The Wellness to MAHA Pipeline

Ian Bremmer provides a concise summary of the MAHA movement and the coalition it has brought together around a combination of valid health concerns and pseudoscientific conspiracy theories.

This video explores now far right influencers have adopted the "crunchy mom" hippie aesthetic to promote wellness misinformation, conspiracy theories, and the "trad wife" lifestyle. There are also links to several good articles on this subject in the references.

• The Crunchy-to-Alt-Right Pipeline

• What’s the deal with crunchy moms voting right? 

• Why the Left eat junk Resisting Big Business is the preserve of the Right

• How the Right Claimed ‘Crunchy’

• The ‘crunchy mom’ influencers embracing Maha 

• Right-wingers are leading new ‘crunchy mom’ movement

• Read This: The Crunchy Mom to Alt-Right Pipeline

When you picture QAnon, you probably imagine a guy in a basement with 14 browser tabs open. You probably don’t imagine a yoga influencer in Bali talk-typing about “raising your vibration” between #wellness and #momlife hashtags. And yet - that’s exactly where QAnon found one of its most effective gateways. 

This short NBC News piece features interviews with the creators of Conspirituality about the way that QAnon conspiracy theories infiltrated yoga and wellness communities. While the influence of QAnon has waned in recent years, much of the MAHA movement was formed by those who had been radicalized by it.

Naomi Klein's book Doppelganger was one of the first to uncover the phenomenon of far-right wellness conspiracies. She uses the story of Naomi Wolf, another author who she is  often confused with, as an example of how these conspiracy theories turn reality on its head, and how this serves the interests of the rich and powerful.

Here are a couple of videos that discuss the idea of "Horseshoe Theory" that compares extreme and authoritarian versions of fascism and communism and suggests that they have more in common with each other than they have with neoliberal centrism.

The original definition of horseshoe theory represented a cold war mindset, and predated the 2-dimensional political compass that does a better job of distinguishing between authoritarian and libertarian versions of leftist and conservative ideology.

Many have cited horseshoe theory or diagonalism as an explanation for how so many people who identified as "far left" ended up joining a "far right" movement like MAHA. This seems to describe the "swing voters" in the last election much more than the traditional idea of the "independent centrist" voter.

A theory called brokenism described by Alana Newhouse offers a possible explanation for why those who reject the status quo cannot seem to decide between far-left and far-right solutions. She suggests that they simply see the system as fundamentally "broken" and prefer to support candidates that acknowledge this fact over those who don't, even if they don't offer sound solutions.