Eviane Leidig’s book “Women of the Far Right”

EA young woman is sitting in the living room, with perfect make-up and hair done. She speaks directly into the camera in a conversational tone, as if she were recording a message for a friend. Tens of thousands of influencers on YouTube or Instagram come along like this, explaining how to put on make-up correctly – or how to separate properly. Not the American Brittany Sellner: She's about lonely feminists, low sperm rates and the “Great Replacement,” the idea that white people are being “displaced.” “Maybe women are so unhappy because feminism doesn’t act in their interests,” the 31-year-old muses on YouTube. “Have lots of white children so white people aren’t in the minority in 2042,” she wrote on Twitter.

Sellner is one of the right-wing radical women that Eviane Leidig presents in her book “Women of the Far Right”. When Leidig published it last year, Sellner's Austrian husband Martin was already known as the Identitarian Movement's chief ideologist. Millions of Germans now also know him: at a “secret meeting” with AfD and CDU members at the end of November, he is said to have presented a plan to expel large groups of people with a migration background.

Where Martin Sellner gives pithy speeches full of misanthropic visions, his wife serves up the shared ideology as pleasantly as vacation tips. Brittany Sellner's Instagram account looks like many women's. She poses in front of the mountains and the beach, wears beautiful clothes, holds the selfie camera while hugging her husband. Every now and then she shows something else, for example a demonstration against “forced vaccinations” in Vienna a year ago. “We are the antibody. Against this system,” says the banner in front of which Sellner poses with a smile.

Interpersonal contacts with the “community”

The mixture of approachable self-dramatization and almost casually interspersed ideological messages is the ploy of right-wing influencers, says Leidig. She takes the reader on a journey through colorful Instagram accounts and cutely decorated YouTube channels, all in the service of right-wing and racist propaganda. Most are from Americans or Canadians like Lauren Chen and Ayla Stewart. These women like to describe an “awakening” in which they said goodbye to the liberal world and turned to “traditional values”. The political concerns are placed between the personal stories: against abortion, for a very repressive immigration policy, against the welfare state.

It is not uncommon for women to spread anti-Semitic phantasms. Sellner, for example, referred to the slogan that American politics is controlled by billionaire George Soros. In this way, she packages for a different target group what her husband also offers his followers: a mixture of conspiracy stories, racism and incitement. The ideology comes in the guise of the friendly “tradwife”, a woman who of course puts aside money for her husband’s career, but in this case has written several books and made a name for herself online.