108: Downeast with Christiane Northrup (w/ Mooncat, Andy O’Brien, & Alyce Ornella)
Half-a-million Facebook followers. Hundreds of videos in a series called “The Great Awakening.” Christiane Northrup, the matriarch of New Age women’s wellness, warns her followers about fake viruses, and tells them to avoid sex with their vaccinated partners. She stumps alongside QAnon celebrities, shovels campaign contributions to Trump, and dotes over sovereign citizen sheriffs. To ease your symptoms of ascension, she offers bath recipes of alfalfa greens and Dr. Bronner’s soap. You can have a good soak and listen to her golden harp. But in this nowhere world, where oh where is Christiane Northrup? Who is she? Is she flesh and blood, or a social media hologram generated by a Louise Hay AI? Is that mansion she broadcasts from a sound stage, or is there real soil and manure and flowers there? Our guests today know Northrup as super-real, because they live in her home state of Maine. Alyce Ornella, Andy O’Brien, and Mooncat have known her as a doctor, an MLM diva, antivax rabble rouser, and QAnon tour promoter. Now, they tell us, another Northrup may be crystallizing on Maine’s rocky shore, floating past the lighthouses and over the cranberry bogs on a cloud of essential oils. She’s been seen haunting the blueberry patches, wearing a chunky necklace of lobster claws. As Northrup begins to hold revival meetings in Down East churches, and openly fantasize about murdering political enemies, they wonder if she is assuming her ultimate form—as an IRL cult leader.Show NotesDear Dr. Northrup Dr. No: Christiane NorthrupRepublican barred from inviting guests into State HouseNaomi Wolf: “Five Freedoms” speech, April 2021.Arise USA rally draws crowds inside, outside Crosby Center Arise USA Meets Maine Stands UpInside the Disastrous Conspiracy Roadshow That Likely Killed a COVID-Denying Ex-CIA AgentMaine Republican compared the governor to Nazi Josef MengeleME state rep compares COVID vaccine mandate to NazismNorthrup bo
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
You can follow Derek, Julian, and I individually on Twitter, collectively on Facebook, and on Instagram, and you can become a supporter at Patreon backslash Conspirituality, where for $5 a month, You'll receive access to two years of bonus content and our regular weekly bonus episode, which drops on Mondays.
Now, our last bonus featured Julian and I discussing his recent trip to a Catholic funeral to support a friend, but also to do some atheist anthropology and to see whether his curdled heart might open before the altar of God.
It's a conversation on the edge of my own next immersive topic that I'll be working on over the coming months.
I'll be diving headlong into the conspirituality elements of the trad Catholic movement, which is becoming increasingly radicalized, visible, and effective in the anti-abortion politics and culture war panics over trans existence.
I'll be looking into the conspiracism, anti-semitism, and anti-communism of these gothic nooks and crannies through the lens of my own Catholic childhood.
But before that gets rolling, we have Derek dropping a bonus this coming Monday on how 16th century Japan, crawling with Christian missionaries, became a center of firearms manufacture and entered the Sengoku Jidai, the age of the country at war.
But then the Japanese banned Christianity in 1616, and guns as well, with one shogun expropriating all iron in the region, including guns, to melt down and cast a giant icon of the Buddha.
This bonus will precede a two-part main episode series on guns and spirituality in the U.S.
Now, at last count, there's over 2,100 of you supporting this work, and that helps keep us ad-free and editorially independent.
And as we grow, we can do more.
Because we've got plans.
Please also leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or on whatever service you use.
Episode 108, Down East with Christiane Northrup, with Mooncat, Andy O'Brien, and Alice Ornella. with Mooncat, Andy O'Brien, and Alice Ornella.
*sad music* Half a million Facebook followers.
Hundreds of videos in a series called The Great Awakening.
Christiane Northrup, the matriarch of New Age women's wellness, warns her followers about fake viruses and tells them to avoid sex with their vaccinated partners.
She stumps alongside QAnon celebrities, shovels campaign contributions to Trump, and dotes over sovereign citizen sheriffs.
To ease your symptoms of ascension, she offers bath recipes of alfalfa greens and Dr. Bronner's soap.
You can have a good soak and listen to her golden harp.
On January 6th, she wasn't in DC, but she sent blessings to her fellow patriots rushing the Capitol from the quietude of her water-fast retreat.
Sort of like Luke Skywalker bilocating into battle through meditation.
But in this nowhere world, where oh where is Christiane Northrup?
Who is she?
Is she flesh and blood?
Or is she a social media hologram generated by a Louise Hay AI?
Is that mansion she broadcasts from a soundstage?
Or is there real soil and manure and flowers there?
Our guests today know Northrop as super real because they live in her home state of Maine.
Alice Ornella, Andy O'Brien, and Moon Cat have known her as a doctor, an MLM diva, an anti-vax rabble rouser, and a QAnon tour promoter.
But now, they tell us, another Northrup may be crystallizing on Maine's rocky shore, floating past the lighthouses and over the cranberry bogs on a cloud of essential oils.
She's been seen haunting the blueberry patches, wearing a chunky necklace of lobster claws, and as Northrup begins to hold revival meetings in down-east churches and openly fantasize about murdering political enemies, they wonder if she is assuming her ultimate form, as an in-real-life cult leader.
Okay, so going on two years now, we've Now, we've argued on this podcast that one can't really understand the contemporary conspirituality movement without understanding the ubiquity of cultic dynamics in new age wellness and yoga spaces.
Now, the intersection between conspirituality and cults is twofold.
it In terms of content, the two-faced offering of comfort and terror that conspirituality preaches slides seamlessly into the thematics of most cults.
Because in order to recruit, cults have to close their sails on two ideas.
That the world consists of nothing but endless, confusing horror.
But that the group, under the leadership of the fearless leader, offers a safe haven.
And not only that, the cult will actively exaggerate the depravity of the world to upsell its salvation plan.
A lot of you will remember how this played out in the case of the late Katie Griggs, also known as Guru Jagat.
We covered her in episodes 36, 37, and 64.
Now, the ideology of Kundalini Yoga that she inherited or hijacked from Yogi Bhajan was already radiantly paranoid because Bhajan would always describe the outside world as debauched, irredeemable.
And also that the FBI and CIA were out to assassinate him for speaking the truth.
In the COVID era, with Bajan's legacy newly stained by revelations of abuse, it was entirely natural for Griggs to go full Red Pill and boost maniacs like David Icke, who basically describes the fallen world in the same way that Yogi Bajan did, only using anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and a little bit less misogyny.
The bottom line is, the content of cults has always been pure conspirituality because combining love and terror creates powerful bonds.
So, conspirituality offers new content to cults, and cults offer conspirituality something in return.
Infrastructure.
It's no coincidence that some of the first support for QAnon that signified a crossover into the New Age wellness space came from Jay-Z Knight and the Ramtha School of Enlightenment, which has been a brick-and-mortar high-demand group since the early 1980s.
You can hear more about them in episode 104.
It's also not surprising that a portion of the New Age content that braided its way into QAnon beliefs came straight out of the California-based I Am movement dating back to the 1930s, which was then picked up and rejuvenated by Elizabeth Proffitt in the 1980s for her Church Universal and Triumphant.
So when Mike Flynn gave that prayer about the Great Rays, he was, unconsciously or not, drawing on older resources that aren't just thematic.
That prayer card he claimed someone handed to him was printed in some culty print shop.
So there's more on that in episode 81 with Sean Proffitt.
When Tom Cowan came out at the very beginning of the pandemic and said that, according to Rudolf Steiner, dead almost 100 years, there was no such thing as COVID, that message might have died on the vine if it hadn't been for a global network of fringy Waldorf schools that picked up and spread the link, making it more likely for Kelly Brogan to find it.
Now, is the international Waldorf schooling system a cult?
I wouldn't go that far, but we did learn in episode 59 with Jennifer Sapio that certain schools or zones within larger systems like Waldorf International can display classic cult dynamics.
Likewise, when Katie Griggs took up the mantle of COVID is a conspiracy, so let's party like it's the apocalypse, she already had a bustling media network and a gaggle of low-wage devotees to push her unhinged messages.
And there's just no way that the flood of COVID-era conspirituality would have spread as quickly as it did without finding these well-worn riverbanks.
But aside from Griggs and Jay-Z Knight, most of the influencers we have covered over the past two years are completely drunk on the poison chalice of the internet.
Some lead retreats or speak at conferences, some are media moguls, but no one so far has moved towards that very pre-digital commitment, the sweat equity of a brick-and-mortar cult.
Until maybe, now, Christiane Northrup is extremely online, but she's also investing heavily in her ground game, and today we'll look at these developments more closely with some mainers in the know.
Now, I made some jokes off the top, because with Northrup, how do you really avoid it?
But she's actually up to some super sketchy shit, and it's getting more dangerous.
And as Julian pointed out in his open letter back in October of 2020, she was already sharing stages with people like Sasha Stone, who was braying about slaughtering his demonic political enemies.
She was praising the constitutional sheriff's movement and dumping cash into various MAGA campaigns.
And at the end of our panel discussion, which I'll roll next, we'll hear her fantasize about putting bullets into the heads of political enemies.
Northrup's spiral into in-real-life political aggression is important because she can cloak the unapologetic openness of her violent reactionary fantasies in a scented cloud of bourgeois respectability.
And perhaps for us on the pod, it also signals a new phase of the conspirituality phenomenon as we approach the midterms in the US.
Her hundreds of thousands of loyal followers are being further red-pilled into linking sovereign resistance to vaccines and masks.
With actively supporting far-right, QAnon enthusiasts, anti-abortion, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, and stop-the-steal candidates on the electoral stage.
And things are only getting more violent.
And on that note, just a last-minute addition before we kick off.
While in production, our panel guest Andy O'Brien, who reports on far-right politics in Maine, had to submit a police report after being threatened with violence via a phone message.
Now, I heard the message, and I'm keeping the details out pending the investigation, but I can confirm it came from an operative in the far-right Maine Stands Up movement, which was co-founded by Christiane Northrup.
Our guests today are Alice Ornella, who works in the field of disability services and was actively involved in the pro-vaccine legislation that passed in Maine in 2020.
She has watched Northrop's upward failure as a community health influencer.
Welcome to Conspirituality Podcast, Alice.
Hi, thank you.
We also have with us Andy O'Brien.
He's a journalist and former Democrat state representative who co-authored one of the best investigative pieces on Northrop's Q adjacency back in 2021.
Hello, Andy.
Hi, thanks for having me.
And we also have Mooncat, who's a citizen journalist who has been tracking Northrop events as well as events within her growing dodgy network.
Mooncat is withholding their name because they're going to continue to do undercover work.
But you can follow them on Twitter, where they have this great tagline attached to their handle, Scratching Through Maine's Ocent Litter Box and Scooping Out the Clumps.
Welcome to the show, Mooncat.
Hi, thanks for having me.
So I wanted to start with some wisdom from the matriarch herself.
This is from just over two years ago, and as she says, only 32 days into her great awakening.
Here is Christiane Northrup.
Hi, everybody.
It's day 32 of the Great Awakening.
And, you know, I've just talked with a friend, a doctor friend was just over bringing me some homemade sweet potato fries.
And I was asking her about the test for this virus.
And she said, they're just measuring either an RNA strand or DNA strand.
An actual virus has never been completely discovered.
So it's an exosome.
And I'm still trying to figure out, I think, I think that's true from what I've read in other places.
So isn't that interesting?
I got a request from that wonderful Marine with the bullhorn in Sacramento to contact him.
I love the way this works.
See, here's what's happening.
We are, you want to hear it?
You heard it here, not first, but we are the virus.
We are the virus.
We are the radical light virus.
We are the angel warrior virus.
We are the freedom, peace, joy virus.
That's who we are.
It's what we are.
And we are Highly, highly, highly contagious.
All right, there she is.
Thoughts?
Anybody want to go first?
What do you hear there?
That began with reference to her friend bringing her some nice homemade food and then landed in a place that It was somewhat expected but similar to a Simpsons episode.
It's very hard to reconcile a lot of her ideas.
How she embeds everything in this Sort of hominess, particularly interesting.
She has this idea that she is inverting this viral concept.
I haven't heard that one yet.
I'm still trying to process that.
Right.
To me, it sounds like the escalation of some of the rhetoric that was taking place in Maine in public conversations over the two years prior to the pandemic about freedom, which would continue to ratchet up to very high degrees throughout the course of the next two years following that.
Andy, what about the sweet potatoes?
Well, it's really interesting and disturbing how she uses these communiques that she comes out with every day.
to kind of establish a community.
She talks like she's talking to a close friend and she's inviting people into this community and they're sharing food and she plays her harp and she has this kind of soothing, calming voice and she references all this stuff that if you didn't Follow her for a while, you wouldn't know what the hell she's talking about, you know, goddesses and lightworkers and things like that.
But by the time you get to the end of it, it's just fire and brimstone.
You know, it's like reading a copy of the Awake magazine, you know, where it starts to make sense, you know, and you start following it.
By the end, you're like, holy crap, we're all gonna die.
So I think that's kind of like a cult-like behavior where she kind of leads people in and makes them think that she's, you know, they're part of the family, kind of.
And I think that's sort of her strategy or her unique way to bring people into this movement.
There's a way in which it's always buffered, too.
Right up to the end, I mean, she is talking about we are the virus and we're highly contagious, but I think she also uses the phrase that we are the radically polite virus?
Did she say polite?
I was thinking maybe it was light.
Oh, the radical light?
Yeah, the warriors of the radical light, she calls them.
Right, okay.
Yeah, that's her, that's her group.
You know, it's kind of like ditto heads or, you know, people, these, you know, conservative talk show hosts always do that.
They're, they're followers.
They come up with a name for them.
Yeah.
There is something very polite about her whole, at least a classic Christiane Northrup image.
I mean, that's the image that we grew up with, with her on television and just this very mannered, you know, you know, approachable, but very, To speak to this notion that she's sort of generating some sort of community, which is somewhat illusory, but it's part of the point of the episode to dig into how actually brick and mortar it is, how on the ground it actually is organized.
There's these continual references that she makes within the Great Awakening videos to other influencers that she's come into contact with and to other media figures, and she references the Marine with the Bullhorn from Sacramento.
Now, I can't be sure about who that is because she doesn't name the person, but I'm pretty sure that she's referring to Alan Hostetter.
Uh, who at around that time, not in Sacramento, but in San Clemente, California, which I can imagine her mixing those up.
Uh, he's out with his bullhorn every day and risking arrest and then getting arrested several times at anti-mask rallies and trying to tear down the fences that are around the public beaches there.
And he winds up being indicted on, on January 6th charges.
So there's, there are these hints even back in May of, 2020 of where this is all going.
She loves to insert these people into her homilies that she delivers where she'll be like, and then Charlie Freak said this, and then somebody else said this, as this guy Jenkins says whatever.
And it's kind of a way to plant seeds where people are like, ooh, who's that?
I need to Google that.
And then before you know it, you're watching videos about Holocaust denial.
It's kind of a way that she sounds like she's totally sane and reasonable and dispensing common sense, but she's directing people into these really radical pathways.
Part of the issue, it's always she would defend herself and say, well, I never said anything about Q and I never said that.
But it was always I mean, she did talk about Q, first of all, but it was always dropping channels and YouTube personalities who are much more out, you know, aggressive from the start than her image of being polite.
Yeah, I mean, like that Charlie Freak guy, like he's a Nazi.
I mean, he's talking about how, you know, the Nazis were goodly godly people and they weren't actually gas chambers.
They were lovely spas where they sent the Jews and they loved it.
And she starts kind of using the same kind of phrases that these guys like goodly and godly and stuff and it's It's a way of kind of pilling people, cue-pilling people into this world.
And when you start looking up these people that she keeps referencing, you realize that she's following all these YouTubers, and her whole life must be a house of horrors.
She has this sort of constellation that she's found herself in, and she has a lot of influence.
And I think that how she is different from the micro influencers is that she can cross the threshold and actually interact with some of these other personalities because she has that former mainstream leftover credibility that she's cashed in for this newfound fall from grace
version of herself.
And there's that appeal to people who are kind of lost in these parasocial relationships that she's sort of a queen of, in a way.
And she was, for decades, interacting with other people who were masters of that.
So I think that's just what her universe is.
She's a name-dropper, a shoulder-rubber, you know, or elbow-rubber, I guess.
That's who she is.
And she surrounds herself with other people who confirm her own sort of worldview and they do that with each other and that's sort of her mo and has been probably from the beginning i'm really glad that you referenced the parasocial nature of all of these relationships because what she i mean
that's obvious on the surface looking at not only what she posts and links to but also just the sort of dispersal of names in this kind of reference pool but one of the things that she does is that she makes it sound like everybody is there It sounds like everybody is there at tea or everybody is sort of hanging out in the same church basement.
There's this homey quality of, you know, everybody has just gotten a nice snack or something like that and they're going to sit down and chat.
It's a very interesting way of, I don't know, she's doing something weird with globalization where she's bringing it all back to Yarmouth as though everything can be in her house.
Andy, I wanted to ask for the 101 on main politics over the last 10 years.
Like, if I were a Netflix executive, what would be the elevator pitch on what has been most important and compelling, who the main figures have been?
What is the scene of main politics?
Because that's gonna be the backdrop against this question of what's Northrop's stance within it.
I'd say that Maine is kind of a microcosm for the rest of the country in that we've been extremely polarized between the hard right and the mainstream kind of Democrats.
Traditionally we were kind of a Republican state, but we have had a deep sort of paranoid streak as well.
You know, we have governors who are elected by the Ku Klux Klan and the Know Nothing Party.
And back in 2010, Governor Paul LePage was elected with support from the Tea Party.
He really changed politics in a profound way, I think.
Just really bringing this far-right, blunt, A really vicious style of politics into Augusta.
He's made all kinds of comments about claiming that black people are drug dealers who impregnate our white women.
He once called the legislator a little socialist cocksucker on a voicemail.
He's just very crude and cruel.
And he was kind of Trump before Trump.
He described himself as baby Trump.
And I think that's why they liked each other when Trump came several times to Maine.
But there's been a political realignment in Maine where We're kind of a combination of Vermont, sort of crunchy, granola, Vermont style, with a bit of Massachusetts kind of elitism, but also we're Northern Appalachia.
We're the most rural state in the country, we're the whitest state in the country, and we're the oldest state in the country by median age.
And so we saw a lot of these former Democratic strongholds in some of the mill towns go far right with deindustrialization.
And the coastal areas with a lot of the professionals and people like Christian Northrup, when democratic, when they used to be conservative.
Alice, did you want to add something?
Well, I'm not from Maine originally, so I kind of have a little bit of an outsider.
I came about 18 years ago, and I would say, you know, I came here with the impression that Maine was very crunchy, very liberal.
And having lived here through the first two LePage terms, it definitely illustrated to me The underpinnings of much of the culture in the States.
I lived in Vermont for several years and I was always told that I would never be from Vermont.
Now you've been in Maine for 18 years and you still don't feel like you're from Maine.
Is that going to be true for the rest of your life?
Oh yes, for sure.
I mean, part of it's me.
I'm from a completely different part of the country.
I'm not from the Northeast and I don't have any roots here.
But no, I don't feel.
I mean, I have friends whose parents were not from here and even they were told that they weren't Mainers.
There's always been a xenophobic streak in Maine.
You know, we always refer to people who Didn't grow up here or transplants to here is from away.
And there's always been a lot of prejudice towards people from away and Mainers also have had kind of a chip on their shoulder about wealthy people who buy homes here.
And it goes way back to the 18th century when Massachusetts controlled Maine.
And we resented these wealthy aristocrats that would claim vast tracts of land here and kick out squatters and charge them high costs for the land.
And so there's always been a sort of class dynamic to it as well.
And I think LePage kind of fed into that as well as this sort of white grievance politics.
You know, I haven't heard the phrase Northern Appalachia before, and then when you use the phrase from away, that's what Canadians in Atlantic Canada call people who are not from Atlantic Canada, so there's kind of like a, it's coming from two sides there.
But we also have other historical tensions in Maine between Catholics and Protestants, between Franco and Anglo-Americans.
Is that still alive and well?
Well, it's interesting.
It definitely was very alive in my father's lifetime.
Just to give you a little bit of background, Maine was split in two at one point, where the eastern part of the state was controlled by New France, and the other half of the state in the south and west was controlled by Massachusetts.
The French and Indian wars were fought, the indigenous people allied with the French, and these were brutal, brutal wars, essentially race wars, that were some of the most horrendous atrocities were committed then, and it's largely been forgotten by You know, it's not forgotten by the indigenous people, certainly, but in the 19th century, there was a lot of fear and resentment towards Catholics, and particularly French Catholics.
We had a very strong Know Nothing movement here, where we had these groups of anti-Catholic mobs with Burned down a couple churches, a Catholic meeting house in Bath and another one in Lewiston.
They tarred and feathered a preacher, I mean a Jesuit priest in Ellsworth and ran him out of town on a rail.
They would go into Irish shanty towns and just burn them down and beat the residents who lived there.
And that was when the Irish came over during the Great Famine.
And then in the 1880s, a lot of Franco-Americans came down from Quebec.
And essentially, you know, we think of race now in terms of skin color, but here in Maine and in the rest of New England, you know, Franco-Americans were considered an inferior race.
Essentially, second-class citizens.
Even when my dad was growing up in the 50s, the French were considered dumb.
The whole term, dumb French, was just very common.
They were thought to just be people that would only take shop class in high school and worked in the mills.
In the 1920s, one of the largest chapters of the Ku Klux Klan started in Maine, had anywhere from 70 to 100,000 members, 140,000 I've heard.
And they were basically an anti-Catholic organization in Maine because there was a great fear.
The local Protestant population going way back into the mid-19th century and earlier, that the Pope in Rome or the Whore of Babylon, they call him, was going to...
essentially take over America and establish a Catholic theocracy.
It was an earlier great replacement theory that all these Catholic immigrants were going to, they had a lot of children and they were going to take over the country with their numbers.
And so, you know, we have that history.
There was a lot of conspiracies about, you know, These S&M dungeons in the basements of Catholic churches and all kinds of stories about, you know, kind of QAnon style conspiracies about the way children are treated and things like that.
So that's always been here.
We elected a governor on the Ku Klux Klan, elected Governor Ralph Owen Brewster in 1924 in Maine.
And essentially their main issue was prohibiting funding for Catholic schools.
And he went on to become a congressman and a senator and a close ally of McCarthy.
He was actually played by Alan Alda in the film Aviator about Howard Hughes.
He would hire Klansmen to spy on labor reunions to try to expose communists.
Maine has had this reputation, I think, on the national level as being kind of old school, New England Yankee moderates.
Bill Cohen, who voted for Nixon's impeachment, or Margaret Chase Smith, who famously stood up to McCarthy forgetting the fact that she wanted to literally nuke the USSR and Korea.
And she was just rabidly anti-communist.
We've also had a really strong sort of paranoid reactionary movement, along with kind of this New England do-gooder impulse, you know, where the birth of the temperance movement, you know, the Maine law was the first prohibition law in the U.S.
in 1851.
So we're about contradictions, really.
Yeah, I mean, it's a wonderful backdrop for understanding a character like Northrup, for sure.
There's another historical piece that I know is really important that if we jump forward to the 60s, 70s, a little bit into the 80s as well, there's a big back-to-the-land movement.
And I'm wondering, maybe I'll ask Alice, did you catch the tail end of that, thinking that Maine was a crunchy place to come and live in?
Well, I was a college graduate in Chicago who couldn't get a job, so I was like, I'll just move and hop out to Maine.
Yeah, I did have the impression about, you know, living in a very beautiful, very, very beautiful place.
And I was interested in, you know, moving to somewhere I hadn't been before.
So that was definitely in the back of my mind.
It informed my impressions as a Midwesterner about Northern New England, a place I've never visited before I moved here.
It was definitely in my cultural awareness about it.
And actually my husband's father was a back-to-the-lander who studied with the Neerings when they lived in Maine.
So I came to know a little bit more about it after living here.
Well, I want to get back to that family name in a moment, but Mooncat, is this part of your history as well, family or otherwise, or are you a Mainer from birth?
I'm a New Englander through and through.
Southern New England, specifically.
I would say, like, where I grew up was It's pretty Yankee, and there's similar tensions, you know, ethnically.
But Maine has, there's just something stronger, and there's more of a split.
I don't know, there's almost like a lack of a middle class up here in some ways, I wonder.
If that's part of it, you know, places like Massachusetts and southern New England, people are more, they're kind of forced to interact with each other a little more.
Here it's a bubble.
Yeah, and people from other, from southern New England and other parts of the country moved up here for that ability to not interact and to buy tracts of land and maybe curate who they live next to on their commune.
You also have a lot of sort of hybrid redneck hippies I've seen in a lot of areas of Maine where the back of the landers came up and bred with the locals and you just have these kind of redneck types wearing tie-dye shirts and going out on their snowmobiles and big mud trucks and burning out and stuff, smoking weed.
It's a lot different than other sort of rural enclaves that way.
Tell me a little bit about the Neering family.
Helen and Scott Neering, they wrote the book The Good Life.
It was kind of the back-to-the-land Bible.
Scott was a socialist and he was essentially blacklisted during the first Red Scare, I believe.
And they lived in Vermont and did their kind of back-to-the-land thing and then came to Maine.
And their book was essentially, you know, about how to get back to Get back to the land and farm, and I think they talked about dividing their day up into work, recreation, and time for philosophizing and stuff.
It was very attractive to a lot of people.
Who came from the 60s, and all of the big social movements during the 60s, and then the rise of Nixon, and the Vietnam War continuing, and the failure of the movement to really change things profoundly in America.
And so a lot of them came up to places like Maine, where land was cheap.
Inspired by books like The Good Life to get back to the land and focus on what they saw as more meaningful lifestyle, you know, having a bunch of kids, building a homestead and things like that.
You know, what happens with that storyline, too, is that it's based, as you say, on the premise that, well, we're not seeing any real sort of structural change.
The war is still going on.
There are still crooks in DC.
It's really better to rehabilitate this farmhouse and work on the internal self and also get close to the land again.
But it also allows those people to sort of claim a liberal or progressive cred in their background to say, oh yeah, I was a hippie.
Oh yeah, I marched against such and such.
Oh yeah, I did all of that.
It's kind of what we hear in some of Northrop's language fairly regularly, and I think some of her OBGYN work speaks to that, which is, well, I've been on the forefront of women's freedom for a long time.
So, it's an interesting way in which people's past affiliations can sort of be imported into a new future where they're not really that active.
What was your sort of interaction with that material, with things like The Good Life, Alice?
I personally am not a back-to-the-lander.
I grew up in a farming family in Southern Ohio, so I left the farm.
I left the land.
I wanted to leave the land.
The Good Life Center still exists in mid-coast Maine as a place you can go to.
They have stewards who take care of it.
It's beautiful.
It's a beautiful place, spot of land.
It's hard to say.
It's like I had no personal connection to it, but I can see Why is it enticing to people?
If you're feeling overwhelmed by the modern world, it feels like simplifying and coming to something more true.
If you can eat oatmeal every morning and you ground the oats yourself and things like that, you know?
I don't mean to patronize them, but I think it is really a bit of an escapist.
You know, my parents were kind of involved in that and a lot of their friends were.
And, you know, people forget that the Nearings had a lot of other income coming in.
Yeah, right.
That's pretty much always the case, I think.
It always is.
I mean, the cliche here in Maine is the trust funder who comes up here and becomes a farmer, you know.
Right.
It just makes everybody raise their eyebrows.
But one thing about the Back to the Land movement is it really did change Maine demographically and politically.
Our population has basically been in decline since the 19th century, when everybody realized that you could go out west and dig down a few feet and there's no rocks.
We have glacial soil, it's terrible soil, and so a lot of people left, and when the Back the Land movement came, they put kids in the schools, the schools were thriving, and it changed our politics as well because a lot of these people were very left and progressive.
And that did change things.
But there's always been a little bit of a reactionary strain in the back to the land movement.
There's a lot of this kind of yeomanry ideology, which I think is very deeply ingrained in America.
This whole idea of having your own plot of land and being an independent producer as opposed to some parasite who lives off the wealth of others, whether you're at the top or at the bottom.
The conspicuous consumption thing is totally there still with that element.
It's just a different form.
There's still that outward signaling, this is who I am and I'm a part of this ecological system and I'm grounded and everything, but they still Have to get gas and they still have to go to Christmas, you know, in Connecticut.
They choose to have a lifestyle, but it's It definitely is generally funded to some extent from the outside.
I think what happened to a lot of these people is they ended up trying to do everything and they ended up getting divorced and moving back to the city.
I know my parents have a lot of those stories about people who are, you know, my dad and this guy were like, They were like, oh yeah, we can slaughter a cow, and they end up spending the entire night trying to saw pieces of cow and put it into the freezer with a chainsaw.
They just had no idea what the hell they were doing.
And now there's the second generation and third generation of some of these people.
Some of them have become farmers, but they've understood how to Get along in the market and a lot of them have become like organic farmers and stuff, but they're business people.
You know, they've learned how to survive.
They've learned that you can't just retreat from society and form your own society somewhere else.
You still have to swim in the sea of capitalism.
Something that I've noticed, this is somewhat tangentially related to the larger topic, is there's still a lot of people who promote the back-to-the-land and homesteading and homeschooling and what I've noticed is there's a real contingent of folks who fund that or purport to fund it, I wonder what their credit card statements look like, through MLMs, through the wife doing MLM sales, doing doTERRA, Usborne, and
You know, hawking products to fund, you know, homeschooling their child or as part of the whole larger culture now that's definitely I feel like entered the second or third generation of the homesteaders in Maine who aren't professional farmers.
One thing that we should note, too, is that Christiane Northrup is like the middle generation of three generations of MLM sellers, too, which is one of the income streams.
Turning to her sort of docket a little bit more specifically, Alice, You and I first connected back when we started to cover Northrop.
You told me that you'd run afoul of a media mogul named Reed Brower, who had written or had published a kind of puff piece on Northrop after she had sort of come out with her more strident anti-vax views.
Can you walk us through that story a little bit?
What happened there?
Sure, so that was in April 2020 that Reed Brower is a media mogul who owns the vast majority of print media here in Maine, including our two largest newspapers, if I'm correct, and just dozens of small town papers across the state.
You know, he started Spall himself and then just over the years just amassed this big print empire here in the state.
And one of his publications is a women's magazine.
It's a free, you know, glossy that's distributed in the grocery stores and inserted in newspapers.
I'm definitely the target demographic for that paper, or that news magazine, and because I was involved in the vaccination referendum over the two years prior to 2020, I'd become really familiar with Christiana Northrup because she was very active in that, the anti-vax side of that.
So we had seen, you know, through the course of that towards spring 2020, she had become just sharing more and more far-right material on her social medias.
Once the pandemic hit, which was right after the referendum vote in March, you know, this is fake, this isn't real, this is, you know, going
Sharing Cernovich content, just going really far right and in April 2020 this magazine hit and obviously we understood that they had their print schedule set ahead of time and but we were we there was a lot of feedback where we were giving them online about this is really inappropriate she's a Pandemic denier.
She's sharing really far-right anti-vax content.
So what can you do about this?
It was myself and a few other folks.
And then it just grew into this very big social media story in the state over the course of a couple weeks, where Reid was accusing myself and a few other folks of violently threatening them, which absolutely did not happen.
I don't violently threaten people.
Cancel culture.
Cancel culture.
You're suppressing our free speech.
If this magazine isn't for you, don't say anything about it.
Well, it is for me.
I'm a middle-aged white woman in Maine.
Like, I am your audience and we are all your audience.
And we're saying that we don't appreciate this.
And what can you do to fix it?
We were just giving them feedback.
I don't know, like people do in 2020.
And it really culminated in their largest advertiser.
Pulling their advertisements, Coffee by Design, and saying, they're a huge company in Maine, very well-beloved company, and they said, you know, we're not going to advertise this magazine anymore because of the Northrop cover.
We're not going to support this.
We don't support her views.
That made Reid extremely irate.
It made Christianne very irate.
Reed took to, I think he wrote three columns in his various publications about how, you know, we were a group of animals coming after him, and we were a hate group, and it was just the most surreal experience I've ever had.
I can't imagine anywhere else I've lived where someone with a platform like Reed would take to it to call his readers animals and call us sharks.
It's extremely fragile, and I'm imagining there was no actual engagement with the criticism at all.
No, it was like, you're trying to cancel us.
And he messaged me personally on Facebook too, which was awesome.
I was kind of blown away because these people have huge platforms and I have no platform whatsoever.
I have no followers.
I'm not a social media presence.
So it's just odd to be engaging in this conversation with him where he was just reiterating like how wrong we were.
Well, the irony, too, was that he was writing and posting as Maine Women's Magazine, so it was like a man behind the account fighting with all these women on Facebook.
Who didn't like the content!
It was so surreal.
So when you started covering her, that's why I reached out, because I was like, oh, I'm so glad someone else sees this who isn't here in Maine.
Yeah.
Now, tell me a little bit more about the No on 1 campaign, because this was an attempt to overturn the school vaccination processes in Maine, and Northrop was part of that drive.
Am I right about that?
Yeah, yeah.
So, I'd say probably about 2018, there was a law, well 2018 into 2019, It's hard to really remember.
There was a law brought to the legislature.
It was, you know, parent-driven law asking to remove religious and philosophical exemptions for school vaccination.
I mean, this is like the basic series of vaccines.
So, that law passed the legislative process and Christiane was very involved on the opposite side and Testifying against the law, trying to stop the law from being passed.
She has spoken about this extensively, about how she can't believe they didn't listen to her and she brought them books to read and she just couldn't believe it.
Because she's the only doctor in Maine, right?
Yes!
You know who I am!
Right, and that goes back to the Reid thing, because his whole defense was, she's been on Oprah and she's written 18 books, or like, I don't know, it's just like, how dare you?
So part of our political process here is if people collect signatures, they can get a referendum on the ballot.
So, Mainers for Health and Parental Rights, and The what became the Yes on 1 campaign collected enough signatures which made it a ballot issue.
We were basically as a state voting on Whether to uphold the law, which would be a no vote against the referendum, or yes to overturn the law.
So Christiane was extremely involved in that.
She was a major fundraiser.
They auctioned off like a luncheon with her to help fund the campaign at a very, very polite Tony restaurant.
And she made Facebook videos with her daughter Kate about where Kate Kate would kind of lob these like softball questions and then Christiane would answer them as a doctor about how vaccines are bad for children and it's you know parental freedom was the question so that vote happened on March 3rd 2020 where everyone went to the polls and the pro-vaccine side the no question no one won
Was supported by 73% of voters, so it was a very definitive refutation of the anti-vax side.
You crushed it.
Crushed it, and it was I think the largest referendum loss since like the 1930s in the state.
And let me just clarify, in Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom, in the new edition anyway, I'm not quite sure whether she references it in the old edition, but Northrop comes out against the Gardasil HPV vaccine.
But is she actually campaigning in the no-on-one or the yes-on-one side against all school-related vaccinations like MMR and, you know, diphtheria and like the whole series?
Absolutely.
Part of the video she did with Kate was, Kate asked, well, did vaccines really stop all these diseases?
And then Christiane did her whole spiel about how it wasn't vaccines that stopped these diseases.
Part of Christiana's rhetoric, if you would dig in late 2018, early 2020, she would be telling people in her Facebook page, in the comment sections, I remember this comment so clearly, she said, people who take their children to pediatricians are just indoctrinating them into a life of drug dependency or just through vaccines.
I mean, just like these really extreme comments.
Yes, Gardasil is not a required vaccine for children to attend school.
I mean, we're talking about the very basics.
Mooncat, what was your memory of that vaccination battle?
Did that loom large in your vision?
There was definitely some debate among people who I knew about it.
And I know even some couples where one person voted one way, one voted another.
The main thing I noticed was after the pandemic began, a lot of people who Voted yes.
Not fully invested in it.
Changed their tune after and said, I don't agree with this idea anymore.
Because some of this is, well, it's rooted in this philosophical exemption thing.
Which is nebulous, and if they had, in my opinion, it's just the next step would be to have funding for their homeschooling or state funding for religious schools.
This is just about taking apart public schools.
Most of the people Who are driving the whole yes on one thing are homeschoolers.
They don't even intersect with public school people.
You know, they don't have nine to five jobs.
They don't have a lot of the typical, you know, the things that bring people into contact with each other in public schools.
They create community in their own ways and these people have, not all of them, but many of the people that were driving it had the luxury to not have their kids in public school and to try to find new ways to extend their privilege even further was how I looked at it.
It was interesting too because the vote was on March 3rd and by the end of the following week the whole state was shut down because of the pandemic and many of the leaders like Representative Laura Libby and a few other folks immediately pivoted to the anti-mask protests and Northrop was right on that train with them.
So they already had an infrastructure through the YesOn1 to slide right into pandemic denialism.
It wasn't like, oh, we've just been opposing childhood vaccines, now we're being smacked by a pandemic, we should change our minds.
It's more like, this proves our point, people are getting sick.
Exactly.
And the country, they're trying to take your rights away and the whole narrative.
Yeah, you would think that there would be some self-reflection to have your massive defeat and then go into a huge worldwide pandemic, but no.
And a lot of them now are basically saying that, you know, these infectious diseases don't even exist and that it's all psychosomatic or people aren't channeling enough positive energy or something.
It's really gone really around the bend.
Alex, there's another aspect here, and I think it relates to the fact that anybody who encounters Northrop's work online has got to ask at one point or another, what is she actually like as a doctor?
What kind of clinic did she run?
Did she actually serve her clients?
You know in a reasonable way and you've pointed to some neighborhood chatter about how she interacts with patients.
I don't think you'll be able to say too much and we're not going to be able to make allegations here but there are some questions to explore about the outcomes for patients who go to a doctor who doesn't believe in viruses or who thinks that like Louise Hay's take on cancer is reasonable.
Is there anything that you can say about that in general terms from the chatter that you've come across?
Or that screaming into a paper bag is an appropriate treatment for fibroids, or applying... What?
I didn't hear that.
Screaming into a paper bag?
If you ask, if you pose this question on main Facebook groups, did any of you see Christiane Northrup as a doctor?
You hear some fairly horrifying stories from people.
Now again, like I never saw her as a doctor.
I can't comment on that.
I moved here after she was largely not practicing.
You hear some very horrifying stories that this was medical care that was being provided to people in the state of Maine in the 20th and 21st century.
It also illustrated to me that people are still afraid of her status and afraid to talk about it openly.
I mean, she did say that she stopped practicing medicine because of the lawsuits in her, I think it was the Dartmouth alumni newsletter.
She's said a few stories.
She's mentioned lawsuits.
And I think as an OBGYN and any surgeon, you know, that's a concern for a lot of doctors.
That's why they have insurance.
But it starts to add up when you hear some of the stories that people say about her care.
And then she's also said she gave up her license in order to speak freely about topics that she couldn't otherwise speak about.
Hey everyone, Matthew in the Edit Bay here.
I just need to add some detail to Alice's answer here, because the day after we recorded, Mooncat sent me a clip of Northrop being interviewed on the right-wing platform American Media Periscope, I guess, about topics she couldn't previously speak about.
So here's a sample of her recent doctoring.
We are in the ascension of humanity.
Jesus showed the way.
We're now in the ascension of humanity.
And as a doctor, I want to say to people, there may be increases in seizures.
Headaches, sleeplessness, this is all more and more light is coming into your body.
We're ascending to a more spiritual dimension.
So the last thing you want to do is go and get yourself on all this medication.
A seizure is like a lightning bolt of light coming into your body.
You can go get it checked out, but chances are very good they're not going to find a thing.
And then they're just going to put you on medication.
So just talked to a friend, really bad headache.
She never has headaches.
She's resting.
And I said, you say to your body, listen, I understand we're ascending here.
Relax, let more and more light in and just let the headache go away, please.
I don't want to suffer.
And it worked.
She was fine.
So a lot of stuff is going on.
That's very unusual.
So You heard that right.
Seizures are ascension events.
So three comments I'll make.
The first is personal.
As probably a former seizure sufferer, hasn't happened for me in about 30 years or so, she can just suck an egg.
Secondly, this interpretation of seizures was actually central to how one of the cults I was in, Endeavor Academy in Wisconsin Dells, framed the obvious cognitive injuries of the leader, Charles Anderson.
Who would often have what seemed to be minor neurological events that would leave him vacant or slurring.
He eventually died of a stroke.
So, the correlation between brain injury and light entering into your body and meditative bliss or shaking or speaking in tongues, also known as going aphasic, is not original in New Age circles.
What's dangerous about it, besides the general fact that it dissuades people in neurological crisis from seeking medical help, is that the correlation was actually part of my recruitment into Endeavor Academy.
The cult offered a spiritual framework for my otherwise unexplainable neurological events and perhaps injuries.
Lastly, if it isn't obvious, specifically tagging seizures and headaches after denying the existence of COVID is an almost explicit pivot to denying long COVID.
Okay, back to the panel.
Would you say that Northrop has a sort of on-the-ground influence in terms of alternative medicine practitioners in the state?
Sure.
I mean, she shared some public venues and stages with naturopaths in Maine, especially during Yes on 1, and with some DOs who are maybe on the fringe.
Now, there are a lot of DOs, which is Doctor of Osteopathy in Maine, because we have a DO school here.
So, I'm not trying to Not at all putting that credential under the bus.
There are some fringe practitioners who are happy to share the stage with her, to reference her work.
You see her referenced on social media still by naturopaths.
I think she does still have an influence.
I did want to say that another thing that I was made aware of by people who saw her as a doctor in her private practice was there was A very, like, supplements figured in very heavily into what she sold, prescribed, or had on display at her offices.
With regard to this sort of in-person networking and her ability to and the social capital involved in appearing with naturopaths during this particular campaign and getting more and more involved in politics, I wanted to turn to you, Mooncat, and talk a little bit about what you've been seeing
In terms of Northrop's interaction with Maine politics recently, one of the things that she helped to organize and I think was a featured guest in was the Arise USA QAnon Freedom Tour, which, did it hit the state in July of 2021?
Is that when it was?
And the first stop was Belfast, right?
The Arise USA Tour was a tour that was Basically a total disaster.
Robert David Steele had this grand- well, just real quickly, Robert David Steele is a self-described ex-CIA spy.
He's actually- Claims to be.
Claims to be.
He's deceased.
Three weeks after the event from COVID, he has this insane backstory and he's very, very deeply connected to QAnon.
Essentially, he just came to this event and no one was really paying attention to his His thing, they he was sort of like a side sideline thing.
Most people who were upset about this event, because there were quite a lot of people that were upset about it.
Most of them were upset about Sheriff Mack, who is a constitutional sheriff and was connected to the Oath Keepers.
So he's on the board.
Yeah, he's like the leader, or he was one of the higher-ups.
This event was very surreal, and Heidi Sampson, who's a state rep, shared the stage with both Robert David Steele and with Northrop.
Kevin Jenkins was there as well.
I actually attended, I sort of stood on the outskirts of the protest witnessing things and I don't even know where to start with the whole thing because it was generally surreal.
There was interaction with people who were in the event and they would come and Try to have dialogue with the people who are protesting.
Some people were doing it in good faith.
Kevin Jenkins, he's one of Northrop's major cohorts, he came up to the crowd and started Getting really into people's faces and yelling at them, why do you hate me because I'm black?
Repeatedly to them.
That's his thing.
Yeah.
And the whole, so there was some trolling from their side, trying to get reactions with, and they had their cameras out, you know, they're, they're trying to get rile, people to rile, be riled up.
For the most part, the protesters handled themselves pretty well.
A lot of people knew people who were in the event and going to be there.
Robert David Steele also had a lot to say about Andy O'Brien.
He went off on him pretty hard, said he had all of his bank account information and Yeah, he said I was connected to the Russian mob and Les Wexner and Jeffrey Epstein.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, it's still on his website.
It's still on his website?
On his zombie website?
I think so.
Yeah, it was one of the last posts he had.
He just went off in front of the crowd.
It's kind of an honor to be memorialized or I don't know.
I don't know if that's the right word.
But Andy, I'm sorry that that happened.
Were you at the event as well?
No, I was gonna go and then I was like, yeah, you know, it wasn't far from my house, but I'm just, I know what to expect there.
And then all of a sudden I started getting all these reporters texting me for comment on that.
I consider it a badge of honor.
We're laughing, but implying that you have connections to Jeffrey Epstein is like one step away from calling you a pedophile.
And I'm wondering if that had, if that generated backlash as well.
No, I mean, I've had a lot of these... I research a lot of Nazis and far-right groups and things like that, and the first thing they do when they're cornered is call you a pedophile.
So there's videos out there of these guys calling me a pedophile and stuff, and it becomes one of these things where they use it so much it almost doesn't even have any power anymore, which is, you know, kind of disturbing in a way, but, you know, there's nothing you can do about it.
Now, Naomi Wolf also visited Augusta around that same time.
I don't know if she was tagging along with the tour.
She gave a fiery speech.
How did that go over in the state?
I have the impression that she presents a little bit more respectability for maybe a broader demographic.
Did it work?
I just want to set this up.
There was a lobster fisherman protest going on at the same time.
And like, this is a tactic that most of the groups in Maine use.
They piggyback or coattail ride on any other protest.
Naomi Wolf had showed up and Shelley Rudnicki, who is another politician, they demanded to see Janet Mills and were not allowed access.
So Wolf made this into a big deal.
And that was when she did she did this speech.
And I think they were hoping there would be all these rabid lobstermen ready to storm the statehouse.
They were already home by this time when she was there.
Because they have to start working at four in the morning.
Of course.
And she just, she had a very, she wrote it first.
She has a piece of paper and she's reading.
First, she tells everybody that they're her people.
And she gets into this sort of in-group language, just how happy that she has these people that have her back.
And then she talks about how it's the state house's saddest day of her life because she couldn't go to the state house and talk to Janet Mills.
I mean, it's just it's ridiculous, though, just that she just came up and knocked on her door, the governor's door, without any notice.
Why would you talk to me?
I mean, it's kind of the amazing thing about Maine in general.
My backyard neighbor in the town I formerly lived in was our U.S.
Senator.
You have people who go and stand at the governor's car, and you have the owner of all the media in the state of Maine DMing you about how you're being too loud on Facebook.
It's very strange.
It's a very strange place about how we're all one degree of separation from one another.
And actually, you have more access to power than people seem to feel they do.
Yes!
I mean, because so much of this discourse is, nobody's listening to me, I don't have contact with anybody.
There's a big, huge, you know, abstract state apparatus that's just sort of controlling our lives, but really, they're talking about their neighbors.
They are!
I mean, not to harp on it, but in other places I can't imagine these things happening that I've lived in.
Being able to talk to my U.S.
Senator over the fence separating our yards.
It's very unique to this.
And I didn't live in a Tony's place.
This was in the middle of town.
It's just a very unique situation we have up here.
Let me just ask about the lobster guys, because I just want to get this clear that Naomi Wolf and whoever was handling her, they wanted to perhaps whip the lobstermen up into their rally, kind of like Parasite-wise?
Really?
Maybe in Ultimate Fantasy, in their best version of things, you know, there'd be a sort of mains January 6th, but I don't think it was really her primary intent.
I don't think that's what she had intended necessarily.
It's just the rhetoric, especially after January 6th, was extremely...
It was obvious.
She knows what she's doing.
She's very, very smart.
And I think I think that she just tumbled out of credibility very fast and is just looking for people to to help her stay relevant.
And she's scraping the bottom of the barrel at this point.
And that's that was an example of it.
Yeah, and we do have lobster, you know, lobster fisher people who serve as state legislators.
I mean, it is a thing, definitely.
And one of the most vocally anti-vaccine members of the state legislature is a lobsterman named Billy Bob, what's his last name?
Falkingham.
Falkingham, yes.
So, I mean, they definitely, I think they saw a natural connection there, like they could get Billy Bob Falkingham to To bring them over and create a scenario.
That's an amazing name, just gotta say.
I mean, for Northern Appalachia and also this like deep Anglo history, Billy Bob Falkingham, that's fantastic.
He has an interesting past too.
I remember when he was running for office, the Democrats sent out a press release that said he got arrested for assault in 2000 and throwing a bucket of human feces at somebody.
A bucket?
Yeah, a whole bucket.
A bucket.
I don't know, maybe it was on his boat.
Did he go out and collect it?
It was on his boat.
Might have been on his boat.
I get it, right.
That would make sense.
I think the larger story here is that a lot of these groups are trying to co-op all these little grievances, whether it's the anti-vaccine movement, or lobstermen protesting offshore wind, or anti-immigrant movement.
Anti-trans is the big one now, you know, litter boxes and furries and all that nonsense.
They're just trying to mobilize whatever kind of grievances they can for political aims.
They are trying to go access the working class, too.
I mean, Northrop has shown up at the Bath Iron Works protests, as well.
And, you know, I think they see these as channels to a populace that they don't normally intersect with on a day-to-day basis.
Yeah and at Bath Ironworks is like one of the largest employers in the state.
They build Navy ships and they had a vaccine mandate at the shipyard and a lot of those guys are pretty conservative ex-military and stuff and so there was a real anti-vax mood there and I don't even think the I don't even think the mandate ever really Was it was implemented, but anyway, they all these different kinds of groups like like Northrop's group and the people who have the Trump trains that ride around the countryside.
They were all there, but it was again.
It was like It was like the lobster or whatever.
It was really interesting because there was a lot of talk about, like, these are a lot of people that are just very anti-union, but suddenly they're all about worker struggles when it came to vaccines.
You know, I wanted to do this episode, Mooncat, because you've been doing this amazing coverage on the related Northrop events and networks and I was really stunned to see this particular set of clips from her giving a speech in a church.
There's one little piece of film that you put onto Twitter and we can run it now where you say that in the caption, standing at the pulpit in a church explaining to her followers that the right is literally a spiritual path rooted in love as opposed to the left rooted in fear.
The frequency of sovereignty and love and truth is 5,000, maybe a million times greater.
You can do so much more good.
Over here on the right, it strengthens your immunity.
It ignites growth and repair.
It activates more DNA codes.
It lengthens telomeres.
It's the fountain of youth.
Over here, you watch CNN.
You actually believe Shaw?
You think that Governor Mills is keeping us safe?
And that's fear.
And, you know, here's the thing that I do, okay?
You triple-jack all of that, you don't get it, you stay in fear, you keep voting for these same demons.
You're gonna die anyway.
You're gonna die sooner.
The real estate crisis will go down, and, you know, things will probably be better.
I mean, that's how I get through the night.
Because it's so bad.
It's so bad.
But what is it doing?
It is putting all of us in a crucible and remembering who we are as humans, fearfully and wonderfully made in an image of God.
And without these demons, we'd still be watching Netflix and, you know, we wouldn't be doing it.
Instead, we're rising up like these demons.
Next slide.
Mooncat, can you set this up for us a little bit more?
What church is this taking place at?
How many people are in attendance?
Is this part of a series of talks?
I'm not sure how often this has been occurring.
The footage I gathered was from a couple incidents where she spoke at... Alice, we were talking about it being the Unitarian Church in Brunswick.
Yes, one of their groups, when you go to the page, How to Connect to a Group for Brunswick, it links to the Unitarian Universalist Church.
In Maine.
Now, I've never been inside that church, and I am personally actually blocked from that Instagram account, so I didn't get to see the footage.
I haven't set up a burner Instagram to be able to view their footage, but someone who runs that page decided to block me.
I've never commented on it, but you know.
In the video, there's maybe 12 people.
She is doing her usual PowerPoint presentation in this church, where she goes through a whole litany of different conspiracies.
Some of them are pretty passe.
Some of them are kind of modern, typical Q stuff.
There's an overlying idea of this dichotomy between good and evil and that they're the good guys and everyone who doesn't agree with them are infernal and demonic or however she calls it.
She has just a general, real binary view of humanity, which she kind of, that's the umbrella of everything for her.
All of the minor, you know, the little other conspiracies that she inserts into it all.
It's just flavoring for Just sort of a spiritual superiority complex, ultimately, and that's on full display when she's at the pulpit.
She, honestly, I don't know how well this sort of thing is going to go for her.
She's not particularly charismatic, in my opinion, but she does seem to have a collection of people that are following along with her.
And I believe it's Probably based off their own personal investment, sort of a sunk cost fallacy or something where they've gone along this far and, you know, they may as well see how long it plays out.
But I did see recently in a video where she was speaking with, I can't remember his name, but he's a big conspiracy guy.
And she was saying that Their group is now encouraging one another to, or she's encouraging her group to not go to the doctor if they have an ailment, to talk to each other first and seek help within their own community before seeking medical attention somewhere else.
Something's bound to happen.
Something's going to go wrong at some point.
That's the main stuff that I'm thinking of, down the line, how this is going to affect some of these people.
Robert David Steele, specifically, dying three weeks after the main stands up.
They never mentioned anything about him dying or they have nothing to say about him.
Neither does Heidi Sampson, Shelley Rudnicki, any of the politicians, nothing.
And so this indefinite, plausible deniability that they wrap themselves in is, to me, one of the scarier aspects of it because they can believe whatever they want to.
We called out, I mean a number of times, we called out these legislators for appearing at these events and calling the CDC, comparing them to Nazis and Joseph Mengele and stuff like that.
They'll deny that they know anybody like Robert David Steele and just, oh, I didn't know that person.
It's typical plausible deniability.
Kind of disturbing about what Northrop is doing is she's bringing together all these disparate groups.
She'll appear beside hardcore Christian dominionists, like John Linehan, who are just, they want to create a theocracy in the country.
And this is a guy who's running for the state house right now.
She's constantly appearing at local Republican Party meetings, town and county meetings.
She'll appear at evangelical churches and then she'll go to a healing arts fair or a solstice showcase or something with a bunch of sort of bohemian crunchy granola hippie types.
And you'll see people at these events where you'll have these like really hardcore patriotic militia christian people uh next to young hippie women all like you know saluting the flag and uh you know you see these hippies with playing around with guns on instagram and stuff and it's just uh you realize How this is really a fascist movement.
The way that she describes their opponents as subhuman, or she says they're not even a human species, they're cockroaches, they're a regressive species, and they must be stamped out and destroyed.
I mean, this is the kind of behavior that leads to genocide, in my opinion, this kind of rhetoric.
And we should take it very seriously.
Alice, I feel like I want to ask you this.
What do you think it is about Northrop that allows her to slide with such ease between all of these groups?
Like, what is the glue?
How is she able to, first of all, be at ease amongst so many different characters, but also appeal to so many at the same time?
What do you think the magic is?
Well, I think that there is a human She has a tendency to want to be close to status and she represents, she still represents, she has a lot of cachet.
I mean, she is very famous, very wealthy, and I think people want to be close to that.
There's an element of people who want to be near that.
She somehow transcends the typical feeling that people have about people with a lot of wealth because she says, well, I'm speaking to you and I'm on your side and I'm here to be your doctor and to tell you the truth about what's happening.
But people still want to be near that.
I think it's appealing to people.
They want to be invited to her home.
They want to be in that circle where she's having sweet potato fries with you and discussing what's really happening and how we can prepare for it.
So I think that's part of why she can appeal across so many different groups.
I mean, I think we can't discount that she's had 20 or 30 years of media training.
She's a professional speaker.
She's a professional media presence.
And I think she can employ that.
I don't know.
I mean, it is something about Maine.
We were talking about it earlier about how you have this kind of immediate adjacency to your political leaders and to each other because we have such a small population in this state.
Yeah, it seems like she's accessible in some strange way.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't know the details of her fall from grace as well as some others do, but it does seem that she was pretty lonely when the lockdown happened and everything.
And she opened herself up to people to come into her life.
And she had a very personal loss.
Her partner died at that exact same time.
Which I think resonated with a lot of people, and that vulnerability resonates with people.
And using the media and social media, you can really have those confessional moments with people, which is different from being on the PBS stage.
As dangerous as her propaganda has been, I don't think we can help but admire just how skillful a media personality and really a politician she is, and also a cultural figure.
I'm thinking as you're describing all of these sort of Places in which she connects.
It's almost like I can imagine a pavilion dedicated to her at Epcot Center or something like that where it's like there's the mansion in Yarmouth and it has a beautiful garden and there's the harp and there's the sweet potato fries and there's also a gun range out back and there's also like a rally going on and there's also like what else would be there?
Well, she talked extensively about there being an alien portal in her backyard that featured really prominently in some of her videos.
Well, maybe at the end of the shooting range, the portal opens up or something like that if you get enough targets or something that it expands.
I don't know.
Like you said, she's really good.
She's really good.
And I think some of these figures that we're talking about are really good at You know, being everything that people kind of need at the moment.
Rounding up, I've got three last questions, one for each of you.
Andy, how influential do you think Northrop will be over time in the state of Maine?
I honestly think she might be waning on the wane because she's really made a name for herself in the anti-vaccine movement and the COVID denialist cause.
I don't think the vaccine issue is going to go away, but I feel like it'll be overshadowed by other things.
Right now, We're in a really rough political climate in Maine and in the country, but especially in Maine, you know, we have a democratic trifecta, but the polls are really difficult right now.
And it's, it is possible that we could get a lot of these people, including people that Northrop has endorsed and worked with elected, and they could have some real power soon.
So I don't, I don't know if Christian Christiane Northrup will be at the front of all this, but I think her influence will continue.
I guess that's what I would say.
Because I think that they're all united right now by their just galaxy of conspiracies and their hatred for the left and Democrats.
But it's kind of a fragile coalition.
What has been interesting is to see Christian Northrop's followers, a lot of them were sort of ostensibly liberal, some of them are LGBTQ, become Red-pilled through the anti-vax and COVID-denialist movement and following Northrop and so that now they're anti-Black Lives Matter.
They've become far-right, gun-toting racists.
I think that that is going to continue.
I just don't know if it's going to be the vaccine and the medical freedom that's going to be driving it.
It could be something else.
I mean, I think already anti-trans bigotry is really taking over.
Mooncat, what's next on the undercover schedule for you?
I'm continually just searching through this stuff, and I have a little bit of an archive of stuff that I still haven't released yet.
Mainly, I'm just continuing to bounce around following their media as they create it.
I mean, these groups, they come and go.
The personalities in these groups are very conspicuous for a certain amount of time.
Then they sometimes just disappear.
Just speaking real quick to whether or not Christiane's cult aspirations will go anywhere, I predict that it will fail because of infighting, because that's how all of these organizations destroy themselves.
Alice, I wanted to ask you, what's it like being a parent in Maine right now, especially after the pandemic and everything that's gone down?
Well, I think everyone, I mean, in Maine and in the whole country is really affected by the issue that's on everyone's mind right now is the violence and gun violence in schools.
We all live, most of us live in towns that are like Uvalde, Texas or Sandy Hook, Connecticut.
I mean, that's the size of most of our towns here.
And so I think that's what's on everybody's mind right now, um, in terms of pandemic outcomes.
I know a lot of folks are really struggling with, um, housing and childcare.
I mean, housing and childcare have been pretty much decimated over the course of the pandemic, particularly because I think our population increased by 25, 30,000 people in the past two years.
Moving from other parts of the country here.
So I think, I think you have, we kind of settled this school vaccine question in a really decisive manner, pivoted right into the pandemic and then people are now are seriously, a lot of folks are really just struggling with having a place to live and, and a job, you know, a job that pays enough and childcare and feeling, is it okay?
Is their kid going to come home from school at the end of the day?
I said three last things, but because you brought up Yuvaldi, I just wanted to finish with this clip.
It might be a little bit dark to finish on, but this is Northrop speaking to a guy named Jeff Weitzman, and it really sort of encapsulates one of the more disturbing aspects of Northrop's messaging, which has been her willingness to tacitly, but sometimes openly endorse violent rhetoric.
So, Jeff Weitzman is a cancer denial activist, and he's put her little monologue here under some nice slide guitar.
There's an illusion with you that, oh, Chris Northrup, she's come to this place now where she's on this plateau and she doesn't have to feel anymore.
Oh my God.
You know, there are parts of me, and so I've learned to love them, okay?
Here's an example.
Alright.
Let's see.
Do I get to pick the firing squad to kill these demons?
No.
If you were a new age person and you read books like You Cannot Afford the Luxury of a Negative Thought, you would be afraid that that thought is going to somehow lead you to, oh, oh, oh, cancel, cancel, cancel.
I had a bad thought.
I wanted to harm that person.
No!
I like those thoughts.
I listen to Zev Zelenko say, I am all for love and forgiveness, and if anyone comes near one of my children, I will have no problem putting a bullet in their head.
I want people to own that part of themselves.
Amen.
Because that is righteous anger.
It is a cause of health.
That guitar was supposed to make us feel warm.
Yeah.
So yeah, closing thoughts.
How's that going to go over in Maine?
Does the slide guitar help, do you think?
I mean, I find it absolutely terrifying because there are people who will really love that comment, that commentary.
And so I find her, the way she paused, I was like, no.
I want you to have those thoughts.
It's seriously terrifying to me.
Because I don't think anyone like her, she wouldn't be killing anyone.
She wouldn't be pulling the gun, but pulling the trigger.
She's happy to incite other people to have those thoughts.
And insight is not even, like insight is a proper word for that, but there's also like permission and almost blessing given in a way that I don't really see a comparison to any other public figure that way.
I mean, she's not pounding a Bible, she's not shouting, she's giving a kind of spiritual permission and that seems to me very chilling, extremely effective.
Yes, the dehumanization of her enemies in combination with her rhetoric, you know, that's a bad equation.
And maybe she can deny that she's talking about things in material terms and say she means it in some sort of quasi-spiritual way, but it's in keeping with History, this isn't something that we haven't seen before.
It's precedent to something much worse when people find ways to forgive themselves for committing atrocities against those who may not be as human as them.
It's pretty messed up.
And the fact that people just nod along and Bask in their essential oils and micro entrepreneurial displays at their their bougie barn.
You know, it's it is it's it's stomach turning in a lot of ways.
Again, I just that that luxury to have this view of the world with just crying wolf when anything comes along that
goes up against their worldview and then it's just it's sad and they're not all bad people and you don't fall into the trap of demonizing them back that's not going to work but we still have to be aware of what these people are thinking about other people in their community that matters we We can't just be in denial of that.
