X Close

Meet the alt-Right Crunchy Mums Anti-vax mothers are consumed by paranoid love

'How many children will fall victim to this?' Brook Mitchell/Getty Images

'How many children will fall victim to this?' Brook Mitchell/Getty Images


October 3, 2024   6 mins

If you were lucky enough to have a mother growing up, there are a few moments you’ll probably remember. In the middle of the night, stumping over from your bedroom to admit “I frew up”. The ceremonial bringing out of the sick bucket. A cold flannel on the forehead, Savlon on the grazed knee.

In those moments, your mother not only knows best, but becomes a sort of goddess. Against the fevers, blocked noses and nettle-stung shins of childhood, she wields a mystical healing power — the ability to kiss it better, to ordain that you’ll be “right as rain” in the morning (and you always are). This relationship rests on a limitless bank of trust, the ultimate vulnerability and the ultimate faith.

But what if your mother is not worthy of it? What if, having recently emerged from a global pandemic, she is now at odds with your family doctor, and mistrusts the mysterious adults who administer jabs at hospitals? What if she now represents a gatekeeper to things that might help, or even save you, from syrupy sweet Calpol to a vaccine preventing a bout of measles that might kill you?

This is life for the children of “crunchy mums”, so called because of the hippy, molar-cracking-granola world they emerged from. They congregate on anonymous forums, on Facebook, Reddit and Mumsnet, swapping advice on raising a child under the radar of mainstream medicine. One mother asks for tips on how to lie to doctors about her children not having had their vaccines. Another’s 17-year-old daughter begs her for the Covid jab; she is told to coax her out of her mainstream-media brainwashing and push “homeopathic prophylaxis” instead. “All the protection, none of the risk,” the comment says. Another woman asks how to treat her four-year-old with meningitis, whom she refuses to take to hospital. “Is this necessary?” she says of heading straight to A&E. “I am over Covid politics.”

On a different forum, a mother worries about the prevalence of measles in her son’s school; he is not vaccinated. “Stay confident in your decisions. Don’t let fear manipulate you,” comes the soothing reply. In one nannying forum, a woman tells of a mum who refuses to let her daughter carry an Epipen despite being fatally allergic to bananas. Instead, a “homeopathic salt” is kept in the house for emergencies. Another posts a picture of her three-year-old’s teeth — or what remains of them; they are all but completely decayed thanks to the misguidance of a “holistic dentist”. The mother now wants to do “what’s best” for her toddler, to relieve her pain, but it seems a little too late.

The Crunchy Mum phenomenon might appear, to most observers, as utter selfishness masquerading as care. This is certainly how I see one such “TikTok influencer” whose sister-in-law writes a warning post on Reddit exposing her for making videos about her “amazing and perfect” home births, assisted by an Amish midwife with “no official medical training”. Her fifth child, we are told, was delivered in a traumatic episode involving life-threatening pre-eclampsia and an admission to hospital — but the influencer “absolutely will not disclose” these facts to her followers, denying having had life-saving mainstream medical treatment to continue pushing her all-natural brand.

Spending a little time on these message boards, one gets the impression that these women — and it is almost exclusively women — are motivated not by selfishness, but by a surfeit of paranoid love. A couple of seams run through the discourse. The first is a hangover from woo-woo communal and natural-living circles of the Sixties and Seventies; it is all about lentils, flax seeds and coconut oil. This is where a lot of Crunchy Mums seem to start; after all, what can be so wrong with raising your child in the bosom of Mother Nature? There is an organic feminist flavour to it all, slightly witchy, vaguely empowering and ultimately quite harmless.

“In one nannying forum, a woman tells of a mum who refuses to let her daughter carry an Epipen despite being deathly allergic to bananas.”

But the second seam is where the problems begin. It seems unlikely that the alt-Right homesteader mentality can coexist so comfortably with the dippy softness of the sandal-wearing Mother Earth sisterhood, but that confluence, the coaxing from concerned mother to anti-Big State freedom fighter, is at the heart of Crunchy Mum ideology. A few weeks or months among aluminium-deodorant-dodging acolytes online sends you hurtling down a pipeline of classic tropes — a distrust of Big Pharma, an aversion to vaccines, a suspicion of mainstream education.

There is a distinct hierarchy to these forums, where even quotidian questions are met with a barrage of replies which jostle to be the most extreme, the most radically sage. Mothers out-do each other with “well actually” correctives informing forum-lurkers that, in fact, you might be killing your child with radioactivity from baby monitors, seed oils or whatever else. Women bond over how they are shunned by other mothers at the school gates; they delight in the digital garrison they have formed, the spite of it all. If children see their mothers as a sort of magician, a healing goddess, then the cultists see themselves as the chosen ones.

This anxious-but-smug fatalism is nowhere clearer than in the big-ticket forums of Crunchy Mum culture: the autism boards. Here, mothers advise one another on “detoxing” their children through natural methods, which promise to see “autism characteristics improving or going away completely”. This process involves overhauling the diet, introducing supplements, and for some reason getting chiropractors involved. You must junk pesticides, preservatives and artificial colours. And give your child Epsom salt baths. One mother reassures another that her five-year-old has “lost” his autism diagnosis by cutting out “gluten and casein”. When the original poster expresses concern that this strict diet would remove some of the greatest pleasures from her little boy’s life, she is scolded: “The changes you make now can impact the rest of his life.”

The link between “alternative medicine” and obsessions with autism is not new. In 1998, Andrew Wakefield, a former physician, published a study in respected medical journal The Lancet linking the MMR jab to autism. Though the research was based on a study of only 12 children, it quickly became accepted that gastrointestinal inflammation from the vaccine caused developmental disorders. It sparked the first major wave of what would become a global and recurring anti-vax movement. The paper was ultimately discredited — The Lancet retracted it in 2010 — and Wakefield was disgraced. The fable is by now so familiar, but nonetheless many parents are still determined to believe it.

Why? The appeal of this theory is that it gives parents a sense of control, which saves them from the bleak uncertainty of genetic fate while conferring blame on those who didn’t try “hard enough”. There is great comfort in the belief that the destiny of the person you love most in the world is not random, but in fact entirely dependent on the sacrifices you are willing to make for them. You are determined to face censure from your community, to smilingly nurse them through bouts of mumps and rubella, to become the heroine of your own family story, to save them. If anything, the controversy of your beliefs only burnishes your heroism.

There are significant spiritual overtones to this martyred maternity. Crunchy Mums represent a slippage between real and mystical lives; they are the modern continuation of a medieval thought system which held that left-handed children represented something sinistra, devilish, and that harsh correctives could drive the dark out. In one forum, this connection is taken to an extreme in the context of — what else? — the Covid vaccine: “Don’t take it under any circumstances,” a mother says. “The mark of the beast is an unforgivable sin and you will get grievous sores all over your body… Plus the shot changes your DNA — writing lucifer (shot contains luciferace) [sic] all over it. Hell is not worth it. Plus the definition of pharmacia is spells, witchcraft, potions. [The] Bible WARNS against witchcraft and seeking such things.” This is worth unpacking. Luciferase is a family of proteins that, from the Latin, bear light (produce photons) — so are used as bioluminescent markers. These harmless, useful proteins are used in a variety of common medical applications, but not the Covid vaccine. That this woman has combined fundamental medical misunderstanding with earnest spiritual sentiment crowns her Crunchy Mum to end all Crunchy Mums.

Groomed by others to leap from well-meaning woo-woo to paranoid extremism, Crunchy Mums are a growing army. But it is one thing asking how to make soap out of your own breast milk, and quite another to give your baby botulism. These children are living the same embattled lives as those who, centuries earlier, would have grimaced through back-room exorcisms, huffing the acrid smell of burning sage from the local warty witch, getting leg cramp from sitting in a salt circle until your deformity is cured. And for the mothers, the same ancient affliction: guilt, overwhelming love — you will and must do anything to save your child. But what if rather than saving them, you’re condemning them?


Poppy Sowerby is an UnHerd columnist

poppy_sowerby

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

76 Comments
Most Voted
Newest Oldest
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Martin M
Martin M
1 month ago

I have never heard the term “crunchy mums” before, but I guess it kind of works.

Brett H
Brett H
1 month ago

They congregate on anonymous forums, on Facebook, Reddit and Mumsnet, 
And then only exist on those sites. Are they telling the truth, are they pretending, are they even real? Poppy has decided she’s going to report from the front line of social change. But reporting on signs of life on these sites gives them an odd sort of credibility. How many mothers/women (because we don’t know how many are actually mothers) are there actually behaving like this out of the total population? And why does every sub group have to be categorised like insects in a museum with names like “Crunchy Mums”, which is about as infantile as you can get. The internet is not real, but stories like this contribute to the delusion and then become a “source” that others then use in their story. Where is the evidence from the other end, where the medical services see the results of “crunchy mum’s” so called practices? How many “crunchy mums” does it take to make a movement?

Geoff W
Geoff W
1 month ago
Reply to  Brett H

Some evidence, pre-dating Covid, exists in the statistics which governments keep on rates of childhood vaccination for measles and so on. These are frequently lower than several years ago. In Australia, one of the lowest rates is around the area which includes Byron Bay and other locations, which have attracted hippies and their later equivalents for decades. That area was also notable a few years back for the disproportionately high number of morons who demonstrated against the construction of mobile phone towers on the basis that they gave you cancer or curdled the milk in the cows or faded the curtains or something.
On most of these issues, I’m with David Baddiel, who said that a conspiracy theory is how idiots get to feel like intellectuals.

Mark HumanMode
Mark HumanMode
1 month ago
Reply to  Geoff W

I’m NOT with David Baddiel, who denigrates idiots to feel like an intellectual, but is an idiot.

Jim Veenbaas
Jim Veenbaas
1 month ago

The author, I believe, is deliberately ignoring the gargantuan elephant in the room – the lies and misinformation pushed on parents during Covid. Children were utterly abused by the state. It should not be surprising then that parents mistrust the medical establishment that failed them so completely.

The author betrays her bias by implying that children should have been vaccinated. Unless a child had underlying health issues, getting vaccinated for Covid was a horrible idea. I’m shocked anyone could think otherwise now.

Seb Dakin
Seb Dakin
1 month ago

The trouble with conflating suspicion of COVID ‘vaccines’ with the full range of woo-woo homeopathic beliefs is that, for children and even teenagers getting injected was no more helpful than getting that actual disease, and came with risks that the medical establishment (not to mention the companies making substantial profits) were only too keen to cover up at the time, and about which the media were way too quiet, and have remained so.
COVID and the various policies, including those that grossly infringed on human and civil rights, was an episode that justly undermined trust in the medical profession who in many cases got it wrong, and certainly didn’t adhere to the ‘first, do no harm’ when engaging in guesswork, however well-intentioned, that had baleful consequences for individuals and the economy.
And don’t even get me started on the gender-affirming stuff.
Forums where contrary ideas to received opinion are discussed by people with a real stake in outcomes are to be welcomed, rather than airily dismissed as nutjob echo chambers, however nutty some of the opinions are that one might find there.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago
Reply to  Seb Dakin

I agree, very poor article. The endless conflation is unworthy of unherd and goes against the ethos of the site. Its so bad it should be taken down

Jonathan Andrews
Jonathan Andrews
1 month ago
Reply to  Seb Dakin

The author insults people who have good reason for mistrusting a medical establishment that has made big mistakes and is appallingly arrogant. This doesn’t mean that they too have daft ideas and sometimes we have to trust the quacks.

Sowerby is a poor writer who has half-baked and superior opinions based on five minutes reading and has swallowed a thesaurus.

Sinistra? Yep, very clever, you know a little Italian. I like to show that off too.

Why use a more an ordinary word like wise when a fancier one like sage can be used?

Point of Information
Point of Information
1 month ago

Sage is a herb.

“Sinistra” is a reference to the Latin term which explains the association of scary things with left-handedness – it is such a well known historical superstition that she summarises it with one word.

Do let the forum know if you need any more help with reading.

Mark HumanMode
Mark HumanMode
1 month ago
Reply to  Seb Dakin

Agreed. What the writer is picking out is part of a now very large citizen movement in which people work things out for themselves, in conjunction with doctors and other experts if necessary. I have worked for the pharma industry for 30 years, so love medicine and science. But practitioners are drawing the curtains closed on their minds. Willful ignorance, misdiagnosis and mistreatment is rife. If you can, research and think about it for yourself. Warning: your results may vary.

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
1 month ago
Reply to  Seb Dakin

I wonder if she knows she sounds like a nut bar?

Philip Hanna
Philip Hanna
1 month ago

I love this piece, thanks Poppy. I know women who followed this exact same trajectory, from homeopathy to flax seed to message board hell and then anti-vax etc. It is more common than it ought to be, and as usual, the internet gives all these fringe ideologies a place to gather and amplify the noise to all the corners of the world.

Katharine Eyre
Katharine Eyre
1 month ago

An interesting article and I’m glad that Poppy spends her time rooting out all this information and spending time on the various forums so I don’t have to.
It appears to me that these Crunchy Mums exist on the long continuum between mainstream mumming (whatever that is…) and actual abuse. From the article, I guess there might be a couple of things that hover very close to the latter and justify some kind of external intervention.
But was it not ever thus? Is it not just things which have gone on since the year dot behind closed doors just manifesting themselves in the virtual world?
As a childless person, I absolutely stay away from commenting on the way people raise their kids or giving advice on it. I prefer to ask questions, try to sound like I’m interested (which mostly I’m not because I don’t like kids) and go away thinking “well, you learn something new every day. I’m so glad I’m not a mum.”

Geoff W
Geoff W
1 month ago
Reply to  Katharine Eyre

Would your forbearance extend to a mother (or father) who refused to vaccinate their child against a disease from which the child subsequently suffered and died? Or to a woman whose child died at birth because she refused traditional medical assistance?

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago
Reply to  Geoff W

The strawman is strong with this one.

Geoff W
Geoff W
1 month ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

Vaccination has all but eliminated many fatal diseases, e.g. cholera, typhoid, smallpox. Influenza can be fatal. Equally, modern natal medicine has significantly reduced fatality rates (of both mothers and babies) in childbirth. There was a case in Australia recently when the parents wouldn’t give their child medical care (I forget for what illness) because they believed in the healing power of prayer; the child died.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago

My favorite sort of article, a libfem overdose of internalized misogyny from a woman that has no children.

Dear Poppy,

You wouldn’t write an article about how “some” people of color are not performing their culture right….so don’t write an article how “some” women aren’t performing their sex right. And don’t write an article at all about parenting if you aren’t one.

Regards,

Not a Trump voter, not far-right, not conservative, not an anti-vaxxer.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 month ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

I do have children, so does that mean I’m free to criticise the idiotic mothers who refuse to get their children vaccinated? I’ll assume you feel free to criticise certain aspects of Islam despite not being Muslim yourself?

Martin M
Martin M
1 month ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

I don’t know anything about this particular commenter, but over the last three years, I have come to the view that somebody who says “I’m not an anti-vaxxer” is probably an anti-vaxxer.

J D
J D
1 month ago

This is the kind of nothing article typical of the Guardian not UnHerd. It is so smug and condescending. There are very good reasons to doubt the efficacy of much mainstream medicine. Can some people throw the baby out with the bath water? Sure. But we don’t solve that problem by retreating into naïveté about big Pharma. It would not be hard to do a similarly patronising piece about damage done to children by mothers who blithely hand over their kids to the medical industrial complex. But that article wouldn’t do any good either. To think otherwise is pure hubris and frankly ignorant.

Jonathan Andrews
Jonathan Andrews
1 month ago
Reply to  J D

Her articles are reliably panned btl. For how long do the fans have to boo a player to see him substituted?

Graham Cunningham
Graham Cunningham
1 month ago

This – to my mind – is a story about the near impossibility, in the digital age, of separating the wheat from the chaff in its huge ‘information’ silo. On the tomb of our post-digitised Western civilization might eventually be written “Too much information”.

Christopher Barry
Christopher Barry
1 month ago

But then, the world is complex. We can’t hope to fully research all the decisions we make so we must make the decision to trust others.

I trust a garage to ensure my car is safe after its MOT. I trust that my windows are made of safety glass which will not injure a careless child.

On matters where there is no good authority we can trust, things get political…

Graham Stull
Graham Stull
1 month ago

I don’t even know where to begin with my criticisms of this article, so I’ll just start somewhere in the middle and see where my typing fingers take me.
1) The real genesis of the crunchy mom movement lies not in any innate fault with these women, but with the systemic failings of Big Pharma, Big Food and the rampant government overrreach of modern society.
2) The concern for autism stems from the fact that rates of autism have skyrocketed. Given that official, institutional medicine is as reluctant to confront this problem as Ms Sowerby herself, it is normal that mothers would seek explanations themselves. Any mother would DOESN’T get crunchy on autism is guilty of child neglect.
3) The Covid vaccine for a 17 year old? Is Ms Sowerby serious? I almost thought I was reading a spoof at this point. The data is in on both the dangerousity of SARS-2 and the efficacy of the ‘vaccines’. For anyone under 50, the mortality stats tell a clear tale: there is more costs than benefits. For the under 20s, it’s not even close. These medical novelties fail any reasonable test, and all I can say is shame on any parent who would allow their child to take one of this ‘vaccines’.
4) Covid opened my eyes, and the eyes of a great many, to how thin the evidence base is for the current childhood vaccine schedule. In not one single case has a post 1980s addition to the schedule met reasonable safety standards for the approval of a new medicine – i.e. a large-scale, double blinded randomised control trial conducted by researchers who are independent of the company promoting the product. Therefore not a single one of these vaccine products can be considered ‘safe’!
5) Are these unsafe vaccines the cause of skyrocketing rates of autism, inflammation and autoimmune dysfunction in today’s young people? Honestly, I don’t know, but certainly neither does Ms Sowerby. As a concerned mother, though, I would be very reluctant to expose my child to these unsafe products, given the likely risks.
6) What about efficacy of vaccines? Have they really prolonged life the way Ms Sowerby suggests? The truth is, no one really knows, because no long-term studies were ever done, and population level data is massively confounded by the general improvements in living standards that ran concurrent with the rollout of vaccines. The best guess, though, is that the effects of even tried and true vaccines on population health are marginal at best.
7) At some wild point in Ms Sowerby’s nonsense article, she references ‘distrust in Big Pharma’. Here I nearly spit my coffee. For how could anyone in their right mind NOT distrust Big Pharma? They are convicted criminals, repeat offenders. They have bought the regulators (FDA, EMA…) who are supposed to regulate them. They own the media through advertising, and clearly used this leverage to steer the narrative on Covid. From a former job, I have first-hand experience with how they bully governments on pricing decisions for medicines and the design of HTAs around new medicine approvals. You have to be either a complete fool or a shill not to be distrustful of these companies.

Jeff Butcher
Jeff Butcher
1 month ago
Reply to  Graham Stull

‘The best guess, though, is that the effects of even tried and true vaccines on population health are marginal at best.‘

So it was solely improvements in living standards that resulted in the complete eradication of deaths by Polio and Measles I have witnessed in my lifetime here in the UK?

High living standards in western countries have patently not prevented recent measles outbreaks amongst the children of those who chose not to immunise them.

Conversely, low living standards in poor countries did not get in the way of a vaccination programme that removed smallpox, a vile disease, from the face of the earth….

Graham Stull
Graham Stull
1 month ago
Reply to  Jeff Butcher

The issue isn’t whether vaccination prevents ‘outbreak’ as defined by whatever tests are used to detect the presence of the pathogen in a predefined population. It’s whether the outbreak is all that dangerous to begin with.
To wit, when I look for evidence, I inevitably hit the wall of published BS and circular references. A prime example is this peer-reviewed ‘review’ article on a measles outbreak in the US and Canada which states that “Lack of vaccination against the measles virus is the leading cause of preventable deaths in children worldwide.”
The reference it gives leads to this generic page on the Canadian public health website. No trace of a source on this bold statement.
Interestingly, this review of the 2018 measles outbreak says nothing about what actually happened to the children infected under the reviewed studies. Did any die? If so, were they already sick and immunocompromised?
The study does tell us that 41.8% of unvaccinated children are so, due to ‘non-medical exemptions’. This of course means that over half are unvaccinated because of a medical exemption. In other words, the unvaccinated children whose outcomes are being used to justify continued use of this medical product ARE ALREADY SICK.
My feeling on the measles vaccine is that it is probably a good idea for children with some pre-existing condition, but otherwise healthy children’s (selfish) interests are better served by being exposed to the virus and surviving it.
This then leads to an honest national conversation about how much an individual (healthy) child/family should be forced to risk a potential vaccine related injury or side effect, in order to create sufficient vaccine-induced herd immunity in order to protect the sick and weak.

Marianne Kornbluh
Marianne Kornbluh
1 month ago
Reply to  Graham Stull

When I was a kid (70 years ago) and someone in my class got the measles, smallpox, mumps, scarlet fever, my mother had me visit the sick child so that I caught the disease as well. We were only vaccinated against polio.

Paul Thompson
Paul Thompson
1 month ago
Reply to  Graham Stull

You have no fuc king idea what you are talking about. Several vaccinated diseases cause deafness. Is that a good thing, to be deaf? Most would say “No, being deaf is a bad thing”. But anti-vax morons say “Well, we are not 100% certain that being deaf is bad”. Polio causes paralysis. Most would agree – paralysis is bad. But anti-vax morons are saying “We can’t be sure that being paralyzed is any worse than not being paralyzed”.

Nick Wade
Nick Wade
1 month ago
Reply to  Paul Thompson

Yeah. Everyone’s stupid apart from you. Winning argument.

Jane Stephen
Jane Stephen
1 month ago
Reply to  Paul Thompson

I had measles 64 years ago as a baby and it left me with partial sight. I have never been able to drive, am a tripping hazard and it’s made life difficult. I wouldn’t wish it on my child, so they were vaccinated because I do know the damage these childhood diseases can cause

Graham Stull
Graham Stull
1 month ago
Reply to  Jane Stephen

Sorry to hear it.
But we can also post testimonies of a vaccine injured child. It all still only amounts to anecdotal evidence, which takes us right back to my earlier point:
None of these vaccines have been trialed with doubled blinded RCTs, so we have no idea which of you is the outlier and where the relative risk lies.

Graham Stull
Graham Stull
1 month ago
Reply to  Paul Thompson

I was skeptical of your argument, but then you dropped the f-bo mb inside an ad hominin and my eyes were suddenly opened.
Thanks for clearing things up.

David Hirst
David Hirst
19 days ago
Reply to  Graham Stull

ad hominem

Paul M
Paul M
1 month ago
Reply to  Jeff Butcher

Uhhh, what? You do realize smallpox is alive and well right

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 month ago
Reply to  Paul M

Smallpox was eradicated 40 years ago

Christopher Barry
Christopher Barry
1 month ago
Reply to  Paul M

You need to back that up. It was eradicated in the 1970s.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox

Jeff Butcher
Jeff Butcher
1 month ago
Reply to  Paul M

No it isn’t

Richard Ross
Richard Ross
6 days ago
Reply to  Jeff Butcher

^Boom! For the win!^

Nick Wade
Nick Wade
1 month ago
Reply to  Graham Stull

Bravo!

Paul Thompson
Paul Thompson
1 month ago
Reply to  Graham Stull

The shoddy and despicable linkage between autism and vaccination has long been disproven.

Su Mac
Su Mac
1 month ago

A good illustration of how for some, a genuine shift in perception i.e. the integrity of the pharma and health systems can then lead down a rabbit hole of “and this, and this too”. Once you realise the MHRA is prepared to bury significant numbers of adverse vax reactions for their Pharma funders (80% industry funded) and zero effectiveness on kids – who do you turn to for advice?

A more nuanced article would look at some of the parenting dilemmas around this betrayal as well as the extreme examples.

It would be interesting to compare with post Thalidomide era – I expect though no one bothered to record what mothers did/felt after that betrayal.

There is maybe a parallel with some African countries where brutally damaging “live trial” approaches to new vaccines have entered folklore and feed resistance to Western medicines.

In the end this highlights a curious phenomenon with an easy rummage through Mum’s Net.

But what are the middle ground doing? Not the Crunchy but maybe the Bit Crispy Mums?

Chris Maille
Chris Maille
1 month ago

My grandmother used to say that when you don’t have anything kind to say, don’t say it at all.
For this article, I am going to heed her advice. Have a nice day everybody.

Tyler Durden
Tyler Durden
1 month ago

The key modern trend in Anglo parenthood seems to be home schooling to avoid left-liberal indoctrination i.e. domination of the school system by Democrat-voting Millenials and Zoomers in North America.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 month ago
Reply to  Tyler Durden

Home schooled kids are bizarre and often completely lacking in social skills. The parents keep them away so they aren’t indoctrinated, only to then indoctrinate them themselves

Richard Ross
Richard Ross
6 days ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

This stereotype is so far off the mark that it’s not even worth debating. My kids are publicly-schooled, but the many homeschoolers I’ve met are all more respectful, better-spoken and more focused. You’re right, today: that is bizarre.

Martin M
Martin M
1 month ago
Reply to  Tyler Durden

When Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers are dead, and Millennials and Zoomers rule the world, it is going to be way more left-liberal than it is now, mark my words.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago

This is an excellent article

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 month ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

You’ll be downvoted for that comment by all the fools on the comment section, who will oppose anything the majority do simply to be contrarian

Jeff Cunningham
Jeff Cunningham
1 month ago

Human rationality is not an ideal tool for truth seeking. Our patterns of perception and reasoning fall constant victim to an array of biases and shortcomings. … this does not mean that human rationality is poorly adapted to its purpose. That conclusion would follow only if the evolved purpose of reason were to arrive at objective truth. Instead, … reason evolved for another purpose. Human reason is the way it is–“flawed” if seen as a tool for classical logic in the privacy of your mind–because it is a social tool. Reason evolved for convincing and persuading other people, winning arguments with other people, defending and justifying actions and decisions to other people. These functions may be achieved regardless of whether the content of a proposition is true. I can benefit from convincing someone of something even when that thing is false.” — from Language vs Reality, by N.J. Enfield.
https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/5472/Language-vs-RealityWhy-Language-Is-Good-for#:~:text=In%20Language%20vs.,it%20deserves%20our%20deepest%20respect.

Chipoko
Chipoko
1 month ago

“If you were lucky enough to have a mother growing up …”
Whaaat? Most people have mothers! This sort of ‘eyegrabbing headline’ style is a complete turn-off!

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 month ago
Reply to  Chipoko

Why? There are many people who lost their Mum at a young age

Paul Thompson
Paul Thompson
1 month ago
Reply to  Chipoko

In other words (to interpret for those needing the guidance), if your mother was there in your house as you grew up.

Martin M
Martin M
1 month ago
Reply to  Chipoko

Most, but not all.

Daniel Lee
Daniel Lee
1 month ago

Vaccine reluctance by a few people has been with us for a while. It was the Covid czars’ mandating this specific vaccine for everyone and enforcing it with everything from social ostracism to the literal force of law that turbocharged the movement.

Paul Thompson
Paul Thompson
1 month ago
Reply to  Daniel Lee

The COVID vaccinations were oversold as the certain cure for the pandemic. It was a huge mistake on the part of Big Epidemiology. Now stupid people are over-generalizing the ineffectiveness of vaccinations. They are very effective for a large proportion of diseases. Smallpox, polio, rubella, scarlet fever, mumps – on and on – effective near elimination of these terrible diseases. Stupid people like Nick above have NO idea why scarlet fever (causes deafness) and other diseases should be eliminated.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago
Reply to  Paul Thompson

There is no vaccine for scarlet fever.

Nick Wade
Nick Wade
1 month ago

My personal view is that the efficacy of vaccines is much overstated and unevidenced. In effect they are a religion. We have modern plumbing, clean water and nutrition to thank for the decline of disease, which began way before mass vaccination.

Like most people, I believed the religion, but the entire Covid shambles with its appeals to credentialism for what were blatantly idiotic policies opened my eyes, and spurred me to do some research. Perhaps Ms Sowerby might consider doing some.

Paul Thompson
Paul Thompson
1 month ago
Reply to  Nick Wade

Astonishing. Measles outbreaks occur frequently, because stupid people like you believe that washing your hands stops the spread of airborne microbes. Rubella, polio, scarlet fever, disease after disease is NOT seen due to vaccines. I realize that ignorance is the preferred state of many, but vaccine efficacy is not in doubt. The only ones that are probabilistic are for rapidly mutating diseases (influenza, COVID)

Nick Wade
Nick Wade
1 month ago
Reply to  Paul Thompson

Actually, recent outbreaks of Polio have been caused by vaccines. There’s very little evidence for your claims because proper trials have never been done for vaccines. Why do vaccines exist in this special paradigm where proof is not required?

Paul Thompson
Paul Thompson
1 month ago
Reply to  Nick Wade

Show me the outbreaks of smallpox. The outbreaks of polio occurred 60 years ago when the vaccines were being developed. Idiots like you encourage vaccine hesitancy which promotes disease, because it encourages other stupid people to forgo vaccination. The outbreaks of polio are mostly in Muslim countries, because Muslim ignorance blames vaccination for all kinds of false problems. In some Muslim countries, vaccinators are killed in rural areas. This is the kind of massive stupidity that is found on the left, but not so often on the right.

Nick Wade
Nick Wade
1 month ago
Reply to  Paul Thompson

Don’t think this was 60 years ago, Einstein.

https://www.science.org/content/article/first-polio-cases-linked-new-oral-vaccine-detected-africa

“Last week, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) reported seven children, six in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and one in neighboring Burundi, had recently been paralyzed by poliovirus strains derived from a vaccine meant to prevent the disease.”

Nick Wade
Nick Wade
1 month ago
Reply to  Paul Thompson

This cites a WHO report. Perhaps they’re idiots too? People really don’t like their religion questioned, do they?

https://nationalpost.com/health/more-polio-cases-currently-caused-by-vaccines-than-the-wild-virus-who-report

“Vaccine-derived poliovirus is moving across Africa, with vaccine-derived Type 2 poliovirus spreading uncontrolled in West Africa, bursting geographical boundaries and raising fundamental questions and challenges for the whole eradication process,” writes a report by WHO’s Independent Monitoring Board.

Daniel Hunn
Daniel Hunn
1 month ago
Reply to  Nick Wade

Interestingly, a recent measles ‘outbreak’ in the US appears to have also been vaccine derived.

https://icandecide.org/press-release/measles-outbreak-in-maine-was-vaccine-induced-all-along/

Paul Thompson
Paul Thompson
1 month ago
Reply to  Nick Wade

From that article:
“The World Health Organization (WHO) published a report last week, which recorded nine new polio cases that were caused by the vaccines in four African countries in Nigeria, Central African Republic, Angola and the Congo.
A total of 16 countries have had similar outbreaks. That includes cases in other African counties, and in Asia in places such as the Philippines, China, Myanmar. It’s risen the count of polio cases caused by vaccines to 157.”
157 cases. Worldwide. And how many cases of polio were not contracted due to the vaccine? Hundreds of millions. Stupid people like you do not know anything about polio – how many persons my age (72) spent their ENTIRE LIFE in an iron lung due to polio, how polio pretty much ended public life period in the 1950s, how millions were NOT paralyzed due to the vaccine, how Salk and Sabine gave the virus patent-free to the world, how the lines to get the initial vaccines were long. Children were very happy to be vaccinated, because the cost of NOT VACCINATING was so very very high.

Paul Thompson
Paul Thompson
1 month ago
Reply to  Nick Wade

Polio, or poliomyelitis, is a highly contagious viral disease that can cause paralysis or death. The effects of polio include: 
ParalysisIn about 1 in 200 infections, polio can cause irreversible paralysis, usually in the legs. Paralysis can lead to permanent disability and death. Post-polio syndromeThis condition can develop 15 to 40 years after polio and is characterized by new or progressive muscle weakness. Symptoms can include skin rash, lung inflammation, or muscle weakness. Respiratory and cardiovascular collapsePolio can cause fatal respiratory and cardiovascular collapse. Other symptomsInitial symptoms of polio include fever, fatigue, headache, vomiting, stiffness of the neck, and pain in the limbs. Other symptoms include skin reactions, low blood pressure, narrowing of the airways, and a swollen tongue or throat. Polio is spread through person-to-person contact, or less frequently, by contaminated food or water. There is no cure for polio, but it can be prevented with the polio vaccine. The polio vaccine is given multiple times and can protect a child for life. 

Polio has been eliminated from the United States, but it still occurs in other parts of the world. 

Christopher Barry
Christopher Barry
1 month ago
Reply to  Nick Wade

Interesting discussion, shame about the name-calling each way!

From your reference, which is useful, it should be noted that the infected vaccines used in the privileged West have dead viruses, so pose no danger.

Chuck Burns
Chuck Burns
1 month ago

What the COVID incident showed us is that we CANNOT trust our government, the medical establishment, and that predatory Capitalist Big Pharma will kill us to make a profit. I will also add that the once highly credible LANCET has lost all credibility.
This article is nothing more than a propaganda hit piece.

Jonathan Andrews
Jonathan Andrews
1 month ago
Reply to  Chuck Burns

The article is rotten but I would change your framing and suggest we should take the view of the state with a large pinch of salt. They are, sometimes, correct.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
1 month ago

perhaps instead of scapegoating these mothers, it would be useful to see what is behind their thought processes. Surely, it has nothing to do with the serial lying from public health authorities over vaccine efficacy during Covid. Surely, it has nothing to do with the millions injured by the jabs and the ongoing excess deaths. On a broader front, surely it has nothing to do with a vaccination schedule that has grown from fewer than ten shots just 50 years ago to more than 70 today.
Are they extreme? Perhaps, because when the pendulum shifts away from one extreme, it typically stops at or near the same point on the other side of scale. People were lied to. By politicians, by public health officials, by their own doctors, by pharma, and by the media. To date, not a single person from a single one of these groups has even hinted at being wrong, let alone been contrite. None. When poor Andrew Bridgen brings up data, it’s usually to an empty chamber in Parliament, which may be the sorriest spectacle of this entire sorry episode.

mac mahmood
mac mahmood
1 month ago

Are these women going to refuse any treatment other than those based on homoeopathy for cancer?

Mark Royster
Mark Royster
1 month ago

Does Unherd make money on comments? Only reason I can come up with for publishing such articles. Unless the editors actually agree with Poppy. I dont know which is worse to cynically go for comments or to regard this as thoughtful journalism.

ELLIOTT W STEVENS
ELLIOTT W STEVENS
1 month ago

Typical mid-wit, shit-lib article I could have gotten in The Atlantic if I was masochistic enough to subscribe to it.

Did Unheard have a company meeting about 2 months ago where it decided to begin sucking?

JR Hartley
JR Hartley
1 month ago

This is the whirlwind you reap when some people in powerful places think that what is “useful” for people to know is more important than the truth. They are not good enough at it to entirely conceal their work.

Heather Tomlinson
Heather Tomlinson
1 month ago

What is most troubling to me is the section of society who seem to have blind faith in corporate entities who prioritise profit and big government. Obviously not students of history.

Claire D
Claire D
1 month ago

Yet another ‘Balancing article’ from unherd HQ..
Perhaps they have a new.invome stream that doesn’t approve of the counter narratives..
There are mountain ranges of evidence, scientific and personal, on the dangers and inefficacy of the COVID vaccine.
Is it any wonder Mothers are fearful and suscipious.
Any right thinking person should be..

Evan Heneghan
Evan Heneghan
1 month ago

No allowance whatsoever Poppy for the role MSM, big Pharma, and Government messaging has played in breaking the bond of trust with parents? No consideration of the fact that the number of proscribed childhood vaccines have doubled in the US in under 40 years? No doubt many of these women are dangerous quacks, but I’d appreciate a bit more balance and perspective in the article. Cheers.