Is Trad Twitter Giving Conservatives A Bad Rap?

The Times recently profiled the infamously divisive homesteader Hannah Neeleman, better known online as Ballerina Farm, generating a whirlwind of discourse about Mormonism, feminism, agency, but most importantly, the discontents of tradwifery. Social media is abuzz analyzing Neeleman’s digital footprint to cross-reference details and debate whether she’s a brainwashed victim of patriarchy or a glowing example of the idyllic life awaiting modern women if they’d only put down their glass of wine, abandon their cats, and forfeit their Marxist liberal arts education. 

Of course, Neeleman has never purported to be a so-called “tradwife,” though she fits the bill in more ways than not. Owns and works a homestead? Check. Produces children like it’s her full-time job? Check. Aesthetic home kitchen where she prepares elaborate home-cooked meals from scratch on a humble $30,000 stove? Check. 

You get the picture. Neeleman is beautiful, thin, aesthetic, hardworking, procreative (times eight), Mormon, wealthy, traditionally conservative, and white. But she’s also a Juilliard-trained ballerina, a content creator, and a pageant queen who participated in a beauty pageant two weeks after giving birth to her eighth child. She’s precisely the type of woman you idolize, envy, write hit pieces about, spend too long debating the ineffable inner contents of her mind – what subconscious desires may or may not lay within. She’s a freak of nature. The top 1% of the top 1%. 

The Ballerina Farm Hit Piece Is Misdirected Projection

To be so talented that she could get into Juilliard as a classically trained ballerina, to be so principled that she would give it all up to live on a homestead in the middle of Utah to produce eight children. To marry into a family of exorbitant intergenerational wealth, brought into being by a grand gesture of romanticism (or creepy stalking, depending on your perspective). To be so conscientious that she works the homestead of which she has a stake in, makes elaborate farm-to-table recipes, produces regular social media content, competes in pageants, and raises eight kids without any outside help. 

In this way, she is almost too exceptional to be “traditional,” no less because she doesn’t identify with the moniker in the first place, but also because she is an outlier, reaching the pinnacle of excellence in various domains and monetizing what less charitable journalists would characterize as a peasant LARP. Neeleman is painted as a victim of her circumstances – a Serena Joy of Utah, regrettably married to a Fred Waterford, in which her own version of repressive Gilead is her homestead which keeps her from her true dream of dancing. This projective hit piece hints at an abusive hellscape hidden behind the facade of the idyllic trappings of tradwifery. 

Paranoia-laden tweets and TikToks speculate she must cry in between cuts of making buttermilk biscuits. It’s not that the discontents of the trad meme lifestyle are so fantastical as to be an impossibility. Mary Harrington produced an excellent piece for Unherd with the same premise, only she wasn’t making mountains out of molehills to demonstrate the lifestyle’s potential for toxicity. This brings me to the precipice of The Times piece’s point: that women are taken advantage of by institutions, ideologies, and expectations of honor, duty, and purity that strip them of agency and make consenting to such decisions an impossibility. As this person describes Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, “Unspeakable violence lurks under the surface of patriarchal domesticity.” 

The Times doesn’t make a great case that Neeleman is in fact a secret prisoner rid of agency and beholden to the every whim of her husband, mostly because any grain of truth that may be contained in its contents is quickly discredited by the ideological blinders steering the ship. They might have better luck setting their sights beyond opulent pageant influencer homesteaders and onto societies built around genuine policing of women’s decisions, perhaps of the Middle Eastern variety. 

The Toxic Echo Chamber of Trad Twitter

I can't, however, fault the writer for developing a bad taste in her mouth when approaching trad subcultures on Twitter (now X). These groups fester, forming paranoid cliques that run the gamut from esoteric hippies who reject the value of modern medicine to unironic repeal the 19th-ers. Among them are also ironic Christians who spend their days ranting about why the latest repentant former OnlyFans worker is undeserving of forgiveness like a self-appointed deity. Then there's sundress-phobic puritans and internalized misogynists (a term I do not use lightly) overly concerned with assessing the "value" or lack thereof of fellow women, often for male validation. Some self-identified tradwives appear to be more interested in cosplay, which cheapens any genuine value that could be derived from their talking points. 

This is made all the more apparent by their predominantly male audiences, adoption of male talking points, and appearances on uncharitable dating podcasts who cherry pick the lowest common denominator of modern women to flex their faux moral superiority over. These are the bad actors who have shaped the cultural image of the “trad” sphere, which is growing more ambiguous in a digitized, modern world. In contemporary times, where our most “based” tradwives boast public profiles with hundreds of thousands of followers, are they not all e-girls? 

In contemporary times, where our most “based” tradwives boast public profiles with hundreds of thousands of followers, are they not all e-girls?

It wouldn’t matter if the sphere weren’t overly concerned with excessive moralizing, comparison, and doomsday ranting about the demonic vices of modernity contrasted by the inherent superiority of the past. This thoughtless reverence of the past is a gross exercise in naturalistic fallacies whose appeals to tradition are dictated by their lack of openness to experience and intolerance of variety. I’ve come across impassioned rants filled with such conviction over arbitrary differences in lifestyle choices, like opting to give birth in a hospital. Not everything is a “crunchy” mom competition to see who can withstand the most needless suffering for clout. Let your holistic freak flag fly, but shaming women for doing incredibly normal things like relying on the advancements of modern medicine to safely deliver a baby into the world is exactly why normal people shudder at Ballerina Farm’s nanny-less Utah-laden homestead and intuit nefarious business afoot. They associate the image of conservative traditionalism with freakery, schizophrenic mysticism at odds with science, and unrelenting judgment for the most tasteful showing of skin.

Sundress Gate: Modesty as Virtue Signaling

When Evie released a limited drop of our first dress – an amusingly controversial sundress – I regret to admit that I predicted the moral panic about modesty which ensued. Some criticisms had nothing to do with modesty and were perfectly valid expressions of preference, whether about style, cut, color, material, or price range. Too many, however, were an annoying exercise of intrasexual competition. “A woman of God like myself would never deign to wear such a risque dress” was the popular sentiment on trad Twitter. I made a snarky tweet mocking this particularly boisterous crowd, which some interpreted as an unfair characterization of any and all criticisms of the sundress. This was not my intention, which I clarified in the thread.

I made efforts to denounce the shameless pearl-clutching that was taking place en masse for misunderstanding Evie's mission and politics regarding sexual morality. Unfairly lambasted as "Tradwife Magazine" or "like a Gen-Z Cosmo for the alt right,” Evie has been categorized, by association, as a fanatically far right trad magazine. This is a label that might make sense to you depending on your own ideological leanings which shade how you view the rest of the political compass. My only contention is that Evie has never regarded itself as a puritanical publication with its sights set on self-righteous moralizing about such benign displays of healthy “sexuality” like showing your shoulders. This is not to shame religious, traditionally conservative women who do subscribe to strict ideals of modesty, but to point out the limitations of criticizing a publication (or anyone, for that matter) for failing to live up to a litmus test you made up. In the West, we don’t veil our women or hold them responsible for male lust, no matter how fervently some insist we must dress like colonial women to have any place on the right side of the political spectrum.

Evie proudly advocates for conservative, traditional women all of the time, and many of our writers could rightfully be labeled “tradwives” in the most meaningful sense of the word, but what we definitely don’t do is advocate for Islamic or Amish sensibilities around sexual norms. Let me reiterate that by sexual norms, I mean something as benign as wearing a sundress that doesn’t make you look like a beekeeper. If you want to shout into the ether that a company’s first product didn’t live up to your expectations or your personal morals, knock yourself out, but I came across numerous tweets in this sphere coping with their sexually repressed frustrations by projecting a lot of ideological baggage onto Evie. 

Normal people who look at tweets insisting that a publication has committed grave hypocrisy for voicing conservative (or, at the very least, not liberal) ideals while wearing sundresses in the summer are doing cartoonish runs to get away from you, reminiscent of a Looney Toons character tripping over their legs to escape a nuclear blast. Tell me you think it’s ugly, you don’t like rayon, or it’s not your style. Don’t tell me that wearing a spaghetti strap, floral pattern dress or baking a cake while having breasts is akin to a burlesque show, unless you want to be a permanent ideological minority that never gains ground within the general populace.

The Trad-Freak Right Alliance

It can be difficult to discern where Trad Twitter ends and the Freak Right begins. The Freak Right, coined by one of my favorite Twitter philosophers, Edmund Smirk, is just one of many phenomena he has aptly diagnosed that marks the shift in the dissident right ethos in recent years.

The Freak Right is a fringe group of provocateurs less interested in policy, unity, or an optimally functioning society than they are in flirting with sociopathy for likes, edgy dick measuring contests, and a general resentment for anyone with healthy relationships and happy lives. This growing faction of the right has boosted the most degenerate, antisocial of figureheads while castigating good faith actors for not being “pure” enough. You can thank them for the rise in Red Pill content, viral rage bait, and intellectually dishonest podcasts that consist of “owning” a bunch of 18-year-old sex workers.

Smirk outlined his political theory of the Freak Right in The American Mind, where he explains, "Members of the Freak Right have committed themselves not just to building a working-class, populist, and decidedly masculine coalition, but actively alienating suburban women voters in the most needless and outlandish of ways, such as opposing [Taylor] Swift (and Kelce and Tayvis) for being a ‘Deep State’ plant backed by George Soros, the left-wing boogeyman himself." 

He adds, “Its members celebrate criminality, are proudly (though not personally) downwardly mobile, and – if the implications of their batsh*t insane rhetoric are to be taken semi-seriously – want to become a permanent, besieged minority with zero political power.”

What has the trad/freak right alliance done in the past couple years, besides whining about Taylor Swift, worsening gender relations, and becoming terminally conspiracy-brained? 

It’s a movement based on zero morals, a malaise of resentment and loserdom which preys on people’s downfall and allows for zero growth, evolution, or personal failures. They now dominate the bulk of Twitter discourse. The Twitter “For You” Page has been dominated by low effort, bad faith, disingenuous rage bait for at least the past year. It’s not just my feed as someone in the right-leaning sphere, either. You run into countless anecdotes from people online, utterly confused why they’re suddenly being frequently recommended right wing content. This content is often used wisely, from bullying single moms and calling conventionally attractive women mid to gloating about aging women missing their biological clock and taking pride in their childless suffering. 

Identifying what is and isn’t Freak Right-coded is intuitive. You know it when you see it. The Freak Right is Pearl Davis. The Freak Right is Andrew Tate. It’s street interviewers, purposely trying to caricature women as gold diggers no matter how sincerely in love they are with their long-term boyfriend or husband. It’s the Whatever podcast. It’s the people in Lauren Southern’s comment sections – a political figure who has done more for the conservative movement than they could ever dream – accusing her of becoming a radical feminist because her marriage didn’t work out or for failing to cosign genuine subjugation of women. This is a phenomenon most women on the right now have to deal with: pivot to radical lunacy, or we will smear you as a feminist. You can understand the people who rage in Southern’s and various other politically conservative women’s comments much better if you imagine them as Stilgar in Dune, circularly citing anything Paul does as evidence he is the Lisan Al Gaib. Any aversion to blatant misogyny and Islamic ideals of sexual morality policing is evidence the liberal feminist mind poison has gotten to them. As it was written!

Closing Thoughts

All “trad” and “dissident” conservatives have to do is this: less. Stop scaring women. Stop acting like Taylor Swift is the antichrist and like the single mom who stuck around and didn’t abort her child is the cause of all social ills. Stop scaring away temperamentally conservative women who would otherwise be receptive to your message if you just acted normal. If we want people to embrace right-wing ideals, we can’t present them with the false dichotomy of living in an individualistic utopia of wine-o girlbossery divorced from family and a repressive caliphate enforced by resentful scolds. It paints a target on the backs of people like Ballerina Farm, whose family-centered traditional life appears like a dog whistle for something much sinister by association. 

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