Covid grifters are (still) wrong: the structure of esoteric knowledge

Good morning to everyone out there in internet-land. I am having some nice strong coffee and listening to jazz, enjoying the golden sunshine of a daylight savings morning. I hope your Saturday is treating you at least as well.

In general, I really want to move away from writing about Covid, because it feels completely purposeless at this point in time – just inviting pain and judgment and hatred, which I already have plenty of. I certainly don’t want to write about the election; I’m no longer enough of a left-wing narcissist to think that my “analysis” is something anyone needs any of. But today I’m going to write about both, because there’s something going on that I think is interesting.

In the days since the election result was announced, I have seen a thread by a familiar Covid grifter circulating all over the internet. The thread is an evidence-less argument that pandemics lead to fascism. The examples in support of this are: the Great Depression, and hyperinflation in Weimar Germany* (only one of those things led to fascism, but whatever?) came after the 1918 influenza pandemic, and Donald Trump’s reelection in 2024 after the pandemic began in 2020 (Trump was already elected once before, pre-Covid, in 2016, but whatever?). The mechanism proposed for how these things happened is that they “brought eugenics into the mainstream” or some such. Obviously, this is not true. Eugenics long predates, and was mainstream long prior to, 1918. The ideology and movement first coalesced in the 1880s; the US state of Indiana passed the world’s first compulsory sterilization law for the “unfit” in 1907. In 1911, the Carnegie Institution – hardly a fringe outfit – released a report proposing several methods for removing the genetically unfit from the general population, including euthanasia by gas chamber. The connection between eugenics and fascist ideology is clear. What I’m saying is that this connection predates, and is only remotely and tenuously connected to, the influenza of 1918 or the Covid-19 of 2020.

I could take a weathered desire path here and argue that these analyses are politically dangerous in addition to being ignorant; that they misidentify the culprits, misunderstand the problems, point people galvanized to “get involved” down dead-end paths. Someone else can make those arguments. I want to talk about something weirder: the funky thread of esotericism running through the beautiful tapestry of the Covid grifter community and through its associated epistemological stance. I read a really fun paper by Susannah Crockford yesterday that reviews the “sociology of secrecy” in an analysis of esotericism, neoliberalism, and the Goop jade vaginal egg (my essay about Goop Lab, which covers some of the same ground, is here). The relationship between esotericism and what we now call science is long, complicated, and fuzzy, but for our purposes, some simple definitions will suffice.

Crockford analyzes the marketing claims of Goop doctors about the jade vaginal egg and how they appeal to and mobilize motifs of esoteric knowledge – the yoni egg is an ancient Chinese secret, whose power can be yours for the low low price of $70 or however much it cost; the doctors are “just providing information” via their marketing strategy, which is portrayed as “standing up for marginalized women and their chronic health problems” by providing this information. Crockford appropriately complicates these claims – how rejected can this knowledge be, if these are doctors working for a multimillion-dollar celebrity wellness company? Who and what is mainstream here?

There’s not a singular answer. Crockford examines, via the Goop jade egg, how esoteric thought operationalizes the secret to mobilize specific forms of social and economic power. There’s information that we have that they don’t want you to know. “The significance of secrecy, for Urban [a sociologist Crockford draws on], is how it operates to grant value to certain forms of knowledge, so that possession of secret knowledge is beneficial in social and political terms to the bearer. A similar position is adopted by Kocku von Stuckrad, who argues that esotericism is a discourse characterized by secrecy and structured by a dialectic of concealment and revelation.” Earlier in the paper: “Claims to being marginalized or rejected by an ambiguously identified mainstream or dominant position are a common component in discourses of secrecy.” These claims are powerful because they carry with them claims to social power, claims to membership in often excluded or marginalized groups, and certainly, claims to economic power.

Though the language of esoteric discourse is often jargon-laden, inaccessible, and exclusive, and therefore sort of elitist, I think elitism implies social and economic status that isn’t critical. As in, you don’t have to be making Goop profits to be mobilizing esoteric discourse for economic benefit. This is exactly what these Covid grifters are doing although it does seem like the economic and social benefits are not objectively huge in magnitude. I think grift motivated by esoteric reasoning is bad whether or not it’s hugely profitable. Weirdly, this mode of reasoning is nearly identical in structure to the mode employed by right-wing health conspiracists, antivaxxers and seed oil people and outright Covid deniers. The content of the secret is different, but the content of the secret is irrelevant – the assertion is that we, the initiated, have unmediated access to the truth.

I think the Covid grifters claim unmediated access to the truth in a slightly different way than the right wingers. While both the right-wingers and Covid grifters claim access to knowledge rejected by epistemic authorities in the media, the medical establishment, and public health bureaus, the Covid grifters – at least on the face of it – seem to embrace science in an interesting way. Listen to these folks tak for long enough and it’s clear that “scientific papers” or “research” are their occult texts, which they interpret for laypeople seeking “information” to confirm that there are bad, bad facts out there that the CDC doesn’t want you to know. Their engagement with scientific papers and published research is poor and superficial, having a lot more in common with the correspondence epistemology of much conspiracy theory. (Correspondence epistemology – where correspondences are interpreted as causal relations. For example, the Bible of 9/11 conspiracy literature, SK Bain’s The Most Dangerous Book in the World, takes the flight number of Flight 93 – 93 is a very important number in occultist Aleister Crowley’s Thelema – as yet another piece of incontrovertible evidence that 9/11 itself wa a mass occult ritual.) The Covid grifters tend to universalize very contested, contextual, and vague research findings; my favorite is the persistent claim that “every Covid-19 infection shrinks your brain,” which is based on a reading of a study from early in the pandemic (2020 or 2021) conducted among only 350 or so subjects above the age of 60 enrolled in the UK Biobank.

The Covid grifters miss (“miss” is a bit passive) alternative explanations because they assume that if it is published in a scientific paper, it must be true and must confirm their existing belief. This is a grave misunderstanding of what the scientific literature is. It’s not a repository of truth claims. It’s a body of work produced by people working in a specific political economy, one that incentivizes publishing “statistically significant” findings (which are not the same thing as actually significant or meaningful findings), and really incentivizes publishing anything about hot topics like, say, a devastating pandemic. Early on in 2020, I remember being so fucking frustrated with public health – we as a discipline were cranking out papers on Covid, but these papers didn’t actually elucidate anything, and certainly didn’t help people answer the questions that needed, with some urgency, to be answered (such as: what do we do about kids in school?).

There’s a faith in the social technology of quantification, which is a mystifying language like any other. Michael Hoerger and the Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative, who I have written about here, here, and here, bother me so much because what they are doing is esoteric knowledge production. Literally, Hoerger (it’s unclear if the Collaborative has any other members) claims an ability to alchemize wastewater data into granular case counts. He also mobilizes his PhD (in a completely unrelated discipline, clinical psychology) and his “published scientific papers” (mostly commentaries or papers on topics completely unrelated to infectious disease modeling) – that is, mobilizes the social authority of science – to lend credence, importance, and social power to his bullshit analyses.

Similarly, they miss the institutional, political, and social context that health authorities are operating in. For them, the fact the CDC hasn’t issued recommendations (to do… what?) based on this secret knowledge (that everyone knows, but that’s beside the point) is further evidence of the white-hot truth of the knowledge. Lord knows, I have massive criticisms of the CDC. But in 2024, what exactly do you expect? There’s an ethic of “so what, now what?” in public health that I actually agree with – it is considered unethical, for example, to screen people for health conditions that you have no resources to offer them treatment for. It’s possible to read the CDC’s anemic masking recommendations in 2023-2024 this way, rather than as evidence of secret plotting to do eugenics and elect Trump or whatever. Masks are really fucking expensive and people are poor. The CDC can only really limply suggest that people do something that they don’t have the resources or political will to mandate people to do.

But of course, thinking about this shit this way is really mundane and boring. It doesn’t grant the thinker any kind of social cachet – look at my own futile newsletter. Who wants to talk or think about any of this complexity? Let alone in a horizontal way that is aimed at actually sitting with the uncertainty? I’m not being flippant. Reality sucks. “Being without meaning is scary,” as one empathetic ex-NXIVM member said to another in one of the vanity documentaries produced about the cult. Constructing an alternative meaning structure here in fragmented, atomized, neoliberalism New Age America is way beyond me, as an individual person.

**I will take this opportunity to hype an illuminating book on this period, The Weimar Republic by left-wing social historian Detlev Peukert.