The Ballerina Farming of America: How JD Vance, Elon Musk, and the Entire GOP Want to Trigger Mommy Mania
October 1, 2024
Never mind the dirt-road pirouettes and egg-apron micro-scandals. Above all else, Hannah Neeleman wants us to know that life on Ballerina Farm makes her happy. “The greatest day of my life was when Daniel and I were married thirteen years ago,” she said in a July video. “Together we have built a business from scratch, brought eight children into this world, and have prioritized our marriage all along the way. We are co-parents, co-CEOs, co–diaper changers, co–kitchen cleaners, and decision-makers. We are one, and I love him more today than I did 13 years ago.”
To those who are mere observers, Neeleman’s social media accounts can come across like Little House on the Prairie cosplay, prizing aesthetics over ideology. Still, Megan Agnew, a British journalist with The Sunday Times, showed up to the farm where Daniel and Hannah live with their eight children and suggested in her reporting that Hannah’s options might be limited. (Neeleman did not respond to Vanity Fair’s request for comment.) Agnew reported that Daniel had pursued Hannah despite her disinterest, and even that the space she wanted to use as a dance studio had become the children’s classroom. Daniel reportedly told Agnew that his wife sometimes takes to bed for a week at a time, out of sheer exhaustion. As in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s frontier world, a big part of reality has been filtered out.
