Brief: Teal Swan’s Satanic Panic to Anti-Woke Pipeline
How do the screams of the Satanic Panic echo in anti-woke politics?
This past week, New Age Satanic Panic influencer Teal Swan released a new video to 1.5M YouTube subscribers about the dangers of "Wokeism." Yesterday, Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) announced plans to form a Congressional Anti-Woke Caucus.
We know by now that conspirituality is a machine charismatics can use to generate mystical solutions to exaggerated or imagined crises. With Swan’s pivot into anti-woke discourse, she is taking the next logical step in broadening and secularizing her message.
What's not entirely clear is the pathway Swan has taken from Satanic Panic influencer to a New Age starseed, to unlicensed trauma recovery expert, to this potential future as a culture warrior. This Brief connects some of the dots, as the entanglement between New Age wellness objectives and reactionary populism tightens.
Show Notes
"Wokeism" and Today's "Woke" Society
109. Who’s Afraid of Teal Swan? (w/Jon Kasbe)
111: Who's Afraid of Teal Swan (pt 2) (w/Jennings Brown)
UNLOCKED: Swan Song Series 1 | Close to Home (please search "Swan Song Series to find all unlocked episodes)
From QAnon to Anti-Woke. A New Age guru pivots to a new… | by Matthew Remski
Qanon - The Great Awakening: PsyOp or the Real Deal? - Piercing the Veil of Reality Bernhard Guenther
The January 6th Capitol Siege has indelibly linked QAnon to domestic terrorism.
The deletion of vast networks of QAnon influencers and groups from social channels like FB and Twitter
Cullen Hoback’s Q: Into the Storm documentary
Rep. Jim Banks announces the Anti-Woke Caucus
Fighting the Woke Agenda in Congress - The American Mind
-- -- --
Support us on Patreon
Pre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada
Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | Julian
Original music by EarthRise SoundSystem
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hey everybody, Matthew here with a Conspirituality Brief called Teal Swan's Satanic Panic to Anti-Woke Pipeline.
Remember that you can catch us on Apple Podcast Subscriptions, on Twitter, on Instagram, and Patreon, and you can pre-order our book through the link at the bottom of the show notes for this episode.
Hey there.
I do this episode today with a heavy heart, knowing that I'm stepping out on a limb by doing it, because anybody who shares a viewpoint that contradicts the current in-style social narrative is immediately branded a villain.
These are strange times indeed within human society.
The current trend within society is wokeness.
And this should make a spiritual figure like myself very, very happy.
After all, awakening is a virtue.
Society is served by people being aware and well-informed.
It's served by people being actively attentive to and also responsive to important societal issues.
But alas, I am not happy.
Because the woke movement is not what people think it is.
It is not wokeness at all.
Instead, it is a human society that has fallen into yet another pothole of both ego and of unconsciousness.
Alas, that is the voice of Mary Bosworth, who goes by the name Teal Swan.
The clip is from the opening of her latest YouTube video, titled Wokeism and Today's Woke Society.
Now, if you're familiar with Swan, you'll know that this is a new direction for her, but you'll also know that it's the latest in a career of derivative cultural pivots.
The question I'll try to answer in this brief is, what connects Swan's emergence a decade ago as a late satanic panic influencer, to her rise as a new age starseed, to unlicensed trauma recovery expert, to her current flirtation with right-wing culture war positions?
The short answer is in the title of our podcast, because conspirituality is a machine charismatics can use to generate mystical solutions to exaggerated or imagined crises.
With Swan's pivot to anti-woke discourse, she's really just taking the next logical step in broadening and secularizing her message.
And it's right on time for an escalation in mainstream political appeal.
Because yesterday, January 13th, just six days after Swan's video dropped, Republican Representative Jim Banks of Indiana announced on Twitter that he was going to create a Congressional Anti-Woke Caucus.
We'll return to that in the wrap-up.
If you're not familiar with Swan, I'll give a little thumbnail.
She is a 38-year-old American YouTube priestess who serves millions of followers and endless stream of mesmerizing self-help content in the genre of shadow work and unlicensed trauma recovery.
Her channel is pushing towards 200 million views in total and her aesthetic is emo glam with flowing dresses and psychedelic backdrops that rhyme with the vibrational paintings she makes and sells in print form or on hoodies in her extensive merch store.
Her vocal rhythm strides slowly with ASMR precision and she has perfected the intrusive eye contact of the webcam guru.
On the about page of her YouTube channel, her team writes, Teal Swan's worldwide following has given her the moniker, The Mirror.
She has earned this moniker because when you step in front of her, you see the truth of yourself and the truth of the universe.
This is a disarmingly self-aware summary of her parasocial draw.
Because followers see in Swan a person they want to emulate.
A heroic journey they want to follow.
That journey begins with despair.
Countless followers talk about finding her videos late at night while in spells of depression.
That's how journalist Jennings Brown found her during a particularly rough point in his life, and it launched him into the research for what became the excellent podcast The Gateway, where he learned that Swan's SEO team is skilled at targeting her content at Mainly young women who are treading the waters of emotional vulnerability.
He visited her villa in Costa Rica where retreat participants recover traumatic memories that Swan can then help heal.
Swan's main hook is that she has transcended depression up to and including suicide attempts by facing it down without flinching.
How does she do it?
The first way is that she draws on common New Age concepts.
She teaches that the growth of the soul is nurtured by transformational pain, but that pain is illusory and ephemeral, and that you can intervene in its flow.
She has famously and controversially said that, quote, suicide is a reset button, unquote, And this has drawn the ire of mental health professionals and the concern of social media moderators, who inconclusively tracked the possible connections between the deaths of members of Swan's Facebook groups and her statements.
It's important to note that these connections, while disturbing, have never been proven, and that most followers will understand that reset statement within the context of a general New Age belief in reincarnation.
Swan's second on-ramp into transcendence is much more Christian, and it emerges out of the story she tells of surviving severe childhood abuse.
Swan claims that she survived years of satanic ritual abuse perpetrated by a family friend.
According to Swan, the satanic cult committed rape, infanticide, and sewed young Teal Swan into the body of a corpse for 12 hours during one particularly abject ritual.
And as with every Satanic Panic instance, none of her stories have been corroborated.
Also, there are three pieces of evidence that suggest that all is not what she says.
A childhood friend says that the logistics, timelines, and impacts of the alleged abuse just don't line up.
Jennings Brown decoded pages from the childhood journals in which Swan says she recorded the abuse, and the decoding shows pretty normal teenage musings in characters that appear derived from the runic writing of Tolkien.
Thirdly, Swan's satanic panic story comes into its final form only after her therapeutic encounter with disgraced Utah psychotherapist Barbara Snow, who was a leading voice in the disastrous satanic panic therapy movement in the 1990s.
However much of it is untrue, the power of Swan's story has given her the wisdom and glow of resurrection, and this allows her to sit in a kind of Costa Rican webcam paradise to hold virtual court around the world, with sacred survivorship giving her all the credibility she needs to dispense advice.
So that's the thumbnail.
And if you're interested in more, we commit almost a full chapter to her role in the conspirituality world in our upcoming book.
And then back in July, we began publishing what eventually became a 10-part series exploring her claims in detail, but also the cultural milieu that holds and inspires them, beginning with the OG satanic panic text, Michelle Remembers, published in 1980, four years before Swan's birth.
One main objective we had was to push back at some sensationalizing depictions of Swan that followed the Jennings Brown podcast.
That pushback started with a somewhat tense interview with director John Casby, whose Hulu documentary The Deep End demonstrably exaggerated Swan's spookiness with dodgy editing and scrambled timelines, While making her followers look insane, while providing viewers with no historical or cultural context and analysis for her content and techniques.
The documentary created the impression that Swan is somehow uniquely creative and dangerous, and not the product and beneficiary of a self-help industry that commodifies trauma, both real and imagined.
The documentary made her into the enigma she seems to want to be.
Our own series cast a very wide net, and we were never sure how to cap it off.
But with Swan's current turn to anti-woke rhetoric, we can now summarize some themes and arcs.
Here's Swan again from that video, with something of a thesis statement.
Make no mistake, the current wokeness trend is not genuine awakening.
It does not reflect genuine awareness or even intelligence.
And it is often marked by false concern.
If a society was genuinely woke, that would be a good thing.
But the general direction of change that you're seeing within society today, is actually a false wokeness.
It's a gaslight.
It is something disguised as the opposite of what it is.
It is unconsciousness, disguised as consciousness.
It is virtue signaling, disguised as concern for others.
It is immorality, disguised as morality.
It is prejudice, disguised as social justice.
It is an assault against health, disguised as measures that are pro-health.
It is racism disguised as anti-racism.
It is primitive ego disguised as evolved states of being.
It is further damage to traumatized groups of people disguised as help.
It is a backward step disguised as forward movement.
So you can hear all of the common targets and then the rhetorical binary cadence that illuminates her polarized view.
Now, beyond this taste of her oratory, I won't spend a lot of time on the content here because it's very thin.
You can tell that it's a new subject for Swan because there just aren't any details.
There's no broader framing.
A lot of the text rolls out like a chat GPT string that follows the prompt, write an SEO blog post about why woke culture is bad.
And her unfamiliarity with the material is flagged by the overuse of stock constructions like the problem in today's society is.
She never defines the terms, never gives examples of the behaviors she's criticizing.
She doesn't locate the origins of the word woke in black liberation politics, signifying the moment of waking up to the reality of structural racism.
Unlike her content that shows a passing understanding of psychological concepts like attachment theory and personality disorders, here she is really over her head.
Now, the hand-waving vagueness that leans on keywords may work in her favor, because the New Age milieu she operates in is chronically depoliticized.
This is a demographic in which it's common to believe that political consciousness is just too low-vibe, and in which an obsessive preoccupation with the project of self-improvement really doesn't leave any room or time for civic engagement.
So, within this context, the video has pulled over 120,000 views and generated more than 4,000 comments in 6 days.
At the top of this spot, I pointed to the convergence between Swan's video and Representative Jim Banks' formation of the Anti-Woke Caucus.
And I'm just going to quote from his manifesto here as an example of anti-woke discourse that isn't vague at all.
He writes, We no longer live in a normal America.
The issues that Congress used to take up, like health care, the economy, or our withdrawal from Afghanistan, all regrettably pale in comparison to the creeping tyranny which nearly all Americans now feel.
The nation's most powerful forces, our intelligence agencies, corporations, the press, our universities, and even our military are all pressing further and further into uncharted territory from which it's not clear America can return.
For the time being, saving America rests in the House of Representatives.
The most toxic part of this tyranny is its doctrine, wokeness.
Everyone has by now heard this word, but it means something very specific.
It means that all the so-called oppressor groups must be punished for their past and present alleged sins.
There are many steps to punishing them, inducing self-hatred through indoctrination, stripping away their rights by not enforcing the laws on their behalf, Public humiliation, hatred, expropriation, and ultimately violence.
That's what the left has done so far.
It's not exactly clear yet how far this can go.
So, unlike Swann, Banks knows exactly what he's talking about in political terms, and unlike Swann, he's pointing fingers and naming names.
So he's full mask-off moral panicking here.
Swann's version is softer, more non-dual.
She's appealing to her listeners' inherent spiritual superiority.
And to be fair, she might in her mind only really be referring to the most vexatious examples of progressive navel-gazing, as in the work of Robin DiAngelo.
But when she says that wokeism is racism dressed up as anti-racism, she lumps DiAngelo in with Kendi.
The jury is out on how far she'll take her polemic.
With as much engagement heat as she's getting, we've seen this over and over again with online radicalization, there will be powerful incentives to go farther.
Wherever she winds up, the question remains, what connects Swan as a late satanic panic influencer to this current thirst for reactionary culture war positions?
We can look first at a pragmatic pathway.
By the summer of 2021, a number of the New Age, conspiracy-theorizing influencers we follow here on the podcast started to turn their attention away from the QAnon fever dream to the increasingly mainstream moral panic driven by heterodox Twitter celebrities like James Lindsay and Jordan Peterson.
This panic over wokeness.
Here's a really good example of that drift from a massage therapist and retreat leader named Bernard Gunter, who posted to Facebook on June 7th, 2021, the following.
At this point, anyone in the health, healing, spiritual wellness community, including any artists and musicians who do not use their popularity and social reach to speak out against any aspects of the pathological woke ideology, including the racist critical race theory, is complicit even by being silent about it.
It's a litmus test for their conscience, level of embodiment, critical thinking skills, and if they've they value truth, integrity and dignity over self-interest,
career, money, fame, and mob pressure, public image, being concerned what others think
of them, based on postmodern cultural Marxist brainwashing. That's my unpopular opinion
on it seeing how this dangerous anti-divine woke virus keeps infecting the world and the
minds of people and will have the most devastating effects on children for generations to
come."
So lots of hackneyed dog whistles in there.
One standout is the reference to postmodern cultural Marxism, which not only cashes in on the Jordan Peterson weather system, but it retains the anti-Semitic themes of Gunther's previous, up until that point at least, obsession with QAnon.
Because just one year before, Gunther was up to his throat chakra in the storm.
In a 24,000 word essay that's still up on his New Age coaching site, he tried to bring an attitude of spiritual rationalism to the project of taking QAnon seriously.
So what happened between June of 2020 and June of 2021?
I don't know anything about Gunther's soul journey, but from the outside it looks like it was a sensible move for him and others to shift focus away from QAnon, a brand in decline.
The January 6th capital siege indelibly linked QAnon to domestic terrorism.
And then we had the deletion of vast networks of QAnon influencers and groups from social channels like Facebook and Twitter, and that severely curtailed the monetization potential of QAnon rhetoric.
And then Cullen Hoback's cue into the Storm documentary pretty much stitched up the origin story of the global fever dream by pinning the scam on a nihilistic, porn-obsessed tech bro named Ron Watkins.
So with all this negative press piling up, it made a lot of sense to shift discourse onto a parallel, more socially acceptable track.
And this was a trend we noticed on the ground while reporting throughout 2021.
Yoga and wellness influencers who had flirted hard with QAnon were suddenly backing away, erasing posts, answering questions cagily.
I asked Booty Yoga founder Busy Gold in October of 2020 about a video she appeared in where she said things like, the transhumanist agenda, it completely matches up with the satanic agenda, with all the adrenochrome stuff.
And when I asked her about it, she emailed back to say that her concern was about the dangers of transhumanism and the AI agenda.
She wrote, I don't talk about the Q movement or post about it, so definitely not interested in talking about something I already stay out of.
My concern is with the proliferation of technology and big government.
That is unrelated to things like QAnon.
Mm-kay.
Now, why is Swann 19 months behind Gunther's leap into the anti-woke fray?
One good thing we can say about Swan is that she doesn't tend to move quickly on the news cycle.
She is not hard-pressed to maintain or grow her following, so her YouTube channel is like an ocean liner.
It's well-stocked, there's good ballast, disciplined service, and a DJ spinning Vangelis in the banquet hall.
She doesn't need to chase down the news cycle in rapid-fire fashion.
She's already well monetized.
But beneath the pragmatism of following that sweet, sweet engagement honey, there's a deep thematic issue at play that connects Swan's satanic panic past with her potential culture war future.
And here it is.
The Satanic Panic was and is a deeply reactionary cultural spasm that used the fiction of Satan to reinvigorate the need for divine salvation in a Cold War world.
It imagined a phantasm of organized, otherworldly violence that conveniently displaced guilt and anxiety over continued Western imperialism and growing inequality at home and globally.
It obscured the more difficult, mundane reality that child sexual abuse most often occurs at home, perpetrated by people who are harder to isolate and demonize, harder to disentangle from the core culture, harder to call evil.
Parents and caregivers who commit crimes against children not because they are worshipping Satan, but because they are deeply broken people, living in deeply broken social systems for which we are all responsible.
Is this ringing a bell?
The Satanic Panic is and was a deeply anti-liberal, anti-secular movement that sought to re-evangelize the world with religious and specifically Catholic vibes.
Lawrence Pazder rejected his own training in psychiatry to fixate on the cosmic religious drama of his wife, Michelle Smith, who overcame Satanic abuse through her direct connection to the Virgin Mary.
His movement was obsessed with notions of sexual deviancy, and this had grave consequences for LGBTQ plus people.
It was misogynistic because it played upon tropes of the absent or frigid mother, lovelessly throwing her children into dodgy daycare centers where if you pulled up the floorboards you would find dungeons.
Is this sounding familiar?
The Satanic Panic was and is a counter-revolutionary movement that has always posited sensational and morbid causes for the everyday cruelties of capitalism.
Coming in hot at the tail end of the 1960s, it tried to close the door on social movements that located suffering in history and structural violence against women, black people, and queer people.
The satanic panic said, no, hold up.
The real problem is still Satan walking among us in the form of the depraved.
It's not us.
It's not the immiseration of the working class.
It's not the overconsumption of the privileged or our inability to hold the powerful to account.
It's nothing material that we can do anything about in the world.
Rather, it is Satan attacking us metaphysically and personally.
And so we must arm ourselves with spiritual practice, and that means we will turn away from the hard work of mutual aid.
The Satanic Panic was and is a politically ambivalent landscape that was able to clothe itself in progressivism through saving the children and in feminism through believing the women while concealing its reactionary tendencies.
It made for strange alliances between feminist psychotherapists who asked their clients leading questions as they grappled with the mystery of memory, and Christian fundamentalists who assumed Satan was always hard at work.
Does this sound familiar?
We might plot out the same mismatches today in alliances between gender-critical feminists and the Matt Walsh Brigade, and now in the building resonance between Swan's female empowerment brand and Jordan Peterson's anti-woke I doubt that Teal Swan has thought very much about what bothers her so deeply about the so-called woke agenda.
I suppose I could smash like and subscribe and find out more, but I'm willing to bet that the main thing that chaps her ass about the progressive social politics she's learned enough to complain about is that it downgrades the sanctity of the individual victim and survivor, especially if she's white.
It tarnishes the halo of the heroic, suffering savior.
For self-help prophets like Swan, the real sin of wokeness is that it finds harm in structures instead of finding evil in people.
It distributes suffering along a horizon of social oppressions rather than locating it in heroic stories of personal trauma.
It shows that our problems are too shared and intertwined to be resolved by self-help alone, and so when Swan attacks whatever she thinks wokeism is, she is reasserting that social healing is subordinate to personal healing, and that real leadership is spiritual rather than political and ideally informed by evidence.
And on that note of evidence, of how we know things, the Satanic Panic was and is a deeply anti-evidence based movement that launched 12,000 criminal cases in the 1980s and 1990s against people accused of satanic ritual abuse, but none of these cases turned up physical evidence.
It is a movement rooted in the sanctity of intuition and the reification of nightmares, in which progressive, Bay Area creative writing teachers like Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, authors of The Courage to Heal, guided their students to dig deep to find memories of familial abuse, and if they found none, to dig deeper using creative writing prompts.
It is a movement in which survivors like Teal Swan likewise suggest to their followers that if they are conscious of their trauma, they are not yet spiritually evolved.
Swan's personal survivorship has won her exclusive and mystical insight into the nature of evil and the processes of enlightenment that work for everyone.
Contrast this way of knowing the world with the findings of, say, critical race theory, which isn't about intuition at all.
It's about crunching the hard data of wage theft, mortgage redlining, and the outcomes of countless criminal cases to show incontrovertibly that American companies, institutions, and governments perpetuate structural racism.
The founders of critical race theory did not go into hypnotic trance states to discover the truth about how black men are sentenced differently from white men for the same crimes.
They did not go on retreat to Costa Rica to understand how school districting can perpetuate cycles of economic distress.
They created a precise and testable map of the social world through a process beyond Swann's grasp and interest.
They did peer-reviewed research.
And the thing about being an intuitive, starseed-channeling prophet is that no one can check your work.
And when no one can check your work, let's be honest, your job is just easier.
When you can sell opinions on trauma online without a license, what will hold you in check?
What will push back?
What will reflect back to you the limitations of your view?
And where will your performance review come from?
These days, it will come from the engagement metrics.
So it's little wonder that Swan and other self-help influencers are irked by a social movement that focuses on accountability and material change.
By contrast, spirituality is just easier, and this is an embarrassment because Swan and others have clothed their wares in the language of ultimate human value.
Her main product is called the completion process, after all.
And the progressivism she is now turning against is saying, Starseed, when you come back from your retreat in Costa Rica, the world will be even more unequal and unjust than before, and you may not have anything but your own self-satisfaction to offer it.
So what wokeism really does is that it puts the self-project in its place and it says, okay, yeah, sort out your heart the best you can.
Not because that's the most important thing on its own, but so that your personal baggage doesn't sabotage the friendships and coalitions you've got to go on to form as you find your place in the work of really changing things.
