One of the more ironic aspects of white supremacist fascism is, it's all about the project of restoring an imagined great pre-modern past of racial purity.

It's imaginary, so they make it up by stealing shit from non-white indigenous cultures they see as "primitive" https://twitter.com/DarrylLeroux/status/1349018011961876482

The Nazis and their supporters really leaned into this hard with their whole theory of Aryan race identity and appropriation of Indian culture and religious symbolism, like the swastika

Savitri Devi made it her entire lifework.

New Age has a lot of its roots in the Theosophists, who were notorious for this sort of combination of race theory and selective indigenous cultural appropriation.

It's intertwined anti-indigenous eugenics with selective cultural theft from the indigenous from the get-go.

White "shamanism" is one of the most popular forms this fascist appropriation takes.

It works not only because white fascism hinges on the idea of re-establishing a "primitive" white past, but also on the notion that pure, "primitive" whiteness is naturally supreme.

So with white fascists and supremacists you often see this push to appropriate "primitive" cultural roles that center communing with nature and/or nature sporits.

Which dovetails nicely with New Age views of the indigenous as more animalistic & therefore more attuned to nature.

Which is, to be clear, really fucking racist.

The fake shaman stuff is also a useful shortcut to claims of authority by people who don't know what they're talking about or are peddling patent falsehoods.

David Ickes, the Holocaust denier who popularized the antisemitic blood libel theory that the world is run by disguised Illuninati reptile aliens that secretly eat children, whose work is/was in many ways proto-QAnon?

A "shaman" who received these "visions" from "spirits."

Jordan Peterson is (was?? I can't remember if the jury is still out on him still being alive) big on this sort of appropriation "shamanism."

It was core to his brand, which was all about pitching a return to a "natural order" of white male supremacy.

A lot of this revolves around mystical notions of collective unconscious that were popularized by Jung and also Eliade and even Joseph Campbell, all of whom were directly complicit with fascism and/or antisemitism to varying degrees.

All engaged to some extent with the idea that "primitive" folks were basically animals living out this "natural" order and consciousness unwittingly, and that the "civilized" (read: white) could learn about how to restore their, superior natural pasts by observing the indigenous.

QAnon revolves around treating the mysterious voice of "Q" as basically an omniscient intelligence, so I wouldn't and won't be surprised to see them keep getting friendlier & friendlier with white appropriative "shamanism" that ascribes spirit origins to conspiracy theory BS.

Meanwhile, the QAnon cult is increasingly become a safehouse for anti-vaxxers and attracting mystical crystal healing types who are perfectly happy to buy into ahistorical shamanism and other harmful New Agey ahistorical/anti-scientific content that, ahem, resonates spiritually.

A lot of us grew up thinking of New Age stuff as automatically hippie and therefore vaguely in the neighborhood of liberal/leftist, but a lot of this stuff has its origins in antisemitic, racist eugenic thought that never really disappeared, and that is finding new life in QAnon.

Just as COVID-19 "nature is healing" stuff reminded us that eco-fascism is a real and undeniable current in environmentalist space, anti-vaxx/QAnon synchronicity is powering up to remind us that New Age has the same problem, as badly and probably worse.

Anyway, sorry to hijack your tweet, @DarrylLeroux, this shit just drives me bananas