\u201cMy age lowered by 25 years. And I\u2019m still going, by the way. It\u2019s incredible.\u201d<\/p>\n
The man who\u00a0speaks these lines<\/a>\u00a0is in a split screen with the host of the show. His goatee and what\u2019s left of his hair are approaching the colour of table salt. He wears a white polo shirt with a popped collar while behind him is a photo of paradise: palm fronds, the edge of a beach, and crystal-blue water.<\/p>\n He goes on to clumsily explain that the veil is being lifted from our eyes, and \u201cTartarian-type structures\u201d\u2014he\u2019s referring here to a mythical, Atlantis-like advanced civilization alleged to have existed in what is now Russia\u2014used to have antennae that were aggregating plasma out of the ether, and ether used to be in the periodic table of elements. A hundred years ago, \u201cthey\u201d said ether didn\u2019t exist, but people were being healed by this etheric plasma.<\/p>\n And now they can again.<\/p>\n This esoteric account explains\u00a0a short video<\/a>\u00a0I saw while researching this story: another man, sitting down, holding on to twin compact fluorescent light bulbs, all lit up and wired to a device outside the frame, rubbing these light bulbs on his shaved head. He thinks he\u2019s giving his body healing plasma, and not the kind that blood drives collect.<\/p>\n The man with the popped collar claims to be an anarchist. As the Make America Healthy Again movement becomes the official healthcare body of the U.S. government, it\u2019s funny to see that the people against the very idea of a government are engaging in the same sort of pseudoscience.<\/p>\n Tesla, Trump, and the CIA<\/p>\n I was perusing Telegram, the social media platform often embraced by people who cry \u201ccensorship\u201d on a daily basis, and that\u2019s where I saw the ad. It had been posted on a Telegram channel claimed to belong to Stew Peters. Peters was the host on the receiving end of this diatribe over Tartarian architecture. Like Alex Jones, he is a conspiracy-fuelled loudmouth who blames \u201cthe Jews\u201d for just about anything.<\/p>\n The ad itself was an AI-generated image of famed inventor Nikola Tesla holding a light bulb aloft while behind him were sitting dozens of disciples doing the same, in a sort of light bulb cult. Whatever was being sold through this post could heal just about anything according to the text\u2014allergies, psoriasis, injuries, even yellowjacket stings\u2014and the answers could be found at TZLA.club, a website that advertises that its members \u201cbecome superhumans.\u201d<\/p>\n The device is called TZLA, with a pronunciation echoing the name of the Serbian-American engineer who inspired it. It comes in a kit. Inside, there\u2019s an alleged plasma generator, and the plasma is accelerated before ending up in the kind of compact fluorescent light bulbs you commonly buy\u2014the spirally ones that look like a DNA helix. You touch various body parts with these bulbs, and the plasma they contain apparently improves your health. You can even use them on your pets.<\/p>\n Yes, plasma is the name of the liquid portion of your blood\u2014without the red and white blood cells\u2014but in this case, \u201cplasma\u201d actually refers to a state of matter, like solid, liquid, and gas. It\u2019s the \u201cphysics\u201d plasma, not the \u201cbiology\u201d plasma.<\/p>\n When gas is given enough energy in the form of heat or electricity, for example, it will change. The atoms it is made of will go from being electrically neutral to becoming electrically charged. This plasma will still carry an overall neutral electrical charge but will be teeming with positive and negative ions, and as such it will behave in interesting ways. Plasma is at the heart of stars, but here on Earth we find it inside of neon signs and in those now-outdated plasma television sets.<\/p>\n The idea of using plasma in medicine is not foolish; in fact, there\u00a0is\u00a0an emerging field of study called plasma medicine. Obviously, shooting very hot plasma onto a human body is a bad idea, but we can now generate \u201ccold plasma,\u201d which doesn\u2019t go above 40\u00b0C (104\u00b0F) when it touches skin. It is being looked at for applications in dermatology and in cancer care, primarily, but the evidence in human beings so far is not particularly convincing, with very few rigorous trials and instead of lot of uncontrolled medical anecdotes. At best, we can say that it\u00a0seems\u00a0to\u00a0speed up wound healing<\/a>. A handful of plasma medical devices have been approved (including in Canada and in Europe), but they look very different from the TZLA.<\/p>\n To hear the people endorsing the TZLA, it can cure everything\u2014including cancer. As we like to say, if something is said to cure everything, it probably doesn\u2019t cure anything. Validated medical interventions all have very narrow applications. Ibuprofen works against headaches, but it doesn\u2019t treat diabetes or Alzheimer\u2019s disease. A key feature of medical pseudosciences is that they claim every disease is caused by one thing and that a universal salvation exists.<\/p>\n Another key feature is the misuse of scientific verbiage to sound serious. Many people using the TZLA are said to feel a bit ill after. Nothing to worry about, we are told: it\u2019s a Herxheimer reaction. This impenetrable name makes it sound like a well-understood medical phenomenon\u2014and it is but only for a narrow condition. A Jarisch-Herxheimer reaction is a fever, often accompanied by other complications that can be quite severe, after starting antibiotics for an infection caused by a spirochete, a specific type of bacterium (see Lyme disease and syphilis). But in wellness circles, any bad reaction to an unneeded \u201cdetox\u201d is now wrongly labelled a \u201cHerxheimer reaction\u201d to reassure people that this is expected and normal.<\/p>\n Pseudosciences are also commonly interwoven with conspiracy theories. After all, how else to explain that the TZLA is not used in major hospitals? The answer we\u2019re given is that when Nikola Tesla died in 1943, his papers and possessions were seized by the CIA. The reason for that is that eleven years prior he had told journalists he had developed a weapon called\u00a0Teleforce<\/a>\u2014often misreported as a \u201cdeath ray\u201d\u2014that would bring peace to humanity by preventing wars. This much is true, and in fact, the CIA asked Trump to evaluate the content of Tesla\u2019s papers to see if there was anything in there to give the U.S. a leg up, militarily.<\/p>\n No, not Donald Trump but John G. Trump, Donald Trump\u2019s paternal uncle. John Trump was an esteemed professor at MIT and he concluded that nothing in Tesla\u2019s papers had any military relevance. And that\u2019s where the conspiracy theorists come in. What if, they ask, Tesla had figured out a way to heal humanity, to banish all diseases, and the U.S. government had been hiding this knowledge since 1943?<\/p>\n Now, you\u00a0can\u00a0finally put your hands on this incredible technology\u2026 except that you can\u2019t buy it from a store. You can\u2019t really buy it. You have to pay your way into a club and then you are given it.<\/p>\n Welcome to anarchy.<\/p>\n Sticking it to the man<\/p>\n The word has come to mean \u201cchaos\u201d in common parlance, but the political philosophy behind anarchy simply means the absence of a ruler. It\u2019s the idea that society should organize itself based on voluntary cooperation, not top-down government order. Anarchists do not recognize the power of the State. They denounce central banking and use cryptocurrency instead, while they often refuse to pay taxes and do not wish for their children to be schooled.<\/p>\n There is a tension between anarchism\u2014which typically rejects capitalism\u2014and anarcho-capitalism\u2014which does reject the need for government but wants to keep money flowing. Many anarchists want goods to be owned by the community; anarcho-capitalists want private ownership. The more I dug into these movements, the more fractures I saw.\u00a0<\/p>\n Anarcho-capitalism is at the core of the TZLA device. The man with the popped collar who said the miraculous machine had de-aged him by 25 years is a self-proclaimed anarchist: Jeff Berwick, a Canadian who lost some money during the early-aughts dot-com bubble burst and who relocated to Latin America. He is the instigator of an annual conference called Anarchapulco which attracts like-minded people to Mexico and which is chronicled in the HBO docuseries\u00a0The Anarchists.\u00a0In it, tensions arise as people disagree on what anarchy should look like in practice. As Berwick himself states in the last episode, \u201cWe started out wanting to fight the government, but we ended up fighting ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n Their views on healthcare can be glimpsed at the periphery of the series, which otherwise focuses on internecine conflict and the resulting disillusion. At Anarchapulco\u2014and at the counterprogrammatic Anarchaforko and AnarchAWAKENing\u2014we see shamans, and healing tuning forks, and aromatherapy. When Stew Peters\u00a0endorses TZLA on his show<\/a>, it\u2019s all about how Big Pharma doesn\u2019t want you to know, because they want to keep you sick so they profit. Humanity needs to sever its ties to \u201cBig Pharma and Big Hospitals and Big Government.\u201d<\/p>\n This is why TZLA is only available through a private membership association or PMA, not a corporation. Basically, its members leverage the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution\u2014the freedom of assembly, specifically\u2014to claim they can do business outside of government laws and regulations. To quote the most successful tourism slogan ever, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, and what happens in a PMA stays with the PMA.<\/p>\n TZLA is \u201chiring,\u201d whatever that means for a social club, and it looks like every position under the sun is up for grabs,\u00a0including CEO<\/a>. The club would prefer someone who knows about \u201cAI strategy and governance\u201d and one of the questions you have to answer when applying is whether or not you took the \u201cCOVID19 injections\/vaccines\u201d.<\/p>\n I applied to join the TZLA Club as a mere member but the links I was sent to get the ball rolling didn\u2019t work. On Facebook, where people discuss the device, the prices often quoted are US$ 10,000, 11,000, and 11,111. That\u2019s the membership fee, and it gets you the device as a freebie. That\u2019s a lot of money for an unregulated, unproven device based on a conspiracy theory. The scientist who is heralded as the expert on this thing is none other than Ana Maria Mihalcea, who follows the teachings of a fictional being called Ramtha and who claims to have found\u00a0self-assembling nanobots<\/a>\u00a0inside the COVID-19 vaccines.<\/p>\n If this sounds like ramblings worthy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr, it\u2019s important to highlight that these anarchists are neither MAGA nor MAHA. They see the government as evil regardless of who sits in the White House. But anarcho-capitalists have a lot in common with American right-wingers, who want to privatize everything and worship the free market. Moreover, all of these groups share a distrust of the mainstream and thus an embrace of the alternative. Berwick summed it up when he told Peters\u00a0last February<\/a>\u00a0that people are indoctrinated into believing that \u201cthe only way to heal yourself is with a guy in a butcher coat with really bad handwriting, and he\u2019s gonna give you the Pfizer products for the rest of your life, and it\u2019s gonna basically kill you and take all your money!\u201d<\/p>\n Real medicine, according to Berwick, comes from \u201ca scientist in Mexico\u201d (presumably Mihalcea) who claims to have rediscovered Tesla\u2019s secret work, improved it, and now it literally cures cancer.<\/p>\n Burn the system down or improve it<\/p>\n Watching\u00a0The Anarchists, I couldn\u2019t help but feel that their rebellion against the State was idealistic and juvenile. Some have argued that\u00a0Anarchapulco is not\u00a0<\/a>true\u00a0<\/a>anarchism<\/a>, much like how\u00a0true\u00a0communism (and even capitalism) has never really been put into practice. Every example can be dismissed as misapplied theory.<\/p>\n But this version of anarchism seems content to give every institution the middle finger until its services are desperately needed. One anarchist is shot three times and has to go to a local hospital. Another one\u2019s drinking problem leads to advanced liver scarring, but the hospital care he needs in Mexico (presumably as a\u00a0de facto\u00a0medical tourist) requires money that he and his family no longer have. In a country with a public healthcare system run by the State and in which you have a government-issued card granting you access to this care, this wouldn\u2019t be an issue.<\/p>\n And yet another is a war veteran with PTSD who makes daily death threats and becomes a ticking time bomb at the conference. He ultimately dies by suicide. What he needed, in my opinion, was the services of a licensed psychiatrist, and regulated pharmacological drugs, and scientific research into PTSD that is part of a supervised framework to reduce the risk of releasing ineffective and dangerous treatments. It means peer review, and governmental oversight of the drug approval process, and medical boards. This system is far from perfect; but burning it down does not answer the need it used to fulfill. It merely invites charlatanerie, feel-goodery, intuition, and appeals to nature to occupy that void.<\/p>\n The righteous fire of this revolution also attracts grifters. Berwick himself is not exactly the hero of\u00a0The Anarchists, and a search for his name reveals questionable ventures and serious accusations. In 2014,\u00a0The National Post\u00a0reported that Berwick and two partners created a community in South America called\u00a0Galt\u2019s Gulch Chile<\/a>, named after Ayn Rand\u2019s dollar-worshipping libertarian utopia in\u00a0Atlas Shrugged.\u00a0\u201cSome forked over tens of thousands of dollars for a slice of freedom they would never see,\u201d one can read in the paper, with the real estate debacle being labelled \u201canother dumb\u00a0gringo\u00a0story.\u201d The founding partners threatened to sue each other by running to the courts\u2014you know, those things under the control of the evil government. Outside of legacy media, more questionable sources claim that Berwick and his wife were behind\u00a0a Mexican passport scam<\/a>, extracting pricey deposits from people and never delivering the goods.<\/p>\n Plasma healing has broken free of the anarchist movement, though. I found a similar device called the\u00a0Theraphi<\/a>\u00a0by Phitality, where\u00a0New Age verbiage<\/a>\u00a0about \u201cthe phi ratio\u201d and \u201csacred geometry\u201d is used to convince desperate people to purchase it. It\u2019s a \u201cdouble conjugate plasma light system,\u201d you see, and it generates a \u201cphase-conjugate, centripetal, and negentropic energy field.\u201d I\u2019m sure many physicists would be left scratching their heads.<\/p>\n Cure-alls are a dime a dozen. They\u2019re like fad diets. When you\u2019ve figured out one doesn\u2019t work, you get tempted to try a new one. Years before Berwick was all in on the miraculous healing powers of the TZLA, he was\u00a0interviewed<\/a>\u00a0about another cure-all: stem cells. \u201cThey pretty much cure or fix everything,\u201d he said, \u201cand they make you much younger.\u201d So, he asked his \u201cPuerto Vallarta guy\u201d if he could inject them into his penis. The guy found him a doctor willing to do it. And Berwick\u2019s wife said, according to him, that the sex they had the following day was \u201cthe best ever.\u201d<\/p>\n If you believe all of this, there\u2019s a plot of land I\u2019d like to sell you. It\u2019s in Chile and it\u2019s got \u201cfreedom\u201d written all over it.\u00a0<\/p>\n Take-home message:
– Plasma is a state of matter, like solid or liquid, that results when gas is given enough energy that its atoms become electrically charged.
– The field of plasma medicine is still very much in its early, experimental days.
– Devices like the TZLA and Theraphi claim to deliver healing plasma, but they are unproven, unregulated, and based on the conspiracy theory that famous inventor Nikola Tesla figured out how to heal all diseases before he died.<\/p>\n