[philwelch]

For a very long time there’s been sort of a hippie overlap between organic/natural foods, alternative medicine, skepticism towards Big Pharma, and antivax. Prior to 2020, if you wanted to assign a political leaning to this scene, “fascist” is probably the last one you would pick. Likewise, it’s relatively new that antipathy to the World Economic Forum or Bill Gates is considered right-wing. And if you told anyone ten years ago that a prominent anti-government protestor would be a self-described “shaman”, you would have never guessed which side he would be on.

There’s a far more interesting story that isn’t being told here. How on earth did the right become a more welcoming environment for hippies than the left? When it comes to vaccines in particular, that’s easy: the mainstream center-left was all in on COVID vaccine mandates, and were willing to alienate alt-medicine hippies to impose those policies. Anti-vaxers were always a weird, unpopular fringe group, and it was rhetorically convenient to try and dismiss all lockdown-mandate skeptics as “antivaxers”. But it’s all part of the same broader political realignment we’ve been going through over the past decade or so.