Granola Nazis and Tradwives with Dr. Cat Tebaldi

Welcome to a new CIHAS series – monthly interviews with cool people doing interesting work. Last year, when our podcast editor and co-host of our ALL OF THE SNACKS podcast episodes Lucy moved on, I decided not to find a replacement. I loved making the podcast with Lucy, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to justify the cost. I would love to be able to grow the newsletter to a place where we could have a podcast strand again, but it's not on the cards right now. In the meantime, I wanted to introduce a written interview series with the kinds of people I would want to have on the podcast. People whose work makes my brain light up and I can't stop thinking about. I have a few people in mind – mostly academics – but if you have any recommendations then please drop names in the comments!

Our first interview is with the brilliant Dr. Cat Tebaldi. Cat is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Luxembourg, culture and computation lab, where she researchers language, gender, and reactionary digital cultures. Her book Alt-Education: Gender, Knowledge and Far-right Metapolitics has recently been published with Routledge.

You can follow Cat on Bluesky here.

Laura: Hi Cat, I’m a big fan of your work - thanks for speaking with us! Can you start by telling us more about who you are and what you do? 

Cat: Hi! Thanks so much for asking about my work - I think yours is really cool as well. I'm a postdoc researching language digital cultures – basically weird people online and why they are often moving to the far right. I'm very interested in wellness influencers, both as a researcher and a new mom who cares a lot about health and wellness and wants Nazis out of these spaces.

Laura: I first came across your work on Granola Nazis in a brilliant essay you wrote for The Global Network for Extremism and Technology. I think people are surprised to learn that fascists are into ‘crunchy’ coded things like granola/essential oils/yoga. In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein identified what she calls ‘diagonalist’ alliances – the liberal-yoga-mom-to-anti-vaxxer pipeline during the Covid-19 pandemic. But this isn’t a new phenomenon – like guys c’mon, the Nazis were into yoga. Can you speak to the entangled history of what we might call 'wellness' with fascism?

Cat: This is a very good point - we are surprised by these coalitions between the right and things like yoga or organic food that we associate with 'hippie' styles in the US or UK, but environmentalists and health gurus have been linked to eugenics and far right racial and gender politics. Sabrina Strings wrote a beautiful book about how anti-Blackness and anti-immigrant politics structure ideas of health and beauty in the 19^th century US - thinness and whiteness as signs of the 'superiority ' of the Anglo German mix imagined to characterise the us - while at the same time environmental movements gained popularity because of fears of a loss of vitality and masculinity in white men.  In Switzerland where I currently research there are links between holistic health and organic food and the far right (don't ask Weleda or Demeter food what they did in the Second World War). This isn't to say that eating some oats makes you a fascist, but that what we understand as health and wellness is always caught up in larger cultural and ideological frameworks about what is a good body, person, society.

Laura: How do you define a Granola Nazi? What do they want? Can you point to any examples? Like is Ballerina Farm a Granola Nazi? Are these people always overtly white supremacists or do we have to look for more subtle clues? You often refer to these people as ‘digital traditionalists’ which seems like an oxymoron; how do Granola Nazis reconcile these tensions between modernism and traditionalism?

Cat: A Granola Nazi is someone who takes cultural styles and practices associated with the left, and links them to far right political projects. The most typical example are those who are part of pagan communities who might look like funky Wiccans but who instead embrace a kind of religion called 'folkish paganism' that celebrates whiteness as a kind of religion (example is Lana Lokteff, the far-right content creator). Another group would be those who are linked to wellness - where this term is understood as health and alternative spiritualities - these can include carnivore diet male supremacists or 'crunchy moms' interested in health and staying away from toxins - but who think modernity and feminism are also poisons. The crunchy mom or the wellness guy is trickier because it can be closer to what you or I would see as normal, everyday concerns but used these as vectors for extremism (hello MAHA).