Thanks as always to The Other McCain, Pirate’s Cove and Bacon Time for the Rule Five links!
What with all the fuss about the Kung Flu going on these days, this is particularly relevant; another quack is out there scamming folks, but this one has an M.D. – proving again that qualifications don’t rule out nutbaggery. Excerpt:
Superstitions did not disappear in the modern age, but with the COVID-19 pandemic driving people to spend more and more time online, anxiously searching for and simultaneously being bombarded by anything that looks like information, this prophesied crystal-clutching and horoscope-consulting is all the more evident. And there are misenlightened gurus who epitomize Sagan’s dire warning, chief among them Dr. Christiane Northrup.
An obstetrician-gynecologist by training, Northrup rose to fame as a New York Times bestselling author of books like Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom and The Wisdom of Menopause. She was platformed by Oprah Winfrey on many occasions and was named by Reader’s Digest in 2013 as one of the 100 most trusted people in America. Her online fanbase is considerable: 149,000 followers on Instagram and over half a million fans on her Facebook page. For a medical doctor’s star to shine so brightly during a pandemic should be a boon, but Dr. Northrup is no ordinary doctor. Every night, she addresses tens of thousands of followers in ten-minute videos that deny the reality of the pandemic, promote every magical belief under the sun, and weave a grand Dungeons-and-Dragons-style narrative about the Age of Aquarius and Northrup’s Warriors of the Radical Light.
Wow.
Odd times sure do tend to bring out the odd people. Now, as far as I’m concerned, folks have the right to follow whatever loony New-Age guru they please, and much good may it do them. What’s not clear from this article is how much good old traditional cash this particular fraud is scamming from the rubes. Apparently her videos are a real hoot:
I watched a month-worth of her solo videos to better understand the world in which she lives. In this parallel universe, there are Indigo children, time travellers from the future, and geomancers performing acupuncture on Mother Earth by moving rocks around. She constantly tells her viewers, whom she calls “sleeping lions” and “warriors,” that they need to take action. That is when the supernatural forces of Providence will magically come in and take care of the rest, like the reinforcements who show up at the end of an action film just in the nick of time.
Again: Wow.
Maybe someday folks will outgrow this kind of nitwittery. Then again, looking around at the state of affairs in our world today, maybe they won’t.
