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    What Elon Musk wore to the White House foreshadowed his downfall

    In case you missed it, Elon Musk and Donald Trump have fallen out.For some – and in particular anyone looking at the tech billionaire’s White House wardrobe – this will come as little surprise. Long before anyone hit send on those inflammatory tweets, or tensions spilled out over Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBB), Musk’s political downfall was written in the stitching.During his time in the White House, Musk shunned the sartorial rulebook of someone at the shoulder of a president, where suits and ties are the common code. He wore dark Maga baseball caps at the Oval Office and told a rally in New York: “I’m not just Maga, I’m dark gothic Maga.” Then there were the T-shirts with slogans such as “Occupy Mars”, “Tech Support” and “Dogefather”. At campaign rallies, commentators noted he looked “more like he belonged at a Magic: The Gathering tournament than a political event”, his dress sense the style equivalent of the k-holes that it is claimed Musk frequently disappeared into.The more casual styles of Musk and his Silicon Valley tech bros – where stiff collars are eschewed in favour or crewnecks, tailored jackets softly pushed out the door by padded gilets – are light years away from those of the suited-and-booted US Capitol.But if Musk’s clobber signalled a new DC power shift, it also spoke to different norms. “Disruption might be a badge of honour in the tech space,” says DC-based image coach and style strategist Lauren A Rothman, “but in politics, chaos has a much shorter runway. The White House has been around for a long time. We’re not going to stop wearing suits … This is the uniform.”View image in fullscreenAll of this dressing down, dressing objectively badly and dressing “inappropriately” has form. Consider, if you can bear to, the case of Dominic Cummings. The former Boris Johnson aide subjected Westminster to dishevelment, Joules gilets, beanies, Billabong T-shirts and tote bags advertising the 1983 gothic-inspired horror novel The Woman in Black. He wasn’t just a Tory, he was a gothic horror Tory.As Jonathan Freedland, the Guardian columnist and host of the Guardian’s Politics Weekly America podcast, notes: “Dressing down is usually a power move in politics, just as it is in the boardroom: only the most powerful can get away with it.” That was, he says, the message Cummings sent “when he roamed Number 10 in a gilet: ‘You lot are worker bees who have to wear a uniform, whereas I’m so indispensable to the man at the top, I can wear what I like’.”It was the same with Musk, whose threads were a flipped bird to all those Oval Office stiffs in suits. As Rothman puts it: “His uniform of casual defiance stands in sharp contrast to that traditionally suited corridor of political power.” And that contrast screams out his different, special status.Before him, there was “Sloppy Steve” Bannon, a man never knowingly under-shirted. On this side of the Atlantic, Freedland points to former David Cameron adviser Steve Hilton and his penchant for turning up to meetings barefoot: “ditching the shoes was an instant way of signalling his membership of the inner circle”.It’s that age-old question: who has the privilege to be scruffy? As Freedland puts it: “Musk was happy to stand next to the Resolute desk of the president looking like he was dressed for a gamers’ convention. That was his way of reminding everyone of his superior wealth and unique status, outside conventional politics.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenBut what Cummings and Musk share in sartorial disorder, they also share in political trajectories. Scruffy Icaruses who flew too close to the sun; their clothes a foreshadowing of their fall. Trump might talk about draining the swamp, but his Brioni suits are very much swamp-coded – plus, while Johnson might have had strategically unruly hair and ill-fitting suits as crumpled as a chip wrapper, suits they still were.Ultimately, nobody likes a bragger. Because dressing in a way in which your privilege is omnipresent if not outright stated, is a surefire way to piss people off. Not least Trump, who noted that Musk had “some very brilliant young people working for him that dress much worse than him, actually”, in an interview on Fox in February.“The contrast between Musk’s garb and Trump’s cabinet,” according to Freedland, “made them look and seem inferior: servants of the president rather than his equal. It was one more reason why more than a few in Trumpworld are glad to see the (poorly tailored) back of Elon Musk.”To read the complete version of this newsletter – complete with this week’s trending topics in The Measure and your wardrobe dilemmas solved – subscribe to receive Fashion Statement in your inbox every Thursday. More

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    Is ‘chic’ political? In Trump 2.0, the word stands for conservative femininity

    The idea of “chic” is a fashion-world cliche. At best it is a know-it-when-you-see-it vibe, at worst a lazy adjective chosen by a writer to describe something that reminds her of Jane Birkin. It feels inoffensive enough. But now, “chic” has become something of a lightning rod online – a shorthand for a type of conservative-coded aesthetic.It began last month, when a creator named Tara Langdale posted a video to her TikTok following of just over 30,000 in which she sipped from a long-stemmed wine glass and read off a list of things she finds “incredibly UN-chic”. Wearing stacks of gold bracelets and a ballet-pink manicure, Langdale called out fashion choices like tattoos, Lululemon, visible panty lines, baggy denim and hunting camouflage as unchic, because, to her, these choices seemed “cheap”.“Remember, money talks, wealth whispers,” Langdale said.The not-entirely-serious video racked up views and sparked a conversation about how style preferences can carry political baggage. “This is giving mean girl,” one user wrote in the comments. “Classism isn’t chic, hope this helps,” wrote another. “Voting for Trump is unchic,” went a third. Many took particular issue with Langdale’s anti-tattoo stance, which they saw as stuffy or downright rude.View image in fullscreenSuch comments came with a strong dose of projection: Langdale, a lifestyle influencer, does not post about politics, sticking to fashion, makeup or motherhood. Nevertheless, many in the fashion TikTok community felt her commentary on “chic” aligned with the feminine aesthetic of Trump 2.0, where the rigid and airbrushed beauty standards of Maga officials such as Karoline Leavitt, Kristi Noem and Nancy Mace are celebrated.“Chic is starting to feel like a conservative dogwhistle that polices women’s looks,” said Elysia Berman, a creative director and content creator based in New York who posted a takedown of Langdale’s unchic list. “What chic has come to mean to a lot of people is a very narrow definition of elegance. It’s this thin, white, blonde woman who speaks softly and is basically Grace Kelly.”The ideal vision of womanhood from Donald Trump’s first term was caked foundation and clumpy mascara, as seen on the likes of Kimberly Guilfoyle and Lara Trump. But the facial augmentation and overly sexy aesthetic tied to the president’s inner circle – see “Ice Barbie” Noem, who posts full glam videos while deporting immigrants – does not necessarily match that of the president’s more social media savvy supporters, many of whom are now opting for a sleeker presentation.Momfluencers and tradwives celebrate RFK Jr’s “Make America Healthy Again” policies while wearing breezy milkmaid dresses. Evie Magazine, a politically conservative version of Cosmo, appropriates the trending visuals of feminist magazines with headlines that decry body positivity and promote vaccine skepticism. As the New York Magazine writer Brock Colyar described young Republicans at a post-election night party: “Many are hot enough to be extras in the upcoming American Psycho remake.”The word “chic” has always been tied to a French, or francophile, sense of femininity, usually in reference to a woman who subscribes to Vogue and innately understands how to look good. But those turning it into a dirty word on TikTok, taking note of how it aligns with a changing conservative aesthetic, see it as having a more prescriptive, even oppressive, meaning for women’s fashion.Suzanne Lambert, a DC-based comedian whose “conservative girl” mock makeup tutorials went viral earlier this year, described the right’s obsession with all things ultra-feminine as “just this soulless, boring kind of fashion”.“Republicans are more focused on assimilating than we are on the left, so it makes sense that they all end up looking the same,” Lambert said.Ultimately, anyone who’s attempting to look chic – or wealthy – is probably neither of those things. Those TikTok imitators who equate chicness with pearls and a Leavitt-esque tweed shift dress? “They think it’s giving Reagan, but it’s really giving Shein,” said Lambert.(Ironically, some of the unchic pieces on Langdale’s list – Lululemon leggings, Golden Goose sneakers, a Louis Vuitton carryall bag – come with hefty price tags and could connote liberal elitism.)In an email, Langdale said that her definition of chic had nothing to do with politics. “Chic by definition means simplicity and timelessness,” she wrote. “Reading a neutral palette as ‘conservative’ conflates style choice with ideology. Conservatism as a moral or political stance varies widely across cultures and religious communities, so tagging a fitting tank top and trousers as ‘Republican’ is lazy stereotyping.”Langdale called chic “this year’s version” of “old money” dressing, a TikTok trend that prioritized subdued, luxury items over the loud, brash and individualistic. “You can own every item on my unchic list and still be considered chic,” she wrote. “Labeling an item chic or unchic speaks only to its aesthetic, not a person’s style or worth.The conversation around chic is ongoing. Other creators, inspired by Langdale’s video, posted about what they considered chic in their niches. A medical student said it was “incredibly chic” to color coordinate scrubs with personal accessories; an office worker considered not letting colleagues in on their personal lives the height of chicness.Kat Brown, a 25-year-old New Yorker who works in fashion PR, made a video talking about how it’s “not chic” to be overly trendy, with chicness coming from a more sustainable wardrobe. “Smart consumption is chic,” Brown said. “Chicness is more reflective of your resourcefulness and creativity, rather than any sort of socioeconomic element.”For all the angst on chic-Tok, true insiders probably aren’t paying much attention. Fashion editors often make lists of words they consider so dull and unspecific that they prohibit writers from using them in copy; “chic” is usually right at the top. And when a word like chic is so bland to begin with, who cares if its wielded as an insult? As a British couturier played by Daniel Day-Lewis in the 2017 period drama Phantom Thread bemoaned of “chic”: “That filthy little word. Whoever invented that ought to be spanked in public. I don’t even know what that word means.” More

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    Republicans say they want more American babies – but which kind?

    Some of the children were too young to stand on their own. Instead, they sat on their parents’ knees or in their parents’ arms, waving American flags. Many of them seemed confused about what, exactly, was even happening.But these kids were in the midst of making history: their families were among the first to take advantage of Donald Trump’s February executive order granting white South Africans refugee status in the United States, on the grounds that Afrikaner landowners – who make up just 7% of South Africa’s population yet, decades after the end of apartheid, control about half of its land – are facing persecution. While the doors to the US refugee program have been slammed shut to virtually everyone else, these Afrikaners showed up in the US earlier this week, their refugee status promising a path to US citizenship.Days later, the Trump administration took a far narrower view of who deserves access to the American polity. On Thursday morning, a lawyer for the Trump administration argued in front of the US supreme court that the 14th amendment does not guarantee citizenship to the American-born children of “illegal aliens” – a view contradicted by more than a century of legal precedent.This split screen raises a vital question: is the Trump administration really interested in helping children and families flourish – or only the “right” families?Over the last several months, the Trump administration’s policies on immigration, families, and children have been pockmarked by all kinds of contradictions. The administration is reportedly considering numerous policies to convince people to have more children, such as “baby bonuses” of $5,000 or medals for mothers who have six or more kids. The Department of Transportation has issued a memo directing the agency to “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average”. And JD Vance has proclaimed: “I want more babies in the United States of America.”These moves are, in part, fueled by the growing power of the pronatalism movement, which believes that the declining birthrate in the US is an existential threat to its workforce and its future.Why, then, does the government want to exclude an estimated 150,000 babies born every year?“It’s hard to look at any of these policies and not believe that they’re created for the purpose of satisfying a political base that was promised some sort of notions of recreating a nostalgia for a white Christian nationalist nation,” said P Deep Gulasekaram, a professor of immigration law at the University of Colorado Law School.If the fate of the US workforce is really of concern, experts say immigration could help grow it – but the Trump administration has taken a hardline stance against immigrants from the Global South and their children. The administration has not only reportedly turned the refugee agency responsible for caring for children who arrive in the US alone into an arm of Ice, but also slashed funding for legal representation of children in immigration proceedings. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress are trying to block parents who lack Social Security Numbers – such as undocumented people – from benefiting from the child tax credit, even in cases where their children are US citizens.The Trump administration has also unveiled new screening protocols that make it far more difficult for undocumented people to “sponsor”, or take custody of, children who enter the US alone. Just last week, the National Center for Youth Law and the legal advocacy group Democracy Forward sued the Trump administration over the changes, which they say have forced kids to languish in government custody. Between December 2024 and March 2025, kids went from spending an average of two months in government custody to spending an average of six.“This administration has compromised the basic health and safety of immigrant children in egregious ways,” Neha Desai, managing director of children’s human rights and dignity at the National Center for Youth Law, said in an email.In March, KFF, a charity that conducts health policy research, conducted focus groups of Hispanic adults who are undocumented or likely living with someone who is undocumented. Many spoke of the effect that the Trump administration’s policies are having on their families and kids.“I have a six-year-old child. Honestly, I’m afraid to take him to the park, and he asks me, ‘Mom, why don’t we go to the park?’” one 49-year-old Costa Rican immigrant woman told KFF. “How do I tell him? I’m scared.”“Even the children worry. ‘Mom, did you get home safely?’ They’re already thinking that something is going to happen to us on the street,” added a 54-year-old Colombian immigrant woman. “So that also makes me very nervous, knowing that there might come a time when they could be left here alone.”The supreme court arguments on Thursday centered not on the constitutionality of birthright citizenship, but on the legality of lower court orders in the case. Still, some of the justices expressed concerns about what the case could mean for children.Eliminating birthright citizenship, Justice Elena Kagan suggested, could render children stateless. The high court needed a way to act fast, she said.If the justices believe that a court order is wrong, she asked, “why should we permit those countless others to be subject to what we think is an unlawful executive action?”Both the historical and legal record make clear that the 14th Amendment encapsulates birthright citizenship, Gulasekaram said. But, he said, predicting the supreme court’s moves is a “fool’s errand”.“There’s really no way of getting around the the conclusion that this is a call to some form of racial threat and racial solidarity as a way of shoring up support from a particular part of the of the of the Trump base,” Gulasekaram said. “Citizenship and the acquisition of citizenship has always been racially motivated in the United States.” More

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    Abigail Disney: ‘Every billionaire who can’t live on $999m is kind of a sociopath’

    My conversation with Abigail Disney opens with the kind of bog-standard line that starts most chats. But because she is a left-leaning American, with a record of righteous criticism of the man now once again in charge of her country, I suspect it might invite a very long answer indeed.Still, out it comes: “How are you?”“It’s a good question,” she says, “because we’re all struggling with it.”A deep breath. “I spend a lot of time trying to think of reasons to be optimistic, because I don’t know how to function without that. And I want to find the energy and the grit for a really long fight. This isn’t just four years … you know, there’s a whole civilisation-level reset to be done. I mean, I heard the other night when Trump spoke, he mentioned that we would get Greenland one way or another. And then there was laughter. Laughter! I just thought, ‘Oh, we have sunk so low.’”The film-maker (and the grand-niece of Walt Disney) is speaking to me on video call from her home in Manhattan. She talks with a mixture of speed, eloquence and certainty – partly because her view of Donald Trump and his allies is all about something with which she is well acquainted: wealth, and what it does to people.“Trump is an inheritor,” Disney tells me. “He never acknowledges it, but he wouldn’t have been able to do any of the things he did without an inheritance. He absorbed the lessons of inheriting money almost unfiltered: ‘You have this money because you’re special.’ If you read about his childhood, it’s like the textbook worst way to raise a person – you know, he was violent, he was a bully and he was rewarded for that, even as a very small child. And the more money he had, the more he exhibited these bad qualities, and the more people told him he was wonderful.”I then mention something she well knows: that Trump’s sidekick Elon Musk is also from a very wealthy background, having started his first business ventures with money provided by his father, and then becoming rich beyond the dreams of avarice. This, she tells me, partly explains the frazzled morals of someone who has just imposed all those cuts to overseas aid, with apparently no regard for the consequences.Among the schemes Musk has frozen, Disney points out, was the Pepfar programme, AKA the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, which is estimated to have saved 25 million lives by supplying medicine to people with HIV and Aids around the world. “There are people suffering and dying today because of that cut,” she says. “There are children who have HIV who shouldn’t because of Elon Musk. Now. As we sit here and talk.”She exhales. “That natural human proclivity to say, ‘Hmm, that doesn’t feel right’ – he doesn’t have it. Trump doesn’t have it. They’re spending no time in shame, and shame is a righteous emotion. It’s not an emotion you want to live in, but it’s an emotion you want as a motivator sometimes. And where is it? Where’s the shame?”View image in fullscreenWhat makes Abigail Disney fascinating is that she is also an inheritor. To quote from a speech she recently made – at the Vatican, where she took part in an event focused on making wealthy people around the world pay more tax, and the idea that large concentrations of wealth now threaten democracies – she acknowledges that she is rich “only because of some quirks in the tax system, some good luck, and some very loving grandparents. But nothing else.”Now a 65-year-old mother of four, she is the granddaughter of Roy O Disney, who, with his brother Walt, founded the Walt Disney company in 1923. In her early 20s, she resolved to start giving away large chunks of her inheritance. By 2021, she had donated approximately $70m to causes centred on women living with HIV, women in prison and women affected by domestic violence. She has long been a member of the Patriotic Millionaires, an American organisation focused on changing the system so that people as rich as its members – and those who have even more money – pay more of their income in tax.“I am of the belief that every billionaire who can’t live on $999m is kind of a sociopath,” she says. “Like, why? You know, over a billion dollars makes money so fast that it’s almost impossible to get rid of. And so by just sitting on your hands, you become more of a billionaire until you’re a double billionaire. It’s a strange way to live when you have objectively more money than a person can spend.”She has also campaigned – successfully – to improve wages and conditions for workers in the theme parks that bear her family name (she still owns shares in Disney, though not, she says, enough to give her substantial clout). As an active Democrat, she was among the big political donors who, in the summer of 2024, said they would withhold money from the party until Joe Biden stepped down as its candidate in the presidential election.View image in fullscreenBut aside from all that work and her advocacy on wealth and tax, Disney is chiefly known as a film producer and director, some of whose work has presciently looked ahead to the polarised, angry country the US seems to have become.In 2015, for example, she made The Armor of Light, an acclaimed and very sobering documentary about Rob Schenck, an evangelical pastor based in Washington DC who was long associated with the American hard right, with views on abortion to match. The film portrays him trying to find the courage to speak out about the scourge of American gun violence and pull his followers out of their love affair with firearms; after it was released, he and Disney began to regularly make their case to gatherings of rightwing Christians.But as Trump began his march towards the White House, they started to get a sharp sense of what his politics were going to do to American society. “When I first started asking about Trump, the people we met were like, ‘Are you kidding? No way – he’s a joker, he’s nothing.’ And then, halfway through the summer of 2016, it was like the iron curtain came down, and we stopped getting invitations. And when Trump was elected, we never got another request to speak.”For Schenck, things were about to get very ugly indeed. Over decades, he had been involved in the campaign to nullify Roe v Wade, the US supreme court judgment that established women’s constitutional right to abortion – which, in 2022, was overturned. But three years before that watershed decision, he wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times announcing that he had changed his mind. At that point, Disney tells me, former allies who were now staunch Trump supporters turned on him.“Death threats and all kinds of things came in,” she says. “He was told he was going to hell by people he had been friends with for 40 years. It’s horrible what he’s been through.”That kind of belligerent nastiness is arguably the defining feature of the mindset of the president and his followers, but Disney is adamant that the roots of his politics lie in wealth and privilege, and how Americans view those things. As she sees it, Trump and Trumpism are not some sudden bolt from the blue: his rise to power, she says, highlights a cultural shift that began in the 1980s, when the US really started to venerate the wealthy.“Our magazine covers did not used to be littered with CEOs,” she says. “They used to have pictures of Martin Luther King on them, or a war hero, or the woman who founded the Girl Scouts. Just look at the magazine covers and you’ll see the way this country has lost its way.”Soon enough, along came reality TV, the frenzied worship of a new kind of celebrity, and social media. Trump, clearly, has skilfully used them all. “We all laughed and said he was stupid, but obviously he’s not,” she says. “In the 19th century he would have sold a lot of snake oil. He came along right at the correct moment. And he played his role brilliantly. You’ve got to give it to him.”View image in fullscreenOne question hangs over the whole of our conversation: what is to be done?For now, Disney tells me, pursuing political activism via film-making probably isn’t an option. She is understandably worried about what Trump and Musk might have planned for such outlets as the non-profit Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which might once have played a key role in holding them to account. The fact that the TV and movie industries are in crisis – thanks to recent writers’ strikes, and the impossible economics of streaming – makes things even more difficult. “I’m thinking of maybe pivoting to short videos – just talking at the camera, and doing that low-maintenance kind of thing,” she says. “I feel like I’m missing an opportunity if I don’t go on social media and try to be present as a public voice.”As the Trump revolution gathers pace, I tell her, I often wonder when massed opposition will materialise. Put another way, why aren’t millions of people already in the streets?She sighs. “We could all show up on the streets. But what would be the uniting message? The chaos is deliberate: it’s meant to give us too much to handle. Do we go out there about the environment? Do we go out there about DEI [diversity, equality and inclusion policies]? Do we go out there about gay rights, about women’s rights?“You know, the difficulty of being progressive is that it’s difficult to unite everybody around a single issue. So most of the progressives I know are trying to figure that out. And even if we did go out [on the streets], what is our leverage? We have none.”What does she mean by leverage?“Well, we [Democrats] have a minority in the House and the Senate. We have a cabinet that is so radical, and they are lining the government with people who are beyond radical and there is no place where we can exercise visible dissent … We’re being shut out. And the way of communicating has completely changed. An op-ed in the New York Times isn’t going to change things.”View image in fullscreenDisney is at pains to talk about the necessity of slow and arduous work: building opposition from the grassroots up – which will be helped, she says, by the fact that Trump and his cronies will sooner or later hit no end of problems.“I really don’t think it will take very much time for a lot of the people who voted for him to regret it, especially on the economy,” she says. “We’re going to have so much inflation: the tariffs are terrible. I think that there’s going to be some turning, and in the meantime we have to really work on building institutions. Black associations, neighbourhood associations, PTAs – we need to do the work of rebuilding those spaces. We need the basis of a really vibrant progressive society. We let it die.”When I mention the progressive flag-bearers Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who have recently been organising Fight Oligarchy events across the US, Disney speaks with an urgency that sounds almost optimistic.“We need Bernie barnstorming,” she says. “We need AOC barnstorming. We need, you know, the people we have that are greeted as authentic in the real world, not focus groups, to go out and be authentic with their passion and their smarts about where to go from here.”She mentions a handful of impressive young Democratic politicians such as Maxwell Frost, the 28-year-old congressman from Florida who had a key role in the pro-gun-control movement March for Our Lives. “There’s a bunch of people,” she says. “And what we need to do is put together a coordinated campaign. But you’ve got to build the infrastructure to do it.”We end as we began, with Donald Trump, and how awful he has made so many Americans feel. “He has a critical mass of 35% to 40% of the American public – which is far too many people – who are completely on board with the cruelty and the derision and the trolling,” Disney says. “But that leaves everybody who’s either too tired, or too alienated or estranged from the process.”She suddenly brightens. “They’re ours,” she says. “But we have to do the work.” More

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    Why I quit my homestead dream just as farmer tradwives became mainstream

    Our homesteading experiment began before tradwives, before Donald Trump, before Covid-19. It was the summer of 2015 when we were all sure no one would vote for a former reality TV star. I was 25 years old and desperate for a security blanket, working a sales job and looking for excuses not to return to college.My husband, Patrick, and I had talked about farming since our first date. We wanted goats. At his 2-acre property in a quiet suburb of Portland, Maine, we kept a few chickens and a scrawny vegetable garden.One morning, Patrick texted me: “I found the place. You’re going to love it. It’s uber cute.”Ninety-three acres in midcoast Maine, with an abandoned farmhouse and huge barn. Overgrown fields, alders encroaching across a pool of fetid swamp water to scratch against the door, no floor in the kitchen, and a single pipe gravity-feeding spring water from the mountain side. A three-hole outhouse was the extent of the plumbing.It was perfect.View image in fullscreen“What’s your end goal, man?” asked Patrick’s old college roommate. “What are you imagining in five years? Her barefoot and pregnant in the garden?”It was 2015 and you could still buy a piece of rural heaven for less than a small fortune – if you were willing to put in some sweat equity. We put a deposit down on some goats and signed our mortgage.Back-to-the-land wasn’t a political statement then. Sure, your urban friends would think you’d lost it, but not in an anti-vax, don’t-tread-on-me way. I had no desire to be barefoot, nor pregnant. But we were still in the honeymoon phase of our relationship, and building a life together from scratch had its romantic draw.I told myself I was sucking the marrow out of life, as Henry David Thoreau had once done. I even wore a T-shirt that said “Resistance is Fertile”. I thought of homesteading as an overtly political – even rebellious – act.Homesteading was in my blood. My mother had gone back-to-the-land with her first husband in the early 1970s, inspired by Helen and Scott Nearing, hippie icons who taught a generation to “live simply and sanely in a troubled world” with their book, Living the Good Life (1954). Scott Nearing was an outspoken pacifist, communist and protester. He and his wife, Helen, ate raw foods, tended their own land and railed against capitalism long before there were TikTok trends on the subject.Before my mother moved to Maine, she went to her grandparents to share the news of her move. They had grown up on a hardscrabble Missouri farm during the dust bowl. They had moved to town for a reliable job and to give their deaf daughter, my grandmother, the opportunity to study.When my mother told Daddy Kays, as she knew him, about her plans to go rural, he was horrified. Why do you want to do that? he asked. Why would anyone choose to go back to subsistence living? Why did my mother insist on denying what my great grandfather saw as progress?My mother left her homestead in the late 1980s. She moved to town to provide a better education for her young daughters, to seek more stable employment, and to leave a Sisyphean list of chores. By this time, many homesteaders were joining her in shifting back to a less isolated existence.The few who remained largely credited not a deeper sense of political motivation, but a strong community. Where homesteaders had gathered in groups, they seemed to remain. The Nearings had cultivated a following of interns and volunteers who showed up each year and had gradually settled around their homestead in Harborside, Maine. To this day, that area remains a haven for self-sufficient living.It could never be said that Patrick and I did things halfway. For two years, we showered outside in the negative temperatures and biting winds of a Maine winter. We preserved our harvests, bottle fed baby goats, raised pigs and chickens and geese and sheep. Patrick rebuilt our entire home from the studs. Fields were cleared and hayed to feed our animals. All of our equipment came from barters, trades and Craigslist. For what we couldn’t find a good deal on, we made do. Our lives revolved around the movement of firewood, without which we would freeze in winter.View image in fullscreenI wrote a book on our lifestyle – So You Want to Be a Modern Homesteader? – and shared our journey on social media. Through this outreach we connected with others making a similar leap, a community that was tiny and fringe before the interest in rural living sparked during the pandemic and ensuing lockdowns. We greeted each other, in person and online, with the excitement of people into some shared niche hobby. We troubleshot problems, speculated on livestock choices and traded sourdough starters.Even before terms such as “tradwife” became popular, I noticed remarkable consistency in our homesteading friends. When a couple would show up at our farm to buy a goat or lamb, they’d bundle out of their unblemished Volvos with a snot-nosed toddler swaddled in one car seat in the back, the other car seat occupied by a sleeping infant. The mother would have kind, slightly confused eyes and an instant attraction to animals. The men were bearded, in lumberjack plaid.It got to the point I would joke that I could not tell my friends’ husbands apart, so uniform was their charcoal facial hair. The men always knew what they were doing: brimming with the self confidence of someone who recently read Everything I Want to Do is Illegal, possessed of at least one scheme to provide for his family while living off the land.After five years, our routine was set. The farmhouse had electricity and running water. We’d cleared the fields and put in a farm pond. Every spring we welcomed a new batch of goat kids and lambs that we sold, we milked our goats and sheared our sheep. We turned over our land sustainably using pigs, and we collected dozens upon dozens of eggs every day from the chickens, ducks and geese.View image in fullscreenWe were also very tired. We fell into bed every night exhausted, and woke up and did it again. There was little time for hobbies outside of running the farm, and less for intimacy. There was no time for travel – even going down the coast to see our parents had to be planned and limited to a few hours out of the day. When we did have time to sit together, we bickered about chores and finances strained by hungry animals. The addition of an indoor shower did little to remove the grime that stuck in our emotions.Faced with exhaustion and burnout, for a few years we tried to downsize, to reverse out of our headlong rush into self-sufficiency. To make time for occasional date nights and rest, we tried to sell a few animals here and there, but the chores still piled up.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThen in late 2019, Patrick’s son died unexpectedly. In the onslaught of grief, we had to manage feeding dozens of animals and moving firewood in for the winter. Have you ever had to make sure that a funeral would be over in time for evening chores?Soon after, Covid arrived. Within the online homesteading community, jokes made the rounds about how well positioned for a pandemic we were: we did not need supply chains or contact with the outside world to thrive. And yet there is a difference between choosing to stay at home on the farm and having to, particularly when the farm is wrapped in a thick cloak of sorrow.By the end of the first year of the pandemic, we were ready to get off the farm. And then our entire flock of more than a hundred birds succumbed to bird flu, which at the time was a new avian disaster. Our abundant flock of friends and entertainers disappeared overnight, culled in the wake of a burgeoning pandemic.Community can save a homestead from failing under this kind of stress. But as we tended to our tragedies, the community around us had shifted.People had started making careers out of being influencers and content creators. The homesteading world was no less full of social media personalities than the rest of the internet. And when Covid lockdowns hit in 2020, anyone who was online talking about self-sufficiency had an opportunity. Those of us who had shared our homesteading journeys since we first shot up on Instagram’s algorithm in 2013 were getting phone calls from places including the New York Times asking us about our lifestyle. Our follower counts had exploded. We – the fringes, the freaks – were the popular kids now.Leaning in to the popularity of from-scratch living was a recipe for success. Hannah Neeleman’s Ballerina Farm, once home to rough-and-ready farm life and now curated to a perfect prairie-wife aesthetic, has 10 million followers. All of my other contacts who leaned into the buzz around self-sufficiency in 2020-2021 now have hundreds of thousands of followers.Unfortunately for my pocketbook, I was wrapped up in several blankets worth of troubles at that time, forgetting to reply to emails and sometimes forgetting to just get out of bed.Not all of my friends went full “tradwife”. Some simply began to prothetize more about organic methods, no till gardens, and permaculture practices. They DIYed themselves crazy. How many of them had outside help to manage a menagerie of animals and a list of home improvement projects? Far more than ever mentioned help.Thoreau had brought his laundry into town for his mother. Now, today’s homestead influencers have perfected promoting a from scratch lifestyle while utilizing invisible helping hands at every turn.A less welcoming community grew around these very online homesteaders. When a follower would realize my political views swung left, they’d pepper my pictures with comments about how they’d thought they liked me until they found out I was a radical lefty. Several new homesteading festivals have sprung up around the country, including the popular Homesteaders of America Conference, which draws almost 10,000 homesteaders annually and welcomes speakers such as Joel Salatin, an outspoken libertarian linked to possible roles in the Trump administration and Nick Freitas, a far-right state delegate from Virginia who has referred to the Affordable Care Act as a “cancer”.View image in fullscreenFor those reasons, the embrace of traditional living gave me pause. In between the grief and the daily grind, my community – online and in real life – was becoming more hostile. There were subjects that could not be talked about, loud unfollows when opinions became known, and a lifestyle that had been fun and alternative was warped by ugly exclusion.It felt as if a curtain had been pulled back from my lifestyle choice. I had enjoyed the connection to my food and the land through sustainable living, but I had never thought of my lifestyle as a step backwards in time. I had laughed at the idea I might someday be barefoot and pregnant in the garden. But, with a never ending list of homestead to-dos, I was as tied to the wood stove and the milking routine as an 1800s woman before me.The happiest “homesteaders” I know continue to thrive in semi-urban environments, with neighbors who stop by to check on the ducks if they want a break from the farm. Most of them are minimally online, disengaged from the performative fetishization of the lifestyle. They keep one foot in the garden, and one on the pavement of society.Today, Patrick and I keep a few goats and a garden in the backyard. We have the ability to leave the farm now and then for a trip, and we’re in the process of moving closer to family and culture. We are taking steps to ensure that our hard work is preserved, working with a land conservation group to keep the property in farmland long after we are gone.We have no aspirations towards self-sufficiency, but a desire to experience varied aspects of life while remaining connected to our food sources. I now have a set of skills I can draw on if I find myself in the kind of calamitous situation that sections of the homesteader community are prepping for. I feel a deep appreciation for the labor of food production. I’ve also learned to embrace the freedom of progress. Today, I run, I read, I write, I take the time to walk in nature and sit and converse with my husband.Today, I am able to slow down and live. More

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    The US’s plutocrats and politicians want more, more, more. Matt LeBlanc shows us a better way | Arwa Mahdawi

    ‘Nothing will come of nothing,” King Lear said. He was totally wrong, I’m afraid. The truth is, a lot can come from nothing. More specifically: great life satisfaction can come from doing very little.You know who is well aware of that? Matt LeBlanc (AKA Joey from Friends), the king of 90s primetime TV. A TikTok featuring resurfaced interviews in which LeBlanc extols the joys of sloth is generating enormous enthusiasm online. The TikTok pulls from a 2018 interview in which LeBlanc gushed about how much he enjoyed taking time off after Friends and then cuts to a 2017 interview in which he said: “I should be a professional nothing.” Speaking to Conan O’Brien, LeBlanc explained: “Because I think I would like to do not a fucking thing. That’s what I would like to do. Just nothing. Nothing. Zero.” (Same, Matt, same.)Why is this old clip getting so much new attention? Because in a world that fetishises productivity, it seems that people appreciate someone unapologetically enjoying being lazy. Perhaps more importantly, however, at a time when it seems as if the rich and powerful never have enough, but are constantly seeking more, more, more, it’s refreshing to see someone be content with what they have. Obviously, LeBlanc has millions and is a household name, so it’s not like he is making do. Still, having gazillions doesn’t seem to stop others from trying to claw their way to more, does it?Look at tech oligarchs such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, for example. They have more money than God and instead of quietly enjoying it they are throwing funds at Donald Trump so they can try to get even more influence over our daily lives. The one good tech multimillionaire seems to be Tom Anderson, the co-founder of Myspace. After he sold the site for bags of money, he quickly retired; now, he travels the world having fun. He hasn’t tried to set up some dystopian new venture or become a politician. He’s just enjoying life.And look at the US government, which is crammed with people well past the age of retirement who refuse to cede power. US gerontocracy is so absurd that, last year, the then 81-year-old Kay Granger, who had been a Republican congresswoman since 1997, was mysteriously absent from work for months. A reporter found Granger residing at a senior living facility while dealing with “dementia issues”. She could have retired decades before, but, like many of her colleagues, she seemed determined to continue working.The moral of all this? A lot of people leading the US should be more like Joey from Friends. Try to enjoy retirement, please! Just give it a go! Particularly you, Elon. Please try doing a lot, lot less. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

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