[Ezra Klein]: If 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 Cost Vlad Alamaru, who's better known as the Bronze Age pervert. You hear it in his longing for the Bronze Age.

[Bronze Age Pervert]: I am here just to spread the political views of the ancient Hittite Empire or the ancient Mitani Empire.

[Ezra Klein]: You hear it when the pastor Doug Wilson yearns for the time before the 19th amendment.

[Doug Wilson]: 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.

[Ezra Klein]: You hear it in the increasingly constant idealization of 1950s America? Why wouldn't you design a system consistent with nature?

[Interviewee]: What would that look like to you? It would look like what we had before Betty Friedan wrote the feminist mystique, before lifestyle feminism dominated every institution in the west.

[Ezra Klein]: 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 Trump 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 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 staff writer of the Atlantic and the author of Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 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.

[Ezra Klein]: Helen Lewis, welcome to the show.

[Helen Lewis]: Thank you.

[Ezra Klein]: So, I want to start with a clip from Scott Yenner, a professor at Boise State University that I think is a good place to start.

[Scott Yenner]: 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, mealsome, and quarrelome than women need to be. Without connections to eternity delivered through their family, such medicated, quarrelsome, and mealsome 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.

[Ezra Klein]: I 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 spitting out here.

[Helen Lewis]: 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 in instead into pursuing careers which aren't real jobs. They're not doing anything of any merit anyway. And therefore, their lives will essentially be empty and pointless. But I find it I I like my job. And I also feel that my job is equal social worth to Scott Yenner 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 JD 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 by 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 mention because I think it can be easy to look at Yenner 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 of unifying theory on a MAGA right that in other ways is coming apart. So defend that for me a bit.

[Helen Lewis]: Right. So you can see the splits in 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 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 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. So, this is a very coherent ideology. And the reason that 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, these provocators 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, over steroided guys in tight t-shirts parading around in nightclubs for the Graham. 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.

[Ezra Klein]: What does that vision look like?

[Helen Lewis]: 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 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 Yenner, 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 them more, to pay them higher salaries. What we want to do is essentially restore a traditional way of life in which men are the ones who go out and earn money. And women's money, if anything is, is back to being pin money. It's kind of secondary.

[Ezra Klein]: So I think it's worth 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 masculinity. The arguments here, and we're going to tore 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 jobs in human resource management and in marketing and environmental protection and men are caged in these little offices and doing retail work that is beneath them and you know Yenner in that 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 level being made.

[Helen Lewis]: 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 course 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 mystique when she was talking about specifically the unhappiness of stay-at-home housewives. She said, 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 living these incredibly blissful lives? That's not what you get from the literature of the period. In my first book, which is a history of feminism, I wrote about some of the women who wrote to Mary 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 than they can afford. They didn't know how to stop having anymore. They were exhausted by their late 30s from this relentless tide of childbearing. But this is the kind of that era has now passed into memory long enough that it is susceptible to being revitalized by this into this kind of tradition that is now sold to people on Instagram because no one can really remember what it was like to live in those conditions anymore.

[Ezra Klein]: 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 a usually 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 out of something like this and thinking, "Oh, there was so much less there than I thought." Like, I just assume 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 or find yourself responding to?

[Helen Lewis]: I do find the kind of battery cage idea of humanity to be quite compelling. I know that I'm sure I would 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 like vegans are oppressing you.

[Ezra Klein]: 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. So 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 as there's a line in that says essentially that because of the fact that you're being kept in this 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 and there's a bit like well you should chuck out your plastic chopping board and I was just like oh I was sort of expecting you to advocate fascism at the end, but you've kind of kept it lower. You've kept it more achievable and that's the bit where I slightly parted company from it.

[Helen Lewis]: 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 here, 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. The 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 this side and I think an actually important one that I wish the left would take more seriously. There is been a sustained drop in fertility rates across many many different countries. So relatively few liberal democracies are now at a at 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 thyos I don't know how you say the Greek word is testosterone the this thing that Francis Fukuyama is talking about in the end of history in the last man this thing that n is talking about 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 it, destroying it with chemicals in the water. And it is creating and is maybe a sort of actual effort to create. A docile form of man who is suited for the 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, that there's some stuff I actually agree with on chemicals, some stuff I'm generally worried about and hormonal changes. And then this sense that what's really happening here is the destruction of what it means to be a man and the literally the vital fluids that make men manly. That's the book.

[Helen Lewis]: Right? But there is an obvious overlaid political valence on this which is that this idea that if you're high T you're risktaking, you're possibly violent and you don't mind about inequality. 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 equal rights for all. So it's very easy to see how that vision of masculinity maps onto kind of MAGAism. Definitely the bit I find I just again when I start drilling down into the examples it's 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. 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 sort of falls apart in your hands. But I also think that don't you think it does speak to some people? It 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 would be pretty close to their lips, right? That's the like how dare you speak to me like that. 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 does have a relatively wide appeal.

[Ezra Klein]: 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, 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, 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 in advanced age and 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, your 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 an incredible cherrypick, isn't it, about Donald Trump the ultimate alpha male. In the same way that, this is what I find very difficult about all of this literature is 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. 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 emphasizing.

[Helen Lewis]: 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 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 goblet.

[Ezra Klein]: Yeah I personally find that much more appealing than I do the very pompous we're all going to have a sauna together in us guys but you know it's definitely not gay kind of that sort of very terrified homophobia that sometimes comes out of some of those communities.

[Ezra Klein]: 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 right as this guy bronze age pervert. Can you describe who that is?

[Helen Lewis]: He is a thinker whose real name is Costen Alamario. He's Romanian and he has a kind of whole persona which is about bodybuilding and eugenics and nature. Yeah, that's those are his maybe his three favorite things. And again, it's 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.

[Ezra Klein]: Yeah, it's very much the way I describe the book, which is aesthetically interesting, even if I think it's intellectually becomes a bit tedious, but it has this really like niche for gooners quality. It's very um you know like romantic poetry but like filtered through 4chan lingo. Maybe it's worth I want to play a clip of this interview he did with Michael Malice in 2024 talking about the problems of modernity.

[Bronze Age Pervert]: Why is it disgusting? It's because it privileges safety and near life, the preservation of life at the expense of things that are exciting and great and free. And 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, "Oh, okay, Bap, this is very nice, but is it really true?" And then what happened 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 youth to the desires of disgusting old people who sacrificed the youth and also to women frankly especially the middle-aged sterile woman who made the pandemic procedures her whole life it gave meaning to her life you saw it in action.

[Ezra Klein]: I can't tell you how much joy it brings me to hear you with your accent say the phrase these middle-aged sterile women. It's just.

[Helen Lewis]: So the reason I think that clip is useful and this book bronze age mindset got written up in the Claremont Review of Books. There reports that most young staff in the Trump administration had read it. It had become a like a piece of code passed back and forth. 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 with the kind of campy provocatorism. 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 thymos and testosterone are, weak and empathetic and they don't want to put themselves in situations of danger. So, this is the idea that essentially the whole world is 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. 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 2 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. So, it's ironic that 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, 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? this is just fake cosplay version of masculinity that everybody is indulging in. 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.

[Ezra Klein]: I think the laring point of that is I think very important because it is a bunch of intellectuals in elite competition with other intellectuals, a bunch of humanities academics. I mean, Bronze Age pervert went to Yale, was it? He's definitely spent a few terms teaching I think at Emory but this is and that's the same thing with Lomez he was an academic Charles Cornish Dale has a PhD I'm many of my friends are academics but I can see how it slightly deranges people.

[Helen Lewis]: There's an elite overproduction problem.

[Ezra Klein]: Right it does it as soon as I was thinking about this I started thinking about Peter Turchin's idea of surplus elites that 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 had that same kind of yearning in them to be intellectuals and to be taken seriously and this provides an outlet for that.

[Ezra Klein]: One thing that I find interesting about the modern right is it can't seem to decide on when its nostalgia is for.

[Helen Lewis]: Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]: 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 to a sort of premodern 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 MAGA 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.

[Helen Lewis]: No, you're right. Some, somebody like Doug Wilson, Pete Hegseth's congregation founder, he seems to like he basically sort of wants to live in Salem circa 1650. As far as I can see,

[Doug Wilson]: The 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 chutzpah to call it progress for women.

[Helen Lewis]: 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 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 critiques of modernity at the end of the 19th century at which point he is 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. 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 Lomez 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 denmother and they were ruled by kind of petty bitching and backbiting and ostracism where 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." 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 a vibe really.

[Ezra Klein]: 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 in some ways that is its point. One of the things many of these screeds are say explicitly is that 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.

[Helen Lewis]: Right. But that does get on my nerves because as somebody who spent a decade writing about feminism, the thing that you constantly got assailed with was why 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 interesting in vibes again but yeah I think that's exactly right 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're cool with this like a sort of initiation right essentially like if you don't blanch at somebody using the n-word in the group chat That's it. You're allowed in the club. And the other thing is about this idea that you just trip up liberals because essentially you say, "I want to sterilize retards." And then everybody goes, "How dare you say the word retards?" Well, 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, firework language. But you've trapped your opponents at the level of kind of going huh about the exact words in which you're wrapping it.

[Ezra Klein]: 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 is battery cage modernity and when he's talking about 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 4chan poetic is that there has to be something more than this that there has to be a way that is more authentic to be 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 disenchanted modernity than this and the place where the book has genuine moments of appeal and inspiration is in the channeling of that sense which is a very old sense.

[Helen Lewis]: That there is some form of 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. 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 masculinity. if there ever was.

[Ezra Klein]: I masculinity massive mustache to be fair he did have a very impressive mustache but also had these delusions of grandeur right he's got a book that's I believe literally called why I am so great and the idea of the 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 them 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 so I'm not religious myself but I was raised in a very religious household my parents are Catholic my 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 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 like their idea of 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 it he is in some ways an incredibly feminine figure passive one he lets things happen to him he doesn't storm into 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 wreck on him as a much more masculine figure than the biblical record suggests. I raised this with someone, one of the pastors I interviewed in Doug Wilson's church, and 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 the tables in the temple, the money lenders." So, 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. He was somebody who had literally had a divine revelation. And then he was also somebody who was patriarchal. There are lines from there saying, godly women should be quiet. women shouldn't be preaching. So, the relationship with Christianity is also very tense, I think.

[Ezra Klein]: 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.

[Helen Lewis]: Well, it's also very funny because successive popes just turn out to be a terrible disappointment to them, which is just like somebody was raised Catholic, just really funny. No, have we got another pope? Does he agree with No, no, no. He also keeps saying things about the poor. Oh, gross.

[Ezra Klein]: 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, "Nietzsche never forgot that the fundamental fact of nature is inequality." And this is something these people, the followers of Heidegger and Heidegger himself to a 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 find solace and meaning only in submission. It is good that this is so, and they shouldn't be made to feel shame 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 that believes in equality and in doing are subverting and denying the hierarchical dominance and obedience structures of nature.

[Helen Lewis]: 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? 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 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, right? 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 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 Caligula. Probably not. You're probably going to end up as a essentially a 12-year-old girl who got raped by her master every night. 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.

[Ezra Klein]: Sure. And this will start getting into this real discussion of masculinity. The I guess the argument they would make, let me try to steal man this is of course I 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 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 misread?

[Helen Lewis]: 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. That 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 are the dominant force and they set the rules. Well, at the moment, we live by the baby boomer's social conditions that they find most amenable to them. But the other bit that I think is worth taking away from this and I don't want to dismiss all this stuff out of hand. 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 8 hours a day and 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 diagnosing 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. 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 modern society aren't set up well for boys.

[Ezra Klein]: 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 one place a lot of these ideas have magnetized tors 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. Men 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 like a competitive race with girls like as if 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 perhaps society's 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 the idea that it is more recently evolved in a way that is not good for boys and men it's not a crazy thought and I think is something worth when you look at this data taking seriously.

[Helen Lewis]: 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 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 we're always talking very broad brush strokes here but there is some evidence I think that things like comparing yourself to other bodies and faces on Instagram hits girls particularly harder. 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. Those things are more heavily peddled to men. We know that the majority of problem gamblers are men, but this comes out, 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 there are still things in ways in which like sexual violence being a very obvious example that 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 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 this slightly new way of talking. I try and discourage feminists from 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 some point women's fault. And 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. Cuz 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 tongue in your head, then we won't have this argument.

[Ezra Klein]: 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. Bronze Age pervert, true to the name, is known for constantly posting pictures of tanned and muscled male bodies. Raw egg nationalist Charles Cornish Dale weightlifter you 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 mindset in its sort of weird internet grammar. "In 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 are the pinnacle of nature." The book is full of just like hatred for the obese he keeps calling like yeasty physiques. You now see Clavvicular who is like the biggest streamer of the moment who is this looks maxer who has I think has become deranged and is clearly in a very unhealthy spiral appearing in court overdosing on live streaming, as he has this like crazy stack of testosterone and other things that have made him infertile. it like you're watching like a mass social body dysmorphia emerge very 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 selfmastery or discipline for men but it's all this homosocial weightlifting competition.

[Helen Lewis]: 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 as intrasexual competition and the fact that they were all kind of doing all these sort of things for each other. And I think, 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, but 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 versus Bell, the famous eugenic judgment by the Supreme Court, this idea of the unfit, the morons, the imbeciles, and then the physically handicapped and the degenerate, 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. Yeah. That's got such a long dark history. in even in America on the left as well as the right 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 we like to think that all 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 sort of subhumans, you find them all that so often in the kind of right-wing and non-discourse on things like X. You 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 palid, nerdy, they've made everybody want to be these intellectual, conceptual, not sort of connected to the real vital forces of being alive. And I mean, this is very old-fashioned anti-semitism. And he tries to soften him 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 he uses the term directly which is maybe to say all this is very old.

[Ezra Klein]: This is all very old and it expresses itself as old, right? It's bronze age. It's 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 sexual facts, but a huge amount of it 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 specifically addresses itself to people who are alienated by society in whatever way it might be and latches on to that 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're getting all these messages about how men are patriarchs and toxic masculinity and blah blah blah but you are maybe small and frightened and you don't really know if you're going to have any friends or girls who want going to want to date you. It preys on people at the most insecure moments of their life. For a long time, the men's rights internet was specifically aimed itself to like recent divorcees who were also absolutely primed to hear some thoughts about how women are kind of pretty awful. And 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 cuz they all believe very much in having agency. But if you feel that the world is this gyrocracy then like how are you supposed to navigate that? You just keep consuming more of their content and kind of wallowing in your own stew.

[Ezra Klein]: 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 as more of an actionable set of policy ideas is by Helen Andrews in her essay the great feminization. So who is 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 ousted from president of Harvard in the 2000s and 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 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 for far more female doctors, far more 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 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 in that 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 epiphenomenon of demographic feminization. There's a something to practice as a tongue twister. But the idea essentially that the 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. 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-perpetuating and squalid well you know go and read like the government inspector or something like that bureaucracies have been cfka was onto this when it was all men this is just a quality of bureaucracy it's just now that the we have moved into a situation in which the majority to people in things like HR, university administration, they are female that it's become, well, hang on a minute, this is just yet another sign of creeping evil feminization. The other one that got to me was 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 to on gender to be. And I'm not entirely confident that I want to say that his colleagues who 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 politicsy going on. The other thing that I found out was 2006, the year that happened, four-fifths of Harvard's tenure faculty were men. So the claim is, yeah, 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.

[Ezra Klein]: I found that essay so strange and maddening. She was on Ross' show, which is an episode worth watching, debating that. But her argument,

[Helen Lewis]: well, she was on exactly the same problem in that episode of Ross' Show. She's on with Leila Labresco Sergeant, 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, 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 pre represented this or have you just come to a conclusion first and just had this chain of stuff that lines up below it that to me is is fatal. So I tried, I 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.

[Ezra Klein]: 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 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 work forces among just 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 or when they went around firing anybody who had used the term diversity in a grant application. was that cancellation being done by a very male-dominated structure. 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 and 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 a upfront direct discussion about their differences in which the men hashed it out and got to a truth outcome.

[Helen Lewis]: was Senator McCarthy actually secretly a woman is a really big thing we should know but like the so um Even the word ostracism, right? The word ostracism comes from the ancient Greek practice of writing down people's names on 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 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 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 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.

[Ezra Klein]: So I think dueling was bad.

[Helen Lewis]: Big strong. I'm going to make this claim.

[Ezra Klein]: 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 BAP, about the last men, which particularly I found this flaw in, 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 limiting my own competitive instincts as it is. And it's in Helen Andrew's piece too that what she in some ways if I'm going to be maximally generous is talking about the HRification of 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. 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.

[Helen Lewis]: 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. I'm someone who's always had loads of male friends and very happily married for a decade. And some of the things I love about men are, for example, their ability to become completely nerdly obsessed with very stupid things. That level of intensity of focus. I absolutely love my dad's terrible jokes that are passed into family law that we all repeat back to him. There are just so many different models of masculinity that are just I think the word I would put is comfortable. 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. 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. I was just having a conversation about my article with somebody 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 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'm speaking on behalf of all women here always a good idea but if you said do you want like 10 out of 10 incredibly chiseled boyfriend or do you want one who 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. I just think that's how it works. And I think that's again is 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 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 their edge. 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.

[Ezra Klein]: 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 selfmastery and discipline. It is a way of channeling strength and competitiveness and aggression and yes, testosterone and thymos in a direction that is 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.

[Helen Lewis]: But that's by 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. Yes.

[Ezra Klein]: Lots of these people also don't have children. They it was this 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 virtue 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. You have Nick Fuentes. It's like incel in a basement railing against women's 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 national Christian nationalists pastor who as you mentioned is the founder of the se Pete Hegseth is in Pete Hegseth has tweeted out his Doug Wilson's attacks on women voting. Doug 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 a part that like I actually found myself having a more emotional reaction to like where any good men here. I'm not against the critique that the left did not create space for a healthy vision of masculinity. I agree with that critique. But this is so warped where these people have ended up. This is a terrible vision of what it means for a man. It means to be an adult.

[Helen Lewis]: Yeah. I don't want to live in the world that they envision. I think it's also a recipe for anxiety. 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 is 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 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'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, which is about capturing a woman and 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 make himself the modern Genghis Khan.

[Ezra Klein]: I mean, man, so many of friends I know have like zero one kid.

[Helen Lewis]: That's why I'm like I'm always banging the baby drum. I like cuz I'm like, man, civilization's going to collapse and no big deal.

[Ezra Klein]: Yeah. I'm like, where do you think people come from? Like some magical people factory.

[Helen Lewis]: Where's the bit in that about how joyful it is to be raising children? The idea that these are their own independent human beings. They're not 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. It'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 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 standup comics doing stuff about how their girlfriend is annoying. This is all kind of good old boys battle. 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. 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.

[Ezra Klein]: 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 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. And that I think is really dangerous. I see this in a weird way with Clavvicular. This looks 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.

[Helen Lewis]: Right.

[Ezra Klein]: Right. He has talked about how it has made him infertile.

[Helen Lewis]: He has talked about how he couldn't possibly have a girlfriend because of the lifestyle he now 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. I don't think what he's doing is good for him. I don't think it's what attractiveness means and I worry about all these young boys who are now growing up in a 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 but it's cleaved off from all these other things that make somebody a compelling person. Their warmth, their imperfections also. And I will say this that I think that the idea that liberalism 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. Mark Zuckerberg, a liberal in good standing for many years and like abandoned kids into this farm of extremism and like just created a space where any of us could thrive where there like wasn't a better competitor to it. And there's a lot going on in society. None of it's monocausal. But I really worry about the 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.

[Helen Lewis]: Yeah, I think about this a lot. because it's a cliche to say at this point but for people who have lost religion you have lost a lot of community and regularity and to your life and a rhythm of your life too the church in which I grew up we had palm Sunday and then Easter and then you have harvest festival and then advent and Christmas there is a sense of life's occasions being marked there are baptisms and funerals there is confession there's a chance to offload your sins there 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 6 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?" I 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 the effect of that 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 leftwing 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 like wherever it might be. And those are really unhealthy things. Alice Evans has this theory, the sociologist about, 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 there they weren't feeling 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. 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 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. And 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 or spaces of our culture.

[Ezra Klein]: 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 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 lightweight corporate you go 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 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.

[Helen Lewis]: 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. One thing about the Zar Mani 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 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. And 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. So 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 it the past is not a safe place for it to go.

[Ezra Klein]: 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 to then run for the Labour leadership and become prime minister and he put out an advert now the soundtrack is Oasis so there's nostalgia, but a lot of the shots were of new skyscrapers that have gone up in Manchester. And his point there is, 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? Be 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. 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? 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.

[Helen Lewis]: 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 technopunk, 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 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 the 250th and Hulk Hogan at the RNC. His aesthetics in a funny way are 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.

[Ezra Klein]: But that's also about the left taste makers hatred of the middlebrow.

[Helen Lewis]: 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 doric column and like a nice whitewashed 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 there 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? Everything he owns is covered in gold, which is what you kind of think if like I said, I suddenly had loads of money, why wouldn't I cover anything gold? Whereas the thing that if you're a high net worth person who flies on private jets and reads Condé Nast Traveler magazine, everything should be muted earth tones.

[Ezra Klein]: 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. He wants that ballroom to looks like the Roman forum that people might have seen on their holiday in Italy. So this is a bit about the kind of the less hatred of the middlebrow the popular and the mainstream.

[Helen Lewis]: The best politics are always cringe. I mean, you mentioned Hamilton. I love 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 Obama era cringe." And it's cuz 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 straightforwardly hopeful about the upward progress of America. So, it does kind of read as cringe. But again, 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 could tell that to all the Democratic consultants. We've been talking about what these ideas mean for men, for their formation, for their possibilities, what kinds of grievances they 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?

[Helen Lewis]: Well, yeah. I mean, there's a kind of suite of ideas. So, no fault divorce, the roll back of that, right? Take it back to the idea that divorce someone in the couple is to blame and they 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 say you have been adulterous and disobedient and therefore your kids should be taken away. And I've written in support of no fault divorce. We only got it here in Britain within the last decade because I think that the 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 but 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 masculinist paradigm. The Heritage Foundation put out a report in January that said they wanted a kind of Manhattan project to support families. They are against dating apps, daycare, single parent benefits. There is an argument there for supporting a certain kind of family.

[Ezra Klein]: Right? Exactly. They they want tax breaks, right? So, they want the American economic system and tax system to be regeared towards being friendlier 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 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 I think they have an uphill argument on that. And then you get the kind of the wilder fringes. So Doug Wilson we mentioned a couple of times he has an aspiration in 200 years that he wants household voting.

[Ezra Klein]: So in the fullness of time a single woman would still be able to vote but once she married then her husband would vote for her. Is that.

[Helen Lewis]: Yeah. Well, her husband wouldn't vote instead of her. Her husband would cast the vote that she and her husband and household they he was representing the whole household.

[Ezra Klein]: but presumably he would have the power to simply decide what the household should be voting, right? I mean, isn't he in the leadership position there? Yes, he would have 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.

[Helen Lewis]: More pressingly he also thinks women shouldn't serve in combat roles in the military.

[Doug Wilson]: So women are created by God to be lifegivers, 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.

[Helen Lewis]: And now that is if I had to put my hand on my heart, I think that is also what Pete Hegseth believes.

[Pete Hegseth]: 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.

[Helen Lewis]: And he has an aesthetic demand for his army. he wants an army of people without beards. He's very clear about 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 ad 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. Contact the EOC as soon as possible.

[Ezra Klein]: So, there is also a hunger for using the instruments of the kind of proDEI bureaucracy in the other direction. And actually saying, well, we think it's now it's white men's turn to get treated to some of this, you be treated as a protected group and get some special latitude in some of these hiring decisions. Scott Yenner wants to, for example, reinstitute male only military colleges. He thinks that having women in military training colleges again affects these kind of very manly, vigorous, slightly bullying standards and they make everything a bit of an HR bureaucratic nightmare.

[Helen Lewis]: There's also I mean obviously the Dobbs decision a couple of years back which is I think significant worth thinking about here. It some of these things feel like they are just not on the table, right? like repealing the 19th amendment. Doug Wilson can talk about that all he wants, but it's I think not going to be a demand of the Republican party anytime soon. On the other hand, things make their way in weird ways. One question I have really had is does this become a real agenda, particularly after Trump? Because Trump has this quality of one way he's able to hold this very strange coalition together is he gives everybody a little bit and then he'll also happily represent the opposite. And he has such individual power over the Republican party that what he says goes. The people behind him, the JD Vances and Pete Hegseths and RFK Juniors, 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 pervert or any of that stuff. And on the other hand, they have to promise more and they will have to promise more to try to pull these influencers and institutions and churches 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 Roe versus 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? 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 find ways that are small tweaks, 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 JD Vance is going to go in front of the American people in 2028 and say, "Guys, vote for me." Well, half of you... or like women enjoy voting for the last time. You won't get to again because it's wildly unpopular in the same way that actually complete and total abortion bans are unpopular. But the one thing you would say about the American political system is unfortunately it is very friendly to minoritarian ideas. It is easy to capture and for people who have got things that wouldn't pass a referendum to nonetheless smuggle them through by 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 how we treat each other and what is proposed. I don't know if you read this piece in New York magazine by Sam Adler-Bell about the women leaving the MAGA right. I found it to be a very moving and very sad piece where all these women who were influencers or involved in right-wing politics and maybe they didn't like the what they felt to be the school marishness of the left or maybe they had more Christian and conservative views and they sort of nodded along and played along 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 trash 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 and 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 workforces where they were like, "Hell yeah, I love going to the strip club with the guys." Because the implicit promise was, "Yes, there are women up on stage who we think are, but I'm like an honorary guy." And then there comes a moment where you find out you're not an honorary guy. Actually, oh no, they think this way about all women. And I think it was the philosopher Kate Man this was her theory of misogyny right was it promised an exemption for good girls like if you do things right as a woman then actually you kind of get exempted from it and then you've crossed one of those invisible trip wires and you discover 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 feminized gyrocracy and then you find out actually no, it's 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.

[Ezra Klein]: I mean, that gets into the macropolitics of this one. I do think there's genuine challenges for the left here on how to sense some of the underlying alienation, grievance, upset, and find a way to meet it with something healthy, 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.

[Helen Lewis]: And like I feel this very very.

[Ezra Klein]: it's a very because they just can't stay normal. They just have to let themselves go and let their unchained all over the place. Yes. And you're right. 2010s it was liberals kind of going you've worn a traditional Chinese dress while being Katy Perry like 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.

[Helen Lewis]: Yeah. So you know yes you have like maximum probably liberal dominance of toward around 2020. Donald Trump is banned from the platform after the 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 ads where Kamala Harris is talking about gender reassignment surgery for immigrants in prisons and I mean this all came out of very certain culture and Democrats like it led in part, it's not the only thing. I mean, there's inflation 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 were solving the right-wing misogyny and neo-Nazi problem for the right. And now all those people are out and Nick Fuentes 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, normie voters in Ohio and Colorado are not looking for.

[Helen Lewis]: One of the most interesting things that anyone said to me during my reporting for this piece was when I asked Douglas Wilson about Nick Fuentes and he just condemned his language. Even though Doug Wilson has called women small breasted biddies and Jezebels and all this kind of stuff, but he said, the way that Nick Fuentes 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 Fuentes is actually a kind of self mole for the left.

[Ezra Klein]: who runs the federal government right now Doug Wilson like Donald Trump and and Doge just didn't manage to fire Nick Fuentes as paymaster.

[Helen Lewis]: they didn't find him well yeah but you know what I mean this I think this is really interesting.

[Ezra Klein]: oh well nevertheless.

[Helen Lewis]: but no but it is kind of fascinating right because I think that the Fuentes appearance on Tucker Carlson crystallized this you have a whole movement that has built itself on basically nannying women will tell you not to say the bad words and we're the guys who don't agree with that and then some people say things that are Nick Fuentes I quote in the story said I think women should be putting gooses like Hitler put his enemies in gooses we should do that with women and it's just now no one can say anything against that because that would mean you were kind of a cuck like you were just a kind of pantywasting HR department me and it didn't matter for Nick Fuentes his own on sexism. It matters for him over anti-semitism because there were enough powerful people in that coalition who just went this is our line. And that was fascinating to me was that you've made your whole politics about having no line. So how the hell is anybody supposed to now ever go back and enforce anything? And you're right. I think about the culture war ads. You mentioned the sex change stuff. I think the Kamala for they them, which is an 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 oncoming, gas price rising, going, I actually don't care about any of that. If you try in that context to rerun your culture war playbook, people are going to say, why are you talking about the Jews? We're just we could we hear a bit more about gas prices, please, and a little bit less about this kind of stuff.

[Ezra Klein]: I think that's a good place to end. Always our final question. What are a few books you recommend to the audience?

[Helen Lewis]: Well, I was trying to think about what novel would be kind of interesting and resonant with this discussion. So, I have Christy Mallerie's own double entry by BS Johnson, an English writer in the 20th century. It is about a young alienated guy who discovers double entry bookkeeping. The idea that for every debit there's a credit. and he decides that for every slight that's been done to him, he gets now to enact one on society. So, 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 that kind of alienation. So, that's my first book recommendation. My second recommendation is very exotic and I'm very sorry. It's I can't think of a less Ezra Klein book, but I'm going to try and sell you on it anyway. Nancy Mitford's biography of Madame de Pompadour, Mistress of Louis the 15th of France.

[Ezra Klein]: Nope. Nope. Not. Yeah. Okay. No. I'm not arguing.

[Helen Lewis]: I heard you like French royal history. I've never had you down as someone who's massively into it, but try it. Nancy Mitford. She was a brilliant historical biographer. She wrote biographies of Frederick the Great, of Louis the 14th, the 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 creeping up on them. And then my final choice when I was researching my book on genius one of the most insane stories that I found is about the genius sperm bank. So, I have brought The Genius Factory by David Plotz, 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 racial theories of IQ. So it is a California story. Let me shock you. We're going about that. It's a classic California tale of sperm and entrepreneurship and eugenics. So those are my three.

[Ezra Klein]: I can't believe you did that to California here at the end of the show. Helen Lewis, thank you very much.

[Helen Lewis]: Thank you.