C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S

early-twentieth-century modern yoga movement, which, by mingling the medieval asanas with Scandinavian gymnastics and a “strongman aesthetic” borrowed from a colonial European culture anxious about racial contamination and decline, concocted a practice fit for a nascent Hindu nationalist identity: disciplined, virile, purifying, intolerant of “all sickness, disability, and sexual deviance”. To this day the ruling “Trump-and-Putin-friendly” BJP hold up their ultranationalist leader, Narendra Modi, as a “yogic saint”: like Trump, teetotal; unlike him, “celibate ... consulting with astrologers, and rising before dawn every day to do postures and to meditate”.

Only with the re-emergence of New Age and yogic spirituality in the 1960s, asserts Klein, did it become associated with the diffusely progressive hippie and environmental movements. “Now, however, i t seemed as if the movement’s older, supremacist roots were reasserting themselves.” On reflection, it’s easy to see why. As Beres et al note, “right-wing politics have always been more deeply connected to back-to-the-earth notions of natural living, bodily purity, spiritual heroism, and intuitive prophecy than is commonly acknowledged”. A wellness culture committed to the idea that the body can be “purified through discipline and focus” will always be vulnerable, unwittingly or not, to an essentially fascist ethos of exclusion. Beres cites endemic “wellness-world fat-shaming” as an example; Klein mentions a Canadian yoga instructor who argued, during lockdown, for a mass die-off of the physically weak (“I think those people should die”). In addition, a general disillusionment with allopathic, evidencebased medicine, combined with the “predatory, forprofit” model of American healthcare, was bound, in the authors’ view, to incubate a response whose rebelliousness was located in its irrationality. The growing popularity of quack alternative treatments – beat cancer with the alkaline diet or coffee enemas! – has given the alt-health community common ground with a libertarian right that shares its feverish loathing of Big Pharma. Tucker Carlson might not be seen dead in a yoga studio, but there is a distinctly New Age disdain for verifiable science in his reported determination to reverse his declining male hormone levels by bathing his testicles in red light.

Mostly, though, it’s the purity: the fear of contamination that aligns the alt-health movement with the most repugnant excesses of racial supremacism. Beres et al refer to the “pureblood” hashtag used by anti-vax influencers on TikTok to flaunt their unvaccinated status; the reference is to the Harry Potter books, where “pure-bloods” are wizards or witches whose bloodlines are uncontaminated by non-magical ancestors. The fact that J. K. Rowling has stated on the record that she had always conceived of her pure-blood characters as thinly veiled Nazis need not, of course, mean that the TikTok #purebloods were borrowing the term in anything other than ignorance or naivety. Nonetheless, the hashtag has been picked up and disseminated by right-wing and whitesupremacist influencers. To many in the alt-health movement the body is a sacred space, and in the tip of a vaccination needle they see a source of violation, “where the state gains access to the inner person”. Viewed in this way, the anti-vax paranoia of the supposedly progressive, raw-chocolate-eating neo-hippie is a tragic consequence of what really informs their adherence to alternative practices: plain old American hyperindividualism, or what Klein astutely identifies as “neoliberalism of the body”, laundered by a wafty spirituality, but as resistant, at heart, to the collectivist logic of vaccination as any gun-toting, Trump-loving libertarian.

The result is what the extremism researcher MarcAndré Argentino has called “pastel QAnon”. For the uninitiated, QAnon – in its non-pastel, fully garish incarnation – is an internet-based conspiracy theory that, despite centring on the claim that the world is run by a group of cannibalistic, Satan-worshipping paedophiles bent on bringing down Donald Trump, has grown into a full-scale political movement with representation in Congress. “Pastel QAnon”, on the other hand, connotes Instagram fitness, alt-health

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or shamanic influencers who either conceal their affiliation with the violent waking nightmares of the QAnon f a i th fu l or are unconsc i ously or semiconsciously perpetuating them. It is watered-down extremism, weak conspiracist squash. What is frightening about it is that it demonstrates how a society can flip into its fascist doppelganger not only via the explicit agitations of a demagogue such as Trump or Viktor Orbán, but also through the ignorance or inattention of a politically disengaged electorate. You’re put in mind of the almost – and I stress almost – touching artlessness of January 6 rioters like Jacob Chansley, the infamous bare-chested, bison-horned “QAnon Shaman”, whose lawyer, Albert Watkins, argued should be pardoned for his participation in the assault on the basis that he practised meditation and yoga, and only ate organic food, as if he hadn’t quite twigged that he was also trying to destroy American democracy.

Other alt-health influencers covered by Beres et al are less pastel-toned in their conspiracism. The British independent researcher Charlotte Ward – who coined the term “conspirituality” in a paper co-authored with the sociologist David Voas – is also known as Jacqui Farmer, author of Illuminati Party!: Reasons not to be scared of the Illuminati, who parrots the QAnon canard that Michelle Obama was born a man and believes that cervical smear tests cause cancer, “whatever lies the Illuminati UK government and their medical establishment tell you”. The kindly-looking septuagenarian former ob-gyn Dr Christiane Northrup has gone from advocating hormone-balancing tinctures to suggesting that mRNA vaccines secrete poison through the sweat glands of the vaccinated, and could therefore sterilize any woman who went near them. As for the “Deep State” and its pro-vaccine “psy-op”, she is not beyond violent rhetoric. “Do I get to pick the firing squad to kill these demons?”, she asked the film-maker Jeff Witzeman in 2022. Northrup is “a case study in the quiet slide of a red-pilled alternative medicine influencer toward the political right”: the Martha Stewart of questionable herbal supplements turned implacable enemy of the cabal.

One insight that emerges forcefully from Mike Rothschild’s Jewish Space Lasers is that pretty much all conspiracy theories can be traced back to a single, abhorrent source: antisemitism. The belief, held by some QAnon followers, that the Washington and Hollywood elites harvest a substance called adrenochrome from kidnapped children and use it as an elixir of youth directly resurrects the blood libel, the medieval belief that Jews ritually murdered Christian children and baked their blood into matzo. This impressive book traces the history of antisemitic myths linked to the Rothschild family (to which the author is not related), beginning with arguably the most notorious and enduring. By 1798, Nathan, the third son of the dynasty’s Frankfurt-born founder, Mayer Amschel Rothschild, had settled in England. The story goes that, having been present on the battlefield or tipped off by a messenger, Nathan learnt the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo early, and, by spreading the lie that Napoleon had won, triggered a panicked sell-off of British “consols”, or government stocks, that he was then able to pick up for a song. When the truth about Wellington’s victory emerged, the consols rocketed in value, making the Rothschilds so rich that they had effectively seized control of the world economy “in one swift stroke”. As Mike Rothschild explains, the debunking of the theory has not stopped it doing the rounds to this day: Alex Jones includes a version of it in his documentary Endgame: Blueprint for global enslavement (2007).

And the theories kept coming. The Rothschilds backed both sides in the American Civil War. The family founded the US Federal Reserve and owns every central bank in the world, except in those few brave states that resist western hegemony: Iran, North Korea, Russia and so on. Hitler’s grandfather was not only Jewish, but a Rothschild. The book’s title comes from the more recent theory, promoted by the QAnon-supporting congresswoman Marjorie

TLS

“Alex Jones advanced the theory that chemicals devised by the Pentagon have turned the majority of American frogs gay

Taylor Greene, that the Californian forest fires of 2018 were accidentally st ar ted by space-based generators funded by the Rothschilds and designed to beam solar energy back to earth, “devastating the US economy” while they were at it by undercutting the fossil-fuel market. Where the authors of these three diverse, if richly complementary, books converge is in locating the source of such conspiratorial gibberish in a profound sense of powerlessness exploited by actual elites, as opposed to the childstealing, blood-drinking, shapeshifting reptilian ones. The further we retreat into our digital cells, the more that lack of agency is both entrenched and rendered a source of resentment by our isolation, our loss of faith in collective effort or, indeed, in a consensual understanding of reality. For Klein this mass disengagement is the preserve not only of the QAnon follower or vacuous conspiritualist, but of the many millions of us who maintain, on TikTok, or YouTube, or Instagram, a digital double as eerily like and unlike our true selves as Naomi Wolf is to Naomi Klein. “All are ways of not seeing.” At base, conspiracy theories are a form of weaponized complacency, a distraction technique Klein links to the theory of disaster capitalism that she developed in The Shock Doctrine, in that it leaves the structural causes of the crises facing humanity unexamined while presenting a simple, lurid and, crucially, personalized narrative to make sense of them. In They Knew (2022), her impassioned diagnosis of an America in terminal decline, Sarah Kendzior goes further: the fanciful conspiracy theories of QAnon and the like are explicitly designed to draw attention from the real conspiracies undertaken by an unaccountable and brazenly criminal elite. In her view it is the fatal error of the mainstream media to dismiss these conspiratorial smokescreens out of hand: they owe their success to harbouring a grain of truth amid their fabrications. The Clintons may not be blood-drinking Satanists, but the kernel of the QAnon narrative, that the global elite is implicated in child trafficking and abuse, is harder to gainsay in the wake of the Jeffrey Epstein case and the shamefully – if not incriminatingly – lackadaisical efforts to bring him to justice.

I have my quibbles. Conspirituality is told in a tonally various, plural first person, so it’s hard to tell which of Beres, Remski or Walker is responsible for the mildly beer-pongish register inherited, presumably, from the project’s podcast origins, but which on the page strikes a counterproductively distancing note in what is otherwise an engaging account. (“It’s not our scene”, “What’s not to like?” and “They watched grown-ass adults try to bend spoons with their minds” are bad enough, but when the authorial “we” interrupted the narrative to insert a “Record scratch” in square brackets, this reviewer’s cringeometer sprang into the red.) On the basis of Doppelganger you might conclude that Klein’s literary sensibility is a good deal less fine-grained than her powers of political and cultural analysis. In discussing the idea of the double in Philip Roth’s work, she both overpraises Operation Shylock (“by far Roth’s most sophisticated work”, an assessment no serious reader of Roth would share) and undersells its complex play of fact and fictionality by conflating “Philip Roth” the character with his authorial namesake.

Minor cavils aside, the combined effect of these alarming, insightful and deeply researched books falls somewhere between enlightenment and the impulse to put their implications out of your mind as quickly as possible. One reason Trump and his ilk are content to let conspiratorial thinking flourish is that it always skews towards the authoritarian right, not only because it is inherently reactionary, juggling its brightly coloured balls while the powerful slip out of the room, but also because by sowing “epistemological chaos”, as Beres et al put it, suspending all logic and verifiable fact in favour of a cultic credulity, it demands its cultic leadership. The line between fifth-dimensional consciousness and fascism is as thin as incense smoke. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a tincture. n

SEPTEMBER 8, 2023