Charlatans of catastrophe: How to spot a “disaster spiritualist”
A book excerpt from Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat
This Monday, I’ll be in conversation with my good friend, Mike Hull, at Powell’s in Downtown Portland discussing Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat.
We’ve received a lot of great feedback since the book was published last week. If you’ve read it, or are planning to, please consider dropping a rating or review on Amazon or Goodreads.
I’ve known Mike for over 20 years, and we even spent a month on the road together employed by Yahoo! Telemundo and Palm Pictures in 2005 covering a Latin music tour. I highly recommend checking out his recent HBO documentary, Betrayal at Attica. I’m really looking forward to this conversation. There will be time for Q&A, and I’ll be signing books as well.
Keep scrolling to read an excerpt from the book on disaster spirituality that was published earlier this week on Big Think.
In her mammoth 2010 work, The Shock Doctrine, Canadian journalist Naomi Klein coined the framework of “disaster capitalism.” Her book describes the agility with which multinational corporations have exploited natural disasters, civil wars, and terrorist threats to encourage deregulation, and to appropriate public assets and utilities.
Klein opens her book by recounting how the economist Milton Friedman, at the age of ninety-three, made his last vandalizing policy suggestion: that instead of state and federal governments rebuilding public schools in the parishes of New Orleans devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, they issue citizens with vouchers to pay for private school tuition. The disaster, according to Friedman, was a golden opportunity to accelerate the march toward privatizing everything. For example, Klein noted that New Orleans’ public school system ran 123 schools at the time Katrina hit. By 2010, privatization had driven that number down to four, while the city went from seven charter schools to thirty-one.
Within months of COVID-19 erupting around the world, it was clear that the practices of disaster capitalism as described by Klein could be adapted to create an equally ruthless dynamic. In disaster spirituality, a real public health crisis, or a fictional moral panic like QAnon, can become the basis for an evangelical call to spiritual renewal. Whereas the captains of disaster capitalism seize distressed assets for privatization, the charismatics of disaster spirituality seize the attention and emotional commitment of their followers. That attention is then funneled into monetized networks that sell spiritual and wellness products focused on individual well-being (or smugness) as opposed to the common good. As a result, the consumer is left even more isolated and unprepared for social stress.
Pierre Kory is a critical care physician who made headlines in December 2020 by testifying before the Senate that the antiparasitic drug ivermectin was a “wonder drug with miraculous effectiveness” against COVID. As the pandemic raged, he used the contrarian social media sphere to sow doubt about vaccine data, while claiming, against evidence, that the efficacy of ivermectin was being suppressed by Big Pharma. His FLCCC (Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance) website then became a global hub for hundreds of doctors offering telemedicine sessions to prescribe proprietary alternative COVID-19 treatment protocols, and pharmacies willing to sell and ship these pseudomedical combinations of dodgy drugs.
Likewise, New Age propagandist Mikki Willis teamed up with a discredited hydroxychloroquine doctor, Vladimir Zelenko, to create and market a supplement stack as a supposed COVID-preventative to his extensive email list. Other opportunists promoted anti-5G accessories, like a $113 belly band for pregnant women to protect their unborn babies, or a $125 pet collar for your cat or dog to create a force field against the supposed dangers of 5G radiation.