There’s no doubt that the trad wife has made a comeback with younger generations, many of whom became disillusioned with “girl boss” hustle culture and opted instead for homemaking.

“A byproduct of white supremacy is capitalism,” Kimberly Jenkins, founder of The Fashion and Race Database, told Atmos. “And capitalism is productivity.” But productivity for women increasingly revolves around self-improvement and aesthetic appeal, Jenkins added, as seen in “glow up” culture as well as the rise of MomTok and other social media trends like “stay-at-home girlfriends” who happily tackle domestic duties. The shift is seismic: The hashtag #tradwife had been viewed over 600 million times on TikTok as of May 2024.

It’s no coincidence that many trad wives uphold and espouse a conservative Christian lifestyle, “masterfully” pushing content and trends with ideologically conservative underpinnings, according to Jessica DeFino, the beauty critic behind The Review of Beauty. With an incoming American presidential administration outwardly aligned with female domesticity—which Jenkins says lends the trad-wife-value-system ultimate legitimacy—the politicization of trad-wife ideals has only grown.

Some women continue to mobilize, organize, and resist by rooting their identities in feminist values and fighting for causes like reproductive justice—even as they homestead or otherwise run a household. But even activists and anti-capitalists, Jenkins said, labor to distribute messages and build followings, with algorithms and trend cycles amplifying the relentless pursuit of being “enough.” In other words, both sides risk being caught in advanced capitalism’s vicious cycle, producing content, building audiences, and chasing social capital. The difference is that one side uses these platforms to connect collectives and build social movements, while the other sells conservative gender roles and peddles false wellness claims. 

Wellness culture is no longer just about clean eating and self-care—it’s a breeding ground for misinformation. Influencers, not official nor trained experts, tout “natural” lifestyles as cures to erroneous health concerns and push distrust in governmental health policies.

A growing wave of vaccine skepticism during the COVID-19 pandemic helped catapult wellness into public discourse and turbocharged the wellness-to-extremism pipeline which has since become a blueprint for figures such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The health secretary nominee, who has promoted the discredited theory that vaccines cause autism, is committed to doubling down on the promise of “Make America Healthy Again,” a health-focused initiative that has broadly appealed to the many people who have been let down by a privatized health care system. In reality, the emerging MAHA movement peddles disproven “solutions” for chronic diseases and health concerns, many of which are individualistic, capitalistic, or both.

Kennedy has repeatedly spread disinformation around drinking water and promoted “raw” unpasteurized milk, the latter at the center of a controversial TikTok trend pushed by wellness influencers that puts people at risk of foodborne illness—and, incidentally, once a favored ingredient among the most liberal foodies. But Kennedy isn’t the only figure promoting controversial health claims that now embody a far-right distrust of virtually everything governing bodies tell us. Manosphere influencers including Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, and Andrew Tate have repeatedly amplified pseudo-facts about wellness alongside climate denialism, while controversial neuroscientist Andrew Huberman weaves political messages with pseudoscience health claims and traditional values.

But the popularity of the wellness movement extends beyond personalities—it’s embedded in the algorithm, too. TikTok, Instagram, and X have been shown to boost content promoting anti-vax, anti-sunscreen, and raw milk endorsements with studies showing that frequent social media users are more likely to distrust vaccine safety and importance. 

As Jessica DeFino explained, wellness has become a lucrative political tool to generate clicks and consolidate power, especially against the backdrop of a broken system. “There is something hopeful about the idea that you could take control of your own health if you buy the right things or do the right behaviors or eat the right foods,” she said. “Because then you wouldn’t need to rely on the broken system.” 

Cultural commentators have also pointed to how framing food safety processes like pasteurized milk as “impure” invokes Biblical language, specifically referencing the devil. By contrast, “purity” becomes synonymous with unprocessed and unpasteurized foods, which trad wife influencers spend hours making from scratch,  in turn tying individual consumer choices—and public opinion—to a person’s morality. “These are code words for dirtiness and evil,” said Maria Santa Poggi, a writer who dissects the politics of the algorithm. “From a Biblical standpoint, those have been terms used historically to drive people into hyper-individualism.” 

It’s not just the wellness space that’s been infiltrated by extremism. Beauty trends now commonly reinforce outdated racist and sexist expectations of women. 

From glazed donut beauty and strawberry girl makeup to clean girl aesthetics and even Instagram face, the marketing machine is pushing overconsumption among women to appear palatable and “demure.” But these trends require work, effort, and money—and they certainly aren’t inclusive. “We need to start looking at content that may seem liberal on its face, but that’s actually promoting the idea that women need to be and should be as beautiful as possible,” DeFino said. “This is often under the guise of doing it for their own health or their own empowerment or their own fun and freedom and expression.”