The internet is such a beautiful and treacherous place: celebrity gossip, inconspicuous lifestyle bloggers, and culture critics who claim to know it all. Toxically, I aim to be all three.
Lately, there’s been a wave of conversations, news stories, and podcasts about what’s going on with young men online—particularly their slippery descent into extreme conservatism, white supremacy, and hate speech. Nowhere is this more clearly outlined than in Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy, which maps the internet’s incel and alt-right culture, drawing from flashpoints like Gamergate.
YouTube, in particular, has become an alt-right pipeline for young men—especially during isolating moments like the COVID lockdowns. A 2023 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that YouTube video recommendations lead to more extremist content for right-leaning users.
We even have a whole subsect of “podcast bros” (per the media)—think Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan—who’ve helped radicalize followers around topics like trans rights, vaccines, and voter integrity.
And while men are almost always the problem, it’s worth asking: what do alt-right pipelines look like for women? It’s less talked about, but in my opinion, it’s picked up serious traction over the past year.
Many cite trad wife content as the obvious starting point—Ballerina Farm, model Mormon Nara Smith. But trad wife content isn’t subtle. It’s loud. It tells you exactly what it believes in: traditionalism.
Sure, it’s a pipeline—but it’s also a spectacle. Some women gawk at it in disbelief; others, especially Mormon women, genuinely see themselves in it. I don’t think it’s trying to convert. It’s more about glamorizing, normalizing. And it’s upfront about what it is and isn’t—unlike Rogan or Shapiro, who brand themselves as commonsense middlemen.
These pipelines don’t look like propaganda. They look like Pinterest boards, wellness trends, and morning routines. The scariest part? They’re working. ILet’s explore them—one soft-filtered dog whistle at a time.
Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, and the Weaponization of Pop Culture
Pop culture has arguably always been written off as a “women’s interest”—an unserious, infantilized hobby. And while it’s certainly mainstream, its deep embrace (often bordering on obsession) has long been a cornerstone of Queer communities, sometimes allowing it to feel almost like counterculture. One of the most notable examples of this is the enduring popularity of celebrity blinds. But even within that world, there's a darker undercurrent. A substantial number of blind item columns carry misogynistic and racist undertones—what I would argue is a specific kind of gay male misogyny: snark about women’s hair, bodies, and age.
More broadly, pop culture has often been rejected or trivialized by heteronormative culture. That is—until recently. The ongoing Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni legal drama changed the landscape. Messy and seemingly never-ending, it flooded the internet with constant updates. And with each new development, the court of public opinion swung drastically. The story tapped into something deeper: our collective obsession with celebrity spectacle and our eagerness to pick sides.
Enter Candace Owens. The notoriously inflammatory political commentator—aka the alt-right’s favorite pick-me girl—jumped at the opportunity to weigh in. Owens, who’s made a post-#MeToo brand out of “exposing” supposedly false victims, began covering the Lively/Baldoni case on her YouTube channel. Her content took off. Thanks in no small part to the virality of her short-form clips across TikTok and Instagram Reels, Owens saw a massive spike in viewership. According to Social Blade and The Cut, each episode about the Lively and Baldoni drama pulls in at least 1.5 million views. From January to February, she gained 450,000 new subscribers on YouTube. Her total video views have quadrupled compared to this time last year.
What’s perhaps even more telling? The comment sections. They're filled with viewers, mostly women, expressing shock at agreeing with Owens for the first time. That shift is also visible in the data: her audience is now 65% female. Regardless of what political affiliation those followers claim (and let's be real, it's often murky), the trend is clear: people are coming for pop culture commentary, and getting served a side of alt-right ideology.
And this isn’t the first time we’ve seen it happen. The Amber Heard vs. Johnny Depp trial was the test run for this kind of pipeline—and we passed it with flying colors. That trial proved how easy it is to turn public sentiment against imperfect women. It revealed how a cultural appetite for justice can be hijacked by misogyny, and how quickly mainstream audiences will echo right-wing talking points when they’re wrapped in celebrity gossip and influencer aesthetics. After all, there’s nothing this country loves more than hating a woman who happens to be an imperfect victim—America’s oldest bipartisan issue.
Sprinkle Sprinkle and the Art of Strategic Submission
Let me start by saying: I really feel for my sisters in heterosexuality right now. Dating is bleaker than ever (see above re: men absolutely losing their shit to the alt-right), and at this point, a bearded marriage might be the best-case scenario. For everyone else, there’s what's become known online as the Sprinkle Sprinkle movement.
At the center of it is Leticia Padua, better known as SheraSeven—or “the sprinkle sprinkle lady.” A dating coach who’s been posting on YouTube since 2013, Leticia gained renewed virality in 2023. Much of her content revolves around teaching women how to secure a provider. Some liken it to “soft escorting,” but it’s more nuanced than that. To be fair, game recognizes game. Sprinkle Sprinkle ideology centers the idea that a man should be the ultimate financial caretaker. Sure, there are moments that might read as empowering, like encouraging women to use a man’s money to build a business—but that advice assumes you’ve already landed him.
Leticia is just one of thousands of dating or “life” coaches making this kind of content online. And while some of it is framed as empowerment, it’s often steeped in survivalism—advice dressed as strategy that relies heavily on outdated gender norms. In one widely circulated clip, Leticia advises women to get “feminine” jobs and act as feminine as possible in the workplace. Why? Because, according to her, your boss will inevitably be a man—and if you're feminine enough, he’ll give the hard tasks to someone more “masculine.” Not a man, but a masculine woman. The implication is clear: there are good women (soft, compliant, decorative) and bad women (assertive, efficient, direct). You, the feminine one, get paid while doing less.
It’s a workplace strategy rooted in weaponized femininity—which, while sometimes effective, also assumes a lot: that your boss is male, that he controls your workload, and that doing less is inherently desirable. But more importantly, it relies on gender essentialism—the idea that men and women are fundamentally different and naturally suited to specific roles. This stands in direct opposition to Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, which argues that gender isn’t innate but constructed through repeated behaviors and cultural expectations. Leticia’s advice doesn’t just reflect those expectations—it reinscribes them. Femininity becomes not a choice, but a default setting to be optimized for social and financial return. But in 2025, it can be hard to separate the two.
What’s missing from this ideology is the fact that many so-called high-value men aren’t just looking for someone to take care of—they’re looking for pedigree, networks, cultural capital, and, yes, perhaps a career. The version of submission that Sprinkle Sprinkle promotes is reductive. It implies that the only path to stability is through a man.
It whispers that if you play the role well enough, you might just win the life you deserve. And in an internet economy that’s distorted our perception of wealth, success, and love, it’s not hard to see why it resonates. But the fantasy has conditions. It suggests that in order to access that life, you must submit—that a man not only can, but should, provide the Birkin, the lifestyle, the escape from labor. And that you, in turn, should never have to work again. Except what Sprinkle Sprinkle offers is work: emotional labor, performance, calculation. It’s mental warfare dressed as ease.
And it’s not just reductive for women. The image of the “provider” as the ultimate masculine role is crushing for men, too—especially in an economy where wealth is increasingly performative and unequal. When men are told their worth lies in how much they can give, and then they can’t give enough, the failure feels existential. Some retreat into resentment. Others spiral into incel forums, where rage replaces status and submission becomes something they believe they’re owed. And still, they should go to therapy for that.
It’s not as overt as Candace Owens, but it’s just as ideological. One teaches outrage; the other teaches obedience. Both sell control as choice—and both feed the same pipeline. Just in different packaging.
Lazy Girl Jobs and the Politics of Doing Less
Perhaps the great scholar Kimberly Noel Kardashian was right: no one wants to work anymore. In 2023, TikTok saw the rise of one of its more compelling and contentious trends—lazy girl jobs, sometimes used interchangeably with soft girl jobs. These weren’t minimum-wage roles or passive income fantasies, but white-collar jobs that promised a calmer pace: remote work, flexible schedules, and low emotional friction. They were branded as an anti-grind alternative for women who were exhausted by the girlboss era’s demand to hustle, optimize, and monetize every part of their identity.
Users shared videos explaining how to find lazy girl jobs, what industries to target (government, finance, project management), and how to use key phrases in interviews to secure them. The framing of this trend was aesthetic and aspirational—desk setups with warm lighting, a matcha latte offscreen, Zoom calls in soft sweaters. But despite the branding, none of these jobs are actually lazy. Whether you're pushing yourself creatively, emotionally, or politically, labor is still labor. And if you want to grow, be promoted, or break through pay bands, especially in corporate America, it still requires navigating emotional politics—and often performing stability under pressure.
What lazy girl jobs do represent is a shift in branding. They echo the post-2020 wave of “anti-work” content—Instagram infographics declaring I don’t dream of labor, the quiet quitting era, the rejection of hustle culture. In many ways, the trend feels like a response to the burnout and disillusionment left behind by mid-2010s girlboss ideology. But where the girlboss told women to lean in, the lazy girl tells them to check out—to choose peace, softness, and safety over ambition. Rest becomes rebellion. Detachment becomes desirable.
Still, the trend flattens reality by assuming all women are operating on the same playing field. They’re not. A 2020 report from Lean In and McKinsey & Company found that only 24% of Black women said their manager helps them navigate organizational politics, compared to 30% of white women and 29% of all men. Similar gaps appear when it comes to advocating for new opportunities, managing career paths, or receiving sponsorship for advancement. When managers are less likely to support or champion your growth, the option to simply “opt out” of ambition or coast in a soft role isn’t just unavailable—it’s a privilege. For many Black women, and other women of color, visibility and overperformance have always been non-negotiable.
The trend also erases the realities of caregivers and working mothers. Not everyone has the same 24 hours. What looks like “ease” on TikTok often depends on having someone else do the childcare, the housework, or the emotional labor. The fantasy of the lazy girl job doesn’t scale across class or caregiving lines. And the fact that it's called a girl job is telling. There's no lazy boy job trend, because men are rarely expected to center softness or balance in their relationship to work. The burden—and branding—of rest continues to target women.
Lazy girl jobs may not be a pipeline in the same way Sprinkle Sprinkle or Candace Owens content is. They’re not overtly ideological. But they can be reductive. They offer a vision of labor that’s stripped of struggle, sanitized through soft aesthetics, and optimized for performance. They sell a fantasy of escape—not from capitalism, but from effort. And in that way, they still serve the system. It’s just softer.
Woo-Woo, Granola, and the Trap of Wellness
Spirituality, especially when it challenges the rigid teachings of organized religion, can be incredibly powerful and affirming. There’s a subtle liberation to it—a sense of coming home to something intuitive, embodied, even ancient. And when it’s paired with health and wellness practices, it becomes a whole worldview. The woo-woo meets the granola: energy healing, yoni steaming, moon rituals, tinctures, magnesium baths. It’s about listening to your body, tracking your cycle, tuning into the Earth. For many women, this space feels like freedom.
But eventually, something shifts. You go from questioning what’s in your food to questioning the legitimacy of food safety regulations. From wondering about 5G to worrying that it’s part of a mind-control agenda. From skepticism about Big Pharma to listening to podcasts that claim trans people are physically impossible because of “science.” The transition rarely feels abrupt. It moves quietly, through Facebook mom groups, crunchy Telegram chats, or spiritual influencers who post about energy healing one day and “natural law” the next. You don’t notice how far you’ve gone until you’re already there.
Any good marketer will tell you the goal is to get people off the platform and into your system. Off social media and into private Discords, Telegram channels, or Substack newsletters. Meta and X might have inconsistent moderation policies, but they still offer more oversight than a privately run chat server. Once people are in, the language becomes more extreme. The ideas become harder to untangle.
Even astrology gets folded in. What starts as an exploration of cosmic identity turns into gender essentialism based on charts and signs. Sexuality becomes fixed. Gender becomes preordained. It shifts from self-understanding to soft determinism, framed as divine order. As if it was all meant to be. As if it was written in the stars, the only true compass we have left.
Wellness is one of the most permeable pipelines. It crosses platforms, generations, and belief systems. It exists on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube,Twitter—anywhere people are looking for healing, connection, or answers. And maybe it’s more recognizable had longer to brew. The anti-vaccination movement in the U.S. goes back to the 1800s, but its modern form took shape after a now-retracted 1998 study published in The Lancet falsely linked the MMR vaccine to autism. Countless studies have refuted the claim, but the damage was already done. Misinformation metastasized, recirculated in mommy blog posts, wellness influencer rants, and “just asking questions” podcast episodes.
Take the curious case of Kat Von D. In 2018, she faced backlash after posting on Instagram that she and her husband wouldn’t be vaccinating their son. The post has since been deleted, and she’s repeatedly stated she is not anti-vax. In the years since, she’s undergone a public shift. She converted back to Christianity, got rid of her witchcraft books and artifacts, and began warning followers about the energy they might be bringing into their homes. Which, ironically, is rather witchy. Don’t worry, Von D is doing great, When she’s not hosting birthday parties for Marilyn Manson, she’s posing with Tucker Carlson. She’s even found time to move to a much more chemtrail-free Indiana. Though Kat Von D has returned to organized religion, her spiritual aesthetic hasn’t disappeared. It’s just merged with right-wing aesthetics and a quieter sense of paranoia.
What Kat Von D illustrates is how easily wellness and spirituality can be recast—not rejected, just rerouted. The language of intuition, purity, and energy stays the same, but the underlying belief system shifts. Divine truth replaces scientific consensus. Personal feeling becomes political position. And science itself, once a tool for understanding the world, becomes a battleground—no longer a shared framework, but a sorting mechanism for belief, identity, and belonging. This is the pipeline at its most seductive. It doesn’t shout. It affirms.
True Crime and the Performance of Protection
While true crime draws a wide audience, it overwhelmingly leans toward women. According to the Pew Research Center, 44 percent of U.S. women who listen to podcasts regularly tune into true crime, nearly double the rate of men. And that’s just podcasts. On YouTube and TikTok, true crime videos are repurposed and reshared constantly, often layered with makeup tutorials or personal commentary.
The genre focuses heavily on female victims, and perhaps that’s part of the appeal. There’s been no shortage of armchair psychology to explain why women love true crime, but women aren’t a monolith. For some, the content feels cathartic. It’s not just about fear, but recognition. Maybe there’s comfort in imagining that if something happened to you, someone might care. You’d be mourned, investigated, remembered. For others, the appeal is more practical, offering tips, warnings, or imagined scripts for what to do in a moment of violence. And sometimes it’s just a time-killer, especially in the case of true crime videos blended with Get Ready With Me content.
True crime isn’t new, and neither is its profitability. From Forensic Files to Dateline, the genre has always relied on ad revenue. What’s different now is the visibility of profit. Creators like Bailey Sarian, with over 7.6 million YouTube subscribers, mix storytelling with makeup tutorials, casually offering product links alongside murder narratives. Sarian isn’t the only one. Many true crime creators operate more like lifestyle influencers. They run merch stores, promote affiliate codes, and post sponsored content. What’s changed isn’t the business model but the aesthetics. And in this shift, the complexity of crime often gets flattened. The story becomes part of a brand.
Much of this content also leans into carceral feminism, where the default solution to violence is policing. Pro-cop sentiment often shapes the narrative. Officers are framed as heroes, investigations as thorough, and justice as achievable if victims follow the right path. Simply just don’t have cyber sex with a stranger and then meet up in a Denny’s parking lot. But some of us want a Grand Slam, in more ways than one.
It mirrors the logic behind TikTok’s Target-trafficking stories, where women are stalked in parking lots and saved by their own hyper-awareness. These stories rarely explore structural violence. Instead, they place the burden of safety on the individual and reinforce the idea that awareness is protection.
True crime also opens the door to ideological drift—not just through the stories themselves, but through how they’re delivered. Pro-life organizations like Live Action have adopted true crime aesthetics to share stories of violence against surrogates, conflating surrogacy with trafficking and abortion with murder. These videos don’t look overtly political. They look like every other video in your feed. The title might reference a crime. The thumbnail might show a woman’s face. The framing feels familiar, almost benign.
Other creators who started with true crime and internet mysteries have slowly shifted into conspiracy content. The change is rarely dramatic. It begins with a slightly different tone, a new kind of fear, a subtle reframing of what’s to blame. The messaging moves from personal safety to institutional mistrust—sowing doubt around vaccines, reproductive rights, or medical systems. The conspiracies aren’t presented as extremes. They’re wrapped in the same soft narration and high production value as everything else.
And this is where the algorithm does its quiet work. You might not seek out conspiracy content, but you don’t have to. Maybe it starts with a missing persons case. Maybe it’s a clip about trafficking. Then comes a video with a religious overtone, or a short produced by a pro-life group. Another video autoplays. Then another. Something just “asking questions.” For creators, the pivot is strategic. For platforms, it’s just engagement. And for viewers, the shift often goes unnoticed—until the narrative has already changed.
True crime doesn’t just entertain. It affirms. It tells women their fear is valid, their deaths would be meaningful, and their safety is their responsibility. The result isn’t just anxiety, but performance.
Purity, Leftism, and the Illusion of Progress
One pipeline that rarely gets called out is the left’s obsession with ideological purity—and its growing vulnerability to misinformation disguised as anti-establishment thinking. I don’t necessarily think this dynamic is specific to women, but I do think it’s often not addressed enough, especially considering how much of it unfolds in the same digital spaces women are frequently navigating.
In some corners of liberal and leftist spaces, people are pushed toward increasingly extreme anti-government narratives. It doesn’t always look dangerous at first. It looks like holding institutions accountable. It looks like resistance. But underneath that aesthetic, it can quietly become a pipeline of its own.
Part of the complication is that liberalism itself isn’t unified. There are Democrats, and then there are leftists. Many far-left thinkers and creators are skeptical of institutions like NATO, government regulation, or electoral politics altogether. That suspicion doesn’t come from nationalism or hate—it often comes from watching systems fail, especially for marginalized people. But that kind of mistrust can blur into something else. When it’s paired with a constant push toward moral purity, it starts to operate like its own pipeline.
There’s an unwritten code of what makes someone a good liberal or a bad one. Doing it wrong doesn’t mean being conservative—it might mean not supporting something loudly enough. Or wanting a more nuanced take. Or simply aligning, even slightly, with the Democratic Party. In these circles, purity isn’t about hate. It’s about being perfectly intersectional, perfectly informed, perfectly in step. Anything less becomes suspect.
Supporting a Democrat—any Democrat—can be enough to get you labeled complicit. The “Never Kamala” crowd is a good example. At one point, creators like Madeline Pendleton equated her with Trump or argued that Obama’s healthcare plan was a right-wing blueprint. That kind of commentary drives engagement, but it also flattens complexity and leaves room for misinformation to spread.
And when the pressure to post outweighs the pressure to verify, facts fall away. In that space, disinformation thrives. As WIRED reported, Russian-aligned bot networks have been pushing fake news about student protests and the conflict in Gaza. The goal isn’t to persuade—it’s to divide. To keep people angry, overwhelmed, and too suspicious to act.
The damage doesn’t come from believing every lie. It comes from seeing so many you don’t know what to believe. You scroll past AI protest signs, fake footage, or a knockoff news site, and suddenly everything feels like noise. The algorithm doesn’t care what’s true. It cares what performs. And what performs is usually the most dramatic, most reactive, and most extreme.
The right doesn’t require precision. You just have to be hateful. But the left often demands ideological perfection—and when the standards keep shifting, people start checking out. They stop talking. They disappear from the conversation. Or they slide deeper into anti-government thinking that starts to resemble the rhetoric they once opposed.
It’s the end of the world as we know it…
These pipelines don’t always look like danger. They look like wellness influencers, soft girl jobs, aesthetic routines, pop culture recaps, and astrology memes. They look like safety. Like empowerment. Like logic. That’s what makes them effective. They don’t require belief, just attention. And in a digital economy built on content, clicks, and control, attention is currency—and currency shapes ideology.
So no, it’s not always Candace Owens or a conspiracy-laced livestream. Sometimes, it’s a girl in a claw clip telling you to rest. Sometimes, it’s a true crime TikTok that makes you feel seen. Sometimes, it’s a well-meaning infographic passed around a little too fast. The pipeline isn’t just built by extremists. It’s sustained by aesthetics. By algorithms. By the platforms we trust and the content we share.
Which means the most powerful question might not be how far will they go? but how close have we already gotten?
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