A background story about how a healthgroup became conspiracytheorists. Not a completely new subject, but still relevant.
"They have been moving generally to far-right views, bordering on racism, and really pro-Russian views, with the Ukraine war,” she says. “It started very much with health, with ‘Covid doesn’t exist’, anti-lockdown, anti-masks, and it became anti-everything: the BBC lie, don’t listen to them; follow what you see on the internet.”
Things came to a head when one day, before a meditation session – an activity designed to relax the mind and spirit, pushing away all worldly concerns – the group played a conspiratorial video arguing that 15-minute cities and low-traffic zones were part of a global plot. Jane finally gave up.
This apparent radicalisation of a nice, middle-class, hippy-ish group feels as if it should be a one-off, but the reality is very different. The “wellness-to-woo pipeline” – or even “wellness-to-fascism pipeline” – has become a cause of concern to people who study conspiracy theories.
I honestly think you’re not reading enough into it. For one thing, I’m not calling the crisis “supposed”, I’m quoting the article. The author is calling it “supposed”. It’s one of the things that makes me doubt the rest of the article’s problems are (just) bad writing. “Agenda” is a loaded word, it’s (ironically) too black and white, and presumes intentionality. A better one is “Perspective”, and the one on display is that men and women go nuts for fundamentally different reasons, where ones are personal faults (and fixed by changing the person), and others are systemic faults (and fixed by changing the system). I specifically chose the article I linked to show that it’s not malice, necessarily, it’s just the lens through which the subject is seen. IDK, think of it as sublimated misogyny, if you must.
And just to make this point one more time: young men do spend too much time online. So does everyone. You don’t end up in a Qanon Facebook group by not being online. And they do fall for bullshit artists. So do the rest of the cranks. You don’t end up in a Qanon Facebook group by not falling for bullshit artists. They just stick out like a sore thumb because, tech being male dominated as it is, they were the first to be a big enough bunch of suckers to be worth dedicated con artists. The rest of the world will undoubtedly get there, just wait :(