300: Farming Ballerinas

Summary

Conspirituality Episode 300: "Farming Ballerinas"

Release Date: March 19, 2026
Hosts: Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, Julian Walker
Main Theme:
A deep dive into the world of "Ballerina Farm," a viral Mormon influencer family that embodies a dreamy, homespun, back-to-the-land aesthetic—while promoting pseudoscientific health products, old-school gender roles, and problematic wellness conspiracies. The hosts break down the real-life privileges and ideology lurking behind the farm’s gorgeous social media presence, including issues of wealth, class, power imbalances, parenthood, and the mystification of domestic labor.

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Episode Overview

The hosts dissect the phenomenon of Ballerina Farm—the ultra-popular Utah-based wellness+homestead influencer brand run by Hannah and Daniel Neeleman. Ostensibly a wholesome, family-run farming business showcasing raw milk, bone broth, ballet, and big Utah stone kitchens, Ballerina Farm exemplifies the new "tradwife" trend merged with wellness pseudoscience and hints of conspirituality.
Purpose: The episode critically examines how privilege, class, and religious ideology are glossed over or misrepresented in Ballerina Farm’s online persona, challenging what millions of followers see versus what is left unsaid.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Who Are Hannah and Daniel Neeleman? The Ballerina Farm Origin Story

• Background: Hannah Neeleman grew up Mormon in Springville, Utah, one of nine children, daughter of a flower shop owner, Juilliard-trained ballerina, and beauty pageant winner.
  • Notable quote: “She seems to have really taken the craft seriously, unlike Timothée Chalamet, who can fuck all the way off with his recent degrading comments about ballet and opera.” (Derek, 04:17)
• Daniel Neeleman: Son of JetBlue founder David Neeleman, also raised Mormon; background in tech & airlines, brings significant inherited wealth.
• Farm Founding: After living in Brazil (where they vacationed on "farm hotels"), they bought land in Utah. Their farming venture was enabled by millions from family wealth, not scrappy bootstrap effort.
• Timeline:
  • 2017: Began raising pigs in Utah
  • 2018: Fire destroyed first farm; bought new 328-acre property for $2.75M
  • 2019: Launched Ballerina Farm's social media and direct-to-consumer meat business
  • 2023: Massive online growth, presence expands to retail and dairy (including an attempted raw milk venture)

Timestamp Highlights:

• [02:02] — Introduction of Ballerina Farm & the "raw milk" controversy
• [03:38] — Hannah’s ballet + pageant credentials
• [08:11] — Revealing the JetBlue heritage and questions about funding

2. Aesthetic & Brand: Tradwife or Aspirational Influencer?

• Not quite “tradwife”: Though often grouped with the tradwife movement, Ballerina Farm skews more aspirational and cosmopolitan than overtly traditional.
  • Matthew: “There’s a sophistication that is sort of like threaded throughout all of this...it’s not completely down home.” (07:01)
• Euro-elite ballet/courtly hobbies: Ballet, expensive stoves, global travel create an elite vibe.
• Brand Contradictions: Use of high-end props (e.g., $20K–$35K stove), stylized wardrobe, and slick videography undercut the homestead authenticity.
• Hidden Labor: The feeds rarely show the 60+ staff or acknowledge the true scale of their operation.
  • Julian: “They are much more in the aspirational influencer realm than the straight tradwife realm.” (06:38)
• Mormon background: Understated online, but integral in shaping their family structure and reproductive ethics.

Timestamp Highlights:

• [04:41–06:38] — Discussion on the tradwife aesthetic vs. elite aspirations
• [15:53–18:09] — The problem of privilege and omitting key facts about wealth

3. Wellness, Pseudoscience & Raw Milk Scandal

• Wellness Products: The farm markets protein powders, “calf-first” colostrum, bone broth, and raw milk—all heavily promoted with wellness and beauty claims (e.g., “raw milk = glowy skin”).
  • Hannah in People Magazine: “Since you’ve been drinking raw milk, your skin has gotten a lot better. And I kind of think there’s something to that.” (31:23)
  • Derek, refuting: “Packaging something that has little proven health benefits for humans is worth the stress placed on the cows that’s needed to harvest it.” (32:47)
• The Raw Milk Incident:
  • Ballerina Farm’s raw milk tested positive for dangerous coliform bacteria.
  • The Neelemans’ response was deflective, blaming regulations and insisting no unsafe milk was ever sold.
  • Neeleman quote: “No, absolutely not. And when we saw some of the comments circulating on social media about this, we realized there was a lack of knowledge, a lack of education for Utah. Every batch of raw milk that’s bottled has to be tested...there was no chance that any unsafe milk would ever get to the shelf.” (37:21)

Timestamp Highlights:

• [19:47–32:47] — Detailed breakdown of the raw milk marketing, controversy, and regulatory scuffles
• [37:20–37:50] — Neeleman’s video response to the raw milk scandal

4. Power Dynamics, Gender Roles & Family Presentation

• Uneven Power: The apparent egalitarian family dynamic is belied by public instances of male dominance and traditional Mormon gender roles.
  • Julian quoting NYT scene: “Daniel is back in the room now...Do you plan pregnancies? ‘No,’ Daniel says. When he says no, Neilman responds gently. ‘It’s very much a matter of prayer for me...I’ve never been told no.’” (14:15)
  • Matthew: “I care pretty much if they’re influencing the sexual politics of millions of people...I just don’t get any sense that we’re looking at equal power here.” (13:19)
• Mormon Priesthood Structure: Men ultimately preside over the home and business, with recent rhetorical shifts trying to paint this as “subservient but equal.”
  • Blair Hodges (Mormon expert): “Men hold the power in the home...There’s also been an uptick in trying to claim that women hold the priesthood in a secondary sense...I wish I was making that up, but I’m not.” (23:56)

Timestamp Highlights:

• [13:19–16:41] — Discussion of specific power imbalances and public representations
• [23:56–25:25] — Blair Hodges explains Mormon gender and power dynamics

5. Manufacturing Authenticity: The Constructed Nature of the Feed

• Professional Staging: The “candid” family moments are highly choreographed, using multiple videographers, careful editing, and visual cues that signal authenticity while hiding scale and labor.
  • Julian: “It’s like you’re getting this window into a very domestic, humble, living off the land moment between mother and child and…cow and camera person and editing screen.” (26:30)
• Contrast Between Feed and Reality: Small-scale, manual-family-farming is an illusion. The real business is an industrial-scale, direct-to-consumer operation supported by staff, tech, and market capital.

Timestamp Highlights:

• [26:30–29:19] — Deconstruction of viral “authenticity” in Ballerina Farm videos
• [32:47] — “They also sell bone broth, cocoa, electrolyte powder, flour jerky, and multiple other food and accessory products like tote bags, aprons, even burger and breakfast food boxes. So all of this implies an extensive manufacturing and shipping operation behind the scenes.”

6. Contradictions of Motherhood, Care, and Class

• Elite Reproductive Performance: Hannah’s rapid successive pregnancies and pristine appearance are held up as an ideal that’s mostly unattainable and risky.

  • Matthew: “No one has that many babies and turns out like this…Women with off the charts genetic privilege are representing extreme visions of women’s reproductive work to other women who…would not be doing regular fashion shoots, postpartum workout reels, or making it seem like nothing had changed their ballerina physiques.” (38:19)

• Unwaged Labor Romanticized: Influencers profit by glamourizing unpaid care work, fostering the “mystification” of domestic labor as love and ignoring its economic value.

• Parenting at Scale: The show notes (with input from ex-evangelical Tia Levins) that in huge religious families, “parenting” often becomes regimented child management (blanket training, parentification, corporal punishment), not the attentive engagement presented online.

  • Tia Levins Quote: “How do they get that many kids under control?... Blanket training. Severe corporal punishment. Intentional neglect. Parentification and practices that force children to suppress their development and needs are common in these extremely large families.” (44:37)

  • Matthew, on resource dilution in families: “...The finding is that this range of deficits in attention and care...accrue as the number of siblings rise.” (47:22)

  • Julian, on nostalgia for “latchkey” neglect: “We were latchkey kids and we were fine.” (50:46)

Timestamp Highlights:

• [38:19–44:10] — Deep dive into the physical toll and rarity of high-parity motherhood
• [44:37–51:00] — Parenting strategies in mega-families, resource dilution, and child autonomy

7. Capitalism, Gender, and the Mystification of Housework

• Silvia Federici’s perspective: The show closes with a Marxist-feminist analysis, positioning Ballerina Farm as a colossal “performance of mystification”—romanticizing domestic labor as natural, unaccounted-for love essential for capitalism.
  • Matthew, paraphrasing Federici: “...What appears in the culture as love or feminine nature is in fact labor that we’re not calling labor. And it’s unwaged so that capital can appropriate it invisibly.” (52:58)
  • Federici Quote (via Matthew):
    “Housework had to be transformed into a natural attribute rather than be recognized as a social contract, because from the beginning of capital's scheme for women, this work was destined to be unwaged. Capital had to convince us that it is a natural, unavoidable, and easy, even fulfilling activity to make us accept our unwaged work.” (52:58)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

| Timestamp | Speaker | Quote | |-----------|-----------|--------| | 04:17 | Derek | “She seems to have really taken the craft seriously, unlike Timothée Chalamet, who can fuck all the way off with his recent degrading comments about ballet and opera.” | | 13:19 | Matthew | “I care pretty much if they're influencing the sexual politics of millions of people...I just don't get any sense that we're looking at equal power here.” | | 23:56 | Blair Hodges | “Men hold the power in the home...There’s also been an uptick in trying to claim that women hold the priesthood in a secondary sense in that the men will delegate to them certain responsibilities… Now, they’re not ordained to it and they can’t do anything with it. But that's the rhetorical shift the church has been trying to take. I wish I was making that up, but I'm not.” | | 26:30 | Julian | “It's like you're getting this window into a very domestic, humble, living off the land moment between mother and child and cow and camera person and editing screen.” | | 31:23 | Hannah (quoted from People) | “Since you’ve been drinking raw milk, your skin has gotten a lot better. And I kind of think there’s something to that.” | | 37:21 | Daniel/Hannah | “No, absolutely not [unsafe milk was never sold]...there was no chance that any unsafe milk would ever get to the shelf.” | | 44:37 | Tia Levins (quoted) | “How do they get that many kids under control?... Blanket training. Severe corporal punishment. Intentional neglect. Parentification...” | | 52:58 | Matthew (via Federici) | “Housework had to be transformed into a natural attribute rather than be recognized as a social contract, because from the beginning of capital's scheme for women, this work was destined to be unwaged.” |

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Segment Timestamps

• 01:18 — Podcast proper begins
• 02:02 — Introduce Ballerina Farm / the raw milk episode premise
• 03:38–09:11 — Background: Hannah, Daniel, family, origin story
• 11:39–15:53 — Controversies: religion, medical advice, power dynamic
• 19:47–38:19 — Raw milk, marketing, feed analysis
• 38:19–44:10 — Grand multiparity, health tensions, influencer contradictions
• 44:10–51:00 — Parenting at scale, resource dilution, discipline
• 52:58 — Marxist-feminist critique and concluding thoughts

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Tone & Language

True to Conspirituality’s signature style:

• Analytical, irreverent, incisive.
• Frequent references to theory, lived experience, and pop culture.
• Language is accessible but rigorous, with biting humor and compassion.

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Summary Takeaway

This episode reveals how viral influencers like Ballerina Farm manufacture a fantasy of accessible, authentic rural living—subtly propping up patriarchal, capitalist, and religious ideals, and smuggling health pseudoscience into the wellness mainstream. The hosts interrogate not only the ethics and contradictions of Ballerina Farm’s content, but also the broader forces that allow such phenomena to flourish in contemporary conspirituality culture.

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Recommended for: Media watchdogs, parents, wellness skeptics, cult-spotters, and anyone tracking the overlap between “trad” content and digital-age wellness grift.

Transcript

[Julian Walker]

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This is Chris Christensen from the Amateur Traveler podcast. Your vacation time is important. You don't have enough of it. There are so many places to see. We help you choose where to go. Each week we cover a different destination, typically in an interview format, and we learn why you should go there and what you should do for a one week itinerary. Get the most out of your vacation time by listening to Amateur Traveler. Go and subscribe to Amateur Traveler today and travel better.

[Derek Barris]

Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy, conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism. I'm Derek Barris.

[Matthew Rimsky]

I'm Matthew Rimsky.

[Julian Walker]

I'm Julian Walker.

[Derek Barris]

You can find us on Instagram and threads at Conspirituality Pod, as well as individually over on Blue Sky. You can access all of our episodes ad free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on [e-mail] conspirituality. You can also just grab our Monday bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions. As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.

[Julian Walker]

Conspirituality 300 farming ballerinas when Hannah and Daniel Neilman recently went on camera to explain their position on raw milk, they assured their 22 million plus following that they were going to follow regulations. With a bit of a grudge. The couple behind Ballerina Farm wasn't going to let a little bacteria get in the way of their farming operations, so they'll just focus on pasteurized products for now. While not associated with Maha, some of their takes on health certainly rhyme. So today we'll get into this uber popular feed who they are, what they're doing in the mountains of Utah, and how privilege plays out in farming and childbearing esthetics.

[Derek Barris]

Ballerina Farm is at a huge presence in crunchy back to the earth social media feeds. For years they've amassed 10 and a half million TikTok followers, 10 million on Instagram, and over 2 million YouTube fans. Before we dive into the politics, healthism, cosplay and misinformation emanating from their feeds, just going to do a quick recap of the basics. For listeners who might be unfamiliar with their aesthetic, the feed largely focuses on Hannah Nealman, who I discovered I share a birthday with June 25th, though I am 15 years her senior. There's a lot of good birthdays on that. There's George Orwell and George Michael.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, and. And my younger brother.

[Derek Barris]

Oh, I didn't know that. Okay. And Hannah Ne, who grew up in a Mormon family of nine children in Spring, Utah. Her parents owned a flower shop, which she credits with her eventual turn toward the land. Her mother, she says, concocted herbal tinctures and always maintained a huge garden. Hannah attended a Juilliards school summer ballet program at 14, and then she received a scholarship to Brigham Young University's theater ballet program. She finished her university ballet studies at Juilliard. So she seems to have really taken the craft seriously, unlike Timothee Chalamet, who can fuck all the way off with his recent degrading comments about ballet and opera. My wife is a former ballerina herself, and we attend multiple ballets every year, so this is a bit of a personal topic for me. And besides ballet, Hannah also won multiple beauty pageants, which very much plays into her aesthetic.

[Matthew Rimsky]

So I'm not going to defend Timothee Chalamet, but because his whole family is wrapped up in the ballet world, which is something that came to light after he made these comments. So that was weird. There's some weird stuff going on. But with regard to Ballerina Farm, I think there is a point to be made that, you know, Chalamet is pointing with a kind of gesture at the mass market. That and Hannah's form of ballet, which I find very interesting for the tradwife aesthetic, especially in the elite, coded Juilliard educated I looked up. Tuition is 80,000 per year. A lot of people get scholarship. We don't know what her situation is, but, like, this is an elite, you know, education. You know, there's a private bar, studio at home. You know, this is not something that really, I think, I don't know, speaks to the working poor. Like, you know, at that level of ballet. There are other options, of course, but we're priced out of that here. We can't, you know, afford to go to the National Ballet here in Toronto. I mean, she is, I guess, making exposure to ballet through Instagram accessible. But I think any other activity, they could hinge this aesthetic on horseback, riding, skiing, everything is, you know, price beyond what most working people can afford. And so I think, like, at this point, I consider accessible working class art almost, you Know, coming from quality YouTube creation or, you know, people watching gamers stream on Twitch. But what I find unique about ballerina farms and ballet itself is that in her, in their context, is that it's much more Euro cosmopolitan than I have come to expect from U.S. tradwives, especially those who resonate with Maga and Maha. So, you know, that's interesting too. They also do a lot of international travel. Like they've got these connections in Ireland with some, you know, pastry chef, and he's always over there, and they're always over there. But yeah, ballet, it's not really an American pie thing as much as horse culture would be.

[Julian Walker]

It's interesting because they kind of issue the tradwife label and also kind of, as we'll get into, leave a lot of stuff out from how they present themselves on social media about their actual lives. And so I feel like they're much more in the aspiration. She's much more in the aspirational influencer realm than the straight tradwife realm.

[Matthew Rimsky]

Yeah. There's a sophistication that is sort of like threaded throughout all of this that isn't quite, you know, it's not completely

[Derek Barris]

down home in terms of ballet. All folk musics, for the most part at least for paid musicians, come from the courts. Ballet comes from the court. So I don't think it ever made the assumption that it was coming from a working class perspective, although that changes from culture to culture and how it's presented. But I just personally feel like it's not making the presumption. I don't know how much Hannah is making the presumption that it's accessible to everyone. But when you speak about working class art on YouTube and Twitch, I mean, those are owned by Google and Amazon.

[Matthew Rimsky]

Yeah.

[Derek Barris]

So when you're saying, here's where you can find working class art, and then it turns out that that's making money for two of the largest tech companies in the world, then what does that actually say about the creation process and accessibility?

[Matthew Rimsky]

Well, it says that creators who don't have money are stuck on platforms like that. That's all it says, Right? Yeah, but they can. But they have. But they have democrat somewhat democratized tools

[Derek Barris]

and still feeding some of the richest billionaires in the world by. By actually doing as we all are.

[Blair Hodges]

Right.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah.

[Derek Barris]

So Hannah's husband Daniel is on the. His. The other presence in their feeds. He too was raised Mormon and he also has eight siblings, though he was raised in Connecticut. His father plays a role in this. David Neilman. He is the wealthy founder of JetBlue Airlines, which is an important as of the farm which we'll get into at least assuming where their funding comes from. David founded another of other airlines, including one that he sold to Southwest. He also founded a home security and monitoring company where Daniel worked before becoming a farmer. Hannah met Daniel in Utah. They got engaged three weeks later, so seems to have taken right off in terms of their relationship. They were married in July 2011 and eventually moved to Sao Paulo. For Daniel's Hannah danced with a local company in Brazil and she discovered a love of agriculture through their weekend farm hotel getaways.

[Julian Walker]

What even is that?

[Matthew Rimsky]

It sounds. It sounds very bohemian, doesn't it? I don't think so.

[Derek Barris]

I don't know. There's a fascinating farm hotel in Albuquerque that has peacocks all over it that we stayed at once years ago. I don't know what the Brazilian models are like, but there's all sorts of eco tourist resorts where people can take part in activities while they pay to stay there. That's not. That's not that unique. Yeah. The couple reportedly smuggled goats home in their car trunk and then worried that their HOA would complain. So after four years in Brazil, they returned to Utah and bought 100 acre farm which was inspired by their goats. By 2017 they were raising pigs in Utah and their first farm was destroyed in a wildfire. So they purchased a 328 acre farm the following year for $2.75 million. Hannah's brother suggested naming it Ballerina Farm based on her love of ballet. And then shortly after they launched social media handles with that name and it took off on TikTok. In 2019 they began shipping meat directly to customers and reportedly by 2023 they were reaching 70 million doll. Just to be clear, I don't know if that's annual or all they had done over the years. So I was looking for the information but I couldn't find it. As a private company, they don't have to list it. So that's all I could find. In 2025 they opened two retail locations. They opened a stand in Commerce, Utah and then shortly thereafter the Ballerina Farm store in Midway. And that was last June. Then from the meats they got into the dairies. They bought 120 milk cow, which is the initial impetus for this episode as they were planning on offering RFK Junior's favorite beverage, raw milk, until all those pesky regulations got in the way. And we'll get to that in segment two. At this point, as of today, it appears that the farm employs a staff of 60 that includes multiple chefs, and they also offer an aspiring line of home body and wellness products such as Julian's favorite bone broth hot cocoa. They also have protein powders and Ballerina farm hoodies and aprons, which Matt Matthew is wearing a hoodie right now as we record.

[Matthew Rimsky]

Yeah, exactly.

[Derek Barris]

Now, as I said, we're going to get into the recent raw milk debacle and then we're going to weigh in on their actual farming cred versus presentation. But I just want to quickly speed run through a few of their controversies. They are practicing Mormons. I mean, that's not controversial, but it does play into the the story. Their children are homeschooled using a Mormon Christian curric. While they don't share much about their faith on social media, it's reported that they mention it a lot more in private contexts. So the whole look at our real lives ethos seems incomplete from from what we could tell, besides their love for raw milk, Hannah has apparently encouraged followers to dump traditional medicine. This is exceptionally dangerous considering her whole thing is look at me with nine children, but you guys give birth at home. I'll be fine. It'll be fine. Which Matthew is going to get soon. There's reporting of an uneven power dynamic between the couple. In one video, Hannah asks for tickets to Greece for her birthday and Daniel instead gives her an egg apron. I don't even really know what that is. He says, you're welcome. At the end of the video. While she's clearly disappointed and that video has been taken down so there seems to be this weird dynamic taking place where the kitchen videos have this tradwife component, yet she claims the relationships is is more egalitarian. I don't personally care what dynamics a couple agrees to, but it's pretty obvious that in this domain, like others, the performative camera work doesn't actually reflect the reality of their lives.

[Matthew Rimsky]

I mean, I care pretty much if they're influencing the sexual politics of millions of people. I mean, I personally think any normalization or glamorization of a woman forbidden by religion from using birth control or not having any legal title to the brand that's built on her literal body. So we'll get into that. That's not good for anyone. I just don't get any sense that we're looking at equal power here. In most online listings, Hannah is not listed as co owner. And in that creepy Times interview that we'll link to, Daniel's actually speaking over her quite regularly. She only really finds time to confess that she had an epidural for one of her births when he's momentarily out of the room. And then there's this passage where the journalist Megan Agnew paints the scene.

[Julian Walker]

I want to ask her about birth control, but we are surrounded by so many of her children. And Daniel is back in the room now too. Do you. I pause and look at her fixedly plan pregnancies? No, Daniel says. When he says no, Neilman responds gently. It's very much a matter of prayer for me. I'm like, God, is it time to bring another one to the earth? And I've never been told no. But for whatever reason, it's exactly nine months after a baby that she's ready for the next one. He says, it's definitely a matter of prayer. She says it's a matter of prayer, but somehow it's exactly nine months.

[Matthew Rimsky]

He says, oh boy.

[Derek Barris]

When I said I don't care. What I care about is what consenting adults agree to in the terms of the boundaries of their relationship. You jumped to what is being presented. That's a different. That's what we're talking about today. But I just. People. Every relationship has its own boundaries. And what people agree to on their own terms is totally fine to me. I don't judge in that sense.

[Matthew Rimsky]

Yeah, I guess when we're talking about power imbalances, that's the whole question of like whether people are actually agreeing, you know, to things in good conscience and with all of their agency. That's. That's what's at question. Right. Then you look at what you see in front of you and you go, hmm, is, is this something that's really chosen? Right.

[Derek Barris]

The aesthetic presented? Exactly. That's open for analysis because it's public. But the private, you know, I can never tell what someone's agency or intention is on a personal level.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, it's. It's our whole ongoing thing of always trying to ride the line between mind reading and. And analysis of what's presented. Right.

[Derek Barris]

Yeah. Now, the biggest criticism of the Neilman's has always been their privileges. Hannah competed in the Miss World pageant just 12 days after giving birth to one daughter, telling the New York Times she was still bleeding a little. And when she was criticized, her response was a pageant is not like I'm running a marathon. I'm literally in a chair getting pampered mostly. Now, Hannah might be getting pampered, but her father in law was busy funding a coronavirus antibody study that was weaponized contrarians. And this very Much crosses over into our field. One of the Stanford studies that was conducted by John Ianitis. Julian, how do you.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, I'm not sure

[Derek Barris]

that's right. Yeah, yeah, we've covered him on multiple episodes and probably pronounced it right at that time. That study found that Covid wasn't actually deadly after all. David Neilman, the father, partially paid for that research, which makes sense if you are an airlines tycoon. You don't want pesky things like a pandemic getting in the way of your business. And then finally, back to the privilege and the farm's aesthetic. Hannah has also been criticized for romanticizing traditional gender roles, failing to publicly display the farm's employees on the feed, and not acknowledging that financial privilege. Viewers speculate that the family is likely not living off the profits of the farm. It's kind of tough. Again, 70 million is a pretty viable. But, you know, we not sure what they're paying in reality. They don't have to live off their profits though, and it's their choice to spend their money however they want. But it is a bit tough to stomach a back to the earth tradwife esthetic with a apparently $20,000 stove in the background. That's a whole thing in itself because the stove that's often featured could run 35,000. But she claims that they bought it used for a lower amount. So what a steal. You know, to, to me it gets down to how you're using it in presentation. Owning a nice stove isn't a problem, but it does get into dicier, parasocial territory.

[Matthew Rimsky]

Well, I mean, you know, there are nice stoves and then there are abominations of overproduction that nobody needs and they just steal food from other people. Just to focus on the object for a moment, it really is the Cadillac of pre electric appliances. And I think part of what part of the story that's being told by that stove is embedded in that. And that's because, you know, it's related to this multiple oven wood fire technology that in its basic form actually did have a working class form. It was pretty well distributed down through the classes over a century ago. But you know, this particular object comes from this peak industrial era of like the best Steinway pianos. And you know, if we forget about the absurdity of the cost, I think it's in that kitchen because it signifies the best of this sort of bygone world. I bet they have Aladdin kerosene lamps too. So I found a great substack conversation on this between Anne, Helen and Meg Conley. They're talking about LDS culture. Quote, Mormon culture often tells girls they should grow up to be something kind of like an aga stove. Always on, divided into compartments, one that is ready to receive whatever needs warming, one that is always prepared to produce something sustaining a surface that is not too hot to the touch, but enough warmth to extend to all the people in the space around you, all the while burning through more fuel than you can shake a damn stick at.

[Julian Walker]

On this past February 21, Hannah and Daniel Neeleman sat down at the rustic kitchen table in their picture perfect farm kitchen to address a spate of bad press about Ballerina Farms raw milk containing unsafe levels of coliform bacteria, which signals potential fecal contamination, one strain of which is the more familiar sounding E. Coli. We'll come back around to the interesting way they chose to address the problem. But first I want to backtrack and get a sense of how they got to that moment. Because the dream of going back to the land, raising a traditionally conservative religious family that now comprises nine kids, and running a farm that sells multiple products, including raw milk. All of this was realized via the extraordinarily successful cultivation of this social media profile and narrative that looks very candid and authentic, but is actually very deliberately crafted. And plenty is being left out.

[Matthew Rimsky]

It's deliberately crafted and lots is being left out. But I want to talk about what's in there because I do find it fascinating. The graphic design and logos have a kind of retro feel to them that kind of reminded me of Norman Rockwell at first. If Norman Rockwell had like painted bourgeois vanity farmers, he didn't. But, like, that's what he would have done if he was commissioned that way. But then there are these glimpses of tech devices and, as we've said, pretty expensive appliances. It actually makes me think of the very sterile vault tech world of the Fallout game and series like after there's a global nuclear war and the rich have hidden themselves away in underground vaults and arrested their kind of cleaver family culture in 1956. And so the public service announcement graphic design on vault tec walls transfers almost perfectly to the Ballerina Farm packaging. I think that's a little bit ominous for today because it's like they're hiding out from something that's like really bad going around them. So there's this escapist subtext I see in the feed about the safety of of rural places. It also makes me think of all the prepper oligarchs that are building their mansion bunkers in New Zealand with Regard to fashion, there's a whole thing on this that, you know, I'm not qualified to go into. But people go on and on and on about Hannah's fits. My understanding is that she's doing pretty standard trad wife stuff. Vintage style, milkmaid dresses, gingham floral prints, long skirts with cowboy boots, linen aprons. But Daniel stands out in what looks like could be a $500 Stetson hat, which is no longer what farmers wear. Again, this this sub stack conversation between Anne Helen and LDS writer Meg Conley puts it this way.

[Derek Barris]

If I asked a teenager to create an animal crossing island with a farm aesthetic, they might create something close to what ballerina farm looks like. And they definitely dress their animal crossing character in a gingham Dr. Cowboy hat. But like real ranchers and farmers are more likely to be wearing hoodies, baseball caps and muck boots. I'm not saying they never wear cowboy hats. My dad is from a small town in New Mexico. He grew up wearing cowboy hats and cowboy boots. But if he was doing anything physical or dirty, he wore boots with a good shred and a baseball cap.

[Matthew Rimsky]

Well, that's the thing. If he was doing anything physical or dirty. So, you know, I don't know Daniel's history with, with like LDS missions or anything like that, but it looks like he's halfway dressed to knock on your door with regard to what's hidden. Julian yeah, yeah, they really. They don't talk about their Mormonism at all. But that's in the backdrop here. No abortion, no birth control. And so I turn to our Mormon correspondent friend Blair Hodges of the Relationscapes podcast, and this is what he told me by voicemail.

[Blair Hodges]

I think the largest Mormon families aren't involved in business ventures like this. So I don't think it's. I don't think it translates that way, if that makes sense. At the same time, the Mormon priesthood is set up such that men hold all of the keys of authority. Like women can't be ordained to the priesthood. And I, like all men, all worthy men, hold the Mormon priesthood and they are thought of as the priesthood leader in their home, and they preside. The church has made efforts to kind of soften that language over the past couple decades, but the fact remains that, like, men hold the power in the home in terms of having the final word. Like they're supposed to counsel with their partner, but the buck stops with them. And so that seems really similar to what's going on here in a business sense is like he's serving as the patriarch of the business. And she's doing the matriarchal subservient but equal. Subservient but equal role. There's also been an uptick in trying to claim that women hold the priesthood in a secondary sense in that the men will delegate to them certain responsibilities. And in that way they actually do hold the priesthood. Now they're not ordained to it and they can't do anything with it. But that's the rhetorical shift that the church has been trying to take. Coming straight from the top. The current church president, Dallin Oaks, is the one who's promoting this idea that actually women have held the priesthood all. All along, if you think about it. Because men tell them what to do and then they do it. And that means they also have priesthood. I wish I was making that up, but I'm not.

[Matthew Rimsky]

All right, thanks, Blair.

[Julian Walker]

That's absolutely classic. All right, so back to the raw milk. As I'm tracing the ballerina farm story in relation to raw milk, I found my way to a social media video from January 7th of 2023. The caption reads, morning milking with my Lois. And the video shows Hannah and her three year old daughter first getting ready to go out to milk this solitary cow behind a classic red barn. It's snowy and there are sheep. The cow is at first lying down in some hay chewing the cud. All of this is shot by a silent and invisible camera person who gets great B roll. Like there's a rooster walking along a two by four. There's Hannah struggling with opening the gates of the enclosure. There's the sheep mil about and observing. And then multiple angles on the milking process from different distances. It's like you're getting this window into a very domestic, humble, living off the land moment between mother and child and

[Matthew Rimsky]

cow and camera person and editing screen. Right?

[Julian Walker]

Yeah. And the framing of the shots, like the more it's. It's invisible if you don't think about it. But the more I look at it, I'm like oh wow. The shots, the editing, the composition. There's a level of deliberate and even artistic professionalism. It's a 90 second video. I wouldn't be surprised if it took an hour or two to make. We see Hannah's sleepy looking face leaning up against the cow's flank as she milks into a stainless steel pail. And Lois then says the little toddler, your face is in the way. Presumably meaning that from that angle the udders are obscured from the shot by her she knows. And then Lois's Little hand with chipped turquoise nail polish tries to do some milking into a tall glass mason jar before mama helps and fills it up. But not before Lois takes a nice big gulp help from the jar of raw milk. The final shots are of Hannah rocking and kissing her baby for a moment indoors before taking a selfie style long drink in the kitchen from that freshly sourced milk in the jar while maintaining direct eye contact with the viewer. So why am I going into this much detail? Well, In July of 2024, an Instagram reel shows the arrival of their first dairy cows. And again, everything is exquisitely shot to give the sense of just being there with the family and the neighbors for this exciting moment. But we start again with Hannah and her little girls getting dressed, brushing their teeth, and then driving across the property to see. But in this video, it's clear that there are actually at least three videographers capturing every single angle and sometimes therefore capturing one another in the shots. Yes, the little girls are there in their matching farm dresses. Yes, dad is there in the large cowboy hat. He' seems to never take off whether he's indoors or outdoors. Yes, Hannah is shot up close with her baby strapped to her chest, tearing up as she reflects on the realization of this dream. But this is all oddly mismatched by the sheer scale of what is being revealed. There's a shiny double decker semi truck that pulls up to deliver what looked to be about 50 cows. And they amble into an enormous open air facility fitted with high tech computerized robotic milking machines. And then the B roll includes sweeping sh, massive barns and rows of what looked to me like state of the art new farming equipment vehicles. A quick search shows that Ballowina farms as of 2025 had 150 dairy cows. So this was just the first delivery.

[Matthew Rimsky]

Yeah, and you know, the average price per cow is about 2,000 bucks. That's about 300,000 in livestock. They're not breeding them yet, it looks like. I mean, that would be a whole other learning curve, but yeah, there's a ton of investment and that equipment is incredibly expensive.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah. So let's follow this thread now from the January 2023 video of mother and toddler drinking milk about as raw as it gets on camera to Hannah's teary eyes as the first batch of cows is being delivered. And she says that this has been her dream since before the farm even existed. This is like some 18 months later by which time. Derek, you said they're doing about $70 million in sales? We're not sure exactly how that all breaks down. And then there's this neck. Next combined media moment. So here's a clip from TikTok. It's about three months later. So October of 2024.

[Hannah or Daniel Neelam (Ballerina Farm)]

So we just got in from milking. We drink our milk raw, but I'm going to show you how we strain it and what we do with the milk before we drink it. Okay, so what we're using here is this non gauze milk filters. And then we place that and on top of the gallon milk jug. And then here's the milk we just milked the Jersey cows that we're gonna have at the dairy. And also what lady is, is A two. A two. So what that means is it's a genetic. So she doesn't have the A1 casing, which is hard for a lot of of people to digest. So this is today's harvest. You want to get it in the fridge as soon as possible.

[Julian Walker]

So that's Hannah straining the dirt out of the genetically engineered raw milk before feeding it to her family, which there's some amazing cognitive dissonance here. That same month, People magazine published an exclusive puff piece titled Ballerina Farms. Hannah Nealman reveals the one raw ingredient behind her viral glowy skin. And I love how it starts. So much goes into Hannah Nealman's lifestyle, between her booming Ballerina Farm business and her viral fame on social media. But when it comes to skin care, the mom of eight keeps it totally simple. This goes on in a typical fashion to talk about her bright complexion, which apparently draws frequent compliments in her social media comments. And Hannah says, well, she gets a lot of vitamin D from being outside and drinks lots of water and of course, uses only organic makeup. And all of this contributes to her lovely combined with eating a really simple diet. Then she says it was her mother who pointed out something important to her. She was like, since you've been drinking raw milk, your skin has gotten a lot better. And I kind of think there's something to that. And then she casually mentions that she's also incorporated Ballerina Farm's new protein powder into her routine. Now, according to The Neelemans, about 90% of what the farm produces gets shipped out of state via online sales. And by the looks of their Instagram feed, they really push the protein powder which is made with the supposedly highest quality. And they term this ingredient calf first sourced colostrum. This retails at $69.99 for 30 serving bags. So about $2.33 per scoop. As you touched on Derek. They also sell Bone broth, cocoa, electrolyte powder, flour jerky, and multiple other food and accessory products like tote bags, aprons, even burger and breakfast food boxes. So all of this implies an extensive manufacturing and shipping operation behind the scenes.

[Derek Barris]

You know, they don't really have any relation that I'm aware of to Kennedy and the Maha movement, but it crosses over in the language. Like colostrum comes from the mother. So I don't even understand what calf first means. And there's also a debate as to whether there's such a thing as excess colostrum that the calf doesn't need. So it's a bit dicey that packaging something that has little proven health benefits for humans is worth the stress placed on the cows that's needed to harvest it.

[Matthew Rimsky]

Yeah, I think it kind of begs the question of just how human centric and mama bear oriented these folks might be. Like maybe they found that nobody's too grossed out by harvesting colostrum. I mean they might try dehydrating ve next, like, who knows? Like it's on the spectrum of, of ostentatious carnivorism.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah. And it's in terms of that calf first designation. I looked it up and it's, it's basically saying this is the very, very first milk that the mother produces right after giving birth.

[Matthew Rimsky]

So the calf doesn't get it.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, to your point. Exactly.

[Matthew Rimsky]

So it should be calf last colostrum actually calf second. But I just want to clarify something. 70 million in sales, 150 dairy cows they're shipping, I mean must be shipping tons of protein powder. They're just retailers, right? I mean aren't they just importing stuff and packaging it and sending it out? Isn't that the picture that you're getting?

[Derek Barris]

Well, the 70 million was like a CSA that was from where direct to consumer meat business. So they've only recently expanded into retail.

[Julian Walker]

That's right. Yeah, yeah, but, but yeah, I look at that Matthew, to your point and it's like how are you generating all the ingredients for all of these products? How much of this is that? You now have a brand and a packaging aesthetic and you're, you're, you're selling these various things, you know, are you making the electrolytes yourself? I don't know. Yeah, so that's a glimpse into their pseudoscience promoting but still legal and probably not life threatening product line. But the raw milk, it turns out that it's illegal to transport raw milk across state lines. So in around April of last year they opened what the cut describes as a roadside stand close to the farm in Comma, Utah, where alongside beeswax, candles and protein powder, raw milk was available for six bucks a jar. Are the raw milk operation. As you mentioned, Derek then expanded that July to a new flagship store some 20 miles away in the town of Midway, which has a population of 6,000. And pretty soon, disgruntled locals and store owners were finding a line around the block for the Ballerina Farm store, nowhere to park on their main street, and throngs of tourist shoppers flocking in to try to catch a glimpse of their favorite influencer. Ballerina's social media also had to weather a slew of negative reviews for their $8 a serving raw milk ice cream, which one commenter described as absolutely horrendous. It turned out that the Utah Department of Agriculture actually agreed on the horrendous part, because in January of this last year, journalists began reporting that back in May and June, batches of raw milk from Ballerina Farm had tested as carrying unsafe levels of that particular bacteria, which can result in E. Coli. Hannah and Daniel quickly put out statements about having stopped selling raw milk in August, and that prior to that, all of the raw milk they did sell had passed safety testing. They framed the decision to stop sales as business based, saying it was not making sense economically to put this much time and effort into raw milk operation given the level of strict regulation in Utah. And then on February 21st, Ballerina Farm published a video to their 2.2 million YouTube subscribers addressing the controversy. And again, all of this felt very staged. There's a candid opening, candid seeming opening of Daniel walking into the shot to sit with Hannah at their rustic kitchen table with his cowboy hat on. Of course. A voice off camera asks them several softball questions. Daniel looks stressed throughout, with Hannah mostly answering while he does a lot of hard swallowing and lip pursing and cheek muscle flexing.

[Hannah or Daniel Neelam (Ballerina Farm)]

Because raw milk is such a small part of what we want to do, and we still want to do it, someday we're going to focus the team to pasteurize products for now.

[Julian Walker]

Was unsafe raw milk ever sold at

[Matthew Rimsky]

any Ballerina Farm store?

[Hannah or Daniel Neelam (Ballerina Farm)]

That's a great question.

[Blair Hodges]

And no, no, absolutely not.

[Hannah or Daniel Neelam (Ballerina Farm)]

Absolutely not. And when we saw some of the comments circulating on social media about this, we realized that there was a lack of knowledge, a lack of education for Utah. Every batch of raw milk that's bottled has to be tested. So it's not a once a month test. It's an every single time test. If it didn't pass, they wouldn't leave the farm. So there was no chance that any unsafe milk would ever get to the shelf.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, so yeah, they're making some good factual points there. They spend a good deal of that 12 minute video detailing just how time consum controlling the state regulations are about raw milk. And that's the reason they're not selling it anymore, even though they still want to at some point in the future.

[Matthew Rimsky]

So to switch gears a little bit, I just want to talk about the impossible and maybe contradictory nature of Ballerina Farm as a cultural commodity. You know, we had a good discussion about mystification last week and that's the primary mechanism I see at play here. Because the social and religious values as expressed in Hannah and Daniel's diy, like super fecundity lifestyle, mystify several layers of just material reality through a brand that, you know, I've said it already, I think they're ultimately engaged in a class war against poor people. So there's four levels see here. So like, first of all, just on a physical level, how impossible or unlikely is it for women in general to become grand multiparous, which is the term that's used for, you know, seven, eight or nine children to the extent that Hannah Nealman has, and not be suffering from all kinds of negative health outcomes, which she may be, but we're not seeing that. Secondly, on the interpersonal level, how contradictory is, is it to be an influencer getting paid for glorifying unpaid labor in the home while hiding the wage labor house help, and while, you know, telling women who don't have, or implying that women who, you know, don't have such means might have this lifestyle available to them. On the parenting level, what does it really look like to manage nine kids? I think you might have some thoughts about that, Julian. On the political level, and this is where I'll, I'll quote from Silvia Federici at the end. How contradictory is it for housework to be presented and performed as love? Federici argues that that's how it works in order for it to ensure that it remains unwaged. Okay, so the first part, you know, no one has that many babies and turns out like this. That's my little subtitle. And the caveat is, is that, you know, you guys know that I'm not the science person, but, but given what I've seen in my own family and the families around me and just sort of, you know, general family domestic knowledge from humanity, I'm like shocked by the idea of anyone having nine kids in 13 years. And so I wanted to dig into it. And the, you know, short form is that if we have clear information on Hannah's relatively painless births as she describes them and lack of complications, you know, she is doing something that Olympic athlete level rarity would be a good descriptor for. I think only a tiny minority of women wind up with outcomes like this. And within that minority we see, you know, friend of the Pod Bauhaus wife, Yolande Norris Clark, who after having had 11 free birth children, is now doing CrossFit every morning at 4am by her own account. Account. Now, this is part of this first contradiction. Women with off the charts genetic privilege that are selling really or representing extreme visions of women's reproductive work to other women who, if they had nine kids, would not be doing regular fashion shoots, postpartum workout reels, or making it seem like nothing had changed their ballerina physiques. So they are really performing a near impossible physicality. So across the board, women retain about 11 pounds above pre pregnancy weight at one year postpartum, 47% retain more than 10 pounds, 24% retain more than 20 pounds. And those weight gain numbers rise with multiple pregnancies and so do complications. So grand multiparity predicts twice the risk of postpartum hemorrhage, three times the risk of placenta previa. But the big one is bone density. You know, the loss can be between 1 and 9% per pregnancy and it is cumulative with elevated risk when inter pregnancy intervals are short. And they've been really short for Hana. So if you are poor, and most grand multiparous women actually are because they're from rural and religious communities with low education rates or restrictions on birth control, all of these risks go up. If you're black, lack they go up further. So Hannah's fertility mimics that of a kind of underclass, but with none of the consequences, you know, really she's, you know, not intentionally, of course, but she's glamorizing a physical life that can't really exist, you know, except for she's managing to do it. It's kind of a miracle when she delivers at home. She's glamorizing a health circumstance that's routinely dangerous for poor women. Okay, so part two, the economic model that's sort of proposed or represented by the tradwife context is also not real. And this comes from comments made by Caroline Klein, who's the assistant director of the center for Global Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University. And she's speaking to Kuer while Tradwife content promotes, sometimes explicitly, often not at all explicitly, the idea of women being wives and mothers and being in the home and leaving the breadwinning to their husbands. The most ironic thing is that the most popular trad wife influencers are actually bringing in pretty excellent incomes from their influencer work. And so some people have kind of pointed out that these tradwife influencers are making money by telling other women not to make money money, which is mind bending.

[Julian Walker]

Okay, yeah, yeah, that's, that's so on point. I mean, Derek and I did a brief last week called the Stepford Wives Conference, which is essentially about Turning Point USA putting on this women's Leadership Summit. And it's exactly that. It's all of these high powered, glamorous, presenting, entrepreneurial woman getting on stage and saying, you don't need to, you don't need to have a job and you don't need to make money and you should just stay home and, and do live life the way God intended.

[Matthew Rimsky]

As for women, right, so the third part is parenting. Now, they don't talk about nannies, but there's obviously household help. There's a homeschooling tutor. I've got a comment on this from friend of the pod, Tia Levins, who I interviewed on her great book, the well Trained Wife. You can find that in our archive. But that's her account of the ordeal of leaving an evangelical marriage and community. Now, bear in mind that with this post that she made to Instagram, she's not speaking about families with millions in assets. So some of these effects are going to be mitigated by money. She writes. The question isn't how do they parent that many kids? Because they don't parent in meaningful ways. The way most of us have come to understand parenting, the act, process or skill of raising, nurturing and supporting a child's physical, emotional and social development. So the question is, this is Tia. How do they get that many kids under control? There's a long list of ordinary parenting things you probably do or did with your children or you understand that science, history, research and time have taught us are important to healthy child development that advances into autonomous adults. I made a list of these neglects and shared them in reels using my fundy baby voice and real persuasions. My mentors used to encourage us to give up things like friends, privacy, consent, college education for girls, and childhood development. So here's her blanket training. Severe corporal punishment, intentional neglect, parentification and practices that force children to suppress their development and needs are common in these extremely Large families. So not saying anything that we know anything about how they're parenting their kids, the Neelman's. But when you know there are nine kids in a family and it's the states and they are a religious Christian family, then these are the things that are going on. So do you guys know what blanket training is and parentification?

[Julian Walker]

Well, parentification I would assume refers to having some of the kids end up performing parenting roles to the younger kids. Yeah, yeah.

[Matthew Rimsky]

Prematurely like handing over responsibility at five, six, seven years old.

[Julian Walker]

And blanket training is keeping the kid in a very small. There's a very small area that they're allowed to play on and if they're, if they go off of that, they're going to get very harsh punishment, right?

[Matthew Rimsky]

Yeah, they're going to be hit. So you know, a 3x3 blanket or something like that. You can very effectively train a child to basically always be where you expect them to be. If very early on, as soon as they're able to crawl off of a blanket, you show them that they can't. If you've told them that they can't.

[Blair Hodges]

Right.

[Matthew Rimsky]

Which is kind of incredible. So anyway, T11S is a great commentator on this. I would say as a dad of two, I don't need any more than that to convince me of, you know, the kinds of pressures that might be involved in that size of family. Yeah, I mean the other thing is that the nature of the real format makes it very easy to film like serene little duets between the moms and you know, one of the many kids. So Yolande Norris Clark just posted one the other day in which she seems, you know, to be almost like a loving parent, like all of the wrath and you know, evangelism was gone and she was just lolling about. Yeah, lolling about in bed with one little very cute baby, her last one. And you know, if you go to Hannah's feed, there she is, she's making bread with this one from fresh sourdough starter. She's burping the littlest. There are these little crystalline moments that the medium can capture out of what is most likely a constant shitstor. When you have one or two kids, I think attention like that can be sustained sometimes I can't see how that would happen. At 9, Ohio State University sociologist Douglas Downey worked on this theory called resource dilution model which is pretty self explanatory. But the finding is that this range of deficits in attention and care impacting educational outcomes accrue as the number of siblings rise and certainly Conflict battling between siblings go on as well. Like, I can't imagine the conflicts between nine siblings unless they were incredibly, incredibly disciplined in some way to function as kind of like a. Some sort of egoless unit. So I've looked, and I haven't found any psychological consensus on grand multi para family mental health outcomes. I have to imagine that the diluted resources cast a shadow there as well. But I'm also, like, reminded of a paradoxical effect of, like, neglectful parenting or diluted parenting generating devotion. I've heard about this in a lot of different stories, but I'm reminded of the story of RFK Jr. Being the third child of 11 in his family. And he describes the distance and inaccessibility and then the death of his father, turning him into a giant. Giant in his imagination. Like, if your father is assassinated, he's going to occupy an incredible place going forward. But the fact that there were so many other kids also kind of put him at a holy remove in a way.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah. Mythic.

[Matthew Rimsky]

Yeah, mythic. Right. You know, I also wonder if neglect with seemingly benign outcomes is weirdly part of the brand too, because. Because I don't know about you guys, but there's a lot of Gen X parents out there that I see who express a kind of nostalgia for an era in which the children are basically left to their own devices. Right. That they're running free. I think that if we can imagine that, oh, yeah, our children would have such a great time if we didn't have to look after them because they could run around in the barns, that would be fantastic. Yeah.

[Julian Walker]

And it often takes the form of, you know, we were latchkey kids and we were fun fine.

[Matthew Rimsky]

It's like, yeah, totally fine. Right? Yeah, yeah, We. We drank raw milk out of the gutter.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah.

[Matthew Rimsky]

Here's the last part, which is that the reality of domestic labor, especially when it's unpaid, and it's shown here as being, you know, just care work that is mystified by the premise of love. Now, I think there are a lot of things that make Ballerina Farm compelling as a brand. You know, the aesthetics are incredible. The apparent bounty, the orderliness. But running beneath all of this, I feel this proposition that, you know, these are people who love each other deeply. This is a tight family, and I think we're shown this love baked into every sourdough loaf, symbolized by every glint of sunlight off of, you know, every surface. But what kind of love is it? And, you know, this is where I point. I want to point to that particular strain of Marxist feminist tradition that says that capitalism requires the constant reproduction of workers that it doesn't want to pay for. And so what appears in the culture as love or feminine nature is in fact labor that we're not calling labor. And it's unwaged so that capital can appropriate. Appropriate it invisibly off the books. It's not accounted for. So, you know, the argument from Federici and other is Federici and others is that this is imposed. It's not a natural state of things, and its costs fall unevenly across race and class. And she articulates this most in, famously in Wages against housework from 1975 and then a book called Caliban and the witch from 2004. And her core argument is that the mystification of domestic labor is love. So the construction of housework as this expression of natural femininity rather than as work, it's not a cultural accident. It's a structural requirement. And in our story, what I see is Hannah and Daniel performing this mystification, like at the scale of propaganda. I don't think they're being intentional about that at all. I think they've found a market in which that's become some kind of fantasy that people want to vicariously absorb. But Federici, I'll just leave you with this. She goes really hard. Housework had to be transformed into a natural attribute rather than be recognized as a social contract, because from the beginning of capital's scheme for women, this work was destined to be unwaged. Capital had to convince us that it is a natural, unavoidable, and easy, even fulfilling activity to make us accept our unwaged work.

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[Matthew Rimsky]

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