STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
And I'm Leila Fadel. It's a common sight on Instagram - millennial women in curated outfits sharing recipes, health tips and parenting advice in spotlessly clean homes.
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LACEY LYNN: What you can expect is lifestyle content, food - lots of food.
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SHYANNE PILCH: Making a bone marrow whip is so incredibly easy. All you do is bake off the bones. I do that to...
FADEL: But some of these accounts are strategically spreading messages of hate. Lacey Lynn and Sensibly Shy are just two influencers who include anti-feminist and white nationalist views in their otherwise wholesome content.
INSKEEP: Many of these women say they're eagerly anticipating Donald Trump's return to the presidency. Now, to be clear, not all accounts are the same. Not all traditional wives - or tradwives, as they're sometimes called - are sharing bigoted content. But groups that track extremist movements say their ideologies are spreading, and social media is key to recruitment.
FADEL: To learn more, I spoke with Eviane Leidig. She researches global extremism and has been an adviser to the U.S. Justice Department, the U.N. and the Council for Europe. She's also a fellow with the International Center for Counter-Terrorism in the Hague. Her latest book is "The Women Of The Far Right." Leidig says that a lot of the people who follow these accounts are unaware of what they're looking at.
EVIANE LEIDIG: They come across this content, and they don't often realize that it's leading them to this rabbit hole of much more extreme content.
FADEL: Yeah. I mean, I can see how that happens, because I was, like, looking at it. I'm like, oh, beautiful family. Pretty.
LEIDIG: (Laughter) Yeah.
FADEL: And then it's like, wait, where's this gun? And what'd you say about immigrants (laughter)?
LEIDIG: Yeah, exactly. So you picked up on the fact that there is a really diverse range of aesthetics. So that kind of cements in either the, like, 1950s suburban housewife and a white picket fence, all the way to the hippie, bohemian, off-the-grid-living, homesteading, aspirational lifestyle. But I think what unites these women is that they have very clear roles in terms of what they see as traditional gender divisions. And they also have a very strong opposition to feminism, regardless of the aesthetic that they promote on their accounts.
FADEL: But is there anything dangerous about that? I mean - or is that just women preaching the life that they happen to be living?
LEIDIG: So the moment that it does become problematic is when it gets tied into what they see as a white nationalist, utopian vision for society. And this is when we start to see a lot of the white supremacist discourse come out, as well as quite a lot of coded language or subtle language. And it's not until you're actually immersed into this community that you actually start to pick up on those signals.
FADEL: Now, if you could describe some of this coded language and the way that it leans into racist theories, anti-LGBTQ language, anti-immigrant views, I mean, how does that look?
LEIDIG: So it often comes across in disappearing content like Instagram Stories, which only lasts for 24 hours. They'll talk about LGBTQ individuals grooming young children in schools and in classrooms. You will also see a broad range of things like population replacement conspiracy theories. So this idea of the great replacement, for example, which is this notion that white people are being deliberately replaced by immigration in Western societies.
FADEL: Is there a sort of coordinated effort going on here?
LEIDIG: Well, I do think that there is a coordinated effort. A lot of these momfluencers were quite politically active in the so-called alt-right, which I noticed in the 2016 and 2020 elections. And for many of these influencers, they deliberately shifted towards posting about motherhood content because they wanted to showcase to their audiences what they hoped would be role models in terms of right-wing traditional families. So it really was a deliberate propaganda choice that they made.
FADEL: These influencers are peddling in theories that end up being very, very dangerous. Is there anything being done about that?
LEIDIG: There is unfortunately very little being done. These influencers are very adaptable. They know what is the gray area when it comes to being able to post content that sits just at that boundary between what is accepted and not accepted on these platforms. And at the same time, there is a gender blind spot when it comes towards recognizing the harms and the quite insidious role that these women do play on platforms.
FADEL: Eviane Leidig is the author of "The Women Of The Far Right." Thank you so much for your time and your insights.
LEIDIG: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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