Antisemitic Conspiracies Drive a Canadian-Run Vegan Jungle Commune in Belize
UFO sightings, multilevel marketing schemes, an escape from the ‘New World Order’, and admiration for The Protocols of The Elders of Zion influence a Corozal commune run by a Toronto woman.
“Remove your face mask and do not comply
You are not the reason dying Grandma died”
Already unusual lyrics for a song. More unsettling, still, to hear on a Christmas carol.
Posted in December of 2020, the song was recorded on video and posted on Serenity Retreats Belize’s social media pages and embedded in the retreat’s digital Christmas card. In it are five adults, one with an acoustic guitar and one with a hand drum, and two with songbooks open to read from. A traditional-looking arrangement to record traditional-sounding Christmas cheer. The song’s tune, cheery, as Christmas carols always are. Its words are somewhat less so:
“Let’s come together, cross that six-foot border
Jingle all the way past their New World Order,”
Reality might have a little less jingling and a little more escapism. All the same, avoiding the New World Order while eating tasty-looking vegan food at a resort owned by an antisemitic Toronto woman is what Serenity is all about.
From Resort to Commune
Serenity Retreats Belize is one of two branches of communal living spearheaded by Toronto native Nissrien Barakat, who sometimes uses the moniker “Reverend ConsciousNiss”, in Corozal, Belize.
Barakat started Serenity after buying the resort grounds and facilities in 2015. In addition to a series of small houses, Serenity’s grounds are home to a licensed hotel, a restaurant, a freshwater pool, and a yoga studio sometimes staffed by a resident instructor. From promotional images to the sights in the backgrounds of residents’ social media posts, it’s easy to see the appeal of permanent residence.
Footage of Serenity from every source looks stunning. Its restaurant and hotel services are well-reviewed on booking websites and business pages. But during the Covid-19 pandemic, Serenity’s been more than a resort. It’s been a community with a life of its own.
“Since Covid began, I shut down as a resort and focused on community development solely,” Barakat explained in an email. Barakat affirmed that the label of “commune” was a word fit to describe Serenity in its current state, but that it was only “one aspect” of Serenity.
Protocols and Holocaust Conspiracies
As the Christmas carol would imply, Barakat and many who go through Serenity are firm believers in conspiracy theories. In addition to discussions about the New World Order, Barakat and Serentity’s social media echoes all sorts of anti-vaccine conspiracies, including that Covid-19 vaccines are being used as a form of population control. In June she referred to vaccines in Canada as “culling the herd” and compared immunization records for international travel to race segregation, remarking “Whites to the left and coloureds to the back… Except now it’s vaccinated and unvaccinated. Muzzled and unmuzzled. Obedient and disobedient.”
Some conspiracies floated in and around Serenity, including that of The New World Order, have histories of use as antisemitic dog whistles. Serenity’s website even sells a guide to starting a community subtitled “Preparing for the New World Order”. In 2020, a social media post from Serenity’s business page linked the New World Order to the Rockefeller family. The Rockefellers, along with the Rothschild family — another name Barakat invokes as a family secretly controlling global institutions — are often used as synonyms for secretive Jewish forces. Likewise, George Soros is often invoked as a placeholder for anti-Jewish beliefs. Barakat alleges Soros is behind the antifascist protest movement and Black Lives Matter, which she calls a psy-op.
However, Barakat’s statements also reveal antisemitism that isn’t as subtle.
Nissrien Barakat is a firm believer of and advocate for the Protocols of The Elders of Zion, a forged antisemitic text first used by the Russian government in 1905 that details a fake meeting between Jewish elders plotting world domination. During the Holocaust, Nazi Germany distributed the Protocols to in order to gain support for the genocide of Jewish people.
In 2020 Barakat stated from her Facebook account connected to Serenity’s business page that “Everyone needs to read the Protocols of Zion. They are behind everything that is happening right now. They write about everything they planned to take over in the 20th century and they succeeded.”
An Instagram follower alleged that Barakat also posted a video of herself reading from the Protocols on a since-deleted video to Serenity’s Instagram page. Barakat would neither confirm or deny this.
Barakat also liked and interacted with several antisemitic comments and calls to action on her Facebook account linked to Serenity’s official business page.
One post liked by Barakat claims “If NAZI’s were evil racist fucks, than why did they barter and team up with the Africans, Indians, Japanese, Italians, and middle eastern people. [sic]” and that “We defeated the wrong enemy”.
Another, liked in 2020, includes a text graphic claiming that “Mongol Turkic led Marxist-Zionist Bolshevik” people committed “ethnic cleansing” against 80 million Russians during the First World War. Another invokes The Great Replacement, saying that “Their (Marxist-Zionists’) goal is to destroy all ethnically specific indigenous identity/peoples and create a very mixed mono-culture of lost slaves”.
Barakat stated that her comments in regard to The Protocols of The Elders of Zion are “of no relation to Serenity Retreats” and refuted that her statements were antisemitic by claiming she was a Semite. She also said she expected me to print her seven paragraph statement about the protocols and antisemitism in full.
The statement referred to Nazi death camps as “transfer camps”, which Barakat alleged were used to house Jewish people “on trains to Palestine with their assets in tact”. She went on to blame deaths of German Jews during The Holocaust on British Second World War forces.
One paragraph stated, “I am flattered you took the time to research and glad it has given you an opportunity to potentially have a deeper understanding of the world you live in and those whom rule over you… You know, the ones you can’t criticize…”. A later section blames said “they” for what Barakat described as “mass entry of migrants, with crime rates skyrocketing as a result”.
Barakat is currently active in fighting against vaccine mandates in Belize, which she refers to as an “experimental treatment”. During Canada’s recent federal election, Barakat shared content from the People’s Party of Canada, which she called “a party for the people”. In Facebook posts she called its leader Maxime Bernier, who appeared alongside vloggers representing white supremacist groups on the eve of the election, “Canada’s only hope”. Barakat also shared multiple posts from Chelsea Taylor, a former PPC Member of Parliament candidate and a lightworker.
Conspiratual Community
Barakat’s conspiracy-driven politics aren’t hers alone. As the language in the haunting-if-not-a-little-catchy Christmas carol would imply, challenging the whims of the New World Order — a general term to describe secret world governments as part of countless conspiracy umbrellas — is a cause Serenity resident’s often champion.
Social media accounts of those who lived at Serenity in 2020, the most prolific of which has over 71 thousand followers on Instagram, are chock-full of anti-mask and anti-vaccine conspiracy theories. Many posts imply that Covid-19 isn’t a real pandemic, while others allege that the virus might be better fought off with a holistic approach than with modern medicine.
New Age philosophy is also common among Serenity patrons. Current and former residents often talk about themselves on social media using terminology like vibrations, divinity, and spirituality.
It goes past personal and communal politics, too. One member uses her social media presence at Serenity to promote Canada’s own Druthers. Druthers started in 2020 and took off in unprecedented numbers in its first year of free distribution among Canada’s various anti-mask, anti-lockdown, and anti-vaccine crowds. In December 2020, Rayne and the Canadian Anti-Hate Network reported that Dave Bolton, the father of Neo-Nazi Mike Bolton, an avid Atomwaffen supporter, worked closely on Druthers with its owner Shawn Jason Laplante.
At its height, Laplante claimed monthly issues of Druthers — paid for in part by advertisements and grassroots donations — to have exceeded 500,000 prints. When one sees the quality of Druthers’ best when compared to more traditional, potentially lazier conspiracy papers pushing similar narratives, it’s easy to see why. It’s even easier when you see that before Laplante reached that number, some Druthers’ print editions had already reached Belize.
I Love You, Pass It On, an earlier project of Laplante’s, was also promoted alongside Druthers and subscriptions for Purium by Serenity residents.
In 2019 Serenity was the subject of a UFO documentary titled Close Encounters In Corozal. In it, UFO documentary filmmaker Rob Freeman boasts that they “would have full video of” an “anomaly”, but that his SD card gave him an error message while reviewing footage and needed to be reformatted, deleting his video in the process.
Barakat boasts UFO sightings as an attraction to Serenity on its website. On her blog, she detailed her own experiences and her belief “without an ounce of doubt” that she saw “a spaceship or spacecraft”. She pitched the idea that perhaps they were being visited because of their proximity to Jupiter, as, “maybe it requires less fuel”.
Multilevel Marketing
Members of Serenity Retreats Belize come from different walks of life. One former member who lived in Serenity during the pandemic is a well-recognized model, published on several major magazine covers. Another, a former Hollywood film editor, with films like The Life of Pie and Goon on their portfolio. A recent resident from Canada sells orgonite — crystals purported by pseudoscientific communities to have healing properties.
Despite the variety of jobs worked in past lives, those living in Serenity often work one and the same job now. Some might describe the gig by the label of ‘social media influencer’.
Others would call it part of a pyramid scheme. A multivitamin and dietary supplement multilevel marketing company by the name of Purium has its fingers deep in several who pass through Serenity. In fact, out of the five Serenity residents filmed in Serenity’s Christmas carol, Barakat is the only person who seemingly has not marketed Purium products on Instagram. Several other residents of Serenity in from 2020 to 2021 sell Purium products.
Pro-MLM website MLM Companies warns “no independent studies have confirmed any of the claims made by Purium Health about its program”, but does note the company employs a naturopath. In 2010 Purium faced legal discipline in California for exceeding allowable levels of lead in four products. Their current Better Business Bureau rating is F.
Some residents have blended Covid-19 conspiracies (not to mention Druthers promo codes) with Purium sales pitches, as the brand markets itself as an immune system-booster of sorts. Barakat herself has posted content on social media mocking germ theory — the commonly accepted concept of infectious diseases.
Expansion and Sale
In addition to Serenity Retreats, Barakat owns Serenity in The Hills, a “Phase II” of what Barakat calls “A Plant-Based Society”. On her website, she lists existing housing and planned additions to the new community and instructions on how foreigners to Belize can maintain a visa and apply for permanent residence.
She also writes that focus on her mountain community is the reason she’s looking to sell her original jungle resort.
“During this time hosting vegan/yoga retreats, I discovered my passion for community development. As most know, I have expanded down south to the mountains with the intention of simply expanding the community. However, as time has gone on, my focus has shifted completely from retreats and into developing intentional vegan communities,” Barakat stated on a sales page for the resort.