Outrage Overload

A Connors Institute podcast

Outrage Bonus – The Crunchy to Radical Pipeline: How Wellness Content Fuels Conspiracies

Aired June 4 2025

👩‍🌾 It started with a garden…

Kavisha Pillay just wanted to grow vegetables in her tiny city garden.
Maybe bake some bread. Find balance. Live more intentionally.

It was the middle of the pandemic, and like many others, she was exploring a slower, more grounded lifestyle online. Her feed filled with sourdough starters, natural remedies, and linen-clad influencers promoting homesteading, motherhood, and self-sufficiency.

But something shifted.

What started as inspiration turned into something else entirely. Posts about composting and herbal teas slowly gave way to something more insidious. The tone darkened. Kavisha—an expert in digital ethics and algorithmic influence—found herself slipping into a space she never meant to enter.

“I was just looking for gardening tips,” she says. “And suddenly I was questioning if I was ‘feminine enough’ and whether my modern, working life was somehow wrong.”

This wasn’t just lifestyle content. It was ideology—packaged in soft lighting and vintage filters.

🧵 Kavisha’s Story: A Modern Rabbit Hole

Kavisha’s experience is the heart of this episode. Her journey reveals how social media algorithms quietly guide users through emotional and aesthetic cues, leading them from wholesome content into increasingly ideological spaces.

Even with her professional background in understanding digital manipulation, she wasn’t immune to the pull.

Her story serves as a powerful reminder that radicalization doesn’t always look radical at first. It can come in the form of a sourdough reel or a post about homeschooling.

🎓 Layered Insight from Catherine Rottenberg

To help us zoom out and understand the broader cultural forces at play, we turn to Professor Catherine Rottenberg, a sociologist at Goldsmiths, University of London. Catherine studies neoliberal feminism and the politics of care, and she offers a framework for understanding why the tradwife aesthetic resonates so strongly right now.

“Even as tradwives disavow feminism, they’re deeply entangled with it,” Rottenberg explains. “They monetize their lifestyles, perform idealized femininity, and reject modernity—all while thriving on the platforms of modern capitalism.”

She helps us see how nostalgia, economic precarity, and toxic work culture all contribute to this trend—and how what appears to be a personal choice is often shaped by broader forces of power and influence.

Kavisha Pillay is a social justice activist and founding director of the Campaign On Digital Ethics (CODE). With a background in transparency, accountability, and civic engagement, she has led mass mobilization campaigns, published influential research, and developed civic tech tools designed to boost public participation in the fight against corruption.

Catherine Rottenberg is a professor of sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she specializes in feminist theory, political culture, and the intersection of neoliberalism and gender. She is the author of The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism and has written extensively about how care, empowerment, and femininity are shaped—and often distorted—by modern capitalist logic.

Episodes in the Series:

🧩 Part 1 (this episode): The Crunchy to Radical Pipeline — how “tradwife” culture and wellness spaces sometimes slide into conspiracy and control.
🧠 Part 2: What’s Pulling Young Men to the Right? — exploring Gen Z’s growing gender gap and the search for belonging.
💥 Part 3: Inside the Manosphere — where all those frustrations find a home in online communities like incels, MGTOW, MRAs, and pick-up artists.