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      How the Kids Online Safety Act Was Dragged Into a Political War

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      The Senate was set to pass the Kids Online Safety Act on Tuesday, but the legislation faces an uphill battle in the House because of censorship concerns.Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union sent 300 high school students to Capitol Hill to lobby against the Kids Online Safety Act, a bill meant to protect children online.The teenagers told the staffs of 85 lawmakers that the legislation could censor important conversations, particularly among marginalized groups like L.G.B.T.Q. communities.“We live on the internet, and we are afraid that important information we’ve accessed all our lives will no longer be available,” said Anjali Verma, a 17-year-old rising high school senior from Bucks County, Pa., who was part of the student lobbying campaign. “Regardless of your political perspective, this looks like a censorship bill.”The effort was one of many escalations in recent months by those who oppose the bill. In June, a progressive nonprofit, Fight for the Future, organized students to write hundreds of letters to urge lawmakers to scrap it. Conservative groups like Patriot Voices, founded by the former Republican senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, are also protesting with an online petition.What was supposed to be a simple piece of legislation to protect children online has been dragged into a heated political war. At the heart of the battle are concerns about how the bill could affect free speech on culturally divisive issues, which both sides of the spectrum worry could be weaponized under the guise of child safety. Liberals worry about censorship of transgender care, while conservatives are concerned about the same with anti-abortion efforts. The tech industry has also latched onto the same First Amendment arguments to oppose the bill.The controversy stems from the specific terms of the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA. The legislation would require social media platforms and other sites to limit features that can heighten cyberbullying, harassment and the glorification of self-harm. The bill would also require tech companies to turn on the highest privacy and safety settings for users under 17 and let them opt out of some features that have been shown to lead to compulsive use.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Do you ever get the feeling that we’re living in a postmodern fiction? You’re not alone | Dan Brooks

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      Writing about the assassination of President John F Kennedy for Rolling Stone in 1983, 20 years after the shooting, the novelist Don DeLillo remarked: “Europeans and Middle Easterners are notoriously prone to believe in conspiracies … Americans, for their own good reasons, tend to believe in lone gunmen.” How times change. Since Donald Trump was wounded in an assassination attempt on 13 July, social media have boiled over with talk of conspiracies, false flags and complex manipulations of state and psyche for unclear ends. After Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy for president, various online conservatives argued that he was actually dead. Meanwhile, otherwise sensible observers blamed the media for creating the narrative that Biden had lost mental acuity and keeping Trump in the public eye – a kind of Rothschild conspiracy for people who took undergraduate sociology.It’s fun to scoff at such people, who believe that powerful forces secretly organise the world even as we confront evidence that human intelligence is no longer sufficient to run a branch of Chipotle. In fairness to the paranoid mindset, though, a lot of events from earlier decades’ fiction have been coming true lately. Consider Lisa’s prophetic line from the Bart to the Future episode of The Simpsons, original airdate 19 March 2000: “As you know, we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump.” It was funny at the time. I believe it was either Karl Marx or Nelson Muntz who said that history repeats itself: first as farce, then as whatever all this is now.The other week, Twitter user @ZeroSuitCamus posted a passage from an essay JG Ballard wrote for Vogue in the 1970s (incorrectly attributed to his 1975 novel High-Rise) about a future in which our daily activities are all recorded on video, and every evening “we sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters …” Here is the Instagram experience and its strange effects, complete with filter, algorithm and night-time scrolling, delivered to us decades before it became reality. David Foster Wallace predicted the filter, too, around page 111 of Infinite Jest, in which internet-enabled video calling makes everyone so insecure about their faces that they briefly adopt electronic face-improving technology, before it develops such a stigma that they all go back to voice-only telephony. Wallace’s 1996 novel about a form of entertainment so fascinating that it amuses its viewers to death raises some uncomfortable questions for any reader who gets screen time updates on their phones.All these texts – DeLillo, Ballard and Wallace for sure, and The Simpsons, too, in my opinion – fall under the category of “postmodernism”. The contours of the genre are still debated many decades after it emerged, but two key themes on which critics agree are (1) characters who find themselves at the mercy of impossibly complex systems; and (2) a sincere effort to acknowledge the importance of texts in modern life, which has since curdled into mere referentiality. I submit that these themes are no longer limited to literature and have become defining aspects of the way we live now.I also submit that it’s kind of weird that we have identified our own time as “postmodern” for three generations running. In the same way that the term “modernism” tells you something about how people thought of themselves in the years after the first world war, the fact that we regard ourselves as “post-” suggests a certain mindset. In many ways, our culture thinks of itself as existing after the important part of history – increasingly, after the good part. Latter-days thinking prevails, particularly on social media and in the arts, which seems resigned to rearranging the material already provided to us.I don’t think many of us are delighted to see previous generations’ satires coming true. Stories about technology-driven anomie and lives that had become unmoored from meaningful values were thrilling to readers in the 1980s and 1990s, but to be a character in such stories is a different thing. At the same time, we aren’t kicking against it – at least not much. There is that postmodern sense that the systems governing our world are too big and complex to do anything about them. We are all in a self-driving car that is taking us somewhere we don’t want to go.The bad news is that the conspiracy theories are false, and the car keeps veering toward pedestrians not because California billionaires are secretly priming the public for mandatory bicycles, but rather because someone saved money by skimping on quality control. Incompetence is more common than malice, even though it makes for a less compelling plot. The good news is that the sense that our world has become a work of postmodern fiction is also false. If it sometimes feels unpleasant to believe that what is happening in the news is real, it is also vital to remember that we are not characters in a story. What happens next is not written, even in outline form.The impossibly big systems are real and in many cases evil, as anyone who has travelled by air in recent years will attest. But they are nonetheless our systems, made and not given, and they can be remade. The end of the postmodern era will come not when the last Simpsons joke comes true, but when we realise the world imagined by the previous century is not enough for us – entertaining and fun to talk about, sure, but fundamentally less interesting than what we can come up with. Sooner or later, we must become authors again.

      Dan Brooks writes essays, fiction and commentary from Missoula, Montana More

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      Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman and Other Tech Billionaires Brawl Over Politics

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      Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman and other tech billionaires, many of whom are part of the “PayPal Mafia,” are openly brawling with one another over politics as tensions rise.Less than an hour after a gunman in Butler, Pa., tried to assassinate Donald J. Trump this month, David Sacks, a venture capitalist based in San Francisco, directed his anger about the incident toward a former colleague.“The Left normalized this,” Mr. Sacks wrote on X, linking to a post about Reid Hoffman, a technology investor and major Democratic donor. Mr. Sacks implied that Mr. Hoffman, a critic of Mr. Trump who had funded a lawsuit accusing the former president of rape and defamation, had helped cause the shooting.Elon Musk, who leads SpaceX and Tesla and previously worked with Mr. Sacks and Mr. Hoffman, then weighed in on X, name-checking Mr. Hoffman and saying people like him “got their dearest wish.”In Silicon Valley, the spectacle of tech billionaire attacking tech billionaire has suddenly exploded, as pro-Trump executives and their Democratic counterparts have openly turned on each other. The brawling has spilled into public view online, at conferences and on podcasts, as debates about the country’s future have turned into personal broadsides.The animus has pit those who once worked side by side and attended each other’s weddings against one another, fraying friendships and alliances that could shift Silicon Valley’s power centers. The fighting has been particularly acute among the “PayPal Mafia,” a wealthy group of tech executives — including Mr. Hoffman, Mr. Musk, Mr. Sacks and the investor Peter Thiel — who worked together at the online payments company in the 1990s and later founded their own companies or turned into high-profile investors.Other tech leaders have also been pulled into the political spats, including Vinod Khosla, a prominent investor, and Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz of the Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Olympics Opening Ceremony Singer Redefines What It Means to Be French

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      Aya Nakamura, the French Malian singer, did more than open the Games. She redefined what it means to be French.A new France was consecrated Friday evening during the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. When Aya Nakamura, a French Malian singer, came sashaying in a short fringed golden dress out of the august Académie Française, she redefined Frenchness.Adieu the stern edicts of the Académie, whose role has been to protect the French language from what one of its members once called “brainless Globish.” Bonjour to a France whose language is increasingly infused with expressions from its former African colonies that form the lyrical texture of Ms. Nakamura’s many blockbuster hits.France’s most popular singer at home and abroad gyrated as she strode forth over the Pont des Arts in her laced golden gladiator sandals. A Republican Guard band accompanied her slang-spiced lyrics. Her confidence bordered on insolence, as if to say, “This, too, is France.”Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader, had said that Ms. Nakamura sings in “who knows what” language. But her denunciation of the performance on the grounds that it would “humiliate” the French people failed to stop it.The backdrop to the ceremony was a political and cultural crisis in France broadly pitting tradition against modernity and an open view of society against a closed one. The country is politically deadlocked and culturally fractured, unable to form a new government or agree on what precisely Frenchness should be.In this context, the thrust of the ceremony, as conceived by its artistic director, Thomas Jolly, was to push the boundaries of what it means to be French in an attempt to bolster a more inclusive France and a less divided world. It was a political act wrapped in a pulsating show.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Elon Musk Shares Manipulated Harris Video, in Seeming Violation of X’s Policies

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      Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has waded into one of the thorniest issues facing U.S. politics: deepfake videos.On Friday night, Mr. Musk, the billionaire owner of the social media platform X, reposted an edited campaign video for Vice President Kamala Harris that appears to have been digitally manipulated to change the spot’s voice-over in a deceptive manner.The video mimics Ms. Harris’s voice, but instead of using her words from the original ad, it has the vice president saying that President Biden is senile, that she does not “know the first thing about running the country” and that, as a woman and a person of color, she is the “ultimate diversity hire.”In addition, the clip was edited to remove images of former President Donald J. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, and to add images of Mr. Biden. The original, unaltered ad, which the Harris campaign released on Thursday, is titled “We Choose Freedom.”The version posted on X does not contain a disclaimer, though the account that first uploaded it Friday morning, @MrReaganUSA, noted in its post that the video was a “parody.” When Mr. Musk reposted the video on his own account eight hours later, he made no such disclosure, stating only, “This is amazing,” followed by a laughing emoji.Mr. Musk’s post, which has since been viewed 98 million times, would seem to run afoul of X’s policies, which prohibit sharing “synthetic, manipulated or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Vivian Jenna Wilson, Elon Musk’s Transgender Daughter, Says He Was ‘Cruel’ and ‘Uncaring’

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      Vivian Jenna Wilson’s remarks, in an exclusive interview with NBC News, were a response to Mr. Musk’s comments about her transgender identity.Vivian Jenna Wilson, the transgender daughter of Elon Musk, said this week that her father had been “uncaring” and behaved in a “cruel” manner toward her as a child over her being queer and feminine.In an exclusive interview with NBC News on Thursday, Ms. Wilson, 20, called Mr. Musk “cold,” “very quick to anger” and “narcissistic.” She described him as an absent father who, according to NBC, would “harass her for exhibiting feminine traits and pressure her to appear more masculine, including by pushing her to deepen her voice as early as elementary school.”Ms. Wilson’s interview came in response to remarks Mr. Musk made earlier this week about her transgender identity.In an interview on Monday with the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson that was streamed live on X, Mr. Musk used Ms. Wilson’s birth name, which is known as deadnaming, and said that she was “dead, killed by the woke mind virus.” Mr. Musk also said that he had been “tricked” into authorizing gender-affirming care for her. He later doubled down on his claims about Ms. Wilson on X, saying that she was “born gay and slightly autistic” but that she “was not a girl.”Ms. Wilson said that her father’s comments had “crossed a line,” and she countered that he “knew what he was doing when he agreed to her treatment” when she was 16, NBC reported.It said that Ms. Wilson said she thought that her father had been “under the assumption that I wasn’t going to say anything and I would just let this go unchallenged, which I’m not going to do, because if you’re going to lie about me, like, blatantly to an audience of millions. I’m not just gonna let that slide.”Mr. Musk did not immediately reply to an email requesting comment on Friday afternoon.Ms. Wilson has largely stayed out of the public eye, NBC reported. The last time she garnered media attention was in 2022, when she filed a request to change her name “and, in the process, denounced her father,” it said.At the time, NBC reported, Ms. Wilson said in a court filing that she no longer lived with Mr. Musk, nor did she “wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”Ms. Wilson told NBC on Thursday that she had not spoken with her father in about four years “and that she refused to be defined by him.”“I would like to emphasize one thing: I am an adult,” she said, according to NBC. “I am 20 years old. I am not a child. My life should be defined by my own choices.” More

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      Saint Ann’s Teacher Charged With Sharing Sexual Images of Students

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      Prosecutors said the teacher, who worked for Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, lured students from four different schools to share explicit images with him via social media.A former teacher at an elite private high school in Brooklyn was charged on Thursday with soliciting sexually explicit images of children, prosecutors said.The teacher, Winston Nguyen, who was arrested in front of students last month, taught math at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn Heights. Between October 2022 and May 2024, Mr. Nguyen pretended at least 11 times to be a teenager and “fellow student” on social media, during which he enticed or tried to entice teenage students to send him “images of nudity and sexual performances,” according to prosecutors at the Brooklyn district attorney’s office.Mr. Nguyen, 37, who lives in Harlem, used two different Snapchat accounts to exchange messages with the children — five girls and one boy, all between the ages of 13 and 15 — prosecutors said. The teenagers attended four private schools in Brooklyn: Saint Ann’s, Poly Prep Country Day School, Berkeley Carroll School and Packer Collegiate Institute.Mr. Nguyen was charged with use of a child in a sexual performance, promoting a sexual performance by a child and disseminating indecent material to a minor, among other charges.Frank Rothman, Mr. Nguyen’s lawyer, said his client turned himself in to prosecutors in Brooklyn on Thursday morning.“We arranged for his surrender with the prosecutors and detectives,” Mr. Rothman said. “He showed up and will be processed like any other defendant.”Eric Gonzalez, the Brooklyn district attorney, said the investigation into Mr. Nguyen had “revealed extremely disturbing conduct,” adding, “the fact that he was a teacher and a trusted figure among students make these allegations even more troubling.”On one occasion, Mr. Nguyen paid a child to send a sexually explicit video to him, according to prosecutors. He also shared explicit photos he had received with other children, prosecutors said.Before he was hired at Saint Ann’s, Mr. Nguyen was charged with grand larceny after he was accused of stealing more than $300,000 from an older couple he was hired to care for, according to news reports.Mr. Nguyen spent about five months in jail before being sentenced to time served, according to news reports.Saint Ann’s did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Mr. Nguyen is expected to be arraigned Thursday afternoon. More

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      in US Politics

      Sundresses and rugged self-sufficiency: ‘tradwives’ tout a conservative American past … that didn’t exist

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      View image in fullscreen“Hey guys, and welcome back to my channel! Today, I’m going to be giving some tips for the ladies on how to attract a masculine man – a provider man,” the perky blonde woman tells the camera. Beaming and dressed in a pink dress complete with matching sweater, her swoop of blonde hair pinned back with a pearly headband, the woman rattles off her tips.“You want to look feminine, you want to be fit and take care of yourself and you want to be friendly,” the twentysomething woman continues. “I feel like the most feminine women I’ve come into encounter with are very peaceful. So have a sense of peace about you. Be content in your life without a man and pray for the right one to come your way.”She added: “You should be smiling a lot.”Meet Estee Williams. With more than 100,000 followers on Instagram, another 200,000 on TikTok and a history of appearances on shows like Dr Phil and Piers Morgan, Williams is one of the most prominent faces of an internet phenomenon-slash-controversy: the traditional wife, or “tradwife”.Tradwives first began trending online in 2020, when people were looking to wring excitement and comfort out of the smallest household tasks. Although there’s no single definition of “tradwife” – and many female influencers who’ve been decorated with the label don’t use it or even reject it – you know the tradwife when you see her. She is probably baking sourdough in an immaculate outfit, has a gaggle of kids (or wants them), and suggests – either silently or very loudly, like Williams – that life is better when women adhere to “traditional” gender roles and perfect at-home domesticity and nurturing.With the selection of JD Vance as Donald Trump’s running mate, the values that undergird the tradwife lifestyle are taking center stage at the highest levels of politics. Vance has fashioned himself as a champion of the so-called nuclear family, disparaging “the sexual revolution” and divorce. Days after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022, Vance tweeted: “If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had.”He has also suggested that Kamala Harris, who is likely to become the Democratic nominee for president after Joe Biden ended his presidential campaign on Sunday, should not have political power because she does not have biological children.“Why have we let the Democrat party become controlled by people who don’t have any children? And why is this just a normal fact of American life?” Vance asked during a 2021 Virginia talk. “That the leaders of our country should be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring, via their own children?” Harris has two step-children.Vance’s own wife, Usha Vance, earned a law degree from Yale Law School as well as a master’s from Cambridge University. She clerked for Brett Kavanaugh before he joined the supreme court, and, up until JD Vance’s nomination for the vice-presidency, worked at a law firm that describes itself as “radically progressive”. Usha Vance resigned from the firm last week to focus on supporting her family.Tradwives are trending – and Vance is rising – as the United States is being roiled by fights over gender rights, which are only set to intensify if Trump and Harris go head to head. American women are grappling with a backlash against abortion rights, their economic mobility and feminism itself. They are also dealing with the failure of US social programs to keep up with the rising cost of living or to provide meaningful support for working moms. As of 2023, the United States was one of only six countries on the planet – as well as the only rich country – not to offer any kind of national paid leave.Tradwives portray a fundamentally conservative and individual solution to that societal failure: retreat not only into the home, but also into history. Using the iconography of an idealized past, they evoke the economic and emotional fantasy that families, and especially women, can opt out of the complexity of modern society. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could choose to live on one income? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could choose to stay home and raise children, rather than be forced into it because childcare is so damn expensive?In reality, that past was only made possible through extensive government intervention – the kind to which modern Republicans are fiercely opposed.A softer lifeFor the internet to dub you a tradwife, you typically have to be more than a homemaker. You must swath yourself in an aesthetic that draws from a vast and varied array of historical reference points.The account of Gwen the Milkmaid, a blonde who boasts about 70,000 TikTok followers and a backstory as a former OnlyFans worker turned God-fearing tradwife, lives at the center of a Venn diagram of common tradwife inspirations: the nuclear family of the 1950s, Little House on the Prairie, and a 19th-century belief in “separate spheres”, when men went out to Do Industry while women upheld a cult of domesticity. Gwen likes to frolic in sundresses, “homestead” in the Canadian suburbs, and glory in “the feminine urge to take care of your husband and make him food all the time”. (Gwen also throws in a distinctly modern set of pseudoscientific beliefs, like “the sun doesn’t cause cancer”.) Above all, tradwives like Gwen preach self-sufficiency.But 19th-century homesteading, the source of so much inspiration for both tradwives and the GOP – was not a private endeavor undertaken by hardy men and their supportive wives. It was the result of the huge government subsidy program known as the Homestead Act. The 1950s, another conservative inspiration, were also shaped by government subsidies for housing and education – as well as a post-second world war movement to pressure women out of the workforce – that briefly made it economically possible for vast numbers of white American women to live as housewives. (These subsidies were nowhere near as available to people of color.)The women of the 19th century and 1950s also lived without the right to birth control or, after they were invented, credit cards. (Gwen the Milkmaid is skeptical of the former.) Domestic violence was not taken seriously. Rape victims’ sexual history could be brought up in trials, while marital rape was not even a crime. There’s a reason that the 1963 publication of The Feminine Mystique, a book about the widespread unhappiness of white middle-class housewives – written by a white middle-class housewife – triggered the advent of second-wave feminism.View image in fullscreen“None of these people would seriously want to go back to a period when a man had a right to rape his wife,” said Stephanie Coontz, the author of six acclaimed books about the history of marriage and families, including her forthcoming book For Better and Worse: The Problematic Past and the Challenging Future of Marriage. Tradwives are nostalgic for the 1950s because, she said, “they’re looking back at a time when it was economically possible for a woman who didn’t want to work out of the home to stay home.”The social and economic conditions that made the nuclear family structure so dominant in the 1950s were also exceedingly unique. Except for this post-war period, it has been far from traditional for US families to be made up of a breadwinner husband, a wife who stays home to do unpaid cooking and cleaning as well as 2.5 kids who get to enjoy an extended childhood.“The tradwives misrepresent what they are doing as what everybody used to do,” Coontz said.Many so-called tradwives do openly work for money – often through home-based small businesses, influencing or a combination of the two, such as selling courses on how to be a stay-at-home influencer. Like all influencers, their product is their own lifestyle.‘A sneaky little bit of prosperity gospel’Tradwifery is not a monolith, and some of the most popular women who have been labeled “tradwives” by the internet don’t talk about politics or gender roles. But social media algorithms and chatter can co-opt them into conservative projects about femininity and families that these women may not personally support.The internet has crowned @Ballerinafarm, whose real name is Hannah Neeleman, the queen of tradwifery. Neeleman, who told the New York Times that she was unfamiliar with the term “tradwife”, has 9 million followers on Instagram, eight children, and a husband whose father has founded airlines, among them JetBlue. They all live on a working farm in Utah, where Neeleman – who has a mane of blond hair that would make Cinderella jealous – helps run the farm, cooks meals from scratch and competes in beauty pageants. Neeleman has been doing this since before the Covid pandemic struck, but after being literally crowned Mrs American, Neeleman competed in Mrs World this year days after giving birth and rocketed to mainstream fame.Neeleman leans into the homesteading aesthetic, framing herself as a “city folk” Juilliard-trained ballerina who chose to go back to the land. But, unlike Estee Williams (who supports Donald Trump) and Gwen the Milkmaid (who doesn’t seem to like Justin Trudeau), Neeleman does not talk about her politics. Same goes for the model Nara Smith, a mother of three with 8 million followers on TikTok. Although Smith is open about her work as a model, describes herself as a “working mom” and is more likely to cook in a slinky slip than gingham, she has also been labeled a tradwife.She’s known for videos where she’ll whisper things like: “My husband has been loving Snickers bars and when he was craving one, I just decided to make him a batch myself.” Other recent productions include homemade Cheez-Its and cough drops, because Smith “doesn’t usually keep cough drops or traditional medicine in the house”. She cooks the messy cough drops while wearing a (white!) dress that retails for $2,990. Her motherhood and marriage look effortless – which may be the source of the tradwife label.“The sort of totalizing world of the tradwife – she’s in control of her home, she’s in her home, she’s controlling the food that comes in, controlling the media that comes in – there’s a real appeal to purity,” said Kelsey Kramer McGinnis, an adjunct professor at Iowa’s Grand View University. “There is a sneaky little bit of prosperity gospel thinking in here. ‘If you live this lifestyle, if you do this thing that God is calling you to [do] as a woman, he will provide. And not only will he provide, he will provide beautifully. He will provide a beautiful family, a beautiful home, beautiful surroundings, a beautiful body.’”McGinnis first encountered tradwives because, as she researched Christian influencers for her forthcoming book on Christian parenting, her social media algorithm presumed she’d be interested in tradwives, too.“I really quickly started to realize that there was a ton of overlap. Not just among the people making it but among the audience,” said McGinnis, who has written about tradwives for Christianity Today.View image in fullscreenAfter I watched several Williams videos on YouTube, the platform started serving me ads for the Alliance Defending Freedom, the powerhouse Christian law firm that masterminded the overturning of Roe and continues to chip away at abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. In May, Media Matters for America found that watching tradwife content on TikTok led its “For You” Page to be flooded with far-right conspiracy theory content “within an afternoon”.Estee Williams, Gwen, Neeleman and Smith did not respond to detailed lists of questions from the Guardian for this story through their email addresses and social media accounts. Smith did also not immediately reply to a request for comment through her representation at IMG Models.‘Starting with the American family’Despite the tradwives’ popularity, it’s not financially feasible for many women to quit their jobs. It’s not even clear that women want to. Almost 80% of women between the ages of 25 and 54 are now part of the US workforce.While Maga Republicans like Vance have a lot to say about the “traditional” family, they don’t seem interested in reviving the kind of widespread social programs that enabled it. Vance has called universal childcare “a massive subsidy to the lifestyle preferences of the affluent over the preferences of the middle and working class”.Project 2025, a policy playbook written by the influential conservative thinktank the Heritage Foundation, has a litany of proposals aimed at the intersection of labor and family life that stop well short of a full-spectrum social safety net. The playbook suggests improving retirement savings for families where only one spouse works, allowing workers to accumulate time off and incentivizing employers to provide on-site childcare.“We must replace ‘woke’ nonsense with a healthy vision of the role of labor policy in our society, starting with the American family,” Project 2025 adds. To that end, its architects propose that the Department of Labor to “commit to honest study of the challenges for women in the world of professional work”.Inadvertently or not, tradwives are already supplying an answer to this study, and it’s one that conservatives may like: what if women just stayed home? More