Introducing The Conspirituality Report

Tracking the bizarre and dangerous intersection between online conspiracism and yoga, New Age, and wellness cultures.

Welcome to a new weekly series about a strange online movement with tangled roots.

In 2020, menacing propaganda began streaming into the yoga and wellness worlds. Charismatic influencers read the room, and poured their talents for emotional exploitation into increasingly morbid themes:

• A pandemic exploited or even created by shady governments.
• Racial conflicts provoked by media elites.
• A PCR test designed to strip your freedom, and a vaccine designed to erase your soul.

Suddenly, all the yoga classes, meditation seminars, sound-healing workshops and magical supplements took on apocalyptic necessity. Desperate times called for divine remedies. Engagement surged.

Not only did this wave of alluring panic face little resistance — something held the door open. “Conspirituality” — an online horseshoeing of right-wing persecution complexes and leftish spiritual hope — had been a feature of this culture for decades. It groomed the vulnerable for QAnon. It also gave QAnon a socially acceptable face.