#paltrow

What is a great man without his greatness? Just an old man.🧠

Goop’s newsletter heralds itself as “Inbox sage for the digital age,” despite the fact that saging is an important practice in Native American and other Indigenous culture—one that’s been so overwhelmingly appropriated that sage itself is now running out. As writer and activist Taté Walker told Fashionista in November 2019, “Commodifying sage has led to overharvesting and shortages of the plant.” The most expensive product sold in the beauty section of Goop is the ZIIP Ox + Crystal Gel Kit, a $480 product; the copy reads, “This nanocurrent device plus clean conductive gel is aimed at stimulating collagen for instant sculpting and glow boosting.” It also reads as a scam—and it’s one of the most profitable around, reportedly valued at around $250 million. As a business, Goop knows what it’s doing: Tell people you won’t just make them better, you’ll heal them, make them feel love, make them feel fixed, and you can’t fail—especially not with celebrity backing (something we’ve also seen with poosh, Kourtney Kardashian’s Goop knockoff).

As of today, there are now more than 82,400 cases of COVID-19 in the United States, with more than 1,170 deaths. The U.S. now has more confirmed cases than any other country in the world. But according to self-styled expert and “holistic psychiatrist” Kelly Brogan, there is no pandemic and the novel coronavirus doesn’t exist.

The basis for Brogan’s assertion is her belief that there is no such thing as “germ-based contagion,” calling the concept of contagion “not a conceptual framework that I operate within.” In other words, as far as Brogan is concerned no one can ever catch any kind of disease, virus, bacteria, or other infection of any kind from another person who has it. (Unsurprisingly, Brogan is also a staunch opponents of vaccinations.)

Brogan claims that the thousands of deaths worldwide attributed to COVID-19 are really “likely being accelerated by the fear itself. And I’m sure you understand that, the role of fear in all this.” It’s not the nonexistent virus that’s killing people--it’s their fear of the nonexistent virus. If only people would stop being afraid of this thing that doesn’t really exist, no one would die!

Brogan does not provide a basis for rejecting over a century of medical and scientific research to the contrary. She rejects the “mainstream” explanation simply because it is mainstream, and instead promotes an alternate conspiracy theory: The United States government is planning to leverage the fear of COVID-19 to “link our passports with our vaccination records” as a method of gaining “totalitarian governmental control not unlike the divide-and-conquer dehumanization agendas that preceded the Holocaust.”