By David Futrelle
Is the BBC broadcasting white nationalist propaganda?
That’s the question on a lot of people’s minds after the network ran a profile of a self-described “tradwife” by the name of Alena Kate Pettitt who believes in staying at home and “submitting” to her man like it’s 1959. When she’s not doing chores or cooking up a meal for her hubby she’s promoting a somewhat performative version of her lifestyle on her YouTube channel “The Darling Academy.”
It’s all meant to look and sound very wholesome and innocent; Pettitt presents the #tradlife as something that brings her and other women “a sense of belonging, and home, and quaintness.” as she tells the BBC.
But the “underground movement” of militant stay-at-home-wives and mothers she’s a part of turns out to be lousy with alt-Nazis and other white nationalists — as a number of critics were quick to point out on Twitter, among them historian Mike Stuchbery and social media researcher Becca Lewis.
Even a cursory investigation of the hashtags #tradwife and #tradlife — which Pettitt and others use to promote the movement on Twitter — reveals not only photos of delicious-looking (and sometimes not-so-delicious-looking) home-cooked meals and fresh-picked vegetables and fruits from the garden, but also a great deal of very explicit white nationalism. Here’s a small sampling:
In a recent tweet highlighted in the BBC report, Pettitt purports to be shocked — shocked! — to discover Nazis lurking about in a movement she says is all about a “wholesome, vintage dynamic” rather than racism.
But I don’t buy the innocent act; the hashtags #tradlife and #tradwife are positively crawling with Nazis and assorted other white nationalists; she can’t have possibly missed it. And even if at one point she was ignorant of all this, she can’t claim to be now. She could choose to promote the stay-at-home-wife lifestyle without the alt-right hashtags. But she hasn’t.
That’s her right, but she shouldn’t be surprised if people see her as a white nationalist, or at the very least an enabler of white nationalism. As they say, if there are three Nazis sitting at a table and you sit down with them, there are now four Nazis.
The real question is why the BBC has decided to sit down with these people. Sure, the report notes that the movement she’s a part of is steeped in hate, but they take her denial of racism at face value, and don’t bother to challenge any of her other assertions about the alleged superiority of her lifestyle.
The BBC profile presents her life as freeing and even sort of glamorous, in a homey, retro kind of way — and it certainly doesn’t hurt that she’s young, conventionally attractive, and articulate-sounding, with a smooth delivery that belies the nonsensical nature of much of what she’s actually saying. The BBC producers mostly just let her talk, ignoring any of the possible downsides of her life, ans not even bothering to bring up the rather basic fact that the majority of women, like the majority of men, “choose” to work largely because they have to.
The piece ends with her celebrating the “selflessness” of the #tradwife lifestyle — and putting down the “selfishness” of those women who she thinks don’t “invest” as much in their husbands and families because they work. The BBC offers no challenge to this wrongheaded comparison; they let this white-supremacist-enabler have the literal last word.
That’s really not good enough.
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The BBC is having a field day with hate groups. Last time it was TERFs when they made a documentary about detransition that only involved talking to TERFs and angry detransitioners with no happy trans* folx.
Well, racism definitely isn’t vintage when it’s still alive and well today.
Is anyone else reminded of the Stepford Wives?
Why is the Beeb suddenly promoting hate, in general? First the TERFS, now the White Nationalists…
Not sure I can trust them now.
Watched the video and holy shit is it full of alt-right dogwhistles. It would have been hard to fit more in. At 1:04, she actually scrolls past and ignores several search results referencing white supremacy. It also references Stepford on her website—she seems to have missed that it was a cautionary tale, not an instruction manual. There is just so much wrong here.
Oh no BBC, nooo….
I honestly haven’t felt this much disappointment since the train-wreak that keeps on giving that is Fallout 76. 🙁
She probably leaves the thinking to her man, too, so maybe the ignorance is genuine.
@Definitely Not Steve
I’m mostly just surprised nobody at the BBC raised any alarm. The video very clearly shows several indications of the alt-right connections.
Yes. Now to read the post.
@Naglfar,
I’m surprised by hardly anything from the mainstream media these days. Treating Nazis like they’re a legitimate viewpoint everybody should consider barely registers.
WMDKitty-“Why is the Beeb suddenly promoting hate, in general? First the TERFS, now the White Nationalists…”
Look who won the last election, and has threatened to clean out that hive of treacherous left-wing scum? The higher-ups at the Beeb are running scared and will willingly bend the knee if it means protecting their jobs and perks.
So I guess the Beeb is now full of alt-reich ‘volk’, if noone there raised the alarm? Then again, Brexit happened.
There was never a time in history that the Beeb wasn’t a white supremacist outfit. Granted it’s been a few decades since they were this blatant about it, but that’s the bottom line. Nor are they alone in this; the answer to the question “Is [Major Western News Organization] broadcasting white nationalist propaganda is always yes, yes they are. From Drug War scares to White Slavery and back again, that’s one of their big sellers, always has been.
@David F.
David, you sly jokester.
Help folks. I have a Facebook friend who I agree with politcally completely who sometimes calls to discuss her personal probs. The call before lasted more than 2 hours with me hardly getting a chance to talk. This time I suggested a counselor. I see one for family stuff. She called me a hypocrite and hung up on me. I don’t know what to do. I’m not equipped to be a counselor nor am I pysically strong enough to deal with some of the issues.
@Dreamer
I think you did the right thing. Some people don’t want true communication. Instead, they want a shoulder to cry on — but have no intention of returning the favor. She hung on up you? Pfft.
@Dreamer
I have had many people in my life tell me that I need to see an counselor/therapist, and it was difficult to hear when I was less mature. I still need to see a therapist (working in finding one!) but now, when people say that to me, I’ve begun to hear “you deserve a qualified professional to help you out, and I love you but I can’t do that because I’m not qualified”. Rather than hearing “wow you’re broken, get your cray ass to a shrink”. Fine line.
What I’m trying to say is, don’t feel bad for your unwillingness to be your friend’s fake therapist. Knowing your own limits and suggesting that someone reach out to a professional is truly helpful. It’s what a real friend would do.
1959? I was there. I witnessed it. I couldn’t understand why in a democracy women had to submit to their husbands. I also couldn’t understand why so many married people seemed miserable. Also, in a democracy, everyone belongs. Everyone gets a voice. Everyone deserves to be treated fairly. Everyone who needs it deserves help. In a democracy, neither gender nor race matters.
Luckily, I didn’t find out about the holes in our Founders’ thought processes until much later. It left me room to think my own thoughts, helped by the idealism of the civil rights movement (some of my oldest memories are of photos of civil rights demonstrations) and some — many — novelists.
Thank you folks. Sent a message to her. I don’t want to lose her but I also know from my own damage she *might* need help. Triggered by her. I apologized and explained I’m damaged, lol!
@WMDKitty
If they can make money from being “impartial”, then they’ll do it.
I want to complain, as a resident of the UK, since our taxes are paying for this bullshit. I hate gender policing bullshit like this, and as someone who is not white, these fuckers want me dead. Then again, I shouldn’t complain and I shouldn’t pay taxes for it if possible because it’s too late and they had transphobes on.
I’ve avoided pretty much all media partly for this reason. They’ll do anything for profit, even amplifying repressive scum. I think it’s time to make media suffer through doing anything that will hurt their business.
And for the Nazi scum who believe white people are under threat, no they aren’t. This could have been prevented if people of color and of marginalized genders had much more influence with the BBC or literally any other western media outlet.
Is it wrong this makes me happy that my babies aren’t going to be white because I don’t want these idiots to use them as some sort of poster child if they get my pale skin and red hair. I’m sitting here praying “please have your dad’s hair and skin. Please have your dad’s hair and skin. And maybe his eyes since mama’s do not work”
Most reporters don’t have the context for the white nationalism resurgence we’ve seen. They don’t know WNs have explicitly advised followers to claim everything is “only a joke” when it’s called out. They don’t know the excuses WNs make for their trash beliefs or the dogwhistles WNs use. They don’t know the relationships between Red Pill, Jordan Peterson, explicitly WN groups and Incels. They really have no idea unless that’s an area they specialize in, and most of them can’t specialize anymore because they laid off all the specialists. Newsrooms are rushed, inexperienced (saves money to lay off the oldest, remember) and editorial layers are eroded or eliminated through job cuts and layoffs.
The truly aggravating part is that at one point, a racist speaker came to my area and a fellow reporter was assigned the story. I checked, and saw the person had known associations with Pamela Gellar and others in the movement whose names I recognized. I let the other reporter know, but he did not take my information seriously and as a result, the article, which still took an antiracist tone, failed to provide much-needed context about the speaker’s background, qualifications and associations.
I could not get the other reporter to take me seriously. I could not get him to take the associations with dangerous groups seriously.
The resulting article was good, but without its needed context. I failed to sound the alarm and he failed to take a female colleague seriously, and the supervisors failed to ensure anyone could establish expertise in the area or sufficient work time for deep dive research so that these problems could be caught, resulting in a half-assed article that failed to show the rising tide of White Nationalism.
Soon afterward Trump came onto the scene.
I’ve regretted ever since my total inability to get anyone to take me seriously about these issues. And they still don’t, either. That’s the hardest part. It’s happening all around them and they still refuse to listen to the warnings.
Anyway, that is how reporting can end up so shamefully inadequate.
@Lainy
Not at all. I want their stupid plan to backfire if such tradwife proponents want women to only be baby-making machines. However, we do need to be vigilant for anyone who wants white women to make babies only with white men.
If this catches on with people of color, this is sadly a very sexist movement and will hurt them especially, but it will at least backfire against the Nazi supporters of this tradwife/tradlife bullshit – their efforts to control women will be in vain if the birth rate of white people isn’t massively greater than the birth rate of people of color.
This shit really pisses me off. I feel very concerned as to how appealing this looks – many people are pessimistic about modern life (for many legitimate reasons, such as market fundamentalism and the role of technology and climate change), but this appeal of a traditional life where people are forced into certain roles in order to make sense of a chaotic world is a dangerous ideal.
As someone who read on a forum about a Filipinx individual being murdered by neo-Nazis in Bratislava, Slovakia, it’s pretty important that this needs to be addressed.
Welcome to the Republic of Gilead. We sacrificed hundreds of thousands of our people to fight the Nazis and their allies, just to give the game away 4 generations later. I wish I felt more hopeful right now.
@Jarnsaxa
They will only care if they’re making money even if it upsets woke people. They only care about appealing to the “moderate” masses since they’re the lowest common denominator and the source for the highest profit margins. Said “moderate” masses will not know or care that this is a thing or even be sympathetic to it. Heck, you have the CEOs of Twitter and Reddit who don’t really give a shit about it under the guise of “free speech” (allowing even the most repressive voices to take over their websites).
It is especially shameful to hear a company that primarily gets its money from taxpayers amplify Nazi voices.
I have a two year old son. I would love it if I could quit work to spend more time with him and cook proper dinners and make our house all nice and keep on top of paperwork and make him beautiful clothes and organise fun activities instead of frantically lurching around trying to juggle my work and domestic needs. My husband would also love it if he could afford to be a stay home dad, and he’d be great at it. Even if only one of us could stay home, it would free up some shared time in the evenings and weekends where we could spend time enjoying each other.
I think most people feel overwhelmed by their jobs at some point, but especially parents of young kids. If you take away the misogyny and authoritarianism, wanting to be a stay-at-home parent is hardly a virtuous or unusual desire, it’s just one that most of us can’t afford.
Which makes me wonder – how can Nazis? All of the alt-right I’ve encountered on the internet are living off their parents, their trust funds, or desperately trying to monetize their five minutes of notoriety. All neo-Nazis I’ve met in real life ( in England, on the other side of demonstrations ) have not looked particularly affluent, in fact a sizeable minority of them seem unemployable. I know extreme right wing views are associated with above-average wealth, and discussions of the oppression of the white working class are racist dog whistling, but if you wanted an en-masse picture of the effects of alcoholism and a rough life on white English men, you couldn’t do worse than turn up at an EDF rally. They’ll be the drunk ones pissing on the war memorial at 10am. Where are they getting the money to afford a tradwife trophy.?