Some in Sedona’s crystal-loving, New Age scene are moving toward the right and Donald Trump

You might assume that Sedona’s New Age, spiritual hippies with their crystals and vortexes are on the left end of the political spectrum.

But they may just be another example of being so far to the left that in politics today, they’re on the right.

It’s the political horseshoe that modern-day populist politics has created — with the extremes on both sides often converging.

Laura Gersony reported the story for the Arizona Republic.

Full conversation

LAURA GERSONY: I was covering a Democratic rally up in Sedona, and I got to chatting with a woman who was a yoga instructor. And I just mentioned in passing, “Oh, I hear the New Age scene is big up here. I've been meaning to just check that out, see what's going on.” And she rolled her eyes. She sort of scoffed at me, and said, “Oh, I can't stand those people.”

And I thought, “Oh, why is that?” And she said, ‘Well, they're viciously anti trans. Many of them are fans of Donald Trump … they oppose my own right to choose, my own right to an abortion,” And she said, “yeah, a lot of them are going right wing.” And I must say, I was really surprised by that. I found that totally counterintuitive. I thought, are we talking about the same people right now?

GILGER: Right. Like, there's this impression at least of the kind of New-Agey, crystal-loving, you know, pro-environment, kind of spirituality that you find in Sedona, that it would be very left wing. It's often been associated with, like Marianne Williamson, right, who was, you know, run on the far left for president several times. 

GERSONY: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I think of Marianne Williamson as someone who set herself apart from Joe Biden by running to his left. … For example, on the issue of Israel and Gaza, you know, talking about a military industrial complex. I mean, she was, for a long time, I think, the most prominent face of this very left-wing political culture. But that's definitely starting to change.

GILGER: OK, so this was before politics changed too, right? Like, it's not necessarily that the people who are part of this New Age community in Sedona may have changed their views, although that may have happened as well. But the political scene has definitely shifted behind it, it sounds like.

GERSONY: Absolutely, yeah. I spoke with Susannah Crockford. She's an anthropologist who has studied Sedona spirituality, and she said overall, there's been a shift towards what you might call “right-wing engaged.” That in the past, she would bring up politics and people would kind of give her weird looks, you know, say she was lowering their vibration. Really, they preferred not to talk about politics at all. But more recently, especially since the pandemic and since the rise of Donald Trump, people are more leaning into a sort of mistrustful, anti-vax attitude that often pushes them towards the American right.

Amber Victoria Singer/KJZZ

GILGER: We should say this is also a pretty wealthy community, right? Like Sedona, we hear so much about the housing prices there. It costs a lot to live there, to be a part of this New Age community there.

GERSONY: That's such a good point, and that's one of the points that Susannah Crockford made, that I found so interesting. Is that people move to Sedona to distance themselves from American political and economic norms. They move there because they hate, you know, capitalism and participating in markets. And they want to free themselves and be on a higher plane. And yet they wind up there monetizing their own spiritual practice. She said, just to pay the bills, because, as you said, it's expensive to live there.

One woman I spoke with was Anita Dalton. She's the head of Sedona Center for the New Age, and she saw Trump in the spiritual salesman she's fallen in with over the years who sort of blend entrepreneurialism with spiritual development. And some of the spiritual salesmen she loves have had frequent run-ins with consumer protection laws, with fraud, larceny — but she loves them anyway, and trusts the products that they're selling.

GILGER: Spiritual salesmen. They're selling her things like the crystals, the books, the candles, et cetera?

GERSONY: Yeah, that's right, and she described them to me as multi-level marketing schemes.

GILGER: So, all right, that's one of the people you met there, tell us about some of the others. Because it sounds like some of them were even surprised to find themselves aligning with someone like Donald Trump. 

GERSONY: Yeah, totally. I spoke with one woman who goes by the name Aila Arya Anam. She was formerly known as Paula Green. She, as a young adult, worked in a chemistry lab. She fell ill, chronically ill, and she says, was because of chemical poisoning from the lab she was working in. That's kind of what pushed her into this more holistic-medicine space. She was involved in the feminist goddess movement of the 1980s, was in a lesbian relationship for more than a decade before eventually moving into the New Age scene. And she said that she was surprised to find herself, especially after the pandemic, aligning with what she described as “Arizona's gun-toting cowboys.”

And she made it very clear in my interview, you know, “I don't agree with them about everything. I don't even agree with some of the other spiritual people who gravitate towards the right up here, but on the issues that really matter to me” — which for her, right now are really anti-vaccine and anti-mask mandates. Ahe will choose the right over the left.

GILGER:  Yeah. So, pandemic changed things for her. What about the “Make America Healthy Again” idea and RFK Jr.? There's this kind of political horseshoe that keeps happening there, where you see people on the far left kind of running into colliding with people on the far right. 

GERSONY: Yeah, totally. You know, from my vantage point as a politics reporter, ultimately, these are fringe communities. But I think it reflects a theme that I hear from voters across the political spectrum. And that is that something feels wrong with our health system, for example. Other people make this critique of, I don't know, our economy, our political system, there's just a sense that something's not right. And I think that's true for voters on both the right and the left. And right now, the Democratic Party has put so much energy into defending those institutions — defending science, defending our Democratic norms — and they've put far less energy into explaining why something feels so wrong.

And I think that's why you're seeing some of these low-trust voters pick the right — or even come up with their own explanations for why something feels amiss. I do sometimes wonder how durable this coalition is going to be. You know, even the people I spoke with, said that they don't trust Trump on every issue. They don't trust the other people in their coalition on these issues. So. I think this is — it's really still accurate to think of this as an unlikely kinship, really more united by the structure of thinking, the fact that they are drawn towards conspiracy, that they don't like expert knowledge. I think it's still accurate to think of this as an unlikely partnership and not as some kind of, you know, match made in heaven.

GILGER:  Yeah, I wonder Laura, like as you're talking to these people, getting to know them a little bit to report this story, how did they personally think about this? Like, so much of politics has to do with the personal and our own identities in that. How did they identify themselves and end up in this kind of alignment?

GERSONY: That's such a good question. So just to give you another example, one woman I spoke with was Shelley Evans. She is one of Arizona's better known sovereign citizens — but she doesn't like that term. She was very skeptical, for example, when I approached her asking for an interview, because she just says she doesn't think of herself as political. And this is someone who made headlines, you know, for being part of a group that the FBI considers a threat to domestic sovereign citizens.

Laura Gersony/Arizona Republic

GILGER: Yeah, and explain sovereign citizens for those who don’t know.

GERSONY: Yeah, so the sovereign citizen movement is essentially made up of people who declare themselves independent from the U.S. government. A lot of the times, that just means they refuse to do certain administrative things, like, you know, getting a normal license plate. But other times, you know, experts have said that this is really a nucleus for radicalization. It's often linked to a more militant style of far-right activism. And so in Shelley Evans's case, she does not see herself as a political person. She thinks of herself as being really spiritual and social. She's repurposed a yoga studio into this community center that hosts all kinds of events. You know, there's anti-vax groups that meet there. There's a crypto seminar telling people, you know, to take their finances off the mainstream financial grid and put it into cryptocurrency. And there's also just normal meditation and, you know, tree-planting events. So she sees herself, really, as not dealing in politics at all.

GILGER: Yeah. So let me ask you, Laura, lastly, what you took away from this. You kind of happen across this; it's one of those surprising political moments in a political reporter's career, right? Where you're saying this doesn't make any sense to me, “I want to understand it.” What did you come out understanding?

GERSONY: Yeah, I think to me, the bottom line was really the failure of Democrats to reach these low-trust voters. It's been now almost a decade right since Donald Trump came onto the political scene. And I think that time and time again, what I heard in these interviews is that the Democrats have failed to answer this rising skepticism. There was one interesting moment where it was Anita Dalton, the head of the Center for the New Age, told me that there's one politician on the left that she trusts, and it's Bernie Sanders. That you know, and he's someone with a real strong populist, anti-establishment message. But by and large, people on the ground in Sedona did not see the Democratic Party as really answering the skepticism that they held.

GILGER: All right, a very interesting political moment. Laura Gersony is a politics reporter for the Arizona Republic, joining us. Laura, thank you for coming in. Appreciate your reporting here. 

GERSONY: Thanks so much, Lauren.