Strange bedfellows: Here's the insidious link between Alex Jones' InfoWars and Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop
November 11, 2018
The same expensive, dubiously beneficial “wellness supplements” are available for sale at Oscar-winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow’s tony Goop lifestyle blog and at Texas-based conspiracy-monger Alex Jones’ InfoWars.com, said Quartz on Thursday.
<p>While the conventional wisdom says red and blue America will never see eye-to-eye and that the cultural gulf that between “coastal elites” and “white working class America” is all but uncrossable, it seems Lululemon-wearing Manhattanites and angry rural Trump supporters can agree that adding “eleuthero root, cordyceps mushrooms, and ‘nascent iodine'” to your diet can somehow boost your life essence.</p><p>“Near the end of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/25/magazine/how-amanda-chantal-bacon-perfected-the-celebrity-wellness-business.html">a profile</a> of Amanda Chantal Bacon, founder of the ‘wellness’ brand Moon Juice, the <em>New York Times Magazine</em> noted that many of the alternative-medicine ingredients in her products are sold — with very different branding — on the Infowars store,” wrote Quartz’ Nikhil Sonnad.</p><p>Sonnad continued, “Moon Juice is<a href="https://shop.goop.com/shop/collection/brands/moon-juice"> frequently recommended</a> by Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness blog, Goop; it’s a favorite of Hollywood celebrities and others who can afford things like $25 ‘<a href="https://www.moonjuiceshop.com/products/cashews">activated cashews</a>.’ Infowars, on the other hand, is a dark corner of the American right, heavy on guns, light on government intervention, and still very mad at Obama.”</p><p>Quartz assembled a compendium of ingredients sold at both Moon Juice and InfoWars, the names they fly under at each site — “Super Male Vitality” at InfoWars is sold as “Sex Dust” Moon Juice — and their respective costs.</p><p><a href="https://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_bills/2015/10/trump_carson_bush_all_benefited_from_multilevel_marketing_schemes.html">Multilevel marketing schemes</a> are a staple in the right-wing methods of generating revenue. Glenn Beck, Jones, Rush Limbaugh, President Donald Trump and Ben Carson have all lent their names to dubious “supplements” and shilled for pyramid schemes.</p><p>All of this is an outgrowth of the tangled network of mailing lists, mail order scams, PACs and other money-making endeavors that prey off of gullible conservative voters, many of whom are elderly and on fixed incomes.</p><p><a href="https://www.rawstory.com/2015/02/new-report-says-conservative-chumps-sent-50-million-to-right-wing-scam-groups-like-sarahpac/">A 2015 report said</a> that Republican voters donated more than $50 million in 2014 to scam political outfits like SarahPAC, only to have that money “siphoned off to vendors, wasted, and just plain old pocketed by people in these PACs.”</p><p></p><p></p>
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