Meet the Conspiracy-Peddling Gossip Blogger Who's Cast Herself as a Trump-RFK Player

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/10/jessica-reed-kraus-houseinhabit/


In 2020, as for so many people, things shifted for Jessica Reed Kraus. A Southern California–based lifestyle blogger who got her start writing about motherhood, Kraus felt dubious about Covid safety measures and vaccines, and disaffected from mainstream liberal politics.

With her photogenic world upended, she wanted to talk about natural immunity and her objection to “vax cards,” she later wrote, and how they would “eliminate portions of society from general aspects of life.” When she did, she wrote that she was branded “an anti-vax Qanon nutjob which made me overly defensive.”

The pandemic ushered in a new focus, a transition from posts about decorating her gorgeous Southern California home—once featured on Martha Stewart’s Instagram—and her Etsy business helping others make similarly tasteful purchases; the most popular items were canvas teepees for children. Instead, she grew both increasingly conspiratorial and, at the same time, more invested in carving out a niche where celebrity gossip met hard news. It “proved,” she has written on Instagram, “an accidental hit.”

Today, Kraus has a million followers on Instagram, and her Substack, House Inhabit, is top-ranked in the platform’s culture category, with some 380,000 subscribers, many of whom pay $7 a month for her paywalled posts. (By the Wall Street Journal’s estimate, the site pulls in more than $1 million annually.) Over the the last year, she’s given more attention to a new set of boldface names, becoming a fixture in both the Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. universes, providing unstinting positive coverage of both men that she depicts as free from mainstream media bias.

*snip*