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Women’s Glossies Go MAGA

Columbia Journalism Review · Carolina Abbott Galvão · last updated

The conservative magazines pulling women into right-wing politics through lifestyle content.

Like many young women, Alex Clark grew up watching movies about girls who worked at fashion magazines. Early on, she knew that’s what she wanted to do, too. She read every book she could find about working in the industry, and wrote a fashion column for her high school paper. In college, she minored in fashion merchandising. Now thirty-two and the host of Culture Apothecary, a conservative wellness podcast, she’s glad she didn’t go down the mainstream media path.

Take Teen Vogue, Clark said, calling from Scottsdale, Arizona: It “became a Marxist rag.” She continued, “What an absolute disaster that has become.” (Teen Vogue was shut down in November.)

Clark’s first jobs in media included a role as a  traffic reporter at WDJX in Louisville and cohost of a morning show at 100.9 WNOW (now WHHH) in Indianapolis. She said she didn’t feel she could be “openly conservative.” So, in 2019, she left radio to host the Turning Point USA–produced podcast POPlitics. The following year she started The Spillover, which she rebranded in 2024 as Culture Apothecary, and shifted focus to wellness because she thought that health topics would resonate with more voters ahead of the election.