Doing Their Own Research | Hari Kunzru

In August 2020 Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is now secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, suggested that Covid-19 could be a “plandemic,” “part of a sinister scheme.” In July 2023 he was recorded telling dinner companions that “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” whereas “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” Vaccine research, he said at a panel discussion, could well be responsible for many major pathogens, including HIV and the Spanish flu of 1918.

Kennedy is part of a cohort of medical influencers who gained prominence early in the pandemic, peddling miracle cures such as bleach, hydroxychloroquine, and the livestock dewormer ivermectin, or offering “natural” or “alternative” ways to beat the virus, through diet or exercise or competitively priced supplements. The “antivaxxer” subculture that made him a celebrity grew powerful in the late 1990s, following a panic about the MMR vaccine and autism initiated by a subsequently retracted paper in The Lancet. Participants came to consider themselves freedom fighters, freethinkers opposing tyranny.

When the pandemic started, many people, scared by the news and already suspicious of the medical establishment, found the threat to freedom of Covid-19 mitigation policies even more alarming than Covid-19. The pandemic appeared to them a kind of epidemiological Reichstag fire, an emergency fabricated as a pretext for an intensification of government control, on either a national or a global scale. Fears of a “world government” or “new world order” have been bubbling under the American cultural surface for a very long time, at least since the growth of the system of international organizations that followed World War I. Villains such as the UN or the Trilateral Commission are sometimes “revealed” as vehicles for a global totalitarianism identified with the reign of the Antichrist prophesied in the book of Revelation.

During the first year of the pandemic this long-standing complex of conspiratorial thinking was reactivated by powerful images of authoritarianism in the news—Chinese government workers in hazmat suits transporting the infected to isolation centers, police drones hovering above English hill walkers. The mask was seen as a symbol of compliance, a muzzle worn by “sheeple” who had already surrendered and were possibly even under a sinister form of mind control, robbed of their autonomy by some ingredient in the experimental drugs the authorities were so keen to pump into the populace. In Kennedy’s opinion, the development of a Covid-19 vaccine was “a pharmaceutical-driven, biosecurity agenda that will enslave the entire human race and plunge us into a dystopian nightmare.” With his elevation, conspiracy—which usually presents the government as a distant object of obsession or fantasy—has become governmental logic.

If you have ever found your way to the part of the Internet where people “do their own research,” you may have encountered the art of David Dees. He once freelanced as a commercial illustrator for clients including Disney and Sesame Street, but his career faltered in the mid-Aughts after he contracted a serious illness that he attributed to cadmium poisoning from paint. After a spell in Sweden, during which he came to believe he was being targeted by sinister forces he identified as “Zionists,” the CIA, or agents of the agrochemical company Monsanto, he became a recluse in rural Oregon, treating his ailment with meditation and Reichian electrical “frequencies” as he produced a wildly popular body of baroque and frankly paranoid “political art” (his own term). Dees’s instantly familiar Photoshop aesthetic is lurid and hectic to the point of absurdity. Politicians become bulging-eyed grotesques. State storm troopers menace crying children. Black helicopters hover in the air. Each frame is busy with visual violence, batteries of jabbing needles, rivers of glowing radioactive sludge.

Dees died of cancer in May 2020, just as the pandemic was getting underway. Consequently he made very few images of what surely must have felt like the end of days, the sum of all his fears. His work defines what might be called the New Weird Fusionism, a successor ideology to the old Fusionism that powered the Republican revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. That Fusionism, which emerged from William F. Buckley Jr.’s circle at the National Review, was a union of social conservatism with political and economic libertarianism, and it proved to be a recipe for electoral success. The New Weird Fusionism combines ideas from the conspiracy cultures of the Christian right and the countercultural left, and it too has forged an electoral coalition, fueling the populism that has brought Donald Trump to power for a second time.

One Dees image, probably produced in the 2010s, can serve as a key to the New Weird Fusionist worldview. Like most of his work, it is a collage made with digital editing tools. It shows a kind of split screen. On the left side is a dystopia, a gray hellscape of brutalist tower blocks overlooking a tax preparer’s office and a pharmacy studded with security cameras, offering “FDA APPROVED DRUGS…PSYCH MEDS, PAIN KILLERS, MMR VACCINES.” Outside are a woman who may be a prostitute, an obese man on a mobility scooter, and a middle-aged gender nonconformist with a male-coded mustache, conservative glasses, a skirt, and heels. Overhead the sky is gridded by chemtrails, a surveillance drone, and choppers. Dominating the frame is a threatening black-clad figure, a police officer in riot gear, carrying a Taser. On his body armor he has a patch saying “BAPHOMET,” which is the name of the deity that the Knights Templar were accused of worshiping when they faced the Inquisition in 1307. Baphomet figures prominently in contemporary Western occultism, notably in the iconography of the Satanic Temple, an organization that campaigns against the encroachment of Christian ideas into civic life and has petitioned for the erection of Baphomet statues on the grounds of several state capitols. The tallest tower on the skyline is marked “FEDERAL RESERVE.” On its flank is the Star of David.

The right side of the image depicts a contrastingly colorful utopia. Its store has a sign saying “ORGANICS,” and instead of a pill and a syringe, there’s a picture of an ear of corn. There are no looming towers, only trees and a single groovy parametric building, its biomorphic shape topped by a flourishing roof garden. Cats sun themselves. Sunflowers bloom. In the blue sky are a paraglider and a distant contrail. The store, with its baskets of nutritious fruit and its sign promising “SUPER HEALTH FOODS,” is surrounded by a park where children are playing in a tree house. The scene is dominated by a family: a man, a woman, and a little girl. They’re dressed casually. The dad is square-jawed and clean-shaven, the mom mildly crunchy, wearing a scoop-neck T-shirt and a turquoise necklace—a pair of unthreateningly attractive white Americans joined together to procreate across the old culture war divide.

The message is hardly subtle. In the bad world “the Jews” are controlling the money, using satanic RoboCop enforcers to promote ill health, immorality, alienation, and gender confusion. In the good world a natural balance of vitamins and herbs promotes community, harmony, and leisured prosperity, with the (presumably goyish) nuclear family at its center. Dees combines established antisemitic tropes most often associated with the Christian right with two other elements, both central to the 1960s counterculture: a libertarian distrust of government and an aestheticized vision of natural harmony.

It may seem surprising that organic food would feature so centrally as a counterforce to the emergence of a totalitarian world government, but the “health and wellness” scene is now a major feeder for conspiracy culture. In 2011, in a paper published in the Journal of Contemporary Religion, Charlotte Ward and David Voas coined the now widely used term “conspirituality,” which they identified as a synthesis of “the female-dominated New Age (with its positive focus on self) and the male-dominated realm of conspiracy theory (with its negative focus on global politics).” The resulting ideology has two core tenets: “A secret group covertly controls, or is trying to control, the political and social order, and…humanity is undergoing a ‘paradigm shift’ in consciousness.”

According to Ward and Voas, the New Agers and the conspiracists share three common beliefs: nothing happens by accident, nothing is as it seems, and everything is connected. For New Agers the stars control our destiny, there is an occult or hidden world populated by hard-to-sense entities like spirits or aliens—and of course, we’re all one, if only we would realize it. For the conspiracists the hidden hand of the Illuminati is everywhere, the truth is being kept from us by sinister forces, and every image on the pinboard is linked by red thread. Interconnectivity may be a holistic nostrum, but it’s also constitutive of what Richard Hofstadter famously called the “paranoid style” of American politics. Whether you believe the agents of the hidden power whose presence you sense are angels or men wearing black suits and earpieces may largely be a question of disposition.

In early 2020 a group of researchers was preparing a podcast and reached out to Ward and Voas. As Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker relate in Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat, they discovered that while Voas was a conventional scholar of religion, the core of the paper was written by Ward, whose “aim in studying conspirituality was not academic.” Indeed, she was a believer in what she called “conscious conspiracy” and wanted to foster what she considered to be a “global awakening.” By 2014 Ward had become a central promoter of what came to be known as the Hampstead hoax, a moral panic that led to 175 people in the leafy North London suburb being falsely accused of satanic abuse. A social media profile suggested she was now living in Suriname, though the writers were unable to secure an interview.

Ward’s radicalization demonstrates the subterranean relationship between mindfulness and paranoia, which facilitates traffic across some unlikely borders. She and Voas date the emergence of conspirituality as an Internet phenomenon to the mid-1990s, but the links between America’s conspiratorial right and the left-coded New Age and health and wellness cultures go back much further. In a new book called, bluntly, Fascist Yoga, the British artist and writer Stewart Home argues that postural yoga (the exercise practice familiar in the West) owes as much to Western physical culture—and the Western esotericism out of which so much modern conspiracism flows—as it does to any Indian tradition. What is usually called “yoga” has its philosophical roots in a kind of ersatz Hinduism peddled by mystics such as Madame Blavatsky and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and in forms of exercise promoted by the European physical culture movement.

Home is a veteran of antifascist cultural struggles in Britain. Since the early 1980s he has been involved in many underground movements, and he has often made a point of confronting right-wing infiltration of subcultural music and art scenes—producing, for instance, meticulously detailed blogs analyzing the mainstreaming of fascist tropes in industrial and neofolk music. His writing about yoga is intended less as an academic study than as an attempt to educate practitioners about the influence of fascism on their culture. He tells a series of biographical stories showing how at various points, from the early twentieth century to the 1970s, which he takes as an arbitrary cutoff point, Western yoga existed in uncomfortably close proximity to various strands of extreme right-wing thought.

When yoga became popular in the United States after World War I, legislation was in force that prevented Indians from immigrating to the US on eugenic grounds; American practitioners appear to have been at pains to defend the ancient wisdom they taught against any association with racial backwardness. In a 1933 book, Eastern Philosophy for Western Minds, the journalist and yoga popularizer Hamish McLaurin found it necessary to reassure his readers:

One reason why the truths contained in the old Sanskrit writings are not more widely known and highly regarded in the West is that they have so long been identified with a people who differ from us in color. Because the Indo-Aryan texts were treasured and preserved in India, it has been taken for granted that they were the product of a dark-skinned race. This, of course, is not true. They are, and always have been—from a racial standpoint—the legitimate heritage of the peoples now in the ascendancy throughout Europe and the New World.

Yoga, in other words, has nothing to do with present-day Indians:

The millions of futile, irrational, child-like beings observed by the modern traveller in India must resemble the people who compiled the Vedic texts about as much as a group of colored stevedores resembles the teaching staff of Carnegie Institute of Technology.

The mystical cult of Aryanism that emerged out of the fascist avant-garde in this period had, of course, as its chief antagonist the rootless cosmopolitan Jew. McLaurin lamented that “Europeans of Aryan descent” had been “governing their conduct according to a formula originally intended for the Semitic peoples of the Near East.”

Much of the faddish fitness culture promoted by the contemporary right-wing “manosphere” is recognizably indebted to the antimodernist Völkisch movement of the early twentieth century. Today’s raw-meat-eating, perineum-tanning, sperm-retaining “high-T” influencers frequently cross the line into far-right politics, whether it’s the clownish Nordic chest-beating of Marcus “the Golden One” Follin (“Honor the Gods, Love your Woman, Defend your Country”) or the baby-oiled Nietzschean flexing of Bronze Age Pervert, the pseudonym of a Romanian American political scientist who exhorts his followers to revolt against the modern world in favor of an aristocratic lifestyle of “sun and steel” and Darwinian sexual competition. The obvious question poses itself: If the way of the warrior is so superior, why did alpha males fall away from it? Jews, migrants, soy, seed oils, bossy women, and low-testosterone “bugmen” are to blame. The Männerbund is, as ever, encircled by the mob.

Perhaps the affinity between a purity-obsessed physical culture and right-wing traditionalism would be less politically significant were it not for America’s long-standing belief in the transformational power of the mind. The New Thought movement of the nineteenth century was founded on the proposition that sickness was caused by negative mental states, and correcting them could bring about a cure. Through Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science, Spiritualism, and other branches of what William James called the “mind-cure movement,” the notion that human biology and perhaps even the entire physical world exist downstream of an individual’s mental state grew in popularity and gradually became attached to a variety of projects, notably moneymaking. From Napoleon Hill’s 1937 best seller Think and Grow Rich to Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), generations of Americans were encouraged to believe that the acquisition of wealth was primarily a matter of adopting the correct mental attitude.

One young man who took heed of this was Donald Trump, who attended Marble Collegiate Church in Midtown Manhattan, where Peale was the pastor. Peale officiated at Trump’s first wedding, and his influence can be felt in Trump’s relentless exaggeration (or “affirmation,” if you prefer) of everything from his personal wealth to the size of the crowds at his rallies. This is perhaps not simple mendacity but a product of the belief that fact-checking, as a form of “negativity,” will actively bring about bad outcomes. There is no such thing as constructive criticism: it’s always an attack. Trump feels like a billionaire, so he is one. He feels that whatever he’s currently pitching is the best, the greatest, like you’ve never seen before, not just because he’s a good salesman but because asserting the greatness of something is a way of making it so.

Inheritors of Peale, like Rhonda Byrne, the author of the self-help manual The Secret (2006), promote the biblical notion that “whatever you ask for in prayer with faith, you will receive,” advice that sent Byrne’s book to the top of the New York Times best-seller list and kept it there for two hundred weeks. Denizens of 4Chan’s /pol/ message board believed in 2016 that they had “memed” Trump into the presidency. Evangelical pastors believe more or less the same thing, with different theological justification. New Age liberals are known for manifesting their intentions and trying to be the change they want to see in the world. Crypto investors “hodl” (hold) for dear life and hope to send their favorite token to the moon. The traffic between belief and reality has never been so heavy, and in the case of new financial phenomena like crypto and so-called meme stocks, fundamentals are irrelevant in the face of sentiment. In the markets at least, the mind-cure movement can do what it claims, drawing reality toward itself.

Take this pervasive culture of magical thinking, add in fears of an enemy’s hidden hand, dissolve the mixture in the radically flattened media environment of today’s Internet, which rewards provocation and reinforces bias, and a phenomenon like QAnon becomes not just comprehensible but almost inevitable. Its promise that the evil child abusers of the deep state will imminently be brought to justice is legible as a version of the “paradigm shift” of conspirituality. This is a mode common to Christian millenarianism (the empire is satanic, Jesus is coming), New Age spirituality (this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius), and believers in the transhumanist “singularity,” the point of technical acceleration beyond which the future is impossible to predict or control. The New Weird Fusionism mobilizes all these beliefs, allowing participants to role-play through our polarized present as superior spirits experiencing the thrill of the collapse of the established order of things. Becoming “aware” or “awakened” or merely “woke” is a motor for fundamental transformation, a shift in personal consciousness that is also a shift in objective reality. If you “follow the white rabbit,” as QAnon urges, you will find a hidden truth so fiendishly concealed that it cannot be understood without a huge common effort. Now you are part of something. Something big.

Of course, you’re not paranoid if they’re really out to get you. What is the reasonable reaction to pervasive surveillance, a degraded media environment rife with bad actors, a predatory for-profit medical system, Gilded Age levels of wealth inequality, and a government that has a history of covert experimentation on unwitting subjects? We’re more than half a century past the Kennedy assassination and the revelations of the Church Committee, and we have no reason to believe that anything has seriously been reformed. Conspiracy theories are ridiculous not because they don’t respond to real problems but because they naively reduce complexity to a personal scale. To see the world in conspiratorial terms is to refuse to acknowledge that agency is often diffuse and that intractable problems are usually so not because sinister figures in a boardroom are preventing us from seeing the truth but because those problems have causes that don’t easily offer up simple solutions like busting in and arresting the bad guys.

Perhaps the weirdest thing about the New Weird Fusionism, the aspect that may be hardest for the rationally inclined to accept, is that it’s not an aberration, easily dismissible as a popular delusion. It’s the epistemological foundation of the new administration. Under Kennedy pseudoscience is in the ascendant. We have measles outbreaks in eight states and a CDC that hesitates to promote vaccination. The development of a promising pancreatic cancer treatment is under threat because it is based on mRNA technology. Measures are being taken to remove fluoride from drinking water, and researchers are being directed to look again at the debunked link between vaccines and autism. Under Trump, government agencies are destroying or rendering inaccessible data sets vital to climate and public health research. State lawmakers are seeking to ban nonexistent “chemtrails.” The political push to bring sources of “objective” information under explicit ideological control may itself be part of a broader cultural change in the way we approach the already quaint notion of consensus reality.

As the world becomes ever more technologically mediated, we experience it as labile, untrustworthy. Some of us are old enough to remember when the camera never lied. Now we approach each image with suspicion. Up until around 2016 social media feeds, where a majority of Americans now find at least some of their news, were relatively uncomplicated chronological affairs. Now they are governed by opaque and mutable algorithms, and the experience of being online increasingly induces paranoia. Why am I being shown this? Why aren’t my posts being seen by others? One of the less appealing promises of AI is the production of disinformation at scale: fake people, with fake faces and voices, offering up fake opinions and arguing with one another. You could be the only real human in the chat room. As we try to make sense of the world through the new digital fog, paranoia might actually be the beginning of an adaptive strategy.

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