Written By Will Grant
 

Imagine a slower pace of life: Growing your own vegetables, spending more time with the children, the smell of freshly baked sourdough wafting through your well-kept home, no pesky job or financials to worry about. That does sound lovely, doesn’t it? And then while your healthy kids are playing in their mud kitchen, you hop online to chat with your tradwife friends about how to ban immigration, ban abortion, and breed out the blacks. Wait, what?!


To be fair, it’s quite a leap to go from baking bread to white supremacy. But there seems to be a connection between these wholesome and traditional values and something far more sinister. For some women, the tradwife movement is as simple as being tired of the rat race and genuinely wanting to spend more time with the family and less time at work. But for the more suggestible traditionalist women out there, it is a pathway to the bigoted alt-right; to the white nationalists espousing racism, misogyny, and heterosexism, sometimes to the point of explicitly advocating violence and terrorism. 


And because we can’t quite understand what the hell sourdough has to do with terrorism, we’ve invited special guest Dr Kristy Campion on the show to discuss the links between the tradwife movement and the alt-right. 


Dr Campion is a Senior Lecturer and Discipline Lead of Terrorism Studies at the Australian Graduate School of Policing and Security at Charles Sturt University. For the past two years, her research has focused heavily on right-wing extremism in Australia, and whilst investigating why there were so many women in a movement inherently dismissive of women’s rights, the tradwife connection became apparent.


We’re all for everyone making their own choices and living life the way they want to. If you want to stay at home with the kids and cook and clean and greet your husband at the door with a cocktail, go for it! If you want to oppose feminism, disagree with women voting, and think women don’t belong in the workforce, whatever floats your boat! (Even if we think that is a stupid boat to float). But it’s when these hate-filled world views fuel attempts to force other people into alignment via means of violence that things get a bit… Trumpy.


An intriguing aspect of extremism, similar to religion, is its attraction for individuals who crave certainty. For people who desire an existence devoid of doubt and ambiguity, with blame for all of life’s problems placed squarely on undeserving populations, the rabbit hole of extremism is all too easy to fall down.


Dr Campion chats to us about the unexpected rise in conspiratorial activity during COVID and an age predisposition towards the baby boomers due to their non-existent digital filter. She also imparts a bleak truth in that at some point, you aren’t responsible for a friend's or a loved one’s beliefs. But fear not! The answer lies in reinvigorating our appreciation of democracy; a rebrand for the 21st century so that democracy once again slaps! If the youth get reacquainted with the pros of democracy and the freedoms and order it affords, then the desire to leave the mainstream lessens and extremism becomes salty af.

 
 
 

  • [00:00:00] Dr Kristy: We do see varying shades of pink when it comes to the traditional triad wife, those that are very benign about it, but then there are others that become quite ideologically committed to it and they start to adopt some of the other views that form that connective tissue with the extreme right when they adopt really racial positions.

    [00:00:19] So you mentioned the white baby challenge. Well, part of that is connected to this idea that white people are being bred out of existence, that white people are being subject to this silent genocide. And so what connects to that is this idea that if you're not white and you're in that country, then you're a threat, which means you shouldn't be there.

    [00:00:37] And that's when you start seeing women, particularly in the trad wife movement, adopting ideas like the great replacement, which we know was a big motivator for the terrorist attack that later occurred in Christchurch, New Zealand. So all these ideas are connected to each other. Not all of them adopt all of these ideas, but they can eventually get to that point where they are endorsing violence, both politically, but also within the home as well.

    [00:01:05] Will: So when you think of a traditional wife, uh, what sort of things come to mind?

    [00:01:11] Rod: A bow in the hair

    [00:01:12] Will: a bow in the hair

    [00:01:13] Rod: a skirt that starts just below the breasts and pushes out. And when the man gets home, she stands there immaculately quaffed and says, not only am I looking great, what cocktail would you like honey? And the children are all bathed and fed.

    [00:01:28] Will: Yes. Yeah. The children are all bathed, the long flowing dresses, the flowers in the hair lots of baking. Kids doing wholesome activities. Kids that are nowhere near any screens. They're all doing, you know, great wholesome.

    [00:01:40] Rod: Well, to be fair, in my view, that the traditional wife thing is it's a 50 stereotype. So of course, there's no screens

    [00:01:47] Will: So it's people gardening, people making, you know, their own food people maybe making their own clothes or doing things that are very wholesome. A lot of that, aside from the genderedness this is appealing to me. I like the idea of a lot of these traditional sorts of things.

    [00:02:02] Rod: You like to eat the clothes that you make yourself. But does that mean, cause I do or have made clothes, I do garden and make food. Am I more down the traditional wife part? Am I a trad wife? I clean the house.

    [00:02:15] Will: I'm gonna dive in with a little bit of definition, but we're going to explore. Okay. So a traditional wife, a trad wife is someone who has potentially dropped out of the modern rat race, looked at the evils of modern society and said, you know what? Some of the ways that families lived, women lived 50 years ago, a hundred years ago, or further back, maybe there's some positives there. Maybe if I lived a little bit more like my grandmother or my great grandmother.

    [00:02:44] Rod: So briefly, but smoking heavily.

    [00:02:46] Will: That's your great grandmother. Maybe life would be a little bit better. Underneath the surface there's something a little bit more, a little bit more something going on. In 2017, Mormon blogger, wife with a purpose, Ayla Stewart. She was living the trad wife thing. So a lot of content on Instagram and a few other social medias. I think she had YouTube.

    [00:03:09] I think she was on Twitter, a lot of pictures of of baking, playing with her kids, doing things at home which are wholesome and lovely things. She responded to a comment from the Republican politician, Steve King. Steve King rightly says we can't restore our nation with someone else's babies. I'm issuing a white baby challenge. I've made six match or beat me. Now you can guess here. The challenge went viral or at least the tweet went viral.

    [00:03:39] Rod: Do you mean as in like a virus that made people feel sick?

    [00:03:43] Will: It made people have a lot of opinions. A lot of people, a lot of people were hostile as you can guess. But a lot of people were saying, I stand in solidarity with Ayla. Love this woman. She's a hundred percent right and make white babies great again. What I want to explore today. What the hell is going on here? What is the link between living a traditional wholesome life and maybe some very sinister things? And to do that, I've invited on someone who's writing on this subject I've found really fascinating.

    [00:04:15] Dr. Kristy Campion. Senior Lecturer and Discipline Lead of Terrorism Studies at the Australian Graduate School of Policing and Security at Charles Sturt University. Kristy, welcome to The Wholesome Show.

    [00:04:26] Dr Kristy: Thank you for having me.

    [00:04:27] Will: When we think about a tradwife, where should we start? How do you introduce the concept of tradwife? And what does it mean that, you know, you study it in a school of terrorism? Not a school of terrorism school, a school against terrorism.

    [00:04:41] Dr Kristy: But yeah, we're very against terrorism here in the Australian Graduate School.

    [00:04:45] Rod: Good to get that out there.

    [00:04:45] Dr Kristy: Look, so I guess the first thing to say about the trad wife movement is that there are many different types of trad wives and only a very small number of them, are people that we would consider to be of concern when it comes to things like far right terrorism and far right extremism.

    [00:05:02] But for the most part, when we're talking about the traditional wife and the trad wife aesthetic, we're really talking about a movement that's largely dominated social media and which largely sees a lot of filtering, a lot of Instagram filters, really representing this bucolic idealistic way of living in which the woman, you know, remains in the home, taking care of the family, the hearth, the garden, and the husband is the male breadwinner.

    [00:05:32] And to, to an extent that is an entirely normal thing, I think, even in contemporary society. But when it becomes interesting to us is when the tradwife ethos becomes fused with something that might just be a little bit more problematic to contemporary society. And that's when we see tradwives saying things that might be racist misogynistic, homophobic, all the way through to explicitly advocating violence and or terrorism.

    [00:06:01] Will: What is the pathway here? I mean, where people coming into the trad wife world? Do they start by thinking, you know, it'd be nice to do more baking?

    [00:06:09] Rod: Who's against baking

    [00:06:10] Will: or I want white people to rule the world. Like where is the start in their thinking?

    [00:06:14] Rod: So I'm guessing there's a few steps.

    [00:06:16] Will: I don't know. There might be

    [00:06:18] Rod: because I'm quite a fan of baking, but the whole white supremacy thing, it's not in any recipe book I've read over to you expert.

    [00:06:25] Dr Kristy: Look, it is quite a leap to go from making your own sourdough in COVID lockdown through to, you know, advocating a white supremacy. But I think one of the tricky things about this is that when we're talking about pathways into potentially problematic or dangerous movements in our society, there is never any one pathway. But what we do know about the tradwives is that it is disaggregated online movement. There's no formal membership, you know, you don't sign up and suddenly the next day you're a tradwife.

    [00:06:57] It is actually a choice that you need to make. And often that choice is informed by what you're viewing online and how you respond to what you view online. So many people would see Tradwife content and go, no, thanks, that's not for me. Whereas other people think, well, this might, this is a bit interesting. I might have a closer look. And so some of the ideas inherent to the Tradwife movement can actually be really appealing for some people.

    [00:07:21] Will: Probably appealing to many. I mean, some of the base level things of baking more and playing with your kids more. I don't think there's many people that say, look, no, I don't want any of those.

    [00:07:29] Rod: Growing your food, making your clothes, you know, not spending all your time totally focused on career and stuff. That is not unappealing.

    [00:07:36] Dr Kristy: You do actually see trad wives say that they were burnt out by the rat race, that they were exhausted with with trying to sort of be everything to everyone. And so in that way, the trad wife ideal in a really benign sense is a form of escapism. Or a way of stepping away from, you know, the expectations of society, but in its more dangerous form, the trad wife ideal is one that is inherently opposed to equality. And this is where it gets a bit a bit tricky when it comes to its role and presence in our society, because the far right trad wife, which is the one that I tend to look at more, typically adopts or, you know, develops certain beliefs that argue that there is a fundamental inequality between men and women, which is both natural and desirable. And this is when you start seeing them talk out and really explicitly reject and oppose things like feminism, women voting, women in the workforce. And with those sorts of narratives comes this whole host of ideas about how society should be structured and who belongs in that society.

    [00:08:45] Will: One of the pictures that I found when I was looking into this topic is this idea of train your boys to be men and train your girls to be women. And there's definitely pictures of the boy, you know, with the dad out hunting and the girl with the mother folding sheets. So that seems to be part of it. This pushing more of these gender stereotypes from an older time.

    [00:09:06] Dr Kristy: Yeah, absolutely. Look, gender is essential to the trad wife worldview. And this is, I would say it's not actually that specific to just far right trad wives, but to the far right in general, for a long time, the Australian far right in particular have had this opposition to what they saw as gendered insecurity.

    [00:09:27] This idea that the, what's normal for a woman to do, what's normal for a man to do that the lines between these things have become increasingly blurred ,which has seen men become emasculated and women become too masculine, and this all feeds into some of their ideas about current society being perverted and corrupt and decadent and all of those sorts of things.

    [00:09:47] So women and men occupying traditional gender roles is actually seen as a more authentic and purer way of living. It's also seen as a better form of, of parenting as well, that they're sort of teaching their children to live a more authentic and more natural life, which has ultimately seemed to be more harmonious.

    [00:10:08] Rod: So these are people who would say the gender roles have become blurred and they will stop talking because we're all supposed to go, and therefore that's bad.

    [00:10:16] Dr Kristy: It is. Yes.

    [00:10:18] Rod: So they don't even have, they don't even feel, I assume that they need to even make the next statement. It's just like gender roles become blurred.

    [00:10:25] Dr Kristy: In some parts of the far right online particularly, it even goes further than that. So it's not just a matter of gender roles being blurred. It's a matter of sexuality being perverted and corrupted. And this is where that homophobic, transphobic...

    [00:10:39] Will: So same argument, same thing. That while we have to be traditional men, traditional women, then we should also be traditional heterosexual rather than... Anything else. Is this a pathway to, to the far right sort of argument? Does the tradwife online discourse, does it open people up to drifting towards the far right sort of world? Is there a risk of that from your perspective?

    [00:11:04] Dr Kristy: Look, I think it certainly can. We do see, I guess, varying shades of pink when it comes to the traditional tradwife. You've got those that are, you know, that are very benign about it, but then there are others that become quite ideologically committed to it. And they start to adopt some of the other views that form that connective tissue with the extreme right. And this is where we start seeing it get a little bit darker, a little bit more problematic.

    [00:11:31] And so this is when it comes to things like, when they adopt really racial positions. So for example, the idea like you mentioned the white baby challenge. Well, part of that is connected to this idea that white people are being bred out of existence. That white people are being subject to this silent genocide.

    [00:11:50] And so what connects to that is this idea that if you're not white and you're in that country, then you're a threat. Which means you shouldn't be there. And that's when you start seeing women, particularly in the trad Wife movement, adopting ideas like the Great Replacement, which we know was a big motivator for the terrorist attack that later occurred in Christchurch, New Zealand.

    [00:12:09] So all these ideas are connected to each other. Not all of them adopt all of these ideas, but they can eventually get to that point where they are endorsing violence, both politically, but also within the home as well.

    [00:12:21] Rod: So as a person who is studying terrorism matters, did you dive into Tradwife and that led you to potential terrorism matters? Or did you start talking or thinking about terrorism and Tradwife came up? Which way does this go for you?

    [00:12:37] Dr Kristy: The TradWife movement came to my attention when I was more broadly researching what women do in the far right, because there's this idea that the far right doesn't serve women's interests therefore, it doesn't make sense that women are there. But we know that women actually form quite a large part of the far right, particularly when it comes to things like finances or presenting, you know, a soft face on quite extreme narratives, all the way through to actually committing acts of terrorist violence.

    [00:13:06] So it started there. And then as I went through, I began to identify that there are certain patterns of behavior that are venerated in the extreme right. There are certain feminine ideals that are held as being better or worse than others. And one of those ideals, the aesthetics, that was particularly important was the trad wife ideal, which is this ideologically conforming, compliant, but most importantly, Submissive woman

    [00:13:34] Will: that you said aesthetics there, that this is an appealing thing as opposed to the, say the neo Nazis of the 1980s, where it's the images that we think of the romper stomper, you know, a gang of young men with shaved heads and jackboots and things like that, which is not going to be appealing to a lot of people.

    [00:13:53] Whereas clearly within the trad wife and again, of course, stressing, as you've said before, That you can be a trad wife and not be alt right at all. But within this is a far more appealing message that there is in traditional values, a lot aesthetically or lifestyle wise, that is nice and worth embracing.

    [00:14:14] Dr Kristy: Yeah, absolutely. There is. And I think, you know, if people are making that choice, that's absolutely fine. What's not fine is when they start to adopt ideas that threaten the safety and security of their fellow citizens. And it does take a while to get to that point, I think.

    [00:14:28] Will: But it does? Like, are there some that might drift into this with a feeling like life could be better? a feeling like I don't want to be in the rat race and I want to go, you know, I would like to be wearing linen. I would like to be living near grass. I would like to have more sunshine and playing with my kids.

    [00:14:44] Rod: And sourdough is awesome.

    [00:14:45] Will: Yeah, exactly. And that is a, that there is actually, not everyone, of course, but there is some sort of a pathway there?

    [00:14:53] Dr Kristy: Yeah, there certainly is. And there is, I think growing appeal. And part of that growing appeal is due to factors that are largely outside of people's personal control as well. So generally when we're talking about ideology, we're talking about a worldview or a belief system that promises people something better than what they have. Now, if we take our current context where we have difficulties with housing, with rent, insecure living, rising costs of food and groceries, that sort of thing, it is really easy to see why people would actually want something different and want something that they see as being better.

    [00:15:32] The issue with some of the ideas involved with the TradWife movement is that their solutions to these problems can be quite quite drastic at times, quite racially motivated or can be quite discriminatory towards their fellow citizens.

    [00:15:50] Rod: Is this part of this whole thing though, you say this a lot with people who go like things don't feel right for me now. I don't know what is better or how to get there, but I do know that if it's not right now, why don't I just burn this down? Like with no kind of clarity about what that might mean, but it's like, if I burn down what's going on now, therefore what follows will likely be better. Is that kind of thing you're talking about? They don't really have a clear plan. It's just not this.

    [00:16:15] Dr Kristy: Yeah. It's quite revolutionary. This idea. And you see it in In, honestly, in, in virtually every terrorist movement, this idea that society is so irreparably broken and corrupt, you can't fix it. The only thing you can do is destroy it to the bedrock and start again.

    [00:16:32] Rod: How relaxing.

    [00:16:34] Will: One of the other things that you've been studying is the environmental thinking within the far right. And again, it seems to be this manifestation that the environment is not a left wing thing. Or having good families is not a left wing thing. That they are saying that these values that we hold probably globally spending time with family, having a nice environment around us, that there is a capturing of this within the far right to say the pathway to get there is through our mechanisms, our means, rather than, you know, building society together.

    [00:17:06] Dr Kristy: Yeah, absolutely. I think part of the appeal that they have is they essentially are able to divide society into two, sort of us versus them. And the only way that we can be realizing our true potential, that we can be living in this bucolic bliss is if we get rid of them, if we get rid of the other.

    [00:17:26] And this is when you start seeing them advocate quite strong anti immigration positions, but also at times it goes through to, not just let's deport these people, but let's actually destroy these people because they're a threat to our racial survivability. They're a threat to our authentic and pure way of life.

    [00:17:44] Rod: How clear do these people actually articulate what their current problems are as opposed to shit ain't right. Do they articulate what's wrong well, or is it just "it's wrong", therefore bad, therefore fix or change.

    [00:17:57] Dr Kristy: Look, the leaders of the movement all of these diverse movements do tend to be pretty eloquent. I have had suspicions about Toastmaster courses. Because their eloquence has increased at times. So generally it's the most high profile, visible individuals in the movement that do tend to be the ones that are out there creating and sharing propaganda. I mean, they don't see it as propaganda, right? They just see it as communication.

    [00:18:23] And this is sort of just how I guess vague this sort of space is. You actually never know what's going to resonate with someone and what they're going to do once it does resonate with them. So this is where some of that sort of ambiguity comes in, where it's one thing to have, for example, a trad wife or an eco fascist stand there talking about, you know, achieving this great social ecological harmony. But it's another thing to know how someone who's more predisposed to violence might react to that sort of information.

    [00:18:52] Rod: Yeah. I just always wonder, I mean, I think about this with all kinds of more extreme articulations of stuff where they go, you know, Shit's bad. And you go, cool cool. We need to fix it. Cool. Cool. Can we go back to shit's bad? What specifically shit is bad for you? And I know that doesn't matter because you have an emotional reaction, but like, I'm very curious to know as a scholar of this stuff, is there much out there that talks about specifics, like, I get that the the spokespeople are articulate, but what they're articulating, is that actually particularly clear or specific?

    [00:19:20] Dr Kristy: Look, in a lot of cases it is, and it also tends to be packaged quite well. So there have been times when terrorism has been described as like a dark form of political marketing. And definitely with extremism, you do see some really strategic choices being made and how they communicate. So for example, you might have a member of the far right in Australia and they're, you know, standing in front of some symbolic location, and they're giving a speech about how multiculturalism is destroying society. But what they'll tie in there are mainstream issues, which makes this content more accessible. So they'll be talking about how multiculturalism is bad on the one hand, but also they'll link it explicitly to things like buying a house and the difficulty of the current housing market. And so they're able to make quite, I guess, leaps of logic, but they're able to make their content more accessible by leveraging quite common problems in society.

    [00:20:17] Rod: That's interesting. So that actually is broadly speaking, an argument, like they're making an argument, not just like foreigners bad, therefore everything bad. They're actually kind of, at least if tenuously going this connects to this.

    [00:20:30] Dr Kristy: Yeah. Look they do have different like communication strategies as well, depending on who they're talking to. So for example, if they're talking to the general public they'll be a little bit vague about who they see the ultimate enemy is, right? But then the moment they're behind closed doors and you're seeing how they talk to each other, like in a chat room or, you know, meeting, whatever, that's when you'll start seeing them being much more explicit about who exactly is at fault.

    [00:20:55] Rod: So I've seen the front of the public, the bottom line is the enemy is not you. These are people who aren't you. That's it.

    [00:21:01] Will: Well, I think just on that, I think it's worth thinking about the strategic innovations that the far right has done since the social media era. Strategic ambiguity where, you know, a lot of the gamer gate and the those sorts of people came through and there's like Pepe the frog and let's see, I'll make a Nazi thing and if anyone calls you on it, you just say, no, I'm being ironic. And so there is a way of talking there that allows people to bring far right ideas into discourse. I think on the other side, there's the trad wife as well, which is a way of saying a positive thing about sorts of virtues that they would articulate. And so I see a bunch of innovations in communication across the far right landscape over the last 10 years that have allowed them to come so much further into mainstream discourse.

    [00:21:49] Rod: The TradWife seems particularly clever because look at all these wonderful things, happy people, healthy people, families smiling, Garrett gathering around the wireless set to listen to whatever it is.

    [00:22:01] But I mean, that's in it because it's, it starts from good and then starts to talk about bad as opposed to these people who start from bad and talk about how bad could be better. I know I'm dumbing this down a lot, but yeah.

    [00:22:12] Dr Kristy: Oh, look, no you're absolutely spot on. I think in about the seventies or around about that time, we actually did see neo Nazis in Australia sit down and have a chat about that exact problem, which is people were just not vibing with the swastika anymore.

    [00:22:27] Rod: Come on, look at it. It's awesome. It's got corners. It's red and black.

    [00:22:31] Will: You're not meant to say that, you know, you don't say that.

    [00:22:33] Dr Kristy: And so that's when they started sort of thinking, well, how else can we draw people in? Cause remember these people think that they're political revolutionaries. They don't wake up in the morning and go, Hey, I'm the bad guy. So, you know, from that point, you really do see a deliberate move in the far right to steer away from that explicitly Nazi symbology and the adoption of things like Pepe the frog, you know, the memes, the trolling, all of that was part of a continuation. When we think about how the far right exploits social media or just the online world in general, they have always been at the forefront. So, you know, they were using the bulletin boards back in the eighties.

    [00:23:10] They've got an incredibly long running white supremacist forum still to this day, they inhabit all of the encrypted social spaces with ease, you know, they are natives to that space. And so I guess one of the takeaways I've always had with this is that when we see people with ideologies that we don't tend to agree with, or that we think are particularly backward, such as the tradwives, we tend to think that means that somehow they can't use the exact same technology we do every day. They do, they use social media the same way anyone else does. They use it to connect, to you know, to promote to share ideas. Their purpose behind it is different.

    [00:23:48] Will: What do we do about this? Like, is there a way to recognize that the tradwife or you know, far right discourse is bleeding into things that you might find palatable? Or do we stop by other sorts of means? What's the sort of things that you're advising in the terrorism world?

    [00:24:04] Dr Kristy: The rather unpalatable answer to that is that there's not a lot we can do. It's not illegal to have horrible ideas about society.

    [00:24:13] Rod: Look, nor should it be. Horrible ideas are one thing, ideas are one thing.

    [00:24:18] Will: Yeah, you're right.

    [00:24:19] Dr Kristy: Look, it is, yeah, it is one of those unfortunate things. You can you can be a, you know, hold whatever political belief and that is protected. And I'm a big fan of continuing that protection. I think what we do need to do though, is look at a little bit closer at what you just sort of indicated there, that mainstream blur when the extreme goes mainstream, and there has been a lot of research on that. And one of the indications that comes out of that research is that part of the problem is actually sitting politicians and this isn't just in Australia. This is around the world where you have you know, politicians who are using far right narratives or far right ideas to their advantage to, you know, to get more votes, to get more support.

    [00:25:03] And so it's not just a matter of going, okay, well we need to deal with the extreme when the question is also, okay, but how can we build more responsibility and accountability into the mainstream as well that's really magnifying these ideas.

    [00:25:15] Rod: That's more important, right? Because it's the insidious parts that really matter, isn't it? The obvious people yelling and spouting ridiculous ideas and wearing dumb clothes, they stand out, but the insidious sneaking in, you know, the slow acceptance of things is scarier.

    [00:25:30] Will: Part of me is thinking though, that yes, insidiousness is a thing that we have to worry about but there's, if we think directly on the trad wife thing, that we need to have that conversation that says actually a lot of the positive aspects that people there are arguing for are legitimate and fine and they are a legitimate critique. You know, if you step further and not necessarily saying it's further, if you add onto that a bunch of racism or a bunch of now we've got to stop immigrants or now we need to bury people under the ground, you know, that's a very different thing. But to say people can live different lives and it's this sort of you know, acknowledgement of actual diversity that I think is different from saying all women have to go and work in the workforce.

    [00:26:13] Rod: That's a very good call. I mean, if your preference is you're going to stay at home and do it. I don't care if you're a wife, a father, whatever. Great. Stay at home, do the things, whatever. It's fine. Are people getting unfairly smashed for claiming trad wife in the non right wing crazy sense? Is there a lot of that kind of stuff going on where you've decided to stay home? You decide to have your children whenever it is. Tradwife, you know, definitions inserted here. Are people getting smashed for that when they maybe shouldn't be?

    [00:26:39] Dr Kristy: Look some tradwives have intimated that they feel like they're judged for making their decisions and you're absolutely right that in a, you know, a free and open democratic society if no one's hurting anyone, people should be able to live the way that they want to live and particularly if they can afford living on a single income, well, hats off to them. But I think part of the trickiest side of these things is when you see, the far right tradwives advocating things like legalizing marital rape, for example.

    [00:27:08] Rod: I read something about this just yesterday that said if it's within marriage, it can't be rape. Yeah. What the fuck are they talking about?

    [00:27:14] Dr Kristy: They're also, they seek to deny women access to abortion services if that's needed as well. So, you know, it's when they start to try and take ownership over other people's choices. So we respect their free choice to be a trad wife, that's fine. They can be a far right trad wife, also fine. But what's not fine is when the choices that they've been able to enact, they seek to deny others.

    [00:27:35] Rod: That's the bit I don't get from any deep ideology about society. Like you, you choose the way you want to live. Good for you. Why the hell do you have to care so much about how I live, how you live, how anyone else is like, just back off. I don't get it. I don't care why you would care so much about what other people do.

    [00:27:52] Dr Kristy: One thing that's really interesting about the far right in general is just how fixated they are on society and its functioning. If you're not complying with their perfect order, then you're an enemy and you need to be gotten rid of. And it's just, it's such a strange thing because you actually don't see it so much with other ideologies. Obviously you do see it with the likes of Islamic state where they're, you know, enforcing particular behavioral norms and dress codes and boundaries and all that sort of thing. But you also do see it with the far right, that fixation on society's not working for them, therefore it shouldn't be that way for anyone.

    [00:28:25] Rod: Do you do a lot of research where you're actually talking to such folk like you personally? Is that an experience you've had?

    [00:28:31] Dr Kristy: No, that would never get through ethics. But some of the work that we have been doing is really looking at their online discourse and just looking how they're talking to each other without them necessarily talking to us. And that in itself has yielded us an incredible amount of information, particularly about gender. Gender has been one of the big themes has come out of it, but also around things like sexual violence.

    [00:28:54] So on the one hand you have, you know, the smiling, well dressed trad wife saying, you know, rape in in marriage, it shouldn't be illegal. And then on the other hand, you have male posters on 4chan and they're explicitly advocating the use of rape as a weapon or as a way to, to rebuild the white race as a way to punish women who haven't complied.

    [00:29:15] Will: Our terminology is not impoverished, but is a little bit constrained by 20th century politics in the sense that we use neo Nazi and we use alt right, to talk about the right and things that are new now compared with old movements. And absolutely they connect. But clearly within the alt right, there is a hostility to new things now within all of this movement, hostility to feminism that I don't know that the actual Nazis fought against that much. I mean, of course they would have. They would have.

    [00:29:52] And so potentially dropping the actual Nazis hatred of Jews to instead, not drop it but to stead be hostile to the trans community, the gay community and modern feminism. And so, so what we actually unite there is this, just this hatred of the other people who aren't them and that they can't control.

    [00:30:13] Rod: Yeah, that's a good call. So alt right, what does alt right mean anymore? In fact, is that too broad?

    [00:30:17] Dr Kristy: Look, I'm not actually a fan of the term alt right because it's the name that they gave themselves. And they gave themselves that name because they didn't want to be called white nationalists or white supremacists. So I thought, well, what's going to be more palatable at the time to the American public?

    [00:30:31] Rod: They recognized that was bad. Well done.

    [00:30:34] Dr Kristy: Another strategic communication. Yes.

    [00:30:37] Will: So what do you term the movement?

    [00:30:38] Dr Kristy: Look, I just generally refer to them as the extreme right. If they're advocating violence in association with the right wing ideology, they're extreme right to me.

    [00:30:45] Rod: Christ, I call them horrible wankers. I think yours is much more sophisticated, but yes.

    [00:30:49] Dr Kristy: I think yours has a lot more, a more catchiness to it.

    [00:30:53] Rod: Might not go well in a journal article, but it's true. Is there a bit of research that you would love to do that you know you just bloody couldn't, either because it feels unsafe, it feels wrong, or it just would never get approved? Is there anything you think? I'd love to find out from X.

    [00:31:06] Dr Kristy: You might be aware that very recently Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber passed away. Now he's something of a really interesting figure in the study of environmental extremism on the one hand, and also the study of the extreme right on the other hand, because some academics are starting to say, you know, Ted Kaczynski was a right wing extremist, whereas others are saying no, he was idiosyncratic.

    [00:31:29] Will: It was a sort of rejection of industrial society.

    [00:31:30] Dr Kristy: Yeah, he was purely environmentally focused. And so I think, you know, it would have been great before he'd passed to get his opinion on that because he was actually still engaging with people. He was still reading scholarly papers. I think actually he was still writing them as well. But unfortunately that opportunity has passed us by.

    [00:31:49] Will: There was a project that was coming up the other day for vaguely stuff that I might work on. So it's in the misinformation space, the biosecurity projects. And so in biosecurity, obviously farmers are at risk and ports are part of the risk pathway.

    [00:32:03] But there's a bunch of people in what's called the peri urban community, you know, sort of out on bush blocks and things like that. They're sort of beyond suburban and they are a risk vector for various sorts of biosecurity, you know, so they might have the virus that grows on a banana plant or something like that.

    [00:32:20] But these are also the people that have deliberately marginalized themselves from society. And so when government and by government, it's just biosecurity officers come in and say, Hey, Gary, you got a banana plant? And they're like

    [00:32:31] Rod: fuck you. I'll kill you.

    [00:32:32] Will: Yes. Yes. Yes, now these are not terrorists, but they may be highly hostile to government. They're not necessarily acting in a terrorist sense, but there is a bunch of people out there via misinformation or via something else are like, nah, I don't want a part of all of you. And if you come near me, then there's trouble.

    [00:32:53] Dr Kristy: And that's been a problem for quite some time. So we've had New South Wales police raising the alarm over some anti government elements for quite some time. And that's because in the regional areas particularly, they were seeing people boobie trap their homes, stockpile weapons, and prepare for eventual violent confrontation with authorities for literally any reason, you know, and it's because in my opinion, they spend a lot of time online. They consume a lot of really fringe conspiracy theories, and they develop this sense of persecution that the government is out to get them specifically.

    [00:33:31] Will: Has the internet made it all a lot worse?

    [00:33:33] Dr Kristy: Well, look, people were conspiratorial before the internet, but I think it's definitely made it a lot more accessible to them. And I also would note that there does appear to be a generational factor here. You know, on the one hand, we were all worried about young people radicalizing to extremism.

    [00:33:49] We're worried about all the time that young people are spending online. But on the other hand, You have the older generation who are much less critical with what they see online, and this is when you start seeing, you know, like flat earth conspiracies become quite prominent in parts of Australia that you wouldn't normally expect it, where you might start seeing them engage with the sovereign citizen movement, which is obviously one that's caused quite a bit of trouble, particularly during the COVID 19.

    [00:34:16] Rod: The old do have power. It turns out after all they do have influence. There you go. There's an upside. What would you love to see? Like you finished your career in terrorism studies, trad wives, et cetera. What would be a really nice positive result? I managed to make X happen or understand why.

    [00:34:32] Dr Kristy: I think one of the things that I'm really committed to is the Australian Democratic project. We have seen studies out recently that young people in particular are disengaging from democracy. They're not seeing what's in it for them anymore and so they, you know, they might be more likely to support authoritarian regimes.

    [00:34:51] And so, you know, in response to that, what I'm really committed to is better education around actually what does our democracy give us? How does it serve us? And what freedoms does it allow us? I think to an extent we've become a bit alienated from those core democratic values. And we see this in our political discourse all the time, particularly around anything that relates to equality.

    [00:35:15] You know, one of the foundation stones of our democracy is the principle of political equality. So I think that if there's one thing that we can do from a terrorism and security studies perspective is to build a greater understanding of democracy within society because ultimately I think that's a protective factor. That's what stops people.

    [00:35:35] Rod: But is it fair to say that freedom is scary, right? For a lot of people, the idea of freedom is actually terrifying. I've often said for decades, I've thought. I wish I could just believe in a religion because then my decisions would be made for me. I tried, but I can't. Like, do you find this a lot?

    [00:35:50] Like freedom is actually quite a confronting prospect if you really think it through. You get to choose is not always a bonus. Do you come across this? Like people kind of, they might not say it out loud, but they're Oh, but if I get to choose, I have to choose. That's tough.

    [00:36:04] Dr Kristy: Yeah. Basically in terrorism studies, what that intersects with is the idea of certainty, right. Certain people cannot cope with uncertainty. They cannot cope with insecurity, with not knowing where the boundaries are.

    [00:36:17] Will: Is that Your population? Like, is that literally a definition of your population that you're looking at? The people that are prone to terrorism are the people that can't cope with a lack of certainty?

    [00:36:27] Dr Kristy: Look it has been mentioned in the literature. Yes. Yeah. And how they respond to it is really important. But when we're looking at, for example, the trad wives, if you're looking at neo Nazis, Islamic State, whatever you're looking at, you're looking at a movement that promises people a very secure world where they know exactly how to act, exactly how to address, how to interact with others, what's expected of them. So even though it does all these horrible things, it offers some security and certainty.

    [00:36:54] Will: I don't know why they got to do it for other people though. Like you have it for yourself. Like take on a rule and go, okay, I'm wearing homespun cloth

    [00:37:03] Rod: My pants have to be three inches too short

    [00:37:05] Will: only ever. That's all I'm ever going to do. But don't tell other people you got to do that

    [00:37:09] Rod: because what this gets to is a lot of other people kind of asking to be told because it's easier. It's more relaxing. I mean, it's true. You think about if someone says to you, as I often do with students and stuff, well, what about this? Is this ethically correct? Or is that ethically correct? And I said, well, it depends. And they're like, Oh, for fuck's sake, would you give us a straight answer? It's like, I can't because it does depend. And that's not necessarily satisfactory. So even, yeah, there are people who want to tell other people how to live, but there are a lot of people who are going like, can you tell me how to live? Cause I don't know what to do.

    [00:37:38] Dr Kristy: They can't cope with doubt. They can't cope with the unknown. That was, I think one of the biggest takeaways during COVID 19 when we saw people engaging with those wild conspiracy theories is that they were struggling to cope with the fact that the world was unpredictable and scary. So they'll seeking these simple solutions and unfortunately extremist ideologies offer very simple solutions.

    [00:38:01] Will: Well, how can more mainstream people give some of that certainty? Because people clearly want it. What can we do?

    [00:38:09] Dr Kristy: Look, not a lot, unfortunately. I mean, because again, even if it's your family member, right? Who's gone down the rabbit hole and they're believing in all these conspiratorial ideas. It's still not really your place to tell them what to believe. At some point they have to take responsibility for their own trajectory.

    [00:38:28] Will: You know, we've done a bunch of work in misinformation and I think it's worth understanding the harms. You know so for example the harms of astrology, I don't think are very high.

    [00:38:37] Rod: Astrology is real, man.

    [00:38:38] Dr Kristy: Spoken like a true Sagittarius.

    [00:38:39] Will: Yeah. No, excuse me, Scorpio. But I don't think that's very high, but clearly, you know, misinformation in the pandemic, there was clearly that time when a bunch of people in Iran, you know, they heard the story about alcohol curing COVID and they drank a bunch of industrial alcohol, 800, 900 people died.

    [00:38:57] So clearly there are times when misinformation absolutely brings in harms. And so in similar sort of thinking, it's these sorts of ideological beliefs on society, if you're not doing any harm, okay. Leave it alone. Okay. Yeah. You know, you want to believe that the world will be more certain if you wear whatever? Good for you.

    [00:39:15] Dr Kristy: Look, and there have been some, I think, some mentions in the literature of academics saying, Oh, you know, we all have to exist in the same shared objective reality. The fact of the matter is we don't.

    [00:39:28] Will: No, I certainly don't. No I'm a long way from that.

    [00:39:32] Rod: What is this objective?

    [00:39:34] Dr Kristy: But I think one of the the hazards, particularly of the far right and how they've been able to adopt myths or disinformation strategies during COVID was their strategy behind it, which was they wanted to foment distrust, they wanted to widen the gap between the you know, the ruled and the rulers.

    [00:39:53] And that was because they thought they could take advantage of that. Ultimately they didn't really. But that was certainly part of their intent.

    [00:39:59] Will: Is the world getting better or worse?

    [00:40:01] Dr Kristy: Look, I'm not terribly optimistic. But what we do have some very committed professional experience to expert people that work with these sorts of wicked problems every day. And so long as they're still working within the rules of law, I think, you know, we're doing all that we can. At the end of the day, they can't control what people believe. They can't control what people say, although that obviously is subject to some forms of private regulation, but if they can stop people from hurting each other, then I think at the end of the day, I think that's a win. That's really all we can hope to achieve.

    [00:40:33] Rod: Are you in a job where you go home at the end of the day and go, Oh god, the stuff I had to think about, the stuff I had to dig into just makes me feel like meh. Where do you go home and go, actually, things are pretty good. Like, is this a tough job?

    [00:40:45] Dr Kristy: Look, it depends on the research topic at the time. We recently finished a research topic looking at sexual violence and the extreme right. And I would say that one was pretty grim. It wasn't one that I don't think filled any of us with any sort of optimism or hope. but there's other research out there where you're like, actually, you know what people are doing really good work to try and understand these problems and the more we understand them, the better policy we can create to confront them.

    [00:41:10] So, you know, I think we just have to remain alert to the fact that this is such a dynamic space and particularly terrorism threats, you know, they have a habit of rising and falling, coming and going. So they don't generally last forever.

    [00:41:23] Rod: So this stuff doesn't grind you down on average, it's actually positive and good for you?

    [00:41:27] Dr Kristy: Look, I think it's interesting and I think it's meaningful. Anytime we can do something that we feel like is going to mean that someone one day looks at, I don't know, is executing a search warrant and goes, Oh, hang on, this person might actually be planning to harm people. You know, that, that's the biggest win I think that you could ever have in our field is to know that you've contributed towards making society a little bit safer. Is the content grim? Yes, but I think, you know, someone has to do it.

    [00:41:55] Will: Fair call. Final question then. I think if someone is looking at a bunch of videos about baking bread and playing in the mud with the kids

    [00:42:03] Rod: keep going. I want links.

    [00:42:05] Will: Raising goats, growing our own plants. What would you do to just say, all right, that's all good, but put some boundaries in.

    [00:42:11] Rod: Look out for this bit because then suddenly it's gone weird.

    [00:42:13] Dr Kristy: That sort of aesthetic on social media, you would end up trying to follow or look at a fair chunk of the population which I don't think you've got the resources for.

    [00:42:25] So look, some of the things I guess to look out for is those sort of explicit narratives that are anti feminist or explicitly anti multicultural, explicitly homophobic. There's a lot of transphobic content. That sort of content is more indicative that someone's supporting, you know, that more dangerous element of the far right, rather than, you know, being a relatively apolitical, benign housewife that's made a choice for herself.

    [00:42:48] Will: Kristy, thank you so much for joining us here on The Wholesome show.

    [00:42:51] Dr Kristy: Thank you for having me.

Will Grant
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