#crunchy to alt right pipeline

[samwisethewitch]

Homemaking, gardening, and self-sufficiency resources that won't radicalize you into a hate group

It seems like self-sufficiency and homemaking skills are blowing up right now. With the COVID-19 pandemic and the current economic crisis, a lot of folks, especially young people, are looking to develop skills that will help them be a little bit less dependent on our consumerist economy. And I think that's generally a good thing. I think more of us should know how to cook a meal from scratch, grow our own vegetables, and mend our own clothes. Those are good skills to have.

Unfortunately, these "self-sufficiency" skills are often used as a recruiting tactic by white supremacists, TERFs, and other hate groups. They become a way to reconnect to or relive the "good old days," a romanticized (false) past before modern society and civil rights. And for a lot of people, these skills are inseparably connected to their politics and may even be used as a tool to indoctrinate new people.

In the spirit of building safe communities, here's a complete list of the safe resources I've found for learning homemaking, gardening, and related skills. Safe for me means queer- and trans-friendly, inclusive of different races and cultures, does not contain Christian preaching, and does not contain white supremacist or TERF dog whistles.

Homemaking/Housekeeping/Caring for your home:

Making It by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen [book] (The big crunchy household DIY book; includes every level of self-sufficiency from making your own toothpaste and laundry soap to setting up raised beds to butchering a chicken. Authors are explicitly left-leaning.)

Safe and Sound: A Renter-Friendly Guide to Home Repair by Mercury Stardust [book] (A guide to simple home repair tasks, written with rentals in mind; very compassionate and accessible language.)

How To Keep House While Drowning by KC Davis [book] (The book about cleaning and housework for people who get overwhelmed by cleaning and housework, based on the premise that messiness is not a moral failing; disability and neurodivergence friendly; genuinely changed how I approach cleaning tasks.)

Gardening

Rebel Gardening by Alessandro Vitale [book] (Really great introduction to urban gardening; explicitly discusses renter-friendly garden designs in small spaces; lots of DIY solutions using recycled materials; note that the author lives in England, so check if plants are invasive in your area before putting them in the ground.)

Country/Rural Living:

Woodsqueer by Gretchen Legler [book] (Memoir of a lesbian who lives and works on a rural farm in Maine with her wife; does a good job of showing what it's like to be queer in a rural space; CW for mentions of domestic violence, infidelity/cheating, and internalized homophobia)

"Debunking the Off-Grid Fantasy" by Maggie Mae Fish [video essay] (Deconstructs the off-grid lifestyle and the myth of self-reliance)

Sewing/Mending:

Annika Victoria [YouTube channel] (No longer active, but their videos are still a great resource for anyone learning to sew; check out the beginner project playlist to start. This is where I learned a lot of what I know about sewing.)

Make, Sew, and Mend by Bernadette Banner [book] (A very thorough written introduction to hand-sewing, written by a clothing historian; lots of fun garment history facts; explicitly inclusive of BIPOC, queer, and trans sewists.)

Sustainability/Land Stewardship

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer [book] (Most of you have probably already read this one or had it recommended to you, but it really is that good; excellent example of how traditional animist beliefs -- in this case, indigenous American beliefs -- can exist in healthy symbiosis with science; more philosophy than how-to, but a great foundational resource.)

Wild Witchcraft by Rebecca Beyer [book] (This one is for my fellow witches; one of my favorite witchcraft books, and an excellent example of a place-based practice deeply rooted in the land.)

Avoiding the "Crunchy to Alt Right Pipeline"

Note: the "crunchy to alt-right pipeline" is a term used to describe how white supremacists and other far right groups use "crunchy" spaces (i.e., spaces dedicated to farming, homemaking, alternative medicine, simple living/slow living, etc.) to recruit and indoctrinate people into their movements. Knowing how this recruitment works can help you recognize it when you do encounter it and avoid being influenced by it.

"The Crunchy-to-Alt-Right Pipeline" by Kathleen Belew [magazine article] (Good, short introduction to this issue and its history.)

Sisters in Hate by Seyward Darby (I feel like I need to give a content warning: this book contains explicit descriptions of racism, white supremacy, and Neo Nazis, and it's a very difficult read, but it really is a great, in-depth breakdown of the role women play in the alt-right; also explicitly addresses the crunchy to alt-right pipeline.)

These are just the resources I've personally found helpful, so if anyone else has any they want to add, please, please do!

#homemaking #homemaking resources #gardening #urban gardening #self sufficiency #self sufficient living #sustainability #sustainable living #homesteading #nontrad homemaker #nontrad housewife #urban homesteading #solarpunk #cottagecore #kitchen witch #kitchen witchcraft #crunchy to alt right pipeline #book rec #book recommendations #resource #long post #mine #racism tw #racism mention #transphobia tw #transphobia mention

[mbrainspaz]

scientist friend on the phone: I don't actually think flat earthers are real.

me: I'm looking at one right now. *waves and smiles at my only coworker who waves back*

scientist friend on the phone: I don't believe it! I've never met one!

me: are you... in the face of first hand evidence I've gathered... insisting that the existence of flat earth conspiracy theorists is a conspiracy right now??

her: ....you're hurting me.

me: What if I told you I know two flat earthers.

her: STOP

#i'm laughing at myself #conspiracy steve #conspiracy theories #science friend #I do know two flat earthers #science denial #conspiracy brain rot #the crunchy to alt right pipeline exists #dialogue from memory #flat earthers

[honey-and-fig]

Bread Sheeran has been fed and I’m waiting on him to peak so I can make my first loaf of sourdough 🥲

#I’m the crunchy to alt right pipeline but like in reverse

[androcola]

i wish i could go barefoot more places but i cant

#little known fact about me is im into the Barefoot connecting you to the earth shit #like...not in the weird alt right pipeline crunchy mom anti big pharma 5g way but like. the normal nice way #like. its nice to feel the earth under you without shoes or socks #but like if a place says no barefoot i totally understand and respect that #i dont go barefoot in places cuz theres just too much broken glass n shit all over my town #and acorns n pepples and things that hurt too much

[literary-butch]

I have a bone to pick with crunchy mums and “self-sufficiency” influencers as a poor, disabled queer person. Both of these tend to end up pulling people into the alt-right pipeline because they are so isolationist. They believe society is somehow the root of toxicity and don’t believe in things like community gardens, community projects, leisure centres, public schools and mutual aid. 

Home schooling, hiding from the world and not socialising with your neighbours prevents your community from growing and deprives you from the support network that organically exists around you. 

If you learn nothing else from AIDs and COVID-19, never forget the importance of community in times of crisis. Create strong communities, not isolated individuals. 

#hopepunk #mutualaid #queer community #mutual aid

[kaijuerotica]

i dont wanna reblog the post bc it's long and i dont wanna deal with it but uh

if you think that no one your age is voting republican, you are in an echo chamber.

are there some statistical changes in party affiliation over time? yeah

but we also have very well known things like the alt right spreading their ideas in video game communities and the crunchy to alt right pipeline. Younger does not automatically mean more progressive. It just aids in the lie that the past was always worse.

[john-marshall]

What happens to the AuDHD manic pixie dream “girls” when we age out of the Fairy Princess phase?

Let’s get into the whole timeline.

First you’ve got Spooky Baby. And then there’s Fairy Child, followed by Old Soul. If you’re parentified, then you go through a people pleaser kind of Teacher’s Pet or Mommy’s Little Helper phase, which ends with Burnt Out Puberty Alien, followed by Teenage Wasteland.

Then you get into the Manic Pixie Dream “Girl” phase, during which you and your friends will get emotionally abused and have relationships with narcissists and other toxic people, which will bring on your Cassandra phase, where you’re the Psychic Witch who can predict the bad things that are about to happen to everyone around you.

From Cassandra, we turn into The Most Helpful Person in the Room, in which we try to codependently serve and please other people in order to get our needs met and prevent their and our future suffering, which leads us straight to Burnt Out Bisexual Performance Artist, and wildly, some of us get Famous phase, but if you don’t, the next comes Art Teacher, Eccentric Art Teacher.

Some of us will take a branch into the wilderness. If you’re outdoorsy, you might pick a biome: Desert Gremlin; Beach Witch; Bog Hag. Take your pick.

The privileged among us might graduate from higher ed around this point and become Dr. Quirky PhD.

There could even be a mermaid phase. But the domesticated variety of AuDHD femme might go into Homemaking as an Art Form. That can be Cottage Core Lesbian, Homemaking Hippie, Crunchy Mama. I call this Manic Pixie Dream Partner and it does get you wifed up.

But watch out. Because next comes MILF, maybe dog MILF for the childless among us, followed by burnt out MILF, who less people want to fuck.

Then comes Sexy Librarian, followed by Regular Librarian.

At any point along this timeline, you might come out as non-binary or full lesbian. I don’t make the rules.

For the pale among us, it’s important to watch out for the TERF or alt-right pipelines that can draw in homemakers and black and white thinkers.

For the party girls among us comes the Sobriety phase.

For your old age, we’ve got Well-Oiled Beautiful Bald Lady, who wears a purple velvet cape to the art openings. There’s also Mrs Claus and, of course, the Witchy Woman Whose House the Children Run Past.

When you croak, you might go to Heaven, or take on your final form of Haint of the Woods of the Circled Stones.

And of course, if you’re very good, you’ll be reincarnated as a childless couple’s rescue dog.

#p.txt #this is a transcript from a tiktok #i have adhd and autism but the tiktok autism/adhd community is #all. like this.

[provably-moths]

i contradict myself a lot in terms of my personality just out of pure hilarity because there’s nothing funnier than knowing a lot of things but never once explaining how i know them to people. is it experience? is it hyper fixation? special interest? who knows! one day i talk about the crunchy mom to alt right pipeline and the next day i’m talking about the value of heirloom tomatoes and homemade granola like fucku i’m such a creature and love to cause emotionally and mental whiplash!!!! my entire personality is based on being weird and confusing but i’m so lovable that people have to look past it :-)

(i have border line personality disorder and am neurodivergent)

#provably posting #bpd #wizard posting #special interest #hyper fixation #weirdo #just a lil guy #a small creature

[roris-ramblings]

“Crunchy young adult to alt right cult pipeline”

“mean girl teen to young adult nurse pipe line”

“gifted kid to burntout teen pipeline”

boring, overused, unspicy.

“Being trained to be a politician kid to Anarchist teen pipeline”

Intriguing, underused, vanilla extract.

#pipelines #vanilla extract #anarchist

[bellarad]

Man, people can be so rad

Another doula followed me on my birthworker insta who used a lot of like... woman-centric language. Which is fine, because most birthing folks are cis women and some people aren't totally like, aware if trans birth and gender variation of birthing folks. But the language she was using was pretty TERFy. Like, "we as women need to take back our sacred power of creation from the hands of men" type stuff. Very bioessentialist.

So I messaged her and was like, hey listen, I'm non-binary and a lot of the language you use sounds pretty terfy and if you are a terf I don't want you following me unless you're willing to learn from me thru a trans perspective.

She was like, "omg no I'm super okay with trans people and I don't want to be exclusive at all. I didn't realize my language would be taken that way - can you give me suggestions and feedback about how to change it?"

She took my feedback, she asked for more resources and instas to follow and she dug into what it means to be a TERF and how to be a good ally to trans folks - I was super impressed!

She just messaged me asking if I would give my perspective for a paper shes writing about the crunchy to alt-right pipeline in terms of how it affects trans folks and said that basically she was falling down that pipeline without realizing and me messaging her helped her backtrack and get out of it.

I think that a lot of times, talking to terfs isn't necessarily constructive and a lot of them are just so set in their ways that you cant reach them. But I think that feeling people out is important. I could've just blocked this person and been rid of her potential harmfulness, but instead I engaged her in a teaching moment and was able to help prevent further extremism from budding.

Give folks a chance ✌️

#terfs #birthwork #crunchy to alt right

[kieransometimesthinks]

Idk how many of y’all listen to the podcast If Books Could Kill (I highly recommend it, by the way) but they recently did a subscribers only episode on Naomi Klein’s book Doppelgänger, which led them to talk about Naomi Wolf and radicalization. And that episode helped me finally articulate something that’s bothered me for awhile.

There has actually been research on radicalization. How it happens, what the general patterns are, etc. And there have specifically been studies done to figure out how exactly the internet is influencing radicalization. (Specifically in regard to violent radicalization and conspiracy theories, which are often linked.) And the findings are chilling.

The timeline for radicalization is so much shorter than it used to be. Prior to the internet, it was somewhat difficult to acquire radical fringe movement talking points. You had to join a group, which generally meant meeting in person. And that was your only source of information to further radicalize you. But with the internet, you have a constant flow of radicalizing material available at all times. It’s now possible for someone to go from relatively normal, centrist beliefs to a Q Anon fanatic in under a year. That level of extreme shift just wasn’t possible before the internet.

But the more interesting and disheartening findings were that all radical conspiracy theories lead to the same end result. It doesn’t matter how you enter the pipeline, the final destination is always the alt right.

So for example, let’s say you’re a leftist who gets really into organic and homegrown food because you’re appalled by the lack of federal regulations for large scale food production. Maybe you have food sensitivities or maybe you’re just a hippie. I’m not here to judge your motives. When you try to seek out communities for homesteading, gardening, and natural cooking- you will inevitably be exposed to conspiracy theory weirdos. Because the crunchy granola to alt right pipeline is extremely well established by this point. And the longer you’re in the space, the more likely you are to start actually considering the conspiracies you’re hearing. Because the fucked up thing about our brains is that the more we hear something, the more we start to believe it’s normal and true. Even if we objectively know it is a lie, hearing it repeated over and over again makes us start to accept it. So at first you only start to believe the more “normal” conspiracies. That big pharma has no interest in promoting things they can’t mass produce, so maybe they’re encouraging doctors to downplay the importance of nutrition whenever they’re giving out gifts to doctors. There are just enough verifiably true statements in this conspiracy to make it seem plausible. You may even think it’s harmless to humor it, because of course big pharma doesn’t have your best interest in mind. They’re run by hedge fund managers. But then once you start believing that big pharma is actively suppressing information at the expense of the general public, you start considering other conspiracies. If they’re lying about nutrition, what else are they lying about? You don’t understand enough of the science to understand how medications work. Maybe they’re lying about the drugs. Maybe the side effects of the drugs *are* proof that they’re actually bad for you. Maybe the crazy conspiracy theorists are onto something. And if you keep following the logical path of escalation, you’re eventually going to end up at something completely batshit like being a vaccine truther or claiming that all processed food is basically poison.

And by the time you reach the end of the pipeline, you’re functionally indistinguishable from an alt right member, despite the fact that you started as a crunchy leftist. And these things have real consequences.

It starts off harmlessly enough. Who cares why someone is choosing to eat an organic, unprocessed diet? It doesn’t hurt anyone else. But if you go down the pipeline you see shit like Pete Evans telling parents to feed their newborns bone broth. Which all legitimate medical groups agree will fucking kill your baby. Your baby will die of malnutrition. That’s an objective fact. Or you see a shit like Belle Gibson telling people with cancer not to get chemo because it’s poison and you can cure cancer with diet. And that causes people to fucking die.

So why am I bringing this all up?

You may have noticed me ranting a lot lately (which I’m sure has nothing to do with my spiraling mental health and the fact that discourse is one of my worst coping mechanisms). And two main threads in those rants are “Everything is more messy and nuanced than we want it to be” and “For the love of all things good, take even a single goddamn moment to think critically about the ideas people are trying to sell to you.”

And this is why I yell about this all the time. Because being able to see when people are trying to sell you bullshit is important. Being able to tell when someone is over simplifying a complex issue to radicalize you is important. Knowing how to ground yourself in the real world to keep yourself from being sucked into fringe political echo chambers online that skew your perspective of reality is so fucking important. Because once you start believing conspiracies and treating everyone who disagrees with you as brainwashed sheeple, you’re going to end up at the alt right.

So please, PLEASE take this seriously and actually think about why people are trying to get you to follow them. Being a skeptic is a good thing. And for fucks sake, try to keep some empathy along the way.

[androcola]

does red 40 actually do all that shit or like is that another crunchy mom alt right pipeline antivax 5g conspiracy theory cuz it really sounds like it

#i was watching tjis video where this lady was talking about her son with adhd #and she was like ''he was such a good child. then he had red 40 and went fucking nuts'' or something like that #like.this seems very crunchy mom like #idk

[vomitnest]

[sadstereos-blog]

i have such big beef with missfeministkitty and her followers.

she refuses to acknowledge that not all cats can’t or will not eat food besides kibble, some cats have dietary restrictions that cause them to only eat kibble, and when you tell her she’s not board certified (which she isn’t. she isnt a professional pet nutritionist, she took an online course and acts like she knows everything), she blocks you (she also blocks you for asking abt cats with restrictions).

i saw someone bring up the ‘raw food diet owner’ to ‘crunchy person’ to alt right pipeline bc they all involve conspiracies.

she also spreads a lot of misinformation about things and most of the people that follow her (including herself) are the rudest, nastiest people you’d talk to.

like, don’t police how i take care of my cat when you don’t know what is best for him

[fabricdragondesigns]

The Pipeline from Crunchy Moms to Alt-Right Conspiracist

#youtube

[vague-humanoid]

The Pipeline from Crunchy Moms to Alt-Right Conspiracist

#Youtube