Anti-Vaxxers Falsely Linking Celebrity Deaths to Vaccine (CNN)

"I think we're going to be stuck in this pattern for a while." Lisa Marie Presley's death is the latest sudden death anti-vaxxers have blamed on Covid vaccines. @derekberes tells me the propaganda's coming from an unusual intersection of right- and left-wing sources.

Yoga Teachers Take on QAnon (NY Times)

“Conspirituality, a podcast about the intersection of New Age spirituality and far-right extremism, has compiled a list of roughly two dozen wellness influencers who have posted QAnon-related content.”

California’s yoga, wellness and spirituality community has a QAnon problem (LA Times)

When public health orders closed L.A.’s yoga studios, meditation rooms and other spiritual hubs in spring of last year, those privileged wellness seekers were told, “some for the first time, that they can’t do something,” Beres said. “Since they don’t have any public health knowledge, since they don’t have any civics knowledge, the only place they have to turn is their Instagram feeds.”

QAnon’s Unexpected Roots in New Age Spirituality (Washington Post)

Last year, Matthew Remski, a writer and co-host of the “Conspirituality” podcast, was reporting a story on QAnon for the Canadian magazine the Walrus, and he interviewed Lamont Daigle, founder of a Canadian QAnon spinoff group.

The Far Right and Far Left Meet Over Wellness Conspiracy Theories (Time)

Some New Age spirituality and wellness influencers are aligning themselves with extreme right-wing anti-science activists, a merging of interests known as conspirituality. 

Leading New Age Conspiracy Influencers Plan Their Retreat to Utopian Lagoon (VICE)

The prayer meeting and the planned community were first reported in November by Conspirituality, which casts a critical eye on the growing convergence between New Age “wellness” circles and far-right conspiracy theories.

COVID-19 misinformation spreads in yoga community, experts say (Good Morning America)

Derek Beres, co-host of the podcast "Conspirituality," which tracks the yoga and wellness communities, said the spread of health misinformation in the yoga community is not new with COVID-19. "Misinformation has spread in the yoga community for decades," Beres told ABC News' Kaylee Hartung. "There is a constant sense of this idea of sovereignty and yoga that I know better than the doctors. I know better than the system."

She was a popular yoga guru. Then she embraced QAnon conspiracy theories. (NPR)

"If you've been practicing yoga, these are going to be very familiar ideas to you," said Matthew Remski, a former yoga teacher and journalist who hosts a podcast about conspiracies, wellness and cults called Conspirituality.

Losing the Plot: The “Leftists” Who Turn Right (In These Times)

But even for those with deeper political commitments, Callison told the podcast Conspirituality, ​“these left-to-right travelers tend to do something sort of sleight of hand, where they begin to put civil freedom above social justice. What should remain for them is a belief in the need for redistributive equality, or some kind of end state where economic inequality has been ameliorated somehow. But that seems to fade deep into the background, instead replaced by a kind of obsession with matters of speech and platforming.”

'I debunk wellness misinformation for a living… So, why did I fall for it?' (Cosmopolitan)

Yoga teacher and co-author (with Matthew Remski and Julian Walker) of Conspirituality, Derek Beres, says that at the heart of the wellness and New Age world, there is also a “naturalistic fallacy that everything natural is good, which primes people to think that the return to nature is the key to ideal health.”

MAGA Influencers Are Sold on This Grifty Wellness Company (The Daily Beast)

Derek Beres, co-author of Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat, and co-host of the Conspirituality podcast, described [The Wellness Company] as a “prolific grift.”

Wellness culture's link to COVID denialism (CBC Radio)

Journalist Matthew Remski explains why new age spirituality is such fertile ground for anti-vaccine movements.

Chakras, crystals and conspiracy theories: how the wellness industry turned its back on Covid science (The Guardian)

Some of the people pushing anti-vaccine content do so in the sincere belief they are working for the public good. “They believe themselves to be martyrs,” Beres says. “They’re fully bought in. They think this is an apocalyptic-level battle they were made for, to be the champions.” But Beres believes others “are like: ‘Wow. I can make a bunch of money here.’”

For wellness community, social media often a conduit for misinformation (NPR)

NPR’s David Folkenflik talks with Derek Beres, co-host of the podcast Conspirituality, about vaccine misinformation in the health and wellness community.

Conspirituality on the BBC

Derek talks to Naga Munchetty on BBC5 about anti-vaxxers in the wellness industry. The conversation begins at 44:35.

Pastel QAnon is Infiltrating the Natural Parenting Community (Rolling Stone)

“Natural birth implies that the medical industry has problems — and it certainly does, there’s no doubt about it,” says Derek Beres, cohost of the podcast Conspirituality, which covers the rise of conspiracy theories in the wellness industry. “[But] there’s this idea that everything that has to do with medicalization of child birth is bad….it’s that distrust of the medical environment combined with a real lack of scientific understanding.”

The Virus, the Vaccine, and the Dark Side of Wellness (Harper’s Bazaar)

“The meeting point of QAnon and the wellness community­—it’s vaccines—it’s where everything converges,” said Derek Beres, who, along with Julian Walker and Matthew Remski, created “Conspirituality,” a popular podcast that explores the growing overlap between New Age spirituality and right-wing conspiracy thinking. Before the pandemic, vaccines were not a central topic of interest to QAnoners. But as the virus spread, lockdowns followed, and people were spending more time than ever refreshing their social media feeds, theories began to proliferate that Gates had planned the pandemic for the sole purpose of creating a vaccine mandate that would make every injected human trackable by a GPS microchip. To Walker, the refocus was not a coincidence. “I really think that, somewhere in the network of people who were propagating this QAnon stuff, there was an attempt to figure out how to really reach people in [the wellness] community, and they realized vaccines were the way to go.”

The dark side of wellness: the overlap between spiritual thinking and far-right conspiracies (The Guardian)

The Conspirituality podcast, presented by a journalist, a cult researcher and a philosophical sceptic, goes deep, unravelling the “stories, cognitive dissonances and cultic dynamics” in the yoga, wellness and new spirituality worlds every week over a soft-spoken hour. It is dense and fascinating, and moves in and out of topics alternately Instagramable and apocalyptic within two breaths. Certain thoughts stay with me. “If you keep getting enlightened, are you ever really enlightened? When you attempt to integrate a holistic practice into a capitalist society, more is always demanded.” And, “Conspirituality is an ideology, but it’s also a financial racket and it’s also a way of being with other people.” As I listen, I become aware of how the intimate nature of a podcast encourages me to think about the subjects with a particular empathy – aside from the words spoken, the speaking itself encourages the listener to consider their own vulnerability to misinformation.

Facebook froze as anti-vax users swarmed comments (AP)

Los Angeles resident Derek Beres, an author and fitness instructor, sees anti-vaccine content thrive in the comments every time he promotes immunizations on his accounts on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. Last year, Beres began hosting a podcast with friends after they noticed conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and vaccines were swirling on the social media feeds of popular health and wellness influencers.

When Famous COVID Skeptics Finally Get Sick, It’s a Marketing Opportunity (VICE News)

The benefits and pitfalls of illness as a moment to grow your brand were immediately clear to Matthew Remski. He’s a former yoga teacher, cult researcher, and author, as well as one of the co-hosts of the Conspirituality podcast, which examines the ways the supposedly progressive health and wellness worlds have become overtaken with conspiracy theories previously confined to the right wing.

James Van Der Beek’s Influencer Wife Is Peddling Vaccine Conspiracy Theories on Instagram (Rolling Stone)

Over the past few years, the city’s free-thinking ethos has meshed with the burgeoning “medical freedom” movement to create a toxic blend of strong anti-vaccine sentiment. “Austin is the new seat for the holistic practitioner,” says Derek Beres, who has documented the overlap between right-wing ideology and spiritualism on his podcast Conspirituality.

The wellness world’s conspiracy problem is linked to Orientalism (Vox)

“New-Agers are not secretly Nazis,” Remski wrote in a four-part blog on yoga and conspirituality. “It’s more like: fascist ideas of the perfected body and earth [have] generated enduring cultural memes for holism, embodied spirituality, and health. Those memes, sanitized of their explicit politics, carry jagged edges of perfectionism and paranoia about impurity. And that double message — your body is divine but it is also under attack — has become standard in the commodification of yoga and wellness.”

The yoga world is riddled with anti-vaxxers and QAnon believers (Wired)

Researchers have tried to document the recent revival of ‘conspirituality’ – the intersection of yoga, spirituality and holistic health with conspiracy theories. The Conspirituality podcast, co-founded by cult survivor and yoga teacher Matthew Remski, lists figures in the wellness industry who have shared conspiracy theories and aims at exposing ‘faux-progressive wellness utopianism.’

The Terrifying Story of How QAnon Infiltrated Moms’ Groups (Mother Jones)

Derek Beres, a freelance journalist who hosts the podcast Conspirituality, about conspiracy thinking in the new-age community, recently devoted an episode to Northrup. “She’s been very influential—women, mothers, have really appreciated her advocacy around the idea that you know best for your own kid, that doctors are just trying to make money off you and your family,” he told me. He explained how this fits with Northrup’s recent slide into the QAnon trope of rampant child sex trafficking. “You imagine your child being stolen or molested,” he said, “and that’s just hitting the same fear button.”

A riveting tale of electoral fraud – podcasts of the week (The Guardian)

The real usefulness of this podcast isn’t understanding who might storm government buildings, but rather why your hippy uncle is spreading misinformation on Facebook – and where he got it from.

“Conspirituality” Boomed During the Pandemic, And It Could Have Consequences for the Vaccine Effort (Teen Vogue)

The term “conspirituality” emerged in 2011, when researchers published an article in the Journal of Contemporary Religion examining the overlap of New Age beliefs and conspiracy theory. The phrase has picked up recently, and there’s a podcast called Conspirituality dedicated to debunking theories its practitioners spread.

Could One of Your Facebook Friends Be the Next Qanon Shaman? (The Nation)

Remski, who cohosts a podcast called Conspirituality, doesn’t regard the slippage—in Chansley’s case, between shamanism, evangelical Christian prayer, and fealty to the baseless QAnon conspiracy—as at all paradoxical. Rather, it’s indicative of “a very common, New Age, recombinant smorgasbord of beliefs.”

Does yoga have a conspiracy theory problem? (BBC News)

Yoga’s emphasis on self-care and self-discovery chimes with people who feel abandoned by government and healthcare institutions, says Mr Remski, co-host of Conspirituality – a podcast exploring the link between conspiracy theories and New Age beliefs.

‘Conspirituality’ Explains Why the Wellness World Fell for QAnon (VICE)

The concept has only become more relevant since; there’s now even a podcast documenting this phenomenon, called Conspirituality.

‘Pastel QAnon,’ where pro-Trump conspiracy theories meet New Age spirituality (Yahoo News)

“Conspirituality” was launched to raise awareness about the potential dangers of QAnon-based misinformation. Its website has a list of key words and phrases used by QAnon and its affiliated groups. Recently, Beres noted that he and his “Conspirituality” co-hosts have also been tracking the emergence of another troubling trend: calls for violence from wellness influencers and use of increasingly militant rhetoric. 

Unraveling the Tangled Web of QAnon Conspiracies and Wellness Devotees: An Interview With ‘Conspirituality’ Podcast Host Matthew Remski (Well and Good)

When reporting for an article earlier this year about how fringe segments of the wellness world became a hotbed for COVID-19 denial and contrarianism, I had the pleasure of speaking with (the very smart) Matthew Remski, co-host of the Conspirituality podcast and a cult dynamics researcher. In our conversation, we danced around an often interrelated phenomenon: the wellness world’s infiltration by QAnon.

Why some New Age influencers believe Trump is a “lightworker” (Salon)

Matthew Remski, a co-host of the Conspirituality podcast and a cult dynamics researcher, described Northrup as a “conspirituality aggregator” who feeds what she finds most interesting to her followers, of which she has many.

Wellness Influencers Denounce the Spread of QAnon (Gizmodo)

Creators of the podcast Conspirituality have compiled a crowdsourced list of wellness industry personalities, from a chef to a reiki healer, who’ve hyped QAnon—many to tens of thousands of followers.

The Rise of “Conspirituality” (On the Media)

In this moment of growth, one community in particular has found itself prey to QAnon: the yoga, wellness, and spirituality world, where skepticism about vaccines has intersected with the rapid spread of disinformation online to create a toxic stew known as ” conspirituality,” a term popularized by a podcast of the same name that tracks the convergence of conspiracy theories and “faux-progressive wellness utopianism.”

‘Brotherhood Is Healing’: When Men’s Self-Help Groups Collide With Covid Restrictions (Gizmodo)

Bowditch says that he quarantined for the recommended 10 days post-symptom onset, although the blog Conspirituality, which covers “faux-progressive wellness utopianism,” noted that during this period, Bowditch shared an Instagram story in which he and his fiancée walked their dogs down the street without masks while joking about spreading covid “like Christmas cheer.”

Conspirituality Is On The Rise In The UK’s Yoga Community (Refinery 29)

“There have always been conspiritual beliefs,” says philosopher Jules Evans, author of The Art of Losing Control, “but the pandemic has turbocharged them.” There’s even a podcast called Conspirituality dedicated to debunking these types of theories.

This yoga instructor is fighting the rise of QAnon in the wellness community (CBC Radio)

Conspirituality, a podcast that examines the links between wellness and conspiracy, has curated a list of more than two dozen wellness influencers who have alluded to QAnon in their posts. 

Canadians Involved in New Age Spirituality and Natural Health Are Being Sucked into the Dark World of QAnon (Press Progress)

Matthew Remski, a Toronto-based cult researcher and co-host of the Conspirituality podcast, is among those monitoring the spread of far-right conspiracies and disinformation inside the New Age and wellness communities online.

Leaders in the Yoga Community Speak Out Against QAnon (Yoga Journal)

In an interview with cult survivor and researcher Remski on the Conspirituality Podcast, Corn warned of the dangers of “Pastel QAnon” and their pleas to “protect children.” If you look closely, you might see QAnon hashtags attached to the posts, mixed in with other hashtags used by anti-trafficking campaigns: #savethechildren, #endsextrafficking, #eyeswideopen, #thegreatawakening, #dotheresearch, #followthewhiterabbit.

How QAnon infiltrated the yoga world (Insider)

The post previously included the now deleted phrase “wwg1wga” — a QAnon slogan which stands for “where we go one, we go all,” according to screenshots obtained by Conspirituality, a podcast that traces the rise of QAnon in the yoga and wellness world.

Matthew Remski: Conspirituality (Radio New Zealand)

This intersection between right-wing conspiracy theories and left-wing wellness utopianism has been dubbed “conspirituality”. Matthew Remski joins us to explain how and why these worlds have collided.

‘Playing with fire’: The curious marriage of QAnon and wellness (The Brisbane Times)

Derek Beres is an LA-based fitness instructor and co-host of the podcast Conspirituality, which launched in May to discuss how conspiracies seeped into the wellness world. Australians make up the podcast’s second largest listener base after the US.

Dr. No (Mainer)

Matthew Remski is a host of the podcast Conspirituality. Together with co-hosts Derek Beres and Julian Walker, he’s been documenting Northrup’s slide into the sickening darkness of QAnon’s worldview, and how she’s drawing her followers into the cult’s vortex.

COVID-19 Has Led Wellness Influencers to Embrace QAnon (Bitch Media)

By the end of May, the film’s claims had burrowed so deep into the New Age community that three horrified wellness practitioners started a podcast called Conspirituality to specifically debunk Plandemic and try to find answers for why the conspiracy had become such a draw in their circles.

#WAKEUP #DOYOURRESEARCH! #TRUTH (Suomen Kuvalehti)

From the Finnish newspaper, Suomen Kuvalehti: Matthew Remski, a Canadian yoga teacher and author familiar with CULT DYNAMICS, and his colleagues scold the conspiracy thinking of the spiritual circles he called conspirituality in a podcast series of the same name. Remski talks about “situational vulnerability.” In various ways, the weak are often prone to following gurus.