40: White Supremacy: Grift and Gravity (w/Michelle Cassandra Johnson & Daniel Lombroso)

Around 2015, the alt-right movement erupted online to both provoke and monetize MAGA momentum and distort and defame the real-world progress symbolized in Barack Obama and agitated by Black Lives Matter. Young white supremacist poster-boy Richard Spencer and edgy internet crypto-racists like Lauren Southern, Mark Cernovich, and Gavin McInnes led the viral charge, racking up subscribers while lining their pockets on the side. Daniel Lombroso of The Atlantic embedded with their ilk from 2016-18, collecting enough footage to release the award-winning documentary, White Noise. Julian sat down to talk with him about the movement, and about making this film while Jewish.

Was any of this a surprise to anti-oppression activists on the ground? Not according to Michelle Cassandra Johnson, author of Skill in Action: Radicalizing Your Yoga Practice to Create a Just World. While the white supremacy Lombroso whistleblows is spectacular and absurd, the white supremacy Johnson and other justice activists feel in their bones has been a centuries-long war of attrition against equality. Matthew sits down with Johnson to discuss how the yoga and wellness worlds in particular are (and are not) responding to the intensification of both calls to justice, as well as the blowback.

In the Ticker, we wonder if Gwyneth Paltrow’s new long-COVID Goop merch—and her “longer-term detox” that includes selling Goop-approved $500 blankets and $8,000 necklaces—heralds a dawning era in high-end disability consumerism.

Show Notes

It took a year, but Gwyneth Paltrow figured out how to exploit the pandemic

Gwyneth Paltrow Is Selling Vibrators

Healing My Body with a Longer-Term Detox

The NHS dings Gwyneth’s long COVID cures

Lauren Southern hides the face of her biracial baby

Daniel Lombroso’s White Noise

Southern Poverty Law on Cernovich

Southern Poverty Law on Southern

Richard Spencer, white subsidy sucker

Michelle Cassandra Johnson’s website

Michelle Cassandra Johnson’s TedX talk at WakeForestU