Mourning a friend's descent into extremism

February 25, 2022 12:52 PM

Anti-vaxer Stephanie Sibbio's childhood friends talk about their friendship, their friend's black-or-white thinking, "mama bear" identity, how social media replaced actual friendships, and her slide into extremism on an emotionally complex episode of the Conspirituality podcast.

Must-read essay "That Time When I Was in a Cult and Got a Loving Letter from a Friend" by Matthew Remski (co-host of Conspirituality and interviewer on this episode) reflects on how a friend opened a door to the possibility of life outside of the cult: "he takes me seriously, and tries to imagine and validate my inner life, even as he feels alienated from it." (archive.org version)
posted by spamandkimchi (25 comments total)

Is there a transcript for the podcast?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:12 PM on February 25, 2022 [15 favorites]

Conspirituality is a great podcast.

It's also how I learned that someone from my friend circle in my early 20s became the borderline-abusive leader of a yoga cult in LA. I didn't know her super well – she was more my roommate's friend – but we'd been familiar for years. That was a wild thing to hear out of the blue on a podcast.

(She, too, was into COVID conspiracy theories. It sells, I guess. Sadly, she died a while ago – unrelated to the cult or to COVID.)

Anyway. I skipped the Stephanie Sibbio episode, but this summary makes it sound more interesting than I'd realized. Maybe I'll give it a listen this evening. Thanks!
posted by escape from the potato planet at 1:27 PM on February 25, 2022 [6 favorites]

I wasn't really aware of the links between Qanon and progressive wellness. I would like to read more about this.
posted by craniac at 1:46 PM on February 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

There's a huge overlap between woo-ish alternative-medicine and right-wing conspiracy theories. (Conspirituality is, like, a whole podcast about it.) They may seem like unlikely bedfellows on the surface, but both often appeal to the same kind of magical thinking, as well as the desire to feel different / special / clued in to some secret.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 2:01 PM on February 25, 2022 [48 favorites]

This is close to home. My mother has been into secular-spiritual wellness for as long as I can remember, even stopping my vaccination schedule sometime around my adolescence (I have since caught up.) My brother, a NEET shut-in going on 15 years now, lives with her and somewhere along the way became a right wing conspiracist. Their world views have been aligning during the pandemic in a way that really surprised me.
posted by tuffet at 2:50 PM on February 25, 2022 [10 favorites]

>I wasn't really aware of the links between Qanon and progressive wellness. I would like to read more about this.

I learned a lot from this thread a few weeks ago: wellness to white supremacy pipeline. The thread discusses a lot of what escape from the potato planet mentions.

(I mentioned whiteness to white supremacy when I was in a video chat last week. A few of the people on the call laughed. I was very disappointed at the response, but they stopped laughing as I talked about it.)
posted by philfromhavelock at 3:39 PM on February 25, 2022 [14 favorites]

Empress, alas, no transcript that I know of. I prefer podcasts with transcripts since I often just want to skim, but now that I'm back to doing jigsaw puzzles I started actually listening to them (on 1.5x speed). This one works especially well as podcast because you can hear the emotions as Sibbio's (former) friends process what has happened. There's a really intense part when one of them describes when Sibbio uses their friendship as Instagram fodder.
posted by spamandkimchi at 3:47 PM on February 25, 2022 [4 favorites]

The essay with the letter linked in the post is very, very good. I really admire someone who could write such a loving but honest letter to someone they felt was getting sucked into a cult.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 4:11 PM on February 25, 2022 [7 favorites]

Off topic from this post, but the author of the letter linked in the post, R.M. Vaughan, would also make a good post topic himself. He tragically went missing in mid-October, 2020, and was found dead 10 days later. He had a huge influence on many people in the Canadian arts and LGBTQ communities. A friend of mine knew him and described his influence similarly to these remembrances. By all accounts, he seems to have indeed been a very good writer (among other artistic pursuits), and equally loving and honest with all in his communities.
posted by eviemath at 6:17 PM on February 25, 2022 [10 favorites]

That letter is amazing. Thank you for that.
posted by Grandysaur at 7:33 PM on February 25, 2022

What a beautiful letter. It strikes me how the writer was, apparently intentionally, making himself vulnerable to the reader. Exposing his own uncertainty and doubt , while at the same time displaying how those very qualities are strengths and necessary for survival.
Thanks you for sharing this.
posted by Zumbador at 8:30 PM on February 25, 2022 [4 favorites]

There's no transcript, and I don't have time to listen, but does the profit motive come up here?

Take a controversial position, start yelling ... profit. Especially in an industry (wellness) that often verges into hectoring the client to "do better."

I'm not saying that some of the culty tendencies didn't actually sink in with Sibbio: they probably did. But I'm sure her accounts receivable last year were quite healthy.

A lot of people I knew when I was in my twenties went for the money in ways I didn't / couldn't, and we're no longer friends, but they did indeed vault themselves into the upper middle class. It's amazing what kind of belief system(s) often go hand in hand with the pursuit of $$$.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 10:46 PM on February 25, 2022 [11 favorites]

I had to stop listening at the clip where she's talking about how she's having break-through bleeding because of other people's vaccinations. This woman needs to be institutionalized. I am legitimately horrified that she has custody of this kid. She's dangerous to others, to a point that it's shocking to me that she gets to walk around free.

On the other hand I was also disgusted by the contempt shown by her "friends". At least that far in the podcast I saw zero compassion. This woman is severely mentally ill. The host is good. He keeps trying to steer away from the contempt into a possible real conversation, but I'm not sure I can hang in there for the 2nd half to see if it gets there.

Listening to them reveals all my ugly prejudices to myself against white women of a certain class, who I can't help but see as basic. Change a couple of tiny details and they would have become her, and yet none of them seem to have an awareness of that.
posted by liminal_shadows at 6:22 AM on February 26, 2022 [3 favorites]

Listening to them reveals all my ugly prejudices to myself against white women of a certain class, who I can't help but see as basic. Change a couple of tiny details and they would have become her, and yet none of them seem to have an awareness of that.

They’re likely subconsciously aware, which explains the lack of empathy. They need to create distance and an explanation, or the just world fallacy that most upper-middle class folks hold would collapse.

Calling women “basic” is just garden variety sexism and othering. It’s another way of saying “I’m not like those other girls,” and it needs to end. Dressing cute and drinking PSLs doesn’t negate a rich and complex interior life.
posted by leotrotsky at 7:03 AM on February 26, 2022 [41 favorites]

I was also getting the impression of lack of compassion at a certain point in the interview, but as the women went on to describe some interactions with their former friend, it became more clear that they also felt quite hurt by lots of specific things that Sibbio had said and done to them, personally. They’ve had a friend break-up, in a pretty major and hurtful way. (And it does sound likely that Sibbio feels that too, even though from this it sounds like she had more of a role in initiating the friend break-up.) Toward the end of the podcast, the host asks the group basically about what they would want to do to try to reconcile, and one of the women noted that they were beyond that point: that they felt the relationship was irreconcilably broken, and that imagining a reconciliation was painful and hurtful to them. Eg. think about more traditional romantic break-ups: there is a stage where you have to put your empathy for an ex who has acted hurtfully toward you aside or over-correct temporarily in order to take care of yourself. It sounded like that is the stage where the group of women are at with respect to their former friend.
posted by eviemath at 8:14 AM on February 26, 2022 [15 favorites]

I had to stop listening at the clip where she's talking about how she's having break-through bleeding because of other people's vaccinations. This woman needs to be institutionalized. I am legitimately horrified that she has custody of this kid. She's dangerous to others, to a point that it's shocking to me that she gets to walk around free.

I haven't listened to this, but unless there's something you're not saying here, we usually don't institutionalize people for saying stupid things, even if they're very, very stupid. As a person who has struggled with severe mental illness, I hope you'll reconsider what you say about institutionalization. Maybe you didn't mean this to sound flippant, but to me, it does. As anyone who has dealt with a severely mentally person who was a danger to others can tell you, it's not easy to take away another person's freedom - and it shouldn't be.
posted by FencingGal at 9:05 AM on February 26, 2022 [34 favorites]

Calling women “basic” is just garden variety sexism and othering. It’s another way of saying “I’m not like those other girls,” and it needs to end.

Flagged as fantastic.

White woman here. The childhood friend who grew up literally next door is now an anti-vax Q devotee. (I’ll leave our class background as an exercise to the reader, as well as our current tax brackets. Do we audit men’s “deserving” of their social status in this way?)

I have countless cherished memories of this person. The bitter heartache of knowing she has grown up to be a Nazi is difficult to describe. Could it really have been me, just as easily?

One might assume I haven’t contemplated this.
One would be wrong.

See, cutting off contact with her isn’t something I did because I’m a catty hypocrite. It’s something I did because I’m not interested in empathizing with bigots.

On a related note, “ugly prejudices” we discover within ourselves are something we’re supposed to work on.
posted by armeowda at 9:22 AM on February 26, 2022 [43 favorites]

I only hope that I never become publicly delusional and horrible in such a way that all my childhood friends decide to talk to the world about my dissolution. But then, Stephanie has chosen to platform herself as a public figure. Gives me the willies, though.
posted by RedEmma at 12:37 PM on February 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

Just as "The Algorithm" is happy to be fed hate-clicks from headlines, it’s happy to be fed hate-clicks from influencers, yes? I can believe both that Stephanie chose to be a public figure, and then chose to be a damaging one, and in this world deserves the responsibility for it; and that in a better setup she wouldn’t have been rewarded for each step towards awful. The pandemic + the internet are doing strange things to a social species.

Counter argument, the Birchers were pretty bad.
posted by clew at 4:42 PM on February 26, 2022

I listened to this podcast and I feel like these friends with their 20+year history together did not take this breakup lightly. And I think that this story is one that isn’t getting told enough - the dissolution and fragmentation of real human connections due to massive propaganda and misinformation campaigns. Not only will we have many years of the death toll of these past three years to contend with, we have long Covid, and we have this THING which has taken control of many of our lives. This stuff went from “my kooky Uncle” to, in some cases, deadly. Only a few years ago it was said in a hugely public way that “facts have a liberal bias.” We can’t be a society like this.
posted by amanda at 6:30 PM on February 26, 2022 [8 favorites]

I am close enough to anti-vaxxers that "breakthrough bleeding because you contaminated me with vaccine shedding" is...pretty much standard. Within the cultic milieu it is absolutely normal and normative to ascribe virus actions (shedding, systemic damage, infectious periods) to the vaccine. Designating it mental illness does nothing at all to address the deliberate and calculating misinformation project going on.

It also does nothing to help that person, or their peers, to deal with it. I'm 'lucky' in that my anti-vaxxer family does not proselytise at me but my peers are not. How many times do you sit through being told you're stupid, a bad mother, a bad person, or have your choices taken away, or your family threatened, or belongings and food taken our adulterated before you are allowed to stop empathizing? And any comment or pushback is met with accusations you're doing the same thing to them for their beliefs? Because they hold them as strongly as you do yours, bad believe their proofs are better.

I had the... misfortune to be surrounded by crunchy types after having my kid. I can remember being told that it's sad I didn't just 'nurse more and be in the sun' when my week old ended up in hospital with severe jaundice. The tongue tie, severity, the constant rain for that week was immaterial, just like all the complications during pregnancy and birth were, because if I truly cared I would have done it differently. It was grating and I lost my temper more than once. And there's a lot more scientific support for those choices than "vaccine shedding". I slowly lost the ability to be open and vulnerable with those people and the friendships faded. Because when you are faced with a friend who prioritises the impossibilities of their beliefs over your lived experiences as well as science and medicine, their treatment of you becomes untenable.

My mother has barely spoken to me for two months now, after I finally made a public post on Facebook unequivocally supporting vaccines, masking, quarantine, and calling out local government figures for their grifts. She makes sure never to actually discuss vaccines or whatever with me. But she and her sisters went to extraordinary lengths to cover up those beliefs and in the process tried to convince all of us that we couldn't visit our grandmother in hospital.

I cannot explain how devastating that was, to realise my grandmother's children would lie to their children, just so they don't have to explain that they are anti-vaxxers. Not just that they put her in danger themselves, not to mention the great-grandkids, but that they would lie and tell us nobody can visit or that we can't go to the hospital, when the reality is that they can't because of their choices. That...broke something in me. How can I talk openly with my mother after that? How can I trust her? Compassion is there, intellectually, but emotionally? I'm scared and I'm sad and I'm angry and I just want my mum to be safe.
posted by geek anachronism at 9:53 PM on February 26, 2022 [37 favorites]

I've noticed this impulse in some internet comments to immediately scold the people who were harmed by someone else's actions for not being empathetic enough because the harmful person was supposedly mentally ill. But it's easy to pontificate from a distance when you're not the person who was harmed.

I listened to the whole thing and the friends spend the entire first half talking about what they loved about Stephanie and all the good memories they had together. When they discuss her descent into antivaxxer madness, their explanation is that she felt anxious and confused when COVID hit, but was also too scared to be vulnerable with her friends to share her feelings, so she clung to conspiracy theories to justify her fears. They laugh a few times when discussing her beliefs, but how do you not laugh when repeating something completely absurd? There's clearly a lot of love lost between them.
posted by airmail at 12:28 PM on February 27, 2022 [12 favorites]

At least that far in the podcast I saw zero compassion.

Wow, were we listening to the same podcast? I heard a group of friends who were sincerely mourning the loss of somebody they all cared about, and honestly trying to figure out where it all went wrong. There was some anger, sure, and some incredulous laughter at some of her more fantastical beliefs, but overall, it sounded to me like a group of friends who were doing their best to work through their complex feelings over somebody they cared about whose behaviour had become, quite frankly, dangerous and bizarre.

The thing that hit me hardest, and that I struggle with myself, is the fact that they all valued Stephanie as an independent thinker who would stand up for what she thought was right, would act to protect those she loved, and who did not hesitate to speak truth to power. Those are all good things, and that's also how I would like to see myself. In North American culture in particular, we laud those kinds of people; think of every second blockbuster action movie we've seen in the last fifty years. But what do we do when somebody's convictions collide with reality, and with societal interests and the safety of others? How do we help them climb down? How would I react if I were the one being told to climb down?

I don't have any answers, and like so many people, I'm exhausted just thinking about it all.
posted by rpfields at 10:27 AM on February 28, 2022 [4 favorites]

I stopped listening at the point where the group began to speculate that their ex-friend was not really friends with her new set, and that her relationship with the new influencer buddy was likely not a friendship, that it was probably all about how to capitalize on their newfound platform together. Phew. Like she's barely even human anymore.

Prior to this the host had already tried several times to get these women to speak of their ex friend in more human terms. But each time, even when some individual friends seemed to get close to humanizing the ex (e.g. admitting there was something admirable about her taking a sincere stand against the world, even though it's bonkers), the group dynamics of this friend group repeatedly intervened to put an end to the attempt. The group is not willing to see the ex friend as a complicated human being. The group is determined to "split" the ex friend as all-bad. The group insists on dehumanizing her as someone who never had any purely redeeming qualities even from when she was 12 years old: the group won't even allow itself to admire the ex-friend's jovial high spirits without interjecting a poisonous caveat about "she was never the person you'd go to for help, she was just about having a good time." The host's attempt to nudge the group towards a more humanizing perspective failed over and over.

I completely understand where these women are coming from, and their feelings are both valid and recognizable to me personally. They feel angry and betrayed and heartbroken by the loss of someone they loved. Of course they would talk about their ex-friend this way. There's nothing more natural in the world. Any one of us can recognize ourselves in their words if we have ever been through a breakup. There is always a phase that follows when we can't say a single good thing about our exes without injecting poisonous caveats into it.

And you know what? Nobody should be interviewing us to get us to talk about our exes when we're in that phase. We're guaranteed to fill the interview with petty, mean-spirited attacks towards the ex which will end up a permanent embarrassment to us (if we're decent enough to feel embarrassed by pettiness).

Allow those petty grudges a little time to grow into a lusher, larger, more encompassing anger; allow our bitterness to deepen into sorrow. Then we might be interview-ready.
posted by MiraK at 9:20 PM on February 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

Wow, so interesting that people experienced this podcast so differently! I listened to this when it came out and thought the friends came across as people still deeply hurting from the loss of a good friend and responding in completely understandable ways to someone who's actively hurt them in pursuit of their own self-centered and fear-induced righteous crusade.
posted by flamk at 7:37 AM on March 4, 2022 [3 favorites]