One piece of connective tissue between the right and wellness influencers we cover is their liberal use of the language of Civl Rights to describe their completely incomparable grievances. Derek covers a few recent examples, centered around one particularly troublesome analogy by a tech-bro entrepreneur using slavery as an analogy for his hustle.
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In her forthcoming book, Doppelganger, Naomi Klein discusses the nuances of cultural appropriation.
The way that cultures can be honestly shared and celebrated and honored, versus what has happened repeatedly since COVID began.
Aggrieved, predominantly white people co-opting the language of civil rights for their own purposes.
Thus you get anti-maskers marching into businesses that ask customers to wear masks, screaming, I can't breathe, taking the very real tragedies of Eric Garner and George Floyd and creating a spectacle of themselves because they were being asked to put on a piece of cloth for five minutes while waiting for their latte.
I'm Derek Barris and this is a Conspirituality Brief about the ways that the right and some wellness influencers are co-opting the language of civil rights for their own purposes, the mirror world that creates, to put it in Naomi Klein's words, and possible solutions for getting past this.
Let's begin with Scottsdale, Arizona Councilman Guy Phillips speaking at a rally in 2020.
I can't breathe!
I can't breathe.
Insanity.
Now he hasn't been alone in using this phrase, which was used to great effect by groups like Black Lives Matter for other unrelated and actually important purposes.
Comparing the long and still ongoing civil rights struggles of Black Americans in this country to being asked to be of service to fellow citizens for public health is ludicrous and lacks any sign of empathy or societal understanding.
And yet over and over, I've seen predominantly white yoga instructors and wellness devotees use this phrase, and it's picking up again with the supposed upcoming mask mandates.
And in fact, a few organizations have started requiring masks again.
Take Morris Brown College, where administrators noticed a troublesome uptick of COVID cases at the beginning of their fall semester.
And so they implemented a two-week mandate for students and staff and anyone on campus.
Given the health disparities in America, it might make sense that the first Black-owned and operated educational institution in Georgia's history might want to exhibit some caution.
But you won't learn about that in Mickey Willis' latest newsletter, where he calls out Morris Brown College by name.
And then he goes on to write, Over the coming weeks, inevitably, we'll see more follow suit.
The push for boosters is on the horizon, too.
But the timing couldn't be more perfect, as we, the 99.9%, are waking up to the power of the boycott.
This is how we reclaim our power.
Boycott all local businesses and major brands that enforce unconstitutional, unscientific COVID protocols.
Through this simple step, we financially disempower every company that requires masks, social distancing, or proof of vaccination.
Now, Willis isn't the only conspiracy theorist prone to hyperbole, and he's done far more damage than most in destroying the public's understanding of how vaccines work and why they're necessary.
But he also wouldn't have bothered to research Morris Brown College before calling them out, because the college became an important institution for Black Methodists in the post-Civil War era.
Nor would he bother to care about the fact that one-third of Georgia's population is non-white and may experience a significantly higher disease burden, according to the Georgia Department of Public Health.
Nor would it seem that Mickey would care to know that counties in Georgia with large income disparities, which run along racial lines, were 1.8 more times likely to be hospitalized and 1.7 times more likely to die from COVID than whiter, wealthier neighborhoods.
No, no, it's just boycott, boycott, boycott, followed by Mickey's tragic story that he can no longer shop at his favorite store.
Target?
Because they support LGBTQ issues.
No, seriously, here's what he writes.
To achieve enough impact, the type of impact that creates actual change, we all must resist temptations to compromise.
This will require us to break our addiction to comfort and convenience.
Target was once my family's favorite place to shop.
Ever since their support of ideologies that destroy the minds and futures of children was revealed, we haven't stepped foot in a Target store.
Or online.
Driving an extra 20 minutes to support a company with morals?
A small price to pay in my book.
My man, I think you need some new books.
You need a new library.
Let's start there.
But all of this apocalyptic language around these issues about putting on a mask is reaching a fever pitch again.
And so you have Mickey's buddy, Alex Jones, who kicked up this fervor a few weeks ago on his show.
And ever since, the right has been scanning Google alerts on a minute-by-minute basis to see who's next on the boycott list.
And as a reminder, Alex Jones has to pay over a billion dollars to the families.
Of Sandy Hook, whose children were murdered.
Six and seven-year-old children were murdered because he called them crisis actors and said it was fake.
That is who people like Mickey Willis and anyone else who's holding up Alex Jones right now as a champion and an influence and taking down the deep state, that's who you're supporting.
You know what they say about the company you keep?
Now, some contrarians are just going for it all, like the king of hyperbole, Bret Weinstein, who posted this earlier this week.
If they try to lock us down again, they'll face a mutiny the likes of which the world has never seen.
We watch them callously lie as they drained our wealth, targeted our children, and plotted our subjugation.
We may be stuck with the virus, but not the New World Order.
Hashtag Nuremberg 2.
Now, Brett is Jewish, he's said he's a secular Jew before, but I don't think that's a reason for insinuating that the infamous trials that resulted in numerous Nazi leaders and politicians being murdered for their role in the Holocaust is in any way comparable to being asked to put on a mask to enter a store.
These comparisons are so thoughtless and ahistorical.
You would expect self-professed academics and journalists to do the bare minimum of recognizing the real-world impact of the atrocities they're relating to a few COVID restrictions, but they don't.
Audience capture and attention is their goal, and apparently genocide and colonization make for great analogies in their books.
Now, speaking of colonization, these examples so far almost, almost pale in comparison to this next clip, and I shared it last week on our Instagram feed for Conspiratuality.
Alex Hermozzi is an Iranian-American entrepreneur, and his bio is pretty scarce, but he says that a decade ago he started a brick-and-mortar gym and grew it to six locations, he sold those, and he began investing in other companies.
Now I'm not going to comment on his business skills because he's apparently worth $100 million and he's had success in that and so good.
Put that aside.
I'm using this clip to highlight just how careless people can be with their analogies.
And this one is especially egregious, not only for its content, but due to the fact that it's coming from this hyper-masculine Jimbro mentality that we've seen too much of.
You know, this weird Silicon Valley optimization, testosterone-fueled click rhetoric that's only been getting louder with the likes of Vivek Ramaswamy gaining polling points in the GOP primary race after Posting a video of himself shirtless playing tennis, and that was his debate prep, and RFK Jr.
taking off his shirt in Venice Beach.
And, you know, I shared this misogynistic take on female partners that Alex had on his feed as well, so I'm really not being hyperbolic about this hyper-masculinity that's going on right now.
But in this clip, he's talking to Modern Wisdom podcast host Chris Williamson about truths about human nature.
And when I posted this clip on Instagram, and this was the entirety of a YouTube short and that's how I found it, someone commented that I was missing context about Hermozzi.
That's kind of hard to take given what he says here, but I went ahead and I found the three hour interview, so I'm going to give you the broader context, meaning Chris stating the question and then where Alex's brain goes next.
And, you know, Chris starts by talking about burnout and how different people have different thresholds for their capacity to work and how some people can't work as hard as others.
And it's all fine at that point.
But then you'll hear Alex chime in.
I work at the pace that I like to work at, and I also like to see where those limits are.
And that's exciting to me, to go, okay, just how much harder can I go here?
And then again, you've got to temper it with, that's burnout, like that's just the beginning of it.
And you only know that after you've burned out like 30 times.
But that's, it's tried to say after Atomic Habits by James Clear, right?
But the intersection of like, what you love to do, what you're good at, and what you can be paid for is like slap bang in the middle of it.
Slaves worked all the hours they were awake for their entire lives.
In American history, in Egyptian history, in the rest of the world that had slaves, which is most of the world at some given point.
I think, like, if they can do it, so can I. Now, you're like, well, did they have a happy existence?
Well, they didn't get to pick the work they did, but it means that you can work.
That's if you have the cat behind you.
You can work every hour of the day.
I'm like, well, if you get to have the cheese and you get to eat the cheese the whole way you're going, then... I mean, there's the famous quote, you know, the person who... the person who loves walking walks further than the person who loves the destination.
Speaking of libraries...
I would recommend adding The Wretched of the Earth by the psychiatrist and revolutionary writer Frantz Fanon to it if you haven't read it.
And he writes, Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe.
It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness, and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions.
And as you've probably noticed, the borders of those dimensions are pretty boundless, and we have in many ways exceeded them or at least changed their math.
But I don't want to also deny that we've made progress as a culture in civil rights, in feminist rights, but we're also backsliding right now.
Progress is not the inevitable outcome of social evolution.
And yes, we're all kind of dealing with outright antisemitism, bigotry, misogyny, xenophobia, and racism on a daily basis, and I do hope that's bothering you as much as me and we can fight that.
There's really something twisted about comparing well-intentioned if not perfectly executed public health protocols to genocidal maniacs or bragging about your hustle by comparing it to slavery?
Seriously, man?
They didn't have a choice but we do so you can get the cheese and what the fuck are you talking about?
Do you hear how idiotic you sound?
The sickness and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions.
Now, I'd never argue that words hurt more than bullets or gas chambers.
But words can lead to a whole range of inhumane responses.
And that begins by belittling the traumatic experiences of the past, and the fact that many people are living through the repercussions of those experiences today.
We have such a high level of privilege and detachment in America.
At least the entrepreneurial, financially successful class, I understand.
Not everyone has that privilege, and with income disparity, it's less and less.
Many of us can't be detached, but for some reason, people with hundreds of millions of dollars who have millions of followers are pretty detached, and they have that influence.
And they seem to be using the pain of others as their trademark without a second thought.
And some people really need to have second thoughts before speaking.
Because we have to contend with serious problems and the consequences of those problems in the coming months and years.
It's not like the social disparities that are going to widen due to climate change are going to make that any easier.
And so far, with the people I've been highlighting today, what do we have for solutions here?
Boycotts?
Boy, Mickey, that's really brave that you don't shop at Target anymore, a company that did $109 billion in revenue in 2021.
I'm sure they miss you.
Mutinies?
Yeah, Brett, I really see you taking up arms and heading into the streets.
And Alex, man, you just need some history books and maybe a life coach or something.
Because if that's what's churning around in your brain, I fear for your social skills.
And I don't think you understand the impact that your words have and the damage that it does to people.
What else?
Well, we have Sticking Your Head in the Sand, which seems to be Barry Weiss's response to class systems.
I have one more clip for you, and it's with Jordan Peterson, of course.
And he offers an even more mind-numbingly stupid response to any attempt to evening the playing field.
The reason I think it's important to understand what's drawing people to these ideas is because I want to defeat these ideas.
Why?
Because I believe they are fundamentally illiberal, and because I do not believe in a world of caste.
I believe that we should be fighting for a world in which there isn't a caste system, not where we reverse a caste system.
Okay, well then I would say that the systems that have privileged people like me in the past are also the same systems, for whatever reasons, that have in fact led to the freeing of the people who weren't allowed to play the game increasingly across time, and that that's a universal truth, not a particular truth.
And that's the point, right?
Well, and you accept that argument.
You accept that argument.
And so then we have another problem here, Barry, still, which is you're making the case that well-meaning people want this, and I understand your point, and it's not like I don't feel for the dispossessed.
You know, and grasp the argument.
But my sense is, is that the very institutions that are under assault by people who purport to be standing up for the dispossessed are in fact the best antidote to that dispossession that the world has ever produced.
So forget Weiss's kumbaya moment.
If society was starting on an actual level playing field, we could feasibly hope for a colorless future.
But we can't get to level.
So the aspiration is a non-starter.
It makes no sense except to make Weiss feel good about saying it.
And as for Peterson, well, he's always another story.
One more book for your library, Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Brazilian educator and philosopher Paolo Ferrer.
And he writes, So Peterson's idea that the colonizer is the only one who can grant freedom echoes Reagan's trickle-down economic sham perfectly.
It keeps those in power in power, while continually dropping crumbs for the proletariat to scrape after and feel thankful for.
It's a bullshit cop-out of an answer with no precedent and no chance of implementation.
Before he gets to solutions, Freire has to identify the problems.
And it is this, quote, Pedagogy which begins with the egoistic interests of the
oppressors, an egoism cloaked in the false generosity of paternalism,
and makes the oppressed the objects of its humanitarianism, itself maintains and embodies oppression.
It is an instrument of dehumanization.
So how do we move forward?
Well, let's look to Friere.
You start a dialogue, which means the oppressed have to speak and the oppressors have to engage and actively listen.
And I understand the argument that's going to come back from Peterson and Ruffo and the likes of them, that they are not actively oppressing anything.
And that's how they manipulate the ideology behind something like critical race theory, because it's talking about systemic structures, not individuals. And if you can't understand
that, you can't even begin to get to a 101 conversation about these topics, which is why people
like Peterson and Rufo are so manipulative and so good at distracting from the real conversation. So
with Friere, you have to be open to learning from others, including the oppressed
class.
And that's something I rarely see from the characters I've mentioned in this episode.
Sure, they claim to learn from one another, but they're pretty much only talking to people who've already bought into their worldview.
They think it comes from top-down solutions.
It doesn't.
It's bottom-up.
They won't recognize that.
So a solution, this is how Freer puts it, Quote, the revolutionary process is eminently educational in character.
Thus, the road to revolution involves openness to the people, not imperviousness to them.
It involves communion with the people, not mistrust.
And that requires being honest about the past and the present if we hope to ever forge a more equitable future.
And as we progress, hopefully towards such a thing, by God, quit comparing masks and vaccines to the Holocaust.
