Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat

The Covid-19 pandemic brought together New Age influencers, alt-health practitioners, and far-right conspiracy theorists in a campaign of fearmongering and antivaccine misinformation, according to this anguished and hard-hitting inquiry. Expanding on their podcast of the same name, the authors characterize “conspirituality” as a synthesis of the female-dominated New Age movement and the male-dominated realm of conspiracy theory, and draw provocative links between conspirituality and fascism, contending, for example, that conspiritualists draw “heavily on old fascist anxieties about sexual potency and deviancy.” Elsewhere, the authors document modern yoga’s “spiritual and shameful obsession with eugenics,” noting the influence of 19th-century eugenicist and bodybuilder Eugen Sandow on the “upper-caste proto-nationalists of India,” who sought to “sculpt a new national body, purged of foreign influences and colonial shame.” Some of the book’s most shocking revelations can be found in profiles of conspirituality influencers like Christiane Northrup, the “grandmother of alt-health gynecology,” who advised her followers to withhold sex from partners who were considering getting the Covid-19 vaccine, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose antivax nonprofit, the Children’s Health Defense Fund, released a film falsely suggesting that “Black people are naturally immune” to Covid-19. Packed with surprising insights and no-holds-barred takedowns, this is a forceful exposé. (June)