The New Right’s Very Old Vision of Men

and I love horror movies. I love my dog, and I love trying to trick you.

I'm Tracy Bennett. I get to pick the word "word" every day, which is not as easy as it sounds. The fun fact about me is that I am descended from a witch who was put on trial in Salem. New York Times games are made by people, like the ones you just heard from. Go to nytimes.com/games to start playing today. If you travel deep into the new rain, what you find at the moment is a constant yearning

for something very old, not just a time when America was great, but a time when men were great, when men were men. You hear it in constant Vlad Elmario, who's better known as the Bronze Age, you hear it in his longing for the Bronze Age. You hear it when the pastor dug walls in your hands for the time before the 19th amendment. The net effect of women's suffrage was not an advance in women's rights, but rather part

of a push to replace covenanted entities like families with raw individualism. You hear it in the increasingly constant idealization of 1950s, America.

“Why wouldn't you design a system consistent with nature?”

What would that look like to you? It would look like what we had before Betty Verdant wrote the feminine mistake before lifestyle feminism dominated every institution in the West. There's a time when all this could be dismissed as a fringe movement on the fever swamps of the internet. But Bronze Age pervert is a favorite of young drum staffers.

Defense Secretary Pete Heggseth invited Doug Wilson to preach at the Pentagon. Tucker Carlson is known as Tucker Carlson. These are not all fringe figures, and it's not just them. It's a much broader thing on the new right, which increasingly wants to return, is theorizing for how to create a return to very old ideas of how men should be.

To very old policies that centralize the power they wield, and the way society is ordered. Helen Lewis is a staffer at the Atlantic in the author of Difficult Women, a history of feminism in 11 fights, and the genius myth. She's just written a great cover spur for the Atlantic mapping this world. She calls it masculineism.

Talking to many of its key figures, trying to understand its core ideas. So, I want to have her on the show to talk about it.

There's always my email as recline show at nmytimes.com.

Hello, Lewis, welcome to the show. Thank you. So, I want to start with a clip from Scott Yenne, a professor at Boise State University,

“and that I think is a good place to start.”

Our independent women seek their purpose in life, in mid-level bureaucratic jobs, like human resource management, environmental protection, and marketing. They are more medicated, metal some, and quarrel some than women need to be. Without connections to eternity, delivered through their family, such medicated quarrel some and metal some women,

gain their meaning through the seeming participation in the global project. They are agents of the new world, but not new life. Such women are now the backbone of every left-wing cosmopolitan party in the western world. I thought that was as concise a description of this masculineism, that you've been reporting on, as I've heard from many of its subjects.

So, tell me about him and the view of society, you understand him to be spinning out here. Well, you know, as you heard, it's one that's not afraid to be offensive,

but the essential thesis is that it's women's role in life to have children.

Modern women have been deluded instead into pursuing careers, which aren't real jobs. They're not doing anything of any merit anyway, and therefore their lives will essentially empty and pointless. But I find it quite, I like my job, and I also feel that my job is equal social worth to Scott Yanne of being in a think tank, right? Like he's hardly a cancer surgeon,

“calm down, son. I find it kind of intriguingly repellent, and I think a lot of people do as well.”

One of the things that I heard in that clip is an echo of the JD Vance, miserable cat ladies clip that went around in the 2024 campaign. We're effectively rolling in this country via the Democrats via our corporate oligarchs by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are

rest of the country miserable to it. Which I mentioned because I think it can be easy to look at

Yanne or some of the people talk about, and think, oh, this is a fever swamp right wing movement. This is when you've clicked on too many posts on X, and the algorithm has found something out about you that you wish it didn't know. But one of the arguments you make in this piece is that masculineism has become a kind of unifying theory on a maga right that in other ways is coming apart. So defend that for me, Beth. Right. So you can see the splits of maga very obviously at the

moment over the war and Iran. American support for Israel as a military ally, protectionism versus free trade. You know, there are all these interesting currents that are going on. However, if you asked, do you think feminism has gone too far? How many people in the maga coalition are going to,

“you know, are going to push back on that and say, actually, I think we should give more jobs and”

opportunities to women. So it is this one thing that basically everybody can agree with. Traditional

gender roles are better. Equality has been a failed pursuit. It's maybe even an illegitimate pursuit. Empathy, which is feminine by nature, has been misused and is ruining our politics because women and their parties represent them, the Democrats feel sorry for all these underdogs. You aren't really underdogs. They're kind of cancers on our society like violent criminals or illegal immigrants. So, you know, there is all, you know, this is a very coherent ideology. And the reason I wanted to

write the piece is I think people are now quite familiar with the idea of the Manusphere and the kind of Andrew Tate, you know, these provocateurs who are creatures of the algorithm. And I wanted to say, well, hang on a minute, actually, there is a really serious ideological and political project here behind this. It has got people in think tanks. It's got people who are working in politics. And it has

“got its kind of intellectual outwriters. But this isn't just some, you know, over steroided guys and”

tight t-shirts, parading around in nightclubs for the gram. These are people who want to completely restructure American life into a way that they find more agreeable. And they want to use legal instruments and political instruments to do so. What does that vision look like? So, the tip of this way to say is that men would be the breadwinners and women would be homemakers. I mean,

the kind of reference point always tends to be in the 1950s. But it's a, you know, it's a very fake

Pleasantville black or white picket fence version of the 1950s. Lots of families did not, in fact, live in that way. But, you know, you would do that, for example, Scott Yanner, he mentioned there, one of his most controversial proposals is this idea of the family wage. The idea that you would restore discrimination back into the job market by saying, it's okay to preferentially hire men married men. It's okay to promote the more to pay them higher salaries. You know,

what we want to do is essentially restore a traditional way of life in which, you know, men are the ones who go out and earn money. And women's money, if anything, it's, you know, it's back to being pin money. It's kind of secondary. So it's worth, I think, free to expand on that, which is to say, I think the core critique here and the core politics here is that modernity has thwarted masculinity. The arguments here, and we're going to tour through a number of them,

they, they shift between this, as you say, 1950s nostalgia for when you had the single breadwinner family. And this, in some cases, it's very Christian, in some cases, it's very pagan. But this spiritual level of politics, and it seems to me to have this dimension of modernity as hollow, people are working, as you mentioned, particularly women, these bullshit jobs in human resource management and in marketing and environmental protection and men are caged in these little

offices and, you know, doing retail work that has been e-them. And, you know, younger in their

“quote says, agents of the new world, but not new life. There's all this emphasis on what life is,”

the good, the beautiful vitality vitalism. Can you talk about that dimension of it, this, the spiritual cell being made? Yeah, I think that is part of it, because another thing that often comes up is the idea that women are on a huge amount of anxiety medication and anti-depressants. So you have this situation in which women having anything that they feel is wrong in their lives is taken as proof that they've picked the wrong horse in life. And if only they would pick this alternative vision

of femininity, they would be happy. Anyone, this is part of the exchange that I had with Doug Wilson, the evangelical pastor, that this is not a new phenomenon. It was something that Betty Friedan was writing about in the feminine misty, when she was talking about specifically the unhappiness of stay at home housewives. She said, you know, they're taking medication like cough drops. And a bit that I struggle with is somebody who loves reading historical novels, historical fiction,

historical bookfries, is that, oh, we absolutely sure that women in 1700 will, you know, we're living these incredibly blissful lives. That's not what you get from the literature of the

to Mary Stopes, who was our kind of version of Margaret Sanger, got contraceptive pioneer,

and they were describing lives of despair, where they had far more children that they can afford. They didn't know how to stop having any more. They were exhausted by their late 30s from this relentless tide of childbearing. But this is the kind of, you know, that era is now passed into memory long enough. That it is susceptible to being, you know, revitalized by this into this kind of trad-wife vision that is, you know, you know, sold to people on Instagram, because no one can really

remember what it was like to live in these conditions anymore. Okay, let me try to think about

“how to do this, because I will say that typically when I get into a literature, I think I'm usually”

generous reader, and I leave with more sympathy for than I came in, and I read your piece and then I read the last man by Charles Cornish Dale, the raw Ignationalist, I read Bronze Age Mindset,

and it's one of the first times I can really remember coming out of something like this and thinking,

"Oh, there is so much less there than I thought." Like, I just assume, people were making some reasonable arguments, but I want to try to be generous before I get into that reaction. So let me ask it this way. As you were talking to these people, as you have immersed yourself in this literature, which parts of the critique, or the diagnosis of modernity and its ills and ailments, did you find recognizable or find yourself responding to? I do find the kind of battery cage

idea of humanity to be quite compelling. I know that I'm sure my life would be better if I took more exercise, got outside more took a screen break, didn't doom scroll. Like, I think all of those things are reasonable. I think the American diet is hideous, particularly for lower

income Americans. So I don't think all of those things are ridiculous, and that's something

that comes up a lot in the last man. The idea that elites are keeping you fat, they're keeping your low testosterone. If you don't eat enough meat, that's like vegans are oppressing you. Vegetarian is a nice tool of social control to sap our vitality and make us easier than more obedient to subjects. But it's very interesting because clearly that has caught on because Arnold Schwarzenegger made a documentary about being vegetarian and except he'd rebranded it as

plant-based. And it was all about how actually you could be an incredibly good weight-lifter if you were on a plant-based diet. You could have incredibly strong erections on a plant-based diet. So clearly that has seeped into that discourse that there is something unmanly about not eating meat. I think I like that, but more than you did. I found it, maybe my expectations are lower, but the thing that I found that was interesting about it was that it moved from saying it is

impossible to be a man fully in a liberal democracy. That's there's a line in that says essentially that. That because of the fact that you're being kept in this rubbish jobs and you'll have low testosterone, all this kind of stuff. And then you get to the end and you find out, okay,

“so what are we doing then? And there's a bit like where you should chuck out your plastic”

chopping board. And I was like, oh, I was sort of expecting you to advocate fascism at the end, but you've kept it lower, you've kept it more achievable. And that's a bit where that was a bit when I slightly parted company from it. That's where you probably come to, okay, let me describe the argument of this book because I think it actually gets at something that I want to try to do or which is it brings up some things really worth talking about and then goes in some really well

directions. You can correct me if you feel like I am being unfair in any part of this. The last man is an argument that begins by saying what we need is a hormonal theory of politics. And the hormonal theory of politics is this and in this part is real. There has been over the decades, a measurable and sustained drop in testosterone in men across a number of countries in sperm quality and count among men across the number of countries. There's also, and this is a big topic of discussion on

“on the side. And I think an actually important one that I wish to left would take more seriously.”

There has been a sustained drop in fertility rates across many many different countries. So relatively few liberal democracies are now at replacement rate or above if any of them are. I think Israelis, while the weather Israel's liberal democracy is its own question. So he sort of starts it there and says, "Look, the core of masculinity, thy most or thy most, so did I say the Greek word, is testosterone. This thing that Francis Fukiam is talking about in the end of history

in the last man, this thing that Nietzsche is talking about is just testosterone and we are destroying testosterone. And we're destroying it with endocrine disrupting chemicals that are in all the things we buy, destroying it with bad diet, destroying it with chemicals in the water. And it is creating and is maybe a sort of actual effort to create. And this is where things begin to my future

not suited for the displays of dominance and hierarchy and a conquest and excellence that has driven

“civilization forward and to find man forever. And then as you say, it kind of ends with a stirring”

call to throw out your plastic cutting boards and fill to your water. But this is the argument that there's like some stuff I actually agree with on chemicals, some stuff I'm generally worried about in hormonal changes. And then the sense that what's really happening here is the destruction of what it means to be a man in the literally the vital fluids that make man manly. That's a book. Right, but there is an obvious overlaid political valence on this, which is that

this idea that if you're high tea, you're risk taking possibly violent and you don't mind about

inequality, it's about the strong dominating the week. And therefore liberal democracy is inherently

feminine because it's more concerned with making sure that the week don't suffer too much, that they're equal rights for all. So it's very easy to see how that vision of masculinity maps on to kind of mega-rightism, definitely. The bit I find, I just again, when I start drilling down into the examples, it's, I find it tricky. So young men, for example, have much higher testosterone than old men. So actually, really, are we talking about, if women shouldn't be in leadership positions,

maybe old men shouldn't be in leadership positions. So because they don't have the requisite thymos either. Or no, you're not saying that. So you're actually just making very large sweeping claims about men and one thing and women another thing. That kind of stuff, you know, sort of falls apart in your hands. But I also think that don't you think it's does speak to some people.

“And I think it speaks to people who have like a female boss and they resent it and they find”

it slightly masculating. The kind of people who, if a woman upset them, the word bitch would be pretty close to their lips, right? That's the day you speak to me like that. You're just, you're just a woman. And I think that's closer to the surface in a man. Even men who are otherwise impeccably liberal than perhaps we sometimes like to acknowledge. So I can see why this stuff does have a relatively wide appeal. And, and the person of Donald Trump in the 2024 election became

a vehicle for this feeling. This guy who stood up and pumped his fist covered in blood after an assassination attempt rather than cowering behind his secret service guards or a lectern or, you know, staying on the floor. This guy who would say anything he wanted to say no matter who it offended, who did not play by the rules of feminized society. This man who kept driving forward through adversity, you know, lawsuits and electoral losses and made his own reality around him.

That the Trump for all his seven-tari lifestyle and obesity and the fact that he's, you know, in advance to age and, you know, I haven't measured his testosterone, it's probably not that high anymore. But the Trump represents what masculinity in a way is supposed to be, which is an effort to dominate other people in a bid to achieve greatness for yourself, your can, your country. And then the brother Mark is the author of that until he came back and like bust through the and showed you could

still do this. But it's an incredible cherry pick, isn't it? About Donald Trump the ultimate

alpha male. In the same way that, you know, this is what I find very difficult about all of this literature is that it just implies that everybody is a kind of a kind of a candle or a princess sparkle. Donald Trump is at the same time a man who wears more, more make up than I do most days, a man who loves sunset boulevard, you know, like, you know, the man loves a musical, one of his better qualities. But you know what I mean? So those aren't the things that they're

emphasized. And here I'm saying actually, right exactly. Which I like about Donald Trump, right? Like I actually, I'm not dissing on him here, but so much of these people are engaged in a very Judith but Larry and level of gender performance. It is the most like cis gender performance of heteromasculinity,

“you could possibly imagine. And Trump, I think in some ways it makes him appealing is he's got some”

of that but he's got the other thing too because he's actually not at his core, like an insecure thwarted, like, little goblet. Yeah, I find that much more appealing than I do, the very pompous, we're all going to have a sauna together and us guys, but, you know, it's definitely not gay, kind of, you know, that sort of very terrified homophobia that is that sometimes comes out of some of those communities. So let me take it here because again, I want to try to run through

some of these ideas. I think of one of the founding fathers of this in the new red is this guy Bronze Age pervert. Can you describe who that is? He is a thinker who's real name is a constant alarmario. He's Romanian and he has a kind of whole persona which is about body building

it's, you know, there's a kind of almost like, I am Dracula kind of level to the, to the

hamming up the accent and stun that kind of stuff. So what, once again, this is somebody who's playing a character on the internet. Yeah, it's very much where I describe the book, which is

“aesthetically interesting, even if I think it's intellectually becomes a bit tedious, but it has”

just really like Nietzsche for Gunners quality. It's very, very, you know, like romantic poetry, but like filter through 4chan lingo. Maybe it's worth, I want to play a clip of this interview he did with Michael Malis in 2024 talking about the problems of modernity. Why is it disgusting? It's because it privileges safety and mere life, the preservation of life at the expense of things that are exciting and great and free, you know? And when I wrote this book in 2018, sorry to keep talking

Michael, if I made it over here. But when I, when I wrote this book in 2018, some people liked it because I expressed myself directly and was humor and so on and they said, okay, but this is very nice, but is it really true? And then what happened, you know, people will say, now I planned it. No,

I didn't plan it. The pandemic happened, which basically I think demonstrated the truth of what I'm

saying in the pandemic, in my view, was a mass sacrifice of the world's use to the desires of disgusting old people who sacrifice the youth and also to women, frankly, especially at the middle age, sterile women who made the pandemic procedures at whole life, it gave meaning to it life. I saw it in action, you know? I can't tell you how much joy it brings me to hear you with your

“accent, say the phrase these middle-age, middle-age sterile women. So the reason I think that clip is”

is useful. And you know, this book, Bronze Age mindset got ridden up in the Kermart view of books, there were parts that most young staff in the Trump administration had read it. It had become like a piece of code passed back and forth, some is done. The reason I think that clip is interesting is that combined to two things the book does, which is, this sense that there is something more than mirror life, right? He says,

a preservation of life at the expense of things that are exciting, great and free. With the kind of campy provocaturism, like, oh, it makes me so excited to hear you say middle-aged, sterile women. What's this idea about privileging safety and mirror life over things that are exciting and great and free? Well, this is the idea that women because of their lack of fine moss and testosterone are, you know, weak and empathetic and they don't want

to put themselves in situations of danger. So this is the idea that you, you know, essentially the whole world has one kind of giant HR department telling you that you're not allowed to do the things you want to do anymore, particularly kind of things that young men want to do. And I mean, I can understand why people feel like that, but I also think that, again, I just, I find a huge amount of complacency, I think, has driven it. I don't think people would be talking like that

in a time when they had lost three of their age children to a preventable disease before the age of two. You know, I don't think they would have been talking about that when, immediately after the first World War, right, when you could quite easily have lost four of your sons in a completely pointless advance, two miles across France. This is an ideology that is born out of fat modernity itself, right? The luxury that they have to play with these ever-so-spicy ideas

are because they've never lived these lives. I don't think if you went over to somewhere that

is currently in the middle of a conflict, and you said to them, "I will enjoy this incredibly dangerous masculine experience that you're having." I think, no, I think they'd actually they'd like a stable food supply and peace. So, you know, it's ironic that they, you know, they talk about Fukiyama because this is what he predicted in the end of history. He said that, you're going to end up with people who are just bored full of on-way, and they're going to have

to find things to sort of entertain themselves because they don't have the material deprivations

“and challenges that previous generations have. And that's what I hear when I hear about,”

I hear, "Oh, that we're all having a go at carons on a podcast, isn't it so spicy?" And you think, "How is, what does this got to do with the Spartans?" You know, this is just fake cosplay version of masculinity that everybody is kind of indulging in. You know, these people could sign up to the army. They could go and serve in a war, and they've not chosen to do that. They've chosen to become podcasters. I think the interesting point of that is, I think, very important because it is

a bunch of intellectuals and elite competition with other intellectuals. A bunch of humanities academics. I mean, Brasic Herbert went to Yale, was it? Yeah, he's definitely spent a few terms teaching.

child's Cornish Dale has a PhD. You know, I'm many of my friends are academics, but I can see how

it slightly deranges piece. Isn't a lead over production problems? Right, it does. As soon as I was thinking about this, I started thinking about Peter Tertions, idea of surplus elites, that, you know, and some of these people, perhaps they didn't fit in socially at universities and colleges, perhaps they didn't fit in politically, but they have that same kind of yearning in them to be intellectuals and to be taken seriously, and this provides an outlet for that. One thing that I

find interesting about the modern rate is it can't seem to decide on when its nostalgia is for.

“Yeah. So there's a dimension of it that's further than 1950s. I think of that as more”

wear Donald Trump has based his remembrance of politics, and he was around for that. So far enough,

but then you have people who seem to be looking back to earlier in the country's history,

but it has stretched way beyond that now. All the way, and we'll talk about Bronsage, our part, which is a nom-to-plum of one of these folks, who is trying to bring back sort of pre-modern, much more directly pagan view. There's a lot of primitivism in all of this, a lot of societies filled with chemicals and endocrine disruptors, right? It connects to the Mohammed movement in that way. But this question of when were human beings human? When were men men? When were women women?

There actually isn't a agreement on it. No, you're right. Somebody like Doug Wilson, Pete Higgs, that's

“congregation-founder. He basically wants to live in Salem, circa 1650s, as far as I can see.”

The liberation of women was a false flag operation. The true goal was the liberation of

liberty and men. And in our day, this was a goal that has largely been achieved. These were men who wanted the benefits for themselves that would come from easy divorce, widespread abortion, mainstream pornography, and a promiscuous dating culture. The early 20th century was characterized by the Christian wife. The early 21st century is characterized by the tattooed concubine. And these sons of Billy Al have the Chusper, but they call it progress for women.

That's, you know, that for him is his vision. Other people, yeah, have that vision of 1950s, suburbia. Other people look to the Romans or the Greeks or the Spartans, even, you know, there's a big excitement about the Spartan. Other of them take inspiration from kind of

“Nietzsche, which is interesting to me, right? So Nietzsche is writing these critics of modernity”

at the end of the 19th century, at which point he's making all the same criticisms about his society that they're making now. And you think, well, hang on a minute, this is a vastly less industrialized society. You know, this is before the invention of antibiotics, all of this kind of stuff. So how can this be exactly the same criticism now? And it goes in the other direction too. So one of the things I read for the piece was this very famous essay on The Long House by Lo-mez, which is constantly

referred to. And his idea is that there were these matriarchal societies, or there were these communal dining halls that were seen overseen by a dead mother, and they were ruled by kind of petty bitching and backbiting an ostracism, and where, while the men were going out drinking manly things. And one of the things I thought was, all right, that's interesting. I wonder what society he's referring to then. I should go out and read a bit more about what this place is actually like.

And he's not referring to anything. He says there's no specific historical reference. And he says in any case, one can't really define the long house. Lest it should lose its force to lampoon the vast constellation of social forces, it imagines. And I thought, well, that's extremely convenient, isn't it? You're invoking this terrible thing that happened in history, except it didn't happen in history in any way that you can concretely describe. And in any case, you don't

want to define it because it's more, it's more of vibe, really. But this is the grammar of a lot of this. This constant, are we joking? Are we serious? I mean, when you talk about almost any of these people, almost any of these books, it's all the ethos of the troll, where the real argument is being smuggled in gift wrapped in irony and imagery and jokes. And oh, I'm only kidding. And are you really offended such that to argue with it has a little bit of the quality of arguing with smoke. And and in some

ways that is its point, one of the things, many of these screens are, say explicitly, is it, you know, there are reaction to impuracized bloodlusty technocratic modernity. There's an idea that to sort of cohere things into that fact-based form is to force yourself into a form of argumentation that by its very nature misses deeper truths about life. Right, but that does get on my nerves, because as somebody who spent a decade writing about feminism, the thing that you constantly got

look at the facts, actually they're against you. And so it's quite odd to have pivoted into an era

in which apparently no, actually we're not that interested in facts. You know, we're actually just

“interesting. It involves again. But yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think I thought a lot about”

what the point of the defensiveness of the languages. And it clearly part of it is about a kind of signal like we're all guys in here, you know, you're cool with this. Like a sort of initiation right, essentially. If you don't blanch somebody using the N word in the group chat, that's it, you know, you're allowed in the club. And the other thing is about this idea that you've just, you trip up liberals, because essentially you say, I want to sterilise retards. And then

everybody goes, how do you say the word retards? Well what you've done is you've invoked a very

old idea about sterilisation of the unfit for breeding. And the idea would be just as a boron

if you used extremely clinical language about it as you're deliberately offensive, you know, if I work language. But be, be, be, be you, you've trapped your opponents at the level of kind of going, uh, uh, uh, about that exact words and which you're wrapping it. I want to try to, because I actually, I will say I had a really quite negative reaction to a bunch of this. The part of it that I could recognize and the part of it that I do understand why it connects to people is it is an effort

to pull up ideas of the Romantics ideas from Nietzsche into a modernity that often feels very

“hollow. I mean, you talked about this. I think it's battery cage, modernity. And when he's talking”

about, you know, more than mere life. And probably when he's talking about it in the book, uh,

before I get into what I don't like about the book, the thing that he is often getting at and

articulating in a way that is, you know, four-champoatic is that there has to be something more than this that there has to be a way that is more authentic to be a human being, more authentic to expressing the energy of life that moves within us that we don't know how to talk about, but we do feel. And the modernity has very little language for, particularly disenchanted modernity, that then this. And the place where the book has, I think, you know, genuine moments of appeal and inspiration

is in the channeling of that sense, which is a very old sense, that there is some form of the immediate experience that industrial society alienates us from. I mean, I think that's probably why Nietzsche is such a reference point, because you have the sense, both of an intellectual, who is not appreciated or known in his own time. Nietzsche goes mad after saying a horse being beaten in the street and spends the last decades of his life just sitting in a corner, his mind completely

broke. And I can't imagine. And I can't imagine. And I can't imagine a massive moustache to be where we did have a very impressive moustache, but also had these delusions of grandeur.

“He's got a book that's, I believe, literally, called YA. I'm so great.”

The idea of the Uber Munch is that everybody around you is essentially cattle and you are not. And that is like, that is every member of the intellectual darkwebs theory of the universe, right? It was, oh, there are sheep all and everybody else is in, but I alone have seen through it. So there is this inherent kind of narcissism to it about the idea of kind of being an Uber Munch that I think you really, that doesn't surprise that it's a reference point to me there.

The Christianity I struggle with more, right? I saw I'm not religious myself, but I was raised in a very religious house. My parents are Catholic. My dad was a deacon and the Catholic church. My mom was a religious studies teacher. And their practice of Christianity was I think an incredibly positive one. They would go and give the sacrament to the sick, you know, and they'd go and visit nursing homes. People who didn't have anyone else to visit them. They would volunteer in soup

kitchens, for example. They were ideal Christianity was a one that was based around service to other people. And I don't really see a great deal of link between that and the version of, like the, even in the persona of Jesus, right? So the persona of Jesus in the gospels, he says blessed are the meek. You know, he's in some ways an incredibly feminine figure, a passive one. He lets things happen to him. He doesn't storm into, you know, Pontius Pilots

front room with an AK47 and gun everyone down. He lets himself be killed to die for our sins. And therefore there's this interesting sense that actually Jesus is kind of slightly an embarrassment to some of these people. They've had to in this American Christianity, particularly even jellical Christianity, had to wreck on him as a much more masculine figure than the biblical records. So, Jess, I raised this with someone, one of the pastors who I interviewed in Doug Wilson's church,

and like, you know, I said this, I said this, it's really hard to match up your idea of this masculine patriarchal Christianity with the Bible. And he said, oh yeah, but remember when Jesus overturned them, you know, the tables in the temple, the money lenders. So, you know, there again has been a kind of attempt to go back through the Christian tradition and find the bits you like. Often these guys are more keen on Saint Paul than they are on Jesus, because Saint Paul

literally had a divine revelation. You know, and then he was also somebody who was patriarchal.

There are lines from there saying, you know, Godly women should be quiet, you know, women shouldn't

“be preaching. So, I, you know, the relationship with Christianity is also very tense, I think.”

Well, there's a desire for the order or the perceived order of the Catholic or Greek Orthodox church. Not, I think, for the social radicalism of Jesus Christ. Well, it's also very funny because successive popes just turned out to be terrible disappointment to them, which is just like, somebody who was raised Catholic, just a very funny, no, have we got another pope? Does he agree with no, no, no, he also keeps saying things about the

Paul. Oh, gross. I mean, yeah, this is a pretty old problem, but there's a split. And I think Louise Perry was the first one. I heard her talk about this and it's actually helped me think about this between the pagan side of the new right and the Christian side of the new right. And Bronze Age, pervert is on the pagan side. And I want to go back to what you're saying about hierarchy and the Uber mentioned in Nietzsche. This is a quote from his book.

He writes, Nietzsche never forgot that the fundamental fact of nature is an equality.

And this is something these people, the followers of Heidegger and Heidegger himself, to great degree, all forget. It is madness to ask the common prefab run of man to fashion his own way, his own religion. The many finds solace and meaning only in submission. It is good that this is so and they shouldn't be made to feel shamed for it. So much of the modern idiocy is based on shaming those who would find true pleasure in submission. The long chain of being is held together

by command and obedience. And this is really the core politics of this book and a lot of these, which is that we have ended up in this Christianized liberal democracy, the beliefs and equality, and in doing our subverting and denying the hierarchical dominance and obedience structures of nature. Right, but when you read some of that stuff, don't you think it's a bit like how people

who regress to their past lives, always end up that they would have been clear patria. They would never

have been some guy who died as a toothless peasant at the age of 12. There is a kind of belief that if they lived in these ancient hierarchical societies, they would be one of life's winners. I went back through my notes from when I was reading the last man and I threatened, "Do we want to return to a civil service run by unix?" Right, is Elon Musk ready to make the ultimate sacrifice, because actually that's much better if you have a professional unit class who are looking after

to do actually. No, there's loads of stuff from this period that they don't want to take back,

“and all of it is really predicated on the idea that, "Yeah, if you want to go back to Roman times,”

you're going to be a Roman citizen, not a slave." Right, you're one of, you're one of life's winners, so that's inevitably what you would have ended up as. And the thing I kept coming back to was this thought experiment by the philosopher John Rawls, the veil of ignorance. You know, you should make decisions, not knowing which side of the outcome you'd end up on. And if I said to you, "Do you honestly want to take your chances if you could be any citizen in the Roman Empire any

time, or any citizen in America today?" I think almost everybody would take their chances being born in contemporary America, rather than thinking that you were going to end up as, you know, colligula, probably not. You're probably going to end up as essentially a 12-year-old girl who got raped by her master every night. You know, sure. There is just this kind of, but then I think this comes back to this idea that they are special people, and therefore

they don't live in a society where they're able to exercise that specialness anymore. Sure, and then, and this will start getting into this real discussion of masculinity. The, I guess your argument they would make, let me try to steal me on this, is of course they don't like John Rawls because we don't live behind the veil of ignorance. And acting as if we do, and ordering societies if we do, turns out to have this fundamental problem, which is that it

subverts the natural way men are supposed to be, which is it is the expression of these competitive, aggressive, ambitious, even violent instincts, which maybe we don't realize it at the time, but we now know are a potent driver of civilizational progress, and we fall into stagnation

“and decadence when they are thwarted. That's what I understand them to be saying. When you talk”

to them, I mean, is that what you hear or is that a mystery? No, I think that's reasonable. And there is a kind of light side version of that, right, which is that in here in the developed world, we live in aging societies. And that has profoundly shaped how decisions are made in just ways that we're only really beginning to reckon with now. I'm not sure if that's so much about gender, as it is about an aging society. If you live in a much younger society, then the young people

that are kind of dominant force, and they set the rules. Well, at the moment, we live by the baby boomers social, like they're social conditions that they find most amenable to them.

this stuff at hand, is that I do think that there are, there is a place in society for male spaces.

I made a program from the BBC about the gurus, new gurus, it was called, and you know, one of the things I did was I went to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Jim. And I thought, I talked to older guys who had lived a life and they were teaching younger men about controlling their aggression and had to channel that into positive ways. I wrote in difficult women about the problems of

“boys in school, which, again, I think are real. I think there are lots of boys who find it really”

difficult to sit still for eight hours a day, and they, you know, they are not encouraged to kind of burn off their energy. And the whole school model has been framed around this idea of the kind of good girl who sits there passively and kind of just digests information. In a way that doesn't suit lots of boys, the New York Times had a really interesting report a couple of months ago

about ADHD diagnosis and teenagers. And one of the things I took away from that is that lots of them

don't end up on medication that they start as teenagers in adulthood because they find a job that suits them better than being cooped up in school, putting to this box that I think is particularly restrictive for boys. You know, if we're going to take some of this ideology, perhaps we do say that girls and boys on average, on average, maybe there are some differences between them, and that we need to be more attentive to the ways in which some bits and one society aren't

set up for well for boys. I think it's worth dwelling on this for a minute. And I've had Richard Reeves on the show who's written a lot and done a lot of work on this. It won't place a lot of these ideas have magnetized towards because it acts as a genuine true justification for the idea of something being wrong. Is that there is something going wrong for men and boys? I mean, we talked a bit a few minutes ago about falls into testosterone and sperm quality. I mean, that's measurable

“and strange and it's been going on for many decades now and we should I think think about it and”

worry about it. But you also have men's wages not doing great. You have girls performing much better than boys in high school, much more likely to enroll in college. Men today are five times likely or than in the 90s to say they don't have any close friends. They are four times more likely to die by suicide. Sometimes it's going to all get framed as a competitive race with girls. Like, as if, you know, it would be fine if both

genders were dying by suicide at the same rate. But that's not the way I think about it. That there is boys are not doing great on their own terms and the sense that, you know, perhaps societies evolved in way, whether that is in terms of the chemical soup and the microplastics that were all exposed to from childhood now all the way up to the structure of school, the structure of the workplace. The idea that it is more recently evolved in a way that

is, you know, not good for boys and men, sort of crazy thought. And I think it's something worth, you know, when you look at this data taking seriously. It's not a crazy thought. I think of it differently to that, which is I think that there are girls specific problems and there are boys specific problems and then there are some problems that affect all young people, you know, um, screen usage. But that you break that down and it affects boys and girls in different ways.

Again, these on average is with huge amounts of exceptions. You know, we're always talking

very broad brush strokes here. But we, you know, there is some evidence, I think that things like comparing yourself to other bodies and faces on Instagram, hits girls, particularly harder. You know, social contagions of particular things hit girls harder. And then at the same time, you get boys who are funneled towards crypto gambling day trading. You know, those things are are more heavily pedal to men. We know that the majority of problem gamblers are men.

But this comes out to, I think we're still steeped in this idea that everything is a kind of neat oppressor oppressed binary. And in the case of gender, that's, you know, there are still things in ways in which, you know, sexual violence being a very obvious example that, you know, women are oppressed by men. But I think we can also get to this stage now where we say it's not actually a competition. A lot of time, it's capitalism is doing it to both boys and girls doing

unpleasant things. Right? And the service of social media companies making a profit, girls are being shown huge amounts of very filtered images of what faces can look like. And I think we just probably need to find a slightly new way of talking. I try and discourage, you know, feminist from sort of framing everything and kind of men are doing this to us kind of way. And I think that the real damn full of a lot of this discussion is it's almost impossible to have a conversation about

men on its own terms in lots of these parts of the right without it having to be in some point women's fault. And if we could just break that chain, those conversations will be a lot

“healthier. And I think liberals will be a lot happier in participating in them, right?”

If it can be, actually, maybe we've got we got some bits of the COVID response wrong, schools should have opened early in California. That's a conversation people are going to be much happy to have if it's not done. Some childless cow did this to you, right? Because at that point, I'm like, I'm out. I'm not interested in wealth. You have to say at that point, sorry,

There's this interesting dimension in a bunch of these books where it does feel to me you're watching

“both in these books actually in a culture broadly. Men import what has more traditionally been a”

huge problem for women and girls really quite rapidly, which is this obsession with unrealizable body aesthetics. It brought age pervert, true to the name, is no one for constantly posting pictures of, you know, tandem, muscle, male bodies, raw, agnationalist, Charles Cornishdale, weightlifter, you know, talks a lot about that in his book. There's this whole idea of the pursuit of beauty as a way of aligning yourself to hire good. This is from the Bronze Age Perfect Mindset

in it's sort of weird internet grammar. In the same way, see from all this, it's aesthetic physique,

has the most cosmic significance and it's because of what I've said so far that aesthetic bodies

are a window to the other side because they're the pinnacle of nature. The book is full of just like hatred for the obese. He keeps calling it like yeasty, you know, physics. You know, it's the cleavicular, who, you know, is like the biggest streamer of the moment, who is this looksmaxxer,

“who has, like, I think has become deranged and is clearly in a very unhealthy spiral appearing”

in court over dosing on live streaming. You know, as he has this crazy stack of testosterone and other things that have made him infertile, like you're watching, like a, like a mass social body dysmorphia merge rapidly. It seems to me among men and one thing I see in the stuff in the new right, like this is like the one place I want to talk about this more broadly, but the one place where they seem to have an idea of self mastery or discipline for men, but it's all this homosexual

weightlifting competition. That's the interesting thing about it, is that it's all done for other men and you used to find people on the men's rights internet, we talk about women's inter-social, inter-sexual competition and the fact that they will kind of do all these sort of things for each other. And I think, you know, I just think about that a lot is that a lot of that is

“it's done to impress other men. At the same time, I was at having this intense anxiety about”

homosexuality, but it also has this deep, but in that quote, you bring it has this deeper eugenic quality to it, right? If you go back and read, Buck vs Bell, the famous eugenic judgment by the Supreme Court, you know, this idea of the unfit, you know, the morons, the imbecils, and then the physically handicapped, and the degenerate, you know, that's kind of Nazi language. There is the idea that there are lives winners who are physically perfect and mentally

acute and then there are lives losers who are, you can even read in their features that they are subhuman. You know, that's got such a long dark history in even in America, on the left as well as the right, you know, in California there were thousands of people sterilized for mental and physical disabilities in the 20th century. So these are ideas that were in circulation and they could be again, these are not, you know, we like to think that all of these things just got ruled out

completely after the Second World War. Why? So many other things that you would never have thought

will come back of come back. This idea that there are sort of subhumans, you know, you find them all that's so often in the kind of right-wing and non-discuss on things like acts. You see it all over these books too. I mean, there's a explosive passage in Bronze Age mindset where he talks about the problem of the Jews and their pallid, nerdy, you know, they've made everybody want to be these intellectual conceptual, you know, not sort of connected to the real

vital forces of being alive. And I mean, this is very old-fashioned, antisemitism. And he, you know, tries to soften it by saying, well, when I say the Jews, I'm not saying just the Jews are all the Jews, but it's straightforward. I mean, you know, he uses a term directly, which is maybe to say, all this is very old. This is all very old. And it expresses itself as old, right? It's Bronze Age. It's, you know, going back into Christian nationalism. It, it is all making this argument that

modernity has taken a wrong turn. It has taken a wrong term in all of this equality among men and women, among people of different races and ethnic backgrounds, among the idea that people in different countries have equal worth. A lot of it is framed as like a debate about gender roles or, sexual facts, but a huge amount of history is about the past versus the present. And whether or not our modern values are a betrayal of our baser and more fundamental instincts.

it's because of modernity. And it may be any other number of other things, but it gives, you know,

it's specifically addresses itself to people who are alienated by society in whatever way it might be. And latches onto that. You know, who does someone like Andrew Tate appeal to to go back to the kind of broader Manus fair? It's actually young teenage boys, right? It's actually at that period of age where, you know, you're getting all these messages about how men are patriots and toxic masculinity and blah, blah, blah. But you are, you know, maybe small and frightened and you don't

really know if you're going to have any friends or girls who want to go on a date you. It prays on people at the most insecure moments of their life. For a long time, you know, the men's rights internet was specifically aimed itself to like recent divorces. He also absolutely primed to hear

“some, you know, thoughts about how women are pretty awful. And I, you know, I think that is,”

I think that is really sad because that's the bit where I, I find these people quite predatory

if they're taking people who have got genuine personal problems and supplying a kind of ready-made set-like bad guy for them to fixate onto, which is probably not going to go anywhere. Like, what can you do about these things? If you think that the world is rigged against you, this is funny because they all believe very much in like being it, you know, having agency. But if you feel that the world is this guy not Chrissy, then like how are you supposed to navigate that?

You just, you know, you just keep consuming more of their content and kind of wallowing in your own skin. I'm Paul Tonorial. I cover soccer for the athletic. And I'm Amy Lawrence. I cover football for the athletic. Whatever you call it, the biggest competition in the sport is happening right now.

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more insight than anyone you know. We've got more than 70 obsessive reporters on the ground, covering the ins and outs from every game. I almost forgot to mention the best part, Amy. Free access to the athletics world cup coverage in our app. Download the athletic app and see that. We've been talking here about various essays and books written by the men of this,

“but one of I think the most influential essays in the space that is also framed”

is more of an actionable set of policy ideas by Helen Andrews and her essay The Great Feminization. So who's Helen Andrews and what was the argument of that piece? Helen Andrews writes for a compact magazine and that, you know, the argument with that, it starts with

Larry Summers being from President of Harvard in the 2000s and this is the kind of first moment

really when there were so many women and I could deem me that they had a hysterical overaction to his public comments that maybe they weren't so many women in STEM because, you know, they're just innate lack of aptitude or interest essentially. And this is portrayed as this kind of warning sign of like the feminist freakouts that are about going to dominate the next two decades. And then Andrews goes on to make this case that you have far more female lawyers,

form far more female doctors, form all female academics and they are not interested in the pursuit of truth and justice and rigor they are driven by feelings. And so in the law that will translate to the fact that they will just feel quite bad for criminals and kind of not want to discipline them and punish them appropriately. In academia it means that you stop asking hard questions with uncomfortable answers and you stand up having a kind of hippie come by our drum circle where everybody talks

about their positionality. And there is obviously something there that spoke to a lot of people. I mean the reason that I wrote about it is that again I had this sense of smoke and sand in then I tried to go through the specific evidential claims that were being made and see whether or not they stack up. One of which being that wokeness is an epiphonominant of demographic feminization. There's a something to practice as a tongue twister. But the idea is essentially that

if you get too many women in an organization it will collapse into kind of bitching and backbiting and all the things that characterised that period of whatever you want to call a peak woke of 2020.

that happened in that period. I don't know if you can separate out correlation and causation

“in all of those times. I don't think you can ever draw a neat line which is when women in”

organization get above 60% then organization collapses. And that's kind of the claim that

basically Andrews makes, which is that these bureaucracies run by women become just self-appetuating

and squalid. Well, go and read the government inspector or some of that bureaucracies have been Kafka was onto this when it was all men. This is just a quality bureaucracy. It's just now that we have moved into a situation in which the majority of people in things like HR, university administration, they are female. That it's become, well, hang on, this is just and yet another sign of creeping evil feminization. The other one that got to me was, you know,

I looked into the Larry Summers thing. First of all, those, his reported comments were very much skimming the surface of what his private emails to Jeffrey Epstein revealed, his views to

“on gender to be. And I'm not entirely confident that I want to say that his colleagues,”

obviously, knew him a lot better, didn't think this is a very good chance to get rid of somebody

who we think might be a liability to us. Often in cancellations that I've covered, there has been something else going on something office politics he going on. The other thing that I found out was 2006, the year that happened, four fifths of Harvard's tenured faculty were men. So the claim is, you know, there was a feminist backlash to the things he said, but it took place within an organization that was still at that point ruled and run by men.

So it's not as simple as suddenly Harvard became a citadel of women and therefore at that point it didn't tolerate anybody saying anything it disagreed with. There's much more complicated things going on. I found that essay so strange maddening. And she was on Ross's show, which is an episode worth watching debating that. But she was on exactly the same problem in that episode of Ross's show. She's on with Leila Bresco's sergeant and they bring up a discrimination

case which she frames as being some women ejected to a kind of slightly poorly poster. And it turns out to have been a pretty explicitly pornographic poster and the woman, you know, in a very male-dominated workplace, experience that is sexually aggressive. Once you get to that stage within essayist where you go, I'm going to have to go and follow your every single citation down the rabbit hole to find out if you've really represented this or have you just, you know,

have you, have you come to your conclusion first and just have this chain of stuff that lines

up? You know, that's it. That's it. It's fatal. So I tried, you know, I like you. I tried to

“read things with an open mind. I think she captured something important the many people felt,”

otherwise there wouldn't have been such a reaction to it. But I, I've, I've became increasingly annoyed at the vibesiness of it. Well, there's just this reality that the essay, I think avoids confronting in any way. So her basic argument among other things is cancellation is an explicitly female way of meeting out punishment. cancellation is a, a feminine punishment where is getting punched in the face is a male punishment. And so this age of cancellation is just reflected the tipping point of

of women taking over workforces. Among other completely obvious questions about this is cancellation and exclusively female way of doing things or when the Trump administration went around getting people fired for saying a bad thing about Charlie Kirk after his murder or when they went around firing anybody who would use a term diversity in a grant application. Was that cancellation being done by a very male dominated structure? It's just, it's constant to watch

what she is describing as a outcome of female domination and to say, no, this is quite obviously what social media makes possible. And that the period in which he's talking is a period of algorithmic social media taking over as in the primary communications platforms and in this period also of slack coming into workplaces and it creates this capacity for like individual instances to be raised up to ricochet everywhere. And but you could just look around, you look on the right,

you look as as you're noting, I mean, did the communists not cancel people, did they handle everything by having a, like, a upfront direct discussion about their differences in which the men asked it out and got to a truth outcome? Well, Senator McCarthy actually secretly a woman is a really big thing, we should know about like the so even the word ostracism, right? The word ostracism comes from the ancient Greek practice of writing down people's names on a, like a stone or pottery

tablet and then they are banished from outside the city walls. That is done in a society which women

that there are sometimes ways that you settle disputes that don't involve violence. But you're right, partly yes, this is again, this is a correlation causation question, right? Yes, obviously things like cancellations and indirect conflict have increased. But is that just part of a wider social shift away from violence? Someone like Stephen Pinkleberg, that's just true, we live in a less violent society than our equivalent countries were in 1800 when people were jooling. And is that

about women's entry into public square? Maybe it is, but maybe it's also a bunch of other things too. Here's the other thing that I found very strange in a bunch of these different books and what you just said gets it in. They don't really try to argue normatively that the changes have been bad.

“So I think dueling was bad. Big strong. I'm going to make this claim and I think that the way we”

have gotten, I mean, maybe until very recent past, but over time, better and better and better at living in complex societies without falling into civil war with each other. I think that has been a human advance that the kind of self mastery we have developed and the virtues of liberal democracy

that became taken often for granted, even if not always followed. They reflected progress. One thing

I found strange about the last man, which particularly I found this flaw in, he has all the thing about how if you rub testosterone gel on men and then put them in a dominance game. They're more comfortable with hierarchy. Is that good? Like am I supposed to prefer that they don't look for more win-win outcomes when you're like slather? Like I don't want to be saw that in testosterone to become worse at cooperation, I have enough trouble limiting my own competitive instincts as it is.

And it's in Hell and Andrew's piece, too, that in some ways if I'm going to be maximum generous is talking about the HRification of maternity and yes, in maternity you have a lot of big institutions and as institutions get bigger, they bureaucratize and this can be a problem. I've written a book abundance in part about the problem of institutional incentives taking over, but nevertheless there is a dynamic here where you are trying to make complexity and scale work at a very high level

and that does require you to have rules, procedures, approaches to managing difference that are not

“dueling. And I bring this up both because I think it's a weakness in the pieces, but also because I think”

it actually gets at something that is significant here which is the implicit vision and sometimes the explicit vision of masculinity in these books I found deeply depressing, like almost repellent. And what I... It's funny, yeah, it's funny you said it because it made me think that none of these

things are the things that I love about men. You know, I'm someone who's always had loads of male

friends, they're very happily married for a decade. And some of the things I love about men, our for example, there are ability to become completely nerdy obsessed with very stupid things. You know, just like that level of intensity of focus, you know, I absolutely love my dad's terrible jokes that have passed into family law that we all repeat back to him. You know, there are just so many different models of masculinity that are just... I think the way I've put

is comfortable, you know, that idea of the great thing that you become a dad or you follow your interest and you become comfortable with the person you are and you just radiate that. Maybe, you know, maybe you are a bit weird, maybe you're into model trains, whatever it might be, that's all good, you'd like to read a lot of books about the Second World War, all of these things are very true of many of my friends. You know, just I was just having a conversation about article with somebody who's

who said, oh yeah, my friend's boyfriend got really into all this stuff. And of course they're not together anymore, right? So women don't want to be with anxious, controlling men. And as a result of the fact that they can earn their own wages and we have divorce, they don't have to be, so you have to find some way in which they have to put up with it. But, you know, I just think if you really want to success a relationship with a woman, probably looks maxing as less good

than being thoughtful, sending a gift occasionally. I think if you ask much, I mean, I'm speaking

on behalf of a woman here, always a good idea. But if you said, do you want to like,

10 out of 10 incredibly chisel to our boyfriend or do you want one who, like, you know, will have dinner ready for you when you've had a really long day out? Almost all of them, I think, would probably pick the small thoughtful acts of kindness over Stone Cold Hotty. I just think

“it that's how it works. And I think that's again, it's kind of, it's a big part of this political”

project is very difficult to accomplish if women don't have to put up with it. But what I find so what and setting about the visions of masculinity and lots of these books is they seem so anxious

they don't feel happy, they feel stressful to me. Like, and that's me reading them as a woman.

I don't know if you had the same experience as a man. I'll go maybe further than you as a man

“who loves being nearly obsessed with issues. I think it is fair to say that a vision of masculinity”

has to begin at some level with recognizing that biologically, men are stronger, more aggressive, just physically. And as such masculinity in its healthy spaces and its healthy development has tended to insist upon self-mastery and discipline. It is a way of channeling, strength and competitiveness and aggression and yes testosterone and thymos in a direction of this pro-social, in a direction that is committed to its obligations to others,

to children. I am amazed at how little there is about fatherhood in these books.

But as with many you genesis fans, lots of these people don't have kids themselves. I'm also well having lots of attacks on childless cat ladies. Lots of these people also don't have children. It was one, as I read more of this and I read some of the people you had written about, I had, this is what I mean that I came out less sympathetic to all this and I went into it with, I had assumed that all these talk about virtues, somewhere somebody was going to talk about what

I understood to be virtues. But no, they just like the word virtues because it sounds old and they like old things because they think it was better before. There's no virtues anywhere here. And the way

you see it is in the people who are now, I think, the leading voices. You have Donald Trump,

this virtuous, disinhibited, incredibly corrupt man with his multiple wives, his, like, endless amount of sexual harassment, his inability to control himself and be decent to other people. You have Nick Funtase, it's like insell in a basement, railing against women. Unmarried, has no children, is not connect himself in obligations to others, to community. To any of the things that build the kind of civilization, he comes to want Doug Wilson, this national, Christian nationals

pastor, who, as you mentioned, is, you know, the founder of the Seck Pete Hecksup is in, Pete Hecksup has tweeted out his Doug Wilson's attacks on women voting. Doug Wilson, who, like, has severed his Christianity from all of the humility and care and compassion and radicalism that you just read on the literal words of the Bible. I mean, what is the sermon? Where is the sermon of the mountain? Any of his work? I find it appalling. I really, this was a part

that I actually found myself having a more emotional reaction to. Like, where are any good men here? I'm not against the critique that the left and not create space for a healthy vision of masculinity. I agree with that critique. But this is so fucking warped, where these people have ended up, this is a terrible vision of what it means for you to be an adult. Yeah, I don't want to live in the world that they envision, you know, and I think it's also a recipe

“for anxiety. You know, this idea that you have to have a woman that you control. And actually,”

if she does things, if she's disobedient, that's a bad reflection on you and it's humiliating to you. I think it's a recipe for both violence and relationships, but also deep, insecurity and unhappiness. You should have somebody, for me, the vision of like equal partnerships is just that it's so much more relaxing. You know, you have freely chosen each other, and every day you make their commitment to stay together. It's not like with one of you

leaves, you'll be destitute or whatever it might be or you're living in fear all the time. You have freely made this commitment. To mean that there's a much more positive vision for a heterosexual relationship than the kind of thing that I'm seeing in this, which is, you know, a kind of, you know, capturing a woman and kind of holding on tight to her. And having these kids that are there because essentially their miniature versions of you, right, that they perpetuate

your empire, you see that in the kind of Elon Musk belief that he wants to use surrogates to have like, you know, to make himself the modern gang is calm. I mean, man, so many of friends I know

“have like zero one kid. Yeah. That's why I'm like, I'm always banging the baby drum. I'm like,”

man, civilisation is going to, you know, collapse and he'll be killed. Yeah. Yeah, like, where do you think you'll cover up like some magical fucking people factory? Where's the bit in that about how joyful it is to be raising children? You know, the idea that you know, these, these are their

into eternity. I didn't have a particularly emotional reaction to it. And I think, I think I've just

burned out my circuits after 15 years of writing about feminism because I just feel like misogyny is so deep a bigotry. It's so casually indulged. It's not treated seriously. If these guys were saying going around saying, I don't think black people should vote. I don't think Jews should vote. It wouldn't be seen as, oh, aren't they kind of cute? And they're putting some edgy things in them. Actually, even has even Nick Fuente's gone that far, right? Whereas you can say it about women

because there's an assumption that it's a part of a continuum that starts with kind of stand-up comics doing stuff about how their girlfriend is annoying. This is all kind of good rumbus, just battle

of the sex is fun. I mean, I know that these people despise me and everything about my life.

“And I sort of don't care because I like my life. And I think it's a pretty good life.”

You know, there is service involved to other people. And I think that I try and think about other people more than I think about myself. And all of those things, I do find a bit missing in this literature, right? I think it's also quite so popular now. It's that a lot of it is essentially self-help. And that is the dominant literary genre of the age and the kind of dominant social media genre of the age. This is what I want to say about it because this is where I think I actually

feel very strongly about it. I care about it because it is actually popular. Not necessarily some

of the individual people we're talking here, but Andrew Tate clips Nick Fuente's clips, right?

These things are exhorting a real cultural pull. And it is self-help. And it is self-help that has been cleaved from any kind of genuine pro-sociality. It is self-deformation.

“And that I think is really dangerous. I see this in a weird way with clivicular. This look”

Maxar. Here's somebody who is cleaved. The desire to become maximally attractive. From all the things that that desire is supposed to do for you. Right? But he has talked about how it is made him infertile. He has talked about how he couldn't possibly have a girlfriend because of the lifestyle he know leads. He it's like we have taken the urge and severed it from the purpose. And so we have turned it pathological. Like I watch him and I think what he's doing is good for him. I don't think it's

what attractive it means. And I worry about all these young boys who are now going up in an online environment where they're being told this is what it means to be attractive. I don't think it's what women find attractive. But it's cleaved off from all these other things that make somebody a compelling person, their warmth, their imperfections also. And I'm also, I will say this, that

“I think that the idea that liberalism at Broadway had so little of value to say about what it”

meant to be a man or boy for so long. And we created the sort of social media world and often partnered with the people running it. Mark Zuckerberg, a liberal and good standing for many years. And like a band in kids into this farm of extremism. And they just create a space for any of this could thrive where there wasn't a better competitor to it. And there's a lot going on in society, none of its monocosal. But I really worry about this world in which this is what is passing

for self-help because I think if you followed it, you would not help yourself. You would make yourself into someone much worse. And many people are. And that is a failure not of these trolls. But a failure of the mainstream to actually have a vision of human flourishing and the self-improvement that feels vital to people. Yeah, I think about this a lot because, you know, it is a cliche to say at this point. But for people who have lost religion, you know, you have lost a lot of

community and regularity and to your life and a rhythm of your life too. You know, the church in which I grew up, we have palm Sunday and the Easter and then you have harvest festival and then advent and Christmas. You know, there is a sense of life's occasions being marked. There are, you know, there are baptisms and funerals. There is confession. There's a chance to kind of get you know, offload your sins. There are kind of rituals within that. But I'll probably deeply

helpful to people as anchors within their lives. And while I can't say I have personal faith anymore, I think that it is a shame to have lost that those structures in life. And I don't know if there is a way to recreate them. And I don't think any of this would be happening. If we weren't

And I wish I could give it up. I felt like when these people who go to a course

eating meat is terrible and they're like, do you still like burgers? I do. And that's probably also true. But with the digital world, we have essentially hooked everybody up to a little dopamine

“trip. And I think that, you know, the effect of that are particularly on young people who are still”

forming their opinions. If you look now, young men and women's political attitudes, you find this replication of young women and more leftwing and young men and more rightwing in lots and lots of countries now. It's really interesting finding. And part of it I think has to be to do with kind of sex segregated algorithmic feeds and people spending more time in segregated online spaces than

they do in the playground or the local youth center of the pool hall or wherever it might be.

And those are really unhealthy things. Alice Evans has this theory, the sociologist about, you know, young people deradicalizing each other if they can just spend enough time together. And so yeah, I think you're right to continue to bring this back to an almost spiritual discussion because these ideas wouldn't be so popular if they weren't filling up a lack and a feeling on we in alienation. And I would like those to be filled in a better way. But the starting point

for that is recognizing that those feelings exist. One thing this whole movement takes very seriously is aesthetics. And at every level of it, from Trump himself, who is very concerned with

how the people around him look, how the spaces around him look, concerned in his own way with beauty,

all the way down to, you know, these people like that who at least put a certain conception of beauty,

“the physical form at the center of their politics. One of the things that I think is interesting”

here is I do think they're on to at least this, which is that aesthetics has been almost an empty ground of politics for a long time. And I do think there's a hunger for more beauty in our lives for politics to have aesthetic opinions. And as I'm curious how you weigh that, the sort of constant performance and camp of this movement, but also the kind of consistent belief that one of the problems of modernities we've abandoned, having sufficient views and emphasis

on the beauty of our surroundings or spaces of our culture. That's so interesting. I hadn't ever really thought about it like that, but you're right. I think every political party now has to pay such attention to aesthetics. It's just that Maga has an aesthetic. I'm not sure if someone said to you, what's the Kamala Harris aesthetic? I'm not sure you could really sum it up, or what's the Democrat aesthetic. For a while, it was the kind of nevertheless she persisted. I'm with her. Again,

these are very like female focus slogans and the kind of, you know, sort of lightweight corporate

“ego-girlism. But I don't. I wouldn't say that I think that the left has got a consistent aesthetic.”

I mean, the far left has, right? This is why you get all these kind of mean jokes about people with blue fringes and whatever it might be in Palestine plushies and stuff like that. But the mainstream democratic party does not have a consistent aesthetic in the way that Maga does. Well, there's, like, to the extent that Maga women often look a particular way, right? And Maga men look a particular way. I think about this actually a lot. And I've wanted to try to figure out how to do something about it.

It does seem to me that the left has done too little thinking about it's own aesthetic. One thing about this run, I'm Donnie Campaign, is it had a real aesthetic. It had colors. He dresses in a very certain way everywhere. Well, Bama, of course, you go back to the famous, you know, hope and change posters. You go back to that movement. It had in its own way in aesthetic. But one reason I think you see a much more thorough going one in Maga and aesthetic that runs through not just the candidate

and their graphic design. But the things they put on Twitter about architecture, the executive orders about classical architecture and beauty, what should be in a museum, is because it's fundamentally a movement about the past. And so it gives you the capacity to choose in aesthetic from the past you prefer and say that, that is beauty. And I think that when when you're dealing with liberalism or or other forms of of left ideology or more left ideology in the American context, it's harder

because you can't as naturally reach backwards. You, if you're so focused on critiques of the past, then endlessly have to modernize it. So Hamilton by Lin-Manmo Miranda has real aesthetic and what it does is it combines an aesthetic of the past into this multicultural update. So it's simultaneously honoring it and critiquing it. But that's actually hard to do. And so I think sometimes one of the

past is not a safe place for it to go? And also that's related to optimism versus pessimism. Because there is a version of that actually Andy Burnham here in England is now running in a bi-election from which he hopes as a springboard and then run for the Labour leadership mid-come Prime Minister. And he put it an advert. Now the soundtrack is Oasis, you know. So there's in the start there's 90s nostalgia. But a lot of the shots were of new skyscrapers that have gone up in Manchester.

And his point there is you know like we are building stuff. Like here is the place the future's

being built. Which I always thought would be the centerpiece of any kind of Gavin Newsom

presidential run, right? With like California the place of the future. There's a bit of a problem with that though, right? Which is that and again it's maybe comes back to the aging society. How many people in America are excited about the future versus how many of them think it's a veil

“of joblessness, declining living standards, a heating planet, like all of these things. Right?”

Who hates waymos? Which I think are awesome having been to San Francisco recently like I felt like I'm sitting in the future. Who hates them more than taxi drivers unions? You know, who hates driverless trains more than train drivers unions? And so yeah if they want to reclaim the idea that they're going to have futuristic aesthetics that could be kind of awesome, but they would have to also deal with the fact that many people do not look forward to the future

with a desperation to get there. The difficulty is for that aesthetic that the left is very skeptical of technology and that AI in particular has widened that skepticism. And so if you can't have an aesthetic of the future that is in some ways sci-fi and a little techno punk, then you're not left with very much because you don't like the past. You're not comfortable

“with the future. Donald Trump is president in the present and and I think it's hard. But I will say”

I think this is one of the places where I'm most sympathetic to a thing happening in the new right, even if I don't like where they take it, which is culture is very powerful. And the aesthetics of culture are very powerful. And Trump's version of it is very specific with UFC on the lawn for you know, the 250th and you know, in Hulk Hogan at the R&C, his aesthetics in a funny way, very camp. But they're at least very central to him in his vision of politics and we're in a much more

visual culture to where the platforms are smooth as much more visual. And I don't think political movements do not have both a visual identity and a visual perspective, a perspective on what is beautiful and what is to be culturally prized are going to to compete well in the Sarah. But that's also about the left taste makers hatred of the middle brow. I mean, just to take architecture right, you have to show that you are a refined person by liking brutalism. And if you just

preferred a nice, direct column and like a nice white wash, you know, whatever it might be, that's kind of basic. That's what normal people who don't know anything about architecture like.

And the problem is that there are far more normal people than there are people who know a lot

about architecture. And I think Trump has got that, right? Trump just has the tastes of a kind of normally person. He has the taste of a normal person who's got a lot of money rather than elite taste.

“I think there was a piece about this at time of 2016 election, right?”

Everything he owns is covered in gold, which is what you kind of think, if like I said, I certainly have no money, why would I cover anything gold? Whereas the thing that if you're a high net worth person who flies on pirate jets and reads, you know, Condinus Travel Magazine, everything should be muted earth tones. So like his exact lack of taste in elite sense is read by normal everyday people as he likes basic things that are easy to appreciate. And nice, you know, he wants, like he wants

the regime, he wants that ballroom to look like the Roman forum that people might have seen on, you know, on their holiday in Italy. So this is a bit about the kind of the let's hatred of

yeah, of the middle brown, the popular and the mainstream. The best politics are always cringe.

I mean, you mentioned Hamilton, you know, I love, a lot of Hamilton as much as a white liberal millennial could. But I went back to see it a couple of years ago and I was like, oh, this is a bomber era cringe, unlike it's because it's so earnest and sweet and like now everything is so cynical and jaded that it's quite hard to put yourself back into the state to be able to appreciate someone who's just straight forwardly hopeful about the upward progress of America. So it does kind of

read as cringe. But again, you know, you're just in the same way that having no shame is a very useful asset in American politics. Having no sense of cringe is probably also quite good. I wish you'd tell that to all the damn character consultants.

possibilities, what kinds of grievances emerge from. But what do they mean for women? One thing

in your piece is really looking at what people who are at the Vanguard of this movement are saying

“should be done, how the world should work. What are these people proposing?”

Well, yeah, I mean, there's a kind of suite of ideas. So no fault divorce, the rollback of that, right? Take it back to the idea that divorce, someone in the couple is to blame and they thought therefore get penalized. And one of the reasons that the feminist movement was very against that is that that was used to punish women, essentially, to, you know, to say you have been adulterous and disobedient and therefore, you know, your kids should be taken away. And I've written in support

of no fault divorce. We only got it here and written within the last decade. Because I think that

one thing you need when you're trying to get through a relationship, if you have kids is like,

really, this is, yes, this is a divorce. This is also a co-parenting negotiation. And turning that into an adversarial fight from the very start is unlikely to end well. But that doesn't fit this kind of masculine this paradigm. The heritage foundation for that report in January that said they wanted to kind of man-hatten project to support families. They are against dating apps, daycare, you know, single parent benefits. You know, there is an argument there for support.

Supporting a certain kind of family. Right, exactly. They want tax breaks, right? So they want the American economic system and tax system to be re-geared towards being friendly to the types of families that they think are the best ones. It's perfectly legitimate for them to make that argument. The reason that we have a situation the way it that it is is that people didn't like the idea that the children of a single mother were kind of starving over a principle. So they think they have

an uphill argument on that. And then you get the kind of, yeah, the wilder friendships. So Doug Wilson, we mentioned a couple of times. You know, he has an aspiration in 200 years that he wants household voting. So in the forms of time, a single woman would still be able to vote, but once she married, then her husband would vote for her. Yeah, well, her husband wouldn't vote instead of her. Her husband would cast the vote that she and her husband and household,

he was representing the whole household, right? But presumably he would have the power to simply decide

“what the household should be voting, right? I mean, sure, that isn't he in the leadership position there?”

Yes, he would have if if they disagreed, he would break the tie and he might break the tie by going with her desires or he might break the tie his way. More pressingly, he will say, "Thinks women shouldn't serve in combat roles in the military." So women are created by God to be life-givers, nurturers. That's how they're created. That's their function. That's their form. That's their creational identity. God gave them to be life for us. And you shall not take

a woman who is given for the nurturing of life and turn her into a death agent. And now that is if I had put my hand on my heart, I think that is also what Pete Higseff believes. Because I'm straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn't made us more effective, hasn't made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated. And he has an aesthetic demand for his army. He wants an army of people without beards,

“he's very clear to read this. And I think Donald Trump has that too, right?”

There was that famous reporting about Donald Trump not wanting disabled veterans in his parade. He's got a vision of what he thinks an army should look like. So there's all of that stuff is actually already happening. You've got the chair of the Equal Opportunity Commission,

who has basically put out a kind of ambulance chasing lawyers at saying, "Are you a white male?

Who's experienced discrimination at work, based on your race or sex?" You may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws. Kind of the EOC is as soon as possible. So there is also a hunger for using the instruments of the pro-DI bureaucracy in the other direction. And actually saying, well, we think it's now its white men's turn to get treated to some of this.

You'd be treated as a protected group and get some special latitude in some of these hiring decisions. Scott Yanna wants to, for example, reinstitute male only military colleges. He thinks that having women in military training colleges, again, it affects these kind of very manly vigorous, slightly bullying standards. And they make everything a bit of an HR bureaucratic nightmare. There's also, I mean, obviously, the jobs of decision a couple of years back, which is,

I think, significant where we're thinking about here, some of these things feel like they're just not on the table, right? Like repealing the 19th Amendment, Doug Wilson can talk about that while he wants, but it's, I think, not going to be a demand that they're public imparting,

One question I've really had is, does this become a real agenda?

Part of the after Trump, because Trump has this quality of, one way is able to hold this very strange coalition together is he gives it everybody a little bit and then he'll also happily represent the opposite. And he is such individual power over their public imparting, the what he says goes, the people behind him, you know, the J.D. Vances and Pete Heggsess and our kid you know, is nobody has that kind of power.

And so they actually, they both are often more true believers than he is. I mean, I don't think Donald Trump is reading, Bronze Age Poverty or any of this stuff. And on the other hand, they have to promise more, and they will have to promise more,

or to try to pull these influencers and institutions and treasures and so on into their orbit.

“If this was to start getting traction as actual ideas, what would that look like?”

But I think you've got to think about it equivalent to the campaign to end Rovers' Wade, which while it was a kind of stretch goal of the religious right for decades, in the interim what they did was make it much, much harder to have an abortion in the states where they controlled the state houses, right? You know, imposing regulation and legislation. There's stuff in project 2025, for example, about making it harder to produce and distribute

abortion pills, right? You just, you find ways that are small tweaks, you know, by imposing burdens on people that you just nudge and nudge and nudge towards your desired end state. As you say,

I think it's relatively unlikely that J.D. Vance is going to go in front of the American people in

2022 and say, "Guys vote for me, well, half of you." Or like women enjoy voting for the last time, you won't get to them again. Because it's widely and popular in the same way that actually complete in total abortion bands are unpopular. But the one thing you would say about the American political system, as unfortunately it is very friendly to minoritarian ideas. It is easy to capture and for people who have got things that wouldn't pass at a referendum to nonetheless

smuggle them through by, you know, controlling bits of government bureaucracy that no one pays

“attention to by controlling state houses, for example. So that's how I see this agenda going forward.”

It will be through little tiny tweaks to the tax code or things like that, right? And I guess it will also be through culture and through, you know, how we treat each other and what is proposed. I don't know if you read this piece in New York Magazine by Sam Alderbell about the women leaving the Magarite. I found it to be a very moving and very sad piece where saw these women who were influencers are involved in right wing politics and maybe they

they didn't like what they felt to be the schoolmarishness of the left or maybe they had more Christian and conservative views. And they sort of not a long and played a long and even harnessed and argued for a lot of this and then woke up one day and realized that the men around them were treating them like shit and they were being cruel to them and that what was promised to them as a return to a kind of traditionalism where they were cherished and respected and would

not have to be medicated in working a useless job was actually just a way of justifying not being treated with any kind of respect or consideration at all. Yeah, that piece really reminded me of, there's a book from the 2000s by Ariel Levy called female chauvinist pigs and it's about the way that women coped with working in really male dominated workplaces where they were like, hell yeah, I love going to the strip club with the

guys because the implicit promise was, yes, there were women up on stage who we think are, you know, haws and whatever, but I'm like an honorary guy and then there comes a moment where you find that you're not an honorary guy actually, I'll know, they think this way about all women and I think it was the philosophy Kate Mannis was her theory of misogyny, right? Was it promise and exemption for good girls? Like if you if you do things right as a woman then actually you kind of

get exempted from it and and then it find and then you know and then you've crossed one of those invisible tripwires and you discover that's, you know, you're on the outside now. And so I read that piece and I oscillated between sympathy and what did you think was happening here? And I guess that's the point about the kind of semi-jokey semi-ironic. You think you're all doing ironic sexism because actually we live in this incredibly you know feminized go andocracy and then you find out actually

“now what did school extremely unironic sexism. But also I think the interesting thing is that what”

is the left doing wrong that all of these things happen and people have direct experience of misogyny and yet they still don't feel that the left is for them. I mean that gets into the macro politics of this one I do think there's genuine challenges for for the left here and how to sense some of the

right something more virtuous and something more ambitious than this. But there's also I think

this reality that if I mean this might all be a huge political disaster brewing for the right I have this basic theory that whichever side controls Twitter pays for it and I feel it's very very very much. It's very super because they just they just can't stay normal, they just have to let themselves go and let their unchanged it all over the place yes and you're right. 2010s it was liberals kind of going you know you've won a you've won a traditional Chinese dress while being

Katy Perry like can't kill her and then now it's just oh let's do some open racism of the type that is actually extremely unpopular with the American public at large like right out there in the open. Yeah so you know yes you have like maximum probably liberal dominance of Twitter around 2020 Donald Trump is you know banned from the platform after the you know effort to overturn the election and Democrats convince themselves in that period and of a lot of things that the public doesn't

believe and they lose touch with where a lot of voters are. And by 2024 they pay for that and it gets thrown back in their faces and these you know ads you know work Comble Harris is talking about gender reassignment surgery for you know immigrants and prisons and I mean this all came out of

“very certain culture and and Democrats like it led in part it's not the only thing I mean there's”

inflation and and a lot of other causal factors but it led in part to a pretty devastating loss but now like the fever swamp that matters is on the right and they control X and Elon Musk I've had people on the right say to me that Elon Musk has created a huge problem for them because he didn't realize it but the or maybe didn't care but it was actually the liberal moderators who are solving the right wings misogyny and neonazi problem for the right and now those people are out and

Nick Funtays and everybody else is out in public and if the left can find an appealing politics for itself it does have this opportunity of facing a right that has driven itself somewhat crazy and has many of the key people associated with it who are quite influential just offering

an incredible and almost endless series of terrible things they've said or terrible people

they've associated with who you know normi voters in Ohio and Colorado or not you know that that's not what they were that's not what they were looking for one of the most interesting things that anyone said to me during my reporting for this piece was when I asked Dr. Swelson about Nick Funtays and he just condemned his language even though Dr. Wilson has called women small-breasted biddies and Jezebel's and all this kind of stuff but he said the other way that Nick Funtays talks about women

“is very disrespectful and then he said I think he's a fed like I think he's a federal agent this”

is kind of this conspiracy theory whatever that Nick Funtays is actually a kind of self-mull for the left mate you know just to do so to run to the federal government right now Dr. Wilson like the Donald Trump and Ando's just didn't manage to fire Nick Funtays as paymaster they didn't find it well yeah but you know what I mean this I think this is really interesting oh nevertheless but no but it is it is kind of fascinating one because I think that the the Funtays

um appearance on Tucker Carlson crystallized this you have a whole movement that has built itself on basically nanny and women will tell you not to say the bad words and with the guys who don't agree with that and then some people say things that you know Nick Funtays like quote in the story said I think women should be putting goo legs like Hitler put his enemies in goo legs we should do that with women and you know it's just no no one can say anything against that because that

with me you were kind of a cock like you were just a kind of panty wasting HR department me me me me me me me and it didn't matter for Nick Funtays own on sexism it matters for him over anti-Semitism

because they were enough powerful people in that coalition who just went this is our line and that

was fascinating to me was that you made your whole politics about having no line so how with the hell

“is anybody we're supposed to now ever go back and and enforce anything and you're right I think”

there is you know I think about the culture war ads you know you mentioned there the the sex change stuff I think you know cameras for they then which has been incredibly influential ad I think that worked because it tapped into a sense that democrats are focused on irrelevant issues for tiny minority groups however I think that the republicans should be very mindful of the other side of that which is Donald Trump in the middle of a huge inflation shock on coming gas

price rising going I actually don't care about any of that you know if you try in that context

like we just we could we hear a bit more about gas prices please and a little bit less about this

kind of stuff I got to go please to end I was trying to think about what novel would be kind of interesting and resonant with this discussion so I have christian malories owned double entry by B. S. Johnson and English right from the 20th century it is about a young alienated guy who discovers a double entry bookkeeping you know the idea that for every debit there's a credit and he decides that for every slide that's been done to him he gets now to enact one on society

“so you know someone brushes past him and then he gets to do something bad and I think it really”

captures some of that sense of just an uncaring world and and that kind of alienation so that's my first book recommendation my second recommendation is a very exotic and I'm very sorry I can't think of a less as recline book but I'm going to try and sell you on it anyway Nancy Mitford's biography of Madame de Pompador Mr Assembly the 15th of France no don't not me okay no no I'm not I'm not I'm not I'm

I'm not a good question like French royal history I've never had you down as a someone who's less

been to it but try Nancy Mitford she was a brilliant historical biographer she wrote by Chris

“of Frederick the Great of Louis the 14th of Sun King but I think this one is extraordinary so”

Louis the 15th is the King before the revolution right that was Louis the 16th and this is a portrait of Versailles during that period which is where all the French nobles were cooped up they didn't go and visit their lands and they had no idea of what it was like to live in the rest of the country

and it is this sort of sparkling anthropological study of an elite that have no idea that the

shadow of the guillotine is is creeping up on them and then my final choice when I was researching my book on genius um when the most insane stories that I find is about the genius sperm bank so I have

“brought the genius factory by David Plots which is the story of one mad eugenicist millionaire who decides”

that the way to solve all of America's problem is to get lots of Nobel Prize winners to donate their sperm and give it to couples to make babies let me just shock you doesn't go well a lot of the people turn out not to be Nobel Prize winners a lot of the people involved in it are very odd indeed and then when the press find out the whole thing kind of melts down one of the only people we know who was involved with that is William Shockley who won the Nobel Prize for

his role in the invention of the transistor and later became an enthusiastic proponent of a racial theories of IQ so it is it's a california story let me shock you we're going all about that it's a stereotype california tale of sperm and entrepreneurship and eugenics yeah so those are my three I can't believe you did that california here at the end of the show Calon Lewis thank you very much thank you

this episode of this screen just produced by any galvan fact checking by Michel Harris with Julie beer our senior audio engineer is Jeff Gelt with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Johnny Simon our executive producer is Claire Gordon the show's production team also includes Marie Cassion Roland who Kristen Lynn Emma Calback Jack McCordic Marina King and Yon Coble original music by Isaac Jones and Pat McCusker audience tragedy by Shannon Busta the director of

New York Times pinning audio is Annie Rose Strusser