A little more depth. Feel free to read up on the wellness to fascism pipeline in your own time, but here’s an outline of how I understand it:

The concept of wellness begins when the general public is encouraged to care about health. Wellness influencers are soon to follow (consider: Richard Simmons, Jane Fonda. The aerobic gymnastics world championships).

The wellness influencer population balloons during the current age of social media. A lot of them begin parroting conspiracy theories, for good reason! There are real conspiracies with negative health impacts. Consider: Big Ag pushing HFCS. Unfortunately, not all of these influencers are gonna be well read on the science, and someone looking to become fit and healthy is probably more likely to just uncritically listen to models on instagram. So now there is a huge community of people that will uncritically believe conspiracy theories as long as they come from a wellness influencer.

Now, whether by design or accident, far-right conspiracies are sprinkled into this mix. While there is probably already an undercurrent of this*, the situation takes a nosedive during the early stages of the COVID pandemic. There’s a huge explosion of fascist conspiracies, notably the idea that the pandemic was caused by foreigners, causing anti-asian hate crimes to spike. So, where are health-related conspiracies going to propagate most virulently? The wellness community!

So, how do seed oils factor into this? Let’s say you’re someone thinking about becoming healthier. You don’t really know much about health science, and aren’t really trying to fix that situation. One day, you’re on tiktok, getting bombarded by thirst traps, when one day, the algorithm throws a fit thirst trap your way to tell you about one simple trick that will help your heart health: switching from seed oils to beef tallow and butter. Now, you’re not totally stupid, and you know that for some reason, beef tallow and butter are supposed to be kinda bad for you, so you’re a little skeptical. That’s when the influencer tells you that canola oil, one of the most popular and cheapest seed oils, doesn’t come from a real plant- Canola is a portmanteau of “Can” from Canada, where canola oil was developed, and “ola” from “oleum”, latin for oil. That’s right, you heard them: Canola oil was invented in a lab by Big (canadian) Science! A couple more tiktoks and spoonfuls of the naturalistic fallacy later and QAnon themselves is knocking at your door, looking for a place to stay.

*Of course, there is a fascism to wellness pipeline in play as well, though this is a little more straightforward. You can’t look like the master race if you’re unfit. You can’t be pure if you eat processed foods. But also buy these Alex Jones approved nutrient supplements, etc.