing what tattoo, but like who is a real anti-hero can be like tightly framed and sort of classified according to who's wearing what tattoo, but like who is
And, you know, when it comes to the Oklahoma City bombing, I'm here in Canada and I know the name of Timothy McVeigh and I can kind of see if I close my eyes and squint, I can see his sorry mugshot as we're speaking.
And I know that he was executed and that gives me this sense of, oh, so that's over.
Exactly.
So I can attest to your main point, just from personal experience, that I don't have a clear picture at all of the network of influences that brought him to that violence or that have sanctified him since.
So he really is burned into my brain as a lone wolf, as a crazy person, who I really want to dissociate from, who I want to say, this is not my guy.
And not only that, but most people, and maybe this is not you because you're tuned to these issues, but most people in the United States don't have a clear idea of what his violence was meant to signify either.
So, you know, and this is stark for us.
So if you think about like, And this is a claim that rests on the sort of mainland definition of the United States, so that's a different historical argument for another day.
But, you know, on the mainland U.S., the Oklahoma City bombing is the biggest deliberate mass casualty event between Pearl Harbor and 9-11.
And I think most people have no idea what it was and what it meant.
I think maybe people have heard of McVeigh or a few co-conspirators and have an idea of a lone wolf attack or a few bad apples or madmen or maybe even, quote, disaffected radicals who didn't like the government.
But this is a very clear example of a leaderless resistance attack perpetrated by a movement that is still active in our country.
It is the largest domestic terrorism event in U.S.
history.
And it is enormously significant.
And there are historical reasons for why the memory of it was cemented so badly, I think.
But I, you know, it's just a stunner of the recent past that the way that that trial unfolded allowed a reemergence of this movement Well, you know, you speak about this leaderless resistance, and I want to ask a more specific question about that in a bit, but I think what the coverage ended up doing was it turned McVeigh into a kind of leader.
Instead of a cog in a machine.
And it feels like there's also like a cognitive storytelling.
You mentioned, you know, maybe this is how our brains work.
It might be, it's like there's a Hollywood and Netflix issue as well.
Because it does seem to be easier and more compelling to tell a memorable story about the lone wolf than it is about the whole forest that he's running around in.
And it's like we've built infotainment systems to specifically reject the challenge of complex understandings.
And, you know, so you've written this manual for journalists, but I'm wondering if you could imagine publishing a version for film producers and directors.
That's a really interesting question.
I mean, we've been, I've been talking with some folks about possibly adapting Bring the War Home, and certainly we run into that set of issues frequently.
For instance, like how do you get people to tune back in to a story like this, which has not just one episode like Oklahoma City, but many episodes where we have had confrontations with this movement and failed.
It is a Frustrating and overwhelming history in a lot of ways.
And I I'm always for that reason really deeply grateful when people want to listen to a podcast like this or read the book or engage these histories because you know, it's not easy work.
I get that.
But yeah, the infotainment component is an interesting way to think about it.
I think like Part of that is built into the way that we arrest and police and prosecute, too.
So the fact that, you know, the FBI had a policy on file having to do with earlier failed trials and huge, huge tragic public relations disasters at Ruby Ridge and Waco, their policy on file when the Oklahoma City building exploded was Um, we are going to prosecute individual crimes only without looking at a broader movement.
Wow.
From there, it's, it's all limited and winnowed down to just one fraction of it from the beginning.
And I think that there's a way that his execution is sort of the unavoidable end point of that strategy because then, you know, people, you know, he's executed.
I remember, you know, I grew up in Colorado where the trial happened and I remember, um, My parents' friends at our lefty Unitarian church saying things like, I wish they would just execute McVeigh so I could go back to disagreeing with the death penalty.
That execution really closed the book on the problem for people.
Instead, what we see is that militia groups rose after the Oklahoma City bombing and Our online activity exploded after the Oklahoma City, sorry, that's a bad choice of words.
There was an exponential rise in online white power activity after the Oklahoma City bombing.
And now, of course, in hindsight, we know that that was a time of reorganization and development that led us into the political crisis we face today.
Well, and that political crisis, you know, as you point out from your previous work in Bringing the War Home, is this connective and sort of syncretic, holistic movement.
You write in the Lone Wolf essay that white power and white supremacy movements are broad-based social movements united through narratives, symbols, and repertoires of war that connect neo-Nazis, Klansmen, skinheads, people in every region of the country, people in suburbs and in cities and on mountaintops.
You write that it joined men, women, and children, felons and religious leaders, high school dropouts and aerospace engineers, civilians and veterans and active duty troops.
And you say again here that it is characterized by a kind of leaderlessness.
Now, we have long noted on this podcast that a movement like QAnon meets many of the criteria for what we might describe as a cult, except for its leaderless nature, which allows for a kind of plausible which allows for a kind of plausible deniability as to who's responsible for what or who's actually issuing orders.
But it also allows for personalization.
Personal heroism or anti-heroism amongst its participants because everybody in a way can be a leader.
So do you see a direct line in terms of structure and content between the leaderless nature of white power movements over the last 50 years and QAnon?
That is such an interesting way of thinking about it.
And yes, absolutely.
Because I think, you know, leaderless resistance is an operational tactic, right?
It is The idea is that one or a few people can take action as an individual or as a cell towards a commonly held set of enemies and objectives without communicating with other cells and without communicating with kind of the movements Superstars.
And I mean, I usually say leaders again there.
So there are leaders in the white power movement.
It's just that leaderless resistance is an operational tactic that lets them distance themselves from the violence of the operatives.
Right.
So and it lets them sort of acknowledge that in a I mean, and this little part is about, I think, all social movements in the late 20th century and early 21st century, that there is no central leader and no agreed upon one thing that they want.
It allows a sort of hybridity of objectives within the movement.
So, for instance, All of them in the white power movement, almost universally, they are looking for a white homeland.
But people have a whole bunch of disagreements about where the white homeland should be, right?
So are they going to do that in the Northwest, in Oklahoma, or in the South?
It's like a matter of a lot of debate.
They don't even have to answer that question in order to do leaderless resistance action.
They just have to begin the process of violent resistance to the federal government.
It almost seems as though in imagining where the white homeland would be if they don't actually You know, get out the cash and take out the mortgages and figure out how to get the land together, that it can exist any way in a kind of cyberspace imaginarium.
Yeah.
Where so many of them are spending so much of their time anyway.
Absolutely.
And the homeland, I think, is much less important to them today than it was then.
But I also want to point out that these activists got online in like 1983-84 So they were pioneering the internet as their own sort of organizing space for a real good long time before the rest of us had even keyed into this as an issue.
And it does seem like the online environment is perfect for the secrecy that all of this requires, the kind of Contrarian, we're going to go against the grain.
We're going to invent, like, a new history and a new space in which to live.
And that's where we start to move into conspiracism.
And the chapter that you've edited in this volume that I think really stands out in that respect is the Fear of White Replacement chapter.
The subtitle is Latina Fertility, White Demographic Decline, and Immigration Reform.
It's by Leo Chavez.
Yeah.
And it studies the political invective against Latinx immigrant populations who are seen by right-wing sources as the over-fertile polluters of white racial identity.
Right.
Chavez refers to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, and you do as well in your review of the incidents like Christchurch, as well as, you know, occurrences of the 14 words uttered by white supremacists who are obsessed with white birth rates.
As the Great Replacement is a phrase that has moved out of, you know, 4chan and Steve Bannon's basement into Tucker Carlson's primetime, what are you seeing with regard to the Great Replacement theory as both a hardcore dogma, but also kind of now being in the water of mainstream white anxiety?
Like, how do those two iterations interact?
That's such a great question because I do think it is worth distinguishing between the Great Replacement with capital letters as it appears in the white power movement and the way that it has sort of opened into more mainstream usage.
Although, I personally don't believe, really, that people who are saying it with a megaphone are unaware of the first usage.
So, The Great Replacement, I think, is capitalizing on a broad fear of demographic transformation.
And one thing I really love about Leo Chavez's piece is that we see that this anxiety goes way back.
And you can trace this concern about overpopulation and hyperfertile women of color all the way back to eugenics movements in the early 20th century, if not earlier.
And the sort of third world immigrant is thought of as the epicenter of this fear because they have so many children.
And of course, one thing that he documents is that they don't, in fact, statistically have so many children, but that's kind of neither here nor there for fear doctrine.
So, white power activists see Almost, I would argue, almost everything that is important to them as a social issue is fundamentally about the white birthrate, which is one of the reasons that women become so important to this movement.
Right.
But they see opposing abortion, opposing immigration, opposing integration, opposing LGBT rights, feminism, all of those things are a problem, they say, because they will lower the white birthrate.
Not because of sort of abstract concerns about the life of unborn children, but because they're worried that the impact of those policies will be abortion of white babies, women in the workplace having fewer babies, interracial marriages that result in non-white babies.
And it's hard to overstate how hugely scary that is for them.
That is an apocalyptic-level threat, because this is a group of people that see their race as their nation, and they believe that if the race is to continue, they have to have white children.
That's amazing.
My mind is a little bit blown with the connections that come out of that intersection of concerns because in the field, in the demographics that we study, notions of fertility and bodily purity and heteronormativity and transphobia are ubiquitous throughout yoga and wellness culture.
Connected to not necessarily this explicit notion that white babies are going to be replaced, but the links are there.
It's almost osmotic in a way.
Because, you know, as you're speaking about, you know, white birth rates going, and that being a concern, going way back in history, like we know that the physical culture movements that have given rise to wellness and yoga cultures in Europe and North America You know, at this point, are directly coming out of this eugenicist fear of white bodies becoming infertile as the races mix in the early 20th century.
So, anyway, lots of...that's not a question!
There's a lot of crossover and I want to talk more about the body sort of movement part of it because this is something that I'm really interested in, but let's put a pin and come back to it.
Right.
I will just quickly mention that if people would like to read more about this, the Alexandra Stern book, Eugenic Nation, is a stunner.
And we'll tell you a whole bunch of interesting historical information about how deeply eugenics is even in things like the Sierra Club and environmental preservation.
It's really interesting and I think it's huge in early 20th century America.
So, the Great Replacement for white power activists is about the white birthrate, but the Great Replacement with capital letters also posits that all of that is deliberate.
That there is a cabal of elites, usually Jewish people, who are on purpose trying to diminish the white birthrate and overrun the white people in order to create this Evil something something and that is either the you know that part changes over time that is the Zionist occupational government or the new world order or the deep state I think is now going out of vogue.
It's whatever the scary thing is and I would love to talk in a second if you want to about the relationship between apocalyptic imagination and The problem with being able to keep an enemy in that discourse consistently, but that's a different question too.
So I think when the Great Replacement comes into the mainstream, people often lose sight of both how much it is about whiteness proper, right?
And not just something vague about like the nation's character is changing, which is coded but not so overt.
Um, or about like preserving Western civilization, which is another way that these groups articulate white supremacy in code, but sometimes less clear.
And it usually gets separated from the idea of scary outsiders, elites controlling that.
And the language around that part, you know, in the white power movement is gonna be like globalists, elites, cabal always hints at Jewish people.
Sometimes they talk about Jewish people outright.
So there is a way that what that is doing is sort of mobilizing people in the mainstream who are just worried in the abstract about the nation changing, towards radical ideas.
But there is absolutely no question that the Great Replacement is a anti-Semitic white power doctrine that has been in this movement for decades.
Yes.
Well, there's a lot there and we put a couple of pins in, but I'm also cognizant of our time and I want to make sure that I run some scenarios by you.
And because, you know, on this podcast, we covered the intersection of right-wing and new age cultures through the promulgation of conspiracy theories.
And we, there are racial elements and complexities to the stories that we encounter all the time that I don't feel that we have the chops to cover well.
And sometimes this means that we avoid difficult things altogether.
I want to just ask you to pretend that you are our senior editor, and I want to run by a couple of scenarios.
A couple are real, and a couple are hypothetical, but they're plausible composites.
And I'm sure there's going to be overlaps in what you answer, but if we can tease out the nuances, that'll be good.
Okay.
Cool.
Alright, so first of all, I don't know if you know the influencer Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Uh-huh, vaguely.
Okay, so he's one of the Disinformation Dozen.
He is a Kennedy.
He is the son of Bobby.
He, as a member of the Disinformation Dozen, he's responsible for an incredible amount of anti-vax disinformation online.
Now, for us, that means he's got COVID blood on his hands.
Here's the thing.
He has actively courted and collaborated with Black communities and leaders, including leaders from the Nation of Islam, who for their own good and historical reasons, you know, Tuskegee, Flint, harbor distrust in government.
They harbor distrust in techno-pharma institutions and medical care.
And, you know, I just wanted to ask, like, what are some best practices for reporting on this?
I mean, we hate the fact that this guy is actively harming Black communities who are already disproportionately harmed by COVID, but how do we explain that he is manipulating marginalized populations for his own ideological ends without further stigmatizing those populations?
I mean, I suppose you talk about that, but I mean, I think it is worth continuing to, you know, there were a bunch of stories about the reluctance of black communities to take the vaccine early having to do with Tuskegee and the long history of distrust in the government that I think is completely warranted by the many times that the government has betrayed the trust of African-Americans in this country.
Yeah.
But I think that, you know, people capitalizing on that distrust to deliberately harm a community should be described as such.
Right.
I mean, I guess the potential collateral damage is further alienating the people that, you know, we believe that he's co-opting, right?
is that, you know, if we could somehow speak to, you know, not only his own disinformation, but who he's attracted to and why.
But really, I mean, it's a complex question because it comes down to, well, are you really going to spend that much time on RFK Jr., or are you going to, you know, work to make sure that the water improves in Flint so that, you know, years down the line, there will be less mistrust?
I mean, I think we have to do all of it, right?
That's why this is hard, is maybe this is where it's good to go back to the idea of the fence, right?
Like, we could think about RFK Jr.
as someone who is You know, I never like to assume anything about people's intentions because if there's one thing you learn as a historian, there's a huge difference often between what people say they're doing and what they're in fact doing when we get to look at their actions over time.
And I think belief is the hardest thing to prove.
But purposefully or not, he's contributing to that fence that is creating unequal outcomes in black communities that is harming people.
So I think having an eye on both the fence and the people doing the work of reinforcing it is the ethical thing to do.
OK, here's another hard one.
Just last week, crowds protested and overran the barriers around the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, where New York Nets player Kyrie Irving is currently on the bench until he complies with a vaccination directive from his team.
Now, it's not clear who organized the gathering, but there were Black Lives Matter groups and Black civil rights activists that participated with Black leaders giving bullhorn speeches about bodily rights and autonomy.
Now, you know, in one of the film clips that I saw, one woman of color taunted fans entering the center for being quote-unquote slaves to medical tyranny.
So, you know, if you're the beat reporter and you are taking this in, what data do you feel is crucial to include here that, you know, will record the amazing positive ways in which BLM as a protest movement has exposed white supremacy, even as this complexity emerges?
I mean, I think what you have to do there is think about co-optation and who's speaking also.
And so I think anytime you're reporting on a social movement, I think this is another place where context is very important and looking at what else the people speaking have been doing and saying.
What kinds of relationships they have with the rest of the movement is always important.
And then also, you know, there are contradictions.
There are always going to be contradictions between any one person's sort of political stance and what groups of people do and don't do, right?
There are, you know, multiplicities of belief.
And I think that that is part of what's wonderful about living in a free society, that you can have these rich contradictions.
But I think careful reporting has to always foreground context.
Okay, let me try two more.
This one's a little bit hypothetical and it carries echoes of the Black Panthers with it.
Let's imagine a smallish urban Black liberation movement with roots in the, you know, 1970s that has adopted an anti-lockdown, anti-vax, anti-masking position that's coherent with its long-standing anti-state Counterculture.
And it also will be repeating or reposting, you know, QAnon content, for example.
Now, they are vegan.
They believe that pork polluted their slave forebears with, you know, low intelligence, as they might argue.
They believe that modern vaccines will specifically sterilize black people, leading to birth rate crashes.
Now, if you're a public health reporter, you know, where do you start here?
What do you really want to be careful about that would encourage a non-stigmatizing outcome?
Oh man, that is such a doozy.
So the historian brain is, this is what I would want people to understand.
There are all the time crossovers.
Okay, so many of us are walking around with an idea of our political culture that is left, right, center.
And I think this comes from civics class in high school history, maybe, but I mean, I know I had this in my brain from somewhere before I started studying.
And in the middle is the United States, and on the left is Stalin, and on the right is Hitler, right?
But it's a straight line, and those things are far from each other.
That's really not how our politics looks now.
And some political scientists have talked about this as horseshoe theory.
I think it's actually a circle, where I think often the two fringes have more in common with each other than they do with the middle.
So the left and the right have a degree of overlap.
And I think this is very little studied.
And I think in some cases, it has to do with sincere crossover of belief.
And in some cases, it has to do with deliberate opportunistic recruitment campaigns, where people from one side are trying to grab people from the other, when they are characterized by mistrust of the state, And by sort of generally anti or countercultural kinds of formations.
So like even in the 80s, you can see that a whole bunch of stuff that I would have thought of as leftist winds up in the white power women's housekeeping materials like macrobiotic diet, organic gardening, traditional midwifery, paganism, And they look different, right?
Because if you're a traditional midwifery person on the left, you're all about women's empowerment and like the divine feminine and distrust of medicine.
If you're a traditional midwifery person on the right, you're all about distrust of medicine, but also uncleanliness and the idea that women's bodily functions are unholy to men and should be kept separate.
And right.
So there are different ideological motivations, but they push the same outcomes.
So that's a hard set of things to disentangle, but it is worth the work to find the people in the academy who have been looking at that one particular strand to help you disentangle it.
And I think in this scenario that you're describing, my answer would be, I have no idea, but let's talk to the people who've been looking at, you know, the move bombing in Philadelphia in the seventies and like looking at the different ways that nation of Islam has articulated their ideas about food cleanliness and the different ways the move bombing in Philadelphia in the seventies and like looking at the different ways that nation of Islam has articulated their ideas about food cleanliness and the Right.
So there are those moments of crossover.
I think it's a really interesting locus of activity that we don't know very much about, but it's worth finding out instead of sort of just doing a story quickly that doesn't get at those questions.
It feels as though this is one of these instances in which, uh, like I'm a, I'm a cult researcher and cult survivor and the literature is really assiduously anti-content in the sense that, you know, we, we don't, we don't really, we know that cults can form around leftist political ideals or self-help we know that cults can form around leftist political ideals or self-help ideals or, or, or a particular diet or an Eastern or an
Like, the actual content of occult beliefs aren't really indicative, or they don't really tell us much about how they function.
And so, the study is really about the social psychology of potent, charismatically-led groups.
And it seems like, you know, I wonder if there could be a conference one day between the historians who could track the sort of material through lines of how did these movements converge and then diverge and who was related to whom and who was reading whose books.
But then also there's this other thing around like people bond together around affect and attitude and sort of shared behaviors that seem to have historical materialist links but also seem to have other things going on.
Right.
So, okay, so if anybody wants to write that dissertation, come find me.
I would love to go to that conference.
And I think it's like, you know, part of it is even just about as somebody who, a friend and colleague who had spent some time in Coeur d'Alene mentioned, like, you know, there's lots of survivalists there in the 80s, and only some of them have this set of ideas.
There's also a lot of survivalists who are just there being survivalists.
And then there's leftist survivalists, center survivalists, right-wing survivalists, right?
So survivalism is a behavior, and probably a set of affects, and probably a set of attachment patterns to, you know, community and to land and so on.
And then there are material traces about, like, so the Order, which is a terroristic white power group in the 80s, The leader, Bob Matthews, met his first wife through an ad in Mother Earth News, which was read by people across that spectrum, right?
Not just survivalists.
So we have some footprint of that, and I think that the other part of this question is there's a really good reason that we don't have that research, which is that people have typically left it as, oh, crazy people, let's not engage this.
And it's, it's easy to see something like, I mean, a lot of the groups that I look at wouldn't be called cults proper, right?
But like, it's easy to see a charismatic leader and assume that they represent everything about the reasons that people following them might give but they really don't so like in the white power movement one of my most interesting finds was that there are really as many routes into this activity as there are people in the movement so you have people who are there because they're diehard believers or um you know because there was a tragedy in their life that you know like there's a bunch of like
Kind of narrative trope stories we tell about people who are drawn to extremism.
But there's also people like one woman who was really important in the movement was really there for childcare at the beginning.
Right.
And then just sort of like fell into it because her husband was into it and then you know their marriage counselor was into it and pretty soon you see she's drawn in socially.
Oh my gosh, yeah.
So it's child care and she liked the soup that they made together.
It's about volleyball games and big spaghetti dinners.
It's about like, you know, they'll come and pick you up from the airport.
It's about all of the parts of your life that end up being contained in this movement.
And my guess is that all of that now with social network activism online and in the age of COVID, it's just like hyperspeed because it's all happening instantaneously in our living room.
Right.
Do you have time for one last scenario?
Yes, sure.
Okay.
The last episode that we did, episode, or no, two episodes ago, 74, we covered how a white celebrity yoga teacher has used, you know, her considerable charisma MLM sales and life coaching to build this kind of economic fiefdom.
But she's also left awake of interpersonal harm, and one of our interview subjects spoke to that.
So, when I asked this person, Tatum Fuersted, why she was coming forward about seven years after the relationship with this mentor-influencer ended, part of her answer was about white supremacy.
So here's the quote.
She said, I've been learning a lot about, now this is a white woman, 37 years old, lives in Minnesota.
I've been learning a lot about how white cisgender women are the gatekeepers of the patriarchy and how we protect it to serve our own best interests.
And I really want to stop doing that.
And after trying multiple times to say something to Elena privately, I felt like by not saying anything publicly, I was continuing to protect and enable another harm-causing white woman, and I don't want to do that anymore.
Now, in a lone wolf mode, the story about this influencer is about a charismatic and manipulative person, as she's being described by Tatum Fjersted.
But Fjersted is pointing to something larger.
She's saying that white women can hold cultural power in ways that don't seem to have any direct impact on racial justice, but they actually do, insofar as their behaviors can further entrench patterns of exclusionary and predatory capitalism.
They're simply going with the flow, and this is one of the outcomes.
So, the yoga and wellness demographic is made up predominantly of white women, and in relation to a story like this, what would you say to the average consumer or participant in this culture who might say, yeah, it's good to expose the kind of mean girl story here, but I don't see what it has to do with these larger political issues of race and inequality.
Why should I care?
Well, I mean, I don't know anything about this particular story, so I'm sorry not to be up to speed.
But like, I can say that, you know, just generally not doing anything is complicity, right?
Because the fence is standing there, whether or not you personally are interacting with it or at all.
You can walk away from the fence and there the fence is still standing and it is hurting people.
So there is a level of complicity about all of this if there is inaction.
And the other thing is just, you know, the history has a lot to say about the different ways that white women have been Both victimized by patriarchal white supremacy and have worked to uphold it.
And some of the history coming out about this is really powerful.
Like there's a there's a fantastic new book by Stephanie Jones Rogers called They Were Her Property.
Which really just shows that white women were not just sort of ornamental passive recipients of the system of slavery in the South, but were actually actively involved in the violent punishment of their slaves.
Similarly, we can think about white women's complicity and lead roles in things like schoolroom battles about curriculum.
We see that again right now with the critical race theory stuff.
And white women's beauty is also predicated on these ideas about white reproduction.
So all of that is historically informed.
And I don't know particularly what the white supremacy was at work in this story, but I do think it's worth You know, if people are saying that that's their reason for action, I think it's always worth taking that seriously as one of the things at Planety.
Well, I think the broadest point was that there, according to Furstead, she saw this connection between a deceptive, hyper-capitalist, you know, bourgeois Women's club in which there was this kind of economic manipulation and emotional manipulation and the way in which systems of patriarchy and white supremacy tend to work in general.
And so her personal story she saw embedded within that larger narrative context.
That's amazing.
Yeah.
Professor Ballou, thank you so much for taking the time for and speaking to me today.
Oh, thank you for the wonderful interview.
And I appreciate you having me on.
You might have noticed that we put the interviews front and center last week and this week, predominantly because from my perspective, they were just such fascinating and strong conversations last week with Robert McIntyre and Matthew.
That was an excellent interview.
So thank you for that.
Yeah, great.
It reminded me of my origins in journalism, which I want to just briefly talk about.
And I know we're going to go into a debrief based on the hypotheticals that you discussed with Dr. Ballou.
And it's also something that I've Entertained before on the podcast, really the origins of this podcast and the work that we were all doing a decade ago and probably longer was the fact that there was no political engagement in the yoga community.
And even before this episode started, Matthew, you and I were going back and forth about how to view different domains of society in terms of politics.
And the fact that in America, a lot of citizens have the privilege of believing that politics doesn't affect their life and only become politically aware in any capacity when they actually realize, oh, my representative did this and now my street is closed and it's a bike lane and there's no more cars or, you know, that's something happening in my neighborhood right now, actually, where people are up in arms.
And the lack of political engagement is a real problem.
And that's why I've emphasized in the past, my brief time in political journalism was covering zoning board meetings and school board meetings.
And of course now you hear about the craziness of school board meetings for a number of reasons which are problematic, but most people don't pay attention to them unless they're invested in them in some capacity.
At zoning board meetings specifically, how your town is zoned and the taxes that you pay very much affect you, whether or not you realize it or not.
And what I really appreciate about this episode as well, and the interview and where we're going with this, Is the idea that you have to do research, real research, before you engage with interview subjects.
I long ago abandoned the notion that objective journalism is something that's possible.
There are so many different nuances and angles and historical incidences in someone's life, and their perspective is going to inform their reporting.
So the idea of a purely objective journalism to me is just impossible, but you can get close If you are honest with the evidence, which sometimes forces you to look at a situation and turn it around, and when you turn it around it might not look like you want it to look.
But that is, in effect, what good journalism does.
So in my very first reporting job, well, I had a number of stringer positions in the college newspaper in New Jersey, but my very first journalism job was in a town called Monroe, New Jersey, which is infamous for being the site of the Driving While Black videos that came out in the mid-90s.
This was before my time there, but It's a very white Trumpian now neighborhood, still is that.
And when you used to report back then, I know I'm showing my wear here and that, but this was pre-internet.
The internet was around, but we weren't using it.
Like all of the interviews, all of the stories I covered were done on a telephone and by driving around to different places.
So when you were covering a congressional representative, for example, from that area, you went to their house, you knocked on their door.
You called them.
There was a real engagement and interaction that had to happen, and I was responsible for turning around 11 stories a week back then, which is no small feat when you're working for a local newspaper, but it requires a lot of face-to-face interactions.
And I bring this up because as we transition into these hypotheticals, we are existing in a much different journalistic domain right now, where so much of the reporting is done online and not actually engaging with the subjects.
I mean, at a high level, White House correspondents are there, of course, but so much of what we read and influence, and I specifically think of the characters you're going to entertain here, Matthew, They're not engaging in good faith arguments with the people on the ground.
There is no objectivity, there is a subjective experience that they're trying to put forward, and that is a real...
Pivot from what journalism was just a generation ago, or at least what good journalism was considered to be.
I would argue that good journalism still holds up to that standard, but it gets harder and harder to accomplish as different media outlets are monetized in different ways and as they realize who their audience is and who they're speaking to.
So to really engage and grapple with these hypotheticals, is no small feat, and I'll speak for myself as we go through this.
These are shaded by my own perspectives, but with the hopes of transcending even some of my biases to look at the broader picture of the story that we want to present.
You're absolutely right about the characters that were going to scenario coming forward being inaccessible in the way that your representative was accessible by phone or through a knock on the door.
And so it seems that these are really questions about reporting on stories instead of reporting on people.
I found in the investigative work that I've done since in the last two years that there is still door knocking, there is still a lot of cold calling that I've had to do.
The best information comes when I've got somebody on the phone and I'm able to interview them over and over again.
But that is very rare and it's very difficult to secure.
It's very difficult to get paid for that.
And so, yeah, I think it's really good to be aware of this fact that we're kind of reporting on images and stories rather than on people.
Nonetheless, how we report on stories Absolutely has political impact, and it absolutely shows whether or not, you know, we're tuned in to who gets listened to and who gets platformed and who doesn't.
In that, you brought up a really good point, which is we are reporting on stories, but they involve people.
And sometimes in this social media environment, especially, it's really difficult to understand that The story itself does not necessarily represent the totality of the person, but people take things very personally in these digital spaces, so that any affront to any of their beliefs or ideas they treat as an offense to their person, when the criticism might be on a particular action.
Now, with some of the figures, it is all-encompassing, but for others, it might just have been a bad move.
But the taking of it so personally is also one of the challenges that the modern journalist faces, given the communication systems.
Yeah, it's quite a paradox because it's like we have less access, subjective access, sort of embodied presence adds access to the people that we're studying.
And at the same time, we're working in a medium that people take dreadfully seriously in personal terms, right?
Yeah, it's almost like there's some weird calculus at play where we're both isolated from contact but then we're super attenuated to people's personal view of us when we're never meeting.
Simultaneously distant but intimate in some kind of weird way.
And then there's also this other piece here that I heard you talking about, Derek, which is where we've arrived at in terms of media and journalism and news is this hyper editorialized, super niche marketed kind of landscape where everyone is not just telling you the facts.
They're telling you it.
Everyone, of course, is always going to be talking through their lens, through their particular way of seeing things, but it's amplified so much.
And even the advent of a podcast marketplace is that too.
It's very niche.
And so for me, the question is not so much, are you biased?
Everyone has biases.
It's how conscious are you of your biases and how do you try to own and examine what those are based on?
Like we're biased, for example, with regard to vaccines by our point of view that we trust the science and we trust public health institutions.
You can call that a bias.
But we know that that's our perspective.
And there's enough evidence to bear out that perspective.
Just to add a third question to that, Julian, though, it is really, can you admit you're wrong if it turns out that the evidence presents otherwise, and can the people who listen to you
Have enough faith in your work that they trust that your apology is sincere and they're still with you, which is something that I've noticed, not a lot, but with some of our listeners, I've come across people who are with us for a while, and then we said one thing they didn't agree with, and then they said, well, I can't listen to you anymore.
And that makes me wonder how you can manage any relationship in your life, because there's no one that is going to agree with you 100% of your time.
I mean, but yeah, but with podcasts, it's a buyer's market, right?
I mean, you know, I don't have to, I don't have to listen to you is also a function of there's 10 billion other podcasts that I can listen to and you pissed me off today and you're in my earbuds and so fuck you.
Yeah, I get that.
For me, this is one of the reasons why I have a tendency to hold progressive and liberal sources of information and news media to a higher standard, because I feel like our side really should have that level of integrity to be able to say, you know what, we got this one wrong.
And and and here's what we here's why we think that happened.
We apologize.
And now we're going to move on to trying to do a better job because the other side is so blatantly propagandistic and so captured by that propaganda that they perceive the quote unquote liberal media as propaganda when really it's just for the most part trying to tell the truth.
I think it's it's it becomes doubly important that there is that level of transparent integrity and being able to admit when you're wrong.
Alright, so speaking of admitting when you're wrong and transparent integrity, let's talk about RFK Jr.
and see what kind of reporting challenge he presents.
So these are the scenarios that I ran by Dr. Baloo.
I think in some ways it was a little bit unfair because they're all really, really difficult.
And so let's see how we do with these.
I mean, we know... If I can pause you just for a second, Matthew, I just wanted to say that this is very similar to what happened when I talked to Lee McIntyre.
And when I said, hey, let's do a lightning round, and I ran these different things by him, and she had a similar response, which I think is a kind of academic humility, where people don't just give confident snaps, like, like, slapshot opinions.
They're like, ah, that's interesting.
That's complicated.
I would need to know more.
It could be this or it could be that.
So I'm not going to say for sure.
Right.
It's true, and it also, I mean, to be fair, it indicates the difference between, you know, academic work and on-the-ground reporting where, you know, there's an intense amount of information to take in at any given time.
And narratives and ways of telling stories and, you know, terms used are all sort of concretized Way faster than anybody can keep track of.
And so the sort of on the ground, like, okay, well, how would you apply this?
That's its own skill, right?
And it doesn't, you know, and there's not a lot of time to learn it in.
So I understand.
I mean, I proposed these because I struggle with them.
So looking at RFK, I mean, we know this guy is Disinformation Dozen captain.
He's probably the political sort of heart of the Disinformation Dozen in terms of his legacy and his connections.
We know that he is courting black communities and leaders who have their own good historical reasons for Their distrust in government and institutions and so on.
What do we have to keep in mind in order to report on this guy?
And how do we do it?
How do we how do we explain that he's manipulating marginalized populations without adding more stigma to the mix?
The first thing I would look at when looking at what he's done, specifically moving into and targeting black communities to spread his propaganda, I would point to a previous example, which happened in the Somali American community in 2017 in Minnesota.
Andrew Wakefield had been courting that community for almost a decade at that time, and it led to a measles outbreak because of his anti-vax messaging.
And I pulled this piece from Vox that was reporting during that period, which explains it.
Minnesota's 2017 measles outbreak is a case in point.
In 2008, anti-vaccine advocates, including the Organic Consumers Association and Andrew Wakefield, a British doctor who falsified data suggesting vaccines are linked to autism, began targeting local Somali Americans who had concerns about autism among their children. began targeting local Somali Americans who had concerns about autism The activists saw an opening, offering an explanation when the health department couldn't provide one.
This is even looking what you just said a moment ago about academics.
They're going to weigh the evidence.
But when you have these charismatic charlatans who just have an activist message they want to get across, they don't have to wait for explanations.
They just pounce.
And it's important to remember In context, the WHO said that the measles were eradicated in America in the year 2000.
So yeah, there was only 79 cases in Minnesota among that community.
I think 62 were Somali-Americans, so something like 80% were specific to that community.
So it doesn't appear like a large number, but the suffering those families and the children had to go through is purely because of The anti-vax propaganda and RFK is using the same playbook.
You know, I just wanted to point out that a line in the Vox report, like, the activists saw an opening offering an explanation when the health department couldn't provide one.
Like, it just raises all kinds of questions for me about the diagnostic procedures for these kids.
What, how was neuroatypicality in the Somali American population of that city?
How was it understood?
Were there other sort of factors involved?
Were there, you know, language issues?
Like it raises all kinds of questions about not only The health department not potentially providing good services, but the public education system, there's a deep story there.
I'm sure it's much more richly reported than the Vox article.
So I'm actually interested in that.
I want to check that out.
Part of what you're seeing there is that people like Kennedy and Wakefield, they're actually going to go out into those communities and actively solicit and engage and create events and, you know, be walking down the street and have megaphones and all the rest of what they do in a way that public health officials don't have time or it's not really their style.
And another connection here is that Wakefield's autism vaccine connection hinged upon thimerosal, which was taken out of almost all vaccines the year after his falsified study came out.
And RFK Jr.
still talks about thimerosal even though it's in almost no vaccines.
So he knows he's being egregious when he goes into these communities and makes that connection because it doesn't exist in the MMRR vaccine anymore.
You're saying Kennedy doesn't stay true to the facts.
Very, very interesting.
Yeah, and I want to add there, too, that thimerosal was taken out not because of any negative impacts, but because of the fear-mongering and all of the parents thinking that, oh my god, this is terrible.
We took out the thing that didn't actually have an impact, and I hope you're happy, but now you're saying that it's still there.
Exactly.
It's a little bit like the mask cock-up from last time that Lee McIntyre was critical of.
I wanted to ask you, Matthew, you had said before that Kennedy was collaborating in some sense with Nation of Islam.
Is that correct?
Yeah, one or two of the thought leaders on a couple of the conferences that he did around his medical apartheid film were Nation of Islam people, right?
Yeah, and for me that's a really interesting one in terms of how we frame these sorts of things because Nation of Islam is just an openly right-wing, fundamentalist, anti-Semitic, anti-LGBTQ, they're actually a black supremacist group.
Kennedy collaborating with them really portrays any pretense toward progressive politics.
And that's something that I feel should be pointed out and not just glossed over.
Sure, they're associated with black liberation in some way, but it's from a very, very Um, religious fascist kind of point of view.
But that aside, the manipulation of vulnerabilities that are rooted in marginalization and oppression in order to perpetuate science denial and misinformation about vaccines Something we should be able to name and critique openly, especially in light of the danger it pushes onto black communities in the name of this kind of caricature of liberation and empowerment that people like Kennedy and perhaps Wakefield in that example are exploiting.
I don't know.
You know, with regard to what you were saying, Derek, the tough part for me with these kinds of people is that I just wonder how much they really believe what they're saying, because I don't I don't understand why Kennedy would do everything he does.
It's not like he needs the money.
And I don't see it.
I can't follow the money to what he's getting out of it, like why he would do this unless he really thought he was helping protect children.
I think the really important thing is what does his uncle think now that he's back?
Well, I wasn't in Dealey Plaza, so I can't say for sure that he didn't appear on the grassy knoll and give communion to the faithful.
Just one note that I wanted to add, which is kind of like a today I learned I don't really have anything to say about it, but what I didn't know about the Minnesota measles outbreak situation is that Elon Omar Seems to have broken her teeth by pressing the state legislature at that time to fund more vaccine outreach.
She put forward a motion that was actually voted down at the time.
But yeah, to speak to the sort of ongoing politics of public health and the role of, you know, perhaps progressive Democrats in this whole story, that was pretty interesting to me.
Okay, number two.
This one is very complex.
It's been a couple of weeks now, so I mentioned this to Professor Ballou.
There was this protest outside of the Barclays Center in Brooklyn because Kyrie Irving, who plays for the Nets, is still benched, I think, because he doesn't want to be vaccinated.
So, there are BLM groups and black civil rights activists that are in the crowd.
There are leaders that are giving speeches on bullhorns about bodily rights, autonomy, and so on.
So, this is obviously in our landscape.
So, I find this on Twitter, and it just seems incredibly Tangled to me and so and so my question is what what is crucial for me to include here for reporting?
if I want to You know record the the positive ways in which BLM as a protest movement has exposed inequality and white supremacy but then in this case It can also have these other associations.
It can adopt, you know, kind of sideways affiliations that are actually really damaging to public health.
You have these parallel issues that are coming up and while I am a fan of knowing a little bit about a lot, Specialization matters in these regards, but specifically to this, if I were to look at this from a reporting standpoint, you and Dr. Baloud talk about leaderless movements during the conversation, and that to me very much defines Black Lives Matter.
There are official chapters and there are leaders within those, but inclusivity is a defining feature of that movement from all the protests, the marches I went to, it was It transcended the singular person or the personality when it works best, in my opinion.
So when you mention this, I'm reminded of John McWhorter's work, which he talks about how black people specifically, but really you can apply it to any people, are not monolithic.
So we should expect a wide range on the topic of vaccinations as any other topic in this population or others.
And to me, focusing too much on the groups that are involved sort of takes away from what really matters, which is the efficacy of vaccines.
I agree with that.
I think, you know, people are still individuals within political context and individuals can be wrong, they can be misinformed, they can have a wide range of different levels of intelligence or education on any and all topics.
We've seen, of course, yogis, doctors, research scientists, influencers of all backgrounds and identities who can express conspiracists or anti-vaxxer beliefs very passionately in the public square.
So, pointing out that their opinion on any given topic is factually incorrect or logically fallacious, I think can and should be done on its own terms.
In this case, the activists, of course, are not wrong because they're black.
They're just wrong.
They can still be factually and morally right on the other topics that are central to their activism, and I think that accurate reporting can still support them in those areas while being critical of this mistake.
And I just, I feel sometimes this is one of those areas in our political discourse today where nuance and detail can be overwhelmed by a kind of pressure to dutifully embrace the broad strokes performative gesture, right?
It's sometimes referred to as virtue signaling, which I think has some descriptive power.
Yeah, I mean, with the scenario I'm not suggesting that the activists are wrong because they're black.
I'm talking about the fact that BLM is, yeah, but that BLM is now, its name is in the sort of melee of anti-vax protesting and that's really Interesting, that's really like, you know, is there a policy?
Is there, I know, I understand that it's leaderless, but I mean, so is QAnon?
You know, I'm just wondering what it means when we see that a political organization that is so firmly associated with Leftist progressive politics shows up in a space like this.
Like, how do you understand that?
How do you report on that?
The problem is what happens when any sort of movement gets defined and starts to have a hierarchy.
And I don't know where BLM is in that process, if at all involved.
But at least the way that you presented it was as if it is a centralized organization, which from my understanding it is not.
Yeah, what did I say?
I said, it's not clear who organized the gathering, but BLM groups and black civil rights activists participated.
I don't have, I didn't have like a monolithic sense.
It's that, it's that, you know, I think that the Twitter feed that I was referring to actually, it showed, oh, this guy who organizes for BLM is wearing a BLM shirt.
He's got a megaphone.
He's shouting this.
And then there was another guy doing the same thing.
And then there was somebody from a black church.
Like, I don't have the sense that BLM Toronto is in on this protest, or BLM Chicago officially.
No, no, I wasn't suggesting that.
And my point is more that, okay, well the fact that this guy is wearing a BLM shirt doesn't mean that people in good faith on the left can't criticize what he happens to be saying in that moment.
Oh, I don't say that either.
Just how do you do it?
Like, how do you do it?
Or how do you do it recognizing that as he's wearing that shirt, as he's associated with that movement, he's also bringing a lot of cultural capital with him, and you're going to want to be aware of that as well.
Yeah, I think you make clear what you believe you would agree with him on, and then say what you think he's wrong about.
To add some more context here, because this just blew my mind, there was another video from that day where there was a MAGA dude standing on a soapbox in the middle of the crowd.
I want to say real quick what it looks like for all us white American flag swinging Trump supporters to be out here with BLM!
So let's look at that too!
Listen, this country was founded on the words, all men are created equal.
And all 56 members of Congress signed those words.
The Constitution is what we're keeping to fight back.
It's the Constitution that we can fight these people with.
Don't get it twisted!
These cops who are bad cops, they're just humans!
Bad humans!
And they're bad humans in every single category of life!
But the one we like to focus on is racism!
Because I'm giving it a stage!
Every time you name it, every time you talk about it, you give it a stage!
You give it importance!
Stop calling out racism!
Yeah, so stop calling out racism.
He's referring to the cops who are trying to actually create order in front of the Barclays Center because it looks like sort of baby January 6th-ish with barriers starting to come down and people starting to rush the actual doors.
His megaphone has a sticker of the Punisher skull on it, recently popularized by Blue Lives Matter groups.
The Punisher skull also shows up on social media avatars of people like QAnon promoter Joe M. He's got a sticker on his megaphone that says CNN sucks, so we have a mainstream media conspiracy theorizing here.
He's got, in the center of the megaphone, a sticker of the Black Eagle, Which, this is a sign that culturally drifts from right to left and back again, so I don't know what the hell that means.
But he's bullhorning, he's shouting at this predominantly black crowd from this podium.
And I'm like, what sticks out to me here is that BLM is so solidly branded left that we might have another example of this really closing horseshoe, or a horseshoe sharpening into a vax syringe, and it's very, very confusing to me.
It's actually my old neighborhood.
That was my subway stop in Brooklyn, so I know that area very, very well.
Wow.
No dearth of craziness on soap boxes there, and New Yorkers will tend to ignore.
Now, this is a different situation, and he definitely had some level of courage to be able to do that in that crowd.
He was welcomed.
He wasn't afraid of anything.
It made me laugh towards the end.
I mean, it's so intense and so over the top and sort of, you know.
Easy, easy to sort of pick apart.
But it made me laugh toward the end because I heard an echo of a malformed version of a kind of Marxist argument, right?
Which is saying, they, the powers that be, want to divide us along these lines of race, but we need to express solidarity against them and unite in our anti-vax mission.
I mean, if I was so, so, I mean, are we just talking about the story or are we reporting it out?
I mean, I guess if we were reporting it out, I guess what the first thing I would do is I try to seek multiple statements from BLM groups on vaccine politics to start with, to see whether there's any cohesion there.
For the, the preachers from black churches who were also representing at the event, I would reach out to the churches as well and try to gauge like, is this, is this Why are these beliefs held?
How are they being politically understood?
And then I would really try to find, you know, a researcher in public health who specializes like in, I don't know, in black politics, to try to sort out what would be best, what would be most effective for communicating the details of this story in this horseshoe land, this strange horseshoe land.
I've had the sense over the last several years that there has been this big kind of right-wing co-opting of protest movements.
So the kind of protest and the kind of language and just the whole aesthetic around protest that has traditionally been something that's come from the left since the late 60s, they've found a way to co-opt it to their own purposes.
And this to me is a great example of that, where they're like, we can cosplay this kind of a righteous protest and get people to buy into it with us, even though our agendas are so radically different.
Because the basic premise is anti-institutional and anti-authoritarian.
It's populist.
It's populist.
And so here in Toronto, when The Line, which is this proto-QAnon import group, was gathering on Saturdays, their soundtrack for their parade was like Woody Guthrie.
Which was just mind-blowing to me.
It was so strange.
But it was tied up.
It was tied up in the populism of, we need to get back to work because we can't afford to be locked down anymore.
We need to work together.
We need to make a living.
We're humble people.
We need to get back to our farms and whatever.
Nobody has farms.
So communists, essentially.
Well, it's strange because everything seems to be just aesthetics, right?
Yeah.
It's like, it's so easy in this age for Woody Guthrie to just sort of be like chiseled off as a veneer and slapped onto something else to give people a feeling of holistic freedom or camaraderie or something like that.
I mean, last thing on this story is that Kyrie Irving just the other day, I think, is starting to post pictures of Morpheus on Instagram, which is pretty eerie.
And I'm like, is he saying he's red-pilling people?
No doubt.
Okay.
So, all right.
Number three.
Is this number three?
Okay.
Yeah, alright, so this is the, let's say, a small black liberation movement with roots in the 1970s.
They are anti-vaxxers.
They are anti-lockdown.
They're vegan.
They stay away from pork.
They think it had a polluting effect upon the spirituality and the intelligence of their people during slavery.
They believe that modern vaccines will specifically sterilize black people.
Yeah, where do you start with this?
What's best to keep in mind?
Well, I don't want to be endlessly singing the same note here, so I'll keep this brief.
I mean, I think in one sense, cult members are cult members and misinformation is misinformation.
And it doesn't mean that race isn't an issue in this scenario.
I just think it means that the transitive properties of false ideas on their own terms are unchanged by race.
They can be addressed on their own terms.
And the racial dynamics at play can also be addressed on their own terms.
And the intersection, of course, is interesting and important.
I think that, as we've discussed, cults seem to rely on hooking into deep human needs for belonging, shared purpose and beliefs, and an identity that usually sets members apart from often a corrupt and a fallen world.
And we know that this can be done by exploiting family dysfunction, trauma history, mental illnesses, and of course sociopolitical marginalization.
For example, Jim Jones recruited very heavily in the African American community via his Christian Marxist ideology that evoked utopian aspirations and then of course delivered one of the worst mass suicides in history.
So, I don't know.
I wonder sometimes about some hand-wringing on cases like these because I think as long as one addresses the legitimate underpinnings of concerns around black liberation and then discusses how this has been tied to or co-opted by misguided individuals to these cultish false beliefs and conspiracies, the reporting can be good.
It can be humane and honest.
I'm stuck on one thing that you said, which is, you said something about the properties of false ideas, and you used a word, you said, what was it, transitive?
Transitive properties, yeah.
So what you're saying is, whatever the anti-vax ideology is, It's going to be stable transculturally.
Like it's, it's, it's, there's a false idea and that it, and that false idea can sort of, I don't know, be communicated like a virus between various people.
It's going to impact people regardless of who they are and where they come from.
And, but it's unchanging and it can be addressed in the same way that COVID-19 can be addressed with a vaccine, let's say.
Like it's a, there's one problem, there's one problem, there's one solution.
No, no, no.
I'm saying the aspects of the situation that is this misinformation and conspiracy theory stuff, it's still false regardless of where it's showing up and who's saying it.
And then the other pieces, you know, so you can address that on its own terms and then look at the other aspects of the situation that may have specificity to the culture that it's arising in, right?
Right.
Yeah.
If we were to look at this in terms of a public health perspective, it would I have no choice but to be a long story, which is always a barrier to really get messages across.
The idea, I'm not as familiar with more of the modern black liberation movements that you're discussing, but I do think of the Nyabingi communities that became Rastafarian communities.
And they were very much a response to the post-colonial British conditions they were left in on the island at that time.
And they had certain beliefs about the pollution of foods.
And so you have the Ital diet stemming from that.
They grew beards.
Dreadlocks came much, much later.
Beards were the rebelling against society because the British wanted clean-cut natives on the island.
And so that was their way going against it.
And they also were not fans of the medicine that was being presented.
And so they had very much a holistic belief.
And to be able to offer that perspective of why that community is rebelling against the conditions of that society at the time, I think, is very important historically.
Historical precedent is everything.
In a vaccine related story, you know, we often hear Tuskegee being invoked by people as being a problem.
And of course, they weren't getting the vaccine.
It's a completely different problem, but it all gets wrapped up together.
Yeah, there's an irony there.
Yeah, so to tease apart those conditions from the reporting perspective and to try to give some history of what led to those conditions, but hopefully to also say where the progress has been made is really important.
I don't see how you break through the barrier of belief in such a story, but that would be my attempt if I were to write this.
I think you're right that it would be very long, right?
That it would take a lot of history, like it's a very complex whirlpool where we've got spiritual beliefs that merge with like authentic political grievances and conspiracy theories.
And, you know, we have one outcome is this righteous anti-vax discourse.
But I think, you know, what a lot of these stories like this bring up for me is that it seems that there are better and worse rationalizations for anti-vax and anti-public health positions.
Like we just, maybe we'll do a thing on this in an upcoming episode, but we just watched this animated poem from multi-millionaire supplement dude, Aubrey Marcus, that was, that he produced with some friend and a whole team of animators that he produced with some friend and a whole team of It's quite beautiful, but it's just also deranged.
But it's in part about protecting precious babies from vaccines.
And he implies through the animation and this really shitty poem that the vaccines are some kind of gateway into contemporary techno-dystopia.
And the idea that nature is benevolent.
They can't get over this idea that nature is only going to do good things for you if you just didn't have this medical say.
It's so ridiculous.
Yeah, yeah.
So this is the guy who cosplays as Maori for his expensive empowerment workshops.
And I just have, like, way less empathy for that particular take on anti-vax rhetoric than for the black vegan religious anti-vax group that's afraid of, like, disappearing into the jaws of America, right?
Absolutely.
Like, and so there's actually something when I read about, when I read about, you know, black resistance to vaccination, I'm like, absolutely.
There's this part of me that's like, I get wanting to check out in that particularly material way and to with all of the symbolism of the vaccine branding you and, you know, changing your DNA and all of that.
It makes sense to me on a symbolic level.
So I think for me in the end covering a story like this would be Just about meditating on the fact that certain beliefs about science, vaccination, diet, and liberation cultures really are a seamless blend of politics and religion and survivalism, and that happens in the same way that civil rights movements blend those things.
But civil rights movements generally move in the other direction, like towards institutional change rather than, you know, checking out altogether.
And you can be wrong for right reasons or good reasons, right?
You can have a sympathetic eye to why someone might arrive at that wrong opinion about the facts based on the history and the politics.
Yeah, and I suppose I have this fantasy that if you talk to that person who said, you know, the vaccine really brings to the head of a pin everything that has controlled us and has defined us as being wards of the state.
I have this fantasy that acknowledging that in some really shared moment would, would be able to open the door to the next conversation, which is, well, you know, and then it seems it's also working.
And, uh, I really, you know, I guess, I guess I fantasize about, um, oh, you're my friend.
I understand where you're coming from and I really want you to take this thing cause I think it's gonna keep you healthy.
In this particular piece, I would consider bringing in someone like Al Sharpton because he checks off all the boxes you just described.
He's extremely aware of the historical precedent.
He has, obviously, he's a huge civil rights leader.
He has specific anecdotal evidence of diet and why it's important because of his health problems.
And he's pro-vaccine and he does a lot of work trying to get black people vaccinated.
Being able to find someone like that who checks off all the boxes and can speak to it both intelligently and empathetically is really important.
And probably someone who also knows what it means to not be appreciated by certain parts of his demographic, like somebody who also knows what it's like to be slammed or to, you know, to what is somebody who knows what doesn't work too, because, you know, it's not like he's had some sort of perfect, you know, communications career, like he's faced challenges.
Absolutely.
I would love to hear Cornel West make this case, because I think he would do it beautifully and powerfully.
You know, the intro to the interview, I mentioned this scenario, and then I presented it to Dr. Ballou as well, but it's going back to episode 74, and it was Tatum Fjerstedt saying that one of her reasons for
Coming forward with her story about being under the influence of Elena Brower and the whole MLM and yoga celebrity scene was, you know, the quote was, I've been learning a lot about how white cisgender women are the gatekeepers of patriarchy and how we protect it to serve our own best interest.
And so she says, you know, if I didn't come forward with this story, I would somehow be participating in that or upholding that.
And so, yeah.
I feel like, as I said in the introduction, I had a lot of feelings about that comment, because on one level it made sense to tie her particular story into a larger political discourse, but I also think that it's not a statement that really has a comfortable place to land.
Like, I think there's a lot of people who would feel that it was shoehorning a large political issue into what's mainly an interpersonal one.
But yeah, what do you guys think about that?
I mean, to me, I want to say I really support Tatum and I'm so glad that she came on and I'm glad I support everything she's done.
The issues that she's bringing up in that closing comment are obviously important, but to me at the time it felt like a bit of a non sequitur and that may just be me.
I mean, I respect the intention behind it, but at the same time when I look at What we were discussing for the most part on the episode is a charismatic white female influencer who's persuading many thousands of other mostly white female followers to consume her content, sign up for her events, buy her books, and perhaps enrich her exponentially at their own expense by joining her downline, which I'm sure many have.
Right.
The doTERRA recruitment piece is happening based on an exploitive and dishonest sales pitch that ties female spiritual empowerment to the aspiration of entrepreneurial wealth.
I feel like there's so much going on there without seemingly tacking on issues about gender or racial politics that didn't really seem to be part of the story so much.
I mean, it's an example of everything we critique on the pod, and it's got the hallmarks of oblivious privilege and the disturbing dynamics that you covered really well, Matthew, around kind of pseudo-feminism.
But unless there are specific solid examples of people of color being fleeced by Brouwer and then not being heard when they spoke up, which Tatum kind of alludes to, but it didn't go anywhere.
And unless Brower and her doTERRA, you know, double blue diamond presidential elite cadre We're being overtly anti-transgender.
I'm not sure I really see the tie-in.
I think that larger context matters, but sometimes linking everything back to a formulaic political talking point, I find weakens the analysis on both sides.
So just two quick points.
I think Tatum's reference to BIPOC practitioners asking the wellness world to do better in terms of inclusivity, accessibility, challenging predatory capitalism.
This was a very generalized scenario that she's talking about.
It wasn't about Brower's specific customers, although I'd say that Brower is in the sort of white wellness women's block that has controlled the social power that Tatum is questioning.
She also, like, she didn't tie everything back to the politics.
It was just one of three reasons for coming forward that she gave, but for me it was part of the analysis.
Yeah, I'm not meaning to be overly critical of her.
It's just it's something that for me, I was like, wait, why?
Why are we going there?
Why is it about being cisgender and white?
And yeah, well, that's the thing is that these are these are analyses that are in the water.
And I think it feels like, you know, we perhaps, you know, white people generally have a certain, I don't know, tolerance level for how often these issues are brought up.
I'm not sure.
But certainly when when categories of behaviors are mixed or set against comparatively structures of political realities, yeah, there can be a challenge in integration for sure.
One journalism piece specifically before I reply to the larger scenario, Julian, is one of the more important pieces of advice I've learned as an editor, and I do it often to my own pieces, is after the piece is done, I chop off the final paragraph.
path.
Because often the final paragraph is trying to make this like tie everything in grand statement and usually is actually useless to the rest of the piece and usually if you chop it off where you actually ended leading up to that is the perfect ending.
So that just came into mind when you mentioned that specific example.
But to Matthew's broader hypothetical, it made me think of The fact that white women were trending on Twitter yesterday, and this is because of the election of Glenn Youngkin as the new governor of Virginia.
The story specifically focuses on the 75% of non-college educated white women who voted for Youngkin as compared to 56% who voted for Trump the year before, just a year ago.
Youngkin is worth $440 million and he carried rural districts.
I had no idea about the money.
Yeah, I didn't follow this guy.
Exactly.
That's disgusting.
You have another example of an ultra wealthy person cosplaying as the champion of the people and he laser focused on critical race theory throughout the entire campaign.
And when you actually look into it, critical race theory isn't taught in any school in Virginia.
But he was able to create that boogeyman and he held to that talking point.
The overall number of white women who voted for Youngkin was 57% compared to 49% for Trump the year before.
It turns out that more college-educated white women voted for Terry McAuliffe than had voted for Joe Biden.
So, I mean, the dumpster fire known as Twitter has a lot of thoughts on this topic, but I bring it up because it touches upon a subject that we've covered before, which is a lot of people in wellness spaces don't engage in politics because they believe they're separate from politics.
This is what I started this conversation with a little while ago.
They feel like they can exist in a democracy without paying any civic debt whatsoever and that politics is dirty and doesn't affect their life.
And of course, we know that this is just a privileged view.
It affects everyone.
And from the Conditions of roads to your Wi-Fi carrier to your ability to buy food and the schools your children go to all of that is tied up in politics.
And so in the story above, there would have to be for me some backstory about political engagement, or in this case, a lack of political engagement and what that actually costs.
Another example that just came to mind is the Aaron Rodgers situation right now because it looks like when he said he was immunized when he was actually asked if he was vaccinated it looks like he had taken a homeopathic nasal spray and I'm still trying to find out which one
so if anyone knows please DM us but it would have to be but it would have to be like a distillation of something that gave you COVID symptoms down to 6C right like or Or 10C, probably.
10C or something like that.
Yeah.
So it would have to be.
This is a great example of transitive properties.
It doesn't matter what the homeopathic remedy was.
None of them do anything.
Hey, that's next week, by the way.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Next week is our homeopathy episode.
Finally, we've been working on this.
I'm very happy about that.
We'll have Jonathan Jarry on to talk about it as well.
Sorry for the spoiler.
So, a teaser.
It's a teaser.
But I also bring this up, and again, this is speculative because we're still learning about this story, but his Girlfriend slash ex-fiancé slash now-fiancé.
I'm not good at gossip, but I tried to tease some of this apart.
Shailene Woodley runs an eco-sunglass company.
And while it's not explicitly anti-vax in any way that I could find just after cursory research, the website is very much filled with back to the earth, give to the earth mentality.
So you might have an example, a real world example right here of someone whose influence has created a problem for an entire industry known as the NFL because of this privileged view and this misunderstanding of what your theories are actually creating down the line.
I mean, all of the Green Bay Packers could have suffered from COVID because of this viewpoint and the lying about immunization versus vaccination.
And to me, you have to be pretty politically checked out in general from politics, from public health, from all of these topics we're discussing.
for this conspiracy theorizing to be able to perpetuate through these communities.
You know, coming back to Fearstead, my guess, to speak to some of your points, Julian, is that the fact that pointing out that Brower is white is probably going to communicate less to Brower's demographic than pointing out that she's gotten rich on an MLM, which is the worst form of predatory capitalism.
So, You know, I just think it should be clear to anyone that Brower and people like her just like running the Monopoly board and and they're like putting hotels on, you know, rose and frankincense and lavender and whatever.
Well, let me ask you this, too, Matthew, because this was an interesting thing I just had a query about.
So if she's if she's a white woman in a position of privilege and she's mostly putting her stuff out there to women and she's involved in a predatory MLM that is has lots of women at the top.
Are we saying it's a perpetuation of patriarchy because that's a kind of patriarchal model of power that just happens to be inhabited by women in this case?
Yeah, she didn't use the word internalize, but I think when Tatum described her understanding of that, she said, we're talking about strict hierarchies, charismatic leadership, leadership without accountability was a big one, and profits just flowing to the top.
And I think that the money is where my political analysis would start because I think that's just very, very easy to grasp.
But I also think, and this is going back to my conversation with Dr. Baloo, that given enough time, I think it would become apparent that the predatory capitalism that Uh, is described when we report out a story like, you know, uh, uh, Furstead and Brower, is that, you know, white supremacy is in there as one of the fence planks along with predatory capitalism.
