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July 6, 2023 - Conspirituality

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161: The Timeline is Chaotic (Conspirituality Audiobook Excerpt)

Matthew narrates the first three sections of the audiobook, Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat. More information on our book here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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	Hello everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality Podcast where we investigate the intersection
	of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian
	extremism.
	My name is Matthew Remske.
	You can catch us on Instagram at conspiritualitypod and support us at patreon.com slash conspirituality, where for $5 a month you'll have access to ad-free main episodes and Saturday briefs, as well as over a hundred Monday bonus episodes, plus live streams and AMAs at the $10 tier.
	In the housekeeping department, I'd just like to flag our ongoing coverage of RFK Jr.' 's conspirituality campaign.
	So this past Saturday, I published a brief interview with Friend of the Pod and historian of American fitness culture, Natalia Petruzzella, who shed light on Bobby Muscles and his recent workout campaign videos from the barbell patio of Gold's Gym in Venice Beach.
	We discussed sweat-washing, the body-shaming of soft liberals, and the ongoing legacy of go-you-chicken-fat-go from the John F. Kennedy era.
	The Bobby coverage will continue this Saturday with Derek's brief report on the candidate's recent online health summit, which gave a taste of how a Kennedy health agency might be staffed with some of the worst people in the world.
	On the panel were Mickey Willis, Sayerji, Sherry Tenpenny, And Del Bigtree, all moderated by Charles Eisenstein, who believes that shifts in collective consciousness are allowing the timeline of alien disclosure to manifest, which is a sign that the campaign of Bobby Muscles is also a quantum shamanic healing phenomenon.
	But today, I'm very pleased to introduce a sit back and relax episode for us and for yourselves.
	We're going to run the first 40 minutes of the audiobook version of our book, which is called Conspiratuality, How New Conspiracy Theories Became a Hell Threat.
	So, this is episode 161.
	The timeline is chaotic, which is a quote from the opening pages.
	The narrator for the audiobook is yours truly.
	I had the pleasure of recording the whole 14 hours over an intense but happy week this past March at Noble Street Studios here in Toronto, guided by Hachette audio producer Elise Green, audio director Allison Elliott-Yarden, and studio engineer Mike Nakato.
	So today, you'll hear the preface, the introduction, and chapter one, which is called Charlotte's Web.
	We hope you enjoy it, we hope you buy the book, and if you do read or listen to it, please leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads or both.
	Prologue.
	March 2020.
	A friend of a friend is suddenly posting on Facebook several times a day.
	The mood is a strange blend of terror, belligerence, and sanctimony.
	She isn't scared of a little virus like COVID.
	Fear of the virus is more dangerous than the virus itself, she says.
	But new 5G cell towers?
	These were destroying our collective immune system.
	She questions the accuracy of PCR tests and then suggests they are actually causing the infections.
	One of her posts links to an article on a dodgy-looking alt-health site.
	You click through, but then bounce when you see links in the margins to articles about vaccines and autism and cilantro curing cancer.
	The comments in her feed are a dogpile of agitated folks overusing phrases that ping-pong between ominous and ecstatic.
	The agenda of powers that be, and everything is unfolding according to source.
	Who is this person?
	She led classes at your local yoga studio?
	You actually like her.
	Her classes were helpful during that rough patch in your life.
	She talked about loving your body and making peace with what is.
	Her voice was soothing.
	She was persuasive when she criticized conventional doctors for not connecting physical health to emotional health.
	While your family doctor didn't ask you a single question before writing you a script for Ambien, this yoga teacher connected you with an herbalist who did acupuncture.
	You went to two appointments and they were great.
	You discussed your dreams while he stuck needles in your back.
	He talked about chamomile tea and valerian root tinctures, about how deep breathing resets your nervous system.
	Now, her studio is shuttered by COVID-19 lockdown.
	Your friendly yoga teacher seems to have ditched her own breathing exercises in the scramble to keep business flowing.
	She's posting at all hours.
	It's hard to know when she sleeps.
	She intersperses her red alerts with livestream yoga classes.
	There's always a Venmo link in the top comment.
	She waves Sage around in front of her webcam and asks why the hell yoga isn't considered an essential service since there was nothing better for the immune system.
	The doctors aren't telling us that, she complains with a knowing smile before stretching into a downward dog.
	Speaking of essential services, she half-jokes.
	Essential oils were helping to keep her calm and balanced.
	DM her for details.
	Thieves Oil is an amazing antiseptic, by the way.
	One dude who shows up on every thread had recently left an office job to become an empowered men's life coach.
	He can't contain his contempt for people who are living in fear.
	Crossfitters lament being locked out of their boxes and share shrill articles about vitamin D and kimchi while claiming face masks are petri dishes for bacteria.
	Another regular is a doula who writes a mommy blog.
	She shares a paranoid post claiming that toddlers were all terrified of adults and masks.
	They were forgetting who their mothers were.
	And that herbalist the yoga teacher referred you to?
	There he is, proudly declaring he doesn't believe in germ theory.
	Yes, the same guy who stuck needles in your back.
	New German medicine is now his thing.
	Viruses are essential to our evolution, he announces.
	Join me on Telegram for more of the truth they don't want you to hear.
	The ominous mood is periodically relieved by posts from holistic healers who want to reassure everyone that everything is going according to plan.
	All the fear and uncertainty, just natural responses to a transformational time.
	A new phrase starts popping up.
	The Great Awakening.
	Within a few months, the ideas and memes are replicating and mutating as quickly as COVID-19 itself, infecting mutual friends, even showing up in your DMs.
	Make sure to watch this before they take it down, followed by a YouTube link to a homemade video with a weird voiceover and tons of graphics with statistics about something.
	You can't tell for sure because the uploader never linked to sources.
	More DMs.
	Coming from randos, they're strange.
	From in-real-life friends, the messages feel claustrophobic.
	And coming from family members, they're downright distressing.
	Mom, why are you sharing this with me?
	And just when you think it can't get any more tense or weird, it becomes clear that many of these posters are either promoting or getting drawn into uncharacteristic political invective.
	Worse, all of it is trending hard right wing just as the 2020 election campaign is ramping up.
	Someone you know to be gaga about organic food and ayahuasca posts a sermon from an angel channeler who had a vision that Trump was a light worker.
	A guy who leads chakra workshops for men and who once campaigned for Bernie Sanders is posting about Joe Biden being in the pocket of the Chinese.
	The timeline is chaotic, but cryptic hashtags keep it strung together.
	Hashtag Save the Children.
	Hashtag Trust the Plan.
	Hashtag Enjoy the Show.
	Hashtag WWG1WGA.
	It's chilling, because you've heard these terms in a news report about QAnon, an online conspiracy theory that was melting brains and ruining families.
	Saving the children referred to the belief among anons that elites around the world existed to perpetuate child sex trafficking.
	The show pointed to their belief that their invisible prophet, Q, was battling said elites in lockstep with Donald Trump according to the plan.
	Victory was a foregone conclusion.
	The weird string of letters was for the rally cry, Where We Go One, We Go All, which they believed had been embossed on the bell of a sailboat owned by John F. Kennedy, who for some represented the last sitting president to challenge the American political orthodoxy.
	Other anons came to believe he would return from the dead.
	Your yoga teacher starts looking more underslept on her stream, twitchier.
	She starts featuring some guy, probably dating him, who sells supplements and leads seminars on Bitcoin.
	They publish a couple's livestream titled, Nothing Can Stop What Is Coming.
	What happened to these people, most of whom you knew to be educated, well-meaning, politically liberal, or at least moderate?
	and generally kind? How, with all their talk about healing and oneness, had they fallen
	into a rabbit hole of right-wing paranoia scented with new-age candles? Where would it all lead?
	Introduction If you've chosen this audiobook, there's a good chance that
	the landscape of our prologue feels familiar. In early March 2020, a lot of us noticed
	our social media feeds starting to prickle with uneasy questions.
	Is this virus thing serious?
	Should we be cancelling that trip?
	Infection rates of something called COVID-19 were spiking somewhere.
	There were x- and y-axis graphs to prove it.
	The upward line looked like a hockey stick.
	By mid-month, the clues and whispers crystallized in a world-stopping declaration from the World Health Organization.
	The NBA cancelled its season, as though turning off a light.
	Schools shuttered and church services were bumped to Zoom.
	Restaurants closed and the mail ground to a halt.
	The big box stores scrambled to put spacing stickers in the checkout lines.
	There was a weird run on toilet paper.
	Did you have enough flour at home?
	Alcohol wipes?
	What exactly were you supposed to wipe down, anyway?
	What would the children do, and what would you do with them at home all day?
	By April, the challenge became balancing doomscrolling with the search for reliable info on what Are Not meant.
	We learned about flattening the curve and how to wash our hands long enough to sing Happy Birthday twice.
	Crafters started making masks at home from fabric ends with pockets for coffee filters.
	Facebook groups formed to collate the most helpful information about keeping safe or to organize grocery runs for shut-ins.
	But soon, among the images of hospital chaos in Italy and cruise ships docked like floating leper colonies, an even more curdled version of social media emerged.
	An anti-social petri dish of rumors and accusations.
	Are we being lied to, yet again?
	What are the Chinese up to?
	Was it a bioweapon targeting Western democracy?
	Is 5G making us sick?
	Why are we getting mixed messages about masks?
	To be fair, folks prone to conspiracy theories had a lot to pull on when it came to the ragged fabric of public health communications.
	Introverted policy wonks were suddenly in the limelight, interpreting changing and complex emergency data for a headline-hungry news cycle.
	They tried their best to thread the needle between this is a dangerous time and we'll do just fine.
	But every day, their anxious, meandering, or incomplete statements threw the red meat of controversy into the jaws of the social media beast, fueling the fire of fantasy and paranoia.
	First came the warning about COVID spreading on surfaces.
	People spent frantic hours disinfecting grocery bags, bank cards, car keys, and door handles.
	But suddenly the science changed, or rather developed, and we learned the term hygiene theater.
	It made a lot of people feel as if they had been silly or neurotic.
	Infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, who'd cut his public health teeth on the AIDS crisis decades earlier, unintentionally contributed to the early confusion.
	At first, he advised the public not to wear masks, but did not disclose that this was based on a supply concern that vulnerable health care workers must not run out of masks.
	When the headlines pointed to aerosolization as the primary route of contagion, suddenly masks were essential for everyone.
	At first, cloth was fine.
	Then it was blue surgical masks.
	Eventually, it had to be N95s.
	Could you catch COVID outside?
	At the outset, major newspapers said, yes you can.
	Hypervigilant readers rained down a highbrow resentment on spring break beach partiers.
	Conservatives decried the framing of Black Lives Matter protests as acceptable, even noble, while churches or workplaces were shuttered.
	Were PCR tests reliable?
	Accessible?
	What did rapid flow mean?
	And who could be trusted to explain it?
	On the vaccine front, history will show that the COVID response was a wonder of global innovation and adaptation.
	But the news fog through which it was first told was garbled with amplified panic over exceedingly rare side effects.
	The mayor of Detroit turned away thousands of doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, appeasing his citizens' inflated fears over the rare incidence of blood clotting as a side effect.
	Then, Pfizer released a flawed report on vaccine injuries.
	It would take many months for it to become clear that each facepalm in science communications, each vague reassurance, each bylaw that restricted employment but failed to support workers edging toward bankruptcy, each whiff of hypocrisy from public officials or opportunism from drug companies landed on cultural wounds that crossed political boundaries.
	While well-meaning researchers and scientists were constantly working to keep up with the evolving science and offer the best assessments they could with the evidence at hand, social media was working in binaries to punish anything perceived as flip-flopping.
	This gave everyone who was already on the edge of institutional distrust a boost of validation and a broader demographic to engage.
	The official responses to the COVID-19 pandemic illuminated the opacity of medical bureaucracy.
	The changing rules and the jargon they were delivered in reminded many of every confusing and queasy doctor's office visit they'd had.
	Lockdowns reminded some of all the times it felt like the cure was worse than the disease.
	COVID exposed the craven policies of governments interested in health only as far as it could keep people working.
	It made many people feel, more powerfully than ever before, that they live in an age in which they are surveilled but neglected, in which they are managed but not heard.
	In hindsight, this very real social precarity and sense of institutional betrayal helped to foster an urgent desire for novel answers and individual empowerment.
	And increasingly antisocial media began to crackle with vaguely connected phrases and memes that were both paranoid and strangely overly confident.
	People were posting about COVID as if they had better intel than public health officials, a better grasp of the big picture.
	They had a secret knowledge they were compelled to share, even if the details were sketchy.
	According to them, something far more terrible than a pandemic was unfolding.
	In reality, the posters argued, the pandemic was a ruse through which governments, big pharma, and amoral tech companies could execute ancient plans for world domination.
	The sacred circle of family and nature, from which health and fulfillment flow, was under attack.
	At a certain point, it might have clicked that some of these posts weren't coming from the usual cage-fighting political pro wrestlers.
	The paranoia had a goop-y glow.
	The pandemic had inflamed an obsession with health.
	Not the public type of health.
	Now caricatured by tedious messages about social distancing and masks, but an impassioned, moralizing fetish for personal health that is preoccupied with low body fat, supplements, positive thinking, sugar elimination, and focus on the soul.
	As veterans of wellness and yoga practices and their volatile business climates, the three of us knew the scene and had heard the jargon, just not at this shrill pitch.
	In fact, Conspirituality, as we named the podcast we scrambled together by May 2020, is at least a century old, and we'd been picking at its modern threads for over a decade.
	In its current form, we see it as an online religion that fuses two faith claims.
	One, the world is possessed by evil forces, and two, those who see this clearly are called to foster, in themselves and others, a new spiritual paradigm.
	By chance, we had the chops to hack into this tangle, and quickly.
	Derek had been covering the pseudoscience of alternative health grifts as a journalist.
	Julian was a noted yoga world skeptic.
	I had graduated from years spent in two spiritual cults and into the world of anti-cult activism and research.
	All three of us loved our ragtag chosen family of yoga enthusiasts, meditators, herbalists, organic farmers, and plant medicine psychonauts.
	We'd seen the clear benefits of non-conventional and personalized wellness practices in our lives, how non-traditional spiritualities could help mend the wounds left by big religion and fill the space where conventional medicine had failed its patients.
	But we also knew that this culture emerged in an ideological and economic landscape that churned out spiritual junk food, emotional manipulation, and pseudo-political demagoguery.
	We knew of vulnerable people who went to Reiki masters believing that warm hands hovering over their abdomens could heal their diabetes or endometriosis.
	We knew of drug addicts who had used yoga practice to help create new lives, only to find themselves ensnared in yoga cults.
	We heard stories about cancer patients on pilgrimage to rural Brazil to undergo psychic surgery by John of God, who, by the way, now sits in jail convicted of multiple rapes.
	We also had our own stories.
	When Derek was 30, he was having anxiety and panic attacks.
	Over time, they became intolerable.
	He tried yoga and meditation, and even spent six months on a benzodiazepine.
	Then he found Edgar—not his real name—a homeopath for Manhattan's jet set.
	The initial consultation was long and probing, and it involved a series of very personal questions.
	He would later wonder about the point of this line of questioning.
	How could it possibly relate to the treatment, given that most homeopathic products have no active ingredient and therefore no possible physiological benefit?
	But he was desperate for relief.
	He received a series of costly prescriptions for sugar pills with Latinate names.
	After four failed attempts at finding the right formulation, he lost faith in the treatment and stopped seeing Edgar.
	His anxiety attacks never stopped.
	When Derek was diagnosed with testicular cancer in his mid-thirties, his hometown New Jersey friends rallied around him.
	But some of his friends and colleagues in the Los Angeles yoga and wellness worlds, where he'd taught classes for years, turned cold, sanctimonious.
	Your cancer happened for a reason, they told him.
	They were hinting at the New Age dogma of personal spiritual responsibility, which is used both to explain aberrations that disrupt the idealized world of love and light, and to blame people for remaining sick, even when they are chanting all the right mantras.
	The truth, of course, was that Derek's cancer had real-world causes.
	As a boy, he had an undescended testicle that required hormone therapy, a strong predictor for his eventual diagnosis.
	Derek also grew up overweight, and the scars of being bullied lasted for decades.
	In his mid-twenties, working in the wellness industry as a yoga instructor, music producer, and health journalist tilted him toward developing orthorexia, an eating disorder centered on an obsession with pure, or clean, foods.
	It's a disorder that can lead to malnutrition, chaotic weight fluctuations, and social isolation in the singular pursuit of health.
	It took Derek 15 years to leave the fad diet hamster wheel as he realized that wellness world fat shaming was a professionalized and socially acceptable form of bullying.
	It sharpened his radar for seeing how pseudoscience intersects with ableism to devastating psychological effect.
	A big chunk of his health journalism went on to expose how wellness influencers, most of them not certified in nutritional sciences, capitalize on bodily dysmorphia to promote certain foods and demonize others, often for profit, while overlooking the reality that many people don't have access to healthy foods in general.
	Julian's first experience of the yoga world, at 23, was shaped by his relationship with Anna Forrest, a world-renowned teacher who described herself as the alpha dog of her tightly-knit group.
	Forrest had a gruesome backstory of abuse and addiction, which she would recount at every sharing circle and workshop.
	She also had an ever-changing cast of studio managers, employee teachers, friends, and lovers who would fall in and out of favor, with the door locks being changed after each dramatic new banishment.
	She gave Julian a job and affirmed his gifts, but she also meddled in his personal relationships and convinced him, along with many in the community, that he must have repressed horrific family trauma memories of the sort she believed her approach to yoga could heal.
	Disenchanted by how pop spirituality seemed to deny suffering in the name of magical thinking, Julian was captivated by Forrest's emphasis on facing one's demons.
	It turned out that Forrest had been influenced by a hypnotherapist who had guided her to her own recovered memories of awful abuse both in this life and in previous lives.
	Her unqualified and projective diagnosis of Julian was incorrect and subsequently devastated his relationship with his parents and younger brother for the better part of 15 years.
	In his late 30s, Julian watched a friend and fellow teacher, Psalm Isidora, grow to national prominence on the strength of claiming to have found an approach to tantric yoga that had completely healed the trauma she sustained as a child in a fundamentalist Christian cult.
	Isidora had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was open about believing her yoga had replaced the need for medication.
	As her star rose, she started undergoing multiple rounds of plastic surgery, presenting herself in increasingly sexualized ways, and was cast in a reality TV show on the Playboy channel.
	Isadora was heralded as an inspiring voice for traumatized women, an exemplar of resilience, healing, and empowerment, until she tragically died from suicide at 42 while trying to kick her Xanax and alcohol dependency.
	She had gone cold turkey under pressure from a close group of friends who believed they could support her through it at home.
	The tragedy dovetailed with a tendency Julian had seen in Yoga World to frame mental illness as either a spiritual gift or something that could be balanced out by enough yoga, meditation, wheatgrass juice, or going gluten-free.
	Yoga, meditation, and other practices of self-expression have remained important in Julian's life.
	But for him, it was clear that the spiritual marketplace, with its charismatic figures and ungrounded philosophies, often created more suffering than salvation.
	As an antidote, he turned towards science and psychology and went to therapy.
	When the crisis of conspirituality hit in 2020, he felt like he had some solid tools to deal with the trauma and to protect himself from figures who might take advantage of his vulnerability.
	I came to the Conspirituality Beat through the world of cult recovery.
	The first group I was recruited into in 1996 was founded and led by the American Neo-Buddhist monk Michael Roach.
	I first went to see him speak in a church when he swung through town accompanied by his entourage of beaming college dropouts who sat in a circle at his feet.
	At one point, it seemed that Roach looked directly into my soul, even though the place was packed, as he said, You're going to die.
	What are you doing about it?
	I felt something crack inside.
	I was at a low point, a crossroads in work and personal relationships.
	Looking back, I was likely suffering from undiagnosed depression.
	But suddenly, here was somebody, a white guy like me, but in maroon robes out of the Middle Ages, who seemed to be speaking the truth amid all the ennui, cutting through the hypocrisies and dissociations of modern life.
	This was a person with an urgent message.
	That's what I wanted to be.
	Within months, I was following Roach around the world, tasked with transcribing and editing his talks for publication.
	My close attention to Roach's teachings helped me see something earlier than I otherwise might have.
	Roach purported to teach a strictly traditional Tibetan Buddhism, rooted in the renunciation of worldly concerns in order to develop limitless compassion.
	His capacity to recite long passages of Tibetan scripture from memory was impressive.
	But before long, it became clear to me that Roach was also making shit up, branding a strange cocktail of tantric worship and prosperity gospel hopium.
	He was clearly chasing big money, proselytizing to oligarchs from Hong Kong to Moscow about how Buddhism offered a pathway to ethical financial success.
	He was also exploiting his young followers, who were positioned within the group to become teachers in their own right, but typically failed to launch.
	One woman, decades his junior, played the role of Roach's spiritual partner, which meant eating from the same plate, never standing more than 15 feet away from him, and eventually living with him for a three-year retreat in a yurt in the Arizona desert, practicing sexual yoga.
	Years after I had gotten out, Ian Thorson, one of Roche's closest disciples, died of dehydration and malnutrition in that desert, just beyond the boundaries of Roche's retreat center.
	Helping to break this news as a former insider catapulted me into cult journalism.
	I published a series of gonzo articles about Roche's group and my memories of Ian, including details about Ian's fragile mental health.
	It took Roach only two months into the pandemic to market an online meditation program designed to plant seeds to eradicate the virus.
	After pulling myself out of Roach's cult, I was recruited into another.
	It's called cult hopping and it happens to people who can't find a social and psychological bridge back to reality.
	This second group, in southern Wisconsin, was called Endeavor Academy.
	The group's daily activities revolved around a book called A Course in Miracles, a sort of post-Christian Bible for New Agers, popularized by the media magnate Louise Hay and perennial presidential hopeful Marianne Williamson.
	While at Endeavor, I watched Gloria, who was in her 60s, wither and die of aggressive cancer because the group's ideology valued miracles over medicine, and because Charles Anderson, the dry-drunk ex-marine spiritual leader, pretended he could heal disciples with his energy.
	I never knew Gloria's real name, but I knew that the group leaders didn't even notify her children when she stopped eating or when she collapsed for what turned out to be the final time during an ecstatic prayer session.
	I got out of Anderson's cult in 2003.
	Having strained my family connections and stalled out on my university prospects, I wound up hanging around the yoga and wellness world as a gig worker for another 15 years.
	It felt safer for a while.
	But over time, it became clear that the dynamics that could crystallize into the brick-and-mortar cults I'd been caught up in—dynamics such as deception, hype, and charismatic leadership—were common throughout the yoga and wellness world.
	The industry was decentralized and baldly entrepreneurial, but it functioned as a petri dish incubating clumps of high-demand groups.
	Although we came to this project from different angles—cancer, deaths, cults—one thing we all shared was the whoosh of riding yoga's economic boom as young gig workers in the aughts.
	It's given us a felt sense of how the current explosion of conspirituality is wedded to the drivers of the wellness economy.
	As an online religion, conspirituality today is not just a set of ideas that people come to value in their quiet and humble hearts.
	It is generated and circulated by virtual churches, revival meetings, and seance sessions in the form of small group courses and mastermind Zoom meetings.
	How these religious networks function is inseparable from their means of support.
	The line between virtual worship and the e-commerce that drives it is very hard to find.
	All of this comes at the tail end of a decades long process.
	Up until 2005, yoga teachers and meditation instructors would market themselves by posting paper flyers around town at health food stores, coffee shops, and on notice boards of the studios they gigged at.
	Workshops, retreats, and weekly classes all required their own branded angle, benefits, and style.
	Their personal inkjet printers were working overtime, and the most online anyone got was to post workshop announcements on MySpace.
	Suddenly, flyers required website addresses where people could find out more and sign up.
	Then came email lists, newsletters, subscriptions to newsletters.
	Leaders in the field were often former corporate executives who had left the rat race for the lifestyle race.
	They knew all about branding and customer experience.
	They could soft-sell their communities of loyal fans.
	Top earners, or those who pretended to be, produced video courses about online marketing, email capture widgets, social media ads, Google keywords, and content marketing in the form of blog posts and videos.
	And what good was all of it without selling products?
	DVDs, supplements, premium video courses, all of which were promised to generate oodles of passive income while spreading the gospel of spiritual prosperity.
	The movement matured to produce affiliate marketing schemes centered on free digital summits that allowed otherwise competing influencers access to shared lists and audiences.
	By the time COVID hit, a well-oiled internet machinery was in place to reach millions of people across multiple platforms through massive online conferences.
	Conversion funnels turned consumers into members of in-groups, receiving not only dangerous propaganda, but also special early-access offers for online misinformation seminars.
	The exponential growth in these campaigns mirrored the infinite promises of the new age, but also the growth of COVID-19 transmission rates and case numbers.
	What we didn't realize until years later was that this whirlwind of marketing techniques and sales funnels functioned as a delivery system for the pieces of a disturbing historical puzzle we can now identify as soft eugenics.
	Modern yoga and wellness, which echoed with a kind of now depoliticized body fascism that was over a century old, was being laundered through aspirational consumerism so that its sexist, racist, and violent implications were almost invisible.
	These were techniques by which we could constantly judge ourselves against impossible ideals of physical and moral fitness, and perform our virtues or confess our sins to dominant figures who held charismatic power.
	Those authorities assessed us with a warmed-over version of the 19th century pseudoscience of physiognomy, the premise that the appearance and performance of one's body revealed character and social value.
	We didn't recognize the ableism that could easily curdle an otherwise wholesome yogic worldview, especially through the influence of American individualism.
	The twisted message was that if a person was injured or disabled, they were revealing the karmic punishment of their own unprocessed trauma.
	We didn't recognize the eugenics theme running unconsciously through all of it—that flaws in bodies should be identified, corrected, and bred out of existence so that they no longer troubled the advancement of human evolution or the conscience of the privileged.
	At the time, we didn't understand that these obsessions with posture, bodily strength, and purity have always been foundational to the politics of us versus them that divides the worthy from the degenerate.
	We didn't recognize that we were stretching and twisting in the internalized echo of cruel beliefs about the body, mixed up with evergreen prejudices against the disabled, women, and minorities.
	We've covered one yoga and wellness influencer after another who have seemingly lost their minds to conspirituality.
	A common refrain we've heard from our podcast listeners is this, Well, at least the pandemic has forced people to show their true colors.
	True enough, but there was something broader and deeper at play than personal eccentricities.
	What awakened in 2020 were the sleeping values of a century before.
	The conspirituality explosion was in part a story of bad historical ideas bursting out of their hidey holes in the gentrified yoga studios of the global north.
	These studios, along with their studio-type adjacent businesses that offer bodywork and life coaching, provided an infrastructure that was ready for the conspirituality moment.
	The bar for achieving conspirituality influence lowered at the same moment the stakes were rising.
	The monetization of the supposed Great Awakening—the familiar prophecy of a world-enlightening spiritual revelation now framed through the promise of freedom from a trance state induced by the evil cabal behind the COVID-19 hoax—no longer required lifelong investments from a small number of dedicated enthusiasts.
	In a moment of peak cultural anxiety, COVID-contrarian gurus could throw off their brick-and-mortar limitations, recreate themselves on Instagram, and get paid through subscriptions as they learned how to use the algorithms of these platforms to spread misinformation.
	The three of us have collaborated on Yoga World cultural criticism since meeting as bloggers in 2011.
	We read each other's work, discussed and sometimes debated the labyrinths of religious vs. spiritual, cultural appropriation, spiritual bypassing, and the problem of cults.
	At the end of April 2020, Derek published an explainer piece on a new term he'd come across—conspiratuality.
	A month later, the New Age-inflected anti-vax documentary Plandemic went viral, prompting Julian to publish a viral piece titled The Red Pill Overlap, tracking the incursions of far-right ideology into Yogaland.
	Within a week, we were on Zoom, resuming an old and now more urgent conversation.
	Since then, through our podcast, we've mapped this movement and its winding journey through anti-vax fervor, anxieties over 5G technology, trumped-up child trafficking panics, the violence of January 6th, the rise of Omicron and the hashtag OK Groomer trend, the occupation of Ottawa, the war in Ukraine, and whatever else is happening as this book goes to print.
	Hopefully, beginning this examination with a little of our own journeys gives our readers hope that, yes, the fog can lift.
	In Part 1 of this book, we delve into the idea of conspirituality—what it is, how it works, and why it ensnares so many people.
	Part 2 unearths the historical tensions and perennial brainworms that have degraded cognition in the wellness world.
	In Part 3, we introduce you to our Rogues Gallery, the most egregious examples of influencers who instrumentalized conspirituality in the COVID era along a spectrum of earnestness and deceit.
	In Part 4, we share the stories of some of those who have been impacted by conspirituality, the lessons they have learned, and what they can tell us about the future of this shared, disruptive dream.
	Finally, we share insights from the experts we've had on our podcast.
	Thank you.
	Conspirituality 101.
	Chapter 1 Charlotte's Web As we scrambled to get our podcast together, we leaned heavily on a 2011 paper, The Emergence of Conspirituality, by British independent researcher Charlotte Ward and American sociologist of religion David Vose.
	The paper contained the first modern-day definition of conspirituality, referring to it as a synthesis of the female-dominated New Age with its positive focus on self and the male-dominated realm of conspiracy theory with its negative focus on global politics.
	It was, they wrote, a rapidly growing web movement expressing an ideology fueled by political disillusionment and the popularity of alternative worldviews.
	It goes on to say, Conspirituality offers a broad politico-spiritual philosophy based on two core convictions, the first traditional to conspiracy theory, the second rooted in the New Age.
	One, a secret group covertly controls or is trying to control the political and social order, and two, humanity is undergoing a paradigm shift in consciousness.
	Proponents believe that the best strategy for dealing with the threat of a totalitarian New World Order is to act in accordance with an awakened New Paradigm worldview.
	It was a chef's kiss type of academic work.
	Unrelenting in its clarity, punch, and predictive acumen, very impressive features for research into an online phenomenon that was published before social media exploded the world.
	This definition captures so much about what we understand conspirituality to be today—the handshake between hope and cynicism, and the divine, accelerationist storyline that the world is careening towards transformation aided by political and spiritual conflict.
	The formula had immediate application as we tracked influencers and their followers.
	On the gender front, we indeed tracked female doctors, channelers, and at least two women cult leaders who presented the female-oriented positive focus on the self, echoing Ward and Vose's observation that the majority of New Age and wellness enthusiasts are women.
	But we also saw preacher men and bro-scientists pushing a negative focus on global politics, who in some cases began to integrate arguments for gun rights into their views on natural empowerment.
	But of course, there were also plenty of new-agey men and loads of conspiracy theorist women on our beat.
	Regardless of gender, conspiritualists convene at the spa or at the MMA octagon.
	They indulge in self-care products, but also cloak-and-dagger political intrigue.
	They crave nurturance, but also dominance.
	They come with many identities, but vibe together to conceive and awaken new paradigm.
	Having been embedded in yoga studios and alternative health circles for decades, we began exploring the real-world impact conspirituality was having on the people in our orbit.
	Informed by the work of Ward and Vose, we found ourselves studying the explosion of new conspirituality themes through the interplay of COVID denialism, the reactionary politics of Trump, anti-vaccine fear-mongering, and a cultish surge of prophetic spiritual dynamics.
	Conspiritualist viral messaging slipped into an already seamless e-commerce delivery system that leverages social media, email marketing, and websites designed to sell books, video courses, and online conferences to passionate followers with shared fears and longings.
	While we wouldn't have gotten far without this paper, we also have to report up front that we were duped by its lead author.
	Charlotte Ward was not a dispassionate scholar of a new religious movement.
	She was, in her own words, an enthusiastic conspiritualist, at least until around 2015, when her online footprint vanished into thin air and became relegated to the Web Archive.
	Prior to that, she was an active participant in the online outrage mill that churned out macabre conspiracy resources and set the stage for the explosion of QAnon two years later.
	Ward's aim in studying conspirituality was not academic.
	It was sectarian, even propagandistic.
	It appears her goal was to academically legitimize conspirituality as a politically neutral cultural orientation and practice.
	The bulk of her original website, Conspirituality.org, now archived, records her breathless use of web analytics to track rising interest in what she termed a global awakening.
	She giddily presented reports on the rise of web searches for keywords such as Illuminati in Hungary and Poland as proof that transformation was at hand.
	The Illuminati is one of several names for the imaginary elite cadre of bankers, politicians, and intellectuals purported to secretly control the world.
	Since 1981, David Vose, Ward's collaborator on the paper, has been building a meticulous archive of research on religious movements, but he takes very little credit for the ideas that define conspirituality.
	Charlotte deserves full credit for the paper that was ultimately published, Vose said by email.
	I did my best to give it an academic gloss, and I can't now remember exactly how much I contributed, but the core content is hers.
	That core content shines with what appears to be scholarly distance.
	Ward describes the New Age view as a natural state of spiritual wholeness obscured by a modern loss of magic and mystery, rendering humanity out of touch with the earth and our inner knowing of transcendent truths.
	By trusting the spiritual guidance of synchronicity, reading the signs, and debunking the lies of materialist science, the New Ager perceives a universe of paranormal phenomena, divine purpose, natural herbal healing, and immersive metaphysical meaning.
	Against this, Ward juxtaposes the mindset of conspiracy theorists preoccupied with uncovering the hidden patterns that expose a dark and paranoid vision of the world in which nothing can be trusted.
	Cabals of villains with nefarious agendas manipulate current events and hypnotize innocents with lies and stratagems.
	Their bloodlines extend back into an ancient demonic past and forward into a transhumanist and alien hybrid future.
	In Ward's formulation, what connects these two seemingly opposing groups—New Agers and conspiracists—is a penchant for seeking patterns and a belief that hidden truths can be discovered through alternative methods by those who truly want to wake up.
	Where New Agers gravitate to conspiratorial explanations for why there is no evidence to support their favorite paranormal or alternative medicine beliefs, conspiracy theorists flirt with the idea that exposing and vanquishing evil cabals will inevitably lead to a predestined utopia.
	The impulses toward debunking, retribution, and spiritual awakening flow into each other seamlessly.
	As clients seek to expose, depose, a shadow government, Ward writes, ideas that others are becoming awake and aware or shifting in consciousness lend encouragement.
	People are awakening to a new interconnected paradigm in which they remember their infinite power.
	Ward's clients, such a strange word for a religious studies paper, ground their views in personal spiritual epiphanies.
	It's a theme with a long history within the New Age and wellness worlds.
	Whenever a client faces pushback over implausible claims about such things as the nature of the universe, the efficacy of a meditation practice, or the value of turmeric in combating cancer, they will typically say that the doubting Thomas simply needs to experience these things themselves.
	Then they will believe.
	In the COVID and QAnon eras, this axiom shows up in the command to do your own research, and in the co-optation of taking the red pill moment from the Matrix series.
	Ward's scholarship at first seems solid, but on her archived website, the enthusiasm hidden within her analysis shines through.
	If you are into Internet Truth and Conspiracy Theory or Alternative Spirituality, Ward writes, you will have heard about the Global Awakening.
	This is what we are looking at.
	And if you ever feel awake and alone, well, the numbers prove that you are not.
	Feast your eyes on our data and subscribe to our blog to keep up to date with the numbers.
	When it came to conspirituality, Vos notes carefully, Ward was a participant observer.
	She was sufficiently detached to analyze the phenomenon, but her familiarity came from personal interest in alternative spirituality tinged with conspiracism.
	A big red flag waves over Ward's fondness for the British conspiracy mongerer David Icke, who preaches that humans are controlled by alien reptiles and who has endorsed the anti-Semitic urtext of 20th century conspiracy theories, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
	On her website, Ward quotes Icke to defend the conspirituality movement against charges of racism and anti-Semitism.
	We need to drop the ludicrous, childish labels of Jew and Gentile and Muslim and all this illusory crap, Ward quotes Icke as saying, and come together in the name of peace and justice for all.
	There is not a Jewish injustice or a Palestinian injustice.
	There is simply injustice.
	Yikes.
	This same quote appears in Ward's paper, where she launders Ike's biography with the descriptors, British author and activist.
	She lets his quote stand unexamined in the academic setting and then uses that omission on her personal site to prove its truth.
	We have had published a peer-reviewed article, Ward gloats, which states that conspirituality is not about racism or antisemitism.
	The truth is that an unchallenged quote from England's version of Alex Jones shows that conspiritualists can sound like pacifists if key facts are omitted.
	But as the history of conspirituality will show, it's naive to the point of negligence to argue that the movement isn't rife with anti-Semitic, racist, and fascist themes, and that, like Ike, it tries to present itself as centrist rather than right-wing.
	Ward's views can also be obscured by her cosmic scope.
	Conspirituality is conscious conspiracy, she waxes, in a passage that links to Ike and the British conspiracy website thetruthseeker.co.uk and ancient alien star and Illuminati tracker David Wilcock.
	Wilcox, a QAnon booster who hints he may be the reincarnation of famed 19th century clairvoyant Edgar Cayce, believes the disclosure of secret human contact with aliens is about to usher in a global spiritual transformation.
	Ward shared enough of Wilcox's concern with global pedophile networks that by 2014, she was embroiled in researching a moral panic in London's Hampstead neighbourhood.
	Now known as the Hampstead Hoax, it saw 175 adults subjected to mob allegations of satanic ritual abuse.
	The main target of the allegations was a man named Ricky Dearman.
	As the eventual court judgment described, Dearman's children were physically and emotionally coerced by their mother and her new partner into fabricating a lurid tale about him and fellow teachers at Christchurch Primary School.
	That tale involved a satanic cult which drank baby's blood and cooked children in a secret room at the local McDonald's.
	The stories predicted and predated the precursor to QAnon, the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, by almost two years.
	And their source predicted the porous boundary between the puritanical extremism of yoga and wellness culture and the drive to spread satanic panic conspiracy theories.
	The children's mother was a Bikram yoga teacher, and her new partner was a raw food fanatic.
	Two of the rumormongers who spread the Hampstead allegations online to a global audience of an estimated 4 million were jailed, with the court issuing a scathing ruling against their claims.
	But a third online activist was never charged.
	In 2015, a Jackie Farmer had launched an anonymous research and networking site committed to supporting the false allegations.
	In 2017, a citizen sleuthing group supporting the falsely accused published a paper trail that unmasked Jackie Farmer as none other than Charlotte Ward.
	They found her through a screenshot maze of email addresses and YouTube accounts.
	Ward also wrote under the name Jackie for Conspirituality.org, with the HTML link for her author's page pointing to Charlotte in the address line.
	In a 2018 attempt to distance herself from the hoax, Ward emailed a journalist at ukcolumn.org to request an end to their investigation.
	She signed the email Charlotte Ward, a.k.a.
	Jackie Farmer.
	The Sleuthing Group also tracked down, online, a 2014 self-published book titled Illuminati Party, Reasons Not to Be Scared of the Illuminati, authored by Jackie Farmer.
	The promo blurb, written by Ward, as Farmer, remains online at Google Books.
	It reveals the gentle aim of Ward's practice of conspirituality.
	She wants readers to somehow gain strength as they absorb her abject tales.
	This book does not try to persuade you that the Illuminati do or do not exist.
	This is because they do.
	But it is an illusion that they have all the power.
	In fearing them, you are under a spell they have cast.
	This book has been written to help you break it.
	I've been working underground as a warrior, subverting the Illuminati for years.
	I discuss a few things you can do, too, if you choose.
	In the preface, Ward notes that she's written the book for ages 12 and up, then advises terrified readers to chant a protective mantra.
	I release my fear and step into my power.
	We don't know much about Ward's story before Conspirituality, where she came from, where she was educated, or how she acquired her interests.
	According to LinkedIn, she now resides in Suriname, South America.
	She responded to our initial email query with a cryptic comment that there were mistakes in the paper she'd published with Vose, which the reviewers could not have been expected to spot.
	She signed off apologetically.
	If you send me a list of questions, I'd happily answer them in writing.
	Frankly, I probably sound a little deranged live, anyway.
	She didn't respond to follow-up emails.
	For us, the word Farmer Tangle is a call to caution and humility as we go forward under a banner we unwittingly repurposed from a propagandist.
	First, this story has shown us that skill at analyzing a toxic social movement does not necessarily indicate a person is safe from its seductions and excesses.
	Objectivity is hard.
	Second, it has revealed that the line between real-world conspiracies and spurious conspiracy theories, such as the reality of child trafficking versus satanic ritual abuse, can be easily blurred, especially among vulnerable populations or excitable amateur investigators.
	Third, it has demonstrated that exploring the world of conspirituality can provoke the unintended consequence of promoting it.
	Bottom line, we spent 18 months quoting a double agent.
	We used Ward's model to deconstruct the same world she was trying to build.
	Charlotte's Web shows how conspirituality unfolds in the chaotic shadowland of the internet, where everyone can be the detective of their own fetishes and feel heroic about it.
	Where no one needs to or can be transparent, and where rumor can escalate through allegation into moral panic with blinding speed.
	It's anyone's guess what Ward's search history contains between 2011 and 2014, but her publications suggest more than passing familiarity with what was brewing on the underground message, or Chan boards, that would later give rise to Pizzagate and QAnon.
	Ward's story presents research challenges we must navigate but not get caught in ourselves.
	We were only a few months into our reporting when a few irritated listeners began to say that our episodes were generating a moral panic around the issue, that conspirituality was less of a deal than we were making.
	They argued that this could only marginalize those who follow the figures we were criticizing.
	We believe they are wrong, that conspirituality is a powerful and intoxicating socio-religious movement that can ruin families, disrupt public health measures, and encourage civil unrest.
	We believe that it must be spotlit and understood.
	But we hope this criticism keeps us honest and empathetic.
	Finally, wherever Ward is now, and whatever her current views, her story reminds us that conspirituality, like much of the internet, is an unforgiving, delusional world that entraps highly creative and empathetic people.
	Everyone deserves to be welcomed back from it, should they manage to leave.
	Hey everybody, thanks for listening.
	We hope you enjoyed the excerpts.
	We'll see you next Thursday with another main feed episode that might address some questions you already have if you're a new listener.
	Namely, is our book a conspiracy theory?
	Because the patterns we've tracked on this podcast and in the book at times suggest something organized and coherent.
	So, do we take this too far?
	At what point does the intricacy of our research mimic the paranoia of what we're researching?
	So, we'll look straight at that question next week.

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