Episode description

Imagine a slower pace of life: Growing your own vegetables, spending more time with the children, the smell of freshly baked sourdough wafting through your well-kept home, no pesky job or financials to worry about. That does sound lovely, doesn’t it? And then while your healthy kids are playing in their mud kitchen, you hop online to chat with your tradwife friends about how to ban immigration, ban abortion, and breed out the blacks. Wait, what?!

To be fair, it’s quite a leap to go from baking bread to white supremacy. But there seems to be a connection between these wholesome and traditional values and something far more sinister. For some women, the tradwife movement is as simple as being tired of the rat race and genuinely wanting to spend more time with the family and less time at work. But for the more suggestible traditionalist women out there, it is a pathway to the bigoted alt-right; to the white nationalists espousing racism, misogyny, and heterosexism, sometimes to the point of explicitly advocating violence and terrorism. 

And because we can’t quite understand what the hell sourdough has to do with terrorism, we’ve invited special guest Dr Kristy Campion on the show to discuss the links between the tradwife movement and the alt-right. 

Dr Campion is a Senior Lecturer and Discipline Lead of Terrorism Studies at the Australian Graduate School of Policing and Security at Charles Sturt University. For the past two years, her research has focused heavily on right-wing extremism in Australia, and whilst investigating why there were so many women in a movement inherently dismissive of women’s rights, the tradwife connection became apparent.

We’re all for everyone making their own choices and living life the way they want to. If you want to stay at home with the kids and cook and clean and greet your husband at the door with a cocktail, go for it! If you want to oppose feminism, disagree with women voting, and think women don’t belong in the workforce, whatever floats your boat! (Even if we think that is a stupid boat to float). But it’s when these hate-filled world views fuel attempts to force other people into alignment via means of violence that things get a bit… Trumpy.

An intriguing aspect of extremism, similar to religion, is its attraction for individuals who crave certainty. For people who desire an existence devoid of doubt and ambiguity, with blame for all of life’s problems placed squarely on undeserving populations, the rabbit hole of extremism is all too easy to fall down.

Dr Campion chats to us about the unexpected rise in conspiratorial activity during COVID and an age predisposition towards the baby boomers due to their non-existent digital filter. She also imparts a bleak truth in that at some point, you aren’t responsible for a friend's or a loved one’s beliefs. But fear not! The answer lies in reinvigorating our appreciation of democracy; a rebrand for the 21st century so that democracy once again slaps! If the youth get reacquainted with the pros of democracy and the freedoms and order it affords, then the desire to leave the mainstream lessens and extremism becomes salty af.

SOURCES:

• Defining Ecofascism: Historical Foundations and Contemporary Interpretations in the Extreme Right, In Terrorism and Political Violence, by Kristy Campion
• Women in the Extreme and Radical Right: Forms of Participation and Their Implications, in Social Sciences, by Kristy Campion
• Steve King's rape comments reveal the misogyny at the heart of white supremacist ideology, NBC News, by Mona Eltahawy
• Alt-right women and the "white baby challenge" [Excerpted from "Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right is Warping the American Imagination" by Alexandra Minna Stern (Beacon Press, 2019). Reprinted with permission by Beacon Press.]
• Why Are Gen Z Girls Attracted to the Tradwife Lifestyle?, The Public Eye, Spring/Summer 2021 by Mariel Cooksey

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.