In the aftermath of Alex Pretti’s killing in Minneapolis, my Instagram algorithm served up a never-ending carousel of sizzling rage. Most of that rage was directed toward the country’s immigration-enforcement agencies, while some, of course, was aimed at defending them. But I wasn’t expecting the post from Blake Guichet.
“There’s a difference between compassion that is grounded and compassion that is hijacked,” Guichet, a pro-Trump Christian influencer who posts on Instagram under the handle “thegirlnamedblake,” had typed on butter-yellow slides. “You do not owe the internet a statement on the current tragedy.” In her caption, the Louisiana mom added that she had chosen to “opt out of the cycle of Internet outrage.”
I was surprised to see this, because Guichet so often opts in to the news cycle. During last year’s government shutdown, she logged on to explain that SNAP benefits are part of a “system of reliance.” She has posted seven times about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. “The enemy would love for believers to stay silent under the guise of being apolitical,” she wrote in November, “but silence doesn’t bring change.”
Over the past two weeks, I’ve noticed countless other Christian creators sharing similar posts alluding to ICE—messages reminding their followers to “protect your peace” and assuring them that “it’s my responsibility to carry my family, not the world.” Instead of offering a defense or a critique of the administration’s handling of immigration, these influential conservatives appear to have settled on an alternative strategy. Let’s call it “virtuous disregard.” They’re throwing up their hands, turning back toward their families, and encouraging their followers to do the same.
Generally speaking, conservative Christian lifestyle influencers are attractive, married women with kids. On Instagram, they tend to cultivate a very specific aesthetic: sourdough bread on gleaming white countertops; toddlers running through the yard and husbands coming home from work; Bible verses in wispy fonts alongside instructions for living a slow, intentional life. The captions offer a deluge of affiliate links for supplements and nontoxic cleaning products.
This community of influencers grew during the coronavirus pandemic; their focus on government overreach felt particularly urgent as people faced lockdowns and vaccine requirements. When these women wade into politics now, some of them do so more subtly, offering casual references to synthetic food dyes or “making America healthy again.” Others are more direct. Guichet, for example, has posted openly about her support for Donald Trump and his administration’s actions. Nearly everyone in this community was vocal after Kirk’s assassination in September, and made passionate calls for all Americans to condemn violence.
These influencers did not express such sentiments after immigration agents killed Pretti. The issue, for them, presents a conundrum: Choosing to aggressively defend the administration’s mass-deportation blitz—which includes shooting a man while he was restrained on the ground, and detaining a 5-year-old—would appear inhumane to many of their followers. But being too critical of the administration would risk alienating plenty of others.
So Guichet and her peers scrambled for a third way to respond—a “way of broaching the subject so that they can still maintain their status,” Mariah Wellman, a Michigan State professor who studies social-media influencers and the wellness industry, told me. The responses to Pretti’s killing ended up following the same general formula: Refer only vaguely to the events in Minnesota, insert a warning about succumbing to peer pressure and emotional manipulation, and advise women to focus on their families.
Sadie Gannett, for example, who posts as “organic.gannett,” wrote that she is “not interested in being another voice on the internet giving input on current events”—only in pursuing “truth and justice and critical thinking and law and order.” The best place to make a difference, she added, “is right inside our four walls.” A creator named Erin Wilkins, who goes by “essentiallyerin__,” explained on Instagram that she has “no desire to add fuel to the fire,” and that people “are being emotionally manipulated for an agenda.” Instead of engaging, Wilkins suggests that her followers “create peace in your home” and “build strong marriages and families.” (Guichet, through a spokesperson, declined to comment for this story. The other influencers I reached out to, including Gannett and Wilkins, didn’t respond).
You can trace some of this language back to the conservative Christian commentator Allie Beth Stuckey, whose book Toxic Empathy asserts that progressives seek to manipulate Christian compassion in support of an amoral agenda. The former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton zeroed in on Stuckey late last month in an essay in this magazine decrying the “cadre of hard-right ‘Christian influencers’ who are waging a war on empathy.” In response to Clinton, Stuckey wrote a column for The Free Press arguing that women are allowing their emotions to be hijacked, as they were, she argued, during the 2020 protests after George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer. Empathy “is the bait for pulling Christian women into the Democratic Party,” she wrote. But “if you know a message is meant to manipulate you, it’s not effective.”
Other conservative women with a microphone have echoed this rhetoric, effectively shifting the discussion from Pretti’s killing and immigration enforcement to an attack on the political left. “I believe that words like compassion and empathy and inclusion and love—they’ve been weaponized against us, especially as women,” the conservative activist Riley Gaines said on Fox News last week during a discussion about anti-ICE protests. “Feel first. React loudly. Ask questions later,” Bethany Mandel wrote in the New York Post. “We’ve seen this movie before.”
None of this is necessarily surprising. Political partisans tend to behave in a partisan way—even if that partisanship is disguised as apolitical, Christian living. What is notable is how the followers of these conservative influencers, who are also mostly women, have responded. Part of the point of messages like Guichet’s is to absolve her audience of the need to engage in a subject that makes them uncomfortable. “It’s emboldening people to say, I am not required to speak on this, and that doesn’t make me a bad person,” Wellman, the professor who studies influencers, told me. Guichet’s post, for example, now has 92,000 likes and 3,300 comments—far more engagement than other recent posts on her page. Many women who weighed in have welcomed the message of absolution. “I’m emotionally exhausted from everything happening in my real life,” one wrote. “Can’t be bothered with online anything right now.”
But dozens of other comments expressed dismay and disappointment. “It’s crazy” that these accounts “are all in lock step,” one self-described conservative wrote in a reply to Wilkins’s message about emotional manipulation. “We are supposed to be the free thinkers.” “You helped sway peoples opinions and votes and now you’re deciding it’s no longer your problem,” another commenter wrote to Guichet.
Of course, it’s hard to know how many of these dissenters are followers with genuine concerns—and how many are liberal interlopers. But Guichet responded to some of them anyway. “I am not a news source anymore,” she wrote in one exchange. “God called me out of that season.”
The next few months will likely present many more distressing events on which these influencers will feel pressured to weigh in. How they respond may be determined not by logic or even empathy—but by the particular season in which they find themselves.
Discussion about this post