How white nationalists infiltrated the wellness industry

Australia Broadcast Center

21-05-2025

The Mighty White Soap Company appears to be run out of a rural home in Michigan, in the US Midwest.
The marketing images they've posted online have an earthy, back-to-the-land appearance. Owls, antique fonts, and autumn leaves complete the quaint theme.
But to the right audience, the product names of Mighty White mean much more than they first appear. Take, for instance, one recent product called Day of the Rope Soap.
"There is a political manifesto written by an American neo-Nazi called The Turner Diaries that advocates what's called accelerationism: the idea that you can create enough low-level chaos as individual actors to destabilise a national government to the point that it collapses and white nationalists can fill the political void," Mark Hay, a freelance journalist covering extremism and niche subcultures tells ABC Radio National's Late Night Live.
"And in that novel, The Day of the Rope is the day that they execute all of the 'race traitors'… the people within the white community who worked against the supposed white interests."
Hay says Mighty White soaps are often named with references to far-right memes or tropes, or with openly racial names like its Caucasian Abrasion body scrub.
Mighty White is one of the companies that Hay has documented as part of a small but growing wellness subculture that uses ideas of purity, health and fitness to spread white nationalism. It's one of the oldest examples that he found, as it has been selling its soaps since 2015.
The connection between soap and white supremacy is cropping up all over the place, as Hay revealed in a major investigation for Al Jazeera published in February. He identified more than 20 companies in the US and United Kingdom that were active while reporting on the story from November 2022 to January this year.
He discovered hateful ideologies that have infiltrated the wellness movement and uncovered what they say about a new phase in white nationalism.
Hay came across the story by chance while trying to learn more about white supremacist communities, researching in neo-Nazi forums and chat rooms. He had grown accustomed to mostly seeing "disaster prepper" or racist literature, but in recent years, a new type of post caught his attention.
"A few years ago I started seeing ads for soap, and it struck me as odd," he says.
"And I decided to look into it. And after a little bit of time, I realised … this is perfectly logical. It's new, but it's an extension of trends that have existed within white nationalism for decades."
That trend within white nationalism, Hay says, is built on the notion of seeking purity, one that relies on the idea of returning to nature and ancient wisdom. This is a desire that the wellness industry, including soaps and other natural products, also caters to.
"White nationalism, or any other supremacist or ethno-nationalist movement, usually harkens back to some romanticised idea of the past. The past when [white people] 'had power'. The past when the community 'was pure'. The past, when everything was good.
"Built into that is usually the idea of a romanticisation of more traditional ways of doing things, of escaping from modern society, which is usually described in these communities as degenerate … as unwholesome.
Hay says in recent years white nationalists have started to publicly move away from the racist trope that other races are "dirty", so that at first glance they seem different to older forms of racism.
"A lot of the white nationalists in the space right now have tried to rebrand themselves around what you might call in heavy italics "positive racism". So this idea that, 'We don't hate other people … we just think everyone should be separate'.
"So there's less that idea of literally trying to purify and scrub out, but there is that idea of returning to a pure vision of 'who we think we are'. And oh, by the way, that involves 'us having a pre-eminent social position'."
These changes are about giving white nationalism a friendly face. This includes adopting the sleek, family-friendly look of the wellness industry, Hay says, and hiding the violent and hateful parts of their beliefs.
"You will find white nationalist groups who talk about the fact that, 'We want to focus on having picnics and outdoor meetings and public events that you can bring your family to, where we see our healthy white children running around and being happy, and other people will look at us and see how great and friendly and family oriented and not scary [we are], and not wearing hoods and not sporting swastikas.'"
Hay says the respectable end of the wellness industry, which is now worth billions of dollars in the US, hasn't been doing much to discourage white supremacists.
"There has not been much of an attempt to root out white nationalism. You will find individuals, community leaders, writers who denounce the presence of these companies within the wellness space … but they mostly keep a distance from it or don't acknowledge or recognise its existence.
"It's not a large enough phenomenon to have raised alarm, I think, for the mainstream wellness industry, which is a multi-billion-dollar industry at this stage.
"The wellness industry, while it is starting to coalesce, is a relatively new industry and it's unregulated, so it's very hard to figure out … who would actually do what about this?"
One big part of why wellness businesses selling soap, tea and other products are starting to spring up more frequently among white nationalists circles, according to Hay, is that they allow them to live in "parallel economies" and "parallel societies", that keep white people separate from other parts of society.
These wellness businesses are rarely large enough to support an entire community, he says. However, they can support a family in the white nationalist movement who want to cut themselves off from traditional employment that might prevent them from expressing some of their more noxious views.
"They mostly believe the idea that … if we can't win over the nation's politics, we can at least wall ourselves off from what we see as degenerate influences, from what we see as harmful multiculturalism, diversity, and progressivism," he says.
"We can create our own little corners of the world where we don't have to engage with anything except a white nationalist worldview.
"You do still find concerning situations of white nationalists raising their children entirely ensconced within white nationalist communities. The Ku Klux Klan in America actually used to have a children's education and engagement corps of its own. And there are some extremist communities that have their own homeschooling networks so that kids will only be schooled and raised in their own racist ideology and in communion with racist, indoctrinated children.
"And wellness does play into that, in part, because if you're walling yourself off from the rest of the world, you do need your organic coffee and your bar of soap and your hair tonic and whatnot. And these businesses help to create an economic base."
While the trends within the wellness space are concerning, Hay says that there are internal conflicts within the white nationalist movement that make it hard for any one group to rise to long-term prominence.
"The one thing you can say about white nationalists is that a lot of them hate each other as much as anyone else. They in-fight and squabble. Most groups fall apart within a few years. White nationalist businesses in the wellness sphere and beyond are pretty ephemeral. They come and they go.
"So the idea of one individual managing to gain enough control to dictate other people's lives, that does not happen very often in the white nationalist world, in America at least."