The Crunchy to Far Right Pipeline

It is true that some municipalities do have water that is turning the frogs gay.

Hello, hello, and welcome back to A Bit Fruity.

I'm Matt Bernstein, and I'm so happy that you're here.

A couple weeks ago, I was perusing Reddit as I do in the wee hours of the morning, and I came across this post that reignited a curiosity in me about a topic that I find so fascinating and so dark.

And I want to read that Reddit post to you, which was in r/slash Maine, the forum devoted to people who live in the great state of Maine.

The title of the post reads, why are so many alt-right wingers in the homesteading and gardening space?

And then the text of the post says, I'm 24 and single.

Being mostly by myself, it has taken a toll on my mental health.

The last few years, I have been branching out and meeting people in my area that have similar interests.

After meeting with a a lot of people with a lot of the same interests, I thought I would make a lot of great friends.

The more I talked to them, the more I heard dog whistles or just laughable conspiracy theories.

If you don't like and/or trust the government, I get it.

But I just want to talk about sustainability or great plant convos to plant together.

Why does the conversation always go to the woke left or litter boxes in schools when I would rather talk about research papers of permaculture practices?

Why, indeed?

Do you like my radio voice?

It's very, very professional.

Who among us hasn't known somebody, maybe a family member or a friend, who one day was like, I'm on my way to yoga.

And you were like, okay, cool, have fun.

And then, you know, a few months later, they're like, you know, you really shouldn't be drinking the tap water.

And you're like, wait a minute, the tap water we've been drinking like our whole lives?

And then a few months after that, they're resharing the wildest far-right shit you have ever seen on Instagram.

Who among us hasn't had that person in our lives?

I mean, just a few months ago, Shaylene Woodley, who is an actress whose performance in Big Little Lies raised me as a homosexual male and who has long been involved in, you know, environmental activism and some really cool shit as far as I'm concerned.

After Donald Trump had his attempted assassination, she reshared on Instagram Melania Trump's statement on the event.

What is going on here?

I am currently recording this episode from a cabin in the woods because I needed a break from New York City and I thought, wow, what better time and what better place to record an episode about what some are calling Wu Anon.

I like the name Wu Anon.

Have you heard of that one?

Oh, yeah.

That came out soon after QAnon.

Also, like

Wu to Q.

The Wu to Q pipeline.

And who knows?

Maybe while I'm out here in the woods, I'll run into somebody who will convince me that seed oils are communism.

Here with me to explain what the hell is going on from this wellness to far-right wing journey is Derek Barris, who is the host of the popular and prolific podcast Conspirituality and the author of many books, including Conspirituality, How New Age Conspiracy Theories Become a Health Threat.

Derek, welcome to A Bit Fruity.

Hey, Matt, thanks for having me.

And I should say, co-author with Matthew Remsky and Julian Walker, the Conspirituality Project is the three of us.

So we've all put equal labor and effort into investigating this rather strange and

sometimes amoral and often dangerous territory we're going to discuss today.

And Derek is also, drumroll please,

the first cisgender heterosexual guest on a BitFruity.

I am absolutely honored to hear that.

Thank you so much.

Maybe, actually, maybe cisgender heterosexual male.

Either way, huge honor, huge first for the pod.

Diversity matters.

Representation matters.

And Derek, I am so accepting of your lifestyle choices.

Same.

It's something we've talked about because we are actually three white cisgender males who run the podcast.

So we have done our best to invite as many diverse guests on as possible.

And we've kept to that for four and a half years now: of trying to get as many voices in as possible.

So it's important to diversify.

Before we get into today's show, if you would like to support the show or would like more of the show, as always, you can get that on Patreon.

A link to the Patreon will be in the episode description or the YouTube description, depending on where you're watching this.

Over on Patreon this summer, I have been doing a multi-part retrospective on the Buy Sister saga, the James James Charles Tati Westbrook vitamin gummy heterosexual homophobia scandal.

And spoiler alert, Tati Westbrook, aka Glam Life Guru, aka Mother of Beauty YouTube, is going to be having a heavy presence in today's episode.

And I'm really excited to talk about my problematic queen.

So let's just get into it.

Derek, how are you feeling going into this conversation?

I feel wonderful.

It is a strange career turn that my life has taken being critical, having both worked in the wellness industry for decades as a yoga instructor, as a health and science journalist, but also being critical of some of the beliefs and practices within it.

So any opportunity I have to be able to discuss these issues is always a wonderful morning for me.

We're going to be talking about some of the ways that people get politically radicalized through alternative wellness practices in this episode.

And because this has happened at this point to a number of like public figures and influencers that I have loved for years, I'm going to be framing parts of the conversation through their journeys.

So, Derek, might I tell you about a YouTuber called Raw Beauty Christie?

Let's go for it because you sent me some of the advanced YouTubers we're covering, and they are new to me.

So, I always find it interesting how the crossover into other worlds sort of reveals the same processes that we've seen in spirituality for years.

You mean you're not heavily invested in makeup YouTube?

It's surprising, I know, but actually, no, but maybe, maybe today is going to change me, Matt.

Maybe it will.

Derek and I are meeting up afterwards and we're doing a Sephora haul.

All right.

The other thing I want to say before I talk about anyone in this episode is that everyone that I mention in this episode, I only have the knowledge of their kind of like political radicalization pipeline because I have been fans of them enough to pay attention to this stuff.

And so I just want to say that I am not, I'm not trying to like aggressively rip into anyone.

I just think that we have, at this point, kind of a lot of case studies of how people get radicalized in this very specific, but simultaneously very broad and far-reaching way.

And we're going to explore those without, you know, attacking anybody.

All right, Derek, Raw Beauty Christie.

Raw Beauty Christie, or you know, we'll just call her Christie, is a beauty YouTuber who gained a lot of fame in the latter portion of the 2010s for having this more relaxed approach to makeup reviews.

Whereas a lot of the early beauty YouTubers, like Jaclyn Hill, were these sort of like models for high-glam femininity, you know, very much subscribed and were able to reproduce traditional norms of femininity.

Christy was more, you know, rugged, more approachable.

She wasn't afraid to say, like, this blush fucking sucks.

And that drew me to her.

And it drew over a million people to her YouTube channel.

I was a big fan for a number of years.

And in 2020, Christy became pregnant.

You know, it's a big deal when anybody becomes pregnant, but particularly so because she had not shied away from talking about the fact that she had struggled with infertility for 15 years.

And listener, I'd like for you to note that down because it's important in what we will talk about through the course of this episode.

But Christy becomes pregnant in 2020.

This was the point at which personally I kind of tuned out of her content.

Not because there was anything wrong with it, but it went from a lot of like makeup content to a lot of like pregnancy and early motherhood content, which as a you know, early 20s gay man just didn't really interest me, but you know, to each their own, very happy for her.

In fact, thrilled that she was able to have a healthy child.

Good for her.

In recent years, Christy's content kind of turned to being, you know, she's always been very transparent, but it's become a lot of extremely intimate conversations with her audience about her ongoing issues with mental health or, you know, chronic pain and lifestyle changes.

She moved to Washington and she became a homesteader.

Pause.

Derek, can you explain what homesteading is?

It's this sort of glorified, romanticized version of getting back to the land.

And sometimes, I mean, there are actual homesteaders, so we should be clear on that.

There are people who decide to live as off the grid as possible.

They move to a ranch, they grow their own food, they raise their own animals for their food.

They try to be as self-sustaining as possible.

And that, that's totally a lifestyle choice.

There's nothing wrong with that.

And some people believe that society is falling apart and they want to learn how to take care of themselves.

So that's great.

But I think what you're identifying are the people who sometimes will create an image of homesteading, even if they are actually living off the land in some capacity, but then they sort of create this sort of, I guess, homesteading porn out of it for consumption online, and they will inevitably monetize it in some capacity.

And so they create the image of it.

It's very curated.

You always use certain specific colors.

Like in our field, we have pastel QAnon, which was early in the pandemic that was identified by a Canadian researcher.

And homesteading has its own aesthetic of a lot of wood, a lot of flannel sometimes, from what I've seen.

And it's this idea that

you can be completely self-subsisting, but that from our research, that doesn't always reveal what the person is actually doing.

Because

if you're homesteading for your career, that means you're taking advantage of a lot of technology in the first place.

And the whole idea of homesteading is moving away from that.

So there's this paradox that's embedded in the very idea of being a homesteader influencer.

Yeah, yeah.

There's, and we'll get into this.

I have a trad wives section of my outline.

Trad wives.

That's a stone that's not being, uh, that will not go unturned in this episode.

But,

you know, I think implicit in anyone who like becomes an influencer and monetizes the fact that they are like living traditionally, there's that inherent contradiction, right?

And also a lot of privilege required, I think.

And, you know, to be clear, if you want to like live in Washington and like grow your own food and have chickens, as Christy does, power to you.

All of these things in and of themselves, I think, can be pretty benign.

Absolutely.

We talked before we started recording is there's a range of entry points to this sort of broader field of what we call conspiratuality, but some of it is helpful.

Some people find comfort in it.

Some of it is benign, as you identified.

But we mostly focus on when it starts to become dangerous in some capacity.

From my own field, that usually happens with health misinformation and health disinformation, which I'm sure we'll get into.

Yes.

Yeah.

So part of her homesteading journey, which again, for a long time, I was not following closely because, you know, again, I am a homosexual man in his 20s living in New York City.

I have never milked a cow.

I have no desire to ever milk a cow.

I don't grow anything.

I tried to keep ivy alive in my apartment, and even that was a struggle.

So now I just have the fake plants that are like freeze-dried with artificial dyes.

I am not watching homesteading content, but I am happy for everybody.

However, one of the many sort of pivots towards traditional living that Christy was open with her followers about was the desire that she had to homeschool her child.

Here is where the scandal begins.

And if you have been following me closely on this podcast or on Twitter for a while, you know that nothing quite gets me going like a beauty YouTube scandal.

And yes, I am self-aware enough to know what that says about me as a person.

Thanks, Derek.

Thanks.

A few months ago, Christy is doing a Q ⁇ A on her Instagram stories and someone asks her, have you decided on homeschooling or not?

And she posts a photo of herself and a number of small children, including presumably her child, whose face she does not show on social media, and so neither will we, sitting on a grassy lawn in a circle with the text over it that says, yes, we will be homeschooling with a homeschool co-op.

Now, People saw this photo and identified it as a photo that was also posted by Christy's sister, who has been featured a number of times in her content, you know, like doing my sister's makeup for a day or, you know, stuff like that.

And her sister, people realized, was the person who was running this homeschooling co-op.

And so they went to check out the page for the homeschool co-op that her sister had set up and that ostensibly Christy was sending her child to.

I went to the website for this homeschooling co-op and I would like to read you the Who We Are About page.

Derek, are you ready?

Uh, hopefully.

who we are we see our family learning cooperative as a lighthouse for this fallen world a place of rescue from the darkness and perverseness of the broken public school system the mission is to provide a safe place for children to learn and grow in their relationship with god building up a community of homeschoolers who are taking back their identities in christ jesus We pray to be a seed planting cooperation for the kingdom of heaven.

We are also here to to inform and equip other churches and or communities how to plant a school of your own.

The Lord told us we would be a blueprint for more schools to come.

We have faith and we are walking boldly with the world of our Father in our hearts.

What's your reaction?

I'm not surprised.

First off, let me caveat it that I'm not a parent.

I don't see anything wrong with homeschooling in general.

I actually think that sometimes like schools that incorporate being in nature more is is going to be much healthier than stuck inside of a classroom all the time.

I think there's a lot of good arguments for non-traditional schooling, but I do know that the data reveals that almost all homeschooling is evangelical or fundamental Christian.

And I mentioned the word romanticize before, and one thing that persists throughout most conspiratuality musings is this idea that there was a better time and we need to get back to it.

And that always entails some sort of rejection of the current system.

But you mentioned the word privilege before.

And usually, in these environments, the people who are able to send their kids either to homeschool co-ops, as you said, or do it themselves, have some certain level of financial or social privilege to be able to do that.

And so when you hear about their rejection of the public school system, which I also think is fantastic, you know, different areas have different systems, but overall, it's a great system.

Combined with this focus on religion, that pretty much cuts across most either private religious schooling or most of these sort of trad wife homesteading, homeschooling situations.

I just see that language of like, we were called upon by the Lord to like.

take our children's education back and I'm like, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no.

I did an episode of this podcast, one of the earliest episodes that I did was with with a couple who were both homeschooled by evangelical families and in an environment that was like religiously, totally abusive and inappropriate.

And both of them, to the credit of homeschooling and to what you're saying, like they did say there are a whole number of reasons why they think homeschooling could be the right choice for someone.

When I was doing my research for that episode, something that I found really interesting was basically a movement of black families deciding to homeschool their children because they were really uncomfortable with like the way that black history and things like slavery were being whitewashed in parts of this country's public education system, which makes so much sense to me.

My problem is not that a YouTuber homeschooled her child or that anyone homeschools their child.

I think that's fine.

But

things can go off the rails in an incredibly white supremacist direction.

And in this case, they did.

One of the biggest contradictions that you'll see, and it's usually blind to the people who are engaging in it, is that the evangelical community tends to be anti-trans, anti-gay, anti-any non-heterosexual lifestyle.

And they always rail against the woke public school system for trying to indoctrinate their children.

But what they're actually doing is they're indoctrinating their children into a fundamentalist religious environment.

And they because they are so deep within this Christian ideology, they can't understand that there are many of us who don't share their metaphysical understanding of the universe and we have our own ideas and own practices.

So what they're really saying is we're going to indoctrinate our children the way we want to indoctrinate them, but they'll present it as removing them from indoctrination.

Because the Lord told us to.

That is an amazing cop-out for like just making any sort of questionable decision-making.

I don't know.

I might adopt that.

That's like tastefully manipulative.

I fucked over my friend because the Lord told me to.

Sorry.

Take it up with the big guy.

So things take a dark turn.

On the 4th of July, this past 4th of July, last month, a video was posted onto Christie's child's homeschooling co-op.

It has its own social media page.

A video is posted to this social media page featuring a number of kids and parents, among them Christie's

child and husband, at a local kind of parade/slash protest that they had held in the streets as a homeschooling co-op against public schools.

And people were holding up these like pretty wild anti-LGBT signs, notably signs that said things like, don't mess with our kids, hashtag don't mess with our kids, which is a movement and an organization that is specifically about.

Do you know about don't mess with our kids?

I've heard the term, but I don't know about the organization.

Yeah, it's like a movement.

It's an anti-LGBT public school movie.

It's exactly what it sounds like.

People did, you know, a wild, you know, people on the internet do a wild amount of sleuthing, but they realized that Christy had liked that video.

So she essentially is endorsing this sort of thing and sending her kid to partake in it.

And

furthermore, more photos being posted from this homeschooling co-op revealed that Christy was fulfilling her lifelong dream of hosting a homeschool co-op on her property.

The kids were being taught in this, like, you know, renovated, beautiful, modern shed that she had created in her backyard.

And people were piecing together content from her Instagram of her home renovation to the homeschool's Instagram and featuring kids in the shed.

And people just realized that she was sort of operating this entire like Jesus freak right-wing anti-LGBT homeschooling co-op.

And I was like, whoa, whoa,

what happened to this girl that I started following like seven years ago because she wasn't afraid to be like, fuck this lipstick.

This lipstick fucking sucks.

We have come a long way, Derek.

And so obviously we don't know exactly what happened here, but we have clues.

This feels reflective of what has become like a pretty standard arc that we can recognize from like the wellness slash alt medicine slash living off the land earthy spirituality space to like fascist white supremacy anti-LGBT ideology.

I think it'd be helpful to sort of define the terms in case some of your listeners don't know conspirituality.

It was a, it was created, coined in 2011 by two researchers, Charlotte Ward and David Voas.

And it basically encapsulates the left-leaning wellness new age space with right-wing, libertarian, individualistic ideology.

It's a pretty new term and and it's a pretty broad term.

And within that, the three of us hosts have our different takes on it.

But from my perspective, the glue between them is this intensive focus on individualism.

And right-wing politics is anti-anything that hints at socialism.

They don't know the difference between socialism and communism.

So you'll often hear that conflated.

But it what it always boils down to is the glorification of the individual.

And unfortunately, that is something that has proliferated in wellness spaces for 200 years since

yoga and Hinduism and Buddhism started being introduced into America in the first place.

It's this idea of the spirituality as a way to embolden your individual self, not as a community exercise, which is mostly how it functions in other places.

And that has created this very weird convergence of people who think they're living these very spiritual lives, but then you'll find them just taking and shoring up their resources and trying to create their own little cults as indicative of this particular environment you're identifying.

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Now, back to the show.

I want to talk about the kind of like the way that this particular pipeline of radicalization is like, I don't know, people talk about the horseshoe theory where it's like you go so far left that you become right or you go so far right that you become left.

I want to talk about how this applies to that.

And I want to tell you about the first time that I noticed this happening.

It was in the wake of.

COVID and kind of the whole anti-vax movement, particularly around COVID.

In March 2021.

Okay.

Let me set the scene for this.

Basically, as you might remember, especially if you were living in America during like 2020, 2021, anti-vax movement was huge and there were like rallies all the time everywhere.

The anti-vaxxers were like organizing on Telegram to occupy cheesecake factories in protests of masking measures.

It was wild.

It was wild.

Honestly, it was like I couldn't even like really.

go outside and like trek around New York City without encountering some sort of demonstration from like anti-Fauci people or whatever.

One day i was walking through central park and i encountered one of these demonstrations and i decided i was like okay i want to like talk to these people because like what is going on really i was expecting to find just like a bunch of trumpers basically Because in the media, the anti-vax movement was being sort of labeled as this very like Trump adjacent right wing movement.

What was so fascinating, what I found there was that it was like very like, some of them were Trump people.

Some of them were like QAnon people.

They were talking about like 5G and the trans pedophile cults and whatever, but a lot of them were like hippies.

Like they weren't wearing shoes.

They were like crunch, crunch, like, you know, crunchy granola hippies.

And these people were all like.

in community with one another at this little like lawn in central park protesting and i was like okay okay i'm misunderstanding what's happening here again i think we're going to find using individualism as a framework informative here because i've I've been writing about the anti-vax movement since 2010, 2011,

at least the modern incarnation of it that was really fueled by Andrew Wakefield's false connection between vaccines and autism in the 1990s.

So it's always been a problem.

I wrote about the measles outbreak in Los Angeles in 2015 because

all of the crunchy mothers there who weren't vaccinating their children and the measles spread through that community.

So it's happened before, but COVID basically gave it steroids.

In fact, we founded Conspirituality as a podcast the very week that plandemic, that pseudo-propaganda film was created.

Can you explain plandemic?

I remember watching it.

That was, that was crazy.

When that came out, Mickey Willis is somebody who was in our circles in Los Angeles.

He had done an event I had been a part of in 2011.

So it was very familiar, but I didn't know that he and others around him had gone that far into anti-vax ideology.

And it was a complete propaganda film for the anti-vax movement that just basically posited the idea that whatever COVID vaccines were going to be developed, because they weren't even on the radar yet, were going to be a nefarious government psyop to try to control the population.

And just last week, he sent out an email about the MPox vaccine and the dangers of MPox and how that's going to be another COVID.

Like he's monetized anti-vax disinformation for many years years now.

And he really found,

as a somewhat failed filmmaker, he found an audience and now he has adoring fans around him.

And that's sort of, that is often what it comes down to, unfortunately, is people just want to be recognized for whatever ridiculous shit they can come up with.

And the anti-vax movement is filled with that.

And so when you were in New York and you see the yogis and the hippies without their shoes on, two of the threads that run throughout all of conspiratuality is nothing is as it seems, and there's this sort of ultimate power that is keeping the individual down.

Now, that is true.

It's called unfettered capitalism.

And

there are political solutions to that.

But the problem is most of the wellness community has no interest in politics whatsoever.

They think it's all a charade.

They don't understand how it affects their daily life because they never pay attention to it.

And so they think they live outside the system when every facet of their their life is governed by the rules and regulations that we all abide by.

And, you know, I started my career in local political journalism in New Jersey in the 1990s going to zoning board meetings and school board meetings where politics happens.

But the wellness community, usually privileged people who don't have to worry about being negatively impacted by politics, thinks that they've transcended it.

And so they get pulled into that very individualist sense of spirituality that I identified.

And that just really dovetails well with the right-wing pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality.

Wait, speaking of what, so, okay.

When one is reading about beauty guru drama, as I do, I'm sorry guys.

I'm not proud of this, but it is what it is.

It's really localized on Reddit more often than not.

And I did read this, what I thought was a kind of brilliant analysis of the whole Raw Beauty Christie situation.

I have so many Reddit screenshots that I did while I was.

So this person wrote in response to the Raw Beauty Christie situation.

From what I've researched, it is commonly due to the reject modernity, embrace tradition mindset.

The world feels scary and difficult.

Women are supposed to have it all and be the best, most responsible mothers they can be while earning an income.

Quality of life is supposed to be better.

Look at all these rights women have.

Then why do I still feel terrible?

Why do I still resent my husband?

Why am I still so scared about everything and the world my child is going into?

Maybe these rights aren't as amazing or good for me as everyone says they are.

We haven't heard from our moms in the 60s and 80s about how bad the world was.

Maybe that world was better and we should go back to it.

Maybe modernity, women's rights, LGBT rights, isn't worth the price.

Thus, conservative pipeline.

It's really unfortunate because it's ignoring the biggest issue.

The reason things are terrible is because of capitalism.

Because of the insistence that we continually be making a profit and contributing to the world, primarily in an economic sense, rather than anything else.

Women's labor and autonomy will always be disrespected because capitalism requires their humanity and labor to be undervalued in its essence.

How else will they make profit?

That feels a lot like what you just said.

There's a sentiment, I believe Naomi Klein identified it, but a number of people have as well, is that conspiracy theorists and conspiratualists often get the feeling right, but the facts wrong.

And that is absolutely true.

And this disillusionment with how capitalism operates in American society is a feeling that so many of us share, including myself.

But we're not always able to pinpoint exactly what that means.

And unfortunately, Really understanding what it means, either if we're talking about politics or we haven't really touched upon science yet, but the wellness community being anti-political and anti-science, they often go together.

If they don't have the resources or understanding where to look to understand the sort of systems that hold us back and make us feel that way, it's very easy to get caught up in propaganda because one thing propagandists do very well is they flatten everything and make it feel like it's one thing.

So, the reason your child has autism, oh, it's the vaccine, duh, of course.

When it's probably a combination of a lot of things.

And that process perpetuates itself throughout online spaces everywhere.

And if your feed is filled with people you follow who get pulled into these pipelines and you're not following credible media organizations, or if you're not reading scientific journals, or if you're not staying up on what the House of Representatives is doing to pass regulations, it's so easy to get just sucked in by these very simple messages because you're like, oh, that's what's holding me back.

Okay, that's what I'm going to pinpoint and pursue now.

Yeah, it does feel, I think the idea of having the right feeling, but pointing it in the wrong direction, if you will, is so important, right?

Like these people will talk a lot about like big pharma and I never want to be like, I think actually big pharma is great and sound.

And I think we should love big pharma and we should love our government.

Like it's, you know, it's like, I think there's a reason, especially if you're from a minoritized group, whether you're a woman, whether you're a queer person, whether you're a person of color, like anyone who's been disenfranchised by like the medical system, as women are known to have historically been, it's like, okay, there is a reason why I can understand you being distrusting of these huge institutions.

But then you have like the essential oils companies of the world being like, those doctors, they're out to get your money, but we, we just want to heal you.

Pay $79 for your starter oil kit.

Let's talk about something that I think about a lot and cover a lot.

And it will intersect nicely with your focus on makeup, I think, because I'm sure

you come across natural beauty influencers.

Little gay boy, I could connect this to something you know about.

That's chemophobia.

And chemophobia is the fear of chemicals.

And that also

goes across.

It's the anti-vax movement, the anti-sunscreen movement, the anti-seed oil movement, anything anti-that has to do with some sort of product that is manufactured and made.

Chemophobia,

glyphosate is a great example of how people fear glyphosate when so many studies have shown that it is effective for what it's supposed to do and not detrimental to human health.

So you get in this position that is very difficult to navigate because being somebody and having a podcast that often focuses on the anti-vax movement, the default reactivity to us is, oh, you're shilling for big pharma.

And I'm in the same boat as you here.

Like, I

absolutely, I'm a cancer survivor.

Chemicals saved my life.

So I'm kind of a fan.

I used to, I worked in an emergency room for two years.

I was a health journalist.

I'm kind of a fan of medical interventions.

And I'm not a fan of for-profit healthcare in any capacity.

But having those conversations requires differentiating what you're actually talking about at that moment.

And as I said earlier, what propagandists do very well is they flatten everything so that if you are advocating for the COVID vaccine, that just means that you're a fan of big pharma in every facet.

And that's not fair and that doesn't create good dialogues and conversations.

But social media's currency isn't nuance.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, speaking of clean beauty and

the direction that that can take you, are you ready for our second beauty guru?

Let's go.

All right.

Tati Westbrook, I would like to have a conversation with you.

Tati Westbrook,

Tati Westbrook is someone who I have talked about at this point at length over on Patreon in my Buy Sister series.

Most people know her, in my opinion, unfortunately, as the beauty guru who feuded with James Charles in 2019 over his failure to endorse her vitamin gummy supplements.

Can I give one piece of advice here that I think is important?

Because you mentioned supplements, and that happens to be one of my specialties on the podcast.

If you want to understand a supplement's efficacy, there's a very simple way of doing this, which is go to the product website and then don't just take what they're telling you for face value, but then read

at least the abstracts of the studies that they're presenting on their own website that's backing up the efficacy of their product.

And I will guarantee you, because I've done this dozens of times, that what they're claiming and what the evidence actually shows never lines up.

But what these companies do is they just throw some studies or some abstracts on their website and say, oh, see, it works.

And they're banking on the fact that people aren't going to actually go through and read it.

So part of what I do is I go through and read it.

And so if you are really ever genuinely like, is this going to work or not?

Just do that.

And you will very quickly understand that most supplements don't do what they're purported to do.

Well, speaking of, Tati is a beauty guru who for a long time on this platform was extraordinarily uncontroversial.

In fact, that was like.

part of her appeal, a large part of her appeal was that while the beauty internet seems always to be embroiled in some scandal, she never was.

One of her kind of earliest tiptoes into scandal, though, was the launch of her supplement company, Halo Beauty.

If you have been around the beauty space on YouTube, I'm sure you are feeling warm and charged right now at the mention of Halo Beauty, but Derek, let me give you the brief.

Basically, she is someone who would mention with increasing frequency her interest in like clean beauty.

And like, I think beauty comes from the inside out.

And, you know, a lot of these ingredients in our lipsticks and foundations are kind of not good for you if you start

doing your own research.

And so briefly, I just want to mention like the launch of this brand that she created called Halo Beauty.

She, as many beauty gurus do, she started to tease that she was launching a product.

And so, you know, people are thinking, well, she reviews like makeup all the time.

And so she's just going to launch a makeup product, like an eyeshadow palette or something.

This is back in

2018, 2019.

And she's teasing like my brand.

I've been working on this for years.

I'm so excited.

And I, you know, I was in college.

I'm like, I'm ready.

Like, I'm giving you my, my $30 for this, whatever you're launching, Tati.

My loins are girded.

Then the big day comes, and she reveals her brand is

these pink pills, which are biotin supplements that cost like $40 for a 30-day supply.

She is going through every single ingredient and explaining how it's going to like purify your pores from the inside out.

And like, this is where beauty starts.

And like making these like kind of wild claims.

And speaking about like marketing and kind of website stuff, she had like all of these pictures on the Halo Beauty social media that were like showing like people's acne clearing up after like 30 days on these pills.

Like it was just, it was wild.

It was wild.

And do you have any thoughts on influencer supplement companies?

Oh, I have a lot of thoughts, but as you're talking, I'm looking over a site.

And first off, real results, it has what you're talking about.

They're all anecdotes, and anecdotes do not provide data.

They're the beginning of data, right?

So I don't want to discount anecdotes.

But when you see that without any actual data, that's the first red flag because there's no studies listed on her site.

The second one,

she's doing what is often done by supplements companies, which is she's taking all of the ingredients and she's, first off, she's listing their purported benefits.

She's not linking to studies, unlike some other companies.

And she's also saying things like it will help clear up your skin, like things you can't actually prove.

But what she's not doing is sharing the studies that show the dose amount.

And that's the biggest oversight that these companies do is because CBD is a great example.

A lot of companies will have 10 or 20 milligrams of CBD in their product and then they'll list all of the benefits that CBD is supposed to do, but at 400 or 600 milligram doses.

So the research is done at these very high dose levels, and then people will include a micro dose of that, but then pass it off as if it's doing the same thing.

And that's what I'm seeing here.

She doesn't list dose levels or anything, but she's saying all of the benefits of it.

And there's no actual way to know whether or not it's going to do that.

And she's also, last one, she's relying on the concept of synergy, which a lot of supplements companies do, which is this idea that if this does this and this does this, well, together they're going to be even more powerful.

But there's no chemical proof of that if they haven't been studied together.

So you can't take individualized studies, throw them all together, and say, well, well, that must mean they do all these things because there could be contraindications with some of the ingredients.

This happens often with adaptogens, which are healing mushrooms.

They're contraindicated to a lot of pharmaceutical products, but supplement companies won't tell you that.

So

that's where the negative possible impacts come in is if you're on a statin or a blood thinner or diabetes medication, and then you start taking the supplement for some other reason, it could mess with your medications, and you'll never get that warning from these companies.

Wow.

I waited like six years for someone who actually knows about this stuff to explain to me why my gut feeling about Halo Beauty was correct.

Thank you, Derek.

Again, like Tati Westbrook, problematic though she may be, falling down the woo-to-cue pipeline as she may be.

definitely harboring some wild homophobic feelings as she may have exhibited in 2019, still kind of an internet mother to me.

And so it hurts my soul to analyze her problematic behavior.

And yet, to an audience of 8 million, she's going down quite the rabbit hole.

So maybe a year ago, two years ago, she moved from LA to Texas.

This is when she starts talking a lot about toxins and also Christianity and also

doing

research.

We're all doing research.

Derek, what do you make of doing doing research?

I do research all the time, and I think it's important.

But when they say that, usually what they mean is they've read a couple of Instagram posts by people they follow.

That's not research.

I mean, research is actually reading 30, 40 page studies and coming to conclusions and also reading conflicting evidence.

I regularly interact with two chemists.

One is a cosmic chemist named Michelle Wong or Lab Muffin Beauty Science.

She is the best follow for anyone interested in makeup or beauty products to actually know because she's a cosmetic chemist.

So, whenever I come across something like, say, Halo Beauty, and I have a question, I'll just DM her.

She'll reply with these lengthy replies that really break things down for me.

Dr.

Andrea Love is a biochemist, and she's on the board of the Lyme Disease Foundation.

And she's another one who, if I have questions on these things, that is actually doing research, is reading the materials and then consulting with experts.

Reading some Reddit threads or some Instagram threads is not actually research.

We're all doing our research.

I just left.

I mean, that's kind of like, I don't know, when I'm like having a casual conversation with someone about like health stuff or whatever, and they say, like, I've been doing my research, that's when I start getting really nervous that I've lost them.

That's usually one of the first signs.

Absolutely.

As is moving from Los Angeles to Austin or anywhere in Texas.

Okay, there are a couple videos that Tati made that I am going to clip in little segments from into the podcast right now.

Hey guys, welcome to today's extra juicy video.

We're going to talk about beauty secrets, controversies, things that I do in my routine that are not necessarily mainstream.

So I just want to start by saying nobody knows your body like you know your own body and what is truly best for you.

I feel responsible for my day in, day out choices.

And that is something powerful to grab a hold hold of is you have authority over your choices.

There's two big, big, big red flags that I want to talk about.

The first one is actually in a video where that she titled Controversial Beauty Opinions, uh-oh, which is a video that she also started by being like, I'm going to say things that might trigger people.

A lot of people are triggered.

And that's another one where as soon as people start talking about like, oops, didn't mean to trigger everyone.

I'm like, oh no, oh no, right wing dog whistle.

Am I wrong wrong for thinking that?

Am I too sensitive?

Am I a blue-haired lib?

No, it's attention capture.

You're setting up somebody.

You're

framing whatever you're going to say as if it's going to be a controversial.

Usually it's not.

Usually it's just flat out wrong.

Like real experts aren't debating what you're talking about.

You're just doing it because you have an agenda.

So that is always a big red flag.

It's totally just like big water doesn't want to tell you that the water is turning the frogs gay.

No one wants to say it, but I'm brave enough to say it.

And there is some municipalities where you have to worry about tap water.

Flint, Michigan is a pretty famous example.

But most tap waters, and when I lived in Los Angeles for 11 years, we filtered our water because it tasted disgusting.

But moving up to Portland, Oregon now, it is fantastic.

And you just have to look into filtration systems.

All that said,

the idea that they're poisoning you through the tap water, unless, again, you're in a situation like Flint, which was a whole political and social reason for it happening, that is real.

But what will happen is influencers will take instances like that peripherally and just say it's all bad, which is absolutely not true.

The U.S.

has some of the best public health systems in the world.

So anytime you hear an influencer saying, oh, the wheat is toxic in America or seed oils are bad.

We have more regulations than most anywhere in the world.

So that is provably untrue.

Seed oil mentioned, when you started that tangent and you said it is true that some municipalities, I thought you were going to say, it is true that some municipalities do have water that is turning their frogs gay.

I thought you were going to be like, to give these people a little bit of grace.

And I was going to be like, which ones?

Because I want to move to there.

That would be an interesting consequence of all this.

No, I haven't seen that yet.

Sorry.

It's like,

Alex Jones, broken clock is right twice a day.

And one of those times happened to be that, in fact, the water is turning the frogs K.

Speaking of seed oils, that's why I gasped when you said seed oils, because that is a big one that I don't really understand.

So maybe you can fill in the gaps for me.

But in controversial beauty opinions, Tati says that she no longer wears,

okay, deep breath, Matthew.

She no longer wears sunscreen on her body because since removing seed oils from her diet, her body responds to the sun differently and she does not burn.

Honestly, people hear that I go out and I'm not afraid of the sun and they want to throw rocks so hard.

They're like almost like cursing you, like you're gonna get cancer.

You're a bad role model.

I do wear a hat and I shield my face and I use sunscreen on my face, but I also am not afraid of the sunshine.

You'll hear a lot of people in the holistic community talking about removing seed oils and how sunshine reacts differently.

You don't burn anymore.

I have not burned once going out in the sunshine at all over this summer or even last summer.

And I've been a little over a year, maybe year and a half seed oil free.

Like I do not have any snacks in my home that have any sunflower seed oil, grapeseed oil, canola oil.

I found that out of everything was the most beneficial to my health.

And also I don't get even a little bit red going outside.

I've heard this often.

It is amazing.

Actually, one of the influencers we covered a few years ago would call Sunburn's light nutrition.

Fuck off.

Yes, she is a chiropractor who positions herself as a self-help coach.

Her name is Dr.

Meli, Dr.

Chiropractor, Melissa Sell.

That is a common one, this whole conflation.

And again, threads, looking for threads.

The thread is chemophobia.

The thread is modern society, is toxic.

All of these things are created in labs when some of the most dangerous products on the market are essential oils, depending on dose level, to be clear.

But essential oils can be terrible for you.

I saw a documentary where parents were spraying essential oils on their children, not sunscreen, and then having them run out into the sun.

So they're actually calling those actual cancer-causing agents into their body through this process and thinking that they're living naturally.

And that, again, goes back to the whole romanticized idea, the idea that sometime in the past, we convened with nature and everything was perfect, not realizing that up until a couple thousand years ago, humans were in the middle of the food chain, not at the top.

And we have a very glorified understanding of evolutionary biology.

We're in a pretty good place right now, and a big part of that is our understanding of chemistry.

But what these influencers do is they exploit our underlying fear of chemistry in order to usually sell us products?

Halo beauty.

Yeah, that are still chemicals.

Yes.

I don't know about seed oils, but you know what could fill your seed oil void?

Some $40 hot pink pills.

Seed oils are predominantly healthy.

They are heart protective.

They are generally good for you.

What they're talking about is they exploit this fear of like going to a food cart in New York City and seeing deep fried products, right?

We have this image of food kinishes that are sitting in oil for a long time.

That is completely different than using some avocado oil or some olive oil, any sort of oil in a pan at home.

Of course, you have to take

heat distribution into account.

But besides that, yes, some oils are better than others, but seed oils are definitely not toxic.

Yeah, she says things like, you know, stay on the outside perimeter of the grocery store because you don't want any of that process shit in the scent.

It's like, Tati, whatever.

I just like, I was like, you know, at a certain point, I'm like, wow, I started watching you

every day.

She would make these makeup videos five days a week on YouTube for a long time, which is such an incredible level of output that I still to this day can't fathom.

But she was making like the best deals at CVS on lipsticks right now.

And I was like, you know, clamoring for her insight.

And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Why are you telling me that you can go out in the sun as long as you haven't been consuming seed oils?

Something has shifted.

What she says is actually pretty, pretty common in the wellness space.

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I'm kidding.

I'm kidding again.

I'm having fun today.

What can I say?

Podcasts used to be fun.

No,

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And now let's jump back down the rabbit hole.

What's interesting to me about this too is that I think I feel like you have to be surrounded, be like in an echo chamber of like weird wackadoo wellness beliefs for a while before you feel empowered and confident enough to say it to a platform of millions of people and like not feel like you're going off the rails.

To be fully unafraid of the reactions that you will get for saying something, to be clear, absolutely crazy and untrue, like you can go out in the sun and not burn as long as you don't consume seed oils.

Like you have to have been like.

kind of relishing in that kind of shit for a while, right?

Absolutely.

And I want to point out that these spaces are not new.

I started practicing yoga in 1997 in New York City.

And even back then, in those brick and mortar spaces, before influencers were doing yoga on social media, things that were said, you are your own best doctor.

You know your body better than anyone.

Trust yourself.

Don't trust experts.

Like those have been around.

Those were around in the 90s.

They were around before that, I'm sure.

But what happens is how that translates through online spaces because you no longer have the personal inner communication.

You can just rely on your pre-existing biases and then people you trust online, which creates this whole weird parasocial relationship that happens.

And so you trust these people, even though you've never met them in real life, at least in the olden days, you had to actually have some contact with that person to build that trust that no longer exists.

And so, yes, those

feelings have been said probably a number of times before you've publicly publicly stated them, but you've been in some sort of environment that facilitated that.

In her video, I was making myself sick.

The first thing that she does is really berate tap water.

And one of the things she says about tap water, you all knew it was coming.

Fluoridation.

I do not drink tap water.

I find it alarming if you go online and do some research about water and look locally at the levels of different things, like not just fluoridation.

This is crazy to me.

I mean, a lot of this stuff is crazy, but this is crazy.

So water, I want to tell you, Derek, like my understanding of water fluoridation, why it happens and the conspiracy around it.

I think I have a very basic understanding of.

And you fill in the gaps.

Can we do that?

Sure.

So, okay, my understanding is that fluoride is put into tap water by governments because it is good for your dental health, prevents tooth decay in populations, and that that is like has long been scientific and medical consensus.

Yes?

Absolutely.

But it has long been at the center of various right-wing conspiracies that date back to the Second Red Scare.

And this is something that I learned in researching for this episode.

Basically, during the Second Red Scare, which was, you know, the whole like communists are invading the nation kind of thing, far-right activists claimed that the government was fluoridating water to turn people into communists and to basically

make people like docile, you know, stifle the revolutionary spirit of the American people against communism.

It was promoted heavily by the John Birch Society, which is kind of just like a far-right white supremacist type group.

So that's my understanding of the fluoridation.

What I'm not totally sure of is how we get from like white supremacists being like, they're putting fluoride in the water to turn us into communists.

How that flows up the river, if you will, to glam life guru, youtube.com/slash glam life guru.

Well, first, on a very basic level, again, I have to go back to chemophobia.

It's this idea that there's this ingredient in something we consume that's harming us.

But you mentioned, I mean, John Birch was really rooted in Christian nationalism, but you know, the white supremacy angle has kind of been simmering under so many of these right-wing movements.

And in our book, Con Spirituality, we identified the first evidence of like when yoga started becoming popular in the late 19th century, some of the biggest proponents were known white supremacists.

And it all had to do with the glorification of the body.

And in this case, the glorification of the white body and the white race.

But it still was this idea of building physical fitness in order to be strong and to protect against insert enemy here.

And since the 1940s, the enemy in America has been communism or some form of socialism.

It's this rooted idea that the idea of the collective is not nearly as important as the individual.

And the right wing has exploited that ever since.

And really, when the term conspiratuality was coined, the researchers pointed back to the 1960s as another indication of when it happened, because what you had was civil rights being enacted.

You had feminism coming to the fore, but you also had like social turmoil.

You had the Kennedys, you had MLK Jr., Malcolm X, all these very well-known figures being assassinated.

And there was a lot, it's very, there's a lot of echoes of what's happening today.

And so in all of that confusion, what you find, again, are people coming saying, I know what's going on.

And the challenge that we have as, say, science communicators, for example, is Every expert, epidemiologist, cardiologist, public health officials, all the people I've talked to over the last four and a half years of this podcast, they're all really good at saying things like, this is what we know right now.

This is where the evidence leads.

We're working with this assumption, understanding it might change in the future.

That is honoring science, but what it doesn't do is it doesn't capture your attention as someone yelling the frogs are gay at you when staring into the camera.

If you're a parent of a child with autism and you don't know why it happened, you're not having RFK Jr.

look and say, no vaccines are effective.

This causes autism with such certainty.

And it's that certainty that the influencers are able to exploit because they take vulnerable people in situations where they're exposed to being open to any sort of idea that will explain their predicament.

And rather than listening to someone and say, well, we have to weigh these things out, which would be the right course of action, they're seduced by the person who says, no, it's definitely this.

Yeah.

And I mean, something about Tati Westbrook, among other people, is that while I don't know that I would call her a cult leader,

she is a popular YouTuber.

And one of the things that makes her a popular YouTuber is she is beautiful.

She's extremely articulate.

She's rich.

She dresses well.

She has voluminous hair.

Wait, one second.

I'm going to change my camera battery really fast.

What was I saying?

Tati's beautiful.

She's rich, she's hot.

Yeah, to your point, I mean, when you have someone, especially someone with whom you've already developed a parasocial relationship with through something like makeup or like lifestyle content, it's a lot easier to listen to them about like their solutions to the, you know, unsolvable woes of the world than it is to like grapple with the fact that, I don't know, so much of this echoes to me.

It's like how people are engaging with like woo to cue just seems like how some people engage with religion fanatically, which is like life is hard.

We don't have answers for a lot of things.

I am going to latch on to the quickest or most charismatic thing that gives me an answer, even if it's a false one.

Charisma goes a long way.

And part of the challenge of science or media literacy communicators is needing some charisma.

Thankfully, there are some really good ones, but there are definitely more in these sort of cult angle that you identified.

I mean, they're not all cult leaders.

Some of them do aspire to that.

A general thread is they all want to be adored in some capacity.

These influencers don't like being told that they're wrong.

Whereas if you're talking to the true science communicator, they'll look, at least look at the evidence and try to weigh it out.

But you're playing in a very

uneven playing field of social media because the charismatic people know how to exploit this medium.

I'm an advocate for being as honest with the evidence as possible and being able to change your story when it's called for.

And that's something you won't really find a lot with people in the spaces that you're identifying, except if it's to say, I used to do this until it made me sick.

And so then I started doing this.

And guess what?

You can also buy this from me.

Something that I want to talk about, like.

I want to once again give grace to some of the people that I have been critiquing, which is, I don't know, a common thread on this podcast is like trying to understand how people, you know, get the way that they are and maybe even do harm and not excuse it, but explain it.

And maybe that helps, you know, the same behavior stop in its tracks in someone else.

You know, how I want to address that in this particular instance is that like, I think alt-right spaces are usually associated with men correctly.

I think they tend to make up more of these spaces.

But I do think the wellness and like homesteading and like natural living kind of thing offers a unique entry point into the far right for women.

And sometimes understandably so, right?

Like, like I said at the top of the episode, Christy struggled with infertility for 15 years.

Tati Westbrook has also struggled with infertility for a really long time, which is something, you know, she's, I think, around 40 now and she's documented her struggle with getting pregnant and how that's impacted her mental health, which is also something that famously in this country is usually not taken seriously.

Tati Tati has also struggled with endometriosis, which is a pretty brutal condition that's famously under-treated and under-diagnosed in women.

On average, it takes 10 years to diagnose a woman with endometriosis.

Women's health issues for, you know, forever have been taken less seriously by doctors.

Male bodies are treated in medical science as the default.

And so, when I see, you know, especially someone who has been victim to all of of these structures and institutions, I understand why they would feel empowered to turn away.

Absolutely.

Not only were male bodies treated as the default, they were the only ones studied up until the 1980s.

They didn't even look at female bodies.

The challenge here, so first off, it's a matter of intention.

It's something we talk a lot about in the podcast because there is a range.

Not everyone who's involved in either consuming these products and ideas or selling them are being malicious.

I think a lot of them are true believers in these things.

So when I see someone selling something, the first thing I have to assess is, are they grifting or they actually really believe this is going to work?

And that gives you different insights and it provides different entry points in how to have a conversation around it.

But overall, what I would suggest is

looking for an actual expert in the field that you're confused about.

So if you're talking about OBGYN issues, Dr.

Jen Gunter is one of the best people on social media to look at.

She's written numerous books.

Her last book was about menstruation.

It was called Blood.

And as a cisgendered man who is married to a woman who will be going through menopause at some time in the near future, I wanted to learn more about what that process is going to be like for her.

So I read that book and then we had her on our podcast to discuss these things.

And that is someone I would turn to if I had questions about, if I were a woman and I had questions about my body.

I wouldn't trust someone as well-meaning as their anecdote might be because I actually have my own strange health anecdotes that aren't actually supported by data.

And I do talk about them, but I also never recommend them.

I would still turn to an expert to understand what's going on to better assess it rather than someone who's selling me something and who doesn't, frankly, who's never studied the field.

So you're saying that this Sephora halls don't make her an expert in health and wellness?

How dare you?

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

You might have to work me out of this podcast now.

Have you considered that that might make you a misogynist, Derek?

It is.

I would be called one.

I mean, I've criticized acupuncture on the podcast before, and a number of people said it's anti-Asian.

And I just kind of, my eyes go wide at that because most of the literature that supports the fact that acupuncture doesn't work comes from Asian countries.

I mean, it's just, but it's that idea.

We conflate things all the time.

We're like, oh, it's this thing.

So it must work for this reason.

Instead of actually looking at what

hundreds and thousands of studies have provided.

So, yeah, it's not, that's not criticism that I haven't seen before.

Feminist author Caroline Criado-Perez wrote, far too often we blame women for turning to alternative medicine, painting them as credulous and even dangerous.

But the blame does not lie with the women.

It lies with the gender data gap.

Thanks to hundreds of years of treating the male body as default in medicine, we simply do not know enough about how disease manifests in the female body.

And then she goes on to write about how basically we need to attack.

those structures first before turning our sights on, you know, Tati Westbrook.

And I don't know, that makes sense to me.

Absolutely.

You know, one of the things that you'll see the right, I mean, one of their main targets is critical race theory.

And it gets to the same point.

Critical race theory is the 101 entry point of being like, hey, we were a country built on slavery, and all of these systems were put in place to keep the white man and the predominantly white man elevated.

Let's look at those systems and see what we can change.

And you see, the Christian nationalists are right-wingers by just saying, no, you're being racist, which is absurd.

In defense of modern medicine, the one hope that I have is that more women are enrolled in medical school now than men.

And what you'll find is a lot of the criticisms you're saying are absolutely true.

But there are a ton of researchers right now who are working at changing that system.

And it's really refreshing to see.

So I hope in the coming decades, we're going to see more good holistic science coming out of all of these people who are dedicating their careers to it.

Yeah, the gendered element of this whole strange phenomenon we've been talking about this episode has really crystallized to me on the Trad Wife Internet, which this could absolutely and perhaps should be, let me know in the comments, be its own episode.

But Derek, I want you to tell me what you know about the Trad Wife Internet.

It's not something that we've done full episodes on, but I have looked into it.

And referencing back to the pastel QAnon, again, it has its own aesthetic of someone who has the time and money to make every single meal from scratch and film it and light it properly and do the makeup and do the clothing.

It's pretty, it's pretty tremendous.

How much effort is placed on this 1950s Americana romanticized image is really troublesome to me.

And again, to be fair, like if this is something you do and you're raising your family this way, you know, more power to you.

But when you put it online online and you're monetizing it, I just think it's a bit gross.

This is a hot take.

That was a hot take.

You're going to get some comments about that one, Derek.

But I agree with you, but it's a hot take.

So, okay, if you don't know, if you've been living under a rock, and you know what, in this case, good for you if you have been.

But trad wives are basically online content creators.

They're women content creators who perform what they imagine life would be like for housewives in the 1950s, like you said.

Some of the most famous ones are Ballerina Farm, who has 10 million followers on Instagram.

Nara Smith, who has millions of followers on every social media platform, actually both of them do.

Nara Smith is famous for going viral many times over, for making things from scratch to the point where it gets ridiculous and it's been turned into a meme.

But like, my kids this afternoon told me that they wanted bubblegum.

So I went back in the yard and started fermenting.

She's like making like fucking, I don't know, water from scratch in her house.

Nara Smith is actually hysterical because she's played into the ridiculousness and she's turned into a troll.

Like now in her videos, like making cereal from scratch, she'll like wear actual ball gowns and it's kind of hysterical.

But in all of these trad wife content creator stuff, which have become very popular, there's an emphasis on homemaking, childbearing, cooking from scratch, pleasing your husband.

If you're noticing noticing some frightening levels of like some of those things seem normal and some of them seem really not normal, that is exactly what is so unsettling about these content creators.

And the irony, of course, being that a lot of successful trad wife content creators are earning, you know, six, seven-figure salaries and running sometimes independent businesses by performing a version of femininity from, you know, a time that women could not open a credit card.

What is another interesting common thread through trad wife content is this conflation of like traditional lifestyle and traditional, i.e., conservative politics.

But presented to an entirely new, very young audience on TikTok, there's a strong like kind of fundamentalist religion,

religious undertone to a lot of it.

Both Ball Arena Farm and Nara Smith are Mormons, which is something that doesn't get talked about oftentimes explicitly, but is just the ideals of fundamentalist religion are like carried through their content.

One of my biggest critiques of this kind of content that to some people might seem far-fetched, but like to me just doesn't seem far-fetched, is it seems like it's like sometimes unbeknownst to these women, like it seems like far-right recruitment propaganda.

I think people unwillingly recruit without recognizing it.

It might not be intentional.

Sometimes it is.

I mean, Mormons are, from my interactions with them, are generally really nice people, actually.

I knew a number of them in Los angeles but like i'm sorry the underlying philosophies of the religion are insane wildly anti-woman anti-black anti-gay yeah absolutely in every in every facet so you know that you're always balancing this fact that people are complex but you have to like weigh out how much you want to be influenced by it and also What's interesting to me, I'm 49 now and having lived through some generations watching these cycles, because time does not move linearly as we think so in the 1990s when i was going on take back the night marches at rutgers university which were focused on women's safety you had a really strong undercurrent of feminism and and trying to create an you know equal gender equality at that time and so now when i see women in their young 20s talking about how great the 1950s were it feels you feel like you're being gaslit like i feel like it at that times because i'm like when i was that age you know you go through those cycles, and so you have to step back and wonder what the appeal is.

And when you're talking about this, this appeal is a level of privilege because the two that you identified,

the amount of money that has to go into the lifestyle that affords these videos to be made, I don't know how much that's talked about, but I do know that that's not most young people, or even my age Gen X person.

That's not our situation where we can spend hours a day filming content.

And so you create this illusion of a lifestyle.

And even if you are living it, what happens with the power of social relationships are people like, I want to live that too.

And then you go out and you try to do it.

And you're like, wait a second, how do they pull this off?

And I think that's also, you know, something that needs to be talked about.

If you are making a living monetizing these things and living this, you should at least be honest about where all that money is flowing in because it's not cheap.

No, absolutely not.

And also, I mean, just to tie it into like the main, I guess, theme of this episode, it's like the trad wife influencer feels like a really popular entry point for people to be like, it would be nice to wear an apron and cook a sourdough recipe.

And then, but like after three months of following this person's content, they're like, and also Trump 2024.

And women are primarily should be focused on pleasing their husband and giving birth once every other year.

And also perhaps Trump 2028 and 2032.

Like, you know what I mean?

It's like, it's again, it's this like back to the land, natural living.

And also like, women should be in the home.

Even just pointing out the fact that how privileged we all are to live in environments where we can control the temperature at all times, that is historically very new.

And I think what happens is when you're born into something, you don't realize precedent.

You don't realize what people had to endure to get to this place.

And that's just blind privilege.

I mean, that's pretty much anyone in modern society are living through that at this moment.

The fact that you're using this super advanced technology in your phone to be able to film all of this content, like that didn't exist just a generation ago.

And so we take all of these comforts and luxuries that many of us are able to have, at least in America, and then we try to wrap that into this, again, I've used this term a lot, but romanticized image of what the past was, that leads to a lot of frustration because you're right, because the people who are able to present that life, whether they're good people, whatever their intentions are, that is the top of the heap.

And for all the people watching it, they're always going to feel frustrated by the fact that they can't actually do what they're seeing on the screen.

Do you know about the QAnon shaman?

Yes, we've done full episodes on him.

But it's not all women.

And so before we wrap up this episode, I want to point out that just because of the place that I occupy on the internet, and probably if you're listening to this, the one that you're more familiar with, like I've been focusing on how the wellness to far-right pipeline tends to attack women, but it absolutely comes for men too.

I mean, like the third most popular presidential candidate right now, you know, plus his heart, he's probably dropped out by the time this episode goes up.

I've been getting texts as we've been talking.

It's happening right now as we talk.

RFK is done.

Did he endorse Trump yet?

That I don't know.

I haven't seen that on the text.

Let's see.

Oh, oh, hmm.

Yes.

Yes, he's endorsing Trump.

Well, there you go in real time.

But I mean, that's the thing about it, right?

So RFK is someone who is kind of a wellness to far-right guy.

I'm sure he wouldn't describe himself that way, but that's what he is.

Like he's a big vaccines autism guy.

And he just dropped out as a supposed independent and immediately endorsed Trump.

And so, you know, he's out there.

I think Joe Rogan is responsible for a lot of this, like, just asking questions to like radicalizing men to the far right.

And I think perhaps one of the mascots for this archetype is the QAnon shaman.

The QAnon shaman, though you may not be familiar with his moniker, is someone whose image you most definitely know.

He was at the January 6th Insurrection, the guy who storms the Capitol with.

I don't even know how would you describe this, Derek?

His costume?

Yes.

It's very, you know what?

I maintain that a lot of these people on the far right, like they're just theater kids who lost their way.

They want to perform in a track show.

Yeah, that's fair.

I mean, that's where he comes from.

He was a performer and he created this

very,

it's the very Coachella Burning Man costume.

It's like a throwback to an archaic society that never actually existed.

And it's just this hodgepodge of whatever.

He had the horns and that's what he's mostly known for, but he painted his face red and white and he wore some fur Daniel Boone cap.

He looks like a patriotic Flintstone.

That's very good.

I like that.

He looks like a Fred Flintstone went down the woo-to-cue pipeline.

So who is this guy?

I mean, he was a conspiracy theorist before he got online traction

in Arizona.

And he was, like you identified, he was probably a theater kid who just wanted to be famous for something, created this image of himself, and then happened to be one of the people that stormed the Capitol.

I mean, we knew about him before January 6th.

There's a great podcast called QAnon Anonymous that had done episodes on him.

We had covered him.

And he was just someone who was just attention capture, grabbing whatever conspiracy theory was out there, yelling about it, yelling about like taking back the power.

But he went to the Capitol on that day.

And so, most of the images that people know from the day are him standing

in Congress, like holding a flagpole or whatever he was holding that day and shouting a lot and ended up doing jail time for it, came out of jail, tried to clean up, started selling yoga pants, is running for Congress,

trying to stay, trying to stay relevant, basically.

One thing that's unfortunate about these environments that we operate in is when people go viral for any sort of reason,

when they kind of drop out of virality, they want to maintain that.

And from my understanding, he's someone who didn't have a lot of employment opportunities.

So then you have to monetize.

You have to make a living.

And if you can make a living having your image on yoga pants, then why not?

I'll sell that.

And you see this happen a lot.

And some people are more successful.

Alex Jones, who I think is one of the most horrible people on earth, to be clear, he sort of set the playbook by monetizing supplements with far-right propaganda.

And I think a lot of people have seen that and tried to replicate it.

And I would put Chansley in that bucket.

Well, but the fact, right, that Alex Jones chose to sell supplements and the QAnon shaman chose to sell yoga pants, like it speaks to the fact like these people know that the conflation of this like woo-woo to far-right avid kind of conspiracy follower is popular enough that they thought that they could cash in on it.

Absolutely.

Years ago, I forget what publication, but they showed how if you look at InfoWars and then you look at Goop, they're actually selling the same supplements.

They're just packaged differently and they're marketed differently, but they're the same products.

Whoa.

Whoa.

That's crazy.

That's that's also not crazy.

I mean, I guess I could have assumed that.

Gwyneth Paltrow, this might be your cross to bear.

Oh, God.

I don't know how I ended up there, but yeah.

Well, I mean, I could say that from the beginning of this episode, I think it was always going to come down to Gwyneth Paltrow, unfortunately.

It does.

I have two final questions before we wrap up today.

Before we started recording, you know, and I want to bring this back to the Raw Beauty Christie narrative that we opened with, which was, again, if you recall, that she sent her kid to a private schooling co-op that it seems like she has some involvement in running, that ultimately gathered for a July 4th parade where they all were holding like anti-LGBT, anti-public school science, sort of this like kind of right-wing grooming conspiracy.

When I was talking to you about this stuff before we started recording, you said that most conspiracy theories always end currently at least in the place of like anti-Semitism and anti-trans slash anti-gay stuff.

How do you think that applies here?

Could you elaborate on that?

Not just currently, first of all.

I mean, anti-Semitism, most every conspiracy theory is rooted in anti-Semitism.

It goes back there.

And because there has been this long-standing, back to biblical times, perception of the Jews as having all of the capital, it goes back to being money lenders in the Bible and Jesus overturning them.

So

that's where it comes from.

And then it traces throughout history.

Every time you want to point at someone nefarious, it's been the Jews.

It's been anti-trans, specifically more recently, but anti-any sort of non-heterosexual lifestyle

for generations before that.

So basically, any perceived unorthodox either person or lifestyle is a fitting victim because we're tribal animals.

And so,

if we can pin the problems of someone on something that is outside of us, and when you're dealing with what it looks like from this homesteading school or this homeschooling movement, it's rooted in Christian nationalism.

And

Christian nationalists are very good at being bigots, unfortunately, for the most part.

And I want to differentiate that from Christians overall.

I mean, I don't believe in any of their ideology, but there are a lot of good Christians.

And I would say most Christians live live in some charitable means or, you know, some light.

Well, I can't say most because evangelicals are such a big part of American society.

But

the idea of the other plays very well, even in terms of the Bible, like Satan was not a real major character in the Bible.

Like that came much later, this idea that there was some sort of ultimate form of evil.

And when that ideology was being created centuries later, that has persisted throughout cultures, especially Western culture.

And so getting back to it, you need to point out some problem for why life is not idyllic or perfect.

And so why not go with the easiest possible route that will get the quickest attention from people?

And it tends to go in one of those two directions.

The last question that I have for you is, like, How do we stop people from going down the pipeline, right?

Like, I know lots of people, as we all do, who have their own wellness practices, whether it be yoga or crystals or like whatever else brings them joy or makes them feel good.

I'm not trying to step on your toes if you love your crystals or, you know, whatever else you do, right?

Like, I don't give a shit.

I really don't give a shit.

But how do we keep people from like being exploited by the far right through this path, right?

If you want to look into the ingredients in your foundation, like go for it.

But how do we prevent people from like falling into it so that six months later, they're like, we must keep the children out of the gay public schools?

Unfortunately, it's going to remain local.

I mean, the internet has really skewed our understanding.

I mean, as much as I love it, my father was a computer programmer from the 60s.

I've grown up with computers.

I love technology, to be clear.

It really has skewed our understanding of reality.

And unfortunately, misinformation travels much faster than good information.

And so the only systemic effects you can have is in regulations and trusts, like breaking up trusts, things like that.

We don't need to get into all that, but we're pretty clear that we're not going to monitor social media in any sort of meaningful way.

So the only thing that I've seen effective are one-on-one conversations or small group conversations with people you care about.

So meaning when I do the work that I do, when misinformations do the work, we will put out good information.

We'll do the best with it, but we know that it's not going to sink in across lines, especially with conspiracy theorists.

So, what you're left with is: if you're watching a friend go through it, is stepping in and trying to help that person, is sharing good information, is not just laughing or yelling at them, is actually saying, oh, that's really interesting.

Did you know this though?

And then trying to share something that can shift them in a direction that's going to be more informed, more science-based, and more rooted in empathy and understanding of the broader population.

I mean, I think that's specifically with the vaccines because vaccines have been framed, especially since the pandemic, as an individual choice.

It's not, I'm sorry, it's a public health decision.

So when you're sending your unvaccinated child to school and they have measles, they contract measles and then they spread it.

That's affecting other, that might be affecting an immunocompromised child who can't get a vaccine.

So understand that these decisions are not always just about you.

And that's really hard to do in America.

But drawing back is you have to try to shift people's understanding that their individual choices are not always just on them.

So yeah, if you think your crystal is bringing you something, I mean, that's not going to harm anyone.

But when you get to these health decisions that we need to make and you're seeing people go down these rabbit holes, try to catch it early and try to just...

try to just feed them people who actually know what they're talking about.

And hopefully that can deflate some of what's going on with them.

Yeah.

Tati Westbrook, I'm not giving up on you.

I'm not giving up on you, sister.

Well,

Derek, thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for being here today, for shedding your decades of insight into this world on this

little gay podcast.

I appreciate it.

Oh, I had a wonderful conversation, Matt.

It was truly a pleasure.

I already told people where they can find more of you, but I do that.

It's just a ritual.

Where can people find more of you?

Conspirituality.

We're on every podcast platform.

Conspirituality.net is our website.

And my personal website is derekbaris.com.

I have other projects.

I have a non-profit I'm launching soon.

So I have other things going on.

So you can find me there.

Thank you.

If you have made it this far for listening, I am so grateful that you decided to spend an hour with us today.

I am going to go enjoy the rest of my weekend in the woods.

And who knows?

Maybe this episode will never air because I ran into someone who like yeah, told me, like, seed oils, seed oils are making us all non-binary.

And

maybe I'll have gone down the pipeline by Tuesday when this is supposed to be up.

So who knows?

Who knows?

The world is my oyster.

No, I'm kidding.

I'm kidding.

Maybe send this to like your uncle who's like, I don't know, posting some weird shit on Facebook or your aunt who's like in a yoga cult.

Maybe, maybe we can find a way through less judgment and more empathy.

Who knows?

But until next time, I love you and stay fruity.

We did it.

Stay fruity.

That's great.

Great tagline.

That's my thing.

Well, you know, I love a little euphemism.

I'm the water turning the kids gay in communist.

If I can help.