The pandemic’s lockdowns drove wellness influencers toward conspiracy narratives

Evidence

Then came Covid—and this booming, unregulated industry of self-styled health experts collided with a global health crisis that scared the hell out of pretty much everyone, including the professionally well. After all, their yoga studios, CrossFit boxes, and massage clinics were, for the first time, locked tight, and their incomes and futures were suddenly highly uncertain. As Ehrenreich taught us, we turn toward the body when life feels out of control. It was in this period that so many of those fit and beautiful influencers stopped merely cooing soothingly and offering encouraging words to motivate our home workouts and green juicing and started whispering to us alarmingly, about dark forces coming to poison us, and eventually, to gag, jab, and dominate us. It was then that the diagonal lines started to race toward one another. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 594

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is where the chapter’s core device — ‘diagonalism’ — is being defined by its enabling conditions: economic uncertainty plus bodily threat turned wellness sellers conspiratorial.
• XREF: Cites Barbara Ehrenreich’s ‘we turn toward the body when life feels out of control’ — grounds the diagonalism causal story in an existing theoretical frame. — connects to: New Age wellness fairs function as hub venues where conspiracy theories circulate — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 42; the MOC “The Viral Refinery: How Preexisting Fringe Fears Get Smelted Into Mainstream Reality”