Cover not available
Article published In:
Language, Culture and Society
Vol. 5:1 (2023) ► pp.9–42

Granola Nazis and the great reset

Enregistering, circulating and regimenting nature on the far right

| University of luxembourg

This paper analyzes the naturalization of Nazism, through semiotic processes of enregisterment, circulation, and regimentation of the register “nature-tradition” associated with a characterological figure I term the Granola Nazi. Granola Nazi is assembled through a rhematized set of semiotic elements, images, practices and forms of talk, which have come to indicate socially typified personae – strong virile white farmers, traditional earthy homesteading moms – and the moral order they embody. Using linguistic anthropological and digital methods, this analysis draws on 885 Instagram accounts as well as linked data from YouTube and print media (i.e. cookbooks, diet advice), to explore how the worlds of far right neo-folkish movement intersect with discourses of health and wellness, creating moralized discourses of “natural beauty” and “folk vitality” which naturalize far- right racial hierarchies. This is at once a co-option of discourses of health and environment, but also one which reveals the how the naturalization of Nazism is made possible by racism and sexism in long present in liberal talk about nature, beauty or wellness.

Keywords: far-right, digital media, linguistic anthropology, environmentalism, health, beauty
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Folkish, ecofascists and wellness gurus
    • 2.1Neo-volkish
    • 2.2Eco-fascism and far right ecology
    • 2.3Wellness influencers
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Methods and data
    • 3.2Analysis
    • 3.3Research ethics
    • 3.4Limitations
  • 4.Enregistering nature-tradition
  • 5.Circulating Nature-tradition and ‘folk vitality’
  • 6.Regimenting Nature-tradition, fighting the globalists
  • 7.Naturalizing Nazism
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Works cited
Published online: 22 August 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lcs.00036.teb
References

Works cited

Agha, A.
(2005) Voice, footing, enregisterment. Journal of linguistic anthropology, 15 (1), 38–59. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2011) Meet mediatization. Language and Communication, 3 (31), 163–170. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baker, S. A.
(2022) Alt. Health Influencers: how wellness culture and web culture have been weaponised to promote conspiracy theories and far-right extremism during the COVID-19 pandemic. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 25 (1), 3–24. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baquedano-Lopez, P.
(1999) Prayer. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 9 (1/2), 197–200. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bederman, G.
(2008) Manliness and civilization: A cultural history of gender and race in the United States, 1880–1917. University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Borba, R.
(2022) Enregistering “gender ideology” The emergence and circulation of a transnational anti-gender language. Journal of Language and Sexuality, 11(1), 57–79. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Burnett, S.
(2022) The battle for “nofap”: Myths, masculinity, and the meaning of masturbation abstention. Men and Masculinities, 25(3), 477–496. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Delfino, J. B.
(2021) White allies and the semiotics of wokeness: Raciolinguistic chronotopes of white virtue on facebook. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 31 (2), 238–257. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Del Percio, A.
(2022) Genealogies of reflexivity: register formations and the making of affective workers. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2022(276), 41–67. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Duffy, B. E., & Hund, E.
(2015) “Having it all” on social media: Entrepreneurial femininity and self-branding among fashion bloggers. Social media+ society, 1 (2), 2056305115604337. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Eberhardt, M.
(2022) ‘You probably have a parasite’: Neoliberal risk and the discursive construction of the body in the wellness industry. Language in Society, 11–23. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ehrlich, P.
(1968) The population bomb. Ballantine.Google Scholar
Forchtner, B.
(Ed.) (2019) The far right and the environment: Politics, discourse and communication. Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gaddini, K. C.
(2021) ‘Wife, Mommy, Pastor and Friend’: The Rise of Female Evangelical Microcelebrities. Religions, 12 (9), 758. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gaddini, K.
(2022) The Struggle to Stay: Why Single Evangelical Women Are Leaving the Church. Columbia University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gal, S.
(2013) Tastes of talk: Qualia and the moral flavor of signs. Anthropological Theory, 13(1–2), 31–48. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2018) Registers in circulation: The social organization of interdiscursivity. Signs and Society, 6 (1), 1–24. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2019) Making registers in politics: Circulation and ideologies of linguistic authority. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 23 (5), 450–466. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gershon, I.
(2010) Media ideologies: An introduction. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 20 (2), 283–293. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gershon, I., & Prentice, M. M.
(2021) Genres in new economies of language. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2021(267–268), 117–124. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goodrick-Clarke, N.
(2002) Black Sun: Aryan Cults. Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identiy, New York und London.Google Scholar
Gottlieb, J. V.
(2021) Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain’s Fascist Movement, 1923–1945. Bloomsbury Publishing. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hughes, B., Jones, D., & Amarasingam, A.
(2022) Ecofascism: An Examination of the Far-Right/Ecology Nexus in the Online Space. Terrorism and Political Violence, 34 (5), 997–1023. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hoganson, K. L.
(1998) Fighting for American manhood: How gender politics provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars. Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Hutton, C.
(2012) Linguistics and the Third Reich: mother-tongue fascism, race and the science of language. Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hynnä, K., & Kyrölä, K.
(2019) “Feel in your body”: Fat activist affects in blogs. Social Media+ Society, 5 (4), 2056305119879983. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Van den Bulck, H., & Hyzen, A.
(2020) Of lizards and ideological entrepreneurs: Alex Jones and Infowars in the relationship between populist nationalism and the post-global media ecology. International communication gazette, 82 (1), 42–59. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Irvine, J. T.
(2019) Regimenting ideologies. Language & Communication, 66 1, 67–71. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leidig & Tebaldi
. (October 10 2022) Cottagecore to Granola Nazis [paper presentation]. Center for study of Right-Wing Extremism (CREX) workshop. The Hague.
Li, K and Blommaert, J.
The Care of the Selfie: Ludic Chronotopes of Baifumei in Online China. In Kroon. S & Swanberg Eds Chronotopic identity work DOI logo
Lubarda, B.
(2020) Beyond ecofascism? Far-right ecologism (FRE) as a framework for future inquiries. Environmental values, 29 (6), 713–732. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Maly, I.
(2019) New right metapolitics and the algorithmic activism of Schild & Vrienden. Social Media+ Society, 5 (2), 2056305119856700. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Milani, T. M.
(2020) No-go zones in Sweden: The infectious communicability of evil. Language, Culture and Society, 2 (1), 7–36. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mondon, A., & Winter, A.
(2020) Reactionary democracy: How racism and the populist far right became mainstream. Verso Books.Google Scholar
Parmentier, R. J.
(1994) Signs in society: Studies in semiotic anthropology. Indiana University PressGoogle Scholar
Pérez-Milans, M., & Xiaoyan, G.
(2020) Hoping for success, becoming a spiritual subject: Converted returnees in China. Language, Culture and Society, 2 (2), 197–226. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pollan, M.
(2007) The omnivore’s dilemma: A natural history of four meals. Penguin.Google Scholar
Rogers, R.
(2021) Visual media analysis for Instagram and other online platforms. Big Data & Society, 8(1), 20539517211022370. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ross, S.
(2019) Being real on fake Instagram: Likes, images, and media ideologies of value. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 29 (3), 359–374. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Silverstein, M.
(1993) Metapragmatic discourse and. Reflexive language: Reported speech and metapragmatics, 33 1. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Staudenmaier, P.
(2010) Between occultism and fascism: Anthroposophy and the politics of race and nation in Germany and Italy, 1900–1945. Cornell University.Google Scholar
(2014) Between occultism and Nazism: Anthroposophy and the politics of race in the fascist era. Brill. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Strings, S.
(2020) Fearing the black body: The racial origins of fat phobia. New York University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2015) Obese black women as “social dead weight”: Reinventing the “diseased black woman”. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 41 (1), 107–130. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tebaldi, C.
(March 2023) Granola Nazis : Digital Traditionalism, the folkish movement, and the normalization of the far right. Global Network on Extremism and Technology. Accessed May 15 at [URL]
(2023) Tradwives and Truth Warriors: gender and nationalism in US white nationalist women’s blogs. Gender and Language 17(1). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tebaldi, C. & Gaddini, K.
Forthcoming). Socialism Sucks: social media, youth politics, and the rebranding of Christian Nationalism.
Vigouroux, C. B.
(2017) The discursive pathway of two centuries of raciolinguistic stereotyping:‘Africans as incapable of speaking French’. Language in Society, 46(1), 5–21. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vigouroux, C. B.
(2019) Language and (in) hospitality: The micropolitics of hosting and guesting. Language, Culture and Society, 1 (1), 31–58. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vigouroux, Cécile B.
“Language and (in) hospitality: The micropolitics of hosting and guesting.” Language, Culture and Society 1, no. 1 (2019): 31–58. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Walsh, M. J., & Baker, S. A.
(2020) Clean eating and Instagram: Purity, defilement, and the idealization of food. Food, Culture & Society, 23 (5), 570–588. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wodak, R.
(2009) Discursive construction of national identity. Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Yount-André, C.
(2021) Moral Orders of Multinationals: Registers of Value in Corporate Food Production. Signs and Society, 9 (1), 89–117. DOI logoGoogle Scholar