Granola Nazis and the great reset

Abstract

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.