[…] even if shady social media characters […] don’t seem like that big a deal in the grand scheme of things, by contributing to a world that values “Light Language” and sci-fi physics over real science, as if facts are just opinions, they wind up making space for more urgently dangerous groups to take advantage.
It’s exactly this paranoiac rejection of “mainstream” healthcare and leadership that gave such momentum to QAnon, whose rhetoric overlaps considerably with that of the “alternative wellness” sphere: “great awakening,” “ascension,” “5G.” The diagram of QAnon and New Agers looks more circular every day. It appeared an unlikely crossover, at first: that of violent right-wing conspiracy theorists and seemingly progressive hippie types. But America’s ever-escalating unrest has led a disarming number of citizens (mostly white, middle class ex-Christians—similar to the folks who joined Heaven’s Gate back in the day) to a similarly anti-government, anti-media, anti-doctor place.
In the early 2010s, well before QAnon, the term “conspirituality” (a portmanteau of “conspiracy” and “spirituality”) was introduced to describe this rapidly growing politico-spiritual movement defined by two core principles: “the first traditional to conspiracy theory, the second rooted in the New Age: 1) a secret group covertly controls, or is trying to control, the political and social order, and 2) humanity is undergoing a ‘paradigm shift’ in consciousness” (this definition comes from a 2011 paper from the Journal of Contemporary Religion).
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the US in 2020, it was like rocket fuel feeding conspirituality’s flame.
Antivaxxers and Plandemic truthers would fall squarely into the category of conspirituality, but so would plenty of less conspicuously QAnon-related wellness aficionados: the sorts who might sign up for an essential oils MLM, for example, or wear “Namaslay” T-shirts to their whitewashed yoga classes, or run a “holistic self-care” Instagram account. The sorts who maybe searched for “all-natural health remedies” on YouTube one night and ended up in “all doctors are brainwashed” conspirituality territory, unable to navigate their way out. Trickily, not every conspiritualist even knows or is willing to admit that their beliefs have anything to do with QAnon. In fact, some of these believers regard the terms “QAnon,” “conspiracy theorist,” and “antivaxxer” as offensive “slurs.” And the more outsiders invoke these labels, the more firmly insiders dig in their heels. After all, both camps think the other is “brainwashed.”