The wellness to fascism pipeline

There’s a lot to think about in this Tressie McMillian Cottom essay about Trump’s cross-demographic appeal, and you should read all of it (gift link). Here I’m going to focus on one piece, which is the wellness to fascism pipeline:

Then there are the wellness influencers. They sell diets and lifestyles that make our bodies into secular religions. If I do any more mindful, radical self-care, I am going to exfoliate myself into not existing. Maybe that’s the point — for people like me to disappear. The historian Kathleen Belew calls wellness’s radicalizing effect the “crunchy-to-alt-right pipeline,” a shadowy space where far left and far right mingle over fad diets and weird politics.

People afraid of lead in their water start following accounts that show them how to buy a water purifier. Algorithms push them deeper into a web of health influencers who distrust the government. That’s a short trip to disinformation about how the state is most definitely poisoning our water supply and, oh, haven’t you heard that vaccines implant trackers in your arm? That pipeline also builds a lot of community feedback along the way — followers, mutuals and faves. By the time a sensible person gets to the most egregious rhetoric, there are a lot of people around her or him saying that these ideas are totally normal.

There’s always been a potentially fascistic subtext to the wellness racket in the USA, given the extent to which it is driven by various purity fetishes, that themselves echo the sort of racist nativism that is always at the heart of fascism.

There is an underlying white nationalist thread at play here — clean is synonymous with whiteness — and independence is often associated with liberation from a multiracial state. Wellness influencers merge old ideas about cleanliness with liberal ideas about independence, from the state and from puritanical shame.

Influencers can claim to be apolitical. But they promote ideas like “doing your own research” and “being a freethinker,” convenient gateways to political extremism online. Wellness becomes white nationalist when neat brands nudge people toward the idea that the state is the enemy. Extremists follow that up by telling those people the state is the enemy because it includes “others” like minorities and immigrants.

Can we find this intellectual trajectory apotheosized in one particularly disgusting and malignant figure of our time? We can comrades:

There is no better indicator of how important the wellness left-right configuration mattered to this election than Trump’s pick of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy embodies incoherent ideas of a social-media-driven iteration of white nationalist ideas about health, such as touting raw milk and junk science about Covid-19 vaccines.

By cozying up to Kennedy, Trump was able to code himself as a standard-bearer for these ideas, even if he doesn’t necessarily embody them. Kennedy is one of Trump’s biggest cultural ambassadors for the wellness addicted.

From a candle that smells like Gwyneth Paltrow’s vagina to a Madison Square Garden Nazi rally . . . it’s not that far.