Relationscapes
MINI EPISODE: How More Young Women Are Hitting the Alt-Right Pipeline (with Jess Britvich)
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Introduction – 0:00
BLAIR HODGES: I'm journalist Blair Hodges in Salt Lake City, welcoming you another mini-episode of Relationscapes, the podcast where we explore the shifting landscape of relationships, gender, sexuality, race, and more. I'm not trying to freak anybody out but let's talk for a second about a disturbing statistic from the center for American women and politics in a segment I like to call, "What's up with the youth?"
Thank you Cory Feldman. Alright, here's the statistic. This comes from The Center for American Women and Politics. Young women age 18 to 29 consistently back Democratic presidential candidates more than women in other age groups and more than young men. Almost half of young men in this age group, 18 to 29, voted for Donald Trump in 2024. That's almost half of them. That's compared to 38% of young women. The scary stat is that the number of young women supporting Trump actually rose a bit between 2016 and 2024, it went up by 6 percent. 32% up to 38%. What's up with the youth?
There's been a lot of talk about toxic masculinity and how young men seem to be becoming more radicalized, but we also need to pay attention to young women as well.
Which brings us to our next guest. She is a rising TikTok influencer and public advocate who says if we paid more attention on TikTok and Instagram, the rise in women who voted for Trump wouldn't be so surprising. Her name is Jess Britvich and she has had a front row seat to a rising phenomenon of social media content geared toward women that seems to be apolitical and harmless or self-helpy—focusing on trends like clean beauty, natural living, even yoga and wellness. But a lot of this stuff has actually been funneling young women toward right-wing politics.
Jess Britvich joins us to talk about these social media trends, and how media literacy can help us push back against them, right now.
PolitikTok – 02:16
BLAIR HODGES: Jess Britvich, welcome to Relationscapes.
JESS BRITVICH: Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here.
BLAIR HODGES: I'm excited to have you here. The algorithm brought you here. You're one of the videos that started showing up in my Instagram feed. When did you start doing content creation?
JESS BRITVICH: Oh, gosh. Well, it's the millennial in me. I grew up with the Internet. I've always been on the Internet. I started really creating content, though, in the sense that we kind of know it today when I was formerly a social worker. I started doing TikTok beauty stuff just as a creative outlet from the emotional labor and all of that from being in the field.
I have since left the social work field and am now working a more typical 9 to 5. I realized how much—so much of what I talk about now: politics, Internet culture, trends, and sociology—really is how I navigate the world and what I think. And now that I'm not talking about it all the time at work, I’m like, okay, I need to get this out somewhere.
So I really began transitioning my content to focus more on this type of lens. And that's when it really started to take off. It was kind of like, oh my God, I should have been doing this the whole time because I love it.
BLAIR HODGES: You're good at it, too. I think one of your biggest strengths is there aren't as many women doing this kind of in-depth cultural analysis that you do while mixing it with the aesthetics of the typical thing that might show up on a girl or young woman's feed—like makeup and fashion.
JESS BRITVICH: Exactly. And that's what I talk a lot about in my content—how so many of these right-wing pipelines are introduced to young people through content that doesn't seem political at all, but yet it is. We live in this kind of hyper-political space where—I mean, I'm a believer that everything is political.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
JESS BRITVICH: However, the average person isn't always looking at it through that lens.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. I think they think politics is like when we vote or something—
JESS BRITVICH: Exactly.
BLAIR HODGES: —instead of politics as what we decide to do about people as people. Like everything's political in that sense.
JESS BRITVICH: Every single day. From the moment you wake up, the first breath you take, to going to bed—it affects literally everything.
Defining the Alt-Right – 04:31
BLAIR HODGES: So we've seen trends of young men feeling unsettled with things like economic opportunities or shifting gender roles. They've become easy targets for far-right propaganda. We see this in the podcast world; we see this on social media. And you're sounding alarm bells now because you're seeing more and more young women get sucked toward those same alt-right pipelines as well. First, take a second to describe what you mean by "alt-right" and what that encompasses.
JESS BRITVICH: Really, "alt-right" is kind of a moving definition. It's more of an ideology than a strict set of politics or whatever.
BLAIR HODGES: There's not like a governing board, right?
JESS BRITVICH: Exactly. It's not like there's a board saying, "This is the alt-right."
Overall, it encapsulates authoritarian rule, white supremacy, super strict gender norms, patriarchal roles, really top-down hierarchies in society. The term was originally coined from insidious corners of the Internet like 4chan—worse than Reddit—4chan, 8chan. It wasn't as mainstream then.
BLAIR HODGES: And they were the alternate to the right. Like, "We're more hardcore, we're racist, and we'll say we are!"
JESS BRITVICH: Yes, exactly. So now, the way I define the alt-right is—I mean, I think Trumpism is just alt-right these days. Sometimes I get pushback, like, "You think that's alt-right? That's not." Well, I think that just shows how far we've shifted.
BLAIR HODGES: And I think when people do that, they're just trying to shift the conversation to irrelevancy. Instead of actually addressing what alt-right is, they'll argue definitions with you or argue whether someone counts as that or not, rather than talking about what it really covers—racism, sexism, gender issues, all of that stuff. So I think that's just a dodge if people criticize you for that.
JESS BRITVICH: Yes, 100%. So whenever I'm talking about these alt-right pipelines, it's about the entry points to being indoctrinated into this more extremist, super right-wing ideology.
The Pipelines of "Clean" Products – 06:32
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, and you call it a pipeline because you can think of it like Mario—where you hop in the pipe, go down, and wind up in another land. Where is this taking us? It takes us to a particular place. And you notice there are entrances into that pipeline for women that don't seem like they would take you to that world to begin with.
JESS BRITVICH: For sure.
BLAIR HODGES: Talk about some examples of those.
JESS BRITVICH: Yeah, I mean, I think some of the most common entry points begin with content that seems pretty innocuous but can lead you down much darker paths of misinformation, anti-science, even racism, eugenics, white supremacy, gender norms, all that kind of stuff. A big one is clean beauty—or just "clean, clean, clean" in general. It really encapsulates this idea of purity that starts with our products at home.
And it starts with a lot of fear-mongering and anti-science. So women will be searching "clean beauty." It's a buzzword, and it's a thing that's being marketed very much to women right now. There's clean beauty at Sephora, there are all these brands saying that they're "clean."
BLAIR HODGES: Is it like cosmetics that are supposed to more "natural" or something like that kind of thing?
JESS BRITVICH: Exactly. Certain ingredients.
BLAIR HODGES: It sounds good, like not putting chemicals on your face if you don't need them, that sort of thing.
JESS BRITVICH: Right. But that's the thing—at the end of the day, everything is a chemical. It's a huge marketing term. When it says "clean," it really means nothing. These are unregulated terms. "Clean," "non-toxic"—things like that really mean nothing. There's no governing body that says this is the level of whatever that makes it clean.
There's a lot of fear-mongering in this marketing about these "toxic chemicals." But at the end of the day, it's about dosage. Water is a chemical. And if you have too much water in your system, that can be toxic.
BLAIR HODGES: There's the woman who died from water poisoning during a radio contest. I don't know if you ever heard that, but it was a challenge to drink as much water as she could and she died. She overdosed on water.
JESS BRITVICH: Exactly. So it kind of starts like this.
Now, there are reasons that women—or whoever—might want to explore clean beauty. Maybe they have sensitive skin, certain allergies, whatever it may be. But the thing with these marketing terms is that they start to demonize science and sow seeds of distrust in our regulating bodies.
The entry point is just, you know, "clean beauty." Oh, I have sensitive skin, I want to try to find something with less harsh chemicals perhaps. But then soon, because of the algorithm—and that's the big thing I talk about—it’s not just, oh, I'm interested in clean beauty. All of a sudden, I'm on the path toward the alt-right.
What I'm really talking about is the algorithm. The algorithm loves the alt-right pipeline because alt-right messaging thrives on a lack of nuance. It's misinformation, it's emotion-based, it's fear-based—and that's what short-form algorithms love.
BLAIR HODGES: Yes, social media companies want to keep your eyeballs, right? So they're going to serve you up the content they think will make you stick around. And it's not random. It's the fact that certain stuff keeps more people on. So you start watching this video, we're going to serve you this one, then this one, then this one, stay here—that's the algorithm.
JESS BRITVICH: Exactly. And this has even been proven through studies on YouTube's auto-suggest feature and things like that. So through the clean beauty–alt-right pipeline, it starts very simply with searching clean beauty. But then soon you're starting to get fed other things that are anti-science and really start to lead toward anti-vax rhetoric.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, that's chemicals.
JESS BRITVICH: Yeah, exactly. It's anti-science, and it's just misinformation.
BLAIR HODGES: And you see it with clean eating too, right? They're saying, oh, these particular food dyes or something. And sure, we can all eat more healthy—
JESS BRITVICH: 100%.
BLAIR HODGES: Neither of us want to discount that. I know, I've seen your content. But when there becomes an over-fixation on it, combined with skepticism and doubt toward actual specialists who are trained in chemistry and trained in food and nutrition—ignoring those people and saying, "We actually know better." Anti-institutionalism. That's where it takes you.
JESS BRITVICH: Mmhmm. And this is where it is too—this anti-institutionalism as well as individualism. That's what a lot of this messaging is. I think it's a way people feel—and why it's so attractive—is it makes people feel like they have some type of control over things. Because it says, oh, if you just eat X, Y, and Z, you can cure your hyperthyroidism or whatever.
BLAIR HODGES: This supplement too, by the way—20% off!
JESS BRITVICH: Use my discount, which I’m selling, link in my bio. Right, right.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
JESS BRITVICH: And so it’s these grifters who are spewing misinformation in order to just make a buck and are really sowing seeds of doubt about these different larger things that really are meant to keep us safe.
And also it puts the onus on the individual without critiquing larger systems that actually are the result of why maybe our food isn’t the healthiest as other countries or why, you know, people are getting more sick these days.
Or, you know, it talks nothing about universal health care or the environment or, you know, the toxins in our air.
BLAIR HODGES: Or how different communities have access to different qualities of food based on socioeconomics, based on race, all of that.
JESS BRITVICH: And don’t be fooled. This is 100% a white woman pipeline. It’s very much—that’s what it’s, that’s the target market.
The Tradwife Pipeline – 11:35
BLAIR HODGES: Right. That connects us to tradwife content. And this is a different pipeline entrance. I think some of the popularity of tradwife is a little bit voyeuristic, where people are like, this is kind of bonkers, I’m going to watch this. And other people kind of start to buy into the kind of ideas it’s promulgating, which is, again, an individualistic, back-to-our-roots, more natural way of living, these so-called traditional gender roles.
JESS BRITVICH: Yes. Tradwife is short for traditional wife, it was coined in Internet culture. And it is this idea that women are prescribed to have certain roles in the home. It’s very much the return to the nuclear family, that this is what is going to give you fulfillment. Women are to be home, they’re to be making the home, they’re to be providing for the husband. The husband is the one going out and doing the hunting and gathering.
It’s like these very primal, just—it’s gender essentialism really, at the end of the day.
BLAIR HODGES: No career and education needed if you’re supposed to be home cooking the meals and taking care of all the babies.
JESS BRITVICH: Barefoot and pregnant and, you know, all of that. Here’s the thing: a lot of these tradwife influencers know how to market themselves. And here’s the other thing: these super popular tradwife influencers on the Internet, they are not tradwives. They are entrepreneurs bringing in lots of money through views and AdSense. So they’re selling this lifestyle that they don’t even participate in themselves.
But for the viewer, they’re able to view it in this very aesthetic way. They’re waking up, they’re cooking bread from scratch and going out to their chickens and whatever, and, you know, caring for their cute little always blonde-haired, blue-eyed babies, which, you know, we can get into. But I think people view this very aesthetic content and, absolutely, women are exhausted because we don’t have support systems here in the United States for women.
BLAIR HODGES: Well, it can look nice, right? If you’re in this sort of like girlboss mentality and you’re, like, trying to kick ass in corporate America and it kind of sucks—it sucks for everybody out there—how nice would it be to just go back home and bake some bread! Like, that sounds good to me.
JESS BRITVICH: And that’s how it’s sold. But the idea is, instead of critiquing capitalism, it says, oh, look at how things used to be, let’s go back to your prescribed role in life. Well, go ask your grandma and your great-grandma if they really had that creative life, because I’ll tell you, mine didn’t.
BLAIR HODGES: Or like any people of color, or any—you know,
JESS BRITVICH: Yes, yes. Most people never fit into the illusion.
BLAIR HODGES: And again, one way that it trends into alt-rightness is it is whiteness. It’s very white. The politics are very individualistic. It’s sort of anti-collectivism, all of that.
The SkinnyTok Pipeline – 14:10
BLAIR HODGES: Okay, so there’s a new one that’s just come across my radar, because the algorithm’s not going to serve this up to me, and I found out about it because of seeing videos like yours. But this is SkinnyTok, and this is new to me.
JESS BRITVICH: So SkinnyTok is—oh gosh, exactly as it sounds. It’s tips for weight loss for women. And it’s really a response to, a lot of times, the body positivity movement. We’re seeing this pendulum really shifting back towards, oh my gosh, these really extreme expectations of what women’s bodies are supposed to look like. And it’s thin. It’s thin, thin, thin.
We’re seeing people who were co-opting bodies of trends that were often, you know, of Black women. You know, we’re getting the BBLs, we’re getting the lip filler, now we’re seeing people removing their filler, they’re trying to get as skinny as possible. It’s really from—we see Ozempic, you know, just—we could talk about that, you know, forever.
And it’s very much, gosh, reminiscent of 2000s Pro-Ana. Are you familiar at all with like Pro-Ana websites or anything?
BLAIR HODGES: No.
JESS BRITVICH: This was like the early 2000s, 2010s. And these were blogs. They were Pro-Ana blogs, and it stands for pro-anorexia. And it would be people sharing tips about how to fuel these eating disorders. It’s really scary. And I hate to say I dabbled whenever I was young as well too. Now it’s this rebranded Pro-Ana stuff.
And the thing is, the way all of these things are branded and marketed online through these algorithms is, a lot of times, as empowerment. And that’s what I find really scary. We see it with the tradwife stuff—it’s, oh no, it’s empowering to be back to your roots of, you know, whatever. And then we see it a lot with the SkinnyTok stuff—it’s empowering to take control of your body and be proud of your body and blah blah blah blah blah.
But it’s really dangerous. It’s really scary. And it just sows the seed for a lot more insidious implications.
BLAIR HODGES: It ties people into a very judgmental attitude about their own bodies and about other people’s bodies that serves the interests of people who want to sell you products to be skinny or to look skinny. It’s trendiness.
JESS BRITVICH: Absolutely.
The New Age Spirituality Pipeline – 16:29
BLAIR HODGES: And that’s not necessarily a right-wing thing traditionally, right? Like, that’s something that any woman, regardless of the political air she breathed as she was raised, can fall into.
I think that’s another danger of these pipelines, which brings us to another one: new age spirituality as an entrance, because that’s typically not a "conservative" thing, that’s not coming out of conservatism, right?
JESS BRITVICH: Well, a lot of these things started as more left-wing trends. Especially when we’re looking at—a lot of these things were connected to environmentalism, especially when it comes to homemaking and the environment, you know, the natural living, all that kind of stuff.
BLAIR HODGES: And mother earth spirituality, sort of the granola thing, right?
JESS BRITVICH: Yeah, yeah. And same with these very hippie—but I think that really the spirituality side of things really got co-opted through QAnon. The connection there is wild. And I still don’t fully understand how those two subgenres kind of collided, but they really go hand in hand.
BLAIR HODGES: Especially with COVID. Have you heard of the Conspirituality podcast?
JESS BRITVICH: Yes, yes.
BLAIR HODGES: They do a great job of explaining how yoga circles and sort of these wellness people just have a very conspiratorial way of viewing the world—of, sort of, we have this isolated truth, but there’s also these underhanded systems that are trying to get us. And so it’s a conspiracy mindset through a spiritual lens. And it connected right in with QAnon, because that is Conspiracy Theory 101. There’s a secret cabal of evil leftists who are controlling the world and eating babies.
JESS BRITVICH: Eating babies and adrenochrome or whatever.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I got my cup of adrenochrome right here, by the way. It’s delicious.
JESS BRITVICH: Yeah, my Dunkin’.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it’s a mix-in at Dunkin’.
JESS BRITVICH: Whenever I try to explain to anybody who is not familiar with QAnon—which I am envious of someone at this point in 2025 who is not familiar—but I actually had this discussion with my coworkers recently, and I explained this to them, and they’re like, “What? This has to be—” I’m like, no, this is a huge fraction of the population who believe this.
BLAIR HODGES: There are millions of people. And yes, you sound like a crazy person trying to describe it.
JESS BRITVICH: Right?
BLAIR HODGES: It’s like, there’s no way that people would believe that. But they do.
JESS BRITVICH: I know, I know.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay, so new age spirituality merges with—again, this is a merging of who you might assume would be kind of leftist oriented. It’s the same in those new age spirituality circles: against vaccines, against Big Pharma. It again gets back into these conspiracy theories and false views of what natural stuff for our bodies is.
JESS BRITVICH: Yes. That’s what a lot of this content tends—I think for women especially, that tends to be like the entry point to the super right wing. It’s the MAHA movement. MAHA has recruited—
BLAIR HODGES: So, Make America Healthy Again.
JESS BRITVICH: Yes. It’s RFK Jr.’s platform, and it’s done—gosh—just a number on recruiting young women to the right wing because of this idea of wanting to—it sounds great, you want to make yourself healthier. But it demonizes so many things. I mean, even from SSRIs, medication, even going back to natural birthing and anti-epidurals, and just—it’s really just anti-modern medicine in general.
And while 100% there is room to critique modern medicine—there’s so much room to critique our current medical system—but instead of actually critiquing the system, it’s critiquing the science. And it’s putting on these individual—it’s so much. It never critiques the system. It’s about critiquing your individual choices.
BLAIR HODGES: And it props up a supplement industry that’s actually as lucrative, actually sort of more lucrative, than what we call Big Pharma as well.
JESS BRITVICH: Well, the Big Pharma is a multibillion-dollar industry. Big Wellness is a multitrillion-dollar industry. Trillion. And it’s unregulated. It’s full of just misinformation and grifters and things that are actually going to make you more sick.
And that’s what I think is so—oh my God—just infuriating, honestly, is to see women turn to the Internet because they’re frustrated with systems. They can’t get the support that they need, they can’t get the help that they need. So they turn to the Internet for answers. And there’s these individuals, these grifters, who are capitalizing on that, who are feeding you information that is actually going to make you more sick.
People in general are going to the Internet to find something to help cure an ailment of theirs and are being fed misinformation that is then worsening the problem. And I just think that’s unforgivable.
Breaking Through Social Media Algorithm Rot – 20:47
BLAIR HODGES: One of the things that scares me most is that you can enter into it through any of these many pipelines. And there’s more—people can follow you on TikTok and Instagram, @jessbritvich, to hear more of these pipelines—but you can enter in on any one of these and not even have to care about any of the other pipeline entrances. You don’t even have to be aware of them.
So someone might vote for Trump because they know he teamed up with RFK Jr. And they might not even like Donald Trump, they might have a problem with him, but they’re like, okay, well, at least there’s this. I’m going to put myself here in this camp and dismiss all the other stuff. I mean, I won't talk about the Epstein files, I’m not talking about the sexual assault allegations and the criminal convictions and the stealing of government documents, et cetera, et cetera.
JESS BRITVICH: Turning over Roe v. Wade, like with a court that he stacked.
BLAIR HODGES: Well, and locally in my own state, I can vote to try to preserve Roe v. Wade and pretend like the national ban is impossible, even though we know that’s the goal.
JESS BRITVICH: That’s the plan.
BLAIR HODGES: That’s what scares me. Social media allows us to isolate ourselves in these information silos. And we get enough—like someone who’s coming in through new age spirituality—they get enough. They don’t have to learn about anything else. Someone who’s on SkinnyTok gets enough. Someone who’s a tradwife fan, or someone into clean beauty.
So they don’t even have to be comprehensive in what they’re looking at. Any one thing can pull them into that side of the political aisle.
JESS BRITVICH: Absolutely. And that’s what’s so scary and why it’s so powerful, and why we don’t, unfortunately, have that ecosystem on the left. And unfortunately, it’s because a lot of us are already naturally at a disadvantage, because even to refute some of these talking points, it takes a lot—it’s about nuance. All of this is nuanced. And the Internet hates nuance. And people don’t have time for nuance.
BLAIR HODGES: I know. Everyone who advised me on this podcast, by the way, was like, “You’re covering too much stuff, or you’re talking about this too in depth.” And I’m like, I don’t want to change that. I recognize that will limit my audience, but this is the kind of content I believe in.
JESS BRITVICH: But for the right folks, it’s going to hit, right.
BLAIR HODGES: Do you feel that? Because you’re really good at translating stuff, and you have to keep it short because you are doing short-form content. So how do you negotiate that nuance into a short TikTok video?
JESS BRITVICH: So I script out a lot of my videos—not necessarily word for word—but I will make bullet points before I get on and film. And then I will—oh my gosh, if you should see—and maybe you could pick up on it just from this conversation—my brain goes a thousand miles a minute.
So I will just film, and sometimes I’ll have like a 10-minute video that I will edit down to a minute 30. I try not to go above a minute 30, a minute 40, because that’s really when things start to dip. And even that is kind of longer form content for short form, like an Instagram Reel or a TikTok.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. People are going to be hitting the right side of their screen to double speed it.
JESS BRITVICH: Exactly. Which, take off for that little feature, and I get twofold. And this is critiques that I really like to hear from people because I have some people say, “You really break this down really easily to understand. I really get it now. This is engaging. This is like great content.” And then I’ll have some other people who say, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Can you make this more of a one-on-one?”
And that’s really interesting to me, because I think a lot of times people in left-wing spaces in general—we want to educate, we want to quote peer-reviewed studies, we want to recommend these books, you know, whatever. That’s not what they’re doing on the right at all.
BLAIR HODGES: No.
JESS BRITVICH: I know definitely my content’s a little bit more academic, but I want it to be accessible, I want it to be entertaining, I want it to be approachable. And that’s why I love to do my makeup or incorporate different trends through it and hope that it kind of catches.
Because that’s another part of my love. I mean, we’re all multifaceted. I love doing my makeup. I love sparkles and pretty things.
BLAIR HODGES: See, and I think the medium is the message, to quote Marshall McLuhan, this old media theorist. It’s like when you do the thing, like you’re standing there showing your fit, right? So someone’s looking at their phone, they see you full body, kind of at a little distance, just maybe enjoying a drink or whatever.
And then you’ve got all this text down the side and some music, so you’re not speaking anything. And your text—it’s like, I laugh because sometimes I’ll see those, and it’s like, “Shoes from here, dress from here,” or something about work. And yours is like, “12 ways that the right wing can trick you into being a moron,” or something. [laughs]
JESS BRITVICH: Exactly. It’s like, you didn’t know this is what you were signing up for whenever you first did the first two seconds.
BLAIR HODGES: But again, the medium is the message. I think you’re reaching people that like that aesthetic on the one hand, and also people that can see the irony in you kind of co-opting that. Because you’re also like traditional woman—you look sort of, would you identify as high femme? I don’t know how you talk about your appearance.
JESS BRITVICH: That’s why sometimes I hear that I’m Republican-passing, you know, so that’s why I try to have these tattoos—
BLAIR HODGES: With the blonde hair too. [laughing]
JESS BRITVICH: Exactly! But I think I have a lot of privilege in this space in particular. I am able to say things and not get the same backlash that Black women, that trans women are saying in this space, who have been saying it for a lot longer.
So I try to always be very cognizant of that. I’m not the first one, by any means, to be saying any of this stuff. Everything that I’ve learned is from people who’ve been doing this work a lot longer than I have. But I also hope to use my privilege in this space to know that the way that I do fit into the mold, and the traditional gender norms—from just the way, first impression—can be used to my advantage to get the message across the best I can.
Being a Woman on the Internet – 26:28
BLAIR HODGES: While you’re doing that, do you experience harassment? I know your videos are getting hundreds of thousands of views. You’re getting a lot of comments. How do you deal with all the comments and the harassment that happens?
JESS BRITVICH: It depends on the day. Oh my God, the comments are great. I definitely get so much more positive feedback than negative.
BLAIR HODGES: Can you see all of them though? We’re talking like 3,000 comments on a recent video. I don’t even know how you’d—
JESS BRITVICH: Yeah, no. I’m limited. I would love to be even more engaged in my comment section and DMs and things like that, hopefully one day. But the thing is, it is, especially when I first started and a lot of my videos started to pick up, it’s easy to zero in on the crazy. I mean, it is crazy, like some of the stuff you’ll get, and you kind of just have to laugh at some of it. And still, it depends on the day. Sometimes I literally don’t care at all.
BLAIR HODGES: Do you get vulgar stuff? Are people—are men harassing you? Are you getting nasty stuff too?
JESS BRITVICH: Yeah, it’s always men, or sometimes it’s women. But the worst ones are men who will say violent, super misogynistic things. What upsets me—I never get upset personally that this person is saying this to me. And if I did, I think that’s totally fine too. But I get angry that this is what women have to deal with coming onto the Internet and having a voice.
And it makes me angry that people feel entitled to say things like this. And I know that going into it, but it just continues to reiterate these things I’m trying to point out and talk about. So that’s just upsetting.
BLAIR HODGES: Are either of the platforms—Insta or TikTok—better?
JESS BRITVICH: Instagram’s way worse with AI.
BLAIR HODGES: Now it seems to me that they could just filter out crap. It should be able to recognize this person is harassing this person, so just don’t even send that through.
JESS BRITVICH: Instagram got rid of all of their moderation. And that’s the other thing. I mean, we didn’t even get into this, but all of these tech bros who are controlling these algorithms are in bed with the Trump administration.
BLAIR HODGES: They were at the inauguration.
JESS BRITVICH: Yeah, exactly. And then even TikTok, whenever it was banned for 24 hours, we get back online, everyone was served a notification: “Thank you to President Trump for—”
BLAIR HODGES: Thank you so, President.
JESS BRITVICH: Unbelievable.
BLAIR HODGES: Thank you. The guy who made TikTok signed the thing that was going to—
JESS BRITVICH: Yeah, it’s unbelievable. So obviously these algorithms, we know what they prioritize and we know what’s being censored.
BLAIR HODGES: So do you report bad comments? You just delete them?
JESS BRITVICH: I delete. I’ll block. Sometimes I’ll just ignore it. It just depends. Instagram’s way worse than TikTok, and I think Meta, just in general, is. And I think it’s because what I’ve kind of concluded is Instagram, I think TikTok is really good at feeding things to your bubble. It’s kind of an echo chamber.
And TikTok, for better or for worse, Instagram will see my content and it will want to feed it to whoever is going to give the most engagement.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, harassment.
JESS BRITVICH: People are going to see it as rage bait.
BLAIR HODGES: And that’s what happened to Twitter, but times ten. I had basically stopped using Twitter because I had this big account, Jazz Fans Against Racism, which was about the Utah Jazz and talking to Jazz fans about racism. And because it’s in Utah, a very predominantly white community, after Musk took over, it became unusable. Literally unusable. All of my mentions were racist, overtly racist.
JESS BRITVICH: Yes.
BLAIR HODGES: Slurs and harassment. And I wasn’t getting put in front of the people who actually followed the account anymore. Yep. It just drove me right off the platform.
JESS BRITVICH: And that’s what’s so frustrating, too, and why I’m talking about this. It’s not just social media anymore. Social media has such an impact on the outcome of our elections, on public opinion, how we organize, how we disseminate information. It’s all through socials now.
And to see just such a grip, and the amount of money and the huge infrastructure that the right has in getting this content out there and developing right-wing content creators to recruit to their messaging—it’s really a huge system that the right has built. That’s why we’re seeing it everywhere, in combination with all these other things we talked about.
BLAIR HODGES: Luckily you can still make them a little bit of money, so that’s why they’re not completely just killing you off the platform.
JESS BRITVICH: Yeah, right.
BLAIR HODGES: But I do think it’s probably still gamed against the kind of stuff that you do. I also worry about the ownership issue. I think that’s a real problem. I started using BlueSky for that reason, but it’s not a perfect place. It’s pretty good, but it’s also not quite the same. I don’t know.
JESS BRITVICH: I need to get on BlueSky.
BLAIR HODGES: They’re pretty different than TikTok and Instagram, and I think what you’re doing there works. I think it’s just a different, text-based—video is not going to do much on BlueSky, anyway.
Improving Our Relationship with Social Media – 31:16
BLAIR HODGES: That takes me to the last question for you. You’re growing your influence. Your account’s pulling up. My account’s small. I don’t have a huge following. I have more listeners than social media followers, for sure.
What is your advice for people who use social media but aren’t trying to be influencers to improve their online experience? What do you suggest for people to become more influential in spreading the kind of content they want to see?
JESS BRITVICH: I kind of have a series where I talk about, if you like engaging with a certain type of content, look for these certain things versus these other things.
For instance, if you like the clean beauty space, look for creators who are talking about beauty for sensitive skin, who are still using peer-reviewed studies, and aren’t using fear-based language to get their point across.
If you like the idea of trad wife living, look into creators who talk about anti-capitalism, who talk about sustainability, who talk about the environment. Those types of things. I think there are still ways to engage with these ideas and trends without them having to funnel to the alt-right. A lot of these trends reflect larger issues that leftists are already talking about in content and other spaces.
I think it’s about being cognizant of those things. Also, just being really aware of misinformation. The misinformation out there is rampant. It’s only going to get worse with AI. Really just make yourself aware—it's really scary. Learn how to spot misinformation, spot language meant to manipulate your emotions, and how to do your own little fact-checking.
It’s media literacy at the end of the day, and that’s so important.
BLAIR HODGES: Do you have any go-to outlets where you pick up that kind of stuff? I point people to check credentials. That’s not a guarantee that what people are saying is correct, but it does mean they’re operating in a field where they’re held responsible and are more likely to correct mistakes.
JESS BRITVICH: Exactly. Or some type of licensing board or something. What’s scary is that a lot of times people will throw out credentials, but it’s something totally unrelated to the area they’re trying to influence.
BLAIR HODGES: It happens all the time. Jillian Michaels right now, like, what? How is she a specialist on anything?
JESS BRITVICH: But she’s exactly—truly RFK Jr. period.
BLAIR HODGES: Exactly. See, and I should have gone for him first. Also notice the sexism in me, like going after a woman first. I’m still a work in progress.
JESS BRITVICH: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But Jillian Michaels is the worst, so I give you a pass.
BLAIR HODGES: Cool.
JESS BRITVICH: Yeah. So I think those are big things. Understanding how the scientific process works, too. Also, watch for fear-based language and make sure they’re not just critiquing individual choices but larger systems at play.
BLAIR HODGES: I think that’s a good general rule. Even with terrible news or issues the left cares about, pause for a second and look into it. I’ve seen some things blown out of proportion, and some things we actually don’t need to worry about right now.
If we keep calm, sometimes we need to shout and feel what we’re feeling. But it’s good to pause regardless of the content, check what it’s doing to us emotionally, and reengage our minds. Verify what’s real and figure out the best course of action. What can I do in my little, limited sphere? That gives a sense of control, too, because there’s so much I can’t control.
JESS BRITVICH: Right. And whenever you hear a friend sharing something that isn’t accurate and could lead down these alt-right pipelines, don’t be afraid to gently call them in, call them out—however your style is.
BLAIR HODGES: Like, hey, you want to go to American Eagle with me? They have a great ad campaign going.
JESS BRITVICH: On right now, and I’m going to go buy some jeans I’m really interested in trying on.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Well, thanks. Jess Britvich is a content creator, and she talks about Internet culture and politics. She’s a former social worker. She lives in Pittsburgh. You can follow her on TikTok and Instagram @JessBritvich.
This has been a lot of fun. I look forward to seeing your content. You make me feel young. You keep me kind of in the know—I know what the kids are doing.
JESS BRITVICH: I’ll send you all the hot trends so I can keep you up on what they’re all talking about.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. I feel like that guy in the gif with a skateboard and a shirt that says “Rock Band,” like, greetings, fellow kid.
JESS BRITVICH: What’s his name? Steve Buscemi?
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, Steve Buscemi!
JESS BRITVICH: Oh man, well, thank you so much. This was wonderful.
BLAIR HODGES: Thank you.
Postscript: On the K*lling of Charlie Kirk – 35:58
BLAIR HODGES: Alright, I really enjoyed that interview. Um, the mood is gonna shift now and I don't have any great way of transitioning here other than to say I'm gonna address some tough stuff right now. The discussion involves gun violence and death.
Around the 6 minute mark of our discussion, Jess mentioned Turning Point USA as an example of the alt-right and I agreed with her assessment. Little did we know that within about a week, Turning Point founder and conservative activist Charlie Kirk would be shot to death here in my home state of Utah. This one really hit close to home, it happened in a place that I've been. I've walked through that courtyard many times. I worked at a university that's just a few miles away from Utah Valley University. I've presented papers there, attended conferences there. I have friends who are professors and students there. I know people who were present when he was shot. And I have to say his death affected me, but it didn't change my opinion, or Jess's opinion, about Charlie Kirk's work. But speaking out about it can have huge consequences right now, and it certainly did for Jess after she made a video in the aftermath.
But before I say more about that, I first want to emphasize that Charlie Kirk's murder was awful and tragic and disturbing and I entirely reject that kind of political violence. It is never acceptable.
I was also disturbed to see many of the tributes to Mr. Kirk that poured out on social media and in the news. And I think it reflects something about American culture. A lot of us have been socialized to respond to death like this in a "civil" way. To be reverent. To send our "thoughts and prayers." To avoid "speaking ill of the dead." To think about the loved ones left behind and "pay our respects," or at the very least, to not raise any unsettling objections to whatever eulogies other people offer up. It's just really taboo to go against this mode of public mourning, right?
On one hand, this seems quite humane. We value life. We empathetically recognize how painful it can be to lose a loved one. I appreciate this collective approach generally, but I also believe it raises some problems.
One problem is that this culture of how we respond to death is not universally applied. Consider public reactions to the killing of Osama Bin Laden, if you can remember that. I think it was like 2011 or so. Most people aren't concerned with the sanctity of human life categorically at that time, there were celebrations about Bin Laden's death for the role he had in killing thousands of people in the 9/11 attack. Now I'm not saying Charlie Kirk is Osama Bin Laden. I'm saying consider the different ways people grieve, or the different people we believe are worthy of our public grief.
Think of all the prominent voices now calling for Kirk's murderer to face capital punishment. There's not much reverence for human life in general in that case, only for worthy human life. So our socialization to respect the dead is usually extended to a pretty limited in group. When somebody dies who's done a lot of harm, they usually land outside the circle of proper death memorial. So what about the problem of reacting to the death of somebody who's deeply harmed you or people you love?
I'm very familiar with what Charlie Kirk stood for, and there was a lot of bigotry, racism, queerphobia and misogyny there. He said that women belong at home, not in the workforce. He insists insulted prominent and well educated black women as being stupid. He said he gets worried if he sees a black airlines pilot because he falsely believes they probably got some kind of cheat code to pass up white people who would deserve the job more. He called the Civil Rights Act a huge mistake that was one of the most important pieces of legislation in US History. He said that God's perfect law in the Bible called for the stoning and killing of queer people, and that while he wouldn't necessarily want that to become law in the US, he did agree with it as God's perfect law.
And these weren't isolated statements. I'm not just grabbing things out of context. These ideas were mainstays of his worldview. A worldview in which he feared that white people in the United States are being squashed out by people of color and immigrants and that it's important for us to stop that trend.
So people who are issuing general calls for respect or civility or unity in response to his death—a death which, again, I just want to say I condemn in the strongest terms—those folks want everybody to pretend like his hateful ideology either didn't exist or that it's not as important as these culturally approved ways of responding to death. But I can't unify in memorial rituals with people who knew what Charlie Kirk stood for and who agree with him, or with people who know what he stood for but just make excuses for it. Like, "okay, he was a flawed person, but otherwise wonderful. A Christian and a family man." I can't stand together with people who think he was simply being taken out of context, because I know that simply isn't true.
These are facts: He spread extremely racist, misogynistic and queerphobic views that still influence and resonate with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people in this country. Many of his followers will deny that he's a purveyor of those things, but it's true, and I nevertheless think it's right to be disturbed, shocked and dismayed by what happened to him, to reject violence like that out of hand. Not to take any glee in it, but I also recognize the depths of the pain people feel from the hatred that he spread.
And I see its ongoing impact, and I have to keep denouncing it. I don't want our cultural scripts, our cultural expectations on how to react to death, to overpower our greater sense of justice and safety for marginalized people.
So again, I talked to Jess Britvich days before the shooting occurred. And after the shooting, Jess went on TikTok and created a video about how Kirk had contributed to the context in which he was killed. And this is an argument that has to be carefully made because we're not interested in blaming the victim here. But I do think it's fair to point out that Charlie Kirk favored policies that directly impact gun violence in the United States. He unwittingly became one of the people who he said would be sacrificed in order to safeguard the Second Amendment from firearm control efforts. And I never wanted that. I don't want that for him. I don't want that for anyone.
But as news of Kirk's death spread, some of his followers started a doxxing and harassment campaign. They were going after the people with large social media followings, people like Jess Britvich. And they contacted workplaces and demanded people be terminated. And Jess was one of the people who lost their jobs in the aftermath.
Here's her reaction to that on TikTok.
JESS BRITVICH: Even knowing what happened, I would post that video and every video I've posted here a thousand times over. And while I'm disappointed that my employer chose to let me go during a coordinated doxing campaign, I'm not shocked. And this video isn't about my former employer, so please just don't bother them. That's not my intent, because this isn't about me and my employer. Former employer!
This is about the current culture we're living in, where the Overton window has shifted so far right, where speaking out against the regime is seen as radical. Especially if there's a perception that that might harm the bottom line. So it creates a culture where silence is rewarded and the far right has spent years creating a machine that punishes anyone who speaks out against the system. I mean, think of Turning Point's very own professor watch list that targeted whoever taught what Turning Point deemed to be leftist propaganda.
It's meant to scare companies, schools, institutions into submission because they know if they can make challenging the system feel dangerous. And when I say the system, I mean white supremacy, Christian nationalism, patriarchy. The fear will do the work for them because it preemptively scares people into complying in advance is how capitalism and white supremacy and Christian nationalism work hand in hand. It creates an economy and a job. A market where workers are reliant on their employers. It makes them afraid of losing their livelihoods.
Here's the thing. I'll be fine. Don't get me wrong, we're not really in the position for me to be losing my job. It hurts, but I'll be fine. I'm shielded in ways that trans individuals, the black community, Palestinians, have never been. They have been putting their bodies on the line, risking their jobs, risking their safety for generations. This moment feels shocking for a lot of white people because we've mostly been insulated from the fight. Having privilege means putting ourselves in situations that are uncomfortable because our advocacy means nothing if we abandon it whenever there's actually something at stake.
I have a lot more to say about my personal experience about this current moment, about McCarthyism, about how I think a lot of these doxing attempts are in response to Covid and the Black Lives Matter movement as like, revenge, because I have more time now. I'm going to be saying a lot of that on Substack. My first long form video is already up. The long version is behind a paywall, for a couple reasons.
One, because I did lose my job, so. [laughs] But also because I want to keep trolls out and use this as a space to really build community for people who want to dive deeper into these discussions. I'd love it if you subscribed. Regardless, from the bottom of my heart, I want to thank everybody here who's helped me build this platform, who's in this fight.
It gives me hope.
BLAIR HODGES: I think what Jess said is true. We have to be willing to say uncomfortable things and be bold right now, even though it's hard and it can be really scary. So I recommend checking out her new Substack and also just following her on TikTok or Instagram as well. Jess, thanks a lot for being with us and best wishes as you're moving forward.
All right, on that happy note, I'm Blair Hodges, a journalist in Salt Lake City. Mates of State provides our theme song, and we have another full episode of Relationscapes coming up for you next week. See you then.