Tangent: Granola Fascism
Added 2024-05-02 20:13:39 +0000 UTCHi friends,
This is one of those Tangents where at every stage I had to fight the urge to upgrade the project to a main channel video essay. Maybe I still will! I read several books for this, and justified the amount of research time to myself on the grounds that it will likely all be relevant to future videos. Conspiracy theories, New Age spirituality/wellness—all of this is subject matter I've been wanting to cover for a long time and intend to cover further.
I came pretty close to reshooting this one because I had basically filmed 4.5 hours of rambling from an outline. But the end of the month was approaching, and fortunately I feel like I was able to sculpt it into something coherent in editing. There remain several little factual inaccuracies that I've tried to correct with text on the screen.
If I were to expand this into a main channel video I would probably want to avoid the word "fascism," which is a bit hyperbolic for some of what I'm covering. It totally applies of course to QAnon, or to what I'm calling "wellness eugenics." But I've tried to take a more balanced and sympathetic view to, for example, alternative medicine, where nuance is required and we shouldn't be recklessly throwing around accusations. I hope I made that clear in the video.
Anyway, enjoy, and let me know what you think!
-Natalie
P.S. Here's the video link, in case embedding doesn't work: https://youtu.be/HSzXeUkosBM?si=n2klqv-v7HBVxiyD
Comments
The contrast between Darwinian beliefs that humans "crawled out of the mud" & fascist/spiritualist beliefs that we "fell out of the sky" (14:00) is especially interesting given Paglia's claims about Sky Father Gods v. Earth Mother Goddesses. I wonder what she'd have to say about it.
Rose Dombegh
2025-09-17 00:34:13 +0000 UTCWatching in June 2025 and this is keeping me sane. Maybe the only thing.
Liz
2025-07-01 17:04:44 +0000 UTCA full year later, I feel like this is genuinely one of your best videos.
Rose Dombegh
2025-05-22 20:09:25 +0000 UTCDescribing Joe Rogan as a “blank slate of a man” is so audaciously correct.
Whitters
2025-04-16 01:35:33 +0000 UTCBy the way, I adore your channel. I love deep dives and yours are the best! I appreciate the work and passion. I'm beside myself each time you release a new video. Thank you!
Pamela Boudreau
2025-04-15 21:30:49 +0000 UTCI had a therapist and I really liked her. But she insisted I had to watch "The Secret." I made it clear that in my opinion, this was nothing but magical thinking and elitist. I watched it to make her happy. It was torturous. We had to break it off!
Pamela Boudreau
2025-04-15 21:01:07 +0000 UTCI have my own relationship to left wing new agey religion shit. My mom considered herself a sort of pan pagan spiritualist and that was my influence growing up. I relate to fatigue with modernity and a romanticisation for an idealized past but like, I don't think humans are fallen from angels or risen above animals. I think that we're still animals and that a lot of human suffering could be mitigated by not taking ourselves so seriously and understanding ourselves not as heirs to some legacy of superiority over the natural world and instead see ourselves as part of it. Basically I think humans are still in the dirt but that is where we belong and we'd feel a lot better if we accepted that and stopped tryna scapegoat various "out groups" as the reason why we haven't lived up to some superiority complex. I remember seeing that new age animated alien creation myth and crying. Not because I actually believed we're all reincarnated aliens, but because I think it taps into a very common modern human feeling of being separated from something vital to our wholeness. i just think that feeling is not from the humans separated from their higher alien origins, but animals separated from their natural habitat they evolved to thrive in. And in my mind that habitat that we human animals feel bereft of is each other and the earth. Humans are social creatures. Literally evolved to have collaboration and community effort as the survival strategy that gives us "fitness" for our environment in the darwinist sense. But modern humans are isolated from each other in crappy disillusioned jobs where we're expected to compete with each other for resources, instead of work together to compete with other animals to make sure the community has the resources it needs. I also think in our natural habitat, the day to day activities of humans are allowed to shift nd change with the seasons, just like every other animal on earth. Why I am I working the same amount of hours doing the same bullshit job in January as I am in July? When my animal cousins and ancestors spend the winter concerving energy and the summer gathering it in various ways? I'm watching these tangents out of order so I'll relate this to what you said in your spiritualism tangent about Doaism and the oneness of all things. Basically I believe every living thing on earth, including humans, are inextricable and indistinguishable from the earth itself. If the bacteria in my gut are not technically my cells, but are still a vital and functionally indistinguishable part of the "whole" that is me, then therefor I see humans and every other animal on earth as the same as the bacteria in my gut. And just like when the bacteria in my gut don't perform their function for the whole (say my gut bacteria decided they were superior to the other cells in my body and stopped digesting my food so they could instead do office jobs selling each other stupid shit) then I would get a stomach ache and get sick. The earth is sick (climate change) because humans aren't performing our role in the ecosystem. So I do think we humans have to ask ourselves, as animals, what is our role in the ecologocal whole that is the earth? And how do we modern humans start performing it again?
Seiya
2025-04-11 02:27:58 +0000 UTCHi Natalie 😀 I’m new to your Patreon and want to leave a (prob not too brief) note of thanks. I discovered your channel last year & it had an enormous positive effect on my life. I had been in a pretty bad place after 5 years of pregnancy/marriage/home ownership/having to settle & downgrade my career, all happening in a kind of snowballing intense rush. You have been such an inspiration to me; I have since found my way back to my own intellectual center/community & sense of personhood. I’m GenX & you give me hope for the future. What you do is so important in our public square & for the common good & democracy. Please know that what you do matters. You seem like a genuinely good person - thoughtful, kind, careful, considerate, rigorous in your work, etc. Sometimes, we are startled by, or taken with, another because it enlivens an essential part of ourselves. Thank you so much, Rachel ps - this tangent is a particularly important look at the world. If I may recommend a text that helped me to better understand Maga, the fascist movement, etc, it is Presidents, Populism, and the crisis of Democracy by Howell & Moe (I was cynical about the UC press, too). My background is in East Asian Studies and theory (Dartmouth & Paris IV, I studied under Rancière; my focus was semiotics in Peking opera). 🥂
rk
2025-03-23 18:12:58 +0000 UTCHave any of you guys ever played the game Disco Elysium? There's a character in that game that embodies that bizarrely complex spiritual racism thing beautifully. Also, dear Odin, I hate how much white supremacists have dug their claws into Old Norse/Germanic mythology and folklore, it's already insanely hard to learn about and research because we only have two surviving literary works, one of which is very unreliable, accounts from Tacitus, and some cool rock carvings. Thanks a lot for personally shaving years off of archeologists and folklorists' lives, guys. Also I totally agree that those European guys never should've been allowed to learn about Hinduism. It's so damn icky seeing the worst kinds of people projecting their racist ideas onto an extremely old and complicated religious tradition they know jack shit about. Totally feel you on the romatic-vague-critiques-of-modernity-tech-bad-pills-bad stuff that's out there, I too feel strongly about the environment and especially animal welfare/rights (been vegetarian since I was 8) but I HATE the fatphobia and the rejection of like, all scary-sounding tech (so many CHEMICALS, oh no, so scary, not like literally everything in the world is made of chemicals). Also on a personal level I like video games and computers, so, yeah. Damn, I didn't mean to ramble so much in this comment but I think this kind of Crunchy Facism gets under my skin so deep because it's such a deep and nasty twisting of stuff I value highly. The environment, caring about animals, self-care and self-understanding, even spirituality (esoteric or otherwise), though in that case it's just that I think religion is cool and interesting to learn about, as I myself am an atheist. Like I don't agree with Catholicism ideologically but the churches and lore go pretty hard. Also I find it fascinating that those spiritual fashy dudes seem really, really threatened by the idea that humans are just a type of animal. The whole insistence that the "good" "pure" race are descended angels and all the "lesser" ones are relatives of primates, when the truth is that humans ARE a type of primate. If I recall correctly, Charles Darwin was an abolitionist. ALSO ALSO THANK YOU for also agreeing that modern medicine is important even though it has this ugly history, I have never once heard from anyone critical of it who also gets that mainstream medicine is really fucking important and didn't give me weird crystal-healer vibes. Like, those critiques are spot-on, but also, I'm sorry, I'm not gonna not get vaccinated because it has a patriarchal history. Also also also, denial of death thing? Right on the money too. Makes way more sense than Freud, I can tell you firsthand that sex drives nothing I do but the fear of death and annihilation, of the inevitability that I just won't exist and my mind cannot fathom it it all, has haunted me for as long as I can remember. Even just typing it right here is sending a wave of visceral fear all over my body.
Asocksual
2025-02-25 16:46:31 +0000 UTCOnly 10 minutes in, but I have a feeling there that you're relying to a great extent on Wouter J. Hanegraaff. ^_^ I think it's safe to say he was my favourite scholar of esotericism when I was studying religious studies. I'm curious to see if my assumption was right.
DaniloDaSelva
2025-02-23 03:04:46 +0000 UTCThe part about epidemiology being incompatible with American individualism really lit something up in my brain. As well the idea that contradictions and denials of reality are actually the ultimate flex that reinforce people’s own veracity is wiiiiiild. I’ve dabbled in the concept of phantasm as it relates to alt-right conspiracy thinking, but her analysis makes so much upsetting sense!
Isla
2024-08-22 02:43:36 +0000 UTCSuggest reading Placebos by Kathryn T. Hall
Benjamin Swanson
2024-08-21 14:55:03 +0000 UTCTl;dr—for whatever it’s worth—I felt your critiques were spot-on. Problematic discourse, even if unintentional, surrounding a nostalgic return to “healthier” and “more pure times” often ignores the problems of the past, and the problems generated in the present by such a return…like indigenous people unable to eat their long-term staple foods, like quinoa, because the very people who grow it, have been outpriced by crunchy capitalism.
Eric Phillips
2024-08-11 08:33:07 +0000 UTCAny baseline or overly simplified critique of “modernity” is highly suspect to me because it often falls into the trap of an immensely privileged perspective. Steve Cutts, former illustrator on projects for Google, Coca-Cola, etc; digital designer; user of digital tools, can critique many of his targets from a place of immense wealth (generated through art, corporate conglomerate contracts, and digital media), food security (he can shop *exclusively* at Whole Foods, or in his case Harrods, should he so choose), and ready availability of information and access to its dissemination. Access to the internet provided this Alabama boy with some of the first truly safe spaces to express myself from within an overtly oppressive community. Fast food is often a necessity in the food deserts of Povertyville, USA, and the ease of access to healthier choices is inherently facilitated by massive globalized systems of commerce (
Eric Phillips
2024-08-11 08:25:31 +0000 UTCA banger. YES GAWDD
Albertyna Varga
2024-07-10 16:05:40 +0000 UTCThis is a brilliant video i just subbed and I knew it would be worth it, this video got me thinking it's such a fascinating topic I can't wait for you to expand further if you do this is probably gonna be my go to vid to watch for a while
Jerzey Banks
2024-07-08 21:24:47 +0000 UTCapparently this shanin blake character had a kidney infection and decided to let god handle it and not go to the doctor. aghh
Sappho's Friend
2024-06-18 16:47:19 +0000 UTCSo good! But wait did you just say that freudian psychoanalysis is scientifically rational? It's really equivalent to q shamanism.
Hanna Lemon
2024-06-12 06:26:26 +0000 UTCIncredibly, incredibly eye-opening. I'll defo revisit this tangent in the future it supplements a lot of my fiction writing. Also absolutely gonna add these to my reading list! Thank you for this robust talk and introducing me to this topic (at least, at this length and angle) wonderful!
Michael Mwangi
2024-06-06 15:05:00 +0000 UTCAlso, Ernest Becker is the shit! In college, I got to delve into Terror Managent Theory, a branch of Social Psychology that was inspired by that work. I even ran a TMT study for my senior thesis. Check it out sometime.
Adam Kauffman
2024-06-04 16:16:43 +0000 UTCGreat video! It seems that that relationship between disavowal of the body/mind over matter you see in wellness culture tied to fascism, is also there in what you’ve described in the past about inceldom, which is essentially a kind of fascist eating disorder cult. Both of these ideas root angry backlash at reality in a rejection of the physical fact of the body, ultimately expressed through hatred of others. Would love to see this video expanded into a main channel one!
D Henty
2024-05-27 07:21:22 +0000 UTCThere’s another book by Barbara Ehrenreich that’s super interesting for this matter: Bright-sided.
Cota
2024-05-26 02:46:10 +0000 UTCI would like to comment about conspiracy theories in tragic events. Here in the south of brazil we are going through horrible and devastating floods that have already displaced over half million people from their homes. I'm talking about whole cities being under water, it's despairing. It is the result of a really strong climatic event called El Niño reforced by climate changes/global warming. It was pretty well antecipated (even though the government did absolutely nothing about) and in simple metereology terms it can be understood. What I really wanna talk about is that many people, notedly extreme-right supporters, and coming up with other imaginary explications that make no sense, like acclaming that que HAARPI american laboratory is experimenting on us, or that other forces are inducing everything in our region. In other tragic events, I could see people believing in this kind of stuff because they needed to see a reason for all of that, a root to the problem. Although, thats not the case, the explanation is pretty visible and SIMPLE!!!! So I guess that this theories are showing up because the climate change and the warm waters of pacific ocean is not emocional engaging enough, idk. Another perspective to this situation is that climatic change is something that most people avoid or silence, especially right-wing that dont wanna mess with industries and transportation and fossil fues. To blame global warming is to agree that the system needs to change.
Vitória Xavier
2024-05-22 00:49:46 +0000 UTCI'm catching up with a lot of these tangents, and It's dawned on me that Contra doesn't really talk about Horror, Fear and Terror (I mean of Fear and Horror in it of itself). I hope one day she gets to talk about Fear and Horror.
Oscar Glass
2024-05-19 04:18:40 +0000 UTCcontra, I agree moby and the pacific choir have their excesses (i agree with some of these critiques, depictions of women that come off as sexist, or their questionable depictions of public transport that don't speak class consciousness to me), but i disagree they are up in the antimodernist fascism alley. Antimodernist, luddite and spiritualist yes, fascist not (though im an antispiritualist and antitheist so it's not as if i like that at all, but obviously the venn diagram isnt a circle). I saw their video "in this cold place" as a teenager still, and i remember how everyone in the comment section back then (2017 cca) was losing their sh over trump having been depicted as a dollar sign robot that transformed into a Swastika. This video also contained a direct protest against american anti-immigration policy and war. It's got anticapitalist tones, but just their work occasionally has some contradictions or is depicted in a sloppy way. if you havent seen that video, i suggest you watch it, because it just doesnt come off as a fascist
Sappho's Friend
2024-05-06 18:04:44 +0000 UTCOh man. As a Waldorf teacher and someone who actually went to grad school to study the applications of Anthroposophy in education, medicine, and therapy—this hit real close to home. I yawp’d when you mentioned Anthroposophy and Steiner. He’s fucking invaded every corner of my life (even my Tolkien scholarship! Fuck!)! The granola is real in these quarters. Some fucking frightening people I’ve come into contact with.
Andrew May
2024-05-06 13:46:28 +0000 UTC“There is a pathetic story that Julius Evola tells in his biography. He recalls an extremely desperate time in his life in which he lost the will to live. […] Only an encounter with the quietism of Buddhist extinctionism saved Evola from madness and suicide. Only a newly acquired fascist spirituality, with its humanist and supremacist dream of material acquiescence and subjective indestructibility, could put a stop to the madness of the metaphysical masochism that he had been facing. This is how Miroslav Grishko recounts Evola’s torment and his recovery: Recounting in his memoirs an intent to commit s*icide and thus follow the pattern of his influences […] the seemingly haphazard discovery of a fragment from the Majjhima Nikaya spares Evola’s terrestrial life: ‘He who takes extinction to be extinction and, having taken extinction to be extinction, thinks of extinction, thinks of extinction, thinks of extinction, thinks “Mine is extinction”, and rejoices in extinction, such a person, I say, does not know extinction.’ Extinction must always be deferred, continually pushed towards the most extreme exterior point. S*icide and non-s*icide form the same gesture from the perspective of the remoteness of the higher form of extinction. In this conception of extinction’s remoteness, the unmappable model of inner war nevertheless yields the minimal form of a praxis, which infers in its performance the prosecution of a mission” -Gruppo di Nun, Revolutionary Demonology I think you hit the nail on the head in suggesting the danger of spirituality is actually the danger of a spirituality that opposes death rather than one that embraces it. I think part of why this video will alienate many is because it doesn’t offer much hope for a leftist spirituality beyond the final remark. I would recommend the book I cited if you are interested in a leftist take on esotericism and the occult rooted in this acceptance of annihilation, it is beautifully dark and hauntingly hopeful. On a personal note, my mom used to be a hippie, and still is into New Age stuff, homeopathy, alternative medicine, etc. She has been struggling with gastrointestinal issues for decades and a friend of hers recommended a couple of alternative medicine books. I did some basic research into the authors, and of course both turned out to be quacks. I have tried to warn my mom but she said many of the things you mentioned: the treatments aren’t working, the doctors won’t listen, I just want to live longer, etc. It is really painful to see someone you know fall out of desperation for people taking advantage of others and not be able to do anything about it, because what alternative can I even offer her?
Prosinco
2024-05-04 18:58:52 +0000 UTCThe more I hear from others about searching for meaning, the more I gravitate back to existentialist philosophy and how surprisingly comforting it can be. Meaninglessness doesn't have to just be terrifying chaos, it can also be freedom, lack of anxiety, appreciation of any good moment or connection, knowing that it'll all end eventually and there's nothing you can do about it, so you might as well enjoy things wherever possible. And meaninglessness as a concept is a lot harder to exploit than other concepts and theories about the human condition, I think - fanaticism usually seems so linked with higher meaning and purpose. I find it pretty freeing to see the world as a big meaningless blob where everything is contradictory and nothing makes sense, because that seems to be the only answer to a world where you can find contradictions to pretty much any idea or assertion about reality.
Dana Migdal
2024-05-04 18:02:51 +0000 UTCI want to add that I'm offended the Q-anon Shaman refers to himself a a Bodhisattva 😂
Stephanie Kauff
2024-05-04 15:27:31 +0000 UTCI'm Buddhist and one of the teachers from Tibet told his students about the first time he saw an airplane and he described it as a "large flying house" but this was during WWII and I was wondering why there would be planes in Tibet at that time.
Stephanie Kauff
2024-05-04 15:23:09 +0000 UTC!! Thank you for pulling on this thread. A case study for this, in my life, was a regular at my old job at a hardware store in 2020. She was an all-organic, vegetarian homesteader in the mountains, who read tarot and practiced yoga, and was the most virulent anti-vax, anti-“globalist”, racist, trump-supporting, QAnon, rude customer. I was often trapped at the very end of my shift, with no one else to ring up, as she’d proselytize her conspiracies and it was just paralyzing for me. She felt like a walking paradox. It seems she was the epitome of granola fascism
Wren Stryker
2024-05-04 14:46:07 +0000 UTCThis was probably my favorite tangent yet. I love and appreciate that you talk about the anti-fatness within granola and fitness culture.
Ingeborg Olderø
2024-05-03 15:39:01 +0000 UTCi subscribed here literally to see these tangents and have been loving every single one of them. also loving how they build on each other, from the new atheist movement trickling into gamergate, trickling into qanon, and now into granola fascism
Carolyn Davis
2024-05-03 15:29:34 +0000 UTC
