Front Burner - Wellness culture's link to COVID denialism

Episode Date: October 4, 2021

Journalist Matthew Remski explains why new age spirituality is such fertile ground for anti-vaccine movements.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. So last week, this map popped up online. It showed this loose network of businesses that said they would not enforce vaccine passport rules. And as I clicked through the map, something really stood out. The number of businesses that could

loosely be described as being part of the quote-unquote wellness world. An acupuncture fertility clinic, a place that sells crystals, and even an organic lunch spot. Today, a closer look at the connection between wellness culture and anti-vaccine and anti-vaccine passport movements. Matthew Rumsky is a journalist and co-host of the podcast Conspiratuality, as in conspiracies plus spirituality. He's a former yoga teacher, so he knows this world intimately. Hi, Matthew. Thank you so much for making the time today. You're very welcome. Thanks for having me on.

So before we get to the conspiracy stuff, can we start with you just painting a picture of the general online wellness and spirituality world for me? Like, what does it look like? It looks like a very large affiliate networked maze of unregulated disciplines that range from alt-health secular to very religious promises of salvation through meditation or intention setting or energetic medicine. And there's this range that goes from like quasi-materialist, you know, ostensibly evidence-based practices like acupuncture or TCM or the pre-modern like Indian health system of Ayurveda. But it goes all the way up to sort of completely magical practices of channeling, crystal healing, gong baths you know discovering what alien family of star seeds you belong to um but the common family of of what a star seed star

seeds yeah this is this is in the disclosure uh community where people uh believe that we're living in an age in which it's going to be discovered that, you know, all human beings actually belong to transcendently evolved alien species. And we're going to learn that about ourselves. But the common denominator amongst all of the practitioners, and I think a lot of the consumers of this demographic is that in the absence of there being real standards of care or qualifications for practice, what makes you really popular or visible in this world is charisma. So, can you tell me a little bit more about what you mean by that? I mean that there's no way of proving that you have a good meditation or yoga practice technique, except by appearing to do

so. There's no way that you can prove that your magical water through, you know, the Kangen filters or bottles or whatever is, you know, has some evidence-based effects except for collecting anecdotes and presenting them in a very charismatic way. That's what makes you visible. It's not about going to school. It's not about getting credentials. It's not about peer review or any kind of accountability. I wonder if you could give me an example of someone who's been really good at that and how. Well, in the yoga world, the precedence of charisma over any other kind of value goes right back to the beginning of the globalization period with somebody like Mr. Iyengar, who is the most notable, probably the most photographed yoga personality in the history of the industry. And in the book that he published in 1966, Light on Yoga, which I think has sold about 3 million copies in English alone, he makes medical claims for each of the postures on

each of the pages without a shred of medical training or, you know, there's no medical disclaimer at the front of the book. And so, it really begs the question, why do people believe what he says? So, I guess, continuing on that thread then, I wonder if you could talk to me a little bit more about how the Venn diagram of this wellness and spirituality world and conspiracy theories kind of meet and overlap here. And I guess we should probably put in a caveat that like, this is a really large group. And so, we're not talking about like everybody in the wellness and spirituality space here. Right. Well, this is where the term conspirituality is really useful, and it was coined by two scholars in a 2011 paper, David Voas, who's a professor of religion, and then Charlotte Voas, or sorry, Charlotte Ward. What they say conspirituality is, is it's this amalgam of two core convictions.

this amalgam of two core convictions. So, the two convictions are, one, a secret group covertly controls or is trying to control the political and social order, and number two, humanity is undergoing a quote-unquote paradigm shift in consciousness. And proponents believe that the best strategy for dealing with a threat of a totalitarian new world order is to act in accordance with an awakened new paradigm worldview. And so, no, we're not talking about everybody who ends up being a consumer in the wellness space, but we're talking about a very powerful marketing drive that is at its core, which says on one hand, the world is a very uncertain, scary place. And on the other hand, it says, and that means that this is your opportunity to wake up, find your personal power, you know, speak with your guides and take these herbs and become a transcendent being with perfect immunity.

I mean, before the pandemic hit, these would be influencers who would be talking about the nastiness of the fluoridation of the water. Also, there's this like panic around fertility, especially as it's potentially expressed through the divine masculine and the divine feminine. So, for instance, there's a Canadian or I guess former Canadian conspirituality influencer named Yolande Norris-Clark, recently a Frederick during New Brunswick, but now I think she's living in Central America because she didn't like the lockdown policies. And she based her free birth programming. So, she advocates, you know, women giving birth without any medical interventions at all and her premise was that the quote-unquote birth industrial complex actually exists to enslave women and deprive them of the transformational opportunity of unassisted birth you know ideally in the forest or something like that so before covid her brand was built on claiming that OBGYNs are actually out to control your autonomy so that you can't express yourself and develop spiritually. This is common within wellness discourse,

and it has been for decades. I promise that birth tends to work very well when it isn't being sabotaged, especially by technological interventions. I started speaking out against the totalitarian coup that has been ongoing in Canada for over a year now, back in February of 2020. I was ridiculed, laughed at, and threatened for doing so. A few weeks later, I began talking about the impending... for doing so. A few weeks later, I began talking about the impending... Right. Okay. And being, just to be clear here, as we sort of move into COVID here, being anti-vax is not new to some in this community, right?

No, not at all. At the heart of modern wellness is this idea of personal health that can be perfect and autonomous. Now, listeners might have heard the phrase sovereignty, which from a wellness point of view is often used to refer to the belief that a virtuous and mindful and awakened person should be impervious to all disease. And so, a rejection of public health measures or the notion that health is actually a public affair is kind of baked into that philosophy. Now, this makes sense in countries like the US where a lot of this stuff comes from because healthcare is run there, you know, just on the principles of predatory capitalism and people feel neglected institutionally. It doesn't make so much sense in Canada, but that hasn't stopped the sort of ideology from spreading. And specifically to the point about vaccines, the very notion that the state could make you healthy through an injection of a uniform

substance that everybody is going to get that isn't sort of like tailor-made or bespoke to your constitution or whatever is really insulting because what it does is it demystifies the spiritual mystery of health and makes it shared. All wellness practices, because they are filtered through commodification, late capitalism, they are really designed to increase consumer individuality or at least the impression of it. So everybody gets their special formula. Everybody has a particular body type. Everybody has a particular sort of allergen profile and stuff like that. And then of course you have your chakras and you have your past lives and you have all of this stuff that makes you uniquely, uniquely snowflakely you, right? And if you say to that person, no, actually, we all need 0.5 milliliters of the same

Pfizer vaccine, and then we're going to be okay, that kind of blows apart all of the preciousness that this economy is built upon. What's interesting to me is that submission to state coercion in regards to the special medicine is often framed as having no choice. I had no choice but to take the injection. I had to go see my dying father. But actually, you did have a choice. Talk to me a little bit about how this all manifested in the context of the pandemic, when the pandemic hit. What did we start seeing? We saw a lot of yoga teachers and wellness practitioners locked at home with everybody else.

Their ability through their gig work, you know, pathways to make money was shrunken down to being on screen as much as they possibly could be. I think what some people began to feel, and not only because they were also anxious about what was actually happening in the world, but they began to feel that if they migrated their concentration towards transgressive or inflammatory content, that they would become more visible. And that ended up being true. We have a great example in a New Jersey yoga teacher and yoga mat seller named Crystal Teeny, who before the pandemic hit, had a very sort of modest 2,000 or so followers. And then as she started posting QAnon materials, it skyrocketed to 100,000. Now, we're not sure what exactly red-pilled her, so to speak, although she made reference to over one weekend watching all nine episodes of a documentary, well, quote unquote documentary called Fall of the Cabal, which was a primary QAnon recruiting video. Now, how did she get access to that? Well, because it was circulating through yoga Facebook groups, because yoga Facebook groups might have overlaps with anti-vaccination groups.

Or anti-vaccination groups might have overlaps with 5G is going to kill us all groups. in which QAnon material burbled up into mainstream yoga and wellness land and became very, very attractive for influencers who wanted to increase their engagement, whether they believed in it or not, which is a very sad thing, because I ended up interviewing a lot of sort of B-list yoga personalities who had gone through a spate of posting QAnon materials. But then when I asked them about it afterwards, like, why did you do that? Or were you really on board? They didn't really have an answer. Some of them didn't want to talk about it. They wanted to put it behind them. They might have felt that they had gotten sideswiped by something that felt like a pressing social issue at the time, but they didn't really understand

what it was about. Right. You got to think it's sad too, because a lot of these people probably had fairly large followings. And you have to think that by doing this, they probably brought these more fringe ideas to a more mainstream audience too. Absolutely. Yeah. The best example that we've studied on the podcast this is a classic one now is that christianne northrup who's a obgyn who has been like the patron saint of alternative women's health for the last 30 years in the states she lives in maine somehow somebody sent her something she got red bill. She went down a rabbit hole at some point and began this video series in which she was talking about how the Great Awakening was about to occur if we all meditated in the correct way and took baths in particular, Epsom salts and whatever. If you want to stop creating the same patterns, you need to change your consciousness.

So step two, sort through your beliefs. Acknowledge the health-eroding beliefs you have inherited and release them. This includes your family legacy, which affects your energy, health and potential for change. For example, if all women... But she became the main mainstream gateway for the viral spread of pllandemic by Mickey Willis on May 5th of 2020. It was her share out of a QAnon-related Facebook group that brought her 500,000 followers into contact with the worst and most effective anti-lockdown COVID denialist propaganda that was made. Right. And of course, the Plandemic is this idea that there's like this hidden agenda behind COVID-19, that this is all government driven.

Okay. Now here's a couple of things. Are the vaccines experimental? You bet they are. Will the vaccine stop me from getting COVID? No. Will the vaccine stop me from spreading COVID? No. Have the vaccines caused any deaths or injuries? Yes. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you.

Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. What are we seeing in Canada? Are there like high profile figures in this community in Canada who have been sort of active in the conspirituality COVID-19 ecosystem? There's a spectrum. So two influencers that I reported on for The Walrus are Daniel Laporte, who's a women's empowerment kind of popular psychology influencer based in Vancouver,

and then a guy named Lamont Daigle, who's a men's group facilitator and Kangen water seller in Toronto. So Kangen water is like miracle water. It comes in a special bottle or something. It's sold through multi-level marketing. They say if you drink enough of it, it'll clear your spilkus or your cancer and also balance your chakras or whatever. Now, Lamont Daigle, he's co-founder of an organization called the line here in toronto and if anybody has seen photographs from anti-mask anti-vaccine anti-lockdown protests uh in toronto montreal calgary edmonton wherever and you've seen a logo on a sign black white

backdrop um black circle painted in kind of a zen ink thing and then a red slash through it if you turn that logo about 20 degrees clockwise it looks like a q uh and when i asked him i said this kind of looks like a q and he kind of smiled and dodged the question um anyway this group is a driving force in anti-lockdown protests, in Toronto especially. Saturdays, they tend to gather. And at those protests, you'll see signs protesting the cabal, the Rothschilds, the globalist agenda, signs saying, just say no to adrenochrome. The whole world's looking to see what Torontoonto is going to do i'm one of the leaders of what's happening here in toronto i've been busting myself every week to get people out

and i said you know what we're going to get thousands of people here we're going to come to a new location and we're going to take the streets no more sidewalks for us we're not going to take the sidewalks we're going to take the street and look what happened we shut down we shut down downtown Toronto. So you can read bits from my interview with him and the Walrus. But as I was researching the article, I ran into this group of young men on the boardwalk in the beaches here where I live. You know, I sat down on a park bench next to this guy who was wearing kind of hippie clothes and he was playing a guitar and he was lecturing, like really lecturing two other young men about the line and about the globalist agenda and about the vaccine rollout and about how Lamont, you're going to meet Lamont Daigle tonight, man. You guys aren't going to believe it.

You know, it's kind of like meeting Jesus. This is what this kid was saying. And I was like, also, I was with my own children. And so, like, I couldn't break in and say, hey, can I ask you a few questions? But this is, you know, it was a great example of the coalescence between sort of conspiratorial paranoia and then spiritual prophecy sort of all rolled up into one. A very exciting kind of like event-based package. You know, you talked about driving forces of sort of the anti-mask, you know, the driving forces of sort of anti-mask, anti-vax. I can't help but think that on the political level, the People's Party of Canada is also one of those, has also been one of those forces. And, and is, have you seen any overlap, just because we're coming out of a federal election, between this party and this alternative wellness conspirituality world? Yeah, so, so a very, very important name for everybody to remember

is Nicholas Pereira. I mean, important name, I think he's overexposed. So there's part of me that's reluctant to give him more oxygen. But he is, he was a candidate in one of the ridings in New Brunswick, but he teaches men how not to ejaculate. Right. Some people might just from the headlines, they might remember this guy's the semen retention guy. The semen retention guy, right. Semen retention soldiers, have you set your goals for the week? What are you focused on? Where's your mind? Wherever your mind goes, you follow. Your life follows.

Right now, I'm in the final week of the campaign here in my local city in St. John. It's a federal campaign happening in Canada, and it's the first time I'm running. There are alt-right and far-right groups that are into semen retention, not necessarily as a spiritual practice, but because, you know, things like they view pornography usage as humiliating and weakening. So, for them, it's about not expending excess energy, but it's tied up with these sort of subtle but sometimes overt misogynistic ideas that women or thinking about women drains vital energy away from male bodies. Now, with Pereira, we see this bumped up a notch in, I think it has a little bit more sort of culture and credibility to it. a little bit more sort of culture and credibility to it. So, firstly, his other name is Nakula Das, and he's either taken or he's been given that Sanskritic name by a yoga group. And, you know, if I'm right about this yoga background, then the semen retention takes on a kind of significance from a practice called Ayurveda, which is an

Indian sort of pre-modern naturopathy. And in Ayurveda, they say that semen retention is at the heart of immune building. So, if you really want to have a strong immune system, you will not ejaculate. You will protect yourself in that way. But they also say that in a spiritual sense, protect yourself in that way. But they also say that in a spiritual sense, it allows people to wake up to a kind of hidden knowledge about the universe. And here is the sort of, this is where the biological and the ideological converge, right, in this one strange idea. Is there a certain part of the political or ideological spectrum, you would say, that a lot of these people generally fall on? I think it might be intuitive to some people to think that maybe people who are part of this wellness community may lean to the left of the political and ideological spectrum. But

it's fair for me to say that that's not necessarily the case, that they very much could also lean to the right. Absolutely. Or there's no resistance within yoga and wellness culture to right-wing ideologies becoming de rigueur. And that really is sourced back to the fact that the fundamental premise is one of privatized religion, where the self and the sort of progress of the personal identity towards an enlightened state is the most important sort of aspect of the entire landscape. It's also that yoga practice and wellness contexts actively depoliticize people over the tenure of their practice lives. Don't engage in politics or, you know, let's not discuss divisive things in this sacred space. And we're here to, you know, commune with our higher nature. and, you know, we want to

separate ourselves off from negativity, quote unquote. So, you know, there's no real political backbone within yoga and wellness spaces. They're quite neoliberal that way. They're really about the care of the self and going with the flow. And this was so interesting. I could listen to you talk about this all day. Thank you. Thank you so much for this, Matthew. Thank you. You're really welcome. Thanks a lot. Great questions. All right, so before I let you go, an update in line with our side hustle is CBC's Secret Basketball Podcast. Canadian swingman Andrew Wiggins has received his COVID-19 vaccination.

He'll now be able to play for the Golden State Warriors this season. Wiggins had been restricted to solo workouts, and he was going to have to miss out on home games. This is because San Francisco's COVID-19 guidelines require proof of vaccination for large indoor events. Golden State can once again turn to Wiggins to help them rebound from last year's lackluster season. That's all for today. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.