Amala Ekpunobi

EXPOSED: Ballerina Farm Responds to Feminist Writer’s Lies

Traditional family influencer and Ballerina Farm figurehead Hannah Neeleman has issued a response to Times writer Megan Agnew’s viral article that claimed she was forced to give up her ballerina dreams and lives her life oppressed under the thumb of her husband. Let’s talk about it.

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Duration:: 16m
Broadcast on:: 01 Aug 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

This episode is brought to you by Snapple, want to know another Snapple fact? The first hot air balloon passengers wore a sheep, a duck, and a rooster. Ridiculous! Check out Snapple.com to find ridiculously flavored Snapple near you. It's become sort of end to hate on the traditional lifestyle these days, and a leftist journalist took it upon herself to write a scathing hit piece about the traditional family. How'd she do so? She visited one of the most viral, inspirational, trad families of our time, ballerina farm, and decided to sort of slyly write a hit piece about this family. She twisted their traditional lifestyle into one of oppression and victimhood, specifically painting the mother, Hannah Neoman as an oppressed victim, who was held under the thumb of their traditional patriarch, the father, Daniel Neoman. Hannah, the strong mother of eight, was turned into a woman who was victimized by her husband and forced to leave a career in ballet to take care of children on a farm. But it turns out, shocker, that leftist journalist was lying, and lying so much so that she's had to write a new article backtracking on her story. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this story, I'll give you a little bit of background. Hannah Neoman and Daniel Neoman, the mother and father, and eight children. They live in a farm in Utah, and they sort of film these beautiful moments in their traditional life, and they've gone viral because of those moments. They now have a company, Ballerina Farm, where they sell products from their farm, and of course they video their lifestyle, and these videos are consistently going viral. Now a journalist from The Times, Megan Agnew, decided to ask Hannah and Daniel if she could come to their farm and give them an interview that would then be published in an article. They agreed, Megan visited the farm, and then she published an article in The Times, the article is titled Meet the Queen of the Tradwives and Her Eight Children. Right out of the gate, you notice that something is very wrong with this article. First of all, because Hannah Neoman does not even refer to herself as a Tradwife, and she says she's actually maybe a little traditional, but far from it in other ways. She is co-CEOs of Ballerina Farm, the company that her and her husband run. While they take care of eight children in a traditional sense, they are also full-time workers for this business. So that was strike one for this article. And you go on to read it, and Megan Agnew very slyly tells these sort of lies about the family and what she experienced on the farm, and we'll go through some of those lies now just so you know what's going on. You can tell right out of the gate that Megan Agnew doesn't like kids. She's writing about Hannah and Daniel's kids as if they are so annoying, constantly interrupting the parents, hanging on Hannah's hair. She writes of Hannah carrying her baby for four hours, and says, "The baby never left her chest, as if that is somehow some great feat for a mother of eight children." Megan is also clearly obsessed in this article with getting Hannah alone, I guess, to sort of see if Hannah's going to tell her any secrets about her life or secretly express that she is a victim being held down by her husband and children. She doesn't get the chance, though. She also writes several narratives that are clearly spun to paint a certain picture of Hannah. My favorite is when she talks about Hannah and Daniel's age when they met one another, saying that Daniel was 23, and Hannah was nearly two years his junior. Nearly two years his junior, meaning that she was one year in some change younger than him. Interesting way to write that. She also talks about Hannah telling her about receiving an epidural for one of her births. At the time, Daniel is on a phone call, so he's sort of out of the room, taking care of something. So Hannah, in a very soft voice, lets Megan know that she did receive an epidural and that it was a good experience. Megan goes on to write this as if Hannah sort of whispers to Megan, "I got an epidural when Daniel wasn't around for the birth and it was so amazing." It implies that Daniel feels strongly that Hannah should not perceive epidurals and go through unmedicated births, while Hannah, when given the opportunity as he's away, wants an epidural. She also writes of Hannah Neumann's exhaustion, saying sometimes she gets so ill from exhaustion that she can't get out of bed for a week. However, she never asks about Daniel's level of exhaustion. Speaking of Daniel, Megan takes a lot of time in this article to paint Daniel as an evil, conniving, domineering patriarch who holds Hannah under his thumb. She writes that Daniel is constantly correcting her, that he won't give her time alone, that he takes Megan on a tour of the farm rather than letting her talk to Hannah, even though Megan expressly asks to come to her the farm. All in all, there are very clever, shall we call them lies or reframings, strewn throughout this article, and you can tell in reading it that Megan's sole purpose is to bring down ballerina farm, to repaint the picture of this family that people have seen on social media, and to prove to all the young liberal women out there that Hannah Neumann is actually not leading a fulfilling life. She is in fact being held under the thumb of her husband. And perhaps by extension, she's trying to let women know that this entire traditional lifestyle that many aspire to is actually not one to be aspiring to. It is in fact a lifestyle of oppression, victimhood, and patriarchy. At least that's what I recognize when I read this article for the first time, and that's why we did an entire video on it, which you guys can go check out if you'd like to know more. And I must point out the most deceitful part of this article, and it's what is written about Hannah Neumann and the lifestyle that she left behind in order to have this traditional family. Hannah Neumann was a ballerina, hence the name ballerina farm in the farm that they now live on. And it's written as though Daniel Neumann forced Hannah Neumann to leave behind the city lifestyle of a highly trained ballerina so that she could be subjugated as the wife and mother of eight kids. I cannot tell you how many videos I got on my TikTok for you page of women talking about ballerina farm and saying that this is some revelation in this article, and this is what real brilliant journalism looks like. And while these women express that they felt so bad for Hannah and the lifestyle that she was forced to leave behind, I could see what was really behind their commentary. They were happy to see Hannah knock down a peg. They were happy to find out that this traditional lifestyle that is framed as being so fulfilling and happy and joy inducing is actually nothing like that, at least according to Megan Agnew. The reason they thought this journalism was so brilliant is because it confirmed their own biases about this family and about the traditional lifestyle at heart. But some of us saw through that article and decided not to shut up about it. We were going to call Megan Agnew out on her reframing of everything that she experienced on this farm. And slowly more and more videos were getting made where we were asking, why did you write it this way? Why did you say 23 and she was nearly two years his junior? Why did you not ask Daniel more questions? Did you actually ask to talk to Hannah Neillman alone in your initial invitation to write this article? Or did you ask for a tour of ballerina farm? Is it possible that Hannah Neillman sort of spoke softly about her epidural because Daniel was on the phone? So many questions that I guess Megan Agnew could no longer ignore that she was getting exposed and she had to write a second article where she walks back a lot of the things she said in her initial framing of the family. With that being said, let's read this new article and see what Megan has to say. I said at the outset I could tell that Megan Agnew already sort of had this article written before she visited the farm, but she just wanted to be able to plug in the details and needed to visit the family in order to do so. And it seems as though that characterization was correct because here's what she writes. I assume that behind the enormous brand was a steely business woman with her heels dug in about her choices, defensive arguments at the ready. Isn't the job of a journalist really to leave your assumptions at the door when you go visit somebody and keep an open mind as to maybe being wrong about those assumptions? In the initial article, Megan insinuated that she asked to speak to Hannah alone and that she wasn't intending on seeing the whole family and in particular Daniel, but we get a new story in this one. Daniel had more opinions leading the way when I asked about their stances on abortion, marriage, feminism, and the label, Tradwives. When you asked about their stances, interesting. If it wasn't clear already that she didn't ask to speak to Hannah alone in her initial communication with this family, it becomes abundantly clear with this next quote. But the most surprising part of the day, perhaps naively on my part, was trying to talk to her alone. Perhaps naively. Yup, it was naive to think you could come into a family, a mother and father with eight children and get the mother alone whilst simultaneously trying to watch her day as she takes care of an entire farm and eight kids. Now on the topic of that pesky epidural, remember how it was framed in the initial article that Hannah sort of softly told her that I got an epidural when Daniel was not around? Whilst Daniel was on a phone call, it sort of painted this picture that Hannah was trying to hide this information from Daniel and wanted to tell this feminist journalist so that the feminist could leave with the true story of what really happened and unmedicated births and yada yada yada. In this new article she writes, there were so many things I wanted to ask which were inappropriate to do so in front of her husband or young children about contraception, married life, the trials of motherhood, or just simply who she was and what she thought when she was away from it all. Did Hannah want to hide this information from her husband or did you wait till her husband was on a phone call to ask her these questions? Interesting. And of course we could tell in the writing of the initial article that maybe Megan Agnew was unmarried. Maybe Megan Agnew didn't have children because she seemed sort of shocked by the lifestyle of a married person with children and she clearly didn't have a good grasp on what that lifestyle looked like. Well now we have that confirmed. She writes, "In recent days there's been criticism that I, a childless unmarried woman, didn't understand that this is the reality of having eight children all homeschooled with no childcare. But I felt the exact opposite when I was there. It made me understand exactly how it was to be a woman with eight children and no childcare, demanding and rewarding and gloriously intimate and difficult to find space to speak. It went from an annoying lifestyle of being corrected constantly and having children hang on your hair and having no time alone and being so exhausted that you have to lie in bed for a week to be rewarding and gloriously intimate." There is so much pivoting, turning and twisting in this new article that Megan Agnew might want to consider taking up a career as a ballerina. And she writes about how demanding and difficult this lifestyle is of having eight kids with no childcare and homeschooling all of them as if Hannah is forced to do these things. I must remind everybody that Hannah and Daniel Neumann are millionaires and they are heirs to an even bigger fortune because Daniel's father founded like five different airlines. So they're not worried about money. They choose the lifestyle of eight children who are homeschooled with no childcare because that's how they want to rear their children as difficult as it may be. And then we find out Megan's true bias in this new article where she writes this. "I think this is the reason she inspires such strong opinions. The trad life makes women feel threatened by one another's choices. It is as if one lifestyle is going to inhibit the other. That our freedom, however we interpret freedom, is being undermined by the existence of someone else's." Megan, if you want to be a childless unmarried woman who is subservient to her career, which you are and which was emphasized in this article, you can do that. Hannah's lifestyle does not threaten your lifestyle. In fact, that is the very basis of feminist thought, choice. And lastly, after all this writing that depicts Hannah Neumann as a victim who is oppressed, we get a reference to Hannah's true thoughts on her life choices. But of course, we get that at the very end of the second article that probably nobody is going to read. Megan writes a quote from Hannah Neumann, "Anything great requires sacrifice. You know that," she said gently, "you know what it took to get where you're at." And Megan closes out this second article by saying, "and that, I think, is the very simple and very complicated truth of it." And I wonder what happened in between the publishing of this first article and this second article that suddenly made Megan Agnew wake up. Was it all the people calling her out on social media? Was it the Neomans maybe reaching out to her about the lies that she told in the initial article? Who knows? But at least we got the second. I guess she could have sat on the lies and the reframing that she did in the initial one and never told the truth. But I feel like in this case, she might have been forced to. But that's enough on Megan Agnew. I think we've exposed her bias, and it's bias that she took with her the moment she stepped foot on ballerina farm. What I want to point out is that this bias was strewn throughout the initial article, and so many people decided to overlook it. And I don't know if it's because they knowingly did that, or we are living in a world where people are literate when it comes to media. So ballerina farm actually recently responded to the controversy. So here's that. A couple of weeks ago, we had a reporter come into our home to learn more about our family and business. We thought the interview went really well. Very similar to the dozens of interviews we had done in recent memory. We were taken back, however, when we saw the printed article, which shocked us and shocked the world by being an attack on our family and my marriage, portraying me as oppressed with my husband being the culprit. This couldn't be further from the truth. Nothing we said in the interview implied this conclusion, which leads me to believe the angle taken was predetermined. For Daniel and I, our priority in life is God and family. Everything else comes second. The greatest day of my life was when Daniel and I were married 13 years ago, together we have built a business from scratch. We've brought eight children into this world and have prioritized our marriage all along the way. We are co-parents, co-CEOs, co-diper changers, kitchen cleaners, and decision makers. We are one and I love him more today than I did 13 years ago. This family was put through yet another scandal that took place all over the internet of people calling Hannah a victim, people calling Daniel evil. People talking about their eight children and the abuse that their mother is enduring on this farm and it wasn't even true. Can you imagine the pain, the discomfort, the shock after you very generously allowed a journalist into your home to meet your children, to talk about your family, your lifestyle, and to have this happen on the other end? And people so confidently, with such audacity, ran with this story, painting Hannah in this way, talking about a family that they know nothing about. We should probably think about that. We need to get better at recognizing bias, waiting for the truth, and not bending reality with our own personal prejudices and blinders, which is exactly what Megan Agnew did with her initial article and what everybody else did as they made video after video talking about ballerina farm and the Neoman family. And what's super interesting about this story is that all the people talking about trad wives and traditional lifestyles and the trad family and homesteading have been running their mouths about this family, meanwhile the Neomans have stayed completely silent. I wonder why that is. Maybe it's because they are so personally fulfilled with their own lives that they don't feel the need to talk about what other people have going on in their lifestyle. They don't even feel the need to have to defend themselves against these horrible scathing articles that are being written about them. And that is why we're talking about this in the first place because traditional people are happy out there living their lives and people who hate their lifestyle feel the need to butt in and create controversy. And it's controversy that does not exist so long as these left-leaning people are not creating it. So yeah, if you've been running with the narrative that Han and Neoman is an oppressed victim and so are all the other trad wives, if that's what we want to call them, you might want to rethink that because Megan Agnew, the prolific author of this brilliant journalism, has been forced to rethink it and to rewrite it. So those are just my thoughts on this story. Drop your thoughts in the comments down below. As always, I encourage healthy debates. So if you disagree with anything said in this video, do get out but do so respectfully. And if you like this video, like, subscribe, click the notification bell to be notified every single time I post a video for you guys, which is every day. And I will see you next time. This has been interesting one, guys. Bye. (upbeat music)