WTFWTFWTFWTFWTFWTF
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Was this a public school?
Wouldn’t have imagined that this type of thing would fly in most public schools.
This is a really good article that illuminates how QAnon works - and throws some subtle and not-so-subtle shade at the whole new age movement.
More commonly associated with right-wing groups, the conspiracy theory is spreading through yoga, meditation and other wellness circles. Friends and colleagues have watched with alarm as Instagram influencers and their New Age peers — yogis, energy healers, sound bathers, crystal practitioners, psychics, quantum magicians — embraced QAnon’s conspiratorial worldview and sprayed it across social media.
The health, wellness and spirituality world has always been primed for that worldview, followers say. Though largely filled with well-meaning people seeking spiritual or physical comfort, the $1.5-trillion industry can also be a hotbed for conspiracies, magical thinking, dietary supplements with dubious scientific claims and distrust of institutional healthcare, including vaccines.
“It’s always been the water we were swimming in,” said Julian Walker, 50, a Mar Vista yogi, ecstatic dance teacher and co-host of the “Conspirituality” podcast, which tracks the marriage of conspiracy theories and spiritualism. “Now we’re seeing what happens when the water rises.”
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.”
As the number of yoga studios soared in Southern California and rents rose, studio owners realized that offering $3,000 teacher trainings was more lucrative than charging students $25 per class, Walker said. Those classes created a glut of newly licensed teachers, some of whom turned to Instagram to build a following and secure sponsorship deals.
In behind-the-scenes marketing trainings, aspiring wellness influencers were told that “being controversial, taking definitive positions that make people love you or hate you, is a great way to build your brand,” Walker said.
Last spring, extremist researchers began to note with alarm that bigoted, far-right ideology was being laundered through vivid sunset photos and slickly designed “educational” slides on Instagram. That recruiting tactic, aimed largely at women, has since been dubbed “pastel QAnon.”
“Instagram is the platform where yoga and QAnon intersected,” said Cécile Guerin, a yoga teacher and extremism researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in London. She said the ideology was a clear fit for a community that has long been taught to search for and decode hidden meanings and patterns.
Instagram is just as horrible as FB and Youtube on so many levels.
The theory’s promised “Great Awakening” echoes the yogic views of ascension and consciousness. The anti-mask and anti-distancing rhetoric focused on bodily autonomy and sovereignty, themes embedded in New Age practices, too: that you are your own guru, that you know your body better than anyone else.
“People aren’t taking QAnon as seriously as they should, given how pervasive it is in these worlds — evangelical Christians, yogis — that otherwise have very little in common,” Schwartz said. “They’re creating a world where truth is whatever you feel like it is.”
The extent to which influencers are consciously embracing QAnon belief systems, or just picking and choosing the types of details that will do well online and attract a wider following, is “still a mystery,” Remski said. “Nobody will give you a straight answer.”
It felt “terrifying,” Pearlman said — a reminder that “even though as a community we’re really peppy, we love everybody, and it’s all very ‘kumbaya,’ there is a dark underlying worldview.”
Abraham, the energy healer from Trabuco Canyon, is Jewish. She said she struggled to reconcile the creep of extremist ideology into her inner circle, especially among people whom she had “put on a pedestal” when she first entered the New Age world.
She unfollowed her dear friend and her reiki master, removed their photos from her home and took down her own training certificates from her walls.
“I had to let go of really close mentors,” Abraham said. Her heart hurt so intensely, she said, that she designed and began wearing a bracelet made of crystals that are supposed to cure heartache.
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I mean they have incredibly strong reality denial in common. That’s a big thing to have in common. I hate every single flavor of reality denialist for personal reasons that aren’t even fueled primarily by politics. Anyone who is surprised that the new age grifters would migrate into Q anon is a sucker.
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And influencers are the most easily influenced. They are targeted because they are ignorant magnifying lenses to be used to boost signal to something else.
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What do we even do with this shit
https://twitter.com/evelynpix/status/1407529403169509379?s=21
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Just say we will take it straight out of the curriculum if a single one of you can coherently and accurately explain what it is.
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We could start by nuking Loudoun County
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It’s like they’re getting better at this right in front of us. No one can prove you wrong if you don’t even know what you’re talking about.
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Or just say you will take it out and then ignore them.
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I have a deplorable friend who’s daughter is a teacher. Is it out of the realm to believe Trump could someday label teachers the “enemy of the people” for teaching critical race theory. Of course, whether they really teach it or not is irrelevant. Anyway, maybe these Trumpkins will think twice if Trump starts vilifying someone other than the media. Or they may send their kids death threats. Hard to say.
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“I thought this was America”
Society is going to bifurcate. Right now we have people that accept observable reality and those that don’t trying to share common spaces. There will be a period of “bipartisanship” attempts to meet them where they are and those efforts will fail. I think the ultimate end game here is basically a formation of structural “fenced communities” in social institutions, reality based people will simply stop having things like public forums like this and go about organizing their institutions the way they want and exclude the idiots. It’s going to really suck - those people will just become an ever present danger that could blow up at any time, basically like tornados or hurricanes, and they’ll become an undesirable part of the environment in which we live.
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There is an underlying assumption in your post that the reality based group are going to organize the institutions. Case by case, but I’m not sure that’s gonna be how this goes in many cases.
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? They’re going to have full control over the us for a decade with new voting laws that will get way worse once Dems lose the house.
They are going to completely change what is being taught in schools.
No, they prefer imaginary enemies and victories.
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Yeah, that’s on the menu. The question is if they become fully ISIS or if they satisfy themselves with their petty culture war stuff. I suspect that because most of them don’t actually want to give up on responsibility free American consumerism, they will focus on just creating the most ignorant possible world they can and they will use whatever political power they have to punch down at people. That’s really bad of course, but I think the system might stabilize with basically a technocratic class that tries to ring fence their world to the extent possible, an activist anti-intellectual QAnon class that lives in constant misery, and you’re right that there is a third class of people that just have to suffer through all the nonsense.
Indeed. There is a scenario in play where the American right takes over the country to implement full ISIS With Football conservatism. But there’s lots of other examples in recent history where the ignorant extremist terrorists live their lives as terrorists within a society without actually gaining control of the society.
This seems to assume that the non-reality-based contingent will be ok letting the reality-based folks live their lives in peace. That doesn’t appear to be the case with these people, they find all sorts of ways to convince themselves that reality-based people present a constant threat to them that needs to be stomped out.
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