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Granola Nazis are the most extremist of a broader, and growing, group of right-wing hippies, who link a reactionary desire to return to a “natural” hierarchy with health and cultural practices we might have previously associated with leftist movements. Right-wing hippies can be found everywhere from the libertarian small farmers celebrated by 1990’s health guru Michael Pollan, to the cookbook I grew up with, Nourishing Traditions: against the diet dictocrats, which encouraged fermented food and a eugenic anti-modernism. The most extremist can be seen in “Hearth and Helm”, a group of women made up of Sarah Dye – a literal farmer’s market fascist known online as Volksmom – and her friend Karissa known as Lady LaSSarus (capitalization intended) who are part of the SPLC listed hate group known as folkish, (or neo-völkisch).
Folkish
Folkish, as it is most commonly referred to online, is the belief in a pagan religion which emphasizes whiteness as a spiritual connection to nature. This is frequently realized in an Instagram-friendly signature “dark-hippie” style that emphasizes Nordic folklore or Germanic tribal identities. Both extremist and right-wing aligned health-and-wellness sites draw on this style with posts featuring signature elements: runes, elk antlers, dark forests, strong men with braids and abs, or winsome women in fields of snowy flowers. This style then has spread from the extremist groups to characterize a broader intersection of wellness and whiteness.
Right-wing hippies might sound like a contradiction in terms. However contemporary granola Nazis have long roots in both the green wing of the Nazi party. The granola Nazi is part of a broader contemporary “dissident right”, interested in health, wellness, and nature as a means to race science and eugenics, and frequently comes to yoga for a kind of spiritually inflected “revival of white wellbeing”. This search for whiteness blends Nature and esoteric ideology, conflating the far-right “organic society” of natural hierarchy and inequality with the healthful practice of eating organic food.
Traditionalism
Some Granola Nazis blend paganism and Christianity in a belief system termed Traditionalism. Traditionalism can be understood in two, related senses in the contemporary right. The first, associated with the highly mediatized tradwife movement, is traditional conservatism or TradCon in the digital lexicon (as opposed to NeoCon). This refers to a nationalist and more openly white supremacist iteration of conservatism, which also opposes industrialization, bureaucracy, and social equality. Because of this opposition to industrialism it can appear to blur the lines between leftist – anti-capitalist or environmentalist – discourses and the right.
However, this is not environmentalism, but the location of truth and strength in rurality, and decadence and decline in urbanism. This reflects longstanding antisemitic and anti-democratic ideologies of meaning which animate much of right-wing intellectualism, from theosophy to the New Right’s organic society, and persists today in the contemporary alt-right’s Steven Bannon, as well as Alexander Dugin, or Italian fascist Georgia Meloni. This philosophy of meaning is referred to as Traditionalism, where Nature proves to be a space for the heroic quest for meaning in a meaningless, materialist, modernity. Here meaninglessness is social progressivism and democracy, while meaning is transcendent hierarchy as revealed truth at the heart of all religions. The three original founders located this timeless hierarchy at the intersections of Catholicism and other religious traditions: the Vedanta (Julius Evola); Sufism (Rene Guenon); and Evangelicalism (Frithhof Schuon). The esoteric fascism of the contemporary digital era on the other hand often brings together Traditionalist Catholicism (TradCaths) and pagan imagery.
This new iteration of Traditionalism is what Marc Tuters refers to as esoteric fascism online, taken up in styles such as ‘fashwave’ – an aestheticized vision of neon sunsets and black suns, where modernity is referred to as a dark age or “kali yuga” which must be brought to an end by “spiritual warriors” such as the Order of 9 Angles who often take up actual arms.
From normalizing to naturalizing
The ecological, “crunchy” rebranding of the far right may seem to normalize Traditionalism with its anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, and anti-modern ideology, but may in fact lead to more extremism. It can better be understood as a kind of naturalization of this ideology. That is, fascism is presented as being “natural” – i.e. both desirable and true fact – through images and discourses of nature and natural beauty. For instance, images on Instagram feature Nordic landscapes covered in snow, in which blonde women hold large pregnant bellies, suggesting a kind of continuity between the land and the race. Or images of dark German forests with illuminated clearings, the sunbeams falling on a sign reading Heimatpflege (care or custodianship for the homeland). This presents care for the white homeland as an oasis of Meaning, or a revealed truth, in a literal sign.
These images and others like them use the beauty of landscape and individual to disseminate racist ideologies in highly media-friendly ways. They also create deeply desirable subject positions for their viewers. Instagram accounts’ usernames and bios often reflect heroic imaginaries as they present the accounts as medieval lords, ladies, and “hyperborean heroes”. They borrow from prominent discourses on Instagram such as natural health and masculinity development, to present whiteness and tradition as “restoring male vitality”: be a racist, and you will have abs like a Viking or an old Greek statue. Something Cold, Strong, and White anyway.
Making extremism into meaning
This is a fringe ideology, but has the potential to grow, as the threat of climate change brings eco-fascism, or racial extermination as a solution to environmental devastation, to the fore. We can already see far-right ecologism taking hold across Europe, for example in Switzerland where majority party SVP use the idea of natural beauty to oppose immigration. This is not just a euphemism or a normalization of hateful ideology, but a deep naturalization and legitimation of these views though mundane practices such as health and fitness routines, and through desirable aesthetics with Instagram appeal. Granola Nazis, and Traditionalism more generally, show how the far right is making meaning from hate, turning hierarchy into spirituality. More work is needed on how this happens, and what we can do to interrupt it.
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