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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I’m so glad to know this didn’t pass by without comment. When I saw it on the BBC in its native environment I experienced a moment of “Is this real? Did I somehow accidentally get to Fox News?” But the comments were turned off so it was this random hyper-Nazi propaganda that was just sitting there like a canker sore. Good to know it got diagnosed.
Speaking of things that would be a better president than Trump, my family has often compared my cat to him, and found the cat better. The cat is soft, capable of love, and he would happily donate the presidential salary to the american people if only he got an endless supply of greenies.
@Joseph K.
I see no links. Why didn’t you provide links? Please provide links. I need to know all about this constant misogyny by feminist men against stay-at-home moms.
@Big Titty Demon
Yikes.
I’ve filed a complaint but I still can’t expect the BBC to handle this well. I just need to boycott more media sources (well, I already avoid watching the news and am primarily informed about the world through my mailing list from various non-profits and one or two blogs – thankfully, none of these non-profits have so far been enabling Nazi scum). I’m just angry that the BBC has gotten away with this.
On the Subject of Lex Luthor as better president: Luthor also divested himself of his business holdings upon becoming president, something Trump refused to do. So another solid case of the fictional supervillain being better.
I joke about it, but you can see DC comics basically saying “Of course he divested himself of his business holdings, that’s just matter of course for becoming President.” I suspect they didn’t even consider him not doing it.
@Schnookums
Nor did I, until Trump…
I’ve been thinking my dog could be a better president. She has a tendency to the mischevious, but she’s not malicious and is nice to people.
Slightly off-topic but I strongly urge people to help British citizens, residents and refugees by signing this. I have signed this already:
https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/resist-facial-recognition
The UK is very enthusiastic in deploying this technology, which hurts women and people of color far more than it achieves justice. Who benefits from this? Big tech companies who simply come up with these things.
It’s great that at least one city in the US has done this (although it’s done at a city where some of the most privileged people live, and the ban should apply nationwide to protect women and people of color from further injustice), but it’s very disappointing that the UK have no opposition to this measure against crime.
@Schnookums Von Fancypants, Naglfar:
Also, Lex spent a great deal of effort trying to at least appear to be above board and following the law, even if he was subverting it. (At least, the post-Crisis big businessman Lex did, the earlier pre-80s versions not so much.) Trump never really bothered, just blustering and bullying his way through, along with quietly caving where it couldn’t easily be seen. I doubt we’ll ever know just how much the Trump family paid in fines to make his father’s redlining charges go away…
@Jenora Feuer
It’s actually hard to think of many fictional villains worse than Trump. At the very least, most of them had some semblance of morality and are more comically evil than practically evil.
In an amusing coincidence… I play DC Universe Online, and the current anniversary event has Heroes and Villains working together to kick out the Anti-Monitor. (Which, of course, actually happened in the original Crisis; a lot of the DC villains are of the ‘I want to take over the world, so I want there to actually be a world left to take over’ type.)
I was playing last night, and was surprised by a somewhat cultured voice saying, “Oh, I am going to enjoy this” before I turned around and saw Lex Luthor in full battle armor knocking Qwardians around.
Just before the 2016 US election Marvel had a comic book series titled Vote Loki… bad timing is very bad. Also he would have been so much better president (not to mention so much more competent liar).
re: better presidents
Why don’t we bring back Kings at this point–like the King of the Koopas? At least he’s *only* trying to kidnap Peach most of the time, and he’ll probably get driven back eventually…Worst case scenario, I’m turned into a brick.
Not King Dedede, though. He’s stolen everyone’s food before. Food is more important than a figurehead.
@Troubelle
I have a bad feeling that we’re headed that way…
As if I didn’t lose enough respect for BBC over their election coverage last year…
@Troubelle:
Yes, sadly, Bowser would make a better leader, and I’d much rather deal with his kids than Trump’s kids.
Again late to the the party, but congrats to your sister and you, Parasol!
As for centrists enabling the right (and lately the far-right), I’d say it’s pretty much an example of the balance fallacy/Golden Mean fallacy/appeal to moderation. It’s very tempting for the average person, especially in the case of things that aren’t perceived as directly affecting them or theirs (or even just them, in too many cases; folks be selfish, yo), to just consider the two sides of an argument to be extreme and automatically bad, so they’re going to be the reasonable ones and go for the middle ground, because that’s automatically the superior position, amirite? (After all, the Missouri Compromise and Compromise of 1850 worked out so swell we never had to hear anything ever again from either abolitionists or slavers! War of Secession? Ku Klux Klan? Jim Crow laws? Tuskegee experiments? Civil Rights movement? Assassinations of MLK and MX? Inner city exodus? Birthers? Black Lives Matter? What’s that you’re even talking about?).
It’s tempting because it allows someone the illusion of being the reasonable one, of being the one ready to compromise compared to those who hold opposite positions. It’s an illusion, but a comforting and flattering one, as it allows someone to have an “opinion” on something without really dwelling on its implications or ramifications, and is a nice little ego boost to boot. And to the average person, who doesn’t really take the time to ponder complex socio-philosophical questions (and doesn’t want to), it’s “good enough”. Never mind that if one side becomes more and more extreme and unreasonable, the “middle ground” gradually shifts towards that particular extreme side. Then one day they either wake up being almost as extreme as one side originally purported itself to be, without really even noticing, or if they have a realization at some point that they’ve gone too far (or that going further would be too far), they get lumped in with the other side and can’t understand why most of the time, especially since due to sliding reference bases said other side now looks as ludicrously extreme, even though it now includes everything left (admit it, you knew this one was coming) of the actual extremist side’s original position, and likely more besides (even most die-hard Reaganites from 1982 would likely be shocked at what the Republican Party and its supporters have become if they were to be plucked from their original time and dropped in 2020; of course, most of those still alive today have likely followed this gradual shift and become a lot more hard-right than they even realize).
Because that’s what right-wing extremists do. They get the centrists to more or less approve, isolate the leftists and brand them bad, to cut them off from popular support, then move the goalposts ever more, bringing the mainstream ever more to the right, tarring and feathering any centrist who one day starts saying that this might be too much, until the apparent “mainstream” is mostly their talking points, and anyone to the left is made to look themself like an even worse extremist (because projection’s a hell of a drug) and singled out for ostracism and persecution. You know this is what’s happening when most right-wingers equate liberalism (a socio-political doctrine that in our current times is centrist at best, if not somewhat right-of-center, even) with not just socialism, but marxism-leninism (what they actually mean when they say just “marxism”).
– Martin Niemoeller, German pastor, ex-National Conservative, first supporter then opponent of Adolf Hitler (and rare exception to the above in that he actually somewhat noticed/understood how he’d strayed)
“First we will kill all the subversives; then we will kill all their collaborators; then their sympathisers; then those who remained indifferent; and finally, we’ll kill the undecided.”
—General Iberico St. Jean, governor of Buenos Aires during the National Reorganization Process
I’d also like to submit, for your consideration, Richard Nixon’s head from Futurama as probably a better potential president than Trump at this point.
@Paireon
I think this definitely plays a role. Those people don’t often know much about politics but by playing “reasonable centrist” they can act as though they’re the enlightened ones and above it all.
@Naglfar – My thoughts exactly. I just like using big phrases and stuff because I love sharing knowledge and ideas to a sometimes problematic degree (unlike actual mansplainers though I enjoy being on the receiving end of good infodumps just as much -case in point, the thread from the previous entry, about the similarities between Stormers and TERFs, where I thanked everybody for giving me so much info about feminism; sharing and accumulating knowledge is one of the few things that make this life worth living, methinks).
Whenever people start the Golden Mean argument of “when there are two opposing sides, nobody is completely right or wrong, and the right choice is in the middle,” I favor the following response:
“Neo-Nazis say that we should murder all of the Jews. Liberals are saying that we shouldn’t murder any Jews. So clearly, the right choice is to murder half the Jews. Right?”
@Allandrel
My guess is most centrists, when confronted with that, will immediately start defending the alt right and saying that they’re not really Nazis and that there are fine people on both sides.
“I want you to give me all the money you have in the bank. You, presumably, don’t want to give me any of your money. How do we compromise?” ?
“All we want to do is eat your brains
We’re not unreasonable
I mean, no one’s gonna eat your eyes
All we want to to is eat your brains
We’re at an impasse here
Maybe we should compromise”
– Jonathan Coulton, “Re: Your Brains”
@allandrel
“If you open up the doors
we’ll all come inside and eat your brains “
@Allandrel – Heh, hadn’t seen that one in the last few years LOL.