How a TikTok Trad Wife Decodes Our Cultural Moment
A viral video reminds us that God works through disciples, not edgelords.
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
Sometimes, a viral video can explain a cultural moment better than a stack of sociology journals. This is one of those times. Standup comedian Josh Johnson expertly explained the ironies of the recent double-cancellation of a racist-talking TikTok “trad wife.” His larger point is one we need to hear right now.
Johnson explained in his set the background of all of this: the growing trend of women who bill themselves as “traditional wives,” instructing other women through cooking and other sorts of videos on how to be “better” at being women. One of these content creators enraged the internet with a use of the most notorious racial slur while seasoning some chicken. The comedian was intrigued not by that controversy but by what happened next.
The trad wife, he said, doubled down on the racist talk and, after being fired from her job, started dropping the slur repeatedly in her videos. She tried to affiliate herself with other alt-right white nationalist “influencers.” It did not go as she planned.
“She just doesn’t quite have the juice,” Johnson said. “Like, when you’re watching her, she’s saying bad things, and they’re annoying, but I’m not angry—she just doesn’t have the oomph to get me there.”
She kept using more and more slurs, Johnson recounted, more and more frantically, in the hopes of getting an audience with neo-Nazis and other bigots, “just trying to prove how terrible she is.”
“The neo-Nazis start rejecting her as a psyop,” Johnson said, “because they feel what I feel. They see the video and they’re ...