Leah Sottile didn’t set out to write a book about political extremism. The longtime Pacific Northwest reporter has logged years exploring the Northwest’s long history of right-wing militant movements. But when she started working on her new book, Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets, and the Fever Dream of the American New Age, she was surprised to see major overlap between these spiritual belief systems and hate groups — especially in the West.
A version of this article was first published in the Cascade PBS Politics newsletter. For more, subscribe to the biweekly newsletter.
From Elizabeth Clare Prophet in Montana; to Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment, the Yelm-based spiritual center started by JZ Knight, a Washington woman who claimed she could channel a time-traveling being named Ramtha; to notorious fascist William Pelley, Northwest communities and charismatic leaders figure heavily into the history Sottile maps out.
“I think it goes back to the way the West was colonized, and this perception that continues, in some ways, that this is wide open space where you can come and live out your utopian ideas,” said Sottile of why the Northwest seems to attract a disproportionate share of New Age groups. The problem, she said, isn’t so much individual beliefs: “There's no harm in my mind if you have crystals in your pocket or are engaging in a wellness retreat that is helpful to you.” But when leaders claim to “have all the answers” or focus beliefs on hatred, “there is a real distinction.”
This is what happened with Pelley. As Cascade PBS has reported before, he led a fascist group called the Silver Shirts and propagated antisemitic conspiracy theories. His campaign was headquartered in Seattle, and when he ran for president in 1935, Washington was the only state where his name appeared on the ballot.
What’s not as widely known about Pelley was that he subscribed to a number of New Age spiritual beliefs. He claimed to have experienced the afterlife in a dream, an account of which was published in The American Magazine under the title “Seven Minutes in Eternity.” As Sottile writes, Pelley also claimed he could read the minds of beings from other dimensions using a “mental radio” in his brain that he said could receive messages from the fictional lost island of Atlantis.
When Sottile began researching Pelley, his spiritual bent and interest in the metaphysical was unexpected. “Pelley definitely did surprise me, because I think that people really talk about the Silver Shirts in this historical way, without really knowing what drove that group,” she said. “I was really surprised to learn it was more of a spiritual project than it was a political one. I mean, in a lot of ways that was what appealed people to it. They thought Pelley was some kind of seer and spiritually gifted in some way.”
If the convergence of New Age spirituality and wellness culture with right-wing extremism stretches far into our region’s past, it’s also animating the current political landscape. The group Blazing Eye focuses on most heavily is Love Has Won, started by Amy Carlson during the COVID-19 pandemic and operated largely online. Today, some of the ideas Carlson pushed are being repeated in the country’s highest halls of power.
“I think none of us anticipated that conspiracy theories would be coming out of the White House,” said Sottile. But when her book came out, after Trump’s second inauguration and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s public discussion of conspiracy theories about everything from HIV to school shootings, the timing seemed useful, she said, for connecting the dots between political extremism and New Age spirituality.
“With covering extremism, sometimes it feels like you're just treading in the same water,” said Sottile. “And I'm always just thinking: How can I advance the conversation?”
That discourse could be newly energized in the months to come, with Kennedy now installed as health secretary and previously fringe beliefs being increasingly embraced by government officials. As Sottile put it: “If it can be helpful as we go into this next stage of covering extremism, then that's fantastic.”
