James Van Der Beek Criticized Democrats Using Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories, And We Have Wellness To Thank
By Stacy Lee Kong
Image: Shutterstock
Here’s the thing: for a while there, James Van Der Beek, who played the titular Dawson Leery on Dawson’s Creek, seemed pretty cool. Not cool enough to shift my allegiances from Team Pacey to Team Dawson, a decision I made at the age of 14 and have stuck to for literal decades now (for good reason, btw), but definitely fine. He has a sense of humour about that infamous crying meme, even recreating it for Funny or Die in 2011; he turned out to be a pretty good, and prolific, comedic actor; he’s even Team Pacey! But this week, he did a weird thing: he posted a conspiracy theory-referencing TikTok criticizing the Democratic National Committee’s decision to unanimously back U.S. president Joe Biden’s bid for re-election in 2024, and consequently not hold a preliminary debate.
It doesn’t start off so badly (though perhaps a little bit ominous). “There’s no debate over an 80-year-old man who, if he lives, will be the oldest sitting president in the history of the country, and if he doesn’t live has a vice president whose approval rating is worse than his?” the actor said, while for some reason walking backwards down the driveway of his Austin, Texas home. But then the video veered into MAGA territory: “This guy has obviously declining mental faculties, you’re putting him up in front of a podium with flash cards telling him who to call on and what the questions are gonna be, and you’re telling us there’s no debate? What about the will of the people?”
Now, I don’t think this commentary ~matters~ in the grand scheme of things. Sure, Fox News loved his rant, but I don’t know that Dawson Leery’s voice is about to become super important in the U.S. political sphere, you know? But it is worth pointing out the misinformation and conspiracy theories he’s pushing—and thinking about how and why a former ‘coastal elite’ with liberal politics came to adopt MAGA talking points. (Spoiler: it has to do with wellness.)
James Van Der Beek is wrong about so many things
For starters: it is actually not at all weird that the Democrats aren’t holding a debate for the upcoming presidential election, because there is an incumbent candidate—Biden—and neither the Democratic National Convention nor the Republican National Convention hold debates when sitting presidents run for re-election. (So: when Obama ran for re-election in 2012? No debates. When Bill Clinton ran for re-election in 1996? No debates. And, same goes for the RNC; when Donald Trump ran re-election in 2020, there were no debates. Ditto George W. Bush’s re-election campaign in 2004 and George H.W. Bush’s re-election campaign in 1992.) I’m not a political analyst, but I can guess why that is—if you were a political strategist, would you want to hand your opposition video evidence of people from your own party attacking, criticizing or trying to make the eventual presidential candidate look dumb? Just think of the attack ads.
But Van Der Beek is also not-very subtly referencing a favoured Republican conspiracy theory about Biden: his “declining mental faculties.” The cue card thing is a reference to a ‘scandal’ from last summer, when Biden was photographed holding a bullet-point list of instructions for a meeting with state governors. The list was very specific (“YOU enter the Roosevelt Room and say hello to participants,” “YOU take YOUR seat,” and so on), which right-wing commentators said was evidence the president was incapacitated but is in fact totally normal. This is not my favourite of the batshit Biden conspiracy theories—that honour goes to either the one where he’s actually a robot, or the one where he’s actually Jim Carrey in a lifelike mask—but it is the most concerning one, because it’s also the most effective. In a 2020 poll, 54% of Americans said they believed Biden had the mental fitness to run the country, but things have shifted drastically since. According to a 2023 NBC poll, “70 percent of the Americans surveyed said Biden should not run for a second term in office [and] 48 percent of those against Biden running said his age was a major factor in that stance.”
This is not all down to conservative fear-mongering, obviously. There’s a nuanced conversation to be had about aging while in public office, and how to address voter concerns that may be rooted in ageism while also acknowledging that whatever is happening with senator Dianne Feinstein is not okay. But let’s not pretend that right-wing pundits care about whether Biden has declining cognitive function. I mean, they straight-up ignored similar concerns about Trump! Instead, they are looking for ways to undermine the left, and implying Biden can’t govern is a golden opportunity because it’s something Americans of all political stripes are already worried about. (And no, the fall this week is probably not going to help these numbers.)
How did a generic Hollywood liberal start spewing MAGA talking points?
It's also just very telling that this is what Van Der Beek is relying on to make his point. He could have critiqued Biden on any number of things (ideally, you know, policy), or made an argument for allowing the party to vote for their chosen candidate regardless of whether or not there’s an incumbent. Instead, he leaned on a conspiracy theory, and that offers some insight into the type of media he’s consuming and how his politics have shifted since Trump won the 2016 presidential election, when he tweeted he was “feeling a lot of pain tonight... trying to make sense of it. I feel the anger too... trying to see a way out of it. Maybe it's too soon...”
As for the why? Well… remember how I wrote about the wellness-to-white supremacy pipeline last year? That newsletter was inspired by wellness influencers who were posting breathlessly supportive IG stories about the so-called Freedom Convoy, but it was also about how the Western wellness industry both owes its existence to white supremacy and offers modern adherents a clear pathway from crystals and clean eating to anti-vax sentiment to straight-up extremism. That’s very much at play here, too, because Van Der Beek’s wife, Kimberly, is a wellness influencer who spent the pandemic sharing COVID conspiracy theories and anti-vax messages.
For the record, Western wellness has always been rooted in Orientalism; just look at yoga, which owes much of its North American success to Indra Devi (born Eugenie Peterson in the early 1900s), a Russian woman who fled her homeland during the Revolution, eventually travelling to India, where she started using the name Indra Devi while building a film career. She learned yoga from famed yoga guru Krishnamacharya, then made a career of teaching it herself. After moving to America, she set up a yoga studio in Hollywood that set itself apart from other early Western yoga practices by focusing primarily on movement and exercise rather than breathing or meditation. Before long, stars and public figures like Greta Garbo and Elizabeth Arden became obsessed with Devi’s style of yoga, which had been divorced from its spiritual roots—but was taught by a woman who often wore a sari around town. That dichotomy helped establish the Western understanding of yoga as a secular but exotic practice, a perception that continues to today.
Also relevant: Nazis loved yoga. According to writer and conspiracy theory expert Matthew Remski this was “not for its therapeutic value. Not because they wanted world peace, nor because they wanted to chill out. For them, yoga was an occult tool for purifying and exalting the individual body as a microcosm of the nation that would ultimately triumph over a conspiracy of child-abusing Jews and impure invaders. Nazis cherry-picked the hawkish themes of Indo-Tibetan yoga, fantasizing about becoming invulnerable in body and spirit.”
As Remski stresses, just like Devi’s idea of yoga as secular but exotic, these ideas about cleanliness, health and the ideal physical form may have become implicit, but haven’t actually gone anywhere. “Nazis elaborated and left behind tense obsessions about healthy bodies and homelands that have loomed in the background of New Age and wellness cultures for going on a century now,” he writes. This is how modern, Western wellness upholds white supremacist ideas about appearance, body and even what a ‘good life’ looks like—and why it is so unwelcoming to people of colour, queer people, disabled people, etc.
Kimberly Van Der Beek’s COVID conspiracy theories deserve some blame
But back to the Van Der Beeks.
Yoga, and eventually a wider wellness industry that encompasses fitness, mindfulness, vitamins, nutrition, appearance and sleep, took off because it offered solutions to mostly privileged white women who did not feel well, but were largely ignored or condescended to by the Western healthcare industry—which helped it became a hotbed of misinformation and conspiracy theories. After all, if you can make a lot of money by telling desperate people (or perfectly healthy people who want to ‘biohack’ their lives), that they shouldn’t listen to their doctors and instead buy your serum/meal kit/crystals/workout plan/whatever, it doesn’t take a lot of creative thinking to understand you could apply that logic to all sorts of things, from pushing Ivermectin as a treatment for COVID to casting doubt on the safety and effectiveness of public health measures like, you know, vaccines. And that seems to be exactly the pathway Kimberly Van Der Beek took.
As Rolling Stone reported last year, Kimberly, who has more than 231,000 followers, “has taken a staunch anti-vaccine position, with posts as far back as 2016 falsely linking vaccines to autism. [She] also conducted interviews over Instagram Live with doctors who have wrongly touted the use of ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment; argued in early 2020 that the advocacy of a COVID-19 vaccine diminished the idea of preventative treatments; and falsely linked rapper DMX’s death to the vaccine (despite an autopsy revealing he suffered a cocaine-induced heart attack).” And it’s not just her; according to the magazine, “social media photos also showed the couple engaged with multiple anti-vax influencers,” including conservative comedian and influencer JP Sears, who in addition to disseminating conspiracy theories has also wholeheartedly embraced transphobia. (Sears has been on his own journey toward extremism; in 2014, he was making videos expressing his support for gay marriage; now he hangs out with Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan and says his YouTube channel is about “calling out: absurd woke BS, the unbelievable lies and corruption of tyrants, and highlighting the work that other awesome freedom fighters are doing.”)
Yesterday, I asked Friday Things’ IG followers why they thought so many white male celebrities seem to be becoming ever more conservative (ahem, Chris Pratt), and there were some good answers: “because they were told at a pivotal moment that they mattered and were special and haven’t let that go.” “They seek attention they once had and will take it from anyone.” Also: “Money.” These are probably all part of the explanation, especially the last one—pivoting to conservatism has definitely become an effective business model over the past few years. But the more that I think about it, the more I think it would be a mistake to downplay the role the wellness industry plays in this type of political evolution for people of all genders. In 2021, I wrote about Aaron Rodgers’ decision not to get vaccinated, and how his then-fiancee Shailene Woodley’s wellness practices probably did influence that decision. Just a few months later, he cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 election in an interview with ESPN. And last year, Evangeline Lilly attended the same anti-vaccine march where Robert F. Kennedy compared vaccine requirements to life in Nazi Germany. I don’t know how these people vote, or if they even consider themselves conservative—but it’s obvious there’s a link between wellness, anti-vaccine sentiment and political conservatism, and we should be should clear-eyed about that connection, even if these celebrities aren’t.
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And Did You Hear About…
The vocabulary test that’s inspiring people to post their scores like it’s the early days of Wordle.
This excerpt from longtime film and TV critic Maureen Ryan’s new book, Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood, which explores the racist, sexist dynamic of the Lost writer’s room.
Rolling Stone’s longread on the disturbing latest iteration of the true crime genre: AI-generated clips of murder victims—often children—describing their own deaths.
This short, smart Twitter thread about how Barbie can offer insight into social trends from the 1950s onward. (It’s a good counterpoint to the second-wave feminist critique of Barbie as regressive, which I’ve seen popping up on social media recently.)
Writer Melissa Giannini’s thoughtful profile of The White Stripes’ Meg White, which is framed around White’s unwillingness to be interviewed, in general and for this piece specifically.
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