Why wellness tracks right

Sovereignty and freedom can be traced back to property rights

One of the foundational questions we’ve asked since launching Conspirituality four years ago this month is: how do wellness influencers end up moving right politically? We’ve entertained a number of theories, investigated dozens of different influencers in depth (and hundreds in passing), helped push the concept of diagonalism into public discourse, and continually refine our theories on the topic.

In one sense, it’s easy: right-wing politics champion the freedom and sovereignty of the individual, while left-wing politics strive toward the creation of a more equitable and just society in which resources are more evenly divided.

As with any multifactorial topic, nothing is easy.

This week, I focused on this topic in video format. As I say early on, I’m offering an angle on how wellness tracks right, not the angle. But I think it’s an important one. I’ve included the transcript below the video.

Also, I talked to NBC News earlier this week about Nicole Shanahan, RFK Jr’s conspiracy-prone running mate who still believes vaccines cause autism, 5G is responsible for many chronic diseases, and wild thoughts about IBF.

I’ll be taking off on Monday as it’s a holiday weekend here in America, and will return next Friday. As always, please let me know if you have any questions, requests, or concerns. And if you get something from my work and have the ability to support it, I’d greatly appreciate it.

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Transcript

Why do some wellness influencers tend to track right politically? 

Let’s get into it. 

On Conspirituality, I’ve often made the case that it’s a matter of individualism versus collective interests, which is true, but at the foundation of this split is property rights.

Let’s start with language.

When I started practicing yoga in the nineties, there were a lot of statements in yoga studios that might sound familiar.

• You know your body better than anyone else.

• You have the power to heal yourself.

• You’re your own best doctor.

It’s easy to see how this sort of pseudo-therapy would escape increasingly influential yoga spaces and infect the general culture, which it did. This hyper-intensive focus on the self as the only expert you really need helped to create a severe distrust of institutions.

Of course institutions deserve scrutiny, but we really lose something when we think we know more than experts.

I feel very comfortable stepping into a fitness studio and leading groups in movement because I’ve put in well over 10,000 hours at a high level. That doesn’t mean I would ever feel comfortable telling someone about their cancer diagnosis, their mental health, or their diet. Those aren’t my fields of expertise.

Unfortunately, some people in wellness spaces feel like a little bit of information—or a lot of misinformation—gives them a level of knowledge they don’t possess. And that pipeline invariably leads to a distrust of experts because they position their knowledge against someone else’s, and where else to aim but at institutions?

So institutional distrust helped link a population of wellness folks to right-wing politics and its glorification of the individual, but where did the right’s rage come from?

Property rights, which, really, is just an extension of power.

We can draw a pretty straight line from the attitude of European landlords to early American plantation owners.

That attitude comes from the Church. For centuries, beginning with the Crusades, church leaders instituted Discovery laws.

This meant that if white, Christian men “discovered” new lands, and the people already on those lands weren’t white or Christian, they believed they had a divine mandate to civilize them.

Colonizers used Discovery laws to steal all the property in what we now call America. In fact, the Supreme Court based its 19th century rulings on Portuguese Discovery laws.

By 1845, the term Manifest Destiny was coined as colonizers were trying to kick all other Europeans out of the Oregon territory. The first use of Manifest Destiny was about the annexation of Texas, but it caught on when the same author used it again to wrestle Oregon from Britain.

The colonizers got their property when the Oregon Territory was founded in 1848. Fourteen years later, Oregon was founded as the first and only state to officially exclude Blacks from moving here.

Black exclusionary laws were their way of owning as much property as possible on their own terms. Since slavery was illegal here, they figured if Blacks can no longer be property, might as well keep them out of theirs.

That’s all just to point out that whites and property have always kinda been an American thing.

The intersection that we’re experiencing now really started to form when Brown v Board of Education, which desegregated public schools, was decided in 1954.

Right-wing and libertarian activists were already pissed about New Deal programs: social security, worker’s compensation, unemployment benefits, 40 hour workweeks, no more child labor, banking reform.

Wealthy white men were pissed that tax money was funding these programs. They didn’t want to be taxed, and they didn’t want the “takers” to benefit from the “givers.” 

Their terms.

So you have Brown v Board in 1954. Medicare in 1956. Medicaid in 1961. And the civil rights and feminist movements all occurring during this time.

All these examples of an actual attempt to realize the promise of America as a land of opportunity.

And a bunch of wealthy white men are like, uh-uh, that’s ours. 

And how do they do it? By framing this as a civilization battle of Individual liberty versus collective security. Democracy versus socialism, even though it’s really capitalism versus equity.

Basically every culture war being fought today—public schools, gender, critical race theory, DEI, universal health care, access to health care—all stem from the concerted effort of a small group of men trying to influence public opinion.

And the mechanism they do this through is by creating distrust in all institutions.

And then, sick bastards they are, they use the same institutions to codify their agenda.

That’s what Project 2025 is.

And that is how a segment of the wellness community got indoctrinated into right-wing politics. It’s all about the sovereignty of the individual, which stems from the propaganda of right-wing interests.

Because at heart, it’s about unregulated free market principles focused on the elevation of the individual over the needs and security of the collective.

How many conspiritualists do you see talk about the social determinants of health? 

None, because they can’t monetize that. And because that aspect of health doesn’t fit into the bootstraps individualist mentality that’s been cultivated on the right since the 1950s. (And earlier.)

I don’t think a lot of wellness folks know the history of this propaganda. And I also don’t think most of them are out voting for MAGA, though some of them are. And more of them think this dude [RFK Jr] isn’t batshit crazy.

But the trend toward individualism, combined with a willingness to consistently partake in the wrong side of culture war issues, is part of an intentional effort by the right to shore up as much property and power as possible.

And if they have useful pawns parroting their culture war messages so they can get a small slice of the pie, they’re all for it.

That’s how propaganda works.

What it doesn't do is offer any policy solutions for actually making us healthier. And that’s why the influencer’s claims of being about freedom ultimately fails.

Because it’s really all about them. Not about all of us.

Trickle down wellness doesn’t work for anyone.