This is a similar pipeline my parents went through in the 90s. Started innocent enough with a home garden and taking care of themselves, and ended up with my mom stroking out over a trump conspiracy and my dad going down the prepper path and moving to rural Ghana, where he is either dead or so crazy I don’t wanna hear from him. We are not from Africa, and of European decent, but he was convinced he was “going home”.
Oh. They were absolutely openly racist. Which meant that I made special effort to not be like my parents. Half my friends, even today, are black, and I even dated a black girl for a while when I was 19-20.
My dad moving to Ghana was actually one of his ultimate forms of racism.
I don’t even wish to repeat their ideas here, but they had some truly awful things they believed.
So your dad is racist towards blacks...and he moved to Ghana?
You know I dont know the figure off the top of my head. But isn't Ghana like majority black? Just a wild guess.
Hard to explain without touching on some hardcore old world racism, but essentially boils down to him thinking people who don’t share his skin color are inanimate objects created to trick “real humans”.
Unfortunately, a lot of them have passed this mind set on to the younger generations. I live in a red state and have met SO MANY young racists it makes me so sad (and happy when I see my kid playing with kids of other races!)
I agree, a lot of outdated evil ideas and beliefs need to go. But they will linger until their holders die out.
It does make me wonder what we'll be susceptible to in +50 years and what beliefs we will be vilified for as the generation or two after Gen Alpha wishes for our deaths.
He was one of the first adults I just did not like at all. Never had to meet him thank goodness, but his voice was still in our house every day, and my parents would call into his radio show a lot.
From my child-like perspective, he just made my parents angry, but they kept calling him. I didn’t get it then and I don’t get it now.
My 96 year old grandmother religiously listened to his show (or Newsmax) at about 100dB because her hearing aids would go dead. My dad would occasionally just turn off the circuit breaker to that wall outlet at like 8pm. He’d turn it back on in the early am before she got up.
She’d always go off about hiring an electrician, etc. I don’t think she ever figured it out.
Listened to a lot of Rush (unfortunately), and always felt he was so mean and condescending to the callers, I couldn't understand why anyone would dare call in.
I bet that could make one hell of a funny-sad story stand up routine. (Definitely not that level, and different topics, but I sort of get the whole "they're my family, but fuck")
These days? Yeah I’m doing well. Thanks for checking in. Most of this happened 20 years ago now. I’ve had time to heal and process. Sharing my stories on Reddit is a helpful coping mechanism when I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed or down about things. :)
I appreciate it, but don’t worry. I’m doing great these days. I had a good childhood, it’s once I became a teenager in the 2000s they got very crazy. We lost our house in 08 because they stopped paying taxes and mortgage because they didn’t really believe the government was legitimate once Obama took office (shocker).
Picked myself back up by the early 2010s.
I’m sorry for laughing but what a way to lose your house. Glad you’re doing good, I’ve got a lot of ridiculous stories about my insane parents but that one’s genuinely baffling
It was super intentional on their part, I’m just still not exactly sure why. Well, I am, but also, I’m not. I’m pretty sure they had bought into conspiracy theories about sovereign citizenship. That was their jam for sure.
They were super active politically with the Republican Party in the late 90s and into the 2000s, my dad even running for senator a few times and getting close to winning. But he didn’t and I think that sent him off on the deep end into conspiracy theories.
I have some really insane stories. My favorite being the time I woke up hungover from a party and went downstairs to the kitchen to see them talking to god damned Michelle Bachman in my living room.
Awful thing to wake up to.
Yes, they would let their drivers licenses lapse and not renew it. I remember being 12 and telling them not to do that because they’d get fined, and they were adamant that the fine wouldn’t hold up to the constitution or something.
I just wanted to be able to go to my friends house and eat fast food, but they turned it into a political conversation. Every time.
This descent into madness aptly describes my MIL.
She’s so goddamn loony. She has all of this: the natural foods stuff, drugs/doctors are evil (unless she’s sick or needs surgery 🙄), sovereign citizen bs (my husband registers her car so she doesn’t get her dumb ass locked up).
Add to the trajectory that she of course won’t take vaccines, and now she has HER ONLY GRANDCHILD born in March and won’t see her until she’s six months old so that, what, the baby gets vaccines and she can’t make her sick? It’s like: so then you KNOW vaccines ARE effective and that you’re a Typhoid Mary lol.
She had a mask with holes in it during COVID so that she could go in the grocery store. Gah fucking makes me nuts. I’m relieved she won’t be visiting until I’m back at work. Gonna pick up as many 12 hour shifts as possible that week.
The worst people on earth are ones who think they’re smarter than everyone else but are objectively dumb as all fuck.
I think that’d be a cool thing to do. I don’t know if I need a whole book to convey it, but a few page article would be an interesting thing to write.
It was a childhood of a lot of social extremes in one way or another.
The sovereign citizens movement is so strange. There are lots of videos of people getting arrested by arguing with the police that they’re a “sovereign citizen” and can’t get arrested for violating traffic laws or whatever. It’s basically the same as Michael Scott going, “I declare bankruptcy!”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_citizen_movement
I feel as though they also don't understand that farming at the scale required to feed the country, and the world, is a massive undertaking that requires millions in up front capital from the ammonia to enrich the soil to the quarter-million plus dollar tractors, and that's before i.plements and additional labor.
I'm not defending the modern farmer by any means, they're some of the most arrogant,socially backwards people I've ever had the chance to meet in some cases. But without ammonium nitrate the world starves, there's just not that much arable land to sustain the population with our current eating habits.
Ties in with our culture of "rugged individualism" and mistrust of authority.
"Grow your own food; it's healthier" is not far away from "Grow your own food; the industrial food system is poisoning you and they know it".
Does that sound vaguely similar to other conspiracy theories?
You are absolutely right. I grow tomatoes because I dislike the mealy tasteless store bought ones. So I frequently search YouTube for gardening tips on how to increase yield, rotate crops, pest prevention, composting,etc. and the next thing you know, the YouTube algorithm is suggesting that I watch those "Build a pool with ancient tools" type of videos along with random Stoicism, Jordan Peterson and Andy Tateworm videos sprinkled in, so gross.
As someone that enjoys gardening and indulging in dreams of a hobby farm lifestyle, it is very tricky to find that sort of content without getting a heaping dose of antivax woo shit, Quiverfull, Christian fundamentalism, crypto or MLM, extreme prepping, or anything else like that. Honestly the best cottagecore content right now seems to be queer. Give me a lesbian shearing sheep or a cute gay boy and his boyfriend growing the biggest tomatoes and it keeps its charm without being propaganda for shitty ideals.
I think it is a good fear/work relationship to exploit.
I want to eat healthier, so I look at my food and buy more vegetables from the supermarket. Then I noticed that all the health influencers grow their own because they "just want to know it's safe". Wait, safe from what? Chemicals they say, ok so I grow my own food and it takes a lot of effort but I feel good because I don't have all the chemicals (a valid statement to some extent). Then I'm convinced by bigger fears to go to more effort and the cycle continues until I'm building a bunker and raging about lizard people.
Honestly, and I do believe you, but you should write an article for VICE or something, where you just chronologically go through the craziest parts. Wouldn’t even matter to me if it was true or not. I'd read it.
Though life *is* stranger than ficiton, so I'm inclined to think you're actually serious.
I am serious lol. I talk about it on here every so often as i think it helps me process a lot of the insanity.
If I can some how get vices attention I’d be all about it.
I relate. I often find it easier to just say that my dad died. He isn't remotely the person he was, nor does he have the attachment to reality that he did. I can barely remember what his voice sounds like after all these years. Every father's day I think about how these social media fascists have taken so many loved ones, including mine. They are causing such significant mental health harm. North American culture has gotten sick since these ideologies became super charged after 2016. Some days I try to be hopeful. Some days, not. I will never forgive conspiracy nuts for taking my family from me.
I’m actually so glad my parents didn’t make it to actually see the trump presidency. They would have been all over this new shit.
I’m right there with you man. I get it. It’s so tiring. I have extended family that aren’t super crazy so that’s nice. 🙂
Thank you. I don’t know anything else so it’s not “that big of a deal”. I only know objectively and retrospectively that I missed out on a more normal childhood, but i think it’s sort of like being colorblind. I know I’m missing something, but I don’t have any other experience so I can’t really even be that upset.
Why does it almost always start with trying to eat better? My Dad did that in the 90s. By the 2010s he was watching Alex Jones every day and talking about how it makes no sense that the Moon always faces the Earth.
I tried to explain Tidal Locking to him but he simply would not listen to anything I said. He eventually became so insufferable we all had to stop talking to him for the sake of our own mental health. I haven’t spoken to him in 8 years and I have no desire to. In his mind he’s the one not talking to us.
> Why does it almost always start with trying to eat better?
Because health and nutrition is a field where we definitely need more work to understand exactly how our bodies work. Since there is a lot we still don't understand, pseudoscience flies around freely and can lead people down rabbit-holes of nonsense.
There’s also a big overlap with the way high control groups/cults dial in on behavioral things like food, sex, and clothing to control their members and signal their loyalty and obedience. Food in particular encourages the notion that in-group members are better, more pure, and have access to special knowledge the rest of the world doesn’t (and if they make heavy use of fasting or starvation that makes everyone more vulnerable to manipulation). Also the group can use sales of special supplements or food products to fund itself. General wellness gurus can also get in the habit of telling everyone how they should live and can start taking on cult leader tendencies.
Precisely, every major religion or cult has to control at least one of the primary human drives. You can think of it being the engine of the crazy in a sense. You subjugate the food drive and use that to drive all the other behaviors that you need, or you subjugate the sex drive and use that to drive an entire administration of priests and so on.
Diet is ultimately about control.
It’s one of the few fundamental things you can control that has a very direct and observable influence in life.
Many people on the conspiracy theory fringe seek control over things they don’t understand or have no control over. Choosing to believe something that they think is something only they understand (and a select few) gives them a sense on control.
Diet can be a gateway to a sense of control and why you see as many sham diet trends as actually healthy ones.
My sister researches nutrition. It's pretty well known the placebo effect is extremely strong in that field. If you ask one group of participants to spend hours preparing specific recipies (That you provided all ingredients for) and a second group give the exact same foods, except you prepare it for them. The first group will report MUCH better results in mood, alertness, fitness, hell even their childrens' behavior.
Also, nearly every diet has the chance of working if it succeeds in getting people to actually pay attention to what they eat. Mindless eating is one of the big reasons diets fail.
So a cult comes in, demands a specific diet that people have to work for. And... it works. People feel better. Suddenly you have a hook in them, they trust you, they listen to other things you say.
So... TL:DR- The best diet is one you can follow. Don't trust cultists who give you food advice, even if it works.
There's also how eating better usually involves depriving yourself of something you want, which just happens to be a control technique used by every cult in history. There's something about being in that deprived mindset that makes you extremely malleable
The health-food and "wellness" business has been crawling with con artists since the time of the snake oil salesmen. In addition, a lot of people have anxiety over their health and their diets, which, along with relentless advertising and disinformation, drives orthorexia and endless food fads.
Similarly, most people have no clue as to how the economy works, or how to invest money, so you end up with gold bugs, cryptocurrency scams, NFT grifters, Audit the Fed crackpots, and similar parasites. Right-wing media is crawling with advertisers for that kind of frauds.
And now there are media with greater reach, with greater ability to find suckers and push tailor-made pitches to them for not only quack cures and phony investments, but gangster politics too.
Yeah, it takes the same amount of time for the Moon to rotate on its axis as it does to orbit the Earth, which means the same part of the Moon always faces the Earth.
It's not easy to get your head around the mechanics of how that works. I had to sit down with two pieces of fruit to see it in action.
My oldest BIL went full vegan about 25 years ago, really thought he could eat his way to better health. Unfortunately he looks back now and feels that he went too far, ended up having a series of strokes at 49 that left him permanently disabled. He thinks his low fat/essential fatty acids diet did more harm than good to his heart and brain.
That’s becoming less and less of an excuse for falling prey to conspiracies.
I’m in my mid 40s and had computers at home most of my life and internet in my teens. We played EQ in college and WoW in my 20s. I’ve shopped online my entire adult life. My work and most work environments have required computer and internet knowledge my entire adult life. I’ve been on social media my entire adult life and had smart phones a large part of it. I learned have to build PCs from boomers.
Older adults now should know how to use technology and the internet properly.
I'm in my late 60s and know my way around a computer, since I have done software for a living since college. Most people my age can barely tell their ass from a hole in the ground.
But I think conspiracy propaganda is a bigger problem than just technological ignorance. There are some really evil fuckers behind it and it needs to be rooted out and the sources shut down. It's a war that's being waged against a vulnerable population. Ignoring it and hoping it'll go away is suicidal.
Also, I believe that there is a moral imperative not to be a sucker. Enabling con artists and manipulators is destructive to society.
It’s also tricky because it makes sense from a logical point of view. Conspiracies thrive when there is no transparency and accountability on the government and corporations part.
*Monsanto doesn’t care if you die* and *Medicines will kill you* are two different statements, and only one is false. But damn, they look so similar…
The goal of propaganda isn't to get you to believe its to get you to disbelieve. If you trust nothing the irony is you'll trust whoever is **most confident sounding** which will always be the fascist in the room because they make everything black and white rather than the other side, reality, which deals in complexity, nuance and data.
There’s also a terrible and very possible logic to some of the medicine ones.
“Medicines are there to keep us sick” sounds crazy at first. But then they drop “Companies wouldn’t make money if they cured you. Selling you one pill or selling you hundreds”.
Now once you know actual medical info, you know it’s not that simple. But if you tell Jim the reason he’s so sick all the time is all the damned pills (and not being 150lbs overweight and drinking a 6-pack every night) he may just believe you.
It's such stupid logic though. There are lots of pills where you take them and then the problem goes away. Have these people never taken antibiotics? Painkillers?
Painkillers may not be the great example you're making it out to be. We are kind of on the tail end of an opiod epidemic, that has killed hundreds of thousands, because of blatent and largely unprosecuted lies that some big pharma companies told.
The problem is the world is a complex place and conspiracies live in the minds of people who struggle with the complexity.
Transparency is a wonderful gateway but it’s always rooted in the world being too complex.
The sites she's using also learn she'll watch those kinds of things then add similar stuff to recommendations/feeds. Mostly it's based on what other people who watched the video also watched but there is some other things factored in like engagement. It's the same sort of mechanism that makes YouTube think you love cat videos right after you clicked on one or five in a row.
To stop going down the rabbit hole people have to do things to tell the algorithm they're not interested.
As an example I'm into firearms so will watch firearm content on YouTube. Unsurprisingly right wing politics can often get on to those channels or are watched by a lot of right wing folks. That can lead to some wild video recommendations I'm not interested in. I basically had to correct YouTube's algorithm every time it showed me right wing political stuff. There is a little menu around the video that lets you select "not interested" or "don't recommend channel". The profile or whatever seems to eventually figure it out.
I don't really expect a lot of people to be mindful of that sort of thing. Especially older folks who fall for Facebook/Twitter "facts".
> The sites she's using also learn she'll watch those kinds of things then add similar stuff to recommendations/feeds.
The algorithms are designed to find the gullible. Advertisers and unscrupulous political movements love people like that. They can be ripped off, and they can be manipulated to believe any old bullshit.
I had a pretty long debate with a friend over an article he shared and berated online. It was about the self-help to alt-right pipeline, specifically the way men use fitness to recruit. He blasted it as "left-wing propaganda against self-improvement".
The dude was an alcoholic and made big changes to his lifestyle. He began attending the gym around 5-6 days per week and was getting very into stoic philosophy. When we talked about it, I pointed out how the YouTubers he was following were influencing him. Dude went from being empathetic to "all politics is bullshit, counselors are hacks, and people are responsible for their own problems". He essentially became blackpilled, which is a great way to push someone into an antisocial worldview.
The alt-right are very sneaky with using lifestyle content to influence people. There's a whole brand of "pastel fascism" that uses yoga and new-age spiritualism to recruit women. Men are typically targeted with content about health, fitness, stoicism, and dating advice.
I feel like the older generation are vulnerable to “it’s on the internet” because everything published used to be vetted, and so we automatically trusted books and publications. Now, anyone can say anything on the internet and that means it may not have gone through any hurdles to validate the legitimacy.
On the other hand, the younger generation lived in a world where everything was online, so they either treat everything with skepticism or trust everything, or don’t care. I don’t know.
I tend to trust the established players more, but I also know even they are influenced by money. Really, everyone should study and apply critical thinking, regardless of your attitude on internet information.
This is one major way cults, religions, etc have gotten people in the door for thousands of years. There’s always some bit of useful knowledge (don’t eat pork and you won’t get sick, talking to someone about your problems helps, you’ll lose weight if you eat fewer calories — even of they’re mostly fat). Once the person trusts the advice-giver, then they ramp up to the crazier stuff. It’s a huge vulnerability in people and I think it’s one of the big reasons why education can be so harmful to religion/cults and why those forces always rally against it.
“It’s all over the internet”
Yeah, so is child porn. Something being on the internet doesn’t validate its legitimacy. The internet is full of information, but also is a seedy, dark place full of misinformation, disinformation, and malicious actors, just like the real world.
The internet is not some curated library, or encyclopedia. It’s like the town square, where any lunatic can get on a soap box and shout conspiracies into the clouds. Just like we wouldn’t pay attention to that lunatic, we should pay heed to just any lunatics on the internet either.
I’m not sure how old your mom is, but if she’s over 40 she, unlike many millennials and younger gens, may not have been taught basic skills in school about internet usage and may not realize what exactly it is. I find this often times leads people down manipulative rabbit holes without realizing it. They wouldn’t listen to the crazy guy at the bus stop go on about globalists secretly ruling the world, but think a webpage has legitimacy because of a lack of understanding of what the internet is.
That being said, shoving peoples face into reality often only hardens their delusions, but asking probing questions and stating your concerns on the means of how research is being conducted can be helpful in leading them to start asking questions themselves that can get them out of the rabbit hole.
Yeah, I’m not saying that anyone over 40 doesn’t understand the internet, but that the mid-eighties is likely the earliest inception of public school computer classes that taught about *the dangers of the internet*.
I get the impression that younger folk at times may not realize the extent that older generations with different upbringings weren’t raised in internet culture, nor even with computers, and thus are simply less familiar and less aware of its pitfalls. And even with computers in the 80s and 90s the internet wasn’t the seedy place that it is today.
I think many of us may take for granted just how much our teachers drilled into us a heavy skepticism about things on the internet and that our parents didn’t get that.
I graduated elementary school in 1998. We had computer classes, mainly in the middle grades, but we never once got any sort of “dangers of the internet” stuff. The Web back then was pretty basic and most of us who used it did so via dial-up. My computer classes were mainly Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing and those classic edutainment games. I had to learn about the dangers of the internet by myself, mostly after everyone was on DSL. This whole thread makes me feel so old lol
Computer classes were basically a different planet for us in the ‘80s and ‘90s. It was kind of a vague consideration that we might maybe someday use a networked computer, and hack into the pentagon or something. We were on Apple IIes well into the ‘90s, and this was a well funded public school.
There's a good reason for that. Back in their day, for something to actually be written down and easily accessible/popular, it had to go through at least *some* scrutiny before publishing.
Newspapers had editors that checked if stories were legitimate, verifiable, or at least made sense. If they got something wrong, they would issue a correction.
Even nightly news on TV was pretty reliable. That all changed with the 24-hour news cycle, which could just air opinions presented as facts, and absolutely changed with the internet.
And now, AI. It doesn't excuse their lack of skepticism, but it does (at least partially) explain it.
These engagement algorithms always seem to go from “here’s another cat video to batshit crazy” in about 3.6 seconds.
On of my guilty pleasures are those stupid music reaction videos where someone has lived under a rock a never heard classic rock and gets exposed to it for the first time. (I know it’s professional wrestling but it’s nostalgic)
Recently it seems some of these guys slip in some really questionable off hand comments. Like qanon stuff or moon landing was faked or home school your kids because big government. I’ll go in and block that channel but it’s crazy how much I’m getting pushed to engage with crazy. I hate it
YouTube is nefarious that was. I was on medical leave after neck surgery and had a bunch of time to kill because I basically couldn’t move, it was major neck surgery and my head felt like balancing a bowling ball on a pool que. Anyway. I watched YouTube videos and watched a few from Critical Drinker reviewing movies. Well, after a few I start noticing how they are talking about woke this or woke that and it dawned on my how they sneak in and try to grab you with something relatively innocent. Then they start more and more, deeper down the rabbit hole.
So anyway, the moon landing is fake, Hollywood is woke and the earth is flat.
Most recently he also went on some long rant about female Custodes in Warhammer 40k. The tl;dr is that a page long story in a recent rules book made the first explicit mention of female members of a particular type of superhuman bodyguards for the withered mostly dead corpse of the Emperor of Mankind (don't worry, it mostly makes sense in context).
Somehow this got a shitload of panties in a twist and really "triggered" a bunch of alt-right dbags. Many of them seem to have a surface level understanding of "the lore" and even less understanding that "the lore" has literally never been consistent, and retcons have happened so many times over significantly larger issues. For any sane person playing the game or even interested in the lore, it's basically "Oh, ok, maybe there will be some new minis made and maybe Games Workshop can make some interesting stories about it.".
he never actually uses the word "woke" just says its "the message". The thing is once you start watching the critical drinker youtube will recommend related channels that actually do call everything woke.
I think what helps is searching for your own content in things you want to learn.
My insta feed and YouTube feed don’t really have any crazy stuff anymore because I just don’t engage with it.
YouTube has gotten so fucking bad. The YouTube shorts are even worse than my feed. Some fucking random Christian short with 8 views does not fucking appeal to me. Neither does the 6 year old playing Fortnite on a potato. But somehow it loves to just slide those in there.
Dude, those are like crack to me.
And I hate everything about me loving them. Am I really so pathetic I need videos of younger people “discovering” my old favorite songs and declaring them good?
Yes, apparently.
I'm *very* left wing and unashamedly so, and my viewing habits largely reflect that, yet I still can't swipe more than ten videos before the algorithm is serving me far right extremist content from Andrew Tate or Matt Walsh or others.
Like not just "Stuff I don't particularly agree with" but rather the most vile disgusting "Would've made you a lot of friends in 1930's Germany" type shit you can imagine.
I enjoy gardening, so I get some farming people in my feed. Some are interesting and talk about growing at scale and whatnot. Combine that with the woodworking stuff I follow, and I am inundated with far-right things in my feed. I tell it not interested, but two videos later, it's Jesus says Biden is the Devil!
I have to have talks with my kid about it, and my fear is he won't be as vigilant and turn into a nazi.
During peak lockdown I was looking up videos that had tips to make hand washing laundry more effective and less exhausting (laundromat user) but I knew I was on thin ice above the prepper content so I deliberately removed the videos from my watch history.
Also, a YouTuber who seemed like one of the least culty productivity and Notion tutorial creators turned out to be in a cult.
I have to weed my YouTube recommendations every few days to keep out the propaganda and bullshit. It doesn't matter how much I weed, there are always more weeds trying to get in.
The thing is you can fight it but it’s exhausting. I do feel the burn out of using certain apps because I feel like I have to push back against what the algorithm is trying to direct me to an stay focused on the kind of healthy content that I like. Even YouTube has gotten so bad with this.
I’m just quick to block or hit “don’t recommend” but still it feels like fighting them of with a stick. And most people don’t have the diligence to constantly do that or don’t know that they should.
There really are a lot of social brain functions that get highjacked by social media apps/creators. Especially, that “everyone’s saying it so it must be true” or “everyone’s doing it so I’ll go along”.
I'm not on TikTok, only IG and reddit, but a couple years I go I did a clean up on both IG and reddit of content I was following. I got rid of a lot of politics stuff (I like being informed and know what's going on, but I don't need a bunch of editorial articles telling me how I should feel about a thing) and added more wholesome content. It's been a lot more enjoyable since and my stress and anxiety have definitely decreased. Doom scrolling has mostly been replaced with mindless scrolling, which isn't exactly great, but it comes with less doom, so there's that.
I think people need to realize how the algorithm is affecting their mental health and well being and make different choices on what they consume. I'm a firm believer that "you are what you eat" goes further than just what we put in our stomachs, but also what we put in our heads. At the end of the day, we're all just tools for some corporation to profit off of. Most of them couldn't care less about any of us.
Absolutely. I don’t engage with any Instagram political anything. It’s just rage bait with zero informative content.
My Instagram is hobby stuff I follow, art, engineering videos and cats.
But it's pretty traditional for businesses to completely bald-faced lie to get some money.
Enron published an official Code of Ethics Handbook in 2000.
I wonder if it’s even women owned and not access playing the role for some corp.
If I had money, I would start a team and hire actresses to do a bunch of different accounts
Love how these women make it look like being a stay at home wife is nothing but making sourdough bread in a large, spotless kitchen, and running a vaccum over the rug. And if they're also mothers, then they'll include footage of cuddling their kids (also spotlessly clean) and reading them storybooks. They act like children playing house.
Being a tradwife in 2024 is pretty light work considering all the modern appliances and equipment we have. Even the vacuuming is done by robots now. They probably have a ton of spare time.
In recent years, the “tradwife” movement has shifted from far-right internet subculture to mainstream social media trend, becoming particularly popular among young people. Not every popular homemaking creator is a “tradwife,” though; tradwife influencers specifically preach the gospel of rigid gender roles and biblical submissiveness, glamorizing a 1950s housewife aesthetic while calling for some variation of a “return to tradition.”
To be considered a “tradwife influencer” according to our criteria, a creator had to have a minimum of 20,000 followers, self-identify as a “tradwife,” explicitly promote traditional gender roles, and primarily dedicate their account to promoting homemaking and “traditional values.” Media Matters identified 7 accounts that fulfilled this criteria, then “liked” and watched each account’s 10 most recent videos.
After we interacted with tradwife content, TikTok’s recommendation algorithm began flooding our FYP with right-wing conspiracy theory content.
Our FYP also began displaying medical misinformation and anti-government content, specifically fearmongering about the need to prepare for an impending “civil war.”
Of the 327 videos served to the “For You” page in Media Matters’ analysis, 100 (or 30.6%) contained conspiracy theories or apocalyptic fearmongering.
I love the fact they leave out the 'trad wife of the 50s' was pretty much a pill popping, gin or vodka swilling automaton who wished for an early death
I have.an older Jeep and look for DIY videos on how to fix problems on YouTube ....
From replacing an EVAP to Stormfront and why every patriot needs to horde gold and guns in about 6 seconds
My sister is tradwife influencer. She always had, hmmm, questionable moral system to put it lightly.
Her whole life, she had left wing views. She had kid before being married and didn't baptise her son. I don't have anything against it, but this is important to the story. She bever visited church, etc.
Fast forward few years, she decided to move to another country and open youtube channel as tradwife. On YouTube, she was always deeply believing Catholic, her kids are in church each Sunday, she cook and bake and clean etc. According to her, family is the number one priority. Fun fact is that she does not have any contact with most of my family since she is so toxic that even my mother is doing everything to avoid calls from her. Imagine being so awful person to your own siblings and parents don't want to talk to you! But hey, tradwife with family values and good Christian, right?
It’s super sad for their children, too, because they tend to have a ton of them for pure content exploitation purposes. They do a shit job at homeschooling but have high expectations for these kids to be able to perform for the cameras and parent their younger siblings.
> they tend to have a ton of them for pure content exploitation purposes. They do a shit job at homeschooling but have high expectations for these kids to be able to perform for the cameras and parent their younger siblings.
Isn't this the model perfected by TLC's '19 kids and counting'?
There's so much going on behind the scenes that people being influenced don't take into account. A tradwife influencer has an army of nannies and housekeepers behind her so she can get in front of the camera and make pasta from scratch every single day. It's not sustainable to do all that in front of the camera and keep house to boot all by yourself.
I don’t think the TikTok videos are the problem. They just trend because it’s controversial rather than liked.
It’s the local mom pages on Facebook where this shit is spreading. You’ll see moms talking about being anti-vax, pro homeschool, wild home birthing, and trying to fix their child’s illness with garlic and breast milk.
It’s written so normally like the sun rising that other moms fall into the fear and think there is truth to it.
"Remember when women had even fewer rights, protections, or even standing in their own homes? That shit was great, wasn't it? Smash that Like button, hit the bell, and don't forget to subscribe"
trad-ladies, take your bible off the shelf, take the dust cover off, crack that baby open for the first time, give the spine a gentle stretch, enjoy the smell of ink on paper and then locate timothy 2:12
Is anyone surprised?
No rational intelligent female wants to go backward and give up rights hard fought for by mothers grandmothers great grandmothers.
If you want to chose to be witless barefoot and pregnant that’s is your choice but do not take way my choice to be a single intelligent professional woman taking care of my own damn self!
We knew someone who grew up really smart and then married a right wing loser and then ended up making facebook posts about mike pence and moved to florida.
Radicalization is a quick and slippery slope
They are just another arm of the far right propaganda ecosystem like Ben Shapiro or Tim pool. They're trying to sell women on the freedom of living under family authoritarianism, it is openly very right wing if you know anything about politics
I just assume it’s all a grift. Why do it if you can’t make money. If someone is offering advice online they probably have something to sell or hock. Anything that comes from their mouths will only be in the service of selling more product. So for me by default I don’t listen to their shtick
I've found over my nearly 30 years online that anything health or beauty related is simply one of the worst things you can google for actual good info. If the average user happens to find anything that isn't a direct ad, a misleading ad, a third party ad for something tangentially related or a straight up scam, they wind up on wordpress sites that are ads dressed up like product review sites. Its all very terrible. And if you try the same searches on something like YouTube, or Yahoo, that way lies madness.
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This is a similar pipeline my parents went through in the 90s. Started innocent enough with a home garden and taking care of themselves, and ended up with my mom stroking out over a trump conspiracy and my dad going down the prepper path and moving to rural Ghana, where he is either dead or so crazy I don’t wanna hear from him. We are not from Africa, and of European decent, but he was convinced he was “going home”.
>We are not from Africa, and of European decent, but he was convinced he was “going home”. I shoudn't laugh at this but damn....lol
No, by all means. I think it’s hilarious too.
I feel like the pipeline normally ends at being openly racist. Yours ending up in Ghana is a crazy curve ball lmao.
Oh. They were absolutely openly racist. Which meant that I made special effort to not be like my parents. Half my friends, even today, are black, and I even dated a black girl for a while when I was 19-20. My dad moving to Ghana was actually one of his ultimate forms of racism. I don’t even wish to repeat their ideas here, but they had some truly awful things they believed.
Damn your dad moved back to Africa to go try colonizing it again??
I wish this joke weren’t accurate, dude 🤦🏻♀️
I'm not under the impression that this is a joke. This seems completely in line with the minds of neo-Nazis.
Literally just rebranded lebesraum. Although I guess the British were doing it hundreds of years before Hitler.
You might wanna get your water pipes checked for lead contamination. Seriously
So your dad is racist towards blacks...and he moved to Ghana? You know I dont know the figure off the top of my head. But isn't Ghana like majority black? Just a wild guess.
Hard to explain without touching on some hardcore old world racism, but essentially boils down to him thinking people who don’t share his skin color are inanimate objects created to trick “real humans”.
Jesus Christ dude
(this is not my thought but what's in Dad's head).... The Blacks in Ghana don't think they're better than white people. They understand their place.
Got it, welp glad you seemed to have turned out normal
Wow you have such a great perspective on all of it!
Great example of how much better we're going to be when this generation f****** dies off. That sounds angry. I guess I'm angry.
Unfortunately, a lot of them have passed this mind set on to the younger generations. I live in a red state and have met SO MANY young racists it makes me so sad (and happy when I see my kid playing with kids of other races!)
I agree, a lot of outdated evil ideas and beliefs need to go. But they will linger until their holders die out. It does make me wonder what we'll be susceptible to in +50 years and what beliefs we will be vilified for as the generation or two after Gen Alpha wishes for our deaths.
Why Ghana? Is it like a Rhodesia thing?
To be honest, and no shade to OP's parents, I think the pipeline starts at racist-in-closet and ends at openly racist.
Yes. Chances are they were always like this, and merely felt emboldened by rush Limbaugh and talk AM talk radio
Man, the damage Rusty did to the USA is just insane.
He was one of the first adults I just did not like at all. Never had to meet him thank goodness, but his voice was still in our house every day, and my parents would call into his radio show a lot. From my child-like perspective, he just made my parents angry, but they kept calling him. I didn’t get it then and I don’t get it now.
My 96 year old grandmother religiously listened to his show (or Newsmax) at about 100dB because her hearing aids would go dead. My dad would occasionally just turn off the circuit breaker to that wall outlet at like 8pm. He’d turn it back on in the early am before she got up. She’d always go off about hiring an electrician, etc. I don’t think she ever figured it out.
Listened to a lot of Rush (unfortunately), and always felt he was so mean and condescending to the callers, I couldn't understand why anyone would dare call in.
Newt before him
Just a reminder: cancer has been Rush Limbaugh free for almost three years now.
This improved my day. Thanks.
Every conspiracy ends with "Well, you know it's the Jews..."
“Don't you think that if the Jews controlled the media, we wouldn't be on basic cable?” - Jon Stewart
I bet that could make one hell of a funny-sad story stand up routine. (Definitely not that level, and different topics, but I sort of get the whole "they're my family, but fuck")
Damn, are you ok? That’s a lot.
These days? Yeah I’m doing well. Thanks for checking in. Most of this happened 20 years ago now. I’ve had time to heal and process. Sharing my stories on Reddit is a helpful coping mechanism when I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed or down about things. :)
Technically, we all are. He just waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back to his roots.
At least Ghanaian people are nice. Too bad they have to deal with confused Americans like that.
Oh my god, I'm so sorry.
I appreciate it, but don’t worry. I’m doing great these days. I had a good childhood, it’s once I became a teenager in the 2000s they got very crazy. We lost our house in 08 because they stopped paying taxes and mortgage because they didn’t really believe the government was legitimate once Obama took office (shocker). Picked myself back up by the early 2010s.
I’m sorry for laughing but what a way to lose your house. Glad you’re doing good, I’ve got a lot of ridiculous stories about my insane parents but that one’s genuinely baffling
It was super intentional on their part, I’m just still not exactly sure why. Well, I am, but also, I’m not. I’m pretty sure they had bought into conspiracy theories about sovereign citizenship. That was their jam for sure. They were super active politically with the Republican Party in the late 90s and into the 2000s, my dad even running for senator a few times and getting close to winning. But he didn’t and I think that sent him off on the deep end into conspiracy theories. I have some really insane stories. My favorite being the time I woke up hungover from a party and went downstairs to the kitchen to see them talking to god damned Michelle Bachman in my living room. Awful thing to wake up to.
Did they let their drivers licenses lapse too? Or is that part of the government OK to them because they would get pulled over?
Yes, they would let their drivers licenses lapse and not renew it. I remember being 12 and telling them not to do that because they’d get fined, and they were adamant that the fine wouldn’t hold up to the constitution or something. I just wanted to be able to go to my friends house and eat fast food, but they turned it into a political conversation. Every time.
This descent into madness aptly describes my MIL. She’s so goddamn loony. She has all of this: the natural foods stuff, drugs/doctors are evil (unless she’s sick or needs surgery 🙄), sovereign citizen bs (my husband registers her car so she doesn’t get her dumb ass locked up). Add to the trajectory that she of course won’t take vaccines, and now she has HER ONLY GRANDCHILD born in March and won’t see her until she’s six months old so that, what, the baby gets vaccines and she can’t make her sick? It’s like: so then you KNOW vaccines ARE effective and that you’re a Typhoid Mary lol. She had a mask with holes in it during COVID so that she could go in the grocery store. Gah fucking makes me nuts. I’m relieved she won’t be visiting until I’m back at work. Gonna pick up as many 12 hour shifts as possible that week. The worst people on earth are ones who think they’re smarter than everyone else but are objectively dumb as all fuck.
Your experiences sound so interesting I’m sure you could write a magazine article on them.
I think that’d be a cool thing to do. I don’t know if I need a whole book to convey it, but a few page article would be an interesting thing to write. It was a childhood of a lot of social extremes in one way or another.
The sovereign citizens movement is so strange. There are lots of videos of people getting arrested by arguing with the police that they’re a “sovereign citizen” and can’t get arrested for violating traffic laws or whatever. It’s basically the same as Michael Scott going, “I declare bankruptcy!” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_citizen_movement
Goddam that last part would be a living nightmare for me.
It was surreal. They tried to get me to say hi to her, but I wouldn’t. I knew who she was and wasn’t impressed.
God. Obama’s election really broke something in their brains.
Why is it always the home gardening 😭
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I feel as though they also don't understand that farming at the scale required to feed the country, and the world, is a massive undertaking that requires millions in up front capital from the ammonia to enrich the soil to the quarter-million plus dollar tractors, and that's before i.plements and additional labor. I'm not defending the modern farmer by any means, they're some of the most arrogant,socially backwards people I've ever had the chance to meet in some cases. But without ammonium nitrate the world starves, there's just not that much arable land to sustain the population with our current eating habits.
I don’t think there’s inherently anything wrong with home gardening, but I’ve been learning it’s a theme. 😕
I know, but I think it's funny that something as wholesome as gardening seems to be a gateway drug to conspiracy land
Ties in with our culture of "rugged individualism" and mistrust of authority. "Grow your own food; it's healthier" is not far away from "Grow your own food; the industrial food system is poisoning you and they know it". Does that sound vaguely similar to other conspiracy theories?
I have a garden because I love growing my own vegetables and because I have always been enthralled by the idea of “victory gardens”
There must be a post every week in/r/gardening asking for 'non weird' YouTubers to follow
You are absolutely right. I grow tomatoes because I dislike the mealy tasteless store bought ones. So I frequently search YouTube for gardening tips on how to increase yield, rotate crops, pest prevention, composting,etc. and the next thing you know, the YouTube algorithm is suggesting that I watch those "Build a pool with ancient tools" type of videos along with random Stoicism, Jordan Peterson and Andy Tateworm videos sprinkled in, so gross.
Martina McBride has a lot of good gardening tips/videos on her Instagram.
As someone that enjoys gardening and indulging in dreams of a hobby farm lifestyle, it is very tricky to find that sort of content without getting a heaping dose of antivax woo shit, Quiverfull, Christian fundamentalism, crypto or MLM, extreme prepping, or anything else like that. Honestly the best cottagecore content right now seems to be queer. Give me a lesbian shearing sheep or a cute gay boy and his boyfriend growing the biggest tomatoes and it keeps its charm without being propaganda for shitty ideals.
It’s generally some good stuff if you can filter out that specific craziness. I think you found a great filter.
Maybe it’s lead in the soil, lol
It's the first step of "I don't need this society."
Ah, the first seeds of discontent
I think it is a good fear/work relationship to exploit. I want to eat healthier, so I look at my food and buy more vegetables from the supermarket. Then I noticed that all the health influencers grow their own because they "just want to know it's safe". Wait, safe from what? Chemicals they say, ok so I grow my own food and it takes a lot of effort but I feel good because I don't have all the chemicals (a valid statement to some extent). Then I'm convinced by bigger fears to go to more effort and the cycle continues until I'm building a bunker and raging about lizard people.
> ...my dad going down the prepper path and moving to rural Ghana... He sure did walk the walk.
What in the fuck.
I said that a lot, when my parents were still here.
Honestly, and I do believe you, but you should write an article for VICE or something, where you just chronologically go through the craziest parts. Wouldn’t even matter to me if it was true or not. I'd read it. Though life *is* stranger than ficiton, so I'm inclined to think you're actually serious.
I am serious lol. I talk about it on here every so often as i think it helps me process a lot of the insanity. If I can some how get vices attention I’d be all about it.
I relate. I often find it easier to just say that my dad died. He isn't remotely the person he was, nor does he have the attachment to reality that he did. I can barely remember what his voice sounds like after all these years. Every father's day I think about how these social media fascists have taken so many loved ones, including mine. They are causing such significant mental health harm. North American culture has gotten sick since these ideologies became super charged after 2016. Some days I try to be hopeful. Some days, not. I will never forgive conspiracy nuts for taking my family from me.
I’m actually so glad my parents didn’t make it to actually see the trump presidency. They would have been all over this new shit. I’m right there with you man. I get it. It’s so tiring. I have extended family that aren’t super crazy so that’s nice. 🙂
That is an absolutely wild story. Sorry it happened to you, Bud.
Thank you. I don’t know anything else so it’s not “that big of a deal”. I only know objectively and retrospectively that I missed out on a more normal childhood, but i think it’s sort of like being colorblind. I know I’m missing something, but I don’t have any other experience so I can’t really even be that upset.
WTF? Talk about a fish out of water story. I’m sorry
Why does it almost always start with trying to eat better? My Dad did that in the 90s. By the 2010s he was watching Alex Jones every day and talking about how it makes no sense that the Moon always faces the Earth. I tried to explain Tidal Locking to him but he simply would not listen to anything I said. He eventually became so insufferable we all had to stop talking to him for the sake of our own mental health. I haven’t spoken to him in 8 years and I have no desire to. In his mind he’s the one not talking to us.
> Why does it almost always start with trying to eat better? Because health and nutrition is a field where we definitely need more work to understand exactly how our bodies work. Since there is a lot we still don't understand, pseudoscience flies around freely and can lead people down rabbit-holes of nonsense.
There’s also a big overlap with the way high control groups/cults dial in on behavioral things like food, sex, and clothing to control their members and signal their loyalty and obedience. Food in particular encourages the notion that in-group members are better, more pure, and have access to special knowledge the rest of the world doesn’t (and if they make heavy use of fasting or starvation that makes everyone more vulnerable to manipulation). Also the group can use sales of special supplements or food products to fund itself. General wellness gurus can also get in the habit of telling everyone how they should live and can start taking on cult leader tendencies.
Precisely, every major religion or cult has to control at least one of the primary human drives. You can think of it being the engine of the crazy in a sense. You subjugate the food drive and use that to drive all the other behaviors that you need, or you subjugate the sex drive and use that to drive an entire administration of priests and so on.
Diet is ultimately about control. It’s one of the few fundamental things you can control that has a very direct and observable influence in life. Many people on the conspiracy theory fringe seek control over things they don’t understand or have no control over. Choosing to believe something that they think is something only they understand (and a select few) gives them a sense on control. Diet can be a gateway to a sense of control and why you see as many sham diet trends as actually healthy ones.
My sister researches nutrition. It's pretty well known the placebo effect is extremely strong in that field. If you ask one group of participants to spend hours preparing specific recipies (That you provided all ingredients for) and a second group give the exact same foods, except you prepare it for them. The first group will report MUCH better results in mood, alertness, fitness, hell even their childrens' behavior. Also, nearly every diet has the chance of working if it succeeds in getting people to actually pay attention to what they eat. Mindless eating is one of the big reasons diets fail. So a cult comes in, demands a specific diet that people have to work for. And... it works. People feel better. Suddenly you have a hook in them, they trust you, they listen to other things you say. So... TL:DR- The best diet is one you can follow. Don't trust cultists who give you food advice, even if it works.
There's also how eating better usually involves depriving yourself of something you want, which just happens to be a control technique used by every cult in history. There's something about being in that deprived mindset that makes you extremely malleable
I definitely feel more fascist when I'm hungry
Eat a snickers
The health-food and "wellness" business has been crawling with con artists since the time of the snake oil salesmen. In addition, a lot of people have anxiety over their health and their diets, which, along with relentless advertising and disinformation, drives orthorexia and endless food fads. Similarly, most people have no clue as to how the economy works, or how to invest money, so you end up with gold bugs, cryptocurrency scams, NFT grifters, Audit the Fed crackpots, and similar parasites. Right-wing media is crawling with advertisers for that kind of frauds. And now there are media with greater reach, with greater ability to find suckers and push tailor-made pitches to them for not only quack cures and phony investments, but gangster politics too.
>how it makes no sense that the Moon always faces the Earth. What in the actual fuck?
Yeah, it takes the same amount of time for the Moon to rotate on its axis as it does to orbit the Earth, which means the same part of the Moon always faces the Earth. It's not easy to get your head around the mechanics of how that works. I had to sit down with two pieces of fruit to see it in action.
My oldest BIL went full vegan about 25 years ago, really thought he could eat his way to better health. Unfortunately he looks back now and feels that he went too far, ended up having a series of strokes at 49 that left him permanently disabled. He thinks his low fat/essential fatty acids diet did more harm than good to his heart and brain.
We need parental control for our 50+ parents.
We need Clippy to pop up and tell them, “It looks like you’re looking at something that isn’t true. Here are some dog and cat pictures.”
That’s becoming less and less of an excuse for falling prey to conspiracies. I’m in my mid 40s and had computers at home most of my life and internet in my teens. We played EQ in college and WoW in my 20s. I’ve shopped online my entire adult life. My work and most work environments have required computer and internet knowledge my entire adult life. I’ve been on social media my entire adult life and had smart phones a large part of it. I learned have to build PCs from boomers. Older adults now should know how to use technology and the internet properly.
I'm in my late 60s and know my way around a computer, since I have done software for a living since college. Most people my age can barely tell their ass from a hole in the ground. But I think conspiracy propaganda is a bigger problem than just technological ignorance. There are some really evil fuckers behind it and it needs to be rooted out and the sources shut down. It's a war that's being waged against a vulnerable population. Ignoring it and hoping it'll go away is suicidal. Also, I believe that there is a moral imperative not to be a sucker. Enabling con artists and manipulators is destructive to society.
It’s also tricky because it makes sense from a logical point of view. Conspiracies thrive when there is no transparency and accountability on the government and corporations part. *Monsanto doesn’t care if you die* and *Medicines will kill you* are two different statements, and only one is false. But damn, they look so similar…
Unfalsifiable claims can never be disproven. So you can keep pretending they’re true forever.
The goal of propaganda isn't to get you to believe its to get you to disbelieve. If you trust nothing the irony is you'll trust whoever is **most confident sounding** which will always be the fascist in the room because they make everything black and white rather than the other side, reality, which deals in complexity, nuance and data.
There’s also a terrible and very possible logic to some of the medicine ones. “Medicines are there to keep us sick” sounds crazy at first. But then they drop “Companies wouldn’t make money if they cured you. Selling you one pill or selling you hundreds”. Now once you know actual medical info, you know it’s not that simple. But if you tell Jim the reason he’s so sick all the time is all the damned pills (and not being 150lbs overweight and drinking a 6-pack every night) he may just believe you.
It's such stupid logic though. There are lots of pills where you take them and then the problem goes away. Have these people never taken antibiotics? Painkillers?
Painkillers may not be the great example you're making it out to be. We are kind of on the tail end of an opiod epidemic, that has killed hundreds of thousands, because of blatent and largely unprosecuted lies that some big pharma companies told.
The problem is the world is a complex place and conspiracies live in the minds of people who struggle with the complexity. Transparency is a wonderful gateway but it’s always rooted in the world being too complex.
No, it does not “make sense from a logical point of view.” It is literally the completely opposite of that…
The sites she's using also learn she'll watch those kinds of things then add similar stuff to recommendations/feeds. Mostly it's based on what other people who watched the video also watched but there is some other things factored in like engagement. It's the same sort of mechanism that makes YouTube think you love cat videos right after you clicked on one or five in a row. To stop going down the rabbit hole people have to do things to tell the algorithm they're not interested. As an example I'm into firearms so will watch firearm content on YouTube. Unsurprisingly right wing politics can often get on to those channels or are watched by a lot of right wing folks. That can lead to some wild video recommendations I'm not interested in. I basically had to correct YouTube's algorithm every time it showed me right wing political stuff. There is a little menu around the video that lets you select "not interested" or "don't recommend channel". The profile or whatever seems to eventually figure it out. I don't really expect a lot of people to be mindful of that sort of thing. Especially older folks who fall for Facebook/Twitter "facts".
> The sites she's using also learn she'll watch those kinds of things then add similar stuff to recommendations/feeds. The algorithms are designed to find the gullible. Advertisers and unscrupulous political movements love people like that. They can be ripped off, and they can be manipulated to believe any old bullshit.
I had a pretty long debate with a friend over an article he shared and berated online. It was about the self-help to alt-right pipeline, specifically the way men use fitness to recruit. He blasted it as "left-wing propaganda against self-improvement". The dude was an alcoholic and made big changes to his lifestyle. He began attending the gym around 5-6 days per week and was getting very into stoic philosophy. When we talked about it, I pointed out how the YouTubers he was following were influencing him. Dude went from being empathetic to "all politics is bullshit, counselors are hacks, and people are responsible for their own problems". He essentially became blackpilled, which is a great way to push someone into an antisocial worldview. The alt-right are very sneaky with using lifestyle content to influence people. There's a whole brand of "pastel fascism" that uses yoga and new-age spiritualism to recruit women. Men are typically targeted with content about health, fitness, stoicism, and dating advice.
damn. your poor dad. i’m sorry.
I feel like the older generation are vulnerable to “it’s on the internet” because everything published used to be vetted, and so we automatically trusted books and publications. Now, anyone can say anything on the internet and that means it may not have gone through any hurdles to validate the legitimacy. On the other hand, the younger generation lived in a world where everything was online, so they either treat everything with skepticism or trust everything, or don’t care. I don’t know. I tend to trust the established players more, but I also know even they are influenced by money. Really, everyone should study and apply critical thinking, regardless of your attitude on internet information.
This is one major way cults, religions, etc have gotten people in the door for thousands of years. There’s always some bit of useful knowledge (don’t eat pork and you won’t get sick, talking to someone about your problems helps, you’ll lose weight if you eat fewer calories — even of they’re mostly fat). Once the person trusts the advice-giver, then they ramp up to the crazier stuff. It’s a huge vulnerability in people and I think it’s one of the big reasons why education can be so harmful to religion/cults and why those forces always rally against it.
> don’t eat pork and you won’t get sick The Chinese ate pork for millennia and didn't get sick. They knew to cook it thoroughly.
“It’s all over the internet” Yeah, so is child porn. Something being on the internet doesn’t validate its legitimacy. The internet is full of information, but also is a seedy, dark place full of misinformation, disinformation, and malicious actors, just like the real world. The internet is not some curated library, or encyclopedia. It’s like the town square, where any lunatic can get on a soap box and shout conspiracies into the clouds. Just like we wouldn’t pay attention to that lunatic, we should pay heed to just any lunatics on the internet either. I’m not sure how old your mom is, but if she’s over 40 she, unlike many millennials and younger gens, may not have been taught basic skills in school about internet usage and may not realize what exactly it is. I find this often times leads people down manipulative rabbit holes without realizing it. They wouldn’t listen to the crazy guy at the bus stop go on about globalists secretly ruling the world, but think a webpage has legitimacy because of a lack of understanding of what the internet is. That being said, shoving peoples face into reality often only hardens their delusions, but asking probing questions and stating your concerns on the means of how research is being conducted can be helpful in leading them to start asking questions themselves that can get them out of the rabbit hole.
I was feeling insulted at 43, but then I remembered that I was the weirdo who was the only one using the Internet in high school.
Yeah, I’m not saying that anyone over 40 doesn’t understand the internet, but that the mid-eighties is likely the earliest inception of public school computer classes that taught about *the dangers of the internet*. I get the impression that younger folk at times may not realize the extent that older generations with different upbringings weren’t raised in internet culture, nor even with computers, and thus are simply less familiar and less aware of its pitfalls. And even with computers in the 80s and 90s the internet wasn’t the seedy place that it is today. I think many of us may take for granted just how much our teachers drilled into us a heavy skepticism about things on the internet and that our parents didn’t get that.
I graduated elementary school in 1998. We had computer classes, mainly in the middle grades, but we never once got any sort of “dangers of the internet” stuff. The Web back then was pretty basic and most of us who used it did so via dial-up. My computer classes were mainly Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing and those classic edutainment games. I had to learn about the dangers of the internet by myself, mostly after everyone was on DSL. This whole thread makes me feel so old lol
Computer classes were basically a different planet for us in the ‘80s and ‘90s. It was kind of a vague consideration that we might maybe someday use a networked computer, and hack into the pentagon or something. We were on Apple IIes well into the ‘90s, and this was a well funded public school.
The older generations will believe ANYTHING written down.
There's a good reason for that. Back in their day, for something to actually be written down and easily accessible/popular, it had to go through at least *some* scrutiny before publishing. Newspapers had editors that checked if stories were legitimate, verifiable, or at least made sense. If they got something wrong, they would issue a correction. Even nightly news on TV was pretty reliable. That all changed with the 24-hour news cycle, which could just air opinions presented as facts, and absolutely changed with the internet. And now, AI. It doesn't excuse their lack of skepticism, but it does (at least partially) explain it.
[Still relevant today.](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/194/302/8b9.jpg)
Porn is also all over the internet, what does she think of that
Is your mom my aunt lmao
These engagement algorithms always seem to go from “here’s another cat video to batshit crazy” in about 3.6 seconds. On of my guilty pleasures are those stupid music reaction videos where someone has lived under a rock a never heard classic rock and gets exposed to it for the first time. (I know it’s professional wrestling but it’s nostalgic) Recently it seems some of these guys slip in some really questionable off hand comments. Like qanon stuff or moon landing was faked or home school your kids because big government. I’ll go in and block that channel but it’s crazy how much I’m getting pushed to engage with crazy. I hate it
I wish there was a dial for “I just want to see normal reels” without bait rage
instagram: "sorry, best we can do is 3 cat videos at maximum, followed by tons of bigotry, trolling and conspiracy theories🤷♀️"
YouTube is nefarious that was. I was on medical leave after neck surgery and had a bunch of time to kill because I basically couldn’t move, it was major neck surgery and my head felt like balancing a bowling ball on a pool que. Anyway. I watched YouTube videos and watched a few from Critical Drinker reviewing movies. Well, after a few I start noticing how they are talking about woke this or woke that and it dawned on my how they sneak in and try to grab you with something relatively innocent. Then they start more and more, deeper down the rabbit hole. So anyway, the moon landing is fake, Hollywood is woke and the earth is flat.
Stanley Kubrick filmed the moon landing. But he was such a perfectionist that he insisted on filming it on location.
I love that line. It reminds me of [this XKCD](https://xkcd.com/966/)
Does the Critical Drinker say that?
Yeah dude. Very anti woke, noticed on Captain Marvel.
Most recently he also went on some long rant about female Custodes in Warhammer 40k. The tl;dr is that a page long story in a recent rules book made the first explicit mention of female members of a particular type of superhuman bodyguards for the withered mostly dead corpse of the Emperor of Mankind (don't worry, it mostly makes sense in context). Somehow this got a shitload of panties in a twist and really "triggered" a bunch of alt-right dbags. Many of them seem to have a surface level understanding of "the lore" and even less understanding that "the lore" has literally never been consistent, and retcons have happened so many times over significantly larger issues. For any sane person playing the game or even interested in the lore, it's basically "Oh, ok, maybe there will be some new minis made and maybe Games Workshop can make some interesting stories about it.".
he never actually uses the word "woke" just says its "the message". The thing is once you start watching the critical drinker youtube will recommend related channels that actually do call everything woke.
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I think what helps is searching for your own content in things you want to learn. My insta feed and YouTube feed don’t really have any crazy stuff anymore because I just don’t engage with it.
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YouTube has gotten so fucking bad. The YouTube shorts are even worse than my feed. Some fucking random Christian short with 8 views does not fucking appeal to me. Neither does the 6 year old playing Fortnite on a potato. But somehow it loves to just slide those in there.
Like I said it’s WWF
Leave the pandas out of it
Dude, those are like crack to me. And I hate everything about me loving them. Am I really so pathetic I need videos of younger people “discovering” my old favorite songs and declaring them good? Yes, apparently.
Right??? Like yeah please show me an 18yo learning that Ozzy had some solid opinions about the military industrial complex.
Or show them Dee Snider (Twisted Sister) chewing out Congress in the 1980s.
Maybe it's because you get to relive that precious moment where you find something new that speaks to you, but vicariously. Any time you want.
It's fun to see people enjoy the things you also like.
I'm *very* left wing and unashamedly so, and my viewing habits largely reflect that, yet I still can't swipe more than ten videos before the algorithm is serving me far right extremist content from Andrew Tate or Matt Walsh or others. Like not just "Stuff I don't particularly agree with" but rather the most vile disgusting "Would've made you a lot of friends in 1930's Germany" type shit you can imagine.
I enjoy gardening, so I get some farming people in my feed. Some are interesting and talk about growing at scale and whatnot. Combine that with the woodworking stuff I follow, and I am inundated with far-right things in my feed. I tell it not interested, but two videos later, it's Jesus says Biden is the Devil! I have to have talks with my kid about it, and my fear is he won't be as vigilant and turn into a nazi.
During peak lockdown I was looking up videos that had tips to make hand washing laundry more effective and less exhausting (laundromat user) but I knew I was on thin ice above the prepper content so I deliberately removed the videos from my watch history. Also, a YouTuber who seemed like one of the least culty productivity and Notion tutorial creators turned out to be in a cult.
I have to weed my YouTube recommendations every few days to keep out the propaganda and bullshit. It doesn't matter how much I weed, there are always more weeds trying to get in.
They’re not doing shit “quietly” at all. They’re a loud ass bunch.
for real, like every other video on social media are these propagandists.
Yeah, and it's been going on for at least 5-6 years by this point.
If they were quiet they wouldn’t be so annoying, but they’re loud af.
The algorithm demands controversy, not enlightenment and embetterment. All of these doom scrolling apps are mind poison.
The thing is you can fight it but it’s exhausting. I do feel the burn out of using certain apps because I feel like I have to push back against what the algorithm is trying to direct me to an stay focused on the kind of healthy content that I like. Even YouTube has gotten so bad with this. I’m just quick to block or hit “don’t recommend” but still it feels like fighting them of with a stick. And most people don’t have the diligence to constantly do that or don’t know that they should. There really are a lot of social brain functions that get highjacked by social media apps/creators. Especially, that “everyone’s saying it so it must be true” or “everyone’s doing it so I’ll go along”.
Idk my feed is pretty wholesome.
I'm not on TikTok, only IG and reddit, but a couple years I go I did a clean up on both IG and reddit of content I was following. I got rid of a lot of politics stuff (I like being informed and know what's going on, but I don't need a bunch of editorial articles telling me how I should feel about a thing) and added more wholesome content. It's been a lot more enjoyable since and my stress and anxiety have definitely decreased. Doom scrolling has mostly been replaced with mindless scrolling, which isn't exactly great, but it comes with less doom, so there's that. I think people need to realize how the algorithm is affecting their mental health and well being and make different choices on what they consume. I'm a firm believer that "you are what you eat" goes further than just what we put in our stomachs, but also what we put in our heads. At the end of the day, we're all just tools for some corporation to profit off of. Most of them couldn't care less about any of us.
Absolutely. I don’t engage with any Instagram political anything. It’s just rage bait with zero informative content. My Instagram is hobby stuff I follow, art, engineering videos and cats.
Nothing traditional about a women business owner making money from nostalgia porn.
But it's pretty traditional for businesses to completely bald-faced lie to get some money. Enron published an official Code of Ethics Handbook in 2000.
of course they did.
Traditional enough that Phyllis Schlafly did it decades ago. I'd say it's a fairly traditional hypocritical grift.
It's always been part of the fundie con.
I wonder if it’s even women owned and not access playing the role for some corp. If I had money, I would start a team and hire actresses to do a bunch of different accounts
[Betty Crocker all over again.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4TOEPyY3Lo)
Love how these women make it look like being a stay at home wife is nothing but making sourdough bread in a large, spotless kitchen, and running a vaccum over the rug. And if they're also mothers, then they'll include footage of cuddling their kids (also spotlessly clean) and reading them storybooks. They act like children playing house.
That’s part of the fantasy. Someone offscreen is doing the nasty bits.
Shouldn’t they be in the kitchen rather than making videos and running businesses?
“Tradwife for thee, female entrepreneur for me”
This is what I wonder.
Being a tradwife in 2024 is pretty light work considering all the modern appliances and equipment we have. Even the vacuuming is done by robots now. They probably have a ton of spare time.
In recent years, the “tradwife” movement has shifted from far-right internet subculture to mainstream social media trend, becoming particularly popular among young people. Not every popular homemaking creator is a “tradwife,” though; tradwife influencers specifically preach the gospel of rigid gender roles and biblical submissiveness, glamorizing a 1950s housewife aesthetic while calling for some variation of a “return to tradition.” To be considered a “tradwife influencer” according to our criteria, a creator had to have a minimum of 20,000 followers, self-identify as a “tradwife,” explicitly promote traditional gender roles, and primarily dedicate their account to promoting homemaking and “traditional values.” Media Matters identified 7 accounts that fulfilled this criteria, then “liked” and watched each account’s 10 most recent videos. After we interacted with tradwife content, TikTok’s recommendation algorithm began flooding our FYP with right-wing conspiracy theory content. Our FYP also began displaying medical misinformation and anti-government content, specifically fearmongering about the need to prepare for an impending “civil war.” Of the 327 videos served to the “For You” page in Media Matters’ analysis, 100 (or 30.6%) contained conspiracy theories or apocalyptic fearmongering.
I love the fact they leave out the 'trad wife of the 50s' was pretty much a pill popping, gin or vodka swilling automaton who wished for an early death
> Tiktok Here lies your problem. Whatever content you consume there you’ll soon be funnelled into nonsense/harmful rabbit holes.
I have.an older Jeep and look for DIY videos on how to fix problems on YouTube .... From replacing an EVAP to Stormfront and why every patriot needs to horde gold and guns in about 6 seconds
Youtube isn't that much better, in fairness. I think it was useful that they did their research on the platform more popular for gen z
I would have liked to see them do this on YouTube and Meta as well.
I don’t get the appeal. I would want my wife to make a shitload of money so that we can both get out of the workplace rat race.
Clearly you haven't been listening to enough of Andrew Tate, have you now!
My sister is tradwife influencer. She always had, hmmm, questionable moral system to put it lightly. Her whole life, she had left wing views. She had kid before being married and didn't baptise her son. I don't have anything against it, but this is important to the story. She bever visited church, etc. Fast forward few years, she decided to move to another country and open youtube channel as tradwife. On YouTube, she was always deeply believing Catholic, her kids are in church each Sunday, she cook and bake and clean etc. According to her, family is the number one priority. Fun fact is that she does not have any contact with most of my family since she is so toxic that even my mother is doing everything to avoid calls from her. Imagine being so awful person to your own siblings and parents don't want to talk to you! But hey, tradwife with family values and good Christian, right?
Quietly? They can't shut the fuck up about it, this shit is everywhere.
Something deeply funny about someone spending 80 hours a week editing videos of themselves telling people how quiet and peaceful their life is.
Trad wife influencers are people that like to post videos about how much time they spend with their face right next to the leopard.
Wait till they hit 35 and their husband trads them in for a newer model.
Trad wives are not traditional anything. They’re cosplayers.
It’s super sad for their children, too, because they tend to have a ton of them for pure content exploitation purposes. They do a shit job at homeschooling but have high expectations for these kids to be able to perform for the cameras and parent their younger siblings.
> they tend to have a ton of them for pure content exploitation purposes. They do a shit job at homeschooling but have high expectations for these kids to be able to perform for the cameras and parent their younger siblings. Isn't this the model perfected by TLC's '19 kids and counting'?
Most def. The fundiesnarkuncensored sub here is a great way to see what the trad wife and Christian nationalist types are pushing these days
If only they were quiet about it. They’re fucking everywhere lately.
Not so quietly.
If they are "influencers", they aren't doing it "quietly".
There's so much going on behind the scenes that people being influenced don't take into account. A tradwife influencer has an army of nannies and housekeepers behind her so she can get in front of the camera and make pasta from scratch every single day. It's not sustainable to do all that in front of the camera and keep house to boot all by yourself.
I don’t think the TikTok videos are the problem. They just trend because it’s controversial rather than liked. It’s the local mom pages on Facebook where this shit is spreading. You’ll see moms talking about being anti-vax, pro homeschool, wild home birthing, and trying to fix their child’s illness with garlic and breast milk. It’s written so normally like the sun rising that other moms fall into the fear and think there is truth to it.
Yep. An alarming number of women I’ve gone to church with have gone down this path. It’s concerning as they all have young kids
>An alarming number of women I’ve **gone to church with** have gone down this path There's your problem
"Remember when women had even fewer rights, protections, or even standing in their own homes? That shit was great, wasn't it? Smash that Like button, hit the bell, and don't forget to subscribe"
That’s their fanbase so it’s not shocking that they’re pandering to them. Follow money and the clicks.
trad-ladies, take your bible off the shelf, take the dust cover off, crack that baby open for the first time, give the spine a gentle stretch, enjoy the smell of ink on paper and then locate timothy 2:12
Is anyone surprised? No rational intelligent female wants to go backward and give up rights hard fought for by mothers grandmothers great grandmothers. If you want to chose to be witless barefoot and pregnant that’s is your choice but do not take way my choice to be a single intelligent professional woman taking care of my own damn self!
We knew someone who grew up really smart and then married a right wing loser and then ended up making facebook posts about mike pence and moved to florida. Radicalization is a quick and slippery slope
They are just another arm of the far right propaganda ecosystem like Ben Shapiro or Tim pool. They're trying to sell women on the freedom of living under family authoritarianism, it is openly very right wing if you know anything about politics
I just assume it’s all a grift. Why do it if you can’t make money. If someone is offering advice online they probably have something to sell or hock. Anything that comes from their mouths will only be in the service of selling more product. So for me by default I don’t listen to their shtick
Right wing propaganda is rampant on the internet, the Trolls are out in full force.
I've found over my nearly 30 years online that anything health or beauty related is simply one of the worst things you can google for actual good info. If the average user happens to find anything that isn't a direct ad, a misleading ad, a third party ad for something tangentially related or a straight up scam, they wind up on wordpress sites that are ads dressed up like product review sites. Its all very terrible. And if you try the same searches on something like YouTube, or Yahoo, that way lies madness.
QUIETLY!!!! Well fuck that is news to me!
Well what the fuck are they doing speaking and acting like they've got any agency; they're tradwife LARPers no?