Ballerina Farm & The Tradwife to Extremist Pipeline

Ballerina Farm being on the cover of Evie Magazine represents yet another shift toward the normalization of extreme right wing propaganda

this magazine cover is literally as out of focus as it looks

There’s a very good chance that many of you reading this right now have absolutely no idea why this image is one of the most disturbing images I’ve come across this week.

I mean, it seems like a setup for a hackneyed bit, right? “Oh no, The New American Dream is a wHiTe WoMaN - what’s the big deal?” For anybody that’s not perpetually online, this looks like any given number of magazines you might see at the news stand or at your local grocery store or maybe even at Walmart, depending on where you are in the U.S..

But I promise you - this magazine cover is an alarm bell ringing right in your ears promising the normalization of fascism in a way that’s downright insidious.

The first unusual thing you will likely realize, since most of you discovered ME on TikTok, is that the person posing front and center in this cover is Hannah Neeleman - more famously known as the main figurehead behind Ballerina Farm, a family vlogger who posts about her farm… her home cookin’... her eight kids with husband Daniel… and homemaking. For her efforts, she’s earned nearly 20 million followers between both her TikTok (10+ million) and Instagram (8+ million).

Hannah is what you might call a “tradwife” - a stylistic (and also lifestyle) choice meant to draw to mind the June Cleavers and Harriet Nelsons of the world. A throwback to the 1950s way of living. Her Wikipedia page even claims that she is frequently seen wearing vintage-style dresses and gingham aprons, earning her comparisons to Ma from Little House on the Prairie.

yas tradwife slaaaaay

But Ballerina Farm is more invested in the 1950s than the aesthetic choices.

In an interview with Megan Agnew for The Times, Hannah revealed that she and Daniel are against elective abortion and birth control, and Daniel revealed that there are times Hannah “gets so ill from exhaustion that she can’t get out of bed for a week.” It’s a full on dedication to the type of mindset that drives a certain type of rage bait that can keep the lights on on YouTube and TikTok for many, many years.

As Sara Petersen puts it in her own Substack on the subject,

“When I first saw this magazine cover, I thought it was photo-shopped. Photoshopped by some sort of cultural critique TickTocker with a dark sense of humor - as a way to illustrate the connection between Ballerina Farm’s idyllic representation of traditional motherhood and wifehood and the explicitly pro-Trump magazine, Evie. I thought it was fake at first glance simply because it’s so on the nose. The image. The headline (I don’t have time to even address the accompanying coverlines!!) The over-the-top TRADWIFE ALL CAPS of it all.”

This isn’t an anti-tradwife piece, to be clear. And the problem with the cover isn’t necessarily that it’s Ballerina Farm on the cover so much as what it represents. After all, as The Cut wrote about Hannah and Daniel,

“Unless she endorses the Trump-Vance ticket in a Reel, ham-handedly stage-managed by Daniel, Hannah Neeleman is just a highly visible working mom. She has a too-demanding husband and a lot of kids — relatable to many, unfortunately. Whatever she really thinks about while she’s practicing ballet at dawn in her gym, we’ll never know. In the midst of polarization and endless cycles of reactionary take-baiting, and despite whatever she writes on her website’s About Us section, Hannah Neeleman is a cipher. This is what keeps us coming back for more.”

By design, Ballerina Farm are supposed to be blatantly apolitical, aside from what the very act of being a tradwife represents to many people. So - what’s the issue?

The big issue is that Ballerina Farm are on the cover of Evie Magazine - a women’s magazine launched by a husband-and-wife super-influencer duo named Brittany Martinez-Hugoboom and Gabriel Hugoboom back in 2019.

As Falyn Stempler writes for The Express, “The magazine's mission was to provide an alternative to women's media like Cosmopolitan to "empower, educate and entertain young women with content that celebrates femininity and encourages virtue”” and “reaches more than 10 million people across all social media channels and earns millions of unique page views per month.”

It’s also conservative propaganda that was financed by Peter Thiel.