The Conspirituality of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Our new book was excerpted in Time + covered in the NY Times
Two big pieces of coverage for our new book, Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: our chapter on RFK Jr was excerpted by Time while Michelle Goldberg pulled from our book in a recent NY Times op-ed.
“God talks to human beings through many vectors,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tweeted on April 19th, 2023, the day he announced his primary challenge to Joe Biden. “But nowhere with such detail, and grace and joy, as through creation. When we destroy nature, we diminish our capacity to sense the divine.”
The pious opening signals how carefully Kennedy has navigated his journey to the national stage. Because it’s not the name recognition, or his reputation as an avenging environmental lawyer that puts him in the game. It’s not that he helped found the Waterkeeper Alliance (a global network that lobbies to protect water sources) or built a solid record in defending Indigenous peoples from industrial land-grabs and pollution. It’s not his muscular Catholicism.
One important reason Kennedy is polling at around 15% in the nascent race is because he leads a juggernaut of antivax misinformation that attracts a swarm of conspiracy theorists, from far-right radio host Alex Jones, to left-leaning New Age “COVID-dissident” Charles Eisenstein, who is now serving as his Director of Messaging.
It is, in fact, possible that Kennedy will win the primary in New Hampshire, because, as a result of a dispute over the Democratic National Committee’s changes to the primary calendar, Biden might not be on the ballot. That doesn’t mean Kennedy poses an electoral threat to Biden; he almost certainly does not. Still, the movement around him represents a significant post-Covid social phenomenon: a coalition of the distrustful that cuts across divisions of right and left.
It’s also both a show of strength and a potential recruiting vehicle for what Derek Beres, Matthew Remski and Julian Walker call “conspirituality,” the intermarriage of conspiracy theorism and wellness culture that flowered during the pandemic. In their new book, “Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat,” they show how crunchy yoga influencers were pulled into the paranoid orbit of QAnon. Conspiritualists warned that “the pandemic was a ruse through which governments, Big Pharma and amoral tech companies could execute ancient plans for world domination,” they wrote. “The sacred circle of family and nature — from which health and fulfillment flow — was under attack.”
In their book, the writers describe Kennedy’s adviser Eisenstein as “a kind of Covid mystic for conspirituality intellectuals.” Eisenstein’s viral 9,000-word essay “The Coronation,” published in March 2020, was a key document among Covid skeptics and dissidents, championed by the formerly leftist actor Russell Brand, quoted by Ivanka Trump and tweeted by Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, who recently endorsed Kennedy.