Hours after I announced the birth of my second child, my Facebook feed changed.
Until that moment, Mark Zuckerberg’s data-harvesting site had populated my feed with an eclectic mix of auto-play videos: unlikely animal friendships, standup comedy sound bites, monstrous recipe “hacks” designed to inspire rage rather than hunger. It had been a clickbait buffet, an unfocused, anything-goes attempt to make me actually watch a Facebook Reel.
But as my baby napped, and I scrolled my feed in a postpartum fugue state, I noticed a change. Gone were the cat clips, the internet comics, the viral food videos. In their place was a deluge of content from conservative parenting influencers. There were anti-choice videos and tradwife agitprop and looping, overproduced footage of evangelicals evangelizing large, patriarchal families. A firehose of fundamentalist content that, even after a year, has only dwindled somewhat, replaced at times with Reels about how you know it’s time to have a third baby, and why to ignore the medically recommended 18-month waiting period between births.
It was as if the black box of Facebook’s recommendation algorithm had run the numbers on my biographical data and crunched it into some boolean if-then statement about my politics: “if married with two kids at 28, then likely conservative.”
Well I’m not. Lol.
I’m an irreligious lefty journalist covering far-right politics. But where my reporting once took me to neo-Nazi rallies where angry white men proclaimed their supposed supremacy over all others, lately I’ve watched a shift in the frontlines of proto-fascism.
The white supremacist groups that marched at racist rallies have taken to joining anti-abortion demonstrations. A crackdown on books about race, gender, and LGBTQ+ existence has been spearheaded by well-financed, pro-censorship organizations that promote themselves as “moms” clubs. Conspiracy theories, micro-targeted at mothers, have convinced many moms of far-right fever dreams. When I talk to female members of the ascendant reactionary art scene, they tell me their sharp right turns came when they decided they wanted families someday—as if that desire is in any way incompatible with a desire for free public healthcare and the full suite of freedoms afforded to men. The footsoldiers of female subordination aren’t just wearing jackboots, but also Mary Jane shoes, espadrilles, and heels that are sometimes actually very nice.
The right has long sought to monopolize depictions of motherhood, ideally as an outgrowth of its depiction of femininity: deferential, demure, disconnected from resources, solidarity, and any meaningful power. Facebook’s automatic conflation of motherhood and religious conservatism was testament to that branding exercise’s success. Like a third-rate CPAC speaker, Facebook was acting on the assumption that social conservatives were the arbiters of family values.
But whose family values? Not mine. Not those of the moms I know.
Not the feminist moms, the union moms, the progressive and socialist and anarchist and politically checked-out moms. Certainly not the queer moms, the pro-choice moms, the non-mom birthing parents whose very existence serves as a Fox News bogeyman. That’s so many of us. That’s most of us. We’re not a special interest group but a huge-ass political bloc. The book-banners are loud but they don’t speak for us.
I went looking for publications that cover the political realities of motherhood; that cover parenting like labor, which it is. Liberal platitudes about hard work and “having it all” don’t cut it. Moms need material changes. We need rights enshrined. Moms deserve more ambitious utopias than capitalistic girlboss culture, or the right’s palliative promise of domestic bliss in exchange for our autonomy.
I went looking and ultimately I ended up writing one myself. This is my blog and it’s called Mom Left. It’s for moms, or whoever, on the left. It’s not going to be parenting advice, which I don’t feel especially qualified to prescribe, but politics, history, and reporting, where my CV is a little more credentialed. I’ll run it on Sundays, as a start. If enough people give me $8, I’ll do more. Start a Discord group for subscribers or something, enlist some contributors, go long. It’d be a dream to get back into podcasting.
Is this a mommy blog? I’ve been stewing on why the term is so often a pejorative. Some of it is that lots of people—fuck ‘em!—don’t like mommies or bloggers.
But I also think a lot of existing blog culture—self-branding, influencing, things of that nature—rewards mothers for minimizing their desires. Political demands are massaged into more marketable packages.
It might applaud expressions of maternal exhaustion or disillusionment as brave, and I agree! I think those admissions are necessary in a culture that tends to treat women’s labor as expendable and unwageable, and our love as a natural resource. But the internet content machine would rather divert that discontent into saleable depictions of “authenticity” and “relatability” rather than a fuller articulation of the needs uniting so many mothers.
I think there is room to be louder and I’m going to give it a spin.
So hell yeah this is a mommy blog. It’s an inherently political thing—just not in the way my Facebook algorithm thinks.