The New Right’s Very Old Vision of Men

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1:00If you travel deep into the new right, 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 Kostin Vlad Alamaryu, who's better known as the Bronze Age pervert. You hear it in his longing for the Bronze Age. I am here just to spread the political views of the ancient Hittite empire or the ancient Mitanni empire. You hear it when the pastor Doug Wilson yearns for the time before the 19th Amendment.

1:34The 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 Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, 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.

2:09But Bronze Age pervert is a favorite of young drum staffers. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth invited Doug Wilson to preach at the Pentagon. Tucker Carlson is, well, he's 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 a return. It's 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.

2:40Helen Lewis is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Difficult Women, A History of Feminism in Eleven Fights and The Genius Myth. She's just written a great cover story for The Atlantic mapping this world. She calls it masculinism. 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. As always, my email is reclinenshow at NYTimes.com.

3:07Helen Lewis, welcome to the show. Thank you. So I want to start with a clip from Scott Jenner, a professor at Boies State University 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, meddlesome, and quarrelsome than women need to be. Without connections to eternity delivered through their family, such medicated, quarrelsome, and

3:40meddlesome 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.

4:00I thought that was as concise a description of this masculinism that you've been reporting on as I've heard from any 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.

4:31And therefore, their lives will essentially be 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 Jenner 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 I heard in that clip is an echo of the J.D. Vance miserable cat ladies clip that went around in the 2024 campaign. We're effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs,

5:02by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made. And so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too. Which I mentioned because I think it can be easy to look at Jenner and something people will 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 masculinism has become a kind

5:34of unifying theory on a MAGA right that in other ways is coming apart. So defend that for me a bit. Right. So you can see the splits of MAGA very obviously at the moment over the war in 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

6:05on 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 that represent them, the Democrats, feel sorry for all these underdogs who aren't really underdogs. They're kind of cancers on our society, like violent criminals or illegal immigrants.

6:36So, 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 manosphere 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 outriders. But this isn't just some, you know, over-steroided guys in tight t-shirts parading around

7:07in 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 simplest way to say it is that men would be the breadwinners and women would be homemakers. I mean, the kind of reference point always tends to be the 1950s, but it's a, you know, it's a very fake Pleasantville black and 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 Yenna, he mentioned there, one of his

7:39most 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, you know, to promote them 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, is, you know, it's back to being pin money. It's kind of secondary. So, it's worth, I think, for you to expand on that, which is to say, I think the core critique here and the core politics here is that modernity has thwarted

8:15masculinity. The arguments here, and we're going to tour through a number of them, 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 is hollow. People are working, as you mentioned, particularly women, these bullshit jobs in human resource

8:47management and in marketing and environmental protection, and men are caged in these little offices and, you know, doing retail work that is beneath them.

8:57And, you know, Jenner, 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 antidepressants. So you have this situation in which women, having anything that they feel is wrong in

9:28their lives, is taken as proof that they've picked the wrong course in life. And if only they would pick this alternative vision of femininity, they would be happy. And, you know, and 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 Mystique, 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 the bit that I struggle with as somebody who loves reading historical novels, historical fiction, historical biographies, is that, are we absolutely sure that women in 1700 were,

10:02you know, were living these incredibly blissful lives? That's not what you get from the literature of the period. In my first book, which is The History of Feminism, I wrote about some of the women who wrote to Marie Stopes, who was our kind of version of Margaret Sanger, a 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. You know, they were exhausted by their late 30s from this relentless tide of childbearing. And, but this is the kind of, you know, that has now, that era has now passed into memory

10:32long enough that it is susceptible to being, you know, revitalized by this, into this kind of tradwife vision that is, you know, sold to people on Instagram, because no one can really remember what it was like to live in those 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 a generous reader and I leave with more sympathy for it than I came in. And I read your piece and then I read The Last Man by Charles Cornish Dale, the raw egg nationalist. I read Bronze Age Mindset and it's one of the first times I can really remember coming

11:06out of something like this and thinking, oh, there was so much less there than I thought. Like, I just assumed that 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

11:36or 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. You know, and that's something that comes up a lot in The Last Man, the idea that, you

12:08know, elites are keeping you fat, they're keeping you low testosterone if you don't eat enough meat, you know, like vegans are oppressing you. Vegetarianism is a tool of social control to sap our vitality and make us easier and more obedient as subjects. But it's very interesting because clearly that has caught on because Arnold Schwarzenegger made a documentary about being vegetarian, except he'd rebranded it as plant-based. And it was all about how actually you could be an incredibly good weightlifter if you were on a plant-based diet. You could have incredibly strong erections on a plant-based diet.

12:38So clearly that has seeped into that discourse that there is something unmanly about not eating meat. But I think I like that book 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. There's a line in that says essentially that because of the fact that you're being kept in this, you know, rubbish jobs and you 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?

13:09And there's a bit like, well, 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 kind of, you've kept it lower, you've kept it more achievable. And that's the bit where I, that was a bit where I slightly parted company from it. That's where you parted company. Okay, let me describe the argument of this book because I think it actually gets at something that I want to try to do, which is it brings up some things really worth talking about and then goes in some really wild directions. You can correct me if you feel like I am being unfair in any part of this.

13:41The Last Men 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 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 a number of countries. There's also, and this is a big topic of discussion on the side, and I think like an actually important

14:11one that I wish the left would take more seriously. There is been a stain drop in fertility rates across many, many different countries. So relatively few liberal democracies are now at a replacement rate or above, if any of them are. I think Israel is, although whether Israel is a liberal democracy is its own question. So he sort of starts there and says, look, the core of masculinity, thymos or thymos, I don't know how to say the Greek word, is testosterone.

14:42So this thing that Francis Fukuyama is talking about in The End of History and the Last Man, this thing that Nietzsche is talking about, it's 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 find you to go a bit off the rails, a docile form of man who is suited for

15:16the long house of liberal democracy and not suited for the displays of dominance and hierarchy and the conquest and excellence that has driven civilization forward and defined man forever. And then, as you say, it kind of ends with a stirring call to throw out your plastic cutting boards and filter your water. But this is the argument, you know, that there's like a sort of, some stuff I actually agree with on chemicals, some stuff I'm generally worried about and hormonal changes. And then the sense that what's really happening here is the destruction of what it

15:50means to be a man and literally the vital fluids that make men manly. That's the 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, you're possibly violent, and you don't mind about inequality, you know, it's about the strong dominating the weak. And therefore, liberal democracy is inherently feminine because it's more concerned with making sure that the weak don't suffer too much, that there are, you know, there are equal rights for all. So it's very easy

16:21to see how that vision of masculinity maps onto kind of MAGA-rightism, definitely. The bit I find, I just, again, when I start drilling down into the examples, 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 thymus either. Oh, no, you're not saying that. So actually, you're just making very large sweeping claims about men are one thing and women are another thing. That kind of stuff, you know, sort of falls apart

16:53in your hands. But I also think that, don't you think it 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 emasculating. The kind of people who, if a woman upset them, the word bitch would be pretty close to their lips, right? That that's the, like, how dare you speak to me like that? You know, you're just a woman. And I think that's closer to the surface in men, even men who are otherwise impeccably liberal than perhaps we sometimes like to acknowledge. So I can see why this stuff

17:24does have a relatively wide appeal. 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

17:56driving forward through adversity, you know, lawsuits and electoral losses and made his own reality around him. That Trump, for all his sedentary lifestyle and obesity and the fact that he's, you know, in advanced age and, you know, I haven't measured his testosterone, but it's probably not that high anymore. But that 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,

18:29your kin, your country. And the liberal democracy had thwarted that until he came back and like bust through the, and showed you could still do this. But it's a, 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 Ken doll or a princess sparkle. Donald Trump is at the same time, a man who wears more makeup 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

19:04mean? So those aren't the things that they're emphasizing. They aren't 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 Butlerian level of gender performance. It is the most, like, cisgender performance of heteromasculinity you could possibly imagine. And Trump, I think, in some ways, what 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 goblin.

19:34Yeah, I personally 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 that kind of, you know, that sort of very terrified homophobia 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?

20:05He is a thinker whose real name is Kostin Alamariou. He's Romanian, and he has a kind of whole persona, which is about bodybuilding and eugenics and Nietzsche. Yeah, those are maybe his three favorite things. And again, it's, you know, there's a kind of almost like I am Dracula kind of level to the hamming up the accent and that kind of stuff. So once again, this is somebody who's playing a character on the internet. Yeah, it's very much the way I describe the book, which is aesthetically interesting,

20:37even if I think it's intellectually becomes a bit tedious. But it has this really like Nietzsche for Gooners quality. It's very, very, you know, like romantic poetry, but like filtered through 4chan lingo. Maybe it's worth it. I want to play a clip of this interview he did with Michael Malice 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,

21:13you know, and when I wrote this book in 2018, sorry to keep talking, Mike, if I may go. No, this is why you're here. But when I wrote this book in 2018, some people liked it because I expressed myself directly and with humor and so on. And they said, okay, Bap, this is very nice, but is it really true? And then what happened, you know, people will say, no, I planned it. No, I didn't plan it. The pandemic happened, which basically, I think, demonstrated the truth of what I'm saying.

21:45In the pandemic, in my view, was a mass sacrifice of the world's youth to the desires of disgusting old people who sacrificed the youth and also to women, frankly, especially, you know, the middle-aged sterile woman who made the pandemic procedures her whole life. It gave meaning to her 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-aged, middle-aged, sterile women.

22:16It's just, muah. So the reason I think that clip is useful, and, you know, this book, Bronze Age Mindset, got written up in the Claremont Review of Books. There are reports that most young staff in the Trump administration had read it. It had become like a piece of code, passed back and forth, samizdat. The reason I think that clip is interesting is it combines the two things the book does, which is this sense that there is something more than mere life, right? He says, the preservation of life at the expense of things that are exciting, great, and free.

22:46With the kind of campy provocateurism, like, oh, it makes me so excited to hear you say middle-aged, sterile women. What's this idea about privileging safety and mere life over things that are exciting and great and free? Well, this is the idea that women, because of their lack of thymus and testosterone, are, you know, weak and empathetic, and they don't want to put themselves in situations of danger.

23:16So 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 wanted to do anymore, particularly the 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 eight children to a preventable disease before the age of two. You know, I don't think they would have been talking about that when,

23:47immediately 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, are you all enjoying 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.

24:19So, you know, this, it's ironic that they, you know, they talk about Fukuyama 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 ennui, and they're going to have to find things to now 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 that. I hear, oh, that we're all having a go at Karen's on a podcast. Isn't it so spicy? And you think, how is, what has this got to do with the Spartans? You know, this is this just fake cosplay version of masculinity that everybody is kind of indulging in.

24:53You 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 LARPing 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, Bronze Age Pervert went to Yale, was it? Yeah, he's definitely spent a few terms teaching, I think, at Emory. But this is, you know, and that's the same thing with Lomas. He was an academic. Charles Cornish Dale has a PhD.

25:23You know, many of my friends are academics, but I can see how it slightly deranges people. This is an elite overproduction problem. Well, as soon as I was thinking about this, I started thinking about Peter Turchin's idea of surplus elites. 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 right is it can't seem to decide on when its nostalgia is for.

25:54Yeah. So there's a dimension of it that's for the 1950s. I think of that as more where Donald Trump has based his remembrance of politics. And he was around for that. So fair 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 Bronze Age Pervert, which is a numb to plume of one of these folks, who is trying to bring back a sort of pre-modern, much more directly pagan view.

26:26There's a lot of primitivism in all of this. A lot of society is filled with chemicals and endocrine disruptors, right? It connects to the Maha 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 agreement on it. No, you're right. You know, somebody like Doug Wilson, Pete Hegseth's congregation founder, you know, he seems like he basically sort of wants to live in Salem circa 1650, as far as I can see.

27:00The liberation of women was a false flag operation. The true goal was the liberation of libertine 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 Belial have the chusper to call it progress for women. That's, you know, that for him is his vision.

27:31Other 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 Spartans. Other of them take inspiration from kind of Nietzsche, which is interesting to me, right? So Nietzsche is writing these critiques 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?

28:02And it goes in the other direction, too. So one of the things I read for the piece was this very famous essay on the Longhouse by Lomas, which is constantly referred to. And his idea is that there were these matriarchal societies or there were these communal dining halls that were overseen by a den mother. And they were ruled by kind of petty bitching and backbiting and ostracism while the men were going out doing manly things. And one of the things I thought was, oh, right, that's interesting. I wonder what society he's referring to then. I should go out and read a bit more about what these places are actually like.

28:36And he's not referring to anything. He says there's no specific historical referent. And he says, in any case, one can't really define the Longhouse, 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 a vibe, really. But this is the grammar of a lot of this, this constant, are we joking?

29:09Are 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 in some ways, that is its point.

29:41One of the things many of these screeds say explicitly is that, you know, they're a reaction to empiricized, bloodlessly 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,

30:17the thing that you constantly got assailed with was, you know, you're just talking about feelings, you're not talking about facts. If you 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 interested in vibes again. But yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think I thought a lot about what the point of the offensiveness of the language is. And it's clearly part of it is about a kind of signal like we're all guys in here, you know, you know, you're cool with this, like a sort of initiation, right, essentially, like, you know, if you don't blanch at somebody using the N word in the group chat, that's it, you know, you're allowed in the club.

30:55And, and the other thing is about this idea that you just you trip up liberals, because essentially, you say, I want to sterilize retards. And then everybody goes, how dare you say the word retards? But what you've done is you've invoked a very old idea about sterilization of the unfit for breeding. And the idea would be just as abhorrent if you used extremely clinical language about it as your deliberately offensive, you know, firework language. But you've trapped your opponents at the level of kind of going, ah, ah, ah, about the exact words in 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.

31:31The 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, is battery cage modernity. And when he's talking about, you know, more than mere life and probably when he's talking about in the book, 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, 4chan poetic is that there has to be something more than this.

32:13That 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 that modernity has very little language for, particularly disenchant of modernity, than 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 immediate experience that industrial society alienates us from.

32:56I 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, right? Nietzsche goes mad after seeing a horse being beaten in the street and spends the last decades of his life just sitting in a corner, his mind completely broken. An icon of masculinity, if there ever was one. An icon of masculinity. Massive moustache, to be fair. He did have a very impressive moustache. But, you know, but also had these delusions of grandeur, right? He's got a book that's, I believe, literally called Why I Am So Great.

33:26You know, and the idea of the ubermensch is that everybody around you is essentially cattle, and you're not. And that is like, that is every member of the kind of intellectual dark webs theory of the universe, right? Was, oh, they're a sheeple, and everybody else is, 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 ubermensch that I think you really, that doesn't surprise that's a reference point to me there. The Christianity I struggle with more, right? So I'm not religious myself, but I was raised in a very religious household. My parents are Catholic.

33:57My dad was a deacon in 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. Their idea of Christianity was 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, even in the persona of Jesus, right? So the persona of Jesus in the Gospels, he says, blessed are the meek.

34:28Like, you know, he is in some ways an incredibly feminine figure, a passive one. He lets things happen to him. He doesn't storm into, you know, Pontius Pilate's front room with an AK-47 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 evangelical Christianity, had to retcon him as a much more masculine figure than the biblical record suggests. I raised this with someone, one of the pastors who I interviewed in Doug Wilson's church.

35:01And I, you know, I said this, I said, 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 moneylenders. 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 St. Paul than they are on Jesus because St. Paul was a preacher. He was a controversialist. You know, he was somebody who had a, you know, he had literally had a divine revelation, you know. And then he was also somebody who was patriarchal.

35:33There are lines from there saying, you know, godly women should be quiet. You know, women shouldn't be preaching. So, 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 turn out to be a terrible disappointment to them, which is just like somebody who was raised Catholic, just really funny.

36:04No, have we got another pope? Does he agree with? No, no, no. He also keeps saying things about the poor. Oh, gross. I mean, yeah, this is a practical 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 Ubermensch and Nietzsche. This is a quote from his book. He writes,

37:02And this is really the core politics of this book and a lot of these, which is that we have ended up in this Christianized, you know, liberal democracy that believes in equality. And in doing, are 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 Cleopatra?

37:38They 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 have written, do we want to return to a civil service run by eunuchs? Right. Is Elon Musk ready to make the ultimate sacrifice? Because actually, that's much better if you have a professional eunuch class who are looking after democracy. 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.

38:12Right. 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 at 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, Caligula.

38:42Probably 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 belief. 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 this will start getting into this real discussion of masculinity.

39:03I guess the argument they would make, let me try to steel man 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 society as 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 didn't realize it at the time, but we now know, are a potent driver of civilizational progress.

39:43And 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 misread? No, I think that's reasonable. And there is a kind of light side version of that, right? Which is that 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. So that, that, I'm not sure if that's so much about gender as it is about an aging society.

40:15If you live in a much younger society, then the young people are the kind of dominant force and they set the rules. Well, at the moment, we live by the baby boomers social, like their social conditions that they find most amenable to them. But the other bit that I think is worth taking away from this, and I, you know, I don't want to dismiss all this stuff out of 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 gurus, new gurus it was called. And, you know, one of the things I did was I went to a Brazilian jiu-jitsu gym. And I found, I talked to older guys who had, you know, lived a life and they were teaching younger men about controlling their aggression and how to channel that into positive ways.

40:52I 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 diagnoses in 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, put into this box that I think is particularly restrictive for boys.

41:35You 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 of one society aren't set up 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.

41:56One 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 in 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.

42:28Men today are five times likelier than in the 90s to say they don't have any close friends. They are four times more likely to die by suicide. Sometimes this can 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 boys are not doing great on their own terms. And the sense that, you know, perhaps society has evolved in a way, whether that is in terms of the chemical soup and the microplastics that we're all exposed to from childhood now all the way up to the structure of school, the structure of the workplace.

43:10The idea that it is more recently evolved in a way that is, you know, not good for boys and men, it's not a 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 girl-specific problems and there are boy-specific problems. And then there are some problems that affect all young people, you know, screen usage. But that you break that down and it affects boys and girls in different ways. Again, these on averages with huge amounts of exceptions, you know, we're always talking very broad brushstrokes here.

43:44But 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 more heavily peddled 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, like sexual violence being a very obvious example that, you know, women are oppressed by men.

44:23But I think we can also get to this stage now where we say it's not actually a competition. A lot of times it's capitalism is doing it to both boys and girls, doing unpleasant things, right? In 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, feminists from sort of framing everything in kind of men are doing this to us kind of way. And I think that the real downfall 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.

45:02And if we could just break that chain, those conversations would be a lot healthier. And I think liberals would be a lot happier in participating in them, right? If it can be actually maybe we got some bits of the COVID response wrong, schools should have opened earlier in California. That's a conversation people are going to be much happier 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 what else you have to say at that point. Sorry, if you can't keep a civil tug in your head, then we won't have this argument. 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 and in 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.

45:50Bronze Age Pervert, true to the name, is known for constantly posting pictures of, you know, tanned and muscled male bodies, raw egg nationalist, Charles Cornish Dale, weightlifter, 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 higher good. This is from the Bronze Age Pervert mindset in its sort of weird internet grammar.

46:24In same way, see from all this that aesthetic physique has the most cosmic significance. And it is 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.

46:37The book is full of just like hatred for the obese. He keeps calling it like yeasty, you know, physiques. You know, I see Clavicular, who, you know, is like the biggest streamer of the moment, who is this looks maxer, who has like, I think has become deranged and is clearly in a very unhealthy spiral, appearing in court, overdosing on live streaming. You know, as he has this like 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 very rapidly, it seems to me, among men.

47:14And 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 homosocial 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 would talk about women's intrasocial, intrasexual competition and the fact that they were all kind of doing 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 it is done to impress other men at the same time as having this intense anxiety about homosexuality.

47:49But it also has this deep, and that quote you bring out has this deeper eugenic quality to it, right? If you go back and read Buck v. Bell, the famous eugenic judgment by the Supreme Court, you know, this idea of the unfit, you know, the morons, the imbeciles, and then the physically handicapped, and the degenerate, you know, that kind of Nazi language. There is the idea that there are life's winners who are physically perfect and mentally acute, and then there are life's losers who are, you can even read in their features that they are subhuman.

48:23You know, that's got such a long, dark history. Even in America, on the left, as well as the right, you know, even 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 would come back have come back. This idea that there are kind of, yeah, there are sort of subhumans, you know, you find them all that so often in the kind of right-wing and non-discourse on things like X.

49:01You see it all over these books, too. I mean, there's an explicit 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 anti-Semitism. And he, you know, tries to soften it by saying, well, when I say the Jews, I'm not saying just the Jews or all the Jews, but it's straightforward. I mean, you know, he uses the term directly, which is maybe to say all this is very old.

49:37This 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 is all making this argument that modernity has taken a wrong turn. It has taken a wrong turn 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, you know, sexual facts.

50:12But a huge amount of it is just about the past versus the present and whether or not our modern values are a betrayal of our baser and more fundamental instincts. I mean, that's why it's appealing, because it's saying if you are alive today and unhappy, it's because of modernity. And it may be any other number of other things, but it gives, you know, it specifically addresses itself to people who are alienated by society in whatever way it might be and latches onto that.

50:47You know, who does someone like Andrew Tate appeal to, to go back to the kind of broader manosphere? 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 patriarchs 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 are going to want to date you. It preys 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 divorcees, who were also absolutely primed to hear some, you know, thoughts about how women are pretty awful.

51:22And, you know, I think that is really sad because that's the bit where I find these people quite predatory if they are taking people who have got genuine personal problems and supplying a kind of ready-made, 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, you know, having agency. But if you feel that the world is this gynocracy, then, like, how?

51:54How 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 stew.

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54:06We'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 as more of an actionable set of policy ideas is by Helen Andrews in her essay, The Great Feminization. So who's Helen Andrews and what was the argument of that piece? Helen Andrews writes for Compact magazine. And the argument with that, it starts with Larry Summers being outed from president of Harvard in the 2000s.

54:37And this is the kind of first moment, really, when there were so many women in academia that they had a hysterical overreaction to his public comments that maybe there weren't so many women in STEM because, you know, 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, far more female doctors, far more female academics. And they are not interested in the pursuit of truth and justice and rigor.

55:10They 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 instead end up having a kind of hippie kumbaya 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 and then I tried to go through the specific evidential claims that were being made and see whether or not they stack up.

55:44One of which being that wokeness is an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization. There's something to practice as a tongue twister. But the idea 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 characterized that period of whatever you want to call that peak woke of 2020. And it was incredibly viral essay. I wrote a lot of articles taking issue with some of the things that happened in that period. I don't know if you can separate out correlation and causation in all of those times.

56:17I don't think you can ever draw a neat line, which is when women in an organization get above 60 percent, then organization collapses. And that's kind of the claim that basically Andrews makes, which is that, you know, these bureaucracies run by women become just self-perpetuating and squalid. Well, you know, go and read like, you know, the government inspector or something like that. Bureaucracies have been, Kafka was onto this when it was all men. This is just a quality of bureaucracy. It's just now that we have moved into a situation in which the majority of people in things like HR, university administration, you know, they are female, that it's become, well, hang on a minute, this is just yet another sign of creeping evil feminization.

56:57The 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 reveal his views 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-y going on. The other thing that I found out was 2006, the year that happened, four fifths of Harvard's tenured faculty were men.

57:32So, 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 and maddening. And she was on Ross's show, which is an episode worth watching, debating that.

58:03But her argument... Well, she was on exactly the same problem in that episode of Ross's show. She's on with Leila Bresko Sargent, and they bring up a discrimination case, which she frames as being some women ejected to a kind of slightly porny poster. And it turns out to have been a pretty explicitly pornographic poster, and the woman, you know, in a very male-dominated workplace experienced that as sexually aggressive. Once you get to that stage with an 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,

58:35or have you just, you know, have you come to your conclusion first and just have this chain of stuff that lines up? That, to me, is fatal. So, I tried, you know, like you, I tried to read things with an open mind. I think she captured something important that many people felt, otherwise there wouldn't have been such a reaction to it. But I 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.

59:09Cancellation is a feminine punishment, whereas getting punched in the face is a male punishment. And so, this age of cancellation just reflected the tipping point of women taking over workforces. Amongst other completely obvious questions about this, is cancellation an 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?

59:41Or when they went around firing anybody who would use the 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 the primary communications platforms.

1:00:17And in this period, you also have Slack coming into workplaces. And it creates this capacity for, like, individual instances to be raised up, to ricochet everywhere. And, but you can just look around. You look on the right. You look, as you're noting, I mean, did the communists not cancel people? Did they handle everything by having, like, an upfront, direct discussion about their differences in which the men hashed it out and got to a truth outcome? Was Senator McCarthy actually secretly a woman?

1:00:49This is a really big thing that we should know. But, like, 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 in which women were explicitly second-class citizens. You can take all the women out and people will still decide 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.

1:01:22But is that just part of a wider social shift away from violence? Someone like Steven Pinker would argue that's just true. We live in a less violent society than our equivalent countries were in 1800 when people were dueling. And is that about women's entry into the public square? Maybe it is. But maybe it's also about, you know, 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.

1:01:52So, 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.

1:02:33One thing I found strange about BAP, about The Last Men, which particularly I found this flaw in, you know, he has all this 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, like, slather? Like, I don't want to be slathered in testosterone and become worse at cooperation. I have enough trouble, like, limiting my own competitive instincts as it is.

1:03:05And, you know, it's in Helen Andrews' piece, too, that, you know, what she, in some ways, if I'm going to be maximally generous, is talking about the HR-ification of, you know, modernity. And, yes, in modernity, 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 problems 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.

1:03:43And 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. It's funny, yeah, it's funny you say that because it made me think that none of these things are the things that I love about men.

1:04:14You know, I'm someone who's always had loads of male friends. I've been very happily married for a decade. And some of the things I love about men are, for example, their ability to become completely nerdily 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 are 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 word I would put is comfortable. You know, that idea of the great thing that you become a dad or you follow your interests and you become comfortable with the person you are and you just radiate that.

1:04:49Maybe, you know, maybe you are a bit weird. Maybe you're into model trains, whatever it might be. That's all good. You know, 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, I was just having a conversation in my article with somebody who said, oh yeah, no, 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.

1:05:21But, you know, I just think if you really want a successful relationship with a woman, probably looks-maxing is less good than being thoughtful, sending a gift occasionally. I think if you ask, I mean, I'm speaking on behalf of all women here, always a good idea. But if you said, do you want 10 out of 10 incredibly chiseled ab 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 Hottie.

1:05:52I just think that's how it works. And I think that's, again, is kind of, it's a big part of this political project. It's very difficult to accomplish if women don't have to put up with it. But what I find so unsettling about the visions of masculinity in lots of these books is they seem so anxious at the same time as calling women anxious. They seem so unsettled, so on an edge. They don't feel happy. They feel stressful to me. 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 nerdily obsessed with issues.

1:06:24I 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.

1:06:58And yes, testosterone and thymos in a direction that is prosocial, 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 that's why, as with many eugenicist fans, lots of these people don't have kids themselves. And also while having lots of attacks on childless cat ladies, lots of these people also don't have children. As I read more of this and I read some of the people you had written about, this is what I mean, that I came out less sympathetic to all this and I went into it with.

1:07:37I had assumed that all this 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 endless amount of sexual harassment, his inability to control himself and be decent to other people.

1:08:20You have Nick Fuentes, this like incel in a basement, railing against women, unmarried, has no children, does not connect himself in obligations to others, to community, to any of the things that build the kind of civilization. He claims to want Doug Wilson, this Christian nationals pastor, who, as you mentioned, is the founder of the sect Pete Hegseth is in. Pete Hegseth has tweeted out Doug Wilson's attacks on women voting.

1:08:52Doug Wilson, who 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 a sermon, where is a sermon of the mount in any of his work? I find it appalling. I really, this was the part that, like, 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 did not create space for a healthy vision of masculinity.

1:09:26I 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. Forget to be a man, it means 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.

1:09:57I think it's a recipe for both violence in 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 that commitment to stay together. It's not like if one of you leaves, you'll be destitute or, you know, whatever it might be. Or you're living in fear all the time. You have freely made this commitment. To me, that is a much more positive vision for a heterosexual relationship than the kind of thing that I'm seeing in this,

1:10:28which is, you know, about kind of, you know, capturing a woman and kind of holding on tight to her. And having these kids that are there because essentially they're 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 Genghis Khan. I mean, man, so many friends I know have, like, zero or one kid. That's why I'm, like, I'm always banging the baby drum. I'm like, man, civilization's going to, you know, collapse. No big deal. Well, yeah.

1:10:59Yeah, like, where do you think people come from? Like, some magical fucking people's factory? Where's the bit in that about how joyful it is to be raising children? You know, the idea that, you know, these are their own independent human beings. They're not really, you know, the carriers of your glorious surname into eternity. I didn't have a particularly emotional reaction to it. And 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.

1:11:31It's so casually indulged. It's not treated seriously. If these guys were 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 Fuentes 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, rombustious battle that sex is fun. I mean, I know that these people despise me and everything about my life.

1:12:02And 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 why it's so popular now is 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.

1:12:36I care about it because it is actually popular. Not necessarily some of the individual people we're talking here, but Andrew Tate clips, Nick Fuentes clips, right? These things are exerting 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.

1:13:04And that, I think, is really dangerous. I see this in a weird way with clavicular, this look-maxer. Here's somebody who has cleaved the desire to become maximally attractive from all the things that that desire is supposed to do for you. He has talked about how it has made him infertile. He has talked about how he couldn't possibly have a girlfriend because of the lifestyle he now leads.

1:13:31It'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 don't think what he's doing is good for him. Um, I don't think it's what attractiveness means. And I worry about all these, like, young boys who are now growing up in an online environment where they're being told this is what it means to be attractive. I don't think this is what women find attractive. Like, but it's cleaved off from all these other things that make somebody a compelling person, their warmth, their, like, their imperfections also.

1:14:08And I'm also, I will say this, that I think that the idea that liberalism, writ broadly, had so little of value to say about what it meant to be a man or a boy for so long. And we created this sort of social media world and often partnered with the people running it. You know, Mark Zuckerberg, a liberal in good standing for many years. And, like, abandoned kids into this, like, farm of extremism and, like, just created a space where any of this could thrive, where there wasn't a better competitor to it.

1:14:45And there's a lot going on in society, none of it's monocausal. 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 self-improvement that feels vital to people.

1:15:24Yeah, I think about this a lot. Because, you know, it's 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 to your life and a rhythm of your life, too. You know, the church in which I grew up, we had Palm Sunday and Easter and then you have Harvest Festival and then Advent and Christmas. You know, there is a sense of, like, 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.

1:15:54There are kind of rituals within that that are 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 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 all essentially spending six hours a day staring at a tiny little portal into madness. Right. And I wish I could give it up. I feel like one of those people who goes, well, of course, eating meat is terrible. And they're like, do you still like burgers?

1:16:25I do. And that's probably also true. But with the digital world, we have essentially hooked everybody up to a little dopamine drip. And I think that, you know, the effects of that are particularly on young people who are still forming their opinions. If you look now at young men and women's political attitudes, you find this replication of young women are more left wing and young men are more right wing in lots and lots of countries now. It's a 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 or the pool hall or wherever it might be.

1:17:03And those are really unhealthy things. Alice Evans has this theory, the sociologist, about young people de-radicalizing 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 of ennui and 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.

1:17:35One 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 BAP, 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.

1:18:12And I do think there's a hunger for more beauty in our lives, for politics to have aesthetic opinions. And so 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 modernity is we've abandoned having sufficient views and emphasis on the beauty of our surroundings, our spaces, of our culture.

1:18:43That'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 what you, 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 focused slogans and the kind of, you know, sort of lightweight corporate you go girlism.

1:19:15But 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 and Palestine plushies and stuff like that. But the mainstream Democratic Party does not have a consistent aesthetic in the way that MAGA does. 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 its own aesthetic.

1:19:49One thing about the Zeran Mamdani campaign is it had a real aesthetic. It had colors. He dresses in a very certain way everywhere. Obama, 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 an aesthetic. But one reason I think you see a much more thoroughgoing one in MAGA, an 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.

1:20:24And so it gives you the capacity to choose an aesthetic from the past you prefer and say, that, that is beauty. And I think that when you're dealing with liberalism or other forms of left ideology or more left ideology in the American context, it's harder because you can't as naturally reach backwards. If you're so focused on critiques of the past, then endlessly you have to modernize it.

1:20:56So Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda has a 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 reasons that the left has more trouble answering the question of what is beautiful is that 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.

1:21:29Actually, Andy Burnham here in England is now running in a by-election from which he hopes is a springboard to then run for the Labour leadership and become prime minister. Then he put out an advert. Now, the soundtrack is Oasis, you know, so there's a 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 is being built, which I always thought would be the centerpiece of any kind of Gavin Newsom presidential run, right? Like California, the place of the future. There's a bit of a problem with that, though, right, which is that, and again, this maybe comes back to the aging society.

1:22:02How 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 Waymo's, 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.

1:22:32But 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-y and a little techno-punk, then you're not left with very much because you don't like the past.

1:23:04You're not comfortable with the future. Donald Trump is president in the present, 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 the UFC on the lawn for, you know, the 250th and, you know, and Hulk Hogan at the RNC.

1:23:35His aesthetic's in a funny way, very camp, but they're at least very central to him and his vision of politics. And we're in a much more visual culture. The way the platforms has moved is much more visual. And I don't think political movements that 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 compete well in this era. But that's also about the left tastemaker's hatred of the middle brow. I mean, just to take architecture, right?

1:24:06You have to show that you are a refined person by liking brutalism. And if you just preferred a nice Doric column and a nice whitewashed, 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 normie person. And, you know, 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 the time of 2016 election, right?

1:24:38Everything he owns is covered in gold, which is what you kind of think, like I said, I certainly had loads of money. Why wouldn't I cover anything in gold? Whereas the thing that if you're a high net worth person who flies on pirate jets and reads, you know, Condé Nast Traveller 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, presumably he wants that ballroom to look like the Roman forum that people might have seen on, you know, on their holiday in Italy.

1:25:12So this is a bit about the kind of the left's hatred of, yeah, of the middle brown, the popular and the mainstream. The best politics are always cringe. I mean, you mentioned Hamilton.