(LifeSiteNews) — Change my mind: the most powerful policymakers in the world hate the nuclear family, traditional gender roles, feminine women, and masculine men, and want to extinguish their “radical” and “hateful” ideologies from the face of the planet.
It sounds so outrageous as to be the stuff of dystopian fiction — A Brave New World, perhaps? — but today there is living proof of this agenda, and her name is Eviane Leidig. The European Union (EU)-funded adviser has taken particular aim at “tradwives,” referring to a movement of women who are embracing the role of mother, homemaker, and devoted wife submitted to the leadership of their husbands while opting out of the corporate world.
According to Leidig, tradwives are a threat because they “insidiously” promote so-called “far-right” ideology within the context of attractive and “authentic-looking” videos posted to social media in which they bake bread in pretty aprons and pick flowers from the garden, etc.
What exactly is the “far-right” content they’re promoting? She devotes extraordinarily little time to defining this in her own writings and talks, but when pressed, she has revealed that to her, this denotes a “strong sense of nationalism — often white nationalism — anti-semitism, opposition to immigration [and] LGBTQ rights,” and “traditional views on gender,” which, Leidig said, “is why we talk about tradwives.”
She essentially lumps together ideologies that most people agree are reprehensible, such as anti-semitism and racism, with what should be considered normal and positive views: Namely, that we should acknowledge that there are only two sexes, and that it is good for women to embrace femininity and motherhood, and to raise their own children.
As Leidig explained in one interview, “These women are anti-non-binary,” (do not recognize other “genders”), they “want to embrace their, quote, ‘God-given femininity,’” and “they believe that feminism has forced the breakdown of gender roles in society and is the cause of a plethora of social ills.”
She has added that “the need to restore order by starting with the nuclear family unit is a prevalent talking point across these far-right female influencers.” The horror!
To Leidig, this is what the “far right” looks like. Her antipathy to such normal, healthy lifestyles is so breathtakingly twisted, one wonders how she can justify it.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, then, that she doesn’t. I struggled in vain to find Leidig explain why she believes that traditional gender roles — the common denominator of these tradwives — are harmful, and so dangerous, in fact, that their internet presence needs to be censored (on to that in a moment).
By all appearances, she herself has not come up with any remotely rational, coherent basis for her claims (and mostly insinuations) about the female “far right.” In fact, she admitted in one interview that she purposely did not interview any of these tradwives or “far-right female influencers” because, she said, it was not necessary — they had already explained themselves well enough.
More likely, Leidig understands that the weakness of her own stance will be exposed, and the traditional female influencers’ ideas will be reinforced if she engages with any of them.
The weakness of Leidig’s idea that “far right” female influencers are ideologically dangerous has been well noted even by her would-be supporters in reviews of her book on the subject, “The Women of the Far Right: Social Media Influencers and Online Radicalization.” Here are some excerpts from reviewers:
- “I was very favorably disposed to the topic, as someone who has had many friends fall down the sorts of “rabbit holes” Leidig describes. However, I found the treatment of the topic in this book to be quite poor… the author tends to lean heavily on too little argument and too little evidence and make broad conclusions from both.”
- “I had high hopes for this book, but unfortunately this was a DNF for me. This book was very dry… The author tended to do a lot of telling about the points she was going to make, rather than just making the point and getting on with it, so I felt we were going in circles.”
- “Leidig doesn’t want to engage too deeply with these women’s beliefs and prefers to skirt on their surface. She doesn’t present their world view the way they see it, nor does she explain how they prop up their philosophy in real life. She doesn’t want to see the world through their eyes and make it compelling… Dismissing their point of view without explaining their appeal and inner logic doesn’t help anyone recognize and counter those ideas in the wild.”
- “I was left wondering who is this book trying to speak to? The main reason I felt this way is that there really isn’t a deep cut about any of the women presented or their method… There is also an undercurrent of presumption that platforms/authorities have a desire to curtail these people’s influence at all that I found rather questionable.”
- “I didn’t feel there was much of a thesis behind Leidig’s writing, and the final chapter regarding how to combat online radicalization did not feel very useful to the individual.”
Not much of a thesis? It is clear that Leidig is trying to serve us a nothing burger.
And yet on these clearly tenuous grounds, Leidig admits she wants to forcefully censor and even shut down these tradwives and “far right” female influencers.
In one recent interview, she shared that she supports “hard approaches,” that is, what she refers to as “more repressive measures” to fight “far right” ideology, summarized in the “Four Ds of content moderation: Deplatforming, demonetization, deranking, and detection,” the last term referring to the detection of what could be considered “violating” online content.
We wouldn’t take Leidig so seriously if she didn’t exercise sway over the world’s most powerful policymakers: She is an “expert member” of the EU’s Radicalisation Awareness Network’s (RAN) European Research Community on Radicalisation, and she touts herself as having “delivered talks for the U.S. State Department, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Commission, Council of Europe, U.N., NATO, national and regional intelligence agencies, as well as advised for the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) and tech companies;”
She is also working on an EU-funded fellowship project “explor[ing] the decision-making process of platforms’ content moderation policies” on so-called “far-right extremist terrorist content.”
Interestingly, she admitted in one “Desperate Tradwives” podcast that she has “had conversations with tech companies where they admit [the tradwives] don’t violate their policies” because they don’t incite violence with their speech.
However, Leidig believes that their content “definitely traverses that borderline in terms of what could be violated or could cause harms.”
“We can point to some specific examples where these women have actually influenced terrorist attacks. Why don’t we rethink what is actually violative on your platform, because what these women promote actually falls under hate speech,” she asserted.
LifeSiteNews contacted Leidig for an explanation as to how these women have “influenced terrorist attacks,” as well as for clarification on her other points, but has not received a response. Frankly, these claims, including the claim that these women are guilty of “hate speech,” are ridiculous and dangerous to freedom of speech, but the danger doesn’t stop there.
Leidig’s efforts smell like a desperate attempt to stamp down anyone who even questions the dogmas of feminism and all of the misery it has brought upon women. While many women are still triggered by the idea that it is ideal for a woman to raise her own children instead of sending them to daycare, or the idea that women should seek to be feminine, more and more are waking up to the damage caused by the rejection of these ideas.
Perhaps Leidig doesn’t want to engage in a conversation as to whether children are best served by stay-at-home mothers, because she is not truly interested in the well-being of our children. Perhaps she doesn’t want to discuss whether women should embrace femininity because she doesn’t really care about the health of their relationships.
In all likelihood, she doesn’t want to entertain the reality that there are only two sexes because that would mean there is an objective truth, which would dismantle her worldview and the goals of the globalists she serves.
The tradwives she condemns are obviously not claiming that women should not make money, or have a public platform, or own property, etc. Or are they calling for the government to ban women from college or the workplace.
One does not have to reject equal civil rights for women to acknowledge that there is wisdom in encouraging mothers to stay at home with their children, and yes, even ultimately submit to the leadership of their husband. Those who are truly interested in understanding these ideas will find that they are not born of an oppressive hatred of women but of an understanding of how couples and children best flourish.
On the whole, the tradwife phenomenon signals the awakening of women to the poison of feminism and the beautiful fruits of traditional lifestyles. They are choosing the latter, and this is clearly a threat to the family-hating globalists. The upside of Leidig’s crusade is that she is revealing that feminism is not really about women’s choice or about their happiness. It is about something quite sinister, and Leidig herself would be well served to discover what that is.