What the hell happened to yoga?

It got red-pilled. Or maybe always was.

Guru Jagat, Kundalini teacher to stars like Kate Hudson and Alicia Keys, QAnon adherent, and Trump enthusiast. She died of cardiac arrest in 2021.

We've all got a yoga friend, or a yoga friend of a yoga friend, who went from a sensible suspicion of Splenda and gluten, to a less-sensible suspicion of GMOs and vaccines, to a grander suspicion of Big Food and Big Pharma and perhaps a totalizing suspicion of all of modernity. Next came a deranged suspicion of the Deep State and Anthony Fauci, and finally a barking-mad suspicion of the 2020 election and more recently the diet of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. 

Along the way, of course, these pals have gone for RFK Jr.. And often, and like RFK Jr., they’ve thrown in with Donald Trump. This is the red-pilling of yoga world.

If you took even one look at the January 6th footage, I know you couldn't take your eyes off the nation’s proxy for this hippie-turned-MAGA figure. His name is Jacob Anthony Angeli Chansley. He was the impressively built Q Shaman, aka Yellowstone Wolf.  A ceramicist and one-time Navy hopeful, the Q Shaman refused in 2005 to take the anthrax vaccine. At the insurrection, he wore antlers and pelts. One of these pelts was from a freshly killed raccoon.

While jailed, awaiting trial for crimes related to trying to violently overthrow the government, the Q Shaman requested—what do you think? No, not a long call to a nutjob right-wing lawyer. Organic food. He said he'd starved himself rather than eat that shit with hormones and pesticides. Sound a bit like that friend you’re thinking of?

(In November 2023, the Q Shaman filed a candidate statement of interest to run as a Libertarian in the 2024 election for Arizona’s 8th congressional district. Alas, he’s not on the ballot; he failed to submit any petition  signatures.)

For anyone still confused and miserable about what happened to their friends who went from yoga to MAGA—including gynecologist Christiane Northrop, journalist Naomi Wolf, goop writer Kelly Brogan, actor Russell Brand, academic Jordan Peterson, and dozens more formally normal-seeming influencers—this interview from a few years ago is for you.  

Matthew Remski of the always-brilliant “Conspirituality” podcast broke down the red-pilling of yoga world for me. In 2024, even with QAnon on the wane, MAGA yogis are still very much around.

Virginia: Can you give us a sort of 60-second history of yoga?

Matthew Remski: The minute begins with the dividing line of modernity and whatever we would call pre-modern, which I think we can put at about 1893, when yoga goes global with a couple of speeches given by a guy named Swami Vivekananda in Chicago at the World Parliament of Religions. 

Before that, yoga is an incredibly diverse, very rich, often internally competitive set of philosophies and, you know, orientations towards health care and religious rituals, tea that is just sort of scattered and, you know, richly bubbles throughout all of what is now known as India and then other parts of South Asia. 

After it globalizes it becomes very firmly associated with aspects of the modernization of health and physical culture and what we now know as modern yoga is really the sort of echo of a kind of European influence upon Indian modernization within physical culture, whereby yoga becomes this way for burgeoning Hindu nationalists to begin to use physical exercise and notions about bodily strength and purification to really embolden and repair the body politic of, you know, colonization. 

So I don't know if that’s 60 seconds. But I think really the focal point for our purposes has got to be that yoga undergoes a modernization period in which it's reconstructed from a bunch of very old texts and ideas and indigenous practices. And it becomes a force of modernization rooted in physical culture, which is all about: How do cultures and nation states really view themselves through their bodies?