Can You Hear Me Now

Note. The underlying article can be found here: https://ajprokop.com/2026/09/21/traducation/

Pip: Can You Hear Me Now — where the memes are plentiful, the nuance is scarce, and somebody finally gave the tradwife movement and the trade school movement a shared name.

Mara: Andrew Prokop is doing the naming this week, and the territory he covers runs from domestic labor to educational rhetoric to what happens when culture-war politics decides which kinds of learning count.

Pip: Let’s start with that portmanteau and what it’s actually doing.

Traducation: When Trade Schools Become a Culture War

Pip: The frame here is a collision — trade school advocacy and the tradwife movement — and the argument is that they aren’t as separate as they look. Both, the post suggests, are serving the same political project.

Mara: The post builds to that through a Ms. Magazine piece by Oliver Haug, quoted directly: “Throughout history — though particularly now, as conservatives are increasingly saying the quiet part out loud — the family has always been a political structure. And right now, we’re experiencing the backlash to the rights won by queer people, poor people, people of color, and everyone else who does not fall into the Christian right’s version of what America and an American family looks like.”

Pip: So the tradwife isn’t nostalgia — it’s a control mechanism dressed in cottagecore. And the post argues the anti-college meme wave is running the same play, just aimed at education instead of domestic life.

Mara: Right. The post describes a pattern of LinkedIn memes that start reasonably — trades are valuable, we should support them — and escalate to “college is for losers” and “universities are woke.” The post quotes JD Vance directly: “Universities are the enemy. If any of us wants to do the things we want to do, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities.”

Pip: Nothing says “support the working class” like dismantling the institutions that let working-class kids move up.

Mara: The post also names something the memes leave out entirely: the physical cost of trade work. Years of manual labor, hazardous materials, cumulative damage to legs, backs, hands — and no corresponding push for healthcare coverage or workplace protections in any of the pro-trades rhetoric.

Pip: The post puts it plainly: support for trade schools needs to go hand-in-hand with workplace regulations and funding for care after years of manual labor.

Mara: And the invented word “traducation” ties it together — trade school advocacy repurposed as a wedge against educated women and minorities, paired with Trump’s own line: “I love the poorly educated.”

Pip: The post isn’t against trades. It’s against the meme that trades and college are enemies, when the actual enemy is a movement that benefits from keeping people from asking harder questions.

Mara: The closing argument is about balance — room for both universities and trade schools, without angry memes or federal defunding campaigns deciding which one survives.

Pip: One portmanteau, a lot of unpacked baggage.

Mara: The throughline is choice — who gets to make educational and domestic decisions freely, and who’s being steered by someone else’s culture war.

Pip: More of that next time, presumably.